Springtime

Here are some photos of our cherry blossom party last saturday.  A teacher from our company organized it, and although it rained ALL day, it was fun, and the trees were beautiful against the grey sky.  Our party was the one at the very farthest point along the left side of the river, but when i took this picture, i had no idea of that.  We spent a while trying to find them, and on the way, we got some delicious festival food.
People have been sitting beneath the blossoms like this since they came out last week, and it seems that any time of day, there they are, eating and drinking and chatting.  The trees are often hung with lanterns for night time parties.  It's a beautiful time of year here.
View from under my umbrella.

Here are a few ACC teachers (Mandy among them) and one student (on the right).  
The trees were so full of blossoms that they seemed burdened and weighed down by them.  The one branch is actually dipped into the water i think.  I always like umbrellas in photos too, so i waited until a couple came bobbing along the bridge to catch them.  It didn't take too long, don't worry.
This is our party from a little distance.  The slightly inebriated crew somehow put up a tarp to shelter the people.  The barbeques, however, became flooded and refused to cook anything at all.  

THE PRETTIEST FLOWER OF THEM ALL!  (Mandy)
Here are some of the ACC crew.  Mandy, James, Tilly, Miya, Jacey, and making the face is Rob Lowe, a great man from England who married a Japanese woman and just had a baby!  We got to meet the little man at this party.  He hung out in the tent with his mother.  

Well, there ya go!  I'm slowly realizing that we're well past our half-way point here in Japan.  We only have 4.78 or so months left!  It's going very fast, and now we have to brace ourselves for a long, hot, humid, rainy summer.  I'm not too excited about the extreme heat, but each season has beauty and good things.  

Mandy is diligently watering her balcony garden every day, and her lettuce and carrots are coming up well.  Things grow well here, and now our balcony is full of potted flowers and vegetables.  We even bought a lattice for some sweet peas to climb around on.  They love it.  

Skating In Places We Never Thought We Would

Well, once again we found ourselves in a strange and unforgettable situation.  I'm glad this blog is here so I won't forget it.  

We went skating Japanese style, complete with silly molded skate rentals and a curry ramen noodle snack bar.  Mandy managed to rent some beat up old hockey skates to cruise around in.  I begged to be pushed around in a chair thing, but nobody would push it.  Just jokes, i didn't beg...

Some of Mandy's kind adult students offered to take us in a van to a skating rink right beside the sea.  
It was hilarious, fresh, and the view was beautiful.  Little green mountains and the sea with islands.
This is Hiroko, who required a little assistance to get going on her skates.  We rescued her from an afternoon of clinging to the railing.  After a while, she was doing well on her own.  
Left to right: Masaki, Hiroko, Mandy, Aya, Orie (who manages one of our schools), and Fukashi.  All very lovely people.  
I was standing on skates in the rink when i took this picture of the ocean.  The mystery for me was how the rink ice ever formed in the first place.  it was well above zero.  
Top to bottom:  Mandy's skates and my skates.  mine had toe picks and the spiky heel blade.  I stumbled and nearly fell a few times, RIGHT ON MY HEAD.

I'm glad, especially for Mandy, that we were able to have this little adventure.  I know she misses hockey sometimes.  Our hosts were very impressed with her smooth agility on the skates.  and so fast!  Hayai de su yo!

Random Moments

This is the most splendid Japanese temple i have seen.  It's called Kinkakuji, or 'Golden Pavilion'.  It's calming to look at it and see the reflection in the pond, and the trees.  It appears to be hovering.  
On the way to Kyoto, we saw snow!  Kyoto is in central Japan, but it's surrounded by mountains, so the elevation allows for periodical snowfall.  It was nice to see it from the train window.  Actually, at Kinkakuji, it was snowing lightly and the sun was shining at the same time.  
We were invited to our friends' place (Greg and Maki), and they have a Nintendo Wii, so we played for a while.  It was hilarious, but i'm terrible at video games.  No matter how fast i shook those controllers, i couldn't win the 100m dash.  
This is the cake we ate on Christmas day with Greg and Maki.  
We couldn't help but covet this little bus.  It's just sooooo kyoot!  It's the new VW bus, and it's quite a bit smaller than the original ones.  

Christmas was very different than usual for us, but it was a treat to have some family around to hang out with and to open some gifts with.  We didn't have turkey, or even KFC, but we did make sushi for Christmas dinner.  Sometimes you just have to say, "when in Rome."

Flowers and my injured uncle

The nearby river goes up and down drastically, along with the tide of the pacific.  when it's low, all these sand bars appear, and yesterday there was a massive tree root on one of them.  it looked to be in mid-crawl, trying to get back to the weightlessness of floating in the water.  

My dear uncle Bob fell off a roof in Barkerville and fractured his back, so i'm sad and distracted.  However, i do want to put some photos on here of a Japanese flower arranging show we saw yesterday.  My uncle Bob is a tough guy and i think he'll heal up and maybe even work again.  I know that work is a big part of life for him and it would be difficult to be unable to work.  At the same time though, we're given difficulties and hard times for the best reasons.  But you don't say that to a guy who's going through the hard times.  Seeing the photo of him with the neck brace made me realize that any hard times i go through, i need to regard them as for the highest good.  God lets his saints suffer for their good.  
A student of Mandy's is an Ikebana instructor, and she also teaches tea ceremony.  She invited us to a flower arranging and tea ceremony exhibition in Nishio.  So off we went yesterday, riding bike through the town, over the bridge, through the next town to the cultural center.  It's a big, brick building, and we went there once before to see a Noh play.  Ok, over to Mandy:
Within the big brick building we found about 20 different rooms that were lined wall to wall with a variety of Japanese flower arrangements.  These flower arrangements can be divided into 5 different schools.  Each school teaches a very specific style, technique, and philosophy of how to gather and display flowers.  We could definitely see the range of schools from one vase to the next and we could sense the depth this art form has within the culture.  The style would change from one of simplicity and tranquility (like those above and below) to a more garish and loud arrangement.  
I myself (Mandy) have always preferred the clean lines of simplicity, but I did appreciate the sense of dynamics and movement that some of the bolder arrangements possessed.  While walking around to each art work we could instantly travel from the peaceful atmosphere of a traditional garden to the center of a wind storm where everything appears to be in flux.  It was a joy to be transported and to have the chance to admire an art form that is very new to me.  We saw combinations of colours, flowers, tree branches, fruits and vegetables that were unexpected.  I never would have thought that broccoli would make a nice complement to orchids, but it did.  There were colours of deep plum and rich apricot and the very darkest of greens.  
We also enjoyed the sweet smells of lilies (my favorite), roses, eucalyptus, citrus, pine, and many many more that co-mingled in the air into a bonanza of olfactory delights.  

This particular arrangement appeared to be an interpretation of unknown life forms, perhaps those inhabiting the planets of Jupiter or Saturn.  A very interesting vase choice.
...Isn't Mandy a good writer?  she doesn't think so, but she is.  I saw this guy basking/napping, and i thought that if my dad was here with us, he might like to replace this guy on the couch.  Room after room of flowers combined with sunlight makes a guy schlopiche.  

Japanese Gardening is EASY

These are highlights of a garden i saw recently in Nishio.  It's blurred out on Google Earth, otherwise i'd put in the coordinates.  It'a a beautiful example of a traditional Japanese garden.  
The maple trees are turning from yellow to red this time of year, and this weekend in Kyoto we will see a good example of a Japanese autumn.  Hopefully i'll get a few worthwhile photos.
This bridge amazed me.  All stone, and looked very natural.

Good inspiration for anyone looking to create a Japanese garden for themselves.  No sweat.

The foliage here grows all year, and many ditches are tangles of deep green plants and probably thousands of spiders and things.  The tangled vines are evocative for the imagination.

Uh oh, I'm starting to feel boring right now, it must be time to say goodnight.  Stay tuned.

Jan ken POI!

One thing we've learned as teachers of Japanese children is that, if ever a dispute should arise, even as minor as who should go first in a game, or who should get the leftover cookie, but even one as serious as who wins the championship title of the 'memory game' (if two children end up with the same amount of cards), the solution is inevitably and invariably and necessarily JANKEN.  We call it 'rock, paper, scissors' back home, and it's played for fun sometimes, but here it's a widely used, slick fix-all, and it's amazing to watch three hyperactive 6-year olds go to this game.  They're really good at it, and whoever comes out on top is the indisputable champion of the moment.  No arguments ever arise from the results of this game.  It's tops!

On our quite recent trip to Fuji Safari Park, we were playing bingo on the bus (duh, of course we were.) and as people got double lines on their cards, they yelled bingo and claimed a prize from the prize bag.  There were many prizes, but naturally, they did run out, and when the last, lonely prize was left in the bag, two people happened to yell bingo on the same turn.  Naturally, a janken battle ensued, which tidied up the game nicely.  Works for adults too!

It's kind of hard to explain, and with all the variations, inadequate.  Youtube has a few samples that might help more.

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=1v-qxAM8TtA

Japanese Oddities

"Ha ha, i got 'im goot, yaaa."

Grocery trips are part of our everyday life.  We seem to 'just stop by' the Yamanaka or Uny every day anyway, and a few items can really add up.  Yen are shockingly easy things to spend.  Way easier than dollars, i think.  

We like to explore different grocery outlets.  Some are quite large supermarkets, and some are small specialty shops.  The odd time we'll come across a foreign food shop, and recently Mandy discovered one near our house.  It's not the best foreign food shop i've ever patronized, but it's ok.  

We found some nice salt and brown sugar, but then we came across some stew from Belgium or somewhere.  The package is in Japanese Katakana script and says, "oriental ace curry", which sounds pretty tasty when you read it, but the freaky kid in the foreground will deter nearly all prospective buyers (even the hungriest Belgians).  The look on the kid's face seems to suggest that he recently stabbed someone in the back, literally, with that spoon.  He's got the 'evil' finger to his mouth and everything.  

If that's doesn't turn everyone away from the delicious stew, the little cartoon mascot will take care of the rest.  It looks like it may have recently been stabbed in the back by a kid in a chef's hat wearing a slack expression.  Would you buy it?

a Reflection

This canal is about a five-minute bike ride from our apartment.  Yesterday i was chatting with my dad and he found our apartment on google earth.  If anyone reading this is a google earth buff, you can look up our coordinates at  34 53'32.16" N, 136 59'48.41" E .  

Google earth is really strange.  If they make satellite images of the entire globe available to every joe on the street, then what information do they have about us?  And i mean they as in 'they'.  THE  'they'.  Capital A 'they'.  

Who's to say they don't have live images of the entire world straight into their offices?  

Anyway, i don't worry too much about this particular question.  It's just not worth the time.  I have too many surveillance cameras to appear on, never mind the satellite cameras.  So much to do. 

The other day, Mandy and i were riding our bikes along this canal on our way to the Hekinan library (where we are now patrons), and we stopped to look into the water.  It was filthy!  I was slightly appalled, but mostly i was reminded of this Japanese cartoon i saw that was about how the environment is getting mucked up.  

I don't understand much about Japanese religious beliefs; most have to do with good luck, from what i have heard.  But a Shinto belief is that everything has a spirit, and in the cartoon, this river spirit goes to a bath house to get clean, and eventually it does, and all the gunk that comes out of it reminded me of the canal water a little bit.  

We were just about to leave, but then i saw something moving in the water, and behold, some sort of ray!  Not as big as a Manta Ray, not as dangerous as a Stingray, but a smaller kind of ray.  Still very nice to catch a glimpse before it swam beneath the murk.  It's nice to know that things can still live in there.

How ya doing?

the Shape of the Island

This is the actual shape of the island we visited yesterday.  It's not so much a bean shape with claws after all.  But here you can see the nice path along the side and top, and that's where we want to bike some sunny day.

Rainy day on Sakushima

Hello!  I decided to forego the continual catching-up of the "update" series of posts.  I've skipped the past two weeks and went straight on to today, which is Sunday.  We don't always make it to church, as it is quite far away.  The journey to the church in Nagoya requires quite a lot of time, energy, and money, and so, the odd weekend, we try to go somewhere local that we haven't seen yet.  Today we visited a small island off the coast of Nishio, called Sakushima.  Shima is the Japanese word for island ('Jima' is a variant of the same word, as in 'Iwo Jima').  

Anyway, i've gone and dumped a bunch of photos onto this post, and i have no idea how it will appear when i post it, so sorry about the mess!  

We somehow got in touch with a couple of good-hearted, Japanese ladies who speak good English, and who were willing to show us around the island.  The ferry ride cost around 8 bucks and took 20 minutes.  It was a rainy day, so we were bundled up and carrying umbrellas.  (The island is the shape of a bean, sort of, with pointy claws making a nice little bay.)  







The ladies know this couple who live on the island (Shin and Kyoko), and we walked up to their house first.  We took some time at first to look around the house, which looked a bit junky from the outside, but turned out to be a beautiful artists' lodge.  It is full of homemade items, from doors and drawers and interiors, to paintings on the wall.  Kyoko loves cats, and she gave Mandy a few prints of her cat paintings.  They cook over fire in their kitchen and grow their own food.  Shin (shown playing guitar), writes music and performed a couple of songs for us.  They had really interesting furniture, mostly homemade, like the ultra low table, which had a fire pit underneath that is meant to keep the people warm.  Under the middle of the table is a separate fire pit that is meant to keep the food warm, like an element.  It's very smart and aesthetically pleasing.  They were very nice people, and as they spoke very little English, we had a chance to practise our smattering of Japanese.  

We walked down to the beach (which took about 4 minutes), and there was this cube thing that is actually a rest house.  It's a simple cube, like on that "celebrity squares" game show, but you can sleep in them or just take a rest.  It seems like a landmark too, a kind of symbol for the island (they even put it on the cover of the island map).  We found some nice rocks and shells and took a few as souvenirs.

Their house looked pretty old and run-down on the outside, but inside it was very cozy and comfortable.  There was a big spider hanging above our heads as we came in the door, but they said that the spiders are harmless and actually are handy at keeping the bug population down.  They also told us about huge centipedes the length of a butter knife and as thick as a thumb, that sometimes get into the house, and they bite really hard and cause terrible pain and a lot of swelling.  Kyoko has been bitten a few times and said that usually the pain lasts for a week.  

We saw a part of Japan that few foreigners get to see, and it was a great time, despite the rain.  I think that the more we look around this area, the more amazing things we'll see.  

There were ostriches wandering around outside a restaurant, a very strange goat tied under some trees, and many large, yellow and black spiders everywhere, webbing up every opening in the trees.  We found some sugarcane too, and Shin said that he is planning to grow sugarcane to make his own sugar.  He already boils sea water and collects the salt for their food.  The two ladies we were with told us that 'naturalist' people are quite rare in Japan.   They were kind, relaxed, and generous, and we plan to visit them again.  

Walking around the island reminded me a little of Thetis Island, where my parents went to Capernwray.  It's quiet, with few cars, and there is an island atmosphere that you don't feel on the mainland, and even though Japan is an island (so is every land mass, i suppose), there is an entirely different feel to little ones.  The buildings are mostly black because of the weather coating they put on, to protect against salty rain and winds.  

There's a nice quiet road around the north side of the island, and next time we'll rent a couple of bikes and tour around, hopefully on a sunny day.