Sunday, September 28, 2008

Recent Observations

--Japanese kids go to school ALL THE TIME. I pass uniforms at 9 pm on Friday night, 8 am on Sunday morning...

--I see far more high-school girls out in uniform than high-school boys. I am beginning to suspect that they just like the pleated mini-skirt look. (For the record, high-school uniform skirts leave nothing to be desired in terms of fulfilling testosterone-fueled fantasies of Asian schoolgirls. Also, schoolgirl prostitution laws have only remarkably recently started being enforced. How depressing.)

--There is no way to feel whiter or blonder than to be walking through the city when the Nationalists show up to spew their rhetoric that I can't understand but am told details their hatred of everything foreign. Such as me.

--If you are foreign in Japan and you pass another foreigner on the street, you smile and nod, even if you don't know them. There is a camaraderie born of knowing that one of the two of you probably just had a baffling interchange with a store clerk, and that you're both afraid of the Nationalists.

--Sendai has decided that it is time to be autumn now. Last weekend, the temperature dropped 15 degrees in the course of 48 hours.

--Japanese sweaters and fall coats are extremely expensive.

--Miso soup is a good thing. Natto is not.

--The fastest way to make Japanese middle-schoolers laugh is to tell them what we eat for breakfast in America.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Jozenji Street Jazz Festival

Up until this weekend, my experience of music festivals has been limited to managing to miss Stereophonic and the summer music festival in Sackville and the American Folk Festival in Bangor. The Folk Festival is quite an impressive undertaking for a city of 30,000 people: three days of continuous music in five venues along the waterfront, craft and food markets, crowds of 110,000 people. I like being from Bangor on the Folk Festival weekend. It did not, however, prepare me for a music festival as put on by a city of one million people.

The Jozenji Street Jazz Festival is in its eighteenth year in Sendai and no longer features only, or even mostly, jazz music; we were told the name has remained the same mostly to keep from scaring away the old people. It does centre on Jozenji Street and on Kotodai-Koen, the several-acre park at one of its corners, but also spreads through most of the downtown area. At any one time, there might be ten or twelve bands playing simultaneously, not counting the sundry performers hired by the downtown restaurants, cafes, and shops to try to attract people off the streets. The quantity is rivalled by the diversity: in walking down one block yesterday, I heard and saw four groups that ranged from stool-and-guitar folksy Japanese music to traditional Indonesian dance to garage-band rock. Almost no one stayed put through an entire performance by any one group, and I could certainly see why.

On Saturday, I headed into town with Kristin. We stayed mostly in Kotodai-Koen for the music, and then wandered up and down a few blocks of Jozenji Street to see if we could find the bazaar someone had told us was there. We couldn’t find a bazaar, but we did find an art museum with a jazz troupe playing and a gift shop that sold the most amazing t-shirts. My favourite had a picture of a vacuum cleaner and the corner of the shirt pulled up so that it looked like the vacuum was sucking up the shirt. We took lots of t-shirt pictures, and played with the tops in the toy section (this is where I should admit that we had earlier found a booth selling rather large drafts of beer for 500 yen).

In Kotodai-Koen, we saw one jazz band, who played and sang James Brown apparently without understanding any of the lyrics, but mostly some very good Japanese folk-rock groups. One featured the most genki (an all-purpose Japanese word, most often used to describe the ideal ALT, that means lively, happy, perky, etc) singer I have ever seen. He was bounding all over the stage, trying to get the crowd to sing along, jumping up and down on a milk crate, and just generally using up his breath in pursuits other than singing. His bassist was considerably calmer; he kept taking swigs from a beer in between and occasionally during the songs.

My favourite of the evening was also the last, a very Celtic-inspired group that reminded me quite a bit of some of the Folk Festival groups I’ve heard, also while sitting on the grass after dark, except that they were singing in Japanese. If they hadn’t been, I might have been homesick, but the combination of Celtic and Japanese was just weird enough that I was fine. They rocked out until the ripe old hour of nine, when the festival ended for the day.

On Sunday I went back downtown by myself; I had a couple of appointments and wanted to wander around in between them, with the intent of trying to get an idea of the festival’s extent. I completely failed at this, mostly because I kept getting distracted by a particular band and then realizing I had to run if I was going to make it to the next place I had to be. Sunday seemed to bring out more jazz, which might be because there were more older people around -- businesspeople often work a six-day week, including Saturday, but take a break on Sundays. My favourite of the day featured a female singer who switched from English to Japanese so smoothly that it took me a couple of seconds, every single time, to figure out why I suddenly couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Today is Respect for the Aged Day, a national holiday that makes this a three-day weekend. Some of the ALTs used the opportunity to go travelling, mostly to Tokyo. I am thinking that the one problem with Sendai may be that I will never want to leave, for fear of missing something…

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Sendai Days -- and Nights

There have been no festivals or trips since two weekends ago; rather, life has been filled with the small adventures that constitute life everywhere but are magnified when adjusting to a new culture and a new life. No day is like the one before or after, and something note-worthy happens almost every day. Examples:

-I learned how to withdraw money from a Japanese-speaking ATM.

-I discovered that missing the last subway home (which is at 12) is not a big deal when you have a bicycle. A half-hour ride seems a pretty good trade-off for not having to act like Cinderella for the evening.

-In a class where we were studying the phrases "What's this?" and "It's a..." with the scenario of one character showing another some origami animals ("Mike: What's this? / Judy: It's a bird. etc), one student made the tiniest paper crane I have ever seen. The teacher gave it to me, and it now lives on my desk in a clear plastic box I bought so that I don't lose it.

-I found a twenty-four-hour internet cafe that offers free drinks (in abundant variety) and ice cream (in vanilla), and is about a ten-minute bike ride from my apartment.

-I looked under my desk and found a huge collection of books -- everything from Pride and Prejudice to The Very Hungry Caterpillar (great for teaching days of the week, or food, or numbers) to a book about the more salacious aspects of Japanese culture -- and a year's worth of New Yorker magazines. I have been slowly dragging them back to my apartment, in stages, and my evenings are now quite literary.

-I have learned that the best way to deal with staring is to smile, bow a little, and say "Ohayo gozaimasu (Good morning)/Konnichiwa (Good afternoon)." It's really fun to see people jump and get all embarassed. It works especially well with old people and small children.

-Although it can backlash. I played this game with two kids near my apartment. After I kept going, one said to the other: "Kore-wa Amerika-jin desu?" This means "Is that an American?" but the funny part is that "kore" is the pronoun usually used for inanimate objects, as in "Is that a book?" (Japanese grammar jokes may not translate well. It made me laugh, anyway.)

-One night, just as it was getting dark, I heard drums and music coming from somewhere close to my apartment. I hadn't been told about any events in the area, but I went out to investigate. I took a couple of wrong turns but eventually discovered, about four blocks from my house, a pavilion with live music being played, people dancing in kimono, and tents with people selling food. I don't know what it was or who was running it, but it was pretty interesting. I call it Random Festival.

Every day I feel a little bit more at home here. I just wish I could speed up the internet-at-my-apartment process...