Merry Christmas!

I like getting my students to do creative writing. I think I like it considerably better than either of my two Japanese co-teachers. So I utilise times and projects that are specifically mine. Most recently I had my 3rd-years (same age as American 9th-graders) doing a finish-the-story exercise.

The prompt:

“One day in December, I went to Sendai Station. I saw a strange train. It was called the Polar Express. I got on the train and went to the North Pole to see Santa Claus...”

The answers:

I got to North Pole.

But, Santa Claus wasn’t there.

Santa Claus lived in Finland.

I was very sad.

They got this idea from somewhere, about Santa living in Finland. Several of them mentioned it; a few got back on the train and went to Finland.

When I met Santa, he said

“You are dead.”

This was heaven.

I slept for a long time.

I forgot to get up.

I’m sleeping now.

I met Santa Claus.

But Santa had a cold.

Santa said “Oh... help... me...”

I took care of Santa. Santa has cold recovered tomorrow.

Santa gave many presents to me when I went back home.

When I met Santa, he was dead.

I was very very sad and cried for some hours.

I thought, “I want to be Santa because I can keep children’s dream.”

I became Santa.

SANTA’S SOUL WAS FOR EVER.

There were many Santas on the snow.

All Santas gave me presents.

But about half of presents were empty.

Santa did high-five and said “Yheeeey!”

I got angry.

And I hit Santas face.

I get to the Arctic.

I adventure is the Arctic

and I met Santa Claus.

I was surprised to see Santa Claus.

I said “Hello.” “Hello, welcome to Santa Claus land,” answered Santa.

I went to Santa Claus land with Santa Claus.

I arrived at the station on time.

I said, “Santa Claus! Santa Claus!”

But Santa Claus wasn’t in the station.

I didn’t get a present.

Santa Claus doesn’t exist in the world.

Santa Claus was an old woman.

So, I’m surprised.

“How old are you?”

“Two thousand nine.”

I was shook by an Express. I ought to arrive in North Pole. But an Express arrive in old shrine.

I arrive in North Pole.

But I don’t find Santa’s house.

I noticed then.

This plan is to take away money from us.

I already don’t have any money.

I want to kill them.

When it got there, I found Santa Claus riding on sleigh.

As soon as I tried to talk to him, he ran away.

I asked people near me why he ran away.

People said, “He is very busy in winter. If you want to meet him, you should visit him in other seasons.”

So I came back here.

Silver Week in Iwate-ken

In case there is anyone who has ever talked to me and managed to escape this knowledge: I have a thing for fairy tales. After my third year, Mount A gave me a large amount of money to spend four months reading versions of and about Rapunzel, and since then I’ve been pretty well obsessed.

So imagine my delight when, browsing through my Japan travel guide one night, looking for a short trip for Silver Week, I discovered the existence of a small town famous for its folk tales! I generally find folk tales to be somewhat inferior to fairy tales, partly because editors and compilers often feel the need to adopt what they feel to be an appropriately folksy voice -- but I figured the tales might be more real (despite the falsified voice) if I could actually see the rivers and woods that inspired them.

Tôno is located in Iwate Prefecture, north of Sendai and well off the beaten foreign-tourist track. It’s possible to take the shinkansen (bullet train), but much cheaper (and arguably more interesting) to take local trains. I left Sendai quite early, around six, and arrived just after ten. The city bus schedule coincides with the train arrivals, but I decided not to go out to the hostel yet but to stay downtown and explore.

Downtown Tôno consists of one main road, leading away from the station, and a few somewhat smaller roads that intersect it. By and large, it’s a typically Japanese place: clean and well-maintained streets lined with restaurants, hair salons, and small shops. Any neon in Tôno is subdued and comes mostly from banks and gas stations. And it is absolutely full of kappa.

The kappa is the most well-known character from the Tôno tales, a water monster who drags unsuspecting waders to their death by drowning. They will even venture to the banks of the river and try to charm you in (should this happen, you can get rid of them by bowing; when they return the bow, the water will run out of the hollow on their heads and they will run off to refill it). Tôno is full of rivers; the kappa was used as a protective device by parents to ensure that their children would be unlikely to venture too close to the water. Similar to the character in European folk tales who uses giant scissors to cut off the thumbs of children who suck them; not, overall, a particularly pleasant character. So why, you (sensibly) ask, is it so famous?

The answer is that you can turn them from this…

into these:

Aren’t they cute? This style of kappa are absolutely everywhere in Tôno. The real ones are, folklorically, there too; you can even fish for them using cucumber (their favorite food) as bait. At one pond housing a famous kappa that saved a nearby shrine from a fire, I saw two boys doing so while their parents took photographs. Quite a ways from kappa-as-parental-discipline-through-terror-device…

I eventually made it out to the hostel, getting lost in the rice fields only once along the way, where they let me check in two hours early (I’m glad I didn’t get there at 11…) and rented me a bright red bicycle to take out to a folk village called Furusato, which means hometown. The village is still operational as a farm, although no one lives there anymore and they make most of their living through selling handicrafts to tourists. Elderly people are hired to sit on the porches of the magariya (famously L-shaped) farmhouses and create various traditional crafts.

You can also go into the houses and admire the sunken fire pit and antique handcrafted furniture -- as well as some things which I really wish had been explained in English:

That night, the hostel had an apparently mandatory meeting for all their guests, mostly to announce the next day’s breakfast time and menu. I wasn’t paying for meals, but they provided tea and cake for the meeting. Afterwards, I attempted to speak Japanese with an art teacher from Gunma prefecture and two young guys from Kyoto for probably twenty minutes before one of them took pity on me and agreed that he could speak English “a little.” (As per usual with the Japanese, this meant he was pretty well fluent.) I far prefer bilingual conversations, especially when I’m tired.

I took the bus (it was late! An event thus far unheard of in Japan) back to town the next morning and set off on foot for a sight about 3 kilometers outside town. Along the way, a car pulled over and a man rolled down the window. We had the following conversation:

Man: Do you speak Japanese?

Jenn: A little.

Man: Oh, your Japanese is so good! Do you have an umbrella?

Jenn: No…

Man gets out of car, pulls umbrella out of the trunk and proffers it.

Jenn: But that’s your umbrella… and also, it’s not raining…

Man: It’s going to rain this afternoon.

Jenn: It’s 9 in the morning.

Man: Please. It’s going to rain this afternoon.

Jenn: Um, okay. Thank you. *bowing party* Oh, listen, can you tell me: is this the right road to the Five Hundred Disciples?

Man: Get in the car. I will take you.

Jenn: Um, no. That’s okay. Just, is this the right road?

Man: I can drive you!

Jenn: I like walking.

Man: ... well, okay, yes. It’s just up the road.

Man drives away. Jenn walks another 20 yards, turns a corner, and finds herself at the place. Would have been a thirty-second car ride…

This makes me think that my experience of Japanese people would have been quite different if I were a rural JET.

Anyway. The Five Hundred Disciples are rock carvings done in the 1800s by a monk wishing to commemorate the victims of a famine. They are on boulders scattered up the side of a small mountain, which makes the place look like maybe some kind of large structure collapsed; but no, that’s how he carved them. They have long since been covered in moss, which makes them even ghostlier. It felt like a cemetery.

Back downtown, I visited three museums. The first was housed in the inn where the folktale compiler stayed when he came to visit and compile, and dedicated to the compiler and the tales.

The second was apparently dedicated to nothing in particular and housing a room with hundreds of twentieth-century toys crammed in with no attempt towards organization or labeling. Not that any but the most Herculean effort would succeed…

The third was dedicated to the brief period during which Tôno was a wealthy castle town, and had the typical city museum displays of lacquered flatware, highly-decorated household objects, and extremely fancy kimono.

In between, I found a small restaurant advertising the local specialty, hitsume soba. I explained to the waiter that I can’t eat chicken, the waiter went off to talk to the cook, and they presented me with a bowl of chickenless hitsume soba made just for me! Once I pulled out the flower-shaped fish paste cakes (I hate those things!), it was utterly delicious.

Tôno is about an hour, again by local trains, from Morioka, the largest city in Iwate Prefecture. I left Tono and arrived in Morioka around five. (I left the umbrella on the train when I got off; it never did rain.) I stopped in at the tourist information centre in the station, and they told me which bus to take to get to my hostel. I got off the bus at the right stop, referred to the directions in my guidebook… and realized it was talking about a completely different place. I didn’t even know where in Morioka I was. Good.

First I tried to call the hostel. The second time I failed, the kindly man at wherever I was calling reminded me that you have to put a 0 in front of numbers when you call them within Japan. So I did succeed in reaching the front desk, where the receptionist spoke no English. He gave me directions. I got lost and called back. He gave me more directions. Eventually he spent 18 solid minutes on the phone with me, until I managed to find the place.

The problem? Well, to start with it doesn’t look like a hostel; it looks like a convention centre. Secondly, it’s not called Youth Hostel (which I can read in Japanese), it’s called something-in-really-difficult-Japanese. And thirdly, the main landmark he was using to guide me (a Japanese-style gym) is one of two similar-looking structures on the same street.

Note to self: next time, get directions from the English-speakers before you leave the station.

The next day, I visited the grounds of what was Morioka Castle before it burned down. (Castles in Japan were built with wood. The neighboring lord would attack, or lightning would strike, and the castle would burn down. They’d rebuild it -- in wood. You’d think they’d’ve learned. There are only about six original castles left in Japan.)

Like most castle sites, it’s become a municipal park with various statues, trees and flowers, and a playground. There is a sculpture of Morioka’s favorite son, a poet, who used to jump out the window of his high school and come to the castle grounds to read. I enjoy the commemoration of the terrible study habits of the brilliant and famous.

The real magic of Morioka, in my opinion, lies in a small neighborhood of Meiji-era shops that somehow managed to survive World War II. There’s a very real sense that the people who own the shops now are selling the same things that have been sold in those shops for the past hundred and fifty years. It felt like walking back in time.

Much of the rest of Morioka was relatively unmemorable. Sadly, the temples and shrines were closed for the national holiday. The main shopping streets looked almost the same as Sendai’s. I saw the grave of Princess Centipede, but she was not named that because she was a centipede (her father killed a really big centipede, apparently, and it still haunts her grave. You’d think it would haunt his). It was a pleasant enough place, but what Lonely Planet might call “workaday.”

Nikka (free) Whisky! -- and a Summer Matsuri

Sendai is a funny city. It has a concentrated downtown, comparatively sprawling pseudo-suburbs to the north and south, and ridiculous sprawling projections of land reaching to the west. It is possible to travel on a bus for nearly an hour and still be technically within the city limits, as we did last fall when we went out to visit Akiu.

Recently, we went west (by train, this time, for about 35 minutes) on another prong to reach Sakunami. We had been invited to the area's Summer Matsuri, one of the ones that mostly involves some food tents, a few plastic tables and chairs, and a stage for local performers. Two ALT friends were asked to perform, one playing the guitar and the other dancing hula.

I travelled out with my friend Lili. The area is mostly famous for its whisky distillery, so we thought the festival was actually at the distillery. It wasn't, but once we got out there (about a 10-minute shuttle bus ride from the train station) we decided to do the tour before heading back to the station to find the festival.

The Nikka Whisky Company was founded in 1924 by Masataka Taketsuru.

He decided that he liked whisky and wanted to learn how to make it. So in 1918, quite a while before people did such things on a regular basis, he headed off to Scotland. He enrolled in the University of Glasgow and apprenticed at various distilleries. He also married a Scottish girl and brought her back to Japan with him.

The tour guides stressed the cleanliness of the air and the river water as major players in the tastiness of the whisky. Masataka was travelling in the area and was struck by the confluence of the two (clean) rivers as providing a very convenient place to make whisky. He chose a location in Hokkaido for another distillery because it reminded him of Scotland.

The tour itself was largely forgettable, mostly because we had a lot of trouble understanding what we were looking at. Lili's Japanese is (much) better than mine, but her whisky-making vocabulary is somewhat rusty. So we followed the guide around but mostly looked at the pictures to try to figure things out.

But at the end of the tour was the real reason most ALTs know about the Nikka distillery: the free tasting session. They showed us a video explaining how to water and ice the whisky, then brought us into a tasting bar where they'd set out glasses of various malts and ages. You could stay for up to 20 minutes (not that, being Japanese, they'd ever actually ask you to leave) -- but mostly the Japanese people on the tour tried one or two samples and then moved on. Lili and I, perhaps needless to say, made good use of our 20 minutes.

In the attached shop, you could buy whisky of course, but also various chocolates and other sweets made with the whisky. Most of these could be sampled, and we made good use of that too. Meanwhile, in a low-lighted annex, they sold bottles of the most expensive whiskys. Twenty-year-old single-cask at $200 a bottle, that sort of thing. They also offered a sample, of a $75 ten-year-old version. I didn't really like it, but it was very interesting to taste the huge difference between that and some of the cheaper blends. It didn't even taste like the same product.

Feeling somewhat more light-headed, we eventually made our way to the festival. There were a dozen or so ALTs hanging around, and the organizers made us all get up on stage and introduce ourselves. This was much more popular with the people in the plastic chairs than it was with us. I had to run back to town; when I left, Chantel had gotten everyone out of the plastic chairs to try hula dancing.

Good times.

The Art of the Summer Matsuri

Japanese people love festivals. If you wanted to, you could plan an entire trip to Japan based on attending local festivals every weekend. They hold them for pretty much every conceivable event, particularly natural events. The far north probably takes the prize for some of the strangest cold-weather traditions, mostly involving freezing temperatures and nowhere near enough clothing (sometimes, no clothing at all).

Summer matsuri are slightly different. Very little is required of the participant: mostly the festivals exist as an excuse for getting out of doors (the Japanese are not big on picnics and such) and eating festival food. Basically every city, town, and village in the country has its own summer matsuri -- even if it consists only of a stage with local musicians performing, and a few stalls selling fried food.

Sendai’s biggest festival is the Tanabata Festival in early August. Most cities in Japan celebrate the event, but Sendai’s version is probably the most famous.

Tanabata Festivals celebrate the alignment of a certain set of stars, mythically a pair of lovers separated by the Milky Way for almost the entire year. The story goes that many years ago, Orihime, the daughter of the King of the Universe, wove beautiful cloth for her father. However, she was sad that she worked too hard to ever be able to meet eligible bachelors. So her father arranged for her to meet and marry Kengyu, a cow herder. They fell in love, and in their… distraction, forgot either to weave or to herd the cows. The King of the Universe became annoyed by the lack of cloth and the cows running amok, and put them on opposite sides of the Milky Way. They were so sad, however, that he eventually relented and now allows them to meet for one day per year.

Given that the festival celebrates the actual, observable movement of stars, you’d think the date would be fixed -- but apparently the differences between the lunisolar calendar and the Gregorian calendar mean that some places celebrate in early July and others in early August. So says wikipedia.

Sendai falls into the August camp. For three days in early August, the city is crowded to brimming with tourists from all over Japan, who come to see the fireworks, the parade, and the literally thousands of paper streamer decorations.

Why we celebrate a practically-doomed love affair with crepe paper decorations is beyond me. But they are really very beautiful, and since it brings good fortune to make one, pretty much every business in downtown Sendai (especially along the two main shopping arcades, where the majority of people go for their paper-decoration-viewing) hangs one outside their doors. Many double as advertisements, which can lead to some of the funniest and most interesting versions:

I wonder what the king of the universe would have to say.

Cambodia, July 25th - August 3rd

Although I have not yet become what you might be able to call an experienced traveller, I have noticed a certain pattern in the countries I have visited: once I’ve left, I am more interested in the next new destination than in going back. Countries form a sort of to-do list in my head, and once I’ve checked one off, I feel no desire to give it any additional checks.

But I want to go back to Cambodia. I wanted to go back to Cambodia as soon as I boarded the flight out of Cambodia. And what’s more, I want everyone else to go to Cambodia too. I want everyone to corroborate my impression that it is a country worth untold numbers of visits.

This despite having my ticket cancelled and being stuck there for two and a half very stressful days. [Long story short: go to a travel agent and pay for tickets with cash. Do not use a credit card, and really do not use a friend’s credit card.] It is not every country that can combat that level of anxiety.

It is a fascinating, inspiring, utterly humbling place.

Almost by accident, we embarked on a chronological tour of some of the more pertinent aspects of Cambodian history. And so you will too.

We started in Angkor, the ancient capital of the country and now the site of some of the most worthily famous ruins in the world. Even when the Khmer Rouge embarked on their anti-religious destruction spree of every wat (temple) they could find, they spared Angkor as a testament to Khmer glory.

And what a testament it is.

Angkor was functional as the capital from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, beginning when one of the kings declared himself a demi-god and consolidated all the lands he felt entitled to rule over. He also began a spree of temple- and palace-building that continued for four hundred years, with each god-king feeling compelled to build bigger and better temples than his predecessor. Meanwhile, the god-kings also switched from Hinduism to Buddhism and back again at least a couple of times, meaning that it takes a very knowledgeable person (or a guidebook) to keep straight which temple employs which arcane symbolism and why. (Unless there’s a large Buddha sculpture and a nun who wants you to buy incense; that’s usually a pretty good clue that you’re in a Buddhist temple.)

As international travel becomes more and more common, and as Cambodia becomes more and more politically stable, Angkor has become more and more touristed. This is both good and bad. It is nice to be able to learn about the history of the place from discreet plaques and signs, or from eavesdropping on someone else’s tour guide (the Japanese tourists got very confused when three white people started listening to their guide). It is a boon to the historians and archaeologists for whom attention is the money they desperately need to preserve and restore the temples. It means that Angkor and its gateway city of Siem Reap are remarkably safe -- and tourist-friendly in such ways as having vegetarian food.

Granted, it is a little difficult to reflect upon the bygone glory of the Khmer empire when surrounded by five-year-old modern Khmers who would really like you to give them a dollar in exchange for water, souvenirs, or a photograph of their adorable selves.

It is a little hard to not feel like so many moneyed cattle when your tuk-tuk driver has a predesigned route of seven temples to take you on, the same seven temples he showed to the hundreds of Westerners before you and will show to the hundreds of Westerners after you.

It is a little annoying to not be able to get a photograph of the temples without someone else’s head in it, or to have to line up to take a photograph of some of the more famous spots.

Somehow, though, it doesn’t matter. When I look back on the temples, what I remember isn’t the noise of the temple-sellers and the other tourists, or the nearly-constant camera flashes, or even the history. I remember the quiet, because even in the most popular temples it was almost always possible to slip through one doorway and suddenly feel like you were the only person there. I remember the moss, and the tumbled stones, and the aching sense of loss as I tried and failed to imagine what these structures must have looked like whole. I remember the carvings, especially the apsaras that I became almost obsessively fond of.

I haven’t been that many places, but even people who have say that Angkor is like nowhere else I’ve ever been.

From Angkor, the Cambodian kings managed to repel an attack from the Vietnamese in the late 1100s, but were eventually defeated by the Thai armies in 1431. The temples were never forgotten, but were all-but abandoned and left to languish in the jungle for the next four hundred years, until a French explorer rediscovered them in the late 19th century. Ever since, the French have been at the forefront of restoration efforts.

Meanwhile, the political and emotional centre of Cambodia had shifted to the capital city of Phnom Penh.

This has stayed true for six hundred years, with the exception of the four years’ rule of the Khmer Rouge. The KR, for those who don’t know, were a radical Communist regime that embarked upon a mission of “ideological cleansing” (my term) from 1975-79 which caused the deaths of over two million Cambodians (out of a population of only seven million) from starvation, disease, and outright murder. As that suggests, the KR had the tenets, and certainly the interpretation, of Marxism considerably confused. They distrusted all city dwellers, and forced the populations of all the cities, most noticeably Phnom Penh, out into the countryside to work as slave labor on communal farms.

The government did continue to rule from Phnom Penh, however, which means that there are various memorials and historical sites around the city. The two most famous, and most heart-breaking, are the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former site of the prison where 20,000 men, women, and children were tortured into “confessions” of wrongdoing against the state, and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, where those people were murdered and thrown into mass graves.

I have no pictures from either site. They have been considerably “touristed” as Cambodia has become a more popular destination, with the result that visiting them felt to me more like looking at a museum than looking at a gravesite and a site of such horrific human misery. I wish I could say I cried; I would feel like a better person if I had. But somehow my mind just refused to put the people in the mug shots into the torture chambers or out onto the Killing Fields. (I was by no means the only one -- and I was not as bad as the Japanese tourists posing and saying “Okay... cheese!”) Maybe it’s true that the gratuitous violence on television renders us immune to true human suffering. I’m sure it was a mercy.

[Wait, stay with me, I’m about to stop being depressing.]

Even these sites, though, offered up their own kind of inspiration. Walking out the gates of Tuol Sleng or off the Killing Fields, places that were operational within the living memory of my parents, I found it almost hard to believe that the city is functional at all. There are markets selling fruits and vegetables alongside Cambodian silk scarves aimed at tourists, there is a bustling guesthouse industry, there are tuk-tuk drivers whose sense of direction is so bad that they can’t find your guesthouse with the aid of a map and several other tuk-tuk drivers they ask for help, there are NGOs and charities working with street children and the victims of landmines, there are monuments and museums and parks and carefully-rebuilt wats.

And there are smiles. To put this in perspective: my country bombed Cambodian cities and towns for four years, most likely escalating the Khmer Rouge hatred of all things Western that later led to them killing anyone who, among other signs of past Western connections, spoke French or English. Then, because we decided we hated the Vietnamese more than the Khmer Rouge, we sold them landmines to use against the Vietnamese -- and their own people, who continue to lose lives and limbs to this day. Then we refused to recognize the Vietnamese-backed government for twenty years, preserving the UN seat for a representative of the homicidal dictatorship hiding in the jungles.

So when people asked where I was from, I usually said “Oh, I live in Japan.” But when they really pressed and I admitted to being American, I was greeted not with the anger or bitterness I (as a representative of my nation) would’ve deserved but with delight and cheerful remarks about Obama or sports teams. To be in the presence of such grace is truly a humbling and awe-inspiring experience.

Cambodia has problems. Don’t get me wrong. The government is almost unbelievably corrupt, the poverty is crushing, the crime rate is high. Schools have only just begun teaching the history of the Khmer Rouge; many Cambodian young people, whose parents have chosen not to speak of their experiences, don’t know or don’t comprehend their own horrific recent past. (Come to think of it, I wonder if this will change the opinions Cambodians hold towards foreigners, especially Americans.)

But it is a special place. I saw the best and the worst that humanity has to offer. What I carried away with me was the best.