Shashinjutsu 10

a few more shots from friday: some rocking out, the trophy as presented by the enigmatically pulchritudinous yoshimi, the champion sharing his take, and the best shot i could find of some of m'ladies from friday night - from left - nyonyo, lisa, and serena.

Shumatsu Wa Nani O Shimashita Ka?

hullo. i'm avoiding work, and i thought a good way to do so would be to put a little thing up here about the fine goings on of last friday night. so. yes. friday night, the first annual aiu air guitar competition was held in a small hot room crammed with about 15 contestants and spectators. the lights were turned off and the people holding the competition used some little clip lamp for atmosphere while they videotaped the happenings and hosted it like one of the crazy japanese karaoke shows that always seem to be on. the competitors were introduced and then waited for the song to be queued up on somebody's laptop, posing and strapping on the nonexistant guitar and checking monitor levels and such, and then some japanese metal shitstorm would come out of the speakers and they would flail around for a while until the music was cut off, and then they would introduce the next person. the winner got a giant chocolate chip cookie with frosting on it that said aiu air guitar champion 2007, which he shared with everyone and then did an encore. it might have been the sunglasses that did it for him, or maybe because he did the most drastic back bends. anyway, it was spectacular.

after the air guitar, i went to a birthday party for a taiwanese fella. of course all m'ladies were there, and just about every other taiwanese and chinese student in the school, along with a smattering of white folks. i had some melon soda, some sweet taiwanese jerky stuff, played wii tennis, and got my ass handed to me in some cut throat taiwanese rules uno. a fine night to clear the head like a snort of vick's vapo rub, just what i needed.

Shashinjutsu 9

some more shots of festival happenings...

Shashinjutsu what, 8,9? no, 8

so, aiu fest round one: taro-kun rocking the karaoke competition, the minnesota booth, the mummiez, and some wacky whatnot happening on stage. now round two...

Ashita Tabun Ame ga Furimasen

hey, dudes. a post is long overdue. i have not been in a decent 'blogging mood' of late, but i'm not gonna let this thing go stale. so: aiu festival, then... the first day was a rainy bastard. what the blazes did i do? wandered up and down the row of student run food booths eating everything in sight. "minnesota" soup made by some japanese students who spent a year at st. cloud state, gyoza from m'ladies, taco salad, some japanese crunchy sandwich type thing called takose, a s'more, and a pita sandwich from hina's friends. derrrr... went up in the school to see some friends in their room, which they called the "art pu cafe", i guess they just liked the sound of the word "pu" and didn't know it meant a steaming dumpski. turns out i did'nt make it past mr. aiu round one to the part where i would have anything to actually participate in. not mr. aiu material, i guess. helped sell some frankfurters for a while, and when i was doing that, a big gust of wind knocked over part of the stage and all the outdoor stuff had to be cancelled for the first day. stinky.

second day, woke up early to catch some rescheduled bands in the auditorium, namely taro's band the mummiez. taro's pretty damn amazing, if somewhat lacking in polish, which is better anyway. crazy bastard. watched the first year students perform in their homeroom type groups. there was a competition for best performance, one group did some kind of super mario sketch, another did the thriller dance and dressed like zombies, suchlike. hmm... played some john fucking denver with the guitar club, sold some more frankfurtersssss... no one really bought any, we still had 100 left over afterward. the closing ceremony was really long, but pretty great. the japanese love their ceremonies. there were more performers, dances mostly, some acrobatic stuff with human pyramids, fireworks, and some student videos. pretty damn fine. it rained all weekend, so the field out front turned into a mud pit, and there were clumps of the stuff all over the school all week long. i think some students must have stayed up for the entire thing, and they were up all night after the closing ceremony tearing things down and cleaning. they were wearing the same clothes and staggering around the next morning. so that was the fest. i'll post some pics and then maybe do another post about last night's goings on, which were pretty coo.

She Got A T.V. Eye on Me, She Got A T.V. Eye

the atmosphere around here tonight is really great. everybody's working their dang hearts out getting ready for the fetival this weekend. i can see about five groups of dancers flailing around in the second floor windows as i wander around the quadrangle, (or i guess yard in a dinky little school like this'un) ten other groups crouching on the floor and meticulously carving little shapes out of cardboard with boxcutters or pasting photos together or painting something or playing some instrument or other, and in the cafeteria, they're making an ten foot tall three dimensional clown out of cardboard boxes, shredded pink plastic, sparkly shit and sheer determination. through it all i've been wandering around in my poofy hat and feeling like a lout because they're all working so frigging hard and seem to be having a pretty decent time even though they're half crazed with exhaustion, and all i do is stand there and say "derf! clown! fnur!" and snap a photo. feels like i'm kind of a guest here, more than a student. i'm fine with that, i guess, i just feel really oafish when i see the japanese students putting so much into stuff like this. feels good, though, too, to be around all that positive energy and action.

Tokidoki Eiga wo Mimasu

lets us see can i get this down right. sunday, was it? woke up around 11:30, got preened and prepped, went out to the cafeteria, loaded up on semi palatable gruel, and immediately after plopping down in my chair, max, the australian fellow who used to have a mohawk and still has a car axed me did i want to drive off and try to find some gorge somewhere. so, slipped the food down my gullet, (now i'm remembering it was actually pretty good: gyoza and eggrolls) got my hat and my camera and set off with max and 3 other gaijin to track down this gorge place. we were doing pretty good until the veins on the map started getting more and more atrophied, and eventually dissapeared altogether. we rolled into a dead end at the base of a dam with a large terraced park where the local community was having a little festival. we parked in the grass next to the 50 or 60 other cars, popped out into the alcove park area and got gawked at by an entire town. there was a really beautiful stream next to the park, widened because of the dam, where a bunch of folks were casting lines in their rubber pants. walked back up the bank of the stream, bought some vendor stuff, got oggled some more, and decided to go find the gorge. we tried a few directions until we ended up on a gravelly road with big ass rocks bouncing up and hitting the undercarriage of max's crappy little car, but we kept going, i think because we figured it had to pop out onto a regular road somewhere. it just kept winding around on a narrow precipice, though, and getting rockier and tinier. we finally found a slightly wider patch of the road where two of us had to get out and negotiate the about face of the car so we could bounce back over the road and get back onto a paved street, and when we got out to the street, no one cared much if we saw the gorge, so we just headed back to school.

back at school, i caught a cab out to the mall and met up with m'ladies (the taiwanese crew, remember?) for one of their birthdays. we went to a japanized itallian restaurant and had some decent pasta, but the real attraction at this place is apparently their dessert bread cubes (no idea what the hell they're called). big bricks of really soft warm bread heavily draped in honey, chocolate or caramel and topped with a scoop of icecream. if you want more topping, the waiter comes out, sings a song about your topping, and drizzles it on until you tell him to stop. damn fine. the japanese version of pizza is pretty good. this place's toppings included corn, big strips of bacon, and a complete fried egg smack in the middle. after the food and the whatnot at the restaurant, we went to the arcade to take pictures in a type of photo booth called a "puricura", a squashing of the words "print" and "club". in a puricura, people crowd into a photo booth with a green screen background that can be changed from a big list of choices, snap the pics, and then walk around to the outside of the booth where they can take 27th century electro-laser pens and write all over the photos. when they're printed out, they have sticky backs so you can paste a tender memory somewhere on your stuff. so, after the mall antics, came back and, as far as i can remember, shuffled around a bit, finally got around to doing homework, and went to bed.

aiu festival this weekend, should be super magic time. the japanese students have been working their dang asses off getting ready for this thing for the past month while us int'l students bobble around and whack eachother in the junk and whatnot. there's a promotional poster for the festival that a bunch of students including m'damn self posed for which is hanging up all over the city, in the train station and mall. apparently the whole community gets pumped and comes out to watch the students perform and make food and speeches and stuff. gonna be good, i think.

Shashinjutsu 7

more stuff: the princess and the lake, closer in on the princess, lantern (maybe?) and the lake, and the shrine from further away. n'stuff. ok, lunchtime. more as it happens...

Shashinjutsu 6

here are a few views from the trip. from top to bottom: lake, lake, lake with flag, and the little shrine next to the statue. now some more

Kyou wa Toshoukan de Ikimasu

hey. yes. hello... so tazawako, yes. all i've come up with so far is "uh, i went to the lake and i saw the lake..." and such. there's no suitable way to describe these things. despite that, here's my best-ish effort:

we (about 12 folks, 4 nihonjin, the rest gaijin) left really damn early on sunday morning on a bus to the mall, from whence the longer bus trip departed. it took about two hours to get to tazawako station, where another bus took us to the lake. we got out at a touristy strip of stores and restaurants, ate some rice on a stick (very popular street vendor food, can't remember the name of it) and took a boat tour of the lake, floating up to a shrine and the famous statue of a princess who, according to the story, lives in the lake in the form of a dragon. the water in the lake is bright blue and very clear. we could see massive schools of fish on the shore who swarmed around and leapt at the little pellets of food we threw at them. after the boat tour, we took another bus around to the opposite side of the lake, where the statue and another small shrine were. putzed around walking along the shoreline and up a big bluff behind the shrine. it got dark, everyone was exhausted and jittery because the planning for the trip was a little complicated, so we were mostly silent on bus trip #712 back to tazawako station and the two trains back to wada station and yet another bus back to school. the pictures explain the whole thing a little better.

since the trip... not a whole lot of activity of the bloggable variety. hina has pneumonia. she went back to sendai so her folks could take care of her, and before she left i brought her some cocoa and mickey mouse chocolate biscuit things. she had a fever of 104. sick. anything else...? uh, nope. might go out to an all you can eat place this weekend. dutdutdutdut...ok, pictures then.

Shield for Your Eyes, A Beast in the Well on Your Hand

heyeyeyeyeyey. hey. i'll post about the tazawako trip when i'm on my own computer in m'room and i'm able to add pictures. right now i'm in the computer lab. i just woke up at one pm, dunno why. it's another holiday here, health and wellness day, i think. i've got my journal here, so i thought i'd transcribe a little hastily scratched idear about japan wherein i sound like i'm able to explain things to myself a little better than i can usually muster. was that a grammatically correct sentence? yeh. anyway, this things a little embarrassing, mainly, i think, because i use the term "life force" or something like that, and also because this idea might already be blatantly obvious to a lot of people, and i'm just starting to define it for myself. whatever, here it is, and maybe tonight some tazawako pictures and a rundown of that day.

.......................................................................

i think i might have some kind of stronger idea about why i feel connected to japan, japanese art and japanese people, and i want to try to explain it before the understanding fades. i think all the japanese art i've seen, and all the japanese people i've met, even if they seem more "western" or atypical, have a deep, strong understanding or connection to the life power behing every growing thing, (even non-growing things, i guess, like the wedded rocks) and an instinctual sense of our individual and group place in the movements of the universe. just some picture or idea or understanding carried with them ofhow life flows and where to fit into that flow, from tiny to massive. i think that might be why suicide rates are so high here, (with akita prefecture being the suicide capital of japan) because of that extremely high sensitivity to life flow, and a sense of being outside of it is so much stronger with a person like that. no art from anywhere else in the world, except tribal cultures, which have almost been fucked into nonexistence by westerners, has that fundamental connection to the energy that everything has inside it. i think that's part of why i feel such a strong connection to and gratitude toward this culture, even with all the evidence, socially, economically, and in the physical environment of its stepping out of that flow. maybe. hope i've been able to document or explain the feeling a little. maybe it's bullshit, but it feels real to me.

...............................................

the one example i keep thinking of is a time when kinumo was talking about her astronomy teacher, and she described him as "a man who's head is a bowl filled with stars", and i just wanted to be surrounded by a culture that could see people that way. i know there are massive problems here, too, and that it's not the sole source on the planet of some sort of connection to the universe, and that there's been western art that makes that connection, too. just something i feel very strongly here that i don't feel quite as strongly from other places. they've also got melt banana, sushi, and haruki murakami, so yeah, that's part of it, too.

Yaki Soba Onagaishimasu!

hmmmm...this week...talking, wandering around, learned some actual real guitar chords in guitar club so i can play the neutral milk hotel song "oh comely" now. relatively simple, but so it goes with most beautiful things, dig? also joined the "japanese conversation partner" group, and i'll meet up with my partner once a week to work on, probably, some japanese sentence structure, which is starting to get really confusing, turning the word from the jisho, or dictionary form, to the polite form and then being able to put that in the right place in the sentence and use the right conjugation and whatnot. frustrating.

friday, went on an excursion with my tohoku culture class to a local temple, the site of an early settlement, and a shrine, and learned about a trip that local daimyo, (kind of like governors but more lordly, i think) had to make every two years back in the edo period. they had to travel from their prefecture to edo/tokyo to meet with the shogunate, and the little neighborhoods out here are the places they stopped for the night on their way down.

friday night, went out to the jazz club in the 400 year old building again, this time to see some live music. it was an all night jam session type deal where musicians would walk in the front door, down the narrow isle to the tiny space in the back where the band was playing, and set up their instrument while the person playing before them went to the bar. they were pretty damn good. drums, saxaphone, upright bass and guitar, and they played an inordinate ammount of disney songs. japanese people seem to have some giant preoccupation with disney. before the music, half of the group, about 9 or 10 people, ate sushi at a traditional style place, sitting on cushions at a low table in our socky feets. i think i will take a stand right here and say sushi in japan is a little better than sushi in the states. they just go ahead and put the wasabi right in there for you, and the damn fish was so tender it nearly disintegrated as soon as it touched my tongue. a fine evening. i also managed to pursuade a lady named mako, whith whom i've previously talked about jazz, to come out to the club, and i did it in half japanese, half english even. i sez to her, i sez "would you rather have 'omoide shukudai' (memories of homework) or 'omoide jazu' (jazz memories)", and it worked, i guess. she's another japanese goofball i make kabuki faces at.

yeh, anyway, nothing going on today. i suddenly want some icecream, though, so now i've got a plan. tomorrow there's a trip to lake tazawako that some students have organized. tazawako is over on the other side of the prefecture, i think, and it's a pretty famous, well visited place. the lake has a statue in it, i can't remember who the statue is. have to read up on it before i go, maybe. blephhhh... i'll post soon about the trip, and maybe a little half assed theory i worked out about one of the many aspects of my torrid love afair with the land of the rising sun.