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.
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