12:21 - Festival Season!

It's Saturday morning, I have my first seemingly quiet weekend ahead of me in the last 3-4 weeks. I had a night filled with strange dreams which include false teeth, living out of an ambulance (a really nice one might I add) and other vagueries that only dreamscapes can provide. I have a day filled with lounging, studying, updating this blog, listening to music. Pretty pedestrian actually compared to the last few weekends.

This last week was outstanding the highlight of which includes a real and honest complement from one of my 7th graders. I often feel frustrated because my class has no grade and so I can't tell if there's an impact on my students. The student told me that she likes my class because there is no preasure in it. It tends to be fun and there is no feeling of the weight of the future in the class. I have never gotten this sort of compliment from a student before. I had heard these sorts of things from the other teachers in the school and always took them as a cut. Since my class has no grade I always felt like it was a blow off class and the only reason that the teacher liked it was the same reason the students liked it.. you didn't have to do anything if you didn't want to. I still don't know if it is a good compliment or not, but getting an honest thank you from a student makes the job a worth while thing if only for that one student. Well enough with the yakking, lets get on to the meat:


Hii is a small village on the ocean that is my most distant, oldest, and in many ways my best school. The classes I have at that elementary school are small (no more than 15 people) and the kid are quiet, polite and interested. They had their festival about two weeks ago and I went to check it out. A matsuri is an old fashioned harvest festival. Sort of like halloween and thanksgiving rolled into one. They all have a similar format with a few exceptions. One explaination is that the people of that area to be thankful of a good harvest have a party to thank their kami (spirit/god of that area; there can be many kami in a given area). Of course the Kami spend the whole year in the local shrine and it wants a vacation too. So the locals load a represntation/avatar of the kami into a large portable shrine and haul it around and entertain it. Usually the avatar is a small mirror or a doll. The shrines are large, HEAVY, and are dragged/carried around the vacinity of the main shrine. All the while drums, flutes, cymbals and other things are played. This ruckus is broken up by stops for snacks and booze to lubricate the men (and only men) caring for the shrines. Ultimately every festival has some sort of competition (or multiple competitions) where people from various sections of town struggle against each other in various ways. Unfortunately my camera started to act up and I didn't get the best pictures but here's what I got:



Of course it wouldn't be Japan if there weren't strange old men that held positions of unknown importance. I like the really old guys on the left because I like to try imagining what it was like when they were young men and doing more than holding the spears in the background. I didn't get a picture of him but I think one of the local yakuza was there too. He was probably in his late 40's and just vile looking. Honestly he looked normal, but the way he acted you could tell he was dirty. Or maybe it was his badly dyed baby-crap brown hair that only the shallow and the stupid seem to sport in this country. I wanted to elbow him in his crooked teeth the moment I met him.


Another common sight at a matsuri are GOBLINS! This was a first for me though, I had never once seen an elder goblin only younger goblins. Hii matsuri has an elder goblin, but I never did find out why. The younger goblins (called tengu in Japanese) will, if you ask them, smack you on top of the head for good luck. I imagine in the old days the crack on the head was more severe but now it's pretty gentle and I even got a chestnut to eat for my trouble. Goblins are mountain folk and like most things in Japan can be helpful (as in the goblin that swordsmanship to man) or troublesome.







I was recently privilaged to see 3 degree blackbelts (typically High School Jrs.) testing in kendo. I expect that anyone that reads my blog has a picture of what kendo looks like so I won't go into it beyond that it was cool. The step from a 2nd degree test to a 3rd degree test is immense. The level required was obvious to even my untrained eyes. Even more intresting was seeing a deaf girl test for her 3rd degree. A woman, with a minor disability that has made it to 3rd degree with really no stigma was something that I can't say I wasn't shocked by here in Japan where differences are frowned on (whether it your fault or not your different) and women still don't get as much respect as they deserve.

The test was broken down into first a round-robin style match (2 - 3 one minute matches), followed by a paper test with five possible questions (2 picked that day to answer), and finally my favorite the paired forms (kata).


Recently I also went to Osaka (the weekend after the Matsuri and Kendo). Highlights include teaching a friend to play the best game in the world-backgammon, getting lost more times than I can count. Drinking lots of starbucks (and I don't even like coffee) and the following pictures. I'd say the grand highlight was a walk from Tennoji station north to Shitennoji where a store called Merin Sangyo is located. Merin is a dealer of martial arts equipment particularly catering to the sword arts. They also deal in antique and new katanas (the kind that have an edge and are dangerous). I met the president of the company and talked about the proper way to respect a sword when giving and receiving one and about the current state of education and children in Japan. All very interesting. It was somewhat comforting in an impotent way how often we mirrored each other's sentiment on the kids these days.

Three guardians so to speak of the local areas. The left most was a lion/flower sculpture in the botanical garden outside of Tennoji station. The right was a lion guardian at a temple and the middle (and coolest find) was a dragon painted onto the ceiling cover over a well at Shitennoji temple. I wouldn't have seen it at all if I didn't look up. I wonder how many people miss it.
Not a lot to say other than it was the best party in the two years I've been going to these parties with the teachers.
The guy tallest guy in the right picture is the gym teacher and one of the more fun guys at the school the man next to him helps me teach my 9th grade class and has made the teaching experience worth while..strangely enough he is not an English teacher, but teaches shop class.

Another matsuri below with some odds and ends pictures following that. This more recent festival was the best I've been to just because it was livelier than any I'd been to before. I'm told because it's a port town and is more open to outside influences. The best parts were the competions in town where they typical collisions of the shrines took place but also an impressive 'dance' with huge bamboo poles and flags, the challenge was to control the weight of these things and still see how close to ground you could sweep the pole.

The farthest right of the photos is the yellow lion dance which had just tons of confetti thrown at the crowd, the drumer, the lion and each other. It was a mess. I'm told the reason the yellow team was so much more energenic than the other lion dances is because the lion is suposed to have been wounded with an arrow and is struggling with it during this portion of the dance.

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