Sayonara, sakura...

Having recently said sayonara to another cherry blossom season, I thought I'd share a couple photos of this year's sakura (cherry blossoms). A bunch of our fellow JETs gathered for the customary cherry blossom viewing picnic downtown in Peace Park (along with throngs of Japanese), but Joe was feeling anti-social that day, so instead we opted to enjoy the blossoms on the grounds of the little shrine across the street from our apartment.

It doesn't have the thousands of trees that Peace Park boasts, but it does have something Peace Park doesn't during cherry blossom season — some peace and quiet! We avoided the crowds and had the place all to ourselves. Even though the shrine is also a stone's throw from the train line and the bustling main road, it manages to be this lovely oasis of calm, buffered by houses around its perimeter and several large trees. So Joe and I set up camp there on a blue tarp and spread out our Sequence board game, some strawberries, my favorite dirt-cheap white wine ($3 a bottle — and it tastes great!), crackers & cheese and some inari (rice balls in fried tofu). It was a very pleasant afternoon just the two of us.

Here are a couple other nice trees we saw during our walk around the neighborhood and down the bike path.

In case you're wondering, no, the blossoms don't have a scent — despite what Bath & Body Works may tell you.

We did visit Peace Park a couple times during cherry blossom season, but neither visit was really good for photographs. The first time, only half the blossoms were in bloom, and the second time we went in the evening. I was surprised that there wasn't any special lighting on the cherry trees, actually. It's too bad, because it would be absolutely stunning in places there along the river at night. So we'll have to wait 'til next year to post some proper photos of Peace Park in full bloom.

The cherry blossoms are gone now but a variety of other flowers have now made their debut. Everywhere we go the walkways are lined with Rhododendran and tulips. This weekend was T-shirt weather. It's one of the most pleasant times to be in Japan, and I feel lucky to be here.

The Day of Reckoning

Last Thursday was just another day at work for me, but for the crowd of junior high school students who flooded our parking lot, Thursday was immensely important. It was The Day of Reckoning.

A little explanation first. The Japanese school system is structured differently than the American school system. In America, all kids attend their neighborhood public school whether they are Einstein Jr. or more of the ilk of Beavis & Butthead. Brilliant or brainless, all troop to the same school. Not so in Japan. Here, students are grouped by intelligence level — or to be more accurate, by their ability to achieve a certain score on a test. All junior high students must take entrance exams to get into high school, and some schools have higher requirements than others. Joe and I both teach at what are considered to be "high academic" high schools, though Joe's students are more like the A or A+ variety whereas mine are more like a solid B.

It's extremely important for students to get into a good high school. Students at the best high schools get into the best colleges and go on to work at the best companies. Students at the lower-end schools get cut out of that fold. Testing into a mediocre high school can pretty much doom a kid to a life of mediocrity. As Joe would say, "It's like they just failed at life."

On Thursday all the junior high students who applied to my high school as their top choice school came to find out whether they got in. Around 420 or so kids took the test, but only 320 get in. My school printed up these huge signs showing the student identification numbers of all those who were accepted. The signs were taken onto the balcony of the teacher's office on the second floor, tied to the railing and laid on the inside where no one could see them.

Late in the morning, all the kids gathered in the parking lot below the balcony. When the clock struck noon, the teachers picked up the signs and dropped them over the edge. The students crammed together and craned their necks in anticipation, rapidly scanning the signs for their ID number. Almost immediately, screams of joy burst out as students found their number and excitedly jumped up and down, hugging their friends. Others, meanwhile, continued squinting up at the boards, scanning silently once, twice, three times, frantically searching for a number that wasn't there. Reality sunk in and their faces crumpled, tears flowed, hysterical cries rose up. It was a scene of ecstatic joy and crushing disappointment all flowing together.

I felt truly bad for those students who didn't get in. It seemed a horribly humiliating way to learn their fate. It's like applying to school is reduced to the level of going to check the locker room door to find out if you made the cut for the football team. Except, you know, you're finding out if you made the cut for a good life.

We love kaki!

Yaki kaki (grilled oysters)

One of the things I know I'll deeply miss about Hiroshima some day is the oysters. They are so delicious — and nutritious, so I don't feel guilty eating them. Supposedly the oysters cultivated in Hiroshima are more nutritious than those produced elsewhere.

Hiroshima is actually the leading oyster producer in Japan, cultivating some 30,000 tons per year, and the February/March time-frame is the high point of the oyster season. That means a lot of the little fishing towns along the coast of the Seto Inland Sea have oyster festivals around this time, the biggest one being the Kaki (Oyster) Festival at Miyajima. Joe and I hit it up a few weeks ago hoping to stuff ourselves silly on yaki kaki (hehe...hehehe! Oh how I love Japanese sometimes), but found that at 500 yen for two grilled oysters, they weren't any less expensive than usual.

So I was in for a nice surprise today when Joe and I paid a visit to a little neighborhood market that sells locally grown produce and found a couple guys grilling oysters in front of the store and selling them two for 100 yen. We happily bought a plate, and then one of the guys dished up a couple extra for us, being glad to chat with the neighborhood gaijin, I guess. His generosity paid off for him because we ended up buying a couple bags of the de-shelled oysters to cook up tomorrow for dinner. I left happy as a clam (er... oyster). Try finding that at Kroger!

It's Graduation Day once again

Me with the English Club girls on Graduation Day

March 1 is Graduation Day in Japan. This morning's commencement ceremony was the second I've seen here now, and it was basically the same as last year — very solemn and subdued with lots of speeches and bowing and students looking melancholy. The kids who graduated today were juniors when I arrived in Japan, and since I rarely teach juniors, I didn't have many opportunities to teach most of these kids. A few, however, were seniors in the Advanced English class I taught this year, and the two girls in the picture above were members of the English Club I advise. I'll miss them. The girl on the right is going to major in English in Osaka.

I wish I could say I understood some of what was said at the graduation, but the truth is I couldn't. My vocabulary and listening comprehension still isn't nearly good enough to follow formal speeches spoken at a natural pace. I can pick out words here and there that I know, but I don't know enough yet to tie it all together and understand what's being said.

During the principal's speech, I was, however, able to recognize the beginning of a quote that he repeated from William Smith Clark, an American much loved in Hokkaido. Clark was a Massachusetts professor who lived in Sapporo (where we saw the Snow Festival) for a short time in 1876. While he was there, he helped establish Hokkaido University and, before returning to the U.S., impressed some students by urging them, "Boys, be ambitious!" The slogan caught fire around Hokkaido and remains famous still today. I saw the quote on several snow sculptures at the Snow Festival, which is how I learned about it.

To the graduates the principal recited the full quote: "Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money or for selfish aggrandizement, not for that evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for that attainment of all that a man ought to be."

Sounds like good advice for new grads.

Sitting through all the speeches without a clue otherwise, I'd hoped to hear everyone sing the Japanese version of "Auld Lang Syne" to break up the monotony, but no such luck. Of course we're all used to hearing "Auld Lang Syne" on New Year's Eve, but in Japan the song is played at graduation ceremonies instead. (Department stores play the song at closing time, too, to tell customers it's time to get out.) My supervisor tells me that about three-quarters of schools play the song at graduation, but my school happens to do a different song instead.

Anyway, the tune is the same but the lyrics are different in Japanese, and instead of "Auld Lang Syne," it's called "Hotaru no Hikari," which means "Light of Fireflies." The words translate roughly to, "We studied hard using the glow of fireflies in summer and by the light reflected through the window by the snow in winter. Now the days have passed and it is a time to say good bye."

Maybe I can convince them to play the song at next year's graduation — my last. Though, I'm pretty sure it would make me cry. Next year the students graduating will be the ones who came to the school shortly before I arrived, so I will have gone through their high school careers along with them.

Speaking of next year's graduation being my last, I guess I ought to mention that Joe and I just renewed our contracts to stay and teach a third year, so we'll remain here until August 2010. It was a pretty easy decision for us. The main reason is that we need more time to study Japanese, but also... I just didn't feel ready to leave yet. Japan is a fascinating place and I'm thoroughly enjoying exploring the country and the culture — not to mention the opportunities we have here to visit other countries in east and southeast Asia. Even after a year and a half it still feels like a great adventure. Though, I wouldn't mind some hot wings here...BW3's better watch out when we come home in April!

How much for that purse in the window?

Recently I went on a mission to find birthday party hats to use during an English lesson about party invitations. Not realizing that the pointy paper hats were one American tradition that the Japanese hadn't adopted, I found myself going to one store after another on a fruitless search. That search included a rather long bike ride to the Don Quixote store, which is basically a cross between Odd Lots, Spencer's and a corner grocery — a boxy store full of lots of cheap crap that looks like it belongs in a dorm room. The Donki, as it's affectionately called, has the largest selection of Halloween costumes I've seen here, so I figured if any place had party hats, this'd be it.

I never did find party hats there, though I did make a different discovery. In the back of the second floor, near the black light stuff, feather boas and Zippo lighters, were designer purses behind locked glass cases. The brand names were plastered everywhere on signs in big bubble letters  — Louis Vuitton, Prada, Coach. And perhaps just as prominently displayed as those luxury digs were the price tags.


Let me do the math for you. Using today's conversion rate of $1 = 94 yen, looking from left to right:

• 89,800 yen / 95,900 yen = $948 / $1,013
  
• 142,900 yen = $1,509
  
• 245,900 = $2,598
  
• 128,000 yen = $1,352
  

That's right, just these few purses (and there was a big case of them) ranged in price from $948 to $2,598. For a purse that comes from the equivalent of Odd Lots. Yeah.

It's no secret that the Japanese love luxury goods. I've read articles claiming that one in three Japanese women owns a Louis Vuitton purse. Talk about the watering down of a luxury brand — if practically everyone owns an absurdly overpriced piece of designer garbage, are you really so special or stylish anymore for owning one? Especially when they're selling them at Odd Lots? I mean, even if these things are somehow deeply discounted, who drops thousands of bucks on a purse from Odd Lots? Odd Lots, people! I don't get it. If you're going to cheat and buy the purse at Donki, why not just find a knock-off somewhere for $50?

Though, it does appear that these bags may be sitting on the shelf for a while. According to this ABC article, last December the economic downturn (which has smacked Japan twice as hard as the States) forced Louis Vuitton to cancel its plans to build a mega-store in Tokyo. Oh no, God! No extra super mega warehouse of sickeningly extravagant precious turd-colored purses! The humanity!

Hmm! Maybe the recession actually is making the world a better place.

Sapporo Yuki Matsuri

Our special little Japanese snowman says, "Chiiiiizu!"

The first weekend in February Joe and I headed way up north to the city of Sapporo on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido for a dose of Ohio-like weather. The attraction: the Yuki Matsuri, or Snow Festival.

More than 2 million tourists poured into Sapporo to celebrate the 60th year of the festival, which is world famous for its impressive life-size snow monuments and ice sculptures, like these:





Cool, huh? (Hah! Pun intended!) That last one is a life-size reproduction of Hamamatsu Castle in western Shizuoka Prefecture, where Honda was founded. The snow statue is the castle's resident, Ieyasu Tokugawa, who is considered one of the three people most important to Japan's unification. It took 4,000 people 29 days to create this sculpture with 4.2 million pounds of snow! They brought in the snow in dump trucks — 350 loads. Is that incredible or what?

So the snow festival was a lovely time. It was cold but perfectly bearable — only about 25 degrees. Aside from a few short breaks, it was practically a blizzard the entire time. It snowed so much that after being outside for just a couple minutes the snow was starting to pile up all over us. I didn't mind though — it was fun to get to play around in the snow again (especially because I didn't have to drive in it!). And my long johns kept me nice and toasty. Along the path of snow monuments there were small concert performances, snow boarding stunts and plenty of Japanese and international food vendors. The only thing that struck me as odd was that the walkway wasn't salted, so it was essentially one long ice slick. I fell once and smashed my hip. Glad I'm not 80 years old. Maybe there's some environmental reason the Japanese wouldn't salt the sidewalks?

Besides the gargantuan snow monuments, there also were hundreds of smaller snow sculptures — though when I say "smaller," I mean they were still bigger than Joe. Among my favorites were some of the characters out of Japanese pop culture.

Domokun!

Don't know who these buggers are, but they're cute!

Stitch! Every Japanese kid who rounded the corner and saw this yelled "STITCHI!"

The downtown area had a few blocks of ice sculptures, which were equally amazing.

Hina Matsuri (Doll Festival) dolls

An ice bar!

This one had lots of fish and crabs frozen into the sculpture itself. Hokkaido is famous for its fresh seafood, especially crab, which Joe and I decided to try. We went to a restaurant recommended by the tourism office — something good but not overly fancy — and after recovering from sticker shock ordered a large boiled "hairy crab" for 7,500 yen (around $75 — well, more with the weak dollar now).  It looked like this guy:

We actually were seated at a bar overlooking a pool of the crabs that would eventually end up on patrons' plates.

I wish we could say we melted at the taste, but the truth is the crab was smaller than we expected and served cold (I guess that's the way they do it there) with an icky vinegary-tasting dipping sauce. We were both disappointed. I mean, it was alright — but not worth what we paid. No more hairy crabs for us!

In addition to the snow and ice sculpture areas, we hit a third part of the city set up with giant snow slides and other activities for kids, like building snowmen and getting pulled in an inflatable raft behind a snowmobile. The slides were pretty grand — reminded me of bigger versions of the slide you see in the movie "Christmas Story" when the kids go to visit Santa in the mall. And the kids who slid down them had the same reactions, too — stunned looks often followed by shrieks of terror at the bottom. Precious!

The first thing I did there was build our very own miniature Japanese snowman (miniature... Japanese... of course!) Apparently the Japanese make snowmen with just two big snowballs, not three. Organizers actually handed me two silver mixing bowls and instructed me to fill them with snow and mash them together to make each ball, and some wooden pieces for the face. It was the picture of efficiency! Though all quite uniform (and as such, quite Japanese!). I didn't mind though; I thought the army of little snowmen was darling.

Me and my baby snowman

After we'd thoroughly explored all the snow art, we walked around the city of Sapporo a bit, too. Perhaps one of the most famous tourist attractions we checked out was the Sapporo clock tower, a building constructed in 1878 that looked surprisingly like it belonged on a town square back in Ohio. And there's a reason for that — as Wikipedia informs me, the building is one of the few surviving Western style buildings in Sapporo, a city developed in the 1870s with the assistance of the American government. This clock tower serves as a symbol of the city.

Sapporo clock tower

Even better was the Hokkaido government office building, a stately old red-brick building that also reminded me of home.

The evergreens around the government building were all being supported by pole and rope contraptions to keep the massive amounts of snow from destroying them.

I thought the piles of snow lining the branches were neat.

Downtown Sapporo at night

I came away with a great impression of Sapporo. The city looked so clean and new and just beautiful in the snow.

The Hondori shopping arcade wasn't bad, either, though I spent most of my time there admiring its giant pet shop instead of browsing around all the shops.

Oh, and I couldn't leave out one last thing, so classically Japanese in its inappropriateness. As we were walking along past all the perfectly ordinary shops and restaurants, Joe exclaims, "Look!" and points to the window of a costume shop:

Let's see. What do I want to be for Halloween next year? Frankenstein... hunter in redneck camo hat...Oh! S.S. officer! ... Hmmmm...

Our Commander in Chief — in briefs!

Perched on a low shelf between some style magazines in the window of the 7-eleven this evening was this gem:


That's right, there's Barack Obama, standing proudly in super short boxer briefs, just asking for someone to pick him up. Well, Yes I Can! And did! For 620 yen, I am the proud new owner of this month's issue of Mono magazine (great name for a mag, by the way, fantastic), filled with several pages of ads to buy Obama collectibles.

Leave it to the Japanese to ham up popular symbols in an inappropriate yet playful manner. I suppose it was only a matter of time til we saw this sort of thing given the Japanese's abiding love for Barack Obama. I haven't met a Japanese person yet who couldn't bust out with an enthusiastic "Yes We Can!" at the mention of Obama's name.

A couple weeks ago, while my students were working on their speech assignment, I played part of Obama's "Yes We Can" speech for them and gave them a translation of the speech that I got out of a book that's been flying off store shelves here. All Obama's speeches have been translated and are available on CD and DVD. My students were very interested to listen to Obama, and so were several of the teachers in my office. They just can't get enough of him. Obama was on the news pretty much daily here during the campaign, so the Japanese have come to know and love him along with Americans. When I ask why they have such affection for him, they say they just think he's so eloquent and that his voice is soothing.

So back to the magazine. It's a style magazine, from what I can gather, and the inside advertised Obama memorabilia for sale on various Web sites. Here we see T-shirts, draw-string knapsacks emblazoned with his image, bobbleheads, patches and pins:


On the next page, we've got Obama chopsticks, Obama cookies, an Obama drinking cup (to go with the cookies, of course), and other T-shirts available in 22 different colors.


Turning the page, we see what I can only guess is one of those refrigerator magnet sets with an Obama figure and various clothing items so you can dress him as you please, from a suit down to a Hawaiian shirt plus surf board — or just the blue undies featured on the cover. (Strangely, Obama looks awfully white in this ad, don't you think?)


There are also a few super gaudy watches, books, magazines, and, my favorite — Obama action figures. These action figures, available at ZacPac Toys & Collectibles, will set you back 105 smackaroos. They really love Obama. I'm not joking. Looking at this Web site, these dolls come with different facial expressions and three sets of hands so his hand motions match his expression when you set him up on the miniature stool in front of the miniature American flag.

This got me thinking, did George W. Bush ever get his own action figure? I mean, surely there must be... So I typed "action figure" and "george bush" into Google and the first link to pop up was this "Dishonest Dubya Lying Action Figure" with product description "He lies like a bastard! With Pretzel-Retching Action!" and a remote control with buttons for "Lie! Say Something Stupid! Change Outfit! and Choke on a Pretzel!"

Well I 'd say that about says it all about why Americans, Japanese and everyone else with two brain cells to rub together loves Obama, ay?