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October 01, 2004
Tokyo II (last of the humongo-entries)
I promise that this is the last of the jam-packed posts, from now on I’m going to edit the entries down to just a few photos if not just one.
Tokyo is massive, it emulates the five burrows of New York but with twenty plus areas instead of a wimpy five. Even in such a big city we still found our way around, the subway lines being fairly well designed, but I won’t go off on a tangent about that (yet…). My little posse wanted to see art, wanted to see the city and just wanted to explore, it was good times all around.
Oh I think my back still hurts from this overnight bus. Eight hours to Tokyo with a whopping total of two hours of sleep, all in the name of adventure. (Pirates follow me everywhere!)
When I got off the bus the first thing I noticed was that my friends weren’t waiting for me. We had miss communicated the locations and were on opposite sides of town. Luckily I found a subway station and navigated to their stop. I’m still amazed that I never got lost.
Some of the sidewalks had small flashing patterns of lights embedded in them.
I still don’t quiet know what’s going on here, but this is a passing fad, and I’ve seen a number of girls dressed up in animal and character costumes just strolling around.
This is plastic food, yum. Most restaurants have these displays and I can’t be anymore thankful for the ability to point at what I want to order. Every night I pray to the god plasticoliosis for such fine luck.
I almost bought this little guy for my phone, that’s it right there, hot orange, so I won’t ever lose it. I’ve also been tempted by little remote controlled pets, the remote simply plugs into your phone and turns it into the controller.
Amen brother.
Those who look for art shall find it. This crystal structure is slowly but constantly changing because the rope it’s built on has a fluid constantly pumping through it.
Hanging out at an opening at the Rocket Gallery.
On Saturday I ventured by my lonesome to the National Museum of Emerging Science and Technology. Wow I was blown away it was amazing. This is a part of an analog-style, hands-on, demonstration of the Internet. Love, love, love.
Posted by theinfonaut at 09:20 AM | Comments (5)
October 19, 2004
Matsuri means festival
Matsuri means festival. I think it should mean festival to the power of 10.
This past weekend was amazing. I was taken to a large festival at 11:45pm Friday night and then brought back home at about 6:30 in the morning. Then after 4 hours of sleep (chanting Yayusan! Yayusan! Sorre Sorre! in my dreams) I got up to attend the festivities in my own town. I regret that these photos can’t express the energy and the sound of it all, most especially the sound. Each float contains a set of drums complete with two small drummer boys. The people sing and chant and laugh and dance. The floats are called danjiri. Each one is owned and carried by local groups or neighborhoods. These things are beautiful, weighing in around 3 tons, ornately carved and painted. During the day the groups cart the danjiri around town stopping at houses and business that have made a donation for the privilege of a toast from the danjiri group. At night the danjiri dawn rows of candle lit lanterns (chachi) and battle. The men carry them on their shoulders, shouting, singing, and even making the whole thing jump up and down. They lift it higher, holding it by lower supports. More chanting and singing ensues until they build up the energy to lift it to arms length. Everyone gasps each time the floats invariably teeter to one side as they bring them down from such a great height. I was warned numerous times about the danger of these festivals, it seems that every so often someone is smashed or smothered to death. Once we arrived to the festival grounds and were sucked in by the seething mass of people and the swarms around the 40+ dangiri I understood why!
What my town didn’t have in size it made up for it in personalities. So many great people were out that day and that evening; people from my taiko team (did I mention I play with taiko drum team here?), so many of my students, good friends, good food, plenty of sake and “beru”, good times. In fact: unforgettable.
I’d love to explain this to you, but I don’t even know why they’ve got on frog caps. All in the name of fun.
The danjiri are an amazing show of team work and community. Light sticks go up in the air as two danjiri get close to colliding. Somehow the light sticks and whistles and shouting move the two danjiri in opposite directions. Only in Japan.
A view from up in one of the danjiri. The team let me up in it while they were taking a break and well… stocking up on drinks.
Back to Tanbara land, my town. This is a performance by some of the middle-school boys.
“We’ve been drinking all day!” they shout. Ok actually I had no idea what they were telling me, but they did put on a very cute reenactment of Star Wars with some of those above-mentioned light sticks.
Gotta love the miss-matched black and white tabbi-boots.
What is normally a dead street corner starts to fill up and light up.
They really are heavy, no joke, just check out the struggle illustrated on his face.
This is a mikoshi. It is larger than a danjiri, covered in golden embroidery, and if you thought lifting a 3 ton wooden shrine to arms length was impressive than you might keel over when you see them run at top speed with one of these things.
John and Duncan (two other JETs) and some of my students getting rowdy and taunting the other teams with a little chanting.
After heaving those massive floats around, what’s one single person's weight.
Posted by theinfonaut at 12:43 AM | Comments (3)
October 27, 2004
Ehime is Mikan country
This past weekend I headed to the south of my prefecture, to a city called Uwa-cho. The purpose was to help with a Halloween carnival for the local elementary schools. After entertaining close to 500 elementary students we (myself and the other JETs who helped out) were treated to some local culture. On Sunday we headed up a mountain to go mikan picking. Mikan are basically oranges but a bit smaller and quite a bit hardier. The trees we picked from were over 40 years old and more like old gnarly glorified-bushes.
The mountain has a system of carts and rails to lower the crops, one such lovely old get-up is visible along the bottom of this photograph.
After all that hard work of picking and eating our fill of Mikan it was time for lunch.
Grilling on the little portable hibachi grill.
These miniature-sized game machines looked awfully lonely, and I would have feed them quarters but then I remembered that I’m in Japan, and the trauma of eating foreign money would probably be the final stab for these two worn-down little guys.
Later that day we went to a museum to watch a koto performance and take part in a tea ceremony.
Posted by theinfonaut at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)