Alley Cat Sam

2006-08-07T18:53:00.000+09:00

Random Pictures!!

A creepy old guy running around taking pictures of girls in Harajuku.

Ryan holding hands with some kind of dinosaur thing.

They have strict rules.

Me on a dam.

Leo getting down (or showing us his technique for using a Japanese toilet).

2006-06-24T00:06:00.000+09:00

The Shimoda salmon festival that happened two thirds of a year ago.

I finally got around to editing a short movie from this brutal affair that I witnessed. Shimoda's big on salmon, so they have a big festival every year where you can be as cruel to fish as you've ever imagined, and also eat them and also bounce around in an inflatable duck that I call American Duck (who seems to appear at a lot of festivals around here).

Things to watch for:

-The Fish Pool Scramble- While I'm not sure if anyone actually calls it by that name, the scramble is where you can pay a few dollars to be one of the many people who wades in a pool and catches a live salmon with your bare hands. The salmon then dies of suffocation, or in rare cases bludgeoning, if rumors are to be believed.

-The 'Beat Your Fish with a Stick' Race- The four contestants stand next to a trough, each with one salmon inside. While you are supposed to nudge your fish with your stick, and have the fish swim to victory under its own power, those who really want to win usually wield their stick more like a golf club than a wand of gentle encouragement.

-The vegetarian holding up a fish that she recently murdered- No explanation necessary, Shimoda brings out the worst in us all.

Sincerely,
Matt

2006-06-19T22:36:00.000+09:00

This guy is AWESOME!

I'm seriously regretting that I didn't buy a cd from this band, samurai something-or-other, when I saw them in Harajuku. If you don't believe me that he's awesome, check out his microphone stand for proof.

Honestly, after seeing THAT, who cares what their music sounds like?!?!?!?!

TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL!!!!!

2006-06-17T16:49:00.000+09:00

Potato Snack!

Or what we would call potato chips in America. This particular variety was steak flavored, thus the young Archie holding up a plate of steak. When I bought them, I thought it would be funny because meat flavored anything is pretty funny. After I ate them, I realized that the chips are pretty much the same as barbecue chips, in that they are steak sauce flavored, not flavored like the meat themselves. Deliciousness chased away disappointment however, and I decided to make a mundane post on a website about the potato snack after all.

The hidden secret to the potato snack is on the back of the package. At a cartoon steak restaurant, the anthropomorphic fork and spoon should be having a good time, right?

WRONG! While the knife seems to be enjoying himself, that fork is either terrified, or he is wracked with guilt! Don't be surprised when young Archie keels over at the end of the meal and "Forky" is suddenly nowhere to be found.

In true Japanese fashion, this snack did absolutely nothing towards saving the whales.

Taste: 4 out of 5
Packaging: 72 out of 97
Save the whales: 0 out of 2

2006-06-12T16:34:00.000+09:00

My House

So after just over 10 months of being in Japan, I've decided to finally post pictures of my town and my house, starting with the outside.

-Click on the pictures to embiggify them.

This is Mt. Nakui. Although short, this mountain is annoyingly steep. Legend says that if you climb this mountain as many times as I have, then you are awesome.

This is the main road in my town as seen from a pedestrian bridge. There's nothing notable in this picture, but that's fitting because there's nothing notable in this town. We have one police car, and to the best of my knowledge it hasn't left the station parking lot in almost a year.

This is my awesome house with my totally rad blue mitsubishi parked in front. Those flowers on the left side are not mine, as any plant life I touch withers and dies.

Lastly, the view out my back window. Those are rice fields in the foreground, a grape vineyard midground, and greenhouses beyond that I've never been in, but I'm guessing house zombie experiments. You can also make out hills in the background if you squint, and those green things on the hills are trees. Above the hills you can see sky and clouds if you look carefully. Also a wrestler. (just kidding about the clouds)

-from Matt.

2006-05-10T19:34:00.000+09:00

DEER!

Yep, that's a wild deer that I'm petting right near Japan's most famous torii gate at Itsukushima.
This isn't the deer that ate a brochure and some cigarettes out of an old man's beach bag, we saw that one later.

We were unfortunately there at low tide, but that doesn't mean that Megan and Antonise weren't having a great time! (Mehan and Greg both look confused, so I guess they didn't have such a great time).

2006-01-24T20:40:00.000+09:00

Tokyo Teaser video.

Well, I wanted to put at least some sort of video up tonight, so I put together this one minute teaser video of my 10 day long New Years trip to Tokyo. In it are some various short (very short) clips from Tokyo Tower, Ueno, and Yokohama's China Town district.

2006-01-24T19:18:00.000+09:00

NICE WHEELS!!!!
(is what you'll be saying by the end of this post)

Somehow I managed to wrangle about 3 weeks of vacation and only use up 4 of my annual leave days. This has earned me the nickname "li'l David Copperfield" (the magician, not the Charles Dickens character), although I'm the only person who uses the nickname. Needless to say, I not only have a lot of backed up video from before the trip when I got sick, I also have tons of fresh stuff to work through. First though, everyone who has heard about my new car is really anxious to see it, so here you go!! Pictures of my new car!!

Ok, I was just kidding. That's not my car, it's actually my friend's car, but he only lets me drive it inside with lots of people walking around. My car's way nicer:

I took that first photo really fast and it didn't come out too well, so I took a second picture for you all. I've named the car Pearl, and from the pictures, I'm sure you can see why, so I won't bother explaining it here and boring you all.

As you can plainly see, Pearl's a pretty sweet way to get from here to there, and boy do I love visiting there, although I wish they had more stuff. Since I'm such a pimp, I've appropriately pimped my ride with the following:

a map
an ice scraper that the previous resident left in my shed
a tape adapter for my ipod (not pictured)
a fluorescent light (blue)

The real problem now is that all the ladies won't stop following me and my boss cruiser.

2005-12-15T16:10:00.000+09:00

"Don't talk to me, your breath smells like natto."

Usually I look forward to school lunch. It's a nice big meal, it's dirt cheap (about two dollars US), and it's usually pretty tasty to boot. Every once in a while I get served a lunch from my nightmares, and yesterday was one of those days. First, a little background.

In America, I also liked my school lunch (and in this respect I was somewhat of an anomaly). Although my school lunch didn't taste as good as my occasional lunch from Burger King or The Skylark Diner, it wasn't bad. I enjoyed the ritual of choosing between soggy lasagna or wavy hot dogs, then choosing between tri-colored peas or mashed potatoes, either of which would be served to me with an ice cream scoop. Occasionally I'd get an orange with my lunch and we'd go out into the courtyard and play orange. But you're not here to read about American school lunch.

In Japanese public schools there are no choices. Everyone, teachers and students alike, eats the same exact meal and, in the case of my particular school district, nobody brings their own lunch at all. A typical lunch consists of a bowl of white rice, a bowl of soup (usually containing meat or fish), a piece of meat or fish, a salad or vegetable side dish (usually containing meat or fish), and a small juice-box of milk that smells like BO (the juice-box, not the milk). There are variants, sometimes the rice is replaced with ramen noodles for example, and there is often a dessert (bread, a piece of fruit, or a cup of custard).

This routine goes on every working day, but is punctuated every so often by that horror of horrors, one of the few foods I absolutely can not eat, natto. For those unfamiliar with natto, it is a snotty pile of soybeans so full of ammonia that the entire lunch room will smell of cat butt shortly after the meal begins.

Not only is natto always terrible, apparently this natto was extra terrible, since all the teachers groaned when they found out what brand it was (but ate it anyway). I spent the entire lunch time holding my plates of food really close to my nose so I didn't have to smell the natto-butt smell while I ate my rice, and looked at what else was on my tray.

What's this? Two small fish? Hey, you shouldn't have! Oh, but it seems somebody forgot to remove the heads. Oh, I see, you eat the fish heads, as well as the fins. No thanks, the eyes on mine look a little too bloated. I'll just leave the heads on my plate, thank you. Between the pungent fish and the odoriferous natto, the cafeteria now smells simultaneously like a cat's back AND front ends.

The big argument for why people eat natto is that it's healthy. Some people love it, but I've even spoken to Japanese people who hate natto but eat it for their health. They tell me I should eat it for my health. I respond that orange juice is healthy too, but everyone seems to ignore this point.

Everyone in my school knows I hate natto. In fact, it was part of my introduction. Still, they think it's hilarious, and every time we have natto, I hear everyone's favorite joke at least twice: "Matt-o san, do you want some natto? AHHH HAHAHAHA!! I got you GOOD, sucker!!" I smile and say no, when what I really want to say is, "Don't talk to me, your breath smells like a kitty litter box."

2005-12-09T18:59:00.000+09:00

Double Header!!!

So I got sick about 2 weeks ago, then I got better, and now I'm sick again. Some kind of mutant Japanese cold in a country where decongestant is illegal. That's right, sudafed will get you deported from Japan. I blame the fact that my immune system is basically an infant here with all these new island viruses that it's never seen before.

So one of the hardest Japanese business practices for an American to get used to is the idea that you must come to work when you are sick. In fact, it is a common problem between assistant English teachers and their contracting organizations. If you don't go to work, you go to the hospital or you take a paid vacation day. I saw a teacher faint (or pretend to faint) on a desk in the middle of the day, and they said she could go home 45 minutes early (although that was at my not-so-nice school). One of the junior high school English teachers taught class for the first half of the day, then went to the hospital for the second half to get an IV needle for her flu.

"Aren't they worried about spreading germs?" you may ask. Well, they wear a paper mask over their mouths. I'm not sure which viruses are strong enough to penetrate paper and which aren't, but the teachers usually pull their masks off of their mouths when they talk to you. Or when they're eating. Or when they're sitting there... At the very least, the masks clearly mark who to stay away from.

All this really doesn't bug me too much, going to work sick isn't quite as bad as I thought it would have been, but the lack of good decongestant just burns me up inside. In a country where it's rude to blow your nose in public, you might think they would welcome all forms of nose medicine, but alas, cold medicine is, as one of the pre-departure speakers put it, "the same as heroin in Japan."

2005-12-01T22:31:00.000+09:00

Hey Matt! What's convenience store pizza like in Japan?

Well, during the walk home all the watery cheese, tuna, and CORN slid off, leaving one piece of bacon and a bunch of ketchupy stuff on the pizza.

Oh I see.....
Well, at least someone at work gave you a huge bag of apples for no reason, right?

YES!!!!

2005-11-26T01:44:00.000+09:00

The fall leaves. (there's a double meaning there)

One of the big traditions in this area is to go to lake Towada and the nearby Oirase gorge in the fall to hike around and look at the many colored leaves. It's so much of a tradition that when I went to Towada a couple of months ago, all of the Japanese people that I mentioned it to became very confused and said, "Why did you go? you went too early by mistake Matt-o san!" So last Saturday I returned to Oirase gorge with Jason, Anna, and Dave to see the beautiful colored leaves of the fall season.

See those kind of dark brown leaves just left of the center of the photograph? Those are my favorites.

I'm sure you all remember the rock that a witch supposedly lives under. Well, she didn't kill me before, and she didn't kill me this time either. I expect she's on vacation or maybe dead since the legend is from hundreds of years ago. If you do a comparison with the last trip, the rock looks almost the same, except in the summer you see the rock from a different angle and not covered in snow.

Here I'm doing an explorer pose because I had to "explore" my way out to the middle of the stream by gracefully trudging through the stream. Good thing I had my waterproof boots, eh, Magellan? heh heh heh.

The snow was really falling pretty heavily the whole day, until we turned around to go back. Then the sun came out, and the snow melted off the branches over us, seeming to hit me squarely in the head an unusually frequent number of times. It was just like The Wizard of Oz. Exactly the same, no difference at all.

We build this snowman by a sign. Jason declared that he was from Miami, and I declared that he was Ted.

I hope you appreciate the irony of this sign as well as the fact that I think they spelled cigerettes wrong.

2005-11-19T23:23:00.000+09:00

The Drum Solo.

So this past Thursday night was the annual Aomori charity talent show/servant auction. The event was a big success and raised about 1,500 US dollars for a school in Nepal. It also raised 1,500 Japanese civilians from a peaceful sleep as the incredibly noisy group left the club. I wrote and played a short drum solo for the event, and Leo was kind enough to video tape it for me, so here it is. There was a lot of noise and talking, largely due to it being an all-you-can-drink event, so the sound quality isn't so fantastic.

Things to watch for:

Me talking like an idiot at the beginning.

One of my drum pads comes loose while I'm banging on it, and I have to stop playing to fix it. Half of the audience thinks that I'm done.

Me bobbing my head around and biting my lip like an idiot.

2005-11-14T20:30:00.000+09:00

The Halloween Video.

Disclaimer: this video is not up to my usual standards. Since Mehan mentioned on his site that I would be posting a video of the halloween haunted house, I felt obligated to, but I had very little footage to work with, so half of the movie is a shaky, blurry walkthrough of the haunted house. It was very dim even though all the lights in the basement were turned on. I added "scary" music to this part of the video to make it more "scarier." I added "hip" music to the rest of the video to make it more "hiperer."

Things to watch for:
The tunnel with all the yellow things hanging from the ceiling was where I crawled around and screamed at people for 3 hours.
Keep an eye out for the cardboard snowman to the right of the anatomy dummy. The scary snowman.

2005-11-13T21:55:00.000+09:00

Conclusion
So, again sorry about the lengthy lapse. I haven't emailed anyone in about a month either. I hope you hated the latest five posts all at once (scroll down about five posts if you don't know what I'm talking about). Here are some posts to look forward to in the near future: The inevitable house tour video, 3 months in the making, real footage of an Australian woman catching a salmon by hand the old fashioned way (just like they do in the outback!), and possibly up to three minutes of a very polite Jason talking to a very drunk Misawa army base guy. Thanks for being patient, and I miss all of you. Unless you're one of the people here in Japan, then I hate all of you.

-Matt

2005-11-13T21:52:00.000+09:00

Rice pictures.

Everyone in Japan has to post pictures of the rice harvest from their town. I think it's an international law or something. After they harvest the rice in Japan, they pile it up into these cool little straw hut looking things so they can burn all the dried up rice stalks.

The bad thing about harvest season is they harvested all the grapes, so it doesn't smell good when I walk to work anymore.

2005-11-13T21:46:00.000+09:00

Halloween.
I tried to go as a homemade scarecrow, but failing that and seeing Greg arrive as a much less embarrassing looking scarecrow, I just resigned to being "some creepy thing guy with safety pins for a mouth."

I made my own mask, but it fell apart after about a half an hour because it was made cheaply. After it got busted, I wore my backup mask which was just a plain white ski mask. The little kids were of course all very scared, and the older kids weren't scared and acted tough. The funny thing, however, is how scared some of the adults were (or acted). There was a group of three ladies that were at least in their 30s who screamed as much as the 8 year old kids. Every once in a while, one of the staff members would come through the haunted house with a group saying "I am a staff, these are scary girls, don't scare them!" These girls were never very scary, and were always around the age of 17. I don't understand why they enjoyed going through a haunted house in this fashion, because if no one jumps out at you, you're simply walking through a cardboard room decorated with cardboard mummies and bats and stuff.

It's kind of like the department store that was one floor above except it's darker, more easily inflamed, and it doesn't sell any cool stuff. My favorite kid was the one who walked through the haunted house trying to pass out candy to all of the ghosts. I think he had heard bits and pieces about Halloween, but still didn't quite get it.

2005-11-13T21:45:00.000+09:00

The Speech Contest.

This speech contest had two native speakers on the panel of three judges, as opposed to the last one I went to that had one native speaker on a panel of four judges. So why did the boy with one of the worst pronunciations of the day get a prize? Well he did have a fairly well-written speech, but it might have been more that he didn't write about the time his baseball team didn't win the regional tournament, or the time his blue team won his school's sports festival (both actual speech topics). Instead he wrote an intriguing essay about how he feels the protests in China were Japan's fault. Intriguing because this was the first time I've heard anyone who wasn't the mayor talk about politics in Japan. Neither of my students won any prizes. I wasn't able to get them to break out of their shells and be emotional. They did work hard though. Oh, and Clayton pointed out to me that the middle judge had a bag clearly worthy of mockery. If you want to judge speech contests, you apparently need a giant old lady purse, whether or not you are a giant old lady.

The second half of the speech contest was speeches the students had written themselves, so you can expect some strange topics there. The first half, the recitation contest, consisted of pre-written speeches provided for the students. Arguably this half had the stranger and more poorly written speeches in the competition. The topics were Thomas Jefferson, Hello Kitty, Robots, Ichiro (the Japanese baseball player), and a man who talked to his two cactuses. No joke. My personal favorite of the speeches the students wrote was "How to be an earthling," a speech about being globally conscious.

2005-11-13T21:37:00.000+09:00

The junior high culture festival.
In America, band concerts, school plays, art exhibits and the like will be shown in the evening at the school. Close friends of the students involved and parents are likely to be the only people in the audience. In Japan, they pack all of those things together and make it into a sort of all day open house gala called a "bunkasai" or culture festival. The taiko drumming was pretty rad. I played drumset with the school band to "Sing Sing Sing," and some of the teachers sang karaoke songs with the band backing them.

Apparently my music teacher's left shoulder is a ghost or vampire left shoulder that can't be photographed. I also got my health checked by some students at the nurse's office.

They tried to guess how tall I was before they measured my height, and of course couldn't believe how tall I turned out to be, even though I told every student in the school on my first day that I am 180 centimeters tall. It turns out, I'm in very good health. I'm definitely doing better than this stuffed animal that they gutted and threw on a table.

In one of the more disgusting displays, they grew pitri dish cultures from kids who didn't wash their hands. I didn't take any pictures of the vomitous bacteria that arose. Sorry. The day culminated in an incredibly depressing play about people waiting at a train station for a train to the afterlife. One of the kids waiting was suicidal but missed the train in the end.

2005-11-13T21:35:00.000+09:00

The chorus competition.

"Matt-o san! There will be a chorus competition this saturday held at our school. Will you come?"
"Alright!" I thought. Just my luck, they're holding the big chorus competition at my school! Sure I'll come. Turns out the chorus competition was between the different grades of the school, not between different schools like I had assumed. The theme song of the competition was "Let's search for tomorrow." First, the whole school got up and sang the theme song, which they've been practicing every afternoon for weeks, so I was pretty sick of it by this point in time. Then, the 1-1 class got up to sing two songs, the first of which was the exact same theme song. There are six classes in my school, so I heard that awful awful song 7 times in a matter of three or four hours. I then pulled my ears off and cried. I wasn't alone, because many members of the 3-1 class that didn't win the first place trophy were also crying.

2005-11-13T21:32:00.000+09:00

Back from the dead?

So I haven't updated in a while. I said a reason would be forthcoming, and now it has forthcame. Basically, I haven't had a weekend to myself for an entire month. Last weekend I worked both Saturday and Sunday at my elementary school's cultural festival. The weekend before that I volunteered at the Hachinohe international center's haunted house (not work, tons of fun, but I was nowhere near a computer). The weekend before that, I had to work Saturday and Sunday at my junior high school's culture fest, and the weekend before that I went to my junior high school's chorus competition. Among all of these things being prepared for, I also had to get two students ready for a speech contest that was held a week and a half ago. The minus side, I haven't had time to even clean my house, much less post anything on my website. The plus side? I get four extra vacation days now since I worked those two weekends. Oh yeah, baby. So here's some pictures of everything that's been going on, in chronological order. Also, if you spell speech with a silent D, they are in alphabetical order.

2005-09-26T21:09:00.000+09:00

I ran into some problems with my picture posting, so it's basically going to take me three times as long to do it. For tonight, I'll just put the video up, and I'll probably get the pictures up on Wednesday evening.

This past weekend was the second three day weekend in a row, so I went north to Sapporo. Here I saw a chocolate factory, a beer "factory," a TV tower, a clock tower, a ton of malls and hotels, and two pants droppers, only one of which was mechanical.

Sound like a fun weekend? It was. In the video you'll see:
The overnight ferry to Hokkaido, which at one am was completely full of old drunk men.
The Sapporo TV tower, which is like a small red Eiffel tower, and which sways terrifyingly in the breeze.
Kids feeding huge mobs of pigeons in the park. The boy who was stomping and scaring pigeons was standing next to me after I turned off the camera. He soon decided that it was not only the correct time, but also the correct place to defecate. I quickly walked away just in time to dodge a frantic father who immediately scooped up the child and ran the 60 or 70 foot dash to the bathroom.
The Sapporo beer "factory." Since nobody in Japan knows what the word factory means, they thought it would be a cool name for a mall, thus ensuring the confusion of thousands of english speaking tourists each year.
The Sapporo beer museum which was itself closed, but also had a yakiniku restaurant.
The Ishiwa chocolate factory, featuring an introduction by time-traveling, translucent children, Sapporo's most famous mechanical pants-dropper, and a clip of the 15 minutes of non-stop strangeness and annoying music that is the hourly garden clock tower robot show thing.
Missing from the video are shots of Sapporo's bustling night life district that reminds me of Times Square, the awesome and huge train station, and the many musical instrument stores in which I passed a great many hours out of the weekend. Also missing is footage of me throwing up in the park when I got sick on Saturday from what I assume must have been a bad pastry that morning.

2005-09-20T23:07:00.000+09:00

Wandering Heroes.

For the national holiday of "respect for the aged" day, I managed to cross three items off of my things to see in Japan list. It was, of course, not an easy journey. It was an escapade that would test the physical and mental limits of myself and my two companions. It's a tale of dragons, deities, danger, and Mr. Donut. We went to the edge of the human spirit, stared into the face of eternity, and came back to tell the tale. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The day started off innocently enough, with Anna calling my house and waking me from a dream in which I was walking around my house, and with me calling Mehan's house and waking him from an already awake state. This next part is actually pretty boring and there are no angry native attacks or feats of strength, so suffice it to say everyone ended up getting out of Anna's car at some big complex in the Oirase gorge, which leads up to lake Towada. Here, amidst the tables fashioned from tree stumps and the candies made of clams, a friendly local provided us with walking maps and we were off (in the car).

The first legendary landmark we came to was this big rock. The area around lake Towada is heavily haunted by demons and ghosts. This rock was home to a very beautiful, but super evil old lady who would kill travelers and take their stuff. I guess we either didn't count as travelers, didn't have anything worth taking, or the lady was out for the moment (it was around lunch time, after all), because we came out of trial number one with not a scratch.

Before the next destination on our adventure, a three-tiered waterfall, There was a fallen tree blocking the path. This tree was huge, but I took care of it. No sweat.

The waterfall was pretty cool. It was a little bit smaller than Niagara falls, so I stuck my hand under it. Well, under the edge. They say that anyone who sticks their hand under these falls will be blessed with awesomeness forever. I guess it's good to have some backup awesomeness, in case mine ever fades away.

Finally, we drove to the legendary haunted lake Towada itself. We drove up high to an observation point. We drove down low to look out on the lakeside. We accidentally parked illegally at a hotel and ate in some weird diner where we had to pay in advance, but that wasn't enough. We came to a lake, and by thunder we were going out on the lake, no matter how terrifyingly windy it was... (by thunder?)

We found a suitable vessel from the shipyard's selection of swan boats and pink dragon boats. Mehan was very insistent that he "called the dragon" even though there were 4 dragon boats, 3 of us, and nobody else even thinking about wanting to go on the lake. Upon the boat merchant's suggestion that the dragon boats might tip over and then eat us, we opted for a swan boat.

Mehan checked if the craft was seaworthy, and the three of us were off. After ten minutes of paddling over the 3 foot high waves, we finally made it to the end of the dock. The highlights of our half hour voyage were almost being tipped over by the wake of a giant ferry, and noticing that there was one other swan boat of crazy people out on the lake.

We thought we had come back the same way we departed, but we were wrong. DEAD wrong. The waves of lake Towada had carried us off all the way to Egypt. Or at least some town in Japan that has a pyramid. As we left the road and began our journey to the pyramid on foot, the jungle became more and more thick. The Egyptian jungle. It was here that we were attacked many times by Egyptian amazons and where old Joe, our Egyptian Sherpa, died from a poisonous dart. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of any of this because I was, of course, fighting too many Amazonian Japanese Egyptians to hold the camera steady.

When we reached the pyramid, it was not there, and had been replaced by a boring pile of a couple of boulders. I climbed one. The view was nice, but I think photos of the pyramids of giza have ruined all other pyramids in the world for me.

Finally our party, its numbers dwindled down to only 3 of the original members, ventured on to the day's crowning moment. The point of the journey that makes all of the death and heartburn worth it. We came to the legendary tomb of Christ. This site, as mentioned in the previous entry, allegedly contains the last resting places of Jesus and of his twin brother Isukiri. After being thoroughly saved, and taking a picture of ourselves as some biblical face cut-out people, we counted our limbs and pointed ourselves homeward. We were all a little wiser and, I think, just a little bit more fashionable.

2005-09-20T22:45:00.000+09:00

Big news, taking the world by storm. It turns out Jesus Christ is buried in Japan! Every town in Japan is famous for something. My town is famous for it's pears and for having an old samurai castle. The town of Shingo, about half an hour away by car, is famous because it is the home of Christ's tomb. It's even on the road signs as a local landmark.
It turns out that during Jesus' young life, that period of time where not much is written about Him, Jesus was living in Japan and learning Shinto philosophies that he mixed in with Judaism. Then, when Jesus was going to be crucified, his twin brother Isukiri (not quite sure where Mary came up with THAT name) snuck in and took his place on the cross. Then Jesus travelled back to Japan through Siberia and Alaska, even though Alaska isn't on the way. There, Jesus had a family, lived to the age of 106 and was buried in Shingo town. His brother's body was also transported to Japan and buried there. Oddly enough, Jesus' tomb is marked by a cross even though, according to the legend, he died of old age...

If you think all of that sounds far out, wait until you hear how the legend got started. Years ago, there was a man living in Shingo who had blue eyes and didn't look quite as Japanese as most Japanese people do. Since Jesus wasn't Japanese and of course had blue eyes, this man was certainly the decendant of Christ, which meant that all of the above facts must obviously be true. I guess they "discovered" the tomb afterward. Or something. Christ's descendant still lives in Shingo town, although he's not as much of a local celebrity as you might expect. At the tomb they have a small museum and there is a yearly festival in which people do a traditional dance around the tomb and pray.

...Salvated!!

2005-09-05T18:49:00.000+09:00

At long last, thanks to the combined efforts of saint Melanie and saint Greg, my video camera is back home safely, where it belongs. Along with it comes footage of two of Aomori's national parks, complete with obligatory shinto shrines, plenty of rain, and a grungy Matt talking into the camera.

Shinto trail-makers are butt-heads.

The first place featured in this video is the trail up mount Nakui, which overlooks my town. It was an exhausting, uphill bike ride to the trail (and a really fast and easy trip back). In my worn down state I was thinking quite lucidly and figured I'd try the shortest of the trails to the summit since shorter = easier and I was already a little tired. Those of you who are familiar with second grade geometry, however, would have quickly realized that shortest = way steeper. If I only had a brain. I swear the 1.4 kilometer distance of the trail must have been vertical distance because it took me more than 40 minutes to get up this thing. Compound this with the fact that after about 1/3 of the trail I was hiking inside a rain cloud, and you'll understand better than the people I passed on my return home why I was covered in mud. I managed to get through it all by playing some inspirational music in my ipod, and while being inside a cloud didn't reward me with the panoramic view I might otherwise have enjoyed, it was still really scenic and nice in an isolated kind of way. Since my hiking boots still haven't arrived, I have a nice souvenir blister on my right fourth toe.

Oh, those randy seagulls...

Three days before I hiked mount rains-a-lot, I woke up on the floor of Hachinohe Mike's house after a long night out and five hours of sleep in a sauna-like room. After drinking four glasses of water I decided that instead of following Mike's suggestion to take the bus to the Hachinohe train station, I would just try to walk it and not care too much if I got lost since I had nothing to do all day. The train station was west. I, with my uncanny sense of direction, walked east.**

After a few kilometers walking on a hot, humid, hungover day, crossing over the JR rail on a bridge was the most beautiful thing I had seen all weekend (sorry, ladies, heh heh heh).

I ended up passing a sign that said the local seagull breeding ground was only 5 kilometers away. This is something I've been wanting to see for a while. Not necessarily seagulls breeding, but the area is really pretty and they have a big shrine on a hill next to the beach. I made it to the shrine, although I ended up spending about 400 yen on drink machines on the way there because it was so dehydratingly hot. The place was really stunning, and there definitely were tons of seagulls. The shrine was complete with one of those stations where you could wash little seagull statues with a cup on a stick that everyone seems to have nowadays. Blame Walmart.

**(I've since been informed that the train station was east, and I, with my uncanny sense of direction, walked west. I still don't know who's right.)***

***(I was right.)

2005-08-19T21:43:00.000+09:00

When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.

-Japanese Proverb

So this week I had to go up further north to Aomori city for a 3 day JET program conference. Upon returning I realized I had left my bag containing both my digital camera and my video camera at the hotel's coat check. What this means to you is it may be a while before I can post my next video. It also means I'll be posting old pictures from when I first arrived in Tokyo.

Everyone knows that the Japanese looove karaoke (as do I). Not everyone knows that most karaoke places are all you can drink. While this picture of a karaoke bar in Shinjuku, Tokyo isn't the clearest, I think it offers a more accurate view of what everyone in that room was seeing at the time. Those are some kind of blue light up manatee designs on the wall, and the actual karaoke machine (these things are huge and have an astonishing amount of dials and buttons to fiddle with) is unfortunately off to the right of the frame.

There's an unusual kind of bonding that often happens at karaoke joints. I'm going to make up a word for it right now. Let's call it... conharmetry. No that sucks. How about... fusortium. OK that sucks too. But anyway, I think it has largely to do with the fact that a karaoke bar is usually not the first place you go out drinking for the night, and unlike a dance club, you don't meet other people in a karaoke bar. Bad if you want to go out and meet people (g-duhh), but great for dancing and singing with your drunk friends.

I know enough japanese to survive in stores and navigate my way through a restaurant or train station. I do not, however, know anywhere near enough japanese to build any kind of meaningful friendship with most of the locals yet. My small talk with my coworkers is pretty much limited to "it's hot" and "I brought my lunch today," -Ohh, you are good with chopsticks-, "Why thank you." My supervisor is the one exception. His english and my japanese are just barely good enough that we can have labored conversations about music or food or what my home is like in a mixture of japanese, english, and lots of dictionary consultation and gesturing to make a sort of lingua franca that I'm going to call engrish. (I just made that one up just now, by myself. That's pretty good, eh?) Back to the topic (yes this did have some sort of direction).

Since I've never been the kind of person to be satisfied with one whole friend (call me greedy), I never would have survived in this foreign jungle without the aid of a very welcoming and pretty cool group of colleagues spread around the prefecture (about 120 in all). They all speak english. Although some of them speak "the queen's english" and say so as if they're proud of it, and others shop for wine at the "bottle-o," they're mostly good people and we're getting along well. Mark, on the far right of the picture, is making tyrannosaurus arms for the camera, and I'm wearing a super ugly but free poncho.

I guess the whole point of this for all you guys back home is this: I've found replacements so leave me alone. No wait, that didn't come out right. What I meant to say, in so many words, is that I'm doing alright here. I miss all you guys terribly, but I've found some good people here and we're all taking care of each other. I'm nice and settled in now so you guys don't need to worry, and I'll be starting up with the personal contact again really soon. (my next post will be more entertaining and less functional, I promise)

It’s the friends you can call up at four a.m. that matter.

Marlene Dietrich (1901 - 1992)

2005-08-14T21:45:00.000+09:00

Coca Cola.

Coca Cola exists in Japan, as it does everywhere else in the world, but it is very different. Something's missing. Apparently when Coke was first marketed in Japan, the Japanese people hated it, and they had to change the recipe. Here, Coke seems to have less carbonation, and also it's missing that kind of acidy bite that Coke has in the United States. What's left is just a rather bland, slightly bubbly, brown liquid. I wasn't really a huge soda fan when I left America, but now there is absolutely no temptation at all for me to drink Coke. The snacks here, on the other hand...

Also, the coke I bought was in what I thought was a bottle, but turned out to be a bottle shaped aluminum can. As strange as it seemed at first, it's actually a pretty good idea. All the advantages of a can of soda, the better taste and the fact that it stays cool longer, plus the bottle advantage that you can screw a lid back on to it. And it's recyclable of course. So I'll yield that the package is ingenious, it's just what's inside that's awful.

Side note: Sprite tastes exactly the same.

2005-08-13T01:17:00.000+09:00

First post: Nebuta festival video.

Nebuta festival. This is video footage of the Nebuta festival, the largest fire festival in all of Japan. It takes place every August for about a week in Aomori city, about two hours away from where I live. I put the video to music to make an exciting music video, so that you will become excited and find the festival more exciting and full of excitement. This will make you happy, which will make me excited.

Things you will see in this video:

Aomori city: Just some shots of the city in the beginning, streets and stuff, also a street side festival vendor and a bunch of chairs being set up on the street (they're very big on streets). Not seen are the street side beer and sake vendors (public drinking is A-OK here in Japan).

Big lantern floats: The centerpieces of the festival are these floats, which are basically enormous lanterns, depicting legendary Japanese people of legend and mythical lore from the ancient time of myth and legend. These floats are pushed around by a group of people that I feel very sorry for. Every once in a while these people spin the float around and tilt it and stuff. I think they do this just to show off.

Drum floats: In addition to the lantern floats, there are drum floats that are basically a bunch of big drums on a float. People walk alongside these and play the drums.

Crazy jumping people: This is the role that I and many other Aomori JETs played in the parade. The custom is to wear traditional festival clothes, with bells pinned all over you, and to jump down the street. While jumping, one person yells "ra se ra, ra se ra," and everyone else yells back "ra se ra se ra se ra." Allegedly these are basically gibberish words, but throughout the night they gradually take on the meaning "my legs hurt soo bad," and finally, at the end of the night, "man, what were we thinking?" While jumping, the bells naturally fall off of the festival clothing, and if you see a bell lying on the street, you can pick it up and throw it into the crowd of people watching the parade. If someone catches a bell, it's supposed to mean good luck, so people are always very happy when you throw a bell to them. I heard rumors of old ladies tearing at peoples clothing to try to get bells off of them, but I didn't see any of that myself.

Now that I look back on the parade, I realize that I never really figured out what any of it has to do with fire, but it was a hell of a good time and beats the crap out of the "Vestal Festival" any day of the week.