スキー好き!

A number of factors have aligned to make it very difficult for me to watch the Olympics:

1. I don’t have a TV at home—at least not one with any reception, despite the fact that I live two blocks from the TV station.
2. Streaming nbcolympics.com is unavailable outside the U.S.
3. The vice principal holds the remote for the teachers’ room TV, and when he’s nice enough to turn the TV on, he watches only the Japanese athletes and turns it off when others are competing; women’s figure skating was on yesterday morning, and we watched the three Japanese competitors and no one else.

So then, for a little Olympic action, four of us who hail from the Third Coast hopped a train for the Japanese Alps, to reenact the 1998 Winter Games. When you’ve only skied in the Midwest, sure, you can say you can ski…in the Midwest. Davin and Jackson have been to the Rockies, so they were up to their usual badassery on snowboard and skis, respectively. To me, Nagano's intermediate runs were borderline horrific. Nevertheless, the slopes were powdery-perfect and the whole sweeping mountain scene was gorgeous. We zigzagged the Hakuba Goryu and Hakuba 47 resorts and I graced my fellow skiers with only one major fall…but I didn’t even lose my skis or anything, plus the snowboarder who cut me off even stopped to apologize for my snow-dive, which means it was all his fault, right?The rest of the weekend, we frolicked in the snowy woods—less familiar to us these days than ever before, basked in the kerosene heat of our little loft cabin, and checked out a few après-ski watering holes for darts, drinks, chimichangas, nabe (Japanese hotpot), and even a little Connect Four. Had I not been such a snot-fountain, I would have done it up right on Saturday night at the Tracks Bar fluorescent skiwear party, but alas…I settled for snuggling into the cabin’s bean bag chairs to watch Pump Up the Volume. Don’t judge me, Internet.
In other news, as I grow increasingly sad about this school year coming to a close, I am distracting myself with plans to visit Cambodia and Vietnam for the second half of March. My Vietnamese visa arrived in the mail yesterday, flights are booked straight from Shizuoka (on Mt. Fuji Dream Airlines, whose planes are hopefully fueled by more than just happy thoughts), and bungalow reservations are falling into line...
P.S. The title of this post roughly means "I like skiing!" The word for "like" in Japanese is pronounced nearly the same as the word "ski"...so saying that you like skiing is pronounced: "Ski ski!" Actually, if you want to be supercorrect, "Ski ga ski!" is better (but that makes this hilarious joke less funny)...at least I can impress some 7th graders with this sort of humor.

Silly Holidays Contest

On February 2, when I was sitting around in the teachers’ room with one of the cool English teachers, I mentioned that today was a holiday in America. Part of my job is explaining snippets of my culture, y'know.

“Really? What holiday?”

I felt a tinge of regret.

“Okay…so…there’s this little furry animal, a groundhog, that lives…uh, underground…”

He seemed to know what a groundhog was (surely aided by my brilliant description); he had not, however, seen the movie. Perhaps I should have spared him the lesson, as we are all aware of the absurdity this “holiday” comes down to: a large rodent predicting weather patterns. Then again, the tradition has been mentioned in olde Scottish poetry, and has American significance dating back to German-American Candlemas celebrations of the 1800’s. And it is a little entertainment in the bleak midwinter. I suppose it would be a shame to deny Jimmy the Groundhog of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin his annual moment of glory.

When finally complete, my explanation was better-received than I’d anticipated. Maybe because we all have our silly holidays.

Setsubun, February 3, is a Japanese celebration to welcome spring, but involves some ridiculousness of its own. Due to its correlation with the Lunar New Year, this holiday is a time to bid the old adieu and ring in the new…and what better way to accomplish this than by making someone dress up like a demon, and then throwing things at him/her!Someone in the family plays the oni, the demon: basic paperboard masks readily available at local grocery stores, if you don’t have a more elaborate papier-mache one. They’re found next to the display of fukumame—roasted soybeans in plastic packages, all set to be torn open and thrown. The main event, mamemaki, or the throwing of beans at the oni, is accompanied by chants of “Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!” which translates as “Out with the demons! Good luck, come in!” If no one agrees to be the oni, tossing the beans out the door apparently has the same effect.

Along with the throwing of beans, many students told me they ate a number of beans equal to their age, plus one more for good luck in the upcoming year. And for school lunch the next day, we all got a little package of fukumame-nut mix.

There you have it, parents: if you want your kids to eat their vegetables, just tell them demons will come into the house if they don’t.

Maybe not as exciting as reality TV.

Haven’t done much with my weekends lately, in part in prep for the Great Traveling/Busyness Adventure that will be late-February to April. For now, I’m getting my thrills in small, cost-effective doses. Like walking around at dusk, checking out the first plum blossoms of the season:As of Friday, I’ve finished teaching at two of my three schools. As a little part of my farewell, I attended a basketball tournament two Sundays ago, where teams from these two schools were playing. When the Okabe coach saw me arrive, he made me come sit on the bench and everything.

While I went mostly out of obligation, it really was fun, but definitely not because my schools were dominating. I was quick to discover this was an exhibition tournament, where junior high school teams faced high school teams for 15-minute games. To make it a bit more ridiculous, most of the ninth graders from the junior high teams were off taking practice high school placement exams. “Today is a learning experience,” chuckled the coach. Despite shouting my best encouragements, I couldn’t help but laugh whenever a 5'9"-ish high schooler stood with the ball, looking to pass, whilst a 4' seventh grader on defense would jump and jump, swatting for the ball far out of reach. Even in 15 minutes, scores were typically 50-0…though in one game, Okabe scored 6 whole points! An early layup and one successful free throw, plus the biggest highlight of the day: the tiniest seventh-grader sunk a 3-pointer and the crowd went insane. Totally worth a trip to Fujieda on a non-work day.The following Sunday, Jaime and I popped over to Yui, a tiny fishing village known for its haul of sakura ebi—little pink shrimp (which, much to my dismay, work themselves into many snack foods here in Japan). We were there, however, to visit the Tokaido Hiroshige Art Museum, a little place displaying the woodcuts of Ando Hiroshige. In the early 1800’s, Hiroshige saw Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai, and decided to dedicate himself to ukiyoe—woodcut art. As part of a shogun delegation, he carefully observed the Tokaido Road, the historic route between Tokyo (then called Edo, the shogun capital of Japan) and Kyoto (the then-Imperial capital), and soon after produced the collection, Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido.

The museum had an informational section on the earliest woodcuts (that's where I saw the intriguing/unfortunate piece below) and the process of creating woodcuts: carving a separate wood block for each color used in the work, inking the blocks, and painstakingly layering them one after another to form the finished piece.
The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido were on display, and it was especially cool to see Hiroshige’s representations of places that I have visited. Presently, the Tokaido Shinkansen travels a straight route from Tokyo and Kyoto (and beyond), and the JR Tokaido Line is the local train line I take to work. However, Hiroshige’s woodcuts follow the route of the historic road (the red line on the map below), which passes through some larger cities, but also through now-rural villages, such as tiny Mariko and Okabe.Photos were not allowed in the museum, but you can see little pics of the works if you scroll down here.Weekend events perhaps not quite as exciting as when my friend Jackson downloads a bunch of Jersey Shore and Keeping Up with the Kardashians episodes and brings them over along with mimosa supplies…still decent, though. Next weekend I’ll be skiing in Nagano.

Happy Oshogatsu, and ganbatte.

"In New York City, there is a huge ball with lights, high up in the air. It drops slowly to the ground in front of many, many people..."

I wore a shiny, self-fashioned crown. Together, we did a countdown from 10, then I threw confetti at an unsuspecting student and played Auld Lang Syne on melodica. Ridiculousness is riveting.

"What did you do for New Year?" I asked my classes. Then came to find that Japanese New Year (Oshogatsu) is like Christmas in the U.S., and New Year in the U.S. is like Japanese Christmas.Sure, 5 tons of twinkle lights and an army of robotic, dancing Santa Clauses occupy Shizuoka each December, but that's what the holiday means here. You look for a date if you don't have one, and you go out to a Christmas Party. Japanese New Year, however, is a time for staying home with family, eating traditional holiday foods, sending cards to loved ones, giving presents (of money) to the children, and visiting a temple or shrine.

"We went to shrine to pray for good exams," said most of the 9th graders.

Here, education is compulsory only through junior high school. Nevertheless, most of the 9th graders at my schools are hoping to attend high school (nationwide, over 90% do go on to high school), so these 14- and 15-year-olds are currently cramming for entrance exams; all sports and club activities have been suspended for the 9th graders so they can devote themselves entirely to studying.

They leaf through the glossy pamphlets for various high schools in the area—some trying to decide whether to aim for somewhere near home or swing an hour-long commute, whether to hope to attend a school with a strong sports team or a school that is geared for a particular field of study. For others, there is nothing much to decide—they’ll just go wherever they get in.The 9th grade teachers seem frazzled, counseling all their homeroom students through this next step, but most of the students, even though they're clearly sleep-deprived, seem to be doing all right with the process.

Makes me wonder how I would have done with such a decision as a 9th grader. Thinking back to those worthless career inventories we took (via Apple IIe, perhaps) in early high school, when asked, "How many years of college would you like to attend?" I would select "2 years or less"...and I think no matter how many of those tests I took, the result would always be Paralegal.

To the students who I find hunched over their homework during recess, I can only say ganbatte (good luck). I hope these students aren't being put on specific tracks too early, but it is difficult to say, and there's a good chance my American mind is making a bigger deal of this than it is. I just want Ryo, who is not applying to high schools, but is going to learn how to grow tea from his grandfather, to be happy and find his passion. And I hope that Soichiro doesn’t burn himself out over the next three years at his selective high school for science performance, and figures out for himself whether he wants to go on to the University of Tokyo, not just because his teacher thinks he should.