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.
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