Beautiful Day 



A glass of wine, some late summer fruit, and a picnic overlooking the Waga river. Who could ask for anything more? Even the dogs seemed to enjoy the fantastic weather.
[ 3 comments ] permalink
Autumn already? 



We had some hot days in August, but summer here is short — occasional splashes of yellow and orange are already appearing in the foliage.
[ 2 comments ] permalink
La Vida de los Inmigrantes 

Matthew and I just returned from a trip to the post office to send money to our bank in America. We kept our house in Silver Spring with its attendant mortgage, and I still have financial obligations related to my law license, so here we are: people who need to send money back to the home country. We're immigrants.

Maybe because we intend to return to America after a defined period of time, or maybe because we've maintained such concrete connections there in the forms of a house and a career, it doesn't always feel like we left. I expected to be much sadder when my plane left Washington that June morning, but taking off didn't feel like a break with home. And living here doesn't always feel like real life — it sometimes feels like a diversion from my real life in Washington. But then there are days like today, when we're converting yen to dollars in our minds as we send money home.

We've been immigrants since our respective moves, of course. There have been times that have made our immigrant status especially clear to us. We had to register with the city office, and now carry cards identifying us as legal residents of Kitakami. We both had to get permission to come here long term. We both had to apply for permission to work here, and are limited to working in a very specific field. It's strange to me that if, against the odds, I were to find a law job, I would have to go back to the immigration office to request permission to change fields. Registration is for immigrants. Work restrictions are for immigrants.

Then, there's the language issue. Matthew and I have decided that living in Japan at our respective Japanese skill levels is probably a bit like being illiterate. Everything is written in a language I don't understand. You learn things slowly, and maybe figure out some words, but even months down the road, you can still only make out limited things. This is tofu. My recipe called for silken tofu. Is this silken tofu? Is this burlap tofu? At least I know it's tofu. And 'tofu' starts to look weird after you've written it a bunch of times. We are both taking classes, but it still can be pretty hard to get by in the grocery or at restaurants. When I can't think of a word in Japanese, many times it comes to me in Spanish, my second language. This is not helpful, but my Japanese teacher tells me it is not unusual in third-language learners. Host country language classes are for immigrants.

We are really immigrants.
[ add comment ] permalink
Kintaro 



Kintaro is a hero of Japanese legend, a little boy riding a bear and wielding an axe. It's also the official nickname of the JR Freight EH500 locomotive. This one is northbound pulling a train of container flatcars.
[ add comment ] permalink
Paris in Japan 

I've always liked the rather romantic descriptions of life in Paris that involve someone doing the dinner shopping every day, usually on the way home from work. More specifically, I like the image of riding home on one's bike, baguette under the arm. That's not too far off from how things are here, except that Kitakami isn't full of quaint cobblestone streets and boulangeries. Also, my bag is usually full of things like nattou and udon, not baguettes.

Yesterday, I came close to living that image. Matthew and I hosted our first real dinner gathering in our teeny-tiny home. Previously, I've commented on my hangup about serving Japanese food to Japanese people. Our neighbor across the street gave us yet another bundle of tomatoes (I think that makes something like 42 pounds altogether), so I decided to make a simple tomato sauce for pasta. I biked to the nearby department store because it has a grocery with a largish selection of imported goods, patisseries, and a boulangerie — one-stop shopping for your Italian dinner party needs. I was very happy to locate a loaf of Italian-style bread, which isn't a baguette, but is close enough for image purposes. So there I was: cycling home, messenger bag bulging with lovely fresh fruit (Iwate local melon . . . mmm) and vegetables, a cheesecake and a long loaf of bread in another bag hanging off my arm. It's still too warm for berets, so no French hats were involved in the making of this dinner.
[ 4 comments ] permalink
Wild 

I've remarked before on how close we feel to nature here. In Kitakami, you're never far from a river or park or rice paddy or other place that is just humming with non-human life, such as these black-winged dragonflies that have been decorating the riverside park all summer.



And yet, even with all this life, there's something missing. There are birds and insects and spiders and fish and even snakes — but no wild animals. In Maryland, our neighborhood was full of squirrels, and we saw plenty of rabbits plus the occasional opossum, fox, or deer. Mice, rats, and raccoons could appear as well. Here, the only mammals we've seen in our neighborhood are domesticated cats and dogs.

Okay, I actually have seen two wild animals here. Once, on the other side of the river, I saw a rabbit. The second animal we saw was probably a raccoon dog, but we only caught a glimpse as it dashed across the road ahead of us on our way back from Miyagi — and that doesn't really count because weren't in a town. Two in five months doesn't seem like much.

There are plenty of wild animals in Japan, and you can find a lot of evidence if you head for the mountains to go hiking. There just aren't any in town, and that seems odd with all the nature that is in town.
[ 1 comment ] permalink
Afterparty! 

On a couple of occasions during Undoukai, neighbors told us that a party would take place immediately afterwards. Indeed, while the event judges tallied up the points, each team set up picnic spaces on the outer edges of the field. We had lots of sushi, sashimi, pickles, dango (rice dumplings covered with black sesame, sweetened soy sauce, adzuki bean paste, or edamame paste), onigiri, and packages of cookies and otsumami (beer snacks).



Good thing for all that otsumami, because we had plenty of beer. Including beer in cans so big, they required handles.



After some time, team captains started circulating, carrying their bottles of sake to share. Matthew was the lucky recipient of many refills and friendly visits. I think everyone was impressed that he could speak some Japanese. Or by his moustache.





We ate, drank, chatted, and laughed with our neighbors well into the afternoon. When the party broke up, everyone pitched in to clean up. Clean-up involved separating refuse into burnable trash, non-burnable trash, and the various types of recyclables (plastics, paper, etc). *sigh* I love Japanese organization.

We walked our bikes home along with our neighbors from across the street. No riding for us — in Japan, it's illegal to ride your bike after drinking.
[ 1 comment ] permalink
Fight Fiercely, Kunenbashi 

When Matthew and I decided to move to Japan, we were motivated by the desire to learn more about another culture and another way of life. So, when our neighbors invited us to participate in Undoukai, we had to go for it.

Gathered by teams for opening speeches and organized calisthenics (not only is there a song, but also a whole ordered routine — probably a lot like the factory workers' morning ritual), we prepared for a day of friendly competition. Our team was announced as third largest, earning us a certain number of points up front. Kunenbashi (the neighborhood, not the bridge), represent!

Each team donned a different-colored headband. Team Kunenbashi wore red. The first event was a series of races for the young kids. We adults began our competition with a basketball-passing relay game. A third-place finish in this event stoked our drive for further excellence.

Team Kunenbashi performed well throughout the next few events. These included a relay where we dressed a teammate as a scarecrow, then walked him to the finish line; tea can/beer bottle/giant sake bottle ring toss; and filling a giant sake bottle with team-colored liquid by using small tea cups. And then, we met our Waterloo: Janken.

Janken is a game of extreme skill and concentration, perhaps a bit too much so for the good-natured competition of undoukai. Oh, who am I kidding — it's Rock, Paper, Scissors, and we blew. Team Kunenbashi scored ONE POINT, thanks to our very last player. I think we may want to consider some janken drills in advance of next year's event.

The next event was a 1500m road race. Up to this point, Matthew and I had been responding eagerly to each call for our participation, even if we didn't comprehend totally what the event was. In this case, we thought it was an 800m run. Because neither one of us is particularly athletic, I think we got in a little deep. Matthew ran admirably, finishing in the middle of the pack. Here he is after the race, wearing the cool, damp towel worn by all the other men after a particularly strenuous event.



Well, not the same towel. You know what I mean.

Team Kunenbashi won the next event, tossing small balls into baskets held high overhead. We were not so successful in the tug-of-war, losing both of our elimination bouts. We regained momentum with a third-place finish in the rope-making event. Wow. Before Sunday, I couldn't imagine this at a sports day: "Okay, now we're going to make some rope."



The people participating in the rope-making event were amazing, cranking out more than four meters (about thirteen feet) of rope in five minutes.

The athletics resumed with three final races: a stick-and-hoop relay, a women's relay, and a men's relay, with each leg of the latter two being run by a person fitting into a certain age range (a "different generations" relay, if you will). The stick-and-hoop relay was rather impressive, with Team Kunenbashi demonstrating enough skill to achieve a second-place finish.



Team Kunenbashi lacked someone to run the fortysomething leg of the women's relay, so between the two thirtysomethings, they picked me to be "fortysomething." We also had to borrow an elementary school student from another neighborhood. Sadly, Team Kunenbashi did not place in either of the last two races.

Overall, we finished in fourth place out of five teams. Nevertheless, we had a great time, which was the point. And we still got our cases of beer and bottles of sake as participant rewards.



Confidential to Saru-chan: Happy Birthday!
[ 4 comments ] permalink
Undoukai 

It's a little after 4:00 pm, and we're drunk. This can only mean one thing: undoukai! Undou(exercise)kai(meet) is an annual "sports day" when neighborhoods compete with each other in "sports" such as Rock-Paper-Scissors and the 1500 meter "marathon". For the over-fifty crowd there was even a rope-making contest, which was quite a sight to see. (Our neighborhood, Kunenbashi, came in third out of five with about 4 meters of rope in about 5 minutes.)

All that's in the morning, though. The real reason everybody goes is for the after-party/picnic. Sushi, sashimi, fried foods, crackers, dessert, and all the beer or sake you can drink ¡½ actually, more than you can drink, because everyone will want to refill your glass and drink with you, at least if you're a foreigner.

It was fun, but now we're tired and drunk, so we'll write more and post some photos later. Ja, mata ne! Gokurou-sama deshita!
[ add comment ] permalink
Sustenance 



Here it is: the grass that forms the basis of the Japanese diet, and is so deeply ingrained in the culture that it serves as a metaphor for food, meals, and — even more generally — for resources and wealth.
related link
[ 6 comments ] permalink

Back Next