Hey all,
Wow, I guess I haven’t updated recently. I meant to update yesterday, but I was too lazy. In any case, I think you all want to know about my weekend, right? It’s the only thing worth talking about, anyways. Nothing happened yesterday (Monday). Ok then, here we go.
On Friday, I stayed late at school, wanting to get in my internet access before a long two days without it. I was the only one left in the lounge, so I was surprised when a Japanese girl sat right down next to me. She actually wanted to sit next to me, and talk to me! We ended up having a nice conversation about studying abroad and classes. Turns out she’s in my Art of the Kansai Area class. She was worried that she would not be able to understand the teacher in that class, but I told her that I would try to explain anything she doesn’t understand. Then she left when her friend came to pick her up.
I was glad to finally have a real conversation with a real Japanese person. And it was a REAL conversation. She didn’t even try to slow down her Japanese for me, and yet I understood most of it, and she understood mine. I was gratified. So far when Japanese people have spoken to me, they either want to test out their English, or they use baby Japanese. I really want to go the next level, as it were. I hope I will get to do so before the end of my stay here.
Friday was uneventful, as always dinner with Okaasan and Mayu. But, I stayed up late because Spirited Away was on TV, and I watched it. I hadn’t watched it in Japanese yet, so it was good. For those of you who don’t know, Spirited Away is a famous anime movie that was released by Disney in America a few years ago. It’s not bad, but then again I’m not a huuuge Miyazaki fan like everyone else in the world is. I prefer more mature stuff. But anyways….
Saturday was the big day! Okaasan had promised to take me to DenDen Town, Haley and I had promised to go together, so in the end Okaasan took both of us to DenDen Town. I called Haley using the actual home phone! (Okaasan said it was ok. About 10 yen per three minutes, which is really really cheap). We agreed to meet at Hirakata-shi station. The route was complex and varied and I can’t remember how to get back there, even if I wanted to. We walked from the house to the bus stop, as when I go to school. Take the bus to Hirakata-shi (Hirakata City) Station, which is on the Keihan train line. (As I just found out today, take the Kyo- from Kyoto and put it with the –saka from Osaka, and it spells Keihan, which is a train line that services both Kyoto and Osaka. Pretty neat). After the train ride to Osaka, we transferred to the subway and rode that for a stop, then got off. Alltogether, transportation was about 1000 yen, or about 9 bucks. Not that cheap, but not too bad either. Then we stepped outside at Namba…
My first impression is…omg, Times Square. That’s what this place looks like. There are billboards galore, blinking and flashing lights, loudspeaker voices, cars and lots of people. This place was hoppin’. Okaasan and Mayu decided to go shopping at the mall district, while Haley and I stayed around and explored DenDen Town. We set up a meeting time and place, then parted ways. I felt a little bad at not spending time with my host family, but I’m sure we’ll come here again and then they can show me the mall.
Here's a picture of DenDen Town, courtesy of Haley (Why, why do i always forget my camera at the most important times??)
Haley and I wandered around. There are basically three types of shops in DenDen town: Manga/Anime sellers, figurine shops, and electronic appliance stores. Of course we’re not too interested in housewares or appliances, so we tried to find the manga/anime shops. We also went into three figurine shops along the way. These are stores full of glass cases in which many small plastic figures are displayed. The majority of these figurines come from anime. And these shops were always packed full of relatively old men, even in their forties, peering through the glass at plastic figures of scantily clad females. Although that made me slightly uncomfortable, I was just happy to see characters that I recognized, and to be in a place where other people clearly shared the same interests as I. Haley and I saw a few figurines that we’d like to buy, but I don’t think I will. I know that if I take back a figurine, it will just sit on the shelf and get dusty. I don’t really appreciate them that much. Maybe if I was collecting them it would be different. But anyways, there were shops upon shops of these things, and each shop had multiple floors, and each shop was packed full of nerdy old men. It was very interesting. Then we went in a store that sold anime itself (DVDs) and that was interesting also. Clearly a lot of thought is put into the packaging of anime DVD in Japan, much more than in America. The packaging and cover art is absolutely beautiful, but the DVDs are absolutely too expensive. Plus they are a different region and we couldn’t play them back home. It’s not worth it to buy it at all. I’d say the same with the manga, but here it is cheaper. However, it’s all in Japanese and neither Haley nor I are quite up to that level to be able to read it.
Then we found…the store. So far, I had seen a lot of stuff targeted at guys, you know, big mechas and scantily clad girls. But, we saw a store that said, on the front, “Ladies Only”, and so we went in. Turns out it was a Ladies’ manga store, selling only shoujo stuff (girls), which is, of course, the kind I read. So, it was very exciting. But we didn’t really have much time to look around, because we had to meet up at our meeting place with Okaasan. I vow to return there and maybe buy a manga or two. We met back up with Okaasan and Mayu, who had fun, it seemed. Then we walked back to the station, through the busiest food marketplace you have ever seen, and somehow made it out the other end, alive and unharmed. Haley thought she was going straight home, but Okaasan invited her to come to the Setsubun. For, the setsubun time it was.
I had first heard about setsubun (festival of the seasons) in class on Friday from my Onna to Otoko professor. He said that this festival celebrates the turning of winter to spring, and is supposed to encourage fertility for the new season. He said we should all go to the temple in Nara to see the famous fertility celebration in which two masked priests act out a scene of intercourse (!) onstage in order to ask the gods to bring fertility. Sounds kinda out there to me, and Nara is really far, so I knew I wasn’t going. But later I did ask Okaasan what her family did to celebrate Setsubun, and she said they usually go to a small shrine. So, right after DenDen Town, we met up with Otousan at the station and went together to the shrine.
I’d have to say that it was a really incredible experience, far surpassing the greatness of DenDen Town. After all, how often to you get to see mikos and houshis walking around in formal outfits, and the making of mochi? You guys probably don’t know what any of that stuff is, but let me tell you that it is cool. At the least, though, you need to know what mochi is. For the unenlightened, mochi is a kind of sticky rice. It’s rice that has basically been beaten to death until it is like a taffy texture. Then it is shaped into balls and covered with flour. I didn’t know this up until this weekend, but mochi itself is actually pretty neutral in taste. I always thought it was sweet, since the mochi I’ve had up till now always had some sweet stuff in it, like red beans or ice cream. But mochi in its natural state is just jellified rice, so it tastes just like white rice – pretty boring. But, at the festival they were serving mochi with zenein (or something like that) which is warm red beans (sweet). Haley took a picture of it. It’s like this – mochi is the piece of toast, and the red beans would be the jelly. Toast is pretty boring by itself, and the jelly is too sweet to eat alone, but put them together and you’ve got a dynamic combination. Especially when the red beans are warm. Yummy!
Here's the dynamic duo of mochi and red beans. You can see that the red beans have a lot of water in them, making it into a kind of hot red-bean sweet soup with white balls of sticky rice floating in it. Delish!
After we ate, we watched them inside the shrine doing dances and little ceremonial things. We also saw them actually make the mochi in the back - it’s like a mortar and pestle, but instead large men swing an even larger hammer into a large pestle and some other guy kinda kneads the mochi dough in between strokes. Then a bunch of women with identical aprons and head kerchiefs mold it into ovals and flour it. Very interesting and efficient.
Guys wielding large hammer and pummeling the poor mochi:
The kitchen women in their matching uniforms shaping and flouring the mochi:
It seems the crux of the Setsubun is when the aforementioned mochi is throw by the helpers into the waiting, breathless audience. With the mochi are thrown tiny bags of soybeans. All around me were eager children, hands outstretched to catch it. Why throw that stuff? Honestly, I have no idea. Alls I knows is, everyone wanted to get some.
The mochi, which is frozen before it is thrown, is rather hard. One bounced off my head. It hurt.
Clearly, this proves that I am neither fertile nor very lucky. Or maybe my hand-eye coordination is bad. In the end, I only caught one mochi and three bags of soybeans. Those were easy to catch, and didn’t hurt so much. After the hordes of screaming and running children had somewhat dissipated, we received free, fresh unfrozen mochi from the kitchen ladies and headed on back home.
On the way home, okaasan picked us up some sushi (apparently, it’s tradition to eat a certain kind of sushi on setsubun night) and at the train station, she showed Haley how to get home while I went home with Mayu and Otousan. Once home, we ate the sushi. Apparently, you are supposed to face the lucky direction of the new year (this year, it happened to be northwest) and eat the sushi without talking, silently making a wish for the new season. I think it is similar to our tradition of making a silent wish over a birthday cake, then not telling anyone what you wished.
However, have you ever tried to hold some sushi in your hand, without a plate or NAPKIN (of course, why would there be a napkin in the house) facing a curtain, trying to be reverent, but yet afraid that the contents of the sushi are going to end up on the floor? Yeah, I didn’t think so. You are technically supposed to eat the ENTIRE roll of sushi in this manner, but I had to stop at less than half, because stuff was falling out of my roll. And don’t bother to ask me what was in it, because I don’t remember. I know there was some crab and some vegetables, but that’s about it. I’m sure the ingredients were very traditional…. Guess what we ate for dessert? You guessed it, Mochi! Guess what we ate for breakfast the next day? Yup, the frozen mochi that was chucked at us by the temple helpers. Guess what I don't want to see again for a long time? You got it - mochi!
After dessert, Okaasan finally explained what the heck to do with the soybeans. Apparently, there is a small ceremony involving the throwing of soybeans out the window, in much the same manner they were thrown at us during the ceremony. You are supposed to take a handful of soybeans and chuck them out the window, saying the equivalent of “Devil, outside! Good luck, inside!” I wanted to chuck the beans at the cat (the devilish creature who has scratched me up since day one) but Otousan did that for me. It was actually quite amusing. I chucked my beans out the window, hoping that they did not hit the neighbor’s wall too hard (yes the houses are THAT close), saying the magic line. I hope good luck came inside, for me and everyone else.
Overall it was a very fulfilling day, and I got to see both aspects of Japan in one day – the hi-tech, manga/anime aspect, and the traditional, religious aspect. It was great.
Sunday of course, wasn’t nearly as exciting. I went to Kansai Gaidai to try to get some work done (read: access the Internet) but absolutely no one was here. Plus, the CIE building wasn’t even open, nor the library! I mean, what kind of college’s library isn’t open on Sundays? When are people supposed to study? The policemen at the front gate (yes there are policemen there, resplendent with white gloves) made me sign in in order to even enter the grounds. Eventually I found that the student lounge was open, and I was able to plug in from there. But I don’t think I will try to go on campus on a Sunday again. It’s very lonely.
I just realized that Sunday was the Superbowl. I do believe that this is the first time I have missed the Superbowl in a great long while. I miss my buffalo wings and commercials. Buffalo wings are impossible here but, I did manage to watch some of the commercials over the internet. The Doritos one was funny, wasn’t it? Well, that’s a little piece of home that I miss.
Hmm I’m not quite sure where to end this update, but I think it’s long enough. Subjects to be discussed next time include: the lack of free press in Japan, the recipe for Tiny Fish Bread, my Okaasan’s belief in ghosts, the duration of the fermentation of Miso soup, Barberpoles, and of course, Melon Pan. Until then!
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PS- Did you know that pink mochi is pink because they put in crushed shrimp? Yuck!
