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Happy new year
Last year we failed spectacularly to do anything to celebrate the New Year, which is a big deal in Japan. As I understand it, you’re meant to go ring a bell at midnight, then go to bed and sleep in for ages, then wake up mid morning and have a massive meal with the entire family gathered around. Or something like that.
This year, I’m happy to report, we managed at least to do part of the above. There was no unseemly staying up until midnight but we did manage to compromise our beauty sleep by getting up at 5:30 in the morning to go for a walk up the local mountain and watch the sun rise on the new year. The kids were intially unimpressed at being roused in the cold and freezing dark but put in a good effort, all things considering, and we made it up to the allotted meeting spot on time and joined up with the Yanamotos and headed off to trek up the road in the pitch dark with our torches to the top of the mountain. Felix had trouble maintaining his energy levels along the way:
But he made it up eventually, just as the sun was about to come out:
Ruby was tired out by the experience:
But at least they had good reception up there.
And there were hordes of other people there too.
Although it should be noted that most of them came by car, the wimps.
Tragically when we got to the top the clouds completely obscured our view of the sunrise, but it was a good experience nonetheless. And I got to brag to everybody that I had in fact already seen the sun rise with my own eyes on my epic trek with Mr Nishihara last February.
Then we got home and waited for our very own feast of special NY goodies, brought around to our place in various trays and pots by none other than the Nishiharas. It looked a little bit like this:
Sadly we all had to eat off the small table because we’d given our big table away the previous day (to a good home, of course).
The feast included a special type of sake that everyone has to sip at, or in Felix’s case take a huge gulp of. (He was rapt to have a legally sanctioned opportunity to consume alcohol.) It gets served from its own very special ancient traditional serving set:
The feast included massive crab legs which Ruby had never tried before. Unusually for our princess, she willingly took on the challenge of eating her Very First Crab Leg:
The meal was lots of fun, and it turns out that Jan 1 is much like Xmas day in Australia, where far too much food is consumed and alcohol is drunk, and everyone then sits around in the afternoon feeling bloated and playing with the new games/toys (this year it was Felix’s excellent new Sushi Tower Game, where you stack up the plates and bits of sushi etc. on the revolving sushi belt until they fall over then you have to pay for it with tiny plastic Japanese money).
And of course there were masses of leftovers which we ate for dinner as well as lunch the next day. All in all, a highly convivial festive season.
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Denial
Now we enter a weird new phase of the Japan Chronicles: denial.
Are we really going to turn our backs on the life we’ve known for the past two years and return to the life we knew for six years before that? Which one is the proper one anyway? It’s hard to know any more.
In any case, things are finishing up here at an ever accelerating pace. The kids have both had their last soccer practices at their respective clubs, their last futsal practices, and their last days at school. Amazingly, it turns out that finally, after slugging it out for a year and nine months, Ruby had started to quite enjoy school, not least because her classmates seemed to have eventually found it within themselves to accept her in their midst. So the last day at school was actually quite a saddening experience for our normally unflappable teenager. Felix, meanwhile, has had a fantastic time with his classmates ever since he started yet in typical fashion was not particularly perturbed to have finished. He just takes it all in his stride does our Felix. I hope he doesn’t feel too sad when we get back to Australia.
Eleni is suffering major withdrawal symptoms as she contemplates the end of her role as a pillar of the local Sunami community. She has been a regular at the local community center, what with the Japanese drumming, English classes, taichi sessions, not to mention the many other culturally stimulating activities such as cooking, sandal-making, calligraphy, kimono-wearing and flower arranging (let alone all the others I don’t remember). Eleni is on the public record as saying that she would have liked at least another year in Japan and hopes to return again one day soon. In fact, our imminent return to Australia is increasingly shaping up as only a temporary reprieve from the overseas adventuring that has come to define our lives. Though whether the next destination ends up being Japan or somewhere new is up for discussion.
But I digress. Last Sunday, as if to underscore Eleni’s pivotal role in the local community, a party was held in her/our honour with about 40 people in attendance, including the members of the drumming troupe and various dignitaries from the community center, including all the guys who run the festivals that we’ve variously been involved in (such as the beach opening ceremony and the portable shrine carrying ceremony). It was rather a humbling experience given the amount of effort that had clearly gone into preparing the masses of food, games and activities, a dress-up session, various musical numbers (including the kids and I reprising a couple of numbers from the PJO swing band) and of course speeches.
One of the games was this very wacky exercise where you get people in pairs, with one person sitting behind the other. The one behind is blindfolded and has to either put makeup on the face of or feed cake into the mouth of the person in front by following their commands. Naturally it’s very hard to do and shenanigans ensue. Here’s Felix about to get made up:
Note the guy next to him is already having a great time with the foundation powder.
Felix ended up getting lipstick all over his face, although the general consensus was that this was the result of deliberately bad instructions on his part.
In the next bit, I had to feed Ruby cake. She was thrilled at the prospect of having me for a partner:
And sure enough, shenanigans did ensue:
But I have to say that we won the round thanks to my skilful cake placement — not a drop of whipped cream was spilled.
After that we were all elaborately dressed up in some very fine kimonos by some local experts.
Felix was offered a ninja costume but opted instead for the ancient traditional cultural reindeer costume.
There was a ceremony where we pulled apart a ball to reveal a sign saying Eleni Don’t Go! or words to that effect.
And many presents were duly received.
It was a great night and we felt very honoured.
But that was six days ago and it already seems a world away as we wrench ourselves back into Ordinary Australians mode.
And just to add to the general weirdness of it all, we’ve come away on a last-splurge holiday up to Tokyo (to expose the kids to the bright lights big city side of Japan) and Nagano (to expose the family to a skiing holiday). I am writing this from our hotel room in a tiny little ski lodge in the wonderful town of Nozawa Onsen, site of the 1988 Winter Olympics and all-round cute Japanese mountain village where the top temperature today was -2 degrees, now that you ask.
Next week we return to Sunami and our mountain of half-packed boxes. For the first week of January the kids have already arranged a succession of last-gasp sleepovers at the homes of their bestest friends. Meanwhile, Mummy and Daddy will be hard at work getting the house in order, both literally and figuratively. Some friends have offered to help us clean it out on the last day, which is very kind. So it will be a rather strange time. But then again, everything is rather strange at the moment.
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Eight months on… lots of mud
A couple of weeks back I went up north to do a bit of volunteering and, let’s be honest, to have a bit of a stickybeak at the situation up there.
I hooked up with a volunteer group called It’s Not Just Mud, which is run by a young British guy who was happily teaching English down in Osaka but was so struck by what he saw on the telly that he quit his job and packed his bags and came up to volunteer while camping in a tent. That was in June and he’s still here, and It’s Not Just Mud is now a well-organised unit (soon to be an NPO) with a steady stream of volunteers coming through, and even their own house which operates like a huge commune and reminds me of the place I used to live 20 years ago.
Well the volunteering was a revelatory experience and I’ll try to describe what I encountered. Most of Ishinomaki still resembles a war zone. All the debris piled up in the streets has been removed and the streets have been cleared. The majority of the damaged buildings have been removed, but there are still enough around to give you an idea of the sheer power of the tsunami.
For instance, here are some typical examples of houses that have clearly not been touched since March.
(If you look really carefully you can see the clock inside that must have stopped when the water reached the ceiling.)Many of the blocks have been cleared. I reckon that more than half the houses in our area were gone, and about half of those remaining were uninhabitable. In other words, maybe a quarter of the homes actually had the lights on and people in them.
The water came up to the top of the ground floor of most buildings and hung around for several days. So the top floors of homes are mostly OK, except where they’ve been bashed into by a large floating object, such as another house. Incidentally, we’re told that many people died of exposure in the freezing cold days after the earthquake, huddled in their upstairs bedrooms with no food or drinking water and no way to get out.
This house copped a bit more than most; perhaps it was a low-lying area.
The lucky homeowners with lots of money in the bank can just rebuild, and we saw quite a few brand spanking new homes around the place. But most don’t have that sort of money, and the government handouts have been pretty woeful and as for all the millions collected by the Red Cross worldwide, well, nobody seems to know quite what’s happened to it, which is kind of alarming. Meanwhile, I was surprised to see even some of the large franchises have elected not to rebuild. Or perhaps they don’t have the money either.
But there are also many stores up and running, including the ubiquitous convenience stores, the mainstay of modern Japanese society, as well as smaller local shops. And in amongst the devastation it was reassuring to see the vending machines back in action:
One morning I went down to look at the oil terminal that used to lie right on the shoreline. The area covered in water used to be where the trucks came to fill up with oil. Apparently the entire land mass has subsided by 700 mm — enough to let the sea in to cover it all over.
Nearby was this sad light pole:
And this oil tank, completely shifted off its base:
There are several rubbish dumps around town where bulldozers work ceaselessly adding more to the mountains of debris.
Along with piles of rubbish, there are piles of cars. Literally.
Anyway that gives you a general idea of the scene. So on to the volunteering effort. For the first two days we were shovelling mud out of drains by the side of the road, where it has been sitting for eight months, and into little white bags. It was a bit like an archaeological dig; in one place the mud was full of tools and car parts, in another place household crockery, occasionally a DVD, all sorts of stuff. It was a slow and labour-intensive job, but until such time as somebody invents a roadside trench scraper, this is the only way to get the stuff out.
I must admit to being pretty apprehensive beforehand, given that manual labor is not my strong point, but I’m happy to report that the back held out OK, I was a Useful Member of the Group and lots of mud was duly shoveled into bags to be taken away, presumably to one of the rubbish dumps. Which is kind of ironic when you think of it, because bags of dirt are exactly what you need when the water comes. Perhaps they could store them all somewhere to be brought out in time for the next tsunami?
On the third day we were on house-gutting duty. This involves removing the water-damaged walls, floors and sometimes ceilings on the ground floor of a home in preparation for Real Builders to come in and redo them all with new materials so that the owners can move back in. For those whose homes were left relatively intact, it must be a wonderful thing indeed to have teams of volunteers come in and refurbish the place for you. But a pity for the ones whose homes had to be torn down. Such is the brutal luck of natural disasters.
This is one of the rooms where we removed the floor. Note the thick layer of mud on the concrete base that has sat there for months and then dried up during summer. And yes, we had to shovel all the dry mud into bags too. Next to me is Nicole, a 16-year-old from Canada who came all the way over with her step-dad to help out.
On the fourth day, our sturdy team of volunteers started the day helping to hand out a truckload of 16,000 cabbages donated by a kind farmer in Nagano prefecture. We unloaded a stack at one of the temporary housing villages on the edge of town. I was surprised to see a soup kitchen set up at the village, doling out meals to the residents; surely by now everyone would have their act together? But then someone pointed out to me that these people would have lost absolutely everything on March 11, including their jobs; so they started with nothing and with no source of income still don’t have enough money to buy and cook food. You just assume that everything sorts itself out, but clearly in many cases it doesn’t.
In the afternoon one of the guys took a few of us about 20 minutes up the road to the town of Onogawa. Here the devastation was complete. The entire township, with the exception of a few houses well up on the hillsides, has been wiped clean. The funnel-shaped topography of the inlet at Onagawa served to channel the tsunami into a wall of water higher than anything seen elsewhere.
This photo was taken on our way down the valley. Even up here, the ground is bare.
This photo shows the hospital on the hill near the sea; the hospital carpark doubles as the official evacuation point. But the wave got so high at its peak that it reached the second floor of the hospital, and those who gathered there were swept away. In the foreground is the underneath of a four-storey reinforced concrete building that was toppled over. Word is they’re going to leave it there as a sort of monument to the power of nature.
This is the old seafront, previously a bustling shopping district, showing the toppled building and the newly raised roads.
It’s a similar story over the other side of town. If the wave reached the hospital then I imagine that these buildings would have been totally submerged.
This used to be the produce market on the water’s edge.
And finally, another toppled building lying serenely in the peaceful lapping water with boats nestling nearby.
So that was my four days and I dearly wish it could have been more. It was an inspiring experience and one that I would love to do again. Many of the It’s Not Just Mud volunteers are repeat offenders; some have been there for weeks if not months on end. I’d love to be a bigger part of the clean-up effort. If only we weren’t going back to Australia in a couple of months… if only we didn’t live down the other end of the country… if only I’d gone up there a bit earlier… lame-sounding excuses I guess.
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Last ever visitors
Another one to add to the Last Ever list: a week ago we hosted our last ever visitors from Australia (unless of course a distant relative unexpectedly turns up on our doorstop sometime in the next two months). A great time was had by all as we shuttled them through the now-familiar roster of exciting Mihara attractions such as seaside cafes, okonomiyaki restaurants, islands, temples, and plain old sitting around the house discussing cultural relativity over a beer or three.
First we took them to a new seaside cafe that we’d discovered just a few short months ago. When we arrived, the cafe owner took us out on a tour of the front garden for a bit of a local geography lesson, which included a short stint on this terrifying concrete ledge thingy. Felix took the opportunity to traumatise Eleni by pretending to hang over the edge.
The visitors were most impressed with the very elaborate cake presentation; so impressed, in fact, that we just had to take a photo or two:
I made the mistake of ordering a large coffee. I mean, just look at the size of that cup. It was a nice coffee, though.
Then we took the troops over to the island with the rabbits on it:
And later, a cute lantern display down at Onomichi:
Later we factored in a stop off at everybody’s favourite temple, Buttsuji–tragically the “butt” bit is pronounced “oo” as in “book”, but it still looks good in a photo:
This one gets the Gold Logie for Best Winged Beast:
So it was all a bit sad when they left and we realised that there were no more tours to conduct, but in any case we’ve amassed so much local information over the last two years that I figure we could always start up a tour guide business at some point in the future.
Meanwhile, the Mihara Sports Day was also held last Sunday, and the three representatives from the Sushi on a Stick household acquitted themselves very well from all reports, yet despite their heroic efforts Sunami once again lost out to evil Tanoura up the road, boo hiss we hate them they are too competitive and practice too hard and clearly don’t understand that the Games are meant to be conducted in the spirit of Fun. Which means, letting Sunami win every now and then.
I love this photo of Felix with his mates just before the Soccer-Ball-Around-The-Cones event, looking like something out of a manga cartoon:
Ruby and Felix after their events. Ruby ran hard and was well pleased with herself, as you can see. (Felix if you’re reading this, you were Really Good too, OK?) Love the big S on the front of the vests (that’s for Sunami I believe, although the Superman reference is most pleasing).
By three o’clock it was all over, and even before the official closing ceremony had finished–which surprised me somewhat, in a country that so loves its ceremonies– we were all taking down the tents and packing up. In an amazingly short space of time, the whole carnival, the thousands of people, the tents and flags and brass band and food stalls and loudspeakers and podium and everything else (the locals certainly know how to put on a festival) had been shipped off and there was nothing left but a dusty old field.
And thus our Last Ever Mihara Sports Day came to an end.
Incidentally, Felix’s soccer team had a tournament yesterday at that very same dusty field. And I realised that I’d never really taken enough notice of the Ending of the Match Ritual before, which is a terrible omission because it really is quite a ritual. So I’d now like to relate it to you in all its glory.
In Japan, when you finish a junior soccer match, first of all the players of both teams line up in the middle with the referees and all bow deeply towards the spectators, who clap. Then the players from both teams shake hands and say the equivalent of “good-game-good-game-good-game” ad nauseum and also shake hands with the referees. The referees are now free to depart the field of play. Next, players from each team go over to the opposition team’s bench where they bow once more and say Thank You to the opposition coach and associated hangers-on, who politely clap. Then every player lines up to shake hands with the opposition coach. Then they troop over to their own bench and do the same to their own coach and parents and we all clap furiously and they shake hands with their own coach. Then the players from both teams shake hands with one another again (in theory, although I didn’t see much actual hand contact by this stage). And then, and only then, are we allowed to declare the game over.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to cope with the lack of ritual in Australia. Soccer matches that end when the final whistle blows? Outrageous.
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Beginning of the end
That’s possibly a bit unnecessarily alarmist but with just three and a half months to go we’re now getting to the business end of the season, as they like to say in sport, which means we’re getting into Last Time territory.
And last weekend was our first proper Last Time, if you get my meaning, because we took what will surely be our last visit to Niimi for the foreseeable future. Niimi is a tiny village tucked away up in the mountains of central Japan, about two hours away from our place, that we’ve visited a few times over the last 20 months to catch up with our friends and surrogate parents, who are the actual parents of Hironori (nickname: Sweden), the guitarist I played with in Tokyo 20 years ago who now lives in France.
We’ve also become good friends with Sweden’s cousin Yumi and her two daughters, who live in nearby Okayama and always pop up to Niimi when we’re in town. And so it was on this occasion that we caught up with them too, starting with a visit to their local fun park called Highland in a place called Kojima, which is on the edge of Japan just where the Seto-Ohashi, one of the biggest or longest or somethingest bridges in the world in space, takes off on its long journey over to the island of Shikoku. We took the kids out of school for a day, which meant that the fun park was blissfully empty and there was no waiting time for any of the rides.
Highland is one of those faded and rusting old theme parks that clearly hasn’t changed (or even had a lick of paint) since the grand old days of the 70s when the Japanese economy was seemingly unstoppable. The roller coaster in particular gave every impression that it might happily fall apart at any moment, especially the loop-the-loop bit.
But the scariest ride of all was the sky bicycles, which really do look as if they are about to fall off the rails.
Too scared to admire the view; just keep pedalling!
Perhaps it’s because there’s no machinery to drag you up the slope or around the track; you’re really on your own out there.
Felix, meanwhile, was all set to do the bungy jump when the attendant announced that it was too windy, so he had to settle for second-best on the frankly quite terrifying gravity drop ride. Here he is the second time around with his new best friends that he met at the bungy jump office:
Here’s a commemorative photo with some of the Okayama gang, including Mrs. K on the right:
The next day, we went to a nice town nearby called Kurashiki. In the underground car park at Kurashiki, the machine really spits out the tickets. It’s official:
Kurashiki has a lovely Old Bit by the canal:
Although you can’t really see it in the photo, there are lots of highly cultural old buildings along the canal and in the streets behind. It really is a very lovely spot.
Then we headed off to go visit a bit of Culture in the form of a five-storied thingie. We had to park the car on one side of the road and then cross over to the other side and go through the rice fields (look how high the rice is! Must be harvest time soon) to get to the Culture, which was very pleasant.
Eleni bribed Felix to sit nicely for a photo by offering him use of the camera for ten minutes, during which time he managed to snap about 40 photos, but I sneakily whittled them down to just a few, including this arty one:
The kids really enjoyed the culture:
Then we headed up to Niimi, where it’s grape season right now. If you’re a tall foreigner you have to pick the grapes while stumbling around beneath the bird netting:
Here Eleni relaxes with Yumi outside the grape field after a hard morning’s picking:
We ended up taking home about 25 bunches of grapes. Only a few of these were for us; the rest were presents for various people, just about everybody we know in fact, because in Japan it’s poor form to go anywhere without bringing back gifts. Sometimes this can be annoying (and expensive) but you do get a warm rosy feeling inside as you go around dispensing freshly picked grapes to all and sundry, and of course over the last 20 months we have enjoyed countless gifts from the self-same friends so a bit of quid pro quo is definitely in order.
Niimi is so quiet and peaceful that much of what happens involves just sitting around chatting. Here, Felix practices his acrobatics on the road outside the grape field with the endlessly obliging Yu, husband of Etsuko, sister of Yumi, cousin of Sweden, who lives in France. Small world isn’t it?
We had to leave Niimi at lunchtime in order to race back to Sunami for a special festival at the local shrine in the evening. Though small in scale it was rather elaborate, with dancing and chanting and musical performance and a procession involving a dragon or two.
Fires in baskets are always good for atmos:
Here’s Felix blowing the ancient traditional conch alongside the village elders:
Naturally, Eleni’s drumming group got a guernsey as always:
So that was a pretty full-on long weekend, but there’s precious little time left now for these sorts of shenanigans, and what with soccer and band commitments we have only a few weekends available to us until December. I can sense the end of our journey, and though on the one hand I feel sad that we didn’t get around to doing everything that we wanted to, on the other hand I feel satisfied that we’ve covered a fair bit of ground and had lots of fun in the process.
Or perhaps that’s just a pathetic justification: in truth, I can’t really be bothered. Summer has worn me out.
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Shimanami Island Ride
On Sunday I rode 120 kilometres on my bike. And as you might imagine, I’m pretty proud of myself.
I’m also a broken man: my neck hurts, my right knee is killing me, some of my fingers have gone numb, my bottom is saddle-sore, and my lower legs have taken on a life of their own, the muscles jumping around like crazy so that it looks as if there’s a bunch of aliens in there waiting to burst out.
However it was all worth it. The scenery was spectacular and though a typhoon had brought heavy rain the day before, the skies magically cleared and it was a very pleasant day for a ride, notwithstanding the 90% humidity.
The Shimanami Island Ride is an annual event that goes across our local island chain, starting at Mukaijima (the island next to the mainland) and continuing across all six islands right through to Imabari on the huge island of Shikoku. Unfortunately I only found out about it last year after the event, so to speak, so I was determined to do it this year.
There were four courses to choose from: the 190 km one was obviously intended for hard-core cyclists (containing a deliberately high quotient of hills) and was immediately out of contention; then there was 140 km, 100 km and 80 km. The 80 km one was obviously for wimps so I chose the super rugged 100 km course. Well over a thousand riders took part but we were all spread out to prevent unruly jostling and there was no congestion to speak of. The ride followed normal roads, but although we were nominally competing with the traffic, there’s very little happening on the islands on a Sunday so it was all very peaceful and convivial.
All the bridges have been built with special bike lanes and even little bicycle-only approach paths that are not at all steep (except when you’ve done 50 km or so; then they become horribly steep). The bridges were the highlights in fact because of the views as you cycle along and the cooling breeze high up in the air. And I learned an important Bridge Fact: suspension bridges are not perfectly flat, they go down a bit after the middle, which is rather lovely when you’re at that stage when you can’t be bothered pedalling.
In retrospect I should have chosen the wimpy 80 km course, because I discovered at the 45 km mark that I hadn’t read the fine print (in the form of altitude maps kindly provided for each course) and they had in fact snuck a few hills into the 100 km course. Curses!
Anyway here are some photos.
Here I am before the start, with no idea of the cruel surprise that was about to be sprung upon me in 45 km.
A quick pitstop at the second bridge, still blissfully unaware of the evil hills that await.
After the half-way point (did I mention the hills?) I was decidedly less enthused with the scenery and the ride was possibly even starting to become a bit of a slog. However I’d arranged to meet Eleni and Felix at Dolce, a rather excellent gelato shop on the island of Ikuchijima (which we regard as our local island since it’s serviced by the ferry that leaves from Sunami), so I resolved to at least make it that far. By the time I finally got there I was ready to squib out of the last bit of the race and just catch the ferry home with the others, but the fortifying effects of a double gelato plus some motivational input from Eleni was enough to get me over the line, and off I went once more. And although the last 20 km or so were a struggle, there was some consolation in the form of the occasional discovery along the way, such as this interesting shop:
I wonder what they do in there? And why are the windows boarded up?
So I made it to the end, yay. It was more exercise than I’ve ever done in my life but it was definitely a good experience, and hopefully the sensation will return to my fingers before too long and I should get movement back in my neck some day soon and with any luck the aliens will stop dancing in my legs and I’m sure my bottom will have recovered in time for next year.
Meanwhile, here are some random photos for no reason.
The other day we spotted this sign while out driving.
I think it’s something to do with books, or at least I certainly hope it is.
Also, a couple of weeks back Ruby was awarded a Gold Tag for her summer science project on salt, and it was on display down at the municipal offices so we all trooped down to have a look.
Found it!
And look, the gold tag and everything!
A couple of weeks back, I took the kids down to a local restaurant/cafe place (Eleni being slightly unwell that evening) where a couple of the guys from our brass band were playing an impromptu gig just set up in the corner. And I thought to myself, what a lovely thing to do. So I took a quick snap on my phone. Excuse the low quality.
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Sports Day 2011
Ruby’s school had their annual sports day on Sunday. I wrote a post on it last year so I won’t go into great detail here, mainly because I can’t be bothered, although I will magnanimously give you a few consolation photos of the 2011 version.
Here are the students all marching onto the arena with the flags at the start. You have to laugh at all the pomp and ceremony and precision marching. Who was it who claimed that the post-war pacifist constitution got rid of Japan’s militaristic leanings? I have my doubts.
The sports day had lots of races and relays, a good old-fashioned tug-of-war between parents and their kids, which the kids inevitably won because the teachers joined in on the kids’ end, and other wacky events for the locals involving oldie-friendly activities such as putting the ball through the croquette hoop, kicking the unpredictable rugby ball along the ground and bowling over ninepins with a soccer ball.
Then the kids put on a display called “Stunts” which involved a variety of precision moves such as this one:
And my personal favourite, the Sandy Bottom:
There were various sorts of acrobatics, like this:
And this:
And of course, humid pyramids:
I took the opportunity while all the festivities were in progress to take a look at the pool, which is on the roof of a three-storey building. This is what the arena looked like from the rooftop:
And this is what the pool looks like. Never mind the green water, the swimming season is over until next year, but doesn’t it look like you’re on top of the world? Like one of those horizon pools that rich people have. Maybe the photo doesn’t do it justice, but that’s what it felt like to me when I was up there.
And this is the rather excellent view over the pool wall:
Incidentally, the bottom third of every single window in every single classroom is frosted over to prevent the students from admiring this very view. Presumably the authorities feel that it might Distract Them from their Learning. Isn’t that just lovely?
But I digress. Back to the Sports Day.
It was a monstrously hot day. As with last year, summer has refused to start going away at the end of August like it’s supposed to do, and for some reason we were treated to an especially brutal burst of heat on this very weekend. The Sports Day was conducted right in the heat of the day and the kids were out in the middle of it with no hats right through the 20 minutes of opening ceremony and endless speeches, the warm-up stretching, the Stunts display, the gruelling races, the warm-down, and finally the closing ceremony and endless speeches, which were also on track for about 20 minutes except that half-way through a number of students started collapsing from the heat. When the teachers carted the first one off at the back, nothing much happened. Eleni and I could see the poor thing being given water and fanned furiously by some kind souls in a tent. Then another one fell over right at the front, in full view of the principal, and by the time it got to four students down, all of a sudden the teachers started to panic. The ending was cut short, the AP was out shouting “everybody inside for a drinks break!” and even after we’d all packed up and gone home we could hear the ambulances racing up the hill. Ruby reported that three of them were taken to hospital.
Now this type of stuff is on the national news with frightening regularity. Including last year, I reckon I’ve seen three or four “students collapse from heatstroke and taken to hospital” reports, and I hardly ever watch TV. So what has the school done to address the problem?
Funny you should ask.
Back in July, about half-way through summer, Ruby brought home an important-looking notice with the grand title, Heatstroke Prevention Strategy. And what exactly was the Heatstroke Prevention Strategy?
A white baseball cap. Which the school permits you to buy for ¥630, although you don’t have to buy it if you don’t feel like it, and even if you do buy it the school won’t make you wear it, and anyway most times you aren’t allowed to wear it for one reason or another, and it doesn’t cover your ears or neck so it’s of minimal benefit. But the very notion of allowing students to don a cap in certain situations represents a massive shift in ideology, partly because of the prevailing Japanese orthodoxy about toughening kids up (hence: no heaters in winter unless the temperature falls below 10°C; no water breaks during PE classes in summer; have to take all your books to school in the morning and back home at night, etc. etc. etc.) and partly because Ruby’s school is particularly strict, or backward, or just plain stupid depending on your point of view. (I’ll let you be the judge: further background reading can be found this, this, this and this.)
So this latest incident only served to further intensify my contempt for the Mihara No. 4 Junior High School, if that were possible. There is a back story to all of this, of course, concerning my ongoing battle since last summer to convince the school to make the monumental concession of allowing the kids drinks breaks during PE classes in summer (read about it here).
I wonder if the school will get rapped over the knuckles for failing to exercise its duty of care to pupils on the Sports Day. Or will it simply be dismissed as all part of the glorious toughening up process? I’m tempted to ring them up and say “hey guys, how about that Heatstroke Prevention Strategy! Worked a treat didn’t it?”, but I think upon mature reflection that it would be altogether easier if I just went back to Australia and left them to their own devices.
And it’s just as well that Ruby managed to stay upright the entire way through, despite being in about four different races, one of which involved lugging a 10 kg sack around the track, on a 40°+ day* for heaven’s sake, because if she’d keeled over too then no doubt I would have been exceptionally angry and no doubt it would have been highly embarrassing all round.
* Official temp was 33°C, but humidity adds around 10°C according to the “Feels Like” weather report.
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End of the hols
A strange and eerie calm has descended upon the Sushi on a Stick household… yes, the little darlings are ensconced in their respective institutions of learning for the first time in over a month, and peace reigns once more between the hours of 8 am and 4 pm.
In Ruby’s case, the school holidays actually finished last Monday, when work experience started. (Of course the school couldn’t possibly countenance giving the students time off for work experience, so they shave a week off the holidays instead.) She spent a productive five days at an architectural design company playing with CAD all day, and ended up with a rather nice floor plan of her very own house design, along with a cute little cardboard model complete with grass and trees and tiny little paper figurines (one of them sitting on the toilet even).
Here in Japan, you don’t find your own work experience and contact the school; rather, the school draws up a list of places that have agreed to take on students and you have to choose what you want to do. These are typically uninspired options such as the local 7-11, the local petrol station and a cleaning company, although they do have a few more interesting ones too. Ruby’s preferred option was the nice Italian restaurant down by the beach, called Zona Fortunato (Italian scholars will note the error), and I have to say that this would have been pretty good because (a) the hours were only 11 to 3; (b) she might have learned something about cooking; (c) it was 10 minutes walk from home and (d) we could have come down for a meal to embarrass her in action. But on the other hand, she has often talked about wanting to be an architect someday, and it sounds like the design firm was fun, notwithstanding the 8:10 am starts. And I figure she can always work in a cafe when she’s older, and we’ll come and embarrass her there instead.
You know how I said we were definitely going to see the Pirates ‘n’ Fire festival on Saturday night? Yep, you guessed it… we piked out. It was just too hot and, after all the fun and excitement of the summer, I just couldn’t muster up the energy for yet another trip to a distant beach with an hour’s drive home and another late night, especially as we had to front up to a working bee at the primary school on Sunday morning at 8 a.m. sharp, plus the kids and I had a concert on that day. So, another culture fail to add to the list. After all, we went last year (you can read about it here) and it was fantastic fun and at least we can say we’ve seen it and everything and… enough already.
Even though we didn’t make it to P&F, though, I was rather pleased with myself for discovering a new island, a new beach and even a new cafe on Saturday. Ruby had soccer practice starting at 4:30 in the afternoon at her regular ground which is about an hour away (lots ‘o’ driving… it’s part and parcel of country life) and I had two hours to kill so I decided to take the opportunity to explore a nearby island that was marked on the map. Turns out it even had a beach, although by the time I arrived the beach was officially “closed”, in the sense that the music had been turned off and I didn’t have to pay ¥1000 ($10) to drive in. However the water was still very much there, so I went for a nice swim on a totally deserted beach. Though I did feel a bit of trepidation as I stepped into the water, mainly because I was half expecting to be told off at any moment for Swimming Out of Hours.
(Once back in the Tokyo days, Eleni and I went down to Okinawa for a holiday and we found a lovely deserted beach just near our hotel. But no sooner had we stepped into the crystal clear water than a man raced up on a beach bike shouting at us to get out. It turned out that the hotel which owned that patch of beach was closed for redevelopment and therefore the beach was officially off limits. I tried to protest that the ocean is not private property and people can choose to enter it where they like but he was having none of it and kept carrying on making so much noise that eventually we up and left. We ended up at another “properly supervised” beach with music screaming out the speakers all day long.)
Back on topic, here’s the beach I discovered on Saturday:
Happily I was able to swim undisturbed (certainly by other swimmers) and even buy an ice-cream from one of the stores, which strangely was still open for business despite the beach being closed. Clearly they haven’t read the rules.
On the way back I tracked down a lovely cafe clinging improbably to the side of the hill with the most stunning views from the outdoor tables. Tragically the coffee was disgusting but it was worth it for the island vista spread out in the setting sun:
And readers will be pleased to know that we managed to make it to a festival on the Saturday night anyway, the one put on by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the big factory complex on the way into town. We went last year and I wrote about it on this page, so I won’t go on about it here other than to say that it was another one of those wonderful sea-of-humanity events with thousands of people wandering around and many of the girls dressed up in yukatas and millions of stalls and a big stage down one end and, to finish off the night, a fireworks show, bringing the fireworks count for 2011 up to five.
On Sunday the kids and I did another concert with the PJO band, with Eleni offering moral support from the audience and taking millions of photos. Here is a selection.
Felix ensconced in the trumpet section:
Our band leader Habu-sensei (Mr. Habu to you) has taken a shine to Felix and often gets him up on stage for an interview. I love it because it’s the only time (other than when he had to introduce himself for the first time at the local primary school) where I ever get to see Felix looking nervous and subdued.
Ruby and Felix between them have an embarrassing number of solos. Ruby even has an entire song (the theme from Ice Castles, if you must know; a soppy ballad but it’s not too bad considering) where she gets to stand out the front and get closer to her adoring fans:
Eleni the photographer got a bit arty at one stage and started shooting in black and white:
And finally, yours truly up the back pumping out those bass licks. (How’s the look on Felix’s face — I think he was doing a high note.)
Another crazy action-packed weekend, in other words. Ruby was back at school on Monday morning; Felix had a few more days of freedom but now he too is back inside the hallowed walls of learning and I have time to write posts (at least, that’s my excuse for the pitiful lack of postage during August; pretty poor form to blame it on the kids, I know, but that’s what they’re there for).
And now all we need is for the hot and humid weather to finally go away and leave us alone so that normal programming can resume in earnest.
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Summer report
Gosh, summer is nearly over. And what a summer it’s been. This year we sensibly decided to think local, act local rather than traipsing around the country exhausting ourselves like we did last year. So we’ve been traipsing around the nearby vicinity exhausting ourselves instead.
And it’s been tons of fun. By my calculations we’ve set foot on seven new islands (and driven across countless others in the process), discovered three excellent new beaches, checked out four separate fireworks shows; and we’re not finished yet, with the Pirates ‘n’ Fire Festival still to come on 27 August. That’s apart from all the regular going down the local beach stuff and the kids attending various soccer training camps and Felix going off to Skool Camp and doing wholesome school holiday activities in town. Felix has also been zooming around the neighbourhood on his bike visiting friends (especially Ryota up the road, who has a Wii — not that this has anything to do with the friendship), while Ruby has organised days out with no less than three friends: one from school (two years ahead of her; not from her current group of classmates, who are a total loss), one from PJO brass band and Rio from the soccer club, the one who came with us to the Katy Perry concert in May. In fact it’s been so full-on that we still haven’t made it down to the beach to let off the huge pack of fireworks we bought a couple of months back. Can you believe that?
Needless to say I can’t possibly do justice to all the Fun that’s been Had, so I’ll just whip through the highlights. Better get comfortable, this may take a while.
Summer officially started with the beach opening ceremony on July 2, which I’ve already covered here.
The following week the Nishiharas invited us down to the island of Omishima (hereby designated as our first island visit of the summer) to visit a culturally important shrine of some sort. It was a very nice thing to do on such a stinking hot day, on account of all the lovely shady trees in the grounds of the shrine. Felix got hold of the camera and managed to take 140 photos, which I cruelly forced him to whittle down to just 20. The poor thing, he still lives in a world where cash flows infinitely forth from the ATM and no digital photos are ever deleted. Clearly I need to work harder on robbing him of the innocence of childhood.
The shady spots were possibly my favourite parts of the shrine:
Eleni has fallen in with the rather quaint Japanese tradition of strolling around under a parasol (ladies only, obviously):
There was loads of cultural stuff there:
This photo looks overexposed but I think it illustrates the intensity of the Japanese summer quite nicely:
One of Felix’s six million architectural shots:
I managed to wrest the camera from his grasp at one point (that’s Mr Nishihara by the way):
And lastly, a shot of Mummy with a large propeller. Of course.
The next weekend we were off again, this time with our family friends the Hiranos for an overnight stay at Dogo Onsen, a hot spring town in the city of Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku. The trip to Matsuyama involved crossing no less than six islands, thus bringing the cumulative Island Count to seven.
Poor Ruby was away at a soccer camp that weekend and we did feel rather guilty when we stopped at a pool the first day in a city along the way (I forget where; Yusuke was navigating). It had a slide and one of those walking circuit thingies so beloved of Japanese public pools everywhere, where the water flows along and sort of pushes you around as you walk or just sit in a floaty ring. This one had the added attraction that the circuit goes inside the building at the back and then back out again.
Here’s Felix testing out the design capacity of the floaty ring with the Hirano kids:
Meanwhile the Ladies sat in the pool chatting:
Next we headed over to check out the handome onsen building at Dogo Onsen. And what a fine building it is indeed:
Even more so at night:
Up a side alley we spotted an ancient traditional shooting gallery and stopped to let the kids give full reign to their destructive urges.
Felix didn’t manage to shoot enough Kewpie dolls to win anything but he made up for it by ingratiating himself with some drunken office workers with excellent aim who’d come along afterwards and convincing them to hand over their prizes since they didn’t need a few toy guns anyway. He’s going to go far that boy.
The hotel was pretty ordinary but the brekky was good:
For the second day we ambled around town and eventually stumbled on a cafe serving rather good parfaits. Eleni has always maintained that Japan does really good parfaits but sadly we’ve hardly had any in over a year and a half. So we made up for it by treating the kids, and I generously offered to help Felix out at regular intervals since he clearly couldn’t manage that much ice-cream on his own:
Fast-forwarding now through various soccer camps, the spectacularly successful fishing trip with Mr. Nishimura and my epic shrine-carrying efforts (described in lovingly painstaking detail on this page), we get to the day Daddy insisted on dragging the family off on a mid-week adventure to yet another island chain, this one about an hour down the road, which had been recommended by several different groups of friends so I really thought we should see it and there’s only four months left and we have to get out and do these sorts of things or we’ll miss out and we’re probably never coming back this way or not for many years at least etc etc etc etc.
We set off with only vague plans to find a beach somewhere and go for a swim and, in that wonderfully fortuitous way that seems to happen when you’re on the islands, we stumbled on possibly our Best Beach Ever, even nicer than the one where we swam at Kosagijima after our fishing heroics. And the reason it was so nice was that there WASN’T ANY CONCRETE. Well, there was a short section up to the left but if you looked the other way you could pretend that the beach was 100% natural, which is an absolute rarity in Japan, a country in love with concrete, where virtually every metre of coastline (and every inland river, for that matter) has been fully concreted, supposedly for protection against natural disasters (tsunami, river flooding) which certainly do happen although I think we all know the real reason is to win votes from the powerful construction companies. Tragically for the construction companies, there’s pretty much nothing left in the country to concrete any more. Unless they start on the beaches.
Unfortunately not many photos were taken but here’s a nice one of Ruby in her new Beach Hoodie. Since she’s a teenager we thought we’d better buy her a hoodie so she can hang out in shopping centers, but this one has the added advantage that you can go swimming in it and avoid having to put on annoying sunscreen. What a good idea!
After an exhausting day at the beach we were all tired and ready to go home. So of course Daddy insisted that we all go a few more islands along to visit an accredited old preserved bit of town that I’d heard about from someone somewhere. The kids were thrilled with the idea:
Especially when we piled out of the car and started wandering around the Old Township and they were forced to pose for random photos:
Still, it was rather nice, what we saw of it:
Unfortunately most things were closed (including a very tempting cafe facing the sea) because Tuesday is the day off, which we didn’t know, so we’re going to come back again some time for another visit, and kids, as you can imagine, are thrilled with the prospect. They just love Culture and Old Things. By the way, we crossed another five islands that day, bringing the Island Count to 12.
On the weekend Ruby had a barbeque with her soccer team (and coach) at Sunset Beach, a rusted and fading but still serviceable beach resort on the island of Ikuchijima, the one that’s just a short ferry-ride from our place. So Eleni, Felix and I took the opportunity to go down to Innoshima, the next island along, to check out the practice sessions for the boat races that take place as part of the Pirate ‘n’ Fire festival at the end of August. They row these long thin boats called “koyaha” that apparently were favoured by pirates because they could zoom out to the ships before the poor unsuspecting victims had time to react. Here you can see some of the boat teams rowing madly across in the background while Felix checks out his foot at the water’s edge:
Tragically we won’t be able to attend the boat races because there is a PJO concert on the very same day. But as it turns out you can have a go yourself at rowing a pirate boats on the practice days. We thought this was an excellent consolation prize.
Plus you get to pose for the obligatory commemorative photo:
Island Count = 14, New Beach Count = two.
Last week was a huge weekend for culture. On the Saturday night was the Yassa Odori festival, where about eighty or so teams from the local area battle it out for the honour of putting on the best performance of the Yassa Odori dance, an ancient traditional form of dance that is only performed in Mihara or so the literature will tell you. We went to this last year and I wrote a comprehensive report including videos and photos of the wacky decorated trucks and colourful costumes so I won’t bother with more photos here.
Suffice to say that this year it was a far more meaningful event because Eleni, Ruby and Felix were all dancing in Team No. 63. (I managed to worm my way out of it by claiming official photographer status.) All the teams had to dance past the official judging panel, which included two Miss Yassa dressed up like air hostesses from the 60s (you can just see them down the end):
They had to go to practice sessions for several weeks beforehand and then dance for hours on the night itself and were thoroughly worn out by the end, though culturally stimulated. Eleni won the Best Smile prize for her team and got to dance in the special Best Smile On the Night parade at the end, though tragically she didn’t get to take out the big one.
I’ve posted a video further below for your viewing pleasure.
Sunday night was the local festival for Sunami Heights, which is our particular area of Sunami, which is our particular section of Mihara. In other words, a very local event involving a few hundred people at most. One of the lovely things about summer festivals is the number of young girls (generally up to age 30) who seize the opportunity to get dolled up in their summer yukata (lightweight kimono) and wooden sandals for the event. Ruby was likewise keen to get into the action so we found a yukata at the local shopping centre and arranged for a special hairdo for the evening. The teenager was so impressed with the makeover that she took hundreds of photos in the kitchen before setting out:
I was working at one of the stalls for the first hour but managed to nick out for a moment to photograph the teenager parading around in all her glory:
And here we are a bit later, in a more natural pose. Ruby has recently embraced mobile phone emailing, the equivalent of SMS in Japan, and is now almost constantly wedded to her screen.
Eleni’s drumming troupe, as always, got a guernsey:
And young Felix was commandeered to play the horagai, an ancient traditional cultural conch shell, in one of the songs. Being an accomplished trumpeter now, he gets quite a good sound out of it, which is no mean feat.
The kids also did a bit of dancing, with some of them taking it more seriously than others:
Tragically the powers that be had very stupidly organised the Sunami Heights festival on the very same evening as the Mihara fireworks, which I for one was not going to miss for the world, so we had to leave the festival early and miss out on much of the dancing and general merriment. As soon as Felix’s “dancing” was over, we piled into the car for the mad dash across town and, although we were about 15 minutes late, for some reason the fireworks were also delayed so we got there with impeccable timing, just as the first ones went off. Clearly the God of Public Events Management was smiling upon us that night.
Here’s some video from that weekend.
And finally, to wrap things up, our friend Miyuki from Nagoya came to stay so we zoomed over to the lovely old well-preserved fishing town of Tomonoura and had a highly convivial lunch at a cafe overlooking the harbour.
Then we wandered around the shops a bit, and Ruby took the opportunity to send off another 100000000 emails.
Then on whim we caught a five-minute ferry across to yet another new island, which turned out to have a wonderful beach on it (also no concrete) from which you can actually swim across to the next island because it’s THAT CLOSE. Definitely a new experience for the Sushi on a Stick household and another contender for Best Beach Ever.
Island count = 16, new beach count = three.
Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get any photos because we were in a tearing hurry to get to our next engagement, a fireworks show at Fukuyama, which promised some 10,000 fireworks. They always like to boast about how many fireworks are in the show. Thus the Fukuyama fireworks promised to be our biggest to date. The firework count was well ahead of 6,000 at Mihara and 1,500 at Innoshima, and though I had thought at the time these were ample, the Fukuyama ones were really something else. There were times when it seemed that the whole sky was ablaze and even a bitter old cynic like me couldn’t help but let out the odd “ooh!” and “ah!”. (Yes, with exclamation marks too.) Although I would say about the Mihara ones that every explosion echoed around the nearby mountains for about ten seconds, creating this continuous rumbling effect like a train going past or an approaching thunderstorm, and that was pretty impressive. But the Fukuyama ones were easily the best we’ve seen, plus the fact that so many people were dressed up in their yukatas and the sea-of-humanity factor with everyone enjoying themselves by the river.
So it’s been an amazing summer, but one can now sense it coming to an end. For a start, the temperature is finally winding down; Mother Nature has finally relented, and not a moment too soon. This weekend we’re going to take it easy; tomorrow I’ve got soccer duty and Eleni is teaching, and on Sunday we’ve got a clean-up day at Ruby’s school followed by band practice, so it looks like a festival-free weekend for a change. Next week Ruby has work experience — during the school holidays, of course, the school couldn’t possibly let them go for a week during term time — and Felix has one of those random go-to-school-during-the-holidays days.
Then school goes back in earnest at the end of August and normal programming resumes. And with any luck we’ll find some time over the next week to go down the beach and let off that big bag of fireworks.
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Weekend wrap
What an amazing weekend.
It all started with some good news on Friday, courtesy of the long-range weather forecast that comes out every Friday afternoon, that the week after next is expected to be slightly cooler. Only slightly, mind, but anything’s welcome during the long hot sticky relentless Japanese summer. Actually it hasn’t been too bad this year. The other day a nice big windy typhoon came along and kept me up all night what with the carport roof flapping and the whistling through the cracks, but at least it was a bit of a change.
On Saturday Felix, Eleni and I (Ruby tragically was away on a three-day soccer training camp) went fishing with a very nice man called Mr Yoshimura, a retired fireman who has a little fishing boat. I’d mentioned to Mrs. Yoshida, who we know well because she’s the mother of one of Felix’s classmates and also a member of Eleni’s drumming group, that I really wanted to go out on a boat one day and did she by any chance know anyone with a boat? The squeaky wheel gets the grease as they say, and so it was that at 7:30 on Saturday morning we were down at the Sunami docks stepping out on our latest big adventure.
Here’s Mr. Yoshimura at the helm as we zoom out into the Seto Inland Sea. (Incidentally the primary school is the background there somewhere.)
The view from the boat was superb:
Here’s another view, where you can see the onsen (hot springs) building to the left and even our house, although I’m not going to point it out exactly because you might come and rob us:
I actually told Mr. Y that I wasn’t much of a fisherman and that I just wanted to go out on a boat for the views, but he was adamant that we all have a go. And I’m glad he did because it was actually good fun and we all managed to catch fish, despite being rank amateurs.
Here’s Felix with the first catch of the day:
(There’s a fish there, trust me. It’s in front of his shirt.)
And here Felix models a double-catch (ie two fish at the same time) by yours truly. The lines have two hooks on them; the top one is meant to be a lure or something, but if the fish insists on launching itself onto the wrong hook who am I to argue?
Eleni got right into it too, especially after she caught a double of her own.
This is a typical Sunami fishing boat, with a nice roof over the top so you don’t get sunburnt and a dinky little cultural sail at the back:
Sadly ours didn’t have a roof — Mr. Y doesn’t believe in them — but we were well prepared with hats and sunscreen and loads of drinks.
In the end Felix reckons he caught the most (of course) with 11, while Eleni and I chipped in with about seven or eight each. All in all we caught about 30 fish which we transferred into little esky like this.
After the fishing we landed on a tiny island called Kosagi-jima that has about 50 houses on it, one of which belongs to a friend of Mr. Y who doesn’t live there any more but is happy for people to plop down there for a break after a hard morning’s fishing. So we sat around the table and ate our sandwiches and onigiri rice snacks that we’d cleverly packed for the trip, and then we had the most wonderful swim at the beach right in front of the house, which was totally deserted and much cleaner and nicer than any beach we’ve seen thus far. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was the finest swim I’ve had in ages. You don’t normally associate Japan with pristine beaches and sparkling blue water and cute little islands, but yesterday just proved that such stuff does exist, at least around here.
Here’s another photo of the view on the way back. Sorry, I can’t help it.
The fishing trip was deemed a great success and we took home our haul of 30 fishes and divided it up biblically with friends and neighbours, minus the loaves I suppose.
That night we went and saw a fireworks display on the island of Innoshima. This is part of the month-long Pirate ‘n’ Fire Festival, which we went to last year and loved so much we vowed to come back and do it again this year. We went with the Yoshidas, who joined up on the spur of the moment when we delivered some fish to them. We had to put our cars on the ferry from Sunami to Ikuchi-jima (which is always fun; there’s something inherently lovely about catching the ferry, not least the cool breeze during summer), then hop over on the bridge (the one that Eleni and I rode across a few months back) to Innoshima. The place was packed and we nearly didn’t get a park but it all worked out in the end and we bumped into another family from school so we all got to sit there and ooh and aah for half an hour. The display was described by our friends as being on the small side, having “only” 1,500 fireworks in it, but to my mind half an hour of solid fireworks is plenty. Those big bangs are so terribly loud to my sensitive ears, don’t you know.
So that was Saturday. Then on Sunday I was out being cultural, having agreed to help carry around a portable wooden shrine called a mikoshi (which houses the god of the local neighbourhood) for some sort of annual ceremony. I’d actually been co-opted into this last year and found it to be back-breaking work but they made me promise to come back this year and I’d been dreading it since the moment the official “invitation” arrived, but it turned out to be not as bad as I’d feared (thus validating my belief that you should always lower your expectations so that you can be pleasantly surprised afterwards). All in all I think I made a decent contribution, putting in quite a bit of haulage including up a rather steep hill at one point.
First we met up at the local community centre and the Head Guy explained the shrine-carrying protocols:
Now the Japanese as we know don’t do things by halves, and when they’re in party mode they like to drink hard too. So at 7:30 in the morning I found myself holding a full cup of sake and a tiny plate of pickles, presumably as fortification for the task ahead. There were about 20 of us there (all guys) plus six high school boys who’d somehow been commandeered to lend a hand. I was surprised to hear the Head Guy telling them they were permitted to drink beers too and that we were all to turn a blind eye for the day. (The legal drinking age in Japan is 20.) Just shows that rules are made to be broken.
The mikoshi has a couple of kids on it (Felix’s classmates, as it turns out):
Finally we set off down the mountain towards the beach:
Every few hundred metres there’d be a rest break at somebody’s house where beers would magically appear and we’d all sit around theatrically wiping our brows and complimenting ourselves on our efforts:
Sometimes there’d be a rest break for no apparent reason, like this one just before the lights on the main road. Not that the gods care about earthly traffic signals.
We even stopped at the combined police/fire station. The high school lads didn’t have any beers there.
Whether by accident or by design I’m not sure, but the neighbouring hamlet also had their carry-around-a-mikoshi ceremony on the same day. They’ve only got a limited number of participants and they’re all getting on and are are past carrying the shrine on their shoulders, so this year they’ve just strapped it to a dinky little trolley and were seen pulling it along by a rope, to much jeering and guffawing from our group.
I mean, look how small and light it is, and it hasn’t even got any kids on it! Pathetic really. Whereas our mikoshi is the real deal and takes quite a bit of effort to carry, as you can see in this short instructional video:
Finally we finished up with a huge and satisfying meal prepared by the Women-Folk (of course) together with yet more beers.
And on top of that we were all presented with a six-pack of beer to take home as well (the high school lads were given strict instructions to hand it over to their parents).
So that was truly an action-packed and culturally stimulating weekend. Poor Ruby missed out on the whole thing, and I can’t wait until she gets home and asks what we got up so I can shoot back the ultimate 21st-century retort: READ MY BLOG.
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This blog is about the adventures of a family of Australian barbarians spending two years in the islands of southern Japan. Stay tuned for regular updates on the food, the culture, the earthquakes, the wacky festivals, the school system and more. 
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