 |
 |
|
11.26.2002 We're back. I'm sorry that there has been such a kerfluffle, as they say, about this website. I never knew my name was so in demand! The official story is: the email address that the webhosting people had for me was outdated, and so I didn't get their notices that the web address www.zandercannon.com was set to expire. When the name did expire, it turned out that there are some not terribly ethical people out there who look for sites with a certain amount of traffic and buy up those names if they expire. Then they either route people to their site from it, or put a (presumably) income producing site at that address and take all the traffic that comes their way. Since I haven't trademarked the name zandercannon, I have no true legal claim to it, and if I did, the process of challenging this person or group would run in the thousands of dollars. Buying it back from them would be only slightly cheaper. They have contacted me and told me that they will be taking bids (you actually have to bid for it, since they can't tell you how much it costs, as that would be illegal). So anyway, we're here at www.zanderandjulie.com, and we'll be redecorating around here to reflect the name change as well. So tell all your friends to check www.zanderandjulie.com every week. Oh, yeah, that will be the new thing as well. We'll update the site every Tuesday, whether we have anything interesting to say or not. So check out this website on Tuesday, in between Monday (Strong Bad Emails) and Wednesday (The Onion). Thursday you can check Tom the Dancing Bug. Friday... well, I don't know what comes out on Friday. If anyone knows what cool thing is updated on the web on Friday, email me at zander@zanderandjulie.com. Now the flip side of us posting all the time is that it won't always be pictures of all the things you want to see. Yes, I'll get some pictures up of the Thousand Samurai parade, it's just that it's a pain to resize all those pictures and post them. I'll admit it, I'm a sooky-lala about posting pictures. But sometimes it will just be plain old ordinary stuff about our lives. We're not doing interesting things every week so sometimes it will just be ... well, what this post is today. Our lives have settled into a routine, and we're getting used to things, so sometimes it's hard for us to remember that what we're used to here is pretty different from the States. 1. Rain gear. When was the last time I even owned a raincoat? And rain pants? I think I must have been nine years old. But here you can't live without it. It rains all the time, and all day when it gets going, so you better have some full-on rain gear to keep from being soaked. And of course not everyone in Japan needs rain gear as much as I do, because I have to get everywhere on a... 2. Bike. I did my fair share of biking in the US too, but here it's our only means of transportation. The buses are convenient enough, at least until about 9 pm. Then you're pretty much stuck where you are unless you have your bike with you. Or at least, you can't get back to our house, since we live out in the boonies. Also, my bike has a basket on it. I'd be the laughing stock of Minneapolis, but it's the most convenient thing ever. Life would be impossible without it. I'm thinking of putting another one on. And it has fenders to keep the mud from splashing up. I've never had those before. And a dynamo-powered light. And a kickstand. I should feel like the biggest dork on the block, but my bike is actually cooler than average (It's the basket in back that makes it so stylish). And I'd gotten used to that. I was pretty confident about my bike until I went to the elementary school a week or two ago and as I was leaving, two boys asked me where my car was. I told them I had a bike, and they asked me to point it out. When I did, they both doubled over with laughter. I stood there for a second and gave them sinister looks, but then considered that the best multi-cultural lesson I could bestow at this moment was to make them aware of the all-powerful American "noogie". 3. Teaching English. Right now I teach English to our friend Mrs. Matsumoto and her son Ryo. Mrs Matsumoto is fluent in English, so she just needs explanations of certain slang and idioms. Ryo, who is in the fifth grade, knows almost no English, so we're on the other end of the scale (and my drawing skills have come in rather handy). We're learning the forms of the verb "to be" right now, so I have a wall full of illustrated words like "happy", "sad", "tall", "short", and, of course, "Godzilla". Ryo is a quiet boy, not very outgoing, not very competitive, and he usually looks at me with a puzzled look on his face like I suddenly sprouted four more ears. He reminds me of an eleven-year-old me like you wouldn't believe. 3. Eating Fish. I've never been a huge fan of seafood, but here when you eat fish you are usually just quietly thanking your lucky stars that you're not eating squid on a stick or octopus dumplings or natto. Eating here, particularly when someone has made you some food, is a bit like playing Russian Roulette. When you get the empty chamber (tuna steak, salmon, scallops, shrimp, even octopus or eel), you're just thinking about the poor sap the next time along that's going to be stuck with a whole fish breaded with its eyeballs still in or one ounce of fish with seventy-two thousand bones in it. BLAM! You lose. 4. Telling people about American holidays. Oh yeah...! you think to yourself. No one here knows what on earth you're talking about when you mention Halloween, or Thanksgiving, or Labor Day for that matter (probably Presidents' Day and Martin Luther King Day will be similarly received). We had a little early Thanksgiving meal with two Australians (the Roses) and a New Zealander (Tracy, our downstairs neighbor), and they were all rather charmed with our quaint tradition of 1) telling what we are thankful for and 2) loading up on starch. We also pointed out that we would normally also be watching football and the Macy's Parade on TV and falling asleep because of all the L-Trypto-whatsit in turkey. Instead, we taught them the great American craft project of hand-turkeys, and now we have some lovely artwork on our fridge because of it. That's all that's on our mind so far. .: posted by Zander Cannon 8:54 PM Tokyo Time 11.8.2002 Okay, when I said tomorrow, I really meant a month from now. Sorry. Things are fine here, but we had occasion to experience another phase of culture shock. According to the book, "Culture Shock! Japan" by Rex Shelley, we are just getting out of the "honeymoon period" and going into the first of two big dips into culture shock. The whole process is supposedly about 14 months. Great. Just for the record, I'll (Julie) be writing in italics, so you can tell its me...We're on one of the greatest adventures! We have each other! We really thought we'd be immune to culture shock or anything of the likes, but it creeps in here and there when we least expect it. My principal from Turtle Lake Elementary School had the opportunity to visit Japan a few weeks ago. Amazingly enough, his tour group visited Utsumomiya University, which is a five minute bike ride from our house! We met him there, boarded the city bus, and then hit the town. Touring the 100 Yen store, eating sushi that we chose off of a conveyor belt, (which we think is so cool, but many Japanese people giggle when we tell them of this fondness) and chatting away made the night go by too quickly. Before we knew it he was safely on the train heading back to his tour group. That night I realized I miss how it feels when something or someone is so familiar. Thanks Mr. Skinner, for a great visit.   Thus far our culture shock has been simple homesickness, pining for certain comforts, and loneliness in a land where no one speaks our language. I wondered at that time what would happen if we came upon something with real stakes, when it would be important for us to be understood and empathized with. Well, I figured I had a lot of Japan figured out, so I was running some errands, and I went to the View Plaza at the train station to pick up some tickets we had reserved for a night bus to Kyoto. Actually, it was a night bus from Yokohama (SW of Tokyo) to Kyoto, since Utsunomiya and Kyoto aren't places people need to get between very often. So we would have to take the train down to Yokohama and get on the bus there. Now, these bus tickets (for an eight hour ride) were ¥7100 each way, per person (total = ¥28,400, about $234.00). Not so expensive, but a fair amount of money. I got the tickets, paid in cash, did some shopping at the fairly international nearby grocery store (including Hershey's Kisses for the Halloween presentation I needed to make at the local elementary school), and headed along home. I stopped on the way at the ¥100 shop and went in to get some cheap masks and costumes for the kids so I could teach them about the concept of legalized begging we have in the US, or "trick or treat". Now, I'm no fool, but Japan's general honesty has softened me a fair bit, and so I left my previous shopping in the basket of my bike and zipped in for ten minutes to get some masks, hats, whatever, for these kids. Well, I probably don't have to tell you, when I came out, the bag with the Hershey Kisses and, less obviously, the bus tickets in it was gone. My theory was that somebody saw through the tied-up plastic bag to the chocolate and figuring the previous owner to be a dupe, took them for his or her own. Lord knows no one would guess that bus tickets leaving three days from then from a bus station 100km away would be inside, much less have any use for them. So it began as I stepped outside the store, saw that the bag was gone, and realized -- I still don't speak Japanese, really. What on earth am I going to do about this? I can't just blow off the tickets; we need them in three days. This is our big trip to Kyoto, the cultural capital of Japan! Why isn't that bag in the bike? Could someone have thrown it away nearby? Was it those teenagers over there? I went over to the teenagers/early twentysomethings and asked them if they had seen anyone screwing with my bike, like perhaps taking a bag out of the basket. And how did I communicate this to them? You may be familiar with a language known as "Charades". After a few blank looks, one of them asked me slowly in Japanese if I meant that my bike was stolen. No, just a bag. A backpack? No, a white shopping bag. At this time, I think they were thinking, "Yeah, well, good luck, sucker," or the Japanese equivalent. To make a long story short, I waited with them for the police, where they took the things that I had communicated very, very slowly with them and told them to the policeman at a more logical pace. I asked if I could use the police report and talk to the people at the bus ticket place and get them to print me out some more tickets. Thinking that this was practically a rhetorical question ("Why, of course they would do what they can for some poor gaijin who has been victimized by fate and replace his tickets either for no charge or for a nominal fee" I thought), I looked optimistically out at the group, who, once they understood, furrowed their brows and sucked their teeth and solemnly shook their heads, saying "Mmm, no, I don't think so" in Japanese. I was at my Jr. High school when this all happened. It was my last day of that school and I was harassing my students during "cleaning time," when one of the teachers told me that there was an urgent message about Zander, and I should call our friend Mrs. Katayama. Needless to say, all the blood drained from my body, and I RAN to the phone. It was disappointing to hear that our tickets were stolen, but also a relief to hear that Z wasn't run over by a rabid old woman riding her bike to the grocery store! So began a three day odyssey to try and convince the people at the bus ticket place that, come ON, man, it's just PAPER, just print me out another couple tickets. I mean, the tickets say "Alexander Cannon" on them; no one else in Japan can use them. Heck, just tell the people at the bus platform that if anyone tries to get in seats 11 A and B, arrest them. But to no avail. They wouldn't even do it for a reprinting fee. They knew exactly who I was, they remembered that I had been in there two hours before, they believed me that the tickets had been stolen, they seemingly were sympathetic to my plight, but the fact of the matter was, according to them, I just had to re-buy all four of the tickets, and they really didn't see anything wrong with that. Their consolation for me was that if the tickets show up in the next 6 months, they would give me a full refund for those tickets. I wondered what part of "stolen" they didn't quite understand. So Julie and I figured that we would rather spend (2 x 28,400 =) ¥56,800 to go to Kyoto than spend ¥28,400 to NOT go to Kyoto, and we bit the bullet and did it. So with that in mind, we thought, "for that kind of money, we should have taken the Shinkansen (bullet train)." And soon we would realize how truly right we were. We took the regular old train to Tokyo, and on down to Yokohama, which is a little southwest. The overnight bus left from a department store at 10:40 pm and drove through the night to get to Japan Rail's Kyoto Station at about 7 am. First of all, I'm just too darn tall to be in a Japanese Bus. We were in the top floor of a double decker and the ceiling in this part was about five feet high. I'm six feet high, so that didn't work so great walking over to our seat. Also, the seats just aren't built to curve in the right places for someone as tall as I am. So the seat wasn't that comfy either. Second, there are several stops the bus makes on its way out of Yokohama, so they kept the extremely bright overhead fluorescent light, the one that was a foot from my eyes, on until about 12:30 am. Well, they turned out that light eventually, though they kept on the purple (!) overhead lights, I guess in case anyone needed to go to the bathroom, and it was still a foot from my eyes. Third, there was a kid across the aisle that snored like a chainsaw, and a guy a few rows back with sleep apnia, which means he had to viciously inhale and exhale in order to keep his windpipe open, or so I understand it. At home I think he would have had a ventilator of some kind that would send pressurized air into his nose to do the job, but I can't imagine he could bring that along. So that was noisy, though I'm sure I wasn't a tenth as miserable as the guy himself. So. We showed up at the station at 7 am, tired, feeling somehow misaligned, cold in the morning air, and probably a bit grouchy. But then I saw this poster of Astro Boy and it cheered me right up.  The explanation of this picture is that in Japan, this signal is not rude, but rather is Astro Boy holding his muscle as if to say "I'm strong/ I'm capable/ You can leave it to me". The poster is for Tezuka Osamu World, a museum exhibit at a hotel attached to JR Kyoto Station that celebrates the life of Tezuka Osamu, the most influential cartoonist in Japan's history. His most famous creation is Astro Boy, but he did a great number of other works ranging from silly kid's cartoons to serious examinations of Japan's role in WWII. He's like the Walt Disney of Japan, in terms of his artistic influence. We went to Tezuka World, and it was pretty neat, particularly the library of everything he'd ever drawn and the hallway of old sketches and character designs, but the fact that is was all in Japanese was, as ever, a major roadblock to full appreciation. In the course of our trip to Kyoto, we saw the most unbelievable things. Where a lot of Tokyo and Utsunomiya is very ordinary and cube-shaped and prefabricated, due to being bombed flat fifty-some years ago, much of Kyoto is still made of old wood and laid out in intricate neighborhoods that integrate temples, shrines, businesses, and residences into an overall quite beautiful city. We saw some fantastic old castles and shrines.  This is Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion, built in 1397 by the Shõgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. Some priest there apparently burned the place down to the foundation in 1950, and it was entirely rebuilt in 1955. According to the novel by Mishima Yukio, the priest was so overcome by the beauty of the temple that he thought it could only be surpassed by the sight of the temple in flames. Yes, very poetic, as the Japanese sure know how to put a peaceful spin on tragic events, but at the time I'm sure they were wondering just how many pieces they could cut him into. One thing that I think is really nice about Japan is that they really have no ruins. If they say a building is five hundred years old, it's probably, like the Kinkakuji, been burned to the ground, rotted from bottom to top, riddled with arrows, sunk in the marsh, sneezed on, crushed by Mothra, and rebuilt each time just like it was new. It seems in the western world, if something is old and it gets knocked down, oh well, sad story, hope there were some photos. So parts of Kyoto were really like going back in time because things were not only old, but they looked new, like they did four hundred years ago. Ok, I appreciate the chance to link Japanese history with an actual structure, but I think that tearing it all down and starting all over again every once in awhile is somewhat artificial. I'd like to see how they would look without that fresh coat of paint, even if they were sneezed on at one time. Another thing, for all you people who read "Memoirs of a Geisha", is that we went to the Gion district, which is where the book was set. For those who have not read the book or heard of geisha, geisha are beautiful courtesans that can accompany extraordinarily rich men at private parties thrown at places called cha-ya (high-class teahouse/ nightclubs). It is an old practice, and there are varying levels of class with which it is employed. In Kyoto, the geisha are called geigi, and the geigi in training are known as maiko. Maiko are the ones you see in all the photographs, with the stark white powder on their face and their perfect makeup. Even their back is made up in white powder, though the back of the neck is left untouched, as it is seen as a very sensual place. Geigi do not wear the powder, as it is a sign that one has not achieved full status. Gion is a beautiful area of town. We wandered down sidestreets and just checked out buildings that were, y'know, probably lots of years old. Here is a street scene that was fairly typical.  I really can't describe these buildings any better than this.    Sadly, my photographic alertness failed us that night, as we were walking through these fascinating back alleys of Gion. According to our guidebook, no one ever sees a geisha, unless you are on the inner circle of the inner circle and have a gazillion yen to spend. One might VERY occasionally see a maiko, but most likely you won't. You will generally have to content yourselves with picture books sold at the tourist traps. But Julie and I were just cruising down one of the little streets, and who would pop out of a doorway but a maiko, all made up and all in her kimono, wearing those wooden clogs that look like they are kind of on stilts. She clopped across the street and into another building, leaving us madly trying to get the camera out of the bag. Unfortunately, her courtly skills were more than a match for us, and no photograph was taken. But you can visit this site this site and see what we saw. Better actually. Look closely at the back of their necks for the un-made-up part. Also, look at the color of their collars. Red means maiko and white means geigi. Visiting Gion was one of my favorite parts of our trip because Memoirs of a Geisha is one of my all-time favorite books (and the story is set in Gion). While I read it, a little more than two years ago, I was thinking about how great AND unlikely it would be to visit Gion someday! There's a wonderful park at the end of the district where they were filming a movie the night we passed through. Unfamiliar with both movie filming etiquette and the majority of the Japanese language, we accidentally walked in front of one of the lamps illuminating the scene that was being shot. Oops. Wait a minute, maybe our shadows will be in the next Japanese thriller! Julie and I also made it up to Kyoto Tower, the touristiest of tourist traps, right by the station, and took some pictures of the city at night. It's pretty impressive.  But then on your way down, you see displays like this one. This is an oni, a Japanese demon, dressed anachronistically in Tarzan undies. It was the display that seemed to have the most time put into it, hence our respectful tribute to it here.  One final thing. See anything sinister about these floor tiles?  How about this (albeit out-of-focus) lantern?  It's not because the Japanese were one of the Axis powers in WWII. The swastika (or walking cross, as it is sometimes called) has been a Buddhist and Hindu symbol for thousands of years, and denotes power. This quote, from heathenworld.com, explains the difference between the Nazi swastika and the Buddhist/Hindi swastika. Dr. Friedrich Krohn designed the classic Nazi Swastika in 1919. Unlike the rest of Germany, Dr. Krohn acknowledged the ancient Buddhist use of the symbol, and argued that the Nazi Swastika should point "anti-clock-wise" because to Buddhists this signifies "fortune and well-being". Hitler demanded that the Nazi Swastika point "clock-wise", which to Buddhists signifies "cessation" or "away from God". So in conclusion, counterclockwise and square = good, and clockwise and diamond-shaped = bad. That's not to say that every swastika that denotes a Buddhist temple on a map doesn't make me jump a little. Evil, world-conquering groups are always stealing the symbols of ancient religions and poisoning them for all future use. Luckily, comic book readers of America, that doesn't happen any more.  Until next time. One month from tomorrow. Ok, really, way sooner than that. .: posted by Zander Cannon 12:48 PM Tokyo Time 
|
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
have a pop-up window.