Pierrot le Fou
08-16-2005, 01:50 AM
For those of you entirely unaware of Japanese holidays, and the general Japanese cycle of holidays, we are currently in the tail-end of the last peak season of the year, called Obon. Every year has three main peak seasons for travel, where the roads have 40km backups, the shinkansen is travelling at 130% of capacity, and it costs 4 times the usual cost to do anything in Japan involving travel (hotels, plane tickets, etc.).
The first of those seasons is New Year's, which in Japan is 12/31 (omisoka) until 1/3 (1/1-1/3 are all consider oshougatsu -- New Years). The second season is Golden Week (May) which is a string of holidays packed together so tightly that taking a day or two off from your company can result in a glorious 9 or 10 days of vacation. And, as said earlier, the third holiday is Obon.
Obon is a festival for the dead. Specifically for the dead spirits coming back to visit their relatives. So you dance, you drink sacred sake (Japanese Rice Wine called omiki), and you welcome your ancestors back for the visit. You also visit the family grave, pray a bit, and spend time with your family.
While Obon is held every year, it isn't absolutely necessary to go back to your ancestral home every year for the festival. The one time when it is necessary to go back is when a member of your family has died in the past year, because the Obon after that is the first time they are coming back to visit, and they want to see the whole family.
My girlfriend's uncle had died at the end of last year, so this Obon, she was obligated to go and visit her grandfather, who lives in rural Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku. That is what us edumucated folk call the inaka (inaka is the middle of nowhere for the unedumucated).
So early on Friday, at about 10:30, we set out for Ehime prefecture in the car. There were five of us in a tiny little kei-car (tiny-engined car); her father, her mother, me, my girlfriend, and her family's 14 year-old pug. We stopped for lunch, and then we stopped for dinner, and we kept driving, and driving, and driving... We finally arrived at our destination somewhere around 11pm. There had been some major traffic leaving the Kansai region, which involved sitting at a near standstill while everyone evacuated the cities.
Now for those of you who think that Japan is this country full of the latest technology, please, visit Ehime prefecture. If you have ever seen "My Neighbor Totoro" (となりのトトロ) then you would recognize where I was as pretty-much the same. Tons of mountains, fields everywhere, and pretty-much nothing else.
The area we stayed in was lit by nothing on the street but a lone vending machine. There were bugs everywhere. There was no sound but the chirping of crickets (or suzumushi apparently, but they sound like crickets).
Welcome to the inaka.
We enter my girlfriend's uncle's house to be confronted with 6 cats. Six. Wow. And no air conditioning. For those of you who are unaware of the general weather in Japan, Kyoto is Hell on earth. In the summer there is absolutely no breeze whatsoever, and we swelter in boiling heat and oppressive humidity. Arriving in the inaka breathed life into my soul, with clean pure air, a nice breeze, and tolerable temperatures (green instead of concrete all around).
However, it was not cool for sleeping, as when the breeze stopped, it got really hot really quick. I started to boil. Couple that with the fact that the 14 year-old dog makes more sound than I do when I snore (and I have been known to wake the dead) and you have a problem. I couldn't sleep. I eventually passed out from sheer exhaustion, and awoke the next day in a (figurative) puddle of my own sweat.
The next morning we were going to visit my girlfriend's grandfather for the first time.
Interesting Fact #1: I will be the first foreigner he has ever spoken to.
Interesting Fact #2: I will be the first foreigner he has seen since WWII.
Interesting Fact #3: He is missing half his thumb and some of his eyesight due to injuries sustained in that war.
Now while these are all interesting things that happened 60 years ago, they weren't my biggest concern. For those of you unaware, Japan is a country of regional dialects, to the point where if I were to travel up to the Northeast part of Japan, I would probably be incapable of speaking to/understanding someone who is about 80 years old. The Japanese can be that different. Different grammar and vocab, and generally crazy differences in language.
So my biggest concern was his rural Japanese. My girlfriend has trouble understanding him sometime. So does her mother. So I figured that as the lone foreigner, with an imperfect understanding of standard Japanese, I'd be up shit's creek without a paddle.
We walked into the house through the front door, and were greeted by her aunt, who my girlfriend introduced me to by saying to her in Japanese, "this is my boyfriend" in Japanese, and said to me, "this is my bitch aunt."
When we entered her grandfather's room, he was sitting in front of the TV watching High School baseball. We made introductions, I actually understood him mostly, and we sat around and watched the TV, while my girlfriend's uncle (whose house we stayed at) sat outside because he hates the bitch aunt (wife of the uncle who died) and refuses to enter the house while she's there.
Welcome to family politics.
After a stay of a while, we went to visit some old woman, who was so incomprehensible it was ridiculous, eat some watermelon, and go fishing. The woman was incredibly shocked to see a foreigner, and tended to talk about me in front of me, rather than talk to me, despite everyone telling her that I could speak some Japanese. My girlfriend's family laughed very hard at the look of horror on my face at her Japanese, because I really couldn't understand this old woman.
We sat around, ate watermelon, and watched High School baseball.
I went out for a cigarette, and the old woman followed me out, and decided to start to speak to me without a translator around. I understood about 40% of it. She was saying something about some foreigner that she had met. I learned later that she had hosted some foreigners who were doing a circuit of Shikoku on bicycle. When she'd see them passing through her inaka town, she'd yell out hello to foreigners, because, well, they're foreigners.
We went down to the pier to do some fishing, and unfortunately didn't catch anything. At least not me, my girlfriend's father, and my girlfriend's cousin. My girlfriend's uncle, however, had luck. He's been fishing for 50 years. He took a giant spear, went to the side of the peer, jabbed it once, and asks me, "Do you like octopus?"
Now I answered yes, because I do, as it's tasty, but I could not have been prepared for what was about to happen before my eyes.
The octopus, skewered on a 3 meter (10 foot) spear, was grabbed by the uncle, and tossed onto the dock, where it started to ooze some white crap from its head where it had been stabbed. Yet it still moved. It was far from dead. After squirming on the dock, the uncle picked it up, and with two fingers, tore open its head. It wriggled in protest as he pulled out its innards and tossed them into the ocean.
Yet it still continued to move, alive as ever, so he turned its head inside out, at which point the octopus started spewing ink everywhere. He continued to wrangle with the head of the octopus -- still spewing ink, until it was rendered motionless, at which point the old woman who I couldn't understand brought him a bucket to wash it off with, and tossed it into a basket to take home.
I was afraid he would feed it to me raw on the spot.
We went back to the grandfather's house for dinner, and watched some more TV, before my girlfriend and I would get some respite by going into the 'city' for a good night's sleep in a hotel, and a day of fun sightseeing stuff. We got to the hotel at about 9:30pm, and decided to take a bath (there is a public bath for hotel patrons on the top floor).
So I go into the bathroom changing area, strip down, dangle a towel in front of my naughty bits, and walk into the bathroom area.
Now for those of you unfamiliar with Japanese public bathrooms, there is usually a cold water bath, a hot water bath, and then showers/stools to soap yourself off before you get in the water (so that you don't dirty it). There were 3 stools in this one, of which I could only see two.
I walked in the bathroom to see two backs covered with traditional Japanese tattoos sitting on the bench in front of me, 3 people sitting in the bath in varying degrees of tattoo, and me -- a confused foreigner from the city. For those of you unaware of what the significance of this is, tattoos of that variety generally indicate yakuza or Japanese mobsters. Absolutely marvelous. I turn the corner to get to the third stool only to find that occupied as well, by another member of the yakuza.
Count: 1 foreigner, 6 yakuza.
One of the men in the bath was older and bald, without tattoos, and was definitely the boss as everyone was speaking to him politely. I stood to wait for a stool, completely unaware of what the fuck I should do surrounded by mobsters with no place to go. They were talking about me in really heavy dialect right in front of me, but I got the general gist of it. Nothing dangerous at the moment, but I figured speaking with nothing but 'excuse me's and 'sorry's would be prudent.
I took my bath, and changed back into my clothes surrounded by these yakuza in a tiny room, and was absolutely petrified. I went back to my hotel room, and slept the rest of the night away.
My girlfriend and I woke up the next morning and went to get breakfast around the station. There were two places to get breakfast over the square kilo we searched. The cafe in front of the station we went to was filled with regulars, despite being in front of the station. One of the men there was missing both arms, probably from the war, and I realized how out of place I was even in an inaka city.
We had tickets to go see 闘牛【とうぎゅう】 which is bull-fighting. Like sumo wrestling, except with two 1000 kilo (2200 pound) bulls. Loads o' fun for the whole family. The first bull to run from the other loses. It was actually a ton of fun, and we counted 10 (10!!!) foreigners in the crowd with us. That's a lot of foreigners. We wondered if they spoke the local dialect when they spoke Japanese. We both decided that it would be a riot if they did.
The yokozuna bull that won was allowed to be petted at the end, and one of the handlers saw a foreigner and his Japanese girlfriend, and decided to offer to let us ride on top of the bull. I have a picture of my girlfriend mounting a bull. Blackmail for a later date mayhaps? She looks absolutely ecstatic. It was a fun afternoon.
We went to get lunch before walking up about a kilometer to Uwajima Castle. A frickin' kilometer uphill, tons of stairs, crazy. And what do we get at the top? A tiny little three-story structure which may have constituted a castle in a land of pigmies, but was absolutely disappointing in comparison to the massive climb to get up there. Certain parts of the castle have been lost to time, so it would have been bigger before, but that doesn't change the fact that it's small now.
We walked home, and took an inaka bus back to her uncle's house to shower and get ready for the Obon festival we were going to with her grandfather.
Now Obon is something common across Japan. Everyone has the same song, and dances the same dance, with variations for other songs and other dances on top of it. Usually though, in the city I live in, there are thousands of people, tons of stands for food and whatnot, and generally a time for folks to get drunk and socialize.
I guess it's the same in theory in the inaka, but since there weren't even a hundred people there, it had a very different atmosphere.
All the women were in yukata (summer kimono) and dancing, while the men sat in chairs around the middle raised platform and drank. Everyone else tended to stand around the outside and watch. It being the inaka, everyone knew that there was a foreigner and other city folk, and within about 15 minutes, someone had come up to me to give me some 'omiki' (sacred rice wine) to drink. He had a quick conversation with me, and moved away.
About 10 minutes later, another man came up, said nothing, gave me a beer, and walked away.
Twenty minutes later, a third man came up, talked to me a lot, poured me tons of beer, gave me some octopus, talked to me some more, fed me some more liquor, and just generally was a great guy. He encouraged me to dance with everyone, which I tried to convince my girlfriend to join me in, but she was a no-go. So I danced the bon-odori (obon dance) while she critiqued my style and refused to join. Booooo...
Eventually I got her to dance, along with several of the young people, and the grandfather seemed happy we were all dancing, and I think that I made folks generally content, which was a good feeling.
We head back to the grandfather's house for a goodnight before returning to the uncle's house for our last night in the inaka...
The next morning, with a horrid hangover, and dripping sweat from the lack of air conditioning and the disappearance of the breeze, I stumbled downstairs to a delicious breakfast of sausage and egg, which tasted wonderful and did marvels at aiding my poor hungover intestinal track. We headed back to the grandfather's to take him to lunch before heading back. My girlfriend confided to me in the car that she was shocked that her grandfather actually spoke to me, as apparently she thought that he'd ignore me, and despite having given assurances that he would like me had been worried all along that he wouldn't speak to me because I was foreign.
Thanks dear.
We took him out to sushi, with the four members of our crew (me, girlfriend, mother, father) along with two cousins, an uncle, and the grandfather (of course). We had a farewell in the parking lot, assurances of meeting again sometime, followed by the 10 hour car ride back to the city... I arrived at 11:30 or so last night, and am now sitting here at work, wishing I had taken my girlfriend's advice and taken a vacation day.
The first of those seasons is New Year's, which in Japan is 12/31 (omisoka) until 1/3 (1/1-1/3 are all consider oshougatsu -- New Years). The second season is Golden Week (May) which is a string of holidays packed together so tightly that taking a day or two off from your company can result in a glorious 9 or 10 days of vacation. And, as said earlier, the third holiday is Obon.
Obon is a festival for the dead. Specifically for the dead spirits coming back to visit their relatives. So you dance, you drink sacred sake (Japanese Rice Wine called omiki), and you welcome your ancestors back for the visit. You also visit the family grave, pray a bit, and spend time with your family.
While Obon is held every year, it isn't absolutely necessary to go back to your ancestral home every year for the festival. The one time when it is necessary to go back is when a member of your family has died in the past year, because the Obon after that is the first time they are coming back to visit, and they want to see the whole family.
My girlfriend's uncle had died at the end of last year, so this Obon, she was obligated to go and visit her grandfather, who lives in rural Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku. That is what us edumucated folk call the inaka (inaka is the middle of nowhere for the unedumucated).
So early on Friday, at about 10:30, we set out for Ehime prefecture in the car. There were five of us in a tiny little kei-car (tiny-engined car); her father, her mother, me, my girlfriend, and her family's 14 year-old pug. We stopped for lunch, and then we stopped for dinner, and we kept driving, and driving, and driving... We finally arrived at our destination somewhere around 11pm. There had been some major traffic leaving the Kansai region, which involved sitting at a near standstill while everyone evacuated the cities.
Now for those of you who think that Japan is this country full of the latest technology, please, visit Ehime prefecture. If you have ever seen "My Neighbor Totoro" (となりのトトロ) then you would recognize where I was as pretty-much the same. Tons of mountains, fields everywhere, and pretty-much nothing else.
The area we stayed in was lit by nothing on the street but a lone vending machine. There were bugs everywhere. There was no sound but the chirping of crickets (or suzumushi apparently, but they sound like crickets).
Welcome to the inaka.
We enter my girlfriend's uncle's house to be confronted with 6 cats. Six. Wow. And no air conditioning. For those of you who are unaware of the general weather in Japan, Kyoto is Hell on earth. In the summer there is absolutely no breeze whatsoever, and we swelter in boiling heat and oppressive humidity. Arriving in the inaka breathed life into my soul, with clean pure air, a nice breeze, and tolerable temperatures (green instead of concrete all around).
However, it was not cool for sleeping, as when the breeze stopped, it got really hot really quick. I started to boil. Couple that with the fact that the 14 year-old dog makes more sound than I do when I snore (and I have been known to wake the dead) and you have a problem. I couldn't sleep. I eventually passed out from sheer exhaustion, and awoke the next day in a (figurative) puddle of my own sweat.
The next morning we were going to visit my girlfriend's grandfather for the first time.
Interesting Fact #1: I will be the first foreigner he has ever spoken to.
Interesting Fact #2: I will be the first foreigner he has seen since WWII.
Interesting Fact #3: He is missing half his thumb and some of his eyesight due to injuries sustained in that war.
Now while these are all interesting things that happened 60 years ago, they weren't my biggest concern. For those of you unaware, Japan is a country of regional dialects, to the point where if I were to travel up to the Northeast part of Japan, I would probably be incapable of speaking to/understanding someone who is about 80 years old. The Japanese can be that different. Different grammar and vocab, and generally crazy differences in language.
So my biggest concern was his rural Japanese. My girlfriend has trouble understanding him sometime. So does her mother. So I figured that as the lone foreigner, with an imperfect understanding of standard Japanese, I'd be up shit's creek without a paddle.
We walked into the house through the front door, and were greeted by her aunt, who my girlfriend introduced me to by saying to her in Japanese, "this is my boyfriend" in Japanese, and said to me, "this is my bitch aunt."
When we entered her grandfather's room, he was sitting in front of the TV watching High School baseball. We made introductions, I actually understood him mostly, and we sat around and watched the TV, while my girlfriend's uncle (whose house we stayed at) sat outside because he hates the bitch aunt (wife of the uncle who died) and refuses to enter the house while she's there.
Welcome to family politics.
After a stay of a while, we went to visit some old woman, who was so incomprehensible it was ridiculous, eat some watermelon, and go fishing. The woman was incredibly shocked to see a foreigner, and tended to talk about me in front of me, rather than talk to me, despite everyone telling her that I could speak some Japanese. My girlfriend's family laughed very hard at the look of horror on my face at her Japanese, because I really couldn't understand this old woman.
We sat around, ate watermelon, and watched High School baseball.
I went out for a cigarette, and the old woman followed me out, and decided to start to speak to me without a translator around. I understood about 40% of it. She was saying something about some foreigner that she had met. I learned later that she had hosted some foreigners who were doing a circuit of Shikoku on bicycle. When she'd see them passing through her inaka town, she'd yell out hello to foreigners, because, well, they're foreigners.
We went down to the pier to do some fishing, and unfortunately didn't catch anything. At least not me, my girlfriend's father, and my girlfriend's cousin. My girlfriend's uncle, however, had luck. He's been fishing for 50 years. He took a giant spear, went to the side of the peer, jabbed it once, and asks me, "Do you like octopus?"
Now I answered yes, because I do, as it's tasty, but I could not have been prepared for what was about to happen before my eyes.
The octopus, skewered on a 3 meter (10 foot) spear, was grabbed by the uncle, and tossed onto the dock, where it started to ooze some white crap from its head where it had been stabbed. Yet it still moved. It was far from dead. After squirming on the dock, the uncle picked it up, and with two fingers, tore open its head. It wriggled in protest as he pulled out its innards and tossed them into the ocean.
Yet it still continued to move, alive as ever, so he turned its head inside out, at which point the octopus started spewing ink everywhere. He continued to wrangle with the head of the octopus -- still spewing ink, until it was rendered motionless, at which point the old woman who I couldn't understand brought him a bucket to wash it off with, and tossed it into a basket to take home.
I was afraid he would feed it to me raw on the spot.
We went back to the grandfather's house for dinner, and watched some more TV, before my girlfriend and I would get some respite by going into the 'city' for a good night's sleep in a hotel, and a day of fun sightseeing stuff. We got to the hotel at about 9:30pm, and decided to take a bath (there is a public bath for hotel patrons on the top floor).
So I go into the bathroom changing area, strip down, dangle a towel in front of my naughty bits, and walk into the bathroom area.
Now for those of you unfamiliar with Japanese public bathrooms, there is usually a cold water bath, a hot water bath, and then showers/stools to soap yourself off before you get in the water (so that you don't dirty it). There were 3 stools in this one, of which I could only see two.
I walked in the bathroom to see two backs covered with traditional Japanese tattoos sitting on the bench in front of me, 3 people sitting in the bath in varying degrees of tattoo, and me -- a confused foreigner from the city. For those of you unaware of what the significance of this is, tattoos of that variety generally indicate yakuza or Japanese mobsters. Absolutely marvelous. I turn the corner to get to the third stool only to find that occupied as well, by another member of the yakuza.
Count: 1 foreigner, 6 yakuza.
One of the men in the bath was older and bald, without tattoos, and was definitely the boss as everyone was speaking to him politely. I stood to wait for a stool, completely unaware of what the fuck I should do surrounded by mobsters with no place to go. They were talking about me in really heavy dialect right in front of me, but I got the general gist of it. Nothing dangerous at the moment, but I figured speaking with nothing but 'excuse me's and 'sorry's would be prudent.
I took my bath, and changed back into my clothes surrounded by these yakuza in a tiny room, and was absolutely petrified. I went back to my hotel room, and slept the rest of the night away.
My girlfriend and I woke up the next morning and went to get breakfast around the station. There were two places to get breakfast over the square kilo we searched. The cafe in front of the station we went to was filled with regulars, despite being in front of the station. One of the men there was missing both arms, probably from the war, and I realized how out of place I was even in an inaka city.
We had tickets to go see 闘牛【とうぎゅう】 which is bull-fighting. Like sumo wrestling, except with two 1000 kilo (2200 pound) bulls. Loads o' fun for the whole family. The first bull to run from the other loses. It was actually a ton of fun, and we counted 10 (10!!!) foreigners in the crowd with us. That's a lot of foreigners. We wondered if they spoke the local dialect when they spoke Japanese. We both decided that it would be a riot if they did.
The yokozuna bull that won was allowed to be petted at the end, and one of the handlers saw a foreigner and his Japanese girlfriend, and decided to offer to let us ride on top of the bull. I have a picture of my girlfriend mounting a bull. Blackmail for a later date mayhaps? She looks absolutely ecstatic. It was a fun afternoon.
We went to get lunch before walking up about a kilometer to Uwajima Castle. A frickin' kilometer uphill, tons of stairs, crazy. And what do we get at the top? A tiny little three-story structure which may have constituted a castle in a land of pigmies, but was absolutely disappointing in comparison to the massive climb to get up there. Certain parts of the castle have been lost to time, so it would have been bigger before, but that doesn't change the fact that it's small now.
We walked home, and took an inaka bus back to her uncle's house to shower and get ready for the Obon festival we were going to with her grandfather.
Now Obon is something common across Japan. Everyone has the same song, and dances the same dance, with variations for other songs and other dances on top of it. Usually though, in the city I live in, there are thousands of people, tons of stands for food and whatnot, and generally a time for folks to get drunk and socialize.
I guess it's the same in theory in the inaka, but since there weren't even a hundred people there, it had a very different atmosphere.
All the women were in yukata (summer kimono) and dancing, while the men sat in chairs around the middle raised platform and drank. Everyone else tended to stand around the outside and watch. It being the inaka, everyone knew that there was a foreigner and other city folk, and within about 15 minutes, someone had come up to me to give me some 'omiki' (sacred rice wine) to drink. He had a quick conversation with me, and moved away.
About 10 minutes later, another man came up, said nothing, gave me a beer, and walked away.
Twenty minutes later, a third man came up, talked to me a lot, poured me tons of beer, gave me some octopus, talked to me some more, fed me some more liquor, and just generally was a great guy. He encouraged me to dance with everyone, which I tried to convince my girlfriend to join me in, but she was a no-go. So I danced the bon-odori (obon dance) while she critiqued my style and refused to join. Booooo...
Eventually I got her to dance, along with several of the young people, and the grandfather seemed happy we were all dancing, and I think that I made folks generally content, which was a good feeling.
We head back to the grandfather's house for a goodnight before returning to the uncle's house for our last night in the inaka...
The next morning, with a horrid hangover, and dripping sweat from the lack of air conditioning and the disappearance of the breeze, I stumbled downstairs to a delicious breakfast of sausage and egg, which tasted wonderful and did marvels at aiding my poor hungover intestinal track. We headed back to the grandfather's to take him to lunch before heading back. My girlfriend confided to me in the car that she was shocked that her grandfather actually spoke to me, as apparently she thought that he'd ignore me, and despite having given assurances that he would like me had been worried all along that he wouldn't speak to me because I was foreign.
Thanks dear.
We took him out to sushi, with the four members of our crew (me, girlfriend, mother, father) along with two cousins, an uncle, and the grandfather (of course). We had a farewell in the parking lot, assurances of meeting again sometime, followed by the 10 hour car ride back to the city... I arrived at 11:30 or so last night, and am now sitting here at work, wishing I had taken my girlfriend's advice and taken a vacation day.