(Air) Guitar Hero, too

Someone once sent me a link to an eBay auction for an air guitar, and I found it hilarious. I mean, you've got to be really dumb to believe you have to pay actual money for something you pretend to play with your hands. You know what they say, there's a sucker born every minute.

Or so it seemed.

Today I was walking around the local shopping mall (while I really should have been studying for the JLPT - I'm so screwed), and I came across an actual air guitar in a shop that sells interior accessories and wacky toys. At first I thought it was some kind of gag, but on closer inspection (and a go at the display model), it really did work! What clinched it for me though was that it included "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" by Jet (Go Aussie!) as one of the preset songs. So, as much as I hate to admit it, I'm now the proud owner of one brand spanking new high tech air guitar:

The Japanese take the concept of compact living seriously. O.o

Made by Takara Tomy (did the two companies merge or something?), the Air Guitar Pro features one touch chords (for unco people like me) and sub buttons for sharps, flats and such. It also has jacks so you can hook it up to a music player to practice your own songs or a set of external speakers so you can show the world your l33t guitar skillz. The thing works via an infra red beam on the bottom, so that the right notes sound from the speaker on the back when you strum the air where the guitar strings would be. Neat, huh?

After a few plonks, I'd have to say it's a whole lot of fun, especially because I can't help but ham it up and make mad guitar player faces just for the heck of it. It can get frustrating though, because the IR beam doesn't actually reach all that far (maybe about a foot) and accidentally straying into its path can cause the Air Guitar to play extra notes by mistake. Following the enclosed instructions helps a lot, but of course I realized that only after I took a second look at the packaging and actually found them. :/ 

Thanks to the series of t00bs known as the Internets, I've been practicing the chords to a few songs for the past couple of hours. My personal favourites are "Closing Time" by Semisonic, "Wicked Game" by Chris Isaak, as well as Christmas classics like "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", "Deck the Halls" and "The Twelve Days of Christmas". The Air Guitar doesn't play some of the more complicated chords like Asus, Fmaj etc, so there's a limit to what songs the thing can handle. Even so, it's nice to be able to play and sing at the same time, or as best as I can given I still have laryngitis (damn!).

I reckon if I went out on the street back in Australia I'd be able to make a few bucks with this, even though I suck at playing. Might be good for a few laughs, eh?

zomg

I just walked out to get breakfast and saw snow falling from the sky. OMG snow!

Yes, I'm a n00b who's never seen snow before. I'll shut up now...

Haiku madness!

Kids in Japan learn pretty much the same thing as I did in my youth, like language, science, mathematics, social studies and such. However they get started on stuff like calligraphy, fine arts and poetry at a young age too. The kids in one of my elementary schools are asked to do haiku as part of their classes, and they come up with some surprisingly good ones.

The best get posted on the school bulletin board for everyone to read. I will reproduce some of them here, totally without permission of course, and attempt to adapt them to English while keeping to the 5-7-5 pattern of a traditional haiku. Any mistakes in translation, grammar or spelling are entirely my own. Also, some of the original poems might not exactly fit the 5-7-5 pattern according to Japanese syllabary, but go easy on them, ok? They're just kids.

Here we go:

さくらもち 一口だけで 春気分
sakura mochi hitoguchi dake de haru kibun
Sakura mochi Just one bite and it's all gone The feeling of Spring

星座達 夜空につもる 雪のよう
seiza tachi yozora ni tsumoru yuki no you
The constellations Hanging up in the night sky Resemble snowflakes

菜の花が さくとわたしの たんじょうび
nanohana ga saku to watashi no tanjoubi
Brassica flowers Come at about the same time As my birthday does

さくらさき みなのこころも うごきだす
sakura saki mina no kokoro mo ugoki dasu
Cherry blossoms fly Everyone's hearts and souls are Deeply moved by them

さむくない ふるえているよ ミニトマト
samukunai furueteiru yo mini tomato
Though it's not that cold Cherry tomatoes tremble Shaking on the vine

思い出は キャンプファイアー 火のおどり
omoide wa kyampufaiaa hi no odori
I remember a Brightly burning campfire Full of dancing flames

もみじがね あたまにのって ぼうしだよ
momiji ga ne atama ni notte boushi da yo
Autumn maple leaves Ride on the top of my head Like a pretty hat

And my favourite little gem:

ちょうさむい ふとんの中から でられない
chou samui futon no naka kara derarenai
It's really too cold I don't want to get out from Under the futon

Terribly apt for the current season, in my opinion. Thank heavens for my kotatsu and gas heater. Well, not to be outdone (though I think I've been hopelessly outclassed), I've come up with one of my own (in English only, unfortunately). I like to think it kind of reflects my own life philosophy, and why I will never adopt vegetarianism on compassionate grounds:

But the fact remains
Another life must perish
So that you may live

I think I like the ones the kids made better though... ^^

Fully sick, mate!

I might have mentioned in a few previous posts that i've been feeling under the weather (literally) lately. Well, just before I got my licence and the car that would have helped me avoid all this, there was this one evening where it started raining buckets in the middle of my way home from work on my bike. Turns out that this was no ordinary shower, but Typhoon No. 20, which chose that evening to hit my particular town. Apparently typhoons are so common here in Japan that they've given up on naming them ^^

Now I don't believe that being out in the rain causes colds. Blame it on my scientific background, which insists that colds and flu are caused by bacteria and viruses. So where did I catch my bug from? I dunno, but I reckon that the kids at my elementary schools who like to tug at my clothes and stuff, especially those kids with snot dripping out of their noses, might have something to do with it.

Anyway, over the next few days things got steadily worse, culminating in a fever, runny nose, persistent dry cough and a bout of semi-chronic laryngitis that forced me to stay home for at least one day. No point in going to classes if I can't speak, right? Ah, the irony of it all.

I didn't manage to see the doctor until about 5-6 days after my symptoms started due to work and generally feeling yucky, but when I did, service was swift and polite, as it generally is here. I was in and out of the clinic in under 30 minutes. Best thing was, due to my health insurance (mandatory for all full-time workers in Japan... for shame, NOVA!) the consult only cost me round about 1200 yen. Apparently the healthcare system here will subsidize two-thirds of all medical costs, so it's generally a good deal. It's not like bulk billing back in Australia, but with the advent of Medicare reforms (not happy, John), doctors who bulk bill are getting rarer anyway.

The subsidy extends to prescription medications as well, because I got antibiotics, painkillers, decongestants and even a throat gargle from the dispensary next door for under 900 yen. Not bad considering I used to have to pay shedloads for even simple stuff back in Australia, and bank on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme for a shot at a paltry refund.

Service at the pharmacy was also top notch, and I've discovered that it extends to portioning out individual doses for the convenience of customers:

No chance of taking the wrong number of pills there. I love how each individual sachet also specifies when it should be taken, even though their contents are identical.

A major complaint I have however is the strength and composition of the medications here. The antibiotics I was given were tiny little capsules which didn't do very much to make me feel better. Back in Australia the package tells you to finish the course even if your symptoms go away. Over here you finish the course precisely because the symptoms *don't* go away. Now, what's the point of prescribing weak antibiotics when all they will do is kill off the weak bugs to leave more room for the stronger ones? Also, the meds here seem to be formulated with low concentrations of no less than 6 ingredients together at any one time, so in order to dose up enough to kill pain, you'd overdose on all the other stuff that's mixed in there. That's just plain silly in my books.

Maybe I'm being picky, or maybe it's the frustration at having gone through two and a half weeks of feeling crappy and still having a cough, running nose and a voice at 50%.

Lesson learned: forget the bike, take the car.

p.s.: Traditional cold remedies abound in Japan, and they include hot infusions of daikon (Japanese radish), a local fruit called karin (my dictionary defines it as quince), or probably the most effective one, sliced ginger root, all taken with honey. I might as well give them a try, since regular meds haven't helped. *shrug*

Taimatsu Akashi - Burn baby burn! (image intensive)

The town I'm in is famous for holding on of Japan's 3 great fire festivals, the 松明あかし (Taimatsu Akashi), held in the second week of November. I mentioned in a previous post that it commemorates an event that happened in the Warring States period, when the daimyo from Sendai, Date Masamune, tried to annex Sukagawa. The people of the town apparently didn't want to be ruled by some one-eyed punk from the north, and so built massive stacks of bamboo and straw (called taimatsu) and set them on fire around the town the keep the little shrimp out. It worked, surprisingly, because Date actually gave up on attacking and went elsewhere.

(I should probably mention that my image of Date Masamune is heavily influenced by a certain video game series produced by Koei, and should in no way be construed as an accurate portrayal of a particularly gutsy, if somewhat smallpox ridden, feudal lord from ancient Japan.)

In modern times, the town is quite proud (and justifiably so) of maintaining its liberty, and so every year, the folks here recreate that night by building 10 metre tall columns of bamboo filled with combustibles, carrying them to the Midorigaoka park and setting them on fire. There's a lot of skill involved in making them, and the local masters drop by interested parties such as schools and citizen groups to impart some specialist knowledge handed down from the old days.

Here's a schematic of how the bamboo poles are strapped together to for the basic structure of the taimatsu:

Looks simple, but the size of the actual thing makes it really difficult to build.

And here are the kids at one of my junior high schools weaving together strips of bamboo to make the 1.5 metre diameter rings that hold the poles together:


The whole thing is stuffed with straw then wrapped in sheets of woven grass to keep it all together. Of course there's then the logistics of carrying it to the park. Most groups ship their taimatsu up to the park (located on a hill) on the back of a truck in the days before the festival, but the schools have to do it the old fashioned way, perhaps as a character building exercise, or maybe just to save on the truck rental. It's a well orchestrated manoeuver, involving rotating teams of about 60 people supporting strategically placed struts under the taimatsu, which weighs about 2 tonnes on a good day. I was told that it rained the year before on the day the school transported theirs to the park, adding an extra tonne of rainwater to the backs of their strapping young'uns. Character building, maybe. Chronic injury, more like it.

Burning haystacks isn't the only thing that happens on the day however. The townspeople also re-enact the deployment of their people in defense of the city. Basically, groups of townspeople dress up in samurai gear (complete with replica weapons, feudal period flags and the odd horse) and walk from the main street to the park where the taimatsu are. Even kids get in on the act, with representatives from the local elementary schools dressing up as miniature warriors. Real cute.

I'm never one to pass up a cosplay opportunity, so this year I elected to walk in the parade instead of helping to carry the city hall's taimatsu (duh). I was put into the archers' contingent together with a group of trainee nurses from the Fukushima Hospital, which is located just minutes from my place by car. Here are a few pics of us as well as the other samurai, including this year's winner of the local beauty pageant dressed as the town princess at the time.


Ain't we cool? ^^ btw, I'm second from the right.



I wish I had been able to take pictures of the kids, but by the time the parade started it had begun to rain, and we were all told to put on raincoats to protect our costumes and stave off the cold, so there was no point. Hey, the samurai of yore didn't wear no stinking raincoats! They were hardcore!

I was told later by a friend that it usually rains during the festival, and it would be extremely lucky if it didn't. So I've decided that I'll stay here until such time I can get to see a Taimatsu Akashi that's actually dry for a change. Nyah.

Anyway, the highlight of the festival happened after the parade: the lighting of the taimatsu. In these times of modern organic chemistry, the folks here use an accelerant on the tops of the taimatsu to make sure they start burning quickly. In a triumph of science over nature, all the taimatsu were alight within half an hour. It was nice to get near them while they burned, partly because it's truly a sight to behold, but mostly because it gets really cold after sundown this time of year.


It's a pyromaniac's dream I tells ya. CLAIR must have somehow twigged that I like burny things when I applied. ^^

And finally, I wouldn't have snapped this pic had someone standing beside me not mentioned that one of the haystacks looked a lot like a flaming... uh...

Looks suss, doesn't it? Doesn't it?!!

Graduating from the Passenger Seat

When I got back to the driving school the principal revealed that I was the first foreigner in the school to pass the driving test on the first go, so to celebrate he called the press on me. Apparently it was a big thing, so I went along with it. Unfortunately I was wearing a shirt which read, "Its only illegal if you get caught!", but hopefully no one will figure out what it means >.>

The same evening I got my licence, my landlord came around with the car I'm renting from him, a light blue-green Nissan March Collet (plus the novice driver mark!). Not the best car for running over geriatrics, but hey, at least it's easier to park than a sedan. He asked me to take care of it in the same way you ask a pyromaniac not to play with matches. I'm not that bad, am I? ^^;;;

I took my first solo drive the next day to see if I could navigate the way to my current school. Man, it feels so weird being in the driver's seat. Things look so different, and I'm still more than a little scared behind the wheel, hoping I don't get lost. But oh the freedom! It's nice to be able to go to the local shopping mall and buy the stuff I couldn't lug back on my bike by myself. Here's to a new era in independence!

Just today one of the staff at my school showed me the newspaper article with my name and picture. So there's my fifteen minutes of fame in this country, eh? ^^