It's hard to say goodbye...

Formality is a big thing in this country, and a junior high school graduation ceremony is no exception. Back in my time, we didn't have graduation ceremonies as such, more like prize-giving ceremonies that celebrated (only) the academically successful. The most preparation we'd do for it was to rehearse the motions of going onstage once or twice before the real thing. The kids in my school here had to practice pretty much the same thing in addition to several rounds of synchronized bowing and standing at attention, which doesn't sound so bad until you find out they have to practice everyday for a full week to get it just right. I took a peek at the plan for the day and was frankly stunned to see every single speech, presentation and song was planned down to the minute. Pomp and circumstance don't come easy, you know.

I'm told that black is the standard for any important event, and that the difference is only in the ties the men wear, white for happy events and black for not so happy ones. Efficient use of wardrobe, I'd say. All you really need is one suit and any number of different coloured ties. How cool is that?

As ceremonies go, this one was quite run of the mill, except with an air of marked restraint and not a little awkwardness. Poor kids. They had to sit though three hours of stuffy suits, long speeches and lots and lots of bowing. Seeing that bowing is required before, during and after each kid gets their certificate, I suppose the whole choreographed, synchronized bowing rehearsal I mentioned in the last post was really the most efficient way to get through 138 graduands as quickly as possible.

Here's the graduating batch singing together for everyone. Choral performances are really popular, and an award ceremony where all the kids sing something together was a first for me. Great idea for keeping otherwise bored students (and parents ^^) awake though it all.

No graduation is complete without a valedictorian, and this year it was the former student council president, who was incidentally one of the students in the English speech contest earlier last year. I reckon it would have been fun for her to try her speech in English, but who am I kidding? The rest of the students would have had loads of trouble understanding her, and I reckon there wouldn't have been so many tears in the audience. And cry they did. On their way out of the hall, nearly all the graduates were sniffling, even the boys, and especially the third year English teacher. Not bad for a people famous for their emotional restraint.

The fun didn't stop once the ceremony was over. The junior classes lined up on both sides of the street leading out from the school to see the graduates off. It was a nice touch to give each graduate a bunch of flowers as a bit of a memento as they walked out of the school to the cheers of their juniors:

Much photo taking, hugs and tears ensued. The students got to go home early, and the teachers all had a nice sushi lunch to celebrate making it through another year. I got to take a look at the graduation album afterwards, with all the photos of the students and all the things they did over 3 years in school. All fun to look at now, but in 20 years they'd probably die of embarrassment. Ah, sweet, innocent memories. XD

It wasn't the last time I saw the kids though. The next day they came back to school to pick up their high school entrance exam results. I was glad to hear that the Chinese transfer student I'd been coaching the last year made it to the specialist high school for returnee kids. Even though some of the other students sorely tested my patience during the year, it was kind of hard to imagine that they won't be in class when the new school year starts. However, it was nice to see that even the rowdiest students were crying in relief that they'd managed to get into the high school they wanted. One can only hope that pride in their own achievements will set them on the right track.

Ya~ki imo...

Rice is the main staple of Japan, but it's land and labour intensive, which is why rice is surprisingly expensive in the land of sushi and senbei. The local population loves its carbohydrates though, and Nature has provided in the form of potatoes, sweet potatoes and no less than three varieties of yams, all used in various traditional dishes as a main ingredient, cheap filler or thickening agent.

The epitome of comfort food on a cold day could very well be a hot, fluffy potato, and during street festivals, among the stalls selling takoyaki and chocolate coated bananas, there will always be one or two selling freshly steamed, locally grown potatoes for a couple of hundred yen. The best part is that the vendors will slop on butter like it grows on trees. I've yet to try one, since the potatoes themselves are huge and I'd have no space afterwards for all that delicious yakisoba and grilled squid, yum.

While I've only seen buttered potatoes during festivals, sweet potatoes roasted on hot rocks are available almost all year round, sold out of the back of a small truck that plays a recording of an ojii-san nasally deadpanning, "Ya~ki imo... ya~ki imo... ishiya~ki imo..." The guy gets around, I tell you, because I swear I hear the same voice whether I'm here or in Tokyo. Therein lies one of the many contradictions of this bustling metropolis; you don't really expect to see an old chap selling roast sweet potatoes in a rustic little truck among the steel and glass skyscrapers, but he's there anyway. Since the spiel is the same everywhere, there's no mistaking that the yaki-imo man is in your neighbourhood when you hear him, though I must say that when you're trying to relax in a hot bath, the sudden blast of "ya~ki imo" through the ventilation system can sure ruin the mood.

I wasn't in the bath this particular time, but when I heard the dulcet strains (O.o;;;) of the yaki-imo truck one afternoon, I grabbed some spare change and my camera, and chased it down to a side street next to my school. Well, not really chased, more like a quick walk, since it was moving *really* slowly.

I bought me a small sweet potato which came in an environmentally friendly brown paper bag (that's country living for you) that stayed reassuringly warm for quite a while afterwards. I think the yaki-imo man was quite surprised that I took a pic of him. Good sport though.

He must have thought I was a crazy gaijin. XD

The sweet potato was best eaten hot, so I wasted no time in tucking in when I got home. It was sweet and fluffy, though a little drier than I expected. A little melted butter fixed that right up though. ^^

I wonder if the yaki-imo man gets purple and orange sweet potatoes too, not just the yellow ones. I think the cooked sweet potato is meant to be eaten on the same day, since the ones sold in the supermarket have a note telling you to do just that. Yes, even the supermarkets have a yaki-imo counter where you can pick up hot, cooked sweet potato, but it just isn't the same as buying one from a hardworking bloke in a mobile stall. You really can't buy that kind of added value with money, so here's to the little guy and his home business!

Dear Friends, so long, 忘れない...

So it's the end of the school year and time to see off the current batch of third year students. My school organized a farewell ceremony for the kids before their final exams, but as luck would have it, the school was caught up in an influenza outbreak that week and was forced to let the junior students home early so the third year students wouldn't fall sick before their high school entrance exams. As a result the farewell ceremony was postponed until everyone's exams were over.

Maybe its due to the string upperclassman-lowerclassman culture they have here that they go to such lengths to celebrate the last few weeks of school for the graduating classes. The first and second years got together to perform for the third years, from the relatively tame group song and brass band performance to a Power Rangers-style skit (including costumes) and a full on Japanese cheer squad. Of course there were messages from teachers who had transferred to other schools, as well as a powerpoint slide show of embarrassing photos of the graduands from when they first started classes.

What I thought was pretty cool was the huge murals all the second year students constructed out of paper and cellophane. They put up black curtains in the sports hall and let the light stream through the colored cellophane, creating a stained glass effect:



Nice touch for the actual graduation ceremony.

I don't recall there being such formality when I was in school; when I left, all I had to do was pick up my results sent from Cambridge and that was it. I think having over 350 students in any batch of graduating classes puts any such ceremony firmly in the too hard basket. Here it's way more involved, but I suppose from the kids' perspective its something that's happening to them for the first time, so it's special. All in the name of building school spirit, huh?

All dolled up

March 3rd is traditionally Hina Matsuri or Girls' Day, where families bring out sets of kimono-clad hina dolls and display them in their homes or businesses. Almost all the shops on the central street of the city were festooned with the dolls, comprising of a prince, princess, three serving ladies, five musicians, court attendants and even furniture. The dolls are really pretty, and each painstakingly handmade from ceramic and fine silk. The price of each one is pretty too; when I asked the guys at the Board of Education how much I could expect to pay for one they told me it was in the range of about ¥20,000 (around AU$200) for a run of the mill, average quality doll. It's a little bit out of reach for me, but it does set me thinking if anyone's bothered to make a set of hina dollfies, and how much one of those would cost. $_$

Since I'm kind of a cheapskate (and proud of it too!), I decided to go the eco route and make mine out of origami paper. Good thing I bought a heap of origami instruction books a long while back which had diagrams for the main pair of dolls and some nice looking printed paper:

There's a cultural museum in the city as well, and as luck would have it, they were holding an exhibition of antique hina dolls from up to a century ago. Here's an overall view of a 2 metre tall hina doll display, including dancers, archers, miscellaneous court ladies, furniture, tableware and even a weapons cart and ox-drawn carriage:

The attention to detail is really quite amazing, down to the mulberry paper screens and Chinese style knots on the carts.

To learned individuals, the dolls from the Edo, Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras probably have distinct differences in design and construction, but to a savage like me (heh) its all just pretty silk and somewhat scary looking faces.





Standards of beauty and general attractiveness here sure are different. ^^;

Some of the smaller dolls were on open display, allowing me to take some close shots. The really old and detailed dolls were behind glass though, which is a pity since their kimono and accessories were truly something to behold. One can only imagine just how luxurious and opulent real royal kimono must be.

Anything in miniature holds quite a fascination for me, especially those that need a lot of effort to put together. I really wouldn't mind owning at least the prince and princess dolls, but it seems that silk ages badly and requires proper storage to maintain its colour and texture over the years. I haven't got a permanent place to store things, which makes this a bit of an issue, so it looks like I can't really buy them for now, even if I do come across a suitcase full of unmarked bills on the street sometime soon. Until then it'll be paper dolls all the way!

This is the way we brush our... words?

Back when I was a student, I always got a sharp rap on the knuckles for poor penmanship. "Feh, cursive script is for weenies," or so I thought. Come to think of it, my handwriting still looks as if I'm either juvenile or drunk. And that was just for roman letters. That's write (pun!), I'm completely hopeless when it comes to Chinese characters. Forget stroke order, I even had trouble with remembering what each individual character looked like.

The kids here have no problem with that of course, having been drilled in stroke order, pronunciation and meaning since elementary school or before. It seems to also be part of their curriculum for them to learn basic calligraphy. In almost every school I've been to, the walls have been adorned with student works, some of which look really good (to my untrained eyes of course). So naturally, that annoying little voice in the back of my mind (as opposed to the other voices in my head ^^) started yelling, "Hey, I wanna do that too!" However, it wasn't until I commented on the tea lady's work on the congratulatory certificates my school hands out that she revealed that she was taking classes at the local calligraphy association.

Since my apartment block is a bit of a social wasteland for the only girl amongst the gaijin (or if you like, the rose among the pri... *ahem* thorns... ^^;), I decided to take a chance and go in on an evening when the place wasn't filled with ankle-biting germ factories (I wuv the kiddies, honest!).

What followed was a fairly civilized evening with some of the locals, from junior high students to an 84-year old grandfather, all sitting seiza-style and practicing their brushstrokes. Since it was my first time there, I was given a few basic items to start with, namely a beginner's fude (brush pen), an inkstone, premixed ink, a long, narrow paperweight, a brush stand, a felt shitajiki (pencilboard, but in this case it was to catch any bleed through from the paper) and a stack of 20 sheets of rough calligraphy paper to practice on.

I only vaguely remember what each individual stroke is called from way back in primary school, but most of my time was spent practicing the basic horizontal and oblique strokes. With that, I was able to produce my first (somewhat shonky looking) piece of calligraphy in the basic kaisho style, the phrase "hitori", which means "one person" or "alone":

I still have lots of practice ahead, really. *sigh*

A few more basic strokes (and a heap of pins and needles in my feet) later, and the teacher told me to try this, the phrase for "words" or "characters", read as "moji":

As you might have guessed, the paper is just a little too big for my desktop scanner to handle, but that's ok, since you see less of it ^^ The strokes in black are my own miserable attempts, the orange marks are the teacher's corrections. I thought that calligraphy was a fairly quick affair, because how long should it take you to write a few words on a piece of paper anyway, even if you have to stop occasionally to reload your brush? Turns out you have to be sitting in the right position, with your writing arm level with the floor and holding the brush the right way. The strokes themselves are not particularly tricky, but are really hard to do well. Then comes placement, balance and stroke style, dependent on how much ink you load your brush with, and what consistency it is. Apparently making up your own ink from the block of dried stuff is also an artform in itself, and less of a cop-out than using the premixed stuff.

Just for reference, here are the teacher's examples of both phrases:

Now that's the result of a lifetime of doing calligraphy. Much practice on my part shall ensue. Even if I'm completely rubbish at this, at least I'll have an excuse to get out of the house and soak up some local culture. Heck, I might even make a few friends in this little town. Which is about time really, since I've been here for more than half a year. *twiddles thumbs*

Sometime during that evening, the teacher called me over and presented me with a set of kid's calligraphy tools, which completely floored me. She said it was to encourage me to come back and keep at it. I tell ya what, I really wasn't expecting it at all, but it sure did make me feel really welcome. Well, I might not get to her standard anytime soon, but I reckon I'll give this a shot, and see how far I can go before my time here runs out.