Sunday, 5/19/02
Greetings from rainy Japan. Apparently the rainy season has not started yet, though you’d never know it by looking out the window! It has rained since I’ve been here about as much as it rains at home during this time of the year. But we hear that we’ll know when the rainy season has truly started by the abrupt change in humidity. That’s something to look forward to! Oops, American humor.

I forgot to mention in my discussion of the kabuki theater performance last week that we saw half a dozen maiko, geisha-in-training, at the end of the performance when everyone was leaving. They were dressed to perfection (and I mean perfection: not one item out of place), made up in perfect white powder, waxed hair, flower ornaments, kimono, obi, geta, and lovely parasols to protect them from the rain. The makeup extended to the backs of their beautiful necks in patterns that mirrored the places where their hairdos might brush against their necks: no makeup there, just a marvelously symmetrical outline in white of the back of their necks. Their body language was delicate and intimate and coquettish at the same time. I just stood and smiled and blinked in awe while women all around me were saying “Kiirei! Kiirei!” (“Beautiful!”) and nudging each other and me. It was its own kind of unique and lovely performance.

I spent much of last week tearing my hair out about teaching one hundred years of jazz in just two short classes. What an ordeal! Who to include? Who to leave out? What styles to highlight? I listened to so many examples, did a bunch of internet research, tore my hair out some more, talked to Cary, thought about it, dreamed about it, and finally came up with a couple of passable lectures with pertinent examples. Oooh, that was hard. Teaching here is hard for several reasons: they know none of the cultural references, know almost none of the specialized language (hit, arranger, producer, rhythm section, solo, improvisation, lyrics, syncopation, etc.), and are unaccustomed altogether to listening to music without speaking. Focused listening to music simply doesn’t seem to happen in this society except among a very few specialists. Music is ubiquitous, but it is mere background for the important things like talking, sleeping, reading, and even watching television. At any given time in my lectures, five people are sound asleep. I sometimes point them out to rest of the class and use their condition as a reminder of how hard it is to focus on music (especially instrumental music, and music that lasts longer than three minutes). At any one time, I can fairly certain that I have 20% of the class’s deep attention. Just like at home, in fact, including the sleepers. So I don’t take it personally. It’s hard to keep myself in Slow English mode, especially when I get excited and inspired by what we’re listening to or talking about, but I’m improving. I’ve started to worry about my ability to switch back into Normal English speed when I return! Everything I say is enunciated s-l-o-w-l-y and c-l-e-a-r-l-y all the time.

We had a wonderful outing with Micheal Hishikawa (my colleague interested in Irish music in Japan) and his wife and one of his daughters. We met them in Osaka, then took several trains to the southern outskirts of Nara, where we went on a late-morning hike in the hills. The weather was perfect. First we stopped at Omiwa-jinja, a lovely shrine that you approach through a broad, cleanly-swept walkway through the bamboo-and-cedar forest. It was beautifully tended and seemed much more alive and thriving than some of the more artificial-looking ones I’ve seen. I have come to eagerly anticipate the ritual washing of hands prior to entering a shrine. The water is held in a small receptacle fed by a bamboo tube, and there are small bamboo ladles for pouring the water over your hands (and, usually, for taking a sip to rinse out your mouth before you go in). Invariably, the water is cool and luxurious to the touch and incredibly refreshing on your hands. I could stand there and pour it over my hands all day. After Omiwa-jinja we then proceeded on our hill walk to the next shrine, Sai-jinja (“Lily-shrine”), which had sacred water available to drink and bring home. People were appearing with empty jugs and filling them, drinking the water liberally, praying, and really enjoying the specialness of the place. I was so impressed by the multiple cascading angles of the rooftops of the shrine near where the sacred water was. And oh yes, the water was delicious and very restorative.

We walked along beautiful paths, past people’s gardens and through the forest. Everything was very fragrant, because now is the time that the fragrant trees are blooming. Micheal’s daughter Sayuri picked up a rolled-up section of bamboo shell, and then dropped it with a sharp cry: “mukade!” (centipede!) It was really creepy to see; I’d be happy to go through the rest of my life without seeing another centipede. We ended up at Hibara-jinja, the third shrine on the trail. The young priest at the shrine kindly allowed me to take his picture while he was writing a piece of calligraphy in Morgan’s small shrine/temple souvenir book. Many Japanese people carry these small books to every shrine and temple they visit. The priest in residence then inscribes a small set of kanji to commemorate the visit, and stamps the book with a small red stamp. The difference between the different calligraphic styles is quite impressive. In any case, we decided to have lunch there: cold soba (noodles) dipped in sauce, and fizzy lemon drink with a marble in the bottle that you simply can’t get out no matter how hard you try. Just as we were waiting for our soba to arrive, the faint strains of “Etenraku” (my favorite Japanese court piece, from the gagaku ensemble) drifted through the air. Morgan and I took off to find the source, and discovered the same young priest, practicing on his fue (transverse flute). When he stopped for a minute, I smiled and asked (in Japanese) if he was playing “Etenraku,” he replied “yes,” and then immediately invited Morgan to try his fue! He was all smiles, placing her hands on the flute correctly and teaching her how to blow. Then he told me to take her picture. What a kind fellow! Morgan and I went back to our lunch with stars in our eyes. We continued our walk after lunch through unbelievably fragrant mikan (Japanese tangerine) groves, with jasmine growing as weeds by the side of the road. Heading back toward the town, we passed two enormous snakes slithering through a farmer’s field. They looked like garter snakes, but certainly the biggest I’ve ever seen.

Back in Nara, we headed for the famous deer park at Todai-ji temple (the previous places we saw were Shinto shrines; Todai-ji is a Buddhist temple). Within a minute, we were besieged by deer, begging for a handout. The deer had recently had their fawns, so there were little fawns everywhere, looking slightly bewildered but just as eager as their parents for the little senbai crackers that people there sell as deer food. I didn’t feed any of the deer because I was too busy laughing and taking pictures of Cary and Morgan with their personal entourage of deer. A rather large buck (with fuzzy horns) decided that Morgan needed to give him more crackers, so he placed his wet nose directly on her front and gave her a little half-shove, half-nip, leaving a wet mark on her shirt and thrilling and unnerving her completely. Another was nibbling at Cary’s leg, while a third was rubbing his itchy horns on Cary’s jeans. One of my pictures of the scene is of a fawn’s face filling up the entire space of the photo. Eventually we stumbled off to see the temple.

Todai-ji is swarming with school kids every day of the week, all year long. There must have been several thousand school kids there during our visit, at 5 pm on a Tuesday. I tried hard to just let them fade into the background and focus instead on the building – the largest wooden building in the world. Superlatives for this building can’t even come close to describing it. Just standing there at the magnificent entry gate, with the huge guardian figures to my left and right, I started to feel smaller and smaller. By the time I walked in the front door to the temple and actually stood in the presence of the enormous statue of the Buddha himself, I was about an inch tall. All the noise of the kids evaporated and all I heard was the periodic sound of the temple bell being rung by one of the priests. There is a pillar with a large hole in the bottom: if you go through, you are somewhat closer to enlightenment (at least, that’s what they say). Morgan fit through easily, of course; neither Cary nor I tried. Micheal told us that the hole is exactly the diameter of the enormous Buddha’s nostril, so then Morgan was thrilled to have “gone through Buddha’s nose.” I began to regain my normal size as we walked away from the temple, but it is still one of the most impressive places I’ve ever been. It felt just like the time when I sat in Chartres cathedral, looking up at the deep blue stained glass and sensing a powerful surge of spiritual power. By the time we got home, we were really dead on our feet, yet Morgan was still unstoppably cheerful. Micheal said later that his body surely felt every one of those 20,000 steps that we took that day.

Well! In addition to the deer, centipede and snakes at Nara, we have really seen our share of wildlife this week! Yesterday I watched three enormous raptors that looked for all the world like American bald eagles (though I couldn’t quite see what color their heads were), soaring on the updrafts near the apartment. Not one of them flapped their wings, even once. It was marvelous to watch. Morgan’s first-ever roll of photographs came back from the printers, including some great pictures of a giant luna moth (gorgeous!). Several mornings ago I was putting away the dishes and saw a medium-sized cockroach (an inch and a half long?) scurrying for cover in one of the drawers in the kitchen. Yuck. I wasn’t fast enough to catch it or kill it, unfortunately. Keep in mind, that’s “medium-sized” compared to the flying behemoths of Indonesia, which are several inches long and are everywhere you turn. They also come and go in huge hordes. At the welcome party on Friday night, our neighbor Myles was regaling me with his story of having been bitten by a centipede two nights before. His five-year-old son was also bitten, apparently both of them in the middle of the night. They found it the next day, scuttling around: it was over eight inches long! I could barely stand on the ground for having the heebie-jeebies. Our other neighbor, Notsu-san, cheerfully mentioned that finding and killing centipedes in our apartment building is a “tradition.” That night I was lying awake and scanning the shoji screen for telltale shadows of enormous crawly things.

The university held a welcome party for us on Friday night that was really delightful. Yoko was in charge of organizing it, so she had to go to a lot of trouble to call people, send out messages, arrange food and drinks, bring a boom box and CDs, buy flowers, and serve as host. Wow! Many, many thanks to Yoko Matsuda! There were at least thirty-five adults there and probably a dozen or more children (almost all of whom were good friends with Morgan already), so everyone had plenty of different people to talk to and Morgan was happily occupied the entire time. Yoko gave an introduction of the three of us, and I gave a short speech in Japanese to thank everyone for coming (etc.), then Morgan sang the song “Waltzing with Bears.” The announcement of the party had said that we would be doing some music, and Morgan really wanted to do that particular song. What a great job she did! She sang in tune and kept the tempo perfectly, even as everyone clapped in every two beats to a triple-meter song. We sang on the chorus. Then everyone sang the “Do-Re-Mi” song from “The Sound of Music” in English and Japanese (Yoko had typed up the lyrics), and Morgan and I finished with an a capella version of “The Wild Mountain Thyme” with Cary singing harmony on the chorus. Whew. The food was great, and we had chances to speak with many different people. We went home at 9 o’clock feeling exhilarated about being here, and about feeling so welcomed by all these kind people. Morgan was skipping and dancing all the way home.

I have started to really notice the social blunders that I’ve made, periodically, since I arrived. As far as I can tell, I haven’t done anything really unforgivable, but I’ve certainly done a few stupid things here and there. For the most part, I’ve caught myself in time and tried to repair the damage, but some things you just can’t repair. For example, I’ve made some friends with whom I enjoy spending time. And when I’m relaxed and enjoying myself, I like to be light-hearted and laugh sometimes (right?). Then, before I know it, my American sense of humor has come out (word play, light sarcasm, etc.). Oops. And, the livelier the conversation, the more likely I am to fall into trying to “help” people by supplying the missing word in their sentence. Oops. At least now I’m aware of it and have managed to stop myself from opening my mouth just in time. Several times at the welcome party I noticed a few people watching carefully while I picked up food (and luckily I knew to turn my chopsticks around and use the other end to pick up food from a collective plate; I also didn’t forget to turn them back around and use the regular end again to eat). Rules! I must stand out like a sore thumb sometimes. Just think of all the blunders I’ve made that I’m not aware of. The one redeeming aspect of this is that all my mistakes appear to have been spread among just about everyone, so not every person sees every mistake.

Yoko held a lovely luncheon at her home and invited us to meet her mother and her brother and sister-in-law. What fun! We learned how people cook right at their table (a large portable grill): you bring large platters of raw foods (in this case, shrimp, scallops, chicken, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, tofu, squash, and many other delicacies) and everyone is responsible for taking their chopsticks and turning the foods over so that they’re grilled evenly. Then you eat whatever’s done while it’s piping hot, dipping it in sauce. It’s so fun and lively! What a great time! Yoko lives in a beautiful upscale town called Ashiya, which Cary very aptly described as being like San Francisco’s Nob Hill area. It’s fun to go there. We brought small gifts for Yoko, her mother, and her brother and sister-in-law, but were unprepared for all the gifts they gave us! It was an important and fascinating lesson for us about gift-giving and reciprocation, even for people we hadn’t met before.

Manna from Heaven has dropped down upon us, in the form of a fantastic new boom box that allows me to do nearly all of my class listening tape preparation in the apartment. It has cassette, radio, CD AND minidisk capability, which means I can take all my listening examples from multiple sources (cassette, CD, whatever) and transfer them to minidisk without going to the language lab to do so. I can’t tell you how great that is; I was having to work in the time when there were no classes being held in the room, and there was no guarantee that the technology was going to work on any given day. This way, I can stay up as late as I need to at night (like last night – I was up until 12:30 am creating my “New Urban Folk and Country” minidisk). I can hold an entire semester’s musical examples in the palm of my hand, in the form of a dozen minidisks. The boom box is brand-new, too; I saw the fellow pull it out of a box. I’ve been puzzling my way through the Japanese-language user’s manual, and fortunately much of it is self-evident because the buttons on the machine are in English. Hooray! Not that I can use these minidisks at Evergreen… it’s all still CD and cassette technology there.

Because Cary is leaving in less than a month, I am trying to use some of my evenings to finish my class preparation for the entire rest of the semester. I’m doing ten class sessions after he leaves (from psychedelic rock through heavy metal, country, world beat and hip-hop), and Morgan will have to come to classes with me while I lecture. She’s done that off and on since she was born, so this time won’t be very different. Once Cary has left, though, I won’t be able to go to the office very much. I am trying to be very economical with my time! It’s a good thing that writing these gazettes is quick and easy.

If the weather holds out (and, probably, even if it doesn’t), we’ll be doing some more sightseeing this week in the Kansai (local) area. We’re looking forward to it. My first lecture on Monday this coming week includes the message that American gospel music will not turn you into a Christian.

Much love, Sean