Warped greetings

Currently, in PA of the US of A, in the upstairs bedroom of my mother's house, all is well. The body's readjusting and I feel tired and out-of-it. Hard to imagine where I was yesterday, and how the world here and the world there can exist at the same time. The price that is paid to travel around the world is the feeling of having been warped, and bits and pieces have been left behind, which only catch up to the rest gradually.

When I came home, I felt elated to see the road signs all in clear English letters. That had me feeling very happy. My mom and I went to a conveniece store, and once again, I remembered how different they are here from the ones I'm used to. No one greets you when you come in, and they don't have bento lunch-boxed meals, but hey, there's a great deli, so it almost balances out.

Nice to be back. Merry greetings!

A drink and a snack

Quite the weekend. Saturday began with a bit of shopping in Kumamoto's downtown walking mall. There are two main shopping streets, Shimotori and Kamitori, and from plastic food to fancy kimonos to discount Arita pottery to shops full of nothing but green tea, I never have much problem entertaining myself. Yesterday's shopping trip took me to Tsuruya, the two-building department store connected by a floating walkway. Tsuruya's famous around here; it's a really up-scale sort of store. There's Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and other such names I fill my closets with. Ha, ha, jk, I'm not turning Japanese that much!

Anyway, a highlight was a real live 'elevator girl'-- two -- actually. The elevator girls push the buttons for you and call out nice things, such as, 'Thank you for waiting. Third floor,' and, 'We're moving now, please hold on.' I was told by Hiro that they were very useful in the time when elevators were new in Japan, and few people actually knew how to use them. These particular elevator girls had fuchsia dresses, and dark purple hats with black bows on the front. They wore gloves. They were changing shifts when I got on, so when we got to the bottom floor, the one steps out, and like clockwork the other steps in, they both bow and apologize for the wait(of which there was none at all), and off we went. And a pleasant trip was had by all.

That was just the beginning of the weekend. Aikido was a smashing good time as usual, and practice was followed by the bonnenkai, or year-end drinking party. Last year, there were three or four other foreigners present, but this year I was the only one. Not that it mattered, really. With the aikido group, I rarely feel like an outsider.

Anyway, we had なべ, which says 'nabe,' or 'pot,' a kind of soup you make at the table yourself by adding ingredients to a large pot on a little burner. Most everyone drank beer, followed by shochu, the local firewater made from potatoes, mixed with hot water. Mostly men drink that drink here, and there were 14 men and two women(including me) at the party, an uncommon imbalance. Turned out this year our teacher, Honda Sensei, turned 70. So we celebrated the year end and his birthday.

After much drinking and festivities, half the group headed out, and the rest of us went out for a 'nijikai,' a second party. One of the older guys, who was the same age as my dad(you're still young, Dad!), chose a snack bar. I had heard a lot, I mean a whole lot about snack bars, but I had never been inside one. When I first came to Japan, I pictured a snack bar to be a place where I man could find a prostitute. But slowly, over time, my perspective has changed. I realized that the snack bar institution sort of took over for the geisha institutions when they dissappeared after the war. If a man wants to find a prostitute in Japan, I understand there are places where he can do that. But snacks, in general, I think are places men go to have conversations with women who will entertain them and flirt with them, and flatter them. Partly because I wanted to spend more time with the group, and partly because I was curious, I went along, and was welcomed.

When we went in, there was a couple at the bar on the right, the lady singing karaoke, and three snack girls at the counter. Right away, two of the girls sat us at the sofa which stretched around the left wall covered in dark red velvet and poured us drinks. There were 'snacks' on the table, fruit, cookies, candy, etc. I momentarily wondered if these were the snacks that the name 'snack' referred to. The girls served us whisky, then, they sat down next to us. It was very weird. The snack 'momma,' or owner, probably in her 60s, with her green hair tightly curled, also joined us, and danced around when we sang karaoke.

People here rarely sing karaoke in groups like we do in the US. They just aren't embarrased at all to belt out anything, no matter how skilled or unskilled they are, all by themselves. We each took turns. Hirata-san had a go at some song with the words 'Bounce with me' repeated over and over again Ochi-Sensei did a forced interpretation of Yesterday, and of course my heart nearly melted when Awesome Guy sang 'I Can't Help Falling in Love With You'(Elvis?) in deep bass tones. I sang 'Hello, Goodbye' by the Beatles and 'Sunday Morning' by Maroon 5, in English, and my favorite Japanese karaoke song, Jupiter, by someone someone in Japanese. My singing is not that of an angel, and yet, I got thunderous applause, thank you very much.

The girls(women, really, just normal-looking women in their 40s, maybe) made small talk, even with me. I looked around, and a girl had come out from the counter, sitting thigh to thigh with one of the guys, laughing. It all seemed very silly, but we were all having fun, and there didn't seem to be much sexual about the whole thing. Yet, I do think it gives me a deeper understanding into the Japanese, male, and human minds.

I have mixed feelings, but on the whole, I don't think there's much more to the snack bar thing than meets the eye. It headed towrds 3:00am, my friends waved the 3000yen(about $30) fee for me, but it wasn't over yet.

After the nijikai, Tanigawa-san and Awesome Guy and I went out for a sanjikai, a third party. They had yakitori, and I ate a tofu salad, and we talked about aikido, samurai, etiquette, O'Sensei, and the universe til about 5:00. I remember having the thought that there was nowhere in life I'd rather be then right there at that table.

Finally, I arrived in the hotel Hiro had booked(he had gone to a wedding ceremony that same night, so we got a hotel in the city so we both wouldn't have to worry about time), not even staggeringly drunk, and fell asleep dreaming of a white Christmas.

The real Sunday morning began, but I was somehow still dreaming...

RE: A cut and a flick

For crying out loud!! I wrote another nice blog and when I finished, what did I do? It was breezy, so I closed the window. Okay, I lied. It wasn't breezy, I just closed the window by accident and the writing disappeared into oblivion. I feel frustrated when that happens, which goes to show that it's really good to be lighthearted and not take things too, too seriously.

...

and the tide shifts. I'd now just finished retyping most of it when I discovered the one I thought I'd lost sitting in my drafts. I suppose I'd saved it after all...

ha, ha, it was just a test for me

and now for the original-- A cut and a flick:

A cut and a flick

So what do you get when you go to a hairdresser in Japan? Well, the answer in this case is that you get a haircut and some Miyazaki anime movies. Usually I like to go to that place where they massage your head and two people blowdry your hair at one time, but this time I went to a budget place. There, a nice guy named Hayashi, who had taken two years of English lessons at NOVA English School, made pleasant chatter as I blushed at having an attractive man cut my hair. The last time a nice-looking guy cut my hair I was about 10, and it was my dad.

Hayashi-san likes pachinko, and his other hobby is watching movies. We talked about the Miyazaki anime movies. He's a big fan of Miyazaki(Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, etc.), and I think I mentioned before that I've been going through one by one watching all the movies Miyazaki ever made, so he pulled a set off the wall and lent them to me to watch.

It was nice to relax while getting a haircut. Making small talk during a haircut can be so stressful if I can't find anything in common with the hairdresser.

Anyway, most of the bulk of my hair was razored off tonight. The longest part is still there, though. It hasn't been cut since I came here, and it's nearly down to my belly button now when it hangs down my back.

Wintery Wishes

The newsy news is: I'm going home for the holidays! Thanks to Mom, I'll be spending the darkest part of winter in the warmth and cheer of friends and family. I'll leave on the 21st for two weeks in the good ol' US of A. I wish you all receive your winter wishes and give just as deeply as you wish.

In other news, it was like a springy spring day today, and I went shopping, yippeee!! Had okonomiyaki for dinny din, and now it's cold again. It's hard to write when I'm feeling cold, so I guess that's why I haven't been doing so much recently. But it's a poor excuse, so I shall forge ahead!!

Stylin'

I'm going to keep this short and sweet. My last two posts went to the place where posts go when computers crash. I was fond of those posts, so this post is just a Johnny-come-lately.

Aikido tonight was great. I should say, I've come off of hiatus from Aikido, now that my big Japanese language test is over. Being back after a few weeks off seems, in retrospect after tonight, to have been good for me. I feel refreshed, refocused, and at this point in time, energetic. Exercise is unlike other fuels in that using the energy within oneself to exercise, it actually gives one more capacity for energy. Could you imagine if every time we used gas in our car, it would refill itself until it overflowed? Well, anyway, it's good to have returned.

There's other news, but I don't want to make this post too long because then it'll go ahead and crash. I think it was just cause I was trying to put a video up on here.

I apologize for living in the stone age of computers where blogs don't have flashing lights, music, cool changing colored backgrounds, free giveaways in 3-D. See, when I'm no longer in Japan, I'll figure all this stuff out, and wished I'd learned it back then... uh... now. Until that time, it's SimpleSimonStyleTM.

Duty

The other day I was walking to the post office and I saw a student standing next to her friend's car at the gas station. I recognized her from one of my 12th grade classes, and smiled. She spotted me, and from the distance I could see her eyes widen, and, rather than greet me, which is a student's duty in or outside of school, or ignore me, which she might have gotten away with, she did something totally different, that almost shocked me.

Now my duty, as a teacher, was to report her behavior to her homeroom teacher, which I did. She knew it was unexcusable. In my own mind, however, she'd basically shot herself in the foot by not saying hello.

This brings me to the same few days ago, when I quit doing 'greeting.' In Japan, it is customary to greet your coworkers in the morning all at once, exclaiming 'Good morning!!' as you step in the door. Customarily, everyone shouts back 'Good morning!!' and we go about our merry ways. The same goes when leaving. I shout something like 'See you! Keep up the good work!!' and everyone shouts, 'Good work, bye!!' in response. But I noticed that the response from coworkers differs depending on who comes in or goes out the door. Everyone responds to the principle. The lady who comes and sells juice and biscuits rarely gets a response.

As for me, I've greeted in many ways, loudly, cheerfully, in a focused way, in a general way, and yet scarcely does my greeting generate a healthy response. The whole thing has never felt natural to me, and sometimes it shoots a hole in my self-esteem.

Well, enough with that. It's a very wonderful custom and all, but in my country, we don't have such a custom, and I am not bound to do it. I'll greet when I feel like greeting.

But the student at the gas station was bound to the school's policy to say hello to a teacher. Her skirt was pulled up short(trying to _find_ herself, I suppose), and I'd bet she was scared, so what did she do, she turned, ran away, and hid behind her friend's car! She ran and hid as if I didn't see her standing right there in front of me!! (I once saw a girl from my school get balled out at in the train station by one of the teachers in front of everyone because she was wearing earrings). I didn't really care about her skirt, but when she ran and hid I was offended, because it was rude.

You tell me, for someone like me, where does doing one's 'duty' apply? When I _feel like_ doing it?