Ode to Morning Stretches

Morning stretches are such a pleasure, if you can manage to rise early enough to do them. I'm talking about group morning stretches, of course. In my experience, group morning stretches are a universal phenomenon here in Japan. Every morning, from certain public offices and schools, music plays through speakers, transmitted, I believe, from the City Hall or Town Office. The music is always the same, a simple and leisurely classical piece on a piano that reminds me of finger exercises a child might play as a warm-up piece before practicing. And then, in a prescribed sequence, which is taught to elementary school students, and done by old folks all the same, people stretch--in time AND in sync--to the music.

"Ode to Morning Stretches"

Arms up high, Way down low!

Breathe in, Breathe out!

Run in place, Run in place!

Twist your neck, Turn your face!

Never mind your skirt or tie, Or your uniform,

Stretch your body, mind and soul,

Rejoice as you conform!

It's been hard for me to blog in the past few days... I guess things have been going on in my world and through my mind, but I don't especially want to write them down. It's difficult to write any really personal thoughts or issues on a public blog.

Anyway, did you see this news?! It's surreal, yet not altogether unexpected:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4660938.stm
It seems the environment will become the biggest issue whether it is acknowledged by us or not. When will the environment matter enough to start taking care of it? Let's do our best to start now.

Something different altogether

The feeling which comes after inadvertently deleting one's work is difficult to describe. First, I think, comes a wave of disappointment over the time spent and the effort, depending on the quality of what was written. Following, comes a desperate attempt to retrieve the material, even as it is obviously gone. Then there is an assessment of whether to write the entire thing over again or just a synopsis, or perhaps something different altogether.

Did you hear that they are going to start using 'sea-power' to generate electricity in London?
see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4645452.stm

Maybe some day we could generate electricity from all sorts of things.
What if we could generate the electricity in a gym by using 'treadmill-power,' energy taken from the work done by the gym members? I mean, there's got to be a lot of energy generated there, right? I don't know how charging batteries works, what if you could do it just by walking? Self-charge your own iPod? I have no idea how those things could possibly work. But wouldn't the world be a nicer place to live if we didn't have to bear the stress of looming 'environmental concerns' that seem to be getting bigger every day?

Assumptions

So often are my assumptions blown to bits. I'm growing accustomed to this. So, when I arrive at school on days like today to find dozens of cars parked in the playing field and bewildered middle school students clustered about, while adults I've never seen before direct them this way and that, it doesn't bother me much anymore. I just continue on my way up to my desk where I can sit down and my mind can sort out what I just witnessed.

TICK,TOCK,
TICK,TOCK.

Ah, now, I understand: the entrance exams.
I had assumed that when I was told that the entrance exams were being held at our school today, it meant that the girls from our school would be taking exams to get into college, similar to our SATs.
But that's not actually how it's done here. Here, each school administers its own exam to attempt to match potential incoming students to its standard.
Instead of our students testing today, students from other schools will be taking the exam to get into our school. I had no idea what was going on, but since this seems to be common practice here, no one thought to explain anything to me beforehand, and of course, I didn't know to ask.

Something resembling this sort of information gap seems to occur for me nearly everyday in some form or another. People just don't know what I know and what I don't. I can't blame them for that, so I find that I just have to exhibit some patience.

Actually, because of the tests, I have no classes today. I've armed myself with an arsenal of books to ward off boredom. I brought 'To Learn With Love,' a book about teaching music to children. Also, I made a great investment the other day when I purchased a study guide to the 3rd level of the Japanese Proficiency Test, a sort of degree/ranking you can get in Japanese which is recognized throughout Japan. That plus my 'Let's Learn Kanji' book should round out my Japanese education for today. The final book I brought is a book on meditation by Eric Harrison that I've been rereading lately.

Since my lesson plans for next week are finished, I figure 8 hours, 4 books, lunch, a walk, and a brief nap should be just about right.

Enjoy your day!!

Post-holiday catch-up

Please pardon my long absence over the winter holidays. Things are settling back in again over here, and so I expect to be blogging again regularly.

Orchestra rehearsal started up again last night. I'm glad to say that the group is quite relaxed, and this rehearsal was very fun, as opposed to some frightening first rehearsals I've attended in the past. The theme for this concert is "I look at Nature, Nature looks at me." We're doing excerpts, which I kind of don't like doing. I hold a more traditional view that, for the most part, pieces are meant to be listened to as the full work, not just as a movement or an excerpt. That being said, playing and listening to excerpts can be enjoyable in itself, so I shouldn't be too harsh. After all, there were a lot of excerpts at the band concert the other day, and I enjoyed that.
We rehearsed: 'Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity' from 'The Planets,' the last part of 'Carmina Burana', and 'The Blue Danube Waltz'. I believe there are about 6 or 7 other pieces in the lineup, so we may have started with the easier ones.
As for Carmina Burana, I always wondered when I would get the chance to play that work. Seriously, I've actually wondered where I would be when I got that chance. I think the first time I heard it was when I watched 'Young Sherlock Holmes'(the movie) when I was very young, had developed a small crush on 'young Sherlock,' and felt very enthralled by the music at that time. It has to be one of the most immediately moving and over-played works of our time, aside from Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons.' Doesn't mean just because it's overused that isn't a treat to play, though!!

I've been commuting a lot ever since I joined the orchestra. With Aikido, it makes four trips to the city per week, coming out to 8 hours in the car. Now I adore driving my little car through the windy streets, weaving 'round other cars and dodging obstacles like an itty-bitty Frogger, but it is more driving than I've ever done. So I started doing audiobooks in November. I'm almost finished a fourth book,'The Lexus and the Olive Tree,' by Friedman, an informative, well-formulated, and important book about globalization. It's good to get caught up on my understanding of globalization, yet I find the book is bit persuasively presented for my taste(however, some bits are brilliant, like the chapter called 'Just Too Dehumanizing').

Aikido continues to go well. I'm going to start supplementing practice with visits to a gym again. Practice is excellent for focusing on solidfying basic techniques and clarifying principles, but it doesn't provide the kind of physical workout that Boulder Aikikai's training often did. So although my technique may be improving slightly, my physical strength and endurance have slowly decreased.

In other news, the weather's been mild recently. I've been thinking of getting a fish, but I'm afraid it might freeze to death when it gets colder again. I don't think that would be fair to the fish. Hmm...

The olive oil in my house froze right before Christmas. I'm wondering at what temperature does olive oil freeze?

We are the Champions

I know why the Tamana Girl's High School Brass Band is the best in Japan. Their performance is absolutely stunning. I saw their New Year Concert yesterday afternoon. The event not only featured the flawless performances of dozens of members of the symphonic and marching bands, but also included narration, a storyline, dance sequences, light shows, various costumes, a flag squad, and of course, beautifully arranged music, from the 20th Century Fox opening theme to Disney to Star Wars to Titantic to Princess Mononoke to you name it(and not just movie music), but they even memorized the entire second act--it was enough to make any grown woman cry. This being the New Year Concert, it also meant it was the last public performance for the group before the seniors will graduate in April.
At the very last part of the concert the band director announced that this band, the champion of high school brass bands in Japan had to dismember in part. As he spoke, one by one, the seniors put down their instruments and came to the front of the stage, until the front of the stage was filled with girls, holding hands and singing a song in unison to the accompaniment of their younger peers in the background. The director called each girl's name, and the line slowly diminished as each girl ran over to bid farewell to their friends in the band, as the band continued to play. Everyone seemed so moved, many of the students were crying, but there was one girl who didn't look upset at all. She was glowing with joy; her smile was shining, and there was something magical about seeing that among all the tears and sadness. I do believe seeing that girl's joy has made a lasting impression on me.
The seniors left the stage, and walked through the audience finding their family or friends. It felt like a rite of passage, this final performance. The baton was handed from the senior leader to the junior one, and the finale had all of the seniors gather at the back of the auditorium to hold up a banner of well-wishes to the band for the coming year.
When it was all over, it overwhelmed me how they could put it all off. But can you imagine, on my way home from work be it 5:15 or 8:15, as I walk past the school, that I can hear them practicing? When I leave my house on Saturday afternoon for Aikido, I can hear 'Candide' faintly in the distance, and on Sunday, when everyone deserves a break, I can hear trumpets playing passages by Paganini while standing on my back porch. For this kind of devotion, they deserve more than a break, they deserve to be champions. They practice every single day, and devote so much of their time to doing this one thing very well. The band directors must work so hard. How do they do it all??

Coming soon: the other All-Japan Champs--the softball team

How to Peel an Orange

Start from one end, and peel up towards the other end. That way most of the white, sour-tasting stringeys come off with the peel.

Although I found this discovery to be exciting and practical, many people, I'm willing to bet, will find it merely interesting or possibly only moderately amusing. Others still, may have no interest or may have become bored with the subject long ago. I'm not here to judge. Happy peeling!

Coming Down from Winter Vacation

Took the overnight train from Tokyo to arrive in Kumamoto last Tuesday. Monday was a day at the spa. A theme park spa, if you will. There were over 2000 people walking around in robes and bare feet at the Odaiba Oedo Hot Springs. Check it out:
http://www.ooedoonsen.jp/index.html

Went to DisneySea sea last weekend with Hiro, which restored my faith in the Disney machine's ability to spread happiness to the world while making gobs of money. It was inspiring to the imagination, and I hardly felt the lightening of my wallet.

PA was wonderful--lots of family time, which really does make the traveling worthwhile. Mom did a lot of cooking, which is rare, but she seemed actually happy to be doing it. It was good to spend time at Mom's and Dad's. One of the best parts of the trip was when cousin Rebecca appeared out of nowhere, having been given a ticket to come home as a last minute present from her fiance. And seeing my best friend's baby again made me want to see them even more.
All in all, one of the kinds of trips I'd pay money to do again.

It's been taking me all this week to find myself again back here. The trip home and the trip to Tokyo were filled with activity. Coming out of warp speed is taking me some time.

This is a pot of 'oden' sitting on a kerosene heater in the staff kitchen. A lot of the teachers ate this for lunch on Tuesday, including me.






Today's atypically wintery scene.

Very atypical of Kyushu weather, we had somewhat of a blizzard hit the area tonight. Snow's been just streaming down, and the wind is blowing furiously. Driving was awful; visibility was very low and the roads were icy. Tomorrow is the 'closing ceremony' of the second term, so I know school won't be cancelled, but I'll instead be looking forward to a chilly, wintery white walk down the windy lanes to the school grounds.

I've been driving a tiny little thing--the engine that could, if you will. Here's a photo:

I'd like to get a photo with something next to it, like a small child, so it can be witnessed that they are nearly the same size.
Or a walnut.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am quite fond of this car!

I thought of myself for the first time tonight as an actual alien, speaking a strange language, among many other strange and unfathomable beings and existences. It happened when I was watching a preview for a movie that was in Spanish, a language which I haven't heard for a long time. It's kind of silly, but that was my thought.

Life keeps getting stranger and stranger, and the stranger and more expansive my view of the world becomes, the more things make sense. It feels like knowing that instead of frantically flailing my arms and legs in the middle of a huge blue ocean, I could use my body to swim. My experience has now gone beyond my imagination. Does everyone hit this thought at some point past their childhood?

Well, looking forward to the sushi dinner at Hide's tomorrow night. He's got a real nice group of people joining him, all foreign English teachers, I think.

Then, on Friday, it's back home to Philadelphia, for a week. A whoosh back over to another world. Looking forward to it


Here's a look at Saturday's Aikido practice. It was a large class this time, because we celebrated the bonnenkai, year-end party, afterwards.

I've been taking ikebana classes once every two weeks at school. Here's my third attempt--well, my third attempt after the teacher came along, took half of the stuff out and put it back again in quite a more aesthetically pleasing manner!
The arrangement had a winter theme:



And this is a sign I saw yesterday in the mall:

Currently, in Japan, it is 8 degrees celsius in my bed room, which is 46 degrees fahrenheit, and I can't seem to get the ac/heater working. All right, got the spare kerosene heater going, so it's up to 9 degrees now. Soon, I'll be toasty.

Well, I mentioned some time ago that I'd felt some sort of edge with one of the teachers here, Si Sensei. We couldn't seem to communicate, and I couldn't follow the logic of his English class curiculum. Also, something I may not have mentioned was that we might spend an entire class making corrections to a worksheet he'd made, or have a class conducted entirely in Japanese because the students couldn't understand their assignment. I sometimes had the feeling that he might faint in the middle of class and that he seemed a little 'off'.
To follow up on that subject, my relationship with said teacher has improved in that I now understand his situation. He's wanted to retire for a few years but he is continually asked to stay and he does. He is in poor health, and, he visits the hospital for treatment once a week. Since it is actually more important to support him and his relationship to the students and school than worry about how much English his classes are speaking, our classes together have relaxed and become a strange kind of enjoyable, where not much is expected out of anyone, but it's okay for now.

Last time, Si Sensei had to be about 20 minutes late, so we all sang Silent Night in English(yeah, they sing it in Japanese here). When Sensei did finally make it, he surprised us all with his beautiful karaoke-esque rendition of the song. It was quite lovely, and the students cheered at the end.

In other news, bonnenkais are starting again. Those are year-end parties. There is a bonnenkai for every group a person belongs to. This year I've had one so far, with a possible four total by next week.
Last Saturday's bonnenkai 'quote-of-the-party', by a somewhat intoxicated Mr. Naka, 'Julie, you must play your violin for me before you go back to the U.F.O.', produced fits of laughter by all guests present.

Here's a photo of (part of) the Tamana Girl's High School Marching Band. They are the All-Japan Champions! Woo-hoo!!





This fruit is very common down here. We see them growing on trees all over Kumamoto. You can probably guess what it is?

At long last, internet at home. I can post photos! The blog commands are all in English! Rejoice!

Here, have some nabe:
















Help me identify this spider










Here's my garden, before...



and after :)



more photos to come!

response to Jay

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10312475/site/newsweek/page/1/

Thanks for the story Jay.
I think all my friends who are Japanese here have traveled to English-speaking foreign countries before. If people haven't traveled, they just seem to be kind of close-minded to foreigners. It would be like sending a Japanese person who doesn't speak much English to live in the rural American south or in the countryside in the midwest. I think they'd feel the same kind of isolation as foreigners here. I don't think it's all that different from how any race isolates any other race that is in the minority. But the isolation is really real. I experience it every single day at school, where many of the teachers ignore me because I think I make them uncomfortable. It's not my fault, it's a combination of my not speaking Japanese really well, and them not having the patience, self-confidence or the interest to connect with me. I can see how hate could arise from being isolated. That's when I remember that it's just this teacher's community that I am in, and this kind of isolation doesn't happen at Aikido or when I'm with Etsuko or Hiro. When I keep that kind of perspective, it's not so bad.

Aikido stuff

Aikido last night was good. Honda Sensei was in an energetic mood, and he led regular warm-ups. It was the first time I heard him talk about rowing exercise, tenkan undo, and ikkyo undo in detail. Recently, I've been working with a discrepancy between the way we regularly practice the rowing exercise and the way a senior student practices it. Rather than moving his arms and hips forward at the same time, and heaving back, he extends his arms and keeps his hips back, and brings them together for the heaving part. I decided to begin practicing in this way because watching him from the side he seemed to look as if he were actually in a boat, rowing naturally. But when Honda Sensei demonstrated it tonight, he was clearly doing it the first way I mentioned.

I've been focusing on partnered tenkan practice all year. The way we practice here, the grabbed wrist is palm-down, and it curves into uke's center and turns palm-up when uke turns. The angle in the back for the tenkan step emphasizes the angle at which nage can most easily be off-balanced. Ideally, and often occurring in this dojo, there is little stress felt by nage in the wrist in tenkan. The response of nage is based more on the angle of uke's tenkan and the connection maintained through sensitivity in the uke's wrist than by cranking the angle of nage's wrist or tricking or forcing nage to move. It seems like I forget and relearn this every time.

Mostly my concentration has been on increasing the amount of sensitivity I have to my partner's movements, and looking for the 'open spaces' where nage doesn't want to resist and I feel no temptation to force or trick.

We did an interesting variation on kotegaeshi last night that starts out like shihonage and changes to the kotegaeshi movement. The technique ends with nage's face down on the mat, uke's hand pinning the nage's elbow the floor, and uke's elbow pinning nage's neck. Nage's hand is pulled back like kotegaeshi pin to finish.

Maybe I can show some Aikidoka people next time I see you(at summer camp in August?). Of course, all this stuff is hard to describe in words, which is why I've mostly left it out of my blog. I'm thinking about Aikido a lot more than I write about it.

Last night on my way home from Aikido I encountered a road block with four police cars stopped, red lights flashing. I thought it was some kind of accident, but when my car was in line to pass by, four police officers simultaneously approached the windows of the four cars waiting. My car was last in the line, and I wondered what was going on. I rolled down my window and the cop rambled off an official sounding command, holding some sort of flashlight up for me to approve of. I thought he wanted to look in my car, and then I realized the flashlight was a microphone. Maybe he wanted me to speak... I replied to his order with 'Uhh,...' and after some seconds, he said to me, his face almost breaking into a smile, 'Drink alchohol?' His flashlight/microphone was a breathalyzer. Accidentally laughing, I said 'no' and he let me go on my way. I'd never experienced four-car four-cop simultaneous breathalyzer before.

This week is second-term testing week in school. The teachers have been very busy recently making all their last minute print-outs and the students aren't allowed to enter the teacher's room for the entire week.
I was also a little busy. I created the oral component of the exams for six classes. What that means is that I made up dialogues followed by questions. Rather than testing all the classes on the same material, I tried to focus the regular track classes on conversational English, and the nursing track classes on English they might encounter if they had an English-speaking patient in a medical situation. Finally, the seniors will give short speeches in place of their test tomorrow for a term grade.
This is the culmination of what the Japanese English teachers and I have done this term. I found I had to very quickly get with the program to keep my head above water in the past few months.

I noticed that the incredibly lonely feelings I experienced last year have occurred much less since I came back to Japan in August. I'm sure it's helped to keep up the habit of visiting Etsuko once a week or so. We also go out to various events together frequently. Hiro and I keep each other company regularly too, and I often find a lot of joy in our meals and conversation together.

Since I won't be playing in the Kumamoto volunteer orchestra's Beethoven's 9th('Daiku') Christmas concert, I've had my Tuesdays and Fridays free again. Wednesday and Saturday nights are still Aikido nights, and I'm highly looking forward to our year-end bash(that's 'party,' not 'bash each other') coming soon.

I'm sending out Christmas/holiday cards now, and realizing how much I enjoy doing it. Sending out jolly and warm messages to friends.

Yesterday was the school's 'cultural festival.' We held the show at the Performing Art's Center in Tamana. The students danced and sang, and from what I saw of it, it was quite nice.
I was asked to play violin for about 10 minutes, so I played three pieces with piano accompaniment. The first was the theme from the movie, 'Princess Mononoke.' We played the theme while three students sang as a sort of backup. It was a short piece, and I think the audience recognized the theme and enjoyed it. The second was 'Salut D'Amour' by Elgar, which also came off well, I think. Last was a piece that is very popular for violin currently in Japan. It's by Taro Hakase, and the title is something like 'Passionate Song for the Violin.' Taro Hakase composes music and plays it on the violin on a Japanese talk show. Etsuko suggested it might be good to play, and the pianist had the music. It's a kind of cabaret piece, originally played by violin, accordian, electric guitar, and percussion. So we recruited three teachers to play percussion: bongos, maracas, and tambourine. They came up with a name for the band, and the last piece was announced as Julie Sensei, Tanoue Sensei, and the Three Amigos. They didn't really have much experience with percussion, so that piece was more fun than musically precise. I didn't get to see too much of the students' dancing and singing, but I've been told they're producing a video of the entire day's performances, so it'll be a trip to watch it later.