A little bit of everyday life for you again: this is the sunset in my neighborhood of Uchidomari. why do sunsets on islands always seem to be so much more colorful? Though you can't tell, this is right over the ocean. Below is a photo I took of the same spot, several months ago in summer.
I forgot to say something about mochi: last week teachers kept telling me its going to get colder this weekend. I assumed they'd been watching the weather report. But no. Instead, it turned out that the traditional day of making something that sounded like Muchi (a special kind of purple colored mochi wrapped in large, fragrant leaves and tied with string) was last weekend. And its supposed to get cold when you make Muchi. No one could explain why to me, just... that's how it goes. Above is a photo of the muchi Matsuda-sensei brought me from her family`s muchi-making revelries. Yvonne devoured it all while in a state of extremely high-anxiety. I don't think she even noticed she was eating.I waited for a minute, but that seemed to be the end. Soooo, I ask delicately, why do you eat muchi? A second conference. So we will become strong. No one can come up with an answer for why it is wrapped in big leaves. Or why it should become cold when muchi is made. Lastly, no one can explain why muchi should make people strong if it didnt actually make the sister strong, she just fooled her bro into thinking it made her strong by putting bits of metal in his. Hm.
Air force Base each year.
For all Okinawans except the elderly, an unoccupied homeland is a dream they have never seen as reality, though they have heard stories from their parents or grandparents. If we count Japan's annexation of Okinawa as occupation (which I personally do), than there are no living Okinawans who can remember an independent Ryukyu nation. Okinawans are a peace-loving people, if there ever was one. This marathon is a form of non-violent protest again Okinawan occupation and US militarization.
Above: a mother and daughter run together. The child`s vest reads something like, `as long as there are bases on Okinawa, our bright future will never come`
Well, come on, 1km. that's like .6 miles, I can jog that. Sweeeeet kinda marathon, I`m thinking. Oh no, Joy-su. My friend Shouko informs me. Dash-u desu yo. What? It`s a 1km DASH? You want me to DASH half a mile?! Yeeeeeeaaaaah they did.
So, on a bright and brisk morning last weekend, we all piled into the van at Ginowan High. Spirits are high, hearts are happy, and people seem to be looking forward to running.
I, on the other hand, am tallying the scarce hours of sleep that I have gotten in the past 3 days on my 10 digits, rubbing my bleary eyes, and gulping caffeine like a mad woman on steroids. Though I had performed remarkably well at the practice marathon (we actually did an entire marathon in order to practice for the real one... so Japanese) on Monday, uncontrollable life events had deprived me of sleep and appetite that week, and my dashing performance was... less than spectacular on Saturday. Lucky for me no one really cared if we won, it was just about protesting. I began my dash feeling like things were going well. I passed the dude from team #18. Then about 10 guys passed me (I forgot to explain that I was running the kilometer reserved for 40-year-old men. Why was I placed here I will never know. That`s just how it goes in Japan). About 20 seconds into it I began to feel light headed. And soon thereafter this mantra was floating through my head:
I am Jack`s lungs, exploding inside him. I am Jack`s delusional state.
Mom, sorry you don't watch movies and cant get the quotes.
Right: 2 teachers from my school
Too bad for me that the last 300 meters of my lame little km were uphill. At this point I was moving at a stumbling fast-walk, sounded like I was having an asthma attack, and had Matto-sensei riding his motorcycle along side me, shouting a constant stream of encouragement in Jenglish. I literally stopped moving and tossed the baton to the next sensei at the finish line. And fell asleep 5 minutes later in the van. The moral of this story is 1. never let yourself get out of shape or you will die 2. don't answer yes when you don't understand the question. Last-o: try to sleep before a marathon.
Below you see our entire group including many who didn't run but who were there for moral support. Every one was informed of my near death, and by Monday morning every teacher was coming up to me in the hall and saying: good job joyce! are you ok?!?
The great thing about this marathon is that every year, the teachers who are retiring in March come and run. So it doubles as a farewell celebration for those guys, who have given like 40 years of their lives to teaching in Okinawa. Below you see the team tossing a Ginowan High retiree in the air with three cheers. Despite near death, it was a merry day indeed.
Then there are the guys that shape their brows. The shaping of brows into thin lines and delicate arches doesn't really cross gender lines in America, and this is why Japanese males put foreigners off their gender-balance upon first sight. And the fact that most of them style their longish hair and some of them wear eyeliner might add to the effect. Gender-shmender! It's the word in Japan. Dudes are just as into hair styling, fashion, and eyebrow shaving/plucking/bleaching/arching/shaping as females in this here country. It's just COOL. Take a look at a Japanese fashion magazine. Besides the female models, every male model will have Brow Power happening. How about some more real life documentation?
Now this kid moves in brainier/less cool circles than the previous two, but he gets big points for being on the soccer team. He's got the start-big-go-little...aaaarch! thang goin' on.
Mochi is a favorite traditional Japanese food. It's made from rice... just like everything else in this country. Mochi is described as a rice cake, but this description makes it soundsMochi can be presented beautifully (these pics are lifted from the internet, btw):
...and mochi can have its true nature disguised through the artful use of shape and flavor, such as in this gift box below:
Top row, from left: Nantu mochi (filled with an, dipped in soy-bean flour), sweet-potato mochi, traditional white mochi, yaki manju (baked) and tsumami mochi (green, filled with an). Row 2: Momo (peach) mochi, furusato manju (baked with sweet-potato filling), chi chi mochi (soft, milk-flavored), plum flower (red for good luck, with red azuki-bean filling) and sweet-potato mochi.
But Japanese people like to eat mochi no matter how it comes, kind of like the Whos down in Whoville. Mochi doesn't need presents! Or ribbons! Or wrappings! The tags! And the tinsel! The trimmings! The trappings! Right. Mochi is happily devoured in the simple form of sticky rice mash rolled in soy bean powder. Absolutely no taste at all. Just grandma's jiggle, squishing between your molars. Oozing back and forth across your tongue. Clinging with sickly joy to the roof of your mouth as you desperately try to swallow the cloying mass.
Well, a few weeks ago we had a teacher`s New Years party. Mochitsuki is the name of the traditional mochi-pounding ceremony in Japan, whereby mochi is made. Except nowadays it's made by machines in large factories. But traditionally it was done in the way detailed below. This is a common activity at the New Year. For our Mochitsuki party, we rented a ginormous mochi-making mush kit! The photos below are all mine from mochi-making, but the 3 steps are not mine, I lifted them from the internet:
step 1. Polished glutinous rice is soaked overnight and cooked.
step 2. The wet rice is pounded with wooden mallets (kine) in a traditional mortar (usu). Two people will alternate the work, one pounding and the other turning and wetting the mochi. They must keep a steady rhythm or they may accidentally injure one another with the heavy kine. Below: me pounding mochi! That's the principle behind me! .JPG)
step 3. The sticky mass is then formed into various shapes (usually a sphere or cube).
Well that was simple enough! Above are the hands of my teachers, grabbing globs of mochi, rolling it in simple soy bean powder, and then plopping it on plates. As you can see, homemade mochi is not as beautiful as mochi bought in the store. The dark red mash to the far left is sweetened adzuki bean paste, which is probably the top component to be found in a variety of Japanese sweets. We weren't nimble-fingered enough to encase the beans inside the mochi balls, but had no trouble getting them both in our mouths at the same time.
I think I forgot to tell most of you that I chopped all my hair off by mistake in Vietnam. Though some mistakes can cost you a lot, this one ended up putting me back a lucky $2 (and some hair). The Vietnamese hairdresser nodded enthusiastically as Christina repeated, "trim! trim!" and showed her with her hands how far down my hair should reach. The hairdresser seemed to be doing an alright job at first, snip-snipping away. We allowed our attention to lag. Well, mine didnt lag, I kept up a steady babble of `oh my god why am i cutting my hair its going to be too short is it too short should i really cut it are you guys positive it feels like shes cutting a lot off`. But since I do that every time my hair is cut, people tend to block it out. Ha! The Joyce that cried wolf. Suddenly, she began grabbing massive handfuls of the hair on the right side of my head and hacking it off. HACK HACK!!! As the continuous stream of my chatter reached previously unheard decibils, Christina and friends finally decided to see what I was on about and come look at my head (they were sitting on the other side of it). Indeed, I was hairless on the right side, despite Christina stopping her as quick as could be. Alas. So she hacked off half as much on the other side. And I limped out, distraught and lopsided. The story ends on a happy note, however, as Christina fixed it all up so you'd never really know I only have hair on one side of my head.
This was placed before me last Friday at the farewell party for a fellow sensei. "Douzo Joy-su!" My co-workers exclaimed. "How about Okinawa pig foot?" How about it indeed. chotto....
The absolute biggest occasion of the year for teachers in Japan is the End of the Year Party, occurring in late December just before the break between second and third semester begins. Community is important in Japan, as you know, and the work place is one of the most important in-groups to which people must conform. Therefore, you would have to be dead or dying to not show up at the End of the Year Party. And you would have to be very clever indeed to escape the social pressure to get utterly trashed and make a fool of yourself while at the party. Ginowan High is no exception to the rules. I had the good fortune of a good excuse for not drinking myself silly: a plane trip to Vietnam the next day. And from a sober perspective, the party was all the more entertaining. Above you see us all looking very stately (who knew what was in store?!) And below you can see bits of the glorious feast that was laid out for our dinner.
I had been asked earlier in the year if I was interested in participating in the dance performance at this party, but I had envisioned something like folk dance, or ball room dance, or I don't know what... so I had graciously turned them down. What a surprise it was, then, when several teachers disappeared in their suits and ties and returned to loud blaring pop music wearing these outfits:
WOAH! Super Mario, the Terminator, a drag queen, 3 santas, and... a man in pink plastic with socks stuffed in his drawers. I immediately regretted my decision not to be involved.Who knows what they would have dressed me as?
The curtain rolled aside, and a large cardboard box began to inch itself across the stage. I furrowed my brow and risked a quick glance from side to side at my fellow viewers. Everyone was sipping away on wine, perfectly at ease in their official suits and fancy dresses as the creepy notes of the Terminator theme song began. And the Japanese version of Arnold Schwarzenegger (by this I mean that he is wearing fluorescent pink panties... Japanese people can't have any kind of festival without putting the men in drag) emerges. It's actually quite funny that this particular teacher performed this piece, because he is the Discipline Teacher. That's right, we have a teacher whose only job is to discipline bad kids. He shakes them in the teachers' room, yells at them in the courtyard, walks the corridors menacingly during class and enters any and everyone's room in order to bop a sleeping student upside the head, shoot dagger-eyes at paper-airplane throwers, or generally speaking scare the bejesus out of Wrong Doers. I myself was quite frightened of him before the party. Now I just have to call up the image of the fluorescent pink panties.
Here, you see a member of yet another dance performance. This is a kendo (sword fighting)/PE teacher dressed as one of Ginowan High's female students. Those white bunchy socks he's wearing went out of style on mainland Japan like 5 years ago, but unfortunately still seem to be in full-swing at my school.
The Perfume River, Hue
One of the stops on our moto-tour was the most famous tomb in Hue: emperor Tu Duc (above). Tu Duc is not actually buried here. When he died, they buried him and all his treasure in a top-secret place. It was so secret that all 206 slaves who buried him here were BEHEADED. No one ever found Tu Duc's real tomb, because everyone who knew where it was died. Bad planning.
Above, a lake temple at Tu Duc's, and the mandarins that guard his tomb.
Here is a lotus flower floating on a pond outside a pagoda.
We stopped at a conical hat and incense making village on the way home. I talked to the woman making the hat in this photo about her work. She said it takes her an entire day to make one hat. But she makes 2,000 sticks of incense a day as well. One of these hats costs $1.
So, that's it for Vietnam! If you want to see more photos, just let me know and I can send you the link for my online album.
