Yume no Tengu

I had the strangest dream the other night. I was in Kyoto, specifically Kibune, at the Tori that marks a path up Mount Kurama. A Geisha stood with her back to me, peering over her shoulder from behind a parasol, a red sun painted in the centre. The hem of her kimono displayed Mount Fuji, whilst the cuffs were a latch work of sakura branches in blossom. I was enticed, not least of all because she appeared to be on fire. It lapped & danced around her head, arms and body, a blazing aura that gave off no heat. As she glided up the path, I was drawn to follow.

This particular route to the top of Kurama is serpentine and steep. I frequently lost sight of my quarry, but each time I came close to giving up, I would hear a twig snap beneath sandaled feet, or glimpse a flash of kimono, or a bend in the path would glow, lit up by an ethereal blaze.

I walked for what felt like months, my feet became heavy, the ground treacherous. When the path finally levelled out, I couldn’t see her, but I found myself in the centre of a temple ground. After the cloying tangle of the wooded path up the mountain, the courtyard seemed to sigh with space. A clearing in the trees gave a view of the mountains in the distance, mist rising into the clouds. I was so lost in admiration of the place that the sound of footsteps startled me. I looked, and saw a tall male figure approaching, wearing a simple kimono. His hair was tied in a tight ponytail at the top of his cranium. He carried a katana at his side. Upon reaching me, he bowed deeply, spun round and sat cross-legged, the top of his ponytail just below my chin; only then did I notice that it ended in a microphone.

I was about to say something when a furious wind roared through the trees and deserted temple chambers. I hugged myself and had to secure my footing, so as not to lose balance. The man at my feet wasn’t at all perturbed. I had the sensation of a third presence in the grounds, and thought of the elusive Geisha, when a figure, too broad to have been the woman I followed, appeared at the door of the main building. As soon as I had noticed, he charged towards me, feet not touching the ground, with a pair of colossal wings spread like an unwanted embrace. A bristly white beard trailed behind him like a koi streamer, eyes blazed with fearful vitality, his face was redder than a tomato, his nose at least a foot long. Standing now before me, he was twice my breadth and towered as an adult to a child. I recognised him as a Tengu.

‘You have been here for a year!!’ he bellowed, his voice fierce as a hurricane ‘You heard stories, myths, half truths about this land, which you now know to be false!! You must answer the charges laid against this isle of Gods!!’
Seeing that I was in no position to argue with this enormous fellow, I said into the microphone in the back of the mans head
‘Okay.’ My voice echoed through the seemingly deserted mountainscape, and I wondered if anybody could actually hear what I was saying.
‘First,’ he roared, ‘all Japanese are short!!’
‘I may be big in Japan, but I’ve met a few people much taller then me.’ I replied, looking up at him.
‘Very well!! Japan is one of the most expensive countries in the world!!’
‘Maybe for fruit and veg, but it’s possible to eat out at a very reasonable price.’
‘Indeed!! Ex-Sumo wrestlers are employed to push people into crowded trains!!’
‘Well, there are white gloved guards who do just that, but I’m not sure they’d survive very long in a Sumo match. From what I’ve seen, Sumo is massive over here, and professionals probably have a tidy nest egg by the time they retire, so I can’t see them working for the train companies...unless they got a kick out of it.’
‘Quite!! Japanese men have smaller penises than Westerners!!’
‘I couldn’t possibly comment. My attention in the onsen was directed more at the scenery.’
‘Good!! You can’t get baked potatoes or beans in Japan!!’
‘Well, we don’t have an oven, so we can’t cook potatoes at home, but there are these little vans that trundle about, selling them in colder weather. They play a loop through a loudspeaker, of an old man singing “ishi-yaki-imo”, meaning, “stone cooked potatoes”. They smell great, but I’ve never pinned one down yet. As for beans, even though we’re in the minority, there are enough Westerners in Japan to warrant specialist food shops. I got a tin of Heinz for my birthday.’
‘Absolutely!! In Japan, you can find vending machines selling used schoolgirls panties!!’
‘Um...I’ve done some reading on the subject, but for the sake of continuity, I’ve been saving that for another entry. I hope you understand.’
‘Certainly!!’ roared the Tengu, sounding slightly abashed all the same. 'We mustn’t stand in the way of procedure now, must we?!!’
‘Indeed not’ I said, thinking ‘that wouldn’t be very Japanese.’
‘Finally, Japanese schoolchildren are regimented, disciplined, dedicated learning machines who are nervous, shy and respectful!!’
‘With respect sir,’ I countered, ‘every square inch of my Great British arse.’
‘So, desu ne?!! Little shits!!’ he replied. ‘I am satisfied!! You may go!!’

With that, he beat his mighty wings and flew off into the sunset. When he had disappeared from sight, the man with the microphone in his hair stood up, faced me, bowed again, and walked away, leaving me alone. Slightly bewildered, I leaned against a nearby Tori, only to see the Geisha I had followed. She was still burning with that unnatural flame. She smiled at me, bowed, then turned into a fox. The creature also seemed to be on fire. It disappeared into the trees.

I woke up hungry, finding myself surrounded by neither fish nor rice.

Nomihodai

This is a very useful word to know in Japan - it literally means all you can drink. Nothing much more to say really. That was my St Patricks day, apparently huge in Japan, what with parades in Tokyo over the weekend, but I'm not going anywhere.

I was under the impression that four leaf clovers didn't exist (Jono, are you really Irish?), but, courtesy of my new friend (whose father is apparently about to release some muck on the Shell corporation drilling for oil in a protected coral reef), I've received one of the buggers. However, the blurry results yielded by my consistent attempts at photographing the thing (thanks to Hayley for the crispest image to date) has led me to the conclusion that it is ethereal, and probably a prank courtesy of the wee folk...

Graduation

Apologies for the sudden halt in my near-clockwork production of entries...the weekend was rather heavy...


Friday saw the graduation of every third year Junior High School student in Kawasaki. Naturally, it was a solemn, stately affair, with all and sundry looking very smart indeed. Pictured is one of the music teachers at Watarida (whose name I haven't heard slowly enough to pronounce yet), wearing a variation of a kimono, traditionally worn by teachers on such days. Everybody in fact looked like they were on their way to an incredibly posh party.

There's Takashima sensei looking dapper. Be-suited dignitaries filled the Koucho senseis' (Principals') room, looking important and drinking cherry blossom tea (don't be deceived by this stuff - it may sound and even look like the most refreshing thing on the planet, what with the delicate pink flower gracefully floating in a cup of clear liquid, but the taste is akin to drinking the ocean), and excited parents filed into the gym, usually bare, now bedecked.


Triumphant marches blared out of the tannoy, whilst the third year Home Room Teachers proudly led their students before the stage, a flower in every lapel. Following rousing renditions of the Japanese National Anthem and the school anthem, the arduous process of presenting one-hundred-and-seventy students with their certificates began.

Once that was out of the way, the Koucho sensei launched into his speech...

...yawning is a peculiar, involuntary reaction, caused by fatigue, boredom or seeing other people yawn. There are all manner of explanations, but no serious research has been done into this phenomenon...if you fancy a yawn though, you can read these interesting articles about pandiculation...

...the Principals' piece presented, he gave the floor to the students. Up came the student deemed eloquent enough to deliver the farewell speech. That's when the sniffing began. First it was a mere hint of sorrow, a momentary lapse in the speakers concentration that brings emotion to the surface. As he went on, there were several responses from the third year students. Another rendition of the school anthem, this time with the third years facing the rest of the school. More sniffling, the odd choked sob. Then the music teacher begins playing a slow, nostalgic slice of plinkery on the grand piano, whilst the third years take their places in front of the stage. Then another couple of speakers take the mike, fighting their way through the speech midst tears and gagging. Then a ballad. More tears, now some of the girls are openly weeping. The continuity of freshly ironed uniforms is interrupted by pink handkerchiefs...

...please God, not another ballad...

...now the Home Room teachers and most of the boys are crying. I'm surprised at the characters now red in the face with tears - the hard, chunky, sporty fellows who laugh in the face of despair, and guffaw their way through wedgies perpetrated against the emotionally fragile...the last thing anyone needs now is another ballad...ah...


The finale - everybody leaves the hall, and the parents line up in the corridors to witness the final exit of the third years. One girl, still crying, flings herself on me in a very un-Japanese frenzy of hugs and tears...then the dust settles. I can't help but compare it to my own "graduation", with its swift speech in the chapel, cold pizza in the hall and tales of my friends stealing furtive gropes in the Valley Centertainment Industrial Estate (home to that bastion of a tasteful saturday night, Atlantis).

Straight after the event, I imagined that only those with a heart of stone could fail to be moved by such a sight...then again, the spectacle of miserable teenagers is more common than I tend to remember...

The Japanese and the 'Cute Factor'

Japanese Post Offices are hideous, grey places. In England, there is at least a security partition that protects the public from glimpsing the horror of bits of paper that the staff have to sort through. In Japan, they forgo this, displaying mounds of papers, envelopes, folders, files, cabinets, in-trays, out-trays, shake-it-all-about-trays, which coupled with the apparent fetish they have for administration and paperwork makes for a crushingly bleak picture, to my chaotic sense of filing at any rate. Not since Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” have I seen such a nightmarish hell-hole vision of bureaucracy. With fluffy squirrels. These incongruously cheerful characters, the Post Office mascots, appear in some form or other in every branch, be they posters, cuddly toys or the images on the cash machines that poignantly tell me to “be careful of things left behind”.

The logo on the side of Kawasaki Fire Departments’ delightfully dinky engines is a heroic fox in full fire-fighter gear. The instructions on the back of rice packets give the rice cooker a series of adorable expressions (my favourite being the worried gadget sweating under the heat of boiling rice). A warning notice near a pylon compound gives the pylon a big snarly cartoon face, which despite its ferocious intent, is still disarmingly cute. You only have to look at Manga to see that the Japanese love cute things, the characters all having big doe-eyes, the ubiqutious non-specific Manga-gonks squeezing those eyes shut and squealing with delight. Whether the aforementioned cute thing turns out to be an unstoppable killing machine, or gets torn to pieces by a multi-tentacled demon is another matter.

The instantly recognisable image of a bubble-gum girl in a pink sparkly world is beautifully realised in Nakamoto senseis motorcycle helmet - dark glitter, emblazoned with flower stickers. School-girl chic reigns supreme here, with some twenty to thirty-something women adopting the look. What with Shinto ideals of purity and simplicity, it's not surprising that this cute kind of innocence is considered attractive, thus providing a good base from which to speculate.

Considering the size of Japanese houses, it’s only natural that they (like New Yorkers) would favour the smaller pet. These normally take the form of ludicrous dogs, more often than not, kitted out to the nines with a fluffy wardrobe. The sight of a dacshund in a bomber jacket, yielded to me by my trip to Manhattan, has been matched time and again here. Dogs sport kilts, bumble-bee outfits, hoodies, tu-tus and sowesters (try to picture a Golden Retriever dressed as a fisherman). Hayley has witnessed the fluffy poodle thing of a neighbour, barking furiously and wearing pyjamas, the canine harangue probably translating as "don't look at me!!!" And that's without mentioning the neo-beatnik cat of Yokohama.

Pet shops in Japan are massive window displays of fuzz ’n’ fluff, with a corridor behind the cages, so the staff can nip in and clean up should the animals decide to do something unpleasant. I think there might be concealed cylinders that pump cute-gas into the cages, as every time I walk past this shop, the inmates are performing a frenzied dance of adorability, attracting scores of Japanese women who stand there, cooing “kawaii!” However, prolonged exposure to such a sight gradually reveals the darker side of the 'cute factor'. I find pet shops morally dubious anyway (says the man who's eaten whale) but drawing on an earlier complaint about a utilitarian attitude of the Japanese, I think they see pets more as objects than companions. That's not to say it's a universally Japanese (or human) attitude - the glory of Golden Week had me finding a young lady in a park with her pet tortoise, stroking his tiny scaly head beneath a gigantic pink parasol. Maybe I've lived around cats for too long, but how much emotional connection can you have with a cold blooded creature in a shell?

Of course, if you don’t have time to give a pet the attention it needs (which many Japanese people don’t) or you don’t relish the thought of being repeatedly licked by something that eats its own faeces, you can always go for the Nintendog option. A CGI dog (a variety of breeds) which you stroke, feed and play with using one of those electronic pen gizmos. I think they might have been released just as I arrived, my brief investigation of Japanese television presenting me with several opportunities to see the advert - mighty strange it was too. The expression on the woman’s face as she goes “Aaaaaaaaaaaw!” over this upmarket tamagotchi would be heartbreaking if she didn’t look so happy. I don’t know if you’re given the option of neglecting or starving it to 'death'. I’m reminded of an article I read about a woman whose tamagotchi was 'kidnapped' - she received letters threatening dire consequences should a ransom not be paid. That said, the article was in the Sun (Princess Di memorial issue, no less) and I generally consider Fortean Times to be a more reliable source of information.


Unrelated, but if you have time, the new link in the weblogs menu, Overheard in Chicago is worth a look...