The Beat of my own Drum

I’ve written about taiko here several times over the last three years.  I’ve listened to it whenever I got the chance, dragging whomever I could along with me, because it’s just too good not to share.  I took my first lesson the better part of three years ago, shortly after hearing it for the first time, but it wasn't until the end of last November that I was able to really get started.

You’re finally hearing about it now, at the end of all things, because studying taiko is the reason I was still puttering around Yokohama, a week and a half after school wrapped up for the year.  But let me back up for a minute.  I discovered my taiko studio, Hougaku Academy, a year ago, right before leaving for the summer.  (If you're thinking that was about the time we went to see Drum Tao, you're not wrong!)  I swore to myself that I’d start lessons as soon as I got back in August, and in fact, I did go to a trial lesson at the end of that month, but it was hot and I was being awkward about my crippling lack of Japanese and basically it took me til November to get my shit together.

Here’s a life lesson for you, although I’ve lost track of which number I’m up to.  It really is better late than never.  In retrospect, I wish I’d kept going right after that very first lesson.  Would I have liked to learn more?  Kashiko mari masu.*  But the things I DID learn, the time that I did get, was priceless, to the degree that I think saying goodbye to everyone a week ago was the hardest thing to do this go-round.**

Photo courtesy of Sensei, who says, "I really like this you!"

That is not to say that learning taiko has been easy.  I’ve made no secret about the fact that my feet suck.  The stance you use when drumming definitely doesn’t help.  The best day for them to teach a stray gaijin turned out to be Wednesday, which of COURSE has been my hardest teaching day ever since coming to Japan.  Then there’s the language gap.  My teacher ganbatte’d his heart out, and every week he was better than the week before.  He put my Japanese ability - which, having been picked up (as you know) primarily by watching anime, is more or less worthless - to utter shame, but there were still times when I struggled to figure out what he was trying to tell me.  And while I like to think I made up for a lot of what I lacked with my enthusiasm, it wasn’t quite enough to cover my complete uncoordination.  Even on Sunday my arms still didn’t do 100% of what they were supposed to.

Something else I should probably mention, although it wasn’t a challenge so much as something I found interesting, is the fact that I was the only beginner in my class.  While my senpais were drilling with our other teacher, Shima-san was teaching me the basics at the back of the room.  Most of the time, the fact that 12 or so drums were playing something different really loudly in a relatively small studio didn’t make any kind of difference to what I was learning.  When it DID make a difference, it was usually because what they were doing was so cool that I couldn’t help getting caught up in it, and wishing I was already at their level, so I could play, too.

Now, from the start I knew there was going to be a performance on July 7.  I had my doubts that I’d be able to participate, though, because it felt like I was pretty slow going, especially at first.  I probably should have spent more time practicing.  In my defense, I found it hard to practice without an instrument.  It took me until about a month ago to realize that this was actually an advantage, and that as long as I didn’t mind looking like an idiot I could literally practice anywhere - walking down the street, say, or during my super-stinky hour-long lunch duty.  But gradually I learned all the rhythms I needed, and just before spring break Shima-san showed me how they were strung together to create a full piece of music.  And I honestly couldn’t think of any better note on which to leave Japan.

So I kept going.  There were days when I didn't really want to, days when the kids had worn me down or my feet were killing me, but most of those I went anyway.  Because at the end of the day, I needed it.  Apart from being fun and a good workout, I'm pretty sure taiko's responsible for keeping me sane these last six months.  It was therapeutic as hell to be able to beat the shit out of the drum after a long day of back talking children and baka administrators.  (The 6th rhythm of the first lesson is, in my opinion, best for stress relief.)

Once I'd learned everything, the uniform was actually the biggest hassle.  Mostly this is my fault for not doing anything over the last two years about my marshmallowey shape, but I DID struggle to get tabi.  Those split-toed shoes are a part of the uniform for taiko, and although my classmate told me where I could buy them in Kawasaki, I still couldn't seem to find them, so I went online and located a boutique in Omotesando that sells them, Sou Sou.  They ended up being kind of expensive, but the staff were really helpful and I was able to try them on so I could be sure that they fit.  Also, the soles have hiragana on them, so, you know, totally worth it.

In spite of all the words I've used, in this post and others, I'm still not sure I'm doing taiko any justice.  In the end, I don't really think words can.  Until you feel the beat hit you in the chest, reverberate through your lungs, shift your heartbeat, I don't think what I'm saying will make sense to you.  But the day before our performance, I met one of the women I'd be performing with for the first time.  She asked me how long I'd been playing, and it was the same length of time as her, and when we tried to explain to one another why we were studying taiko, it boiled down to the same thing.  As she put it, "It's my soul music."  I couldn't agree more.

*Certainly.

**I mean, other than packing and cleaning, which I only finished a few hours before my ride came to take me to the airport.

***Video of Hatsune by my senpai, Sekine-san.

The Otaku Report: Vol. 3

It's been about a year since my first Otaku Report, in which I tell you all about the fun weeb things I get to do because I live in Japan.  It seems apropos that I should give a shout-out to the best damn student of all time in this, the third edition of the Report. I mentioned to somebody before vacation that I was hoping to see an old student, and they thought I was being nice (no, they clearly don't know me well if they think I have nice impulses).  For me, I just thought it was sad that they'd clearly never had a student who was such a badass they'd actually want to spend time with them after graduation.

The Kawaii Kingpin and I didn't really break any new ground on the Way of the Weeb that week (there was more time spent in bookstores but that is all I'm going to say on that subject).  That didn't actually matter to me.  See, to make a Bungou Stray Dogs reference (this IS the Otaku Report, after all) I'd been feeling kind of Dazai lately.  A little too detached - you might even say no longer human.  Relating to people and interacting socially had become mendoksai.  It's probably a defense mechanism; after all, there are probably limits to how many times you can rip your still-beating heart out of your own chest, and yet that's the leaving nature of the expat lifestyle.  So I feel like I've been the lite version of my normal brew.  On the other hand, hanging out with the Kawaii Kingpin was just normal for me.  We didn't really do anything, just ate, talked, and shopped, but it was the best time I've had in a long time.

I did consider dragging him somewhere touristy with me - he left himself WIDE open when I first got into town by mentioning sightseeing - but I couldn't quite bring myself to do that to the best minion of all time.  Since he likes masses of people about as much as I do, it seemed pointlessly cruel (also, I'm still hoping he'll make it to Tokyo before he graduates and it would be nice if he actually wanted to see me).  I did drag him into Round One for a few games of big fat Space Invaders, but I don't think he actually minded that.

Speaking of Space Invaders, I first saw it at the Round One near Yokohama Station earlier this year and I've been itching to play it ever since.  Shaggy and I (but mostly Shaggy) used to play the Atari version of this game when we were kids, so it held a certain amount of nostalgia for me.  The Japanese arcade version of it is so lit, though - you actually sit in the gunner's seat and have this big ass laser thing to shoot the aliens with.  Playing with the Kawaii Kingpin revealed a fundamental difference in our approach to the game.  I was trying to keep from dying, while he was racking up points, with the end result being that he killed me on the point spread, but since he's a hardcore gamer it would have been surprising if it had ended any other way.

Back to Bungou Stray Dogs, back in September I got to go to the stage show at Sunshine Theater in Ikebukuro.  It told the story of the "black" period, or basically the first few episodes of season 2, which focus on why Dazai left the Port Mafia.  This might be disappointing if you're a fan of the Armed Detective Agency, or even of Akutagawa, who only appears in silhouette.  Since (for once) my favorite character is central to the story, I was okay with it.  Sensei had to help me buy the tickets, and she was a little worried because it wasn't in English, but I reassured her that I'd do just fine.  My Dazai plush was not quite finished because I managed to melt his bolo clip in the school's toaster oven, but since he was pretty much done I brought him with me anyways.

It may have taken me five short trips and one year of full-time living, but I finally got the chance to see a kabuki play.  After school let out in June I was messing around in Tokyo and saw an Art & Live poster in the train station.  When I looked it up it turned out to have listings of different fine arts events in Tokyo...one of which was a kabuki play that tells the story of Naruto.  After my second time watching Noh (aka, trying not to nap in public), I was questioning whether or not Japanese theater was for me, but if ever there was a kabuki for me, it would be Naruto.  For starters, some of the character designs already look like the old ukiyo-e prints of kabuki actors.  I also figured I could deal with the language gap, since (thanks to the anime's prolific flashbacks) I knew the story front and back.  I wasn't entirely sure how they'd manage to boil 700 manga chapters down into a play, but I was game to give it a chance.

Well, I should have figured that one out from something Blondie once told me.  She complained about how long the kabuki she saw was, and that she left after the first part.  I naively thought that this would be like a classic western 3-act play, with a short intermission thrown in.  As I later learned (according to Wikipedia), kabuki's concept is more than just entertainment...it's an escape from the world.  Personally I prefer to escape via a good book, but hey, to each their own.  Suffice it to say that intermission, when it came, was 45 minutes.  I went to the bathroom.  I went to buy postcards.  I drank some water and twiddled my thumbs, because I didn't bring a bento - and STILL I waited.  It was August, and in spite of the air conditioning it was hot in the theater, so I got drowsier and drowsier.  FINALLY the second act started.

The costumes were gorgeous, and I loved some of the ways they achieved special effects.  Sadly I don't remember them all that well at this point because it's been three months since then, but I remember thinking that they'd managed to tell the story while remaining true to the medium.  I was fighting to stay away to the end, but then the second, FORTY-FIVE MINUTE intermission started, and I decided it was time for me to go find the nearest Coco Curry.

Although I don't dote on my students here like I did in Mongolia, I don't hate them all.  Recently one of the girls in elementary asked if I watched Touken Ranbu, and I felt just awful, telling her shiny little face that I'd missed the opportunity to go to the Swords of Kyoto exhibit while I was on vacation.  There was a stamp rally, too, but I couldn't figure out where all the stops were and I've already written about one of those, so the final item in this Otaku Report deals with pop-up shops.  I was ecstatic to learn that one had just opened for Golden Kamuy on the 6th floor of the Marui department store at Shijo Kawaramachi (I'd be even more happy about it now...episode 20 was not precisely my kind of fanservice, but it was in the ballpark).  I didn't really care for the special design character goods - one of the things I love about those characters is their normal character designs, so putting them in different contexts didn't really work for me.  That said, anytime you can visit a shop selling ONLY goods from one of your current favorite anime, I call it a win.  Now I just have to hope that Goodsmile will get their acts together and make me a Sugimoto nendoroid.

High-Sticking

I know that I used up a lot of words in the last few posts bitching about how unmotivated I was last week.  It took me til yesterday to figure out that the real problem was not, in fact, that vacation was over and I preferred lying in bed watching anime and reading to studying and going to work (although that is, of course, true).  It is one of the great ironies of my life that I like cool weather and dark days but the lack of light wreaks havoc on the feel-good chemicals in my brain.  Some years I'm better at coping than others.  This is starting off like an "other."

That said, serotonin's got nothing on a beat for making this girl happy.  Yesterday was a national holiday, Culture Day, and while it didn't get me a day off school because it fell on a Saturday, at least there were lots of cool things happening because of it.  Not that I cared about most of those things.  My priority was Asakusa's taiko festival, and I am serious when I say priority.  I rescheduled my nihonga lesson and everything in order to accommodate getting there from the other side of Tokyo.

I've written enough about taiko that it really shouldn't need an introduction, but in case you're new here, taiko is the most exciting music in Japan (and yes, that includes the first opening songs for Naruto Shippudden, Durarara!!!, and Noragami).  The taiko festival involves three-and-a-half hours of non-stop drums, with some shinobue (flute) and shamisen (that thing Kubo was playing in the movie) thrown in for good measure.  But really, the drums are what it's all about.

Each beat reverberates in your chest, shocking your heart harder than a defibrillator.  Merely watching taiko is hard, I think - the biofeedback pulls you into the music, makes you need to move, dance, do something.  Or maybe that's just me.

Besides the music itself being exciting there are several reasons why taiko is saikou.  There's something really playful about the performance of it.  It's not just people standing around making music - there's a lot of movement.  The musicians were jumping and dancing around, twirling their sticks and throwing them in the air.

I've taken lessons before, and am hoping to start doing so regularly this week.  I speak as the voice of experience when I tell you that it is hard, sweaty work.  There is a certain form you're supposed to have - not just the way that you hold the drum sticks, but the huge, exaggerated arm movements.  To be able to keep up the energy that it takes to play those drums is difficult, but just about every musician I looked at had a smile on their face.  They were having fun, and that was infectious.

I loved the fact that taiko really is for everyone.  There were kids banging those drums.  There were also old folks.  There were just as many women playing as men, and there were more than a couple musicians carrying extra weight, but they still rocked just as hard as anyone else.  It's hard not to love an art form that welcomes everyone.

Also, it occasionally involves boys with their shirts off, and I am definitely a fan of that.  Speaking of which, if any of the drummers who were there that day noticed me staring a little too intently, or thought that smile on my face was kind of creepy, rest assured, I'm no yandere.  It's just that you guys are my heroes.  Okay, maybe I'd be willing to date some of you, but I'd never resort to stalking (if only because I reserve that for the boys of Drum Tao).  All joking creepiness aside, it was one of the best things I've done this school year, and gave me the strength to get my homework done (mostly) and face another week of anklebiters.

Cheez and Whine

Well, school has been out for an entire week and I can honestly say that I have reached new depths of laziness.  I finally turned on my aircon Thursday - I didn't feel like I needed it til then, but a leaving teacher delivered her futon* and I realized it was too darn hot to put it away unless the apartment was about 5 degrees cooler.  It's just gone downhill from there.  Friday I decided would be a great day to finally watch Deadpool 2 (awesome family film), since that would give me something to do that didn't involve being outside, and I tried to follow it up on Saturday with a less-successful trip to the National Museum to work on art (hint: drawing in a museum in Japan is impossible and I'm about to give up on it).  Today I just gave up on leaving the apartment until the sun was going down, and you might justify my strategy of sleeping through the afternoon and being awake when it cools down as a preemptive strike against jet lag, but it's not.  I just felt like spending an entire day cycling through napping, reading, and watching anime.

But before I dedicated myself to the cult of laziness, I made it to a couple of things, which nicely round out my first year in Japan.  The first was The Director's idea.  She'd seen the big top being erected on Odaiba and decided that it would be fun to initiate Hornblower and myself into her own special fandom - that of Cirque du Soleil.  Being a theater nerd and a former circus employee herself (no, I'm not making that up), she regaled us with stories of how amazing a performance it was.  I scoffed at least a little - after the circuses (both good and bad) that I've seen at the National Tsirk in Mongolia, it was going to take a lot to impress me - but she insisted it wasn't a circus...it was Cirque.  An artistic extravaganza designed to engage your senses and dazzle your mind.

And it was dazzling.  There is no denying the fact that they put a lot of thought into telling a story through each act.  My problem was that the skills themselves were just okay.  I felt like the skills were undermined by the showmanship, rather than enhanced.  The contortionists had these really beautiful undersea costumes, but Mongolia's got the best damn contortionists in the world.  The watery theme was continued by a group jumping on a trampoline at the start of the second act, in cheeky fish costumes with little fins that they fluttered at us.  This act was as good as any I've ever seen, but the costumes were so cheesy that I had to cringe a little.  It was nothing, though, compared to the awkwardness of the clown act.  A female audience member was led out of the stands to pretend to be his date, only then he started acting like a cat.  It made me really, really glad we hadn't sprung for the better seats.  Turns out Cirque just really isn't my thing.

Notable exception - the two acrobats swinging around on straps.  Male acrobats, without shirts.  Okay, so it smacked of yaoi at least a little, as they gazed fondly at each other from across the ring as they swung back and forth, but I'm sure there were plenty of fujoshi in the audience members wishing it would go on forever.  I, for one, will never complain about half naked men (even if they DO seem more interested in each other than in me).

At least, that's what I thought on Monday.  By Wednesday night I may have changed my mind.  One of the art events I've been meaning to get to for a while is Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School.  It takes place on the last Wednesday of each month, and I hadn't been able to convince myself that it was worth it to be out that late on a school night.  Now that it's officially summer there ARE no school nights, so it seemed about time.  The basic premise behind Dr. Sketchy is that your models are burlesque dancers and your studio is a bar, which makes everything a lot more fun.  The deciding factor in me finally taking the plunge and checking it out last week was that they finally had a male model.  I mean, don't get me wrong - I love naked chicks.  I'd just rather draw dudes.

Or so I thought.  Here's a funny thing.  You'd think a dude who gets paid to take his clothes off would be stacked.  Barring that (given that we're in Japan here), you might expect a slender bishounen.  Sergei was neither.  Since belly dancers can come in all shapes and sizes, I suppose so can burlesque (or boylesque, as is, apparently, the term) dancers.  It just came as a bit of a shock. 

As did the tassles.  Yes, you read me correctly, tassles.  So the night was set up similarly to class with Gosnell, back in the good old days.  We started with five short, two minute poses, and then he did four five-minute ones, and finally three ten-minute ones.  The last of those was a contest to see who could do the best drawing, as judged by the model.  When that was finished, he performed for us.  Admittedly I'm uninitiated in the ways of burlesque, although I have a healthy respect for it, but I didn't really feel he had them moves like Jagger.  He kind of bounced around the stage for a long time before losing everything on top - no teasing really - to reveal that he was wearing nipple tassles.  I was so confused.  Maybe it's a Japanese thing, like how you can't go too far with nudity in anime, but the drummers in Tao** had their nipples showing, so...  Anyways, his act progressed, and off went his pants (I'm not even going to touch the fact that his outfit was gold and kind of pimpish), and then off went his boxer shorts, leaving him with a red thong, which, when he turned around, revealed that he had tassles on his butt.....

It's been four days and I still haven't come up with an explanation of that one.  Maybe I'm just too innocent, or maybe I missed the point (because in actual fact, I'm not innocent at all).  Maybe the idea of boylesque is so inherently cheesy that if you take it too seriously you come off as a parody of yourself?  Maybe the point was just to be funny and have a good time?  Awkward dancing aside, I did have a good time, and enjoyed talking to the other artists who came to draw, so chances are I'll be back.  School night or not, Shibuya's not that far.

*So now I have a futon.  This means that I'm willing to entertain guests from distant lands who are too cheap to get a hotel.  Not that any of my friends (notable exception, Azhaar, and that's why she's my favorite) have visited in the last three countries, but hey, in the event that hell DOES freeze over, I'll be prepared.
**Now THAT'S who they should get in the future.

Twelve Drummers Drumming

In the Wayback I actually went to both a taiko festival and took a lesson.  I loved it.  In my experience, everyone does.  When Five went with me to Kyoto, she got to experience the drums at Kiyomizu Dera and was as pumped as I was.  At our school's international day we had a group of drummers that performed, and The Director, with whom I was watching, felt the same way.  In fact, taiko is so awesome that if you've been paying attention, you  may have noticed me whinging a couple of times about the fact that I haven't seen more of it.  But I made up for all that last Friday with the ultimate (in my opinion, anyways) taiko experience - Drum Tao.

In my rambles through the interwebs not so long ago, I came across an ad for their new show, Mangekyo.  It looked AMAZING.  I mean, sure, I love taiko, but I love buff guys in cool costumes even more, and when you put the two together?  Magical.  There are women in Drum Tao, too (also very buff), and actually the leader of the group is a woman (who very clearly understands her fellow Japanese women - the audience definitely had a gender bias). 

 

This was one of those times where I'd discovered something way too good to keep to myself, so I emailed Sensei and my other two favorite work friends, The (aforementioned) Director and Horn Blower, to see if they were also interested.  This is how the four of us ended up wandering around a department store in Ginza Friday night trying to find the Alternative Theater.  That's a thing here...department stores seem to have galleries and theaters more times than you would think is absolutely normal.  Eventually we figured out we had to go downstairs and ride up from the first floor, but we got there in the end.

The thing is, it wasn't just a musical performance.  I think this is the first show I've been to since I moved to Japan, so I'm not sure how it compares to other concerts, if you can call it a concert.  Hot guys drumming would have been more than enough to hold my (rapt) attention, but this was so much more.  The costumes were fantastic.  They had the look of kimono and samurai armor to them, but they still managed to be modern and chou kakouii...I imagine there's a fine line between that and cheesy, but they nailed it.  The actual staging was fairly simple - there were three or so platforms, which different performers mounted to play or dance - but they also used projectors to add a multimedia element - flowers fluttering in the breeze, or a stream in the forest. 

I wish pictures were allowed at performances here.  Maybe I should start bugging organizations to give me press access - I write a blog, after all, even if I only have six regular readers.  As it was, I was too scared of getting kicked out to try and sneak a shot or two (this isn't Mongolia, after all...the Japanese love their rules and expect them to be followed!) so for the most part you'll have to imagine it.  If that's not good enough, maybe check out their official website?

After an hour and a half it was over.  We fought our way to the elevators, and then walked back to Yurakucho station to head toward home.  The Director and I discussed which guys we preferred - she said my choice looked too much like an anime character for her, and I told her that didn't bother me in the least (yes, we are both basically 13 years old, and no, I don't care).  I could have gone back and watched it again the next day with every bit as much enthusiasm.  Maybe I will when it returns in the fall.  Til then, I'm looking for places to take lessons, because that is a kind of exercise that I would look forward to.

Scarecrows and Firelight

Friday I made a decision: I would swap out my summer clothes for the ones in what I thought of as my autumn suitcase.  This was predicated by the fact that I had just ripped a hole in one of my linen (ie, summer) pants, and wanted to be sure the rest made it as least as far as the beginning of summer.  It might not truly be cool (yet.  Most of the time), but my standard cords will stand up to my demanding teacher lifestyle a lot better.

Yesterday started a helluva lot earlier than I would have liked.  The school has an annual picnic in September, and this year we held it at Kishine Park.  It's not that far away, but have I mentioned Yokohama's hills?  I could have met everyone at the school and gotten a ride over, but I decided it would be much more after my own idiom to find my own way there, and that went well enough, but to make sure I caught the right bus I was out the door at 7, where I found this friend waiting for me. 

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that the week had finally reached terminal velocity, and this week I found that at least some of the people around me didn't suck (probably none of them suck, but you know me and my antisocial tendencies).  Monday I found myself chatting with three of the people I miss the most from Mongolia, feeling like the world was at an end, but by the time work was over the following day, I felt much better.  The expat life is kind of like that - rollercoasterish, with its ups and downs.  Still, when the clock ran out on the "family picnic" I was ready to get the heck out of Yomaha.

Last weekend I stumbled onto Tokyo Cheapo's events page, and found out this weekend there would be a firelight Noh performance at Zojo-Ji.  Putting it on the Cheapo site may have been slightly inaccurate, since the cheapest seats were still 2,000 yen, but since we got paid on Thursday I was flush with cash, and so that was my plan.  And then I found out there was a local street festival "next door" at Higashi Azabu, and I figured between the two it would make up for working on a Saturday.

After finding Zojo-Ji and figuring out if tickets were available and how to buy them (if you're reading this around the end of September 2018, they'll set up a table at the bottom of the stairs near the main entrance around 3:30 or 4), I had two hours to kill, so I wandered past Tokyo Tower and found the area of the festival.  It was...interesting.  It's called the Kakashi Festival, which means scarecrow but also happens to be the name of my favorite character from Naruto (which may have influenced me to go check it out, cause, you know...nerd).  Apparently it was an import from Tohoku, where some of the residents of Higashi Azabu originally came from.

So scarecrows are the main part of the festival, although this being Japan, there were plenty with their own cute twists.  A tent was set up with several on display - entered by local businesses and maybe schools?  I kind of wanted to find out if anyone could enter one, because it would amuse me to no end to participate next year by entering a huge version of my Kakashi-sensei plushie. 

There were tons of street food stalls, and games, of course.  I decided I needed one last shaved ice, only to discover it is not nearly as tasty on the last day of September as it is in mid-August.  For some reason that I still haven't been able to fathom, no matter how hard I rattle my brains, there were hula dancers, as well as a kind of cheesy magician.  I thought his tricks (ILLUSIONS, MICHAEL) were fairly transparent, but the kids seemed to be enjoying the show, and I had to admit he was still better than the magician who performed at ASU's TEDx last year.

Finally, I headed back to Zojo-Ji.  When I first got there, I was so busy trying to figure out about the performance that I didn't fully appreciate it (that and the incense.  I'd been trying to fend off a headache all day and the incense wasn't helping.)  There is a nice prayer hall, and apparently the treasure house is currently open.  But I didn't really pay that much attention.

See, the reason I knew the name Zojo-Ji is because I'm an art nerd, and once upon a time the Joslyn had a copy of Hasui Kawase's "Zojo-Ji Temple in Snow" on display, and it made enough of an impression to remember.  While I don't intend to visit all of the famous ukiyo-e scenes of old Edo...probably......I mean, really, there's just too many of them...this was too good a chance to pass up.

So I got back from visiting the scarecrows and entered the crowd, finding my seat and reading while waiting for things to get started.  The special thing about the Takigi Noh - which is what it's called - is that it's performed by firelight, with a little help from some electric lights.  When they finally lit them, I was pretty stoked.  They got the stage set up, and finally, the performance started.  And once it started, it didn't take me long to figure it out.  Noh is not really my cup of tea.

Japanese aesthetics can be a bit...subtle.  In a print, or painted on a paper screen, that comes off very elegantly.  As I sat and watched the first of the three performances - a number of priests sitting still while the two main characters declaimed at each other (calmly and thoughtfully, I thought, although I had no idea what they were saying) I had the entirely inappropriate urge to burst into a rendition of "Brush Up Your Shakespeare."  While the wailing of the flutes was poignant and the hits of the drums called out into the night, the stillness of the actors failed to move me.  So maybe I can't be called a weeaboo in the truest sense of the word, because I left after the first play.  This might have been unfair - the second was supposed to be kyogen, which I've read is comedic, and the third was about a woman who turned out to be a demon, and maybe on a normal Saturday I could have appreciated them, but after the picnic, I was just done.

As I walked away from Zojo-Ji, down a street lit by lanterns and lined with restaurants, I realized there is a good chance I've been unfair to Tokyo.  True, it doesn't have the same magic as Kyoto, but there is something about walking down its streets that feels entirely right to me.  It reminds me of how Seoul used to feel like it was my own personal amusement park, except more.  Walking through Tokyo feels like the whole city is just part of my home.  After all, there was a reason why Hokusai and Hiroshige's most famous prints were of Edo, not Kyoto.

The Return of Sgt. Becks

In high school I was well-known as a hard-core band nerd and a pain-in-the-ass bitch who was too tough on people.  For this reason, during my senior year my rivals started calling me Sergeant Becks - or at least, I always assumed that was the reason, although Baby Chicken Wing (as the youngest was called) will surely let me know over the summer if I've got it wrong.  Although I have changed over the years, one thing remains the same:  I am still a pain-in-the-ass bitch who is too tough on people.

My band days have long been over, but after Engrish took responsibility for directing the school musical this spring, I found myself agreeing to be a part of it.  Being in charge of artsy shit like costumes and sets sort of goes along with being the art teacher, although I ducked out of it last year thanks to the fashion show.  Without that, and with a couple of extra preps in my timetable, I really had no reason to say no this year.  My first responsibility was getting the scripts and scores back to Mongolia, a job I volunteered for because I knew I wasn't planning on bringing much else back with me.  Thanks to the traumatic flight path getting back to UB, they didn't actually make it into the school until several cold January nights later, but because I didn't have to re-check them anywhere, I managed to avoid any baggage fees, so it ended up costing a lot less to get them to Mongolia than it should have (returning them, on the other hand, took us from just breaking even to very deeply back in the red.  Oh well).

Having delivered the goods and chosen student costume and set designers, I thought my responsibilities were fulfilled for a while.  And then The Voice came in one afternoon and said, "So I don't want you to feel pressured, because I know you're busy, but do you want to play in the pit band?"  I think my answer was something like, "Well, I don't want to get in the way of the kids or anything, but I can probably work it into my schedule," because I'm all cool and everything.  Inside, though, I was like, "HELL YASSS!"  So he gave me the score and I started practicing with one of the school's flutes. 

Back in my flute playing days I read an article in Flutist Quarterly (yes, I was a member of the National Flute Association.  I told you I was hardcore) by this guy who had left music to serve in the military for a while.  And he said things like, "It's like riding a bicycle," and "It made me a better musician," but I couldn't believe it.  And during the first week or so carving my way through the score I still didn't believe it.  I've mentioned our sad sax player who honks and toots his way through old age, driving me nuts, and as I started learning the music, I thought I must sound like that to everyone else.  Yes, I could read the music, I could play the notes...but not very well.  I guess I forgot how hard it is learning a new piece (or 20) of music.  But eventually I learned the quirks of the school's beat up student flutes (and fixed a couple of problems on them), got used to using various muscle groups again, and managed to pull off a halfway decent performance (although it would have been even better if my Yamaha had managed to get here from Canada - my mom sent it to me via the principal's Canadian residence, but it got held back in customs.  Grr.)  I also forgot how much fun it was to play in a group, and especially loved working with my fellow flutist.

If you're not familiar with the musical Kiss Me Kate, it's the story of a theater troupe performing a musical production of The Taming of the Shrew.  The leads, Fred and Lilli, are divorced but still have feelings for each other, and during the performance, those feelings start to come into play.  The music is challenging and the material required a lot of maturity and hard work from our kids, a challenge that they rose magnificently to.

One of the blogs I wrote toward the beginning of my time in Mongolia was about watching Hamlet at the State Drama Theater, and I think it's fitting that I'm writing about another production based on Shakespeare at the end of all things.  Even though Americans have a tendency to want to dumb down Shakespeare, I've always loved him, and when I figured out that the 400th anniversary of his death was a scant few days before Lilli Vanessi and Fred Graham were opening the Shrew in Ulaanbaatar I felt like it was a felicitous sort of kismet that led Engrish to suggesting it.

Shakespearean-era costuming is hard to come by in Mongolia, though.  Engrish and I thought we'd sorted out our boys by borrowing a lot of good stuff from our sister school, but most of it was too small for them.  We tried a couple of costume shops, and ended up having a few things tailor made for the leads, but the biggest help was our dance teacher's connection with the State Ballet, from whom we were able to borrow some old jackets and dresses (although this time the girls had the problem - the dresses were made for ballerinas - but in the end nobody went naked).

The sets were a little easier to handle, mostly because I didn't have to do the cutting and screwing.  We have a really awesome maintenance crew at the school and they made the actual pieces...all we had to do was tell them what we wanted and then paint them.  Two of the pieces were from last year's production of Grease, and we were able to repurpose a door frame from two years back, adding an actual door.  The other pieces were made new.  There are basically two sides to Kiss Me Kate.  The play within a play is set in Padua, which I felt uniquely qualified to create, having been there just two years ago.  I tried to use warm, bright colors like you'd see in Italian architecture.  The other scenes take place backstage, and so we painted bricks on the backside of the 3 set pieces.

Most of all, though, I was proud of our kids, who worked damn hard to learn songs, dances, and lines.  Our lead actor was my very own Ukulele Man, who may have changed his hair several times since Istanbul but is still a huge pain in my ass.  Just a few weeks before opening night ("Three weeks, and it couldn't be worse!"), Engrish confided in me that Ukulele Man was stressing her out more than anything else - he still didn't know a big chunk of his lines and had a tendency to ad lib, which is apparently a big no-no with Shakespeare.  I'd watched the first act of the BBC Proms production of Kiss Me Kate to prepare myself for the set and costumes, but hadn't heard the lyrics to most of the songs before the band started to rehearse with the cast.  So it came as a huge shock the first time I heard him sing, "Where is the Life that Late I Led?" and he got to the line, "Where is Rebecca?  My Becky, Weckio?"  I may have panicked a little, thinking he was ad libbing again - it's possible that maybe I let the kids get away with calling me by my first name when we were in Turkey - before I realized it was actually part of the song.  But I assured he would come through, and he did.

It's been two weeks since we closed the show.  They've been busy weeks - we submitted our AP Art portfolios a week ago, and yearbook has taken up a lot of time, too - so my apartment is still a mess but they've gone by quickly, for me at least.  But Engrish confided that it was a little bit of a let-down: all that hard work, staying at school til 8 or later most nights, only for it to be over so suddenly.  I had to agree - I missed playing music and seeing the kids bring their characters to life, especially our lead actress, who did an amazing job as Kate the Cursed.  But in six weeks I'll be on a plane to uncharted waters.  She at least has next year's production to look forward to.

(BTW - Photography credits to B. Munkhbold - I couldn't very well take pictures and play in the pit band.)

Grub on the Road: Table for Two

"Look up," he said...

Traveling with someone is not my normal state.  It's not that I want to be alone (although it's nice, especially when it comes time to write blogs) so much as that I generally can't be bothered coordinating travel plans with others.  I want to go where I want to go...but if one of my nearest and dearest wanted to come along for the ride, I'm generally pretty copacetic.  This trip didn't exactly go down like that...I maybe encouraged Five to go to Japan so that I would have an excuse to go back even though I just spent our October break in Kyoto, but since I still have no idea what I'm doing next year, I'm kind of okay with that.

Anyways, back to my opening shot - traveling with someone is different.  When I'm alone in vacation mode, I sometimes forget to eat all day.  Or maybe not forget...it's just that I've got so many things to do that food kind of gets de-prioritized.  On the other hand, if my raison d'etre on the road is learning new things, Five's is to eat new things. For this reason I put her in charge of restaurants.  For about five seconds - I changed my mind after she announced that we were going to try raw chicken sushi.

That saying about how you won't know if you like it until you try it?  I call bullshit.  There are some things you don't need to try to know they're not good.  Salmonella is one of them.

Fire Ramen, on the other hand...  Five was reading up on places to eat on our second day in Kyoto, and came across this place on someone's foodie blog.  The lines are supposed to be long, so we decided to go the next day for an early lunch and walked right into a special news feature from Tokyo.  They hooked us up with mics and asked us some questions - kind of awkward, but then again, it seems to happen a lot around me.  I didn't think the flavor of the broth was that different, but the fire definitely had an effect.  There were tons of green onions piled on top, and when they poured the flaming oil into your bowl, apparently the onions soak it up, and take on this sort of smoky flavor.  I am not a huge fan of green onions - normally I eat around them, and that was my plan at Fire Ramen.  But I accidentally grabbed a few with my chopsticks, and they actually tasted really nice.  I ended up eating them all.

Afterwards she went to Nishiki Market, the food street I'd showed her the night before so she could try more new things.  I ditched her to catch up with the Kawaii Kingpin - after walking along the Kamo we ended up having an early dinner at Coco Curry.  He introduced me to it back in October, and I was planning to take Five, but she said she didn't really like curry.  Then another friend told her about it, and I came back telling her how you got to choose the size of your portion - in grams of rice! - and she decided that she'd give it a try for lunch on our last day in Osaka.  And ended up loving it so much that she bought a pack to bring back to Mongolia.

The next day we went to USJ.  Theme park food is generally not worth writing about - it's overpriced and the quality doesn't generally match up with said price - but eating fish and chips in the Three Broomsticks with a cold butterbeer was worth it.  The fish was tasty, and the ambience was on point.  I should have taken a photo, but I was less snap-happy this trip.  Which is dumb because that's one of the best things about having a travel buddy - having them take ridiculous photos of you - but there ya go.

We ate a lot of strawberries.  We were there smack dab in the middle of strawberry season, and although we couldn't quite fit in a visit to an all-you-can-eat strawberry farm we made up for it buying strawberries just about every time we saw them.  My favorite strawberries were in the crepes I found at the end of Teramachi arcade - just the right amount of strawberries smothered in whipped cream.

In Osaka we stayed near Shinsaibashi, first in a ryokan that smelled like cabbage when it didn't smell like cigarette smoke, and then in the historic first capsule hotel, located in Asahi Plaza.  This meant we were right in the thick of things, and we had the chance to drool over a lot of food.  Osaka is famous for its okonomiyaki, and it's generally a good idea to try the local specialty, but I had another reason for wanting to try it.  My first anime, Ranma 1/2, had a character who made okonomiyaki.  Five didn't know that when I kept referring to it, but when she finally figured out what I was talking about - apparently okonomiyaki rolls off my tongue a little too fast and explaining it as "this pancake-ish thing" didn't tell her much - she was interested to try it.  I think it was my favorite thing I ate all week.  We were each going to have okonomiyaki, but when we saw their yakisoba, we decided we'd share, and that was delicious, too.

Speaking of anime, I actually had some success in my shopping this time.  We passed the Jump Shop on our way into USJ, and it was still open when we left that night, so I picked up a reproduction of the sketch of the final fight between Naruto and Sasuke, along with a few other things.  In Denden Town I found several nendoroids I wanted to buy, but ended up only getting Araragi from Bakemonogatari (even if he's an idiot and falls for the wrong girl, he's still my most recent favorite).  But my best find was in the Mandarake Grand Chaos, across the street from our capsule hotel.  I originally marked it on Google maps because someone wrote about their selection of cosplay goods, but I didn't get that far into the store - I realized they were closing in 15 minutes while Five was getting her pot bing soo on our last night.  They had a huge selection and I managed to find something I'd been on the look-out for the entire trip moments after walking into the store - another nendoroid.  This one is from an anime I mentioned during my previous trip - Touken Ranbu - about swords that have been turned into boys.  Mikazuki's design is particularly beautiful, and I'm considering making him for the doll contest this summer.  So it's design research.  Yeah, that's a pretty good justification.

So if you're thinking it's taken me a long freaking time to spit out this final blog, you're right.  I haven't really been neglecting the blog so much as neglecting everything in my life.  I decided to get involved in the school musical this year - originally I was supposed to be responsible for costumes and sets and things like this poster, but when our music teacher, The Voice, asked if I wanted to play flute with the pit band I realized it has been a really, really long time since I had played in a group, and that I really wanted to.  So I borrowed one of the school flutes - they're not great, but my flute was at home and is now in Canada, although for some reason the Canadian post held onto it for 10 days and as a result it didn't make it to Mongolia with my principal.  So that's taking up most of my time.  In fact, I'm actually supposed to be painting sets right now, but when I woke up from my Sunday afternoon nap, the sounds of sad sax were wafting in my open window, which I immediately shut and started blasting one of my Youtube playlists.  If hearing that in my apartment is torture, painting just upstairs from it is even worse, so I decided to order sushi and work on this post instead.

Moral of the story - if you're in Mongolia next week, you should come watch Kiss Me Kate.  As stated previously, my students are amazing and the things that Engrish and The Voice have managed to do with them make me so proud they bring tears to my eyes. 

Kyoto Light, Kyoto Night

As I began typing this, I had one day left in Japan, and I found myself wondering if it was a mistake to come.  Not because it was a bad experience, but the opposite - it has been a fantastic week.  Even if I haven't been here that long, I have a feeling of belonging.  It is not all jaw-droppingly beautiful landscapes and temples.  Taking the bus to Roketsu to make my noren, I had to admit that the buildings squashed in side by side were not the most aesthetically pleasing thing I'd ever seen...and yet, I love them, too, love the feeling that you could wander down a different cramped alley every day for a year and see something unique every time.  And if you wanna stick with temples and shrines, there are more than enough to keep you going for a good long while.  As we were walking through Sanjo my second day here, we passed two or three moderately large shrines.  Right in the middle of a shopping area!  It seems like most of them have some sort of festival at some point.  That afternoon when I'd gotten back to the house, my host Taka-san heard drums, and had me come to the window in the second floor of the house to watch a procession walk past.  That is the sort of sight I think I could watch all the time and never get bored.  In Kyoto, I'd have the chance to find out.

Take, for example, the Funaoka Matsuri.  Northward and west of the imperial palace is the Kenkun Shrine, which is where Oda Nobunaga is enshrined.  Oda Nobunaga is the warlord who essentially united Japan, bringing the Warring States period to an end.  I'm not much on history, although with several thousand years of it, I find Japan's much more interesting than America's.  However, I've been watching an anime about swords that have been turned into young men (yes, I know it makes pretty much no sense, but they're cute sword boys and I've watched enough anime at this point to be able to overlook most of the homoerotic overtones).  Their purpose is to protect the time stream from being changed, and in one episode they go back in time to make sure Nobunaga's assassination actually takes place.  When they were reminiscing about him, they didn't seem particularly fond, but at the end of the episode they were all kind of nostalgic.  I'm telling you this to give you some sort of background...if you really want some hard facts, you can wikipedia it.  Suffice it to say that he's kind of a hero.

So it's fitting that there's a celebration of his accomplishments and contributions to modern Japan.  It wasn't as crowded as the other two festivals I made it to - a little more solemn, too.  The whole thing was in Japanese, so I only had a vague idea of what was going on, but it was very interesting.  The ceremony started with music on traditional instruments, their cries sounding like heartbreak.  There were prayers - fortunately I go to church often enough to recognize an invitation to stand and bow your head, whether I understand the language or not - and various offerings where brought into the shrine by the officiators.  Then there were the performances.

There were four performances this year.  The first was a singing/dancing performance which - if I understood it correctly, was a variety of Noh, followed by a masked dancer performing bugaku (my knowledge of Japanese culture is not so extensive as to pull that out of nowhere...I used Discover Kyoto's website for my crib sheet).  The third was - I think - a geisha dance.  It was a graceful series of movements set to music by a lady - albeit an older one - in a gorgeous kimono, at any rate.  When she finished, branches were presented to VIP audience members, who presented them at the shrine, at which point the ceremonial part of it seemed to be over, although we had one final show - swordsmanship, with wooden swords.  The "winner" of the bout demonstrated his real sword on a rolled tatami mat, which lay before the shrine in three neat pieces when I got up to take a look.  And that seems fitting for a warrior's shrine.

Nights are generally downtime or shopping time when I travel.  It's been nice catching up with the Kawaii Kid on some of those nights, and at first when he told me he'd have to cut our Friday night meet-up short, I wasn't exactly thrilled, but we had a good chat and I was seeing him the next day...and then I realized that now that I was free, I could go up to Kodai-Ji and see the autumn illumination.  I really, really love the Japanese sense of aesthetics.  Sit under cherry trees watching the moon through their petals?  Sounds like fun to me.  In the fall, they kind of do the same thing, except with the changing colors of the leaves, and they call it momiji.  I may be missing the best part of it (again, WHY do I have to go home???), but Friday night the first temple on the schedule lit up their grounds, which they will continue to do til the end of November.

I love visiting temples at night.  They just have a different ambiance than during the day, as if the youkai are out to play.  Kodai-Ji was no exception, even with everyone wandering up and down the paths.  Even with the light show in the Zen rock garden....

Actually, I'm pretty sure I spied a few demons in the actual light show.  I'm not much of a fan of them, but I've got to say, this one was very well done...at one point, the light transformed the sand in the garden into rippling water, and the gate turned to gold.  It was genius.

The most magical part, though, was the reflections of the trees on the water.  More than anything I wanted to see it in a week or two, when all the trees would be on fire and the air just a bit chillier, but the words of Frost echoed in my head: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep,  And miles to go before I sleep."  There is still a lot to do before I bid my current school goodbye.

However, it is possible that my subconscious is neither a fan of Frost or else just didn't care, because it may have tried to sabotage me into actually staying this morning.  When I finally went to bed last night, I set my alarm for 6:30.  For some reason, the last time I looked at the flight schedule I scrawled into my travel journal, I locked onto my arrival time in Incheon (11:20), thinking it was my departure from Osaka.  When my alarm when off, I asked myself if I was feeling too lazy for one more walk - I never made it onto the Philosopher's Path, or got further into Fushimi-Inari-Taisha than the first knot of tourists.  And then I looked up my e-ticket, just in case...only to realize that my flight left at 9:30.  From Osaka.  Which was an hour and a half away.

From thence proceeded a string of profanities that probably woke up everyone in the house as I stripped and redressed in a panic, shoving my pajamas into my soon (I hoped) to be checked luggage - but I'm calling it payback for the snoring from the next room.  Blondie was right when she said that you can hear everything through traditional Japanese walls.  I clomped down the stairs, threw on my shoes and socks, locked the door and dropped the keys in the mail slot, as Taka-san requested, finally walking around the corner and on my way.  And then I realized I'd left my iPad on the counter.  For one moment, I thought, "Forget it - I don't like the darn thing anyways!" but that seems wasteful, even for me.  I got back to the door and was wondering how loud I would have to get to wake someone up when I realized that I was able to get the keys back - they hadn't slid all the way into the mail slot, and retrieved my technology.  A quick walk out to the street and a moment of panic ensued when I wondered if there were even any taxis on the streets at 6:50 on a Sunday morning, since that was my plan...spend a gajillion yen on a taxi, rather than miss my flight.  Fortunately the very kind driver who picked me up a minute or two later convinced me to take the airport limousine bus, and even though it seemed to be the slowest thing on the road, somehow I made it with just enough time to check in, get through security with the help of the very kind Korean air agent, and get to the gate before boarding.

Considering the number of mishaps I've had this week, you may be thinking, "Wow, what a gong show!  No way I'd travel with you!"  (Unless you're my dad, in which case you are probably thinking - for neither the first nor the last time - "Get your head out of your ass!")  But for the record...well, you're not entirely wrong.  I'm not usually quite this bad, though, and at least now you know that it's possible to get from Kyoto to Osaka and on your flight in less than three hours.

A Night at the Opera

Is this the real life, or is it just fantasy???  11 out of 10 specialists in stuff agree that dwelling on the past is useless, and I try to listen to specialists, particularly when I've gone to the effort to make up statistics for them...thus I haven't made a huge deal out of the fact that I was originally a band geek.

As in, like, a GIGANTIC nerd.  

Yes, I went to band camp (I also played the flute, but I was in middle school, so no American Pie references, please).  

When I started college, I had every intention of growing up to be a concert flautist, and one of the classes you had to take was a listening lab, in which the classwork involved going to concerts.  The shows the conservatory put on were all free, if you got your ticket at least 24 hours ahead of time, and so suddenly all my dreams of being classy and going to the opera were coming TRUEEEEEEE!!!  Well, I eventually gave up on the whole musician thing (mostly because I couldn't actually get INTO the conservatory), but I still love going to the opera, even though sometimes the lovers need to just fucking DIE ALREADY so I can go home.

The last time I went to the opera in Italy that was definitely the case.  It was a rendition of Verdi's Aida staged in Verona's Colosseum.  Normally I would think that watching an opera in the most intact Roman colosseum in Italy was totally gucci, but it started sprinkling about the same time they let us in to get seated.  And when you play a delicate musical instrument that costs several thousand dollars, the show does NOT go on when rain is involved, thus is was two in the morning before it was over.  However, opera is the artistic equivalent of football for Italians, I went then, and I went again last night, since Teatro la Fenice gives me even more artsy street cred.

Teatro La Fenice (Fenice meaning "Phoenix," which is ironic since it's burned at least a couple of times) is the kind of dope yolo swag opera theater they show you in movies and tv and stuff when people go to the theater.  It's posh.  It's got velvet seats and honest-to-goodness boxes.  I spent almost as much money on the bloody ticket as I did on the cooking class I did yesterday morning (more to come on that another day).  I was hoping for a Verdi opera, because nobody knows how to use a drinking song in an opera quite like Verdi, but I settled for Vivaldi's Juditha Triumphans, because I know how it ends (no spoilers yet...keep reading).

The theater was absolutely stunning, so I was expecting great things from the staging.  However, I had my first misgivings when I noticed that the orchestra pit was actually an orchestra platform.  The band, in all their glory, with all their reading lights, were kind of a distraction, and the divas...oh yes, all the characters were played by women.  Apparently Vivaldi wrote it for the girls' orphanage at which he was music master, but it took the supertitles for me to figure that the badass I originally thought was the title character was actually the antagonist...actually moved around the orchestra, as well as having the stage behind them.  Instead of having an actual set, they used stripes of light through smoke and artfully arranged wooden cubes, when they were called for.  It was very interpretive and minimalist, and was a stark contrast to the theater.  I didn't particularly care for it.

Don't ask what the secret ingredient is...

Okay, spoilers coming - watch out, opera fans.  Judith is a biblical story, but even if you've read your Bible cover to cover, chances are you haven't heard of her.  Protestant bibles group her with a number of other books known as the Apocrypha (also known as Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Bible), since most scholars agree at this point that it's not actually historically based.  It IS, however, a pretty badass story.  Judith is a young Jewish widow during a time the Jews are at war (you can assume it's Babylon, but let's face it - most of the Old Testament is carnage...that is, once you're past who begat who and all the rules about who you are not allowed to sleep with).

Anyway, she gets fed up with her countrymen who are participating in one of the world's great pastimes - whining about how things are without having the faith to actually do something about it - so she puts on her big girl pants and ingratiates herself to the enemy general, Holofernes.  Then she gets him schnockered and chops of his head with his own sword.

Thanks to 11 Points for the great illustration of the importance of art historians

Well.  The staging may have been okay, and it may have taken a really long time to get to the freaking point (I know - it would have been a very short opera if they didn't sing every line three times, but it was hot in the theater!) but in the end, Juditha Triumphans failed to disappoint.  When she cut off his head a whole rain of red...stuff? beads maybe???...fell from above the stage and hit the floor at the same time.  SPLASH!  Best part of the staging, game over!  Judith waved the sword around a little more and there was more singing - and the singing was phenomenal, and the orchestra was absolutely sublime.  I realize I'm being a real jackass, because I'm not really talking about the central point of going to the opera, aka, the performances, but I'm not a music critic and it would be stranger if you went to an opera in Italy and it wasn't outstanding.  These people take their opera seriously.