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So I totally forgot about uploading the pictures I took at the festival on Sunday. They're small and low-quality, because I could only fit my cell phone in my pocket and not my actual camera, but for what it's worth...

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(This entry is SO backdated, because I was nowhere near coherent enough to write anything when I finally got home yesterday.)

It was pointed out to me that I wasn't very clear with Friday's post, partly because it was just a stream of consciousness list, and also because that list was half in Japanese. (This is, however, basically how I think; in a mix of Japanese and English. It is probably the reason why I also end up rambling in Japanese on the rare occasions I get drunk.)

So for those of you who don't understand Japanese, a quick summary of what all those incomplete thoughts were about:

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Sunday was even more intense. As the schedule said, I showed up at campus around two, and we did our stretches and practiced the formation for "Matcha," which we'd finally be performing in front of actual people. The formation was a bit different than we usually do, and the stereo cut out halfway through the song, so we had to be a bit creative and finish things up by singing. We took a break after that, and everyone finished getting into costume and started work on face paint and such. I painted fireworks that matched the design on our happi. :3

Of course this didn't take very long, so I actually sat around a lot while everyone else was fixing their hair and whatnot. Everyone commented on how quickly I'd gotten ready, but... well, what else did I have to do? My hair fixes itself; it's not like I have to do anything to it. That's what I like about my hair.

Anyway, we headed off from school and got to the festival around... three-thirty or four, I think. It turned out that I was right and this was the festival I'd seen advertised on the poster, taking place around Oyama station. It was Oyama's version of the Gion Matsuri, which is really famous in Kyoto. (I looked it up on wiki later; apparently Gion Matsuri started out as a religious thing, to drive off plagues, earthquakes, fire, and general badness. It turned into an annual event and ran for hundreds of years, until eventually the shogunate decided to stop all the religious stuff. The people got upset and basically said "fine, we'll ditch the rituals, but we're gonna keep the parade," which lead to the current form of the festival.) So there were little mini-shrines (omikoshi) being carried through the streets, and taiko drums, and big waving banners, and then dancers, of course-- including us.

We stopped and rested in a little alcove for a bit (where someone noticed a poster up for the Yosakoi Dance Festival in Nikko-- and Mugen was featured on the poster), and then everyone headed for a toilet break. I mention this only because during said break, myself, Mai, Kazue, Nozomi, and another girl got separated from the rest of the group. This lead to a rather confusing (and exhausting) fifteen minutes or so while we ran through the crowded festival streets, trying to figure out where everyone else was. We did eventually find them, after another guy pointed us in the right direction; they had joined up with some of the other dance groups that we've met at other festivals (who are always very nice and bringing food for us) and were helping in those groups' dances.

These dances lean a little more towards the traditional Obon and other dances, and are less like street dancing than ours (the less athletic moves are understandable; most of the people in the other groups tend to be women or men in their forties or fifties); they also use the noroko(?)--little shaky wooden clappers-- more than we usually do. We followed them in several numbers, and it was more than a little chaotic, as none of us really knew the moves and we were trying to watch the other people ahead of us (while a guy waved a giant flag in the way...) It was fun anyway, though.

We finally took a break after maybe an hour of this; we stopped outside a store that had a little purification fountain next to it (with a ladle and everything), and everyone descended on the fountain, muttering "Nomimono! Nomimono!" (Drinks! Drinks!) and started drinking from there before they could get out the drinks we'd brought with us.

After about three ladles of water and a good few handfuls dumped on my neck and arms, I was feeling slightly less sticky and gross. It also helped that we got to sit down and rest. Once I was feeling better, I took out my phone and started getting snapshots of everybody sitting around, and a bit of the floats going by, although the quality was pretty bad so I couldn't get anything too detailed (this included the guy doing the flag waving, which was unfortunate, because he was amazing). Apparently, we did have time then to walk around and buy food and such, but I didn't find this out until later, alas. I really would've liked to get ahold of some of their snowcone/slushy things.

When the break was over, we finally got to do our dances! Well, we danced with the other group for a bit first, but then it was our turn. We had a whole ring of people around us at this point, lining up on both sides of the street. We did "Matcha" first, and I got a bit confused and ended up out of position, but still did pretty well, I think, and everybody clapped really loudly when we were done, which was quite gratifying. Then we did "Yocchore," which was a bit less organized since it had been awhile since I did it, and several of other new people (like Kazue) didn't know it at all, but it was still fun. And then we went on to the next song... and "Yocchore" started playing again. There was a pause, while they sorted out the sound system again. And then the music came back, and it was... "Yocchore." Yes.

So we ended up doing "Yocchore" not once but three times. Which was... eheh. Well. "Yocchore" is the most physically demanding song, I find, because there's a lot of jumping around, and I still have trouble pulling some of it off. By the third time, most of us weren't even trying very hard, we were all so tired, and some of the people had started to leave. By the time we finished the third round and all attacked the water fountain again, most of the people had left. It had gotten cooler and darker anyway, and a lot cloudier. It looked like it was going to rain, actually, though there wasn't much chance of it in the forecast. When we looked at the street again, most of the people had gone, and we ended up leaving soon after that.

We went back to the school parking lot, and said goodbye to those who had to go home for one reason or another, and I (quite reluctantly) returned my happi to Kimura-san. I'm really going to have to ask Rika later if I can keep one of them and take it back with me. They're just so damn cool-looking. I figure I can wear it to conventions if nothing else. Gotta figure out the right way to ask, though.

Afterwards we went to the onsen (I remembered to bring my towel this time!) and I ended up trying a number of the baths I hadn't before, including some of the really weird ones like the rock salt (?) bath, and the sauna, where we rubbed some kind of salt on our skin-- with Techi, Nozomi, and Mai. A little weird, but so relaxing after an entire day of dancing.

Of course, being exhausted and hungry and then taking a hot bath meant that I was just about falling asleep on my feet when I got out. I managed to stay awake long enough to go and get some dinner (at the same cafeteria place we went before), but after that, exhausted and fed, I was pretty ready to crash. Techi was talking about going someplace after that and hanging out some more, but she didn't know where, and while I wanted to do more, everything was calling for me to sleep, so in the end I just got a ride home.

Mind you, I still stayed up until after midnight, poking at the internet and such, but even that was kind of a struggle. I finally just gave up (since the internet was being very dodgy anyway) and collapsed into sleeeep.

Still. It was an awesome, awesome festival. Pure chaos, of course, with tons of people and little shops and music and shrines... several streets were taken up by the festivities, and even though these were streets I ride on or past every day, I absolutely could not have told you where we were at any one time. But the craziness is most of what I love about matsuri; everybody just goes wild and has fun. None of the strict social heirarchy or frustrating rules that fill every other area of Japanese society. I think it was Techi, actually, who was asking me about the US, and if we have "matsuri" there... and we do, more or less, in the form of carnivals or the county/state fairs, but, as I told her, they're zenzen chigau kanji; it's a totally different feeling from what you get here. Carnivals are all lame rides and rigged games and crazy food (deep fried ice cream wtf), and it feels like a bad way to go waste money more than anything; Japanese matsuri have much more spirit and fun, even if they have equally pricey food.

Also? Some of the best music ever. I was actually rather disappointed that I didn't get to hear more of the taiko players-- our own music was closer, and then we moved away from where they were, but as we stood in the Hakuoh parking lot and did our farewells I could still hear them playing, and I wanted to run over to the station and just listen and dance. I love taiko, and still would like to learn to do that... I think learning the Yosakoi dance served just as well, since I got to go to matsuri that way too, but I do still love taiko.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to watch and enjoy the festivals this week, in Nogi and Moka and Mashiko, more, since I won't actually be dancing.
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Notes of the day. I was going to type up a full post with details and everything, but I think this actually captures the spirit of things better.

-Tests were not nearly so hard as they were made out to be. Seriously, we got translations for the sentences and the grammar bits, which we were presumably supposed to know. What's up with that?
-Chisai matsuri! I got to wear the uniform for the first time! Woo~
-ohgod it was hot
-kids were kinda confused, but that's okay, because I had a hell of a lot of fun anyway
-also: kawaii!
-festival food is oishiisou. I wanted to eat everything.
-afterwards we had dinner! Yay!
-Talked a lot with Kimura-san. Cool guy.
-Got home at 10:30? Yes.
-Tomorrow: Ponyo! Ponyo ponyo ponyo ponyo ponyo po~
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A fairly low key day today. We got an overview of our final tests in each of Iijima's classes. They don't look too hard, so as long as I remember to study, I should be fine. We do have to write a report on the differences between the US and Japan, though, so I'll have to start thinking about what I want to do for that. Keleih and I did our presentation on restaurants and such, and that was fine, but I think I want something a little different for an actual report.

After class, though, I met up with my club members for our usual Friday meeting. Today the school theatre group was putting on their play, so we went to go see that instead of having practice.

It was... interesting. I caught maybe half of the dialogue (less towards the end, when I was getting tired), but I could still follow the plot fairly well. It started out with two guys playing soccer... and then space pirates come in and start threatening the one player, trying to make a deal of some kind with him. They're interrupted by a princess, and then by the police. Just when the action is getting intense, the scene freezes, and another character jumps in and starts summarizing the scene. You know the type-- the kind of thing that you get at the end of comics. "WILL the hero survive this encounter? Will the Princess OR the Pirates get their way?" etc.

And as it turns out, this WAS a comic, because the guy in the suit turns out to be the boss of a manga-ka, and as everybody else runs off stage, he starts berating the artist to finish drawing the rest of the comic. She's very reluctant to do so, but finally sits down at the table and starts writing... and then the scene starts up again.

So the play very quickly gets pretty complex, with the artist and her boss sitting in the middle of the unfolding scenes, making comments on the action while the characters of the story ignore them. There's a lot of back and forth between the pirates and the police and the princess... everybody seems to be interested in the soccer player, although I never did catch the reason for this.

Then the artist draws her boss into the comic, and things get even crazier. As the play went on, the division between reality and the story got more and more blurred, especially as the boss, while interacting with the other characters in the story, started yelling comments at the artist.

More back and forth with the different groups... the soccer player showed up with a copy of Shonen Jump (supposedly from 1990? And the play was set in 2054 or so), which was somehow significant, but there was a lot of dialogue I wasn't catching at this point, so I started getting a little confused. The soccer was important, as the other characters were asking about it, and he kept repeating the lines, "blue sky, green field, white lines, white goal." But what the real significance was, I couldn't figure out.

In the end, the woman police officer gets killed by the princess, and the other police is about to kill her in return, but is stopped by the soccer player. Everybody else runs on set, and there is a lot of arguing. The princess does get killed, but then the boss complains that the artist is being too cruel, so she throws the scene out and rewrites it. At last it is revealed that the boss is Kokeru, the guy everybody's been after this whole time, and the soccer player is Kojiro, who is... somebody else. Kojiro runs off with the Princess, and then everybody comes out dressed in soccer uniforms and starts a game, with the artist as referee.

It really was an interesting play, and definitely admirable for its complexity and overlapping plots.* I just wish I'd understood more of what was going on-- especially with the soccer part; I have no idea what that was all about. But everybody did pretty well acting their parts, and I was impressed that they managed to tell such a complex story using a really, really minimalist set (basically just some stairs leading to a raised platform, and five doors).

Definitely worth the watch.

I did a bit of planning when I got home... I looked up festivals in Tochigi this afternoon on the internet, and there are a fair handful that are close enough for me to get to. Plotting them out on my schedule, though, it seems like almost all happen in that second to last week of July. That's the week after our final tests, though, so I should have plenty of time to go and see them.

Now I just gotta grab some people to go with...




*I realize the summary above probably makes it sound really jumbled and full of crack. But it really did seem to have an overall plot, I just couldn't always follow it due to the language issue.
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You know, if things keep up like this, I’m really going to have to buy proper shoes.

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Ow.

Jun. 1st, 2008 08:37 pm
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Ugh. So, we had our (now) weekly Sunday practice. And it was... painful.

It started with jogging. This was a bad sign. Normally, we just do stretches and the work on whatever dance. So first we had to climb over the fence to get out to the track (and I was lucky there was a bicycle parked next to it, or I'd never have gotten over; the fence is easily six feet high and I can't jump that), and then... yeah. We were jogging. Now, this track is next to the river, and runs in a circle basically from one bridge to the other. It is... probably two miles for the full circuit. I actually asked them if we were going to run the whole circuit-- surely not, right? I mean, that's a long jog for everybody. Techi said we'd probably only run half.

Anyway. I did try, but I think I got a few hundred yards in and gave up. I am not built for jogging. The last time I was forced to jog was years ago in high school, and I sucked at it then. Running almost two miles straight off? No. It wasn't happening. I don't have the endurance, and I was also wearing sandals, which work for dance practice but not for jogging. I walked. Techi stayed back and walked with me, which made me feel kinda bad, but I was not going to kill myself trying to do the impossible. We walked about half the circuit, and then raced each other across the middle as a shortcut. I was actually beating Techi, even in sandals, which seemed to surprise her, but... well. I can run fairly fast for short stretches, but jogging slowly just really doesn't do me any favors.

Afterwards, we did our stretches, and then finally headed back to school. It was already after two. We'd used almost an hour of practice time, and hadn't actually done anything.

So we started dancing, and ran through four of the songs one right after another before we finally took a break. Then we ran through three more of the songs. There was another short break, and then we went back to working on "Matcha." We got almost to the end of the song, but still didn't finish. ;_; I mean, I can't feel too bad, I was doing well, better than some of the other new students, and I even got better at the one part I keep missing, but damn. It's a hard song. Awesome and fun, but very hard. (For reference, it's the video that I linked a few weeks back.)

We finished around 4:30, and I left almost immediately to go eat-- I was starving. I'd already gulped down a liter of "sports water" (basically Pocari Sweat or Aquarius-- they're all the same flavor of Gatorade-esque sports drink). I went home and devoured the bento I'd bought at the konbini that morning in minutes, and then went back to the konbini and bought more food. The rest of the evening I sat and watched episodes of Bleach and played Zelda and tried not to move too much, because everything hurt.

Ow.
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So, despite getting almost a week off of classes, I didn't end up doing much due to weather. Thursday I actually meant to go to school for just a few hours, but I ended up staying there all day, working on things online. Mainly caught up on some of the manga scanlations that I've been ignoring. Friday I went for a few hours, and then curled up at home and watched TV all day. But despite being very low-key... I wasn't really all that bored. In any case it really was too miserable out to do much.

For Saturday, Kyuu had invited me to go to a Korean cooking event, and since I didn't really have anything else to do, I went. (I'd never had Korean food, either, so I was a bit curious.) I met her and Brian at the station at 10:30, and we took the train to Nogi, which is a tiny little town maybe ten minutes away by train. Despite being tiny and kind of broken down, though, they did have an international center, which is where the event was held.

At first I'd thought we were just going to go and eat food, but we did in fact end up cooking the meal ourselves. There were two "teams," one making chijimi, which is basically Korean okonomiyaki, and the other making tan po kam tan, which was a sort of spicy vegetable and chicken stew. The chijimi was actually really good-- it was basically carrots, green onion, shrimp, squid, and clams all wrapped up in batter and then cooked like a pancake, and I ate quite a bit of it. The stew wasn't bad either, but I ate less of that because even the mild version was still too spicy for me.

Just before I'd left for the station, Techi (from the shingegumi) had texted me and said they were going "to play billiards and darts" that evening, and did I want to come? When I texted back to ask when we were meeting, she said I could either meet them at practice at four, or they'd pick me up at six. Since I didn't have much to do, and we had no practice Wednesday or Friday, I told her I'd meet them at four.

I kind of regretted this afterwards, because it was still cold and rainy, and I was reluctant to leave my warm and toasty apartment (and my game of Link's Awakening) so soon after I'd gotten home. But it turned out all right. We practiced two or three songs, and then continued work on "Matcha," which is the group's signature song, basically, and which is also quite difficult... we worked on it at last week's Sunday practice for three hours, and still only got halfway through the song. I was a bit frustrated because they kept guiding me through one part slowly, reminding me of all the steps, because I kept messing it up. Thing is, I know the correct steps and even the count, but it's tricky timing and so sometimes I slip up. Repeating what I'm supposed to do won't do me any good if I already know. I just need to practice it more, and I could do that just as well by repeating the song at normal speed. Ah well.

At six we drove to the station to pick up Nozomi and Kazei (Kazue?), and then drove down to our location of choice. It turned out to be one of the internet/manga cafes, called Aprecio. They'd talked about this place before, but I was actually really surprised by how nice it was. Everything was super-clean and very quiet; they had little cubicles with big armchairs and headphones, where you could sit and surf the net, a dozen bookshelves stuffed with manga, and a very well-stocked drink bar that had a full complement of drinks (coffee, cocoa, cappachino, a dozen different teas, and a bunch of soda) and even had a machine that would give you three different flavors of soup! The bathrooms had individually-wrapped toothbrushes and a hairbrush, and there was even a shower. It was practically a hotel.

Anyway, the back room was where we were headed-- they had two pool tables, two electronic dart boards and then a bunch of slot machines and a row of what was apparently mahjong games. The four of us played 9-ball for awhile, and I actually made a few good shots, though I didn't win any of the games. Eventually Kazu and Nozomi came back, and we ordered dinner-- 100-yen curry which was actually really good. There were a few more games of 9-ball, and then Jun, Nozomi, and I switched to darts. The electronic boards aren't quite as cool as the actual metal-tipped darts, even if they do make scoring much easier, but it was fun anyway. I somehow managed to win the first game (after starting out over a hundred points behind), by scoring two bulls-eyes in a row (one was even in the exact center of the bulls-eye, how awesome is that?), and did pretty well at the other games, though I didn't win again.

It was actually a really fun time; the cafe was a perfect hang out place, and it wasn't crowded at all even though it was a Saturday night. If it wasn't so far away I'd definitely go there more often-- it is open 24 hours, after all. We need more places like that in the US.

We left at nine, since Nozomi had to go home, and they wanted to go bowling afterwards (and apparently other places after that; they were talking about Rika getting off work at 1 am, and meeting her to go somewhere) but, while I wanted to go, unfortunately I hadn't brought enough money with me. So they dropped me off at my apartment, and I stayed home and played some more Zelda.

Still, it was a really fun time. A nice break in my weekend.
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So, as they say, “Dude, that was some party.”

And it was. It really was.

I’m not even sure how to adequately describe it beyond raucous.

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Ended up getting home just before one, and pretty much collapsed. Slept for a solid twelve hours.

Like I said, one hell of a party.
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And we're back! I've been off of classes for the last week or so due to Golden Week (though actually it's more like two weeks now, since the previous week included Showa Day and we missed a bunch of classes then, too). While it was nice to take a break, it also meant I didn't get much internet time... there's still no access at the dorm and the campus was locked up, so we couldn't get in to the lounge. I did scrape a few hours of access... by coming to campus and sitting in the park just outside the lounge, but that limits me only to battery time, and since my laptop screen is super-shiny, it was really difficult to get anything done.

Like, for example, doing video stuff.

First up is a video of the street dancing we saw in Ashikaga. This has no sound, unfortunately, because my camera can take video only, but it should give you an idea; definitely a better idea of what we saw than my description of it.



And then we have a video of the Shingegumi ACT! A quick youtube search found this for me. It's an older video, (so I'm definitely not there), but it should give you an idea. This is "Yosakoi," which is not one of the dances I know, at least not yet, but it is possibly one of the cooler dances they do. (It also shows the awesome awesome swooshy coats they wear.) You can see Rika and Techi in front.



Further pictures (again, none of me) can be seen at their site, here: http://www.freepe.jp/i.cgi?actdream116

Naturally it's all in Japanese, but you can poke around anyway.

Updates on further activities (most notably our trip to Akihabara) to come later.

Matsuri!

May. 4th, 2008 08:23 pm
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Ohhh, to sit down. It’s a good thing I don’t have anything planned for tomorrow. I don’t think I could manage it.

Today was insane, in all the best ways. I got up around eight-thirty, ate breakfast and got to school just before ten to meet the rest of the shingegumi. From there we drove to the festival. It wasn’t, as I had thought, at a temple or local shrine… actually it was in some sort of shopping center. Huh. A bit surprising, but… they did say it was a “practice festival.”

We paired up with another dance group there, which was mostly older folk, primarily women. We spent almost an hour getting prepared—people had to change into their official costumes (I finally got a big swooshy coat! Huzzah!), and then we painted our faces, and then there were stretches to do… and then… the dance!

It was basically set up so that we alternated dances with the other group, so people had a chance to breathe a little. This was good, as I was worried we’d been doing one dance after another, which is usually when I start having troubles—I simply don’t have that endurance yet. It was less of a problem than I’d thought anyway; for the first set, I spent the majority of the time on the sidelines with Akira, clapping and keeping time, since I only know the three dances. (I did, of course, dance all three that I knew. And I did quite well, too, I thought… fell down once, much to my chagrin, but I didn’t forget any major parts, and I was doing better than Akira. It didn’t matter; it was incredibly fun. Everyone kept asking if I was nervous beforehand, but when we got out there… I totally forgot the people were there, even as I was up encouraging them to join in.

We broke just before twelve for lunch, which we bought from the vendors outside this shopping center… I ended up with a big loaf of cheese bread and a fish-onna-stick, which was a bit too salty but otherwise pretty good, complemented by a slices of watermelon and pineapple that everyone shared.

After lunch we had another full set of dances… again quite fun. There’s little to say other than that it was fantastic. Though I did surprise myself, by really getting into the… genki attitude, I guess is the best way to say it. Everybody was up and dancing and having fun and I was riding the wave of enthusiasm, which isn’t something I generally find myself doing. Did better the second round; I didn’t fall, and I was managing to follow a few of the other dances fairly well.

The second set finished just before three, and we packed up pretty quickly. (I had to give my swooshy coat back at the end, alas—it is a really, really awesome coat. Hopefully I can convince them to let me keep it after a few more festivals.) From there we headed back to campus, and I half thought we were going to disperse from there, even though I’d had a feeling that we were going to do things after the matsuri.

It turned out the feeling was right, because they planned to head to the ofuro from there. This sounded like the best thing in the world just then. My feet hurt, and my legs were aching; I’d planned to go home and take a shower either way, but the ofuro would be a lot hotter and better. So we went.

It was a little awkward still, mostly because I seem to get through things a lot faster than the others… I was totally clean and washed and ready to enter the baths while Rika and Techi were still washing their hair, so I ended up having to dawdle and wash again, which is a little weird and awkward, but I wasn’t quite ready to go waltzing around by myself, partly because I wasn’t familiar with this place and also because without my glasses things get a little interesting. Not that I can’t see without them, but it's still not the most comfortable thing ever.

Anyway, onsen was had, though I ended up sitting and talking more with Nami and Namachi, as Techi and Rika didn’t like the hotter water. By the end, my feet were a little better, and I was thoroughly relaxed and clean. Huzzah. We stopped briefly in the “yasumi room,” which was a new sight for me—it was literally a “rest room”, with a few of the electronic massage chairs and then a fairly sizeable area with tatami mats, head rests, and pillows, where people were literally sprawled out, resting and sleeping.

It was about five by then, so naturally we went to go have dinner, which was at a little place just down the block from the baths. It was a cafeteria style place, but with traditional Japanese food. I got some tempura, and some teriyaki chicken, and then rice and miso soup, naturally. One of the shingegumi (Ichima, I think), insisted on paying. Again. (Seriously, they wouldn’t let me pay for anything; I paid 450 en for the ofuro, and that was it. Techi covered lunch, Ichima paid for dinner, and someone else got me a drink after the dance…and they helped out later too. It was really kind of embarrassing—I need to make them a batch of cookies or something to make up for it next practice, I dunno. Maybe I can buy them something cool in Tokyo, when we go Tuesday.)

After dinner, we went to the arcade. Normally when I go to the arcade I, you know, play games, and I was thinking I’d play some Taiko no Tatsujin and practice… but they were mostly interested in the various prize games. (I can’t call them claw games because they don’t all involve claws, though most do.) Though at least in Japan the games aren’t totally rigged to be impossible—you can win the prizes, it just takes some time, skill, and of course, a certain amount of luck. The strange giving system was at work here again… everyone pitched in some money and tried to win whatever prize someone was looking at. Techi ended up with two huge stuffed ducks, Rika got a small stuffed Mickey on a koi, Kazu got what had to be a two pound bar of chocolate… and I ended up with a small stuffed rabbit keychain (I think it was Mugen who went after the huge version, with surprising success), and later, as a gift from… I think it was Ichima again, a rather interesting plant. The general idea seems to be that obviously, if everyone pitches in, then everyone can end up with something at the end, without anyone spending a ton of money… but it’s different enough from the way we usually do things at home that it takes some adjusting to.

When everyone had gotten sufficient swag, we played some air hockey, fooled around on the little kid rides (you know, the moving cars and dinosaurs… although in this case it was Anpan-man), and finally, came back home.

I can’t help but be relieved to finally get a respite from the constant business and motion… it was an exhausting day—for awhile there I was ready to simply collapse for the night, even though it’s still quite early. I’m feeling a bit revived now, but I’ll probably still retire by ten or ten-thirty.

Of course, with all this activity tomorrow may seem pretty dull…
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So, earlier this afternoon, I was planning on coming back to my apartment and spending a leisurely evening; by which I mean I was going to come back here and eat instant ramen and spend the rest of the time watching anime, or possibly Doctor Who.

Haa.

The reality was so much better. Zutto tanoshikatta yo.

In fact, I finally succeeded in tracking down the Shingegumi ACT, which is the “street dancing” club I’ve been wanting to join. I had some difficulty at first—I went to the building that was indicated on the little map included with their flyer, and there was no one there except another club, and they directed me to the front of the third building, which is actually the building the language lounge is in. However, I didn’t see anybody meeting out there, so, returning to the lounge, I sent a quick e-mail to the leader of the group, Rika. She sent a reply back that it was a little hard to find them, but if I was still around, they’d be waiting.

So I went out, and practically tripped over them—it seems they practice in a little alcove, which is screened by a hedge of bushes. (I was thinking “mae” meant literally “in front of,” and the place is quite secluded, so it’s not a huge surprise that I missed it the first time around.)

I watched one of their dances, and then started practicing some of the moves myself, and wow, this is going to whip me into shape fast. Lots of jumping around and coordination—my biggest problem with the moves was that I kept mixing up my left and right. In the end, I got most of it, and we started running through the entire dance, and then my biggest problem was that I was out of breath halfway through and started missing the rhythm because I was too tired. Heh. Also, sandals are not appropriate footwear to do what amounts to aerobics in—mine kept half-slipping off my feet, which also tripped me up a bit.

We practiced for over an hour and a half, (and I got there an hour late, at five instead of four!) until 6:40. I was, naturally, pretty tired at the end of it, but fortunately we went to dinner afterwards (as I had suspected we might). Rika drove us to the Joy Café, and although I have no idea where it is I definitely need to find out—the place was incredibly cheap, with great food. I got a tray with a bowl of rice, miso soup, fried chicken (with the requisite shaved cabbage), and the drink bar with unlimited drinks for 650en! It was excellent. The only downside was that the place allowed smoking, which became a little bit of a problem after awhile—the place was popular, as you might expect, and there were a lot of people lighting up.

In the end we were there for over three hours; we didn’t leave until 10:30 or so, and I only just got back. Mostly we talked and talked… there were all the usual questions about where I was from, when I came to Japan and how long I’m staying, and what kind of Japanese food I do and don’t like (Rika was quite sad to hear that I listed natto under the “kirai” category), and then we got into discussions about manga and anime, and video games… we must have spent twenty minutes talking about Pokemon alone. This was the second time that I ended up providing the English names of all the Pokemon for a group of Japanese… who knew my encyclopedic knowledge of those games would end up being so useful?

There was mention of Smash Brothers, and I think I may well have found a new group of people to play that with… which should be quite interesting. Techi said she was a Kirby player, and Rika plays Pikachu… I didn’t hear anything about it from the guys, though.

We talked about anime and TV shows… zodiac signs (after a brief mention of Fruits Basket), which lead to me talking about my job at the zoo last summer, because I was wearing my Indy Zoo shirt, which has a tiger on it (and I’m also the Tiger sign), and how I painted faces there… the club members also paint their faces for the summer festivals, so I may be revisiting my ‘face painter extraordinaire’ skills for that.

Iya…iroiro na koto ga shabeta. Nanikamono oboerarenai. Demo, honto ni, sugoku tanoshikatta yo.

(Forgive me for the occasional lapse into Japanese here. I’ve been speaking mostly that the last four or five hours, and it is occasionally hard to switch back.)

We have practice again on Friday, and then Sunday there’s a mini-festival and barbecue at the school, where there will supposedly be a lot of people performing (also quite a bit of food).

It’s gonna be awesome.

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November 2013

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