Get ready for a long rambling post….

Coming back from my class at the University of Shiga Prefecture today, enduring the winds from Typhoon 20 (they have numbers here, not names) was an incredibly tedious experience. This one didn’t even make landfall, but since Japan is an extremely narrow island, everyone is close to the ocean, so the effects were almost as if it had hit us. In good weather its a 25 minute bike ride that goes parallel to Lake Biwa the entire time, so the winds coming off of that are strong enough as it is. I haven’t looked into it yet, but hopefully the city bus that I see parked outside of the college as I leave my class each time comes somewhere close to JCMU, so that if it happens to snow I won’t have to bike all the way through it.

I didn’t write in my blog about the last class period I had for my Japanese Religion class. We filled 4 hours by watching two movies: the Ghibli film Pom Poko, and an old Japanese film called Hoichi the Earless. I had not yet seen Pom Poko, so it was a nice treat. Its certainly a very Japanese film, in that it deals with a lot of folklore surrounding tanuki, which are a sort of racoon-like creature that is able to transform into objects and even people. Their mountain is being razed so that humans can build new subdivisions, and the tanuki’s don’t want to lose their homes, so they fight back by transforming themselves to personify characters and ideas from Japanese folklore, in an attempt to scare the humans away. The other film, Hoichi the Earless, is one I had seen before while randomly flipping channels on TV one day. Its the story of a blind man living at a temple, and is well known for his biwa playing. He is called every night by the spirits of the Heike clan (this dealing with a very famous incident in Japanese history in which the Heike and Genji clans fought, and the Heike were all but decimated). Eventually the people living at the temple with him become worried when he comes back every night from some errand that he never tells them about. They follow him one night and find him playing his biwa in the middle of some ruins. In order to keep the spirits from calling him back until he is worked to death, the monks paint the Heart Sutra on his body, rendering him invisible to the spirit messenger that comes to get him every night. Unfortunately they forgot to paint the sutra on his ears……..which is how he became known as Hoichi the Earless. Quite an entertaining pair of films, but their relation to Japanese religion was thin at best.

Today’s class was less entertaining than last week’s class. We started out by watching a series of films about some man who has to fight in judo matches in order to win honor for….someone. The teacher spent most of the class fast forwarding through most parts of the films, so I didn’t really catch the plots or significance of anything that was shown. All I know is that the main character jumps into some pond and stays there overnight, holding onto a pole. Its not until the next morning, when he watches some lotus flowers opening, that he comes to some great realization, jumps out the pond and apologizes to his sensei. What is he apologizing for? I’m not really sure. All I know is that this film was very famous and so it was remade about 34763845 times, including in anime form. Next off, we watched The Most Depressing Anime Film Ever Made. Yes, Grave of the Fireflies. But we didn’t watch all of it, no, the teacher just fast forwarded to the very end, the most depressing part. If you’ve seen the film, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen it, my words really can’t describe how heart wrenching it is. After that, it was selections from the Akira Kurosawa classic Ran. Then, we watched one episode of another random anime series called Haunted Junction. While it was kind of cute, it wasn’t really the kind of anime that I usually enjoy (not into all that super deformed, slapstick, nosebleed type anime). Then, with 40 minutes left of class, we watched Princess Mononoke. Of the at least 15+ times that I have seen this film, this was the first time I’ve ever actually watched it in Japanese. As much of an anime purist as I am, I think I prefer the dub in this case. Watching the film I could only think about how I’d like to sell off all the animation cels I currently own plus maybe a kidney to get my hands on some artwork for the movie. (That or just make a ninja attack on the Ghibli Museum some night and rescue the poor cels that are tacked to the walls there….so sad.)

Another thing that watching Princess Mononoke reminded me of was something that a friend of the host family that I stayed with said a few weeks ago. There is an island off of southern Japan called Yakushima, which is supposedly where Hayao Miyazaki got all of his ideas for the setting of Princess Mononoke. From the pictures I’ve seen of it, it certainly seems true. I think I might have to look into going down there for a weekend or more….

Speaking of travel, I learned some interesting tidbits from my new conversation partner who I met last week. Monday was our first ‘meeting’ though, and we spent about an hour and a half chatting about homework, snow, toll booths, you name it. Her name is Machiko and she takes English classes at JCMU on Mondays and Thursdays. She’s currently working in advertising, and is trying to learn Chinese and English as the same time. Sounds crazy to me, but her English is very good, much better than my Japanese. Anyway, some of the things that we discussed were about travel, since she also enjoys visiting various places in Japan. She was telling how, any way you do it, transportation in Japan is really expensive. To take the train from here to Kyoto is about an hour long trip, and costs 1100yen each way (~$11). If you were to drive there, on the highways, it would take you about 40 minutes and would cost about 1500yen because of the toll booths. If you took the side roads, it would take you about an hour to get there and there wouldn’t be tolls, but once you get there, you’re looking at parking rates of up to 1000yen an hour. I guess its a nice way to make people not drive anywhere, since you are all but forced to use mass transit unless there is a pressing need to use your private car. Another travel item we talked about was going to Hokkaido for the annual Snow Festival. From JCMU, its about a 13 hour trip by train, so the possibility of me going to it seemed slim until Machiko told me that she went several years ago and paid all of 30000yen (~$300) for roundtrip airfare and her hotel. Sounds like a sweet deal to me, so in the coming months I’m going to be hunting down some travel agencies for prices, because I’d really like to see the 2-story tall snow sculptures that they have every year.

Jumping into the past a bit, on Tuesdays I took the train to Minami-Hikone (literally South Hikone) to visit a mall called Vivia City. I was going there in hopes of finding some face paint or anything else that looked viable for a Halloween costume. JCMU is hosting a Halloween party of sorts, and there are going to be something like 80 children under the age of 10 wandering the halls and getting candy. Halloween is not something that is practiced in Japan, so every year JCMU holds this event to show Japanese kids what its all about. So I get to this mall, its Tuesday evening around 6pm. Prime mall crawling time, right? Wrong. As we walked in the parking lot seemed a bit dead, which I mentioned to someone else in 2nd year, Ian, who went along with me. He assured me (since he had been here before) that that was just for the movie theater. Getting into the mall, however, we found everything to be closed, including all of the restaurants. We were forced to eat at the only open place (McDonalds, which I’m starting to get sick of eating at), and when we wandered around the mall and found it to be, in fact, closed, we spent a couple dollars in an arcade (which was still open? yes everything else wasn’t?? I don’t understand) to make our 180yen train tickets meaningful, and headed back to JCMU.

As far as the costume hunting went, I came back empty handed. I plan on wearing a kimono that I purchased on last year’s trip to Japan, and I’m going to wear that, along with some other things that I’m going to try and scrounge up. Gonna go to a store soon to look for some kind of cheap, kimono-y looking shoe so that I’m not walking around the flip flops on. Even if I do, I’ve already put more effort into a costume than I imagine most other students at JCMU have. Today, I went about the task of washing the kimono. Ever since I bought it last year, its been sitting in the bag that it came in, because 1) it smelled somewhat old and musty and I didn’t know how to clean it, 2) because I realized after researching kimonos that you must own exactly 5347 other essential pieces before you can actually put on the kimono, and 3) where the heck would I wear it to? Well, now I know where. I don’t have any of the extra pieces however, and I still don’t know the correct way of washing an antique kimono, so I just kind of did it the gaijin way. Filled up the bathtub with water and a little soap, tested a part of the kimono first before plunging it in, and then just….went at it. I was worried that it would be ruined in the process, so when it initially hit the water and then turned bright red, I was getting worried. It was obvious from washing it that the kimono is antique, however the red lining is not. Luckily nothing on the kimono changed colors, however now that I’ve washed it, it smells about 5x worse than beforehand. Instead of smelling old, it now has a very strong chemical odor. With my limited resources here, I think my best bet will be waiting until it dries, lighting some incense, and locking it into the bathroom for about an hour.

Well its now 7:36pm Japan Standard Time, which translates to dinner time for me. I’ll wrap this post up with a picture from my Pig Cam, of a happy looking Samwise sitting inside the doorway of her house, enjoying her newly renovated and expanded cage: