Mother's Day in Japan

Japan is adorable. Japanese Mother's Day (May 12, which I think is the same as elsewhere?) is therefore equally adorable.

Look at the adorable gift from my coworker:

Justin is the brown dog, I'm the white rabbit, and Mystery Child is the dog-rabbit hybrid. Dobbit?
This is darker than I thought...

Ever wonder why Japan is so much politer than other countries? In Japan, children start learning manners BEFORE BIRTH. Hey, with the queasies and the pukies and the ever-expanding wardrobe costs, Baby's already got a lot to thank me for! I dig this!

More postal shenanigans

Back in February, I received a long-lost letter which was accidentally routed to Jamaica instead of Japan. I speculated that this was because Jamaica occurs just before Japan on drop-down menus, and someone clicking quickly could easily have chosen the wrong country.

I have no explanation for this.

And as Justin puts it... "Who is Miss Sent?"

Great News!

I'll give you a hint: she's not old and she's not injured.

Well, it's been a pretty eventful few weeks, which is why you haven't heard much from us in a while.

A lot of what's been happening has been under the radar, some of it pretty bad news (friends and family can get details directly from us or our parents) - but we have some excellent news to share with you today: Nana and I are expecting our first early this winter, after we move "back" to Columbus in June.

Dan and Kath, as expected, are beside themselves with joy.

Of course, this means we'll be wrapping the Senseitions up in the next couple of months as we transition back to the US. There are a couple posts in the pipeline, including (I hope) a suitably sentimental farewell to the country we've so happily called home the last three years, but I'm afraid we're less likely to go out with a bang than with a whimper.

Just in case these next couple weeks fly by even faster than we're expecting them to, we'd like to thank our readers for following our travels here and at The Educated Burgher and School of ROK these last five years.

A wrinkle in space-time

Riding home tonight, I stopped to avoid a confused little girl, who then turned around and backed into my stationary tire. The mother told her, "Nana, be careful!" I said, "Her name is Nana? MY name is ALSO Nana!" Then Mom and I agreed that this was pretty "Sugoi," or "Wow."

I feel like if I had run her over, in addition to all other legal issues, I might have created the sort of space-time paradox of which sci-fi misadventures are made. Also the unraveling of universes. Better not to take the chance.

Japanese lesson:
お-なまえわナナですか？
(O-namae wa Nana desu ka?)
Name (subj) Nana is (question)?
Is her name Nana?
わたしのなまえもナナです
Watashi no namae mo Nana desu!
I-possessive name also Nana is!
My name is Nana too!
すごい
Sugoi!
Duuuuude!

Kagura Dance Show at the Hiroshima Kita Hotel

The night between our Mizuho Highland ski day and our drive through Yamaguchi to visit the famous five-story pagoda, Nana and I stopped with some friends at the Hiroshima Kita Hotel. We lucked out in terms of timing: the night of our stay was a special dinner show featuring a troupe of Kagura dancers.

Kagura is a kind of dance-theater that, like the better-known but significantly more staid Noh, grew out of old Shinto religious rituals. Modern Kagura draws on a wide range of folk tales, literary works, and episodes from history, and Hiroshima is one of its most active hotbeds. It's extremely high-energy, with a raucous live music ensemble and acrobatic choreography.

Sometimes, you go to these cultural things in Japan just to say that you've done them, but in reality they're actually so boring you leave halfway through. (See: Geisha shows.)

Kagura is not one of those things. It's loud, fast, and very intense. Really: it was so gripping I can barely remember what we had for dinner!

This is where Freddie Mercury gets it.
(Somehow I missed this guy's transformation into a crazy-haired fox. Too absorbed to take photos!)

Another tragic episode from the Tale of Genji.

These guys were awesome. Check out that hair!

This picture and the ones below are from our friend George,
who is a much more skilled (and more prolific) photographer than I.

I wish I could remember whatever stupid thing I was saying right here.

Pictures with the cast after the show.

Yes, that's a giant anchor.

I should also mention that the staff and the performers were profoundly amused to have a table of gaijin in the audience. When they were raffling off little souvenir plastic folders, they straight-up just gave them to us, after making a long speech in Japanese thanking us (I think) for coming all the way from America to see them. I didn't have the heart or the language skills to tell them we'd only come up from Fukuoka (and that a lot of us weren't American).

Yamaguchi: Ruriko-ji's Five Story Pagoda

Thanks, George, for the photo!

There is no building quite as iconically Asian as the pagoda. Earlier this spring, Nana and I visited an example particularly beloved among the Japanese as we passed through Yamaguchi on our way back from skiing at Mizuho Highland. (More on that later, perhaps.)

The five-story pagoda at Ruriko-ji isn't the biggest or most spectacular in Japan, but it benefits from being 1) very old (1442), and 2) in a beautiful location. It sits in a pretty little park on a wooded hillside at the edge of the city, looking out over the broad valley in which Yamaguchi sits.

But the pagoda wasn't the only attraction here: the rest of the temple grounds were also lovely, especially with the flowers just starting to bloom.

I think this is a Japanese foot shiatsu diagram. Maybe you put the coin on the spot where you would put the needle?

I loved this stone lantern in the pond.

Plum blossoms!

(Note: We were actually on this trip with a bunch of friends from our apartment building, but I forgot to ask them for permission to include them in this entry - and I don't like posting pictures of people without permission. My apologies to the rest of the Nishijima Mansion crew!)

Flea market find - guri tea caddy, I think

Today Justin and I went to the flea market at Hakozaki Shrine, where we've found some fun things ranging from ceramics to World War II propaganda kimonos to the Tanuki of Doom. We weren't looking for anything in particular, but ended up with this little thing when it caught our eye:

The tea caddy, not the book. That's for size perspective.

So what is it? I could be totally wrong about all of this, but here's my guess.

There is a technique called "guri" in lacquerware which consists of layering colors of lacquer, usually black and red, and then cutting through them to make a stripey pattern. See:

Bottom half is gently cleaned by me, top half is as-bought. I hope this helped us get it cheaper.

This technique was used in China as well as in Japan, although the Japanese name guri has won out over the Chinese name tixi. So if this is what I have, is it valuable?

Probably not. According to this forum, the fact that my piece has a blue enamel interior means it's probably a mid-20th century Chinese piece, nothing really old or super valuable. On the other hand, I paid about $20 for it, which I think is perfectly reasonable for a lovely little decorative box which is still technically an antique. I mean, a mass-produced bamboo box at Pier 1 Imports runs you $20 these days. Which is why we also got this cheapy plastic plum lunchbox for $8, even though it's a little scratched:

Plus it had bubble wrap. That kind of fun is worth at least $1.

When you're ignorant like us, you have to buy things based on whether or not you accept the price as written, because heaven only knows if you're getting a deal or not!