Nihongo o sukoshi hanashimasu!

(Translation: "I speak a little Japanese.")

For me and Nana both, one of our greatest regrets about the time we spent in Korea (besides eating moving squid tentacles) was learning almost none of the language. We learned how to read hangul, the Korean alphabet, which is so utterly brilliant a moderately intelligent sea cucumber could probably figure it out. We also learned a few key phrases, mostly concerned with food and the procurement thereof. But the grammar was challenging, and the pronunciation opaque. More importantly, we spent pretty much our entire day in English, and we were so exhausted by our work that evening classes seemed pretty much impossible.

So learning Japanese is one of our major goals during our time here in Japan. We still managed to put it off until last spring, but since then our progress has been unexpectedly swift. It helps that there's a very good Japanese language school, Genki JACS, only a few subway stops away, and it also helps that Japanese is a lot easier for English speakers to pronounce than Korean. Most importantly, though, Nana and I are in our fourth year teaching now, which means we're a lot more efficient with our work. We simply have had more time to spend on Japanese in a little over one year than we had to spend on Korean in two.

It's not surprising, then, that during a recent excursion to Kurume, I managed a Herculean feat of linguistics unmatched by anything I ever attempted, let alone achieved, during my time in Korea.

I figured out which bus to take.

The thing is, you can figure out most Japanese with nothing other than English. There's some good information online (though you have to hunt for it), the ticket machines work in English, the personnel on the main lines speak a tiny bit of English, and the signs all have enough little bits of English that you can get by.

But buses are another story. Japanese, as far as the eye can see.

So when we found ourselves puttering around Kurume, gorged on yakitori (grilled meat skewers), a fifteen-minute bus ride away a 62-meter-tall statue of the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy with an animatronic Buddhist hell in her feet - you can bet your buttons there's a post coming on that one - and nothing to get us there and back but our meager Japanese.

But we did it! We asked which bus went to Narita-san temple, we figured out how much it was, we even wrote down the characters for the stop. Of course, that last part was probably unnecessary, as all we really had to do was get out by the 62-meter statue, but still . . . yay for us!

Wednesday Weirdness: Sound Village Karaoke

Hard to believe a week has flown by since last Wednesday. Busy, busy, busy!

Here's a little dash of weirdness I've been sitting on for a while now: Sound Village, an . . . elaborate (?) karaoke place downtown, near the Canal City mall.

Sound Village is meant to look like a 1950s American town, with each karaoke room playing the role of a typical town building - post office, schoolhouse, church, movie theater, and so on. The facade is even done up like an old-time movie theater marquee.

 For some reason, they always seem to put us gaijin here:

Overall, the effect is pretty neat, but this being Japan and all some elements of the execution are . . . odd.

Santa Claus flying a biplane, for instance. Or the creepy fake-mud-wall-face that greets you in the entrance cave.

Or, for that matter, the racks of incongruous cosplay outfits.

But the crowning touch is probably the array of naked mannequins in the bathroom watching you pee.

Pictured here: the least sketchy thing about these bathrooms.

 Oh, and the bathroom is also a cave.

Other than that, the karaoke is pretty normal: sit in a huge room with your friends, pick your songs from a book, and rock out.

At least, as normal as it can get with the two of us involved.

Wednesday Weirdness: Kagura (?) Masks and Crotch-Thrusting in Kurume

To paraphrase the great Bart Simpson, Japan is where weirdness comes from.

Nana and I see a lot of weird stuff over here. On Wednesdays, when we remember, we'll turn the spotlight on some of that weirdness, sharing it with you the same way Japan has shared it with us: with lots of head scratching and little explanation.

Here's a video clip from a yakitori festival we went to last weekend in Kurume. Half an hour of internet research later, I'm reasonably certain these are, um, kagura masks? Maybe?

The pelvic thrusts remain unexplained.

The Best $80 I Have Spent In Japan: Nova Bossa Nova and A Second Fortuitous Meeting by the Takarazuka Revue

Welcome to "The Best $80 I Have Spent In Japan" (although the yen has gone through the roof of late, and actually Y8000 is now closer to $105.)

Well, ok. Welcome instead to "The Best $105 I Have Spent In Japan Which Would Have Been $80 Back When The Exchange Rate Was Y100=$1 Which I'm Not Complaining About Since When I Wire Money Home I Effectively Have Earned A 20% Raise."

The point is, I got tickets to Takarazuka. Just look how excited I am.


Every single picture of me in this post will feature this exact moronic grin. Why? Because I cannot even describe how fired up I was to go see Takarazuka. I've been dreaming of this since we lived in Scotland, where I researched Takarazuka as part of my dissertation.

At this point, it would probably help if told you what Takarazuka is. To quote my dissertation, Takarazuka is a

Japanese all-female theater company [fully titled] the Takarazuka Revue. The Revue dates to 1914, when a small performing company was founded to help increase rail ticket sales to visit the spa town of Takarazuka. Today, the Revue consists of five troupes performing to audiences of over two thousand on a daily basis, in Takarazuka and at a second site in Tokyo.

I was going to write a citation for that (it's on Page 7, if you care) but I realized I actually seem somehow not to have saved a single version of my dissertation which includes my cover page, and at this point, one year later (and after a glass of wine) I have absolutely zero recollection of what my dissertation was titled. I would say this is a bad sign, but I did get honors on it, so that has to count for something. The topic of my dissertation was costumes in various stage and theatrical productions of Baroness Orczy's fabulous novel The Scarlet Pimpernel, and I am immensely proud of the fact that not only did it permit me to watch musicals on DVD in the name of work, but also that it contains the sentence "Sir Percy's 'peacock' costume contains all of the elements of a pimp suit, including the cane and plumed hat." (Page 14, if you're still keeping score). If any science postgrads would like to argue with me that science is a harder field, I'd like to point out that you're working for hours in laboratories and I'm analyzing tiger-print pimp hats. Your work may be harder, but I'm sure as heck smarter.

The important point here is that Takarazuka played a significant role in a) me receiving an excellent grade and b) me earning credit for staying up late watching videos on Youtube. More information on Takarazuka from The Dissertation Which Shall Not Be Named:

Takarazuka operates under the aesthetic of spectacle, in which "flamboyant costumes" play a key role.¹ Takarazuka's portrayal of an "idealised version of masculinity," however, is more self-referential than imitative, and "markedly differs in many respects from that expected of actual males in Japanese society."² The costumes, designed and produced in-house by employees steeped in Takarazuka conventions,³ contribute to the kata, or standardized "forms" of behavior and appearance which are "coded masculine or feminine" to indicate to the audience which gender an actress is potraying.⁴ Kata forms for male-portraying otokoyaku, for instance, include long legs and sideburns; however, they are also expected to wear false eyelashes and heavy makeup, which are not likely to be found on an average Japanese man.⁵ In addition to the kata for otokoyaku and female-portraying musumeyaku, Takarazuka's costumes are also influenced by conventions for dressing the hero, who has a signature color (white) and often a signature cut of garment. (page 8)

1Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 26.

2Leonie Stickland, Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan's Takarazuka Revue (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2008), 316.

3Stickland 2.

4Robertson, Takarazuka 38.

5Lorie Brau, "The Women's Theatre of Takarazuka," TDR, vol. 34 no. 4 (1990), 86.

Man, this is some great stuff! Sometimes I forget how awesome I am. One hundred and fifty-nine words and five footnotes? That's like one footnote every 32 words. (Yes, I needed a calculator for that. That's what you get for being a humanities major.)

I studied the 2008 Star Troupe production of The Scarlet Pimpernel (aka Sukaretto Pinpaaneru in Japan, where the only consonant you can end a word with is "n.") The villain of the piece was played by Yuzuki Reon, who was subsequently promoted to Star Troupe Top Star when the woman who played Percy retired. Star Troupe, coincidentally, is the troupe which comes through Fukuoka every year on tour. I saw posters last year all over the subway for their production of Romeo and Juliet, but I was too shy to try to find out how to get tickets. (Also intimidated by this wiki post on how to get tickets at the main theaters, which includes 10 different methods, none of which is actually guaranteed to work). This year, I swore, I would at least give it my best try.

Takarazuka came to Fukuoka with a double-header. The first show was a samba spectacular called Nova Bossa Nova, and the second is a comedy piece called A Second Fortuitous Meeting. You can see the preview on Youtube here. In fact, this is not really optional. You must go look at it to have even a faint clue what kind of awesome Justin and I were dealing with. This barely scratches the surface of the awesome, yet at the same time manages to reveal absolutely jack diddly about the content of the show.

Bear in mind that between the two of us, Justin and I have had about ten weeks of beginner Japanese. We've reached the point where we can correctly produce the sentences "No smoking on the airplane" and "Please turn left at the stop light," both of which are surprisingly unhelpful while watching historical romantic comedies and dance spectaculars set in Brazil.

We knew this before we went, though, so after coercing our beloved teacher assistant Kumi into ordering tickets for us on the phone (shockingly simple for the Fukuoka tour), I sat down to read the plot summaries on TakaWiki. Unfortunately, something went wrong about halfway through, and although I got the basic gist of the plot for Nova Bossa Nova (basically, a diamond necklace keeps getting stolen around), I only read the first few sentences of the A Second Fortuitous Meeting plot before we had to run off someplace. Here are the sentences as they existed at the time:

"A tale from the fairly distant past. In the village of Phosphor on the day of the Star Festival, when once a year the "star in the center of the north" rises to its highest height, there was a legend that lovers who pray for love under the village's sacred tree of Yggdrasil will be happy for eternity."

We arrive at the theater, and I give Justin the lowdown on the diamond theft plot. He says great, what about the second show? And I say, "I have no idea. Something about a tree called Yggdrasil." And Justin, God bless him, says, "Oh, the tree at the center of the world in Norse mythology?" Justin has eternal shotgun in the dream Cash Cab ride of just about everybody we know.

The show starts. Nova Bossa Nova is incredible. The women of Takarazuka are in insanely good shape. They dance and sing flat out for nearly two hours, and this is only half of the evening's performance. The actresses who play men train for years to move, walk, and sing in a stylized masculine fashion, and although I don't know that you're 100% convinced that they're men, they certainly don't seem like women, either. Justin sums it up with the line from The Birdcage - "I just never realized John Wayne walked like that."

It makes discussing the plot with your seatmate nearly impossible: "I like the hero. He's... I mean, she's funny. I mean he. I don't know." It's the sort of thing you find fascinating, if you are the sort of person who can write nearly 1500 words on Sir Percy's cravats. (If you are familiar with the character of Sir Percy from The Scarlet Pimpernel, I think you can agree with me that he would think 1500 words could not begin to do the subject justice).

One thing about Nova Bossa Nova is really disconcerting, and it's not the gender factor. It's the fact that in this musical, produced in Japan and set in Brazil, a good half of the songs are in Spanish. I'm sitting there thinking that my Japanese has gotten much better when I suddenly realize what they're singing is the Julio Iglesias hit "Quiereme Mucho." And then they all go to a tango club. It was the most Japanese Spanish Argentine Carnaval in the history of Brazil.

The second show begins after an intermission, during which we cannot believe that we are allowed to eat in our seats. I also went out and bought a Takarazuka shoulder bag. I only had to get halfway through the show to realize that this would be an experience for the ages. I also paused to get my picture taken with a cardboard cutout of Yuzuki Reon, who was absolutely incredible. Youtube videos really don't prepare you for how amazing her voice is, and the woman can dance like... well, like a very talented man. Her next starring role will be Danny Ocean in the Takarazuka musical version of Ocean's 11. I would give my right molar to see this production, and that's the one which doesn't hurt right now.


So intermission ends, and there we are sitting, armed only with five chapters of textbook Japanese and the knowledge that this play is somehow going to involve the sacred Norse tree Yggdrasil, and boom, out come the performers in costumes ranging from a guy who looks like King George I to a maid whose costume fell off a bicycle from the 1890s. This is not as expected. And there's dialogue... SO MUCH DIALOGUE... and we have no idea what's going on. Imagine trying to follow Oscar Wilde, or Blackadder, or even Jon Stewart, with Hungarian phrasebook English. (Note: link is Monty Python, so of course it's rude). We keep leaning towards each other and guessing things like, "Is that girl, the one dressed like a boy, supposed to be a boy? Or is she supposed to be a girl dressed as a boy? I mean, more so than all the other women dressed as boys in this play. YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY!"

Then Justin, the English major, has an epiphany.

"The one in red simple clothes is actually a rich guy. He's supposed to marry the girl in pink. But he's not sure about it so he's traded places with his servant, the guy now wearing his expensive purple suit. But he doesn't know that the girl he's supposed to marry has also had second thoughts and traded places with her maid. This must be a Restoration comedy."

Check out the actual plot summary:
"Based on the 17th century romantic comedy by Marivaux, this is the tale of a man and a woman who are intended to marry who switch places with two strangers in order to observe their intended partner, and what happens because of this switch."

Hey science majors... WHERE IS YOUR PERIODIC TABLE NOW???

This is the kind of thinking it takes to earn permanent Cash Cab shotgun: you not only can get the plot of something you're watching in a foreign language, but you can correctly identify the production context of the original script. It would be like watching a Sri Lankan guy whonk around with a sword for a while and realizing it was a South Asian adaptation of Beowulf.

To this day, however, we don't know how Yggdrasil fits in.

ORI-ly? Japanese Orimono and Hakata-Ori

(For non web dorks, that's a reference to the meme of the surprised owl asking "Oh, Really?" but misspelled because... it's funny. No, there is no better explanation. You either find it hilarious or you don't.)

The Japanese word "orimono" means "woven things" or "textiles," so "ori" as a suffix can be stuck on to a style of weaving. I wrote last year about saki-ori, or rag weaving. This summer, as part of our language/culture course with Genki JACS, we visited the Hakata-ori Development College to learn about a local specialty.

"Hakata" used to be a separate small city, the port beside Fukuoka Castle. Nowadays, there's just one city, called Fukuoka. But many of the cultural things carry the Hakata name - such as Hakata ramen and Hakata dolls - rather than Fukuoka. Hakata-ori, therefore, is a local loom-woven silk fabric which, in its most traditional form, looks like this: (note that this is the reverse side)

This is similar to many Southeast Asian designs, particularly Chinese minority designs and Vietnamese designs. I'd find you examples but I kind of have a headache and this post is taking forever, so just trust me on this. Anyway, it's because the original Hakata family of weavers traveled to China to study weaving, once in the 1200s and then again around 1500 for a refresher course. (Yes, these were two different people, not a clan of immortal vampire weavers. Which would also be awesome).

The design above contains Buddhist symbols in the center: the X/star pattern represents, I think, the monk's prayer wheel.

(Note the logo in the upper left - this appears on certified authentic handicraft products).

The stripes represent a family. The thicker stripes are parents, so the one set of stripes, with thick stripes on the outside, represents the parents protecting the children as the children grow up. When the stripes switch to thin on the outside, this symbolizes children caring for ageing parents. Buddhist prayer patterns and Confucian filial piety on an imported Chinese loom: it's like East Asian history in belt form!

Speaking of, the most common traditional use of Hakata-ori was as a belt, or obi, worn with a kimono. ("Obi" is a much-beloved Japanese word among crossword puzzle enthusiasts. It shows up constantly.) Our guide at the college said that obis are still popular, but due to cost, they sell a lot of smaller items as well. Coin purses are popular, as are men's neckties:

Back to symbolism. Each of the five traditional colors (yellow, indigo blue, red, green, and purple) has its own symbolic meaning. I have two different versions for this, although they're similar enough that there might just be a translation issue. The first source is my written notes from the college tour (of course I took written notes; I'm a history teacher. I also use semicolons in blog posts. If I started Tweeting, I'd use up all my characters on citations). The second source is an article on Hakata-ori from Fukuoka Now, the English-language local magazine.

This posterboard shows the characters and plant dyes used for each of the five traditional colors.

What's with the double names? The guide told us the fourth fabric sample in the picture was light blue, but it looks pretty darn green to me. I've been informed that in Japan, and Korea as well, people don't distinguish as sharply between the colors "blue" and "green." As a child who grew up with Buddy Blue and Patty O'Green from the Japanese show Rainbow Brite, I'm skeptical of this assertion, but I don't make these things up, I just report them. My friend Leslie, who spent a lot of time in Russia, says that Russians have entirely different words for "sky blue" and "dark blue." I consider this a strong warning about the dangers of communism.

Official, certified Hakata-ori carries the seal of the Japan Traditional Craft Center, which has identified 198 handicrafts made throughout Japan as worthy of preservation and authentication to the consumer market. (You can see the logo in the Buddhist prayer wheel picture above). Hakata-ori is hella expensive, which I didn't really understand until I saw it being manufactured at the college. As required by the JTCC, every step of the process is done by hand. They spin and dye their own silk, although not on the weaving site. This makes sense to me - as a teacher who survived a first grade art class, I advise that you never let anything wet or smelly near your final product, which is why I always locked the children out of the room for the entire class. You can't be too careful.

Hakata-ori is made on huge looms, and I can't even begin to understand how they work. These machines are so complex I can't believe that they were ever invented in the first place. Some key concepts: the fabric produced is the reverse side, so the weavers have to check the mirror to make sure the original pattern is correct; the long threads (warp) flip top and bottom, and the figure pattern is created via threading yarn through a card or computer program. I have no idea how, but I suspect witchcraft.

(The floppy disk here is the high-tech whiz-bang modern version.)

If you didn't think that was laborious enough, take a look at these ladies. The silk warp threads are not long enough for the intended final product (fabric to be cut into neckties), so what do they do?

Tie each individual warp thread to another piece of thread. Seven thousand minuscule, slippery pieces of dark blue silk. They said it takes two or three days.

These are students at the college, which is a two year program. They study, in addition to all the steps of weaving from silk production to putting on the obi, traditional Japanese arts like tea ceremony and flower arranging. The guide said it helped inform their production of the fabric, especially when it came to designing their own original patterns. Most students go on to work in the handicrafts industry, sometimes opening their own shops.

Friday Photo: Japanese-Style American-Style French Toast

Nana and I end up with a lot of cool one-off photos that don't really fit into longer posts. Starting now, we'll try to post one or more each Friday.

Here's breakfast, at a small cafe next to our Japanese language school. 

French toast, milk (with ice in it), yoghurt with blueberry jam . . . and a salad of corn, lettuce, and tomato with ranch dressing.

Conveyor Belt Sushi

Japan can be a tough place to wrap your brain around. So much about the culture is slow, serene, and fastidiously careful - think about the painstakingly manicured grounds of a temple, or the soothing ritual of an outdoor bath. At the same time, so much about the culture is rapid, noisy, and numbingly chaotic - think about the flashing lights of a pachinko parlor, or the busy shuffle of a crowded street.

Nothing captures this contradiction quite like kaiten-zushi, or conveyor-belt sushi, which is for my money the best fast-food option in Japan. (I'd put ramen a very close second).

Conveyor-belt sushi is just what it sounds like: plate after plate of sushi, snaking its way around a restaurant, past the patron's hungry eyes. If you see something you like, you simply grab it and dig in, then pay by the plate at the end of the meal, with plates usually color-coded by price. You can also place special orders by filling out a little slip of paper, which is helpful during the lunch rush, when sometimes the pickins on the belt itself can get pretty slim.

(Remember, e-mail readers: to see videos like the one above, you'll need to click through to the blog.)

Overall, kaiten-zushi is a great blend of these two Japans:

On the one hand, you have sushi, which begs to be eaten with a sort of careful, focused attention - all the subtle flavors, folded into one momentary bite. (Still doesn't keep me from scarfing it down, though.)

On the other hand, you have this endless parade of colors and flavors, presented for your immediate gratification.

Put them together, and you get a shamefully large proportion of our calories every week, plus an insatiable desire to wear our chopsticks like walrus teeth.