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!

The Sapporo Brewery

(Our apologies for the long silence - what with Spring Break, then a busy week at work preparing for an accreditation visit, there's barely been a moment to blog!)

For most Americans, when you hear someone say "Sapporo," you probably picture a tall, silver can with a little yellow star. Sapporo Beer is Hokkaido's ambassador to the world - one of Japan's beer mega-brands, along with Kirin and Asahi (and to a lesser degree, Suntory, which you rarely see outside of Japan).

You have a point, snowman - why not spend an afternoon at the beer museum?

It's history and beer, all in one!

The Sapporo Brewery has a starring role in the very interesting history of commercial brewing in Japan, and by extension modern brewing across Asia. Founded in 1876 as part of a government project to develop the Hokkaido economy, the company that would eventually become Sapporo is one of the oldest commercial brewing operations in East Asia. The old brewery building is simply a spectacular piece of architecture, beautifully restored to house the museum.

An old mash tun.

An restored stained glass window depicting Hokkaido-grown barley.

The tasting hall.

The original brewmaster was trained in Germany, and thus helped set the course of East Asian beer for the next 150 years - Sapporo is a big part of why East Asian beer is almost exclusively based on German recipes, whereas the beers in India and Southeast Asia are typically British in origin.

While the displays are mostly in Japanese, there's enough there for a visitor with a tiny bit of Japanese to piece together a rough history of the company.

Though there are a few more of these labels around than might be in good taste.

The first exhibit included some really fascinating bottles from Sapporo-licensed breweries throughout Asia. It's the dark side of the history of Asian beer: the reason why Asian beer tastes like it does can be traced pretty much directly back to the Japanese Empire. Once Japanese soldiers developed a taste for beer in the 1880s, Japanese-style beer follow them into all the territories they occupied.

Of course, this being a Japanese museum, there had to be some elements of it that were simply inexplicable. Here, it was the Wonka-meets-Santa's-Workshop quality of the models depicting the brewing process.

I don't remember those other brewer tours having quite so many snowman-elves . . .

 My favorite part of the museum, though, was a big gallery full of Sapporo advertisements. I loved the old wooden signboards.

But the posters were also a treat, tracing the broad trends of Japanese fashion and print culture over the decades. (These are roughly in order, from the late 19th century to the early 1980s. Apparently, I failed to take any pictures of anything later, though I remember some good ones.)

This gallery also included a small exhibit on Space Barley, a special-edition Sapporo brew made from barley grown on the International Space Station in 2006. 

At about $100 a six-pack at its initial debut, it was one of the world's most expensive beers - and the best anyone could say about it was that it tasted pretty much like Sapporo. That was the point, though - to show that grains could be grown in microgravity without compromising their usefulness in a variety of food production processes.

Of course, like all good brewery tours and/or beer museums should, our tour ended in the tasting room, where we could sample a range of Sapporo offerings.

On the left is "Black Label," which is their main product (called "Premium," I think, in the US); the middle is "Classic," an old-fashioned light lager; the right is a hoppier pale lager from a small Sapporo brewery in northeastern Hokkaido.

Sadly, Japanese macrobrews aren't all that different from one another, and they start to get pretty old after a while. The "Black Label" doesn't taste much different from "Kirin Ichiban," the "Classic" tastes pretty much like a cheap version of "Black Label," and the pale lager tastes pretty much like "Asahi SuperDry" (which, for my money, is the best of the big Japanese beers).

The onion beer cheese round failed to cleanse the palate.

 But it was still a nice place to sit down for a drink on a cold afternoon.

Plus, this being Japan, they had some stuff to stand in and/or stick your head through for silly photos.

Because you haven't really been there if you haven't taken a picture of your face shoved through a big sheet of particle board.