20 VI 07
(written about the previous week)
one week of absurdly late nights of camaraderie, vice and nerdspeak at the Sokendai campus with a hundredish international students. i spoke awful Spanish, worse Japanese, and French so appalling that it rent wide a ragged maw in space and time. i held my own against the Germans at their official sport (besides soccer). i charmed women from Nice. i became fourth author on a refined mathematical (and hilarious) model describing The Beer Goggle Effect, one's Realized Hotness, and the Hill At The End by discovering fundamental flaws that arise when the problem is applied to someone with too much game.
i suspect that had our tenure at Sokendai been but one day longer, these polite Japanese people would have revolted and removed us by force.
anyway, you can well imagine what the week entailed. instead, i shall fashion some words on this last weekend, a home-stay with the Yabushita family. let us say that i lucked out big time. the Yabushitas are an extraordinarily kind, well-educated clan in Yokohama, a suburb of Tokyo. the parents are older and remind me in many ways of my own parents. Yabushita-sensei, my host father, is a quite distinguished professor at Waseda University (which you have to infer between the lines). his wife, Yabushita-san, teaches Japanese to foreign students and on Saturday gave a class to parents at a local high school on how to wear a kimono. they have three grown sons: Yasuhiro-san, 27, an MD; Tomohiro-san, 25ish, works at a trading company and is a world traveler; and Kazuhiro-san, 19, a very shy college sophomore who slept most of the time.
the Yabushitas have a beautiful home in Yokohama and served amazing meals at every turn. they all speak impeccable English, but i was still able to learn a bit of Japanese. on Saturday, Yabushita-sensei took me to nearby Kamakura. it is a small but bustling town, the seat of the first (Minamoto) shogunate Bakufu government (1185-1333). it was a perfectly cloudless, warm day and the place was Disneyworld-hopping with tourists. we visited several classic temples, including a sprawling complex liberally adorned - and i do mean everywhere - with the Buddhist symbol upon which Zelda's Triforce is based. for a dork with an imagination, it was awesome. that one also has a national treasure site that has enshrined one of the teeth of the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni/Shaka.
i suppose that's a pretty big deal. thinking about a hypothetical Christian equivalent leads to some interesting places. haha.
at the shrine to Hachiman, the indigenous god of war, we saw a Shinto wedding. the bride and groom wore traditional, elaborate garb while musicians piped into bizarre woodwinds. they were cranking them through that day - as one wedding party left, another procession formally strolled up the walk to the shrine.
Kamakura also has a giant bronze Buddha, Daibutsu. it's out in the open, as the building that originally housed it was destroyed by a tsunami forty-seven thousand years ago. the quickest way to get there is via train... but Saturday, like probably any other resembling a sunny weekend, the trains transformed into wildly overcrowded cattle cars. people were pressed against the glass, hands splayed out in defeat. being a fairly broad-shouldered gaijin, i was in a good position to fight back.
the Daibutsu was an impressive sight - a colossus of seafoam green, weathered metal against the deep blue sky. you can actually go inside it for a pittance, which is a bit odd considering the religious momentousness of the construct. if on the inside you touch the metal facing the sun, it burns. innate punitive measures for being cheeky enough to rub the Buddha's belly, i suppose.
one of the highlights of the weekend was a Saturday night excusion with Yasuhiro-san (Yabu-chan) to a local izakaya, or Japanese style drinking bar. we met up with his friend Aoki, another MD and an amazingly energetic, boisterous and fun gent. things started off on a high note with unusual and palatable dishes of food and lots of beer, everyone in the joint laughing and shouting at each other and the waitress, Em-chan. Yabu-chan's girlfriend Marie, yet another MD (seeing a trend here?) showed up an hour or so into the evening and brought her sister Iyo. Iyo is my age, called Piyo-chan for some ill-explained reason, and is an associate movie producer at the company that made Ringu.
both of the ladies were very well mannered and spoke some English, although Piyo-chan was wildly shy about it. i was sufficiently primed from a night of carousing to attempt Japanese, so we had stilted but fun conversations about movies and fish.
turns out marine bio is as appealing to the Japanese as it is to Americans. try it in pubs the world over, i dare you. my host mother made a funny gesture when trying to explain ei, rays, to someone - put her hands up by her head, pointed laterally, and wiggled her fingers to mimic fin undulations. i laughed and have tried it out myself since - i am not sure whether the point gets across or i appear to be intensely flamboyant, but it's pretty amusing.
anyway, i put everyone under the table as only an American ichthyologist can do, and was the only one without a headache the next day. we ended up eating ramen at about 330am, the Japanese equivalent of the post-pub Waffle House run.
went to a mall complex with Yasuhiro-san and Marie-chan before going back to Sokendai on Sunday afternoon. we watched an entertaining street performer - a Japanese-fluent American in a suit that he stole from the Joker. he had an audience of maybe 300 by the end, and at one point switched to rapid English to confuse a young boy who volunteered for a stunt. funny stuff, that.
moved to Shinjuku yesterday and explored Shibuya-cho. more later.
