Slumber Party

Last Friday, the eighth grade teachers at school had an overnight enkai. An enkai is a formal staff party - I've been on several dinner/drinking/karaoke enkais with the teachers at my last school, but never overnight. So I was very curious about this overnight enkai.

We piled into a couple of teachers' cars and drove to Mt Rokko near Kobe (about an hour away). We arrived at 7pm, checked into our rooms. I shared a room with two other female teachers.

It was a traditional Japanese room with tatami mats, a low table and chairs without legs. And at bedtime, we simply pulled these out of the way, and pulled three futons out of the closet!

Of course, the bathroom had toilet slippers to change into. Can anyone who speaks French tell me if these say what I think they say!!!

Dinner was also in a traditional room. And unfortunately, it was a lot of traditional Japanese food.

This first course was sashimi (raw fish), and whole baby squid (those brownish-purple things), and "the reproductive shoot of the horsetail plant" in a bamboo cone. The next day hiking, we saw a reproductive shoot of the horsetail plant.

Next was a "soup" with little broth, but plenty of octopus and bamboo shoots and very slimy seaweed.

After that was a serving of baked red snapper.

Then the waiters came around to light our little table top cookers which contained Kobe beef. Yes, that is a huge scoop of butter on top of the famously "marbled" Kobe beef!

The next course was taro (a potato like tuber). And then tempura (two prawns, fiddler fern, and broccoli).

Finally soup (fish cake and clam) and rice.

Dessert was mochi (surprise, surprise) around red bean paste (surprise, surprise, again).

By the time dinner was over, it was late. We went into another teacher's hotel room and hung out for a bit. I asked what we would do the next day. The English teacher said "biking". The next morning we went down for a breakfast buffet (hooray, they had scrambled eggs and toast, as well as "normal" Japanese breakfast food). I asked what time we would be biking, and got a confused look in return. After a little more back and forth (me asking if we were renting bikes, if everyone was going biking, etc.), I realized that the teacher had been saying "viking", as in viking-style (all you can eat) breakfast, not biking (Japanese people have a hard time pronouncing "v"). We had a good laugh over that!

What we did end up doing was visiting a botanical garden (it was a bit too early for many flowers, so I didn't take any great photos). After the botanical garden, we went to the "Hall of Halls". That turned out to be a music box museum!

Then lunch and a bit of time for souvenir shopping, then back to Himeji.

It was really interesting to experience this overnight trip. Japanese people are famous for their devotion to the company, and I think these sort of trips really encourage teamwork (although at the expense of time with the family).

Osaka Temples and Shrines

A couple of weekends ago, I took advantage of the spring weather (finally!) and took a day trip to Osaka. There are a couple of temples and shrines there that I have been wanting to visit, so off I went! I started at Tennoji Park where I took this photo of the fountain (still looks very winter-ish, I know, but it really was warm-ish!)

Then I visited Shitenno-ji temple. It was really cool, and one of the few temples in Japan that has a torii (the gate at the entrance. Typically when you see these torii, you can assume you're at a Shinto shrine, rather than a Buddhist temple.) Shitenno-ji is one of the oldest Buddhist temples in Japan (the brochure says it is the first state-established Buddhist temple), founded in 593 by Prince Shotoku. Shitenno means four guardian kings, and the temple is dedicated to them.

I'm not sure exactly what was happening that day (or maybe it was just a normal day), but everyone was writing out messages (or maybe sutra) on very thin pieces of wood. They passed them into the monks who waved them through incense, and then chanted whatever was written on the wood. Then they were returned to the writer. Whatever service this was, it was expensive, about $30.

This temple complex had a garden that was based on a Buddhist parable, Nigabyaku-doh. There are two rivers, one of water and one of fire. The water river symbolizes a greedy mind, and the fire river symbolizes anger or grudge. Between the two rivers is a white path which leads to paradise! So this garden has two small streams and a path between them. This photo is of one of the rivers (they were both of water, so it was hard to tell which was supposed to be the one symbolizing anger).

After Shitenno-ji, I visited another nearby temple, Isshinji, which the kindly lady at the tourist office recommended. She only said it was famous in that area. What she didn't say is that this temple makes statues of Buddhas out of the ashes of dead people. Creepy! To make one of these statues, Okotsubutsu, the remains (ashes) of 20,000 people are powdered and kneaded into the shape of Buddha! They began this practice in 1887 and every ten years they make another statue. The temple had a very large cemetary behind it - I guess everyone wants to be part of a Buddhist statue!

Next I took a streetcar south to Sumiyoshi Taisha. What's interesting about this shrine is that it's one of the three remaining shrines built prior to the arrival of Buddhism in Japan. The shrine is torn down and rebuilt exactly as it was every so many years, so while these buildings were built in 1810, their design is much older than that (3rd century).

Even the phone booths have a similar design!

The shrine has a famous bridge which several people were sketching that day (as I mentioned, it was one of the first nice spring days).

This little boy's mother told him to pose and look cute. He immediately did an adorable Shirley Temple impersonation!

Finally, I had my fill of old shrines and temples, and so I ended the day at the ultra-modern Umeda Sky Building. It's a famous 40 storey skyscraper, built for the view of the city.

Japanese Cooking Class

On Thursday nights, a Japanese woman teaches cooking to a few people at the apartment. I usually have Japanese language class on Thursday nights, but this past Thursday was a holiday (the vernal equinox is a public holiday here). Mitch asked me to take his place at cooking class that night, so I was finally able to learn to make a Japanese meal (admittedly though, I won't be making any more Japanese meals).

Our teacher arrived bearing bags of groceries and dishes (as you see in the photo above, place setting is very important). She went over the recipes we were to make, and then she put us to work.

The first dish we made is often translated as "croquettes" - basically a meat, onion, and grated potato patty. There was a tasty sauce on it - made of mayonnaise (of course!), mustard and okinomiyaki sauce (a bit like BBQ sauce). Our teacher was topping these patties with dried bonito (shaved fish), but I managed to stop her before she put any on mine.

The next dish was a soup. The primary ingredient in this particular soup is the dregs from making sake (rice wine). We were each given a bag of these dregs after the sake factory tour a couple weeks ago, but had no idea what to do with them! Also in the soup were carrots, konnyaku (more about this strange food later), salmon, and taro (a starchy root, kind of like a potato).

Next was konnyaku. Konnyaku is a rubbery substance (notice I didn't say "food") made from the root of the devil's tongue plant. As the wikipedia article correctly points out, it doesn't have much taste; it's more about the texture. Unfortunately the texture is extremely chewy - I imagine that chewing on a bicycle inner tube would be similiar. I can only manage to choke down one of these cubes. Here's a photo of the konnyaku being cut, and another photo of the finished dish - we fried it with garlic and of course, dried bonito (fish shavings).

The last dish was a salad, made of daikon, tomatoes, and broccoli sprouts. And those tiny dried minnows that I live in fear of. What Japanese dish is complete without some fish flavor? First we fried those minnows in some oil. Then we mixed them into the salad. If you click on the photos you can zoom in and you can even see the eyes of these minnows.

Dessert was hot milk curdled with more of the sake dregs. And I was hoping for chocolate...

Keep those care packages coming!!!

SUMO!

Sumo wrestling tournaments are held six times a year - three times in Tokyo, once in Osaka (and the other two times in other cities). Osaka is just an hour away by train, so when the sumo tournament came there, it was an easy decision to go check it out! There was a considerable range of ticket prices - from hundreds of dollars to about $30 dollars! We went for the $50 seats and they were great!
Luckily, we got a pamplet in English with our ticket, explaining some of the rituals and rules of sumo. The wrestling match part happens very quickly - a wrestler loses if he's forced out of the ring or if any part of his body touches the ground (except of course for his feet). But the rituals were a little harder to understand. There was lot of throwing rice and leg lifting and squatting and glaring. All part of the build-up, trying to intimidate an opponent.
Here is the procession of wrestlers into the ring. The man in the middle in the brown kimono is the referee.


Once we figured out the basics, we began to try to predict the winner of each match. We judged each wrestler on things like height, flabbiness, and control during the leg lifts. Once we had a system figured out, we started betting with each other - only 10 yen bets, but they added to the fun of the game! Of course, we didn't really know who we were betting on, so we just cheered "go blue" (for the guy in the blue loincloth). We had a great time and I was disappointed when the clock struck 6 pm and it was all over (prompt like everything else in Japan).







The rest of my photos from the tournament are here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/sarainjapan/15Sumo
And here's a video I took of the action.


And as always, I encourage you to check out wikipedia if you want to know more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumo

The Moffle

Wow - just when I thought they couldn't come up with anything else to combine with mochi (pounded rice). Somehow they managed. Check out this yahoo news article
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080319/lf_nm_life/japan_moffle_dc

March 12 on 12

I brought my camera along last Wednesday (the 12th), mainly to take photos of the junior high school graduation ceremony. But it turns out staff aren't allowed to take photos (I'm still a little peeved about that rule, since most of the other ALTs were allowed to at their schools.) Anyway, since I had my camera on me, and it was the twelfth, I took a few photos. Enjoy!

1. Shisas at a temple I bike by on the way to work.



2. The teachers' room - only half of it.


3. My desk and beyond in the teachers' room (you'll notice my pink cell phone, a novel, a Japan guide book, and Japanese language textbooks - all to keep me entertained during those days of no classes.)


4. A classroom - there are almost always 36 students in a classroom. Usually one row of desks will be boys, the next girls, etc. (6x6)


The back of a classroom - those cubbies are for each student to put their school bags in .
5. The first (7th) grade shoe cubbies.

6. The teachers' shoe lockers, and pairs of slippers out waiting for guests to change into on graduation day.

7. Me, being artsy as I waited on the train platform.

8. Dried fish hanging outside a fish shop