YOKOHAMA: Funahashi Family.

Left to right: Uncle Eisuke (holding Harry), Aunt Eiko (holding Peta), Tola, Rieko, Jun, Hidemi.

The man.

Eiko (my Dad's "baby sister") and Jun.

Rieko (Jun's wife) and Tola, staring.

The Anglican church where my parents got married exactly 28 years ago!!

An old car in Motomachi , a posh shopping district of old Yokohama.

A door made just for me.

Yokohama Chinatown.

Under the bridge.

Yokohama harbor-front.

Bay Bridge.

Winter Vacation: Tola Takes The Plunge.
[KYOTO]

This winter my good friend Tola came to Japan to visit me. Our time was thus divided: first week in Kudamatsu, second week visiting my relatives across Japan (West to East). We had many laughs and good times despite the fact that, as Tola quickly found out, you never feel more foreign than when you come to Japan.

Never mind the language barrier, which is probably the biggest impediment to comfortable interaction in Japan; the other major culture shocker is the fact that Japan is inhabited by mostly Japanese people. Tola, being black, stuck out like a ... well, a black person in Japan. If she thought she was a visible minority in Canada.... This meant being stared at alllll the time. Also, it meant people got really nervous when she went asked for help, directions, etc because the stress of communicating with a stranger in a foreign language is quite powerful for most Japanese people. Then again, we met people like the lady who approached Tola in Hiroshima and asked her, in English, where she was from, what she was doing in Japan, and if her hair was real.

We shall now view the pictures I took during our two weeks. Not much to see (for me) in the first week so most of the pictures will be of the second week: Kyoto --> Yamanashi--> Yokohama --> Tokyo.

Tola, in what she claims is "housewear". "I would never wear that in public!". You are now, sucka!

KYOTO.
My great uncle and aunt Takeshi and Kaoru Kagawa (Takeshi is my grandma's younger brother and they look exactly the same) who were our guides in Kyoto. I hadn't seen these people in 15 or 16 years(!) but when they met us at the hotel, they were so friendly and welcoming it was like seeing old friends again. They were super-generous; they paid for our taxi rides, our meals, our admission to the temples....Tola and I tried to pay for dinner (which was had at "Sara", by far the nicest buffets I had ever eaten at.. actually, one of the best restaurants period.) but my aunt nearly got mad at me for even attempting such treachery (My uncle, hilariously, said, "Let him pay for it!").


Kinkakuji. The famous golden shrine. I could tell it was famous because approximately a million other tourists were there that day.

A temple in the Kinkakuji grounds... note the meticulously raked gravel.

Tola buying an English fortune.


Extremely well-dressed Mother and Daughter making their petition to the gods. In Japan, if you see a woman wearing fur, or carrying a Gucci handbag, you don't have to wonder if it's real. It probably is.


Kiyomizudera temple. An amazing feat of architecture. The drop is 13 meters from the stage to the ground. The temple stage (main floor) is supported on the hillside by these massive cedar columns. Apparently, daring young men back in the day would play a traditional Japanese version of hackey-sack while balanced on the wooden railing!! If you missed, either you or your ball would have a nice 13 meter drop to look forward to.


Spring water from the mountains at Kiyomizudera Temple. You drink blessed water if you want to ace your exams.

Kyoto in the evening as seen from Kiyomizudera temple.

Jonas and Abe Come To Play.

One of my oldest and dearest friends, Jonas, came to visit me last month with one of HIS oldest and dearest friends, Abe. They had been gallivanting around Australia for a few months and decided to drop in on Japan on their way home. Their stay was too short, only a week, but we had a great time. Some highlights:

1. Watching "Mom Jeans" over and over again. (http://www.funnyhub.com/videos/pages/mom-jeans.html)
2. Eating delicious sushi.
3. Visiting an excellent Ma and Pa bar I know where they fed us with excellent conversation, food, and beer, all at extremely discounted rates which make me wonder how they stay in business.
4. Watching Tenacious D Masterworks.
5. Talking.

Aren't their outfits cute?

Peace Park: Jonas examines one of millions of paper cranes folded in memory of those who have suffered from the effects of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hirishima.

Abe. Jonas. Squinty Jones.

Hiroshima

Thought of the Year:

"As we face the challenge of ever-expanding populations, increasing demands for energy and food, as well as huge disparities in wealth, we have to embrace globalisation and accept people from all countries as neighbours and collaborators, not rivals. In this interdependent world, war is outdated. Destroying other countries brings no benefit, but creates humanitarian suffering, trade disruption and environmental problems that everyone must bear."

-- His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. January 2008.

Taiko Practice, Japan

Awesome video that Jonny D made while visiting me in mid October. We are rehearsing for the big gig with ZA ONDEKOZA.

The JETLINE.

The following is an actual line from a JET information newsletter, advertising the JETLINE, a kind of hotline, I guess.

"If you need information about the JET Programme or are feeling depressed, lonely, or suicidal....please do not hesitate to call".

Kids Say The Darndest Things.

Sometimes we play a modified version of Scattergories in my classes whereby I make put something like this on a page and get the kids to work on it in groups:

1. A country in Europe.
2. A Hollywood movie from 2007.
3. A musical instrument.
4. Something BIG.
5. Something small.


Some awesome responses of late:

Something BIG: "Children's dreams".
Something mall: "Noda's heart". (I believe Noda, who is a boy in the group, submitted this response himself. I have to get to know this kid better.)
Musical instrument: "Noda." (I asked for a demonstration: it turns out each button on his uniform shirt makes a different tone which emits from his mouth via his voice. I asked if I could play him; it was more difficult than I thought at first because as the buttons went up toward his chin, the notes got progressively LOWER - I tried to play the opening riff to "Redemption Song" by Bob Marley, but since the tuning was backwards, it didn't work very well.)

Signature of Divine (Yaweh) - Needtobreathe

My friend Jonathan Steckley directed this awesome music video! I helped to write music for his first feature film which he made with his cousin and my friend Josh Steckley, a documentary called "Crokinole". Check it out.

The following text is a kind of article that a member of my community English conversation class wrote. Just as a sort of background, the group consists of about 10 members (of which five come regularly) ranging in age from 26 to 70. The average age, however, is closer to 60.

Mr. Inoue, the writer of the article below, is a retired Shinkansen (bullet train) engineer who speaks very deliberately in a gravelly voice, but his words are worth the wait: he has the most ridiculously advanced vocabulary of any Japanese person I know - and much better than the average North American, that is for sure (e.g. 'Japanese parents often cudgel their brains to think of unique ways to write their children's names`). He is the seventy-year-old. He smokes heavily, speaks slowly, and when he smiles, his eyes crinkle up and you can imagine very easily how he looked as a young boy.

Enjoy:

Evolution of the Sushi Restaurant.

(1) The Chief Cabinet Secretary of our side street, or rather a rumor monger, issued a statement that a new sushi restaurant recently took the historical first step near the city gymnasium toward fierce battle against existing rivals in the area.

The other evening, my wife approached me with a proposal to carry out a twilight raid on the den. Although her hidden agenda of escape from her duty to prepare supper for the evening was transparent to me, I gave my generous consent to her idea after much deliberation, because I thought our waste would be the last resort to sweep out the prolonged national financial crisis.

(2) A newly dyed Noren accord a warm welcome to us by waving in a cool breeze. Though this is reduntant, you can see Noren at most Japanese-style stores and restaurants. It's a drape or curtain with the logo of the store printed on it, and hung up outside the sliding front door at your height to catch the eye of visitors.

Noren, like a national flag to stir the feelings of patriotism among the nation, is considered to be the symbol of the store for the whole people who live on it. In Japan, therefore, to say that to guard the Noren is to say that all the employees, above all its master, must make efforts to run the store soundly against bankruptcy, just like the soldiers fight againts their enemies to protect their stronghold where their national flag is flapping.

But recently some stores, alas, have folded their honourable Noren and tucked [them] away, probably because Noren is incompatible with some types of modern automatic doors with optical sensors. Now let's return to the main subject.

(3). The new restaurant has inevitably adopted that hero of the times n this business world - a turning conveyer system which reminds me of a baggage corner at an aiport. Although sushi restaurants of this type lack elegance, at least it promises you a wide choice under your own budget control, as the colour of each plate tells the price of the dish on it; for example, a brilliant Canadian lady had once shouted at her boyfriend at her mercy in NONTA Sushi Restaurant, "Don't eat this and that coloured ones!", according to a certain witness. Also, unlike the-all-you-can-eat system, it will provide you with a sense of fair trade, especially when you drop in such a restaurant for a light meal.
Sushi restaurants of tens of years ago, on the contrary, were supposedly like an unknown world to the poor like me, because they didn't show us their menus nor price lists, instead, they adopted a current price system. Therefore, the sight of the front door of such a restaurant from the street was somewhat imagined like a gateway to the Garden of Eden, but after next blink, a minefield of plot [deception]. Now let's go back to the past, muster courage and jump into such a restaurant.

(4) The master welcomes you with a lively shout. His liveliness means that the stocked fish is fresh enough like him. You can find a glass case with ice bed on the opposite side of your counter displayed with the filleted fishes of the day, which were laid in by the master at the local fishing port at dawn. His daily game at the fishing port, alas, is variable and so is the cost.
No wonder he doesn't prepare a glassy fixed menu with prices. The pieces of fish in the show case is thick enough to identify each family background. Such pieces and exquisitely arranged colourful vegtables and small tree branches create a nice harmony like a beautiful garden by a famous landscaper, and this is his proud menu of today.
When you order your favourite toppings from the look in the case, the master, exchanging small talk with you, takes out the relevant thick slices on the cutting board, slices them swiftly into toppings with some fancy knife-play, grips some rice in the pail, lays the topping to sleep on the small comfortable rice pillow and puts the delicacy on your counter. The atmosphere doesn't allow you to confirm the unit prices beforehand, so you had better swallow your words if you wanted to.
Though this way of gripping the rice in the pail for one piece of Sushi looks nonchalant, the palm of his dominant hand is a bundle of touchy nerves. I saw a TV program about an expert Sushi chef a few years ago. He could grip out rice easily and quickly any number given of grains. The maximum error was three or so grains for every 500 given, no matter how many times he did it.

A series of the master's manner or rather, his performance, looks like refined dancing, and such sophisticated movement and the niceties of his small talk are also your side dishes. He has to have a treasure house of topics to be able to give a wide range of conversation by guests a nod without being officious.

(5) He is seemingly good at calculating in his head. When you ask for your bill, he'll probably give you a prompt answer and his wife or a novice cook will handle the money. I never saw a master will handle the money. I never saw a master take down orders or use a calculator. But I imagine his calculation might be his guesswork from the course of the scene or your appearance. He might welcome some celebrities in town more who don't mind how expensive the bill will be because it's merely sushi, and they can earn a hundred times the night's bill in their business the next day but they don't want to expose their eating to the public.
So, if you can't convince yourself without a detailed bill, you shouldn't darken their door again. Anyway, current price systems would be a nice excuse to insulate stingy guests like me to protect generous ones. Or rather, exclusiveness can be a sales point for some stores. My other guesswork about the reason for his macroscopic business style would be because he doesn't want to use a dirty pencil or calculator so as not to disorder the sense of touch on his palms with cold water when washing hands.

(6) The turning conveyer system has wiped out many difficulties and inconveniences of the conventional business style of this field, and popularized this traditional food among common people. It's a great invention. But if you don't want to sit shoulder-to-shoulder, or need to have a confidential talk with someone over sushi, you can go through the Noren of an authentic sushi restaurant which will promise you your own sanctum, but don't forget a fat purse.

Kyushu: Kumamoto: REIGANDOU (霊巌洞)

Reigandou is the place where Musashi Miyamoto spent his last days living in a cave up in the hills outside of Kumamoto City. I should probably give a very very brief synopsis of Musashi's life so that you can have some idea of what this is all about.

Very very very briefly:
Musashi was 6 feet tall (a giant in Japan, especially back then) and was unique in fighting with a sword in each hand which made him unbeatable, especially when fighting multiple foes. I picked up a replica of a sword Musashi used at a museum once and it is heaaaavy. The strength it would take to effectively wield one in each hand boggles my mind.

-From his early teens Musashi craved glory as a samurai. After leaving his home, he sought the pure Way of the Sword, seeking out duels with progressively better and more accomplished samurai - never losing once. On the way, he single-handedly destroyed the famous and prestigious House of Yoshioka, killed countless other formidable samurai and made himself revered and feared along the way.
- He struggled with his brutal, almost savage nature and pursued, through harsh self-discipline, the harmony between the killing nature of the Way of the Sword and the spiritual side that treasures life. Met a wise monk, read a lot. Becomes semi-enlightened but still struggles with his strength-as-weakness.
- Eventually, his journey leads him to a duel with Sasaki Kojiro Ganryu, a brash, young, brilliantly talented swordsman with a ridiculously long sword called the Drying Pole. The two are considered the best in the land. The final showdown takes place on a tiny island off the coast of Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi-ken (the prefecture I live in).
Musashi, on the morning of this great duel, while everyone around him is freaking out and super-anxious, takes two hours to paint a picture, as a gift to the man who hosted him the previous night. Then, showing up two hours late for the duel, promptly kills Kojiro with a wooden sword he had carved out of a broken oar that he found on the boat on the way to the island.

Musashi killed for the last time when he was 29 year old and lived out the last years of his life in his sixties, living in the cave near Kumamoto, writing his now-famous book "The Book Of Five Rings", a kind of instructional guide on his particular method of swordfighting, but also on how to live a true life according to the Way of the Sword.

Here are some pictures of Reigando.

Very beautiful. Very quiet.
Acorns crunching underfoot.

Lots of little statues. Some very happy.

KYUSHU: Kumamoto and Beppu.

This post will chronicle the adventures of Ken and Brett as they continue their ongoing piece-meal pilgrimage tracing the footsteps of Miyamoto Musashi, arguably the greatest samurai in Japanese history. It might also include snippets of our time in the hot-spring capital of Japan: Beppu.

It will most definitely NOT include the time when, after an hour of wandering around the seedy district of Omuta city looking for a cool darts bar and carefully avoiding hostess bars (where men pay to have pretty (or not) young (or not) women chat them up, pour their drinks and generally make them feel like big men) , we had the awkward misfortune of walking into ... a HOST bar. Everyone was confused. Also, this post will not include the extremely persistent young woman who was offering us massages at a suspiciously high rate. We declined.

Unfortunately, this post will also not include a section about Yufuin which is midway between Kumamoto and Beppu. Whenever we mentioned our upcoming trip to Kyushu, people would say, "Oh, you HAVE to visit Yufuin! It has beautiful onsen (hot spring baths) set in gorgeous natural scenery and a serene atmosphere that takes one back to a time before Japan's countryside was covered in concrete". Yufuin also had rooms starting at $130 per night so it was not a part of our itinerary.

Nonetheless, it was a fantastic trip - a pleasant change of scenery, something new to give Brett and I an extra spark to remind ourselves that we are in Japan and that it's a pretty sweet place to be, all thing considered.

Kumamoto Castle - one of the largest and "best" in Japan.

I barely got this shot off as the ninja was about to pounce. Ninja are like my bowels after Mexican food: silent but violent.

The approach to the main castle towers. The idea behind the winding zigzags when coming upon the castle is that it is more difficult for an attacking force to hit it directly; force them to run the gamut while having archers and gunners firing on you is not so easy when you have to wind your way through narrow streets.




It's really hard to picture this Goro character when I look around me and see so many tiny Japanese men.

An old old temple that was on our Musashi taxi-tour. I don't know anything about it except that it's over 400 years old and that it looks different from most other temples I've seen.
Our bus was supposed to leave at 10:59 and here we were still waiting for it. Brutal! Of course this is a joke as Japan's public transport system (especially trains) is so ridiculously on-time that you could set your watches to it, if you were wearing one, which I'm not.

A little hand-made sign warning about the perils of speeding. Note the extremely high revolutions per minute and the speedometer reading 250 km/hr!!

Modern Japan.

A lady beside us on the train as we rode through Aso/Yufuin landscape.


When you see a nose this big, you have no choice but to do as so many others have done before you, and pick it.


Yukata provided provided for us at our hotel in Beppu. People staying would just walk around the hotel in their yukata...going to the hotel restaurants...bars...baths... awesome.

Super Cool

I wish.

Have Blog, Must Write.

Even though nothing especially exciting has happened in the past few weeks, I feel compelled to write once in a while lest I lose my precious few dedicated readers which I can count on one hand, even after having lost my thumb in an unfortunate smelting accident.

The other day I was witness to a heated discussion between a fellow JET, Aaron, and his friend Randy. They went to college together and both did a year of exchange in Japan. Both have been living in Japan for approximately one year, four months. Therefore, both were evenly qualified to debate (heatedly, I might add) a topic that is near and dear to many people's heart and stomach: the quality - especially the freshness - of food in Japan verses "back home".

Aaron was of the opinion that food freshness and quality is quite excellent in Japan. Randy's view was that food quality in Japan, generally speaking, is a sickly distant cousin to the culinary paradise that is America.

To illustrate his point, Randy brought up the bento, which is basically a delicious Japanese meal served cold (popular lunches for people on the run. I meant "on the go", lest you think bento are for bandits only). Randy asked Aaron if he truly believed that cold, day-old rice is as good as fresh, hot rice. Aaron argued that that is a matter of opinion. Randy reminded Aaron that he (Randy) doesn't believe in subjectivity - there is an objective world, and objectively speaking, bento is an inferior food product! (for more on the objective world, see "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand).

Aaron became exasperated and expressed disbelief that they were even having this conversation. Food is a matter of taste, if you will. How could Randy declare bento, which is a cultural and dietary staple, to be an inferior food product when clearly the Japanese have been enjoying it for decades?? "You're talking about food culture, man!", Aaron kept saying.

"Exhibit B" in Randy's case against the quality of Japanese food was the weakness of the Japanese bread - or any baked good, really. Personally, I have to concede at least half a point because I agree that Japanese bread is long on fluff but short on nutrients and robust flavour. The cakes and cookies are all right, but again, I come from an area which has a rich baking heritage borne of generations of German immigrants that landed in south-western Ontario many years ago.

After I watched this exchange and meditated on both sides of the argument, I have to say that there are some things in Japan which are superfresh and delicious and kicks any country's arse; like any kind of seafood, especially in coastal areas like Yamaguchi (although there are very few prefectures which aren't coastal to some extent). However, Japan comes up short on things like meat (much of which is imported from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, to name but a few) and baked goods. Also, fruit is often freakishly large (due to certain pruning techniques which channel all the trees nutrients into fewer fruits) but also freakishly expensive and not as sweet as back home in Canada.

Oh! And cheese! Man, I miss Canadian cheese.

----------------------

When I told Aaron that I was writing about his discussion with Randy, he emailed me back with this message:

"cool. I hope you include his ethnocentrism and idealization of American food stuffs."

Bento lunches. Different kinds of rice, veggies in various stages of pickling, fish, beans....