BURMA --- CHINA ---: How can you help?

www.mcc.org

The best NGO out there!

Mennonite Central Committee is a non-governmental organization (NGO) and personally, one of the best that I've ever come across. I went to Uganda, East Africa for a year after high school with MCC's SALT program, and was very impressed with the way MCC worked in building communities, helping the grass-roots at the most micro level.

You may be aware that the Burmese military government has been appallingly negligent of their own people by basically blocking out foreign aid and letting their own citizens die by the tens of thousands as disease and hunger spreads day by day. Getting aid into Burma has been a tricky logistical thing for major aid providors, but fear not, MCC has partners (local NGOs) that are already established and running in Burma and all donations to MCC will go to these trusted NGOs.

Give a few bucks, please.

OKINAWA Part III: Aquariummmm.

Outside the aquarium: a misty kid-cooler-offer (It cools kids off. It doesn't offer cooler kids).

That monstrous giant of a shark is the whale shark. I was telling my students how awesome this whale shark was - just going on and on about the size of the whale shark whale shark whale shark! At the end of that day as I was about to hop on my bike to go home, what do I find on the seat of my bike, but this anonymous little gift pictured below!

OKINAWA: Part I.

This distant speck of a prefecture, historically and geographically closer to Taiwan and China than Japan, is a strange, sad, wonderful place. To many, Okinawa evokes images of pristine beaches, clear water, and a relaxed island culture that features reggae and hip hop music. This is one face of Okinawa.

Another face of Okinawa proper is, in the words of Robyn, my friend and host during my brief 5 day holiday there, the 'concrete eyesore' (to be fair, nearly all Japanese cities are concrete eyesores). At least Naha is, and everyone says Okinawa City is even more ghetto. But there is, at least in my eyes, a kind of alluring quality to the crumbling storefronts and faded facades. Okinawa has character.

The fact that Naha, Okinawa and other cities in Okinawa appear so old is an interesting paradox inasmuch as no building on the main island is older than 60 years. Over 80 percent of the island was bombed to rubble by the U.S. near the end of World War II and as such, practically every structure you see on Okinawa is relatively new; rebuilt during the post-war period. The crumbling oldness in Okinawa is, in fact, more to do with the fact that Okinawa is Japan's poorest prefecture than the passing of time.

Some very terrible things happened to Okinawa and her people during WWII in which many Okinawans were not only killed in battle, but also sometimes ordered by the Japanese military to commit mass suicides (to avoid capture by the barbarious Americans).

Okinawans are now often seen as a resilient, hardy people who nonetheless, or perhaps because of these hardships, also have a reputation for being much more laid back and carefree than the rest of Japan. Maybe they see more than others how fleeting life can be and thus, are determined not to let their office be their coffin, as is the case for too many mainland Japanese salarymen/women.

Enough of the heavy.
________________________

My visit to Okinawa was really a visit to my friend Robyn, whom I had met at JET orientation in Toronto so many years ago. She basically devoted 3 whole days to me; driving around, showing me beaches, mountain-top restaurants, and all the places you don't get to see on tour.

Some photos:


Robyn on the left, her friend and fellow Canadian Khadija at the tombs of ancient Ryukyuu royalty.

Shuri Castle. Tons of Chinese influences in the design.

The best seat in the house.

Crumbling oldness.

Hello Kitty.

Robyn.

Robyn approaching the best pizza place in Japan. Located on the top of a very green hill, you have to drive through windy tiny roads , weaving your way through vineyards and gardens until you come across this place (which was packed). Great view, great decor (all old dark wooden beams and boards) and great pizza. Two kinds: Meat, or Veggie.

Meat.

Excellent Reading. "Why Bother?" by Michael Pollen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Okinawa Part II: Meet The Ogasawaras.

First, a little bit about my family name, Ogasawara. It's a pretty kick-ass name. Whenever I introduce myself in Japan, people are immediately impressed. I get the impression that it's a prestigious name, a classy name. "Cool". A Japanese girl I met in Uganda, upon hearing my name, exclaimed, "Wow! What a posh name!". The only Ogasawaras I know of can both be seen on TV as either a professional soccer player (Mitsuo Ogasawara), or a professional baseball player (Michihiro Ogasawara). Needless to say, both are all-stars. Also, there is another Ken Ogasawara somewhere who is a big player in the gaming software engineering world.

The point is, Ogasawaras are few and far between and those that do exist are awesome. If you think I'm being exaggerating or just being revoltingly boastful, I ask you: how many do YOU know? And if you want further evidence, look no further than my own family: Morio, Mariko, Hana. They are all awesome. Case closed.

Anyways, I finally met another Ogasawara. And here's the kicker: she's CANADIAN!

Introducing Nancy Ogasawara. She's a second generation Japanese-Canadian 4th-year JET from Vancouver area. I was the only Ogasawara she'd ever met, too! We met at Rehab, a bar owned by (obviously) a Canadian guy named Paul. With her was another Japanese-Canadian with the very Japanese name of Oki Toshio. The three of us hung out for a day and they showed me around the old-skool downtown/market area of Naha. It was awesome.

Chunky sugar for Nancy's coffee. And beautifully crafted saucers and cups in the old pottery district Nancy showed me around.

Toshio!

Entering Makishi market. Tons of food, most of which I did not recognize.

Goya. A vegetable that is popular in Okinawa and probably nowhere else in Japan since it is incredibly bitter.
Okinawans eat a lot of pork and are known for using every bit of the pig, as is evidenced by the fact that the head and feet of this poor creature are actually for sale at the market. All the pigs had sunglasses on; perhaps it's the Okinawan version of laying the coins on the eyes of the dead.

Great little neighbourhood in the old pottery district of Tsuboya.

Shiisa. This mythical lion-like creature is usually seen in pairs: male and female. The male shiisa has his mouth open in a roar to scare away evil, bad luck, etc. The female has her mouth closed to keep in all the good stuff: peace, prosperity, harmony, etc. See one adaptation of the legend at: http://www.kantetsuryukarate.com/pages/shisahistory.html






[Above and below]: A perfect little art display space that Toshio knew (Toshio knows of a lot of neat little places like this in Naha). The artist's name is Miyazaki Kenichi. I told myself I would post pictures of his art only if I also plugged his website. http://tokotontokotoko.com/

Great Taiwanese tea shop that Toshio recommended. It was about $8 for a tea so my expectations were high, but the place delivered. It was just shy of performing actual tea ceremony (which takes approximately 4 hours to complete)... this one involved 4 different cups of different sizes and seven steps from pour to drink. It was delicious, though.

Profuse apologies to my dedicated reader(s?) who has been checking this blog with breathless anticipation for the past 3 weeks with nary a posted word to satisfy their appetite.

The reason is mostly that my computer, aged 1.5 years, died a sudden and premature death. Efforts to revive it were in vain; it is just now being taken to Apple's Dr. Frankenstein to bring it it back to an unnatural and costly second life.

Coming soon sometime late next week: Pictures and stories from:

- OKINAWA

- Ell's Ditch - venue where Ken will open for up-and-coming singer/songwriter/guitarist-extraordinaire Aaron Lincoln Smith!

My favourite animal.

I'm going to talk about my favourite animal.

My favourite animal is a cat. Because the cat is very lovely.

A white cat is kept in my house. Her name is Tofu.

She came to my house in the winter three years ago. Her eyes are very beautiful blues. She has three children. They are all lovely children who look like her.

Hereafter, I want to make her important as family's member. Thank you.

- Madoka, 14 years old.

Oh THERE'S that 5.93 billion yen in cash! I was wondering...


In the news on Wednesday, March 12: "Two women arrested for record-high inheritence tax evasion after Y5.93 billion cash found in their garage." http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/430740

That's just over 57 million Canadian dollars worth of yen. The idea was to avoid the inheritance tax which would've taken nearly $28 million from the $80 million they inherited from their father (a very successful businessman who passed away in 2004), leaving the sisters with a paltry $52 million. So instead, they hid this unimaginably large amount of cash in cardboard boxes which were stacked in the moldy garage of one of the sisters. The tax man came snooping and they were found out.

It was Yoshie, a lady in my English conversation class, who brought up this story during class. We all laughed at the claim by the arrested women that she had "forgotten about the cash" kept in her garage.

Inevitably, talked turned to what we would do if we had $57 million in cash sitting in our garage. We agreed that it would be nearly impossible to spend it all, but that some leisurely traveling around the world would be nice, send our kids through university, etc.

Takao said that he would buy, like, ten dorayaki cakes and eat them all at once. "What a small dream!", laughed Kimie.

Old Inoue asserted that he wouldn't want that kind of money. "I'd have to go around with ten bodyguards all the time!".

Someone said that they wouldn't mind having the money as long as nobody else knew they had it. Interesting. It reminded me something comedian Dave Chappelle said in an interview. He said that the sudden wealth and fame he got didn't change him so much as it changed the people around him. "You know in cartoons, when a dude is real hungry and he looks at his friend and he sees a roasted chicken? That's what it's like. That's how people start to see you."

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In other news, the weather is finally starting to warm up, which means I no longer sleep with 4 layers of clothes and I don't see my breath when I wake up in the mornings.

Fig. A: Dorayaki cake (sweet red-bean paste cake). You can't get the scale of them from this picture, but they're about the size of a small pancake.

Black Cab Sessions.

AWESOME music/video project by Just So Films and Hidden Fruit.

Chapters 2 and 28 are my favourites thus far! Emmy The Great rules my heart!

www.blackcabsessions.com

English Discush.

"In most countries, women outlive men by an average of 5-6 years. Why is this?". This is the question I posed to my English conversation class tonight.

Takao, the sixty-something-year-old retired math teacher and the most fluent in our class, responded immediately: "It's because women are physically stronger. I'm not talking about muscles! I'm talking about the physical capacity to endure."

I asked him why he thought that?

"Well, take child birth, for example! There's NO WAY I could do that! There's a saying that, wait, what is it... there's a saying that says giving birth to a child is like pushing a watermelon out of your nostril." To which Yoshie, mother of 3 adult sons, expressed some doubt: "It's not quite like that..." and Kimie, recent grandmother, laughed outright said she'd never heard of that saying before.

I wondered aloud whether women have healthier lifestyles than men, and thus live healthier, longer lives? For example, don't men usually drink and smoke more than women? Nay, said Takao (who does not drink, but whose wife does).

Twenty-something-year-old Rie said it's because women handle stress better. She said that women have more flexible minds and can think about many things at once; "if something bothers us, we just drop it and move on."

At this seventy-something-year-old Inoue, he of the massive English written compositions (see December 13 2007 post), said:

"I will tell you the correct answer.[much laughter from the group] It's because God ordered women to live longer so that they can care for their husbands."

To which Rie said, "Well, widows do seem happy." [lots of laughter]

**WARNING: This post may contain scenes which are not suitable for those who are adverse to large phallic sculptures**

The Penis Shrine.

An acquaintance of mine, a lady by the name of Mayumi who works as a receptionist at city hall, wanted to take me and Brett on a road trip. Accompanying us was Izumi, Mayumi's friend. The four of us had gone out for dinner once before while Tola was visiting over winter holidays.

According to Mayumi, there are only two such "fertility" shrines in all of Japan. I've completely forgotten the Japanese name for the place so I can't check to verify if this is true or not. Let's say it is.

Basically, hidden away in some random corner of very rural Yamaguchi, there is a small little wooden shrine containing hundreds of penis sculptures, most of them to scale. Some, as you can see from the pictures below, are quite prodigious.

I'm guessing these are the wishes/prayers of past visitors to the shrine ("Please grant us a baby. Let it be a girl and let her have Zhang Ziyi's face").

Izumi: "Well, I came all this way, I might as well touch it." If you look closely, the tip of this particular member has been rubbed to a shiney sheen from countless people touching it for good luck.
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I read the English translation of the legend of this shrine and it didn't seem to be connected in any way to fertility or penises. Essentially, some dude a long time ago did something bad in his village. He was run out of the village and was given over to mob justice. He managed to escape and later in his life, he erected (I beg your pardon) this little shrine, for some reason. The only connection I can see, if I read between the lines, is that the man might have been the victim of a John Bobbitt-like fate at the hands of the mob, and thus, later in life, wished he could have kids, or something. Anyways, the story I just recounted above is probably not accurate at all, it's going on some very fuzzy memory-work.

The reason why my memory is fuzzy is because Brett and I spent most of our collective energy that day trying not to throw up in the backseat of Mayumi's car. We spent an agonizing 5 hours, round trip, in that hell. This is something that has stricken both Brett and I ONLY in Yamaguchi, Japan. The likely reason is that the mountainous terrain of Yamaguchi makes for very windy and hilly roads. Combine that with the fact that for some reason, the Japanese drivers I've ridden with have very twitchy gas/brake feet, and you've got a fail-proof recipe for car-sickness.

I, through some deep-breathing mediation, managed to master my nausea, but Brett was in bad shape. I joked to him that the fertility shrine must be really potent (ha!) because he's already experiencing morning sickness!* He kept it together through a superhuman effort, despite my telling him stories about various throwing-up stories I'd heard or experienced. I did this because I thought it would make him feel not-so-bad about being sick. But he didn't seem to appreciate my amusing stories. All he said was, gasping, "Dude-don't-talk-about-it. It's-like-a-no-hitter."

[*Actually, I did not make this joke at the time; it came to mind just now and I think it would've been a witty thing to say at the time so I've included it as part of that narrative.]