Enjoy the journey.
November was green, warm and quiet.
We’ve kept close to home (as our photos show!) but there have been plenty of visitors, human and otherwise and a new furry family member to keep us busy. The garden is green and productive, with even more promise for the coming months, work is steady and the house is clean (and almost organised!)
Restfully busy, November was exactly what we needed.
To active tranquillity.
Gem
XX
Things are looking very summery this morning. The cat is melting, the grass is turning crunchy and the cicadas are already tuning up for what looks like it’s going to be a long, hot day. Our extended game of musical couches has made us pretty late to the party this year; now that we’re finally feeling like fresh starts and spring cleaning, the season for it is almost over!
But …. The jacarandas are still in bloom, our coastal evenings are still gentle and cool… the time for new beginnings is not yet completely gone. And that’s just as well, since there’s one very important new beginning happening on the median strip in the middle of a nine-way intersection near our house.
That’s a plover (Vanellus milus) also known as a Masked Lapwing, a mad, idiotic, insomniac bird found all over northern, eastern and central Australia. Plovers walk around and feed all day, then fly around and scream all night. I have no idea if or when they sleep, but it’s clearly only when no-one is watching.
You get the idea; plovers are very active birds. However that particular plover, spotted on the median strip a little over a week ago was, on first sighting, doing something that a plover simply does not do.
It was sitting.
As soon as our eyes met, the plover leapt up and hurried away as nonchalantly as it could. And I thought “Hmmmm……”
The next day, there it was again. Same place, same bird, same nonchalant trot from its seat. And I thought “Aha!”
With a quick look for traffic, I zipped across the road, up onto the median strip and there it was:
Now if that doesn’t say springtime, what does?
I have a certain amount of experience when it comes to spotting plover nests, but it isn’t as though they’re very good at hiding them. A plover couple will find or scrape a very slight depression into a patch of short grass or dirt, then the female lays her eggs in it. Kin and I spent much of September annoying the Clarence Town plovers by hunting down and inspecting their efforts.
The owners of those three eggs had carefully constructed their nest in a wheel rut in a parking area… in exactly the same place where they’d recently lost their first clutch to the back wheel of a ute! They were most indignant when my mother built a fence around it to prevent the same thing from happening again.
(Indignant or not, that fence did the trick. All three of those babies hatched safely and were last seen trekking about near the creek, with both of their parents in attendance.)
My intersection plover might not have actually built on the road, but she was still very close to it, so I didn’t stay and look at her nest for very long. She’d developed two broken wings and a terrible stagger and I was afraid she’d flap her way under a car if I upset her too much. I took one last shot, assured Mama Plover that her eggs were lovely and walked away quickly to let the poor thing calm down.
Her husband remained in the air and followed me the length of the block, then sent a sharp gargle back to his partner to give her the all clear. By the time I was back at my gate, Mama Plover’s broken wings had miraculously healed and she was sitting again.
Kin and I checked on them every day for the next week, and that watchful husband delivered a heads-up and an all-clear every time. On Tuesday evening, we were finally rewarded by this sight:
And then the next day….
And there were no more broken wings for Mama and Papa Plover! Both of them, swooped us, determined to defend their babies from the paparazzi. Plovers are known for aggressively defending their nests; male plovers even have spurs on their wings, all the better to drive off photographers. Kin and I both grew up blonde in magpie country, though, so dive-bombing birds are not a new experience and we managed to get our shots without anyone (us or the plover parents) becoming too upset.
The day after that, we decided to stay well away from the family, as the last eggs would be hatching. We knew that once they were all safely out of their shells, the family would no longer remain in the nest. Until they were clear of that busy intersection, we were not going to risk chasing anyone under a bus!
The family has decamped to a stretch of land near the railway line, so we’ve since been able to sneak up on them and check on the babies. I’m happy to report that all eggs hatched, all babies made it across the road and there are now four fluffy little pompoms running around behind their mother who, by the way, still views us with extreme suspicion. As soon as either one of us is sighted, she or Papa Plover give a sharp chiack! and all four of the babies drop to the ground, where they become invisible.
Well, almost invisible. He’s doing his best.
Our plover family might have brought springtime back to us, but my goodness they’ve made this last week anxious! Building a nest on the ground in the middle of an incredibly busy intersection and then leading your fluffy little stilt-walkers across those roads to another stretch of bare ground where their only defence is to pretend to be invisible at extreme risk of being stepped on… it just doesn’t seem like the best survival strategy. Especially since plover couples generally nest at the same site each year, so every batch of babies will have to face the same hazards!
Still, I guess it’s worked out for them so far; plovers are extremely numerous in Australia, and they seem to adapt quite well to an urban lifestyle. And our plover family is still trekking around with all of its members, so maybe Newcastle railway lines are a better place than they seem for a new beginning.
Happy springtime! And, if you’re walking to Broadmeadow Station, please be careful where you put your feet!
Treading lightly….
Gem
XX
It’s spring alright! The rice fields are green and full of joy (for frogs) and the nights are dark and full of lurve… also for frogs. As well as having bats to watch, every evening we can also listen to the chorus of croaking from all directions.
Of course, all of this activity means that other creatures are becoming active too, including this fellow:
This is a Japanese rat snake (Elaphe climacophora) that I spotted while watering the beans. It seemed pretty determined to work its way up the canal, so we figured it was heading out to the big rice fields to find frogs like the one above. Being Australian, I immediately yelled for Kin to grab his camera and he raced up the canal in pursuit.
Unfortunately, his model did NOT feel cooperative. Rat snakes are quite timid (and, apparently, very bitey) so it decided to try and pretend that it wasn’t there and wait for the camera to go away.
Kin was a little disappointed but, as it turns out, he didn’t need to be! When I went for a run along the same canal, I found another friend for him to photograph!
Another rat snake! They must be everywhere at the moment! This one seemed a little less timid than the first and allowed Kin and his camera to get quite close. It was proceeding in the same direction as the other fellow, so there must be something attractive (to snakes) in that part of town.
It seems that Japanese people respond to rat snakes much the same way as Australians do to carpet pythons, so our friends should have a safe journey, wherever they’re going. It was lovely to see these beauties and we wish them well on their travels. It’s also fun giving our U.S. friends the screaming heebie-jeebies with these photos!
Is anyone interesting out and about in your area? Have they come to say hello?
We’ve just made a Flickr account, so I’m gradually uploading our photos there (including our Facebook albums). If you want to see more snake pictures or others (soon), please come and visit us!
Gem,
XX
By Gem
It’s Sunday night of a lovely long weekend here in Nagahama, and we’ve been spending it doing things we like best!
Yesterday, we finished everything that needed finishing (housework, shopping and the final co-op missions of Halo 4) and we’re off to have adventures in the south on Monday and Tuesday, so we’ve spent this Sunday having a lovely, gentle time.
A sleep-in for Kin, while I made a morning visit to friends in Kinomoto, then home to a simple lunch, scavenged from the contents of the fridge (I told you it’s good to keep soup and salad dressing in there!)
Kin then headed out to do some pottery in Kurokabe, while I baked bread, puttered around in my pots and studied for an hour or two. When he got home, we enjoyed afternoon tea together; you may notice we’re eating some of the same banana bread at both lunch and afternoon tea. That banana bread is actually a bit of an accident…
A few weeks ago, my sister inspired me to make a nice, big batch of dulce de leche and, when I noticed our bananas were beginning to look a little sad in their bowl, I thought that I was being provided with a wonderful opportunity to transform my ingredients into a delicious banoffee pie for us to enjoy over the weekend. A little chocolate, a little cream, a drizzle of toffee sauce…. Subarashii!
What actually happened was that I got home on Friday evening, opened the last container of dulce de leche, tasted it to be sure it was still okay and then grew canines, howled at the moon and devoured the lot with a soup spoon.
(I wasn’t really in a fit state to observe myself, you understand, but I’m pretty certain this version of events is pretty close to being true.)
At any rate, I was left with the situation of having a bunch of sick-looking bananas and no caramel, so banana bread was a fairly obvious choice; cold slices for snacks and hot chunks with custard for desserts. Combined with the bread Oinky and I baked, this treat has made our apartment smell absolutely lovely. Outside, the air still carries a fairly heavy chill, but inside, everything is warm and clean and wonderfully fragrant. Life is good.
The indoor refugees don’t seem to be phased by the cold; they’re so happy to be outdoors, they’re shooting up like rockets. The cold, gusty wind is giving my poor snow peas some trouble though. Every time they try to get a grip on the balcony railing, they’re blown off! After this photo was taken, I tethered them with a bit of hundred yen crochet cotton (Kin says the balcony looks like a spider web now!) and that seems to be helping them hang on a bit better.
And now, I’m preparing dinner and listening to Kin sigh while he sketches. I’m so proud of him at the moment, I could explode!
Kin has just completed the Betty Edwards drawing program for the second time, and the results have been phenomenal. You can see his previous “Before” and “After” self portraits here (seriously, go look at them, I want you to see how awesome this is).
Now have a look at this:
That was his latest “After” portrait. Isn’t he amazing?
It’s lovely when we can combine peacefulness and productivity this way. We’re looking forward to exciting times over the next few days of Golden Week, but we’re both very glad we had a little stretch to work and recuperate first.
However you’re spending your week, we hope you enjoy it! Don’t forget to take some downtime.
(For a calorie count of my caramel orgy, or a look at more of Kin’s photos, please check out our Facebook page!)
Best wishes,
Gem
XX
April sweets.
And an April Fool (we won’t see Shallow again until August).
Very important preparations being made.
By Kin as well! He’ll be studying again in August and is making sure that he’s ready.
Hikiyama Matsuri (one of Nagahama’s most famous festivals).
Time to resume our Lake Biwa adventures!
April was short days, long bike rides and genuine joy at being outdoors. It was time for both of us to shake off our winter blues and get back to work on our drawing, studying and just straight making; food, ceramics and music.
We’re looking forward to a period of rest and focus in May, before we really start to get ready for Australia!
Kin and Gem
XX
By Gem
It seems that all the great cities of the world have been nicknamed. Chicago is the Windy City, Paris is the City of Love and Venice is beautifully known as the Bride of the Sea. Once a city reaches a certain age and size, it seems natural for its people to give it another name, one based on the culture and the character that place has developed.
All except Tokyo.
Tokyo is undoubtedly a great city, boasting the largest metropolitan economy in the world. It is a populous city, with around thirteen million permanent residents and a huge population of commuters from the surrounding countryside. And it is an old city (once called Edo) which has been the de facto capital of Japan for more than four hundred years. Yet for some reason, Tokyo has thus far evaded nicknaming. Is the culture not strong enough? Does the city lack personality?
Quite, quite the opposite. Tokyo, in fact, has an excess of personality. Multiple personalities, if you will. Outside minds may have given the area one name, but to the residents, it’s never stopped being a collection of small (yet insanely densely populated) villages, each existing as its own mad little world and each certain that the next quake will be The Big One. What can you call a place like that? Bedlam? Godzilla’s Playground?
“Don’t EVER live in Tokyo for more than two years at a time,” insisted my Japanese teacher back in Oz. “You’ll go insane; and you won’t notice.”
This is a man whose racing bike has more than once whizzed by me doing forty km on a downhill run despite being declared LEGALLY BLIND more than a decade ago.
He lived in Tokyo for six years.
Japan, overall, can be mad. But even among Japanese people, it’s accepted that Tokyo is much, much madder.
For one thing, the city is constantly changing. In the warmer days of spring, Japanese birds construct nests and Japanese builders hurl down and fling up buildings all over the country. But in Tokyo, they’re busy all year round, making buildings appear and vanish like mushrooms. Stores and advertisements are also constructed or painted on large vehicles (like the flatbed truck bearing massive-breasted, topless, singing battle robots that rolled by during our last visit to Kabukicho) which then move around the city playing deafening music at passers-by. Even without Godzilla or the Next Big Quake, everything is huge, but nothing feels permanent.
Did I say everything was huge? That’s just the outside of the buildings. In their interiors and on the streets, Tokyo tries to pack as much of itself into the smallest spaces it can. That means low ceilings, narrow paths, tiny furniture and constantly touching at least three other people at once. The scale and density of Tokyo causes a low-grade mental pressure that takes genuine effort to resist.
The major issue, though, is not really how much genuinely bizarre stuff (like the topless robots) is actually floating around the city, but how quickly you get used to it. The human brain is resilient and will absorb and adapt to any amount of bizarre stimuli, so in a place where so much is abnormal, your sense of normality becomes extremely unreliable.
When you add the city’s multiple personalities to that mix and the bizarre ways in which they interact, more than anything, walking around in Tokyo is like a real-life version of those nights you find yourself in the weird part of Youtube. You see something, it looks interesting, you click on it, it leads to something else, you click on that, you keep clicking…. and before you know it, it’s three in the morning and you’re watching a man feed his underpants to a goat.
Fortunately, in Tokyo your service provider isn’t gathering any information on you.
Ours would have had plenty on us before we even left our Akihabara hotel.
Although the manager had rented us tiny rooms with tinier ensuites, most of the hotel’s business actually comes from capsule rentals to drunk and weary salary men. Two thousand yen (about twenty dollars) grants them access to a large shared bathroom with lockers and a small, coffin-like space in the wall with just enough room for one sleeper and a porn magazine.
Does this seem strange? What’s stranger is that it only took about ten minutes before we were totally accustomed to the idea of going to sleep each night and waking up each morning knowing that there were a hundred businessmen sealed into the walls like wasp larvae.
If we leaned out of the window, we could see the local Pachinko Parlour, where an animated (and adorable) adventurer tugged on a jungle princess’ leopard-skin bikini top. Below, the taxi-drivers, neon-lit trucks and scooter daredevils played their terrifying game of dodgems, while sirens screamed all around, yet never arrested anyone. We could also watch tired office workers step onto the balcony for a cigarette and a moment to think, without ever noticing any of the frenzied activity around them.
In Tokyo, the people are like islands.
Despite our inauspicious beginning, we fell into our Tokyo routine (and our island status) fairly quickly.
In the morning, I would wake up, give the wall (and its load of snoring businessmen) an affectionate pat and wander into the corridor to heat water for tea. When it was ready, the three of us would step out onto the tiny “balcony” to watch the dodgem game, the suited abseiler on the opposite building and, one morning, a procession of neon-decorated trucks blaring pop music to advertise the new Idolmaster Game (which will be released in May if you’re into that sort of thing. Please don’t tell me if you are.)
After that, it was time for us to decide what to do with our day.
We visited Akihabara, of course; our anime-nerd leanings and our hotel’s location by Dentown made this an obvious choice. While we initially had a wonderful time, cramming ourselves between overstacked shelves of figurines, clothing and art books, we gradually started to notice that Akihabara seems to be morphing into something a lot more seedy and a lot less fun. I don’t know if the art has changed, or the current generation of nerds are a creepier breed, but it had a particularly bad effect on the guys, both of whom declared themselves finished with the place and in desperate need of a bath. And, after accidently catching the tail-end of an AKB-48 show, I couldn’t blame them. It makes me cringe to think that our students could potentially attend concerts in the same building as those sweating, tracksuit-wearing otaku waving their glow sticks at fifteen year olds dancing in ruffle skirts.
(Akihabara still has plenty to offer the nerdy traveller, but you might be more likely these days to just get in, buy it and get the hell back out without enjoying your time as much as you used to.)
Ueno, mixing more of the old Japan with the new was much gentler on the guys’ bruised sensibilities and we spent quite a bit of time recuperating under the cherry blossoms in Ueno Park and in the Ueno markets. Asakasa, though crowded, is also a fairly relaxed place by Tokyo standards and is popular with backpackers and older Japanese tourists. Our objective was Sensou-ji, a holy site devoted to the bodhisattva Kannon, where people have been visiting and buying (actually quite reasonably priced) souvenirs for almost fifteen centuries. (I really love that about Japan; instead of trying to avoid the tourist traps and really connect with the ancient culture of an area, visiting the tourist traps is HOW you connect!)
We skipped Shinjuku and Roppongi this time and very quickly zipped through Ginza, but Kin and Shallow indulged me and allowed me a lot of time in Shibuya.
I adore Shibuya; I could spend all day there, just watching people and walking around. This area is a bit of an artistic and fashion centre, not just for designers and multinationals, but also for the kids who stitch, paint or hammer together their own looks and styles and, when they get a little older, even open little shops of their own, which are immediately graffitied by their younger colleagues. (They do it so nicely, though that no-one minds.)
Really, Shibuya is far too cool for me, but it’s generous enough to let me hang out there anyway.
Most of our trekking was done on foot, although we did hop onto the subway sometimes. As we were generally travelling outside rush hours, Kin and Shallow were permitted to travel in purdah with me, in the “Ladies Only” section of the train (set aside to protect women travellers from sexual assault). Only some of our stations had installed suicide-prevention barriers or calming blue lights, but all played a happy jingle as each train approached, which some claim is another preventative measure.
Personally, I found this ingenious creation much more cheery and engaging than yet another obnoxious noise on the Japanese subway.
Harajuku was so crowded, the tide of people almost washed us away. Shallow’s height became an advantage for the first time since he’d arrived in Tokyo (normally he just bumped his head on things) and he could keep an eye on Kin’s red hat bobbing away on the current. I just became flotsam and grabbed hold of whatever bits I could reach of either Shallow or Kin whenever the flow brought us close together. We saw a few examples of Harajuku fashion on people (and many more in the shops!) but if you really want to see Harajuku girls, visit Jingu Bashi, the Harajuku bridge, on Sunday afternoon. Right over the bridge is a peaceful Meiji Shrine and also Yoyogi Park, where we met with a friend and unexpectedly became part of a cherry-blossom viewing party with the staff of a Shinjuku publishing company.
The park was so covered in eskies and picnic blankets that parties combined like slime mould, forming one ultra-party whose participants cheerfully shared their food and sake and posed for group photographs with strangers.
Islands can join very quickly, if sake is involved.
Much later, and a little unsteady, our whole cherry-blossom party was carolling about being fireworks in the karaoke booth where we’d had dinner. Our merry trek from Harajuku had gone past decorated trucks (each with a pair of feet pressed on the windscreen), night markets, outdoor raves and a woman quietly walking her meerkats through Shibuya.
Just another night in Crazytown.
Gem
XX
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By Gem 
…or maybe not. That is my school this morning. What the hell, man?
To an East-coast Australian, ice is NOT a substance that occurs in nature. Ice is produced by machinery and found in drinks. There is no good reason for it to just appear all over the place and even less reason for it to hang around for months at a time, getting thicker and meaner-looking every night. And there is absolutely NO possible excuse for it to roar back again NOW, when both the plum blossoms and my spirit were just starting to unfurl some tentative blooms.
Still…
…plum blossoms are tough and there have been some signs today that I may soon get my spring; like the honest-to-goodness waterfall tumbling off the roof of the gym. This morning, it was just beginning to trickle, but it was cascading by lunchtime and now it resembles alpine thaw in a nature documentary, just before the music turns to woodwinds and a time-lapsed field of edelweiss blooms.
I can only hope.
During the relatively snow-free weekend, though, Kin and I both popped on our coats (and hats and gloves and boots and scarves and mufflers and three layers of thermal underwear) and went to meet Gecko Sensei, my Tea Ceremony teacher in a watery little town to the south of Nagahama, called Gokasho.
Gokasho is one of Shiga’s Omi merchant towns from the Edo Period. The Omi merchants’ business took them all over Japan, but their families and their valuables remained safely installed in exquisite (not to mention highly secure) mansions in Shiga. Omihachiman is probably the most famous of these towns, but I find Gokasho with its spectacularly laid-out gardens and population of fat, friendly carp in the canals beside the roads, far, far more charming.
In theory, we were there to see the town’s Hinamatsuri displays. Sensei is the archetypal Yamato Nadeshiko, so a visit to a girl’s festival is exactly the sort of outing she enjoys. Kin finds Hinamatsuri dolls as creepy as hell, but is fond of Sensei and doesn’t trust her wobbling around unaccompanied when she’s wearing zori (which is pretty much all of the time). I find the displays fairly interesting, but mostly want any excuse to poke around in the magnificent gardens and old family homes (not to mention tickle a carp or two, should the opportunity arise).
For all of this meticulously planned magnificence, Gokasho isn’t imposing in the way that, say, Kakunodate or Nara can be. For one thing, it’s very obviously a little country village, even if it IS a little country village built and maintained by fabulously wealthy businesspeople. For another, any family home which has lasted for more than two generations develops a really awesome “Nan’s place” vibe ESPECIALLY if that home has since been making an effort to hang onto any item of potential historical value. That means that every old box that every Omi Mum has packed away for the last several hundred years has been unpacked and displayed, including the recent ones, so that next to each other are centuries-old teakettles, exquisitely lacquered furniture, plastic elephants on wheels and shelves of things like combs, old toys and tacky seaside ornaments made from shells, glue and googly eyes.
It’s an incredibly relaxing place for somewhere so interesting. And just look at this kitchen!
I’m always drawn to kitchens, but this was a particularly beautiful example of its breed. A person could really work in a kitchen like that.
The Gokasho gardens are surrounded by high walls and each one is different from all of the others.
I’m certain that the houses and gardens were planned simultaneously, as they complement each other so perfectly and each household seems to have chosen their own aesthetic. One family constructed a fascinatingly erratic landscape with hills, cliffs and a boulder-filled river. Another produced one that was peacefully flat, rambling and flower-filled, except where it rose around the lake (which the house was constructed to showcase).
My favourite garden looks like a small, dry forest with uneven stone paths winding through it. It’s kind of hard to explain what exactly is so breathtaking about that, but somehow this garden manages to feel completely peaceful and separate from the world outside its walls.
And any way, any town where the fish follow you around has to be pretty cool.
(A more complete album of Kin’s pictures can be found on our Facebook page.)
Keeping it cool (unfortunately).
Gem
XX
EDIT: Ugh, I’ve just seen some of the photos of Gokasho available online and they give COMPLETELY the wrong idea of the place. It may be time to buy Kin that 32mm Prime lens and let him do it right.
Spring is around the corner!
…but it’s not here yet! We’re throwing off the outdoor chill along with our coats and enjoying afternoon tea together every day.
Kin is potting madly (his latest creation is a mizusashi to hold water for Gem’s tea ceremonies). This week he begins a machining course as well!
Kin is also doing a lot of drawing (since it’s too cold to play outdoors). Mostly for work, but a bit for fun as well. Keep an eye out; he will post some soon on our Facebook page.
Gem has resumed plunking at her guitar for the first time in over a decade and is playing lots of Beatles and Monkees songs.
Gem is also inspecting other people’s pots….
… and is looking forward to fixing up her own sorry specimens when the weather warms up (the indoor refugee pots are still going strong, though; they’ve kept us in herbs and salad greens all winter).
We’re braving the cold to venture outdoors in the city.
…and outside the city, too!
We are enjoying our newly tidy apartment, eating a lot of soup and drinking a lot of tea. We are only very reluctantly leaving our warm futon on weekday mornings. Gem is reading Vanity Fair (and it’s AWESOME! It’s like Jane Austen, only everyone’s evil! – Gem) and Kin is working his way through a variety of old DC cartoon series.
We’re wrapping up closing lessons, marking exam papers and scratching our heads at some of the answers we see and hear….
In Kin’s case (junior high), most questions result in roars of “It’s orange!”, “I’m sunny!” and “I like pussy!” all of which require his gentle correction: A thump on the head with a rubber hammer and “I’m sorry, the answer was Tuesday.”
Gem’s (much younger) students offer sweeter, yet infinitely more perplexing answers:
“Momoka, where do you want to go?” “I want to go to Kenya! Because, I like black people!”
We’re looking forward to better fruit, to our spring holiday and to Shallow’s visit next month!
And in the meantime….
We’re breathing deeply and waiting for the warm.
Kin and Gem
XX
New Year pilgrimages
And New Year’s cakes!
Scary festivals
A disappointing lack of snow (when it’s still so cold!)
Comfort food
And comfort food
And comfort food
(it’s a good thing there are all of these scary festivals going on to keep us walking around)
Fresh meals from our indoor refugees.
And comfy times indoors (with Gem’s new favourite reading material).
January was frosty times outdoors and winter comforts at home. It was soggy footprints, creepy snowmen and blue-faced six-year olds at work, with wooly scarves to seal ourselves away from the artic winds that whistle through our classrooms. We have had small adventures and happy experiences without straying far from home, staying snug, merry and cheerful (with a bit of excitement sprinkled here and there).
2014 is well and truly underway!
Gem and Kin
XX
P.S. Our Facebook page is playing up again at the moment, but links are still getting through okay. Gem will give it a kicking during the week to try and sort it out.
By Gem
By the end of this year, we won’t be here any more!
The start of a new year has really brought it home to us; our time in this little apartment, in this little town is going to end in 2014! This place has become so much our own it’s hard to believe that, this time next year, it will belong to someone else. Time is suddenly a limited commodity.
But the start of a new year in Japan is a difficult time to manage any sense of urgency. New Years in Japan is like Christmas in Australia; it’s the time when the whole family get together and then just kind of sit around. For a week, the country shuts down, while people eat, gossip and walk to local shrines to pray for good fortune through the year. It’s not a time for exciting trips or big projects, but for kotatsu-snuggling, cups of tea and big bowls of mandarins.
Not to mention New Year cakes!
And other lovely things!
Right now though, we’re still in Nagahama and we still have things to do. On Monday, Japan restarts itself. Our evening classes will resume, our friends will return from their home countries and we will be back at our schools, doing our best to slide some English into stubborn little skulls.
At Kin’s school, there will be a continuation of the dramatic investigation into the identity of the elusive Dick Phantom; one of the boys (we assume) has developed a taste for penis-based graffiti. The Phantom spent the final months of 2013 creating elaborate, phallic extravaganzas over every wall and piece of furniture a kid that age could reach. These works don’t show a lot of dedication to accuracy, but, particularly toward the end of the year, a real focus seems to have been given to scale. We can only imagine that his scope will expand in 2014.
I never really feel I’ve left my school, as half of it seems to live in this building. The very, very small first-grader with the very, very big eyes has finally worked up the courage to ask why I seem to spend so much time here. Her eyes got even bigger when I told her this is where I live!
Although Kin and I enjoyed the Japanese-style New Year, in time-honoured Western fashion, we have made a resolution or two; or rather, have reviewed how our Tanabata wishes and our everyday goals are going.
This is one of Kin’s tanabata goals… or sort of. He never got to start those glass-blowing classes; the college filled up before his enrolment was processed! Instead, he’s been spending his weekends up to his elbows in clay and is having a wonderful time. His very, very earliest work (above) has just returned from the kiln.
Kin never made it to cooking class either but, on the domestic front, is now single-handedly responsible for the running of our household (a development we will share at a later date) and is getting better at it every day. And on the artistic front, with blue plastic document sheets, sticky tape and a stanley knife, he produced a photographic soft-box that make today’s pictures even nicer than usual!
And me?
As you can see, I didn’t learn to braid my hair; I cut it all off, instead! In my defence, though, this has made it a lot easier to reach my goal of learning to swim properly and I HAVE successfully poached an egg, so I think I’m still ahead of the game. I also finished my first knitting project!
Kin’s scarf is so long that he can (and does!) wrap it around his entire head to keep the wind off his face when he rides to work. I’ve started a scarf for myself, now and once that’s done, I’ll be ready to get a little more ambitious.
Learning to draw underwent a lengthy hiatus during our illness, but during this week of shutdown Japan, I’ve picked it back up. Kin is excited to share his skills with me; I think he’s too optimistic, but I’ll keep trying.
We’re ready for you, 2014. We might end the year in New South Wales, but we’re starting it in Shiga, and we’re going to enjoy every single day of both!
Gem
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