Come at me, disasters

I'm pretty bad at updating, 'cause I have too much going on in my life or whatever.  EXCUSES.

Let's see if I can quickly recap what's been going on in my life.

Tuesday morning was the monthly festival (tsukinamisai) at Susanoo Shrine.  I hadn't been able to go for the past three months because of one thing or another (well, graduate school application deadline, food poisoning, and being in Tokyo respectively), so it was nice to see everyone again.  I...hadn't forgotten everything either!  And I got to fold paper for the offering trays and apparently was proclaimed a genius because even though I was shown how to fold the paper from the bottom corner up, I was able to make the exact same shape from the top corner down.  Um.  I'd call that basic spatial awareness, not genius, but whatever.
Also, Nakano-san offered to take me to a fire purification festival that's performed at Misogi Shrine, about 3 hours by car from Nagoya.  It's very unusual, because most fire purification ceremonies are performed at temples, not shrines.  Her husband works at the shrine, and she apparently goes up there a fair amount, so she offered to take me the next time she goes up.  Pretty exciting!

Tuesday evening I had Japanese class, where we read about how people are giving their children ridiculously difficult to read names.  This won't mean anything to anyone who doesn't speak Japanese, but some names in the article included: 結愛（ゆあ）, 明日（ともろう）, 笑（えりく）, 香魚（かな）, 夢紅（むく）, and, my personal favorite, 響（りずむ）.  WHO THE HECK NAMES THEIR KID THAT?  That's just cruel.

After class, we had a nomikai with the foreign freshmen and Tuesday sensei*.  It was pretty fun, although it quickly degenerated to learning swear words in foreign languages.  I know now some swear words in Chinese!  Yay?  Also, one of the freshmen is Mexican, and was trying to teach everyone cusses in Spanish, but finally one of the Chinese boys asked, "Can't you cuss at people without involving their parents?"  Ahahaha, it's kind of true.

Anyway, Wednesday morning I had penmanship class, where, funnily enough, we had a long discussion about people naming their children ridiculous things.
Also, I practiced writing this:

I hope you are super impressed by that heart radical.  It took me...FOREVER.

Anyway, Wednesday afternoon everyone in the dorm had a mandatory disaster drill, because, you know, almost all the foreign students are leaving in a month and it would really suck if a disaster occurred in the next month and they didn't know how to deal with it.  Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh.  Anyway, you would think that a disaster drill would only take...oh, an hour, right?  I mean, there are only so many disasters that can occur.  We aren't near active volcanoes or anything...  But, no, it took 3 hours.  THREE.  HOURS.  Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

After that everyone wanted to throw themselves out of windows, but we couldn't find any appropriate windows so instead a bunch of us went to all-you-can-eat pizza again (and I, once again, failed at eating pizza but ate a million pounds of eggplant pasta; it was AMAZING).

Today I had Japanese class in the evening, and we learned some crazy shortened words.  In Japanese, a lot of borrowed words are simply too long to use in daily speech (plus, Japanese is all about making words shorter than they already are), so words get shortened.  Like air conditioner becomes eakon.  And Starbucks becomes sutaba.  See how many of these words you can figure out (all of them are shortened forms of commonly used English words or phrases**):
1. pasokon
2. rimokon
3. meruado
4. kaanabi
5. santora
6. furima
7. kopipe
8. ama
9. infure
10. shinse
Hint: 1-7 are two or more words mashed into one, while 8-10 is a single word which has had the second half chopped off.
If you speak Japanese and can figure out 9 OR if you don't speak Japanese*** and can figure out 6...I'll give you a prize or something, I guess.  OH MAN, PRESSURE'S ON NOW.  It should be noted that we have a native speaker tutor in our class, and she couldn't figure out some of these.  So they're not easy.  And, no, it won't work to put them through Google translate.  You have to think about it.  You can work in teams if you want, just as long as you are working as a team, not just mooching off some poor soul.

So, yeah, that's what I've been up to!

*Although now I guess he's We Don't Take Class with You sensei.  IT'S SO CONFUSING.  Monday sensei is now Thursday sensei and Thursday sensei is Tuesday sensei.  I don't know what to believe.

**I could have thrown in some German to be a jerk, but I'm not a jerk.  Aren't you happy I'm not a jerk?

***For those of you who want to try this but don't speak Japanese, all vowels are pronounced like in Spanish.  R is pronounced like a cross between an L and an R and is used for either sound in English.  A double A is pronounced like a normal A, just twice the length.  Everything else should be intuitively obvious.

Recap: Life after the S-As' departure

Last time traveling post for now, so might as well enjoy it while it lasts!*

Some stuff that has happened since Nick left for home:

1. My new suitemate came.  Her name is Louki, she is Dutch, and she cleans things when she is bored.  Needless to say, we get along well.  Also, our suite is significantly cleaner and sometimes I don't have to wash a sink full of dishes every time I want to make dinner.

2. The semester ended.  Our Monday and Tuesday classes were definitely not parties.  I could see how an outside observer might think they were parties, but that outside observer would be wrong.  Definitely very serious classes.

3. Tuesday-sensei apparently knows someone who wants an English conversation partner, so he said he'll put us in touch.

4. I finished my graduate school applications.

5. I wrote an article for The Fulbrighter.
5a. I found out my article is going to be published.

6. I set up an interview with a priest at Ueno Tenmanguu for next Tuesday.  Hopefully it will go well.  I'm trying to type up and revise my interview questions so that I make sure to hit all the important points in a single sitting.

7. I was told that I must have been Japanese in a previous life.  (This is the standard response when people can't figure out why the heck I would be interested in Japan.  Never mind that it's interesting or anything.  I MUST have been Japanese in a previous life.)

8. I read Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan, which convinced me
A. I really don't want to join a millenarian movement
and
B. I really don't want to engage in any research where my research subjects are likely to try to murder me.

9. I tried Dutch licorice.  It is...really odd.

10. Itou-san invited me (and my roommates, so Louki is coming with me) to a Thing at Nagoya University tomorrow.  It involves mochi and foreign students aaaaaaaaaaaaand that's pretty much all I know.  But it should be fun!

11. I had penmanship class and somehow managed to screw up the kanji in my calligraphy name as well as the stroke order for pretty much every kanji ever.  MY SHAME IS UNBEARABLE.
It got to the point that Nakano-san would be chatting to the other ladies, and it would sound like, "Oh, did you hear that Suzuki-san is STROKE ORDER, DANA-CHAN moving to Hokkaido?"
11a. On the upside, Nakano-san gave me two children's books that are published by a publishing company that is associated with a shrine.  Needless to say, they're supposed to teach kids about Shinto.  The one I'm currently reading is about a hinoki (Japanese cypress) tree growing up in a forest.  Thus far in the story, the wind has taught the hinoki about the kami and how everyone has a meaning in life and the hinoki's best friend (a dung beetle) dropped dead from the cold.  It...is kind of morbid yet happy?

12. I bought a tea pot!  So now I can drink SO MUCH TEA.

13. I developed a minor addiction to kinkan, which my dictionary tells me means "kumquat" but is definitely not a kumquat.  Or at least what we think of in the states as a kumquat.  It's about twice as big and DELICIOUS.  I would eat a million of them every day if fruit wasn't so darned expensive.

14. I found out that the Fulbright mid-year conference is going to be on March 22, so I will be in Tokyo March 18-23 at the very least.  Might be there longer, depending on whether some other things pan out.  I'm definitely going to try to hit the Ghibli Museum and Washinomiya Shrine (the Lucky Star Shrine) while I am there, though.
14a. I found out that at the conference I have to give a presentation on my research...that is 3-5 minutes long.  I AM GOING TO GO INSANE.  How can I say anything worthwhile in that space?  lskjskhekrhaea
14b. I'm going on a tour of Nikko, sponsored by the Tokyo Fulbright Alumni Association, March 18-20.  It should be cool.

15. I apparently caught Steven's post office curse**, because when I went to the post office to get a customs declaration form so I could send (really late) Christmas presents home, they were convinced I actually wanted a box.
"I need the form you have to write the contents of the box on." 
"You mean a box?" 
"No, it is paper. If you put noodles in the box, you write 'noodles' on the form." 
"You mean a box?" 
"NO, it is a FORM for WRITING WHAT IS IN THE BOX. You post it on the box when you send things out of the country." 
 "You mean a box?"
PLEASE LISTEN TO THE WORDS COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH.

So, yeah.  It hasn't been all that crazy exciting, but I've had some time to sit and read and do all the things I wasn't doing while I was traipsing all over Japan.  Tomorrow I've got the mystery mochi thing in the evening, and then Friday through Sunday is the fieldtrip to Izumo Taisha.  Updates will come...when updates come.

*I totally had this stuck in my head about a week ago, so now I will INFLICT IT UPON YOU MWAHAHAHA.

**Every time Steven goes to the post office, it inevitably ends in disaster and suffering.  Last time he went, their ATM malfunctioned.  Clearly the post office curse is contagious.

Penmanship and Japanese snacks

Today I went to participate in a penmanship class that Nakano-san teaches at Gosha Shrine.  Despite my past experiences with calligraphy,* it was a lot of fun, and I've decided to try to go every week.  It's not incredibly intense and you're actually allowed to chat in class, which is nice.  There were only two other students today (apparently there are usually five or six students, but a whole bunch of kids came down with flu, so their moms had to stay home), both of whom were significantly better than me (but then again, there are five year olds who are significantly better than me).  BUT Nakano-san was not appalled by my pretty bad handwriting, and actually seemed to think that I was pretty okay for a foreigner.

So this was what I did today:

Next year is the year of the dragon, so we were writing all the different characters for dragon in class.

...I kind of screwed this one up and made the bottom half too small.  Apparently the top half is really good, though?

CHARACTER PRACTICE.  (That got smudged.  Oops.)

MORE CHARACTER PRACTICE.

...like I said, my handwriting is preeeeeetty bad.  But hopefully it'll get better?

Anyway, after class we had tea and snacks and talked for about an hour.  And some Pretty Insanely Interesting Stuff came up, but before I write about it I have to anonymize the heck out of some information.  I also emailed a professor about it, because it is That Interesting.  I.e. it may seriously challenge some of the arguments I've seen concerning Shinto vs. the New Religions.  SO THERE'S THAT.
SORRY FOR BEING REALLY VAGUE, BUT UM YEAH.

NOW I WILL DISTRACT YOU WITH PICTURES OF RANDOM JAPANESE SNACK FOODS.

This is chocolate chip melon bread.  It's pretty tasty.  It doesn't have melons in it; the melon refers to the shape.  'cause it looks like a melon.

Not seeing it?

Me neither.

REALLY GOOD NUT CHOCOLATES.

I DON'T HAVE AN ADDICTION; I CAN STOP ANY TIME I WANT.

This is something I picked up at the market at Kawahara Shrine.  Imagine a cross between rice cakes and rice krispies, just with little chunks of peanut embedded.  SO TASTY.

The coolest thing about them is that they make them AT THE MARKET.  They have a big popper basket thing, and right before they're going to pop the rice kernels, they ring a little bell to warn everyone what's going to happen.  The popping rice sounds like a cannon being fired, not even kidding.

This is the fresh chocolate cream melon bread I mentioned a while back.  It's very tasty!  And it doesn't have melons in it.

This is a treat I got from Rokusha Shrine when I visited for the guji lecture.  It's little red-bean-paste-stuffed pastries.  SO TASTY.

This is senbei, also known as every Japanese snack ever.  My dictionary tells me that "senbei" means "rice cookie," but it's more like a rice cracker.  In this case, it's flavored with soy sauce and sugar, which sounds gross but tastes pretty good!

In any case, I have to wake up at 6 a.m. tomorrow for a mystery tour, so I should probably go do Productive Things before it is time for me to sleep.  But before I go...

Julia said...

You could try cleaning out your alarm clock with vinegar! My guess it that it will either work amazingly or explode. 

Um, you wanna try it for me?  I kind of need all my fingers, at the moment...

*My past experiences with calligraphy were so soul-breaking that I really have no way to properly describe them.  12 weeks, the same character over and over and over and over and over in hour and a half-long sessions, 友友友友友 over and over and over and over, sitting in complete silence and writing the same character OVER AND OVER AND OVER, and at the end of the quarter, when I presented my final piece to my sensei, she looked at it, sighed, and said, "Well, you tried."  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Interviews and floss

I haven't had much to write about the last few days, but I suppose I should write something here just to let all of you know I'm alive.

Hey, guys, I'm alive.

I went to Gosha Shrine today to talk to Nakano-san, and we wound up talking for about two and a half hours.  Sooooooooooooo much information.  A lot of it was stuff that I had read about before--like elementary school kids taking field trips to the shrine or kids taking college entrance exams using the shrine as a place to announce their commitment, not just ask for a free pass--so it was cool to get a real life confirmation.

I also learned quite a bit about the female priesthood.  It's very unusual for women to be Shinto priests; apparently 30 years ago only about 1% of the priesthood was female.  Now it's about 10%.  Part of the reason why it was so rare was that women were believed to be kegare, which is a term that is sort of a catch-all for "impure," "polluted," or "defiled."  In Shinto, there is a taboo against blood, and since women menstruate, they were believed to be automatically impure.  (There were even time periods when women weren't allowed to come onto shrine grounds when they were menstruating or pregnant, because it was feared that they would defile the shrine.)  However, that view is slowly changing--the speaker at the lecture I went to on Monday said that he believes that blood is only impure when it shouldn't be there, i.e. because women menstruate so they can give birth, it's "natural" for the blood to be there.  Nakano-san said that the kami don't care whether their priests are male or female; they care more about what's in your soul than what your body looks like.  And then she added, "Anyway, isn't Amaterasu a woman?  And she's the top kami!"

Also, I found out a little bit about Nakano-san's background.  She's been a shinshoku* for 7 or 8 years now. Before that she was a "normal housewife," although she quickly amended that statement with, "Actually, I don't know about the normal part.  I'm weird."**  Her husband was Gosha Shrine's guji, and she began studying to enter the priesthood so she could help him.  There's a test you can take to enter the priesthood, and she apparently studied for it intensively for a month (while raising three children and helping out at the shrine and being a "normal housewife") and then passed it on the first try.  Given the huge number of subjects the test covers--Japanese history, the Shinto classics, the proper norito writing forms, the proper protocols for shrine ceremonies--that's kind of amazing.  Her husband then got a job at a shrine in Yamanashi Prefecture (which is one heck of a commute from Aichi Prefecture, where Nagoya is located) and she became the guji of Gosha Shrine.

Anyway, I got lots of notes which I will turn into something semi-coherent at some point, instead of the random Japanglish scribbles that are currently in my notebook.

ALSO, Nakano-san lent me a children's book of stories from the Kojiki, which will be fun to read.  I've read a chunk of the Kojiki (in translation) and little snippets of modernized Kojiki in Japanese, so this'll be a new experience for me.

In other news, FLOSS IS REALLY HARD TO FIND IN JAPAN.  I ran out of floss a couple of days ago and didn't manage to find any until today.  They didn't have it at the grocery store.  They didn't have it at the convenience store.  Where they did have it, though, was at this bizarre health food store/pharmacy on the way back from Gosha Shrine.  Weird.

*A Shinto priest.

**I mostly think she's awesome.

愛知県女子神職講演会

So today was the 愛知県女子神職講演会 (Aichi Prefecture Female Priest Lecture), which meant that I woke up supremely early and took a subway to the train station, where I met Itou-san (Kawahara Shrine's guji) and we took the train together to Higashi Okazaki.

Itou-san, by the way, is still awesome.  She regaled me with tales of her exploits around the world (seriously, she's traveled so much; I'm pretty jealous) and then tried to get me to teach her English.  She said that sometimes foreigners come to the shrine and she wants to show them around, but doesn't know enough English to be able to pull it off.  So I got to teach a little bit, which was cool.

The shrine (Rokusha Shrine) was only about a five minute walk from the train station.  We arrived really, really early, because the train took 15 minutes less than the schedule said it would, so everyone was setting up chairs.  I got to meet a whole bunch of really cool ladies who were really excited when they realized I could (mostly) understand what they were saying.
...it was kind of funny, because almost all of them told me about how they had grandchildren my age.  Ouch.
Also, one of the women, upon discovering that I was studying at Nanzan, told me that she had graduated from Nanzan, which made her my senpai!
Also also, Nakano-san was there as well, so I got to say hi to her as well.

Before the lecture started, everyone went to pray to the kami of the shrine.  When I went to wash my hands, however, I discovered that a newt had taken up residence in the water dipper.  Itou-san rescued the newt and took it to the pond right next to the hand-washing station.
And then we faced THE STAIRS.
Rokusha Shrine has the most terrifying set of stairs I have ever seen in my entire life.  They are so sheer that unless you're standing at the very edge of the top step, it looks like a sheer drop with no stairs at all.  Also, the stairs are essentially giant stone cubes that were put in place at least four hundred years ago, so time has made them lopsided and scary as all heck.  I clung to the handrail for dear life as women four times my age went up with no problem.
The shrine itself is absolutely gorgeous; it's a Japanese cultural treasure.  I don't have any pictures, unfortunately, but the shrine does have a Wikipedia page (although don't trust the information on it, because I can tell you for a fact that Tokugawa Iemitsu was dead loooooong before 1934).
There was a short purification ceremony inside the shrine as well as an offering of a sakaki branch to the kami.  I have never seen a priest so nervous as the one performing the ceremony today; not only was he performing in front of the kami, he also had twenty incredibly experienced priests watching him PLUS his boss (the guji of the shrine).
Then everyone headed back down the TERRIFYING STAIRS (they were even worse on the way down) and went into the shrine office to listen to the lecture.  The lecturer (who was the only male there) was also a priest, and he was lecturing on concepts of death and the afterlife in Shinto.  He went through concepts of death and the afterlife in a whole bunch of world religions and then in all the different branches of Shinto through all of history.  It was pretty cool, even if it was really hard to understand, because he kept using really complicated words.  (On the positive side, I now know how to say "cremation"?)  I understood about 75% of what he was saying, but afterwards I felt like I had run a marathon.  I keep forgetting how exhausting it is to mentally translate academic speech.
Overall, the important points can be summed up as "there are a whole lot of different views about death and the afterlife in Japanese culture and...we have no idea which one's right, so good luck."

Anyway, there was a lunch break in the middle, so I got a free lunch and impressed everyone again with how I could eat anko.  Unfortunately, my lunch had Ninja Wasabi in it* and so I died a little, but not enough that anyone noticed.  There was also a "tea time" break in the middle of the afternoon, where everyone had tea and cake and that really good mochi stuff that comes in cubes and is covered in ground up sesame and maccha?  I don't remember the name of it.  Anyway, during tea time a discussion about brain-death popped up, as well as one about whether animals have souls.  (The lecturing priest said that he thinks cats and dogs and tanuki and foxes have souls, but not cows and chickens and pigs.  And then he shrugged and said that maybe he was totally wrong.)
Also, I wasn't considered weird for not drinking alcohol (there was the usual post-purification ceremony sake), because a number of the women there don't drink (most for health reasons; I heard some incredibly terrifying stories), but I WAS considered weird for not drinking coffee.  When I explained that I don't react well to caffeine, everyone seemed to consider that a reasonable excuse but also strangely hilarious.
ALSO, everyone kept giving me food; I took home a shopping bag full.  Their reason for giving me so much food was "because you're a student," which I think is probably polite code for "the only reason a human being would be so skinny is if they have no money, you poor, starving student."

The event ended at about 4:30, and afterwards Itou-san and two of the other women and I went to a nearby temple, which is very famous because it has one of Tokugawa Ieyasu's (many many many many many) graves.**  I had actually been to the temple before, when I visited Okazaki back in the summer of 2009, but it was cool to go back and actually know what I was looking at this time.

And then we took the train back to Nagoya.

And now I am really tired and should sleep.

Zzzzz.

Sorry for having lame posts the last two days, even though what I did was awesome.  I'm just...too...tired.

On an ironic note, I am better at socializing with women who are three or four times older than me than with people my age.  Yay?

*THERE'S YELLOW WASABI?  I thought it was mustard or something, a mistake I will never make again.

**Tokugawa Ieyasu was an interesting guy.  An interesting guy.  He has a whole bunch of graves...all over the place.  Because he was interesting.