Hey, guys, guess what I'm doing!

本指令の中で、「国家神道」という用語の意味は、日本政府の法令によって、「宗派神道」や「教派神道」という宗教と区別されて、「国家神道」や「神社神道」という、非宗教の国家的宗派として類別された神道の一派を指す。

That's your hint!

Here's another hint:

The term State Shinto within the meaning of this directive will refer to that branch of Shinto (Kokka Shintō or Jinja Shintō ) which by official acts of the Japanese Government has been differentiated from the religion of Sect Shinto (Shūha Shintō or Kyōha Shintō) and has been classified a non-religious national cult commonly known as State Shinto, National Shinto or Shrine Shinto.

...if you speak Japanese, you can probably tell how horribly butchered my translation is.  OH WELL.

...also, it bothers me so much that there aren't any quotation marks in that entire passage.  I totally inserted them in my translation, because I am a terrible person.

FACT: I steal all my O's with lines over them from the Wikipedia article on Tokyo and all my U's from the Wikipedia article on Kyushu.  Yeeeeeeeeeeep.

Another typhoon, kimono fashion show, and the Shinto Directive for the millionth time

So, let's see, what exciting stuff have I been up to?

On Tuesday we had a typhoon, which was honestly kind of lame.  I mean, I guess it got kind of interesting in the evening, but the morning was alternating between lame gusts of wind and occasional drippy rain.  Laaaaaaaaaame.  Oh, and then there was this weird five minute time period when it was hailing.  I don't even know.  Anyway, class was cancelled, but I didn't find this out until I was running toward class through the rain and got hailed by the guard at the gate.  OH WELL.

On Thursday Nellie invited me over to the Furukawa Art Museum (where I'd never been) because she was participating in a kimono fashion show as one of the models!  I had a little bit of trouble getting in, 'cause apparently my name didn't wind up on the invite list SOMEHOW and they were convinced Nellie's name was "Tin-Tin" (what), but eventually it was cleared up and I got in.  The show was actually a joint fashion show/concert, which I was pretty cool with.  They had a guy playing a really old version of the koto, which apparently no one in Japan knows how to play, so they had to bring him in from China.  It's considered one of the hardest instruments to play IN THE WORLD because there are no frets on the neck of the instrument, which means that you have to have crazy perfect pitch and know exactly where to place your fingers.  I can honestly say it was some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard, and DANG, that guy was talented, and was making sounds that I didn't know you could make with a koto.  There was also a guy playing a kind of flute that's normally used as accompaniment to the really-old-koto, who was also very good.
It was kind of funny to compare the two musicians, because the koto player* was IN THE ZONE and didn't pay attention to anyone else and had literally one facial expression, and the flutist was flirting with all the ladies and making all these "oh yeah, I know I'm awesome" faces as he was playing his flute and just generally showing off his mad skills.
Also, the songs they were playing had the craziest names.  I understand that Chinese is an incredibly compact language, but each song they were playing had a roughly four syllable title in Chinese, and in Japanese they were called:
"Dragon flying through the sky and the sea" (okay, I can see how this could be compressed into four characters)
"Drinking with friends, getting drunk, and reading poetry" (...whatever shakes your boat, I guess)
"It is winter and it is cold and the river is frozen and a person is standing there looking at the winter scenery and feels lonely" (...wait, what)
"You leave your hometown to cross the desert to the east and night falls and you climb a hill and turn back to look at the stars over your hometown and you feel nostalgic and sad and lonely" (okay, now I am pretty sure you are just making stuff up)

Anyway, after the concert they had the kimono show!  It was showcasing kimono from Arimatsu which had been dyed using shibori technique, which Nellie could tell you a whole lot about, but it basically involves dyeing the fabric by twisting, folding, or sewing, sort of like tie-dye!  There were a whole lot of lovely kimono (and some of the obi were TO DIE FOR**), and Nellie was looking ridiculously elegant and poised.  (Although, when she came on stage the woman next to me started swatting at her friend and hissing, "IT'S A GAIJIN," because, you know, maybe it wasn't obvious?  I don't even know.)  Unfortunately I didn't get the chance to talk to Nellie afterwards, 'cause I had to leave for class and she was stuck upstairs to prepare for the next show anyway, but it was a really neat experience, and I got to see some gorgeous clothes and hear some beautiful music.

On Friday, we were reading The Shinto Directive in class (again; I swear, I'm going to spend the rest of my life reading that document), and I finally got a chance to be useful, because Sensei asked us to compare the wording in the English document with the wording into the Japanese document, and I am the only person in my group who is even close to being bilingual.  YAY.  We have to write out a translation in modern Japanese based off of the English document for next week, so we'll see how that goes.

On Saturday morning, Yiyi and I went down to the farmer's market at Kawahara and bought SO MUCH FOOD.  Summer apparently means EVERYTHING IS IN SEASON, or at least many things are, which means SO MANY FOODS TO EAT.  Also, an old dude hit on me creepily and made a pun on my name ('cause "deina" sounds like "ee na"; dude, I love puns, but NO, and also PLEASE move out of my personal space).

Otherwise, not much to report.  I'm reading about how some people wanted to turn Japan into a Christian nation so that it could be modernized (this was during the Meiji Restoration) and working on my paper and dying in the heat and eating ice cream.

*Koto-ist?  Koto-er?

**There was an obi with a flowering tree stitched across the back and it was beautiful and I swooned a little.

Who THOUght writING an ENTIre docuMEnt likE THIS was A gOOD iDEA?

I realized that I didn't talk about Ueno Tenmangu yet, so I should probably do that.

This past Saturday, due to a series of confusing circumstances which may or may not have had to do with it pouring rain on my fieldwork, I decided to go wandering around Nagoya.  I wound up at Ueno Tenmangu.

One of the things the shrine sells is these little dolls, which come with a fortune rolled up inside.  People apparently tie up their fortunes and then leave the dolls at the shrine.  There are SO MANY DOLLS, as you will see shortly.

Also, these little guys all had acorn hats.

See all the multicolored dots on the statues?  They're all dolls.

Here's the front of the main shrine building.

SO MANY DOLLS.

AND EVEN MORE.

Here's the shrine from a different angle.

These are gourds.  They're a special charm that the shrine sells.

Ema for traffic safety.

If you can't read Japanese, on the back of the ema is the name of the requester (bottom line) and the car's license plate.

So that was a fun side excursion, even if I got kind of unpleasantly damp.  I...still don't have an umbrella. I am kind of hoping that it will miraculous reappear so I don't have to spend money on a new one.  Anyway, as it turns out, the head priest of Ueno Tenmangu is friends with one of the guys who works at the Nanzan Institute of Religious Studies, which means I have an in!  Mwahahahaha.

On a side note, miso donuts are delicious, but don't really taste like miso.  They make the underside of my tongue tingle, though, which I don't think is a normal reaction.  I am eating a miso donut while typing this.  That is your context. Yes.

So today I hiked over Gosha Shrine for penmanship class.  (I need a better name for it, but that's...the literal translation.)  This was what I worked on today:

I'm actually pretty proud of this one, except the bottom of the left side of the 5th character.  Ew.  I don't know what happened there.

Of course, this also took me about ten minutes to write, because I was trying so hard...

...I somehow managed to forget the date momentarily.  It was amazing.

This is what a sheet with corrections looks like.  (Circles represent "you did pretty okay here.")  As you can probably tell, Nakano-san's corrections look better than my characters.  Oh dear.

After class we had tea and marron youkan, which is a kind of jelly-block-thing made out of Spanish chestnuts.  DELICIOUS.  Also, lots of interesting discussion, some of which I will have to save for another time (and lots of anonymizing).  We also talked about Kaminazuki, 'cause it's finally over.  Kaminazuki (神無月) is another name for the month of October.  If you read kanji, you know that it's literally "month without kami."  Essentially, all the kami in Japan go to Izumo Shrine for a big meeting where they decide a bunch of important stuff for the coming year, including who's going to marry who.  BUT, as Nakano-san pointed out, October is also when all the fall festivals occur.  So why hold a festival for a kami who isn't there?  We were trying to come up with explanations, but didn't come to a real conclusion.  The best anyone could come up with was, "Maybe the kami have better concentration than humans and can concentrate on their own shrines while at the meeting."  (Nakano-san made a face and said that they should be paying attention to the meeting.)

Also, as we were finishing our tea, the other women said that I should teach English as a part time job.  (There was then much agreement that they would take English lessons from me.)  I explained that I'm not allowed to have any part-time jobs while on Fulbright, and their first reaction was, "Well, you can just not tell anyone..."  I tried to explain what a spectacularly bad idea that was, but then they had a better idea.  "We can pay you...in FOOD!"  So, to make a long story short, I'm going to be teaching English conversation to a group of women from the neighborhood on the 25th in exchange for lunch.  I kind of adore teaching, so that'll be cool.  Plus, it was decided that the conversation topic will be shrine-related stuff.  So.  It'll be exciting, at the very least?

In other news, THE SHINTO DIRECTIVE IS SO HARD TO READ.  We had to read it aloud in class today, which would have killed me dead, except that I read better than some of the other students and even the Japanese students were struggling with it.  There are several things that make it really hard to read:
1. It's written in an older form of Japanese.  Thus, there's weird grammar all over the place.
2. It uses a lot of really weird kanji.  Like 而して.  If you have no idea what that means, it's しかして.  Also, いかが has a kanji????
3. All the hiragana is katakana.*
If you want to try to read it, the full text is online here.  Ow, my eyes.

...and now I should probably start heading toward bed.  So tired.

*If you don't speak Japanese, here's a simple explanation:
There are three alphabets in Japanese: katakana, hiragana, and kanji.  The first two are phonetic.  You normally use hiragana to write the bits of words that aren't in kanji, but for some reason, the Shinto Directive is written so that all the hiragana is katakana.  It looks really weird, and is really hard to read.  ImaGINE IF you were READing a documeNT that lookED likE THIS.  ExcePT it'S WOrse in JAPANese.