Great News!

Recently Chihiro and I got engaged! We're planning on moving to Australia around March next year, and getting married a few months after that. Of course I did the proper thing and asked her parents for permission first (in Japanese)! I decided on a few sentences that conveyed what I wanted to say and then spent almost a week practising them! On the day I was a little nervous because although they have been very kind to me, we haven't talked about anything serious before, and I didn't quite know how they'd react to my question...

It actually turned out pretty well, and although they weren't expecting it at all, they were happy after talking about it. (Chihiro had to do a lot of translating!) Because they were concerned that Chihiro might not be able to find a work in Australia, they said that we should only get married after she gets a job. That's fair enough, and pretty much what we were planning anyway, so it's all good :) Afterwards, her dad was joking around with her younger sisters saying to them "Don't you bring any more Australians home too!"

We're so happy at the moment, and I really appreciate the emails and phone calls from everyone back home. Actually it's the first time I've felt a bit homesick, wanting to celebrate with everybody, but I'm having too much fun here to feel like that for long!

Hanami Picnic

A couple of weekends ago (I know, I've been quite slack updating) I went on a Hanami picnic with friends from EnglishBox (a language school). First we walked around the beautiful gardens of the prefectural art museum, but instead of sitting down under the trees on a traditional blue plastic tarp, we had the picnic at a house nearby. I had a sample of some very nice (and expensive) shochu, which is a distilled spirit that can be made from rice, sweet potatoes, wheat, or sugarcane - whatever happens to be handy I guess! I also tried some unusually smooth sake, some red wine, and of course my favourite Japanese beer - Kirin Ichiban. Thanks to the large amount of food I ate, my stomach didn't complain too much at this unusual combination of drinks!

Shizuoka Festival

A couple of weeks ago there was a big festival held in the city, involving parades, ceremonies, entertainment, stalls, lots of food and drink, dancing in the streets, fireworks, and a nice big bonfire. To kick-off the parade, there was a performance in front of the castle where a celebrity and 3 beauty queens (all traditionally dressed) held a kind of royal court with lots of people in costume assembled in front. After that, the people on stage brought out boxes full of dried rice-balls wrapped in plastic. All of a sudden the crowd surged forward as people pushed and shoved to get a better position to catch them as they were hurled into the audience. Elbows and knees were flying as people snatched at the rice-balls from the air, the ground, and sometimes each other! I was amazed at the vigor the older people displayed - it was almost like a mosh-pit. I didn't manage to catch any, but a nice man gave me one of his. I tried it, and it wasn't particularly tasty. Later I found out that it's good luck to catch them, and that you're meant to cook it first - doh!

All around the park were different stalls, sideshows, stages, and attractions. The taiko drumming was particularly good - it's pretty much a mixture of dancning and drumming. They also let kids have a go on the drums, and of course I tried it too! I wouldn't mind learning to do it properly one day. There was also a place where street entertainers showed off their skills juggling and balancing things, and let the public try out traditional spinning tops that have a string wound around it to launch it with, and whip it back up into your hand, or even balance it on. The centre of the park was filled up with blue picnic tarps for Hanami (flower viewing). There are a lot of these picnics held around this time of year because the cherry trees are blossoming, and they are great excuses to eat and drink to excess with your relatives/friends/workmates. I got to play some hackeysac with a group of English teachers having a picnic too!

Part of the parade had was a noblewoman's retinue. The shoes she wore were about a foot high, and she had a retainer to hold onto to balance herself as she walked. Because the shoes are very heavy, she had a special walking style which involved dragging the back shoe forwards on its side in an arc until it was in front, and then setting it upright and continuing with the other foot! There was also a samurai jumping castle with ninjas running along the roof! All through the main streets of the city centre was another phenomenon - choreographed dancing in the streets by thousands and thousands of people! Each group of 20-100 people had a different costume, and held banners with the name of the company or club they were representing. Most people were dancing enthusiastically (for a long time too), though a few had obviously been coerced into it!

There was a concert too, which had taiko drummers from Okinawa, traditional shamisen(lute) and shakuhachi(flute) musicians, a modern "a cappella" group, and a band. As a finale the band and singers gave a hearty rendition of "Oh Happy Day" and the traditional dancers came on and joined in. They also got members of the audience to sing along too! After that, the mayor of the city was carried through the crowds with a torch to light a bonfire.

Adverts++

It occurred to me the other day that Japan has quite a high density of advertising compared to Australia - it's just that I'm immune to it because I can't understand much of it. On busses and trains there are audio ads played for local businesses as you pass their stop. The seat in font of you has an advert on it staring you in the face, and on trains there are double-sided posters hanging from the ceilings as though there's not enough room on the walls to plaster them onto. I don't really mind it that much, because it gives me something to practise reading Japanese with.

Around most large city centres in Japan, you'll find people handing out free tissue packs. These aren't samples to encourage you to buy the real product. They're actually already paid for by the adverts all over the pack!

Kobe

Kobe is a beautiful city, and an amazing example of how fast things can progress. Since the terrible earthquake in 1995, all the the big buildings and the harbour area have been totally rebuilt, giving the city a very new and modern feel. A section of the docks was left in its original state after the earthquake as a reminder of just how severe the damage was.

Up in the hills, there are the old Ijinkan (foreigner's residences) where foreign merchants and entrepreneurs lived when the city was opened to the outside world for trading in 1868. It felt very surreal as a westerner touring "foreigner's residences" along with all the other Japanese toursists in Kobe, and I even found a house named after me! We also went to a museum which showed just how how much the city changed when it was opened up, and how fast Japan industrialised itself.

There is also a thriving cafe scene in Kobe, which we took great advantage of. Chihiro had a few famous ones that she definitely wanted to try out, and we also found another great one by chance. We've been eating health food for a week since we've come back normal life!

Osaka - Take 2

We spent the next day hanging around the Minami district of the city, which is essentially a capitalist bonanza. The fierce competition ensures that only those places with the tastiest food, the biggest signs, the cheapest prices, and the best customer service will survive. There are many famous Japanese chain-stores and restaurants that originated from Osaka. The octopus balls being fried in the photo are a speciality of Osaka, and were absolutely mouth-watering. This stall was so famous that it had a line of people 20 metres long waiting in front even though other stalls had only a few customers.

There were kilometers of huge shopping malls to wander around, most of them were crowded too! Just a block away is this moss shrine which grants a peaceful respite.

In Osaka we also met up with a friend who is back in Japan for a bit, and going to get married to an Australian guy. We went out to an Izakaya to celebrate, and found one that had very cheap beer ($1.25 a schooner!) and also really nice food, including a massive octopus salad. Osaka was more crowded at night, and the profusion of neon signs added even more to the feeling of energy that the city has.

We found a fugu restaurant (the bloated looking poison fishes), but I'm not really game to try it. It's also a pretty small meal, and apparently the taste is very subtle.

Universal Studios Japan

We went to Universal Studios Japan while in Osaka, which was fantastic, but the waiting times reached up to two hours! The biggest rides had several buildings of multi-level mazes for the crowds to shuffle through. Apparently 2 hours is about normal, and it can get a lot worse! The actual rides themselves were brilliant, especially Spiderman, which used 3D visuals mixed with amazing mechanics that really made the experience feel real, such as 3D sound and a jerk when spiderman lands on the front bonnet of the car we're in, or a blast of heat hitting us from a grenade exploding nearby, or the vertigo from falling from the top of a skyscraper and being caught just in time by one of spiderman's webs!

Although the whole place was extremely commercial, they did a good job of accurately recreating the feel of the movies. One thing I really enjoyed was the "Shrek's 4D adventure" cinema. It was a 10 minute short movie, but was done extremely well, with all the humour of the original (mostly visual, luckily for me). We had 3D glasses, and they made great use of it, but also several times during the movie we'd receive a blast of cool air from behind us, or steam from below our seats, or a bump as the characters jolted to a stop.

Homie ET - just some of the widely available merchandise, cunningly placed at the exits of the relevant rides.

Osaka

I just got back from a fantastic holiday trip to Osaka and Kobe! On the way to Osaka, we took the local train service (much cheaper than the Shinkansen bullet train), but it takes 4 times as long! This is one of the rice fields that broke up the vast stretch of urban landscape along the 6 hour train ride from Shizuoka. The first thing we went to see in Osaka was the city castle, at the centre of a huge parkland and surrounded by two moats. Right next door is a concert hall, where a pop goth band was playing, which explained the massive crowd of people wearing "alternative clothing" hanging around (at first I thought it was a regular Sunday afternoon in Osaka). Strangely enough almost everyone was wearing something similar to someone else. Victorian dresses, striped stockings, 6 inch platform boots, and miniskirts were everywhere. The only original costume I saw was nurse who had a realistic looking eye bandage leaking blood which also spattered her dress.

The castle itself was very impressive, with all the walls made from large blocks of stone. It's been rebuilt very well, so it's hard to believe it was destroyed several times by war, fire, bombing raids, and even a lightning bolt. It was originally built by Hideyoshi Toyotomi, a Shogun who was the first to unify the warring clans of Japan into a single nation.

The view from the castle (left photo) was great, and Osaka seemed to stretch on forver. Even better was the night view from the top of the Umeda Sky building, one of the tallest skyscrapers in Osaka. Underneath this skyscraper was a small maze of winding streets full of little Izakayas and restaurants built to look like they are from the early 1900's. We found a great little place to have a delicious katsudon dinner, and then headed back to a place near the train station that had an entire floor of cafes to look for a place to have dessert. My tummy was very spoilt!