The big move to Indonesia

It's been officially one month since I left little Yakage for the big city of Bandung. Things probably couldn't be anymore different. Yakage had a population of 15,000ish while Bandung is over 8 million. When I went off to Japan last year there was nothing too hard about the idea of living in Japan for a year. I had been there before after all and knew enough of the language to make sure I would never be in dire straits. Now I'm here in Indonesia and there already have been some 

A few notable changes:

I've traded in my little bicycle of Yakage for a motorcycle. When I first arrived in Bandung, I was amazed to see so many of them. I'm fairly certain that everyone learns to ride one and eventually some people make the switch to a car. But it seems that most of the vehicles on the road are motorcycles. I cry a little inside when I think of all the pollution these things are causing, but at the same time I love riding on one. Hopefully one day I'll get some good footage of riding through the Bandung traffic on my way to work.

Speaking of traffic, navigating through Bandung seems to be really chaotic at first. As you pull up next to a car you'll see a motorcycle dart in from the other side to get in front of you. Bikes are constantly doing this weaving game through the cars. So far I haven't seen this cause any problems and all I can attribute to this is that everyone is used to this ordered chaos. It's predictable so everyone knows what should happen. It becomes dangerous when you start driving cautiously.

Another major change has been living in a Muslim country. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world by population and you see it everywhere. My first week of living in my new house found me waking up at around 4:30, possibly earlier, in the morning to a mosque blaring it's call to morning prayer through the neighborhood loudspeakers. Also, you won't find any pork here. Beer is also hard to come by and liquor even more so.

But despite some of those drawbacks, living here is a sweet deal. For just $2,000 I've rented a nice sized house for a year with a nice view over the valley of my little village on the outskirts of the city. For an additional $40 a month I have a helper come 3 times a week to do my laundry and clean my house. I leave for work around 11:30 in the morning and start teaching at around 3 pm. And I'm happy that I actually get to do some real teaching. So long story short, the two experiences in Japan and Indonesia couldn't be farther apart from each other right now

Shimanami Kaido

Well well well, it sure has been a long time. I have no real excuse and unfortunately missed out on sharing a lot of things with the people who read this. Back in April I went to Israel, and that was awesome. In May, I traveled around Japan and finally got to go to a place I had been waiting to see for a long time: Beppu. It's known for its sheer number of hot springs in such a small area. Every city block seemed to have a spa. But today I'm going to talk about something that happened a little more recent.

A few weekends ago there was a big charity bike ride that many of the foreign language teachers decided to join. This was an event I had been looking forward to for a long time as it would feature some beautiful scenery of western Japan. The Shimanami highway connects the main island of Japan, called Honshu, to another called Shikoku. In the meantime, you cross over several smaller islands. The bike route is about 77 km, so a little under 50 miles. That doesn't seem like a lot, but I'd like to think the group I rode with took our time with plenty of breaks and were still one of the first to finish. It was an awesome way to spend a Saturday as we trekked across these bridges and islands.

The body of water in between Honshu and Shikoku is called the Seto Inland Sea and it is filled with probably hundreds of these tiny little islands.

Once we arrived at our destination, many of us had signed up to stay at a Japanese inn and enjoy a nice relaxing dinner. Here I got a chance to talk to all the slowpokes that were finally rolling into the inn. I was a little surprised to see how far people had come for this trip. During the Naked Man festival I knew some people came from prefectures in central Japan. That would have been about a 3 hour trip by bullet train. But this time we had someone come as far as Tohoku, close to the northern island of Hokkaido.

Also, most of the people that were in this bike ride were teachers from the JET program. The bike ride was hosted by JET since they organize most of the big group activities for foreigners here in Okayama prefecture. Anyway, a lot of the people from outside of Okayama were surprised to learn I was not a JET but participating in a JET event. And that's when I learned how fortunate I was to be placed here in Okayama. During the Naked Man festival, some of the people making the trip to Okayama talked about how cool it was that we included people from other regions of Japan to join. I didn't think much of it at the time, but after this trip I realized that the Okayama JET group is more of an exception when it comes to including everyone. Other prefectures' JET programs seem to be much more exclusive and only invite other JETs for their events.

Graduation

That classic song

Since the academic calendar is a little different here in Japan and other Asian countries, graduation for the elementary school kids was the past week. Graduation ceremonies are a big deal here in Japan. According to Roya, the other PiAer in Yakage, who works at the nursery level, even kindergarten schools have formal ceremonies to honor the children moving just next door to elementary school. The whole school attends, parents take a day off from work, and I was wearing a white tie to go with my suit. As you might expect in Japanese culture, there is a set way of doing everything. Every year, the graduating students become robots and enter the auditorium in lines of two before turning at right angles to their seats. When it comes time to receive their diplomas, one by one the children step up in front of the principal, bow, extend right hand then left and grasp the diploma, step back, pull diploma in and bow. Then they must fold the diploma in half without creasing, step back with the right foot and do a 180 spin before returning to their seats. Graduation from Dickinson wasn’t too long ago so during the whole ceremony I wondered if the kids were feeling at all like I had. The moment that I received my diploma was a bit of a blur as I just tried to walk at a reasonable pace down the stairs and not trip in front of the thousands of people watching. Of course, the kids here in Yakage were practicing the whole routine for a week leading up to graduation, so I’m sure they more relieved to just finally be done with it.

Roll out the red carpet

                Something I like about the schools here in Yakage is the camaraderie between the different grades. Of course the schools here are smaller. Every school has fewer than 100 kids enrolled. So the schools will create events to force kids from different grades to interact with one another. This mandatory fun time probably isn’t needed. After all, thanks to random chance of when they were born, they are now going to be sharing a classroom with the same 15 or so other students for six years. They problem welcome the chance to hang out with some other grades during school time.

                Because of this camaraderie, the younger students really look up to the sixth graders. Whenever the sixth grade went on a field trip, the first and second graders would come running out to wish them a safe trip with the Japanese phrase “Itterasshai” and of course on a day the first and second graders had a field trip, the sixth graders couldn’t be bothered. I thought it was touching that the rest of the school joins the graduation ceremony. Once again there is a set script of things for these younger students to say. Things like “Thank you for taking care of us,” and “Good luck,” and so on. The voices of the kids who volunteered for this role can be heard bouncing around in the crowd. The sixth grade then replies back with each student having a prepared line for the different grades. And since singing is such an engrained part of school life here, it’s also a big thing during the ceremony. I got a little choked up listening to the song the younger students sang wishing the sixth graders farewell. Several parents were crying throughout the graduation.

                Now, it’s two weeks of vacation until the new school year starts in April. During this time teachers find out where they will be working for the coming year. The Board of Education doesn't let a teacher remain at one school for too long, so I look forward to seeing where the reshuffling sends them all in a few weeks.

A (sort of) Naked Man Festival

*Warning* There are a lot of men wearing very little in this post. Photos, videos and even words talking about them. Let's be honest, you should have known that already from the title, but if you find that sort of thing distasteful, now is the time to stop reading. Parental discretion is advised.

People have come up with some pretty crazy and fun ways to celebrate life. A lot of them seem to be in Japan for some reason. Sometimes it's just a parade like the Festival of the Steel Phallus. And sometimes, as foreigners we just don't understand why but luckily we can be a part of it. Welcome to Naked Man! There are many of these events held throughout Japan now at different times in the year, but the biggest and most popular is still where it all began, Saidaiji Temple in Okayama.

Bus full of eager exhibitionists

Fired up, ready to go

Why is there water?! WHY?!

Thanks to the awesome organization of the Okayama JET group, a team of foreigners is sent every year to the temple to represent the world. Team members came from all over Japan, showing just how popular this festival is. Some people might say that the best way to break down barriers is to just give everyone alcohol. While that does work, I think forcing everyone to strip down and to don a white loincloth is much more effective. For on that February night, those standing next to you were your brothers-in-arms. After running around the temple grounds and seeing the pool you will be wading into, you absolutely need someone next to you to help spur you on. Shower. Rinse. Repeat x 2. Whatever alcohol you drank doesn't mean a thing after you hit that water for the third go around. Your legs go numb and eagerly awaiting the time when you can return to the field tent for a little warmth from a single light bulb. Surprisingly, this was actually my favorite part of whole experience because the atmosphere is awesome. Spectators are cheering you on, hi-fives all around, and everyone on your team is bracing against the cold with loud shouts of Wasshoi! totally gets you pumped up.

The video is a little shaky at first, but towards the end you can see me in the 4th row. Thanks to the final chant, you can tell we are trying to catch "the shingi" so there is a point to all this semi-nudity. The first half of the festival involves a bunch of dudes running around in the cold for the enjoyment of spectators bundled up in warm parkas. The second half is when all of the participants then gather on the temple stage to wait for a bundle of sticks to be thrown. If you can catch the sticks and escape out of the temple complex, you would win about $2,000. However, there are many sticks thrown into the crowd. Only two of them will give you the cash prize, while the others are just "dummy" sticks. No prize, but you still win some luck for the future year because, hey, you were able to fight past a ton of dudes. Keep in mind there are thousands of participants, some reports say as many as 9,000 people, so a team is essential if you want to win this event. The team attempts to create a buffer to escort you out safely while opponents are diving in to grab at your loincloth touching a variety of sticks to see which one is the shingi.

This festival can be actually quite dangerous. Some people come away with bruised ribs, other people have died in the past. After all, this is a huge mosh pit. For about an hour, everyone is jostling for a prime position where they think a stick will land. The cold you were experiencing before is now replaced with an intense heat from bodies packed so tightly together. Temple priests occasionally throw water on the crowd from above only to see it evaporate almost immediately. From the photo, you see everyone's hands are raised up in the air. It serves a few purposes. First, since it's practically impossible to move, you can't really see where your team is. So people tape their hands with specific colors as a way to identify themselves. Also, you are constantly fighting against being swallowed up by this crowd, which means you need some leverage to keep yourself hoisted up. There is literally no room to move, so when one person inevitably moves a little, it creates this huge ripple effect that moves the entire crowd. Some people come out alright if they are safely in the middle. Those near the edges do not fare as well. Unfortunately, I was one of those near the stairs. After the first few times I tried to get up and get back in the mix of things but there was...no...way. So after maybe the 4th time of getting tossed down the stairs in a human domino and having 10 guys fall on top of me, I decided to wait at the bottom and spot those who were a little more persistent.

There's a lot of build-up to this point of the festival, but once the sticks have been tossed into the crowd, the real shingi seems to be carried out pretty quickly. There is a lot of strategy that goes into this such as decoy runners pretending to have it, and certain formations to pass the sticks along quickly and inconspicuously, all before anyone has had any time to notice what has happened. After that, people are just duking it out for the dummy sticks.

It's a unique way of celebrating, and certainly can be dangerous if you are not careful, but I'm glad I did it, and would definitely consider it again in the future if I have the chance.

SNOW FESTIVAL 2014!

The Sapporo snow festival, Sapporo yuki matsuri, is one of the largest festivals in all of Japan. It lasts for about a week, and I was fortunate enough to have a long weekend so I could catch the second half. Hokkaido is a place I've always wanted to see during my many times in Japan. The island is huge, representing about 1/5th of the country's land mass, and while Sapporo is the 5th largest city in all of Japan, the population of the whole island makes up only about 4% for all of Japan. Why all the stats, Posey? It's to give you a sense that while Japan has a reputation for being very congested with everyone living on top of each other, that is not the case up in Hokkaido.

Alright enough of that, onto the real reason I wrote this entry. We hardly ever get snow in Yakage, and if it does snow, it won't last very long on the ground, so I was pumped to be in Hokkaido where it snowed every day during my stay there.

Yes, that tube is my room

It might sound a little weird, but another reason I was excited about this trip, besides there being a huge festival devoted to the awesomeness of snow, was the experience of staying at a capsule hotel. I was expecting something like a sarcophagus, but you had decent room to move around inside of them. There were even TVs mounted inside.

 After checking in, it was time to hit the streets and see some artistic displays. There are several sites around Sapporo featuring different things depending on what you'd like to see. My hotel happened to be located in Susukino, the entertainment district, and where you'd find ice sculptures of all varieties.

A famous alleyway packed with ramen shops

Every city and region of Japan has it's signature food item. Sometimes it's just being the best place to eat a particular food, like fried octopus in Osaka, while other times it's a well-known food that has been slightly tweaked and embraced by Japanese people. Sapporo is one of the top cities for all the ramen noodle lovers out there. Sapporo's claim to fame is using miso, fermented soybeans, as its soup base but on top of all that, you have great local seafood being thrown in like crabs and shellfish. And a whole wad of butter to top it all off doesn't hurt either. Truly a great meal to enjoy after being out in the cold.

Besides Suskino, another site is Odori, a large park in the middle of the city that has all the snow sculptures. Teams came from all over the world for this competition. The USA team's wasn't too impressive in my opinion but others were incredibly detailed.

Besides those that were entered into the contest, there were many others that were just made by locals wanting to show off some famous characters from Japanese culture. I was happy to see a fight scene from the story of Momotarou the Peach Boy. And then there were just these jaw-dropping constructions that make me wish I had been able to come sooner to document the day to day progression and see how long it took to create one such as the Sochi Olympics at the top of the page.

An old brewery that is now a museum

It would have been wrong to visit Sapporo and not pay my respects to its delicious beer, so I went on a pilgrimage. Even though all Americans I've talked to say they like Sapporo beer the best, it only ranks number 3 here in Japan! Come on, son.

My last full day was originally going to be a sports day as I wanted to get some skiing done for the first time in like 6 years. Instead, I decided to go out into the wilderness to some remote town with a famous hot spring. Baths are so popular here, so having an onsen at your inn is a huge tourism draw. Walking into the adjoining bath house and smelling that rotten egg smell...Mmm...Yeah it was worth the hour bus ride. On top of that, this place Hoheikyo onsen was great because you could bathe outdoors, men and women in separate locations of course. So yeah, sitting in a volcanic hot tub with the snow falling down on you was awesome to say the least.

This is not my photo, as you would not be allowed to bring a camera in, but I wanted to show you all what I got to see

Relaxing vacation, but there was more I would have liked to do, so I guess I'll just have to go back another year.

A Look Back at January

This past month was full of a ton of stuff, but instead of dedicating one post to each one, I am providing a summary of all of them together. First off, after going to hatsumoude with the closest thing to a Japanese host family I've had, it was time to start the school year again. And oh how I missed school, which sounds weird saying. I loved vacation, but my kids are even more entertaining. My first day back at one of my schools saw me getting some New Year's cards, nengajou, from my first graders, reaffirming why they are one of my favorite classes. Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu - customary greeting after January 1st, wishing you a new year

Most cards had pokemon of some sort

I guess I have blonde hair in my Green Lantern form

 Occasionally, there are special events hosted at the local train station. Nothing that stellar, but Japanese people love mochi, and on this day, in addition to the usual food stalls, there was a mochi stand. I was amazed to see how long the line was for the mochi. Also, the time I made mochi back in the fall, we fortunately used a machine to mush the rice together into the mochi consistency. The traditional way is to just beat on it with hammers. I'm glad we used a machine.

Another cool event was at my Friday school. All the kids were required to make kites and fly them for the afternoon. Encouraging some good ol' fashion fun. Parents came to fly the kites with their children. Many of the kites featured horses since it just became the year of the horse in the Chinese calendar. However, some were creative, like this kite with an octopus. Taco is the word for "octopus" as well as "kite.

Decent height on many kites

There were some lows to all of the highs. I had to decide what I will be doing in my second year with Princeton in Asia. I've decided to continue with the theme of this blog and picked a post that will send me to a small town in another country to share a new culture with all of you. Also, one of my favorite teachers went on maternity leave which was very sad. As a support teacher we would teach together whenever I had 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade classes at one school, and I thought we had great chemistry working together.

The month of February should be very exciting. This coming weekend I am going to Sapporo for the snow festival and the following week will be the most famous festival in Okayama prefecture, Naked Man.

Welcoming the New Year in Japan

Winter vacation has come to a close which means I will be heading back to work tomorrow. I spent a few days in Seoul, and that was a great. Seoul would be a cool city to live in, and like Japan, Korea pays its English teachers pretty well. Who knows? Maybe I'll head there for a year or two after Yakage.

I wanted to be back in Japan for New Year's though. Its the most important holiday to the Japanese so I wanted to see how they celebrated it. Like the rest of the world, Japan goes out partying and counting down until midnight, but it has a deeper meaning.

Food stalls set up all week

The festivities occur at a local shrine where bells will ring announcing the new year. Then businesses will close for a number of days for people to continue celebrating. Some big chains will open by the 2nd or 3rd, but my favorite bakery has been closed all week, which was very upsetting. During this time, everyone is returning to their hometowns and going to a local shrine for hatsumoude, or the first visit of the year. At the shrine, you're wishing for good fortune this coming year. If you're a student or parent, this usually means praying for success in future high school/university entrance exams.

Wash your hands first!

I was fortunate enough to go to hatsumoude with a Japanese family, and they were nice enough to put up with me asking so many questions and to show me what to do. During other trips to shrines, like in Kyoto, I was always just going as a tourist, so I would always just walk through and never really wanted to wait in line with everyone else to pay money to get a fortune made for me. But this was hatsumoude, so I had to.



This photo on the left is like a giant collection dish as people throw in some change as an offering to the kami, or god, bow twice, clap twice, then bow once more as you pray for its blessing.



 There's a lot of praying that goes on at various places around the shrine's grounds. I guess less is not more in this case. In order to get my fortune for the year, I shook that wooden case, and received a description based on the number that came out. In case you were wondering, mine was normal luck for this coming year, as long as I remain calm and easy-going. After you read your fortune, you don't take it home with you, instead you just tie and seal it off forever.

 Also, as you might expect of an East Asia country with a lot of ties to Chinese culture, zodiac signs are fairly important. During my time in Seoul and throughout town, I've seen banners welcoming the new year with pictures of horses on them. So yes, for all the 1990 babies out there, this is your year. I'll be waiting a while for the snake to come around again.