Barrage

So I haven't really been saying much, have I? How about a flash flood of what's been going on: 

(I'm not the best photographer or videographer, preferring to just hold the camera in front of me without much attention while I look at what's going on, so I can't claim much quality to this content. And I haven't trimmed any of the videos, so feel free to skip around them.)

The first or second week I got here, Sakura took me out with a friend of hers to a "DJ Event" in a really dodgy tiny club in some random building in the city. It was really loud and full of teenagers and people-who-used-to-be-teenagers and altogether not really my typical scene, but I did get to witness the odd clash between the reserved Japanese nature and the rebellious urges of hip-hop. And, even though I couldn't understand a word of it, you can't really beat the Japanese freestyle championship that went down:

Yeah, you say it!

Sometime later, when I had a day full of nothing and was feeling kind of down, my host mom took me to a nearby super-store to look at the cats in the pet section. It was the first time since I had been here that I had seen kitties up close, and I was surprised at how ecstatic and elated I felt after seeing their adorable selves. I guess I do need some cat in my life to be content...

So sleepy... so adorable...

This little guy was pretty energetic, though. Every time I go back, he's just as restless too.

 A shot of my school from the bus stop:

Nice finger in the shot, ne?

A park a little ways from my house. It has this really nice waterfall-fountain and a man-made stream that runs down to this little pond, and is a really relaxing place to go to think. I stumbled across it on my way home from finding the library (and finding it closed), and it was a pleasant and much-needed surprise. One of the many things that have reinforced my confidence in my ability to wander into what I need or want.

In the distance you can see a sakura tree blooming. This was taken in early spring.

Of course, I got my haircut. I had been wanting to do it since I came, finding that dealing with my hair at school and picking it off my uniform constantly to be too much of a bother. My host mom got me an appointment at a fairly upscale salon, and the salon master had previously worked in New York so he spoke English. I showed him a picture on my iPod of what I was going for and then trusted his expert hands to a cut that anyone else probably would've freaked out about.

It was pretty much the best haircut experience of my life.

A few weeks ago, I had a week that started out pretty normal, except I kept picking up vague hints from what was going on around me that we wouldn't be having school or something that Thursday and Friday. On Wednesday night my host mom came to me and started asking me questions and then pointed to my school calendar, which had something I had (confusedly) translated to say something about athletics or something. I gave her a look and some gestures to say, "I have absolutely no clue what that is and what's going on," to which she replied, "Um... not Sports Festival," (because the Sports Festival is another thing that schools do) and my host dad started saying a bunch of stuff and, "Wooo! Go baseball! Fight!"

Turns out the Not Sports Festival was some multi-day all-school athletic meet thing where all the sports clubs from all the schools in the area competed against each other while all the non-sports-club-members and whoever else in the community who didn't have work lazed nearby and somewhat watched. My host mom had been asking me which sport I was going to watch, but of course I didn't know that, much less what there was and where that what would be.

So on Thursday morning I scraped myself out of bed like normal and stumbled my way to school, to be met with a classroom with only like a third of my class in it. We had our homeroom meeting (but with a sensei that wasn't our homeroom sensei) that lasted all of five minutes, then we were dismissed. Why we had to show up at all? I don't know. Japan.

I wandered out of the school, really confused and completely unsure of what I was supposed to be doing. My host mom was there in her car, though (I did know that she would be there because she had told me that she would be back to take me to the sport I wanted... but I was still overly confused), so I climbed in and sat there kind of like, "Uh..." Since she knew I had run track, she took me to the track and field facility and dropped me off with a "Ride the bus home!", and that was that.

I had run with the track club before then, so I attached myself to their manager and wandered around alongside her for a good few hours. It was unexpectedly cold and windy, though, and I had only worn my uniform (because I had no clue what was going on), so I ended up wearing one of the club member's oversized coats and feeling kind of like a mooch.

It felt like any other track meet, though, with teams lazing about in hastily-erected tents and with bleachers sparsely populated with people half watching. They only ran like three events, though, and repeated those throughout the day, which I couldn't understand why. I guess it was because they had to stretch their meet across all of the days of this multi-day Not Sports Festival.

I hung around for a few hours, ate the lunch that my host mom had packed, and then got bored, thanked the club, and left. Luckily I did know the way back to my school, which was about a 20-30 minute walk, from which I could use my bus pass to get home.

The opening meeting. After a bunch of old guys had their turns at saying stuff I'm pretty sure everyone only half-listened to, each of the teams called themselves to attention and then bowed before splitting off.

Before the girls' 4x100m relay.

"Ganba!!!"

The next day I went with the tea ceremony club to their event (which I did know about because someone actually told me). I don't have any pictures or anything from it, but it mostly consisted of several hours of sitting in a large room with all the clubs from other schools. All the schools had their own tables and we were supposed to keep ourselves occupied with studying or reading or whatever, so I took out my kanji studying materials and tried to focus on that for a while before just pretending to work and then inevitably falling asleep.

Eventually it was our turn to go, so we went to a little room and sat there while another school's club served us tea and okashi (traditional Japanese sweets... these ones were particularly delicious). Then we took our turn to serve tea and okashi to another school's club, and then took a group picture and parted ways to go home.

The next day my host family expected me to just do the check-in at the school and then come home, but this time I was the one empowered with knowledge of what was going on. I knew from a paper I got from one of my school's sensei that the kendo competition (whatever you call that) was that day, and I even had an address that I had looked up on Google and everything. So from the school I took my bike to another school where the competition was being held:

My first impression of kendo.

The kendo event was definitely the highlight of the whole Not Sports Festival, and it made me quite sad that the closest thing to a kendo club that my school has is a couple of kids that commute to another school to be in their club. Even though I understood exactly none of what was going on, I feel like this is definitely the activity I'd be doing if it were more available to me.

Kendo's both really cool and completely terrifying. The participants wear these masks that completely cover their faces and they have a thick band of armor around their waists. They stand tall and silent before striking with their sudden and sporadic screeches... it seemed like a great way to relieve pent-up stress.

I tried to get a video of one entire bout. I don't know the rules at all, but each bout seemed to consist of smaller rounds between two contestants, kind of like boxing I guess. I kept looking for the landed hits that mark a win, but I could never pick up on them.

The girls could be more terrifying than the boys because while they didn't seem to have quite as sure of technique, they liked to vocalize a lot more. And their screeches were a lot more blood-curdling than the boys' shouts.

Once I figured I had had a good hour or so of kendo-watching and I should probably check out other things, I biked off to the Obihiro no Mori (Obihiro Forest) facilities (with lots of different sports facilities; where the track is) and met up with one of the exchange students that was with her club helping the 弓道 ("kyuudou", Japanese archery) event.

Kyuudou's very focused and intense. From what I understand, most of the competitor's score comes from their movements (entering, knocking the bow, preparing to shoot, after shooting, and exiting) rather than from where the arrow actually lands on the target (which is far away and tiny). 

You can't really see the competitors, but you can hear how their clubmates celebrate the rare target-hit.

A few weeks later (and still a few weeks ago), I went with Sakura to watch a sports festival at a nearby junior high school. We were there for a couple hours but still didn't see much because we came just before they dismissed for lunch break. We ate lunch from fancily prepared bentou boxes with one of Sakura's friend's families, and it was all very jovial and a great time. It was extremely hot, though, and sunny, and I was unprepared and ended up getting a sunburn that has left a clear, definable tan line that still remains.

We did get to see the different clubs compete in a relay race, each having something that defined their club as their baton (the baseball club tossed a baseball, the swimming club a pool noodle, the track club an actual baton, the band a pair of cymbals...). It was hilarious to see the baseball club take off in first, throw the baseball way too far, then scramble for it while the track club took an easy lead and all the rest of the clubs (most of them clearly unathletic) comedically followed behind.

After lunch we were able to stay just for the jump-rope event, which was both extremely admirable and completely adorable. You'd never get a group that size to jump a rope that successfully back in the States.

The best part is the kids operating the jump ropes.

Some day between then and now I went to Briar's (the girl from New Zealand) 琴 ("koto", Japanese harp) club's performance. My camera was out of batteries and my iPod was straining with a full memory, so I wasn't able to get a video of the best parts, but the whole performance was one of the highlights of my entire time here. It was such a serene and beautiful display of culture that I hadn't been able to see yet, my host family not being big buffs on Japanese culture. It was one of those moments that had me thinking, "You know, it's not so bad, being here."

A sample of koto music, performed by the club's sensei.

Japanese flute of some sort. I was jealous of the guy that got to play this. There was a point at which the koto and the flute played together and it was absolutely GORGEOUS, but sadly I have no video of that.

To occupy myself on days that I have nothing else, I've taken to wandering around the city on my bike. Ideally I'd like to stop in at little and secluded restaurants or cafes and sample a little of the city's culture and people, but as of yet I've just started familiarizing myself with the geography of the streets. I'm not sure AFS would be too enthusiastic about my solo adventures, but they worry too much (even in my imaginings of them).

Gotham City, a slots parlor. A shining example of the Flashpoint-esque strangeness that you sometimes encounter here in Japan. (adding to the strangeness is that the Slots-Parlor-Gotham-City resides in a Greek-style-facaded apartment building named "White Palace")

I found this in one of the mega-department-stores around here.

Just can't escape you, Utah, can I?

I especially like the little playgrounds I see around. They often have cool structures like this one's airplane, or are constructed really creatively out of hills or other not-typical-playground materials. This is the first one I've actually stopped at.

I've decided to declare myself on a quest to find the coolest playground.

One thing I do actually like about this area I'm in is that it seems that no matter where you are, what time it is, or what the weather's like, you can always hear birds chirping.

A long while back, after resigning from my week-and-a-half stint with the band club, I tried to explore around the other clubs the school had to offer. That's how I ended up in the tea ceremony club and half-in the track club. But one of the first clubs I checked out was the 書道 ("shodou", Japanese calligraphy) club. Sakura came with me for a bit and snapped some pictures for me. After she left, I got some for myself.

This is pre-haircut, obviously.

There's a lot to the technique of how to hold the brush and how to make the strokes and how to end the strokes and all that. I was pretty hopeless, but this poor girl was so good to try and help me out.

I used up a good amount of their paper making rudimentary marks like single lines and corners like this.

The more advanced students can get some pretty cool work done, and they're so swift and sure in their strokes.

The finished works hanging up to dry. Mine is the third from the right (with the disproportionate characters and the "テイラー" squeezed on the side). They allowed me two more gos at it, and it didn't improve much.

Also sometime early on in my time here, Briar, Leah (the girl from Norway), and I went with Leah's host family up to their cabin in the mountains. We did pretty literally nothing up there, but it was a good break from being around my own host family.

I wish I could've gotten out to take a real walk or just sit and breathe the outside air, but Leah was completely opposed to the bugs and wildernessness of it all and it was rather chilly and windy, so we spent most of our time in the cabin.

On our way back home we stopped for a brief moment at this beautiful lake and ate lunch at a tiny restaurant right next to it. There's a story to the mountains, too, but I'm not sure what it is.

Truly a breathtaking view.

The water was a pristine blue, but my pictures don't quite capture it right.

That's Briar taking a picture next to the sign.

 And that's where my picture accounts end. Obihiro's not an incredibly stimulating place, being a small city surrounded by farmland, so the adventures of us five exchange students here aren't as Japan-iconic as what we're seeing from other exchangers in other parts of Japan. We have to look a little harder to find our small excitements, and we (well, me at least) feel kind of down at times about that. But looking back at this collective throw-up of events I've experienced, it doesn't look all so bad.