Geta, Zori and O-Hanami

ICIEA O-Hanami, or cherry blossom viewing, was April 19th this year...and surprisingly, there were cherry blossoms on the trees! O-Hanami is supposed to occur at the maximum blossoming of the cherries and is notoriously difficult to predict, which ICIEA had to do to organize o-bento (lunches), get the word out etc. Around Imabari, it was almost completely finished by the time of the event...but up on the hill at Shimi no Mori, the Sakura were still in full swing!

Like last year, I was part of a group that performed tea ceremony there. It went much better this time; I didn’t walk into the tree this year. And I now own my very own, traditional, boring dark blue kimono, and a pair of really cool zori (formal sandals) which don't fit me, to go with the geta (the other kind of trad shoes) that don't fit me either.

Japanese traditional shoes: there are two kinds, the really odd looking everyday kind, geta, which are made of wood, have two pieces of wood on the bottom, and a thong strap on the top. And there are the formal (but to my western eyes, oddly, less formal looking), zori. They are usually worn with kimono, as kimono today are reserved pretty much for formal occasion. Zori are usually made of glossy, glossy, glossy plastic, dark red for women and black for men...I think they replicate the look of expensive, hard to take care of shiki (enamel), but they look cheesy, at least to me. I usually do my best to ignore them when i see them, out of respect for those forced to wear them...


Disbelieving the horror stories, (fool!) last August I bought a pair of geta for 5000 yen to wear to On-maku, the fireworks celebration here in Imabari. They only come in one of two modes for my size 9.5 feet: much too small, and too small. I was reassured that it was normal, even for Japanese, to wear geta with their heels hanging an inch off the back...(!!). Ok.

No socks of course. By the end of the evening the thong straps had rubbed skin off my feet and they were bleeding. Needless to say it hurt. I thought the scars were permanent but it seems they have faded just in time for this year’s Traditional Shoe Adventure.

In February, I was told that I would need a pair of zori for my tea ceremony performance. Last year I borrowed Yano-san's (not Minami's, another Yano), and later caught him wandering around barefoot at the festival. He was risking catching a piece of glass in his foot so I insisted he take them back and wore my running shoes for the second round of tea ceremony. Scandal!

Anyway, this year I would need my own...Needless to say I wasn't interested in some groovy black plastic ones (for 4000 yen), so I headed back to the mom-and-pop shop where I had bought my geta previously, in search of some alternative zori. I had seen some woven straw zori (echoes of the uber traditional, hand made farmer's sandals) with white cloth thongs and....bicycle tire attached to the bottom! Sort of like the hippy car tire sandals of yore.

I thought these were super cool, and decided to get a pair. I was able to obtain them for the reasonable price of 3800 yen. Yanagihara-sensei thinks they must be Chinese. Of course they don't fit (see above)...and when I put them on, they reminded me of this, rather fiercely. I limped around for a few hours.

But they worked a charm for the tea ceremony.


I was much more relaxed this year, and as a result the complex details of the tea ceremony seemed to flow much more, and, well, it just went entirely more smoothly. As mentioned, I didn’t walk into any overhanging branches, knock off my zori, and so on...For the first time, an enjoyable experience.



Two weeks previously, on my way to tea lessons one Monday, I noticed on the Tonda river a glorious explosion of blossoming trees stretching west on both sides of the river! Quite beautiful.



My tea teacher, Tabusa-sensei, suggested I check it out, and, upon exploration in the early evening, I found a large tent stall selling food and groups of people picniking under the blossoms. It was a wonderful neighborhood celebration, which I had been entirely unaware of previously.

Botchan Stadium, Matsuyama

Saturday, July 19th, on my way home from teaching in Natsume, at the train station, my keitai rang. It was Katsuhiko.

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’, he asked. I truthfully answered that I wasn’t sure, though I knew there were lots of things I should be doing… ‘Oh, in that case, let’s go to Matsuyama for Saijo Koko’s first game of the Ehime Baseball Championships!’

Katsuhiko’s son, Kazuma, attends Saijo High School and plays for their baseball team. He was recruited. Saijo is a town 35km southeast of Imabari, with a strong team. The Ochis, including all three sons, are mad for baseball.

This team has a good chance to win the Ehime championship, meaning they could go to the Japanese National Championships (Koshien) later on in August. There are two national championship tournaments in Japan every year. They are as popular as professional baseball, televised and all…Saijo went to Spring Koshien in Osaka in March, but lost their first game and were put out of the tournament.

Kazuma just joined the team as a junior this year and so wouldn’t be playing, but it was a chance to see the team play on the professional pitch of Botchan Stadium. So of course I said yes.

We left my house in Imabari at noon, arrived in Matsuyama around 1:00 and were seated in the stadium by 1:45. The admission was 500 yen. The game was pretty good, though Saijo lagged a bit in the the fifth through eighth innings. The game concluded after nine innings, with Saijo winning 7 to 1. The other team played better than the score might indicate, but couldn’t score runs. Saijo was repeatedly lucky, ending innings with opposing players on bases, unable to score.



The Saijo team is focused around Takumi Akiyama, a physically and technically imposing (though sometimes wild) pitcher probably already pegged for the majors. There are a number of other very good players on the team, though; I saw some wicked catches and cool, intense plays.

Japanese high school baseball games come complete with cheerleading squads and a band. I got to sit with the fathers, all in their special Saijo shirts and baseball caps(!!) We were given two yellow plastic megaphones, not to yell into, but to knock together in time with the cheers. Good fun!

Saijo’s next game was on Thursday, July 23rd. I don’t know how it turned out yet…

Omishima Art Trip

My friend and macha teacher, Tabusa-sensei, invited me to join her in a trip to Omishima, the fourth island in the Seto Sea group north of Imabari. The islands are joined to Honshu and Shikoku with the Shimenami Kaido, a road system comprised of a freeway and multiple bridges, so we could drive there. The normally expensive highway tolls on all Japanese freeways were being relaxed for Golden Week (the first week in May, when everyone travels), so the trip would be much cheaper.

Tabusa wanted to see a collection of sumi-e, black and white paintings made on paper with calligraphy ink. They were being shown at the Omishima Museum of Modern Art, in the town of Omishima just opposite Oyamazumi-jinja. These paintings were mounted on fusuma, sliding paper doors used in traditional buildings in Japan. There is a long tradition here, of painting on fusuma.

These were comissioned by a large buddhist temple in Kyoto, called Chishakuin, and would be installed there later in the month.

Minami, my landlady, and another friend, Kazu, also came along, so Sunday at nine we jumped in Tabusa’s car and headed off to the islands.

The sumi-e show was quite wonderful, large 4 to six panel scenes with landscapes depicted in the four seasons. One featured a weeping cherry tree, another bamboo grass(?), a third a meadow at a misty sunrise.

The artist Toshio Tabushi has spent five years creating a series of 60 panels, landscapes with a seasonal theme, on the sliding paper doors called fusuma, used in traditional Japanese houses and temples. These are masterworks by this artist, the culmination of a 40 year career.

He applied the ink, then removed it selectively to create delicate layers of grays. There is a wonderful crossover between drawing (line, edge) and painting (the liquid flow of the ink) and, surprising, the atmospherics, the air, created by the removal and smudging. The landscapes really do breathe.

There is also somehow a photographic property to these images; they call out to the negative, to silver. This is created partly, I think by the use of both addition and removal of the ink. At times the paper appears to become saturated and greys out, contrast is lost, there is no white, and no black. This begins to look remarkably like something that happens with a photographic process called solarization, when the image sometimes goes both negative and positive.

This photographic aspect is also reflected in how he places the images on the panels: he makes drawings from photos, then projects those by overhead projector onto the panels, and paints the projections onto the panels.

Photography was not allowed in the exhibit, and I could find nothing about this show online, so I’ve taken a couple of pictures of foldouts from the catalog:

A landscape featuring a weeping cherry tree.


A meadow at sunrise.


We spent perhaps an hour viewing these quite wonderful paintings, then walked across the street to Oyamazumi-jinja to take a look at the 2,600 year old Camphor tree (!).

Local comentary has it that this tree, which has lost it’s higher canopy many times over it’s long life, was shortened to about 20 meters by bomb blast during the second world war. Apocryphal, probably.


South on the local coastal road about ten minutes or so is the Tokoro Museum Omishima, a mid size gallery with Japanese and international modern art in it. Before we went in we had some coffee, and Kazu tried to show me how to make a whistle from one of the small mame (bean) plants we found growing there.


It was hopeless; I couldn’t make any sound at all, though Kazu could make his whistle! Ah well.

The gallery is a concrete structure which stairsteps in about 6 floors down the hillside, facing onto the strait. It’s an interesting structure; stairs run down the outside in a gallery and inside of it…and there, a nice Japanese installation made completely of, I think, Japanese cedar, of a…it seems to be a life size street kiosk, selling magazines and books and stuff, all made of…cedar.









Around back there’s a post box and phone booths. Cool piece! Artist: Yamemoto Hideyoki.


Also a nice wall piece of figures made of twirled tissue paper. A Dantean world of ghosts. Didn’t get the artist’s name.


And a wonderful sculpture, quite small, perhaps 20 inches high, of a seated bishop, mounted on a little shelf, high up on a concrete wall, with a view of the beautiful strait in front of the bottom floor of the gallery. Italian.



After returning to Imabari, we stopped in northern Imabari for lunch, at a place called Kane Tani (Golden Valley). A traditional Japanese luncheon, including a tempura-ed fish backbone (!), which was a surprising, crispy treat. A very nice meal at 1500 yen. Later I found out from Yumi that this restaurant was owned by the same family as a well known fish shop nearby.

Sazae

At the beginning of January, at the dawn of the new year, I was treated to a meal at a small Japanese bar/restaurant in Imabari. I was served slices of sashimi Sazae, uncooked giant (Horned Turban) sea snail dipped in shoyu (soy sauce).

My host, Katsuhiko, sincerely told me that this was his favourite food (of all!!!). He asked if I would try it, so of course I ate a piece. I think it was mostly near the foot. It tasted like shoyu flavoured rubber with small rocks embedded in it. As I chewed, (and chewed, and...), I considered the state of my teeth (not good, at the time), and listened for the sound of cracking enamel. Lucky, lucky, not this time! I turned down a second piece. Three days later I told my Japanese teacher, Yanagihara-san, this story, and she told me it was HER favorite food, too! I thought maybe she was pulling my leg.

Katsuhiko meanwhile, or just after my taste test, told me a story of his childhood in Imabari, to whit: he grew up near where he now lives, Oshinden, in the north of Imabari, down by the beach, where many fishermen used to live. I live a few blocks from him, in Oshinden as well. He said in the summer that he would run out of the house in his shorts and bare feet, play baseball all morning at the neighborhood sandlot (he's still baseball mad), then, at lunch time, go swimming off the beach and pluck some of these Sazae off the rocks at about four or five feet down and stuff them in his pockets. Out of the water, he would crack them open and eat them out of the shell with some shoyu brought from home! He'd do this every day all the summer long.

It was worth the tooth risk to hear that.

This is a picture i took of the jetty in Oshinden, as it looked in January 09.

ICIEA Cookoff 2009

Sunday February 8th. Kurushima Lion’s Club and ICIEA hosted their annual cookoff at Ailand, near Fracasso’s in Imabari.


Mix:
Six gaikokujin:

• Maher: Egypt
• Grace: America
• Chiori: China
• Daniel: Australia
• Khunpo and 2 friends: Indonesia
• Ian: Canada

and 42 chugaku gakusei (middle school students)!

Everyone met at 8:30 am, when we were introduced to the students and chosen by our student teams. They were from various middle schools around Imabari. I was also introduced to my very able assistant, Ito-san, who would help translate, facilitate and make everything work. She did a great job!

Menu

Beef Kabob, toast and middle eastern tomato salad

Siu Gyoza (!) and a very strange Chinese desert

Grilled baby snapper in a sauce, fried potatoes

Baked Salmon marinaded in Ginger shoyu

Fried rice with vegetables and egg

Tourtiere (meat pie) and Poutine

After visiting Marunaka for supplies, we headed into the kitchen and cooked up a storm until 11:30. The girls were very organized, and no one cut themselves.


Due to a miscalculation on my part, however, our team was 10 minutes late, but no one seemed to mind.


Maher's team kababs, my fave:






Grace and her team's salmon and Khunpos' teams' fried rice, which had a Japanese name, but I didn't catch it. It was nice and slightly spicy, the chicken was really nice, too









Some very presentable baby Snapper...










And what's Tourtiere without Poutine? For those who may not yet have had the opportunity, Poutine is a heart stopping combination of french fries, cheese (supposed to be curd, but, well...) and beef gravy. The recipe claimed 2100 calories for four servings. Cholestoral overload.



Siu Gyoza and the mysterious Chinese wet mochi with fruit, anko and strange dried things, which was sweet and very mild tasting.















Just to make sure, Nihon ryori!



Team Canadian:


After generous noshing and lots of compliments and so on, winners were announced and prizes given out. Such is the lamentable state of my Japanese, however, that I didn’t even realize we had won first prize til I was told later (!).

Many thanks to the Kurushima Lions Club, to ICIEA, to the cooking leaders who gave of their time, and most of all to the students who made it so much fun!

Kakemori

A few weeks ago I went to Matsuyama with Tokura-san for a meeting, and just to go. After the meeting she went, as is her habit, to see her father and cook lunch for him. While she was visiting I, having never met her father, decided to take a walk around the neighborhood.

He lives south of Dogo, easterly towards, but not yet at, the mountains. There is a large, steep hill poking out of the great river plain right behind his apato, which I decided to climb.

I walked east along a narrow neighborhood lane, a large onsen on my right, and took the first path heading up the hill. Immediately I found myself in a fairly large 'Kakemori' or bamboo forest. I had not really been in one before; it was a beautiful space. I was reminded of my friend Oliver, whom I had helped plant a number of species of bamboo one year in Vancouver, a while ago now. I felt he would enjoy this place, so I shot a composite photo of it.




Another version:



Continuing upward, past the cemetary (often placed closer to the gods on hills), I found an old, unpaved, muddy path heading up to the top of the hill. Along the path I found this:


...which is a Samurai gravestone. It was just sitting off in the leaves by itself.



At the top of the hill was a beautiful, small jinja, and a large standing stone commemorating the battle of 'Hoshi no Oka Kosenjo' in 1200AD, on the plain below (I assume). In this battle the emperor's forces (the capital of Japan then being in Kyoto) were completely routed by the righteous fury of the combined Shikoku Samurai.

There was another Samurai spirit house, and two New Year's mochi, piled up like a little snowman on the steps of the jinja. The light was magic, the photos were there, and my camera was....dead.

On the second, steep path heading down the opposite side of the hill, which, it turns out, is the normal approach to the jinja, I found more little Samurai houses, keeping company with 39 stone O-Jiso-sama statues. Jiso is the patron god of children, travellers, and pilgrims especially. I love finding odd spots like these. This is just a neighborhood shrine, which happens to commemorate a major episode in the history of Shikoku.

A week earlier I went to another kind of shrine, Freshness Burger, downtown near Kinokunya. Kinokunya is the only bookstore in these parts carrying english language books. Daniel, a kid's teacher for Peppy Kids in Imabari, told me about it. I didn't have a burger, but will, next visit. The fries however were great, the coffee ok, and the atmosphere pleasant; a true cafe.

Yano Taku

I arrived in Imabari in late May, 2006. For the first six months I lived in a Leopalace. Like many westerners the shoebox sized (perhaps 220 square feet) studio apartment, with its single electric burner hotplate and a mini sized bar fridge shocked me. I found myself looking at rental ads, trying to figure out a: what are real Japanese homes like, and b: whether I could even vaguely afford to move into a bigger apato. I often complained to my long suffering Japanese teacher, Michie Yanagihara, at our Tuesday lessons.



One day, she pulled out an advertisement with a picture of a nice old Japanese house on it, and asked me if I thought GEOS would be interested in teaching classes there. I replied that, well, GEOS has its own classrooms, so, no, probably not…

A few minutes later I got the bright idea that maybe I could rent a room in said house…and, thinking it absurd, but what the hell, I brought it up. Michie surprised me by calling Yano-san on the spot. And Yano-san said she’d ask her husband, Hideho. And two days later I was asked when I could meet her to see the house. So Michie and Mayu, my manager, and I went to meet Yano-san at her house.

Everyone got along; Yano-san seemed very nice, and clearly wanted me to move in (no key money!). The rent she asked was less than I was paying at Leopalace. The house was empty and beautiful, all tatami and shoji, slightly ramshackle but generally in very good condition. It even had a western toilet.



The house is, according to Yano-san, an Edo era machiya. It was renovated in the early nineteen eighties, but never, or not for very long afterwards, really lived in; Yano-san raised her two daughters and son next door in a more modern and larger house. Yano taku seems to have been used for her koto and flower classes, and traditional family ceremonies. This is the gate, a feature of Edo era samurai and merchant houses (I think). The Yanos last year renovated it as Hideho's new office; he runs a construction business.

So in the middle of December, 2006, I moved in. One thing became obvious right away: there was no heat. There was an assortment of electric heaters ranging from the dangerous to the merely ineffective, which I immediately avoided, and, luckily, two toyu (kerosene) burning portable furnaces which I immediately put to use.

The formal sitting room.

Usually, in old (early Meiji or Edo) farm or townhouses there are small fireplaces in the middle of some rooms, called irori. These were the only sources of heat, and Yano taku’s irori were removed when it was renovated. Modern houses have large, electric, wall mounted heaters, which heat the air of a given room. There is no central heating. So Japanese houses, in winter, tend to be a clutter of heaters in closed rooms with unheated corridors, genkan and so on. Luckily the temperature in Imabari rarely drops much below 0°Celsius at night. I keep one of the oil burners in the kitchen, which is the coldest room in the house, and one in my room. I can maintain a temperature of about 12 to 15 degrees, which is quite comfy for me.



When I shut them off, the temperature falls quickly…the glass outer shoji tend to rattle in winter winds, but the paper shoji keep most breezes out and some heat in…I sleep on a futon on tatami with a heavy comforter and a heavy fleece blanket. Interestingly, tatami seems always somewhat warm on the feet; it has nice insulating qualities.





Room proportions are also based on tatami size. There are historically 3 different sizes…here it's one by two meters. This is the average space taken up by one person lying down, more or less. So rooms are, to western eyes, oddly shaped. Storage is a big issue; traditional houses have very little storage other than square closets intended for bedding storage. It’s hard to avoid clutter.






But living in this house is quiet (no tv!), and thanks to the surrounding garden and yard, and the location in a neighborhood rather than on a busy street, it actually feels like living in the country. It’s a quite wonderful, meditative space.













This is the tearoom, used for formal tea ceremony.





A tree climbing (?!) snail in the garden. There is a small traditional Japanese garden off the east side.





Minami has weekly flower arranging classes, and events which she holds in the genkan, the formal entrance room. These are easy enough to avoid; I usually schedule a bike ride for those days. The floor of this room, which must be 20 feet square, is mostly dirt, as is the back hallway floor. This is apparently traditional in country houses.



This is my room, in the north east corner of the house.



When I moved in, there was some local wildlife inhabiting the attic, notably a Japanese roof rat and, occasionally, a feral cat. The rat started coming into the pantry in the daytime so I trapped and killed it. The cat left forthwith. Around this time (it was June) I started sleeping with the shoji open (no aircon), and was visited by a four foot plus ‘Shima Hebi’ a bullnose snake. I scared him when I almost stepped on him in the morning, unknowing. He was probably looking for the rat.


Last summer the news was Mukade, large, very poisonous centipedes with notably bad temperaments. I killed five of them, and was quite lucky to avoid being bitten...which would have been extremely unpleasant. A bite on the leg could cause it to swell to twice its size, and take a week to subside...yuk. They can be quite belligerent; it is unwise to step on them, for example, as it won't kill them, and serves to make them angry. For the record, and for anyone looking, the best way of killing them seems to be carefully picking them up with the bar-b-q tongs I keep for the purpose, going to the kitchen, and boiling up a pot of water. Dropped in, they die immediately.



This mantis dropped by and lived in my room for about two weeks one summer. At night, it would sit upside down on the wall in front of my desk, basking in the light of my writing lamp, and watch me writing on my little laptop.