Monday, October 11, 2004

In the latest Metropolis, Japan's No.1 English magazine, in the personals: Ex-Christian monk, average looking, Caucasian, 42, needs education and training in erotic subjects; seeks beautiful, wealthy Mary.  Let me rest in your comfortable bosom, and experience your heavenly love. sutra69lotus@yahoo.com On t-shirt, middle-aged woman in Kamata station "Flower clothing of the companies" On young man's shirt: "Adidas = Impossible is nothing"   10:35:08 AM     Kabuki   After two days of splendid weather—indeed the first two days since we arrived in July that would be deserving of that adjective—it has started to rain for two days solid.  A shame as my parents are here for a brief visit.  Yesterday we had an exciting outing to a Kabuki theater.  It was a free performance and not only that, Roberta’s new friends from the CWAJ had arranged for a group to go backstage and spend some time in the dressing room, where the players are made up in their various constumes, and their faces made up in the characteristic white paint and dreadful red lines below their eyes.  This was quite exciting really as the dressing room is quite big, but there are also a large group of people in it.  On the tatami mats on one side of the room, the players sit on a little stool (by little I mean about 5 centimeters high) in front of the make-up artists (I forget their name, but they have one), and are painted white.  Then they get on a whole set of kimonos, four or five is no exception, I think.  And then they are outfitted with the most elaborate wigs.  They look terrific, albeit that their make-up makes them universally evil.  <A HREF="index.html"><IMG SRC = "http://www.vinkhuyzen.com/images/04.10.04Photo-1.jpg" border = 0></A> <A HREF="index.html"><IMG SRC = "http://www.vinkhuyzen.com/images/04.10.04Photo-2.jpg" border = 0></A> <A HREF="index.html"><IMG SRC = "http://www.vinkhuyzen.com/images/04.10.04Photo-3.jpg" border = 0></A>   The Kabuki itself was quite interesting, however, it can be a bit slow moving at times.  I fell asleep several times during the performance while a woman in magnificent dress danced around slowly on the stage and a few musicians seated on stage occasionally beat the traditional string instrument ‘shamisen’ with what looked like the tool one would use to scrape the ice of a car window in winter and some of the men sang with wailing voices and a man played a flute loudly and off-key. Part of the excitement comes from the on-stage dress changes the performers make with the help of men dressed in black (Lukas called them Ninjas but I would not be surprised that their official name is different).  One Kimono comes off (or the top part is folded down) showing off the Kimono below.  The actors must be incredibly hot, and indeed, when I saw one of the actors leave the stage he was perspiring profusely. We also had a chance to see the temple near Asakusa station, which is Tokyo’s oldest and is quite impressive.  We visited the shrine with two Japanese students (Keisei and Satami, I believe) we had met in the covered market on the way to the shrine.  They were there for a class in intercultural communication and had come up to telling us that “I want to walk with you.”  At first I thought he was trying to pick me up, or that it was some scheme to rob me of my money, but then he introduced his fellow student and I realized once again where I was, Japan!  The temple is very beautiful, but the weather was terrible, so we did not spend much time there.  Here is a picture our Japanese student took of us there at the Sensoji shrine <A HREF="index.html"><IMG SRC = "http://www.vinkhuyzen.com/images/04.10.04Photo-4.jpg" border = 0></A>     12:14:02 AM     Deference   Anybody who has been to Japan will tell you that the Japanese are a polite people.  It is mostly in the little things.  Here are few things I have noticed.  When a group of people is waiting for the elevator, and the elevator has arrived the first person to go in will make an immediate u-turn and push the doors open button, and hold it until all the others have entered.  (When I say all the others, I mean every single one of them.  The Japanese are experts at squeezing many people into a small space, indeed I have often wondered “just how many people can this elevator legally carry”) Whenever there is a conflict in daily life about who should go first, i.e., who should go first through a door or get in the elevator, or get in the cafeteria line the issue is invariably resolved by one party offering the other to go first (an invitation that is accepted with a quick bow of the head and may be a ‘doomo’).  Never will one party unilaterally decided to proceed, a practice I have often witnessed in other places. Another example.  In Japan bicycles ride on the sidewalk, not the street as is more common in most other nations I have visited.  In some ways this arrangement is reasonable, as the speed of a bicycle is much closer to that of pedestrians than to that of cars.  As parents of children who transferred from a 100% car-based transportation mode (our children only rode their bikes on the weekend on the bicycle path between Morgan Hill and San Jose where the danger consisted of oncoming in-line scaters and the occassional rattlesnake) to a 100% bicycle-based transportation mode, we are quite happy with the practice.  However, it also means that progress can be quite slow as you must weave continually around the pedestrians on the sidewalk, for whom bicycle traffic is (I can imagine) a bit of a nuisance.  Tonight on the way back from the goodbye dinner with my parents in a nice restaurant Pascale and Lukas are ahead of me biking rather agressively around the people enjoying the evening.  When the sidewalk becomes too narrow for them to pass the people ahead of them, they must wait until the people allow them to pass.  What was striking to me was that when the people ahead are Japanese, they invariably jump aside as soon as they notice that the children are behind them (since their breaks squeak and they tend to leave roughly 5cm distance between their front tire and the pedestrians calves it usually does not take long); the one who notices the children first will pull the other to the side and more often than not they will smile at them, oh how kawaii (cute) these little foreign kids on bicycles.  Rarely do you see anybody annoyed (although the man who tripped and nearly fell as a result of Lukas running into him from behind did not look too pleased).  But when we get stuck behind a group of middleaged gaijin, they look back, see the children behind them but simply continue on their way, not allowing them to pass, making them wait until the sidewalk gets wider (although Pascale wanted to, there was no chance of passing them sooner as they were also rather fat). Also, at work there are many doors that you can only get into when you wave your magnetic badge in front of a scanner.  It is no big deal as you must wear the badge around your neck at all times anyway.  There is a sliding glass door just in front of the project room.  Now whenever I approach that door to go into the project room and there happens to be a project member who is leaving the room (the bathroom and the green tea dispenser are outside of this door, so there is frequent traffic) and they notice me, they will make a little sprint to the door so that I do not need to bother waving my magnetic badge over the scanner.  Similarly, when I am in Citibank to try to finally set up my account so I can actually use the ATM machine and get money and there are some forms to fill out and the clerk can’t find the form in the drawer of his desk (and I am slowly getting rather frustrated) he gets up, excuses himself and runs over the other side of the room to get the form.  He returns, apologizes for making me wait and helps me fill out the form (it actually makes me feel a little bit better about the bank right then).   * I still think that the banking system is a little inconvenient (chotto fuben desu).  I had to get a dollar account so I could transfer money from the US, but I can’t actually take any money out of that account without transfering it to a Yen account, which is fine, but I cannot transfer money at the ATM, I can only do that by calling the bank and if I call after hours, the transfer cannot happen until the next business day, so that if it is Friday night and you happen to need cash for the weekend you are out of luck; you must wait until Monday).  12:13:28 AM

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