Selling it out on the corner

Old man selling sweet potatoes baked right in his truck at the red-light district in downtown Shizuoka; four for 1000 yen. At a nearby park, people set up ramen shops, also out of their trucks. It's food for the drunk and those keeping warm. I haven't had the chance yet to try it, because I rarely head to the red-light district while hungry.

Shizuoka has a very prominent red-light district in downtown, where Chinese middlewomen standing on corners solicit drunk men into gentlemen's clubs and hostess bars. Prostitution outright is illegal, but it isn't illegal to pay for the company of a woman at a bar, then to take her out shopping and maybe more outside of working hours. Owners prefer that their girls become sorts of girlfriends, because it'll keep their sugar daddies coming back to the businesses.

Male hosts also solicit their services, looking like a bunch of anime characters in suits with overdone stick-straight hair. And the female hosts appear come night time, on trains or on the sidewalks, heading into the district, often with extension-clad blond and red done-up hair, high heels, short skirts, and sometimes even sunglasses at night.

Advertisements outside some racier hangouts include suggestive photos of women pushing their breasts at the camera, having sex, or dressed in school-girl uniforms. The district is located almost exactly downtown, parallel to the main shopping street, interspersed with good and bad restaurants, clubs and karaoke businesses. At least two flower shops stay open late, as well as convenience stores and clothing shops selling gaudy hostess dresses. There's no shame in this peculiar game.

Last time I taught at an elementary school, I brought my matryoshka doll along to introduce the country where I was born. The kids found it unbelievable that the thing opened at all, and completely absurd that the largest doll contained five smaller dolls inside. They absolutely loved it.

For today's visit to an elementary school out in the country side, I'll probably end up doing a Cossack dance because I forgot to bring along the doll, sadly.

Ask me about my compost piles

So I got this hoarding habit, or perhaps problem. I stash and stash, and hide the goods in my plants out back. It's a pulpy mess out there on the ledge of the balcony, but I just can't stop! The stuff I hoard is just a mess, a reeking pile of garbage really. And yet I keep hoarding, keep burying it out back like a dog, because I know that one day, something beautiful will happen; my compost piles will sprout mysterious-to-me leaves and stalks.

The lush greenery at the foreground of this photo is an example of the mysterious something growing from what was originally designated as a planter for chives and shiso. I covered the scraps from cooking in the background with more dirt after taking this picture.

A couple months ago, I visited my friends in Chiba and watched curiously when they would bring leaves, seeds, peels, whatever and bury them in their planters, which already were growing thick with a disorder of mysterious greenery. What do you plant, I asked? Everything, answered Damien. When we have seeds and pulp left over from cutting tomatoes, we plant those, he said. Watermelon cores, roots, lettuce. Melon seeds were exceptionally genki sprouters that shot up from the pot in no time, he said. My watermelon seeds were just as happy to open up.

So upon returning home, I found plastic containers I hadn't thrown out yet and stuffed them full of vegetable and fruit remains, paper from egg cartons, and dirt. Probably more than 60% of my fruit and vegetable scraps, as well as mushrooms and eggs, goes into the planters, which is significant, because I mostly consume fresh produce, not prepackaged foods. That means taking out the trash less frequently, reusing the waste I do produce, and growing a cornucopia of weirdness on the balcony. Of course I've always been fascinated by plants and biology, so to me, it's like watching a nature special every time I look out at my balcony.

Once, I watched a TV special about a house that also had an interesting waste-management system. The "sink" in the kitchen was actually a small pond for koi (Japanese carp), where the owners washed their produce. Koi feed on refuse, so feeding fish while feeding yourself seems like a nice arrangement.

I think the wildlife enjoys my garden too. Yesterday while inspecting my planters, I noticed a spot of earth moving in one. I thought I was hallucinating, but I saw it move again. I dug in to pull out a thicky slimy maggot or perhaps catterpillar or pupae rolled into a ball. Creeped out, I put my friend back in his home and covered him with a new layer of my precious garbage.

Note: I heard that onions don't make good composting material, and neither do fatty foods so don't throw last night's curry in the mix. Stick to fruits, vegetables, roots, egg shells and mushrooms.

Runners

Avi Gerver for The New York Times

MILES FROM HOME

Michel Bach of Pomponne, France, guess who, in New York's marathon.

Caption made me laugh. Full NYT story on slow runners here.

Sunday I'll be running the "Ikawa Marathon," which features very un-marathon-like distances of 2.5K, 5K, 10K and 20K. I'll be doing the 5K because I've stopped running competitively since I had to run the mile in a race in 5th grade. Not ever having run a mile before that, I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I was gasping for breath within the first minute and crying as I finished dead-last, having already given up on the run and walking the whole way.

It's fascinating how big marathon running is; just among the small foreigner population I know in Shizuoka alone, there are seven people I can think of at this moment who are training or have trained for marathons.

Springtime in October

(Springtime in Shizuoka)





(Springtime in Fantasia 2000)

Do you see it? Huh?

The Main Event

This is a scene from Monday afternoon, the third day of the World Cup Daidogei or International Street Performance Festival in Shizuoka. Musicians, athletes and clowns, alongside street food vendors have filled Sumpu Park (the central park of Shizuoka City) as well as Gofukocho, the main shopping street.

What makes this festival extra special - besides that it celebrates the art of art, strength, humor, and intrigue - is that it falls on the weekend around Halloween, so when I was decked out as Spring from Fantasia 2000 (picture to come) on the night before Halloween, passers-by didn't know whether I was a performer ... or a freak (Halloween isn't widely celebrated here).

Last year, I met a German juggler and Russian acrobats. Today, I watched this Japanese marching band playing Disney tunes on saxophones and drums outside Starbucks, teen acrobats from Shanghai balancing tableware under the watchful eyes of their adult supervisors, and two French street performers acting like a frazzled couple while having an argument in the street (or maybe they were just a French couple mid argument, and we were laughing at their misfortunes).

Yesterday, there was a pair Australian strongmen wearing only briefs and tossing each other around, and a European woman imitating deep-water diving while suspended on ropes from a crane. There were two Canadian women on the main shopping street painting stunning multi-colored face designs.

Japanese and foreigners swarm the events, which is notable because street performance is, like Halloween, not wide-spread here. Not even the homeless beg for money. But once a year, performers from around the world whip out hats and bags and ask for the people's yen, as well as for their participation in their acts. It's bizarre and unnerving to watch the generally shy Japanese at times barely responding to the humorous prodding of the performers. But most do open their wallets and give.

It's fantastic to feel like I live in one giant circus for a couple days every year.

Irish

(I wish my cellphone made clearer videos)

The guitarist in this mostly instrumental Irish band got interested in traditional Irish music 20 years ago, by way of rock-n-roll, only three years after he picked up the guitar. Irish music, he said, has melodies familiar to the Japanese ear. The band has existed for some 15 years. It features the guitar, a fiddle, Irish bagpipes called uilleann pipes, a drum called the bodhrán, and a tin whistle. The guest vocalist for one song was my friend, Kat.

They opened the lineup of wonderful (American) folk and country music, ukulele sounds, and jazzy swing getups featuring a clarinet played to sound as rowdy as a saxophone and a washboard, among a medley of brassy voices and almost too much energy packed in the unexpected place of Freaky Show, a bar that most of the time is devoid of anything eventful.

Kat and I were lucky to end up here. She promised the bodhrán player, a guy named Pablo I met dancing salsa who also plays the congas, that she would sing with the band, but due to a crazy schedule was never able to come to rehearsal. One afternoon, we ran into him on the street and he mentioned that it was about time Kat actually made time for him and his band. She promised to come on November first. We were there all night, by the bar, drinking white Russians and flat Guinness, and perhaps literally ripping up the floor.

This rock of salt came from the mountains of Pakistan. I got it as a quaint souvenir from a local merchant.

More Views From Ikawa

Inside the teacher's room in the junior high; I'd turn left, and there always sat the principal. A fan of skiing and coffee, he'd get up from doing whatever it is principals do, saunter into the room and ask whether everyone wanted some coffee. Ceremoniously, he'd reach for the coffee beans and grind them, then make a mean brew. His was never sour, unlike the generic variety Meg, the office lady, made in the morning. He has yet to crack open the jar of olive coffee I got for him from Shikoku.



During sports day, the town gathered at the elementary school grounds and together raised tents, practiced fire and earthquake safety drills, and did morning calisthenics as well as rope pulling, relays and a variety of silly games, which in large schools are done exclusively by the students and are not a town affair.




Lunch break at sports day




at a local restaurant


I walked along the street with these two chatty ladies, who then made their way to see their friend. The technical "downtown" area is tiny, so it was no surprise I'd run into them again, or, more accurately, pass the house where they prattled on cheerfully.


Thinly sliced deer meat resembles tuna sashimi in texture and taste. The antlers are made into keychains and other souvenir thingies, or sold in their entireties for somewhere around 5000 yen each.


At a local fish shop


At the local lacquer lunchbox shop, this man makes about 5 or 6 per day. The start at approximately 4000 yen each. The wooden loops hanging behind him are drying thin sheets of wood which will make the walls of the lunchboxes. The sheets were soaked, then bent into a loop.


Picking out the appropriate cherry bark for ...


... to use as a sort of string to connect the two ends of the loop.


The man's mother explains the complicated workings of ... a lunch box. The old woman talked on and on, to the point when the three students and teacher stopped paying attention and the foreigner who could understand very little continued to nod and smile, as if hypnotized by her quick tongue ... or for fear of appearing rude.

Now, one of these lunch boxes - traditional Ikawa lunch boxes owned by most people for the sake of tradition and given to outsiders as souvenirs - stands in my bookcase.

A cute little cartoon

An MGM cartoon circa April 27, 1935; according to IMDB.com, it's adapted from Hans Andersen's fairytale "The Emperor's Nightingale."

Views of Ikawa

Ikawa is an old town with an old population. Fifty percent of the 600-person Ikawa are elderly. The houses are old and musty, and they still have hole-in-the-floor bathrooms and wood-burning stoves. Many homes have large gardens sprouting things like eggplants, tomatoes and daikon, as well as fruit trees.



The size of the pre-school hearkens back to a time when there were more children in school. Ikawa used to have two elementary schools (now, only one stands and one was torn down).

I look at these tiny mountain schools and I am proud of the Japanese education system. All students from pre-school to junior high are out-numbered by teachers and staff. The elementary and junior high both have more computers (good computers, accompanied by tablets) in their computer labs than students, and in the elementary school the students learn English with an electronic textbook displayed on a huge new computer screen.

They play sports in their awesomely big gyms, read in their packed libraries (and secondary libraries), and eat ridiculously festive and opulent meals. Perhaps it's what I assume about American schools because of organizations like Teach for America and my own understanding of school funding there, but I'd imagine a mountain school of ten in a little poor town would have one teacher and be located in someone's garage.



Along the edge of the lake, shards of old plates are scattered. This fall's rainfall and tomorrow's typhoon is sure to raise the level of Ikawa lake and then reveal old goodies of the pre-dam life as it recedes.



This downtown izakaya attracts the construction workers (the construction and road repair companies are the largest local employers). The guy on the left owns it. He cooked up wonderful Chinese food for my party of teachers. We shared our food with one student's dad and a young man who works in forestry and is on the volunteer firefighter team, which is the only way firefighting gets done in town.



The mountainous region of Shizuoka prefecture actually gets snow in the winter, although not as much as it used to a few decades ago. And people can actually go skiing southeast of town. The ski slope has a restaurant and a farm; the farm has sheep, one goat, some chickens in a hen-house with a dead crow hanging from one side of it, warning other crows to stay away. Unfortunately for me and my desire to live the farm life, the farm hasn't needed farm hands in some years. But it does have a sheep-herding dog.



On top of this mountain, Tama-chan explained that many more dead trees like these used to block the view of yet another more prominent chunk of rock, Mt. Fuji. So they fell prey in droves to hikers hungry for some Edo Period scenery.

My friend, Tama-chan, plays this snake-skin Okinawan instrument and sings in the native language of Okinawa, where her grandparents are from.

She works as the postal carrier in Ikawa, where she lives on the edge of the tiny downtown area in a three-decade-old traditional country house, where the latrine is a hole in the ground.

She has a mean CD and record collection, from which I am borrowing heavily. (We both have a love for world music, specifically South American.)

One time on the job, she had to walk along some abandoned railroad tracks for 20 minutes to deliver a piece of mail. Upon encountering monkeys, she took cover in a tunnel.

Zoom!

I woke up to a story about this awesome new chair-thingy on TV.


(text and photo from here; check out video there too)

Yeah, we've seen a self-balancing unicycle before, but the brand new U3-X from Honda takes it to another level. A creepy-sterile, awesomely futuristic Honda level, to be precise. What makes the U3-X particularly interesting is it has the regular large wheel of a unicycle, but that wheel is actually made up of several small wheels in a series, which can rotate independently, meaning that the device can go forward, backward, side-to-side and diagonally, all being controlled with a simple lean.
Honda credits its ASIMO research for this multi-directional capability, though we're not sure we see it -- ASIMO is biped, after all -- but far be it from us to discredit an excuse to keep up the good work on the ASIMO front. Right now the "experimental model" of the U3-X gets a single hour of battery and weighs under 22 pounds, with a seat and foot rests that fold into the device for extra portability. No word of course on when
the thing might make it to market, but Honda plans to show it off next month at the Tokyo Motor Show ...

About to cross the last bridge to Shikoku. がんばろ！

About to cross the last bridge to Shikoku. がんばろ！

Off-track

How we ended up spending a whole day in Onomichi, which was supposed to be merely a place to get off the train and hop rental bikes to Shikoku island, should've been clear to us in advance. There were no more bikes to rent on the weekend starting Silver Week, a three-day mash-up of holidays. Of course！
Come back tomorrow at 7 a.m. Ugh, fine (I thought.) No problemo！ (my travel partner was excited.)
When historians traced the roots of Onomichi, they discovered that, simply put, Yokohama and Kyoto had a tiny baby, a tiny, beautiful baby between the sea and the hills along the southern coast of Honshu.