卒業式 The Graduation Ceremony

Woohoo! I’m back.. It’s March now and the temperature has been rising ever so gradually along with a persoanl euphoria at being able to see a blue sky for the first time in several months. I await with baited breath the day Spring comes into full overdrive with the blooming of the cherry blossoms.

Along with the seasonal change has come the time for change in my schools as well. The Japanese school year ends around mid-march and that means graduation time for the third years in my junior highs and the sixth years in my elementary schools. Unlike the American school system where the primary graduation ceremony is focused on High School, graduation from junior high over here is a pretty momentous occasion. The reason behind this being next year, all of the students will, for the first time, be separated. Since grade one, these students have been in the same classes with the same students and have thus never been separated before. 

In anticipation of this occasion, all of my schools had been hard at work for several weeks tidying up the schools and making the decorations. After all this time, it never ceases to amaze how talented many of my students are at decorating and drawing (considering even my drawings of stick figures are nothing short of abominations). In addition to their tireless work at decorating and cleaning, all of the students were relentlessly drilled over the graduation procedures. Every bow had to be down perfectly.

Awesome decorations made by the younger students.

Decorations in the third years` classroom

Learning to Bow

1st and 2nd year messages to the third years. They are divided based on which after school club each student was in.

The graduation ceremony itself had major variations from the ceremonies I had experienced in America. For starters, the overall sentiment was much more somber. All for starters, the parents were very formally dressed in black and remained dead silent throughout the whole ceremony. Furthermore, instead of the trademark graduation gown worn in America, the students were dressed in their usual trademark school uniforms.

The ceremony itself started off with third years entering the room, (everyone was dead silent while they did) and taking their seats. Next, all bodies present sang the national anthem and the respective school song. After a short montage of pictures and videos of the third years, the students lined up to receive their diplomas from the principal. It was at this moment that I became extremely thankful I have smaller schools (especially at one which had only 9 third years) as it really expedited the process.

Receiving the certificate of graduation

The table of the solemn big-wigs

After the students received their diplomas, several bigwigs such as the mayor, and the head of the PTA gave speeches, which I believe revolved around being a good member of society (it was really hard to stay awake for these so I missed out on a lot). The last parts of the ceremony involved singing school songs and more or a less a collective meltdown on the parts of the students and the teachers. At one of my schools, virtually every teacher and student was bawling at the end. Overall, the affair felt more like an amalgamation of a funeral and a formal military ritual rather than a celebration.

The meltdown begins

After the ceremony ended, the second and first years lined up in the hallway and made human tunnel under which passed the new graduates. The school then congregated on the outside of the school to take pictures and celebrate in a more informal fashion.

Striking a final pose

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My smallest junior high gathered around a piano and sang school songs after the ceremony.

Another way graduation here deviates from America is that although the third years are off school now, the first and second years still have another week of school left before a short break.   

Along with graduation and slightly improved weather, the spring season also brings something a bit more sinister. When I woke up this morning, my car was covered in a yellow chalk-like substance, courtesy of the notorious sugi tree. The yellow chalky substance is the pollen of the sugi tree and is known throughout Japan for being a serious allergen. Indeed, when I went to work this morning, quite a few of my coworkers were wearing masks and sniffling like crazy. Although I am allergic to mold, and almost every other conceivable pollen, I miraculously appear unaffected by the sugi which is a huge relief for my already beleaguered sinuses.  

Another interesting experience for me over the past few weeks was going to a modern art museum in Kanazawa. One particular exhibit that I found especially pertinent to my experience in Japan thus far was one titled The Perfect Home. The exhibit was a collection of art created by South Korean artist, , who had spent his life in both South Korea and the U.S. a prevalent theme in his work was expressing the difficulty of connecting to one specific culture after living in two radically different places for a long time. In one picture that I found especially relevant, the artist had drawn a map of the world and had drawn his house in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between Korea and New York. During my time here thus far, hardly a day goes by when I find myself missing some aspect of life back in Minnesota and the United States whether for its astounding acceptance of cultural diversity or good cheese. Yet, I know that when I return to America, the situation will inevitably reverse and I will find myself longing for aspects of life in Japan such as amazing Japanese food and customer service that doesn`t treat you like a burden. Thus, I find myself agreeing with the artist that my perfect home is in the PAcific Ocean, lodged between America and Japan.

北海道 (Hokkaido)

Only a few weeks after my escapades in China, I was off on yet another adventure. This time, I would be exploring the island of Hokkaido for a ski trip and to tour Sapporo's famous Yuki Matsuri (Snow Festival). Hokkaido is the large island north of Japan's main island, Honshu, and is renowned for its natural landscape and cooler weather. Especially famous in Hokkaido are the awesome mountains which can be hiked on during the summer and skied on during the winter.

Hokkaido

Thankfully, this time my flight went off without a hitch and I arrived in Sapporo on February 2nd no problem. After my plane arrived in Sapporo, I met up with several other JETs who were going on the trip at the train station. The JETs had come from all over Japan although there were a substantial amount of JETs stationed in Okinawa (they got sick of nice weather perhaps?) As the JETs were coming in several waves throughout the day, a group of about 9 of us explored a bit of Sapporo on our own. Sapporo itself was a nice city but but pretty unremarkable city sightseeing-wise as most of it is new and there weren't a whole ton of historical sites to see. On a side note, the reason that Sapporo and indeed much of the rest of Hokkaido's cities are so new is that major urban development in Hokkaido only began in the late 1800's (considering the rest of Japan has seen urban development for about 1000 years this is relatively new).  I did, however  get to see several sculptors carving out blocks for the upcoming Yuki Matsuri, which was pretty cool. For lunch, we stopped at a ramen place and I got some pretty good spicy oyster ramen. After a bit more roaming around Sapporo, we decided to head over to the Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum where would be meeting up with the rest of the JETs for dinner. Although we arrived at the Sapporo Beer Museum too late to visit any exhibitions, we did get to sample a few beers. We had dinner at the Sapporo Beer Garden, which is a giant German-like Beer Hall where one may eat meat and drink beer to ones hearts delight (or failure). I eventually consumed my weight in grilled lamb, veggies, and beer and had the meat-sweats by the end of the night.

The Beer Test

After the hearty meal at the Beer Garden concluded, the other JETs and I made our way to the bus and went off to Niseko Ski Resort. Niseko was about a two hour bus drive away from Sapporo so minus the whole bus smelling like meat, it wasn't too bad a ride. Evidentially, while we were driving, a 7.0 earthquake hit Hokkaido but we didn't even feel a thing! As we got to the resort at about 12 at night, I pretty much went straight to sleep after arriving.

The next day, those of us who wanted to go skiing/snowboarding picked up our equipment and went off to the mountain. The first day of skiing was fun, but a bit disappointing as most of the mountain was closed off due to bad weather. The resort and the town of Niseko itself was rather interesting as it was almost completely inhabited by Australians. I'm not really sure how this place in the middle of Hokkaido became a snowy Australia, but it was kinda of nice to use so much English for the first time in several months. 

Chillin at Niseko

The next day of skiing was absolutely sublime! The weather was a bit foggy but otherwise clear and the powder on the mountain was like nothing I have ever skied on before. I went skiing with another JET from from the neighboring prefecture named Alex who later coerced me to go down my first black diamond, which after falling on my ass a few times I was able to conquer. The true test of my skiing ability came at the end of our ski day when we decided to head back to the main part of the resort via a long ski trail that began at the top of the mountain. Unfortunately for my already sore butt, we would have to go down a few more black diamonds on the way. This dilemma was further compounded by a blizzard that came out of nowhere and shrouded the whole mountain in an onslaught of winter fury making it so I could barely see 10 feet in front of me. After more or less rolling half way down the black diamond portion of the mountain, however, Alex and I were able to successfully navigate the treacherous trail and made our way back to the hotel. My trails at the mountain were later rewarded with an onsen that night.

Victory pose after the black diamond

Another one of the highlights of this day was finding this little gem in the bathroom of the resort. 

I guess it was a problem at least once if they have a sign for  it.

On the last day of my trip, all of the JETs headed back to Sapporo where most of us would catch our respective means of transportation home. As my plane didn't depart until later that afternoon, I was free to a bit more exploring in Sapporo and most fortunately, the Yuki Matsuri was in full swing when I returned. Although the weather was feeling like the oh-so lovely Minnesota winter weather that I loathed, I nevertheless managed to enjoy the festival immensely   I saw some really spectacular ice sculptures and devoured lots of delicious festival food. After the festival, I bade the rest of the JETs adieu and departed home to Ishikawa. 

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Thai-themed Ice sculpture (kinda of reminds of the buildings  I saw in China)

Crepe at the festival

So that's the story of adventure in Hokkaido. Other notable highlights from this past week include going out to an oyster grill with my neighbor Jillian and one of our coworkers named Fumie. The oysters were delectable as usual although a curious addition to our set meal was serving of the notorious (and potential toxic) fugu. Thankfully I survived yet another encounter with this strange delicacy and lived to eat another day.

Oyster, squid, and Fugu meal

Jillian and Fumie

Eating Fugu

The final highlight from this week was witnessing my first school lockdown drill at one of my elementary schools. Although the school had let me know in advance that it was a drill, it was still a rather bizarre and amusing spectacle. The whole affair involved a random actor, dressed up as a "suspicious person", who wandered down the halls. Then, all hell broke loose when the police (I found out later these guys actually were police officers) ran towards the pretend stranger and proceeded to mock beat the ever-loving crap out of him with their batons. The whole concluded with the police dragging the guy away while he screamed at the top his lungs. I daresay I don't recall anything like that happening during my days as a K-12 student. 

There and Back Again: The Journey from Kunming to Noto

After another day in Kunming, I said my farewells to Colleen and began my long journey home.  My extensive travel schedule would begin at Saturday morning and would end with my arrival at home Monday morning with transfers at Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Nanao and Anamizu respectively. The first leg of the journey, the flight from Kunming to Beijing started out without a hitch but began to go terribly, terribly wrong when I landed and was waiting for my luggage. After waiting around the conveyor belt for an hour, I made my way to the information booth and started saying “no luggage” “no luggage” over and over in the hopes that someone would understand. Someone did thankfully but all they could get across to me was that my luggage would be coming 3 hours later (I still have no idea why! Did they put it on the wrong plane?) When I heard this my immediate thought was “here we go again Chinese airports let round 2 of your torture begin`` and Lewis Blacks’ AirlineTraveler’s Prayer raced through my mind. When I finally acquiring my luggage after the three-hour wait, I went to the terminal to try and change my flight time as I had missed my layover flight to Shanghai. After being pointed towards the wrong booth five times I finally found the manager and we did our best to communicate. I eventually gathered that there were no more flights to Tokyo that day (really?!) and that I would have to wait until tomorrow to catch my flight. With that I was once more whisked off to another hotel by this airline, this time in Beijing. Unfortunately, I was too far away from all the main sites to do any site seeing but that probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway as Beijing was experience some truly nasty smog and I could hardly even walk a few minutes outside without struggling to breathe.

The next day, I finally made my way to Shanghai and then to Tokyo where I landed around 9 o’clock. At this point, I only had 2 hours to get all the way through customs at Narita to my bus at Shinjuku station, which left at 11 o'clock . The airport bus arrived at Shinjuku at about 11:01pm and thus began my mad dash to the bus with me screaming like a maniac person at nearby people to get out of the way and dashing madly across traffic to reach my bus on time. By the grace of Buddha, the kami, or whatever god I pleased with my numerous shrine and temple visits, I made it to my bus at the last possible minute and was on my way home!

Terrible smog in Beijing

Thus ended my hectic, enlightening, miserable, and fantastic winter break. I had the privilege to see a pretty comprehensive mosaic of what life is like in contemporary East Asia. From the modern and high-tech streets of Tokyo, to the lively and developing streets of Kunming, to the rustic and poor village of Manmai, East Asia certainly is a dynamic and diverse place. However, there is still so much more for me to see and learn, so here’s to the next adventure.

Xishuangbanna: Southeast Asia in China

Deciding to simultaneously explore the surrounding area in Yunnan while basking in warm weather, Colleen and I decided to explore the most southern part of Yunnan called Xishuangbanna. Xishuangbanna is a sort of province within a province and is home to a very large number of ethnic minorities who currently outnumber the population of Han Chinese. The most prevalent minority in the region are the Dai people (language and culture related to Thai people) and the region is known as the Dai autonomous. The region is also very warm with tropical weather that hovers around 80 degrees in January so naturally is was a good place to escape the fact that I hadn't seen the sun in Japan since November.

Large gate at Jinghong, the language written on it is Dai.

Our first stop in Xishuangbanna was the regional capital of Jinghong. As Colleen and I stepped out of the airport and into the palm tree lined avenue with a large gate with the Dai language written on it, it indeed felt like we were in Thailand or somewhere else in Southeast Asia rather than in China. As we made our way across the street, we came across the main plaza where an ethnic minority group was practicing a dance routine for a performance to be held later that night. We stopped at a nearby restaurant and had some food. Colleen herself was a little unsure as to what kind of dish this was but it was some kind of fried bread topped with sugar.

Ethnic Minority dance

Some sort of fry bread

In the afternoon, Colleen and I traversed to the Mekong River, which was the original lifeline of Jinghong. As the weather was nice and toasty, we saw many children bathing and splashing around in the river. Having heard all the horror stories about the pollution in Chinese rivers, I was pleasantly surprised to see how relatively clean the Mekong was (although this may change in the coming years as tourism and industry increase in the region).

The Mekong River

That night, Colleen and I sat down and watched the performance that the women earlier in the day had been practicing for. Evidently, the performance was was commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the Xishaungbanna prefecture and had invited a congregation of local minority dance groups to participate in a dance contest. According to Colleen and her research, modernization and the growth of tourism in the area has created some drastic changes in the area for minority groups such as these. Apparently the Chinese government pays these groups some decent money to perform these dances but it comes at cost tot their cultural heritage. For example, these groups will be obligated to perform these traditionally sacred dances for tourists even when it is not the correct time of year for that particular dance, or a certain group will even be mandated to dance to another minority groups sacred dance. So I guess it’s been a sort of mixed bag as wealth in the region increases but certain aspects of traditional culture are diluted.

Dance Performance in Jinghong

The winning dance team

Early the next morning, Colleen and I boarded a bus to the city of Menghai, located about an hour to the west and closer to the Burmese border. While the stop in Menghai was mostly so we could transfer buses, we nevertheless got to a bit of exploring around the city. Highlights include strolling through the morning market were we were served a mysterious rice porridge thing by a woman working there and stolling through the city limits which became increasingly rustic. We eventually stumbled across a really cool temple. It was interesting because this temple looked quite new, I’m guessing it was a perk of the community making money so recently.

Eldery doing Tai Chi in the central square

Exploring MEnghai

Temple at Menghai

Around noon, Colleen and I took the bus into the countryside and it was here that I the 21^st century began to fade away and one almost felt like they were stepping back in time (minus riding a bus of course). Our destination was the city of Manmai located even further in the depths of the hills and jungles but as the bus didn’t make trips there directly, we had to find the way ourselves. Thankfully, Colleen found a local boy to point us in the right direction and it turned out the best way to get to Manmai before dark was to get out of the bus about 5 kilometers from the village and hike there by foot. So Colleen and I did as he said and stepped out into one of the most epic hikes of my life. The beauty of the mountains, tea plantations and valleys was made even more spectacular when arrived at Manmai around sunset and stopped at temple overlooking the surrounding area. After taking in the scenery, Colleen stepped down to the village of Manmai in hopes of finding a place to spend the night. Using a combination of body language and broken Mandarin (most of the villagers couldn’t speak it according to Colleen) we found a home run by a middle-aged woman and her family who had hosted foreign travelers before and spent the night there. Before we went to bed, the family cooked us up a meal of fish, veggies, noodles, and a super strong rice-liquor that tasted like what I imagine battery-acid tastes.  Colleen and I then did some exploring outside and gazed upon a crystal-clear night sky teeming with shining stars.

Countryside in rural Xishuangbanna

Village in the countryside

Hiking with Colleen at sunset

Now at this point in the story, dear readers, this story gets a little less dignifying for me…I’m still not sure if it was the meal the family served us, the battery-acid wine, or something else that day, but something I consumed made me terribly terribly sick that night. Waking up at around 3:00 in the morning I felt as if my insides were on fire and proceeded to make a mad dash to their outdoor toilet. My endeavor was for naught however as I proceeded to release that nights dinner all across the outside of our gracious hosts house. After a whole night of puking my guts out, I thought the worst of this stomach bug had passed…how very very mistaken I was…the very next morning stage 2 of the misery began and…lets just say that they rest of the dinner chose to come out of me in another violent and explosive way…I’ll spare you the details of this particular suffering although let me just say being afflicted with it and having to use a squat toilet, which incidentally was right next to their pig pen did not a very merry Christmas make. Suffice to say that day I was utterly incapacitated and could barely even eat. The only food I managed to get down were a couple of oranges, which Colleen awesomely scoured the village for. As we needed to be back in Jinghong the next to return home, Colleen asked our host mom when we could get a bus back to the capital. Apparently, the host mom told Colleen that there were only two options to get back: Option A would be to take a several hour hike to nearby village of Bada to catch a bus (which given my inability to move wasn’t going to happen) Option B was to wake up at 5:30am the next morning and to ride on the back of motorcycles driven by her husband and his friend. Guess which one happened!

So the next morning, feeling completely exhausted from having consumed no food and having only expelled nutrients from the past day, I climbed on the back of the friends motorcycle like a helpless baby sloth and we drove through the mountain road under a starry sky. I probably would have appreciated the moment so much more I didn’t feel like I was going to die and compounding the situation was that much of the mountain road was paved with very bumpy and stomach churning cobblestone. Thankfully I neither passed out nor released my stomach contents on my hapless driver (I guess there was nothing to release at that point). We eventually got to the village, transferred buses and were on our way back to Jinghong. As our flight didn’t take off until 10pm, we still had a day to kill in Jinghong. As I was in no condition to hike around, we settled on seeing a subtitled Jackie Chan movie playing at a local theater. The film was a very bizarre movie about Jackie stealing national treasures for the Chinese government and had very strange nationalistic tones in it about how great the Chinese government is and how terrible Western powers were/are for stealing Chinese art. We then finally caught our plane and I was back in Kunming where I could finally get some rest in peace for a day.

Woemn selling veggies in the morning