Front and Center

I know I wrote about a different talent show, but now I've participated in one myself--only this one was the showcase for a certain Foreign Exchange Student Performance Contest. The program even included laudatory letters from each student's home country ambassador to Japan (!), but this was as close we got to cross-cultural communication; instead, the thoroughly Japanese audience was content to appreciate the exotic.

How did I get here? A classmate from my summer semester of language instruction started jamming on this Hawaiian love song with a ukulele player going to his central Tokyo college, but they wanted a low-end pulse and gave me a call. We ran two casual rehearsals at their dorm, then auditioned and somehow were allowed to advance to the finalist stage. I liked playing with these dudes so much that participating in the Harajuku concert was icing on the cake, though several of the other 18 groups were clearly there in the hopes of winning.

Our song was 3 minutes long, so for playing it twice--morning dress rehearsal and afternoon debut--all three of us got 1) a full day's entertainment from Laotian wind instruments to a masterful piece on a guqin [oldest Chinese stringed instrument, somewhat like a zither] that was built like a koto [Japanese and derived from the guqin] to watching a few internationals live out the karaoke player's dream of a professional backing band, 2) lunch of o-nigiri [small piece of meat wrapped in rice and then a layer of seaweed] and sandwiches as well as a buffet banquet for dinner, and 3) a grab bag of prizes which I'll get to in a second. I think we were well compensated!















So yes, after our performance we were awarded the title of "Most Rhythmic," although to be fair this was one of the consolation prizes everyone but the top three received. And while I am very grateful for the generous grab bag of gifts, all three of us could only laugh when it turned out that everything had been donated...and half of those generous companies are apparently makers of women's clothing! "You want this skirt?" "Hey, check out these pants!" It was like getting Christmas presents from a Santa loaded on sake. True, they weren't Goodwill donations and our guitar player can really use the futon & electronic dictionary we got, but the prizes just made the experience all that much more wacky and ultimately memorable.

Tea For Free

It's said that growth or adventure requires being pushed out of the ordinary. This is usually true. However, the catalyst for my recent experience with Japanese hospitals came not through tragedy or a Herculean challenge but sheer stupidity. I was rushing to get ready [translation: cram] before class and thought that a kitchen knife would help me open up a grapefruit. When I opened my left thumb instead, my day's schedule came to a halt as I skipped class for the campus health center. The professional nurse there took one good look at the cut and told me to head for the local clinic.

I have no real complaints about the hospital. A fair number of the sicker patients were wearing cloth mouth masks, popular here to prevent or contain colds & allergies, and I thus felt more protected from disease than American lobbies, where some sick child is usually hacking up a storm. Though it did take them a while to call me in, the doctor was very nice and turned in a solid performance on fixing my 5-stitch-wide accident.

The one small scare was that he at first thought I might have nicked a nerve in the process, so he probed around a little first to make sure. I doubted it because I reasoned this would have caused insane pain, but was nonetheless relieved when he gave me an OK sign during the operation. It was a little weird, though, to hear him asking the nurse for a digital camera with which to offer me visual proof of my thin, white nerve's continued existence. A little gruesome to look at, but at least this pushed my appetite clock back by a comfortable 30 minutes or so and let me take care of one or two errands first.

Only one major cultural difference, and it is a huge plus in my little opinion: the automatic tea dispenser. Tea isn't just a drink here, but more like an expected social grace (or grease, without any gritty connotations) whenever a visitor drops by an institution, e.g. when I first dropped by orphanages or when I went with other exchange students on local school visits. Here's what the modest machine offers: plain water (top middle), oolong tea (bottom left), barley brew (bottom center) and green tea (bottom right). Each of these can be had hot or chilled, which is why there are two buttons per kind, but it being a rainy day I of course went for the throat-warming approach. This is another reason why the wait was no problem, as I sampled each of the varieties and confirmed a previously inexperienced preference for green.


Hope everyone is well over there and exercising proper kitchen caution. My thumb is well and offered no problems when I played bass guitar today at a music competition--but the write-up will have to come later. Sick people are allowed to get tired faster than normal, right? And no, I don't plan on attempting more shenanigans just to get a few warm cups on the house.

Spa on Steriods

Happy New Year! I spent two hours on the eve of this popular Japanese holiday enjoying a wonderful cultural experience--the public baths.

I went as the guest of one host family's father. We locked up our belongings & clothes save for a small hand towel, then entered the men's side. First came the water-only shower, to ensure that any dirt would not be carried into public pools. Then it was off into the various wonders provided for our relaxation: hot tubs indoor and out; a sauna room; cold baths to better appreciate the hot ones; and a rock slab where you could lie down on the smooth, hot-H2O-covered surface.

This was a wonderful break from long days with nothing warm outside 8-minutes showers, multiple layers and the occasional room heater. There were, however, two supremely weird and hopefully unique features.

#1: Electric massage...in a hot tub! I was pretty sure that water and electricity never mix well, but some foolhardy inventor must have reasoned that running a current through his pool's shallow end would prove invigorating. My host father emerged unscathed after a few minutes of this torturous-sounding treatment, so I had to try it as well. It felt like a strange, pulsating touch on my shoulders, but my hips translated that pressure into pain.

#2: The front wall of the sauna. The European rooms I'd been in before were all-wood and conducive to focusing all your thoughts on sweating, but this one had a built-in clock and TV set! I almost began to suspect that someone had ripped it out of a normal home and stuck it in this most incongruous of locations. There was some sort of screen to protect the gadgets from heat exposure, but no barrier to defend against the intrusion of noise and news. Call me Spartan, but I think some places here should be more private, or at least more conducive to personal interaction than information overload.

Despite these quirks, I am more than willing to sweat it out with some fellow students soon. Given that many Americans still seem hung up about changing in locker rooms, however, I doubt that this trend will hit Stateside anytime soon. I'd invest in the private sauna room business instead.