Victory Calls My Name

And she knows that I cannot resist the insistence of her pull.

Which is to say that I have figured out how I am gonna put pictures up on my web site. With unabashed use of copy and paste, there will soon be a plethora of pictures available for browsing, with a great many of them having captions. Huzzah!

However, while the pictures and their captions will tell you about a good number of the interesting things I have been doing in the two months of not updating the blog, I don't have pictures for everything. Either I didn't have my camera, or I felt like I would look more touristy than I wanted to deal with, or whatever. So I will posthumously recount what I have been up to, starting with...

First Chakai of the Year

The kanji 会 is pronounced kai. It can be tagged onto any number of things to give the meaning "convention" or "meeting or "get-together." A chakai is a tea ceremony get-together.

The first chakai of the year is linked to the general Japanese thinking of the new year. When the new year opens, it is time to put the past behind you and look to the future. The first chakai of the year is thus the first chakai of a new round of life, and something to be treasured.

Through Ikushima-sensei (the tea ceremony club teacher), the club got five tickets to a beginning of the year chakai. I like going to these special chakai because I get to see varied methods and utensils for performing tea ceremony, so I chocked up (how do you spell that, anyway?) the 1000 yen for a ticket and met with Ryoko, Keina, Mariko-san, and another girl whose name I can never remember to walk to the Manabotto (the same building in which I had been to a prveious chakai and a shodou exhibit) together.

We got there about fifteen minutes after the chakai started; too late to participate in the first round of tea and first to arrive for the second round. Generally, for these chakai, there is a 4-6 hour span of time in which you come and get to enjoy the ceremony once per setup -- one traditional tatami room setup and one where everyone is sitting in chairs at tables, including the person making the tea. So we settled down to wait. A little bit of time passed, more people showed up, and I realized that although I had come in my best clothes (since Mariko-san had told me to make sure and wear a skirt) and the other girls had come in nice clothes, too... we were the only ones not wearing kimonos.

This didn't surprise me too much. Last time I had gone to one of these chakai, there had been few other women not wearing kimonos. This time, though, when we got into the tatami room where the ceremony was actually to take place, people were like, "Oh, you're students? With a foreigner? Sit over there, in almost the most-honored place, so you can see better." We really had almost the best seats in the room for watching what was going on. Being able to see what was going on well, I realized that not only were they all wearing kimonos, but they were all wearing expensive ones. The guys who had come weren't wearing kimonos, but their suits were obviously in the multi-hundred-dollar range. One woman showed up in a multi-hundred-dollar dress suit, at which point I knew for certain that my friends and I were horribly, horribly outclassed.

The people in the positions of honor asked a bit about me; where was I from, why had I come to the ceremony? I was in the tea club? Spiffy.

Then the tea ceremony started. It was a method I hadn't seen before. It involved an exceptionally large shelf, wider and taller than normal. There was also a container in which the water ladle (hishaku) sat, along with a pair of long-handled chopsticks that seemed to serve little purpose. It was interesting to watch, though. The equipment was all perfectly matched. Black was the base color for everything (except the hishaku, made of bamboo). Coming up from the bottom was a design of bright blue with gold inlays that looked like fish scales. It was really nifty stuff.

When the tea ceremony was most of the way done (most of the 30ish people had had sweets and drunk tea, and the tea-maker performing the ceremony was starting to clean the bowl), the two guys in the most honored position stood up to leave. This struck me as incredibly weird. And I was right. The first guy came over to say hi to me. Turns out it was the mayor of Kushiro.

Holy handgranade. :O

Did you know that Seward, Alaska and Kushiro, Japan are sister ports? I didn't. Not until he told me. Then he left. I assume the guy is a busy man, so it makes sense, but it left a small hole in the ceremony. Earlier, I had seen that the first two guys (which I now knew was the mayor and some kind of attendant) didn't really know what they were doing. They obviously hadn't studied tea ceremony. It had made me feel a bit better about the "horribly, horribly outclassed" sense flitting about my brain. But now, at the cleaning stage of the ceremony, the person in the position of honor was supposed to say some things, interact with the tea maker a bit. The lady who had been third place ended up taking care of that after a short apology for taking over with the two guys gone.

The rest of it went as normal, really. After the ceremony was done, everyone got up to go take a closer look at the decorations and equipment used (hot damn, there is some beautiful pottery and painting in some of the tea ceremony equipment). Then we went down two floors to a room with a chairs-and-tables setup and had more tea. That ceremony wasn't nearly as interesting to recount, though, so I'll just say that the tea was good and the cold water holder (mizusashi) for the ceremony looked like a bright blue bucket. It was rather cool.

After that, three of the girls went home, but I needed a kobukusa, a piece of tea equipment in the form of a special, decorated cloth about the size of an average piece of origami paper for the new method I had been learning. So Ryoko (who needed to go to the public library anyway) showed me where the tea stuff shop I had heard about was. When we got there, I realized that I had never been able to find it (and I had looked a couple of times) because the kanji were so expertly (meaning convolutedly) written that I couldn't read them at all. I got myself a nifty-looking, yet inexpensive, kobukusa, then headed home while Ryoko went to the library.

That was on the last Saturday in January. Stay tuned for more stuff as I get to it!

Realizations of the Period

1) I love Photoshop. It's such a good feeling to look at something you've edited in it and say to yourself, "I did that. ... Muhahahahahaha!"
2) I am looking forward to summer. It's gonna be both dark and warm enough for me to sit outside and enjoy the night for hours. Add to that the fact that I have a PSP with Lumines now? Hallelujah! Hallelujah.
3) Rice is tasty, filling, and nutritious. I can see why the Japanese people eat so much of it. I've started eating a lot more of it, too -- it's also easy and fast to cook. Toss something tasty in with it, mix, and you have dinner.
4) I am such a college student.
5) I went to Seicomart to get a new bag of rice, since I was running out, right? They sell like three kinds of rice. The packages are different colors, with different names, and the bags are transparent so you can see the rice in the same places. Looking at the rice itself inside the bags... they all look exactly the same. WTH?