Life Without

Wow.  Has it really been a week in Japan already?  It’s going by too fast.  Photos still posing a problem.  Below, though, is a short video from the first school we visited, the Shumei Univeristy Yachiyo High School.  Their band played a medley of songs for us, many of them familiar tunes, like this one.  Blown away is too simple a phrase for what we felt when the band started playing.  Wow.

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Video two: Taiko drumming.

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Video three: April’s greeting to school administration.

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Video Four: a karate demonstration.

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Video five: a kendo demonstration of rules.

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Video six: a practice kendo match.

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Video seven: the boys shower room atShumei University Yachiyo High School .

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Video eight: a traditional Japanese tea ceremony as performed by students.

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Video nine: School lunch at Shumei University Yachiyo High School.

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Video ten:

Video eleven:

First Contact.  We are now beginning our journey away from Tokyo and acting more directly as ambassadors of the United States.  And pictures still aren’t uploading correctly on this web-site.  So, more video…

This first is to give a picture of something we got very used to real fast: meetings with Japanese educators and city officials who were overwhelmingly welcoming and gracious to us.  Here, it’s some of the faculty and administration of Chiba University. 

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And here’s Robert Horvath, the first of our group to have to give a speech in front of a Japanese audience.

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And now here’s an “icebreaker” of sorts.  As our luck would have it, many of our new Japanese friends spoke some English.

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I can’t remember if we had lunch first or what, but we all knew, once we got our first glimpse of it, that Inzai City was not going to be like Tokyo. 

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And then some time after lunch, we got to meet the mayor of Inzai City.  Here, Debbie introduces herself and then give her speech.

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Next, we get to do for the first time, I think, something we would all get very used to: announcing where we were from.  This is just a sample.

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Pictures still aren’t working right, so I’ll keep adding the video.  I’ll get to the text later.

We are now in Chiba City for the night and the following morning.  Here are some scenes from my room at the Keisei Hotel Miramare.

First, the view.

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And now, some Japanese television.

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I’ve been having some trouble with this web-site on and off and right now it’s simply baffling me. I can’t get pictures up. Video still seems okay. I’ll keep trying, but I’m losing a lot of time to this thing not working. I will finish the whole trip, though, and really sharpen it up–I can’t do that now, though, with the web-site I’m using working correctly.

So, here’s are some videos from my free Saturday.

The first is of Yukio Mishima’s grave site.

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The next is of Tamarein Cemetery, an incredibly beautiful place.

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Okay.  Sometimes you take a risk and it works out beautifully.  You’re everyone’s hero and we’re all looking to make you the next president.  And then, sometimes, no one can understand the risk you took and we’re all left scratching our heads thinking, What the hell was that about?  Case in point for today’s lectures.  Although much of what was presented was interesting, one presenter, an American, used the picture below to try to break the ice.  Can you figure out what it is?  We were about to discuss science and how Japan is in an awful position in terms of resources because just about everything needs to be shipped in.  Any idea?

One thing we learned in Japan is that speakers from different cultures do things in different ways.  The Japanese tend to apologize before speaking; Americans, well, we tend to try to break the ice with a joke. So, this photo is essentially a joke that goes like this: What happens when you pull a whale’s finger (forgetting the fact, of course, that a whale doesn’t have a finger)?  Didn’t work for me the way it did for others, but, oh well… The rest of the session went along nicely enough. And as for sessions, the last of the day before lunch blew people away. Peace Education. With a survivor of the dropping of the nuclear bomb. Wow. Literally a “you-could-hear-a-pin-drop” event. 

This first video clip is, oddly, a video clip of Migiwa Ishitani, who is suffering the effects of the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan because, if I heard correctly, of her parents’ health problems.  She wasn’t able to be with us, but the JFMF co-ordinators felt her message from the previous year was so powerful that it would serve us all well to simply watch her presentation.  They were right.

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This second video clip is of Koji Ikeda, who brought some in the audience to tears as he told the story of his life of suffering because of the nuclear bomb.  His wife suffered terrible physical and health problems because of the bomb and grew to hate the United States; Mr. Ikeda, in some way that I must have missed hearing, suffered less so, and actually moved to the United States for a while to work as an educator.

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Mr. Ikeda again.  Can you hear the pin drop?

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With an hour and a half for lunch, the Rat Pack decided to head over to the City Hall Observation Tower to try to get a look at Mount Fuji from on high. While the fog in the distance didn’t allow us to see the majestic mountain, we were able to snap some pictures and get some video of the never-ending scope of Tokyo. I remember thinking, Does this city never end?, and then being amazed when one of the guys told me that most of what we were looking at had been built after World War II. I was stunned. Wow. Tokyo had been described to us back in San Francisco as New York City on steroids–truer words could not have been spoken.

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And yet another view of the Tokyo that I know I will some day be returning to.

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I’m not going to lie.  My laptop computer went haywire on me during the afternoon session and I spent the better part of the presentation trying to figure out what in the world went wrong with it.  It never came to life again.  Goodbye, my friend.  I’ll always know where I was when you breathed your last: Tokyo, the Keio Plaza Hotel.

As a consolation for my laptop dying out on me, I really only had one thing that could bring me any kind of comfort: my long-reserved dinner at Iron Chef Sakai’s restaurant in Tokyo, La Rochelle. It turned out to be one of the top three dinners I have ever had in my entire life. The other two were at Nobu in New York City and at Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House in Las Vegas. I wish I could have brought my wife. She would have loved every aspect of the dinner, every thing from the pre-dinner drink, to the oysters and the foie gras that served as a loving prelude to the entre, and, lastly, to the after dinner coffee served in a room with a view of the city lights from so many stories up. I would go back tomorrow if I could.

Today was a day of sitting and listening.  At times I felt I was going to take root we were sitting so much, and at other times I felt that I was at the United Nations because at some points we needed to use translation headphones.  An American weed taking root in Japanese soil.  The first session was a panel discussion on education, with superintendents from both Japan and the United States participating.  Although it was all very interesting in its way, I didn’t want to talk about education on a philosphical level but, instead, wanted to actually go to a school and talk with teachers and students on a more real level.  Any school.  As long it had Japanese students.  Hard-working, lazy, whatever.  That didn’t happen.  We sat and listened, listened and sat, which explains the pictures below.  It was a big room and my digital camera doesn’t have much of a zoom.  Sorry.

Now, if you want zoom, my video camera has that.  Zoom: These are the kind and generous superintendents who made time in their busy schedules to speak to us.  What I liked most about what the American superintendents had to say was that they really supported programs like the Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund.

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Today was a mix of both business and pleasure.  We began with a nice breakfast, a mix of both Japanese and American dishes.  I got there a little late, though, and so I missed out on a lot of the Japanese dishes.  This, fortunately for me, would not continue to be the case later in the trip, when more and more teachers were opting for American-style meals.  Some toward the end even began the critical breakdown of not only wanting but actually craving American fast food.  Me, I couldn’t get enough Japanese food.  Even though I did go to MacDonald’s once with my friends Robert and Chuck, that trip was an aberration of time–we needed something fast and possibly portable and where better, we thought, for something fast and portable than MacDonald’s?  The kicker?  My hamburger had just a hint of wasabi in it.

After breakfast, we all went off to our different upper-story city meeting rooms and got our first view of Tokyo in the daytime.

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After taking in the view, the rest of the morning was spent on getting to know our city leader, Naoko, and the schedule for the next two weeks.  It was a bit of a rough introduction because so much had to be covered, but you had to love Naoko–so on top of things, organized, sweet, and fun.

Everyone was assigned one duty or another at the meeting with Naoko–some were given the task of preparing a speech for one of the schools we would be visiting, others acting as liasons with groups we would be interacting with, etc. My task, maybe because I was the only one willing to admit I had a video camera with me, was to videotape the entire trip. I say that jokingly because I was happy to have the job and was eager to do it well. From that meeting of the Inzai, Chiba, city group, all 200 of the JFMF teachers and their group leaders went off to have a traditional, Japanese sit-down lunch at Sansada (Asakusa).

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Lunch led to a brief road trip through Tokyo to the Diet, Japan’s Congress. I was struck by how green some parts of Tokyo are, given that what we saw from up high tended to be just one building after another after another after another… You get the picture.

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As an odd little side note, as we got closer to the Diet building, we passed by a demonstration of some sort.  We were told that those demonstrating were teachers who were either already on strike or who were putting on a show of force before a strike.  It was a taste of home school districts for many of us.  The Diet was not in session, so the afternoon served mostly as a tour of its chambers, the building which housed it, and the grounds surrounding it.  Though the Diet building was very beautiful inside, it didn’t strike me as being beautiful in a very Japanese way.  We weren’t supposed to take pictures, so I can’t show you visually what I am so poorly trying to say in words.  Trust me; it looked kind of… European?  It’s probably that I just don’t kow enough about Japan to say.

We ended the day, fittingly enough for a day packed with Japanese tradition, with two afternoon presentations on two very Japanese art forms: Kyogen and Kabuki.  Don Kenny (Kyogen) and Mark Oshima (Kabuki) took us through their individual presentations of their separate art forms, with each blending history, culture, and craft into presentations that pulled away a lot of the mystery and misunderstanding (at least for me) of Japanese theater.

Below is just a taste of what the American Don Kenny presented on Kyogen.

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Mark Oshima, who has also spent some time in the United States (Denver, I think), then presented on Kabuki with his theater group.

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We got so much Japanese culture today that there was only one place we could go when night descended on Tokyo…

The platter above cost us a little more than $10.00 US, and it fed four hungry Americans quite nicely. The only thing on the platter which was a little odd tasting was the pollock roe–kind of rubbery, if you ask me. Anyway, we washed it all down with some Asahi beer, and then had the night to ourselves.

Once in Japan, we were taken by chartered bus to our hotel, the Keio Plaza, wonderfully situated right in the heart of Tokyo. The video clip below gives a quick look at the kind of room every one of the JFMF teachers was given to stay in while in Tokyo: so much more than what any of us was expecting. After all, after having to share a room with a “blind date” roommate in San Francisco, we were expecting the same in Tokyo. Wonderfully, we all had our own rooms, our privacy, and this allowed many of us to get a lot of work done even after having enjoyed the night life of Tokyo.

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The Keio Plaza really was fantastic. Everything that we could want or need or had a desire to see was within easy walking distance. Anything more, as when I wanted to go to Iron Chef Sakai’s restaurant, La Rochelle, was a short cab or train (subway) ride from the hotel. What a place to stay.  Day or night.

Day:

Night:

From this point on, I’m going to be posting pictures and video in chronological order so that the story of our three weeks in Japan flows more naturally.  I’ll admit that this first day in Tokyo entry has thrown any sort of chronology out of the window, but this was done in an attempt to give a better feel for the entire experience of Tokyo and what it meant for me.  But since I do plan on using this as a learning tool for my students and also as a way for my own kids to “re-live” what I experienced in Japan, I’m going to keep it generally linear. And, remember, it’s a work in progress. What I am doing here now will only get bigger, better, and more useful for me, my students, and the JFMF program.

And so, let’s end this entry with some of my first images of Japan.

There was a tricky part to life on this day: we moved ahead in time and, technically, lost a day of life.  It was like we were going into a time machine that would throw us forward in time for the next few weeks, and then throw us back (to regain our lost day) when the adventure was over. 

We left San Francisco shortly after noon for Japan’s Narita International Airport.  The flight was uneventful.