sapporo, day 6

On the sixth day, some of my Japanese friends who had joined us in Sapporo left to go back to their schools and jobs. The rest of the team split up to do some sightseeing, and I joined a group of twelve who went to visit some museums and hot springs.

We took an hour-long train ride to the small town of Shiraoi where the Ainu museum was located. The Ainu, Japan's indiginous people, had set up a reconstruction of one of their villages, and we spent a few hours walking around there and learning about their history, and watching some traditional performances.

This is a statue at the entrance to the Ainu village.
These are some of the artifacts we saw in the museum. There was also a lot of interesting clothing there; the Ainu do not believe in depicting nature realistically in art, so all of their designs are abstract. While at the museum we also watched some Ainu singing and musical demonstrations, and tried to learn how to play a tiny wooden instrument kind of like a mouth harp. For lunch we ate at a noodle shop, and I had tempura ramen - a bowl of ramen with fried batter-dipped shrimp in it. It was delicious!
After the Ainu village, we went to Noboribetsu, a tourist-y town just a few train stops away. Because of the large amount of volcanic sulfur springs in the area, the region is called Hell Valley, and there are statues of all kinds of demons and ogres all over town. There are also a plethora of onsen, or community baths where Japanese often go to relax and treat their skin with different kinds of mineral water. Above is a statue of an oni, a kind of ogre.
Here is the sulfur springs just before sunset. We hiked some trails through the springs before some of the braver group members went to try out an onsen. The scenery was beautiful, but the smell was nauseating.
This stone marker was near a volcanic cauldron-like crater on one of the trails. The posts were scatterd around the park.

This is a statue in downtown Noboribetsu. The Spiderman figure was placed there by our coach. He always takes Spidey with him when he travels, and photographs the figure in strange or famous places.

sapporo, days 4 and 5

I didn't take any pictures on these days because we were rushing all day to get to performances in different parts of town. Some of the highlights involved dancing for a large audience on a baseball field in front of the Royce' chocolate factory, attempting an odori-style version of our song (dancing in a circle around a platform tower, and dancing our routine six times in a row parade-style on live TV.
We celebrated being the first American University team to be invited to the Yosakoi Soran festival at an after-party the night of the fifth day. We started at our hotel by watching the finals of the competition among the big teams on the TV in our hotel's lobby. Then we ate a dinner provided by the sister of one of our members, who worked at a family restaurant a ten-minute walk away. Then we went to a bar for drinks and food, and even after that some people were still awake enough to go out for karaoke, but a couple friends and I took a taxi back to our hotel to get some sleep. Five performances each day was enough to completely wear me out.

sapporo, day 3

On our third day in Sapporo, we moved from the hostel to a business hotel near Susukino, the downtown entertainment district of the city. Below is a picture of our hotel from the back. From the front it's just a concrete building; I didn't even notice the aqua and red paint until I was walking on the street one day.


After we checked our baggage into the hotel we walked about five minutes to a large open park with a view of the city. We had intended to practice there for our upcoming performances, but since we hadn't been able to officially check into the hotel until afternoon, we weren't able to change into practice clothes. Instead, we spent the morning attending an open house at the University of Hokkaido, a lengthy walk away.
The first thing we did at the open house was try to find lunch. All the different international student groups had stands set up, and everyone wanted us to try theirs.
This is where I was introduced to Japanese "advertising." While American student groups might yell out that they had fresh or hommade food, these vendors would walk around in costumes, carry signs, dress in costumes and practically sing and dance to get people to buy their food. I was accosted by one girl who wanted me to buy her ice cream. She literally grabbed my arm and started jabbering in Japanese. When I said 'wakarimasen' (I don't understand), she switched to English. "You like sweet? Yes? You buy our ice cream!" I didn't want the ice cream, so I settled for taking a picture with her, then moving on.
I actually ended up getting chicken shwerma for lunch. I never thought I'd have my favourite Lebanese food in Japan.
This is an elderly woman doing a watercolor of one of the historic buildings on the university's campus. We actually saw quite a few elderly people doing this scattered throughout the campus.

Later in the evening we went to watch some of the bigger yosakoi teams perform on the big stage in Odori Park. This was what we had come for. It was so cool to be in an environment where everyone knew what Yosakoi is, and where competition for the top spot is as competetive as a major US sporting tournament.

I believe this is the team that eventually won second place overall. Teams are judged based on their energy level, costume and makeup, costume changes and use of accessories. There are also requirements for the music. This group did one of the more traditional performances.

This team didn't do a lot of traditional yosakoi moves which kept them from making it to the finals, but it was the most memorable performance I saw. The group were dressed as train conductors, and the music involved a lot of audial cues that were train whistles. The song had a lot of hip-hop influence, and the dancers were the most synchronised I have ever seen. It was unbelievable how together they were - almost robotic.This group was all girls, and did a flamenco-style routine.Another traditional-style group.

This team had a lot of accessories, especially the flags in the back. The taiko drummers in the front were really cool, and there were even two tiny kids doing taiko drums. When the drumming part was over, a dancer picked up the littlest kid and ran off the stage with him to make room for a formation change. In a few days we would be dancing on the same stage.

sapporo, day 2

(More photos on flickr - I seem to have removed my day 2 pictures from the computer. Oops.)

The second day in Sapporo we were a little more oriented with our surroundings, so it didn't take us long to walk to the nearby convenience store in the subway to find something for breakfast. I tried a sesame pastry and some juice that contained fruit and vegetables, notable radishes. That was the one drink I tried in Japan that I would rather not repeat. After breakfast we started practicing the dance routines we'd been working on for months. There was actually a little gym in our hostel so we practiced there. The TV crew came to videotape us practicing; it was a little intimidating, but we learned to ignore the cameras and just perform.
At lunchtime, we walked to the nearby 24-hour supermarket and got some food from its bakery. I learned that in Japan, what appears to be one kind of food is often another once you take a bite. I got a sandwich containing what I thought was a breaded fish patty on lettuce. When I actually bit into it back at the hostel, I discovered that it was some kind of creamy potato concoction that had been breaded and fried. While it was delicious, it definitely wasn't fish. We also got to sample white bean sweets, traditional dainty desserts.
In the afternoon we practiced again, and after practice the Sapporo TV crew took us on a tour of some of the city's attractions to tape our reactions.


This was the first place they took us, Mt. Moiwa. It is a small mountain that overlooks the city of Sapporo. They treated us to melon-flavored ice cream, a Hokkaido local specialty. We also spent some quality time in the mountain's gift shop, which abounded with cell phone accessories, Hello Kitty memorobilia, and trinkets related to the marimo, a strange type of local algae. Of course they had personified it into a living character as well, and there were numerous marimo puppets, dolls and keychains and things of that sort. It seems that every living thing in Japan can be characterised as a cute cartoon character. There were cartoon raccoons painted on the sidewalks telling children to look both ways before crossing the street. There were cartoon stuffed animals of every kind in arcades across the town. My personal favourite was a cartoon crying pudding in a job-searching advertisement. It had a giant animated tear running down its vanilla-flavored face, and sobbed 'Find me a job!'

The next intent of the crew was to videotape me and one of my friends eating ramen in a ramen shop, but when our bus passed by the shop was closed. I was relieved; in Japan there is an art to slurping ramen noodles that I have not mastered, and I'm sure the tape would have been interesting. Of course I'm sure they were counting on some amusing mistakes, but I was relieved all the same.

Instead, we went to a Yaki-Niku restaurant. We received plates of various raw meats in courses, and grilled them over a charcoal grill set into the table in front of us. The restaurant was called Gaja, and the atmosphere was very upscale. There was even live lounge music while we were there. The meats we tried were very good, and ranged from pork and ground chicken to squid, and even beef cutlets, an expensive rarity in Japan. For dessert there was a small scoop of ice cream with the ever-present cornflakes as a garnish.

When we went back to the hostel, we were too full to have an intense evening practice, so we just limbered up and stretched for half an hour to get ready for practice the next morning.

japan festival

Last weekend was the Japanese festival at my school. Japanese student groups (including my Yosakoi group), students in Japanese classes and the community came together for the festival, which turned out to be a lot of fun. A lot of preparation including advertising, setup and performance practices paid off.




Here is a giant fan with the word "matsuri," or "festival" written in Kanji. It was set up by the registration table.

This sign was set up outside a room where the traditional tea ceremony was being demonstrated. It shows the proper way to hold the tea cup.

Japan is famous for traditional flower arrangements called "ikebana." Here is one such arrangement.

This is a geisha doll in traditional dress.

Someone receiving a lesson on the shamisen, a four-stringed guitar-like instrument.

Yosakoi danced at the end of a two-hour series of performances including singers, a boyou dancer, and a storyteller. Here taiko drummers are performing a song on their drums.

I helped in the Traditional Toys room. In this game, you remove the hammer from the center of the stacks of blocks. Then starting at the bottom of the stack, you try to knock out the bottom block without knocking over the entire tower. I was really bad at this game, but there were some little kids who were really good.

This is another tricky game. You're supposed to swing the ball up into the air and catch it in one of the cups at the top of the stick. Then, if you're good, you can flip the stick over and catch it in the cup on the bottom of the handle. I never got past step 1.

Most of the day I helped kids with three different kinds of top games. This little guy was determined to get the big tops to spin.

These are a variety of paper cranes folded by the people in the origami workshop. There is a Japanese folk tale that says if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, you will have your wish come true.

obi

I tied it myself! Granted, it took three tries and it came loose later, but at least I know how to tie an obi now. Putting on yukata is a lot harder than it sounds!

This week was international week on my campus, and my yosakoi group performed four times, last night being the biggest show. It was a really cool show - we got to have awesome lighting effects and perform on the most prestigious stage at our university. Plus, we got to see other international student groups perform: dances from Nepal, flute playing from Sri Lanka, a Hispanic maypole dance, music from India, and a singer from the Philippines.

And afterward, I got to go out for ice cream with my roommate and her family. A pretty sweet day, all in all.

boot camp

Feeling pain means you're alive, right? Then I guess I'm still alive. The last three days of spring break I was back in town for what my Yosakoi coach called 'Yosakoi boot camp'. And it was - nine hours of practice each day plus stretching and yoga. But it was well worth the effort...after the entire weekend, I am more familiar with the dances we will be doing in Japan this summer. We practiced everything from large stage formations to parade style where we dance in rows down the street, to individual auditions in front of a video camera (not my favourite.) We tried new formations, and even did some yoga to develop flexibility. We took measurement for the tabi shoes we'll be wearing to dance in Japan. And when we weren't dancing, we enjoyed some amazing food prepared by the mom of one of our captains - we had awesome rice, salad, sandwiches and on the last night we had shrimp and scallop pasta and fruit pizza.

It was tiring, and I definitely felt some muscles I didn't even know I had. But it was a great time to hang out with friends and get ready for spring performances and the Japan festival. It was definitely worth coming to camp, especially since in three months, we'll be here.

japan

I never thought I'd get to say this, but it's finally starting to sink in: if all goes well, at this time in about five months I'll be getting ready to leave for Japan!

That little red dot on the map is Sapporo, the capital of the island of Hokkaido. It's there that hundreds of Yosakoi groups meet to perform and compete in an annual dance festival. This year, my Yosakoi club is planning to be one of those groups. And what's even better is that we'll be able to perform our own original dance. This is a very special privilege, because normally each Yosakoi song has a traditional dance to accompany it that might vary slightly from place to place, but not by much.

Of course there are a lot of preparations to do before then. I've started applying for a passport. I've purchased a Japanese phrasebook from Lonely Planet. I'm honing my eating-with-chopsticks skills. But most of all I'm just looking forward to getting to see a country I've never been to before. Five months is a long time to wait.

missing naruko

These are naruko, the castanets that we use to emphasise rhythm when we do Yosakoi dance. Unfortunately, we will be seeing a lot fewer of these wooden instruments at practice, due to a theft from our coach's car. It boggles the mind why someone would want to steal from a random car in the first place, but what they'll do with 60 wooden castanets is beyond me. Here is the e-mail our coach sent out after the theft (humorous to us because we thought the naruko had disappeared several weeks ago, but it turned out they had accidentally been stowed in a member's closet.)

Hey all!
Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving holiday? :-)
Unfortunately, mine started out with a theft of items from my car (my car is still ok though, thank goodness). The thieves took around $350 worth of stuff (including a box of tissues...weird). Anyways, the old NARUKO in the cooler were in the back of my car and they took that. What they will do with 60 NARUKO I don't know? Luckily, I didn't have the radio in my car! But anyways, real sorry that it happened. We still have the 80 new ones that I brought back from summer. And some Japanese students have already offered to buy some more over winter break when they go back to Japan. Anyways, if you see any naruko in a trash can somewhere, let me know. Or if you see someone who isn't in Yosakoi walking around with NARUKO, do-koi-sho on them! >:-(

"Do-koi-sho" is a fast dance move that involves stomping. :P At least we still have some naruko left...

halloween, macro, hugs

Halloween: The other night was our Yosakoi "Washoi" Halloween party. I usually don't celebrate Halloween, but this seemed to be a relatively tame, alcohol-free alternative to most of the shindigs going on around town. In the late afternoon it was interesting to see people walking around in their costumes...there was someone dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow who went around to random classes acting like a pirate. There was also someone dressed as Edward Scissorhands who was taking his role so seriously that he wouldn't answer people who went up and talked to him on the street. Also, our local Chipotle was giving free burritos to people who came in wearing aluminum foil, so there were a couple of people walking down the street wrapped in the shiny stuff. Interesting, let me tell you. In the evening we had our yosakoi party, and ate Chinese food (ironic at a Japanese function, but tasty all the same) and watched videos of different Yosakoi styles from a festival in Japan. We also played "conversation bingo" to get to know other members better, and had a costume contest. I won a bamboo fan for my flamenco dancer outfit, complete with swishy red skirt and roses in my hair. It was a fun night.

Macro: I'm not talking about the mind-numbing economic stuff. It was at the party that someone showed me how to use the macro lens on my camera. The macro button was right there the whole time, and I've been taking blurry up-close pictures the last few weeks because I didn't see the button. It takes a certain amount of talent to miss the idiot-proof macro lens button, and I must say I've got it. But now I can photograph cute fuzzy spiders like the one above, that we made at the party. (My friend Noreen's is the biologically correct one with eight eyes.) Yay!

Hugs: I don't believe in karma, but just after posting the Free Hugs Campaign video here the other day, I got what I would believe was a dose of it if I did believe. I was getting ready to start my second day at my new job when I walked into the 'employees only' area upstairs. One employee, who I had not yet met, was looking at me strangely as I left my jacket with the other employees' wraps and started towards the computer. "I don't think I've met you," I said, smiling at her bewildered expression.

"So you work here now?" she asked.

"Yep, this is my second day," I answered.

I was suddenly thrown off-guard when she said "Yes!! Another one of us!" and ran over and gave me a big hug. I don't know about you, but I think that's a pretty good way to start out at a new place. It's all in the little things...