Golden Week and Beyond

In Japan there's a string of holidays, one after another, at the beginning of May dubbed "Golden Week." This is also the time of some of Japan's best weather, and it seems the whole country stops to take a break. Companies shut down and afterschool activities are cancelled. Some years, the holidays all fall on weekdays and you end up with a full 9-day break of glory. This year we ended up with one three-day weekend and one four-day weekend, but I still made the most of my time off with two trips, one to nearby Tokyo and one to far-away Hiroshima prefecture.


April 27-29: Tokyo!

I'm so lucky that my birthday falls during Golden Week!


Eating rainbow cupcakes and hanging out with friends in Yoyogi park. I celebrated my birthday by attending Tokyo Rainbow Pride. It was a ton of fun.



With my friends, Chihiro and Nanami, eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant (such a treat!!) Nanami and Chihiro studied abroad at UCI and are now working in Tokyo. FIVE whole years later I'm glad we are still friends. :)


May 3-6: Hiroshima & Environs



This is what's called the A-Bomb dome, one of the few structures that remained intact after the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the Hiroshima city center on August 6th, 1945. It was reinforced and preserved, and the area around it restored into what's now the Peace Memorial Park and Museum. The museum is all at once sobering, horrifying, maddening, and inspiring. Since I lived in Nagasaki and experienced the museum and Peace Park there as well, I was able to approach this one with comparatively more maturity and education. It's such a rich and thought-provoking experience just to be in such a place.



Hiroshima in general reminds me of Nagasaki, not only because they were both A-bomb targets, but because they are both small but lively port cities with slow-moving electric trolley systems and verdant hillsides dotted with cemeteries and homes.



Miyajima, one of Japan's historical top 3 most beautiful places, a cornerstone in the foundation of the Shingon sect of Buddhism. Everything here was gorgeous beyond compare: the temples and shrines, the plant and flower life, the views of the ocean, and the famous large "floating on water" torii gate captured here at sunset.





Bicyling across beautiful bridges on the Shimanami Kaido, or the "island wave sea route." This string of islands, connected by bridges, stretches through the Seto Inland Sea from the eastern coast of Hiroshima prefecture to the western coast of Shikoku. We rode about 40km that day, and made our way into Ehime Prefecture for a few hours. Now I can say I've been to Shikoku--three of Japan's four main islands down, one to go. :)



koi nobori, carp streamers, at a large shrine outside of Hiroshima Castle. Carp streamers are flown throughout Golden Week and the month of May, and are especially symbolic of Children's Day, which is on May 5th. One of my 6th-graders told me the story of why carp streamers symbolize Children's Day: In the wild, young carp swim upstream against the current to reach their mating ground. Carp streamers gain a shape and look stronger when the wind blows harder. This represents parents' desire for their children to be strong in fighting life's "upstream" obstacles on their path to adulthood.


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And now, summer's almost here! It seems that such a short time ago I was wearing HeatTech long-sleeved shirts to work every day, a pair of tights under every pair of pants. Now the layers are shedding like crazy. In the past few days it has been 25-30 degrees which, for you Fahrenheiters, is 77-86! I can't believe it is happening this fast. I have waited so, so long for the return of summer. On so many icy nights, curled up under six blankets, I have pined for the warm and relaxing heat rays. As I sit here with my window open, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, listening to the cicadas' summertime scream, I can't believe it's happening now.


My Japanese is plateauing. I gained a LOT of knowledge rapidly in the first couple months after I came, and my conversational skills immediately got better, but now I am stuck in an area where, if I don't really push myself to practice and use Japanese more than is required at work, I won't get better. I need to make a more concerted effort to study on my own and practice speaking, a lot, in order to push myself to the next level. It kills me that my Japanese is now so much more fluid than my French. In terms of bulk knowledge, my French is still bounds ahead of Japanese, and I can still read and probably write much better in French, but for conversation, Japanese takes the cake. I never anticipated the day that this would happen, either. Je me sens bête.


I don't want to talk about my voice (both talking and singing) because it depresses me. My talking voice is better than it was but not as strong as it needs to be for teaching, and my singing voice is stronger than it was but NOWHERE NEAR where it needs to be for me to feel fulfilled in my hobby/passion/lifestyle as a singer. I have clear technique and usage issues in both areas. I'm currently on a speech therapy break because I wasn't devoting enough time to it and it wasn't helping. I feel a little trapped and unsure of whether I'll be able to get my voice back on track before I return to the states...and what will happen if and when I try to pursue a music-teaching job on a recovering voice. It scares me. But I can live in this suspended state for another year before I have to confront any choices.

Japanese Cultural Tidbit

-In Hiroshima, adults were warmer and more talkative to us than we usually experience in the Tokyo area. Within two minutes of waiting at our tram stop, a lady came up to us and asked us where we were from, where we were going, etc. She offered to guide us to our tram stop, making conversation the whole way. In Tokyo, one stranger approaching another, even an interesting foreigner, and making conversation is unheard of. People keep to themselves unless they have a clear reason not to.

-My students cleaned the school pool yesterday. It was dirty and gunky and nasty from 7 months of non-use. Students scrubbed away at the stuck-on brown dirt with bristle brushes and high-pressure hoses, swept dirty brown water down the drain, and polished the pool floor with wet rags. With all 48 students working, the pool went from disastrous to spotless in about an hour. During the polishing time, they had the time of their lives (no really, the TIME OF THEIR LIVES) having "rag races" where they pushed the rags with the hands on the ground, propelling themselves forward with their feet, and at the last moment diving forward into the inch-high water. Can you imagine American students so willingly all working together to clean the pool, with zero complaining and zero entitlement? Here, the idea of personal civic responsibility, of cog-in-a-machine individual contribution to a group goal, is so HUGE that it undermines any personal feelings one might have. And now they get to use the pool all summer with the satisfaction that they have all cleaned it -- together. The school belongs to them.