Japan Part II: Operation Karumai Festival

So now we get to the actual fun part.

Standing alone in the station, all i wanted to do was to call Lizzy, but i had no change, so i bought a ridiculous JR board book for my dad at a newsstand. and then i went through, found my platform...it’s AMAZING. there are a million trains, a million platforms, a million people, and everything - even the location of each individual car - is well marked. a friendly fellow assured me that i was in the right place, and then pointed me to the wrong seat (i was in car 1, seat 1D. i guess i was the last person to whom they sold a ticket on that train!). i was sitting next to a nice, quiet guy from Tokyo going to Sendai on business.

OH MY GOD. Japan is just functional rail system HEAVEN (discount the horrible website - though to be fair, it may well be better in Japanese than it is in English). Lookie here, US - you have things to learn. you can just get on a train that will leave on time and take you less time than it does to make a quiche to get to the other side of the country. it’s unbelievable. what’s also unbelievable is how long it takes to get out of Tokyo, and then greater Tokyo, and then greater greater Tokyo, and then suburban greater greater Tokyo - but after Sendai, it gets a bit more rural. everything went perfectly smoothly - except i got of the train, and there was no one there! i waited and waited, scared that the stationmaster guy was gonna call the police, this random Western girl loitering in a train station in the Japanese boonies at 9:30 at night - but then Lizzy finally came!!! (she got a little lost! it was ok.) it was SO good to see her. we drove and wound all around back to her town of Karumai. Karumai is totally in the middle of nowhere, but what’s really interesting about it is that, once you’re “downtown”, it feels like a Japanese city - it’s really built up, things are close together, and there are all kinds of random shops - and then as soon as you get out of town, you’re in mountains, or rice patties, or both. it’s amazing. Lizzy lives in a cute little duplex, traditional two-story apartment with tatami mats and paper-pane windows and with the whole bathroom being the shower with the tub just for rinsing, and all of that separate from the toilet. it’s really interesting. we fell asleep on our futon with Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell me in the background :-)

in Karumai, they made town announcements - first there’s a little musical jingle at 6 AM, and then a “good morning! today is...etc. etc., drive safely!” (there’s a shitton more in there cause they say a lot, but i had no idea what it was) at 7:30. what a country. i spent most of friday trying to make myself sleep in, and then spent a LOOONG time abusing Lizzy’s free internet. i called my parents and read and responded to loads of emails, and really honestly didn’t do much else till Lizzy came home and took a nap, and then after that we drove to Achinohe! it was such a nice drive - SOOOO green and forested, with rice patties and other little farms tucked on hillsides. not so quaint is the driving-a-million-miles on the windy (other side!) of the roads. there are those funny little Asian trucks that look like the pugs of the truck world from the farm that you have to be careful of because only little old people drive them. also we passed a sculpture of a spirit revered for his giant magical testicles.

our first adventure involved a complicated parking lot and a lot of very heated Japanese. we went to the train station to purchase my return tickets, which ended up being significantly easier than i thought it would be, which was incredibly exciting. then we journeyed from what seemed like the major part of town where the train station was through a weird industrial area to another very main part of town, where there was a main street and a big department store and even an odd fancy hotel with a flashy glass elevator. we were going to eat in the department store thing, but it turned out there wasn’t food there (except for the third-floor movie theater’s popcorn and an italian restaurant) but there WAS a whole darn FLOOR of those famous Japanese photo booths, so of course we had to do one. you pick a theme, and then pick your backgrounds, take the pictures, decorate them, and decide a layout for them - all with a time limit and Japanese being squeaked at you. it was fabulous.

for dinner i FINALLY got my udon! it made my whole trip to Japan worth it - it came with a big raw egg cracked in the middle, and you stir it really fast and the hot noodles cook the egg. brilliant. then we went to the hundred-yen store (shinkansen chopsticks! YES!) and last but not least to the Lizzy’s natural habitat - a coffee shop :-) i had a rice-flour cake and DELICIOUS hot chocolate, and we had coffee-shop conversation. (poor Lizzy, i hadn’t talked to non-ship people for so long that i all i could do was regurgitate ship experiences.) and then we went home and ate rice crackers and Lizzy introduced me to West Wing (i finally understand it! Yay!). and then we went to bed. or, futon.

SATURDAY was AMAZING. we slept in, watched some more West Wing, ate some more rice crackers, and went for a walk around Karumai to see everybody getting ready for the festival! kids everywhere getting their faces painted for taiko, all manner of people in kimonos and happi-coats, and lanterns hanging everywhere. we went to the grocery store and bought lots of Japanese chocolates. there were lots of street vendors for the festival, but it’s also kind of incredibly how many little hole-in-the-wall stores there are in Karumai considering how small it is. we went into a little “diner” for lunch (miso ramen! what an experience). it was one of those great places that you can choose to sit on the floor if you want, and there was one family with two little kids who had sprawled out around and under the table - very homey.

then it was time for Lizzy to get ready for the parade - and i was in for a great surprise! they let me be in it!!!! Lizzy and i went across to the street to her friends’ really lovely traditional home and they got Lizzy all ready in her yukata (summer kimono) and got to wear a sort of Japanese overcoat that’s the neighborhood’s festival uniform. and then we walked down the street to the GIANT elaborate float with big spirits all over it, and there were all manner of kids and families getting ready, and we stood until we all took lots of pictures and then everybody grabbed the enormous ropes (lines, as we ship-people say, and they really were like lines) and we pulled this float. there were a bunch of kids at the front playing a taiko beat on little drums, and then two high-schoolers behind them on the big drums, with other high school boys and girls playing wooden flutes. there were younger kids at the front with sticks with bells on them that they banged on the ground. and Lizzy was up at the very front with the the neighborhood flag. we pulled the giant float up a hill, past the town Shinto shrine, parked it for a while, had some tea in a can, talked to a nice lady named Sako (maybe? or was he the guy in Yokohama?!) and then went back down the hill, following other floats. i walked up front with Lizzy as we wound into down, down the two main streets, and back out the other side in a very slow, very rhythmic progression, all with these giant and complex floats. some of her students recognized Lizzy and waved, and we politely bowed to all kinds of people, especially all the old people (there were LOTS of old people. and another, mysterious Westerner who sort of glared at us.) it seemed like the whole town was in the parade with their different neighborhood floats, so i couldn’t even imagine who’d watch it, but the crowd was HUGE! and there were microphones, and one of the older guys would yell, like PULL! and then everyone would yell back, especially the little kids, and so it went, all the way up another hill, past the Buddhist shrine and to the place where they offered us more tea in a can and also, beer. and then we went back the other way - and they let me carry the flag!!! how funny. we had a good conversation about how to say stop and slow down and wait in English and Japanese. going down, we saw a lion dance happening at the temple, little boys wearing plastic horses doing horse dancing, other very dressed-up kids with small taiko and flute choirs to match fan dancing and some other kind of rhythmic dancing (they had giant metallic hats and straw shing-guard-y things). it was unbelievable. by the time we’d parked the float, they were still playing on and we’d been our feet for almost 6 hours, Lizzy in very uncomfortable shoes. we had a nice conversation with an adult student of LIzzy’s who spoke great English, and then we went home, returned the clothes/were taught to refold yukata, were given lots of food, and then ventured back out to the (almost) store-front home of “the family who feeds me”, as Lizzy calls them. we walked around with this very sweet girl, Chika (one of Lizzy’s students) and an ambiguously-gendered young friend of hers. they took us to the little field where all sorts of vendors had set up shop, like at a fairground. you could fish for tiny pet turtles, play a weird game, buy pot-theme jewelry, or do what we did, which is to buy a chocolate-covered banana. we ran into lots of people Lizzy knew, including a boy who kept giving high-fives and a nice woman who had lived in Australia for awhile. and through all of this all the little kids were still running around all dressed up, and it was neat.

we joined Chika’s awesome mother and little old stooped grandma and her mom’s best friend’s son, Kai, around their family table (on the floor in the main room). there was SO much food - edamame, rice, rice wrapped in seaweed, tofu on a stick, sweet bread homamade by Chika’s friend’s mom, miso, weird Japanese milk (and she was worried that she hadn’t prepared for a vegetarian!!) and also they bought LIzzy sushi. phew. after the meal, and a really endearing tour of their little kitchen, filled with Chika’s old school things and drawings (there was a great, very neatly written letter that Chika had written to her grandma saying, “i hope you feel better grandma, i love you, and i hope that your pee and poop are normal.”) after that we played memory, which happens to be one of Kai’s favorite games and was perfect because we would say the English word and they would say the Japanese. we all got really involved, and it was such a blast.

Then we really had to go home (considering it takes half an hour to leave a Japanese household because you have to do so much thanking, and you have to put your shoes back on). we of course watched more West Wing, and pigged out on all our chocolates and sweet rice crackers - the perfect thing after our ginourmous dinner. it was really comfortable and lovely, and just SO good to spend time with Lizzy.

the next morning heavy rains along with the usual announcements woke me up, and then what had to be like the town’s typhoon warning or something went off, immediately proceeded by ambulances shrieking around town, and i was like “ahhh! Lizzy! wake up!! we’re all going to die!” and LIzzy was like, “no, no, Fumiko warned me about this, it’s just for the festival; go back to sleep!” wailing ambulances around town for 20 minutes on a sunday sure seems weird to me, but hey, trump it up to cultural differences. then i heard a marching band. i guess that’s not so much cultural differences.

and then i had to go :-( the drive to Ninohe was wet but beautiful, and LIzzy didn’t even get lost one little bit, and i got on the train just fine. (hehe on my first train i was in car 3, seat 7A, and on the second train i was in car 7, seat 3A!) it was cool to see everything in daylight - it actually seemed less built-up than it had at night. the mountains were SOO pretty, and so funny shaped! coming out of Tokyo we were along the water for a little while, and i was like “damn ocean, i ALMOST forgot about you...” there were a bunch of dinosaur sculptures, and also pretty red torii gates in the water in same places. it’s remarkable how similar Japanese towns seem to be, even when they’re far apart, but all of the cities we went through seemed really different - Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka, and a bunch of little ones that no one’s ever heard of. the ride was FAST and really great (although no one wanted to sit next to me. hmm), and of course i didn’t want to get off in shin-Kobe! but i did. and then i got lost, and i was too scared to ask for directions, so i ended up walking, in the rain, in what seemed to be the general direction of the port. so i got to see downtown Kobe, and the beautiful Rokko Mountains behind it, but i got very wet. and there was a stupid freeway in my way. but some intelligent person had built this great network of sidewalks, and then the Explorer appeared. it was hard to get back on, i can’t lie (though logistically much easier! no alcoholic crazies or long lines. and it really was good to see everybody. i missed people on my trip, i really did. hardest was saying goodbye to Aki and Megumi, our Japanese inter-port students. they waved and waved, and we set off for China.