Spring Break!

It's been pretty busy around here, lately; really busy, in fact. Not at school, though, not there. In fact, since the sannensei left, my job has become incredibly boring, sitting at my desk for five out of eight hours trying to come up with creative new ways to keep myself from nodding off. I'm usually at least semi-successful.

Outside of work, though, things have been busy. Last weekend—last weekend, was it? I think so. It seems like forever ago now.--I went down to Hamada with some friends to get bus tickets and check out a rock festival that was going on in town. Nothing special, mostly local groups, but what spurred us to attend the event in the first place was the fact that one of these groups—the infamous “Terrordactyl”--was actually a group of Hamada ALTs. It's important in those kinds of situations to show up and represent, yo.

Terrordactyl was pretty good, although I'm not sure their audience—mostly Japanese teenagers—really got it when they started their set with “Earth Angel.” Strange, seeing as how Back to the Future seems to be one of the few American movies that every Japanese person seems to know. In any case, my only real disappointment with the performance was that they failed to follow up their opener with “Johnny B. Goode.” If you're not gonna do that, then what's the point?

This Thursday saw me at another music festival, this time in Masuda. It was called a jazz festival, but I found once I arrived and the performance began that it really was just swing music, which suited me just fine. In fact, I probably enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the rock show. In the great scheme of things, I don't think I like jazz any more than I do rock, but the difference between local amateur rockers and skilled, professional jazz musicians is pretty severe. There are apparently going to be a few more jazz acts coming to Masuda this spring, so if the price is right, I may check those out, too.

This Tuesday, a couple friends and I will be trekking out to Osaka and Kyoto for a week. I'm looking forward to that, especially after getting to be in Osaka for such a short time in winter. I'm excited to see more of the city this time around. I'm assuming Kyoto should also be suitably awesome, but I've never seen it before, so I don't really know exactly what to expect. I'll try to get some photos and video from my exploits in these fine towns, so expect some stuff next week.

MONKEYWATCH, 2008

I'm not entirely sure why I feel the need to let you know every time I see a monkey out here. I imagine you can only hear about someone seeing monkeys one or two times before it becomes incredibly boring, sort of like looking at pictures of someone's baby while they jaw on about how much it weighs and how it looks “just like her mother, thank goodness!” This is sort of the same, only these babies are covered in fur, and I can't really vouch for whether they look like their mother. Also, they might try to claw your eyes out if you get too close.

Anyway, I was making my way home from Hikimi yesterday (Don't the cool things always happen in Hikimi?), the weather was perfect, and I was psyched to get home and fall asleep. Only one thing could have made me feel better right about then, and sure enough, there they were. Not one, but two monkeys had ventured beyond the safety of the mountainous forest to—presumably—make some kind of life for themselves on the road's shoulder. I could tell that thus far it had been rough going. After all, it's difficult to find food in a place where plants don't grow. Granted, they could always return to the forest, but that would be like admitting defeat, and they would never be able to look their monkey peers in the eye again. As I drove by, they looked at me solemnly, and their eyes betrayed a terrible wisdom; it was a wisdom borne of folly, the kind gained only far too late.

In other, far less important news, all of my sannensei(san = three nen = year sei = student) graduated yesterday. A chuugakkou (middle school) sannensei is the equivalent of a high school freshman in America, and that's where middle school ends, so today they're all gone. It's a strange feeling. I didn't even see any of the schools' graduation ceremonies because I was at an elementary school yesterday, so today it was like they had just vanished. It's kind of distressing to think that I probably won't see any of them again, especially at Hikimi, where all the students—especially the sannensei—have been awesome.

All the same, I'm excited about the classes moving up to become ichinensei (ichi = one). Again, this is primarily at Hikimi, where I actually teach at the elementary school twice a month, so I know all of the students that will be moving up. They're all a lot of fun in class, and I'm looking forward to having a class at the middle school that I've already built a rapport with. I've always been completely in charge of classes at the elementary school, so it'll be interesting to see how they deal with me kind of taking a backseat and just occasionally reading words for them to repeat. However it works out, I'm excited to be getting them in class. They're no monkeys, but they'll do.

I like to sing-a, about the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a...

After much deliberation, I believe spring has finally decided to return to this fair city of Masuda. It hasn't quite fully returned yet, but the signs are beginning to crop up. For instance, I have to start putting my drinks in the refrigerator again if I want them to be cold. Gone are the days when I could just leave a package of chicken breasts on a table for a week and not worry about them spoiling. It's inconvenient in a way, really, but I feel it's a fair trade-off, considering I don't feel like I'm going to freeze to death whenever I enter my kitchen now.

Animals are starting to move, too. I'm starting to see birds again, and just last week in Hikimi, I was witness to a herd (pack? flock? gaggle?) of monkeys, making its way along the mountainside, no doubt in search of a decent curry shop. I'm told there are bears out in Hikimi too, but I haven't had the luck of seeing one yet. I have seen a badger, which the school's math teacher told me was a “ground bear.” Have I told you about that already? In any case, the English teacher out there told me that in the spring, the school can be kind of like a zoo, which is bad. I'm assuming that when she said bad, what she really meant was “awesome.” Sometimes things get lost in translation.

The coming of spring also means that the road to Hikimi isn't covered in ice and snow anymore. Since about the beginning of January, I've been riding the bus to Hikimi. This has been both good and bad. Unfortunately, taking the bus to school meant that the earliest I could get there was by the beginning of third period. This can be inconvenient because I'm always the last one to get to work, and I miss any English classes that take place during first or second period. On the other hand, I didn't get to school until the beginning of third period. This gave me an extra two hours of sleep in the morning, since I didn't have to be at the bus stop until 9:10, when the first bus to Hikimi rolled into the station. Riding the bus also meant that I was free to eat breakfast during my trip to work. Every Friday, I had the luxury of stopping at a convenience store on the way to work and grabbing something to eat on the bus. This was a huge plus, since without breakfast I'm usually about to pass out by lunchtime.

Then there was the ride back. On the way home from Hikimi every Friday, I was joined on the bus by three of my students from Hikimi Elementary. This was either awesome or terrible, depending how tired I was. Regardless, I thought these kids were great.

There are three of them, a first grader, a second grader, and a third grader. All of their names are a mystery to me, but I know them well. The third grader seems to be the most collected of the group; I guess that kind of maturity just comes with the territory when you're all of nine years old. He's the one who talks to me the most, and he's really good about it, too. He has the patience that a lot of adults lack, and will use simple explanations to help me if I don't understand a particular word. During our conversations, I've learned that we share a love of the Super Mario Bros. He's excited about Super Mario Galaxy and Smash Bros Brawl, and he tells me he's hoping to get a Wii for his birthday. His birthday is in October.

The second grader seems to enjoy sitting up front and having “very adult conversations” with the bus driver. Every week, he sits at the driver's shoulder and asks what seems to be an endless string of questions. I usually have no idea what he's saying, but it's clear from the tone of his voice that what he's asking about is pretty serious business. I imagine that by the end of his tenure at Hikimi Elementary, he'll know more about the operation of city buses than anything he's been taught at school.

Then there's the first grader. From what I can gather, it seems as though the blood flowing through his veins was long ago replaced by Mountain Dew or some other suitably Xtreme fluid. He rarely stops talking, and he never stops moving. One day I got on the bus to find that all three children had large chunks of ice that they had probably confiscated from some rain gutter. While the other two had stored their ice chunks in their umbrellas for safekeeping, the first grader was wielding his like a sword. He's a cute kid, and I love him to death, but he frightens me, because deep down, I worry that his energy is going to fall into the wrong hands; I am certain that one of these days, someone is going to find a way to harness that energy and, when they do, they'll either use it as a clean power source for all of Japan or they'll destroy the Earth.

A Fair is a Veritable Smorgasbord

Not much in the way of an actual post this time around. I'd like to get back to doing those regularly, and it is something I plan on doing. For now, though, I thought you might like to see these:


This is every picture I've taken since I've come to Japan. And I do mean every picture. You can expect to see lots of dark, blurry, out-of-focus pictures as you peruse these albums. Sorry about that, but when you've got so many pictures to go through, going through and sorting them becomes kind of a daunting task. There are a bunch of pretty good ones in there as well, so take a look if you're so inclined.

But that's not all!

I also went ahead and uploaded all of the videos I've had sitting around on my computer since christmas vacation . What this amounts to is a video of a train, and then a bunch of footage from an aquarium; don't ask me, it seemed like a good idea at the time.



As I stood among the ruins of the once-great Tsuwano Castle, I heard clattering, as a great thunder, come from below. I cast my gaze down upon the lands before me and beheld this magnificent contraption.




This one is pretty self-explanatory.




I have no idea why, but the glass made everything inside look green from the camera. The voice you hear explaining the intricacies of penguin familial relationships is the English teacher at one of my schools. I spent the day in Osaka with her and the music teacher and it was a blast.




This thing was huge. Like, Andre the Giant huge.




This creature is referred to as Jinbei. That's either its name or the Japanese word for whale shark; I'm not sure which.




I wonder how many scuba divers are impaled every year by penguins who aren't paying attention to where they're going.




Not much to this one. Hope you like turtles!



Watch this. I promise it is not strange or horrifying at all!




More animals should glow.


Well, that's all for now folks! Stay tuned.

How I Spent My Christmas Vacation

by Blake Davis

Hey everyone. It seems like not long ago I made yet another crazy promise regarding posts and the like, so today I'll do my best to recount the experiences of my Christmas vacation in a fairly concise manner. I did take a bunch of pictures over vacation, especially in Shikkoku. I took a few short videos as well. You can expect me to post those as soon as I've got them online.

So my last day of school was spent out at Hikimi, my school that's about an hour away, and it consisted pretty much of the end-of-year ceremony. The students got out of school at noon, and the teachers left not long afterward. As soon as I got home, I rushed to get my things packed. In a flurry of action, I tossed a vast assortment of random clothing items into my backpack, hoping they would sustain me for the duration of my short stay in Osaka.

I met the other Hikimi teachers at the Hagi-Iwami airport at about, uh...okay I don't remember that part. Early evening, let's say. It was an incredibly small airport. It might have been just a little bigger than my apartment building. It was actually really nice, though. For a small airport, it had a disproportionately large parking lot, which meant I had no trouble getting a parking space, an ironic circumstance in Japan.

The flight to Osaka took about an hour, and once we got there, it was probably about another thirty minutes by monorail from the airport to our hotel. We checked into our rooms and then left together for a big night on the town. Said night began at an excellent steakhouse where we were served a five-or-six course meal, which ended with an awesome steak, the first I'd had since I've come to Japan. From there, it was off to karaoke, where I distinguished myself with an excellent set of songs, finishing strong by following up Aladdin's "Friend Like Me" with Megadeth's "Peace Sells". In case you were wondering, heavy metal guitar solos don't transfer well to a karaoke environment.

Next we visited a small jazz club whose name I never learned. Playing that night was a trio of two middle-aged men on drums and bass, and an older man on piano. The music was great if you're into that kind of thing (for the record, I am); you could tell the guys just felt it, you know? The gent on bass in particular attacked his instrument with great vigor.

Our last stop of the night, if I remember correctly, was a fast-food ramen joint, where I got an unexpectedly enormous bowl of ramen and left half on the table. A quick bit of advice to anyone who is, like myself, prone to making poor decisions due to a lack of foresight: eating a huge bowl of ramen at three in the morning and then immediately going to sleep is a course of action to be avoided, if at all possible. The end results can be disastrous.

The next morning's story is one of terrible stomach pain and marine biology. It was raining that day, so I didn't get to take very many pictures for fear of getting my camera wet, but I and a couple other teachers visited Osaka castle, which seemed appropriately castle-like. The whole thing was surrounded by a huge moat, which I thought was cool. Moat is kind of an uncommon word in English, one most people typically don't use from day to day. When you think about it, it makes sense that Japanese people, even people who might speak English quite well otherwise, wouldn't know a word like moat. What this meant for me that day was that Hikimi's English teacher had to resort to unorthodox methods of description to tell me the castle had a moat. We had the conversation as we were still walking toward the castle and I couldn't yet see it for myself. She eventually settled on telling me that Hideyoshi (the dude in charge at the time, presumably) had built a river.

After that, we headed to Kaiyukan, Osaka's aquarium, where I beheld the majesty of Jinbei the whale shark. I'm still not entirely sure whether jinbei was the shark's name or just the Japanese word for whale shark. I suppose I could look it up online easily enough, but I like for some things to retain an air of mystery. For my money, though, the most impressive thing I saw at the aquarium were the enormous manta rays. There were actually several different kinds of manta rays at the aquarium, of various sizes. The smallest one might possibly be worn as a hat, while the largest looks like an underwater stealth bomber.

What little time we had left in Osaka was spent eating lunch (we had okonomiyaki, a kind of vegetable-noodle-pancake thing; it does not receive the Official Blake Seal of Approval) and looking around for souvenirs. I didn't really find any souvenirs, although I did pick up some really boss Spiderman and Spongebob stickers I plan to use as prizes in class at some point. After that, it was off to the airport and back home. Upon arriving back at my apartment, I went to sleep for three full days.

Christmas itself was strange. It felt really odd waking up at around eleven and then just kind of going about my business as usual. The first half of the day was spent in a fruitless attempt to get my phone to work. he second half was spent at Ryan's house, playing Guitar Hero 3 on his Wii. Issues with the difficulty curve notwithstanding, it probably has the best tracklist of any Guitar Hero yet. The first two certainly had their hits; Guitar Hero 2, with songs like "Carry On My Wayward Son" and "Sweet Child of Mine", was especially good. But both of those games also had several baffling song choices that I ended up playing through once and then never touching again. Guitar Hero 3 doesn't just bring the hits; it brings them consistently. The tracklist as a whole is a great mix of the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and today, and each set is packed with quality songs.

So I just realized that my description of my Christmas is really more of a short discussion on Guitar Hero than anything. Strangely enough, it feels pretty fitting, so I guess I'll leave it the way it is. Apologies to all those interested in neither guitars nor the heroics that one might engage in with said guitars.

As a final note on that, though, I was really happy to see Stevie Ray Vaughan return to Guitar Hero. I loved Texas Flood in the first game.

Okay, so the bulk of my winter vacation was taken up by an epic road trip Ryan and I took through Hiroshima and the Eastern half of Shikkoku. For practicality's sake, I shall record the events of this trip chronologically.

December 27th: Ryan and I left Masuda for Hiroshima. It's not far away at all, but we got a late start. That was compounded by the absolutely monstrous traffic in Hiroshima itself, and the end result of those circumstances was that by the time we got into Hiroshima proper it was really too late to see or do anything. We walked around the Peace Park and checked it out, but it was already getting dark. We spent the rest of the evening in Hiroshima's arcade mall, which was pretty cool. It was here that Ryan and I both bought our first air soft pistols. It was also here that we began our tour of Japan's arcade taiko machines.

December 28th: We left Hiroshima at around ten and headed out for Shikkoku. This actually entailed hopping across a number of other, smaller islands on a series of bridges. It was a nice trip, and the view was really cool. By the time we got to Kochi that evening, most things were closed, so we wandered around Kochi's arcade mall, played the taiko machine and then called it a day. Back at the hotel room, we sampled some incredible Japanese comedy on TV.

December 29th: We spent the day walking around Kochi, checking out shrines and the like. We went to Kochi castle, but it was closed in preparation for New Year's celebrations, so we only got to see it from the outside. Later in the day, we went out to the Ryuugado caves and took the tour. Turns out there are some pretty cool rock formations in those there caves. Evening saw us return to the arcade mall where we did some shopping and played more taiko.

December 30th: Kochi actually has a Sunday market every week, so that morning we got up and walked through the market to see the wares on offer. It consisted primarily of produce and cutlery, but Ryan and I both found ourselves backup air soft pistols. I fear it may have been the beginning of an unhealthy obsession. After checking out the Sunday market, we left Kochi and headed to Ikumi, a bustling community of about five people. What Ikumi lacks in its native population, though, it makes up for in travelers. You see, Ikumi is right along the coast of Shikkoku, and it's a great place to go surfing, apparently even in the winter. It was freezing the day Ryan and I got there, and as we pulled into the hotel where we were staying, we looked out the ocean and found that it was full of surfers. It occurred to me that Patrick Swayze would be proud. That night we ate at "Aunt Dinah's Ethnic Curry", a restaurant that really nails the classic southern atmosphere and hospitality, but completely misses the target with its menu. This isn't to say that "Aunt Dinah" doesn't serve good food; I just don't think anyone's real Aunt Dinah has ever served them piping hot curry rice and miso soup.

December 31st: We got to Tokushima sometime in the afternoon and spent most of the rest of the day shopping and checking out the city. That evening we watched a brand new Gaki no Tsukai on TV (if you don't know what Gaki no Tsukai is, look it up on Wikipedia; it's probably the finest television program Japan has ever produced) and then headed out in search of a shrine, since we had heard that that's where New Year's is typically celebrated in Japan. We never did find a shrine, and thank goodness. Instead, we ended up in the middle of a big park in the city where there was big New Year's party/concert going on. Getting there, I was overwhelmed by the presence of something I hadn't really seen since I had started living in Masuda: people my own age. It was really refreshing and the atmosphere was great. At midnight, everyone let go of balloons they had been holding and let them drift into space, and then in what seemed like no time at all, the crowd dissipated, leaving a a dark stage and snack vendors. It was probably the best day of my entire vacation.

January 1st: It was on this day that we were struck with the realization that we wouldn't be able to withdraw any money from the bank for the next three days. In America, where debit cards have become the norm, this wouldn't be a problem. In Japan, where hardly anyone accepts cards of any kind, it's a huge problem. Long story short, Ryan and I both became incredibly stingy. I did, however, allow myself the purchase of twenty cans of soda; ten root beers and ten Dr Peppers. I found them in a small grocery store, and I simply wasn't about to pass up the opportunity.

January 2nd: We went to Takamatsu this day, but without money, we weren't really able to partake of the many wondrous treasures on offer there. I hope someday to return to Takamatsu and do right by the city. It seemed like a pretty wicked place.

January 3rd: We headed home on extremely limited funds. In the end, we had just enough left for gas and lunch. We got home and I pretty much just crashed until school started again.

And that's how I spent my winter vacation.

This weekend, exclusively on Blake's Adventures in Japan...

You can expect a big holiday picture/video/poststravaganza. Not sure when this weekend, but somewhere in the Friday - Monday window. You have been warned.