Winter Break Part II

Here, I will talk about part two of my winter vacation. Part one can be found here.

After staying with Tara’s family in Singapore, I went to Tokyo, where I stayed with a couple different family friends.

The first night, I stayed with Yuto and his family. Yuto is a student at a small college near my house in Minnesota. As an international student, he has a host family—not to live with, because he lives in a dorm, but to visit, since his home is so far away. He has dinner with my family once every week or two, and comes to family gatherings during holidays. When I got to Tokyo, he was home for winter break.

His family took me around the Yanaka area of Tokyo. We went to a cute little onigiri shop for lunch, and then we went to make candy. Amezaiku is a traditional Japanese candy. We didn’t make the candy itself; rather, we learned to shape it. As amezaiku is a hard candy, we first waited while it was heated up. We were wearing two pairs of gloves: a thicker pair, to keep us from burning ourselves, and ordinary plastic gloves, to stop the candy from sticking to us and for sanitary reasons.

According to the shopkeeper, amezaiku is different from Western decorative candies because it is shaped out of one piece of candy. There is no making small, intricate parts and then connecting them. You have to do it with one piece, and that means you have only three minutes to do it. Then the candy hardens, and that’s that.

I say this in part to justify how my ‘dolphin’ candies look much more like some kind of eel-shark hybrid.

After making candy, we went to a market called Yanaka Ginza. For whatever reason, the street is largely cat themed. There are cats on the roofs of some buildings, watching over the market, and every other shop sells cat-themed merchandise. One shop even had its own live cat! I bought a little good luck charm. It’s a small glass cat with gold on the inside, and when kept in one’s wallet, it brings good luck.

All in all, I had a really good time with Yuto and his family!

For the rest of my trip, I stayed with Yuriko. My mom met Yuriko the first time she came to Japan, when she studied abroad in Tokyo during her junior year of college. They’ve been friends for more than thirty years. The first time I went to Japan, three-and-a-half years ago, we stayed with Yuriko for a while in Tokyo. It was nice being back there again. It was also great because it was my first time experiencing a Japanese New Year!

My mom with Yuriko and her family in 1991

In my experience, for Americans, Christmas and/or Hanukkah are the holidays where we gather with family and, if religious, engage spiritually with the holiday. In Japan, Christmas is a party day, even a date night. Santa has made his way over here, but the holiday doesn't have the same weight as in America. Aside from Santa, other Japanese Christmas traditions include eating cake and (for some reason) KFC.

On New Year’s, Japanese people gather with their families. Often, they return to their parents’, grandparents’, or even great-grandparents’ house. I spent New Year’s Eve itself with Yuriko and some family friends. Many people in Japan watch the first sunrise of the new year, and go to shrines very early in the morning (or rather, very late at night). I was too tired to stay up much past midnight, but I did have a good time!

In Japan, お正月 (oshougatsu), or New Year’s, refers to January first through third. While many people in America go back to work on January 2nd, Japanese people are on holiday through January 3rd. (They do have work on Christmas, though, so I’d deem it an even trade-off.) Here are some elements of Japanese culture that I learned about during my first お正月 in Japan!

• Yuriko helped me do 生け花 (ikebana), Japanese flower arranging, for the first time! I can’t pretend to know the nuances of ikebana aesthetics, but I do think this turned out very well! Credit for that largely goes to Yuriko.

• おせち料理 (osechi ryouri) refers to foods traditionally eaten during New Year’s. Once upon a time, all of the stores closed during New Year’s, and people didn’t cook. They devised a meal full of symbolic foods that could be cooked before New Year’s and eaten throughout the holiday. Here’s an article talking about the symbolism behind the various foods. 

• Up until last year, I thought that mochi was specifically a dessert. Often it is served as a little ball, with anko (sweet red beans) or matcha (green tea flavoring) on the inside. However, it turns out that mochi is used for more savory meals, as well, particularly during the New Year. Yuriko ordered a lot of mochi from her favorite maker. It arrived on New Year’s Eve. I helped cut it up, which was deceptively difficult: as it is made of rice, it is very sticky. The trick is to get the knife wet every so often to keep it from sticking.
  
  I ate mochi two ways during New Year’s, though I’m sure there are more. One way is to take a piece of mochi and wrap it in seaweed, then sprinkle it with soy sauce. Yuriko’s family adds another special touch: a piece of cheese. It was really good! The other way is a soup called お雑煮 (ozouni), which contains mochi and vegetables.

• Another New Year’s food is soba, or buckwheat noodles. They are healthy. Because of that and because they’re long, eating soba during the New Year is believed to give you a long life. 

• We visited a temple together for the first time in 2019. The temple is called 深大寺 (jindaiji), and it was very busy on January 2nd! There were a lot of merchants, selling foods, traditional Japanese toys, and boar-related decorations, as 2019 is the year of the boar (or inoshishi, in Japanese).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I got my fortune there. The fortune is written on a piece of paper. If it’s a good one, you can keep the paper, and if it’s bad you tie it on something that looks like a clothesline, leaving your bad luck at the temple instead of taking it with you. My fortune was very good—of all the levels, it was the second best. Among other things, it told me that 2019 will be a good year for moving and starting new jobs—which is great, because I’ll be moving back to America in August!

Japan has many New Year’s traditions, and I haven’t listed even close to all of them. Even as it is different from American holiday traditions, it is also similar in a lot of ways. We, too, gather with family and eat symbolic foods; and we also treat the new year as a new start.

Thanks for reading! Here’s to a great 2019 for all of us!

(And, yes, I have already failed in my one-post-a-week goal. In my defense, I did write this last week! I just didn't get around to posting it.)

Aoshima Naked Man Festival

(Don't worry, there wasn't actually any nudity involved in the festival!)

I know I promised to tell you more about my winter break. However, I want to tell you about what I did today while it’s still fresh in my mind. Tokyo will have to wait until next week!

Today, I went to southern Miyazaki for the 青島裸祭り, known in English as the Aoshima Naked Man Festival. Aoshima Shrine is located on a small island by the ocean. Beside the island, alternating rows of stone and water form stripes known as the “Devil’s Washboard” because of the formation’s resemblance to an old-fashioned Japanese washboard.

Aoshima’s entrance into Japanese mythology starts with the story of two brothers, descended from the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu. One of the brothers is a hunter, and the other is a fisherman. They decide to trade jobs for one day; in his ineptitude, the hunter, Yamasachi, loses his brother’s fish hook in the sea. He goes into the ocean to search for it, to no avail. His quest takes him to an underwater palace, home to the beautiful princess Toyotama.

Yamasachi falls in love with Toyotama and spends three years underwater. When he finally finds the fish hook and returns to land with his new wife, he is greeted by a crowd of people standing in the frigid water. That is where today’s festival comes in.

After ceremonially warming themselves up with various exercises, a crowd of people (once only men, but now women as well) rushes into the cold January sea. The women are wearing happi coats, which covers about the same amount of skin as a T-shirt and shorts. The men wear only loincloths. They stay in the water for perhaps five minutes, their heads bowed, hands pressed together in prayer.

Once they return to land, the participants disappear to warm up and dry off. 

There follows another portion of the ceremony. Water is heated up until it is steaming, and a priest dips a palm frond into the water and flings droplets at the participants. Everyone exclaims at the heat, enough that it is almost concerning, except that they are smiling and laughing the whole time. Afterward, the crowd lines up to be blessed by the priest.

That mostly sums up the festival, but the story isn’t over yet! Yamasachi and Toyotama stay together, and eventually Toyotama becomes pregnant. She asks Yamasachi not to visit or even look at her as she gives birth, and he promises to do as she wishes. But curiosity tempts him and he peeks in on his wife, only to see not a woman but a dragon. While giving birth, Toyotama has returned to her true oceanic form. In shame, she flees into the ocean. She leaves her child behind, though she gives him tools for survival: she sends her younger sister to take care him, and she leaves behind her breasts, to give him milk. The child grows up to marry his aunt, and their son becomes the first emperor of Japan.

The site of Toyotama’s childbirth is the location of the second shrine I visited today, Udo-Jingu. The shrine is inside a cave. Stalactites hang from the ceiling, dripping water. It is believed that if a woman catches a drop of that water in her mouth, she will be blessed with fertility.

I found myself particularly drawn to Toyotama’s story. Everyone learns to feel shame over their natural bodies in some way or another, but particularly women. We may be satisfied with the ways our bodies function and provide with us, but when we consider the gaze of others, we are taught to search instead for flaws. Our shame is doubled because we are so often valued for our bodies instead of for our minds. Toyotama was content with her true form in her own company, but as soon as her husband saw her for what she really was, she fled.

Wikipedia’s telling of the myth provides a different interpretation: “After catching her husband spying on her, [Toyotama] was utterly ashamed that he broke his promise. Unable to forgive [him], she abandoned him and their child by returning to the sea.” Instead of shame over seeing herself through her husband’s eyes, she is ashamed that he is not the honorable man she thought him to be.

Whatever the reasons for Toyotama’s disappearance, her feelings resonate across the centuries, and she herself is honored instead of disgraced: Aoshima shrine is dedicated to her, and Toyotama is the reason for the dragon imagery that I saw all over the place. The shrine is supposed to bless marriage, or those hoping for marriage, which does amuse me a bit: Toyotama’s and Yamasachi’s marriage did not end particularly well.

I seriously considered sleeping in today instead of going to Aoshima, and I am glad that I changed my mind. Even just in Miyazaki, I have so much exploring left to do!

Note: In addition to hearing the story from friends, the following web pages helped me piece it together:

https://us.jnto.go.jp/blog/the-legendary-birth-of-a-nation-in-miyazaki/#comments

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyotama-hime

Winter Break Part I

I go back and forth on my opinion of New Year’s Resolutions. On the one hand, we see the new year as a fresh start, and so it’s a good time to build new habits. It was through a New Year’s resolution that I became a vegetarian, actually: one year, in high school, I resolved to be vegetarian for the month of January, and after January I decided to continue.

That said, the culture around New Year’s resolutions seems to be that a lot of people don’t follow through. I tried to be realistic in my goals for this year, which are as follows:

• Write at least five sentences every day, at least through the month of January; if it seems achievable (which it does so far) I’ll continue through the rest of the year.

• Blog once a week until I return to America in August. I’ll likely continue this blog after I get back, but it’s far enough away that I’m not worried about that right now.

I put this here so that you, reader, can keep me honest. If it’s been a week and I haven’t posted anything, feel free to nag me about it. A bit of external reinforcement never hurts.

* 

For winter break, I went on a two-week long vacation. First, I went to Singapore to stay with my lovely friend Tara, whom I know from college. Then, I went to Tokyo and stayed with a friend of my mom’s.

First, Singapore. I’ve actually been there once before—I went in January of 2018, with a couple other college friends. We stayed with Tara’s family that time, too. It was a great trip. I will admit that I was really nervous about my first Christmas away from home. I have so many traditions surrounding Christmas—waking up early and reading my book by the Christmas tree, seeing relatives on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, eating certain foods, and so on—that I was worried I’d spend the whole day wishing I was at home.

That did not happen. I did wake up a bit early (by coincidence) and read by the tree, but I was too busy with Tara and her family to feel particularly homesick. We didn’t do too much—we ate some delicious food, played Codenames: Pictures, which Tara had bought for her brother, watched Shrek The Halls (which I loved), and generally relaxed.

I didn’t do as much tourism as my last visit to Singapore, since I did a lot of that in January. This trip was more about spending time with friends and relaxing by the pool. Tara and I did go to Gardens by the Bay, a lovely botanical garden. We had also gone in January, but there’s a lot to do there. Last time we went to the Cloud Forest Dome, which has plants from the cloud forest biome. This time, we went to the Flower Dome. Here are some pictures!

    

All in all, it was a great visit, and I’m so glad I got to spend Christmas with Tara and her family!

Next time, I’ll talk about Tokyo, and my first Japanese New Year!