6 Aug 94 - =one= more week! Continuing w/ the Aomori theme -- at the sports festival, being in silly races like bagging a goldfish, sometimes competing w/ kids, sometimes w/ their parents, everyone who participated in an event would get a prize - but the prizes for us were special - the ones for the Japanese were stuff like toothpaste, dishwashing liquid and foil, but =we= got ceramic dishes & dolls and nice fans and stuff - once I found out that you get a prize that good no matter how well you did, I tried to participate in as many events as possible. Oh yeah, I didn't get pictures of most this trip because my camera batteries died. Well finally on Monday I got to be a samurai. Because it'd be so hot I wore a bathing suit under the outfit. During the parade, some of the cameramen around would get right in my face and one scanned me from shoes to headband. Evidently, I was on the news - the one time I wasn't home to tape it. Oh well. I got pictures in the dressing rooms anyway. That night there was fireworks - and I tell ya, Japanese fireworks are something to see - they have ones I've never seen at 4th of July shows (probably because I only go to small ones - but these kind weren't at the Oakland Show last year.) I got pics - hopefully they turn out okay. Thursday was Akafun time - no pics because I was afraid for safety of my camera - not much to our part anyway. It turns out it's only the guys in =our=group= who wear the thong-like akafun - everyone else just wears yukata or happi (like what I wore) I carried a banner that said akafun on it. I drenched people w/ water & beer and got well-doused myself. People liked exploding beer on everyone - =that's= why I didn't bring my camera. The walk wasn't that long, but plenty of our group managed to get pretty drunk by the end. For my part I had a couple of beers that mostly got poured out over other people's heads. The people in charge of our group brought a lot, a lot of beer along but only a few non-beer drinks. (I think those were meant for the 4 kids who were w/ us) On the morning news for the past week, every day they had this well-known Japanese fath-healer and a special guest (singer, wrestler, or some other kind of pop star) on which this guy would work his powers during the show. I really shouldn't call it faith healing I suppose, though alot of Japanese evidently have a lot of faith in this method (at least in America, if such a person were on a national morning news show, there'd be a hell of a lot of skeptics there, I think [mmm, maybe not. call it alternative medicine, and there goes the skepticism]) I think they've had this guy on because a movie about him has just been released. Some of these "new age" things are popular here because it's traditional eastern mysticism is still very much alive. During this week I finished the +Winds of War+ (one of those books in which I'm interested in historical aspects rather than the characters - kind of like +Dr. Zhivago+) and read +The Three Musketeers+ - Lord Sudley translation - that's a great book! Both the historical and character aspects are interesting - I give it a triple thumbs up (borrowing somebody else's thumb for this) Though it's 700 pages long it reads really quickly. I want to see all the film versions of it now to see what was kept and what was changed - for example, almost all the mistresses are married women - something alot of people won't understand or approve of. Extramarital affairs have often been common because the marriage was for economic/political reasons - not love or passion. But I'm curious... Also this week I got a mix tape from Brad - what a great friend! Some of the songs on the tape are hilarious and some remind me of Brian (well, anything can remind me of Brian). One of the songs I find especially funny is the Pet Shop Boys "Go West". it sounds like there's a chorus of mounties on it (or lumberjacks..) and I've gone so far west I'm in the far east, where there's no big spaces really... Last night we had a talent show. It was really good & international. People sang American (Gilligan's Island theme), Japanese (iru iru nano ga ata [im not sure about that end there, I overwrote part of it]) Chinese and Danish songs. Every class had a skit. One of the really good ones was the Advanced Class's version of Romeo & Juliet - all the women dressed as men & vice-versa. The guy who played Juliet was really good - he had the Kabuki feminine mannerisms down perfectly. Alot of people included the ika dance in their skit - and the high advanced class did the ika top ten (ika is squid, and there's pictures of squid all over the place here, on street signs etc. because this is squid city.) The really funny uses were ikabana (the art of ika arranging (ikebana - flower arranging)) and ikafun - which is of course a play on akafun. The teachers did one where the 2 male teachers played HIF female students trying to pick up Japanese men. One of them played one who was a playgirl and zyozu [?] in nihongo and Ishikawa was one who wasn't very good at Japanese. So the other went off w/ Suzuki sensei and Ishikawa hit on Matsuda-sensei who turned out to be female (so many Japanese young women look & dress like Japanese young men - especially the high school students - I can see how this is a very androgynous society, where cross-dressing is a tradition in art and entertainment. At one point, one of the people says to him that the HIF teachers must be bad but he said it's the students who are bad. Which leads to my class's skit -- Suzuki-sensei's Special Ed class - I played Norb-san - the guy in our class who is always out of it and always late. Basically we played a totally stupid class - kind of an exagerration of our class, but some things were really true. Wow - some weird things have been happening today. But first - something to gloat about to Brad. I played Virtual Fighter here - on a big screen =and= all the special moves were written down in front (but I bet Brad will think that's a cop-out.) Then I went to a used CD place to buy singles of the songs I know and I heard a song they were playing and I thought "hey - that sounds pretty good. I'd bet Brad would like it." so I asked one of the workers who was singing. He said they didn't have it but "Biyorku" sang it. I thought for a moment and figured out it was Bjork's "Human Condition [Behavior]", neato. Now for the really odd thing. I've been prayed/wished for happiness twice today. I was a little suspicious at first - I thought it might be a ploy to steal my money or something. But what I had to do was this: say "meijisama arigatoo gozaimasu" 3 times, close my eyes for ahile while the person was doing something (this is the part that made me suspicious) I peeked w/ the 1st person and saw they were holding their hand up and staring at the back of their hand. Then I bow my head for awhile (and I have no idea what they were doing during this part). Then I do the "meijisama" thing again. Evidently these people were trying to find foreigners to wish happiness on. It looked like one of the people had a checklist. Also, at the bus station I ran into a guy from San Francisco and his girlfriend (it looked like she had some sort of palsy) who was from Tokyo, but was going to school in San Fran. I told him it was nice to hear English. And I've been running into alot of HIF people today. hmmm