winter break highlights

As many of you know, I decided to spend my winter break here, instead of making the pilgrimage back home for the holidays. My cousin was here for a little over a week, which was awesome! Nobody from home has ever come to visit me before, so it was a new experience.

First we spent a day in Tokyo, visiting Akihabara, Roppongi, Shibuya….

Hachiiiiii <3 Man, I love that dog.

Then some biking around town!

A day trip to Kamakura…

…complete with money laundering!

Quite literally ringing in the new year at a local temple!

 

Finally, a trip to Nikko with the Ishikawas!

Winter break is almost over, and I’m just relaxing reading books, doing a little shopping here and there, and just hanging out in general. School’s going to start again fairly soon… so…

that’s all for now!

October

Fall is in full swing here in Japan. I know I KNOW that pumpkins and Halloween aren’t a part of Japanese culture, but they are something that I do so enjoy. Last weekend, I joined a pumpkin carving event with the Kiryu International Association. They had these beautiful little pie pumpkins shipped in from Hokkaido, where the weather is somewhat similar to the Northeastern U.S., and sold them for about 600 yen a pop, and kids (and some adults) came to carve them! There was a big group of us ALTs there to help out, since there needed to be some explanation for first-timers as to how to carve a pumpkin! It was nice sharing culture :D

Here is, of course, my pumpkin. I had him sitting on my desk at school this past week, but he unfortunately started to mold and I had to.. ahem… dispose of him… sooner than hoped.

I also visited my Nametwin up in Tochigi City last weekend. We took a nice walk along the river, had a bento and had some serious girl talk. I’m sad that she lives further away from me now, but it’s very cool to have a new place to explore with her and it seems like she’s much more comfortable living in Tochigi than back in… that other place… sheesh!

Lastly, I finally played that gig with the band I joined last night! It was really cool! It was my very first time working with a band (well… other than my high school band… does that even count?) I unfortunately don’t have any photos, but I will ask around and see if anyone has any kind of data from the show. It was a good experience doing something new and different. I realized that I really enjoy singing, but I have a ways to go as far as musicianship is concerned. I’m certainly no professional when it comes to this kind of stuff. I feel like I’m always fudging it.

Until next time!

七夕

I went to the Tanabata festival at Orihime shrine this evening. I almost didn’t think it was going to happen because of all the rain we had today. I was going to wear my yukata, but after about 40 mintues of futile obi tying, I eventually gave up and wore a one-piece and leggings. I got there late, so I didn’t get to write my wish and hang it on the bamboo, but I still made a wish anyway!

I went to Tanabata last year, too. I guess I just like this festival because it’s cute. I also made the realization during the past year or so that Orihime is a weaving goddess and because this was at one time the textile center of Japan (see Sunday's post), naturally there would be a shrine to a weaving goddess here! I wonder if there are any shrines to Hikoboshi…

I know for a fact that a map of his constellation is on a bridge in 枚方市 (Hirakata City) in Osaka. Orihime’s is on the other side (which I unfortunately cannot locate the photo of). Also, from Keihan Hirakata-shi station, you can take the Orhime and Hikoboshi lines to… ooh… who knows where!? I never had any good reason to ride them, but I did sincerely like the names. The trains are even pink and blue! Cute!
But, I digress. Back to Ashikaga.They shut off all the lights at about 8:00. Unfortunately, once again, it was too cloudy to see the stars. Oh well. Probably wouldn’t be able to see them anyway, with all the lights from town on, too. The luminaries on the steps were really pretty. Glad my cell phone has a night camera setting!

ココ・ファーム・ワイナリー

I am going to have to quote one of my elementary school English lessons for this post. “Ashikaga is famous for Coco Winery!” I went this past weekend for the yearly harvest festival. For 2000 yen you get a bottle of red or white wine (or grape juice), a lovely goblet, a corkscrew, and a nice little yellow badge to let everyone know you are a part of the festival. The wine was fantastic, as was the food! We lucked out on the weather, too! It was such a lovely day to sit on a sunny hillside and drink wine.

 

Coco Winery produces some of the finest wine made in Japan, a country whose wine is better suited for a sweet tooth than a sophisticated palate. Coco Winery’s vintages are apparently so good, in fact, that it was served at the G8 conference when it was held in Japan.

What makes Coco Winery so special, however is not only its fantastic wine, but the people who work there. The staff of the winery is made up of over a hundred autistic and developmentally disabled men and women. Most of them live at the winery year-round, and they all tend to the grapes that grow on the steep hill (as shown above. Believe me, I was on this hill… it is REALLY steep!!) completely by hand. In addition to the vineyard, Coco Winery is also a school, which retains the philosophy that one’s life can change with hard work and diligence.

Coco Winery is special to me because some of the students that I teach are developmentally disabled. Some of them may live and work at Coco Winery one day. As for my students, I can say this about them: they are quite possibly the brightest, and most cheerful kids that I have had the pleasure of teaching. Their English pronunciation and rhythm is fantastic and I truly look forward to having my weekly class with them. I mean these kids just absolutely sparkle with intelligence, life, and energy, despite whatever disability they may have. Actually, most of the time you’d never know there was anything different about these kids. The other thing that I think is so great is that the other kids at school treat them as equals. You never hear anyone teasing or making fun. I swear. If anything, the other kids are helping them get their lunch or explaining something to them. It’s fantastic. It makes the whole school such a nice place to be in. No wonder these kids are so happy.

In conclusion, Coco Winery is the kind of place I want to support. Especially if the people there are anything like my students, I’m sure that the feeling of having a place to belong and do something really cool like make wine is really awesome.
I’ve already posted a lovely little piece about the vineyard by CNN in a previous post, so please check it out!

日光

 

As you know, I’ve been back in Japan for a little over a week now. Since I’ve been back, I’ve managed to get to Tokyo to hang out with Taryn & Lindsey, visit some museums, do some shopping, clean my apartment (?!), fully recover from my jet-lag, and hang out with some new and familiar faces here in Ashikaga. On a whim, I decided to visit Nikko. It’s not a far trip at all from Ashikaga. It is possible to get to Nikko very quickly from where I live, but since I enjoy riding on trains, and had the entire day free, I decided to take the local trains, which take about an hour and a half and cost a mere 1110 yen. In Japanese, Nikko means “sunshine.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t a sunny day when I went, but I still had an awesome time!

When I arrived in Nikko and started orienting myself to the map, my sense of direction absolutely failed me. I felt hopelessly lost for some reason. I think it may have been jet-lag related, but maybe I’m just plain no good at reading maps. Instead of making the trek up to the entrance of the world heritage site myself, I decided to take the bus from the station.

The bus drops you off in front of a bronze dragon fountain and a statue of a wondering monk. Behind this, there is a parking lot, and in this parking lot is a small red building that sells entry tickets to all of the important shrines & temples in the world heritage site. You can purchase this strip of tickets (which are good for two days) for 1000 yen at this little booth. Unless you are only there to see the Toshogu shrine, and want to skip all of the seemingly extraneous temples and shrines, then by all means, go for that admission. However, I found that it was significantly cheaper to purchase this strip of tickets than to pay entry fees for each individual site. With the little book of tickets, you’ll get to visit the Three Buddha Hall in Rinnoji temple, the main grounds of the Toshogu shrine, the Honjido, Futarasan shrine, and the Taiyuin. Despite this, there is a separate entry fee to see the 眠り猫 (sleeping cat) and the tomb of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Whoever wrote the piece on Nikko in my Lonely Planet Guide wasn’t too keen on this, but I enjoyed the trek up the big stone steps to see Ieyasu’s grave. I liked the sleeping cat, too. So ha.

The architecture at the Toshogu shrine is super unique. You will not see anything this heavily embellished in the Chinese style anywhere else in Japan. Supposedly they hired thousands of artisans to decorate the buildings, and presently they’ve hired a small team of restorative artists to bring the shrine back to its original splendor. They’ve done a really good job restoring both Ieyasu’s shrine and his brother’s shrine. While I was there, the Toshogu shrine was under some pretty heavy restoration work. The whole outer corridor was covered in scaffolding, but they had clear panels of plastic hanging up so you could see the restoration in progress, which I thought was pretty cool.

 

Speaking of artisans. Apparently the guy they had to carve the elephants on the storehouse (and you can tell it’s a storehouse because of the tightly woven beams on the bottom half of the structure. That is a typical storehouse construction. Storehouses were pretty plain buildings save for this unique architecture, so it’s pretty cool to see this heavily decorated example.. I digress) had never seen an elephant in his life before.. so one elephant… kind of looks like an elephant, and the other one looks like he got a friend to help him out or maybe he went to a library or something.

Another cool building that you should NOT miss is the sacred stable. Besides the famous carving of the life cycle of the monkey (with the ultra-famous hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys) there is a horse inside of the stable!! A honest to goodness horse!! Horses have always been a symbol of wealth, so as a tradition, wealthy families would give horses to shrines as offerings. In order to keep this tradition, the Toshogu shrine keeps a horse in the sacred stable. They even post his daily schedule (walks, feeding time, when he’s absent, etc.). In keeping with the extravagance of the rest of the shrine, the horse in the stable is always a white one. I personally felt kind of bad for him in that wee little stable, but they do let him out for exercise, and I’m sure they feed him well, he is the sacred horse, after all. I’m not entirely sure when the custom of actually keeping horses at shrines ended, but instead of giving actual horses, wealthy families would have paintings of horses (or other animals, people or events) commissioned and would give them to the shrines as a symbol of their patronage. These paintings are called emma-do and you can see some really nice examples of them at the Futarasan shrine. The ones at the Futarasan shrine are gilt with images of deer and horses and are super pretty. At present, shrines in Japan just don’t keep horses on premises, mostly because of ... money, space, cleanliness, and laws concerning horse ownership.

After using up my strip of tickets, I was getting kind of hungry, so I stopped at this little set of buildings that was off to the right of the plaza that five-storied-pagoda is in. There’s a couple of little places to get noodles or ice cream or snack type items, but the place to go is the Kanaya hotel. They have these homemade curry pies that are absolutely incredible. Outside they are this amazing flaky, buttery, puff pastry, and then inside is hot beef curry. You can get one for 300 yen. So amazing. I could have eaten a million of them.

Then, while I was walking along Rt. 119 back to the Tobu-Nikko station, I stopped at a little Ochaya (tea shop) to have some  matcha (green tea) and yakidango (grilled rice paste balls… believe me they taste much better than they sound). The woman who ran the place was absolutely adorable. She asked me if I really liked matcha (which OF course I do) and she also told me she makes her yakidango with black miso paste. So cute. I wish I could have taken a photo with her, but there were other people there and I just didn’t want to be that tourist, you know? It was a really good end to my day in Nikko.

The setting of these shrines is absolutely gorgeous; on mountains, surrounded by gigantic cedars that are hundreds of years old. Nikko is a gorgeous place, and I plan to go back soon, and I think you should go there, too!

More photos are on the Facebook!

織姫神社七夕祭り

The Tanabata festival at Orihime shrine! I think this is my favorite, just because the story and the imagery of the stars is so darn... cute.

For those of you who don't know the story, here is my version:
Legend has it that Orihime (princess Ori), the daughter of the Sky King (or just the universe, it depends on who's telling the story) wove beautiful clothing by the banks of the milky way (or, the heavenly river). She was really sad that because she was so busy making awesome clothes all day, she had no time to meet anyone and fall in love. The Sky King was concerned for his daughter's happiness, so he arranged for Orihime to meet with Hikoboshi who lived and worked in the fields on the other side of the milky way. Naturally, they both fell madly in love with one another and got married ASAP. However, once they were married, they spent ALL their time with each other and Orihime totally neglected her awesome clothes making and Hikoboshi let his cows wander all about the heaven. The Sky King was once again concerned about this, because he didn't want his daughter's talents to go to waste and neither did he want to chase after loose cows all over the universe. So, he separated Orihime and Hikoboshi across the milky way and forbade them to meet one another. Orihime was totally devastated and she cried and cried. The Sky King was really just looking after his daughter's best interests, so he cut a deal with her. He told her if she was good and finished her clothes making, she could go hang out with Hikoboshi on the 7th day of the 7th month. Once 7/7 rolled around, Orihime had finished all of her work and it was time for her to go meet with Hikoboshi, but there was no bridge to cross the milky way with. So she got upset and cried and cried, until a flock of birds came. The birds made a bridge with their wings so that Orihime could cross the river to see her man.

The End.
Tonight was my first Tanabata ever, which was really exciting. I first learned about it in my Japanese textbook when I was a freshman in college. We had a concert today at school. All the kids sang and played the recorder. They all did a really good job!! The sixth grade sang a really pretty song called "Can I please have wings?" It almost made me cry.
Then, we had awesome Tanabata jelly for lunch.. which was like.. Jelly with star-shaped peaches. A win for kyushoku!

So this evening I hit up the Orihime shrine to check out the festivities... as it is obvious that a shrine named Orihime would have some kind of festival for Tanabata. Sure enough, they did. They lined the steps with luminaries made from recycled PET bottles and there were some drummers, a guitarist (who was kind of bimyo) and an awesome sinobue (bamboo flute) player.
I ran into quite a few of my students at the shrine, too. They were so surprised to see me out of school, and were unusually shy (meanwhile, I can't get them to shut up at school). Their parents were super nice though!! One of my third graders was up near the main shrine building and he showed me these little green frogs that were hopping around the rain gutters and making a racket.. he grabbed my hand and pulled me over and said: "BRIDGET SENSEI! LOOK, FROG!!" Oh my goodness it was so adorable.

It was too cloudy to see the stars, so we all actually totally missed out on when the two stars, Vega (Orihime) and Altair (Hikoboshi) actually meet. So much for stargazing.
I had a good time, met some really awesome people, got my O-mamori, and got a little dose of culture on a Tuesday night. As always, more photos are on the facebook.

鑁阿寺

I actually went to Bannaji Temple (or dainichi-sama... which is apparently what people call it) for the first time on my way home from school one day. I also visited the same day that I went to Ashikaga Gakko - since it was Showa day there was a whole lot more going on. They had this crazy puppet fortune teller that was cool. It gave me my love fortune... which turned out to be not spectacular, but not terrible, either. I tried to take a video of it w/ my cell phone, but I hadn't quite figured out how to take better-quality videos, so please excuse the poor quality:




There were a ton of people hanging around the temple, so I found it a little difficult to get some good shots sans...human beings.
There is a small pagoda on the grounds, whose form is very similar to the Indian stupa, not a big ol' pagoda like your stereotypical one at Toji in Kyoto.
There is a koi pond & garden which was nice, but there were these junior high school boys who were in my photos. Oh well, I guess they just added to the ambiance. Bordering the garden is an interesting belltower that has these sides that curve upwards toward a interlocking tie beam roof structure that surrounds the actual bell.
Next to the main hall there's another big hall that has red beams and white clay walls. Behind it are a storehouse, a tiny shinto shrine, and bigger shrine (to what, I don't know) which was painted a bright red (looks like its fading now).
So.. according to the brochure Bannaji temple was founded by Ashikaga Yoshikane about 400 years ago, which would be the Kamakura Period, AKA the Ashikaga period, which was when the Ashikaga bakufu ran the show. There's a nice little family tree at the end of the brochure that shows you the Ashikaga clan.







































I love that that dude just decided to take a nap on that bench.
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足利学校

Ashikaga Gakko is apparently the oldest school in Japan! Right here in my city! Holla! I went on Showa day, when, unfortunately, everyone and their brother felt the need to get out and about.

According to the pamphlet, present records can't really support any theories prior to the year 1410, so there is dispute as to when the school was actually founded. So here are 4 theoretical dates:
1. The Ashikaga school is a remnant of the Kokugaku school that originated in the Nara period
2. The Ashikaga school was founded in the year 832 by Lord Ono-no (tee hee what a silly name) Takamura.
3.The school was founded in 1249 by Lord Ashikaga Yoshikane (who also founded nearby Bannaji temple)
4. The school was opened in 1439 by Lord Uesugi Norizane, Deputy Shogun of Eastern Japan.

The school taught Confucianism of the Han and Tang dynasties and also the I-Ching. Next to the school, there is a Confucian Shrine (that actually looks more like a small temple, complete with a butsudan-style roof and shibi on the top roofline) with a bronze seated Confucius inside.
You can gaze out of the Hojo and have a nice think while looking at the pond & garden in the front or the smaller pool in the back. There is also a library on the grounds, that comes complete with 12,000 separate volumes, including the Song Dynasty edition of the 5 Classics of Confucianism. Talk about classics. The library isn't called 'Toshokan' though. Its name literally means "Treasury of Chinese Books."

I don't want to re-type the entire brochure onto my blog, but it really is a neat place to visit and learn a little about Chinese influence on Japanese culture. I would like to go back when there aren't so many people there!















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富士上浅間神社

Fuji no Ue Asama Jinja is a little shrine up on a hill! I saw it the first day I came to Ashikaga. I made a promise to myself that I would visit it once I got some free time. This past sunday the rain cleared up, and I had an absolutely gorgeous day to spend in the outdoors.
I made my way up an overgrown hillside, past super tall cedars and wild bamboo. When I got to the top, I had an amazing view. It was absolutely beautiful.
While I was enjoying the view, I noticed that I was not alone and that there were a couple of older Japanese fellows also visiting the shrine. One of them actually approached me and started telling me some interesting facts about 'Fuji no Ue' as he called it. He started telling me that it was built in the Edo period, and that on clear days you can see Mt. Fuji, and he pointed out the names of some other mountains around. He went on and said that there is a festival every year where parents bring thier new babies up to the shrine and they stamp thier heads with a special hanko. This particular shrine, he said, is for boys. The girls' shrine is on a smaller hill nearby (I'll visit it, too).
My new friend also walked back down to the hill with me, with bells jingling from his belt. He said since there is no bell to ring at the shrine, he brings his own. He also said that he takes a walk up to to Fuji no Ue every day, and that's why he is still so genki (I mean, this guy must have been in his late 70s or early 80s, and he seemed super healthy to me). At the crossroads, he pounded on the ground w/ his walking stick, making a resonating sound, almost like a thick drum. He followed this demonstration by explaining that they also call this hill 'dan-dan' yama because it makes a hollow noise if you hit the ground. He speculated it was because there is a cave inside or something. He also took me to the opening of a small cave on one side of the hill, where there is a small statue of a Jizo inside. Unfortunately, the angle was steep and the cave was small, and I couldn't get a good photo of it, but it was super cool. So, not only did I get an awesome tour from a local, I also got to see some spectacular views.















































































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