Fun fact: Long ago, sumo was an important ritual at the imperial court. Representatives of each province were ordered to attend the contest at the court and fight. They were required to pay for their travels themselves. The contest was known as sumai no sechie, or “sumai party.”
This week I’d like to apologize to all the people who I forgot to apologize to last week. Also the people on the subway. I promise I tried to hold it in. OMG, that’s ssooo gross Calm down, LSP (just know she talks in a super-valley girl voice), no one actually noticed.
Since I didn’t do as many things (I did a lot, just not the usual variety that I can describe), you get more of a ready break this week. Instead I’ll focus more on my (scattered) thoughts or random experiences.
As if in response to my discussion last week on the weird shirts last week, I saw my favorite one yet. As we were walking to sumo, I saw a girl come up behind me up the stairs. She was very fashionable and was wearing a nice shirt, but on the back was written “Licking doorknobs is illegal on other planets.” Now my “chronologically enriched” (as Master Tomasi puts it) readers will probably just think they put random words on the shirt. However, the cool people will instantly recognize it from the Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen episode of Spongebob. Seeing that she was a thirty-something year old Japanese lady, I highly doubt that she had any idea what it said or what it was from, which proves that they really don’t care. Even the dumbest English can be stylish. Like like when white people get kanji tattoos like 山葵 and think they’re cool until they learn it actually just says wasabi.
I took a few pictures of her shirt as we were walking, though was slightly worried that I’d get in trouble since taking pictures of other people is frowned upon. A while back, I saw a picture of a cell phone with the red circle and slash around it and some handcuffs. I asked Maki if you weren’t allowed to use your cell phone for some weird reason (I just realized that Maki sounds like my Navi/Midna/Fi in my blog (Zelda reference, don’t worry)). She explained that it said that you’re not supposed to take pictures of people, specifically girls. I explained that I wasn’t taking pictures of their faces, so there was no privacy issues. She said that was the problem. This is also why I’m very hesitant to take a lot of pictures of “cute Japanese babies”, since I don’t want to seem like a creep.
This weekend I experienced something which I thought was weird considering Japan’s massive population: I saw a few people multiple times throughout the day. I guess it’s not super unusual, but considering the amount of time that passed, I was surprised. On the way to the aquarium, I saw two girls dressed in yukatas (type of kimono). Normally this wouldn’t be too distinctive, especially since everyone was wearing them for the festival that night, but these girls’ hair was “all crazy like whoosh” (that was a quote from myself). Later at the fireworks, they just happened to be sitting next to us. Nagoya’s population is about 2.3 million, so even though I knew they’d be in the same area, seeing people again was surprising. On my 3DS, there’s a function that lets me “connect” with people who I walk by throughout the day (once a day) and use their characters to play games. It also says if I’ve met them before. I currently have two people who I’ve met twice, but it was one day later, so not super unusual, but still not likely. The biggest surprise was a kid who I’ve met three times. The first one was when I was in Nagoya, the second at Gamagori (same weekend, but about an hour away from each other, so the chances of both of us being at both places on the same day are, again, pretty rare. The third was this past weekend. I think there’s some Disney song about things like this, but I feel like I spent years trying to forget it (“Not that, anything but that.” -Scar).
At the time of writing this, I have exactly one month until I return to America, but only two weeks of classes. It’s kind of weird, but at the same time, I’ve largely stopped caring about the classes and want them to be over with. Once I return, I’ll have two days before our new host student comes, then about a week and a half until school starts. I’ve started a list of foods I want when I return (it largely involves pizza, maybe hamburgers, cookies, and pudding (I can eat most of the healthy foods here, I just choose not to)). I say maybe hamburgers because I eat a bunch of hamburg steak here, which is basically just hamburger meat with demi-glace and not steak in any way (it’s more ground up). In Japan, it’s considered proper ettiquette to finish every bit of food on your plate. I’ve seen some people take this to what I thought was an extreme (scraping some sauce of the plate and eating it), but then I remembered that’s how I eat pudding, so I understood. The good thing is that with things like this, I can pull the “I is stupid hakujin [white person]” so I don’t feel bad about my inability to do this most times (I sometimes can). (For those of you wondering, “gaijin” is just general foreigner, “hakujin” is white person, and “kokojin” is black person. I’m told that it’s closeness to “kokoa” [chocolate] is purely coincidence). Many of you don’t know because it’s not technically written anywhere, but the subtitle of the Gaijin Chronicles is My Life as a Minority. I have quite enjoyed playing the race card (though really just while talking to Maki). Often times I’m offered or given forks in addition to chopsticks, to which I usually declare “that’s racist” (even though I know it’s very nice of them). I’m not sure if it’s to prove some nonexistent point or just because I want to do what everyone else is doing, but I usually try using chopsticks anyway (except with french fries. I consider eating french fries with chopsticks or anything that’s not your hand (or mouth directly if you have a fry container) to be an act of Communism and will not stand for it!). I also insist that Japanese people will avoid sitting next to me and will only do so as a last resort, but I only have some proof.
Speaking of subways/trains/buses (implied, try to follow along), I have rarely been in a more crowded place than Japanese transportation. As someone who doesn’t even like when I’m touching people while sitting on a couch (I have a very big personal bubble), I’ve had to get used to my personal space under constant invasion. I think I’ve been more physically intimate with dozens of people on the trains, etc. than I have with anybody else (and they didn’t even buy me dinner first). There are handrails and loops hanging from the ceiling that you can grab, but when it get’s this crowded, you don’t need them. It’s not even possible to fall over (or move at all). I can see why “chikan” [sexual offenders as our book translates it] are such a problem. I took the opportunity to grab some girl’s butt. Unfortunately, she noticed and got really pissed. I don’t remember if I had to agree to pay for her dinner, but eventually she forgave me (until she reads this and remembers). Oh well, that’s what’s happened randomly throughout the weeks, let’s get to the weekend.
Friday
In a giant auditorium next to Nagoya castle, they had a big sumo tournament. It was an all day event (8-6), but the good ones were all later in the day (which worked well since I had school). When you get to that weight, it’s very similar to normal wrestlers. You have most who look like pure fat (American-style), and some that were super ripped (Gaston-style). Before each match, they would do a little warm-up “ceremony”, which was cool, except the warm-up would take five minutes and the match could only last 5 seconds (in the cases where one would charge and the other would simply dodge out of the way (matador-style). Other than that, it was pretty cool. To win, you must push your opponent out of the ring or get him on the ground. I’m pretty sure that in spite of them being sumos, because they’re Japanese, my but was still bigger than theirs. Obviously theirs had more fat, but mine sticks out much more. Maki compared my stomach to theirs as well… I recorded a bunch of the matches, and I spliced them together and put some music behind it. What song, you ask? You obviously don’t know me well enough (or just don’t really know the song), so here. I couldn’t find a sumo outfit at the souvenir shop, so I settled for a towel with the 2nd top sumo (I didn’t know it wasn’t the best) and a small sumo plush. I have no idea what to do with it, but it was too awesome (and cheap) not to get. The shirts were kind of expensive, so I didn’t get any of those. The atmosphere was just like any other sports event; there were people selling beer and popcorn, the crowd yelling the names of their favorite people, and a ton of fat guys without shirts on.
Saturday
For the first time in months, I got to sleep in! The fact that I consider 10:30 sleeping in now makes me sad, but it’s better than nothing. It was something matsuri in Nagoya, so there would be fireworks at the harbor that night. We decided to go to the aquarium since it was right next to where we would need to go. The big attraction that they were advertising was the new baby “shachi”. Since I know you can’t remember what that is, it’s that golden fish-thing on top of Nagoya castle (also the “que?” guy from Wind Waker). However, that’s the fictional version of the shachi. In reality, it’s a killer whale/orca. When you first enter the aquarium, there’s a giant tank in front with a few dolphins who repeatedly swim at the glass then turn at the last second. On the right were the whales with their new baby. There was a huge audience watching the whales do stuff, and at the front was a guy (he probably worked there, who knows) who was commanding the whales with telepathy (or hand movements, it was hard to tell). It was like a Kinect game (that XBox thing where the camera watches you). He made the whales do flips (underwater), swim back and forth, and make him a sandwich (maybe that last one was exaggerated, it was just toast). Most of the rest was like every other aquarium. There was a pretty sweet dolphin show that I recorded bits of (though it was kind of hard since I couldn’t always tell where they’d jump out of the water). They were selling what seemed to be soft pretzels, but after biting into it, I first thought that they were somehow under-cooked because there was some weird cream in it. I later learned it was cream cheese, which it’s good that I didn’t know that at the time… Like pretty much everything in Japan, the Aquarium had its own mascot. I think it was a seal or something, but it looked just like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. There was also a big penguin enclosure, which was pretty awesome. Again, when Maki saw the fatter emperor penguins, she pointed and said, “that’s you.” I don’t get no respect. 
Pro tip: As cool as seeing the penguins at feeding time is, you should probably leave soon after before *ahem* nature calls. The other problem with Japanese people is they don’t get any references (not that half of Americans do). There was a giant penguin in the gift shop, and I just thought “There’s that silly penguin again… it’s too damn hot for a penguin to be just walkin around here,” but I was forced to hold it in. That’s the real purpose of this blog, so that I can express these random thoughts and have at least one person know what the heck I’m talking about.
After the aquarium, we went around back where people were getting set up to watch the fireworks. It was right on the harbor, and so it was very similar to St. Joe’s fireworks. Once we got there, we realize the grass was really sharp and uncomfortable, so I had to run back to the gift shop and buy two towels (which weren’t cheap). The good thing about the fireworks being done by a huge Japanese city rather than a small American one is that they’re able to afford a lot more. There were fireworks shaped like smiley faces, hearts, stars (and horseshoes, clovers and blue moons… Never mind, those are the Lucky Charms shapes. Or they were, now it’s clover hats or something…), and even ones shaped like octopi and the head of the Stay Puft mascot. Because of where we were, the moon was right next to the fireworks, which was pretty sweet. In some areas it probably seemed like the moon was right in the center. However, we were also right in the direction that the (strong) wind was blowing, so it smelled strongly of fireworks (which I didn’t mind) and occasionally we’d see a black piece of cardboard float pass. In the finale, the smoke started to slightly obscure the fireworks, but it was still pretty sweet. On the way back, it was the most crowded place I’ve ever seen in real life ever. There was just a constant flow of thousands of people, it was like a zombie apocalypse. I took some video of that, too.
Sunday
Today we just ate lunch then went to see the new Ghibli movie, Kaze tachinu [The Wind Rises]. It was in full Japanese, but I was able to understand about 30% of what they said. There were only one or two times where I had almost no idea what was going on (though I mostly figured it out later). I haven’t seen Grave of the Fireflies, but other than that, this was definitely the saddest one so far. Part of me wants to see it when it comes out in English, though part of me doesn’t want to see it again since it was so depressing. For those of you who wanted to see it, you should definitely still see it, it was really good. It was another more realistic Ghibli movie, and definitely not one that’s also aimed at kids like most are. That night I had to correct a 400-character draft that I had turned in, then write the next 400 characters (about a page), though I ended up typing another 600-700. I then had to copy it from what I typed to the paper. I was already exhausted (depressing movies take a lot of energy out of me to stay in a good mood), and I was watching TV while writing (which doesn’t slow me down too much), so it took over 4 hours overall (which wasn’t good since I started a little after 9 (after I had finished the other homework and prepared for the vocab quiz we also had the next day)). Luckily the next day I was able to take a wonderful nap.
I wanted to get this update out on time, so I haven’t added some videos that I need to put together. Be sure to check back later (or just next week) for some more sumo videos, videos from the dolphin show and other aquarium attractions! If anyone has questions they’d like me to answer or any other things they want to hear more about, let me know.
Next weekend is my last weekend away (though after classes are done, I’ll be traveling for 2.5 weeks before coming back). I will return to Kyoto to finish what I started. What does that mean? Am I being vague on purpose again? Will Febreeze work as WD-40? How long will my room smell like this? What is a horse shoe? Are there any horse socks? Is anyone even listening to me? What movie is that from? Find out next time on The Gaijin Chronicles! Dah dahh dadahhh da dahh duuhhh.