Kasanomaru

Akainomaru
Originally uploaded by Crystal Skull.

The title is a play on Hinomaru, the name of the Japanese flag, which means circle of the sun. Kasanomaru is circle of the umbrella.
It belongs to a Japanese girl who sat meditating on this rock for about an hour after the previous day's waves had disappeared.

Dusk in Hogi

Dusk in Hogi
Originally uploaded by Crystal Skull.

Hogi beach, home to the San-In beach party in Tottori.

Tottori

Last weekend I traversed Western Japan from the Southern coastline, where I live, to the Northern one, which separates the prefecture known as Tottori from the Sea of Japan. The reason: sun, sea, sand, surf and psytrance. The long journey was necessary because the few of the aforementioned items that can be found in Okayama are of poor quality, mainly thanks to the Kurashiki industrial zone which pours crap into the sea and air in such vast quantities that both are frequently a dismal shade of yellowy grey. The Seto, being an inland sea, is both a pollution trap and flat as a pond.

Thank heaven for the San-In Beach Party! Tottori is blessed with a clean ocean that actually moves! There are people there who allow visitors to take advantage of this fact (they lend their surfboards)! There are people there that put on outdoor parties and actually know what to do and play at them!

After a series of conflicting weather reports, the weekend turned out to be almost entirely gloriously sunny. The air was clear and so was the sea. Did I mention that the sea was clean? Bliss. I even had to dodge ocean wildlife while I was swimming! (not the five ton toothed kind you find in Cape Town, thank goodness). I haven't had an early morning outdoor stomp since Thailand, and that didn't count because it was inamongst the Eurotrash and their trash on an overexploited tourist beach. I have seen lone Japanese people at trance parties before in Cape Town, but at this party I finally experienced being the minority, jamming with a bunch of crazy and free-spirited Oriental hippies.

I'll still be here when it comes around next year. I have only two scheduled events for 2007 so far. One is the San-In beach party and the other is returning to Cape Town where the things I had to travel so far for here are there in abundance!

K.O. in Kobe

K.O. in Kobe
Originally uploaded by Crystal Skull.

A JET participant suffering from the effects of the 2006 Recontracting Conference.

Beam Me Up

Beam Me Up
Originally uploaded by Crystal Skull.

The cavernous lobby of the Kobe Portopia, host to the 2006 JET Programme Recontracting Conference

Kobe

The administrators of the JET Programme love hosting conferences. It means they get to book out large luxurious hotels and fill them with hundreds of unpredictable young foreigners. The most recent one I attended was in Kobe, the city of the '95 earthquake fame, at the grandiose Portopia hotel. The name is apparently an amalgam of 'Port' and 'utopia', two words which, I'm sure you'll agree, somehow don't really go together all that well. The occasion was the West Japan JET Programme 2006 Recontracting Conference, a gathering of young internationalists who have decided to sign their lives away to the Japanese government for another year. Nobody really remembers what it was about. There was an opening ceremony, a few flashy buffets, some speeches and a few seminars that felt important at the time. The real memories are from the evenings, when we decended on Sannomia, Kobe's party district. Clubs and bars threw their doors open as wide as possible in anticipation of the influx of people who are generally understood to have a much better alcohol tolerance than their usual clientele. Needless to say, much was consumed and much madness ensued.

Ja-chan and I decided to go for the budjet option of attending the clubs but only buying booze at the much cheaper convenience stores dotted around the district. By the end of the second night, many had cottoned on to the idea and the perplexed locals carefully avoided the worrisome looking little crowds of drunk foreigners that were gathering on the streetcorners. I only saw one person get arrested, but luckily for the organizers, it wasn't a conference participant.

Kobe is much more vibey than Okayama and a lot more chilled than Osaka or Tokyo. Nestled between The mountains and the sea in the Kansai area, it feels more like an overdeveloped holiday resort than a city. Nearly every view includes either greenery or water, which is much better for the soul than the neverending urban vistas of Tokyo. Ja-chan noted that the girls are prettier and less snooty than in Okayama. I think he's right. He was able to strike up several conversations with locals on the street. We watched a fully amplified three piece band (guitar, bass, drums) playing classic covers on the sidewalk while passers by stopped for a little jive. If that happened in Okayama, everyone would probably be arrested!

Uncle Sam and the Kids of Japan

Uncle Sam and the Kids of Japan
Originally uploaded by Crystal Skull.

Some of my students fooling around in the face of Death.

Okinawa

Every year, the third graders at my school go on what they call 'Graduation Trip' which is a bit of a misnomer because they'll only graduate next year. Anyway, the destination is Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture: a group of pretty subtropical islands ridden with U.S. airbases and their attendant squadrons of airborne pollution factories and legions of braindead servicemen. Graduation Trip is quite an undertaking. You can imagine the logistics of moving a hundred and eighty Japanese teenagers, many of whom have never even left Okayama, let alone been in an aeroplane, though airports and hotel check-ins and the like. Feeding them and keeping them out of trouble is another story. Luckily, the third graders are generally well behaved. Its another year before the little gangsters in second grade will get the opportunity to go on this trip, and I think I'll politely decline to come along. In fact, the biggest trouble causer was probably yours truly, the token gaijin, who repeatedly set off airport security alarms, got lost at Ryuku castle, and scared a bunch of Americans at the Starbucks on the International Street ("Do you think he's a spook?" "I donno man, lets get outta here!").

We visited the cave that was used as a hospital during the bloody Battle of Okinawa (a.k.a. the storm of steel) in WW2 and learned how schoolgirls were drafted into taking care of the multitudes of wounded soldiers with little or no medical training and inadequate equipment. I visited the only war memorial I've ever seen where soldiers from both sides are honoured in the same place. For all their NIMBY environmental destruction and previous military and present economic imperialist compulsions, the Japanese are pretty good at making Peace a priority, or at least appearing to do so (though I do wonder how on Earth sending troops to Iraq constitutes 'self defence'). After a pretty heavy day of travelling and learning about war atrocities, we checked into the hotel on the beach, had supper. listened to an emotional speech by a woman who was one of the schoolgirls in the hospital cave. Afterwards, the teachers convened for a meeting/midnight buffet feast in a private dining room with silver cutlery and chandeliers and stuff. I felt like some sort of upper-class conspirator, though I couldn't really understand what anyone was saying. We got to bed at 2am, a full 22 hours after waking up; slept for a bit, then got up at 6 for a full day of marine sports, including sunorkeruringu (snorkelling); glass-bottomed boat trips, doragon borto (riding a big inflatable banana thing towed behind a jetski - the highlight for most kids); and baray (beach volleyball). My headmaster kindly paid for me to go suidosukiisha-suru (wakeboarding, which was probably the highlight for me). The coral reefs looked a bit battered, but there was no shortage of freaky looking tropical fish eager to munch the zero-nutrient fish food that the tour operators provided. They got so close to the boat that Akita-kun managed to catch one with his bare hands. The headmaster had offered a 300 yen reward for anyone who caught a fish, bu the boat driver told him to throw it back before he could claim his prize.

After playing in the sea, we went to the Ryuku historical village. The Ryuku were the peaceful indigenous inhabitants of Okinawa who got rich through trade with China for many centuries before they were adopted for Japan by Kyushu warlords about a thousand years ago. We saw many Sheesa, stone guardians that look like rabid dogs on nitrous oxide. Okinawa is famous for Sheesa; they come in many forms and shapes from different periods in history, and their main function is to scare away evil spirits (or maybe make them laugh so hard they couldn't possess anyone). Ryuku castle was impressive, and it was special being allowed into the inner courtyard, and then the inner inner courtyard, and then the inner inner etc and so on for about eight times to the inner sanctum where we had to take our shoes off and were allowed a glimpse of (a replica of) the throne of the Ryuku Kingdom.

On the last day, Kamochu third graders were let loose in Naha, the capital city. The teachers skulked away to drink beer, which we had to hide under the table when some of the students found out where we were. Anti-American sentiment was understandably quite visible on the International Street in Naha, though playfully expressed with animatronic larger than life statues of suicidal Uncle Sams, Uncle Sam skeleton demons, hot-dogs about to eat themselves (you'll understand when you see the photo); T-shirts asking for their sky back and (USA) stencilled under STOP signs.
We went to the top of a building overlooking a US airbase and watched fighter jets taking off one after another on and on until we got bored of all the noise and wondering where the hell they wer all going (my best guess is nowhere).

After waiting for all the fighter jets to get off the civilian runway, our plane eventually took off for Horoshima, an hour and a half away over the South China Sea.
Japanese domestic planes have a video camera in the nose so you can see where you are going, and as we came in to land I realised that I knew a little too much about runway lights for my peace of mind, and our 10m/s rate of descent was a little too much information on the screen. Our approach was too fast and too high and there was a moment when I thought 'Oh well at least I'll die having seen Okinawa' but the aircraft stayed in one piece when it dropped out of the sky and bounced onto the runway, and I realised that I was still alive amidst the cacophony of screaming teenage scoolgirls, who then broke into applause for no apparent reason.
It was a fun three days, and if the second graders somehow learn some manners, I might just join them next year.