2004-09-27

Str8 outta Compton

There are two updates at once this time because I'm a dork who typed out something wayyyyyy back on the 15th of September but promptly forgot to post it to the website until now. In the meantime, the NFL season is well underway, the Lions are (surprisingly) 2-1 DESPITE losing one of their good young WRs.

Well, we're almost done now with the summer session--one week to go. It's been going okay, although some of the students have an unfortunate tendency to sleep through classes, a very unfortunate development in an "intensive" course. I guess it should come as no surprise given the tendencies of some of the students during the regular school year. But I'm still wondering if some of them will pass, or if this whole summer thing will prove to be a complete waste of time.

The new AVS (proper nouveaux term for 'student missionary'--don't know what AVS actually stands for) arrived about a week and a half ago. Her name is Sarah and she's from Colorado, but has traveled all over the place (now at Union College in Nebraska, but has studied at Andrews, Southern, Southwestern, Sagunto in Spain and whatever the SDA college in Argentina is called). I think she's also worked at a summer camp in Florida and in fact knows the daughter of one of the professors here. I guess you would pick up a lot of contacts if you moved around as much as she has.

Anyway, she's gotten a baptism by fire into Japanese culture. Last week, which would be just after she arrived, there were some big ol' festivals all over the place around here. We went to one at a coastal town called Ohara, about a 30 minute drive from here. This festival is interesting because they get a dozen or so people around these not-so-small portable shrines, pick them up, carry them around the town and then CHARGE into the ocean carrying these shrines. There must have been at least 10 of these shrines, and each team was wearing different colored belts and headbands. I understand this festival is called the "hadaka" festival, which is the Japanese word for "naked" that even a lummox like me can recognize. I got really worried when I first heard that, but it turns out that they wear these weird white wrap-around things that end up looking like loincloths combined with waders. I guess a long time ago, they did this with a lot less in the way of clothing but for whatever reason now they've sold out and gotten all modest and stuff. Not that I'm exactly *complaining*--the shrines are quite large and heavy and even the wooden boards they use to carry the things look like they'd crush your legs under them like grapes if they fell on you. So of course, most of the people carrying these shrines are gonna be big(gish), burly(ish) guys and heck yeah it'd be unpleasant if they were running into the ocean naked as the day they were born. There were a few women/girls and a few young boys but they must have been special in some way because there weren't very many of them and it didn't look like they were doing much of the heavy lifting or carrying.

Two things stood out in my mind from the festival as being so perfectly goofy. First of all, the people carrying the shrine things would suddenly realize that just CARRYING the shrines was boring so they'd suddenly start throwing these things into the air. I was waiting for one of these things to come crashing down on some drunk guy's shoulder and tear his arm off but that never happened. Then at the end of the festival the greatest thing EVER took place. The crowd was held back from the water by these ropes and a few police officers were patrolling around. I don't know why we couldn't go down to the water--it was kinda choppy so maybe they were thinking some little kid or big fat drunk dude would fall in and drown or something. Anyway, people in the crowd weren't too happy about it--these older guys kept yelling stuff at the police. SO HARDCORE I tell you. Like old, pudgy Asian versions of N.W.A. except instead of "F Tha Police" it was like "I am somewhat belligerent at you, policeman-san" but hey, you take what you can get, huh. Well, at the very end of the shrine-carrying festivities some of these people just decided "screw it, we've come all this way and we're getting in that water IF IT KILLS US" and they walked under the ropes to the ocean. So of course, the whole crowd of people get the idea "why didn't we just do that earlier" and push towards the ocean, while the seven or eight police officers try and get everyone back behind the ropes but It Ain't Happening, Gumshoe. We didn't join in because we figured (well, the white folks figured, I would have just blended in with the rest of the lemmings) that the police might get frustrated and just start whacking foreigners. Anyway, the shrine fun was done, so we just left.

YES. Come to Japan during the summer/fall seasons and experience the goodness of goofy festivals. A gazillion thumbs up from me.