More on Waseda students

In my previous post about Waseda University, I noted its lively extracurricular life. A. sends me this link to the "Waseda University Banzai Society", established in 1976, which is devoted to inventing new kinds of banzai (cheers of enthusiasm or triumph). So far, they have developed 768. You can see some their most popular banzais here.

And some of you lucky people, if you have the Quicktime plugin for your computer's video player, can view this society's rather curious antics in movie format here. All I can say is that I wish I'd thought of setting up "The Oxford University Tally-Ho Society". What larks we would have had! Although, of course, girlfriends would have been made unlikely.

Cliché day

This a view from the top of our road down over part of Hiratsuka city. If you look closely, you can see a bullet train rattling past. They whizz down there every three or four minutes. Below is a picture of the hills behind us. On a clear day, apparently, you can see Fuji from the spot I took this picture (off to the left of these hills, as you look at it) but, sadly, the clouds prevented a brace of Japanese clichés for this posting.


 

Amado

Another part of the morning routine is opening all the "amado". These are clattering great metal shutters that cover most of the windows of the house at night. To keep the burglars and typhoons out, I think.

Today, I will mostly be digging holes.


 

Oishinbo

I've picked a manga called "Oishinbo" as my reading after making a promise to myself not to read English books in my spare time here. From past experience, I know that they tend to spill over into time I should be spending studying Japanese.

Anyway, after a bit of feeling around, "Oishinbo" has been selected. It is about food. The basic plot is two young journalists working for the "Tozai" newspaper are assigned to search for the most delicious foods in the world. Each little story is a gourmet adventure. It quite makes your mouth water. It is aimed at adults and has been serialised for about 20 years, an indication of its popularity. I am reading the first volume and it is striking how this manga was campaigning against factory produced food and for fresh produce such a long time ago.

Two decades later, it is still difficult to get organic/free range stuff in Japanese supermarkets.

The big city

The rather stern looking founder of Waseda University, Okuma Shigenobu

On Saturday, A. had a study group to attend at Waseda University. I went along with her. While she was working, I nosed around Waseda, which is both a district of Tokyo and the home of the well known Uni. It is full of second hand bookshops and shabby cheap restaurants.

You wouldn't describe the university itself as beautiful, although it is pleasant enough, but it does have that feel of raw energy that some places have. Every railing is covered in posters for some club or society or other. One noticeboard was smothered in surreal photos taken by some over zealous student of his girlfriend. There was extracurricular activity everywhere. (A. says Waseda is famous for this.)

In one of the university's squares, I came across four students practicing a modern drama piece. When they were not in quiet and earnest discussion about their choreography, they were bellowing out their lines across the campus (video may take some time to load). It seemed to be the most normal thing in the world. Even the security guard helping a bus reverse into the square didn't bat an eyelid.

The rubbish may be rubbish but the baths are bathalicious

After an early morning spent at the waste disposal centre, the stressed housewife can retire to the "o-furo" for a nice relaxing soak.

The "o-furo", or bath, is a bit of an institution in Japan. In fact, bathing has been central to Japanese culture for hundreds of years. Back when Europeans preferred an earthier perfume, the Japanese sentou or public bath had a similar social function to the English pub: a meeting place where you could pass the soap to your neighbours, have a game of Japanese chess, or just a good chinwag with your mates. The Japanese phrase "hadaka no tsukiai" literally means naked companionship, but is an idiom for a friendship where nothing is hidden. In the period before modernisation (pre-1867), Tokyo had about 600 sentou within the city limits. In 1964, there were 23,000 nationwide. That has now declined to fewer than 10,000, mainly because of the increase in the number of o-furo in private homes. You tend to find older people if you visit a sentou nowadays, which is a bit sad. Like the decline of the traditional English local, I suppose.




What has survived, however, are the rituals of bathing. You must not enter the bath proper without first washing yourself thoroughly. This is a bit counter intuitive at first but the logic is clear if you are going to be sharing the water with others in a public setting. In Japanese homes, it is still usual for the water to be covered after use (with that white rolled-up thing on the right of the picture) and used by other members of the family. Anyway, you sit on the little stool (bottom left) and thoroughly soap yourself in the tiled area outside the bath. You then shower it all off (the whole room is tiled, like an enormous shower) and, clean as a cucumber, you plunge into your bath. The tub is deep. The water is piping hot. The washing is over. So, all you can do is relaaaaax.

For the true bathaholic, there is always the onsen to be visited, but that is another story.

The rubbish is rubbish

Before leaving England, I uttered various blasphemies against the Gods of Waste Disposal. I would like to repent.

The cause of my indignation in England was Cambridge Council's decision to reduce its collections from one a week to once a fortnight, using the excuse that this would encourage more recycling. They had a box in which you could put all your recycleable rubbish. In my ignorance, I said their changes had nothing to do with environmentalism and everything to do with cutting one of the only real services they provided to us.

I now live in waste disposal purgatory. As Dante would have it, "a school of love designed to correct the erroneous". Here we must sort our rubbish in our own homes into six different categories: plastic bottles, plastic with the recycleable "purakuru" mark, burnable rubbish, non-burnable rubbish, cardboard milk boxes and tin cans. There are many collections a week (Hooray!) but each collection is for only one of these types of rubbish (Oh dear!), which means that one must go out almost daily with a little bag of one of these rubbish categories to the communal collection site. There is no house collection of garbage. Oh no! It is all collected from a central area and this area is not the same for each category. It is up the hill for purakuru and placky bottles and non burnable rubbish but down the hill for burnable stuff. By the way, if anybody ever thought of cheating, all rubbish is put in see-through bags so the guilty can be easily identified. And, I nearly forgot, the rubbish can only be taken to the collection area between 7 am and 8.30 am on the morning it is to be collected. Not before. Not after.

A conspiracy theorist would have it that this little detail is a rather good way, given the long commute times into Tokyo, of ensuring that housewives and bigdopeyhouseforeignerhusbands must stay at home instead of getting jobs. That of course is a conspiracy theory and not fair but when you are in Waste Disposal Purgatory your mind tends to wander and entertain the strangest imaginings.

Hanko

I've got my "hanko" back! A hanko is a small, three inch high seal which everybody here uses for signing official documents and suchlike. Makes one feel very medieval! I used to have one during my last sojourn in Japan but had to give it in to my office when I left. I asked for the same design on this one, which is my first name carved in the English alphabet in a swirly, slightly Sixties-ish font. I remember being very pleased with it when I first stepped foot on these shores. I used to put it on the inside cover of all my books. Very adolescent of me. Its reappearance is a blast from the past.

Shimamura Stores

Yesterday, G. and I went on a big expedition over the hill behind our house to Shimamura Stores, the local supermarket. I've already gone in one notch on my belt and I think a few more trips to Shimamura's should get me quite trim. I was intrigued by the selection of cocoas on offer. Not only does Mr Shimamura have your ordinary bog standard drinking chocolates but he has "sesame seed cocoa" (centre) and "black soya bean cocoa" (left, as you look at it). A. tells me it is considered healthy to take sesame and soya and suchlike in this form as a non-meat protein supplement. Must try it. Suppose Ovaltine or Horlicks might strike a foreigner as strange in the UK.

Not sure I'm getting...

...the full housewife experience. This was today's food parcel, which just arrived mysteriously on the doorstep. Who is my benefactor?

Japanese mothers' day

Today was mothers' day here. We visited the graves of A's grandmums and great grandmums. In total, we went to three different graveyards. This one, the graveyard of A's mum's family was particularly beautiful. I didn't feel it was very respectful to go snapping loads of photographs but it was in a tree covered little valley. It was like visiting graves anywhere, plenty of weeding and flower arranging to be done. You also pour water on the gravestones themselves, which was new: a kind of ceremonial cleaning, I think.

HQ

A few pictures of our house. It is in one of the suburbs of Hiratsuka, not really a walkable distance to the centre but there is a supermarket just over the hill and a convenience store a five minute walk away. In the medium term, a car is really going to be essential but it is not too bad at the moment just pottering around the locality.

The house is lovely. There is a small garden which hopefully we can make something of and enough room for the three of us to live. Rather importantly, there is a substantial room which are going to use as a joint study. The desk is arriving on the 9th!


The lounge 


The kitchen 


G's bedroom, which we are using too at the moment 


The study 


The Japanese room, the other bedroom 


George's playroom 


From the kitchen down the corridor (playroom on the first left, lounge second, tatami room third, my bedroom straight ahead, front door right at the end of the corridor) 

A new start

Following my move to Japan, my previously rather nerdish interest in blogging suddenly has a raison d'etre! I think it may be a good way of giving some visuals on how life is over here without bombarding people's email inboxes with reems of babble and blockbusting images. I can send images and text directly to the blog from my mobile so I should be able to do a little bit of a running commentary on my existence here. We shall see whether it works.