Hello all!

I guess there was an earthquake in Japan, based on Yahoo! news and Sam’s concerned email from yesterday. No danger here, though; Matsue didn’t shake, even a little bit. And I’m far enough from the sea not to worry much about tsunamis. So if you were wondering, please don’t worry.

I’m feeling almost back to normal after my most recent bout with the flu, enough to go “running” yesterday (which means I did a little bit of running and a lot of walking). The temperature has been slowly creeping up in fits and starts, but my days off were lovely. Yesterday morning, when I went out for my run, it looked like it might rain, but the air was mild and the mountains in the north had lost their ghostly haze. By the afternoon, it was warm enough for light sweaters (and t-shirts for some!) and today was windy but gorgeous!

The AEON office has been abuzz with activity this past week. Lots of prospective students visited and spent hours closeted with Ryoko-san and Nozu-san, the branch manager and her assistant. I didn’t conduct any full interviews, but I stuck my head into the interview room for some “Hello time!” and to my surprise had some very enjoyable conversations with some of the people interested in studying with us. One woman of note was Mari, a high-level student about my age who wants to be a professional painter; she does abstract oil painting. We ended up talking about Japanese art in the nineteenth century and Ryoko had to interrupt us to get Mari’s paperwork done.

We are also finishing the last chapters of the textbooks and beginning a new teaching cycle in the first week of April, which coincides with the new term beginning at Shimane University and the end of year shuffle of most businesses in Japan, when company employees are shifted and often moved to different branches in new cities (this is what happened to Sato-san, the main teacher of my aikido class; he got transferred to Nagoya). So, many of our students are finishing their studies at AEON or moving to a higher-level class. I will have a new schedule as of next week. I’m losing Voyage, my dreaded first-level conversation class. Taeko, the new teacher, will take it on instead. But I’m losing some students I’ve grown very fond of. Tomoyo, an adorable young university student, gave me a handmade farewell card with a picture of Snoopy and farewell words in brightly coloured marker. I kind of got a lump in my throat reading it. And Yui is another young woman who just graduated on Friday and is moving to another town to teach. She’s a little timid, and has been sick for weeks, so she always comes to class coughing and sniffing, but when she is happy she has the most brilliant smile. I’ll miss her.

Our office is awash in food, as it is a tradition for departing students to give gifts, called omiyage, to their teachers. Maple cookies, tiny individually wrapped pound cakes, Japanese sweets, fruitcake, chocolates; all are piled on top of the cupboard above the office computer for casual snacking. Our office runs on sweets anyway; most of us stockpile candy to give us cheap energy when it comes to teaching three or more classes in a row. Melanie complained that all of the food floating around the office is one of the main reasons she didn’t lose any weight while she’s been in Japan.

I taught Taeko “How’s she goin’, b’y?’ as a greeting last week, and she’s pretty tickled by it, using it frequently to greet me. She taught me a Czech greeting in return (she learned her nearly perfect English in Prague, of all places), but I promptly forgot it. She is starting to lose her deer-in-the-headlights look and adjust to teaching real students.

I had a mid-week holiday on the 21^st (Vernal Equinox Day), so I slept late, cleaned my apartment, and had lunch with Seigi. We went to an Italian restaurant and ordered the cabbage and tuna pizza. I was dubious, but it was delicious, loaded with fresh pesto and thin strips of cabbage. The crust was light and thin, like pita bread, but still hot and soft. The Japanese take their food really seriously. Then we went across the street to Imai bookstore, which had a small English section! It had some classics, some translations of Japanese authors, and Harry Potter (of course). I got a bilingual book of Japanese trivia with the aim of improving my Japanese reading, and a little book called “70 Japanese Gestures” [Did you know, for example, that putting your pointer finger and thumb together to form a circle (the classic Western “A-OK”) means you want to buy condoms if you do it in a pharmacy? Also, to grab your earlobes means you’ve just touched something hot and burned yourself.] I’ve had to take the information I’ve read in the trivia book with a grain of salt; the author seems a little dogmatic, and his research seems pretty dodgy.

My reading of Japanese katakana is still painfully slow, but improving. By the way, my name broken into katakana syllables is SA-RA BU-RE-N-KU-HO-N, which, if said fast enough, sounds about right. I practice by reading menus in cafes; English words are used everywhere and just require patience and imagination to puzzle out (eg. KU-RU-BU-HO-SU = Clubhouse sandwich, KO-HI = coffee, HA-MU = ham, BE-KO-N = bacon). I can recognize a handful of kanji, too, but I don’t know how to say them all.

I’m looking ahead to my holidays and future days off, trying to decide where to go and what to see. The most likely day trip or overnight trip in the near future (April or May) is to Hiroshima, which is about three hours away by bus. I’d like to visit the Peace Memorial Museum and the A-Bomb Dome, see Hiroshima Castle and visit Miyajima Shrine near the city, which stands on the water and is supposed to be stunningly beautiful. Hiroshima is also known for shopping in a country of shopping fanatics (practically all of my students, male and female, are avid shoppers). Hiroshima is, for obvious reasons, a very modern city, but people tell me it’s lovely.

Further down the line, when I’ve saved some more money, I want to go to Kyoto, which is the cultural centre of Japan. It is supposed to be very beautiful there, with lots of preserved older buildings, art and theatre. When Melanie’s friend Fiona was here, she said she got dressed as a maiko (an apprentice geisha) while she was there. It took about two hours for the transformation. I would love to do that! I’d like to go to Tokyo, too, just for the experience, but it’s not a priority on my list. There is one place I’d be tickled to go if I went to Tokyo. The ninja museum near Tokyo sounds like a blast! You can explore a ninja home with all the secret traps and hidey-holes, learn about the history of one of the most famous ninja schools, see a demonstration and throw some deadly shuriken (under close supervision, of course). It sounds like fun.

Thanks to the people who have sent postcards or letters to my students and me so far. I’ve got postcards from my mother and from my friends Lee J. and Mauralea (who sent the classic “three old men and a cod” postcard – I laughed when I saw it), and a letter from Mum’s friend Kathy, complete with pix of her pets and a map of Nova Scotia that I will make good use of. I also got an email postcard from Danny Costello, an old classmate from high school, who is in Korea right now (small world).

Thanks to Sam, too. I got the first of two packages from her, with some white chocolate from Just Us! (yum…my favourite), some magazines, a beautiful scarf and a memento from one of our old role-playing games (a little die-cast figure of my character Justine, which I had believed was long-lost).

Yesterday, after my run, I met up with my friend Seiji and we went for a light lunch and coffee at a café on the shore of Lake Shinji. We sat at the window and I enjoyed the warm sun beating down as I looked out at the water. Then we went to the park around Matsue Castle. It is almost the season for cherry-blossom viewing (hanami), a traditional spring entertainment for all of Japan. Cherry blossoms, or sakura, have an almost religious significance in Japan, and it is traditional for people to go to places with beautiful cherry blossoms, bringing picnics and (lots of) beer, and spend the afternoons eating and drinking under the snowy white blossoms. Matsue Castle is surrounded by cherry trees, and the warm weather this week has heralded the beginnings of hanami season. Tents had been set up just inside the moat, and vendors were selling food (fried squid on a stick, anybody?), plants, children’s toys and masks and all sorts of things. They will be here for the next three weeks, all through cherry-blossom viewing season, and the park will be very crowded. Seiji said one year he came to the park early in the morning and slept all day on the blanket to save a spot for his friends. We wandered through the park; I kept looking up to watch the herons swooping majestically through the air, bearing sticks and grasses to build nests. They are huge birds, moving in almost slow motion over the treetops. We ran into Emi, a Scottish woman who is a friend of Seiji’s, and Emi’s daughter Sarah, a cute two-year-old with blonde ringlets tucked under a purple knit cap, who overcame her initial shyness to bring us handfuls of moss and leaves she had collected. Emi has been in Japan for about a dozen years, and is married to a Japanese man (another Seiji), but retains a lovely Scottish accent. We sat on the ground and talked for about half an hour while little Sarah conducted her explorations around us with a serious, intent look on her face. I learned some more Japanese words: happa = leaf, kusa = grass/weeds, koke = moss, tsubaki = camellia. It began to get cooler and Emi left with Sarah. I wanted a beer, so Seiji and I went to an izakaya, a place that sells lots of small dishes with cheap beer. I left it to Seiji to order, and soon the kneeling waiter placed many small plates in front of us. (It’s still strange to see wait staff kneel on the floor to take an order, even in some coffee shops; I can’t imagine coffee-slingers at home taking this subservient position. Quite the opposite, in fact.) We got salmon sashimi, served with wasabi, lemon and delicate strands of daikon, a delicious white radish, and carrot. Also a roasted wheel of daikon served with a sauce of grated daikon and hot mustard. Also shrimp in a tangy tomato-cheese sauce. And an Italian dish like sashimi, served with black olives on a bed of greens. And fried lotus root stuffed with a savoury sausage. And baby bamboo and wild greens tempura with a dipping sauce. It was a lot of food, washed down with a draft beer. Delicious.

Seiji had to open up Kaya, so we wandered that way and I watched music videos while he set up. It was a dead quiet Sunday night. We chatted for a while before I headed home across the bridge.

The weather continued beautiful today, while I did my laundry, grocery shopping and banking. I aired out my blankets and futon on my balcony, and now it smells fresh and sunshiny. Seiji called to say a famous temple, Sen-Ju’in, had a 200-year-old cherry tree that had come into bloom overnight (this kind of thing is reported on the radio all though cherry-blossom season, as announcers tell people the best places to go to see blossoms). So we went to the temple, high on a hill in view of the castle with a winding road climbing up to it. Walking through an old section of town with long-established sake shops and teahouses, we passed a very old soy sauce factory as we went, and I could smell the sweetish odor of fermentation as we walked by.

Sen-Ju’In is roughly translated as “the temple of the thousand-armed Buddha”, and there were many statues and stone markers carved with kanji along the road. As we reached the top, we stood under the famous cherry tree and the long tendrils of cherry blossoms hung around us like pale pink curtains. The limbs of the ancient tree are supported by crutches of wood, forming a canopy. A small tea house and several temple buildings stood at the top. Apparently, Buddhist priests from Shimane Prefecture have to visit eighty-eight places of religious importance; this temple is one of them. There were many people there, viewing the tree and sitting under its branches. A Buddhist priest in navy blue robes told us about the temple, but I didn’t catch a lot of it. We also visited the graveyard next to the temple; the burial ground of the apparently prolific Adachi family. It was well-maintained, with lots of fresh-cut flowers and vessels of water before the tombs. See the pictures I posted today at:

www.dangerblenkhorn.spaces.live.com

So that’s my week. A little more interesting now that I’m feeling healthier. I'm missing theatre (both doing and seeing) a lot right now. I also want to meet more people, especially girls, to hang out with. I miss girl talk a lot.

Let me know how you are doing; I’m always interested. Take care.

Love,

Sarah