Naked Woman, Naked Man, Where Did You Get That Nice Suntan?

Okay, first I want to say thank you to everyone who visits my blog. I have really been trying to step up the appearance and interface and even made some small design changes since yesterday, so I hope there are a few people out there enjoying my efforts.

It's like "Thanks", with a Jamaican accent.

And I want to tell you that I've started using this RSS business I always see on other people's blogs and websites, and I really like it. Specifically, I am using "Google Reader" because I figure they already have so much of my private info, I might as well just let them know what I read online too. Anywho, it is a really cool and easy way to keep up with news, and people's updates to their statuses and blogs. Like Twitter for people who can decide for themselves whether they'd like to commit to more than 140 characters worth of input. It is also a nice way to bypass filters on your work computer if they block "blog sites" like mine does. >=D
You can now, also subscribe to my blog on the right hand side of the page. Or if you have your own "blogger/blogspot" than you can just "follow" me. The numbers aren't important, but keeping people (who want to be) informed on my life is very important.

One selfish request I have is that you vote on my poll honestly (if you already did ↑TANKS again!) with whatever knowledge you have of my ability and personality. You guys are my lifeline, and I am "polling the audience" before my "Final Ansa'".

Cerebral Side Rant OVER.

Also, please let me know what you think of my writing, or the content, or improvements, or requests for what you'd like to hear more about. I've added a bunch of simple choices you can choose from to the bottom of every post, or you can comment in detail. Because my favorite hobby is finding new challenges and life experiences, maybe you've already tried something you can recommend to me and I will get back to you with a post on my experience once I've picked up your gauntlet. You can do that here, or by email, or on fb, but I would like to know what you like and don't like or just your reaction to reading these entries. It matters to me.

So... anyone recognize the song I stole my entry title from? It's by a little band called "The Specials". And I thought of it because of the words "NAKED MAN".

Yes, after 5 years in Hiroshima, I finally went to the 裸祭り or "Naked Festival". This could also easily qualify as "Crazy Japanese Stuff", although if you're familiar with Shinto beliefs it actually all made plenty of sense. Still, it was that typical half-ceremony/half-competition that you commonly see in Shinto Festivals that purposely creates chaos for the joy of spectators and entertainment of the gods. So I feel "purposely insane" is an accurate description.
So I hopped a Hiroshima AJET bus to Okayama Saturday afternoon, Feb. 19th. and started drinking. The reasons for drinking were two-fold. One, I'm surrounded by other JETs drinking, on a chartered bus, so what better time to drink? And two, I knew by the time we reached the temple in the evening, the majority of the Japanese people there would already be drunk. So four drinks and several hours in, we were quite late getting there, probably because of traffic, and I was feeling drunk and a little bored, so when we pulled into a rest stop I decided to strip down to the cheap fundoshi (loincloth) I had bought last Halloween as a goof with my friend and run a lap around the parking lot. Brace yourselves; it looked like this:

But at least I was recycling!

There was a big tour bus of old Japanese people who had a good laugh and a few even applauded my scantly clad jog in the cold night air. Getting back on the bus our driver said "You're early! We haven't gotten there yet!" and laughed.
Looking back it was the closest thing I've ever done to streaking, but I wasn't really worried because Japanese people are much less sensitive to nudity as communal baths, hot springs, and the festival we headed toward had already made abundantly clear.
Keep in mind, at this point, I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to participate in the festival itself because I needed to have a team of at least 4 people and I was the only one on our bus even remotely interested, so I reasoned this was my insurance that at least I could say I wasn't too shy, even if the festival didn't work out.

Back, dressed, and on the bus to Okayama, the traffic made us later still and i was sobering up, which always makes me feel tired. By the time we got to the shrine, I wasn't really feeling "in the mood" to get naked in the cold. We walked around the grounds and went up to the alter and prayed.

There were TONS of cops there!

No Flash

Flash

Every once in awhile groups of "naked" dudes would appear running around in their fundoshi. Why and from where to where were they running? It was seemingly arbitrary.

This group was carrying the winner's of the "naked boy" portion. Calm down, you can see they aren't really naked.

I lost my group in the crowds and while I ate a doner kebab (my favorite Euro-food; for whatever reason you can always find at a Japanese matsuri (festival),

This sign advertises Turkish cuisine as one of the world's "Top 3"

 
I called some other friends who i knew would be there that evening. Finally getting a hold of one he said, "Come to the changing room, you can hold my shit for me". Okay, I thought, why not? I started asking around and as I got closer and closer to the changing room I began to think, "Why would I sit on the sidelines and hold stuff for someone else doing it?!? No, I want to be a part of this!!"So when I found the place and was looking for him, i ran into more friends and said "Hey, um, can I be on your team?" to which they responded "HELL YEAH!" and it was all good times from there! I bought my fundoshi and tabi (split-toe shoes) for 1000 yen (12USD) and paid another 1000 for the participation fee, and before I knew it an old Japanese man was wrapping me in the longest piece of cloth I'd ever seen, and friends were handing me large bottles of sake!

Haha John, thanks for that.

Not so bad yeah? You can't see it, but my but is hanging out with a thick white cloth covering my crack like a Kurosawa samurai film! The funny thing is, I wasn't the least bit embarrassed, despite my bare ass!

No pictures after that point, sadly. I left my pockets in my clothing and we commenced running laps around the temple like the groups of men we'd seen before. We probably shouted "Washoi, Washoi!" a phrase meant to to liven up our spirits and the atmosphere of the matsuri. We fell into a huge line of fundoshi-clad men, all still shouting. as we approached the temple. Even inside the temple, we were locked in on a path of follow-the-leader and followed them onto a detour into a small and ancient pool of waist deep water which we then sloshed and splashed around in. Keep in mind, this is February and after 9PM, so the water was freezing!
The procession continued to a Buddhist temple on the same grounds of as the Shinto shrine (this is common for Japan where they don't feel the need to choose just one religion), and broke into single file to pray at the alter before reforming and running up into the main shrine's covered (for lack of a better word) porch! It was so strange because less than an hour before I had been to all these same places, fully dressed and snapping photos: look!

Here's the Temple pre-being full of naked men and spectators!

This is the "patio" area's second floor.

But the patio area was now jammed in tight with similarly naked men, and it took only a few minutes of being jammed together to make us dream of that cold pool of water we so foolishly hurried through before! After 40 minutes of feeling like we were at the front of a U2 concert, the waves of people pushing us to and fro, and watching out sweat evaporate and rise visibly to the second floor, they turned off all the lights and under a strobe of photographers flashes, everyone tried frantically to grab the 神木, basically many sticks like what you saw young boy carrying in the photo of "naked men" above. If your group secures one and makes it out of the temple grounds, you win a large sum of cash! But that alone would not entertain anyone, let alone GODS, so being an all-male festival, anyone still within the grounds is allowed to try and take the sticks from you by any means necessary! So this is what it looked like when the sticks were thrown out:

That's me in the red circle!

In the end, I never even SAW a stick, only swarms of people already fighting over them. So once things died down, I changed back into my normal clothing, said good night to the friends I had met there, and walked back to the bus with my Hiroshima crew, stopping to buy a few celebratory drinks for the long bus ride home. I got home at 3 AM with work the next day, so my head crashed hard onto my pillow and I slept blissfully unaware, that as awesome a week I had just experienced, the next week (this last week, as I type this) would be. I really want to tell you about that now, but I will save it til my next post...

Rated G for the Masses

Here is a preview (two months early!) of the article I just wrote for the Hiroshima International Center's quarterly newsletter. That's right! I'm leakin' ME! Because the publication is made using our tax yennies, it has to be tame, but I still mean everything I wrote, even if it comes off as sappy. Enjoy!

I LOVE EXCHANGE        国際交流最高！－ 1月末行われた雪生活体験の楽しい一日について

By Greg Beck

Working at the Hiroshima International Center for the three years has truly been a blessing. As the resident English translator it can be hard. With a lot of last minute translation requests, long hours, and a constantly changing schedule it is impossible to commit to anything in my “free time”, because my free time is different every week! But, would I trade my experience for a “normal” Monday – Friday 9am to 5pm job? NO!

This photo won't be in the article, but apparently some Chinese people are equally clueless about what they wear!

Old dudes chillin' with hot sake

Most recently, I had the honor of working at the Life in the Snow Experience event for my third consecutive year. Even though I always have a wonderful time working at every exchange event, this was quite possibly the best event I have ever experienced! Here is what happened:

After driving two hours into the snowy north of Mizokuchi, located in Kita-hiroshima Town, we arrived at the Miwa-higashi Culture Center with participants from all over the world chatting excitedly in at least eight different languages. Outside more than one meter of beautiful, pure snow, had fallen on a hill with big, black inter-tubes, waiting to be used as sleds. After the opening ceremony inside, we split into two groups. A quarter of the participants went to the kitchen to make dishes from their home countries to share at lunch. Everyone else went outside to play in the snow. Also outside, some of the senior citizens had set up around the same rusty wood stove they do every year, heating sake in freshly cut, hollowed-out bamboo, and pouring the hot sake for anyone nearby into more fresh-cut, bamboo cups. This year however, they had outdone themselves, passing out fresh-stewed wild boar ribs for everyone to snack on in the hours before lunch.

That's one of my bosses with sake and wild boar ribs

Our participants from 15 countries went wild playing in the snow, and sliding down the hill. This year an quiet old gentleman had made his own sled out of skis, and everyone had a turn on it. “Can two people sit on it?” asked two girls, “Yes, two people is best”, he said sitting down and beckoning the closest one to ride with him, completely oblivious to the thought they may have wanted to go together!

Seriously...HILARIOUS!

Time passed quickly and at noon we all went inside for lunch and some amazing performances. The spread of Japanese food was amazing, with Indian curry, Chinese shrimp in chili sauce, Vietnamese fried spring rolls, and New Zealand no-bake cheesecake mix in among the dishes. 

As you can see, the locals did NOT ask for my help translating these (Kabocha = Pumpkin)

While we all ate, I took several breaks to translate in between performances. After watching a traditional, Japanese, artistic dance, a Chinese participant played the Hulusi (a traditional flute), two, young, Korean ladies sang and danced, everyone did a Japanese folk dance, followed by a Scottish country dance, and for a finale, the local Kagura group performed an incredible play about a demon spider! 

Left to Right - Japan, Korea, China

I fucking LOVE Kagura! Also, possibly the best-timed photo I've ever taken!

All day I kept pausing and thinking to myself, “I am so lucky”, and “This is my job? Amazing!” Everyone did a wonderful job of teaching each other about their cultures. Not just foreigner-to-Japanese, but every one learned something about the different nations represented that day. I know people sometimes fear the unfamiliar, but this job has taught me that nothing is more fun than sharing and learning about different cultures.

Later Skaters!

On the First Night of 研修...

Today was my first of five days of translation and interpreting research. We checked in before lunch, I ate with many new faces, and attended 4 hours of interesting lectures based on the meaning, atmosphere, and note-taking for interpreters.

Our guest speaker was an old man named Mr. Komatsu, who struggled to speak through the pain from pulling his back the day before, but in true samurai spirit, came to lecture us anyhow. He talked of many things I won't bore you with, but at the peak of his first lecture before all 115 students, he gave a hearty speech of how diligence and care-planning allowed him to translate, only one month ago, for none other than the Dalhi Lama, despite conditions where it was difficult to hear the man speak. He closed his speech with a heart-warming resolution in which "His holiness" gave him a scarf with Tibetan written, although it was made by Chinese people who, according to the Lama had no idea what it said, and stuck his tongue out in irony.

To any American this may seem like a harmless tale of someone who scraped through a tough time at work, but to the Chinese students this sounded like an endorsement of the Lama by Mr. Komatsu. In fact, Mr. Kotasu, whose speech was entirely in Japanese, only said that the Dalhi Lama was an interesting character and quite friendly, but when he asked for questions, two students felt the need to defend China. The first did not so much ask a question as clarify that the Dalhi Lama represented many anti-Chinese political views. Mr. Komatsu then carefully explained that while his Lamaness does hold those views, the speech which he translated for him concerned only religious and non-political views. Then there was the second Chinese student, who asked, rather pointedly, that Mr. Komatsu (who after speaking for over an hour and a half had demnostrated considerable knowledge of current world affairs) understood that Tibet was part of China, and the Dalhi Lama's comment regarding China and Tibet as being linked by that scarf, ignored the fact that Tibet was linked to China as a part of their country.

Most of us unrelated folk cringed at the awkwardness, but Mr. Komatsu calmly explained that his account had nothing to do with his own political beliefs (in which he had previously even gone as far as to subtly encouraged more foreign, including Chinese, immigration to Japan), and that what the Dalhi Lama said only struck him as friendly and well-meaning.

I take no side in the matter, but it was indeed a fiercely interesting experience for this CIR (Co-ordinator of International Relations).

After that I met a Korean first-year CIR named Baek (written with the kanji for "white" of all things :p) and for the reception dinner we shared drinks with my English friend Nick and talked about many things from our respective countries. All in all the day was more international than....well, the movie "The International".

This month will fly.

What am I doing this month? A LOT!
Work:
In addition to my daily work load: I go to two elementary schools this week to give talks about American culture. I will take a group of foreign people who live here in Hiroshima to a small town to learn about the Japanese traditions of making soba, mochi, and shimenawa (pronounced "she-may-gnaw-wa"). I also have to MC an "Exchange Party" for the Hiroshima International Center, which is basically a poorly disguised Christmas party for local people from many different countries. Also, I get to spend all of next week in Shiga Prefecture studying translation and interpreting on the coast of Lake Biwa.

More than all that, I have bounenkai, which are "forget the year" parties. Most people have one or two this month, but I have four. Two are for work - one for my International Affairs office and one for the international center, one is for touch rugby this Saturday (after playing the Saijo team in Kure), and the last one is for my English Lunch group! Of these four, I am actually in charge of planning and hosting two of them, and each one costs about 40 bucks per person! :[

Social:
Then there is the matter of what little free time I have left. I wish I could say "One word: Snowboarding." but the truth is, I have other things like Christmas shopping and boyfriend/girlfriend obligations as well.

All this adds up to no time or money, and when I wake up January 1st, 2010, this month will probably be remembered as a blur, but most likely a very fun blur.

A (not-so?) quick catch up

Okay, so I've decided to give this "blogspot" a try, mostly because i can use my google log-in for it. Very disappointed "Yogafire" was taken for a a URL. I will leave a comment on their blog afterwards.
I'm guessing you are all on different pages in the book of Greg, so this should be your cliff notes so you can skip ahead:

I'm 25, living in Hiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture (not the same) and working as a Coordinator of International Relations (CIR) for the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme (British spelling, sorry). This means I work for the Prefectural Government (think "State House") in the International Affairs Division, helping with many tasks, bust mostly translating Japanese documents into English, and trying to talk them into sending me on international business trips. So far, no luck. Also, as part of my job i spend afternoons and the occasional weekend, working at the Hiroshima International Center, where I do much of the same work as well as plan, and host events, and guide people on the occasional field trip. Several times a year (including yesterday) I get to go to an elementary school and talk to the children (in Japanese) about American culture. Because I taught at Japanese elementary schools for 2 years in Kure, Hiroshima, this is an awesome perk. I love Japanese children. My normal schedule is Tuesday through Saturday, but sometimes I work Sunday or Monday meaning I get a three day weekend of my choosing that month.

I live in a small one bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of my building. My landlord Mr. Nakaura and his family live above me and he is a friendly old dude. Next to my apartment is Honkawa park, a small park with no grass, but some playground equipment and open space. During the day it is often used by the school next to that, in the afternoon old people hang out there, and at night drunk people smoke cigarettes while high school students practice their dance routines to a boom box; no joke! Running alongside the park is the river, Honkawa (lit. "Main River") and on the other side is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. As in "where we dropped the bomb, UNESCO World Heritage Site - The Atomic Bomb Dome, the Peace Memorial Museum, dozens of smaller memorials, tons of tourists from Japan and all over the world, hordes of park benches, Cherry trees, and old men playing Shogi, Igo, and Majong"...all 30 seconds walk across the bridge from my apartment! And no, the level of radiation in the area is no different than Tucson, Arizona. I have a bicycle and the nearby street car lines taking care of all of my transportation needs. I love my neighborhood.

My girlfriend Sachie and I have been together almost two years now, and everything's great there. She lives in Kure, but has been working/studying/staying in Hiroshima City for the past 6 months, so I still get to see her almost everyday. Last night they turned on the "Dreamination" lights on Peace Boulevard, I think as a test run, but it was a cool, beautiful evening out so we took a stroll down and back together which was lovely. Dreamination, by the way, is thousands of Christmas light displays strung all over both sides of the street which is actually a 100-meter-wide road including parallel side streets separated from the main road by park paths with towering trees, sculptures, and dry, decorative streams.

Winter is upon us, and the artificial snow will hit Mizuho Highlands at the end of the month, where my friends and I snowboard every season. My left knee STILL kinda hurts from when I came down Mt. Fuji last September, but I had it x-rayed, my bones are good, and I'm taking it easy until I hit the snow.

My Japanese language skillz are still slowly progressing as well. I study kanji, though not as seriously as I should, but I can read more and more everyday. lately my team-leader at the Prefectural Building, Mr. Yahata, has been helping me read though an editorial article once a week during our lunch break, which hopefully will improve my overall reading comprehension too. Most days I learn at least one new word, and just while writing this I learned tsutsuga-mushi, which is Japanese for chigger (the bug).

Oh, and "Prefectural Building" is super annoying to write because in Japanese it's just "kencho", so please remember that for my sake.
love peace and chicken grease!
greg