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...

Cruise Ships, Oysters, and Pro-Snowboarders

Sunday, February 13th, was going to be your standard day working at a reception for a cruise ship.

I was not excited to wake up before 6:30 a.m.
I had to meet up with the Port Promotion Bureau folks and welcome the 1,200 British passengers off a 45,000 ton cruise ship called "Artemis" at 7:45, in a suit. Since I took the last week off to go to Hokkaido, I was too exhausted Saturday to go to the Snowboard World Cup in Hiroshima I had been anxiously anticipating, and spent the day sleeping and doing laundry instead. This meant that Sunday morning, after donning my suit, I rode my bicycle to the International Center (which was still closed), and let myself in to the dark and lonely office to print out the speeches I'd be giving at the welcome ceremony that afternoon.

I managed to catch a street car from there to the port, on time, and say good morning. It had been almost a year since the last time I had gone there for a job like this, but I have done it so many times that I was very relaxed, almost to the point of being nonplussed. All of my co-workers (from various different government divisions) were all first-timers though, and so between changing money and helping directions into town and the occasional computer problem (there were a few PCs set up with the ever-coveted internet access), there was a whole lot to do in the A.M. so we got to know one another and shared small talk as tour buses shuttled the passengers to and fro by the dozens.

When lunchtime came, I left the information center thinking I'd grab a convenience store bento, and to my surprise a full fledged oyster festival had been set up next to the pier while I was inside. I went over to take some photos and check for interesting yatai (food stall) treats.

As I started to walk away I was greeted by who else, but Morikawa-san, my supervisor at the kencho, and her husband whom in two and a half years of working together I had still never met. Not only that, her sister and sister's husband where also there! They came to grill some fresh oysters for lunch and invited me to join them, their treat! We had a great time, talking, admiring the enormous cruise ship berthed behind us, and grilling and eating Hiroshima's famed oysters, along with scallops, turban shells, and some fried rice. I felt bad about being treated to all this great food so I ran back to the food stalls and picked up a pack of strawberries to share for dessert. Then I said my farewell and went back to the information center.

Morikawa-san's sister and her husband

Turban Shells (サザエ) look awful, it's true, but they are good!

What a great set-up, no?

Scallops (ホタテ)

After a couple more hours helping out passengers, it was time to gather everyone who was going on board for the welcome ceremony. We lined up at the security desk at the base of the gangway and i translated while everyone traded their I.D.s for passes to get on-board. There were also 10 young women from the Hiroshima municipal firefighter's band with us who would be performing for the passengers at the ceremony, but apparently everyone EXCEPT security knew about this, and we were severely delayed getting on board. By the time everyone was in the performance room, set up, and ready to go, we were half an hour behind, which was terrible because we also had to be OFF the ship in time for them to begin their departure prep for their next leg to Korea.

"Okay, we'll just cut the Japanese MC"... said THE JAPANESE MC. He's a laid back dude, I had done this with many times the previous year and he always joked that I should do it myself. This time though, he wasn't joking. So right then and there, I had to grab a mic, pretending like we had planned for this all along, and set in front of a standing-room-only theater of about 500 passengers, and MC the entire thing, based off the script I had prepared that morning as a translation of what he was meant to have said in Japanese first. In terms of the words coming out of my mouth, this was not much different, I just didn't have to wait for him to say it in Japanese, but the reality of the situation was I was no longer standing off to one side speaking calmly into a mic, but stood front and center and engage the crowd. And may I just say: *Nailed it!*

This is the only photo I had time to take, because I was busy MCing!

Beautiful, right?

After the band finished performing the ceremony was over and we all got off the ship and waved goodbye. An awesome end to a day's work, I thought...but it didn't end there.

Baked mac&cheese = Heaven

I decided to treat myself to dinner at my regular bar, Southern Cross, and as I ate from their menu (baked macaroni and cheese and a BLT) I got a call from Warren, a friend I hadn't seen for awhile, who basically said to wait up, and he'd join me for a couple drinks and discuss our mutual, recently non-existent love lives. As we did this, a crowd of about 14 of the whitest most obviously European looking people you'd ever imagine seeing, poured in with one Japanese family. The bar had been pretty quiet until then, but these guys were there to party, and as calls of "Prost!" rose through the air, I had to ask them, "What brings you to Hiroshima?" in my horrid, rusty German.


"We were part of yesterdays tournament" said the girl who turned out to be Marion Kreiner - Austrian Vancouver Winter Olympics bronze medalist. What?!? Wait... no... I thought, and as the reality of the situation sunk in around me... "So she's (pointing to the only young Japanese woman in the room) Takeuchi-san??" I asked slowly. "Yeah, Tomokaaaa"Marion called and the next thing I knew I was chatting with ANOTHER Olympic medalist and the spokeswoman for the event I had missed the day before, and of course, getting our picture taken!

Warren, Tomoka, and her uncle, a long-time resident of Hiroshima and cool dude.

I had the next day off (thank god) so i stuck around for a few more hours, drinking and chatting with all of them, including Swiss snowboarding Gold medalist and all-around nice guy Simon Schoch, and got all of them to sign a post card from the Artemis which I then mailed (in an envelope, duh) to my brother. It was truly a day AND night to remember.

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