Irony Bites Hard

Santa Clause seems to have taken his revenge for all the times I bitched as a kid about having to sing "Silent Night" in school. (And no, throwing "Dreidle, Dreidle" into the mix along with fifteen Christmas songs does not make it OK.)

At the beginning of the month, the temple asked me to begin teaching the kids about Christmas. As you might expect, this caught me by surprise. What, exactly, did they want me to be teaching? I do think I have a pretty decent, above-average knowledge of the Synoptic Gospels (especially for a Jew), whence the Christmas story is derived. As it turns out, though, what I was supposed to be teaching about was Santa and gift-giving and reindeer and Christmas trees (they love their Christmas trees in Japan!). Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m certainly no ACLU member, but I’ve never really been one to be comfortable with Christmas in the classroom. I’m probably one of those "secular progressives" [read: Jews] that Bill O’Reilly has in mind when he gets prissy about the so-called War on Christmas.

I didn’t really think this was the appropriate opportunity to deliver a lecture on plurality and diversity in the U.S., so I bit my lip and agreed to teach about Christmas. It wasn’t really as bad as I was expecting. I had to read some Christmas books, and I found myself rewriting a few popular Christmas songs to make the lyrics easier for the kids to sing, but other than that, it was pretty easy. I confess that I really enjoyed the Christmas parties Takahashi-sensei and I had in the waku-waku classes on Thursday and Friday; I think I may have finally found a little Christmas spirit. Takahashi-sensei engineered a pretty impressive-looking Christmas tree out of construction paper, and all the kids made origami ornaments to put on the tree. I was certainly kvelling watching my little five year-olds make origami flowers and boats and samurai helmets; they all looked really cute and really… Japanese. I even learned how to make a crane! I’m actually looking forward to the coming week of Christmas parties with my elementary school classes.

Happy Holidays!

P.S. In case you have 3.5 minutes to kill, here’s another fun clip of ol’ Bill. Enjoy!

My waku-waku kids hard at work on their origami ornaments.

Reaching to hang an ornament at the top of the tree.

Ushering

What a huge change and what an experience it was this evening being surrounded by tons of old Japanese people, considering I spent the first hour of my day drawing pictures of different kinds of transportation in the dirt with a 3 year-old. I served as an usher this evening at the temple’s annual charity concert for UNICEF. I sorta felt like I was back in the Sunbelt doing thesis research—except all the old people were Japanese, and it was 45 degrees.

My first task as usher was working on an assembly line making origami goody-bags full of candy to be given out to the concert attendees. My origami skills apparently didn’t pass muster, for pretty quickly I was assigned strictly to putting the candy in the bags. Of course, no Japanese person would ever tell me my origami sucks; instead, one must say it indirectly, like this: “You’re so good at putting the candies in the bags! Why don’t you just focus all of your efforts on that?!”

The actual concert was held in this tiny theater next to the temple, the same place I saw the Japanese rendition of The Magic Flute back during my first week in Tokyo. At first, I stood by the entrance looking official, collecting tickets and distributing programs. Lots of deep, deep bowing was involved. Keiko-sensei tried to point out prominent professors and local politicians to me, but I couldn’t really understand. During the actual performance, I stood by the theater door and smiled obliquely as old people entered; I think I was supposed to help direct them to their seats or something, but no one ever explained the seating chart to me.

Like all the performances I’ve seen in Japan, the concert was realllllly long. The first act featured some famous traditional Japanese storyteller. Unlike, say, opera, however, Japanese storytelling cannot be appreciated on the basis of aesthetics alone. I stood in the back of the theater for a long, long time, listening to a man talk and chant in a language I couldn’t understand at all, and all I could think about was food. So, it actually felt a lot like that very last hour-long “please rise” part at the end of Yom Kippur, when everyone is woozy and tired and hungry! The concert picked up a little bit from there. There was a flutist and a pianist and a tenor, and they took turns performing solo and together.

After helping to clean up, I was exhausted and was looking forward to retiring back to my little temple apartment. In an eerie occurrence of déjà vu, however, I found myself corralled into a special, private room at the temple, where five dignified-looking individuals were sitting around a table. It took me a minute to realize that these were the flutist and the pianist and the tenor and the storyteller from the concert (I later learned the fifth individual was a famous composer who had debuted original work at the charity concert). Maybe I’ve taken too many LSATs in the last month, but I felt the situation would have been perfect as the prompt for one of the logic games: if a Japanese flutist, pianist, tenor, storyteller, and composer each occupy exactly one seat around a table… Anyway, I was introduced to these eminent individuals, and they were told I was supposed to entertain them. Then we were left alone. They stared at me, and I stared back at them. Awkward. Finally, one of them asked me to repeat my name; it took about five minutes to get them to pronounce "Rob" in a recognizable form. Then, they asked for my last name, so I told them—and they all died laughing. I was really embarrassed, and I couldn’t figure out what was so funny. Then I realized that they all thought I was joking about my last name; I suppose it would have been like telling a room full of painters that your last name was Mondrian. I managed to convince them that I wasn’t joking about my name, and there were all amazed. Things lightened up from there. The composer even gave me his card and invited me out drinking with him next week!