Music

In addition to witnessing my first attempts at skiing, this last month has also been an interesting one musically.

Jessica and I saw Coldplay in concert a few weeks ago at this massive arena in Saitama, the prefecture north of Tokyo, and last week I saw Jason Mraz perform in Shibuya. I had a great time at both shows, even if neither got really rowdy. Chris Martin is great, but he’s just not good for rocking out to. (The great Coldplay pics are courtesy of Jessica).

At work, I’ve spent a lot of time this last month shaking, dancing, wiggling, jumping, hopping, flying, eating, and running my sillies out [Raffi, my apologies for bastardizing your song]. I also taught my older classes the Cookie Jar song, which I didn’t think they’d like, but it’s about the only thing they want to do now. I added an extra dimension to the song by having all the kids close their eyes and put their heads down on their desks before the song; then, I hide a cardboard cookie on one of their desks. After the moment in the song when the alleged cookie heister is accused “Yes, you!” that person checks inside his/her desk, and if no cookie is found, the person responds with the traditional “Couldn’t be!” and the song continues until the perpetrator is correctly identified; if a cookie is discovered in the desk, the student screams “Yea, me!” and the song ends. I continue to be shocked by how long this is able to entertain a group of 10 year-olds.

The Cookie Jar song has actually proven to be a welcome respite from the endless playing of this one boy-band song that seems to have put on repeat by every radio station in Japan over the last few months. I hear it at every bar, in the ramen shop, and on the sumo wrestlers’ iPods. I can even hear it when I’m teaching in class—one of the mothers has it as her cell phone ring, and her phone seems to go off every five minutes. I’m so tempted to do as I used to do with my Sunday School 7th graders—take away her phone and make her parents get it back from me, but I’m sure there’s a rule against that in Japan.

Enjoy 扉 ("Tobira") by GReeeN. That's actually the name of the band, and this is actually the music video. And no, despite what's in the video, the band members are not 4 white guys. For reasons I don't entirely understand, the band members have never shown their faces and refuse to reveal their true identities—something about not wanting to get distracted while studying for dental school exams. Oh, Japan...

I'm not sure if I was the only one who noticed, but hearing Chris Martin belt out "you were all yellow!" in a crowded arena in Japan just didn't seem very p.c.

The X-Factor

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve had an exasperating get-me-out-of-here-now experience in Japan, so I suppose I was overdue.

I figured this would be a good time to transfer some of the money I’ve made from my Japanese bank to my American bank because 1) it’d be harder for me to spend the money if it weren’t sitting in my Japanese account and 2) more importantly, the Japanese yen is way strong right now. I actually made my first attempt at making the wire last week on a day when I had a lot of time off from work. I was proud that I thought to look up and write down key phrases like “foreign remittance” before going to the bank. I showed up at the bank and was directed to the second floor, where a sign an English told me that this was the place to do a “foreign exchange.” I took my seat in line next to a sumo wrestler, trying to ignore the now-familiar overpowering smell of talcum powder and baby oils used by the stable managers to dress the wrestlers. After waiting twenty minutes, I was called to a window, where a woman explained what I needed to do to wire money. She began asking what I thought were strange questions, so I thought I had to have been misunderstanding. I asked her to write down the instructions in Japanese, and I said I’d return on Monday after having a friend translate them for me.

I was feeling even more confident when I decided to return to the bank on my lunch break this afternoon. I made sure I had all the right forms, my official Japanese seal, my passbook (like a Japanese checkbook), and my dictionary. A friend had responded to the banker’s note and written exactly what I wanted to have done. The friend also told me that the banker wrote that my transfer had already been approved and that I just needed to return to the bank to complete the transaction. I made my way back to the second floor (no sumo wrestlers this time), where I found myself sitting across from a different woman, one who looked, I thought, even more annoyed to get stuck dealing with the foreigner.

“Rob-san?” she asked, before I could say anything. Apparently the woman from last week had left a note explaining what I was trying to do. This would be painless, I thought! My first order of business was to retrieve the dry cleaning that I had, embarrassingly, left at the bank the prior week. I knew they had it because they had left a message on my cell phone saying so. The woman asked me to identify my lost items, so I told her I had a shirt and a pair of pants. “What color is the shirt?” she asked. “You mean, the one you’re holding right in front of me?!” I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “It’s blue,” feeling pretty confident that my Japanese was correct. “And what size are the pants?” she asked. For a second, I thought she might have been making fun of me, but then I remembered that by Japanese standards, I’m not as skinny. The woman disappeared for a moment, and I saw her confer with an older gentleman in the back of the bank floor. I had apparently identified my own clothing to the bank manager’s satisfaction, for when she returned, she handed me my dry cleaning. I should’ve called it a day and stopped there, but I pressed on.

Pretty quickly, I reached the point I had gotten to the previous week. I had all the forms filled out, and I was ready to stamp my katakana name and get out of there. Then, the interrogation began. “What is your purpose?” she asked. Summoning my best Japanese and utilizing the vocabulary that I had studied prior to undertaking this endeavor, I replied: “I am a customer of this bank, and I would like to transfer money from my personal Japanese account to my personal account in America. Here is all the information you need.” She looked puzzled, as if I didn’t understand her question, so she pointed to the word purpose written in English and even added a little question mark next to it for emphasis. I responded in kind by showing her the note my friend had written. She read it a few times and then the questioning began again. “Are you sending money to your children?” “No.” “Do you have children?” “No.” “Are your children dead?” “No.” “So, you have children?” “No, I do not have children, and I have never had children.” “So you are sending money to your parents?” “No.” “You do not have parents?” “No, I have parents, but I am not sending money to them.” “Where do they live?” “Huh? What?” Again: “Where do they live?”

I managed to steer the conversation away from my parents and back to me. She asked me again what my purpose was. I tried to tell her again, this time slower and more emphatically, “This is MY money, and I WANT to transfer it.” “Why?” she asked. I typed the word savings into my dictionary and pointed at the screen. She asked again what my purpose was, and this time, I was about to reach across the table and punch her in the face. “Savings,” I said. “Why?” “Savings.” “Why?” “Savings!” “And then?” “More savings.” “And then?” “More savings!” At that moment, I had a sudden flashback to my fifth grade teacher explaining conversation patterns to the class, and I could hear him saying that conversations between adults and toddlers usually take the form of question-statement-question-statement-question-statement.

After about the tenth time she asked why, I cracked under the Japanese torture tactics and gave her an answer that I thought would satisfy her: “Maybe I’ll use the money to pay for law school,” I said. This was a terrible mistake on my part because it set her off on a whole new line of sadistic questioning. “How much does law school cost?” she asked. I told her. “How will you pay for law school with this little money?” she asked suspiciously. Then: “And how many years is law school?” I told her. “And why do you want to go to law school?” she asked. “To become a lawyer.” “What kind of lawyer?” I was, by this time, more than a little angry, but I tried to reassure myself that I was probably just caught in the middle of some cultural misunderstanding. I resolved to stay calm and answer her questions one at a time. “What is the name of your law school?” she asked. I told her I hadn’t even applied yet. “So you don’t have any acceptance letter?” “No.” “So, then, you don’t know that you will attend law school?” She had me cornered. Then, she asked me to provide the bank with copies of pamphlets of law schools I would like to attend. I would have done anything at that moment to have gotten the hell out of out of Japan.

Her interest in my post-graduate plans waned, and she began asking about my undergraduate university and what I had studied. The word Princeton seemed to register with her, but she immediately asked for proof. I was feeling more and more like a criminal and began to realize that there’s no way this could be standard procedure for wiring money. I produced my Princeton ID from my wallet, and she seemed genuinely surprised. Score one point for the foreigner! At this point, the following items were all displayed on the table before Satan: my passport, my Japanese bank card, my alien registration card, my Princeton ID, my American ATM card, my credit card, my passbook, and my Japanese seal. She began asking more questions about my American bank account, so I pulled out what I thought would be my final trump card: a blank check. She picked it up with two fingers, like a child holding a dirty diaper. “What’s this?” she asked. “In America, we use these to make payments. Here is my account information. Your bank may keep it for security reasons.” She pointed to the large letters V-O-I-D I had written over the check. “And what’s this?” she asked. I took a deep breath and explained. “Well,” the woman said, “if the check is ‘void,’ then why would we want to keep it? Here, you can have it back.”

Over the next half-hour, the woman and I stared each other down from across the table, like two generals engaged in an intense game of Battleship. We came to a few more impasses. If I remember correctly, she was puzzled by why some forms of identification had my last-name first and some forms had it last. I also found myself explaining at length what a middle name is, why it only sometimes appeared on my identification, and how it can be shortened using a single alphabet letter. Our last melee was over the branch name of my American bank; I explained over and over and over that the bank did not have a branch name but could simply be identified by its address (Japanese banks, if you can’t guess, all have special branch names). “Sir, there must be a branch name!” she insisted. “There isn’t one.” “But that doesn’t make sense!” “It also doesn’t make sense that your bank doesn’t have an address!” is what I wanted to say, but I took another breath and began explaining again.

At last, her questions came to an end. She took my identification, told me to wait, and disappeared. After fifteen minutes, I told the closest person that I needed to leave because I was going to be late getting back to work. I was told to be patient. Ten minutes later, I again said I needed to leave immediately, and I asked for my ID back. I was told to wait a little bit longer. A few minutes later, the woman reappeared and handed me a transaction receipt. We exchanged some (insincere?) bows, and two hours after entering the bank, I left, racing back to work.

***

As much as I try to laugh at these sorts of experiences, there’s a dark element to them that I, like many foreigners, I believe, try to ignore, and that’s xenophobia. Xenophobia, I think, is just a more syllabic, more Hellenic way of saying racism. It does not manifest itself, as it does elsewhere in the world, as outright contempt or (heaven forbid!) disrespect toward foreigners; rather, in Japan I found that it asserts itself as a passive mistrust and suspicion of foreigners. All individuals not holding Japanese passports are required to submit to fingerprints before entering Japan. Personally, I think this seems like a smart idea, but I know many foreign nationals in Japan resent the fingerprinting.

I can’t say I blame Japan for what I perceive as its xenophobia. Along with North and South Korea, Japan is one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in the world. Different figures estimate that the population is either 98 or 99 percent ethnically Japanese. The remaining portion is almost entirely ethnically Chinese and Korean. Foreigners here tend to remark that part of being a Westerner (of European ethnic origin) in Japan means never fitting in anywhere, no matter how good your Japanese or how many years you’ve lived in Japan. Japanese people, no matter how kind, will always regard you with the same social expectations they have for 5 year-old children. Therein arises part of the xenophobia, I think. Because most Japanese people have very little interaction with foreigners, they have a hard time differentiating between what foreigners can’t be expected to know and what they can be expected to know. For example, I appreciate it when people take the time to explain to me how to sit seiza style; I don’t appreciate it when salesclerks explain to me that I’m not supposed to take the tags off of clothes I try on.

I suppose I take for granted the knowledge that people who do not look like me know how to try on clothing and how to use a knife-and-fork. It makes me wonder about whether growing up in a multi-ethnic country is a blessing.

I don’t entertain the idea that people, on an individual level, are xenophobic. I’m convinced that the woman at the bank harbored absolutely no ill-will against me. The xenophobia, rather, is more cultural and institutional. I imagine that the bank simply has special procedures in place for working with alien residents and that that particular branch doesn’t often work with foreigners. For a while in the afternoon, I tried hard to justify the banker’s behavior and her questioning. Then, I relayed the incident—without opining—to a coworker in an attempt to understand the cultural barrier that perhaps I had not seen at the bank. I was surprised by her reaction. She averted her gaze. “I’m so ashamed sometimes,” she said, “by the way Japanese people treat foreigners.” She told me that she had never heard of a Japanese person being asked such invasive questions and that she found the questions obnoxious and rude. I was glad to receive the clarification, but I regretted broaching the subject with her.

Yodeling in Japanese

Following through with a new year’s resolution to get out of Tokyo more, I’ve started taking some weekend trips, which is why the blogging has been a bit slow. Earlier this month, I spent a long weekend in a tiny Bavarian ski village in the northeastern corner of the Japanese Alps in Nagano Prefecture.

I had heard that Japan had amazing skiing, and while I’m not skier, I thought I should at least check it out. I made arrangements pretty much over night to travel to Nozawa Onsen; travel in Japan is incredibly easy thanks to the shinkansen. Nagano, if you’re unaware, hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics, and Nozawa in particular hosted the biathlon event, which, I learned, combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting.

I stayed at an Austrian-themed guesthouse called Haus St. Anton. It was a serious place, with every room named after a ski village in Austria or Switzerland. I got to stay in room Wengen. Some of the staff even spoke German, though I’ve learned over the last few weeks that seemingly 99% of the foreign skiers in Japan are Australians. The only other American in town also seemed to be staying at the St. Anton, so we spent a lot of the weekend together. Everyone at the inn ate breakfast and dinner together in a small downstairs room.

I did go skiing for the first time, though my attempts were mostly unsuccessful, so I don’t want to dwell there, but the town was beautiful, and the views from the mountains were spectacular. It definitely motivated me to try to do some more traveling, and I may even give skiing another try before the season’s over.

Room Wengen was clearly intended to be proportional to the size of its Swiss ski village namesake.

This is the Austrian-themed dining room where I ate German food in Japan surrounded by Australians.

The Haus St. Anton

This is the central shrine in town where you're supposed to pray for safe and dignified skiing. I guess I needed to pray some more, but at least I was safe.

The Ō-yu public bath house with snow falling.

One of the many amazing views from the slopes.

Chilling with the Yokazuna… You Could Say He’s Kinda a Big Deal

I attended the sumo tournament once again this last week. I’m a bit amazed by how much I’ve learned about sumo over the last six months, but I suppose that’s what happens when you count sumo wrestlers as your neighbors.

For two and a half weeks this month, my little neighborhood felt pretty trendy, with huge crowds around the sumo stadium everyday. Now, though, the January basho has come and gone, and life in Ryogoku is returning to normal.

Even cooler than the sumo tournament was an opportunity that came along a few weeks ago to attend early morning sumo practice at one of the many neighborhood stables, where the wrestlers live and train. Way back in September, I mentioned that I had met an elderly British woman at the bon dance in the local park. She’s been living in my neighborhood for something like thirty years. I’m not exactly sure what she does, but she once mentioned something about “correcting the English of Japanese bureaucrats.” She also moonlights as a Sumo commentator. Being friends with a sumo commentator is quite the hook-up in Ryogoku, and the woman was kind enough to take a friend and me to see sumo practice at the crack of dawn.

We walked only about two short blocks from the temple before coming to an altogether unassuming-looking building; it looked, in fact, just like every other building on the block except it had vertical bars covering the windows (which I assume are intended to keep intruders out rather than to keep the wrestlers in, since the sumo guys wouldn’t be able to fit through the windows to begin with). The interior was what I expected: a small genkan and a low wooden platform covered in zabuton where sat the stable master. Most of the room was taken up by the dohyo, the sumo ring where the wrestlers were standing around.

As we took our seats on our zabuton, the lower-ranked deshi wrestlers were in the middle of practice. Two guys would wrestle, and the winner would pick his partner for the next bout, and the winner would stay in until he lost a bout, at which point the new winner would pick his preferred partner. The consequence of using this system of practice was that after every bout all of the wrestlers would run into the ring hollering, “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!” In this respect, the practice resembled middle school dodge ball team selections, and I might have chuckled had each one of them not been able to crush me with his big toe.

Eventually, the deshi wrestlers finished, and the higher-ranked sekitori guys took the ring. My sumo commentator friend was scribbling notes (no whispering allowed at practice!) trying to explain what was going, but I can’t say I quite followed everything. Fortunately, sumo is, at essence, relatively simple: the first person to step outside of the ring or to make contact with the ring with any part of the body other than the feet loses. The stable slowly became more and more crowded with visitors sporting cameras, whom I later realized were journalists. The air was heavy with gossip—though, of course, I had no idea what was up. Then, in walked Asashōryū, and even I knew who he was. Asashōryū is sumo’s yokozuna—its grand champion—and he’s by far the most famous sumo wrestler in Japan (in the world, even!) and is one of the country’s most recognizable faces. Unbeknown to my sumo commentator friend, Asashōryū just so happened to choose the particular stable we were at for his morning practice. Practice wasn't quite the same from that point on; it was as if there were an elephant in the room. Word of Asashōryū’s whereabouts seemed to get around, and the place became packed with journalists. All eyes were on Asashōryū and his (comparatively) little sumo sidekick/servant, who was preoccupied scrubbing his boss’ (master’s?) arms and legs. Asashōryū sumoed it up a bit with his fellow sekitori, and I even saw him lose two bouts. He came, he fought, and he left. The wrestlers stretched, and practice wrapped up.

I got to see Asashōryū a couple weeks later at the sumo tournament. I’m pretty sure he didn’t recognize me, but I recognized him. It had been a year since he had won a tournament, and there was speculation that his career was finished. I saw him take a win, though, in the final bout, and the following day, he won the tournament, making him one of the winningest sumo wrestlers ever. Read about it here, if you want.

Not all sumo wrestlers are Japanese. Lots come from eastern Europe, Russia, and Mongolia. Asashōryū (and the other current yokozuna!) are Mongolian, which is a bit of a rumpus in the sumo world (get it?). This guy on the left is Georgian.

Never too old to find wedgies funny!

Asashōryū and the Georgian get ready to fight.

What happens to sumo wrestlers who misbehave.

Stretching after practice.

Caption contest?

Someone's been watching too much BBC!

On my way to waku-waku class today, I passed one of my 5 year-olds, and (in Japanese) I asked, "Are you ready for class?" He stopped, closed his eyes real tight, thought for a while, and then belted out, "Yes, we can!" I sorta died.

The incident, though, reminded me of something I saw in a shop window when I was traveling through Kansai in December:

Taking out the Trash in Japan

Taking out the trash here is pretty complicated. Though I’m biased, I’d say it’s significantly more complicated than taking out the trash in the U.S. It’s completed enough, at least, to merit its own blog posting. There are just so many variables to keep track of.

The first obstacle is deciding what goes in which can. At home, I currently have six different kinds of receptacles, but it’s time to revise my system. At the most basic level, the Japanese gomi deities differentiate between trash that is burnable and is not. This may not sound too daunting, but let’s try a thought experiment: you’re getting up from your seat at a Starbucks-life café, holding a tray with your empty coffee cap and food wrappings. As you approach the trash, you notice several bins and chutes, maybe with some Japanese kanji on them to provide clues—if you’re lucky. A dozen pairs of Japanese eyes are on you, watching to see what the foreigner is going to do. What do you do?

If you’re like me, you’d slowly begin dismantling your tray, dumping the ice into the ice chute, the wooden stirring stick into the burnable bin, the plastic coffee lid into the non-burnable bin. What about the Styrofoam cup, though? And the Cellophane muffin wrapper? Are they burnable or non-burnable? Does it matter which city ward you’re in at the time? Usually, I’ve just about formulated an answer to these questions when the café employee walks up and takes the tray from my hands to finish the task. I might try to feign a protest and put on a little show, but I know the employee will insist on throwing out my trash for me. It’s a bit infantilizing, to be honest, but deep-down, I’m happy I don’t have to worry about it.

(I’ve also felt really infantilized lately by how often I leave a restaurant and am told, “Oh, you use chopsticks so well!” This comment—and it happened as recently as last night—is all the more degrading because I know that, in fact, I do not hold my chopsticks in the proper Japanese fashion. I wonder how a Japanese woman would feel if she were leaving a restaurant in New York and were told, “Wow, you sure know how to use a knife and fork!”)

For a little while, I worried I was the only one who experienced this daily dilemma, but the more I began talking to foreigners, the more I realized that one must be ethnically Japanese in order to be able to understand the country’s waste disposal system. A few days ago, I came across this humor article in Tokyo’s popular English-language magazine. If you’re so inclined, you can read the whole thing, but otherwise, here’s the best part:

I know our ward means well by publishing a colorful how-to recycling guide, complete with overly chipper cartoon characters acting as environmental gurus. But if I beat my head against the wall for three solid minutes, I would get the same result as attempting to puzzle out their guidelines. Milk cartons are cut and flattened, cardboard and paper bundled, wire binding removed from notebooks, buttons cut off old clothes, and plastic bottles… well, they’re given the equivalent of a prison strip search. Caps come off, labels are removed, and the tiny plastic ring around the neck is wrestled into the bin. Same with glass bottles (peel the labels at least), but they get put in a different bin.

Anyway, so the situation with the trash at home is a bit easier. I have the luxury of taking my time without anyone watching when I decide into which can to throw away a broken pen. Still, though, I manage to screw things up, and I’ve been screwing it up continually since I got to Japan. The temple folks always seem to be giving me pointers about how to take out my trash properly. You know how in Office Space everyone keeps telling Peter about how he can’t attach the correct cover sheets? That’s sorta how my life has been for the last 5 months, except instead of having supervisors hassle me about TPS reports, I have monks hassling me about trash.

After months of trial-by-fire, I thought I had finally figured out the trash system. Then, about 10 days ago, I had about an hour-long chitchat with one of the temple administrators about my trash. It appears I was not only sorting improperly, I was also taking out my trash on the wrong days, putting it in the wrong place, and using unauthorized trash bags! I swear I’m not making this up. As I learned, burnable and non-burnable trash get taken out on different days, and cans, cardboard, and cartons get taken out on a different day still! Burnable trash is on Thursdays and sometimes Mondays, recycling is on Tuesdays, and non-burnable is on Saturdays—well, odd-numbered Saturdays. I graciously accepted the box of authorized trash bags I was given and vowed to do a better job taking out my trash.

In the days since then, I’ve learned that the laws concerning what is and isn’t burnable were recently changed. My Cellophane rice ball wrappings, which used to be non-burnable, are now burnable—at least in my city ward. I’ve been told this change should make things much simpler, but I’ve also been told Japanese isn’t such a difficult language to learn. Because of my Pavlovian-like fear of what happens when I try to take out the trash, I try not to do it too often. Last night, though, I summoned my Japanese domestic side and did it. This morning, when I went to work, I received the usual flurry of morning greetings—ohayyyyyyoooooou gozaimasu! And then this from the principal: “Rob-sensei, do you have a minute? I’d like to talk with you about your trash.”

Since I seemed to be making so many mistakes, the temple administrator finally gave me some fliers to hang up to explain trash procedures.

New Year's Eve in Kyōto: Ringing in the New Year... 108 Times

I spent New Year’s Eve at the headquarters of the Pure Land school of Buddhism, watching 17 monks cast away their sins by ringing the largest bell in Japan 108 times. It was different from my previous New Year’s experience, which involved getting trashed at a Princeton party in TriBeCa.

The tradition, known as joya-no-kane, takes place at temples across the country, where monks ring bells and sound gongs at midnight. Each sounding is meant to cleanse listeners of one of the 108 Buddhist temptations. This particular bell weighed 84 tons and was sounded by a large battering ram, from which hung 17 ropes. An old monk, in purple and gold kaftan-like robes, presided solemnly over the whole affair. The Jōdo shū temple, founded over 500 years before the United States, would have been impressive even without the massive bell. Approaching Chion-in, the first thing I saw was the temple’s colossal gate, which, I learned, is also the largest in Japan. Illuminated at night, the sight of the gate was pretty awe-inspiring.

From the temple, my friend and I walked downhill through the hundreds of colorful festival fast food rotensho stalls lining Maruyama Park. We passed Yasaka Shrine and saw thousands of people lined up behind police barricades, waiting for hatsumōde, their first shrine visit of the year. We decided to skip partaking in Japan’s version of Times Square and managed to catch a cab back to the hotel.

As I stood at Chion-in, one of Kyoto’s coolest temples in my opinion, in the cold at midnight, I really couldn’t stop thinking about how much has happened over the past year and—at risk of sounding old—how quickly the year flew by. As I mentioned, I spent the previous New Year’s surrounded by a lot of Cap friends in New York. I remember talking to a guy who was in Cap and graduated ’07; he was spending the year in China through PiA and was back just for his winter break; I remember him telling me about his experience in China, and I distinctly remember thinking that it sounded really cool but that there was no way I’d ever move to Asia after graduation. Life is funny that way, I guess.

I seem to have blacked out the next few months, the period in which I spent every waking hour slaving away at my thesis on the A-floor of Firestone and in the basement of Dod. My memory kicks back in, though, around mid-April, when I turned in my thesis, went crazy for a couple weeks, and attended my final classes as an undergraduate. Then, it was Houseparties—everyone’s favorite unnecessarily decadent 3 days of formals, semiformals, and lawnparties. Then, Dead Week in (North) Myrtle Beach (which, coincidentally, coincided with Black Biker Week). Then, I graduated, and Princeton was snatched from me in three short days. From there, I had an incredible, carefree summer in New York followed by a (surprisingly?) really fun family vacation in Hawaii. In mid-August, I relocated 7,000 miles to Japan, moved into a Buddhist temple, learned to bow, and began saying things like “Forgive me, for I am committing a rudeness.” And then my Tokyo adventures got underway. It was definitely the most momentous year of my life.

***

I’ve been a bit MIA from the blog over the last few weeks because I’ve been traveling. I spent a week in Arizona with my family and then two weeks sight-seeing in Japan with a friend. It was by far the best time I’ve had in Japan so far, and maybe I’ll try to post some highlights from the trip. A current resolution, though, is at least to post photos from the trip online—lots of really spectacular pictures (not taken by me). For now, here are some photos from New Year’s (all taken by a friend).

Chion-in's San-mon gate is the largest in Japan.

The bell is 11 feet in height and 9 feet in diameter. Intense.

The important-looking guy in the middle on the right seemed to be in charge.

It took 17 monks to ring the 84-ton bell.

After the bell was rung 108 times, the monks gathered around in a circle and prayed.

A huge crowd waits to enter Kyoto's Yasaka Shrine for hatsumode on New Year's. Thousands and thousands more people were lined up as far as I could see down the street.