Kendo & Kyudo

I've never been fond of spiders--are any of you surprised? But when I say I'm "not fond" of spiders, I mean that I will leap inhuman distances to avoid their paths. When the kids at school ask me what I like I respond with things like snakes, rain, and frogs; but when they ask me what I don't like I simply make a scuttling motion with my hands and shudder. Words fail me.

Unfortunately for me, Japan is full of spiders, and the only trait they all have in common is that they will not take "shoo" for an answer. There are the microscopic ones that fill my bathtub with invisible threads whenever I don't use it for a few days; the fat ones that hang just above my head when I open the apartment door; and the dark ones that lurk in the branches of the trees. But Friday I noticed a new kind as I drove home from school. Oh yes, you read that right: these spiders are big enough to be viewed from a moving vehicle. They are bright acid green and they have built correspondingly huge webs that stretch across power lines.  What does a spider need with a power line?? For all I know they bide their time catching and devouring birds while they impatiently wait for someone to walk beneath so they can plunge down from above like terrible green avengers.

So you can see why my only recourse was to embrace the white-kid-in-Japan stereotype and start taking martial arts classes.

I signed up for both kendo (sword-fighting) and kyudo (archery) and went to both classes for the first time yesterday. Both my teachers are men with the patience of saints, and we quickly established a predictable pattern of me dropping something (swords, arrows, gloves--you name it, I dropped it), staring at the offending article for a bitter moment, and finally stooping to pick it up with a, "Sumimasen" ("excuse me").  Meanwhile both teachers nodded kindly and told me I was doing fine--by the end they were doing it so often they looked like bobble heads.

Both kendo and kyudo are very artistic. Everything matters; you must constantly be aware of where your eyes are, where your fingers are, which foot is in front and how far in front it is. When the teachers perform they make it all look simple and fluid and somehow still deadly. My attempts, on the other hand, are predictably labored and choppy. I imagine that if I actually had to use these skills in any sort of battle the inner monologue would run something like this:
"Alright, I've got this. K. Hold the arrow in the left hand, pause, look at target. Wait, dang, are my fingers at the right height?? NO! DANGIT! Wait..wait, okay, got it we're good. Whew. Draw right hand into position on the bowstring. Wait, is my posture correct? Make a circle with your arms, girl! Why do you always forget the circle!!! K. Look at target. Raise arms and bow above head...and....oh shoot just dropped the arrow again!! Oh no wait...there it is! Funny, I don't remember aiming at my own chest...Oh."

Luckily in kyudo all the other students are kind and sparing with their laughter. Even more luckily, in kendo I get to practice with the kids, which gives me an excuse to gallop around yelling, "Kyaaaaaaaah!" with them like an overgrown Karate Kid reject. The kids are only too willing to laugh at my mistakes, but it's impossible to take anything offensively from a 3-foot-tall stranger shrouded in formal kendo armor, nothing showing but a head of spiky hair and huge dark eyes over an impish grin. It also helps that they are exuberantly inclusive; clearly it doesn't matter to them how well I do something, as long as I just do. And that makes it very fun.

Soon I may be able to do actual bodily harm, but in the meantime I am capable of very intimidating charge and some fancy bow-holding. Look out, world!

Party Weekend

The nice thing about living in the middle of nowhere in a country where you don't speak the language is that it is ridiculously easy to fall into new experiences. For instance, you might hear your coworkers mention "dance" and "festival" in the same conversation, and all you would have to do is ask if there was a festival nearby and they would take care of the rest--meaning that they would volunteer you to dance in said festival, in front of hundreds of people, with no prior practice with the dance itself.

That's how I ended up in a tiny room, struggling into a yukata (it takes a LOT of work to wear something that is basically just a cotton robe). The problems began with my feet: they were significantly bigger than anyone else's and wouldn't fit into the required decorative slippers (zori). Luckily I'd foreseen this and brought my own geta (wooden clogs of a sort). However, this meant that while everyone else was padding along on thick pieces of foam I was clunking around in big blocks of wood tied loosely onto my toes. The yukata itself doesn't encourage much movement by binding your legs tighter than a sleeping bag, and the wide sash around the waist (obi) is reinforced with cardboard so you can forget about bending any part of your midsection. And this was my dancing uniform.

Luckily the dance was easy; I was able to get it relatively down after a few repetitions, even without any practice. It was all mostly in the hands: in one hand I held a fan, which I was supposed to move in graceful patterns while shuffling my feet forward. The fans had little numbers on them and at the end of the dance our numbers were part of a lottery; I won a box full of absolutely massive purple grapes (and yes, I do intend to eat the skins). It was incredibly fun. I love the Japanese attitude towards celebrations; that is, that everyone should participate regardless of age, status, or skill.

And that attitude was never more fully demonstrated than the next morning, when I went to a sports festival (undokai) at my smallest school. The school only has 8 students total, so the school invited the entire community to take part in the festival. Toothless grandmas and grandpas, bent nearly double from years of toiling in rice fields, ran sprightly relays around the track. Teachers, devoid of their usual suits and somber expressions, pitted their strengths against each other in huge tug-of-wars. The kids showed off their tumbling and unicycle skills. It was nice to be able just joke around and bond with the kids, and the shy ones started to open up as we cheered on their family members and talked about sundry things in a mixture of Japanese and English.

After that I visited the castle in Kaminoyama. It was like all the other castles I've seen in Japan: a single white tower. The rest of the structure is almost always destroyed, whether by paranoid shogun or the ravages of fires and earthquakes. Even the tower is typically a reconstruction. Still--and this should come as a surprise to none of you--the gardens are always superb. I sat at the edge of their pond and watched the obese fish struggle by until the sinking sun and a noisy group of teenagers finally drove me away.

A good weekend all around. :)