Getting
up ridiculously early on a Sunday to drive to a ryokan* several hours
away. Purpose? To relax. Then, after a night of eating, drinking, and merrymaking, dragging
yourself from sleep to catch the sunrise while soaking again.
Stripping
naked in an onsen change-room full of same-gender strangers, then, in the name of modesty, struggling with a
white cloth the size of a tea towel to strategically cover your naughty bits.
Elementary
school students sliding, tumbling and rolling around on the classroom floor
during breaks between lessons. Junior high school track-and-field students
melodramatically collapsing to the ground after a series of ten-second dashes,
lying on their backs or curled up in utero-esque positions, panting on the
parking lot pavement. Obaasans (grandmothers)
and ojiisans (grandfathers) squatting
on their heels for the duration of an outdoor event – be it a several hour-long
shan-shan performance in the
village of Chizu in the heat of an August afternoon or at the 9 P.M. Magical Starlight
Parade after a long day of walking
around Osaka’s Universal Studios Japan amusement park – so as not to sit on the
dirty, dirty (read: spotless) ground. Their children and grandchildren follow
suit, of course.
Eating
on the street is considered quite impolite. Drinking alcohol is fine.
After
asking my age, locals look at me with wide, round anime eyes,
exclaiming, “wakai! So young!” Then,
they are equally flabbergasted that I have no husband or children.
To leave
home without a packet of tissues is to leave unprepared. To employ said tissues
to cover one’s mouth or nose during a sneeze is a strange usage, indeed.
No one
bats an eye at the micro minis walking by, but good luck trying to pass a tank
top off as anything but suggestive. It’s an undershirt, deshou**, it’s
not meant to be seen unless you’re undressing.
The
mental tornado of multitasking versus the seemingly endless free time for
imagination and monotony. In other words, school and spring break.
My all-in-Japanese Windows 93 dinosaur of a school-assigned
laptop versus the multi-lingual 3G SmartPhone I started bringing to the
staff room once I had enough work to justify not being able to wait five minutes
for Google to load.
The
inverse relationship between upbeat, energetic, unflappable work-week Echo and
the antisocial, sloth-like, grumpy weekend hermit that friends and neighbours get
to associate with on those rare occasions that I seek out or submit to social
interactions.
**でしょう is, like many Japanese interjections, an
opinion seeking confirmation. It can mean “I think that; I am afraid that; it
seems that” as well as “Don’t you think that…?” (meaning that you probably
should.)
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