50 Minutes a Student

1. Special Education Class at　な中 is only 5 students strong, three girls and two boys. They have varying degrees of affliction, but are pretty high functioning. They just need a separate class period a couple times a day. Sometimes, I attend the class with Mother Sensei and we do a simple English lesson together. It usually involves playing games with picture cards ("Karuta") for 20 minutes or more.

But yesterday was different. I went to the class with Mother Sensei and was greeted by their broad, genki smiles. Today was for practicing actions like "walk," "eat," "open," "close," "stand" and "sit." After some drilling, we played Simon Says...

...at one point I had the students stand up then eat and they all stood still despite the fact Simon had clearly Said. Mother Sensei laughed and applauded them for good manners. In Japan, it's usually rude to stand and eat (though there are exceptions for matsuri food and train station ramen stands) and the students were showing me how well-mannered they were!

After Simon Says, they were getting a little distracted. I'm still a novelty to students, so they're always full of questions. Yesterday, Mother Sensei decided to indulge them after one student asked if I could speak Japanese and I said "Sukoshi dake" (Only a little).

They decided to test my Japanese. Mother Sensei would give me an English sentence and I'd translate it to Japanese. It was pretty simple stuff ("My name is Marta." "I like ramen." "I come to school by car.") and the students got a kick from it. Then they asked questions in English with Mother Sensei's help and I answered in a little English and Japanese.

Then one student wanted to know if I could write kanji. I wrote on the board "私はマルタです." Applause all around. Then they wanted to know my favorite kanji...that's a thing, apparently. So I wrote "私は（森）が好きです." But I wrote "suki" wrong and the students helped me fix it. For 50 minutes, we just talked in Japanese and English, teaching each other.

Giddyup, Japan Style

So yesterday I hiked for about 4 hours, meaning I don't feel the need to go for a freezing cold jog. Also, I don't have to prepare any lessons for tomorrow. Additionally, I'm currently waiting for a mess of video files to convert for a project. All of this should tell you I have a ton of free time on my hands so I can do all kinds of useful things...

Like updating my blog!

Let's talk about awesome things for a second. Horses, they're pretty awesome. In some places like rural America, rural Japan, rural anywhere that horses are domesticated, they're still the primary power source on small farms. Horses are also athletes, running in races like the Triple Crown and also dancing unnaturally in the ridiculousness that is dressage. (That's about as white collar as it gets. "Hey, I have a $9,000 beast of strength and kickass. I'll make it dance to "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'.") Some countries still use horses as their primary mode of transportation.

See "Seinfeld" episode "The Pony Remark."

I may be horribly out of touch with Poland's current state of affairs, but from what I know, this seems a logical leap.

Anyway, horses are pretty great. They're not rocket scientists by intellectual standards, but hey, they're horses. What do they need rockets for?

Now, archery. Archery is also rather, really, totally awesome. One of the oldest forms of killing something and watching the light leave its eyes from some distance, archery has shown itself to be pretty freaking cool throughout history. The Mongols (Genghis Khan's clan, to name names) were some of the first to actually start shooting arrows at targets from horseback. That takes some serious skill: taking your hands off the reins, drawing a bow which requires considerable abdominal and upper arm strength, aiming from the swaying back of the machine beneath you and actually hitting something.

Yeah, hardcore.

Japan also has a long history of horseback archery, or "yabusame." It all started in the Kamakura Period, (lasting roughly 1185 to 1333) when shogun Minamoto no Yorimoto was appalled at the lack of archery skills in his samurai. So how did he decide to spruce up the troops? Tasking them with learning archery ON A HORSE.

That training came into use during the Genpei War between the Minamoto and Taira shogun clans. At the end of one battle, the defeated Heike clan retreated from the Genji and took to their boats. The Genji pursued them on horses, but were stopped by the sea. The boats floated offshore waiting for favorable winds. As a sign of their "chivalrous rivalry," someone on a Heike boat hung a paper fan on a mast and challenged a Genji to hit it with an arrow.

One Genji rode his horse into the water, took aim with his long Japanese bow and shot the fan right through. It's still a well-known event today. So well-known that it's a common late summer festival event all over Japan.

I went to a yabusame festival in Tono last month. It was a great day trip and I definitely got a feel for the history and the excitement that the festival is all about.

As each rider raced down the track and shot the wooden targets, the crowd's collective voice rose, roared and cheered!

Immediately behind the archer, a retainer in blue rode with his arms outstretched. He'd turn sideways in his seat for every target hit. It's an interesting way to tally the score since the track is long and it'd be difficult for the judges to see the targets at both ends.

What Spiders Have Taught Me

It's October, so what better time to write about something scary?

Spiders, as anyone with a frontal lobe can tell you, are creepy. They are creepy as hell. I’ll be clear, though and say that yes, there’s a difference between something being “creepy” and something being “scary…” though sometimes, it can be both. Spiders are a great example:

Spiders scare the living hell out of me.

Spiders are creepy little monsters full of fun little surprises.

I didn’t used to be afraid of spiders. Not really. But when, in elementary school, we talked about what we were afraid of, the number of girls scared of spiders sort of gave me the impression that I was supposed to be afraid of them. Seems silly now but after years of dodging webs and a few nights where I’ve woken with a spider tap-dancing on my face, there’s no going back.

And god help the spider that pops in on me unexpected. I don’t like killing spiders, but instinctive fear is a blood-thirsty juggernaut and I’m not about to stop it. 

My arachnophobia is the Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll. That said, I do respect the little beasts. They have their own sort of magnificence: they’re perfect in that they always do their jobs (Gil Grissom said the same of bugs, but I feel it’s apt here, too) and focus single-mindedly on the task at hand.

You never see a sweet article about a new litter of baby spiders or a cute video of spiders cuddling. If there’s a spider involved, it’s doing something spine-chilling like being in multitude. Spiders are not sentimental. They are prolific, determined and beautifully methodical.

I was on a train platform late one night last summer. I looked up above my head to check the clock and noticed to my initial horror, a large brown spider. I was a little nauseous at first, but as I watched in disgusted fascination, I noticed it was working on a new web. I was hypnotized watching this spider crawl around and around, pulling that thread from its own body and making a beautiful but temporary death trap.

For that’s the thing about webs: they’re impermanent. They do their job a couple of times, then disappear completely. They’re meant to catch the spiders’ food, then be destroyed. And yet, for all their impermanence, they are still breathtaking. A spider is like the greatest artists who actually put a bit of their self into their work. I remember researching an American Indian and artist who, after learning he was diabetic, used some soda and his own diabetic blood to paint a still life portrait of a skull. 

Sometimes, I can’t believe the scale of webs. So big, they still serve the primary function, but the audacity of their size is sometimes too funny. I’ve seen webs over front doors, across roads, and under bridges. These are spiders reaching for the stars and landing in a black hole of “Never-Gonna-Happen.” Like novices aiming for prestige with no talent to back it, they’re the American Idol contestants we watch just to see how badly they’ll crash and burn.

But the spider doesn’t care. It know this is only temporary, that every opportunity is short-lived and imperative. The spider is not a defeatist. If anything, it’s an optimist. Keep on dreaming, you little shit.

But spiders are just as diverse as any other species. There are small spiders that make large, sunlit webs, and there are darker more creepy spiders that hide in dark spaces and set traps. Brown recluse, black widow, wolf-spider: each one appropriately named to invoke fear, hatred and queasiness. They’re also the most deadly. They’re toxic and they know it, clap your hands. But they use their horrifying talent in their own defense or to get their own food. 

You might blame the spider for biting you, but you put your hand in its happy little hidey-hole. In all fairness, you were intruding, not the spider. The spider didn’t know you were feeling nostalgic and felt like crawling around the attic for the first time in years. It didn’t know you were going to grab that one log for a fire. In the world of “fight or flight,” the spider is a devoted and ready citizen. 

Scarier still are the beasts of the deepest, darkest wild, like Australia, where “dinner plate” and “bird-eating” spiders are the horrifying norm. Names like that are enough to make me throw my hands up in defeat and walk into the ocean. But you have to gaze in disgust and awe as a spider the size of a Chihuahua leaps up and catches a robin out of the air! They have evolved to literally take down an animal that would normally eat the spiders own (smaller and thus more pathetic, the “bird-eating” spider would smugly add) kind. They are engineered to turn the tables on another would-be predator. In a world where bird eating spiders exist, I look at JRR Tolkein’s Shebol and JK Rowling’s Aragog and think, “You know what, I could see that happening.” 

And you know what? Good for the spiders. As humans, we’ve evolved and made incredible strides to become a formidable opponent in the natural world. Why not give some credit to another species that has done the same? I’ll still keep a rolled up magazine handy, but let’s just say I’m helping our mutual species advance.

Plump: Picture Lump!

Hotto Yudo station and onsen in Nishiwaga

 It's fall! Or as my European friends would put it, "Autumn." Whatever you call it, it's finally here! The heat has broken and the Japanese are eying the trees waiting for the leaves to peak to their most brilliant.

Will, you got something in your teeth...

 Already, the rice fields are just about empty. Instead of oceans of gold, there are stacks of rice drying in the sun. They look like wicker samurai to me! Standing in strict lines, I imagine them coming to life at night and doing sword drills.

Fall is also when we see the close of the big street festivals. Hanamaki says goodbye to summer with their annual festival of floats and street dancing.

 And of course, Fall is just beautiful for doing what it does naturally.

I woke up like this!