embarrassing photos

Y-chan took a lot of photos at last week's festival that made mine look pretty lame by comparison, so I'm going to swallow my pride, along with the last bits of the marinaded octopus that Y bought and that we have feasted upon since, and show some of them. That's the mikoshi girl (above) all dressed and ready for bear(ing) the portable shrine around the village.

That's her doing her job, just before she started shouting at the kid next to her to quit goofing around and help carry the mikoshi.

And m again, this time lugging the shrine through the surf (though it looks as if the adult is doing most of the work). I'll forgive the kids here since a lot of them were just barely holding their heads out of the waves.

And finally Y's shot of the adult shrine in the water. At this point, as I mentioned, these guys are completely out of it, but that doesn't stop them from rocking the heavy shrine up and down in the water so frantically that they're always just a hair from losing it . . . but they never do.

akiya matsuri

So why am I showing you this photo of a little truck full of drummers with an accompanying flute player, or should I say flautist, and a fine array of tissue paper flowers? Bear with me a moment. It was a busy day.

It started out with M's mom, and Y,  K, and Y2,  M's friends, who stayed the night in order to make the trip to the Nagai fishing port's morning market, which--if you remember a previous post--takes place on the 2nd Saturday of each month. M had to take little m to the start of the local festival (in which m was going to get her start at carrying the mikoshi, the portable shrine around the neighborhood). So I drove M's mom, and Y and K down the coast to the port only to find that the incredibly nasty wind and rain of the night before (which had almost aborted my bike ride from the station to the house) had stopped the fishing boats from doing any damage to the society of fishes. In other words, the market was shuttered, and we had to make do with the regular fresh fish store--where we ended up buying 7 sardines, 4 kamasu, 8 sea urchins, 12 big hamaguri clams, 6 scallops, 1 steamed octopus and 7 lunch packs of octopus rice, plus cucumbers, etc., blah, blah, blah, at a price slightly higher than we would have paid at the market.

Got home, ate the octopus rice and tracked down the progress of m's portable shrine. This year was a big one for Akiya: there were, I think, 5 of them--one for little kids, one for little bigger kids, one for teenage girls, one for teenage boys, and one for the adults. (Take my word for it. The teenage girls kicked ass. Made the teenage boys look like total wimps, and the adults look like they were playing catch up all day.) 

 

We caught up with m's shrine when they were taking a break. (The kids carry the mikoshi from 10 to 3 or 4 in the afternoon, so there are plenty of breaks for food and drink. I'm not sure the kids need it but the adults use all the break time to catch up on their lack of alcohol and conversation over the past year.) 

m was very proud that she was already hurting from hoisting the shrine palanquin on her shoulders.

See, she's already got the mix of arrogance, self-importance and cool that is so important for young women at festivals. (She doesn't quite have the callus yet, though, that shrine carrying fanatics get from hoisting the beams on their shoulders. I knew one guy who used to travel all over the country to the big festivals and whose permanent callus rose an inch or two out of his shoulder. I almost expected the growth to grow a head, and start talking, like the character in the movie How to Get Ahead in Advertising.)

But she quickly had to get back to her palanquin hoisting.

Which brings us back to the  photo at the beginning of this post. That little truck with the drummers and the flowers? Well, I helped make those flowers. 

Not really make them, to be honest. But two weeks ago, m and M went to the local fish union building--or to be more specific, house--and folded colored tissues and tied them to the colored rods. And last week, I and m went back to the union where we sat around on the tatami floor with other families and unfolded the tissues into those flowers, while listening to music from the quintessential Shonan beach band, the Southern All Stars. 

So I did my part, I guess, which made me feel less guilty about leaving M and m with the mikoshi, and going back to the house, where I stoked the barbecue and M's mom, Y, Y2 and K and I cooked the sardines, clams, etc. and emptied wine bottles for several hours until the shrine parade made its way around to our part of the village--in fact right down the beach in front of our house.

As always they end up taking the mikoshi into the sea . . .

 . . . before getting totally knackered and finishing up by carrying it back to the shrine. I've done this twice in my life when I much younger and it was the closest thing to doing drugs that I've ever experienced. The chanting, the physical strain and the repetition (not to mention the alcohol every 200 meters) just takes you to a different place. You can see it in the eyes of these guys. They have no idea where they are.

m caught on very quick, and we heard her chastising some of the boys who were goofing off to "quit playing around and do your part!" In a few years from now, I believe, she's going to be leading the teenage girl group in continuing to kick the ass of the other groups. She's got it in her eyes.

picnic chips

Found a recycling place in Yokohama, run by the city, where you can buy wood chips by the carload, so I've been there twice to pack the back of the van. I used it around the parking area stones, where it cut down on the weeds growing, so I got another load to spread around the picnic table on the beach side. This is where a small kind of bamboo has been really difficult to control, so we'll see if this helps. It's pretty nice under the feet, but we also have to see how the rainy season affects it.

I missed it

M was kind enough to show me this shot on the view window of our camera when I got home from work the other day. It had been a miserable morning; I had my rain gear on, but got completely soaked just taking it off in the station parking lot. I rode the train in damp mode, my sneakers squeaking when I got on the train, and I left a wet impression of my butt on the seat when I got off. But it had cleared up in the afternoon, and m played in the surf in the afternoon after school. And then the sunset was kind enough to illuminate Mt. Fuji, a rare sight in the haze of summer, and backlit Standing Rock and the picturesque pine. I forgave her for being able to appreciate this in person, partly because my ensemble had finally dried out by then, and partly because it was Friday night, I had a shochu buzz, and I knew I'd be there the next day if we were lucky enough to have another great sunset.

stuffed on a Saturday

This was one of those days when it feels like there's 34 hours in it, and it's only early afternoon.

We made it to the morning market at Nagai, a fishing village a few kilos down the coast. (It's the most reasonable morning market starting time I've every heard of: the gates open at 9:00am.) It's just a small area in the port, where the fishermen pile their morning catch, and the wives make a few rice dishes with squid and octopus. Awesome. We were a little late so we just got this crab, five uni (sea urchins), and two kamasu--a white meat fish that I don't know the name in English for.

After we finished shopping, we sat out on a sea wall overlooking the bay and ate our squid and octopus breakfast, then stopped at one of the unmanned vegetable stalls to buy some cucumber. Got home, dropped in a few more of the garden stones while M took m to her shigin (traditional Japanese poetry singing) practice. Started a fire and then broke up the uni shells to get the tasty bits out.

After the girls got home we grilled the fish. . . .

. . . . which we then ate with the raw urchin and rice.　Then M went shopping and m, her friend and I made some chocolate chip ice cream and stuck our faces in the ice cream maker and licked out every bit of it. And with that, I've just overloaded on the permissible limit on food mentions, so I won't continue on with how we gorged on the crab and pickled cucumbers later in the day.

death and life in the afternoon

A bad day for wildlife on the beach. While m and I were playing late evening tag, we dodged around this dead gull only to just miss tripping over this beached fish, which almost looked like a salmon that had laid its eggs and expired.

But there's a lot of life in our garden, and we spent a large part of the weekend weeding and planting. M's mom sent a care package of seedlings from the Nagano forest, and while some of them didn't take the replanting well, others are thriving.

The garden now includes this year's addition of:
thyme
rosemary
Italian parsely
several kinds of mint
cammomile
lavender
basil
oregano
lemon grass
tomatoes--Italian and fruit
cucumbers
zucchini
eggplant
peppers--red, green and orange
shiso
halapeno
shishito
edamame
negi
green onions
myoga
goya
fuki
ruccola
one magnolia tree
one june berry tree
one lemon tree
four blueberry bushes (two kinds)
one raspberry bush
two maples
one olive tree

and more . . .

And then there's the life in this little one, who keeps us in awe, in fact, at just how much there is.

rock on

Oh, to be a cat. And yawn a lot and stare nonchalantly at the world with not a care--unless you're hungry, of course, and then you think nothing of having to move the earth and the stars in order to get someone to feed you.

Oh, to be a cat. Cats don't have chores. I have chores. I have lots and lots of chores. I make lists of chores, and strike them out one by one while adding others two by two, resulting in a long line of things to do stretching into something very near infinity. I've never found chores so reassuring, but somehow now my chores have "meaning"--meaning I guess that I'm stuck with the results of my chores in a way that was never true with rental property.

And one of my ongoing chores is sinking the rest of the Sajima stones that were once part of the old house's foundation into the earth to make uneven stepping stones through the garden. I have finished embedding five of them, but I chose the smaller ones to start, which was a good thing, since I've found that it's a much more tiresome task than I first imagined.

The contractor finished the garden with a layer of new soil, between a couple centimeters up to about 15 centimeters, over the top of the clay and gravel that made up the former driveway. The old landlady had been conned a while back by a company that just dumped a load of gravel and charged her a fortune, and that's what we have to deal with--unless we want to dig up the entire place and replace it with better earth.

Anyway, I discovered that clay and gravel were not a welcoming medium for a shovel, so I've switched to a pick, and chop away, sparks flying, to make a bed for the stones. I'm guessing that they weigh around 100 pounds, so once I drop them in, it's backbreaking work to haul them out again (if the pit isn't deep enough, for example, which has been the case for every stone so far). This has kept me from doing more than two per weekend, since I find myself quickly looking for other, less taxing chores, like chopping wood, or pulling a stubborn cork from a cheap bottle of wine.