芦城公園 Rojou Park

"Komatsu at first glance has little to appeal to a casual tourist, unless you are a big fan of concrete."

This sentence was my first insight into the character of the city I now live in, and I'm not going to lie--it was incredibly disheartening, especially considering all the material I had seen on Kanazawa, Kaga, and the Noto Peninsula.

Luckily, when I got here, I quickly found out that while the main drag of Komatsu is indeed a concrete lover's dream, the back roads were full of traditional machi-ya style houses and even walled-in family compounds. Rice fields abounded and right down the road, there was a traditional Japanese garden-style park free and open to the public.

Little appeal, eh? 

Rojou Park occupies the former outer grounds of Maeda Toshitsune's retirement castle. Maeda Toshitsune was the Lord of the Kaga, Ettchuu, and Noto Provinces--the domain that included present-day Ishikawa and parts of Toyama Prefectures--from 1605 to 1649. The Kaga Domain was historically peaceful and prosperous, second only to the Tokugawa clan in Edo in terms of income. Maeda Toshitsune's rule started just five years after the Battle of Sekigahara and the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Growing up in a time of constant political turmoil made Maeda Toshitsune crafty and more than a little paranoid about Tokugawa clan. His fear of invasion lead him to commission a temple hideout, which you can tour today. Myouryuu-ji (aka Ninja-dera) is a working Buddhist temple that is decked out in traps, including a room to hide a small contingent of guards, a trap-door altar, secret passages, and hidden arrow slots. Legend has it that the temple was connected to Kanazawa Castle by underground passageway, but there's no proof around today.

Where does a prosperous, paranoid feudal lord go to retire? Komatsu, of course! Construction of Komatsu Castle, also called Rojou ("castle in the reeds") helped turn Komatsu into a center of culture and commerce. Tea ceremony, kabuki, and other traditional arts began to flourish. The Maeda family used Komatsu as a secondary castle after Toshitsune's death, keeping the city prosperous and lively.

Alas, Rojou was not meant to last the ages. During the Meiji period, the central government wanted Japan to modernize. A part of this modernization was breaking the power of the old noble families--at least, the ones outside of Tokyo. Noble families could only keep one castle. Relevant authorities chose their family seat in Kanazawa castle, and so the castle in Komatsu was demolished. The grounds were used for the city's first public high school...where I now teach. One lone parapet remains by the tennis courts.

The Maedas were not known for their weeding skills. 

To celebrate the history of the castle and its contributions to the history and culture of Komatsu, the city reconstructed a castle garden based on the design of Kenroku-en in Kanazawa and made it a public park in the 1950s.

Maeda Toshitsune is still an important figure in Komatsu's history. His statue stands on a little hill in Rojou Park and during the city's two biggest festivals, he has his own place among the cute mascots.

The face of a political mastermind. 

The park today is home to a formal teahouse and Komatsu's central library. It's a popular place for walks all year and especially popular for picnics in the spring. The city also has a catch-treat-release program for abandoned cats in the park, and despite signs encouraging locals not to feed them, the strays stay as fat and happy as ever. 

Sakura

Erin and I spent our spring vacation up north in snowy Hakodate. While the weather was cold and windy, the view of Hakodate city from the mountain truly lives up to the hype.

This year the cherry blossoms came late and went quickly.  Erin and I found a canal lined with cherry trees near the station in Gifu two weeks ago.

We had to wait another week for the cherry blossoms to come out in Komatsu and Kanazawa, but when they did, it was spectacular! 

Weeping Sakura at Sunset

Rojou Park in the afternoon...

...and at twilight...

...and then at night!

Kanazawa Castle

The road to Kenrokuen

Stay tuned for a history of Rojo Park!

plans

The school year in Japan runs from April to March. One of my students explained that plum blossoms bloom around the time of graduation (early March) or the ending ceremony (late March) and the cherry blossoms start to bloom just after the new school year begins (early April). Granted, this is the Tokyo Standard Symbolism, so since our region's winters are a little longer, the blossoms are about a week late.

Spring break for the students is the two weeks after the old school year and before the new one. High school graduates have about a month total from when they find out they got into college to when they have to be in their first college class. Needless to say, the sales at IKEA-esque home shops are fantastic in the spring. A month may sound shocking to those of us used to a three month summer break before college, but that month is positively luxurious compared to the time period teachers have.

Every few years, teachers in Japan get transfered. The standard is three to five years at a given school, but if it's a good fit, the Board of Education might let you stay for as long as twelve. New teachers especially get transfered often, as they (probably) don't have families that would be uprooted. Transfers can be across the prefecture. In the case of my prefecture, someone working in a city in the far south could be transferred to a very isolated rural town on the tip of a peninsula a five hour drive away. They would know on--for example--March 23rd and be expected to be settled in and ready to work on April 2nd.

For Japanese teachers, the world flat out ends the last week of March and restarts the first week of April. There is no bridge between them, even at the same school. Need a computer fixed? Wait until the world is reborn next week. Who will you be teaching with? No idea. When will the welcome party be? No one knows. Who's your supervisor now? Get back to us on April 2nd and don't get into trouble.

During this time, all events and meetings and schedule changes happen on incredibly short notice, often while ALTs are on vacation. When we all meet up again to see the cherry blossoms, everyone talks about what their new teachers are like and shares stories of how their schools seem to have burst into flames and been reborn into amnesia-stricken phoenixes. It's weird, feeling like the only holdover...at least until July, when new ALTs land.

Very few of the people I teach with got transferred this year, but we have a new principal and vice principals. We'll see how this next year goes. In the meantime, it's off to Hakodate for me.

In Memoriam

With video chatting and email, it's easy for those of us living abroad to forget the distance we've placed between ourselves and our loved ones. Though I was able to talk with my grandmother before she passed thanks to these technologies, they couldn't transport me to the memorial service to be there with my family. I did send a speech audio file, which seemed like far too little. I've been told that people want to see the text, and since most of my readership is family--and in larger part, because my grandmother read my posts--I'd like to share it here.

New Year

Happy New Year!

Erin and I spent New Year's Eve with two good friends in Kanazawa, enjoying traditional foods like ozouni and zenzai* as well as some non-traditional passtimes, namely playing Minecraft or watching significant others play Minecraft. We went to a Oyama Shrine at midnight to watch the hordes descend on the physical shrine itself to pray. The line was several blocks long, so we moseyed along to the fortunes and charms that all shrines sell around New Year's. We paid 100 yen for a paper fortune, and all of us got the best ranking for fortunes. Hooray! I, however, was cautioned that high places would lead to failure. Good thing I already vowed to everything in earshot that I would never climb Hakusan again.

I think spending New Year's in Japan without a Japanese extended family to take you in would be like spending the latter half of December in the US without an American extended family. There are decorations and you're supposed to feel merry and you have a vacation, but you'll never quite have the same holiday experience. Then again, you probably also won't be drinking champagne and setting things on fire while watching Sherlock, so I'm not terribly broken up about it.

Erin and I will stay in Japan for another year and a half, until July 2013. We both love our students and have so much yet to see here.

Now, time for a Japanese lesson. This time, it's Ishikawa winter precipitation!

弱雨　jakuu/ yowa-ame  weak rain. Covers anything that is not like your shower

みぞれ mizore slush. Literally slush, synonymous with slurpy-esque beverages, but from the sky. It's also a flavor of shaved ice, if you want your shaved ice to taste like frozen coats and suffering.

氷雨　hisame small hail/ frozen rain. We have had an inch of this fall in half an hour. At least it kind of looked like snow.

雹　hyou "hail of a diameter greater than 5mm". Self-explanatory. The character components add up to "parcel of precipitation," which is telling.

湿雪 shissetsu wet and warm snow. Demarcated on tenki.jp by a sad, partially melted snowman.

吹雪 fubuki blowing snow or snow storm. Demarcated by an unmelted but extremely distressed snowman. In this part of Japan, it means a chance of thundersnow. Which is awesome.

Temperatures in Ishikawa change quickly, but you can count on something falling from the sky. I have experienced all of these weather conditions in quick succession within one four-minute walk to work. I keep an extra umbrella in my drawer at work in case something unspeakable happens to the one I take with me in the morning. Since the temperature hovers at about 29 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit, the roads aren't plowed; they are instead cleared with sprinklers. Which malfunction and sometimes gush several feet into the air, the terror of bicyclists everywhere.

There is a reason why people in Japan love spring. Not only is it gorgeous...it's not three categories of winter precipitation that aren't really snow.


*Ozouni is a soup made from traditional Japanese broth, greens, mochi (sticky rice cakes), and chicken...or in my case, tofu. Zenzai is a dessert-ish soup made from red bean paste, water, and mochi. There's a theme here. It's mochi.

Forecasts

Today we're going to have a little bitty culture lesson. (I'm going to get disclaimers out of the way quickly: writing about Japan is a minefield of inaccurate and infantalizing cultural assumptions. If you could get a nickel for every blog post or published book that pushes the idea of either Japan as a land of tradition, dammit or Japan as a land of crazy, then Japanese majors could fund their own college educations entirely on the back of the majority of their field in all its self-loathing essentialism.) Anyway.

Japanese shopping and service culture thrives on creating products you at first find strange, and then realize you can no longer live without. This isn't unique to Japan by any means--mint flavored toothpaste is a prime example of the power of suggestion (advertisement) and how it redefines what we view as practical. Mint toothpaste--artificially created demand, but pretty neat. Silicone fried egg shapers to keep your fried egg heart-shaped and English muffin-sized--artificially created demand, but also pretty neat.

This combined with a widespread (but not society-engulfing) value placed on identifying and maximizing seasonal pleasures has created one of my favorite internet passtimes. Fair readers, behold the tenki.jp (Japan's weather.com) indexes in all their glory.

First, because winter is coming, I give you the nabe index.

This week's stew forecast.

For the uninitiated, nabe is a fall and winter dish that's a lot like a stew, but without the day-long simmering. Add veggies and meat to any of the 20,000 flavors of nabe stock (miso kimchi is my favorite) and fish stuff out as it boils...and there you have it. The pot is cooked with a camper stove at the table, and the whole family just fishes out what they want.  Depending on what goes it, it can be really healthy, and it usually warms up the house a bit too.

This is an index about the best time in the near future to eat nabe, and what kind will be most delicious in your area. Today's potential for nabe-enjoyment is expressed as a four-out-of-five nabe pots, and it recommends a kind of bean paste made near Ibara castle. Tomorrow is only a three-out-of-five, but it says that if you like duck, you should totally go for it. Saturday the 10th looks like awful weather in the meteorological forecast, so it makes sense that the nabe index would be highest then.  I have a feeling that part of this is to keep people's morale up through the winter by suggesting progressively delicious food as the cold and dark set in.

Up next, we have the legitimately useful blanket index.

Oh bother, another four-blanket week.

This is based on the night and early-morning temperatures in each area of Japan. Tonight's note is that if I use a thick blanket, I'll probably be okay. However, I shouldn't be fooled by tomorrow's 40 blanket index--if I skimp out and use a thin blanket, I will be cold in the morning.

I trust this index implicitly because today it told my partner, who has been known to fling comforters across the room in her sleep, not to kick off the covers. 


Now we're really about to step across the threshold into "how did I live without this?".  In case you find yourself without a grandparent with outerwear ESP, tenki.jp has you covered. Pun!

You need all these clothes on your body this week. Sorry.

In this index, a 100 means that it's tank-top weather. The cold category expressed, apparently, by a desire to put on ALL YOUR CLOTHES AT ONCE, has the widest margin.  I have to say it resonates with my experience with winter in Minnesota. When you get down to it, inside the right jacket, 0F and -30F just feel pretty much the same. Today's note--don't allow anyone to go out without a muffler and gloves. Tomorrow's note resembles the blanket index. Don't be fooled, if you leave the house without that coat, you will be cold.

Maybe it seems like too much information, but I really like how it takes meteorological data and in a few infographics, gives you a picture of your week. Temperatures and rain forecasts are nice, but I have a much better idea of how to dress for Friday and Saturday knowing that although it doesn't necessitate any more coats or blankets than Thursday, I will probably want stew those days more than any other day of the week...or at least a need for stew on Friday or Saturday has been successfully implanted in my brain. 

So, what's the moral of the story? What's the cultural lesson here? My take on it is another question. Why face the seasons unprepared for all they have to offer and all the misery they could throw at you? We have the technology and the mental capacity to recognize not only patterns in the area and how they affect our comfort (blanket and coat indexes) but also our desires. Since weather is one of the most primal shared experiences, why not predict the effect of weather on us as well? It's an interesting cultural perspective on the utility of quantitative data in the more subjective aspects of our lives--there are different lines between the "sciency" and the "non-sciency" in different societies.

I guess it all depends on how you view the variable, in this case, weather. Is it a shared experience or a series of data?

Nine O'Clock and All Is Well

All of my apartment’s (many) windows are single-paned. Luckily, energy saving measures spurred by the Tohoku earthquake have lead Japan to explore winterization and insulation wrap, so hopefully this won’t completely eviscerate my electricity budget this winter. It’s been warm here—highs have been 21C (69.8F) since late September—so I’ve been leaving my windows open in the evening to air out the place and enjoy the crisp evening weather.

Starting in mid-October, though, I started to hear strange noises coming from the town below. At around 8:30 or 9, I heard bells. These weren’t occasional peals from the big bells from the temple next door like I hear sometimes on Buddhist holidays. This is someone walking with a single handbell: ring, step, ring, step. I looked out my window every time I saw it, hoping to see one of the monks walking around. I never saw a monk, but the noise continued.

Around Halloween, I was riding back from visiting a friend. It was very dark, but even though they don’t have streetlights, the roads through the acres of rice fields a few blocks from my building are less crowded and therefore safer than the main streets. I went down a different road this time, one that goes through an old residential area before it opens up into the rice fields. Then, I heard a new variation on the same noise: clack, step, clack clack, step, clack. I actually followed the noise this time. An older woman was walking down the road with two wooden blocks, clacking away and looking somber. Once or twice, she muttered something I didn’t quite catch. I tried to greet her and ask what it was all about, but she didn’t seem to notice I was there.

The sound faded away as I biked off through the cut-down, dried out rice fields and rows of fruit-laden persimmon trees. What was that? Was she making noise to scare away stray cats from the garbage sites? Was it a religious thing, the muttering a prayer? What if I interrupted some sort of special rite she was doing? Or…what if she was a ghost? It was dark and the moon was peeking through the clouds in a very Halloween-ish sort of way—the thought did cross my mind.

From then on, I heard the clacking from my apartment at night soon after the bells. It went on for more than a week. In fact, I’m sure once it hits 8:30, I’ll hear it again tonight.

I finally asked one of my teachers about it today. She didn’t know at first, which kind of creeped me out. I was about to try to ask one of the Japanese history teachers too when she remembered.

Apparently it’s really rare, but some neighborhoods carry on the tradition of beating wooden blocks and saying 火の用心 (hi no youshin, careful of fire) to their neighbors during fall and winter nights. Long ago, people did this all over Japan to remind their neighbors to put out their cooking fires and be careful heating their homes through the night. Given that houses in Japan are traditionally made of fire-safe materials like pine wood, tatami mats, and paper screens and that they were built so close they almost touched, if one house caught fire, everyone suffered.

No one uses cooking fires anymore, but the areas of Komatsu nearby are mostly comprised of traditional style homes. Combine that with a high percentage of smokers, kerosene heaters in every big room in winter, and lots of ungrounded plugs, and…you have ample reason to remind your neighbors to be careful of their fire-related things at night.

Now that I know the history, I think this is one of my favorite local traditions. Sometimes these little windows open into the past and I realize just how old everything is here. Electricity and firetrucks are very, very new in the history of Japanese cities, particularly out here. How many tens of times older is this now-rare tradition than an electric stove, and yet, it vanished so quickly. I love it when things from the past leap up, grab me by the collar and give me no choice but to reflect on the way people lived their lives generations ago.
So, no ghosts save the ghosts of times long gone.

Also, if you want to read something awesome today, look up firefighters in Edo-era Japan.