Blossoms and wire

Evidencing the warmer winter of the Northern Hemisphere, the first plum blossoms were spotted near the cemetery of Lafcadio Hearn. Streaking lines of electrical wire are a common sight in Japan, and here you can see the deep pink flowers budding amid overhanging cables.

Meet me at the cemetery gates ...

Near our Ikebukuro inn is located the cemetery where the Nihonophile and writer Lafcadio Hearn is buried. As we (at the moment) hail from Matsue, a town where Lafcadio Hearn lived and scribbled for just over a year, we decided to pay our respects. The graveyard is a Buddhist one, and Hearn is buried alongside his wife and child. The headstone bears his Japanese name, Koizumi Yakumo. In this snap, Hearn looks a picture of shyness and modesty. This image of Hearn is often spotted around Matsue: in wrought iron friezes on lamp-posts, postcards, bookmarks and chocolate boxes. He is rather an icon about town!

The Bird Cage

My weekend adventure in Tokyo took Sir S and the travelling Antipodeans to this ornate aviary of a dance hall, Alamode. With two ballrooms and one conversation salon, there was plenty to divert us throughout the evening.

In Ballroom the First, a visual kei band swanned about on the stage, sparkling in white wedding dresses, and all the chaps in the quartet were meringue-white in make-up with enticing Egyptian eyes. The music was jaunty rock that got many a pretty debutante doing the Charleston in a most saucy, outrageous manner with danglies rattling from handbags and fans flapping about.

In Ballroom the Second, slender ladies and men of bird-like fragility flittered about in the fanciest attire. Splendidly dressed Gothic Lolitas ruffled their puffy skirts and adjusted their miniature top hats, men in long tails fluttered about, young chaps in hakama tossed from side to side their long black locks, clowns tumbled, French courtesans powdered their noses and reapplied their beauty spots discreetly in the shadows. Unlike Oriental trance halls (where dancers face towards the music conductor in a pose of worship), the dancers here twirled and swirled alone, enjoying the song in their own bubble of solitude.

In the Conversation Salon, weary dancers rested their feet on velvet puffs, the livelier people chattered vivaciously to their partners, while lookers-on browsed the stalls that were selling silver jewellery and hats - my fave was a tiny, pillar-box hat encrusted with brown gumleaves, over which was tossed a veil and perched upon it a bronze dragonfly. Tres chic!

A cabaret performance particularly titillated the ballgoers. One featured a woman dressed as a Chinese opera singer, giving a somewhat panto-ish routine of pleasuring her master (!) with a quick-witted tongue (!!) upon a folded sensu fan (yipes!); followed by song and dance from a trio dressed up in zebra-inspired attire. The women each had a zebra ear and tail, and were dressed in spangly gymnast costumes of green and blue; the man had on a zebra-ish mask and an intimidating two-pronged codpiece, striped in black and white, which he regularly thrust in our direction. Most shocking!

As the evening came to a close, when one's pin-curls were going limp and the decorations dwindled, I espied this golden bird upon the ballroom floor that at a guess had inadvertently fallen off someone's masquerade mid-waltz. There is a certain joy with which one finds a discarded, forgotten trinket. A fine souvenir from the bird's cage!

Art, sweetie, art!

Just glimpsed the work of Audrey Kawasaki. It's like storybook art noveau with a 60s retro-ness and pretty Japanese touches.

I have collected many postcards by this artist at Graffiti Bunny. They are tacked on my wall above my Writing Nook, and picture melancholic characters cloaked in kimonos, their heads bent in an atmospheric tableau amid willow trees, maple leaves, cherry blossoms or nightflowers. Stylishly done in a sharp 60s fashion mag style, but classically Japanese.

I seek out this blog, Japonisme, for stunning vintage pics bearing a strong Japanese influence, and for snaps of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings. A visual feast, plus most informative and well-written. Bravo!

Fusions of old and new

Sir S and I - along with fellow Antipodean travellers Penny Dreadful and Mr Star - spent the weekend in Tokyo, and as is customary for travellers with a keen passion for fashion, we visited Harajuku on Sunday afternoon, with periscopes and binoculars finely polished, for a spot of indulgent people-watching and bizarre-outfit-spotting. Young Japanese folk gather on the bridge behind the station every Sunday, close to the looming stone torii gate of the Meiji Jingu Shrine. They are gaily decked out in an array of unconventional attire. Becoming somewhat of a tourist attraction, these bright young things cluster in groups along the bridge, chatting cheerfully with equally peculiarly-dressed types, posing for photographs with the tourists, or prancing and preening as if in a Madonna video, like the lovely ladies in this snap below. Most of the fancifully dressed have with them a small suitcase each, which one suspects contains their everyday garb (perhaps they sneak it out of their parents' house, cunningly hidden in an innocuous Mickey Mouse luggage set?).



This snap gives an idea of the atmos: crowded with tourists trying to take a peep at the costumed young 'uns, elbowing this way and that to get a better view.



Curiously, this same day also happened to be Japan's National Foundation Day. The bridge then, was not only abustle with young dandies and gals dressed in goth-kimonos, white spacesuits, fluffy bunny outfits and the best stock of clothes from the queerest fashion houses in Tokyo, but it was swarming with festival-goers and participants celebrating Japan's national holiday. Burly groups of men were kitted out in underpants and traditional shirts - rather drafty, I imagine, despite the sunshine! - and each group hoisted above them palaquins bearing a gold-leafed shrine in miniature. It blazed gloriously in the sun like the unearthed Ark of the Covenant, so that I half-expected Indiana Jones to come swooping out of the trees flourishing his whips willy-nilly!



The crowd was most gregarious and rowdy and, swept along with the flow of Chu-Hi that seemingly cascaded from the glowing shrines, the shrine-carriers wended their way through the great torii gate and under the canopy of trees towards the Meiji Jingu Shrine. A leader at the head of each group broadcast a bellowing chant on his megaphone, and the shrine-carriers (some of whom fell tipsily along the wayside and were replaced with more sobre young women) echoed it in a lively fashion.* Many of the bearers displayed magnificent tattoos** of entwined dragons and the like. The lanterns and banners glowed and the shrines glittered in the sunlight, creating quite a marvellous spectacle.



In that oft-said phrase of travellers in the Orient, the sight at Harajuku was a fusion of old and new, and it is an experience that I most relish here in Japan.

* The chant itself was reminiscent of that of the bouncing heads in the film Spirited Away, a deep, reverberating "oi...oi... oi!"
** In Japan, tattoos traditionally denote criminality, and especially association with the yakuza or Japanese mafia. If not properly concealed, tattoos can restrict one's entry to some gyms and hot springs.

Lessons aquatic

At my schoolhouse, known locally as the Hearn and Chamberlain School of Foreign Manners & Refined Conversation, I was entertained by a most curious scholar known as Captain Nori "Nevermind-the-coordinates-pass-me-the-shochu" Tsunami. A seadog from way back, Cap'n Nori Tsunami has sailed the seven seas with the Nipponese Navy, and it seems he spent most voyages flat on his back starboard-side, a bottle in one hand and a sick-bag in the other. "You see, Sensei," he regaled me, "my stomach was a nuisance. Weak, and so feeble! I would lurch stern to bow clutching my poor belly. 'O-naka!' I would cry, 'Why so knackered, oh-so soon?"

As his schoolmistress, I dared not suggest to him that perhaps the culprit was more likely to be, as per the sailor's parlance, due to sucking the monkey with the landlubbers. The captain stressed, however, that his weakness was purely from reasons gastrological, and assured me that his nautical nous was as sharp as a cabinboy's sewing kit. "The sea took friends from me, it has even took bits from me! Oh, I felt a sickness! But a rosewater sailor? Not I!" he asserted, and thence became further distracted from our lesson, fast becoming stuck in a reverie of dancing girls, flower girls, singing girls, from Chile to Lombok and round the Cape of Good Hope. "Drinking, fine company, drinking, conversation: these things I like; the sea, mph!" he moaned, thumping his tummy.

The captain confessed that, now in his retirement and continuing some maritime pursuits on the side, he was more comfortable with working on the water.

"You have made your peace with the sea and its accompanying gastrological ailments?" asked I.

"Of course, no!" bawled he. "I carry tourists around the castle moat on my boat. It is a small boat. The water, it is calm. There, no wave can bother my belly." He winked at me.
"Now, what were we talking about, Sensei?"

I tapped my pointing rod on the relevant page and reminded the captain that the conversational topic was "Sports - Which is the Most Diverting in your Earnest Opinion, and Why is this So?". At once, Captain Nori Tsunami's eyes lit up with a most feverish glow.

"Wrestling!" he announced.

"Oh?" said I, "Did you tackle a few tars in your time at sea?"

"Naturally, no!" he replied, "Rough-housing it on the Poop deck? I don't like. Mud wrestling, now, I like!"

My pointing rod trembled on the page as the captain pontificated on the rudiments of mud-wrestling, the sheen of the wrestlers' bathing costumes when the mud is spread about, and the shame that this sport is not included in the Olympics, nor is it a regular weekly event at his favourite snack.*

The captain was in the middle of cursing snack-owners across the country, and my pointing rod was about to snap under my tense exertions, when the school bell tolled, and along the corridors, my fellow masters and mistresses bustled from their classrooms in the direction of the Common Room. I dabbed my brow with my Erte handkerchief, straightened my hemline and wished him good day, then went at a cracking pace to recover from my oratory ordeal over a freshly-brewed hot coffee.** Phew!

*Oft unseemly bars, frequented by over-the-hill kabuki actresses, tippling Shinto priests, and the like - see further Sir S's notes on the matter.
**Swiftly dispatched from those modern Clockwork Cafes adjoining the school.

Nostalgia on The Box

With many an arigaato gozaimasu to Detective M, I have been rewatching the gloriously smutty British comedy, 'Allo 'Allo. Concerned that its silly plotlines and juvenile humour would be rendered unfunny by my jaded old age (well, I was 9 years old when I last watched the series), I was pleasantly surprised by the cunning plots, engaging characters and all those saucy running jokes, especially that of zee fallen Madonna vith zee big boobies, followed by the multiple knockwursts containing the original (and forgeries thereof) of zee fallen Madonna vith zee big - erm, yes, well *ahem* ...

My fave characters include:

• Michelle of zee Resistance ... "listen very carefully, I shall say this only once."

• Crabtree, the English spy disguised as a French policeman with terrible French ... "Good moaning!" and, in response to a fainting Michelle, "oh, zee 'az pissed oot!"

• Herr Flick of the Gestapo, who always speaks in a deadpan voice ... after blowing up a Gestapo car by mistake: "I vill not be informing Berlin of ziss incident. I do not vish to look a right nana."

• Madam Fanny La Fan: "Oooh! I am zeeing flashing knobs!"

The jokes about Hitler's sausage and the Madonna are most amusing, such as ... Herr Flick and Helga:
Herr Flick: I have three fallen Madonnas, vith six big boobies. Only von of zem is real.
Helga: Only von big booby?

Tee hee, indeed!

Fun with sepia

Have toyed about a little with the sepia mode of my camerabox. The copper-coloured scoops in this pic are water ladles from a Buddhist temple, taken in the temple district of Teramachi.

Will experiment with sepia further on next week's jaunt to Tokyo to meet up with gallavanting Sydneysiders, Penny Dreadful and Sir F. Starr. Shall have to flapper myself up for some snaps of Roaring 20s glam!

Oishii!

Today was a fine and golden day in Matsue: all the snow has melted away (except for a few garagantuan snowmen whose backsides have thus far escaped the sun's scorching rod). It was so warm that one could peel off one's gloves, with not even a marbled cornbeef colouration appearing on one's skin. Perhaps spring has sprung for good?

Sir S and I took full advantage of the weather and raced riverside into town where the Matsue Food Festival was in full swing. We tucked into the local offerings: chizu baru (cheeseballs on a stick); hashimaki (a savoury pancake wrapped around a chopstick handle, stuffed with ginger and sweet sauce and striped with mayo), being devoured by me below; rice and prawn things on a stick (pictured below, with stall owner in white) and impaled, be-crumbed prawns. We also stocked up the pantry with umeboshi (pickled plums) and chilli miso.



After filling our tumkins sufficiently, we sauntered in the direction of Ye Olde Manga Shoppe, passing by many tots wearing diverting hats* and seafood stalls where trussed-up crabs still managed to wave their pincers in gruff protest. I purchased a manga called Emma, an epic tale about a scullery maid daringly showing off her ankles to chimney sweeps in Cheapside, London. It is entirely in Japanese (no helpful furigana** on the kanji!) so I imagine I will get through it at a rate of one page per week.

* All hats featured flopsome ears: kitten and rabbit were most popular.
** Small letters of hirigana, the most basic of Japanese characters, that are written above kanji, the most complicated of Japanese characters, which thus far I'm unable to read, with the exception of "I", "mountain", "rice field" and a smattering of others.

Erratum!

It was brought to my attention that the phrase "foxes' wedding march" actually refers to a sunshower of the rain variety, not that of snow. However, despite this technicality, this phrase remains an ideal summing up of Miss Ember and Sir S's wedding day and captures both the joy of the event, as well as the mystery exuded by the vulpine spirits within Jozan Inari. Just thought it should be corrected here so that no Gaijin Myths on this phrase are perpetuated (Gaijin Myths in Japan being innumerable as it is).

--ED

Setsubun

Today is the time of setsubun which is celebrated in the home. Beans are scattered within one's house to bring in luck and happiness, and beans are also scattered outside with the command "out with evil, I say!". Instead of the latter, some bean tossers use an oni or damnably ugly hairy demon as target practice (usually some poor chap wearing a 100 Yen Shoppe mask), and has beans pelted at him from point-blank range. Hairy indeed! On this day, people eat the amount of beans that corresponds to their age, plus one for luck. Pity the poor obaasan who has to down 95 of them in one sitting! People also eat long, uncut makizushi (rolled sushi) whilst facing the "lucky" direction for that year.

More snowy snaps

Snapped by my camerabox whilst ambling about the foothills near my house ...

Shrine by the motorway

This road-side shrine is located on the main road near the Ember-Flashy apaato rooms, very close to Lapan.* At the shrine is a little man hewn of stone** donning a red-knit cap, and bunches of bright flowers. As I tripped home through the slush, jostling myriad shopping bags, I noted that some kind soul had placed a tin hat on his head, to keep his woollen hat dry from the snow. I like the way his hat is shaped like the conical straw hats worn by farmers.

*A gourmet grocer with lots of imported goods from Europe, America and Australia (one can snaffle up Tim Tams here) as well as Japanese foods.
** The man is Buddha-ish of appearance, but I have heard that he is supposed to be a wise man, or follower of Buddha, rather than Buddha himself.

Further illustrations of wintery shrines

This inviting little path leads one to a tree-shrine (above). I like to spend time here, gazing at the tree's roots, gnarled and twisted in the earth, and the various objects of worship nestled around them. The tree is always decorated with rope and strung with pieces of folded paper. It makes for one a perfect grotto of solitude and seclusion. In Japan, I enjoy stumbling upon these enduring testaments to nature-worship, whether it be in a glade, between houses on a suburban street or by the roadside as trucks shamble by.

Wintery rambles

My fave wintery plant is this red-berried delight, which I snapped outside the front of a house in the backstreets of the foothills. I don't know its name, so I have nicknamed it Japanese holly. The leaves aren't prickly, but the berries are a burning red and make one feel most cheerful.



I bent my steps towards a shrine, tucked-away above curly-roofed houses, frozen cabbage patches and a creaky woodshed.* The snow-dusted steps led me to the cantankerous gaze of two guardian lion-dogs (koma-inu), who appeared to be unimpressed by their newly acquired manes of snow.



The shrine was peaceful but for the occasional slide and thump of falling snow, now melting in the sunlight. Lumps of ice bobbled in the fount, like sucked ice-cubes in a cocktail. What a stunning scene it was: the snowy-capped lantern, the arched, glittering bough bent over the pathway to the shrine, and all dripping with ice.


The gap in this torii gate made an intriguing windowframe. I like the contrast of the smooth stones with the rough bark and needles in the background, and the conflicting symmetries of stone and wood.



*There's something nasty in the woodshed, Robert Poste's child!

White wonderments!

During the past two days, snow has blanketed Matsue in a crystalline cover of white! The snow started flurrying on Wednesday afternoon whilst I perambulated about on my bicycle in the direction of the schoolhouse. At first it came down as violently as Gerry schrapnel in the form of hail. This proves a frightful obstacle for the amateur cyclist, who must grit one's teeth and pull down one's cloche as the nasty white balls ricochet in all directions, and always manage to get behind one's spectacles, triggering a catastrophe of run-ins with doddling elderfolk, parked cars, and bridges.*



But the hail soon passed, and was replaced with plump white snowflakes that drifted down with a whimsical silence, and smacked an icy kiss on one's lips when racing downhill on one's Yes We Can! On Thursday morn, after a hearty breakfast of rice and miso soup, I donned my purple gloomy-weather coat and fluffy beret and, clutching my camera-box, I tumbled out into the cold. Across the river I ambled, admiring pines laden with snow and road-side lanterns and statues enfolded in a kimono-wrap of frost. Japanese holly was topped with meringue-whipped snow. Everything looked so wickedly clean and sparkling!




*One has to keep an eye out for bridges in this treacherous weather. They always pop up and catch one unawares.

Our House

The abode of Miss Ember and Sir S can be espied behind these reeds. The forest on the hill is the main view we have from our house. The European-style building in the below snap is composed of two shoppes: one an expensive boutique; the other a charming store selling eclectic wares, from pearly-handled chopsticks, parasols, sarongs to plum incense and miniature bathroom models. I rather like the sign and its sinister duck! (Soz, guys and gals, am too rushed to tamper with topsy-turvy snaps!)

Backstreets in Matsue

When cycling to my Japanese lesson, I often weave through narrow backstreets that are lined with traditional-style houses. Of course, I stumbled across a shrine in between two houses: a snug neighbour. Today, a light, feathery snow has fallen. Apparently in Shimane, heavy snow is always guaranteed on Setsubun; perhaps it is the demon's small revenge for being cast out. Anyway, here are some snaps from my locale.

Natto shenanigans

I took part in a culinary adventure and sampled my first Japanese natto. Dubiously hailed for its weight-loss properties on an NHK lifestyle program* (which caused natto to sell out at most supermarkets across the country), natto is a slippery, glutinous package of fermented soybeans. Sold in yoghurt-sized cartons, many Japanese eat the stuff at breakfast or for a healthy snack. My students sagely advised me that, although healthy, natto is infamous for its stench and its neba-neba** texture. See here for natto snaps.

Bravely peeling back the lid, Sir S instructed me on the technique of, shall we say, "stoking" the natto so that it oozes neba-neba, by whisking it with one's chopsticks. After a thorough whisking, the beans appeared to be wrapped in a stringy, gelatinous spider's web. I gave the mixture a cautious sniff (there was no smell of rotten socks; in fact, the smell was faint), then I daubed my chopsticks with the stuff and had three gulps. The taste was similar to beansprouts, and was tolerable. However, it was the texture that was difficult to swallow, and indeed I mean this literally. The natto stuck in my throat like glue and I could not get it down. And if something refuses to budge downwards, the only way for it is to come up-diddly-up. And this it did, with surprising speed, so that I had to rush to the ladies' room with newfound alacrity, and cough violently into my Erte handkerchief. Lorks-a-lordy!

I have concluded that, except for okra, the food of the neba-neba is to be avoided (especially at dinner parties when one has absently left one's handkerchief at home).


*It was found that data used in the show was incorrect, and the program was promptly axed.
** Japanese onomatopoeia for slimy substances.

More snaps from Kyoto