One Half Ninja Turtle

Not quite six months ago, Cliff and I started practicing bo. I still remember the excitement of being told by Taira-sensei that if we bought our own, he would teach us. And so for the past few months we have been practicing, smoothing our movements and thickening our calluses. While far from proficient, we feel capable. We have also memorized our first kata, 徳嶺のこん, Tokumine no kon.

Some weeks ago, sensei informed us that he'd be willing to expand our abilities in 古武道, kobudo, or Okinawan weapons fighting. Taira-sensei told us that if we brought these to practice, he would teach us.

Sai. Not at all like I imagined, these are used much more for deflecting attacks than actually penetrating an opponent, though that possibility still exists.

I was practicing a very basic move at home last week, when one of the sai slipped out of my hands and fell to the floor. It left a very noticable wound in the tatami, one that I'm going to do my best not to show off when it's time for me to leave Higashi.

A (Last) Day at School

Several weeks ago, after an elementary school lesson, one of the teachers at my small school told me that two of the boys were leaving Higashi. Their father was getting transferred for a work assignment and they would be gone by September 18th. As luck would have it, I was scheduled to be at that school during the boys' last week, so I would have plenty of time to say my goodbyes.

The thing about these two boys is that their father is American, so they're English comprehension is well above that of the other students. They didn't speak much or any English to me, but when I talked in class, they often understood what I was saying and would help the other students out. I will miss their funny Japanese interpretations of English...and of my "accent".

For their last week, there were a few special events to bid them farewell. We played basketball and kickball. After the kickball game, the brothers were presented with hand-made mementos, to remember their friends at the school. The boys even made short speeches, and both of them teared up. It was touching to see that their short time at the school had been so good for them.

I made sure to have my camera with me, and took pictures whenever I could. I thought five days would be a long time, but it was over before I knew it.

Post Rally Syndrome

My dad sent me a few DVDs of photographs, ones left on my computer in the US and a bunch that he found and scanned in my grandmother's house. While I plan to put up a few of those old photos (you'll even get to see me when I was only a few years old), here's one that I made after getting back from the Mongol Rally. I sent it to one of my new international friends about a week before I had to go back to work.

Go Cubs!

It turns out, even the Cubs have fans in Okinawa.

I'll buy a can of beer for anyone (in Okinawa) who can guess what player's name was listed on the back. Two beers if you get the number correct, too.

himawari: sunflower

While different eye color is not at all uncommon in the US, it's quite rare in Japan. People will often refer to the color of their eyes as "black." It's pretty accurate. There are some people, however, whose eye color more closely resembles a brown (and in cases where this brown is light, it's really shocking).

Lately, the younger kids of my elementary schools have taken a liking to my eye color. Brown? Green? Hazel? A little bit of everything, they've decided to call it something new entirely.

Himawari, or sunflower.

It's not an exact representation, but I like it. There's brown, there's green, and there's even a little something between where the brown and green blend together.

It's kind of nice, especially on those feeling-down days, to have a kid ask me to see my eyes, then to have her utter, 「お～、向日葵（ひまわり）だ。」(Ooh, sunflowers!)

Photo sourced from 花の壁紙写真ブログ.

Blood Pressure

When I showed up to my afternoon school today, there was a blood pressure monitor (among other things) on my desk. Rather than get pissed about how my desk is the "go to" place when the teachers need to leave things lying around, I decided to use it. Here are the results:

Time: 16:27
Systolic pressure (after contraction): 113 mm/Hg
Diastolic pressure (before contraction): 62 mm/Hg
Pulse: 61 bpm

113/62. It seems like it was a much better idea to keep chill than to flip out about something that doesn't even really matter anyway. I'll take that as my lesson for the day.

Obon

A week and a half ago, I was heading to Nago when I passed by the athletic field in the center of Higashi. All the lights were on and there were a bunch of people doing eisa (a type of traditional Okinawan dance). I stopped by that night to see what was happening. It was a great choice.

Almost two weeks later, I had one of the best nights of my time here in Japan.

Obon is a yearly holiday where people pay respects to their ancestors. They call the spirits of the dead from the sea for a few days, sending them back a few days later. While I'm unsure as to how things are done on mainland Japan, in Okinawa, eisa (as performed on Obon) seems to be a sort of celebration/thanks to the spirits.

So starting at 5:00 pm on Thursday, we danced at various locations throughout a part of the village and we did that until midnight. We took breaks between performances and were even treated to lots of food and drink by the people who were hosting Obon parties (who I found out later, had paid to have us perform for them - this itself is a huge fundraiser for the youth group that organized the eisa).

The event almost didn't happen for me. Over the week and a half of practice, my right knee started to bother me a lot. I went to a doctor on Tuesday and he said, "Stop all stressful activity." Me: "Even eisa?" Doc: "Even eisa." I was crushed.

So I showed up on Thursday with the intent of just taking photographs and video. But when the first round of practice was called for, I jumped in and gave it a shot. No problem! Nothing hurt (I was also using the left leg to compensate for a lot of the up and down movement). We made our way to the first performance spot and by the end of the fourth song (out of five) my left knee started to hurt more than the right one ever had. I sat out the last song and regretted my bad luck.

The next location, I didn't dance, I just took pictures. It felt so lame! Everyone dancing and me standing off to the side in full outfit wishing I could dance. Upon reaching the third location, I decided to let adrenaline run its course for the night - and I danced. I didn't bend my knees as much as everyone else, I didn't spin as fast, doing whatever I could to keep the stress from getting too intense. A little bit of alcohol also may have helped. But before I knew it, we had reached the last location of the night, just around midnight. The longest set of the night, I kept getting encouragement from those around me, a great boost. We sent Obon out with great energy and made our way back to the community center to celebrate our two weeks of hard work and one of the most enjoyable nights I've had here in Okinawa.

A Roll a Day

September 1, and school has started again. It's the second term of the school year, and if today's opening ceremony was any indication, the students are wiped out from their 45 days off. The principal remarked more than once about how sleepy the assembled mass of students looked. If they're anything like I was, they spent last night doing all the homework they put off until the last minute.

There are no English classes today (check that: at my morning school - afternoon school might surprise me with two), so I have some time to prepare for tomorrow's six classes in a row! Since a school day consists of only six classes (for a total of 4.5 hours in the front of the classroom), it is going to be busy. And since it's hot, it's going to be sweaty. And I'm pretty sure I'm the only teacher in the school who gets scheduled for a full day of classes (even elementary teachers don't spend all day teaching - there are specialist teachers that take over for math, science, and phys. ed.).

That gripe out of the way, today is also the start of my new project - A Roll a Day. For the next four months, I'm going to do my very best at taking a roll of photographs a day. 36 exposures per day (day being loosely defined as "a period of time between waking up and going to sleep that includes enough light for decent photographic exposure"). By combining this with the resumption of school, I figure there should be plenty to capture.

A sub-goal of this is to get people used to - in fact, bored with - me carrying a camera everywhere. A lot of people here shy away from cameras with lenses; they're just not used to them unless photos are being taken during formal events, which means they have plenty of time to primp and prepare. But on a normal day, people feel unprepared to have their image captured, and so they hide or put on a photo front (if you smile or pose at cameras, you are putting on a front). I want to get past that, to get the photos of people as they are, not as they want to be seen.

Now, off to prep for tomorrow.