July 2005
The price of fame
So it's July. It's hot. It's Awa Odori season. It's a great time to be in Tokushima. I've been busy this month, so busy in fact that in the space of the past couple of weeks, I've managed to feature in two local newspaper articles and get my mug into the leading Awa Odori pictorial magazine, Tokushima Graph. But fame comes at a price! Check out this set of photos, courtesy of the Graph. Three guys just having a good time dancing down the street, right? But the caption - "The 3 Skinheads". Nice one. :)
I picked up another smaller shot in the Graph, from last year's fun with the local international group, and my other claims to notoriety came courtesy of the speech contest and an interview I gave as a member of Tensui-ren. Said interview featured in this past weekend's Tokushima Shimbun, replete with a large colour photo of me dancing. People keep telling me I look the part, too, but I'm not sure it's my best angle... but anyway, it was a nice surprise to have people calling me up over the weekend to tell me I was in the paper.
I didn't see it myself until Monday because I was off the island, on tour to Shimane-ken
with Minoda-ren. What's that, didn't I just join Tensui-ren? Yes, but on special request
from the old team, I was kindly allowed to join them again for a big event. Shimane is a
good six hours drive away on the Sea of Japan side of Japan's main island. It's quite
rural, nice place, possibly most famous for its ongoing dispute with South Korea over the
possession of an island called Takashima. Politics aside, though, we were there for a
Yosakoi Festival.
Now the plot thickens, of course, because Yosakoi is the summer dance of Kochi prefecture, on Shikoku's south coast. I've written about it before, and you can read up on that HERE, but in short, it's more like freestyle team dancing and it's quite different to Awa Odori. This particular festival was like a competition between all the Yosakoi teams that had turned up. So why the Awa Odori team? We were there as special guests to mix it up a bit, and I think we succeeded in that. We had a couple of performances during the day, but the main event was us coming on last before the judges announced the winners of the day's action. It was about nine in the evening, beautiful summer night, and we got to dance in front of some 2000 people. Fantastic!
Woke up a bit sore the next day, but on the way home we stopped off at a theme park called Washuzan Highland on the south side of Okayama. I haven't been on a rollercoaster for a long time! The view from the top of the Turbo Drop was wonderful, too. We got back to the Highway Oasis at about 6pm, whereupon I jumped straight in the car to get back for still more Awa Odori - practice for the big Festival of the Night Before in Tokushima city. Yes, I love dancing, though I was hoping for a bit of rain today so we could have a rest from practice tonight... :)
I wasn't the only one moving straight on from the Yosakoi Festival to another task. Ellie, the local ALT in Miyoshi where Minoda-ren is based, is also in the team, and she got away on Sunday morning to catch a plane to Tokyo, where she is a part of the AJET team for Tokyo Orientation. It's that time of year again, when some 3000 new JETs arrive in Japan and meet in Tokyo before heading off to their respective placements, and I guess it's a bit nostalgic for me. It's been a long time since I haven't been involved in it! Ellie tells me that things are going well for AJET so far, what with all the changes that have been made this past few months, so that's good to hear. About 34 of those 3000 new JETs will be coming to Tokushima-ken, which is certainly something to look forward to.
And as for the speech contest, that turned out to be a top day. Lots of interesting people taking the stand, and some pleasing results for me personally. I was pretty happy with my delivery and I ended up in third place. I took home some cash for my trouble and more token gifts than I could carry. The winner was a friendly guy from Bangladesh, who's been studying in Japan for five years now, and I also remember a particularly good speech by a Korean girl, who talked about the aforementioned Takashima problem. Suffice to say that Japan and Korea hardly agree on the issue, but at least these things get sorted out over a table these days, rather than at the point of a gun. All in all, a very educational afternoon, replete with a party to finish it off!
Now of course I have to get back to some real Japanese study, but just today I was put onto a great little study resource by a fellow ALT here in Tokushima city. An old school role-playing game that makes you practice Japanese characters to fight battles, sensational! I'll be getting a lot more study done from now on... :)
Speaking of which, I'd better get back to it. Take care!
Love,
Dave