A bit since the last update, it's my turn to fill people in. Last Saturday (the 19th), we went to Tokyo for Maria's Silver Week, three successive holidays in a row. I cannot recall what the three holidays are, and neither could any of the Japanese people we asked. We might have figured it out eventually, I don't really remember.
Anyway, we left incredibly early, the first of our 3 straight days of waking up at or before 6:30 on vacation. We took the shinkansen from Niigata City to Tokyo, and we were surprised that we had to pay nearly ¥20,000 for our tickets! Luckily, it wasn't a problem, just a huge and slightly unpleasant surprise. Once we got into Tokyo, we met up with Meghan, another ALT from Murakami, and her boyfriend Yuya and went to Outback Steakhouse for some real American food. It's pretty much impossible to get anything in Murakami that's REAL American food. Okay, yeah, McDonald's exists down the street from us, and not to be snobby, but calling the stuff from McDonald's food is a stretch. It's just as bad here as in the U.S. with a few different menu items. Other places don't believe hamburgers require buns, or seem to have understanding of what a proper sausage is, and forget about bratwurst. I definitely didn't get enough bratwurst before leaving this summer.
Anyway, Outback was good, but I feel set there for a year, the food seems designed to give you an immediate coronary, but it was nice to have something familiar. That evening we went to our hostel, in the Asakusa -ward or neighborhood or something. We eventually found it because the neighborhood was filled with gaijin (foreigners) more than Tokyo usually is. That was another weird thing, in Murakami there's no foreigners that we don't know (okay, maybe two), but in Tokyo there's foreigners EVERYWHERE, and it was almost jarring to see them everywhere. It felt like we should know them, because in Murakami we do know them! Anyway, the hostel room was small and cramped, so we felt like we had to get out quickly.
Maria wants me to add that the hostel room was REALLY ridiculously small, and she's definitely right. Basically, the room had enough space for the twin sized bunk beds and that was it. We only got sheets, which was fine since they said they had blankets for free if you asked. Except, they were out when we asked. So we slept in the same bed to try to have enough heat. It wasn't completely effective, but it was a place to sleep and for cheap.
Despite still being stuffed from Outback we still explored Asakusa on foot. We found a famous temple, Sensoji, which was next door to a Shinto shrine, the Asakusa shrine. You'll have to look up the relationship between them. Here are some pictures, thanks to wikipedia.
We went to bed and woke up early because we had to get to see bunraku theater the following day. They used great big puppets controlled by 3 performers, with narrators providing voices in a sorta sing-song way with musical accompaniment on shamisens, which is something like 3-stringed guitars. The way the narrators sang they had to switch out every half-hour or so. The puppet work was really incredible, though I wish i had understand more of the language since periods without action tended to drag on and really get boring. You could almost think of it as opera with nothing but recitative, but that's only partly right. Nonetheless, it was exciting to see and we only almost fell asleep once apiece.
Some bunraku puppets and how 3 people operate each puppet. The head puppeteer controls the head and the right hand, another assistant gets the left hand, and the third puppeteer does the legs.
More bunraku information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunraku
After briefly walking past the Diet (the Japanese capital building) and headed out for Machida, where lots of our Oberlin friends are now living in Japan. Actually, all of them were people that Maria knew from Oberlin, theoretically I saw some of them around campus, but I couldn't really remember any. We had some good food Unfortunately not American food, as was our goal in Tokyo, where you can actually get American food. Those other Obies don't realize how good they have it in Tokyo! Afterwards we went to karaoke and had some good time singing great songs. One guy seemed to have a real desire to become an Enrique Iglesias impersonator, and I wish him luck, though I don't know if it has the demand of Elvis impersonators.
The next morning, we again woke up early and met up with Meghan, Yuya, and two of their friends and rode back to Murakami. Tokyo was really pretty great, but there's a lot of people there, and it was nice to return to the quiet of Murakami, I have to admit. That's the update for now, keep tuned for another one.
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