Culture at Work
Cross-Cultural / Japan
Culture at Work
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Note!!!I've uploaded many of my passable photos to Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/jbviews. I'll post some of them here with comments when I have time. Meanwhile, here's a summary of the last week. Previous PostsMonday, November 24, 2008Workshop, Ball & Banquet Imagine 300+ dancers in a large gymnasium, 95% over age 60, all dressed in shiny ball gowns, embroidered folk dance dresses and vests, or black formal wear with bowties..........! After my morning workshop, 4 groups gave dance demonstrations (English, Japanese-Mexican, Okinawa, Japanese recreational dance). There was 10 minutes left to change clothes and quickly eat the sushi and side dishes prepared for the "honored guests" in a side room. Each club dances in a designated place on the floor, and each person has a designated partner for the entire session or the entire afternoon. Their local circles have been practicing for months. Many of the women dancing men's parts dress in vests and black tights or trousers. Honored guests dance with each other.
The Ball happens once a year, and has six sections of 4-5 dances.
Sunday, November 23, 2008Bonsai Village, OmiyaSeveral dancers took the train to a nearby northern suburb this morning to walk through several bonsai gardens. The streets were very very quiet, with many trees, gardens, and some old houses. The weather was perfect -- clear and cool. The gardens are generally free to the public, and some of the trees are more than 100 years old. Photographs are strictly forbidden, but fortunately "Andrew K" visited yesterday and posted many nice ones on Flickr: Bonsai Village. We also looked at a delightful small cartoon museum dedicated to Kitazawa Rakuten, Japan's first color cartoonist (who invented the word "Manga"). There was also an exhibit of Kazumine Daiji, a cartoonist who made hundreds of small cheaply printed adventure comics for boys during the 60s that later became TV animations -- you can see the American influence, but also the emergence of the style that now dominates toys and manga coming out of Japan. Some images of Kazumine Daiji's work. November 18-23, 2008Lavish food & happy dancingIndeed, predictions of internet wilderness proved true. Japan is too wealthy to need lots of internet cafes (not that I had free time to go into one anyway) and people are too sophisticated and distrusting to broadcast unencrypted wireless signals in their homes. I'll try to fill in here -- at this point the week is a blur. Most days consisted of 3 lavish meals and a morning or afternoon dance class, each in a different suburb. I stayed with an artist for two nights who has enjoyed wood carving, sketching, sewing, and now photography. Her kitchen and dining room are furnished with carved pieces she had custom made in Indonesia. Amazing. She also took out her silk wedding kimono from 50 years ago. The embroidery and weaving were superb. The haori (jacket) was originally pale pink, suitable for young women, then later dyed black so that she could still wear it. She lives in her own townhouse, with each son living with their wives & children on either side. They rent 3 other units. Longterm families in these suburbs are wealthy from the increase in land values. The next night, I stayed in a modern apartment overlooking the mountains to the west of Tokyo. Breakfast was accompanied by a video of the Scottish Fiddle Orchestra -- 150 musicians!! The next two nights were in a town to the north of Tokyo, at the home of a semi-retired liquor store owner ("sake house"). They've had a whole range of businesses over the years: a food store, wholesale propane and oil, a pizza shop (a success), a gas station (loss). They mostly rent their property now, so the front yard is a convenience store. Their children have gone on to other work, as the family thinks there is little future in these locally owned stores. The couple's unoccupied spacious 3rd floor is a separate apartment, complete with an home elevator. I was able to get some work done and zone out for a while. In each place, I was taken out to dinner or lunch with the local "English Circle" organizers, and also treated to delicious meals with all the dancers who wanted to come. My camera is full of multi-course dinner photos -- food is served with such artistry. I'll post just a few here. First and last I should talk about the *dancing*, which is the whole point of this enjoyable excursion. We've had between 25 and 60 people at each of the 5 sessions, with some overlap, but mostly the circles are independent of each other. Tomorrow we'll have 150 or more people for the morning workshop before the afternoon ball. In each place, despite the organizers and teachers' modesty, the level of dancing skill is quite high, with the few newcomers easily absorbed. Even though English Country Dance is recent here, most dancers have spent years doing Scottish Country and/or Folk Dance. I was warned to stick to slower dances because the Circle members are mostly retirement age. Sure enough, the elegant tunes from Bare Necessities Volume 11: Delia, Turn of the Tide, and Stepping Stones have been well received. However, they keep asking to repeat "Fast Packet", which is danced to a cheery hornpipe tune (It's a new dance: fast packet has to do with byte transmission not clipper ships!). I assume Bob Lilley intended the dance to be done with a walking step, but I've been teaching it with schottish style step hop for the turns and polka step for the other figures. I have a lot of blurry photos to prove that even the oldest women are really *moving*! And they are particularly skilled at the clapping figure -- loud and well-coordinated. Great fun. November 16-17, 2008Traditional SongAbout 36 people turned out for the Monday morning dance class in this suburb west of Yokohama. The beginners were easily absorbed by the more experienced dancers. Nearly everyone was over 60, but quite willing and able to skip on occasion. Afterwards 28 of us lunched at a "curry soup" restaurant -- a new culinary fashion that combines Indian flavors, your choice of toppings and heat into a large bowl of soup served with plain Japanese rice. Quite tasty.That afternoon, Ikema-sensei and I took several trains to the westernmost corner of the Tokyo metropolitan area. Takao-san is a popular hiking and day outing area with a large, wealthy temple complex at the very top. We returned to my host's house in time for a splendid dinner with 3 of their musician friends. The highlight of the meal was a whole "TAI" (Bream) cooked in a coat of salt. A delicacy quite deserving of its reputation. After dinner, the host and friends gave us a private concert of "mingyo". What a treat! The shamisen player is a fulltime professional musician and demonstrated astonishing virtuousity. The shamisen serves as both drum and stringed instrument. I had no idea it could be that LOUD or produce such versatile sounds. They stopped many times to explain what they were singing -- how the words can stretch out over many notes, how the shamisen and then the taiko and then the singer build up mutual feeling and play off each other. I got to take a turn at the drums, and to see the shamisen up close. The body is wood, the top skin is dog, the bottom skin is cat (with the bellybutton mark visible), its strings of silk and nylon, and his also sports an alligator (?) skin protective sleeve. Not a vegetarian instrument, I'm afraid. Previous PostsJapan: articles & information
The author, Jenny Beer, has taught about Japan / US relations and intercultural communication in both academic and corporate settings, learning about Japanese organizations from the inside during while working in rural Iwate province and a decade later in Osaka . |
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Sorry -- no ball pictures. I was dancing!
The sponsoring recreational dance group and the honored guests had a banquet afterwards (everyone else went out with their own group to eat somewhere else). We sang and danced, and ate and ate. The picture doesn't include rice, savory custard, mussel soup, persimmons, tangerines, tiny cakes, and expresso that followed. The little boat was made by the light-footed, bright-eyed penniless old man to my left, who couldn't eat anything they served except the beer and the cake :-) and spent his time making charming origami -- in this case out of the paper cover from the chopsticks. The bouquet of scented greens and rose was lovely, though what I was supposed to do with it, staying in a hotel and leaving the next morning....they hadn't thought about that.