Confetti

No photo available for this one, but I love the tale told to me by one of my students yesterday.

"Nippon Hamu" (Japanese ham - literally, all the teams here have brand names for names, "Yakult" "Softbank" etc.) recently won the Japanese league and are officially the best baseball team in Japan, which is cause for celebration here in Hokkaido, their home prefecture.

The mayor of Sapporo wanted a parade with confetti, to emulate similar parades as seen in New York, but the ministry responsible for keeping the town clean wasn't so keen.

The deal they worked out was this: A paper company donated the required tonnage, and it was cut into 5x5cm squares instead of the usual confetti-sized pieces. This was done so that it'd be easier to clean up after the event.

Apparently no machinery exists for confetti-throwing, and it couldn't be done by hand since most of the buildings are only about ten storeys high, so the staff involved hacked together numerous buckets with short tubes and fans to propel the precisely-cut confetti the requisite distance.

During the event, announcements were made to the effect that cleaning costs would be high after the parade, so if everyone wouldn't mind, could they assist in picking up the confetti and disposing of it in the bags provided?

Apparently everybody, from the youngest kids to the oldest spectators, and "beautiful women and men" participated in the clean up operation.

She told all this to me to illustrate a "beautiful story of everyone working together to achieve a dream", and I don't think she understood why I was laughing so much...

It's good to have a purpose in life

Yes, they do mean the jelly. Er, and/or the fruit.

Toothpaste and tabacco

I picked this up without reading it first, and I should have known better. Salt flavoured? Fucking salt- motherfucking- flavoured toothpaste?! Gack!

In happier non- gag-reflex- inducing news the best ever anti-smoking campaign continues to entertain.

Yosakoi

At first glance a highly traditional-looking dance, but although it's Awa Odori roots may be, it's actually a very modern invention. The Hokkaido incarnation came about through the actions of some now very rich students, and it's popularity has ballooned every year since.

Although the more mature and sedate team won this year, the younger teams are so full of energy and much more entertaining to watch. The 'Arabian Nights' themed team pictured here were especially dynamic, with at least 3 costume switches that were almost too fast for the eye to follow, blades a-plenty and much coolness.

Park golf

Apparently invented in Hokkaido, park golf features hilly terrain, beautiful views, less aerodynamic balls, rougher greens, one club for all occasions, 50-100m holes, and if you happen to be us, a whole lot of beer and mulligans.

None of this stops the old Japanese folks turning up with 100,000 yen clubs and all the assorted golfing clothing, shoes and caps, of course.

Super-size me

The economies of scale seem to function differently in Japan. Buying a 24 beer crate results in a saving of a few yen over buying 24 individual cans. A stick of French bread roughly doubles in price as you scale the volume and the same goes for numerous and sundry other staples.

Then you have this thing with Coke. I quite like the idea that there are plenty of people out there who will choose to buy the smaller can.

I have no idea where this picture was taken. I'm glad I took it though.

Japanese toilets

Seems like Japanese toilets come in one of three flavours: 'The hole in the floor'; 'The throne' with heated seat, control panel and innumerable dials and buttons and this, 'The afterthought'. I'm not a big guy, so I could at least get the door closed, but still...

Aomori: The aftermath

And finally we arrived back in Hakodate at 5am, having swum at kikonai, where we had to disembark after mistakenly boarding the Doraemon train in the morning (the ticket inspector told us to stop playing with the toys), having traded clothes, drunk way too much, had a cartwheel race, chanted "lasse la, lasse la" and had the entire parade turn to face us and chant "lasse lasse la!" right back at us, having caught a whole bunch of little bells thrown our way for good luck, having boarded the ferry, after realising that there weren't any trains to get us home at midnight and that at least two of our party were working in the morning. All in all an excellent night!

Too many great pictures taken to sort through them all, so I just uploaded the majority.

Aomori #4

Aomori #3

Aomori #2

Aomori #1

Doraemon train

Evan made an aeroplane.

Beach, Japanese style.

Erin told us to expect a beach, so imagine our suprise when this is what we got. The stone pillar supported walkway, looking like something out of Lord of the Rings, and a stepped, tiled stone harbour type thing complete with separate kids' swimming pool and tents.

The entire construction is amazing, and all the more so since there seems to be no good reason for it's existence. It's some way out of a small and insignificant town, there's no outstanding scenery and after the tunnel there are steps. Steps! I figured it was at least partially for the benefit of wheelchair users, but apparently not.

I was there to say goodbye to Erin, but the rest of the town were engaged in some kind of festival. Without warning we found ourselves in a raft race, in which we secured 3rd place and a totally unexpected 10,000 Yen prize. There was also the 'spin around blindfolded and smash open a watermelon with a bamboo stick' game, the 'scatter hundreds of sea urchins in the shallows and for people to collect when a whistle is blown' game. This was apparently succeeded by a similar thing using rice cakes, but Alison had to go, and I casually told the guy who was trying to get us to stay for this last bit that "I don't really like rice cakes", upon which everyone laughed and Erin later told me he was the mayor. Oops.

Japanese beaches. Most excellent.

Goryoukaku Festival

Although it got rained off last year this was pretty much the same deal as in 2004. Key differences this year being that I was 'Parks', the British ambassador, hence the bow-tie and lack of bastard heavy flag, and that the guys representing France weren't pissed!

Apparently the parade isn't just about Commodore Perry's landing, but just as much about Hijikata Toshizou's last stand fighting for the old regime during the Meiji Restoration. There is a yearly lookalike contest, and the winner takes a key role in the parade. The popularity of this historical figure is difficult to explain, but it mainly comes down to manga, like so much of pop culture in Japan.

Hanami 2006: Matsumae

The best of the bunch. Matsumae, the site of the only real stone castle in Hokkaido built to withstand cannon assaults and named after the pre-eminent clan that led the settling of Hokkaido. Also home to a huge variety of cherry blossoms, with something like a hundred varieties, including green blossoms!

The last picture shows what hanami is really all about. Blue tarps, plentiful food, sake, beer and good cheer.

RISING reverses common sense.

This monolithic structure was an abandoned supermarket when I arrived, but with the addition of a multi-storey car park and a makeover it's become the Japanese version of an entertainment centre.

Upon walking through the doors you are assailed by a wall of sound, a deafening cacophony which can only mean one thing - a pachinko parlour. This is the insanely popular art of feeding thousands of ball-bearings into a machine and watching them bounce down in the hopes of scoring prizes. The empty seat you see here is an anomaly that lasted only a few seconds... dozens of people were waiting for spaces to open up, despite the entire floor being covered with identical machines.

Given that this is an entirely new structure, and that it's name is supposed to be an acronym, you would have expected that a little English-checking at the planning stage wouldn't have gone amiss... I have a feeling that since it got through a spell-checker it was deemed correct!

Go!

 
I finally plucked up the courage and entered a local Go club, only to find no-one there! A bit of shouting summoned the talkative old lady who runs the place and professes to know nothing of the game, who then called up a guy to play me, despite my protestations...

A bit of background on the rankings: Fresh players (me!) start around 30-25 kyuu, and quickly work their way up to 10 kyuu-ish, more slowly to 1 kyuu, then it flips over and you start at amateur 1 dan and crawl up to 7 dan. Roughly speaking, for every difference in rank you are entitled to place one handicap stone on the board, to a maximum of 9 in a pre-set pattern. Professionals have a separate dan ranking from 1 to 9, where 1 is roughly equivalent to a 7 dan amateur.

Needless to say, in my first ever game on a full-sized board Yoshio, a 5-dan player and the guy with more hair, whupped my butt good, despite my 9 stone handicap. My second ever game against the other guy I lost by a mere 26.5 points with an 8 stone handicap. I was very proud, and somewhat shocked, that I managed to force the game to be played through to a final count.

Yoshio was quite effusive with his praise, if I understood him correctly, and showed me some Joseki opening moves and some fundamental differences between playing on a small and a real board. He expects I can hit 5 kyuu in time.

In the game you see here Yoshio (white) won quite handily against the other guy I played after a protracted fight in the centre.

Matsumae Ainu

Curious as to who all these demonic looking fellows were I quizzed a Japanese friend, only to find out they're supposed to be portraits of ten Ainu (Hokkaido natives) who helped out the original Japanese settlers in Matsumae, presumably before the Japanese torched all their villages and slaughtered the inhabitants.

Not only are they depicted as being half animal, with hairy clawed feet and inhuman strength, but they had really scary names like 起殺麻 (Ki-sa-ma: rise/kill/hemp) which coincidentally also happens to be a synonym for an insult in modern Japanese.

Hanami 2006: Hirosaki

Since the cherry blossoms came out several weeks late this year I went South in search of some earlier blossoms. Even Hirosaki wasn't in full bloom when I reached there, but the journey was well worth it. Hirosaki park really puts anything in Hokkaido to shame, with a wealth of cherry blossom trees and some stunning weeping willow style blossoms that look like frozen cascades of petals. All this against the backdrop of incredible mountain views, such as in the first picture.

The most suprising thing about the museum pieces in the castle was how small the suits of armour and clothing were. Even the warrior classes of Japan were really quite small. Dangerous, no doubt, but undeniably stunted. The guy who this suit belonged to couldn't have been much more than five feet tall.

The old wooden castle has remained blessedly free of refurbishing efforts and looks quite fine during the day and even better at night, albeit blurrier after you've consumed way too much alcohol with a bunch (or two) of random strangers who are more than happy to get wasted with a pair of sake-toting foreigners.

Hanami 2006: Goryoukaku park

A beautiful view, and a star shaped fort surrounded by cherry blossoms!
Towering over the puny former tower like a giant... tower.
All the hanami mats out, barbecues and alcohol aplenty!

So there's just way too many great hanami experiences to post up this year, but I'll start here. The new Goryoukaku tower puts the old one to shame, and provides an amazing view of the whole city. I held off going up it until the cherry blossoms were out, and I'm very glad I did.