Weekend Stuff

I return after a long absence.

I don't have internet access at my apartment yet, so I can't update on the weekends, but I do have plenty of time to walk around "O"-town and see what's going on. Due to the fact that the town is really multiple towns under one heading, it's quite spread out for a small town. Also, it's very typically Japanese in its layout, with rice fields interrupting houses and businesses with really no rhyme, reason, or districting. The people seem pretty shy, which is fairly typical, and don't really say much to the new weird looking foreigner except maybe konnichiwa or ohayou gozaimasu. It's pretty, though, with mountains pretty much on all sides in the distance.
I walked around a bit this weekend and happened upon middle school students at practice even though it is currently still their vacation time. There were kids practicing hokke, or hockey, which is really field hockey, not real hockey. I think one of the teams, either middle school or high school, I don't know which, won some kind of championship, as there was a ceremony for them in front of the board of education, but I don't really know the deals.
I heard about this ceremony at the sort of welcome ceremony for me at one of the schools. The principals of all the schools, some people from the board, and even the town mayor and vice-mayor came. We sat in a circle, with sheets of paper announcing the names of each attendee hanging off the table in front of them. The mayor gave a speech, which was written down for me, but had to be translated to me for some reason by Jo. It was a nice speech about cultural understanding or something. The mayor seems like a nice old man, but I couldn't tell much else. He smiled a lot and sat next to me. After his speech, I had to introduce myself, which I did a pretty terrible job of, and then each attendee introduced him/herself. Then there was cake and coffee and people asked me what sports I like and what I like about Japan. I told them baseball and food, and they asked me if I eat natto and pickles and various other Japanese things. There was a huge sign on the wall saying youkoso Jeffrey-san or something. I would have taken a picture of it and of all the other stuff, but I don't have a camera as of yet. Really, I haven't done this ceremony justice, as it is typically Japanese weirdness that is so charming and friendly.

On Sunday, Jo picked me up, as I am currently working on getting a car and learning how to get anywhere, and we drove up to "U"-City, a city a few km away. It used to be something like 4-6 towns, but it got combined into one city. It's bigger than "O"-town (big enough to be a shi, not a cho), but isn't massive or anything. There are a bunch of JETs, there, though, mostly living very close together. We just stopped to get two JETs, her friend Heidi, also from NZ, and Nate, a new guy from Minnesota. We took Heidi's car up to Matsue, the capitol and largest city of Shimane.
A note about towns combining: a lot of towns have been doing this in Shimane, and I think around the country. We're pretty sure this is due to economic problems, which is funny, because the government pays JETs to do nothing sometimes. I think the roots are twofold. First is that the Japanese population in general is shrinking. They just don't have kids, and they also live something like a million years on average, so there are too many old people who can't work and not enough young people who can. The second reason, I think, is that nobody young wants to live in the country, so people who can work all move to the cities to get better jobs. Then the whole thing falls apart. Apparently, there was a town in Hokkaido that went bankrupt because there were actually no young people to support the aging population. That's what I hear, anyway.
So, we went up to Matsue because Nate wanted to buy some things which really aren't available out in the boonies, and because there was a fireworks festival. I'm not sure if there is another reason for the festival or not. Some people dress up in yukata, summer kimonos, and tons of people go sit by Lake Shinji (meaning hole road), to watch the fireworks. We went to a restaurant called Gusto (gasuto), basically just to get a prime parking spot. We stayed there for a while, then went out the back way so that the parking attendants wouldn't notice we had been "eating" for four hours. We had to cross a street, which had been closed, and instead of going around, we just ducked under a fence, which I'm pretty sure the police noticed and didn't like, but didn't do anything to us. Then we met up with some JETs and watched the fireworks. It was a pretty good show. Maybe not quite as good as Yokohama's Umi-no-Hi show, but impressive, nonetheless. After I got back, I pretty much just went to sleep. Good times.