Village life - 8/3/06

I arrived in my village two days ago. After a full day of traveling on buses, bullet trains, and kurumas (cars) I found myself in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by mountains and river. I’m a fifteen minute walk from the Japanese Sea – or the Inland Sea for those of you who are more Korean minded – and a fifteen minute walk in any other direction to rice fields and trees. If I’m looking for humidity I don’t have to walk anywhere because here it is! Everywhere I go, it’s there.

I’ve spent my first couple of days here watching Japanese television, exploring the village and local Shinto shrines, and generally stumbling my way through life. When at a loss yesterday for what to eat for lunch, I went to a local café where the menu was only in Japanese and without pictures! The waitress and I awkwardly stared at each other for about five minutes before I pointed at the woman’s food across the way and said, “That!” So that is what I got and it was delicious. I consider it a successful interaction.

I have also spent a lot of time with my landlord’s family who has adopted me as a sort of freakish, unintelligible, gaijin child. On my first night here, they took me to see the fireworks in town and then to a sushi dinner. The restaurant had a conveyor belt like Blue C Sushi (or, as Ritchie said, “Blue C Sushi was like the restaurant that you went to”) and offered such fair as bacon sushi and weird-purple-vegetable sushi. Afterward, we walked around a street fair where I fished for goldfish. I had several unsuccessful attempts and the woman manning the booth finally scooped six fish into a plastic bag for me to take home – most of the fish died overnight and I flushed the rest down the toilet. I’m convinced that the death of my fish isn’t a bad omen.