Saturday Kuniko had to go all the way to the Kansai Airport in Osaka to see off one of her students, and I had to stick around and do my “community clean up” duty. I teamed up with Yasu’s mom to mark out a little bit of territory in the back of the apartments, and we chatted and raked up leaves. Actually, we mostly chatted.
The rest of the day was not so exciting. I did some shopping for White Day, as well as cleaning up the house for next week. It will be a busy week, so I’ve got to clean while I can.
Kuniko got back late in the afternoon. When she arrived at the airport she met up one of her coworkers, but together they were unable to track down their student. I guess she caught the flight OK, but it was a bit of a wasted trip.
We went over to Kuniko’s folks’ place for dinner and had lots of sushi, fried shrimp, and some excellent miso soup. It was fun to play with the cats and chat about our respective trips to Hokkaido. We’ve been getting rice from the family field now for a while, and that means that we are officially on the hook to plant rice when the season comes, in a couple of months. Kuniko is trying to get out of it by pleading that she is afraid of frogs, but I’m going to go out there and plant. It sounds like hard work, but I think it would be a fun experience.
Sunday we lounged around the house in the morning and then after lunch we met up with Inoguchi sensei and his wife to go to Nara. They picked us up in their car and we drove the long way to Nara, trying to avoid all the traffic through Kobe and Osaka.
The reason we were going to Nara is because of a special ceremony that is pretty famous around Japan, called Omizutori. It happens once a year at a famous temple in Nara, and so we thought we’d go check it out.
Once we arrived in Nara we had lots of time to kill. We walked through a museum looking some statues of Buddha and his servants that turned out to be national treasures. We had an early dinner at a tea house that was really good. We sat inside a little room on tatami and pillows, and they brought the food to us to eat. Strangely, I was the only one in the group who received a little table to make it easier to eat. They asked me if I was OK with chopsticks – I got the feeling that they kept some forks around just in case.
The food was traditional and quite good. There were lots of things – tofu, tea and rice (mixed together), mackerel sushi, beans, soup, eel and shrimp. It was delicious. Unfortunately Kuniko and I couldn’t finish – we still had food in our stomachs from lunch.
We went to one more museum to stay warm, do a little shopping, and drink some coffee in the café/restaurant. These were good chances to practice my Japanese, and it was nice of everyone to be patient with me. My language skills are still very choppy – I’ve got a long way to go to get speaking smoothly.
Finally it was dark so we went to the temple to see the ceremony. There were lots of people – thousands, I’d say, that came out despite the light rain. We found a spot in a parking lot far, far away, but we had a pretty good vantage point. As more people came, they were all carrying umbrellas and it made it very hard to see. Luckily, just before the beginning of the ceremony the rain stopped and everyone put their umbrellas down.
The ceremony itself is always vividly captured on film in books and newspapers – it involves big flames and sparks falling on the spectators below. Supposedly if you are hit by a spark it will help cleanse your soul. We were barely able to see the sparks, so it wasn’t likely we’d be hit by one. When they brought out the fire, they just kind of held it up there, and then walked around a little, then rotated out for somebody else. It was the single most anticlimactic thing I think I’ve ever seen.
I did my best to keep a brave face on, since Inoguchi sensei and his wife went through a lot of trouble and organization to plan the day, but inside I was thinking they need a little something more to this ceremony. The pictures are always really exciting, but now I realize that it is because they have their cameras set to extremely long exposure times to catch every spark’s trail.
After watching for about 10 minutes we headed back to the warmth of the car, and then made the 90 minute drive back home. Despite the less-than-exciting ceremony the rest of the trip was fun, and we enjoyed spending time with Inoguchi sensei and his wife. Kuniko and I had a late night snack and then hit the sack.
I posted some pictures from the day trip to Nara over in the photo gallery – go check them out!
