Ikebana

We had our ikebana midterm yesterday. It was pretty intense. A classroom of students intently arranging flowers for half an hour, and then another half an hour waiting in the locker room while the creations were graded. I hope everyone is glad to know I got an A in flower arranging.

The class isn't quite as great as I had hoped, but it's helpful in a way. I like the ideas behind showing off the quirky natural beauty of a flower, but the rules are so rigid that it makes it hard to make something actually beautiful. Definitely no artistic license here.

The way the class goes generally is we sit in the classroom, everyone with a dish-like container for the flowers, a kenzan, or lethal thing made of spikes to impale flower stems on, and a bundle of flowers each. We usually learn a slightly different form every week, which involves a lot of diagrams written on the blackboard and whatnot. The teacher makes an arrangement as we follow along, basically. Then we hang out while he and the assistant teachers go around and correct our arrangements.

Itariamura (Italian Village)

More to follow.

On Saturday we went to Nagoya Port and the Italian Village, four of my friends and my host sister. We had a konbini (convenience store) picnic by the water and walked around the little "canals" in the sunset. I'll have to look up the history of the place, but it's pretty weird. It sort of has the feel of an amusement park, because you walk past some blank walls and you're in a completely fabricated Venice with little canals and gondolas and everything. I wish I could have gotten a good photo, but there were a whole bunch of girls in full fluffy pink getup with the hair and makeup and nails and everything in one of the gondolas. I took some photos of them leaving, though.

Thursday in Osu

Osu

美術部 (March 5, 2008)

Today I spent a blissful four and a half (!!) hours in the Art Club bushitsu ("clubhouse", but in reality a little room off a corridor of little rooms, each for different clubs). The room is amazing. It's like the takoyaki party was distilled and translated into art, drawing instead of playing Super Smash. I learned kurokki, which comes from "croquis" and apparently means something related to figure drawing. What we did was people in the club just took turns standing for three minutes. It was pretty tough because not only were they clothed, they even had like their coats on and stuff, so it was a little bit silly.

The girls also got really excited about reading my Japanese notes and textbook. It's always really telling to see how things are explained to students, especially between Japanese and English, where so many things like adjectives just do not have the equivalence that textbooks assert. It's been irritating me and my American friends that there are so few adjectives at our disposal. きれい means both "clean" and "pretty", 面白い means both "interesting" and "funny", うるさい means both "loud" and "annoying"...It's so hard for us to be as specific as we're used to being with the millions of words in the English language.

ひな祭り

Today is Hina Matsuri, the Doll Festival. Yesterday when I came up for dinner I was completely surprised by a small setup that my host mom had put up near the dining room table. She had the first tier of a doll display, the prince and princess (or emperor and empress, depending on who you talk to), and their furniture and bowls. They are really amazingly beautiful, I spent a lot of my surprise staring at them, which of course got me laughed at.






I'm not completely sure about the history of this festival, but apparently it is imperative that families with girls have these dolls to display. Families with only boys often don't have them, because the superstition is that if you don't have these dolls for your daughter, she won't grow up to marry. In fact, you have to acquire them as soon as possible after a daughter is born, I think. They're really expensive, but it seems that they're also something that gets passed down. My host mother said she had a display with seven tiers of dolls in her house when she was young, but she only has room to display these two now. It does seem like it's something that takes over the house - a full display would definitely take up more space than a Christmas tree. But like the tree, you can display it before the holiday but you have to take it down pretty soon after. My host parents are keeping it up for a little, but it's also bad luck for future marriages if you don't take it down by the fourth.

We had a special dinner too, with special sweets as well :) I had a daifuku with a strawberry in it, and Reiko had some kind of cherry blossom stickiness. My host mother made this really amazing rice dish with lots of things in it. It was a little sweet to eat a whole lot of though, unfortunately.




The restaurant we went to on Sunday had a display: