In Which I Get my Hands Dirty

So today I had my first PII-sponsored cultural activity: pottery making at the Hokutoh Studio. Today was the first of three sessions and we're making a chawan--a tea bowl that's used in tea ceremony. So we arrived and were given a disc of clay that weighed about 850g, a manual potter's wheel (no fancy electric things for us!), a knife, a sponge, some bowls of water, a leather strip, and a wooden shaper.

The teacher's main point was that our feelings are transmitted from our mind through our hands and into the clay, so we should treat it nicely (like how you talk to flowers to help them grow).

First we molded the clay into a ball and then smushed it into the center of the wheel. After shaping it a bit, we dipped one finger in water and, spinning the wheel, made a divet in the center of our lump. Then with our fingers we shaped it into a bowl, and then used the leather strap soaked in water to shape and smooth the edges while the wheel was spinning. The curved wooden shaper was used to sculpt the insides, and the sponge was used to keep the clay from drying out and also to smooth the outside. This was my result from today:

I think it looks pretty good. Next time we're going to work on the bottom, so the raggedy bits from cutting the bowl off the potter's wheel won't be there.

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Enoshima: The Heavenly Maiden and the Dragon

This past Monday was a national holiday -- Mountain Day -- so, of course, Troy and I headed to the beach instead. Well, to an island near a beach since (as some of you may know) I'm not exactly the beach-going type. Plus I'd just climbed Mount Fuji, which was more than enough mountain for me. Enoshima is a small island off the coast of Kanagawa Prefecture, fairly near Kamakura. It's connected to the mainland via a bridge, so you can just stroll on over from the train station. The entire island is dedicated to Benzaitan, the goddess of everything that flows -- time, water, speech, music, and knowledge. According to the "Enoshima Engi," (a history of the shrines and temples on Enoshima) there's also a legend associated with the creation of the island involving Benzaitan and a dragon. In brief, the area around Enoshima was once wracked by violent storms and earthquakes. Eventually the tumult ended and a heavenly maiden (Benzaitan) descended from the clouds....

Homecoming

This is it. It's Friday, February 3rd and in less than 24 hours I will leave this house for Tokyo train station, which will take me to the airport, which will take me...home. Most of this week has been taken up with goodbyes: to schoolmates and teachers, and later, close friends. There were tears involved. I think the photos will do it a lot more justice than I could: Kohei, from tennis group. All the tennis people got together for dinner at an okonomiyaki (think cabbage pancake, with yummy stuff like shrimp in it) but first we went to a boardwalk which had nighttime light shows. Top: Anime Club. They threw a small party for me, where we ate lots of food and watched (what else) anime and talked. Bottom: one of my English classes. They asked me to teach them an American game for the last day, so I taught everyone how to play Heads-Up 7-Up. They were pretty good at it. The other exchange student, Nom, and my Japanese teacher. The last view of school: the walk leading u...

Reflections on Typhoon Hagibis

As some of you may have known, this past weekend Typhoon Hagibis blew through Japan, specifically the Kanto region where Tokyo is. It had the grim distinction of being the strongest/most deadly storm to hit the region since Typhoon Ida in 1958. Typhoon classification scales are confusing (and, interestingly, the only difference between a "typhoon" and a "hurricane" is the naming convention of the region in which it occurs ), but at one point Hagibis was classified as a "violent typhoon," the strongest category the Japan Meteorological Agency has, roughly the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. Fortunately it didn't make landfall at that strength, downgrading to a Category 3 equivalent storm. Personally, although Typhoon Hagibis (which means, appropriately, "speed" in Tagalog) was not the first typhoon I've (pardon the pun) weathered here in Japan, it was most certainly the most extreme. Most typhoons don't directly hit Kanto, inst...

Rice and Ramen

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