Inaka Activities

To most Japanese people, Aomori prefecture is the land of the hillbillies. While it's not the farthest place by distance, it is still one of the most difficult areas of the country to travel to, since there is very little airline service. Tsugaru-ben, the unique dialect spoken in Western Aomori, is used by pop culture and media when they're trying to make a character sound like a helpless country bumpkin.

Aomori has been the poster child for inaka. Inaka means something like "back-country" or "rural", and is usually used in a derogatory tone. Inaka is seen as where the uneducated hicks live, technology is hopelessly behind, people grow and fish their own food, and people can get lost in the wilderness to be eaten by wild boars.

While Aomori is now very modern and is not nearly as back-country as most Japanese people think it is, there are still old remnants of a simpler time when forestry and farming were the main occupations and there was only one school in the entire city. On a trip with my prefectural office, we set out to visit some small towns where the spirit of inaka still lives on to experience the lifestyle of a more traditional time.

Inakadate:

Inakadate (look, it's even got "inaka" written right there in the name) is a small town somewhere between Hirosaki and Aomori City. One thing they are famous for is their rice field art. Viewed from the tower nearby, the fields are planted meticulously with rice that grows different shades of leaves. Using that alone, they can write inspiring words and even recreate iconic images. This time, they decided to use the famous image of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt billowing over a subway grate. After the rice has grown to full size, we'll be able to come back and see what it looks like.

You can already see what it's supposed to look like.

Observation tower for autumn viewing

Arriving around 9 am, we gathered with the other volunteers for the opening ceremonies and then set out to work. As you can expect, walking in the inundated fields is filthy. Most of the local grannies and granddads wear deep fishing boots and cover the rest of their body in clothing for sun protection. For the rest of us, we stripped to shorts and T-shirts and waded into the thick mud barefoot. The fields themselves are filled with swimming tadpoles and mosquito larvae, and there were several frogs hopping about trying not to get squashed. If you're squeamish about getting dirty or critters/creepy crawlies, this probably isn't for you...

Down and dirty

Washing our feet in the gutter

Granny army in full combat gear

Personally, I had a lot of fun. The work itself is straightforward: they show you how to plant the rice, and since there are a lot of volunteers, the whole field is usually done within an hour or 2. Lots of the volunteers are Asian foreigners in Japan for study abroad and the like, and the local children and middle schools get in on the action too. The local middle school kendo club went in with their traditional practice garb, and they emerged completely covered in mud. Lots of little toddlers where playing and rolling around in the sludge without a care in the world. They spent the last minutes of the event horsing around with water hoses and cleaning themselves off.

After the work was done, they served us some free lunch of tonjiru (pork soup) and onigiri (rice balls). One we had finished eating and chatting on the sunny lawn, we headed to our next location.

Kuroishi:

A short drive later, we arrived at a quaint little village somewhere in Kuroishi (a bit to the East of Inakadate), which means "black rock." The bus pulled up to what looked like a warehouse of an abandoned building. We soon found out that it was actually a dance studio, and that we would be learning a traditional line dance called yosare. Performed during the Obon Festival season, Yosare, as explained by the instructor, is one of Japan's 3 great dances (whatever the hell that means). All I know is that it's a lot of fun.

The instructor explained that the word "love" is written on the back of the garb because festivals tend to be where love blooms and couples are formed.

This is how line dancing works during the Obon festivals: a repetitive and lively music plays while dancers in traditional getup make their way down the street. There is a specific sequence of moves that cycle continuously until the music ends. Depending on the dance and song, the sequence can be short and sweet or very long. 

I've done this kind of line dancing at an Obon festival in Los Angeles before, where they had instructors teaching people during the festival itself, so I knew what to expect and learned quickly. Maybe it's just because I really like dancing. It would be really cool if I could participate in the dancing during Obon season, but alas I have no connections in Kuroishi.

During our breaks, the teachers busted out a box of home-grown apple juice and shared it with everyone. Mmm... Aomori apple juice is the best!

Cloudy unlabeled apple juice is the best apple juice.

After dancing, we took a short walk down the street through the onsen district. We all piled into a minshuku, or something like a Japanese bed-and-breakfast. They told us to wash our hands and don aprons/bandanas so we could start making a traditional confection: unpei.

Unpei is pretty, but very simple: it's just rice flour, sugar, and water. They use food coloring to give it a little swirl in the middle to make it look like a roll-cake.

Not my picture, but looks very similar to my unpei.

While the concept is simple, making unpei is particularly strenuous. The dough must be kneaded until it's of a smooth consistency. Out of everyone, only one person managed to make it completely smooth, while everyone else had somewhat grainy dough. Maybe it had something to do with the ingredient proportions.

Next, the dough is separated into 1/3 and 2/3 portions. Each is thrown into a plastic bag, and the smaller portion has food coloring added to it. Then, you flatten the sticky dough inside the plastic bags until they are flat rectangular slabs of equal dimensions. This flattening process, done mostly by hand because there weren't nearly enough rolling pins, took us 20-30 minutes! I was damn near exhausted by the time my dough was properly shaped.

Finally, the dough strips were cut out of the plastic bags, placed on top of each other, and rolled up like sushi to complete the long unpei log. To serve, just slice it like bread (dense, sticky bread) and coat with some rice flour.

The confection itself tasted a lot like sweetened mochi, but I wasn't a big fan of the stuff because it was too sweet (it's half sugar!). All the Japanese people around me who ate it said, 「懐かしい味だ」, which means "what a nostalgic flavor!" After I got home, I sliced the roll and gave it to my neighbors at the Tenrikyou temple because they have a lot of kids (yeah, they loved it, unhealthy bastards). They ended up inviting me to stay for dinner, so I took them up on the offer.

This trip into the boonies was a lot of fun, and totally worth the experience of doing inaka activities and meeting some new international people. I wonder what will be in store for me next time...

Springtime in Aomori

I may not have explained before, but school festivals are considered "work" for teachers and students. After the undoukai, the kids and teachers get to take a day off sometime in the next week. We ALTs, however, are not officially "teachers" and showed up at the sports festivals voluntarily, so I did not get the luxury of having a day off (let alone 4 days for all of the ones I went to). My boss decided it was only fair to give the ALTs four hours off one day to even the odds.

I decided to take my 4 hours off on a Friday afternoon when I didn't have classes. After lunch, I biked home and basked in the glory of the warm sun. I then noticed all the beautiful flowers blooming around me, and decided to grab my camera and head back out for another bike ride. Here are the photo gems I captured on my ride, along with others from a previous ride:

Oh, Japan. You pour snow on me for 5 months, and make me cower in your cold, bleak wilderness underneath bare, craggy tree limbs. Then, in the span of a week or two, you bombard me with all this overwhelming beauty and vivid color. I now understand why Japanese people have so much pride in their distinct four seasons; they are truly formidable, especially up here in the wild north.

Thanks for reading! Next time, I get down and dirty in some rice fields.

Undoukai - Sports Festival

Before I start, I'd like to say that, even though I mentioned before that I'm not allowed to post pictures or videos of my students or school functions, the pictures and videos in this post are of an event that was open to the public. There are several hundred, if not several thousand, recorded media of this event roaming freely somewhere, so I've taken the liberty to post some on here.

In Japan, the period from the middle to the end of May is sports festival season. Sports festivals, called undoukai or tai'ikusai, are times for the students to engage in friendly competition while showcasing their school activities and physical abilities to their parents, relatives, friends, and neighbors. The students are divided into different teams. In elementary schools, there are only 2 teams (red and white), while middle schools have 3-4 teams (of any colors).

First, there are opening ceremonies. The students march around the track like tiny little armies, waving their arms and stomping their feet in unison. Each team and class waves their own flag around, and there's a lot of pomp and circumstance. After the students have lined up, there are several speakers who officially open the sports festival.

After opening ceremonies, it's time for rajio taisou, which means "radio gymnastics (or calisthenics)". While music is played (one of my schools played Backstreet Boys!), the kids go through a set routine of moves to stretch and warm up before rigorous exercise. Most of the kids in middle school just half-ass it because rajio taisou is viewed as childish.

Some schools continue from rajio taisou into a performance routine. The kids get into formations, climb on top of each other, and strike poses. I'm not sure what the purpose of this activity is, but maybe it's some kind of team-building exercise.

The main events of the sports festival consist mostly of running. It doesn't take any special skills to run, so all the students can participate together. There are 100m sprints (70-80m for the smaller children), various relays, longer distance runs (800-1000m), and what Japanese people like to call a marason. The general accepted definition of "marathon" around here is "a long distance run", which can be anything longer than 1 km. The "marathon" at my elementary school was 1.3 km long, rather than the traditional 26 miles we English speakers are used to. Anyways, here are some cool running action shots:

Besides running, there were a variety of obstacle courses. Some were your standard obstacle courses, like crawling under nets, jumping rope, walking a balance beam, rolling a giant rubber ball, or hopping through ladders and hula hoops. Some involved running with parents and other teachers. There were several different options: run with a ball hugged between them, each person squeezed into one leg of an oversized pair of shorts, or with legs bound into a 3-legged race. One of my elementary schools even had a "recycling" obstacle course, where kids needed to crush cans, or sort items into the right bins before moving on.

And of course, a sports festival wouldn't be complete without some tug-of-war! The tug of war here is a little different, in the fact that the "goal" flags are placed tangentially from the rope, and the kids pull the rope laterally instead of in a straight line.

Each grade participated in their own special events also. The tiniest 1st graders had a ball and basket competition. Soft foam balls were laid in a circle, and the kids tried to throw as many into the central basket as they could. This game is something like the definition of adorable:

Middle school first years competed in a tarp-dragging race. All the students stand on the tarp and need to hop in unison so the pullers can slowly drag the tarp across the finish line.

The second years had a long jump-rope competition.

The third years had a "caterpillar" race. All the students in one class bound their ankles to two ropes, and had to move down the track by taking steps in unison.

My favorite was probably the 3rd year multi-event match. This consisted of a long human bridge, a 5-legged race, a team adviser tarp carry, and finally a sprint to grab the finish flag. It's hard to describe, so just watch it:

Somewhere in between all of these, there was a cheering competition called ouen gassen. The kids had practiced their routines for weeks, and used pom-poms and megaphones to dance and chant. This was a surprisingly big deal, as the winners of the ouen gassen received separate trophies from the main sports competitions.

At the end, they announced the winning team based on the results of all the sporting events combined. Since this is the last undoukai for the third year students, there was some crying as well. Finally, the principal said some final words and officially brought the sports festival to a close.

Afterwards, most of the kids and many of the teachers had horrific red sunburns on their exposed skin. After all, many of them hadn't been exposed to sunlight since the snow began falling in November. I had made sure to put sunscreen on, and I don't burn easily to begin with, so I was luckily fine. I'm just wondering how much darker my students will look when I see them again in a few weeks.

I teach at a total of 5 schools, but I was only able to go to 4 of the undoukai (some of the elementary schools overlapped). While it was fun while it lasted, my weekends were properly consumed by these 7-hour-long events. I'm kind of glad they're over so I can get my relaxation days back.

That's all for the sports festival! See you again!