9.13.09 (苫小牧歌い会）

Long entry. First part singing festival at Tomakomai. Last little bit about manga.

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Woke at 6.30am and was on the bus with the other ladies of Feato and the Kid's chorus. It was a little early in the morning to immerse myself in the social fiesta that is the field trip on a bus atmosphere, so I spent most of the whole trip to Tomakomai with my eyes closed and head back. Bought some bananas and melon pan since I hadn't the time to make onigiri that morning, but ended up giving all but the bread away.

The recital hall itself was surprisingly huge and fancy. I had been mentally equating my choir group here with my strings group back in Thompson Falls where our gigs involved graduation at the high school, the annual garden show by the bank, assorted weddings (yes, the attendees were wearing shorts and baseball hats, it was Montana, ok), and the nursing home around christmas time, so arriving at this place and seeing the numerous groups in their expensive looking dresses and tuxes was quite a shock.

Until about two years ago, any kind of public performance would make me so nervous that for months in advance I would have physical reactions to the anxiety, and the day of was so miserable that even the relief of it being over was small consolation for the hell of the whole process. So when we were going through rehearsal and I had only a twittering of butterflies in my gut and I didn't feel like I was going to fall over and die, I was surprised again. I felt oddly unconcerned with any failure. The reasons are probably as such:

1) I have performed enough times (especially in aforementioned low-pressure instances as mentioned above with the strings group, and more recently done a lot of public speaking in Anime Club) that I have become accustomed to the butterflies and have physical experience proving failure does not equal death;
2) I am in a foreign country and no one knows me, and I do not take the opinions of strangers to heart;
3) (and likely the most prominent reason) People expect kids as young as the ones we were performing with to be unpolished and find it charming, therefore dropping the demand for perfection from the adults to similarily low levels.
4) It would be unfair not to mention that everyone was well rehearsed and I had spent a decent amount of effort memorizing the whole thing, as did the rest of us. We had it down before heading out.

So we had a dress rehearsal which did have a hiccup, as our plans had always been to perform the first number with a big blue sheet to simulate waves. The problem was we always practiced on the floor and the stage was outfitted with wooden blocks serving as risers. Tall risers. I thought we were going to have to ditch the prop since it was actually pretty dangerous for us on the back row, thinking how easy it would be to snag a heel in the material once it was set down and promptly take a tumble (not nearly as cute as the word would imply). I was also having trouble remembering the poses at the ends of a couple songs. There was another snag since the tiny little boy (the same kid who says "Sensei" with so much unbridled joy I just wanna kidnap the little squirt) who plays the puppy who turns into a lion was having trouble getting his headgear in order in the short interval the song allowed. It was a little wavery and morale was mediocre. We got kind of a strict pep talk which I tried to soften with my same old song and dance of "You guys are great, just enjoy it like rehearsal and we'll be good". The speech was concluded with probably the finest inspirational words we could have heard. We had a long reccess in which we were going to go to the natural history museum, a greenhouse, and lunch.

Everybody changed back into street clothes with a bit of bounce in their step and we piled into the bus. The natural history museum was sufficiently museumish, interesting skeletons and collections of taxidermied bears and cranes and collections of insects, seashells, and fossils. There was also a good deal of Ainu and Jomon-era peoples tools and so on, and I learned the gal who sings Alto with me (the one who just cannot grasp the concept of softening vocal tone, bless her- on the other hand she and one of the other Altos are just the funniest people I've met in Japan) worked for a short time excavating burial sites of Jomon people and was a real wealth of knowledge on history.

At the greenhouse (which I did not understand was a greenhouse, and was thus totally freaked and excited when we went into this huge building and it was full of trees and grass and plants) the older boy who was the gorilla in our skit showed me an orange tree and I ate curry rice with some of the Mezzos. It was a pretty standard conversation- where you from, why you speak japanese so good, where you livin. I think maybe that gal was newish since I didn't recognize her well. We all had to mosey on but I wanted to buy some of the juice that one adorable heavy set little girl found someplace, but since I couldn't find it in the vending machine, and being my first purchase from a Japanese vending machine I chose "milk coacoa" instead, expecting chocolate milk of some variety. What I got instead was a real damn hot can of hot chocolate.
What.
Apparently selling hot drinks is a common function of vending machines. Go figure.
Everyone else went off to eat bento in the park but I wanted to find the illusive "Pineapple" that little girl had mentioned, so we went back to the greenhouse and wandered around upstairs a few minutes before we had to head back. At that point I still didn't realize it was a greenhouse.

After all that, a stomach full of curry rice and very hot hot chocolate, we sat and listened to a few songs other groups were singing before heading back to get ready. I sleepily rushed to change clothes and we all prepped our stuff, got the butterflies back, and began that nervewracking waiting to perform thing. I started lightly singing one of our songs just for fun and it made the serious girl in the group smile, and then we compared our ear sizes with the ear on the gorilla mask. We made our way backstage and had quite a long wait, during which I discovered the lights cast from above made perfect conditions for shadow puppets. We spent the rest of the time waiting backstage poking each other's "hands", constructing UFO catchers, and other elaborate methods of silent play.

When we did perform, it went almost without flaw. The areas we were concerned about were smooth as silk, and only one false entrance threw us off track. The little puppy boy got that lion mane on with surprising quickness, I remembered my poses, and all in all I think we looked right smart. The audience was singing and clapping along with us, and laughed at our skits (They should have, they were damn funny- One of them being two tiny little boys in fedoras with sunglasses bigger than their faces, standing back to back in their white wifebeaters singing in their teensy voices "ちび子ギャングの親分で大きいなゴリラはようじんぼう" only to be approached by the teenage boy who looks positively giant next to them, wearing the gorilla mask, beating his chest and flexing his arms while we all express fear and awe).

We left the stage with no hang ups and was so in the performance spirit I honestly forgot I was in Japan, excitedly telling the kids, "I'm so proud of you! We killed!" They of course looked at me like what the hell did you just say crazy foreign lady, so I switched back to Japanese and praised them some more. We watched the last few performances and leaving the auditorium a very dignified and refined looking older Japanese lady told me, "かっこよかった.　ブラヴォ.” My little puppy boy got some praise too. An older gentleman in his tux seemed tickled by the novelty of us both.

From there we changed again and visited the science museum. It's a really cool place- free admittance and tons of interactive exhibits to let you play with optical illusions and learn about constellations. They even had a real satellite and helicopter. I wanted to take a turn messing around in the helicopter but there wasn't much time. We finished the experience with a show at the planetarium and I learned the names of constellations. There was also a long and elaborate story about a sparrow who was so in despair over mortality and life that he flew to the stars, and after being rejected by all of the other constellations, let go, no longer knew if he was falling or flying, and became a burning star himself. I know all of the adults in the audience were snoozing (they told me so), but that was a sad goddamn story! Considering the teacher at Sekinaisho told me having the Prince kiss Snow White was inappropriate for children, telling them instead a story about a bird who gives up on life just seems... stilted. I understand the reasoning behind it, but it is a signifigant difference.

Another signifigant difference is something I've observed after sports competitions and witnessed again on the bus on the way home. Rather than simply letting everyone buzz privately with what they thought of the whole things, everyone, one by one, had to give a speech about the day. The normal format was Summary of What We Did with Peppy Adjectives (the word ganbaru in some form is almost mandatory) followed by It Was Fun, It Was Interesting, or I Want To Thank You All.
I can't decide if I think this is a good idea or not. On one hand, it encourages appreciation of what happened, shows gratitude to ones peers, gives everyone a chance to form common bonds when expressing similar opinions. That sounds good. But in reality it seems more like a sort of tedious requirement. You can talk as long as you want (to the chagrin of everyone around you) and spill out your guts about what an earth shaking, emotional, unforgettable thing it was, but expressing your deepest and honest opinions doesn't seem entirely safe when you're being required to share it with the whole group. What if what you say doesn't sit quite right with those people you aren't really good friends with? It could just be fodder for future criticism. And what if you want to privately savor the thing, not have to sum it up in simple and generic terms? What if packaging it so cleanly and neatly only encourages a person, as it did to me, to pack that event away and be done with it. The mandatory nature of it and the finality of it might be fine to bolster the meaning of lesser events, but for the people who really and genuinely Felt Something over it, it seems almost a condescending gesture.

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Got home late but needed dinner and to pay bills. Feeling a kind of childish protest for having to pay bills, I had that wild hair to spend fun money and "treat myself" which resulted in wasting 400 yen on capsule toys (200 of which were cruelly and unforgivingly eaten, returning nothing), 100 yen on rice crackers (ok that wasn't a waste- Yum!), another 100 yen on some new strawberry gummy candy, and then wandering around contemplating going to the Sunkus conbini to pick up that sexy 2000yen Tallgese figure.

Ultimately my short attention span got the best of me and I ducked into a Recycle shop (something I want America to impliment with more fervor- NOW), browsed glasses and pans and arrived with some surprise to a veritable wall of manga. The recent and popular stuff was there, but I've grown pretty jaded to it. I have little interest in it in English and have no motivation to wrack my brain trying to read it in Japanese. I'm actually getting a little down in the dumps over not going manga crazy and scooping it all up. Even Mushishi, which I will be buying, it just... doesn't seem like there's a lot of reason to buy it in Japanese when I have a version waiting at home I can actually read. So I've been holding off on anything I am interested in collecting.

What got the wheels turning for me was not just the staggeringly low price (which I would later realize with a sinking feeling in my gut riding away from the place did not apply to all the books the way I thought it did) but the age of the material for sale. Having looked through shelves and shelves of newer titles, I've gotten to where I can skim past those and look for the older stuff. And I am finding that I am a sucker for that particular period of time and that particular kind of story. I'm awfully relieved to find there are titles I am interested in- they are just few and far between, even in the land of endless variety and endlessly available manga.
The titles I picked up:
Cromartie High School (vol 1)- working my way through this at the moment, it is surprisingly simple to read and goddamn hilarious.
Eat Man (vol 1) - I am such a sucker for this kind of story. It's like Trigun if Trigun sucked and Nightow was just a casual movie watcher who picked up comics on a whim and decided to make HIS FIRST REAL PROJECT YAY. Whipped through this one in two days because I enjoyed it so well. Want to somehow rifftrack it.
Haven't read the others yet, but they include Planetes, Akagi, a weird one I've never heard of called Switch, and a volume of Turn A Gundam.

I thought 3 books were going to cost me 100 yen, as the sticker on the bookshelf said, but the tenant requested roughly 12 dollars, something that staggered me. Instead of asking why, as I should have, I paid and left, wondering if he ripped me off. I'm still not 100% sure. It's a cruddy feeling. But I am stoked with my new friends and will eat any loss I took on this one with a grain of salt.