Peachy Keen

Happy chocolate consumer day everyone! My Valentine's this year will most likely be kicking back, watching an action flick while chowing down on a mug cake, so I'll just talk about my trip to Kobe in 2011 for the Mt. Rokko Ice Festival.

A little back story: my friends and I wanted to go to the Sapporo Snow Festival which is held in the beginning of February, however with Japan's school schedule it requires you to take 年休, nenkyuu, or vacation time on one or more school days. Depending on your schools that would be okay, but since it was my first year as an ALT, plus already asking for days off during Christmas I decided it would be bad form to ask for more. While several Okayama JETs were able to go, my friends and I felt bummed that we couldn't/didn't, so we decided to screw Sapporo and go somewhere more local: Kobe! We discovered that on Mt. Rokko they have an ice festival of their own so we had our own little snow adventure.

After we arrived in Kobe, we took a brief detour and went to Ikuta Shrine in the Sannomiya area. The shrine is apparently connected to the god of matrimony so we went in honor of Ikuta Toma Valentine's Day.

Lots of couples & women buying charms that day...

We also hit Kobe's Chinatown and went to a Kpop store. Yes. A kpop store. In Chinatown. In Japan. Awesome.

Dude where's my Epik High?

We then made our way to the Rokko cable car and made our way up the mountain. Mt. Rokko is one of the 3大夜景, sandaiyakei, or 3 great night views of Japan so we spent the day looking at ice sculptures then waiting for sunset to see the view. Sadly I was freezing my butt off and couldn't stay out too long so I was lazy in my photo taking of the night view. I guess that's why there's Flickr.

This was pretty much my first time seeing ice sculptures like these and despite not feeling my body, I was really impressed with the art. They even sculpted games so people were ring tossing and kids were sliding on ice slides, it was crazy!

Ice purikura!

Oh Kobe Tower, Skytree you are not

Snow, mountains, towers...definitely wasn't a bad way to spend a Valentine's day. 

And now I leave you with this:

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Labels: 2011, friends, JET, Kobe

Japan looooves pretty bright twinkling lights. In the US, families light up their own homes with outside lights for the holidays, but in Japan cities tend to make it an event (Honestly, I think its just another reason for them to make a festival and eat awesome festival food!). Some of the more famous ones are in the Tokyo area, like Shinjuku and Ginza which I've seen during my first trip to Japan in college. Last year, my fellow Peach girls decided to see what the 'west' side was up to and went to Kobe's Luminarie.

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Labels: 2011, friends, JET, Kobe

So...back in December I talked about a crazy video the Ibara JETs did in the fall called Genki Taiso. Well, about a month ago we received a copy and it's been broadcasting on the local channels.

Genki Taiso is a play on Japan's radio taiso which is a morning warm-up exercise companies can do together to build up team spirit and promote health and all that jazz. Do you remember the first episode of Heroes? You know, when Heroes was actually *awesome*? And Hiro and his co-workers were doing those weird exercise moves? Yup, that's radio taiso. Apparently Japan got it from the US back in the 1920s (yay wikipedia) and was used for the soldiers in the 1930s-40s. Then Japan got owned and now well, we get things like this:

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Labels: 2012, day in ibara, friends, JET

The title more or less translates to happy/energetic exercise....GO!

Today was...interesting.

...guess I better back up a bit. The story starts in October during the Ibara Sports Festival. After parading around the track all the participants gathered in the center of the field and lined up to do a warm-up. What us unsuspecting ALTs didn't know was this wasn't the usual, every-morning-radio-taisou the salarymen do. It was a mix of some warm up karate punches, marching, line dancing and jazz hands (okay the jazz hands were our addition). Of course, we thought the weirdness was AMAZING so we kind of...well, we were *genki*. We started to aim the punches at each other, do jazz hands, make weird faces, etc. Then it was finished; we had a laugh and the sports festival continued. We really didn't think anyone paid attention to our shenanigans.

Man, were we wrong. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago where one of my supervisors comes to me and lets me know that the city saw us do the Genki Taisou so *well* that the local broadcast wants to record us and air it. 5 of 6 pretty much screamed at him to let us do it. And so today, we did just that.

I have to say there was just a teeny, tiny moment where I felt...irked over what the instructor said. While we were practicing and asking questions of 'where does our arm go, which direction,' etc. she tells us that mistakes are okay (funny coming from a Japanese person) and the main point is for people to laugh. At first I thought well, to laugh *at* us? Sure, let's look at the silly foreigners do a taisou, dance, monkey dance! Because there are quite a few moments, both inside and outside the classroom where I do feel like the 'monkey' and perform for the kids/community. And well, let's face it, most of the time, I have no idea what's going most of the time anyway so I just go with the flow and do it. Besides, dancing is fun.

Regardless, the irked feeling went away because well, it was our fault for acting silly at the sports festival in the first place and come ON! We're being taped doing a warm-up exercise that the whole town will see!! How awesome is that?! Of course we all requested copies when it's finished. We ended the day with dinner (and DRINKING) at Champloo aka Champs. Even our supervisors came by for a drink to pat us on the back.

The taisou will air in January for who knows how long. Once I get my copy I'm immediately sending it stateside because otherwise I might end up setting fire to it.

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Labels: 2011, day in ibara, JET

Argh, apologize in advance on how out of order this blog is. I'll (eventually) blog about my spring vacation, but for now I just wanted to talk about the 'changing of the guards' so to speak that's been happening all over the Japanese workforce. It's called 人事異動 (jin-ji-i-dou) and it's pretty much when new employees come in and the regulars are rotated to a different position, department, or in a teacher's case, a different school altogether. Apparently they do it to keep the employees "on their toes" and gives people to go up the ladder. Or down. >_> For example, the principal from my middle school is now head of the Education department in City Hall.

I knew about this for a while now, but for the past couple of days it was really evident: employees in the education division were cleaning their desks, and today I was bowing to a whole bunch of new people, including a new supervisor (which sucks because I REALLY liked my previous one, she was SO sweet). It felt like the first day all over again when I was greeting and giving self-intros left and right.

Pretty interesting, since well America definitely doesn't do that. The only transfer you do is A) when you specifically request it or B) you're getting transfered home because you're getting FIRED. Man, Japanese employees must be the most well-rounded workers ever. Then again, if they suck in that position then they're kinda stuck there for the next couple of years.

Yay for Japanese work culture shock!

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Labels: JET, random thoughts