Cultural Immersion
I've been in Okinawa now for ten weeks, and events have been overtaking me with ferocious regularity. We live in a Japanese apartment (although admittedly one constructed to take advantage of the housing allowances of Americans), Atanasia is going to a Japanese Montessori school, I've already done my first gig with the drum group Afrikasia (of which every member but me is Japanese), and I've gone to my first month of djembe classes (ditto). I'm past the stage of large surprises, mostly --- I no longer walk to the passenger side of the car when I intend to drive, and I almost never try to signal a turn with the windshield wipers anymore. I know how much the coins are worth, including the two that look almost alike, and I can do the rough yen-to-dollars conversion in my head. Right now, 100 yen are worth about a dollar, so everything is priced in pennies. My rent is 255,000 pennies, a bottle of water is 110 pennies, and enough Chicken McNuggets and french fries to feed all three children is 14,500 pennies.
I've figured out some of the small stuff, too. In Japan, there's a vending machine on every OTHER street corner (which is efficient, since everybody is willing to cross the street and still find it convenient). They can be anywhere --- at the beach, set into people's garden walls, outside trendy little boutiques in pastel shades to match the signs, right next to restaurant doors, out in the middle of a stretch of road with not much there but a streetlight. Somehow, they all have power, because the drinks are always beaded with condensation. They have names like Dydo, Boss Coffee, and Pokari Sweat (something like colorless Gatoraide). The drink in the taxi-yellow can with black kanji and a small white flower is jasmine tea, and it really does smell faintly floral. I crave it; I have a stash at home now. The drink in the taxi-yellow can with the brown kanji and the faint outline of a Chinese lion is NOT jasmine tea, and makes my stomach feel a little knotty. I know there's mint tea in there somewhere, but the cans with the green leafy plants on them are full of green tea, which of course makes sense in retrospect. I haven't actually tried Pokari Sweat.
I own three pairs of tabi socks already, and I'm not afraid to wear them. I bought them because they have a beautiful orange koi fish centered over your foot as you wear them, and the fish are so vibrant and elegant. But it's still too hot to wear tabi socks with your sandals and not look like the most gooberish of tourists. Right now, I'm developing the callouses between my toes --- everybody wears thong sandals, EVERYBODY (except the people who work outside for a living, who wear white rubber boots). But these are not the flip-flops of summer-camp bath houses; we wear thong sandals with sequins, gilt sandals, clear plastic high-heeled sandals, carved and painted wooden sandals, somber sandals and sparkly sandals and the funky functional kind with the ring around the big toe. Of course, many people in Japan wear other kinds of footwear, but we all walk with a slight shuffle, because we're all wearing shoes that can be slipped off whenever we go inside. I have been able to purchase shoes in Japan, but my outfitting adventures ended there. My feet are size 6 1/2, in the U.S., and at home it's sometimes hard to find shoes because stores don't usually carry a lot of stock in the smaller sizes. Here, as I discovered after much experimentation, I wear a size LL (that's "double-large"). And although I really have plenty of t-shirts to last me through the apparently endless tropical summer (it's still in the mid-80s here and very humid), styles here are different: women layer the shirts that we would wear alone, at home, to create an effect that's substantially more conservative. But my efforts to buy clothes here haven't yet resulted in my owning anything I can actually wear. I've tried to explain this to the women I drum with, but I don't think I've really gotten the extent of my sense of dislocation across. I'm 5'2" and this morning I weighed 120 lbs. At home, I'm a small person, although granted not among the most waiflike. Here, surrounded by Japanese women, I hulk, I loom, I spill out of my clothes and my chair. My biceps are the size of their calves, my sarongs could wrap around any two of them. While there are Japanese women my size here, I have no idea how they clothe themselves.
My drum classes are exciting, challenging, very informative. I've learned more about African-specific djembe technique in three classes so far than I have in two previous rounds of workshops at home --- but to be fair, the classes here are smaller and the teacher has more time to offer individual comments. But I'm wrung out by the time I make it home (Okinawa City is about half an hour away). Daiki-san speaks a whole lot more English than I speak Japanese, but it's not enough for complete sentences, and everybody else is Japanese, so I spend two hours a week staring intently at his hands while he's playing, and at his face when he talks so that, through the gestalt of brain-numbing levels of concentration, body language, occasional words of English, and demonstration, I can sieve fragments of meaning from the incomprehensible whole. Actually, drum is as good a way as there may be to communicate with other people who don't speak the same language. I don't have to understand most of what he's saying to understand when Daiki-san tells me that I've got the timing slightly off in the second half of the phrase, or that I need to make certain tones brighter than others. He's really very encouraging; I had imagined Japanese teachers would be more remote, more formulaic. He's concerned that I'm too tense, that I'm not enjoying playing enough. Which is ironic, since people who have watched me play have sometimes commented on the huge silly grin I wear. It's just the effort of focusing, I think, and the realization that in this style of drumming I lag behind the rest of the class in technique. But I'm learning fast. :)
This week, I've crossed the line from drummer to drum geek. I think the difference is that a drum geek is someone who not only owns several different drums but is actively attempting to learn how to play them all. You may know how attached I am to my one and only djembe, the one with the huge deep voice. I've heard that, to make a djembe, the crafter has to take the wood from a living tree, and the tree has to remain alive or the wood can't be used for a drum. Probably apocryphal, but still a good metaphor for the way I feel about this drum. It's too big for me, objectively, I wrestle with it in order to play it, but I've decorated it with ornaments from people I treasure, I swaddle it in layers of padding as I labor to carry it from home to practice. I bought a special drum-geek stool to make it possible for me to get high enough above the drum to play it. I feel as if I'm not the owner of an article, but the custodian of a relic or a fetish, as if I'm charged with keeping this drum as well as I'm able, but that its story only intersects mine. I love my drum in the same way that I loved my century-old house in Kansas City, the way I love a particular stretch of bottom-land outside Eleanor, West Virginia, the way I love the family grave site some Appalacian family tucked inside iron-fence walls on the side of a hill that now overlooks Interstate 64 but once had nothing but the glaucous curves of hills between it and the approach of evening. But my drum, my charge, is more than half as tall as I am, it weighs 30 lbs., and it's hard to carry and almost impossible to play with a harness (while standing and carrying it, that means). *** The following is drum-geek-speak and may be skipped by my many non-drummer friends and family members. *** I've pulled it to tighten it once, and wrapped it several times on top of that in the attempt to tune it tightly enough to play the style of African djembe we're doing in class, and I feel like I'm trying to make my drum into something it's not --- it has its own voice, and in trying to turn it into a vehicle for another kind of sound I'm afraid of losing the thing that makes this drum unique. So, after a lot of soul-searching, I decided to buy another drum for performances with Afrikasia (our next gig, next weekend, is among a roster of a dozen or so groups, in a club roughly the size of an RV) that I can not only play with a harness but can keep out of the way of a club crowd. It's made in Bali (Indonesia) and has a carving of a long-necked, long-winged, long-tailed bird that wraps all the way around the body of the drum. The wood's dark and has a hard shine, although I don't think it's been varnished. I can lift it with one hand. I can lift it with a hand that's already holding a child. :) It needed only a very little tightening to make that bright, crackling, ozone-charged sound, and the head's much smaller, so I don't have to reach so far for the bass. It feels a little like, well, not like having a second child, because of course you already love a new child as completely as the ones you already have, and not like having a new love, because there's already a tinge of finality to whatever feelings you have about your old love, and a swell of excitement and intoxication about the unknown new. Perhaps it's more like getting a new coworker after someone you were close to has left --- you want to like the newcomer as much, but you still feel a little standoffish, and maybe disloyal, too.
So there's a new djembe in my life, but the real geekiness is just developing. I've also joined a belly dance troupe as a drummer; my first gig with them is in two weeks; I'm doing an African rhythm segment that the dancers will dance to. But being a belly dance drummer means you really need to play the doumbek; I've been practicing with a borrowed one, so I've ordered one of my own, plus a kind of middle eastern tambourine called a riq so I can be the designated percussionist. Yeah, I'm a drum geek, and I'm proud.
I've unpacked and put away four thousand pounds of our household goods shipment, but of course the most essential ephemera is still lurking in the half-dozen boxes I haven't gotten to yet because the packers, according to some arcane formula, labeled them "knick-knacks" and "decor" but which (one can only hope) apparently also contain the cord that connects the digital camera to the computer, as well as other small but essential items of electronic paraphenalia. Ergo, there are still no pictures of our stunningly larger and somehow ever more beautiful children, or of dozens of other things I want to show you --- the view of the sea from our windows, the fishing boats tied up in the tidal estuaries, the Buddhist monk I saw on the sidewalk last week, the inside of a Japanese public bathroom (turns out women CAN pee standing up --- the toilets are like horizontal urinals set into the floor), trees growing green bumpy fruit called Buddha's head that are marvelously white and sweet and creamy inside, and the particular shade of mauve that Japanese drivers are partial to this year. There's a long list in my head of things to show you, although I'm not much of a photographer, so I promise to try to have pictures ready for my next post. What do you think of the blog idea? I wanted a way to let you all know what's happening without clogging your inboxes with long messages and multiple attachments.
May all beings be endowed with happiness;
may all beings be free from suffering.
Torah
This is a link to Masahiro's weblog. He's a member of Afrikasia, and a far better photographer than I'll ever be. If you scroll down to the entry for Sept. 11, you can see a photo of Afrikasia (including me) performing at an outdoor festival.
http://yaplog.jp/masahiro0821/
I've figured out some of the small stuff, too. In Japan, there's a vending machine on every OTHER street corner (which is efficient, since everybody is willing to cross the street and still find it convenient). They can be anywhere --- at the beach, set into people's garden walls, outside trendy little boutiques in pastel shades to match the signs, right next to restaurant doors, out in the middle of a stretch of road with not much there but a streetlight. Somehow, they all have power, because the drinks are always beaded with condensation. They have names like Dydo, Boss Coffee, and Pokari Sweat (something like colorless Gatoraide). The drink in the taxi-yellow can with black kanji and a small white flower is jasmine tea, and it really does smell faintly floral. I crave it; I have a stash at home now. The drink in the taxi-yellow can with the brown kanji and the faint outline of a Chinese lion is NOT jasmine tea, and makes my stomach feel a little knotty. I know there's mint tea in there somewhere, but the cans with the green leafy plants on them are full of green tea, which of course makes sense in retrospect. I haven't actually tried Pokari Sweat.
I own three pairs of tabi socks already, and I'm not afraid to wear them. I bought them because they have a beautiful orange koi fish centered over your foot as you wear them, and the fish are so vibrant and elegant. But it's still too hot to wear tabi socks with your sandals and not look like the most gooberish of tourists. Right now, I'm developing the callouses between my toes --- everybody wears thong sandals, EVERYBODY (except the people who work outside for a living, who wear white rubber boots). But these are not the flip-flops of summer-camp bath houses; we wear thong sandals with sequins, gilt sandals, clear plastic high-heeled sandals, carved and painted wooden sandals, somber sandals and sparkly sandals and the funky functional kind with the ring around the big toe. Of course, many people in Japan wear other kinds of footwear, but we all walk with a slight shuffle, because we're all wearing shoes that can be slipped off whenever we go inside. I have been able to purchase shoes in Japan, but my outfitting adventures ended there. My feet are size 6 1/2, in the U.S., and at home it's sometimes hard to find shoes because stores don't usually carry a lot of stock in the smaller sizes. Here, as I discovered after much experimentation, I wear a size LL (that's "double-large"). And although I really have plenty of t-shirts to last me through the apparently endless tropical summer (it's still in the mid-80s here and very humid), styles here are different: women layer the shirts that we would wear alone, at home, to create an effect that's substantially more conservative. But my efforts to buy clothes here haven't yet resulted in my owning anything I can actually wear. I've tried to explain this to the women I drum with, but I don't think I've really gotten the extent of my sense of dislocation across. I'm 5'2" and this morning I weighed 120 lbs. At home, I'm a small person, although granted not among the most waiflike. Here, surrounded by Japanese women, I hulk, I loom, I spill out of my clothes and my chair. My biceps are the size of their calves, my sarongs could wrap around any two of them. While there are Japanese women my size here, I have no idea how they clothe themselves.
My drum classes are exciting, challenging, very informative. I've learned more about African-specific djembe technique in three classes so far than I have in two previous rounds of workshops at home --- but to be fair, the classes here are smaller and the teacher has more time to offer individual comments. But I'm wrung out by the time I make it home (Okinawa City is about half an hour away). Daiki-san speaks a whole lot more English than I speak Japanese, but it's not enough for complete sentences, and everybody else is Japanese, so I spend two hours a week staring intently at his hands while he's playing, and at his face when he talks so that, through the gestalt of brain-numbing levels of concentration, body language, occasional words of English, and demonstration, I can sieve fragments of meaning from the incomprehensible whole. Actually, drum is as good a way as there may be to communicate with other people who don't speak the same language. I don't have to understand most of what he's saying to understand when Daiki-san tells me that I've got the timing slightly off in the second half of the phrase, or that I need to make certain tones brighter than others. He's really very encouraging; I had imagined Japanese teachers would be more remote, more formulaic. He's concerned that I'm too tense, that I'm not enjoying playing enough. Which is ironic, since people who have watched me play have sometimes commented on the huge silly grin I wear. It's just the effort of focusing, I think, and the realization that in this style of drumming I lag behind the rest of the class in technique. But I'm learning fast. :)
This week, I've crossed the line from drummer to drum geek. I think the difference is that a drum geek is someone who not only owns several different drums but is actively attempting to learn how to play them all. You may know how attached I am to my one and only djembe, the one with the huge deep voice. I've heard that, to make a djembe, the crafter has to take the wood from a living tree, and the tree has to remain alive or the wood can't be used for a drum. Probably apocryphal, but still a good metaphor for the way I feel about this drum. It's too big for me, objectively, I wrestle with it in order to play it, but I've decorated it with ornaments from people I treasure, I swaddle it in layers of padding as I labor to carry it from home to practice. I bought a special drum-geek stool to make it possible for me to get high enough above the drum to play it. I feel as if I'm not the owner of an article, but the custodian of a relic or a fetish, as if I'm charged with keeping this drum as well as I'm able, but that its story only intersects mine. I love my drum in the same way that I loved my century-old house in Kansas City, the way I love a particular stretch of bottom-land outside Eleanor, West Virginia, the way I love the family grave site some Appalacian family tucked inside iron-fence walls on the side of a hill that now overlooks Interstate 64 but once had nothing but the glaucous curves of hills between it and the approach of evening. But my drum, my charge, is more than half as tall as I am, it weighs 30 lbs., and it's hard to carry and almost impossible to play with a harness (while standing and carrying it, that means). *** The following is drum-geek-speak and may be skipped by my many non-drummer friends and family members. *** I've pulled it to tighten it once, and wrapped it several times on top of that in the attempt to tune it tightly enough to play the style of African djembe we're doing in class, and I feel like I'm trying to make my drum into something it's not --- it has its own voice, and in trying to turn it into a vehicle for another kind of sound I'm afraid of losing the thing that makes this drum unique. So, after a lot of soul-searching, I decided to buy another drum for performances with Afrikasia (our next gig, next weekend, is among a roster of a dozen or so groups, in a club roughly the size of an RV) that I can not only play with a harness but can keep out of the way of a club crowd. It's made in Bali (Indonesia) and has a carving of a long-necked, long-winged, long-tailed bird that wraps all the way around the body of the drum. The wood's dark and has a hard shine, although I don't think it's been varnished. I can lift it with one hand. I can lift it with a hand that's already holding a child. :) It needed only a very little tightening to make that bright, crackling, ozone-charged sound, and the head's much smaller, so I don't have to reach so far for the bass. It feels a little like, well, not like having a second child, because of course you already love a new child as completely as the ones you already have, and not like having a new love, because there's already a tinge of finality to whatever feelings you have about your old love, and a swell of excitement and intoxication about the unknown new. Perhaps it's more like getting a new coworker after someone you were close to has left --- you want to like the newcomer as much, but you still feel a little standoffish, and maybe disloyal, too.
So there's a new djembe in my life, but the real geekiness is just developing. I've also joined a belly dance troupe as a drummer; my first gig with them is in two weeks; I'm doing an African rhythm segment that the dancers will dance to. But being a belly dance drummer means you really need to play the doumbek; I've been practicing with a borrowed one, so I've ordered one of my own, plus a kind of middle eastern tambourine called a riq so I can be the designated percussionist. Yeah, I'm a drum geek, and I'm proud.
I've unpacked and put away four thousand pounds of our household goods shipment, but of course the most essential ephemera is still lurking in the half-dozen boxes I haven't gotten to yet because the packers, according to some arcane formula, labeled them "knick-knacks" and "decor" but which (one can only hope) apparently also contain the cord that connects the digital camera to the computer, as well as other small but essential items of electronic paraphenalia. Ergo, there are still no pictures of our stunningly larger and somehow ever more beautiful children, or of dozens of other things I want to show you --- the view of the sea from our windows, the fishing boats tied up in the tidal estuaries, the Buddhist monk I saw on the sidewalk last week, the inside of a Japanese public bathroom (turns out women CAN pee standing up --- the toilets are like horizontal urinals set into the floor), trees growing green bumpy fruit called Buddha's head that are marvelously white and sweet and creamy inside, and the particular shade of mauve that Japanese drivers are partial to this year. There's a long list in my head of things to show you, although I'm not much of a photographer, so I promise to try to have pictures ready for my next post. What do you think of the blog idea? I wanted a way to let you all know what's happening without clogging your inboxes with long messages and multiple attachments.
May all beings be endowed with happiness;
may all beings be free from suffering.
Torah
This is a link to Masahiro's weblog. He's a member of Afrikasia, and a far better photographer than I'll ever be. If you scroll down to the entry for Sept. 11, you can see a photo of Afrikasia (including me) performing at an outdoor festival.
http://yaplog.jp/masahiro0821/
And for those of you who haven't already seen them, here's a link to my artist friend Vickie's web page. If you open the "Coffee Girl Opening" gallery and go to page 2, there are pictures of my Kansas City drum group --- Women of the Drum --- performing (me, too) at Vickie's art opening at the Coffee Girl.
http://www.kisstheskystudio.com/
Here's a link to T'ger's home page --- the best in peasantwear! Go to the "T'ger's Toggs" gallery, and on the second page is a picture of Salen and me working in T'ger RenFest booth (that was two years ago, I think, when I was pregnant with Indiana --- can't tell in that dress though, can you!?!).
http://www.tgertoggs.com/
posted by Torah Cottrill at
Saturday, October 01, 2005
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