Hidetomo Kimura's Art Aquarium: Fishy fun

One of my favorite things about traveling is that when you're in another city or country you have the opportunity to discover different cultures, take in the sights, and enjoy the local cuisine. One of my travel traditions is to to visit an art exhibit or museum that exhibits local talent, because it provides me a glimpse into the values and mindset of the place I'm visiting. I'm hoping to continue an 'Art and Travel'  segment that highlights either exhibits I've seen personally, or ones that are upcoming around the globe that I'd love to see. Here's a glimpse into an exhibit I visited last summer that perfectly blended art, culture, and history.

Originally posted on my wordpress site: TheRoamingHeart

Hidetomo Kimura's Art Aquarium

Goldfish are ubiquitous during Japanese summers; they can be seen lulling in the cool waters of reflection pools at the local shrine, evading being caught by old and young alike at festival game booths, and gracing the yukata of stylish ladies. It is nearly impossible to evade these lucky fish when you visit Japan today, but this wasn't always the case. Goldfish, or kingyo (金魚), first came to Japan, in about 1502. At this time they were few and thus considered a rare and precious item belonging only to those of power and influence. It wasn't until the Edo Period (1603-1867) that the presence of goldfish spread to the entire population and began to influence art and fashion, appearing on woodblock prints and kimonos. Kimura's exhibit aims to recreate the ambiance of Edo Japan and the reign of Kingyo for this years theme: "Cool Goldfish of Edo".

Kimura's art aquarium is a relaxing way to beat the heat of Tokyo summer. A perk, in the evenings the exhibit turns into a lounge where you can order a glass of champagne or sake while enjoying the languid movement of the surrounding goldfish dancing to a DJ's set. If you didn't catch Kimura's exhibit this past summer, he puts on a fresh art aquarium exhibit every year. Location details at the bottom of this post.

A projected kimono with live goldfish mimics the authentic kingyo adorned kimono from the Edo period on either side. Taken on my Iphone

The magnum opus of the exhibition, The Four Season Aquarium. The projection changes to depict spring, summer, fall, and winter. Image Courtesy of culture.cdjapan

A kaleidoscope world. When fish swim by the lens, the pattern changes as though you are rotating the kaleidoscope. Image courtesy of Japan Times

Image Courtesy of Spoon&Tamago

Hidetomo Kimura's Art Aquarium
Dates: Held annually July-Sept
Times: Art Aquarium 11am-7pm
Night Aquarium 7pm-11:30pm
Venue: Nihonbashi Mitsui Hall-5F Coredo Muromachi, 2-2-1 Nihombashi-Muromachi,  Chuo-ku, Tokyo
Admission: 1,000yen for adults, 600 yen elementary school age and under
URL: h-i-d.co.jp/art/index.html or www.facebook.com/artaquarium1

End of fall term and preparations for 冬休み

At the Japanese shrine prayer for nice healthy New Year for everyone.

                                  Probably also praying for it to not be so cold.
                                                       (P.C. Mom)

This past Wednesday I taught my last English class of the fall/winter trimester. In some ways I feel like this trimester has been the most successful yet from my time teaching here. I've been able to implement fun Western/American cultural activities and also participate in Japanese culture activities. Teachers and I are working well together which has me feeling really confident in class. However, I'm also extremely aware that in 3 months the Great Teacher Rotation/Musical Chairs:Teacher Edition will be taking place and therefore can not get too comfortable. The Japanese school system really does likes to keep you on your feet!
One of my favorite class activities that I did this trimester was teaching my students about Halloween and carving a proper American pumpkin in class! It was so cute to see how excited the kids were. They have never carved a pumpkin before let alone actually seen a pumpkin in real life. They were really impressed by the smell of the pumpkin and were in shock when I told them that the pumpkins we were carving would be considered relatively small by American standards of Halloween pumpkins. While we didn't learn/use much English during this class, it was a great way to teach my students a little more about me and to share some of my child hood memories.

The pumpkin that my 1st graders carved.

The pumpkin that my 2nd graders carved.

My most successful English class of this year may have been my last one, this past Wednesday.  In class we were reviewing the names of months and how to say numbers as dates (i.e. first vs. one). In our previous class together we had learned all of the months as well as the dates, and so this class we were just reviewing and applying the vocabulary to class activities to make sure that they retained the information and hopefully have it stored into the student's long-term memory. One of my greatest challenges with teaching this lesson was primarily in the students pronunciation. Many people think that pronunciation is a small/secondary trait in language acquisition. But as I have learned over the past year, if you do not correct them immediately they will continue to pronounce it wrong out of habit until it becomes so ingrained that teaching them the correct pronunciation is almost akin to teaching completely new words. And in some cases, the students cannot recognize the word when it is pronounced properly because they have become accustomed to remembering it with their own pronunciation or the katakana-ized version of English (that damn bastard language that defiles English learning in Japan; more on this in another post).
The problematic words for my students were months ending in ~ber and dates ending in ~th.. Instead of producing the brrrrrr sound my students would respond with a resounding baaaaa (i.e. Novem-ba, Septem-ba). And in the case of the "th" sound initially they would produce a suh sound,. like nineteen-suh and then they moved on to a ts .Nineteen-suh Ninteen-ts. So one of the goals I had set out for this final day of studying dates was to get my students to produce the TH sound. So as we started about with a quick run through of the dates and I made sure to over emphasize the th sound. December nineteenTTTH. To which my students cheerfully responded Decembaa Nineteents. I shake my head and say, listen carefully. NineteenTTTH not Ninteentsss. And I had them try again, to no avail. After a few more failed attempts I decided to switch my tactics and pronunciation a bit to see if it would produce closer results. So instead of emphasizing the (for lack of a better explanation) hissing sort of sound of th I changed it to a TH closer along the lines used when saying, The. And finally my students were able to produce a nineteen-th, twentie-th (they did over emphasize the TH sound, but at least it was a th and not a su or ts., so I can't really complain). Unfortunately, after moving on from review and into classroom application only a few of my students retained the newly learned information of saying TH and not ts or su. Which wasn't helped by the Japanese Homeroom Teacher whispering along fourtien(insert whatever date)-ts whenever the student would give answers during the activities. SMH. I'm still proud of my minor success.

In other news, I am getting ready to go on vacation for my winter break (冬休み）. I thought it might be fun to have a little trivia game for you to guess where I am going (if you don't know already). So throughout my vacation (whenever I have access to a computer or wireless #iphone) I will give you small hints either photos or random clues about my location. If I already told you where I am going don't ruin the fun!



Where in the World is Keri Going?
Hint 1: 
My travel time from Osaka, Japan to my winter vacation location (like that rhyme?) is a total of about 7 hours (not including the about 3 hour transfer wait time in Vietnam).

decision making.

Me with a goldfish (they`re baaaaaack!) trucking around Nagasaki.

Hey everyone,
So unfortunately my adventures/experiments in dating have come to a bit of a close. So, today you wont be regaled with amazing/awkward stories. But, maybe next post? Seeing as how popular the topic of dating in Japan (<- click here if you missed it, you wont regret it) was, maybe for the sake of viewership I will need to go out and have a few more misadventures in dating. If I`m completely honest it is at least mildly entertaining.

I know I said I would post about cat origami next, but...I haven`t got my camera with me right now, and those cats are a betch to fold! Next post, I promise! And if it`s not, then well you can think of the punishment. Boycott my blog maybe?

Usually I try to post about some of the weird crazy things that happen to me while here in Japan,or else the really hectic things (car in a ditch!?!?). But today I thought I would post something, a bit more personal, which I guess is putting myself a bit out of my comfort zone because I dont usually like to publicly share a lot of my personal thoughts. Anyway, hopefully it will still be enjoyable, if nothing else it will occupy about 3 minutes of time if you are like me and have nothing to do today.

Time has been breezing by and if you have been checking my blog posts regularly you may recall that way back in November through to January some of my posts thought about the topic of continuing my year on JET. Well, it is now February, the month of reckoning, and from what I can gather most of my friends in the prefecture have made up their mind, signed and turned in their contracts. If you recall from a few posts back I had a few questions for myself to consider prior to signing, here is a refresher:
Where do I want to be next year? What would it mean for me to sign up for another year? Do I want to put the rest of my future plans of grad school, etc. on hold to spend a second year teaching in Japan? I`m really not sure. But I am sure that by the end of this month, in under 20 days I will have made my decision for sure for sure. Truth be told, I think I already know what I want to do (and I think I`ve known for awhile), but it is pretty difficult to think that once I sign those papers I cant really change my mind one way or another.

These were some of the questions I had to mull over before being able to be confident in signing my contract one way or the other. I didn`t want to jump into a a half thought through yes or no, and so about a week and a half ago, on a particularly long (2 hour) train ride by myself I decided that there was no better time to go over my thoughts. And with that, after about an hour of thinking and internal arguing, I began a little note to myself that was a bit of a condensed version of what I had thought through which ran as follows:

22 years old. It's weird for me to think that when I was younger I used to imagine that at 24 I would be married and at 27 beginning a family. I think when you are a child of 10 you can't really grasp that in your early 20's you will be just as young at heart and have the entire world waiting at your feet. I'm 22 nearly 23 and know now that I am not at all ready to give up my hopes, ambitions, or independence whether that be in the form of marriage or maybe even a boyfriend. Likewise I don't find myself particularly eager to rush back to school. I figure that if you can only be young once why should we waste our prime sitting in a class researching and writing papers. I am never going to be as actively fit nor free of responsibilities as I will be during my 20's. Right now I am accountable to no one but myself (and maybe my boss if I want to keep my job) and no one is particularly accountable to me. It's a liberating feeling to think that if I should want to pick up and move to New Zealand for a year or two no one is holding me back except for myself (and of course the necessity of funds). As a young adult the options and opportunities in life are endless. Our youth is the time to experiment, take risks, get a little lost, and make mistakes. Somewhere along the road we will get ourselves back on the right path and those mistakes we made and risks we took will be the lessons we take away that will let us know which path is the one that will lead us to the destination we hope to reach. This being said I have decided to stay in Japan a second year, and after that, well who knows. For now the rest of my life can wait.

And with that the next 18 months of my life have been decided.


More posts shall be coming soon, I`ve been up to a lot of mischief, or something like that. But I figured it is about time I let my friends/family know what I`ve finally decided.

Things to look forward to in coming posts: Origami cats (I promise they are coming!!!!), Nagasaki Lantern Festival, and maybe more on dating (Tonight I think I am going on a psuedo-date with my Japanese chap from `My life as a 20 something single: Dating in Japan`. But does it really count as a date if you`ve got a chaperone of sorts?)

Where the fuck am I?

Dear readers, Family member in particular. Sorry if I have offended you with the title of this post, but really there is no other title that could adequately summarize the following blog post.

Disclaimer: If you are easily offended, do not proceed. This blog post may or may not include some pictures that would fall under the category of NSFW. AKA. If you are one or any of my grandparents (or really any of my family members), I strongly suggest you skip this post and come back another day for my next post. And all you friends out there, I suggest you do not view this blog further if you are in a professional or academic setting, save it for later -trust me.

Grandparents, if you are still reading, it is fine for now, but really, I suggest you dont scroll down or read much further through this blog.
Anyway this weekend was a crazy wild adventure across Yamaguchi prefecture (much of which will be saved for my next blog) I am only going to discuss mildly inappropriate things and other oddities that make me question `where the fuck am I`.

So, Saturday I drove my car,caught a train, bus, train, and bus, a total of about 3 hours to get from little Oshima island to Nagato City (with a pit stop in Aio, will be mentioned next post) all to go and see the glory that is MaraKannon. What is MaraKannon and why does it fall under the category of either "Where the fuck am I" , oddity, or NSFW - well, you will find out soon enough, and trust me it falls under all of these categories.

Lately I have been experiencing a ton of `where the fuck am I` moments. I think what really set off the train of events was a bathroom experience in Hiroshima Station (a big station). So, if you read my last post you`ll know that I visited Hiroshima (a legitimate city) last week. What I left out of that post though was probably the one thing that will forever stand out the most to me about that trip to Hiroshima, and maybe Hiroshima in general. So anyway, as to what happened, I was at the station to catch the train back to Obatake (Oshima) and I decided I better go to the bathroom now because it is a 1.5 hour toiletless train ride to Obatake Station. So I go into the bathroom and take my tinkle when I realize, what.the. fuck. not only was I stuck using the squat toilet, but also no toilet paper!!! I look completely around the stall and there is no toilet paper in sight, I call to my friend Jessica `Do you have toilet paper?` (she lucked out and got the western toilet so I hoped that maybe, just maybe there was toilet paper in that stall). Her response: No.
The lesson to be learned here is always carry around tissue paper, just in case. (this predicament has occurred once more between that incident and this post, and naturally I was again unprepared, so do as I say not as I do.)
As it turned out, we could buy toilet paper for 100 yen at the entrance to the bathroom.


My next where am I moment (not as intense to deserve a fuck)occured during my long journey to Nagato. Here we go, when I got off of my first bus in Hagi I checked the train timetables and realized that I had to wait 2 hours(!!!) for the train that would take me to Nagato Station. I thought what the heck, even little dinky Obatake station has trains run through more regularly than this...and after the two hour wait the answer became starkly apparent. The train that rolled up into Higashi-Hagi station was about the size of my Honda Civic, okay slight exaggeration, but the train was smaller than a stretch hummer. All I could do was turn to my travel companion, Jessica, and say verbatum: `where am i?` and in my head include: and where the heck am I going? Never! Never! have I seen/been on such a ridiculously small train and I have traveled to some pretty remote areas in Japan. All I could think was that I was bound for a tiny one shack village that somehow thought it deserved the word city. The only nice perk, there was a toilet on the train (not that I needed to use it [it probably didnt have toilet paper]).
(Oh, and Nagato turned out to be much bigger than just a one shack village)



Okay, so I think this blog has gotten lengthy enough for me to be able to write about the glory that is MaraKannon without having to fear upsetting any conservative family members (so conservative/easily offended family members, if you are still reading at this point, all I can say is I warned you).

Before I say what Mara Kannon is and the story behind it let me just post these following photos and you can make of it what you will.

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I mean really, where the fuck am i?
This cannot be reality or a real place.

So, what is Mara Kannon, other than Samantha Jones` paradise (SATC anyone)? Well one thing that is apparent from the photos is that it is a place that loves the male anatomy, a very specific part of the male anatomy. Well, simply put it is pretty much what it looks like, a penis shrine.



As the story goes, during the Japanese feudal period there had been a landowner whose 3 warrior sons where escaping from some neighboring warriors and had ran up into the mountains of Nagato. The two older sons had been found and killed rather quickly, but the third son had decided to disguise himself as a woman and hide out/live in one of the small mountain villages. Eventually, the enemy warriors found him and cut off his penis to prove that a) he was a man and b) they could bring it back to their own area and show that they had killed the brother (twisted right?). And the villagers who had hid the third son felt pity on him and since that day had left wooden penis figures on the spot where he had died. As a result, it is believed that this location is especially blessed with granting men a larger penis, and fixing ED. Well, maybe not, I don`t know. It actually really might, supposedly anyway. But what I do know is that the shrine is said to grant the visitor descendants, and fertility.
The Japanese people take this shrine really seriously, it is very common for people throughout the prefecture to make the pilgrimage to this tiny, odd shrine if they are having difficulty having a child.

Obviously the group of us had more fun enjoying the oddity of the shrine dedicated to the penis, rather than trying to pray for a child or fertility or to fix any disorder, etc. We did happen to see one Japanese couple that we can only guess had come to pray for a child because they had lit two incense, rang the bell, and prayed within the little temple.

Mara Kannon is one of a few fertility temples in Japan, if you happen to be in/visiting the country I would certainly recommend seeing if there is one near you. It is rather interesting to say the least.

And a final where the heck am I (again not as intense),

So the band AKB48 is extremely popular in Japan, especially for teenagers. Check out the video and maybe you will get an idea why I am what the hecking. Enjoy!

http://youtu.be/lkHlnWFnA0c

what kind of country am I living in?


Oh and my toilet seat can give my butt a massage. What can yours do?

Japan, you are indeed something else.