Well it's been over two months.

Internet access was pretty hard to come by over the summer, and I filled up my handwritten journal pretty early on, so I made good on my promise to neglect this blog I suppose.

Well let's see. I ended up doing the omozukai (that's head and right hand) for the female lead in
Hidakagawa and sashizukai (that's left hand) for Oshichi, the only character who appears in the scene we do from Date Musume Koi no Higanoko. I didn't feel very confident in the latter role and I feel I brought my team down, but the other sashizukai was really good so we managed to have at least one good performance of the piece. Hidakagawa was fine all around. Our performances actually drew larger crowds than most of the traditional Japanese puppetry troupes with history going back hundreds of years, which I thought was kind of a shame. One of the teachers got video, but I don't know if it'll be made public or not.

Miscellaneous thoughts on Japan:

The one question every single Japanese person asks foreigners is "what do you think of Japanese food?" This works quite well for me since I can use it to segue into "You know, I've lost twenty kilograms since getting to Japan" which I can usually use to start much more engaging conversation, but it's still something of an eyeroller (along with "you're so good with chopsticks!").

A very close second is "Why are you studying Japanese? You can do so much more with Chinese these days." I don't know how long it's been like this but Chinese is definitely the language to learn over here, there are programs on morning TV for people trying to learn Chinese and most electronic dictionaries have big fat Chinese dictionaries with pronunciation guides. At least this one is much easier to answer and sort of naturally leads into further conversation.

To anyone studying Japanese, karaoke is actually very good reading and accent practice. Any kanji without furigana is something extremely common that you'll need to know, and since you're on a time limit your reading speed will skyrocket. Also, one of the easiest ways to impress a Japanese person that doesn't involve chopsticks is to sing some big hit from days gone by; my recommendations are Yume no Naka e by Inoue Yosui, Linda Linda by The Blue Hearts and Natsumatsuri by Jitterin' Jinn, and anything by Kaguyahime. Or, for that matter, any enka song at all.

The local dialect for Iida is pretty funny, although it's hard to understand. Pretty much every sentence ends in "de na" and a few of the set phrases are much different. Most notably, anyone who's had a semester of Japanese knows that after every meal you say ごちそうさまでした, "gochisousama deshita," which is something along the lines of "thank you for the meal" to whoever prepared it for you. They also know that before every meal you say いただきます, "itadakimasu," and humble or honorific language is really where word-for-word translation fails spectacularly but this is the humble word you use for when you're going to receive something.

So in Iida, before meals it's いただきます like in the rest of the country, but afterwards -- and no one will look at you funny if you say the standard ごちそうさまでした -- you might also hear いただきました、 "itadakimashita," which is the past tense of that same word you use at the beginning of a meal. So in order, "I'm about to humbly receive (this food)" and "I have just humbly received (this food)."

Well I lost anyone who doesn't speak Japanese but anyone who does can share in my bafflement. One of these days I want to try "itadakimashita" out outside of Iida; I've heard you either get confused stares or muffled giggles.

Other Iida dialect, sorry no romaji for the Japanese-impaired: だいじょうぶだよ becomes あんじゃない, どうぞ becomes いっといな but only some times -- I think in cases when the listener is being told to go somewhere, but I could be off. I get the latter a lot from the people who run the local karaoke place. My comprehension of Iida dialect is pretty shady, and I find people who speak it really heavily almost completely impossible to understand.

People drive like maniacs here, which goes quite nicely with the incredibly narrow winding mountain roads. Thank god for good public transportation.

A fun exercise you can do if you're foreign and in Japan: when you're walking past a group of people, slow down immediately after you pass out of their eyesight. Sometimes you get to hear what they say about you when they estimate you're out of earshot. Other times this isn't necessary because they assume you can't speak Japanese anyway. Most of the time this just has the effect of making you appear intoxicated or preoccupied as your speed fluctuates wildly as you walk down the sidewalk.

Anyway, the best I've heard doing this has been "wow, his hair is cool!" I jumped a couple of meters and clicked my heels mid-air.

I have a few anecdotes I can share, most of which involve karaoke or puppets, but I'll actually start with something that happened today. I'm staying with some friends and they had their yearly neighborhood softball game this morning. They've got a five-year-old girl in the family and we got out of the car ahead of everyone else so the father could find a better parking spot. So on the way down there the girl ran into one of her classmates from I suppose kindergarten and I immediately decided I would pretend I didn't speak Japanese (this is pretty fun to do with little kids because they don't take the opportunity to poke fun at you like the slightly older ones tend to and their reactions when you start speaking their language at them all of a sudden are usually quite funny). So she introduced herself to me in English, incidentally in a disturbingly accurate accent at that -- leaps and bounds above the katakananglish most of the kids twice her age speak -- we picked our spot on the bleachers, and she started asking the girl about me.

"Where's your friend from?"

"America."

"Africa?"

"Not Africa, America!"

"Oh. How do they greet each other in America?"

So this kind of dissolved into mumbles for a while and then the girl turned to me and waited for me to make eye contact. I was expecting more English or Japanese, but I'll tell you what I certainly wasn't expecting:

"Namaste!"

I replied in the only way that seemed appropriate, which was to steeple my hands and bow.