2001-11-26 - 9:09 p.m.
I’m on a bit of an extended vacation, because Friday was a national holiday and Monday and Tuesday of this week my school has tests all day, so I just have to make a 3 hour appearance at the Board of Ed. My weekends seem so removed from my work week that come Monday morning I am always surprised when I actually have to go back to work. Adding to this double-life feeling is that my co-workers know nothing about me and never ask me anything beyond how I like Japan and what I can and cannot eat. On one level this is nice because nobody is in my business, but on another level it makes me feel like quite the one-dimensional foreigner. My life here is extremely public and extremely private all at once.
After spending a couple of nights in Tokyo, Saori and I went to Yokohama to visit her friend Debbie. On Sunday we went to a great onsen (hot spring) near Debbie’s train station. The onsen is housed in a elderly people’s community center. After paying our entrance fee and taking off our shoes, we walked past several large rooms with dozens of low tables and cushions on the floor. It was around lunch time, and all of the tables were full with old people sitting on the floor and gabbing , reading magazines, playing games, and enjoying veritable feasts of food and sake brought from home or bought at the little stands in the center. A woman wearing a long red gown walked by us briskly -- Debbie explained that she was probably the ballroom dancing teacher. In another room a woman in a kimono was doing a traditional fan dance as her audience ate their lunch. The onsen is called Aka Onsen, “aka” meaning red, because the water is red. It is supposed to have some medicinal qualities. The changing room, full of naked old ladies, reminded me of the aging chronic sunbathers I would see every day at the YMCA when I was a kid.
After the onsen, Saori and I went to Yokohama station to look around and get some dinner. When we exited the station, our conversation was overtaken by the preaching of a man standing on a truck with a bullhorn. His truck bore a Japanese flag and an American flag. Hundreds of shoppers streamed past him, seemingly oblivious to his message. He was speaking in Japanese but I knew what he was talking about, because Saori had explained it when we had seen the same truck at Shibuya station in Tokyo on Friday. He was a representative of a right-wing extremist group, talking about all of the deaths America has caused in Afghanistan and urging the people to oppose Japan’s involvement in the war. “Nobody likes this group,” Saori reassured me. Still, it was a bit unnerving to encounter them twice in three days.
On a totally unrelated note, you can get a lot of strange things in vending machines here and one of them is a can of hot corn soup.
