2002-07-21 - 11:43 p.m.
Friday was the last day of school, yaahhhoooo! It hasn’t really hit me yet that this job is OVER, no more stupid English textbooks and hours wasted away sitting at a desk doing nothing except memorizing the occasional kanji. But enough about work. Onto summer vacation.
Yesterday Saori and I went to see the biggest Buddha image in Japan which (who would’ve believed it) is located on Mt. Nokogiri, just 30 minutes south of Kimitsu by train. Lonely Planet is getting a nice long letter from me about how they dismiss all of Chiba Prefecture, meanwhile there are lots of decent attractions here, not to mention the biggest Buddha in the entire country. After about twenty minutes on the train, the sea appeared, and the tracks ran followed the water until we reached our stop. We walked for about fifteen minutes through a little seaside town until we found the station for the cable car (the Japanese call it a “rope way”) which would take us up the mountain. A tour bus was pulling in as we approached, but otherwise the area was delightfully free of all of the trappings of Japanese tourism. At the top of the mountain, there were trails to wander off to different platforms with incredible views of the sea and the rolling green mountains below. I especially liked seeing the tunnels from so high above -- like little circles cut into the sides of the mountains, with ant-sized cars coming out. It reminded me of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.
Other trails lead to religious sites, including a temple founded in 725 AD, and hundreds of small stone Arhat statues. The Daibutsu (Big Buddha) itself was stunning, even bigger than I expected it to be. At 31 meters tall, it dwarfs the 13 meter Daibutsu in Kamakura, a much more popular spot for tourists.
This was one of the most enjoyable day trips I’ve taken in Japan because while everything was accessible and designed for visitors, it wasn’t totally overrun with school children, tour groups, and souvenir shops.
Today I went out with one of the ninth grade girls from school. I kept a mailbox on my desk at work so that the kids could write me letters, and a girl named Mai wrote me and told me she wanted to take Print Club pictures together. “Print Club,” “Puri-Kura” in Japanese, is one of those things that means nothing in Japanese, because it’s supposed to be from English, but then it means nothing when you translate it into English. Puri-Kura -- taking and decorating photo booth sticker-pictures -- is one of the biggest fads among jr. high and high school girls. I give major props to Mai, who wrote notes in English back and forth me all term and took the initiative to make plans with me. After e-mailing back and forth on our cell phones about a dozen times Friday night, we made plans to meet at Kimitsu station at one o’clock on Sunday. It’s always a little bit of a shock to me when I see my students outside of school in their normal clothes, after seeing them in their uniforms day in and day out. Mai showed up looking like a normal fashion-conscious fourteen year old, with cute sandals and a cute handbag. We bought our tickets to Kisarazu and I bought us both iced green tea to drink as we waited on the platform for the train. Once we got to Kisarazu, Mai took me to her favorite Puri-Kura place, a colony of Puri-Kura booths in a mall over-run with jr. high and high school girls, some in their school uniforms and some not. This place had costumes (Chinese dresses) and props (huge stuffed animals) you could incorporate into your pictures. The basic method of Puri-Kura is this: You go into a garishly decorated tent-like vinyl photo booth, deposit about $3.50. A touch-sensitive computer screen leads you through deciding picture size and how many poses you want. The camera takes several shots, and you decide the best one. Then comes the fast-paced work of decorating the pictures on the computer screen with backgrounds, stamps, and whatever you want to write, as a clock ticks until your time runs out. After about a minute, the pictures come out of the machine, and if you’re a teenager, you cut them up, trade them with friends, and stick them in a crowded sticker book of all of your Puri-Kura pals. After taking three sheets of Puri-Kura -- that’s twelve poses, one including a huge stuffed Hello Kitty -- Mai and I got some gelato which we ate as we walked back to the station. It was a fun outing, and I hope all of her friends get a big kick out of those pictures.
Tonight the Taiko drummers started practicing in the park near my house for the festival in August. I remember hearing them practicing when I first got to Kimitsu... it really has been a year. Tomorrow I’m off to Hiroshima for a mini-vacation... then only a week in Kimitsu before I move out!
