Friendship and Exhaustion Collide

Sunday, I think to commemorate the Uji Tea Festival, the Cultural Center where I practice taiko held sort of a 'cultural center festival.' I thought the building was just a regular community center, but it isn't at all. Many kinds of cultural groups practice or hold meetings there--drawing, bonsai, other taiko groups, European-style flower arrangement.... Uzu, my taiko dojo, had a performance, which I watched, but that was only 15 minutes of the day. The bulk of the morning and afternoon was spent doing "mochi-tsuki," or mochi making. This was one of the coolest processes I have ever seen. The rice had already been soaking in water overnight. After setting up all sorts of tables and stoves, we started steaming the rice in huge pots stacked on top of each other, 6 pots at a time. When one pot of rice was ready (how this was determined I have no idea), it was brought over to the huge wooden mortar, where one person beat it with a huge wooden mallet and another person kneaded it. The rhythm these two people kept was a lot like taiko. I was part of the rotation of people wielding the mallet, and beating the rice was really hard work. But, the end result was delicious rice balls! 

Sometime in the middle of the day, my taiko colleague Toshiaki took me to a store so I could buy tabi, traditional Japanese sock/shoes to wear while playing taiko. I thought he was going to take me to a taiko equipment store, so I was really surprised when we pulled up at this huge overwhelming Japanese wal-mart called Konan. On the way, he told me more about the connections between taiko and mochi-making. The beating of the rice, the use of the mallet, and the rhythm created, are all very reminiscent of taiko; beyond that, there is a specific style of taiko that was performed after the rice harvest. Harvesting rice is a huge communal effort, and in the celebration that followed, people would play taiko in gratitude to the rice kami (?) for allowing them to have a good harvest. We talked a bit more about how Japan and America appreciate nature differently, before moving the conversation on to such topics as the election and the Doobie Brothers. 

Taiko practice Wednesday night was really fun. Especially after making mochi with all those people, it is starting to feel like a real community. 

Today was Yom Kippur. Jasons and I took the day off school, and the three of us fasted and went to Ryoanji, a temple with a famous rock garden. We stared at the rocks for a really long time and meditated on the past year. I thought a lot about how the rocks reminded me of islands. In my gardens class, we learned about how this one type of moss looks like a cryptomeria tree, so to look down on the moss is supposed to emulate the feeling of looking down on a forest of cryptomeria trees. So these rocks had tiny islands of this moss around them, and I thought about if they were islands, what it would be like to be a person living on one of them. Would this person have any idea about the existence of the other islands, let alone the people living on them? 

Ryoanji was really crazy. It still astounds me to think about all the things I thought and felt while I was there. At the Welcome Party, only 10 minutes after meeting my host dad, he told me that I will only be able to understand Ryoanji if I go more than 15 times. And he is probably right. It was so empty, but so full of meaning. Those rocks have been there for hundreds of years, and will continue to be there, exactly as they are, probably for several hundred more. 

We broke the fast at a pretty great Nepalese restaurant, and then we bought Sigur Ros tickets. Tomorrow I head off with all of AKP for our fall field trip to Hiroshima and Miyajima.