TIME

Is time a clock and a calendar? Or is it something less linear? My time in Japan is bounded on one end by 2008 September 2 and on the other by 2009 June 15. Each day, my activities mostly revolve around the train schedule. I must leave my house by 945 three days a week, or else I will not get to school before class begins. Going home from Kyoto each day is also dependent on which train I catch. Being held back five minutes after a 430 class can sometimes mean 25 minutes added to my commute home, simply because of the patterns of the trains. My host parents have at least 5 calendars in public spaces around the house, and I have two more in my room, because we are always thinking and talking about events on upcoming days. 

One such event was the AKP new year's party, or the "budding talents" party, or as I have been referring to it since mid-November, the "juu-hachi nichi party" (１８日パーティー, literally, party on the 18th). It was yesterday, 2009 January 18 (go figure), and I have been looking forward to it for so long because I played taiko in front of all of AKP and all their host families and a bunch of other people. Six women from my group came and brought drums and we played 3 songs. My host dad videoed it on my camera and I am working on getting them up on youtube, and when I figure that out I will post them here. It was SO fun. Playing taiko is really the best thing I am doing with my time (there's that word again) this year, in this place. 

(thanks to my friend Mia for the photo)

Also I displayed my epic art project, which was very strange. The first part of the day I was too busy stressing about how to display it to be stressed about taiko. But the women from Uzu came pretty much one minute after I got it all hung up, so I immediately had to start preparing for taiko stuff. The art project (called "Cosmos") was really well received, which I didn't really expect. 

Side note: my elective classes this semester. They have only met twice each but already I think they are going to be WAY better than last semester. I am taking Japanese Religion and Japanese Ecology. The Religion prof is from Canada and has been living in Japan for 12 years. She is as weird as you can imagine, but seems really knowledgeable about Shinto and Buddhism, and the New Religions. And we are going on some cool field trips. My ecology prof is a REAL biology professor, not an "asian studies scholar," and has done a ton of research on Japanese ecology before. His specialty is ornithology, and he has gotten everyone in the class so excited to learn about the three dozen or so bird species that live in the Kyoto area in the winter and spring. We already went on a field trip, to a marsh in the north of the city, and looked at some duck species and some not duck species that are living there right now. 

Birds--birds are dinosaurs. Think about it. And the next bird you see, really look at it, and see how it walks, how it moves, how it flies.