Making my way through the nonsense that is the Shibuya Crossing on a holiday afternoon, I am feeling almost desperate to be on a train home. There are just so many people in my way, with no respect for my desire to be not here. Not that I actually expect them to know I want not to be here – I am merely noting their ignorance to the matter. I am almost to the station, when a small but clear opening appears right ahead of me in the shuffling crowd.
I hardly have to think – in fact, I think I know what it is without thinking – to recognize the colorful lettering on the page of that folded-open notebook being held just above people’s heads.
FREE HUGS
I hesitate a moment, verifying that the holder of the sign is respectable/huggable. Despite my being in Japan, I accept that this young Japanese guy is holding the sign, and trust that he knows what it means. Perhaps especially because I am in Japan, actually.
He’s young and Japanese, and he looks trustworthy. I throw open my arms, and instantly see his face light up, as he says an adorable “Sahn kyuu!” (How the average Japanese pronunciation goes for ‘Thank you.’) We embrace, and it is solid and long and wonderfully perfect. I return the verbal thanks, with emphasis on thanking him for the hug (as opposed to his thanking my willingness or whatever on my end), give a gloriously contended smile, and go on my merry way the last few yards to the station.
I savor the experience, and especially the loving hug, as I wander goofily through the crowds up to the tracks. Thank you, God. You gave me just what I needed in order to feel I was heading the right way just now. I am in the right place right now, and it is perfect. Thank you.
In this book I’m currently reading – okay, it’s an audiobook, and I’m listening to it, but you get the point – was a comment by the narrating character that rather struck me the other day. She was talking about some date she’d had (or something like a date, anyway), and, though it seemed there was potential for another activity of some sort next, she had decided to leave. She said, “I wanted to leave while everything was perfect.”
At first, I felt as though she was simply setting herself up for missing out by not going and for delusion by thinking that dates (or more of whatever it was) needed to be always perfect. And then I considered my immediate responses, and discovered that I disagreed with both of them.
When I really began to consider her comment, it gave way to what felt like brilliance. Yesterday, I was at a goodbye beach party. There had been an option to rsvp for an overnight stay after the official party, and I had initially declined this option. I wanted to sleep in my own bed, and several other factors helped me pick that easily. However, once at the party, I found that I didn’t want to leave so soon. I began exploring the logistics of staying the night, and found that there was possibility of enough space for my joining the party.
As I recalled my book’s character’s words, however, I began to think in a different manner. Yes, I am loving spending time with everyone right now. If I left now, I would be leaving while everything is perfect. If I stay the night, what will happen? And I instantly saw the probable, almost certain future of the situation. I would stay, thinking I’d have enough energy to manage the night, and then eventually would hit a wall, want to sleep, not be able to get to sleep because of the partying people, get annoyed at the overly drunk partiers, and have a miserable end to the party. Whom was I kidding here? I would rather leave while everything is perfect, than stay until I’m furiously agitated and starting to hate the people I was currently loving.
And so I left a short while later, had a wonderful time riding home-ish (same train, different stops) with the group of girls who were leaving at that time, chatting and joking and having an overall wonderful time together (as I already mentioned).
And the party as a whole ended perfectly for me. It was just plain cool to have had the party go so well.
Tonight, after another beach day with a different friend, we had planned to go to this awesome salsa party, with this Grammy-winning DJ and various salsa performances and live music for social dancing – it’s a big deal party celebrating the anniversary of some club, essentially. And it was only like 20 bucks to attend, which is way cheap for such a thing here in Tokyo.
When we arrived back to my friend’s place, and I had showered from the beach, I began to consider that line again. Could I “leave” while everything is perfect? Could I just go to bed now and not go, and be happy with that? The answer was a resounding “Yes.” I had been exhausted all day already, and am far behind on sleep for this past week – I want sleep. I love dancing, and I love cool opportunities like this, especially to attend with friends. And the risk was incredibly high that I would grow to exhausted, smoking would be too intense for me in the club, music would be too loud for my already existent headache, and I would be crying (possibly literally) to go home and drink a bunch of cool water and just go to sleep.
So, I stayed home, and it was perfect. Now, I am off to some much-needed and much-wanted sleep. Goodnight, World. I’ll see you when my head feels great again in the late AM.
Long story-ish short: I think it is a very valuable phrase, “I wanted to leave while everything was perfect.”
Tonight, I met a sweet old man named Ozawa Masashi (Masashi Ozawa in the American style of names). He is a monstrous 195cm (6’5″), with an incredibly sweet and open demeanor, and he owns a restaurant in Tokyo, where we ended up tonight after dancing. As I commented on how massively huge this restaurant owner was compared to the average Japanese person, I was informed that he was, in fact, a retired wrestler. Sure enough, photos inside the restaurant tell a black and white story of this man’s wrestling adventures Stateside in the 80s, with matches against André the Giant and the likes. Killer Khan is the name, and wrestling was his sport.
We ate his food (delicious), tasted the hard-to-get sake (fabulous), and enjoyed his happy talk about just about anything (including the facts that his son is about 208cm and looks like him, his daughter is a martial arts champion in the US, and that he himself spent a year in Dallas about 22 years ago). He even showed us photos.
We watched a small bit of one of his matches, and it was amazing to see this man in action, back in his days of wrestling. He was even more of a monster in terms of size, and the other guy in the ring paled in comparison. Frankly, Killer Khan was the epitome of ‘scary wrestler man’.
And now, here he his, across the world from his wife and kids, running a restaurant in downtown Tokyo. I am 100% not a wrestling fan, however, I am definitely a fan of Ozawa Masashi, this happy, massive, sweet old man, who likely hunches from habit with such low Japanese doorways, and who just so happened to be part of a lethal show 30-ish years ago.
Last night, I went to a dance social in Tokyo. It was mostly friends and acquaintances, though plenty of other people I hadn’t known before the social last night. However, they were all adults, which makes the following scenario worth telling (in my opinion, anyway). As an important matter, know that I wore days-of-the-week underwear yesterday. And, yes, they were for the correct current day of the week.
At the social, I happened to be wearing a pair of blue linen pants with a drawstring. As such, they consistently slipped ever so slightly downward as I danced. With my shirt being longer than the waistband of my pants, that normally would be no biggie. However, seeing as this was west coast swing dancing, that means that my shirt regularly would get twisted or bunched up a bit, rising above the waist band of my pants for a couple or few seconds here and there.
Now, I normally am not opposed to such little glimpses of my midriff as my shirt-pants combination were displaying. However, since my pants kept slipping downward, little by little, in combination with the shirt going upward now and then, this meant that the waistband of my underwear was also showing on a regular basis as I danced. I guess I am not really opposed to this either, as they are nothing sultry, but I guess it is a bit of a social taboo when in certain company. I digress…
I chuckled when I first noticed my peeping underwear waistband, because, do recall, I was wearing days-of-the-week underwear last night. “See?” I thought, “I am just so dedicated to my job, that I am even teaching English after hours!” For, every time my shirt went up, “Tuesday” was visible in clear block letters all the way around my hips.
I shared this thought with a few friends, and we all had a good laugh at the silliness of the situation – that I not only was wearing days-of-the-week underwear, but was unintentionally showing them off to everyone, and found a cute little joke around its happening. One girlfriend commented, that it was a mighty fine and creative way to teach high schoolers English, removing clothing and showing the English off on parts of the body. I replied how I could only imagine how much the boys would love learning English. She then said that even she would be interested in seeing that lesson happen. After all, who could resist such a unique lesson, boy or girl, man, woman, or +? I know I’d want to see it, if something like that happened, because that’s just too ridiculous to pass up. 😛
Tonight, I went with my mother to a friend’s band’s performance. The night was filled with Japanese musicians playing Venezuelan music. Some even sang in Spanish. We listened, we danced, we clapped, we cheered, we played with Handicorn, our fun unicorn who travels with my mom, we listened to my friend whistle impressively, and we had an overall wonderful time. I met four different friends at the venue, and I wasn’t really sure that any of them knew the others were coming (nor was I sure that they even knew one another). I am just so wonderfully eclectic in my taste, I think, I regularly show up places to meet with friends whose only link is I.
Post-a-day 2017
**Beware: There is a good amount of reference to genitalia in this one.**
Today, with a Canadian and a Japanese friend, I went to the Kanamara Matsuri. It is a festival to celebrate fertility, only found at the Kanayama Shrine, in the area just south of Tokyo in Japan. From what I understand, the story/legend goes to a young, beautiful woman whom a demon fancied. She denied the demon, and so, he decided to hide inside her vagina, in order to prevent her from having any man. On her wedding night, the demon bit off the penis of her now-husband, preventing them from consummating their marriage. On her second attempt at marriage and consummation, the same event occurred. So, for her third marriage, the woman worked with a blacksmith to fashion a metal penis. Upon insertion, the demon bit the metal phallus, broke all of his teeth, and left the woman. Said phallus is now enshrined at the Kanayama Shrine. People go to this shrine to pray for fertility, protection from STDs and the likes, family, safe pregnancy and delivery, and blacksmiths.
So, every year, on the first Sunday of April, right at the usual time for the Cherry Blossom Season (though it is a bit early for the blossoms this year), the Kanamara Matsuri (Kanamara Festival) takes place at the Kanayama Shrine in Kanagawa, Japan.
Originally, when it started back in 1969, it was Japanese people. However, after a foreigner university professor attended the festival, that professor shared about the festival enough to bring it greater attention – so much so, that the festival is mostly foreigners now. It actually felt like a sort of adventure outside of Japan for a day – Japanese scenery, customs, and decorations, but very little spoken Japanese, and very few Japanese people.
The festival is very popular for the trans-gender, homosexual, etc. community, and so many of the attendees today were visually part of that community. Kimonos were offered to borrow free of charge to visitors to the festival, and so my Japanese friend and I went and allowed the ladies at the kimono place to dress us up. When I asked for a men’s kimono, the lady gave a slight chuckle, and then rushed back to the fabrics and picked out one for me, clearly comfortable with the request. It was the same with my Japanese friend and her dresser, so this clearly was not simply because I’m a gaijin (foreigner) and am, therefore, weird – I imagine it is because of the Kanamara Matsuri that the ladies were so comfortable with the requests. I noticed several Japanese men wearing women’s kimonos, and everyone was fine with it. And so, we got to be dressed as Okappiki, old-timey Japanese police men. It was great.
For the parade, the gods from the shrine, as usual, are summoned to the mikoshi, the portable altars, so to speak, in a little ceremony with bells and music and other traditional details, just before the parade begins. Usually the mikoshi are not phalli, but this festival is all about the metal phallus made by that blacksmith way back when, so… there are three large penises that are carried around the neighborhood. The first is a smallish wooden one, with the metal phallus on the front of it. The second is a large black one, possibly made of stone (I couldn’t quite tell). And the third is a huge, Pepto-Bismol pink one, carried each year by men in drag. The three altars seem like floats in US parades, but, instead of being on top of cars to have them move, they are carried by groups of people, typically men, though also women. So, as the parade moves along, you have a chant of “Ka-na-ma-ra!” going, while three incredibly different and large floating penises bounce along the crowded streets.
One of the hits of the festival is the penis pops. While there are chocolate-covered bananas,
and meat-wrapped sticks of rice,
carved wooden penis whistles (which actually had a rather high, unappealing pitch),
and t-shirts galore with cartoon penises and the name Dankon, a term for penis (literally “man-root”),
the reason people will stand hours in line is for the one-day-only penis lollipops.
There were even some vagina ones, too, but the main thing was the penis pops. I had read up on the festival a bit ahead of time, and so I knew to arrive at 9am, and to go straight for the lollipops.
A really fun bit for me was actually the penis candles and the daikon carving. Just after saying our prayers at the shrine, we found the daikon radishes, but the carving was finished. However, the old ladies who seemed to be in charge of it were quick to hand us already-carved daikon and ask for our cameras. They even helped us with the correct way to pose with the daikon penises (I was a bit unsure initially, but they made it quite clear what was “the way” to do it.).
The candles were quick and simple – a table covered in small and large penis-shaped candles in various colors. I wanted a pretty purple one for myself, but the guy next to me snatched up all the purple ones for some reason – guess he just really wanted them. So, I found myself happy with a blue-ish purple one instead, which seemed to be the only one of its specific hue. (Naturally, I loved that.)
Now, I really expected this festival to be completely against the Japanese style of things, however it was really beautiful seeing how many Japanese people were there, not only participating in it for themselves, but embracing it as part of humanity’s culture. Though it is essentially a fundraiser for HIV research, and thereby a grounds for self-expression in the LGBTetc. community, there were many people, families even, who seemed to be 100% heterosexual, white rice, Japanese folks. And yes, there were plenty of families, which includes small children. One of the best moments was coming across a group of four little girls all sitting on a curb, casually and delightedly enjoying their penis pops, while their parents stood nearby. And the parents were completely okay with people photographing their kids, a concept often somewhat foreign to Japanese people. Today was just filled with openness and acceptance and joy on the part of everyone, and it was fabulous.
When we were heading out from the festivities, we discovered even more food stalls and other standard matsuri stalls in an area with another shrine and temple. We said some more prayers, tossed some more coins, and poured water over a statue in thanks for the blessing of blooming flowers each Spring. On a final walk down a way-cool traditional street of shops, we found loads more penis pops (along with standard regional treats), gifts, and tokens.
There were even life-ish-sized crystal quartz, rose quartz, and aventurine statues of penises, which were about $120 a piece.
I got myself a small crystal quartz necklace, and it is quite beautiful, actually.
As a final fun note, while we were initially heading down that last street, a group of Japanese who were around our ages, were walking right near us (with no one else nearby), and so I found myself laughing as a few of them were goofing off, dancing to no music while one of them recorded the fun nonsense. When one of the guys stopped and posed with some statues, all three of us laughed. No one, however, had had a camera out, and the guy hadn’t expected a photo to be taken. But, when one of the girls joked with him about taking a photo, he asked if he should go back. His friends were a bit hesitant to answer, but my friend was quick to tell him to go back really quickly, because she wanted a photo, even if they didn’t. When he squat back down with the dogs(?), holding his pink lollipop, he told me to get in the photo with him. He tried sharing his lollipop with me, but one of the girls decided it was better for the photo if we each had our own, and so she lent me hers. And so, a random guy and I posed on the ground with dog statues and colored penis lollipops. EditNormal day in the neighborhood, right? 😛
Anyway, that’s about all I have to say about that right now…. Go check it out for yourself, if you’re ever in Japan in early April! It’s one-of-a-kind, and it’s delightfully wonderful! 🙂
hannah ananas 