Fast-forward

It’s been a few weeks since I arrived, so it’s a little difficult to go back to the thoughts and experiences I had during the first few days.  Fortunately, I keep a diary for all those precious, mushy moments.  However, just for now, I’d like to flash forward and catch everyone up on where I am today.

For starters, I’ve cut off my hair and dyed it:

 
For me, this has a lot of meaning: since coming to Japan, already I feel that I have grown up a lot. I have a lot more self confidence, and a much greater propensity for speaking my mind. You’ll find that you have a much more difficult time scaring me. So I’m a very different person from the one that left with a tearful goodbye at the start of the new year, and the new look is symbolic of that transformation. Also, it makes me look older and red hair is awesome—but that’s beside the point.

Seijin no Hi, coming of age day, was this month and I was of age to celebrate. In order to celebrate the traditional way, you need appointments six months in advance to rent a kimono and have it put on, as well as have your hair done, and it costs around a thousand dollars. Suffice to say, I did not wear one. We found me a kimono later. I’ll post a photo next weekend, when I get professionally dressed and go out to the local noh theater.
 
I realized that the reason why the ladies in the kimono shop were asking my age when they were fitting me last weekend—they wanted to know if I were allowed to wear the long-sleeved adult kimono yet, or if I was still too young. I'm actually an “adult” here—which basically means I can drink. As my host mother’s friend told me the other night, “So what if you can't drink in the states? This is Japan.”

I go out and do a lot on my own now, too.  I feel very independent, much more so than I did when I first moved from home, though I’m often with friends. At the same time, I feel responsible to my host family and spend a lot of time playing with my little host sisters or talking with my host mother. It goes both ways. Enough of the gush, though.

The other day we engaged in some naughtiness and entered the Shogun’s burial ground at Zojo-ji Temple, the family temple of the Tokugawa shogunate. In all fairness, they left the door open. Zojo-ji was firebombed during the Pacific War and completely destroyed, but has since been rebuilt. Very little of the original temple remains from the original seventeenth century construction, but it’s still a very hallowed place. Zojo-ji is a Buddhist temple (otera), as opposed to a Shinto shrine (jinja), but it contains some Shinto shrine elements also.


History lesson: Japan’s two main religions are Buddhism and Shintoism, but they have over the years become very integrated. It is often the case that a jinja is included in an otera complex. Buddhist religious figures were introduced to common folk as just a different form of Shinto gods when Buddhism first arrived in Japan via China. Some of that effect remains. Most people are quite reverent to both, but people here don’t really call themselves religious. Participating in festivities and holidays in Japan—which everyone does—according to most everyone, does not make one religious. It’s like our Christmas: a lot of people who aren’t religious in the least still celebrate Christmas. It’s rather more like tradition than religion.

On an entirely unrelated note, I experienced my first earthquake last week. It felt like I was sitting on a washing machine while it was going. Apparently I’ve managed to sleep through several others. Japan is the most seismically active country in the world. The school scared us into taking this seriously during orientation, by telling us that major earthquakes run on seventy-five year cycles and the current one is overdue. The last one leveled Tokyo. That’s fun, now isn’t it?