Monday, August 14, 2006

Yesterday I celebrated the Bon holiday with Hiromi's family. According to my dictionary, Bon is the Buddhist Feast of Lanterns. I'm not too sure why it states that. My Japanese friends told me that it is the Buddhist belief of when past ancestors come back in ghost form and so the living family members need to honor them. Mitsue told me that people don't actually believe that ghosts come back but it is said to be that way. I see a pretty close tie between this and the Confucius ways. I learned in my women in east asian history class that Confucians eldest son must honor their ancestors. That is how it works with Buddhism today, too. Hiromi first picked me up and then we went to an Italian restaurant for lunch. (Japanese-Italian,really). It wasn't too bad, nothing spectacular but hey atleast i wasn't trying to stuff fish down my throat and pretending like I am enjoying it. After lunch, we went to Hiromi's mother in law's since her husband is the eldest son. To honor his deceased father, they put his picture up on an altar inside their home. It is decorated with fruit – probably hundreds of dollars worth of fruit, heaps of flowers, candles, some light things, Buddha statues, presents on the side and it is a few tiers high. Hiromi and her family then take turns throughout the evening honoring him. They light an incense or two and then stick it in this incense burning thing. They hit some thing that makes a gong like noise twice (and for some reasons their kids hit it three times) and then they kneel down and pray for about 30 seconds.

In the evening, we had a huge feast. The feast included salads, Miso soup (which i dont' like and then spilled it all over, very embarrasing), soy beans (which I think is my favorite Japanese food), vegetables that are fried in some type of bread or dough, white rice, avacodos (not traditionally Japanese, but they bought because i mentioned i love them), and then they had fish. For dessert, i have a seaweed flavored jell-o. Everything here has a different consistency, so jell-o isn't the typical jell-o as we know it. It was actually kind of hard to keep down. Then for even more dessert, we had fruit, tons of fruit. Baba (AKA grandmother) gave us each our own little vine of grapes. Grapes here are different too – they are much smaller and sweeter. Japanese people don't eat the skins of grapes. Kokoro and So were laughing at me because I was eating the skins of my grapes. Hiromi explained that Japanese also don't eat the skins of their apples or pears or any fruit that we typically eat. I told her that all the nutrients and good vitamins are in the skins and that is why we eat them in America. She said that there are enough vitamins on the inside of the fruit that it is okay that they do not eat them. Contrary to popular belief, I find the Japanese diet extremely unhealthy. They eat a lot of fried food and an insane amount of salt and sugar is in everything. Their drinks are all sugar and caffeinated as well. It is true that they do not eat as much fast food as Americans, but I find myself trying to have healthy alternatives when eating with my Japanese hosts, but there are not too many options.

There is just a lack of awareness in this country for safety issues as well. My house does not even have a smoke detector. That is one thing I am going to attempt to find when i have my car and can read the Katakana. I also am going to try to find a Carbon Monoxide detector since everything in my house is used with Kerosene. From my hot water for my shower, to my stove, to my air conditioning and even for my heat in the winter. It makes me really nervous to have all this kerosene and not even a detector for Carbon Monoxide. Any Japanese person over the age of 18 has really gross teeth. This is not an exaggeration. I met a boy the other day who was 24 years old, his teeth looked like he was 80. Again, it's simply because they use sugar – based toothpaste. Sugar causes cavities, this is not a huge secret, why do they use sugar-based toothpaste? I don't get it. I'm going to go ahead and make an assumption that 9/10 men smoke here. Everywhere you go, men are smoking. I see so many logical things for me and i just want to start this awareness campaign about seat belts, smoking, fire safety, child safety, toothpaste, etc. There are so many times my stomach churns when I see Hiromi's children about to run in the street or run off in the grocery store for 15 minutes or she just lets them run off near the ocean without keeping an eye on them. As mentioned before, she has a 4 year degree, she's not a stupid person, but these acts make me really nervous. I really just don't get it! Japan is the leading technology country, but they have no common sense about other things.

Ok, back to my story and off about my rant of Japanese culture that i need to learn to accept. The next morning, after an interesting breakfast, we went up to the grave of their family to do their prayers. This is how the Bon praying goes – eldest son and family goes to grave, bring hot green tea, food, water and incense. The grave already has flowers from some other family member – eldest son empties old water and puts the green tea in the flowers. Uses clean water to wash down gravestone. Pours from the top and lets it drip down all over the grave. Then, each family member takes incense, and puts them into this little cave in the gravestone specifically for incense burning. Each family member takes their turn praying for deceased ancestor. The end. The whole process probably took 20 minutes at most.

After that, we all got ready and went to some beach. We spent maybe an hour or two at the beach. Then, we all went home. For lunch, we stopped on the way home and i got a bagel sandwich. I know i'm here for the culture, but sometimes being able to eat something that i typically love makes me really happy. Seeing these other smaller cities really makes me jealous of the people that get to teach there. It makes me realize just how rural i am. These people have a bagel shop and bookstores and cafe's to go to, and actual community. I have...a post office.

After Hiromi dropped me off, Yosco picked me up about an hour later. I then went to her families grave to pray with her. Her shrine was absolutely stunning. You first walk through this long trail to the shrine. On each side of the sidewalk there are absolutely humongous cedar trees and in between each tree is a Buddha statue. I didn't take pictures because some things i feel are rude to take pictures of – aka – people's shrines. She took me inside her shrine and it was just amazing. We then hiked up a small hill (for some reason all cemetaries here are set up on a hill) and her ceremony was much less formal than Hiromi's. She basically lit her incense and was on her way. Succeeding our graveyard visit, we went to her parents house. On the way, we stopped and she showed me some sights along the way. A typhoon hit here and killed people years ago, so one city donated statues to the other one. She showed me the matching statues which made the cities “Sister cities”. Yosco is a pretty cool lady – she is insanely forgetful (early signs of Alzheimer i think) – but i think if there was a Japanese hippy, she'd have been one. Yea, we stopped at some people's houses but didn't stay long at either place. When we were done with all the Bon festivities, we went back to her house for some dinner. I had more seaweed wrapped rice stuff. I love it. Her husband drinks a lot of whiskey and he was pretty drunk. He is the first person to really make me full heartedly laugh since i've left home. It felt good – his English is poor, but who needs English when you've drank half a bottle of Canadian club whiskey and can play charades? Hahaha.