On the way north again, my bike dropped its ever-loosening chain a half-dozen frustrating times, and I resolved finally to take action. Stopped at the dorm for a sandwich and proceeded to the cycle shop, where I managed just enough Japanese to have a new chain put on. Rides like a dream now–comparatively, anyhow; the bike is still a piece of junk. But a piece of junk with a tight new chain that doesn’t go its own way whenever I decide to do crazy things to the bike, like ride it.

I continued on to Vivre for this and that, found only one pair of pants cheap enough to even try on, and was disappointed when I did. Returned home via the never-disappointing 100-yen shop and equally reliable Matsuya, where 350 yen got me a hearty and palatable plate of beef curry on rice, with miso soup on the side.

Then I sat down to the task of the afternoon: sewing the summer collar onto my juban. I wrote out of ignorance in my last post that this was a standard cheat. In fact, it’s just standard practice; only I’m cheating. Everyone sews eri onto their summer juban. I haven’t found out why yet, but I suspect it’s to protect the garment’s collar from the brunt of one’s neck sweat.

At any rate, if I ever learned anything truly useful in junior high home economics class, it’s long gone now; all I clearly recall doing is making a pillow that looked like a cheeseburger. I shouldn’t be allowed near needle and thread. Or, I should be required to use them far more often. Truth be told, once I’d established a rhythm of sorts, I found the work kind of soothing. And then the thread would snarl when I wasn’t paying attention, and I’d have to start a new piece.

It took me over two focused hours to attach one strip of fabric 94 cm long to another with long, sloppy stitches. Came out looking reasonably good, though. I just hope I secured the eri well enough that it’ll stay put the next time I put my juban in the washing machine.

I’ll probably have to sew another eri to another juban next weekend. I’ll think of it as a spiritual discipline.

I took a bath and was thinking about calling it a night when the phone rang. It was Tanja: Hamana-sensei had asked her to pass along to everyone that we’d be quizzed the next morning on the names and order of the 16 Urasenke Iemotos and the 10 families of craftspeople who’ve traditionally supplied our stuff needs. So Sean and I stayed up for quite a while longer, chanting strange names aloud until we felt we stood a chance of not absolutely failing the quiz. (Complications: 12 of the sixteen Iemotos have more than one name. Two of them have three. Each of the craft families also has a hereditary professional name to remember–plus, of course, what they make.)

Finally, bed.

Over-optimism modest chocolate?

Today I prepared for tsuyu by sharpening my holding-an-umbrella-while-riding-a-bicycle skills. Szymon and I pedaled out into a fine rain in search of June kimono. Not an easy mission, it turned out. June traditionally calls for a thickness of fabric between the lined fall-winter-spring kimono and the see-through summer kimono. Seems that the tradition is falling by the wayside–perhaps because the unlined kimono is only supposed to be worn two out of twelve months in the year. What the stores had in stock suggested that most of the people who still bother to put on kimono go straight for the summer material as soon as the season warms up.

We struck out at Daiyasu. No–not quite; we both found cheap used obi, and I bought replacement tabi. Then we ventured, against our better judgement, back into Mimuro, which was just as overpriced and high-pressure as we remembered. We ended up finally at friendly local standby Kimura, where the owner (who I’ve only ever seen wearing Western-style string ties, incidentally) had nothing ready-made to suit us but offered us a reasonable price on custom-made kimono. We both jumped at it, even though the kimono won’t be done until the 13th of June, when we’ll only have two weeks to wear them before switching material again. But they should fit beautifully, and we got to choose colors. And I’ll be able to use it again come September. It’ll be polyester still, but less of it.

I walked out of Kimura having spent a disheartening chunk of my June money before June had even begun. And I have yet to get a proper summer juban. Need to ask Hamana-sensei a few questions about that garment (color, length, material) before I buy anything else. In the meantime, I’ll be using the standard cheat: a strip of summer material fabric that you sew onto the collar of a juban so that it at least looks correct.

Because I could, I took a nap. Then I puttered. Then I went to a birthday party. Classmate Verena turned 21 this day, and we managed to coordinate a bit of a surprise for her on the 3rd floor of the girls’ dorm. Anita ordered a real monument of a cake, something that looked like a high-speed photograph taken a millisecond after a firecracker buried in a bowl of strawberries exploded. Tanja wrangled the birthday girl; the rest of us waited in a dark room to yell when the lights went on. We had the cake with ice cream, sat around and jawed and snacked for a while, and then let Verena get on to her original plan for the evening, which was to make pancakes. We got to try the results: the thin crepe-y kind, flecked with chocolate, served with red bean paste. Exquisite.

Finished the evening in front of Sean’s television, away from which I could not tear myself away, on account of a stunningly weird hour-long live-action drama produced with the visual style of anime. Had to do with some ancient board game, over which contestants grimaced and sweated between soft-focus flashbacks of ancient-board-game senseis in traditional rooms, and hallucinations of computer-generated anthropomorphic mushrooms. Also there was a girl who wore very professional business attire and no expression while watching the game in progress, but who wore a technicolor maid costume when visiting the protagonist at home. Apparently she became the property of the victorious challenger in this episode: a cruel and fey young man with long platinum hair and steely blue contact lenses. Breasts were central to the plot, but neither Sean nor I could figure out how, exactly.

I totally already know what I’ll be doing next Saturday night at 11:00.

Gary-sensei gave an unenthusiastic and more-than-ordinarily unfocused lecture on kaiseki, charcoal, and the way to wash ash. (Of course we wash our ash. Our charcoal, too. Did you expect any less?)

In the afternoon we practiced making koicha using a tana. (The marujoku version, in my case.) Iit differs from making tea on the tatami almost exactly as tana usucha differs from hakobi usucha, so having gotten my head around tana complications and koicha complications separately, I was able to combine them without too much difficulty. And Hamana-sensei had a rather genial air–not that he’s ever unpleasant, mind you.

After supper, Sean and I paid a visit to our favorite local dōgu shop to see if we couldn’t relieve ourselves of some of the scholarship money Oiemoto had handed us on Wednesday. I finally picked up one of the tea person’s basic behind-the-scenes mizuya necessities: a sifter. Matcha is so fine that it packs itself tightly when you leave it alone for a while, so just before making tea it’s best to sift it. You can get an nicer, clump-free suspension in water much easier that way. Sure, you can get the desired results with a standard kitchen model, but I felt like shelling out a little extra for the kind common in the tea world: a tidy stainless steel lidded canister with a bamboo paddle for pushing the tea through the removable screen. More significantly, I acquired what I think of as my first real piece of temae gear; that is, not just the cheapest practice implement available–not something I’ll be looking to replace anytime soon with a better version. I bought a lacquered tray for doing bonryaku and chabako temae. Very basic, very useful. Very pretty. Standard black kakiawase with the bright red tsumagure rim. Not expensive. Just exactly what’s needed. Yes. I’m a little giddy over my new tray.

Late in the evening, Sean and Szymon and I put ourselves into a certain condition with a bottle of Polish vodka, and went for a long ramble around the neighborhood in the quiet small hours. Our stated aim was to locate Funaoka Hill, which is tricky even in broad daylight and sober; it’s a low enough rise that you can’t see it until you’re nearly on it, and no street runs directly to it. We circled until it rose black immediately ahead of us, by which time we didn’t feel like climbing it anymore, so we weaved our way home and to bed.

Sean and I took a late-morning trip to the post office to send a few things to a few people back in the States, and then we stopped into a famous local sweet shop from which many of Urasenke’s tea sweets come. I’d tell you its name if I could remember or read it. Anyhow, it’s basically the Rolls-Royce dealership of sweet shops: extremely polite and polished staff; lots of empty floor space; a brightly lit glass counter running around the room. Inside of and atop the counter: an immaculate array of things almost too beautiful to eat. Happily, I went in knowing what I’d come out with. The place is known particularly for the mochi it flavors with the Japanese citrus fruit called yuzu. I tried a sample–exquisite–and bought two boxes: one for my Kobe host parents, the other for Anita as a thank-you gift for navigating Sean and I around Osaka the Sunday before. The boxes were bright yellow cardboard pressed into yuzu shape, complete with green leaf, and precision-wrapped in the store’s custom-printed wrapping paper. The sticker holding the folds shut advertises the day on which the sweets were bought.

And the store only gives change in shinsatsu: crisp, clean, new bills.

Then Sean and I biked north and east to check out a department store we hadn’t yet visited, in a fruitless search for matcha Kit-Kats, which seem to have gone out of season. We decided to take the long way home, walking our bikes down the gravel path on the west side of the Shimogawa river. A mild breeze from the mountains to the north blew intermittent refreshment down the river, but mostly the air sat still and sleepy and sun-baked above the tall grass choking the riverbed. A young mother with her two children ate convenience store bentō on the bank. A pale, shirtless gaijin sunned himself on a bench across the river. Children with their pants rolled up waded in the shallow water and hopped across the backs of a family of giant concrete turtles that the city, for reasons unknown, has strung across the riverbed like stepping stones.

Our thoughts slowed with our steps, and finally an unoccupied park bench insisted that we sit down and listen to the birds and the insects and the hum of the ancient universe behind everything. We kept very still in the brightness and swigged green tea from 2-liter bottles. I wasn’t wearing a watch, but if I had been, I’m reasonably certain I could have looked to find it stopped, second-hand twitching like a heartbeat without advancing.

Eventually a cloud passing in front of the sun released us from the river’s spell, and we pushed our bikes up the embankment and back into the world of trade and traffic. Even it seemed to be moving in slow motion. We rode an unfamiliar street west; it took us through a thick stand of trees that concealed a stream winding through green shadow along the boundary of a shrine. Up the gravel entranceway, bright red torī shone through the leaves.

Back in the apartment, noble intentions to be productive proved powerless against the napping impulse. And thus the afternoon slipped away.

Dusk found Sean and I with a certain amount of vigor restored, which was good, because I still needed to buy a gift bag in which to deliver yuzu mochi to Kobe the next morning. We pedaled up to Vivre, stopping by the women’s dorm to give Anita her mochi, quickly accomplished the mission, and were riding back along Karasuma, discussing our dinner options, when some festive lights down a side street caught our eyes.

We parked our bikes in front of a convenience store and joined a stream of pedestrians pushing toward whatever it was. Which turned out to be a little local matsuri–festival–at the shrine for the Officially Designated Protective Deity for the chunk of city in which Konnichian is located. We learned later that we were still a day ahead of the main event–the parading of the deity around the city streets in its portable mikoshi shrine, borne on the shoulders of tipsy men in short shorts–but tonight there was plenty to see nevertheless.

The street approaching the shrine’s gate was lined on both sides with cozy little yellow pavilions glowing merrily in the night with the light of bare incandescent bulbs. There were food vendors and games of chance; shallow tanks teeming with goldfish for children to net and take home; trinkets of this kind and that. Giddy festival crowds jostled up a short flight of stairs to the gate, where knots of high school girls with bleached-blond hair smoked sullenly in the shadows, and down the other side to the shrine’s courtyard. Here the temporary marketplace widened to three or four aisles up and down which ambled young people and old, families, couples, snacking on okonomiyaki and yakisoba; long grilled sausages on sticks slathered with spicy Chinese mustard; skewered chunks of pork battered and deep-fried; fresh pastries; snow cones; french fries; cotton candy; yakitori hot off tiny charcoal grills; chunks of fried karaage chicken in paper cups; giant fish-shaped senbei crackers drizzled with mayonnaise and okonomi sauce and aonori and katsuobushi.

I turned toward a tug at my arm to see, unexpectedly, Hamana-sensei and his wife; we chatted briefly, then went our separate ways. Just beyond the hubbub sat the shrine itself, filled with fresh offerings of food and drink that glowed pale and white from the shadows. People walked past quietly, respectfully; some stopped briefly to pray.

Then it was back to the light and noise. Sean and I decided that dinner had found us; we filled up on sausage and okonomiyaki and karaage on the way back to our bicycles. “Oishisō desu yo,” I exclaimed to the karaage-seller: “Looks delicious!” “Meccha oishii,” he replied in very casual slang: “Damn good” is close. He added that it would go great with some beer, and he piled my paper cup unusually high with fresh hot chicken, perhaps as a reward for my being a gaijin attempting his language and complimenting his product.

Different language, different food, and a thoroughly foreign religious pretext–but the same energy as any warm summer-night county fair midway I’ve ever walked. We passed through the gate and left the color and light and smells and sound behind, and I went to bed full of good food and pleasant thoughts about cultural universals and the special charm of summer, when the echoes of forever reach us ahead of the sound itself.

Sean has been wanting to buy a new digital SLR camera, and he’s a dedicated comparison shopper, so he asked Anita to accompany him as translator to a few of the biggest electronics stores in the region; I went along for the ride. The train dropped us off at Ōsaka Station and the station emptied into the melee of restaurants, shops, and game centers across the street from Yodobashi Camera and in the shadow of the big red rooftop Ferris wheel a few blocks away.

The commercial riot of Shijō street is like a preview of coming attractions for downtown Ōsaka, which is so much bigger, taller, busier, brighter, and louder than Kyoto that it makes the latter seem a quaint little burg. The station and its environs, ugly as they are, sparked a certain amount of nostalgia in me for the weekend trips I took to Ōsaka during my first summer in Japan. I quickly re-calibrated myself to adjust for the heightened energy level, and we crossed the street via a pedestrian overpass and one of the godawful-est intersections I know to go shopping at Yodobashi. (After all my visits here, it took until the last leg of this one to discover that the store connects directly with the station underground.)

Every big Japanese electronics store is arranged as a stack of riotous floors of merchandise. The mobile phone industry usually dominates the ground floor, with every provider’s handsets laid out in candy-colored digital tapestries presided over by cute girls in transgalactic flight attendant attire chanting sales spiels, often through microphones. One floor will house camera and video merchandise; another audio equipment. Video games often get a floor of their own. A floor of washing machines and other household appliances isn’t uncommon. Yodobashi also shares space with a multi-floor clothing retailer that plays nothing but Beatles music over their sound system. (And has for at least the last two years; my several visits here in 2006 linked “Paperback Writer” with the store in my head forever.) And the top floor is all restaurants. (Yodobashi also has a commercial jingle, played at frequent intervals throughout the store, set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.)

The electronics-store sales strategy centers on maximum visual volume. Signage abounds. Halos of price tags, feature lists, and discount notices hover around every product, and the ceilings disappear above cascades of signs pointing the way to this or that, or enticing shoppers with special offers, or reminding you to sign up for a point card so that a percentage of your purchase will be returned to you as credit on future shopping trips.

After pricing out Yodobashi, we stopped for a standing lunch of noodles and tempura in the warren of restaurants in the belly of Osaka Station. Then we hit Bic Camera and Yamada Denki: nearly indistinguishable from each other or the first store, and different from Kyoto’s retailers only in that they’re bigger and louder and have more stuff. On the way to and from Yamada we passed through a covered shopping arcade decorated with day-glo articial flower arrangements where every store was a supplier of commercial foodservice supplies: shelves of ceramics disappearing over the horizon, takoyaki griddles, ice shavers, uniforms, ovens, paper lanterns advertising udon and soba and karaoke.

The camera Sean wants is sold out. As in, everywhere in the country. All the stores are waiting on Canon to ship more units. So he paid a deposit and left his phone number, and we rolled home slowly, having accidentally not gotten onto the express train.

After all the excitement of the big city and its bright lights, I had just enough energy for a stiff drink before calling it an early night.

But that will have to wait. Today we continued our recent okonomiyaki streak at a hole-in-the-wall even better than Mr. Young Men but without the most excellent name or mirrored signage. Sean, Szymon, and I had woken to a cold rain that would persist, western Washington-style, without change or interruption until the following morning; and we had descended to the first floor to find that my umbrella had been taken. I endured the drizzle while we explored the neighborhood to the north on foot in search of used dōgu shops reputed to exist there. We didn’t find them.

There were, however, appliance stores and convenience stores and clothing stores and tea stores and liquor stores and drug stores and hardware stores and vegetable stalls and fish markets and butcher shops; only the fishmongers and butchers were doing much trade on a gloomy Saturday morning. One dark shop with no employees in sight displayed a scant few 10-dollar bags on 40 year-old shelves; it looked looted, abandoned, Dawn of the Dead-style. Would have thought it long out of business if the door hadn’t been open. Official luggage suppliers of the Apocalypse. I also peered through a cracked display window belonging to no obvious establishment: inside were lined up at least half a dozen ancient, dust-blanketed sewing machines in various stages of disrepair. None of us could account for the sight.

I was dripping wet by the time we made the Kitaoji subway station. We rode to the Karasuma-Oike stop and walked the last few blocks to the shopping labyrinth. There, sheltered from the elements, I finally bought a new umbrella. 260 yen buys a whole lot more umbrella than 100 yen does, it turns out. Now I’m spoiled. But then, I’ve always had rich tastes. That Boydston, with his 3 dollar umbrella–who does he think he is?

We warmed up at the previously-mentioned okonomiyaki restaurant, where poor Szymon concluded a gargantuan, delicious, affordable meal by spilling a pot of okonomi sauce all over himself. He ran–literally–back to the dorm to change while Sean and I got some important window-shopping and girl-watching done, then raced downtown again on his bicycle to meet all of Midorikai except Nadia at the movie theater.

We watched Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, which I’d seen over a year before in Honolulu; movie release schedules over here cannot be predicted. (Tanja and Verena, also having seeing it and not in the mood to see it again, split to watch The Golden Compass.) I was glad, indeed, to have seen it before: this time it was presented in Mandarin with Japanese subtitles. I would likely have been thoroughly lost if I were seeing it for the first time. Then again, there’s a lot of eye candy in the movie, so I wouldn’t have been bored, at least.

We reunited in the lobby with Tanja and Verena afterwards and Almerindo disappeared to wherever that guy disappears to when he disappears, which is not infrequently. The rest of us popped open our umbrellas and walked home, ambling through the Imperial Palace park in wet, chilly twilight en route.

Then Sean and I took care of some business we’d been meaning to attend to since long before coming to Japan. We are lucky to have in Honolulu a few outlets of the Japanese curry chain Coco Ichiban, and we’d long wanted to compare them with the original. So we hiked down Horikawa and negotiated the purchase of some curry. Turns out it’s pretty much exactly like what you get at the stateside establishments, except with better rice and the option to get it much, much spicier. Also it’s a bit more expensive. So we enjoyed our supper but feel that we can cross that restaurant off our list.

We closed out the day by resuming work on our case of chu-hi and watching Tigerland on Sean’s laptop. Not a dreadful film but definitely not an enthusiastic recommendation.

Flea markets seem to be the roughly the same the world over, though this is the first one I’ve seen outside an ancient Buddhist temple. Lots of old stuff, most of it rubbish, spread out on tarps. Many Japanese swords, some tacky kimono. Cameras. Pottery. Magazines and advertising ephemera from every decade since the war. Tea stuff, none of it particularly tempting. I bought a pair of $5 Chinese tabi. If they’re at least wearable, they’ll be a better choice than the Japanese pair I bought for $26 and which my toenails threaten to make short work of nevertheless.

We headed back to the station and sought refuge in an air-conditioned underground mall brimming with holiday shoppers. We ate a sandwich Sean had packed and gathered our strength before riding a packed bus home. (Note to transit systems everywhere I’ve lived before: follow the example of buses here, which feature payment-accepting mechanisms that accept prepaid bus cards and cash, and make change for 50, 100, and 500-yen coins as well as 1000-yen notes.)

I used to think it was odd how much the Japanese seem to shop. I realized yesterday that I’ve been doing an alarming lot of it myself since getting here. (Of course, I actually purchase very little.) And in this city, of all places, where interesting and usually affordable cultural activities happen ceaselessly. Then again, my full-time school is an interesting traditional cultural activity. Shopping is like a modernity fix.

After an early-afternoon siesta, Sean and I rode down the shopping arcade on Sanjō that we’d explored one night our first week here. Whether because of Golden Week or because it was Sunday or just because the place is dead, there were no more stores open now than there were on our first visit. In one of the exceptions, a small department store, I noted with approval that the first fireworks of the season are available for purchase. On our way out of the arcade we bought okonomiyaki from a little place that cooks various yaki on the street in front of their storefront. (Not literally on the street, mind you.) I also bought a can of beer from a vending machine, to wash down the sweet, rich, cabbage-and-pork pancake-thing. We sat on a low brick wall surrounding a playground along the arcade and ate while local passersby gave us curious stares.

After a few idle hours at home, noticing that the evening was well advanced and determining that nothing particularly interesting was likely to happen, I sat down to watch the delightful Hollywood-Bollywood mash-up Bride and Prejudice, which I had ripped to my hard drive on Curry-sensei’s recommendation just before leaving Hawaii. (Note to authorities: Curry-sensei only recommended I watch it. Ripping it was my idea. Please not to be arresting the wrong person.)

A disappointing trip to a duty-free electronics store in search of bargains that turned out to be purely mythical. The holiday crowds on and around Shijō made getting around a slow business.

May is off to a hot start, and for young ladies the short shorts season seems to have begun. (Imagine my disappointment.)

I bought a new lint screen to replace the torn one in my washing machine. I bought a furoshiki. This is just a large square of cloth in which stuff can be wrapped and carried the traditional Japanese way. It looks better with kimono than the laptop bag I’ve been taking to school with me.

I went to bed early.

We took a quiz this morning. The questions would have panicked me four weeks ago; now most of them seemed almost like common sense. I’ll find out tomorrow how I did on the trickier ones. (Out of what material is the hook in the tokonoma on which the scroll hangs made? a.)Metal b.)Wood c.)Bamboo d.)Rattan.)

After the quiz, we met Furiya-sensei, a young academic-looking type (that is, without the knack for shaving cleanly or wearing a necktie gracefully) who happens to actually be an academic. He’s a specialist in ceramics, and he came to tell us about the parts of a tea bowl and give us a very quick overview of the classification system for tea bowls. (Some are named according to their shape; others according to the glazing technique.) Furiya-sensei also brought show-and-tell: four impossibly valuable tea bowls (in excess of some $200,000 all told), the oldest a rough yellowish Korean chawan almost 400 years old. He insisted that we pick each up, run our fingers over every surface, appreciate the weight and thickness and glaze of each. One of the things I truly, deeply love about tea is its tactility. (Imagine my surprise at finding that “tactility” actually appears in the dictionary.) Everything is meant to be touched; in general, things aren’t appreciated from behind glass. Granted, none of the bowls we saw today will likely be used for making tea very often–not by us, certainly–but I’ll stand by my generalization. I’m amazed still that we were permitted to handle the bowls we saw today. (My favorite was the Raku chawan by the 6th-generation master, surprisingly light and warm in the hands.)

After lunch we changed into samue for an afternoon of spring cleaning. May 1st in the tea world is the day on which we change from the ro, the square hearth sunk into the tatami floor, to the furo, the portable brazier that sits slightly farther away from the guests to keep them more comfortable during the hot months. While the Japanese upperclassmen pulled the ro out of the floors and removed the ash from them, squads of other students gave the school a top-to-bottom cleaning. Midorikai worked on the second floor, wiping down tables, chairs, and floor, removing dust from ventilation grates, and cleaning windows. Because the building is cleaned so well and so often, none of this was particularly taxing, and some combination of fine spring weather and whatever was in the foamy aerosol glass cleaning spray had us all in fine, giddy moods.

Mine turned just as soon as we finished cleaning and I went to work on my haigata. I could almost swear that every time I attempt the task I get worse at it. There’s either too much ash in the furo or not enough. My angles are off, and I can’t smooth my slopes. The best advice I’ve gotten is Hamana-sensei’s recommendation to set a strict time limit for each step of the process, and to move on to each next step without obsessing over the condition of the previous. Dragging the operation out over longer than an hour doesn’t produce better results–just madness. As it was, my fifty-minute haigata almost overwhelmed me, by the end, with an impulse to drive my pointed ash scoop into my thighs. Also to break every nearby window. And scream.

I was more or less recovered by the end of supper. Knowing that I’d receive my monthly stipend the next day, I felt liberated to spend 300 of my last 2000 yen on some straw blinds and hooks at the 100-yen shop; my sheer curtains don’t keep out any light, and the sun coming through my east-facing window often wakes me up earlier than I want or need to be up some days.

I finished the day with a lesson from Szymon on how to put on and then properly fold a kimono. Once I had it on, he encouraged me to sit down on a tatami mat in his room and try some tea-preparation movements. The change in clothes may turn out to be more significant than I have been imagining; it’ll take an afternoon of practice before I’m confident to write more on the subject. We’ll make the change on Friday.