Friday Field Notes

Welcome to Friday Field Notes!

I'm the sort of person who cannot go anywhere without looking at birds, flowers, moss growing out of cracks, stray kitties, planted fields, clouds, cows.

In other words, if you value your life, you'll choose not to be a passenger in any car that I am driving.  Fortunately for all of us, I live here in Japan with no car.  Just a bike and my feet.  I haven't crashed my bike very many times.  Yet.  Today, though, I did have the presence of mind to finally take the new video camera with the good zoom along while walking the kids to school.  Since there's always something blooming, or growing, or walking in the river, I thought I'd share my field notes:))  I'll just be honest--this is really for my mom, but I figured others might be interested, too.  Mom--we'll just take a virtual walk, ok?  If you were here, I'd show you every flower, vegetable, and bird I see, you know I would:))

For the first one, I thought I'd share my lucky bird.  At least, that's what I've called the Kosagi (Little Egret) from the first time I saw one plucking its way through Fujisawa River.  Pristinely white with starkly contrasting black bill and legs, and the goofiest bright yellow feet when he lifts his feet up out of the water.  I'd never seen an egret in the states, so the first time I saw one here made me feel like the luckiest person alive.  In our little river here on the way up to school, I see one nearly every day.  Still makes me feel lucky.

Next time, I'll try to get a shot of those goofy feet...:))

Update:

Goofy feet!  Got them today:)

Those crazy feet make me smile every time I see them.  The effect is even goofier when he's walking...

Double-Digits

My baby is ten years old.  A decade.  Double digits.  His first 0-birthday (but not one that will see him receiving birthday cards that start out "Lordy, Lordy...).

Mommy's Little Helper....                                                   








                                                                                      
                                                                                                

                                                                                           

big brother...                           

sleepy puppy..

My Karate Kid...

My Little Slugger...

Mama's Entomologist...

My Botanist...

You have so many faces, so many interests now--who will you be tomorrow?  Next year?  On your next

0-birthday?  I can't wait to see!               love, mommy

Undokai--an Excercise in Translation

That's Koshi there--in second place.  80m dash.

September and October--Undokai time over here.  That's "Track and Field Day".   Well, sort of.  Translating "Undokai" is kind of like trying to translate German Kuchen and Torte to Cake and Pie.  Well, sort of.  They don't really match up much.  Anybody who's been to Germany and eaten a nice german Kuchen knows that the word may look like "cake", but the thing you ate looked a lot more like pie.  Sort of.  And the Torte looks like cake.  So which word should you use if you want to translate English "cake" into German?   And what if you're trying to describe Pie?  It doesn't matter which German word you pick, they won't have the right picture in their heads.   It's a problem--trust me, I've tried explaining it to Germans before.  You go round and round.  Which brings me to Undokai.

  Undo means excercise, Kai means party or meet or meeting or...a few other things (it's an oft-used word).  "excercise party", though, just doesn't quite get the right image across.  Every year somebody here asks me if they have Undokai in America, too.  Well, sort of.  "Track and Field Day", which is what I remember from elementary school, is the event closest in spirit to Japanese Undokai.  Sort of.  The only thing that matches up from what I remember, is the 50yard dash (our school has 40m for 1st and 2nd grade, 80m for 3rd and 4th, and 100m for 5th and 6th).

But we didn't have the Suzuwari:

gold for the red team... 

...and silver for the white team.  

They're sort of like pinata, but no candy inside.  The kids  (in teams) throw beanbags at them till they break open and the streamers come out.  The team that gets theirs to come open first wins points (a group point-getting effort).  This is traditional--I don't think you could go to an Undokai in Japan and not see this event.   The bells (that's what "Suzu" means, "wari" means "break")  are iconic--you see them in any depiction of an Undokai.  An Undokai with no bells would be Christmas with no tree.

There it is--lovely mylar streamers shimmering in the breeze (alas, this year the white team won the Suzuwari).  And unless I am much mistaken, American track-and-field days don't usually include cheerleaders, or big drums:

The Taiko drum...

 

...and the cheerleaders (girls *and* boys, note)

At one point, during the long "encouragement chant" (this stuff just does *not* translate!), the Red Team turns to the White Team and encourages the other team to do their best ("Gambare!"), and vice versa.  Do we do this?  Somehow,  I don't think so.  That's my oldest, up there on the right and his best friend with the whistle. 

The other thing I've never seen or heard of at Track-and-Field Day, but which is an integral part of the Undokai, is dancing:

awww....aren't they cute:)  See--something for everybody!  Even the kids who can't run too fast can do well in the dance, or the whole group excercise, or the Suzuwari or the Tama-ire game (throwing beanbag balls into  a bucket up on top of a pole--group game). *Everybody* gets to have a good time. Plus--photo ops a-plenty for parents!! (Sorry about all that alliteration...)

That's the first and second graders up above, below is last year's third and fourth graders (my oldest was in third grade last year) dancing to ....can you guess by looking?

...did you guess the Thriller dance?  They wore ripped up old tshirts with fake blood and marker scribbles.  Really.  And they jumped rope during some of the harder parts of the dance:)  Believe me, this stuff is just beyond cute.  If I told you my kids just had their Track-and-Field Day in Japan, would you get these kind of pictures in your head?  Of course not.  Undokai and Track-and-Field just don't match up really.   The only thing that *is* the same is the dashes--sort of.  See--they don't hand out any ribbons.  The kids run, usually four at a time, and just sit down behind the first, second, third, or fourth place pole:

There's Cici sitting at the fourth place pole, with all the other kids who were fourth.  The third, second, and first place poles are visible to the right.  First place is recognized, but not made too big a deal of.  Fourth place is not disparaged.  The teachers run kids together who run roughly the same speed, so the fastest kid in class doesn't run against the slowest.  That way everybody is encouraged to run their best, because they really might be first if they try hard.   Very thoughtful, no?

Japanese Undokai is really equal parts competition and cooperation, and it's the cooperation part that's missing from American Track-and-Field Day. 

So, now that I've uploaded all these images of Undokai into your brain, you can pull them up the next time I talk about it:))  And not mix it up with Track-and-Field, because they're really only sort of similar.

Mata asobou, ne!

Morning Glories

I realize we're getting on towards fall, but it's still hot enough here in the afternoon that a few rogue cicadas can be heard droning on about the heat.  Summer in Japan is not my favorite season, as I dislike sitting in pools of sweat, but I do like morning glories.  And they are everywhere, as the hydrangeas are during the rainy season.  People string twine up to their laudry poles for them, drape netting over windows for them.  But the best thing about morning glories is that every kindergartner and every first grader grows them at school.  This is beginning science in Japan, and they do it right. 

When my oldest son was 3, he brought his first morning glory home from kindergarten.  He'd been taught how to put the seeds into water to tell which were good and which wouldn't sprout (throw out the ones that float:).  All the kids got nice, deep sturdy plastic pots with stakes and rings for the vines.  They used their fingers to poke "eye, eye, mouth" into the dirt to plant three seeds in--easy to remember, and easy even for 3-year-olds to do.  The teachers helped them prune the plants back, too, so they'd grow thicker.  And, of course, the kids had to water their plants every day.  By the end of the summer, I was convinced that this was the best beginning biology project ever.

We had more fun waiting to see what color they'd be.  The kids learned to tell the difference between a bud and a dead flower head.  Every night, we would count the buds to see how many flowers we'd have the next morning.  And every morning was like Christmas--a rush to the porch to see the new flowers.  Since morning glories bloom and fade in a day, they are the perfect choice for young children to learn about plant life cycles.  Not so much waiting:)  And before too many weeks pass, the green hips begin to turn brown--easy to see when seeds are ready to harvest.

We saved seeds for several years in a row, so we could plant as many colors as possible.

The white ones were my favorites--very elegant, I thought.  Though, being my mother's daughter, of course I liked all the colors.  But the real beauty of morning glories is that you don't need a huge yard to grow them in, or any yard at all.  A planter and some string or a piece of netting will do just fine on even the narrowest of apartment porches (you can see what ours looks like).

All in all, a simple, non-time-consuming thing to do with your kids (or for yourself--why not?) in the summer for the cost of a pot, some string, and a packet or two of seeds.

Enduring the Rainy Season...

....and that, dear Readers, is really the only reason not to entertain self-destructive thoughts during Japan's horrible, humid, it-just-rained-and-now-it's-worse, Rainy Season.  Those gorgeous things are planted all over the place.  My kids walk past a whole row of pink, blue, pink-shading-to-purple-to-blue hydrangeas on the way to school. 

Of course, I can't get my damn laundry dry.  Mostly, I just try to avert mine eyes from growing piles of laundry and go out for walks to look at hydrangeas...

 ...pink ones...

...pale blue ones...

















....anything really but the DLP (Dreaded Laundry Pile).  Most of the time, honestly, it doesn't bother me not having a drier.  Hanging up nice, fresh-smelling laundry outside on a nice day is a far more enjoyable chore than, say, cleaning the toilet.  Just not during Rainy Season.  Because boy's underwear does not dry when it's raining outside.  Gah!

Tweetle Beetles

"I thought my Sensei was lying when she said kids in Japan catch bugs for fun. "

--Ezmirelda said in a comment to the last post.

 Yes, It's true--kids do catch bugs for fun in Japan.  I did, too, when I was a kid.  Beetles, lightning bugs, toads, caterpillars, probably other things that have disappeared into the neurological mist.  Have I been gone too long, or do kids in America not catch lightning bugs anymore and put them in mayonnaise jars with holes punched in the lids?  Let me know about that, would you all?  My Japanese friends are under that impression, but I've told them that kids in America catch bugs, too.  If I'm wrong on that count, I'll have to 'fess up that my information on America is outdated (let's not get into speculations about how old that implies I am:)

Anyway, here's our beetle, which Cici has creatively named "Kabuto-kun", aka--Mr. Beetle.

That big horn sticking out of the middle of his head means he's a He Beetle.  He's dark brown and shiny and likes to eat tree sap.  Which is a bit hard to come by, so we give him cut up bananas, apple pieces or put some honey into a hole bored into his log.  We also buy special Beetle Jelly, which can be had at the 100Y shop (The dollar shop, or, rather, somewhat less than a dollar, given the current exchange rate).  You can buy smallish bug boxes and nets as well at the 100Yen shop.  People have been catching beetles and cicadas in the summer here for as long as anyone can remember.  It's just the summertime thing to do.

Our beetle, as I said, is a boy.  Females don't have that big horn on top that gives this species of beetle his common name in English--Rhinoceros Beetle (because of the one big horn on what would be his nose if he had one).  The beetles I occasionally used to catch (or, rather, pick off the front screen door) were stag beetles, which they also have over here.  Kids catch those, too.  Small Stag Beetle, Saw-toothed Stag Beetle--there's really quite a variety, and children as young as kindergarten age can easily identify which is which. 

  In this photo you can see the barbs on his legs for clinging to trees.  They hurt a little if he's clinging to your hand, but big brother Koshi doesn't mind. 

It took me a while to figure out why I have no problem keeping Kabutomushi in the house, but leap into the air and shriek for my dad if there's a cockroach.  Same color, roughly the same size....so, why the different reaction?  Aha--Speed  of  movement.  Cockroaches are fast little buggers--zipping right across the floor and under the fridge in an eyeblink or two.  Kabuto, on the other hand, are *slow*, almost stately in the way they move.  And they don't really hide (unless they burrow under the mulch  to stay cool in the heat of the day).

The Japanese national addiction to catching bugs is the reason a video game like MushiKing could be the wild success it was here a few years ago (the year my oldest started kindergarten, in fact).  Actually, as video games go, MushiKing (King of Beetles) was pretty innocuous--educational, in fact.  My kids (and me, too, of course) learned the names of a large number of beetles from all over the world.  We used to look up on the map where, for example, the Great Hercules Rhinoceros Beetle was from (Brazil), or the Great Caucasus Rhinoceros Beetle (Indonesia).   The game is based on the summer pastime of catching beetles and making the male beetles fight (that's what those splendid horns are naturally for), sort of like cock-fighting.  The Kabuto is strong--they can pull something hooked to their horns that outweighs them by quite a bit.  My oldest hooked up one of his beetles with a thread to one of his toy trucks--I so wish I had gotten that on video.  *Deep sigh*.  All the way down the hall, too.  That beetle was Rocky!

 You can buy a number of species at our local Daiei--which has always made me wonder whether that's OK or not.  Turns out--not.

http://kotaku.com/298898/mushiking-fans-threaten-real-beetles-with-extinction

Yappari--figures.  I knew there were too many rare-looking bugs coming into Japan to be good for beetle populations.  Maybe that's how I can get my kids into environmental activism!

Go catch some bugs--but not from other countries!  And let them go so they can breed!
Mata asobou, ne!

What Little Boys Are Made Of

Boys are boys are boys, no matter where you go or where you live--and that includes "grown-up" boys.
Ahhhh--the summer cometh.  I know this, not by the temperature outside, nor by the flowers in bloom, nor yet by the birds that singeth.  Nope--I know because my son is catching things and bringing them home. 

He was *so* happy, too--better than Christmas (I could tell by the look on his face).  He came in last night with a lizard and a snake.  Ooooh--lizards, we've had before.

We've also had innumerable crawdads (which I finally outlawed because they stink--so, catch-and-release only):

Our genkan, come mid-June, is slowly transformed into a veritable zoo.  If my son could pronounce entomologist, that's what he'd want to be. 

The beetles, stag and rhinocerous, roly-poly bugs (my daughter got on the kindergarten bus once with a pocketful of those), cicadas, butterflies, snails, spiders, minnows, a loach, tadpoles and frogs, even a bee.  Don't ask me how on earth he caught that--he just came in and plopped the box down on the kitchen counter while I was making dinner and asked for honey to feed it.  Papa, however, put his foot down at that, and the bee went back outside. 

Mind you, this is all.....I hesitate even to say encouraged, it's just what kids do in the summer.  Right along with the shorts and tshirts come the bug boxes, the nets, the jelly to feed beetles, the peat to bury the beetle larvae in.  There are no depictions of summer that don't include catching beetles and cicadas along with eating watermelon, watching fireworks, and o-bon dancing.  I think a kid who didn't catch any bugs in the summer would be considered more deprived than a kid who didn't get any birthday presents--seriously.  Which, in spite of the mess in the genkan, the dead bugs, the smelly crawdads, my husband freaking out at 6am because the lizard got loose in the house, well--I guess I'd rather have dead bugs in the house than a kid who spent his childhood in front of a screen of some sort.  It's something about Japan that, all-in-all, I really appreciate.   Not that there isn't just as much Wii, DS, computer games, and the like here.  The Japanese just seem to hang on stubbornly to their traditions at the same time that they produce the latest electronic gadgets.    No need in Japan to hunt down award-winning science toys from hard-to-find catalogues, nope.  Any and all bug-catching paraphenalia is available in every dollar shop. 

The latest additions to the family:

the lizard....

                                      ........and the snake.  He's actually kinda cute.

Go catch some bugs!  Mata asobou, ne:)

UPDATE:

Since writing and posting the above this morning, what do you suppose they've found now?

Yup--my daughter found mr. turtle in the river, and the neighbor boy was the brave volunteer who climbed over the fence and down the ladder steps embedded in the stone embankment down to the river to catch said reptile.  I nearly rolled my eyes, till I  looked at all those shining faces crowded around the box.

Ahh--so what if they're late for dinner.  Those excited faces are worth more than finished homework and table manners anyday.  Besides, the kids all decided to take Mr. T to school, so he'll not be stinking up my genkan:))

  

My Baby is a First-Grader

Ahhh--when the cherry trees are in full bloom, the view out our back sliding door is so lovely.  You almost can't see the power lines that disfigure so much of Japan...


The cherry trees have come and gone...

....and my baby is a first-grader.   Awww.  On the right getting ready to change into her "inside shoes" (a useful precaution taken by schools in Japan--keeps the floors much cleaner, especially since the kids do the floor cleaning.)  Like all schools over here, the children walk to school--there are no school buses except for kindergarten.  All kids (unless they got into a swanky private school) go to a community school within walking distance (about 10 minutes from our house to school).  Since there was no Civil Rights Movement, and therefore no enforced busing, they get to go to the school closest to home.  Nice.  ( Not saying the Civil Rights Movement was bad, just that there were drawbacks to busing kids to the other side of town).

There she is with her Landosel, those big backpacks that all japanese schoolkids use.  In the past, boys had black, girls had red, and that was that.  In the thirteen years I've been here, I've been witness to a sudden explosion in individuality--now there are over two dozen colors to choose from (Cici, as  you can see, chose yellow--although originally she wanted black, like her big brothers:).  In fact, although there is still tremendous pressure to conform, it doesn't seem to be as strong as it was when I came to Japan in '97.  Like maybe now if you're the nail that sticks up, you'll only get hammered half-way down....

One more picture, since the peach trees were *sooo* lovely this year (the mixed pink-and-white trees are my favorite:).....

Now that we're well into first grade and things have settled down  a bit, I should be able to post more often than  I have been!

Mata asobou, ne!

The Coolest Origami Ever and How to Fold a Dog

In vain have I searched--it will not be found, at least not tonight.  The coolest origami i have ever seen was on TV (maybe NHK, maybe Tokyo Terebi--can't remember).  It was something like a variety show, but there was a segment featuring three origami masters who were given the task of folding "from life", the results of which would then be voted on.  Standing at one end of a pier with large pieces of paper, on the signal, they ran to the other end where a large aquarium was set up on a table.  They had to grab a net, catch something swimming around in the tank, transfer it to their own tank, and create an origami version of whatever they had just pulled out of the large tank.  An octopus.  A small skate (ray).  A puffer fish.  And they did this in an unbelievably short amount of time.  It was jaw-dropping, to say the least.

But since I can't seem to find a video of it on YouTube, here's the other coolest origami ever, from origami master Kamiya Satoshi:

the coolest origami ever

(sorry--I would put the YouTube video in, but I haven't figured out how to embed a video yet)

Yeah--wow, right?  All from one 2mx2m piece of paper.  Origami hardly seems like the right word to describe what he does--more like sculpture which happens to be done with a piece of paper rather than folding.  But folded it is, as they show towards the end of the clip.

Over the next several days, I'd like to give you a sense of how he does what he does by posting some how-tos for some very simple origami which will, I hope, help you gain a beginning sense of how the same folds can become many different things.   In a way, origami masters approach origami in somewhat the same way that a chess master approaches a game of chess--with moves stored in the memory in large chunks which enables them to reproduce the chessboard perfectly even if you remove all the pieces.  Origami folds are stored in the memory rather like that--do the same series of folds for the (crane, for example), then do this.  As you get better at origami and learn to fold slightly more complicated pieces, it becomes possible to start making one thing and then just... fold off in a different direction and see if anything comes out.

But fear not, today I'm not going throw you to the origami lions.  Just to the dogs.  Here's the simplest possible dog, plus a variation on the ears.

Pick a color you like, reverse white side can be a white dog, of course.

First, fold a mountain upsidedown!
Big paper or small, take your pick.  Or both to make mommy dogs and baby dogs.

Fold in half again and unfold--guide fold made!
(folding and unfolding just for a guide fold is done a *lot*, so you can see where to fold or to make it easier to fold there later).

Ears:  fold down a flap a little way over from the center guide fold you made before (dog has to have a head:))

Woof!  That's all you have to do to make a dog!

Get a black marker or crayon to put on a face.

Use lots of colors and make an origami version of  Go, Dog, Go!  Red dogs, blue dogs, green dogs, yellow dogs, black dogs and white dogs are all at a dog party.  What a dog party!

here's the ear variation.   Mom will probably have to do this manoeveur (unless you're doing this with a child 6 or older).

Stick your finger inside one of the ears to make it poof out, then.....

....and smoosh it down flat--the place it was originally folded will now run down the middle of the ear.

See how the ear looks floppier?

You can also knick the bottom under to make the chin, or leave it as is and draw the point as the nose.

Two kinds of ears, two kinds of faces, and my daughter's fingers...

She decided she wanted a dalmation, so she folded the color side to the inside with white outside and drew spots on with a black marker.


Fold a big house and a little dog--voila!  A doghouse:)  And if you happen to be folding a dog party, you can even fold a little ice cream to have falling out of the tree ( that was the  reaction of my oldest son  when he was 2 to that big 2-page spread.  He would notice the ice cream cone falling out of the tree and say "dirty!").

Happy folding!  Mata asobou, ne!