Chi-Chi-Chi-Chiba

(I'm breaking this up into two blogs in one day: EVENTS and NOT-EVENTS)

#1: EVENTS

So I spent the weekend in Chiba, a flat, dog-shaped prefecture a couple of hours southeast of crane-shaped Gunma, visiting my friend M. After the mountains of Gunma, Chiba seemed remarkably flat to me as I rode out to Narita Airport on the train. To get to M’s little town, you take the JR (Japan Rail) from Takasaki to Ueno, then switch trains to an entirely different line I’ve never heard of, then take a bus for thirty minutes out to the inaka (countryside), admiring the rice fields and evergreen trees as you go. From there, it’s another 5- or 10-minute walk to his apartment. Traveling in a foreign country is always so fun!

Most of Saturday was spent at the Tako Junior High School PTA Bazaar (or ba-zaa, as they say in Japanese). It reminded me of any little festival back home: tables set up outside, food venders wandering around, arts and crafts displays in the big community building, secondhand and super cheap new things in another building. And everywhere were Tako JH kids milling around in their nice navy blue track suit uniforms, selling hot dogs, apple cider, popcorn, or bento boxes of sushi, and throwing "Hello!"s out at us, the two non-Japanese people. M had convinced his JTEs that he should volunteer, too, so not ten minutes after we arrived, we found ourselves in aprons selling hot sweet potatoes.

It was kind of fun to stand beside a huge fire pit—like a barbeque pit but much smaller—calling out, “Irasshaimase! Yaki-imo! Hyaku yen! Kaitte, kudasai!” (which should mean, if I was saying it right, “Welcome! Sweet potatoes! 100 yen! Buy one!”) Being on the other side of the "Irasshiamase!" was also fun, because I got to be as loud and nasally as I wanted! The attendees—mostly middle-aged or older women with huge empty shopping bags under their arms to put their bazaar goods in—either seemed delighted or terrified of me, but in either case, I still managed to sell about 10 or 15 potatoes before heading to the bazaar myself.

Neither M nor I had brought shopping bags (not thinking we’d really want anything), but after a few minutes in the huge barn/gym/community center place, we realized we probably should have. I picked up a 500-yen t-shirt (and Jonathan, you’d better like it, too, if it fits, that is), a 50-yen sweater (best purchase all day), a 50-yen bag, a 200-yen bag of kitchen towels, a 200-yen pair of sweatpants, and 100-yen toilet cleaner! M got a brand-new coffee maker for 400-yen, which was also a pretty stellar purchase, and some other stuff. After all of our loot was bagged, a 13-year old kid asked us if we wanted any help getting it to our car.

Oh yeah. Getting home. We hadn’t driven, though: M had ridden (had rode?) his scooter, and I biked, neither modes of transportation really full of storage space. We stuck our bags in another building for the time being and decided to cross that carrying everything home bridge when we got to it.

In the meantime, we continued to shirk our duty as potato salesfolk and went to see what was happening in the community arts building. (We were still wearing the aprons, though, so they'd think we were working...) There were students' art pieces hung up on huge displays in the main hall: bright paintings of the beach, self-portraits done in pencil, various watercolors, and a big display of calligraphied kanji. M and I spent a good 20 minutes reading the hiragana and struggling over the kanji: I might have recognized 10 out of 200. Nature photographs (taken by adults this time) lined the walls down the hall. In another room was a scene straight from the North Carolina State Fair: tables of handmade arts and crafts from the autumn and winter holidays. There were knit and crocheted sweaters hanging up, Halloween-themed wall hangings, silver spray-painted flower arrangements, and ceramic animals, mixed awkwardly with the more traditional Japanese masks and art. It was nice to see it all, though. It felt like home.

At 3:30, we snuck into the auditorium, where some performances were already going on. We listened to a couple of men in 1940s voices sing love ballads in high, nasally voices that almost sounded Chinese. We watched a traditional Japanese dance that involved men in expressionless masks circling around the lead singer in a brilliant gold suit. And we marveled over a group of absolutely gorgeous and scantily-clad Japanese women dancing the hula, wearing coconuts and grass skirts. The dancers were soon joined by older women in more modest clothing, but who could also dance to Hawaiian music like they had been born there.

At 4:15-ish, the show finished, we managed to stuff all of our purchases onto M’s scooter and rode home. (Side note: the fastest I could bike was 29 kilometers an hour—about 18 miles an hour—for about half a minute. Keeping up with a motored vehicle on a bicycle ain’t all that easy, though.)

I had to leave Sunday morning, so the rest of Saturday was pretty chill: we made New Zealand lolly cake (involving some kind of fruity, gummy candy I’d never heard of before) and watched anime before playing two extremely competitive games of chess. I almost won one. But lost them both.

The ride back to Takasaki took over four hours: 30 minutes in bus, 70-minute train from Narita to Kesai-Ueno, walk from Kesai-Ueno to JR Ueno, then on a train for 2 more hours until Takasaki. It was funny, though, how competent I felt. I guess because I know how to read a map, and because everything's in English. I can get myself around by myself, and I feel kind of cool. It was also nice how familiar the mountains of Gunma seemed when they first appeared from the window. It’s like I said last time I went on a trip: coming home now feels like coming home, the way I used to feel when I saw the “Greensboro City Limits” sign from I-40. Except this time, it says, "高崎."