Fates have conspired to delay this posting, but I will not be delayed. Through wind and rain, 50 First Dates (who knew that was such a good movie? Don't spoil it, I haven't finished it yet), a demanding cat, and laundry - I am here. Where to begin. First, I was at Kinoe Elementary, and there were cute kids. I took some pictures.




That kid in the back was jumping up and down.

Ok, next. Higashino Junior High had a fun event a couple weeks ago. They have a sister school in Hokkaido (kind of like the Alaska of Japan), and the third years from that school (Nakatonbetsu Junior High) came down for a visit. There was a day of music and games and visiting sites on the island planned, but like any event of importance, there were rehearsals. I attended the final rehearsal the day before the visit.






Everyone has a pen case. They are pretty awesome, that orange juice one for example - there's liquid inside. Tip it one way and the juice flows out of the oranges into the bottle. Rad.


The Assistant Principal - he looked tired.


He was tired. This picture is full of everything I love about shooting in black and white.




The melodica brigade, of course.



After some suitably bombastic music, the rehearsal was over. We headed our separate ways, and luckily I was scheduled to be at Higashino the next day so I could meet the Hokkaido kids. On my way home, I saw the Maritime University kids out doing drills in their life boat.



The next morning I was awoken not by my alarm, but by the town loudspeaker, announcing that due to heavy fog, the ferries would not be running for the time being. They didn't say anything about school being closed, so I got ready and headed to work on a rainy grey day. I got to school, and found all but three teachers were absent - seven or eight of them live in Takehara and other cities on the mainland. The teachers who were there were struggling to get ready for the visit and ceremony. As we hurried down to the gym to get ready, one of the teachers saw that I had my camera and said "Ben! bring your camera." And thus I became the official photographer of the Nakatonbetsu visit. Here are a selection of the pictures.


Nakatonbetsu had way cooler gym uniforms than Higashino Junior High. Many introductions were read.


Nakatonbetsu also had snazzy dance moves and nice dancing jackets.


Higashino wins for dramatic poses though. A bunch of semi-successful games were played to get the kids to interact with each other. I say semi-successful because the kids did everything in their power to avoid interacting with the visitors. They are middle-schoolers after all, no middle schooler likes meeting new people.


Observe the lines of sight as the human knot is undone. Green jackets look at green jackets, Hokkaido kids strain and look outwards.


Another knot is undone without eye contact. I like this picture, I feel like this kid's pose is a metaphor for some difficult political situation.

Slowly the kids became slightly less nervous. A we played a few more games, the bombastic music was performed, and then it was on to the Hiroshima Maru.

The Hiroshima Maru is the training boat for the Maritime college. It is a training boat as in they practice all the stations in a boat on it, and take it out for short trips on the inland sea, but it's more than that - every student, as a condition of graduating, travels around the world working on the ship. They navigate, operate the engines, dock in dozens of cities, maintain the ship, and then bring it back home. It's a pretty cool thing, and it makes me a little jealous of the students. Anyway, we got a tour of it. I don't know if Nakatonbetsu is landlocked or what, but they were impressed with the size and fanciness of the boat.


It is large and fancy.

It was also pouring rain and really foggy. The principal made his way to the boat in a very Japanese wood-block print style.



We got a tour:




Damn. Those are some awesome binoculars. Also in this picture, you can see the fog which was preventing the ferries from running.

The bridge on the Hiroshima Maru was impressive - high-tech, clean, and big. It also had this, which I think is about the coolest thing you could have on a boat's bridge.



Next: down to the engine room.


That's the engine on the right - it was really impressive.


Can't get enough of their track suits.


Doesn't this look like some sort of promotional photograph? It could be titled "The learning moment."



And just like that, the tour was over. We headed to the Higashino town office for lunch. It was pouring rain.




The fog and the clouds had about forty feet between them. On the water there was no gap.


This is the Nakatonbetsu bus, and that's the fog that was keeping them on the island.

We had lunch, and lunch was kind of a disgrace at first. I sat with two boys from Higashino, and three from Nakatonbetsu. After forty minutes of the Higashino boys talking to each other and completely ignoring the boys from Hokkaido, I gave up on trying to get them to talk and got up to take pictures. Two Hokkaido boys came with me.


One stayed and looked miserable.

I ended up going over to the Hokkaido teacher's table to meet some of them and the boys came with me. Away from the impossible Higashino boys, I got to talking with the boys from Hokkaido and their teacher.


As it turns out, they were huge New York Knicks fans. I really let them down when I told them I didn't follow the NBA. They proceeded to tell me (with a little translation help from their teacher) about how badly the Knicks did last season. The were hopeful for next season. I also found out about their foreigner English teacher, Scott from Kansas. Apparently Scott is not very cool. For whatever reason, every question I answered about myself was cool. "Where are you from?" "New York." "Cool! Big city! Awesome!" (in Japanese, of course), that was not so surprising. When my name got a similar response, I was a little surprised. I guess there is a basketball player named Ben. Either way, they decided we need a picture to commemorate the awesome time we were having.





I post this picture just as a point of interest. For boys in Japan, there is no taboo about physical contact, and so you'll often see boys with their arms around each other, or sitting on each other's laps. It's kind of nice.

The plan was to catch the 2:00 ferry, but there was some question about whether the ferry would be running by 2:00. At the last minute it turned out it was, and so we headed down to the ferry port.




The big plan was to stretch colored paper ribbons out over the water as the ferry pulled away.


But then it started pouring.


The ribbons disintegrated, the Hokkaido kids hid from the rain, and the plan fell apart.


The photographer retreated to what turned out to be no shelter at all.


I waved to my new friends and they shouted "Ben!" and waved. It was nice.


The rain let up a little bit and they decided to try it again. They passed ribbons and the ferry pulled away before anything could happen.


The Hokkaido kids are all in the dry ferry now, but the poor Higashino kids were soaked to the bone. My camera stopped focusing for a bit, but then it dried right out. I spent the next half hour driving kids back to school in my tiny car, three at a time.

It seems that I have been ending posts with a picture of fog recently, so I will finish with this one, from the end of that day.



See you Wednesday for a birthday blog update.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 at 9:10 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.