Today’s work was fun – the biggest challenge was printing out a big map of Australia on lots of pieces of paper, sticking them all together and making it look OK for my Australia wall. Not really what I expected to be doing when I woke up this morning, but satisfying nonetheless. Ito-sensei no. 3 took me out for a pretty traditionally lunch (we ate next to a koi pond!), and after lunch I helped some of the 1st and 2nd grade (equivalent to Year 10-11) kids to get the gym ready for a parent meeting tomorrow. The most exciting part of today all happened after work – the Himeji Castle Festival (Himeji-jo Matsuri) started today!
Sam and I went prey much straight from work onto a train to Himeji. It took about 25 mins to get to Himeji station on an all-stops train from Okubo, and once we got there we walked straight towards Himeji Castle, which we could see in the distance to the North from the train station. Our timing was just about perfect by pure fluke – we got to the castle at 6:20 pm, and the Noh concert which starts the festival started at 6:30. Just enough time to grab seats and go and score a free program explaing Noh (traditional Japanese theatre/drama/dance performance) and Kyougen (traditional Japanese comedy/drama like Noh but vaguely understandable). It was a 
pretty incredible experience watching Noh in the shade of Himeji Castle while the sun set to open a matsuri! I can’t think of a more Japanese experience, unless maybe we could do it in an onsen while drinking sake? The sunset was pretty spectacular, and the Noh was quite interesting until our butts and brain started to hurt from uncomfortable chairs and total lack of understanding of what was going on, respectively. The first Noh play was about… well, I don’t actually know. I think there was a dude and the other dude was a chick?And then they all swap at half time and be either the same or different people while the orchestra guys play the flute (fue), 3 types of drums (ko-tsuzumi, o-tsuzumi and taiko) and do the cool Japanese yelling thing a lot. Side note for anyone who has played Okami (the best PS2 game ever made in my opinion) – the music kept making Sam and I want to push R1 and slice through all of the trees in a vertical line.
Then there was another Noh play (this one about a warrior who has fallen in battle, according to the ladies next to us – still couldn’t follow a thing), and then what we think was a Kyougen performance. This was a little easier to understand. There were 2 dudes transporting a barrel of sake. The young one wanted to drink it and the older one wanted to stop him. We could understand snatches of words, and the whole thing was much more slapstick, so I could actually figure out when to laugh. After the comedy there were some speeches, a cool fire lighting ceremony and then a Noh play with the main guy (called Shite in Noh – can be more than one person) playing like a spider demon type thing, and the Waki (the second lead/s) playing a brave adventurer/king type guy fighting the spider.
This was totally awesome because they had cool web shooter things that looked spectacular on stage, and acted a lot like spider web. Was very cool! I think that was the last thing on the program, and after it was done we had to leave due to soreness of bum (the bike riding has taken it’s toll a little), and the fact that we had run out of Noh puns to spring on each other (“It’s Noh good”, “Noh talking”, “There’s Noh business like show business” and so on. And they were the better ones). We walked through the little festival area and tried our hand at the goldfish catching game that is common to Japanese matsuri. You get a little paper paddle and get to
try to catch goldfish in a pond before your paper gets too wet to use any more. I caught 5 fish (1 big one, 3 gold ones, 1 google eyes black one)before my paddle broke, and Sam caught 4 (although I had a head start because the lady gave Sam his paddle for free because she used it to show me how to do it). You get to keep the fish afterwards if you want, but I gave them back because I felt a bit sorry for them.
On the way back to the train station we SOMEHOW managed to find ourselves in a Sega Club arcade – Sam was happy to find Street Fighter 4, Tekken 6, Virtua Fighter 5, House of the Dead 4, various UFO catchers etc. and I was happy to find a taiko drumming game. Sam plugged his 100 yen into the SFIV machine and it ended up lasting him for about an hour, because no one challenged him until he was against the last boss for the second time (on his
second credit). He totally got his arse kicked by Vega (called Balrog in Japanese version), while I played Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop (Tank!) and Naruto songs on the taiko drums. When we finally got onto the train, we met a nice new drunken friend who told us that Akashi has the 3rd best fish in Japan. Go Akashi!
Food highlight of the day: Vending machine ice creams from the Sega arcade – chocolate sundae in a cone for 120 yen? Don’t mind if I do.
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