Hanabi Season
Well, after an intense few days in the theater, the Charity Show is finally a wrap, and it’s back to my regularly-scheduled programming! I got up early and went for a run today for the first time in a couple weeks, and I’m getting ready to play my first music gig in several months!!
Summer is here and it is hot and humid as hell. We’re still in the midst of the rainy season in Japan, so the weather is shit most days, but we’ve actually managed to get pretty lucky with weekend weather so far.
And although they (obviously) do not celebrate the 4th of July here in Japan, summer here brings with it a great many festivals with hanabi (fireworks) shows, and the first one of the season in our area is this Wednesday in Nyuzen (the town next to mine). After that one kicks it off, there will be an average of one big fireworks display per week at various festivals throughout the prefecture!
For various reasons including travelling outside the country for a month, I managed to not see a single fireworks show last summer. To make up for that—and since I have no travel plans this summer—I’ve made it a goal to see as many fireworks as I can (weather permitting) before September. More specifically, I’ve got a schedule worked out and if I stick to it, then I should be able to catch at least 10 big fireworks shows over the next 8 weeks—maybe 12 if I feel up to some longer drives. It’s gonna be a great season!
Happy July 4th to all my American friends and family! Have a great holiday!
Calvin and Hobbes played such a humongous role in my childhood. I was obsessed. I owned every collection and read them cover to cover, over and over again. I would read them in bed every night until I fell asleep with my nose buried in the pages. Embarrassing story: I even ruined one of the books because I fell asleep reading it and ended up wetting the bed that night (yup, I was a bed-wetter).
I knew the comics so well I could look at the first panel of one and tell you every scene and every bit of dialog that would follow. And yet somehow I still managed to read them over and over and never got sick of it. Even now, I have the entire collection loaded onto my iPad, and reading it brings me the kind of warmth and comfort that you get from your mom’s home cooking. Reading it feels like home.
This (and the above picture) is a link to a nice article, written by someone who shares my love for Calvin and Hobbes, that focuses on Bill Watterson’s attitudes and feelings about nostalgia as they come through in the comic.
This past weekend was “Leavers’ Weekend” here, in which JETs and friends from all over Toyama go to a campground in the mountains for a night to celebrate our friends who are finishing their contracts and departing from Japan this year. It’s a bittersweet event, but it is marked by some absolutely gorgeous scenery. As I drove through the valley above, the fog lifted for a moment just long enough for me to pull over and snap a picture. I love seeing these areas of the country, and I love the fact that they are only a short drive away from where I live. My resolution this year is to see much more areas like this before winter comes.
I’ve hardly posted anything in the past few months because I’ve kept myself quite busy. First and foremost, I’m taking part in the Toyama International Charity Show again this year, and have been very busy with rehearsals. We are now less than a week away from opening night, and the show is finally coming together just in time. I’m excited for the show, and I’m also excited to get it done and get back to my normal schedule and normal social life. I feel like I’ve missed out on a lot of fun events and trips because of my commitment to this, which is a little sad, but it’s for a good cause, and it has been a largely positive experience, so I’m happy to be a part of it.
I’ve also been taking hip-hop dance classes one to two times a week, and still LOVING it. We’ll have a studio showcase in October, so we’ve already started working on the choreography for the big show, and I’m really, really nervous, but excited.
So between those two things, plus various other events and commitments, I usually end up with only one night a week for myself to just relax at home and I usually spend those nights catching up on episodes of So You Think You Can Dance and The Daily Show. I’ll post more in the upcoming weeks, when I get back on a normal schedule, but for now I just wanted to give a short update. See you soon!
Tonami Tulip Fair: Sayuri and I went to the Tulip Fair in Tonami (a little more than a 2-hour drive from my place) yesterday. These are some photos I took with my instant camera (called a “cheki” camera in Japanese) and scanned into the computer.
The first photo was taken from the top of a viewing tower and the image on the ground behind us is entirely made up of tulips. It is the 60th anniversary of the fair this year, hence the giant “60.”
We really lucked out with the weather, but I think I’m a bit allergic to tulips. My eyes gradually got more itchy and dry the longer we were there, and in the tulip museum building there was a room that smelled so strongly of tulips I couldn’t even enter it. Once we got back in the car and headed home, however, I felt okay again.
Ran my first 5k race ever today! Came in 63rd of 333 (men’s division), with a time of 24:30! Feeling awesome! Hear me roar!
About Me
My name is Lawrence Denes.After spending 5 years studying Japanese language, culture, literature, and history in St. Louis and Kyoto, I now live in Japan, in a town that most Japanese people have never even heard of, lost amid the rice fields and vending machines.
Please feel free to ask me anything, or send me an email.
