This past week, in a nutshell

I’ve been caught up in doing so many things, both productive and non-productive, that I’ve had no time to write in a week.  Some notable events have occurred, and I feel obliged to make some note of them.  Again, I will attempt to be brief, descriptive, and to the point.

Last Saturday I got to meet my cousin and his family.  As per Alphie’s instructions, I headed North to Umeda in the morning.  However, instead of taking either of the two subway lines he recommended, I hoofed it instead.  The walk covers most of Osaka, and including a short 20 minute lunch break, took a grand total of 2 hours and forty five minutes.  I was able to find Hankryu Umeda Station, and thanks to a nice guy who spoke a little English (and who later very kindly lent me his cell phone to call Alphie), I arrived in Mino-o sometime in the early afternoon.

Alphie (his real name is David, by the way) met me at the station with his two children, Henry and Clara.  Henry is 7 and Clara is 10.  Together, we walked a good ways up this beautiful path that leads from the town into the hills, up a winding trail through the woods, and towards a waterfall.  We didn’t make it all the way up, but that was fine.  Along the way, we stopped at a Buddist temple and a Shinto shrine, with Alphie enlightening me on the difference between the two.  He also filled me in on several things relating to Japan, culturally and socially.  Some things that hadn’t made sense before were starting to. 

On the way back down the mountain, we also stopped at the bug house, a favorite of Henry and Clara.  I was actually reluctant to go inside because of my totally irrational but intense fear of spiders (among other bugs, though it’s mostly just spiders).  However, I was pleased to discover very little unsettling content inside.  The strangest (and scariest) thing was that, unbeknownst to me, many bugs that exist in Japan are MUCH larger than they are in the rest of the world.  There’s a breed of wasp here that a) lives underground and b) can be about 1 ¾ inches long and ¾ inches wide (gggggiiiiiiyaaddddddddd!!!).  There are also dozens of stag beetles here, which are also popular pets.  Henry and Clara have raised them in the past, and are raising more now.

Incidentally, one word… MOTHRA!

After making our way back down the mountain and back through town, we met briefly with Keiko (Alphies wife and the mother of Henry and Clara), before heading into a local grocery store to requisition supplies for dinner.  Alphie explained more about Japan as we toured the aisles, and Clara (whose English is quite good) started speaking to me more.  There were lots of signs in the shop in English, or sort-of-English.  As Alphie explained, the Japanese often tend to translate into English very mechanically, so you end up with a phrase like “LIQUOR, tonight you go out to meet my friend LIQUOR” suspended over the beer/liquor aisle.

After getting foodstuffs, we trekked to their home.  It’s a beautiful wooden structure which Alphie built himself (with some help from Keiko’s cousin, a builder).  Next to the door was a wooden carving (also by Alphie) with the name of ‘Kornhauser’ emblazoned across it, along with some Japanese characters alo.  The inside of the home was also amazing, especially with the view of the mountains and the trees rolling out ahead.  He couldn’t have picked a nicer spot to build.

After resting my (very) weary feet for a moment, Keiko was kind enough to let fiddle around on her grand piano.  Not playing every day, I’m getting quite rusty, but it’s still good to play where/when I can.  I fooled around for a while, at one point playing along with the kids as they pantomimed me playing (it’s hard to explain, but it was terribly cute).  Dinner was served, and we all tucked into curry with chicken and rice, plus a salad (among other things), and after dinner we had tea and something akin to flan. 

During dinner, I discovered Henry has a penchant for dinosaur bones and Clara is quasi-obsessed with the green aliens from Toy Story (she has dozens of pieces of alien paraphernalia).  Both kids are very smart, and seem to enjoy the learning process (something it took me a lot longer to come to grips with).  Clara, switching effortlessly back and forth between English and Japanese showed me a globe she had that glowed in the dark, but it only glowed where there were cities and people (thus showing what the Earth looked like on the dark side, away from the sun).  It was quite cool, or “Ii desu nee!”  In turn, Henry showed me a bird skeleton that he and his sister had found in an old house.  It was remarkably well preserved and still resembled a bird.  I flashed back to finding a grasshopper exoskeleton in the garden when I was about 7, perfectly preserved, and immediately running to find a mason jar in which to store it.

Alphie and Keiko were the most gracious of hosts to have me for the night, and I was sad to leave.  Alphie, Henry, and Clara accompanied me to the train station, and I was just able to make it.  They waved goodbye to me as the train pulled away.  It was a good feeling, and it made home seem a lot less far away.  I missed the connecting train in Ishibashi back to Umeda, but another came along promptly and I was back on course again. 

I headed back to Bricks, and spent the evening drinking with Tohyama-san, an older business man/blues guitarist, and a local TV director and his girlfriend.  As before, the music choice was just that: choice.  What’s more, while talking with the TV director (whose name is Sunahara Kazuyoshi), it became apparent we both really liked jazz (hence our being there).  More talking, and it turned out fathers were both engineering professors.  After even more conversation, we discovered that both our fathers had taught at Brown, at the same time.  What an incredibly small world!  I’ve currently got an email out to an old colleague of my fathers, Barrett Hazeltine, inquiring about whither or not our fathers may have known each other.  After sitting there a little before midnight, I made my way to the subway and caught literally the LAST train back to Tennoji (and by a matter of seconds, too!).

The next day, mildly hungover, was spent mostly at the hotel.  I spent the evening working on my Japanese, and bs-ing with Franz, the Finn, whose last night in Osaka it was.  Once again, history was a topic of conversation.  He enlightened me to fact that one of Americas founding fathers, John Morton, a delegate to the Continental Congress from Pennsylvania and a signer of the Declaration of Independence was half Finnish.  While on the subject of the Declaration, I filled him in on John Hancock and his ‘I’ve-got-something-to-prove’ signature, as well as the corresponding expression for a signature deriving from his name.

It was good to speak in English, to both Franz and cousin Alphie.  Besides music, I’m also getting rusty at conversation in my language.  I’ve gone two or three days here at a time without saying much to anyone, though that’s not exactly a choice.  Besides feeling stupid and arrogant for not knowing the language, this mild loneliness is also driving me to increase my Japanese repertoire of phrases, words, and general understanding.  I’m still hovering well below kindergarten level, but it’s a start.

Monday I tried again to visit Osaka Jo, this time determined not make the same mistakes as last time.  To make a long story short, I did, although in my defense, I had also left my map in my room.  I tried navigating based on the last mental image I had of the map, but it was no use.  I gave up, walked around a bit, then headed back into town to go souvenir shopping (I’ve never seen more shopping arcades, malls, and underground shopping complexes in my life).  I walked maybe 20 miles that day, and it hurt.  I mean it really hurt.  On the last leg of the journey back to the hotel, my feet were in serious, serious pain.

Tuesday I mailed some stuff back to the US (the post office can be fun when everything’s written in a foreign alphabet and the guy helping you doesn’t speak English), then I tried for a third time to find Osaka Castle.  I took the Osaka Loop line, a slightly less expensive but slower train that, as the name suggests, is a beltway around the city.  I eventually made it to Osakajokoen (literally ‘Osaka Castle Park).  It’s the largest park in the city, and is covered in trees.  Birds, some of the tamest I’ve seen, dart in and out of the trees.  I made my way though the trees until I hit the moat.  Over the top of the outer barricade (there’s what’s called an Outer Baily and an Inner Baily, the later of which is where the keep, or rather the main tower, is) I finally saw the top of Osakajo.  It felt good.

Still, success was mixed with failure.  I had taken too long to get there, and by the time I made it through both gates and into the Inner Baily, the castle was about to close.  Content with a small victory, I explored the parks summit for a while.  Around 5, it started to rain, and the distant thunder claps told me the being on top of a small mountain was not a good place to be.  I left via the back slope, whilst behind me some loudspeakers blared the tune to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ for reasons I’ll probably never understand.

I caught the Osaka Loop to Temma station.  I had read there was a jazz club nearby that had a session, and I surrendered myself to paying to fee.  After some searching, I found the place, but I was early.  I went to a nearby grocery store, picked up some grub, and took it to a nearby park, eating my fried-fish, rice, and ginger ale in the last hours of daylight.

Upon returning to Jazz Ya (‘Jazz House’) and paying the fee, I took my seat up front.  The rent there must be very cheap, because the place literally lies DIRECTLY under an overhead train.  The sound is near deafening, and I can’t believe anyone would have opened a jazz club there.  Still, once the jam got going, everything was alright.  The house pianist and bassist were solid players, and some of the other jammers were terrific also. 

One pianist of note, an ex-pat Briton living in Tokyo named Simon Cosgrove, was astoundingly good.  He swung his ass off, had access to bank of tasty chords, his soloing was melodic and slick, and to top things off, piano was his double.  He’s mostly a sax player.  If I had a tail, it’d be firmly between my legs.  Simon’s a real nice guy, too.  He gave me his CD (which I can’t listen to, because this laptop has no CD drive), and his info, telling me to look him once I got Tokyo.  I plan on doing so.  He’s got a weekly gig at the hotel where ‘Lost in Translation’ was flimed.  Basically, he has my dream job.  That bastard…

I played six or seven tunes, had a beer, and made a few friends (including a singer from NYC, who gave me the heads up on a few sessions and clubs about town).  The session was run 100% in Japanese, but a girl named Miki (another pianist) in the front row was nice enough to translate for me, especially when the session leader was either telling me to stay on the piano or let someone else take a turn.

Wednesday I bought some lunch and headed back to Osakajokoen.  I sat down in a small orchard just inside the Outer Baily and ate my noodles and milk tea, shaded under what I assumed were cherry trees.  I should mention at this point that although Osaka Castle is a reproduction (built in the ‘30s), most of the monumental stone fortifications and two of the old turrets are not.  The pictures on the Facebook show their impressiveness better than I can describe here.  There was one rock just inside the main gate of the Inner Baily that stood about 5 or 6 meters tall and weighed about 105 tons (I think it’s called the ‘Octopus Stone’).  What’s more, as I learned later, a lot of the stones came from different parts of Japan.  Some even came from islands.

Once inside the castle, I was bit let down.  Although I was aware that it was reproduction, I thought it was one inside and out.  The outside of the keep looks astonishing, like something out of a movie (indeed, I read it was built by movie-set builders), but the inside is just a museum about the castle.  While fascinating, I was really hoping for a reproduction of a feudal-era Japanese castle.  Oh well.  I admired a lot of the pieces (mostly letters, some statues, a few screens, and three or four pieces of armor, among other things), and the view from the top before leaving.

I stumbled around the castle grounds for a while, then walked down to a place called SUB, another jazz club/bar.  It was quite a walk to get there, and it took me some time to find it.  I was just about to give up, when I noticed a small sign made from the cover of a Sonny Clark album sitting just inside the entrance to a subway station.  I followed the chord from a light that illuminated the fan down some stairs until I found the entrance.  I now understood the name SUB, as the club is literally IN a subway station.

The place is even smaller than Bricks and more expensive (700 yen for a beer, 500 for coffee), but I stayed there for several hours while the bartender played records.  She spoke pretty good English (although it was practically Shakespearian compared with my Japanese), and we talked a lot about music.  She’s a jazz pianist, also, and she’s visiting New Orleans next week.  The club itself is owned by a bassist, who was in New York that night.  He’s had the place since ’75, during which time folks the like of Ray Brown and Art Blakey played there (the latter of which’s hat was hanging on the wall).  There was a piano sitting at the far end of the bar, as well as a bass, a cello, and a drum set.  Later in the evening, I played the piano for a moment.  I’m really, really getting rusty.  I asked the bartender if she would play also, and she was gracious enough to comply.  She’s terrific, and I’d like to see her play with her quintet before I leave Kansai.

I stayed too late, and though I made the connecting train to Nipponbashi, I missed the last train back to Tennouji.  Feeling stupid for dawdling just to fiddle around on a piano, I started the walk back to the hotel (about forty minutes).  It was midnight, and some of the crazies were about.  Still, the route I took was well lit and there were enough people on the street to make it manageable.  I was just tired, and walking 2 miles was the last thing I wanted to do at that moment.  In a bad mood, I got back to the hotel and collapsed into my unmade bed.

Thursday (yesterday) I didn’t leave Tennoji.  I made my way East to the local zoo/park.  I strolled briefly through the roses in the park, meeting a strange man obsessed with the flowers on the way (he took a picture of me with my camera near a species of violet roses he seemed to referring to as “chroking brew”).  Eventually, I entered the zoo.  It pales in comparison to the SD Zoo and to the Wild Animal Park, but some exhibits were decent.  The lions were great.  Three or four times a day they feed one in a private room outside the main enclosure, but you can sit in this room and watch (through glass, of course).  I missed the last feeding, but I got to go inside and watch it pace around for a while from a distance of maybe 4 feet.  The other big cats were also nice, although, like almost every animal at the zoo, their cages were very small.

Near one of the tiger cages, some schoolgirls asked me what my name was, and where I was from.  For the next three minutes, I was the center of a lot of fast talking in Japanese that I couldn’t understand (although I clearly heard the words ‘Justin Bieber’ as least once), and was occasionally prodded to say something in either English or Japanese.  They all wanted pictures with me, and all had camera phones.  At their urging, I did individual shots with each one, flashing the peace sign.  It was embarrassing (I started to feel slightly akin to the nearby tiger), but funny.  I pulled out my camera, and someone nearby took a picture of me with all of them, just for posterity.

After that, I didn’t see much.  They started putting the animals away, but I got a good look at a giraffe, some Chinese wolves, a group of lesser pandas, the penguins, some California sea lions, two owls, and the most ragged-looking Polar Bear I’d ver seen.  Sadly, I missed the monkeys, the reptiles, and the elephants.  I left the zoo, got some grub on the way back to the hostel, and spent the rest of evening studying Japanese, both written and spoken.

That brings me up to date.  Today I’ve been studying Japanese, writing this blog, watching Japanese TV (there’s currently something on about school bands), and making plans (I’m going to Nara for the weekend).  I’m about to head upstairs to pack, then head up to Rug Time in Namba for another jam session.  Hopefully, it’ll be as good as the one on Tuesday.  I have to be careful about my playing, though.  I can’t go for anything tricky, less my hands falter and I play a bunch of out-of-time rubbish.  I just have to start out conservative and tasty.  It’s always better that way anyhow.

I suck at brevity.

Soupy twist,

Ed