On the Loss of Hearing and Other Senses
10月23日 (土) 5:32pm JST
All in all, a weekend of considerable highs and lows for my sense of hearing.
It started with the Deaf School anniversary on Friday. Or maybe before that, at the bus station, when a Japanese man in a sweat suit with drool coming down his face approached me and asked if I speak English. I wasn’t in the mood for it and answered all his questions in Japanese until he finally left. It was a kind of jerk thing to do, but objectively I wasn’t being more of a jerk than him. The difference was that I knew I was being a jerk. Anyhow, it was one of many situations this weekend that deafness could have prevented, for good or ill.
The anniversary itself consisted of a long ceremony, during which I struggled to stay awake and bow at the right times. At least I got to see half the school bowing to the Japanese flag when they went on stage. I purposefully didn’t sing Kimi ga yo, if for no other reason than it inaccurately depicts the process of erosion. And to think, my grandfathers had to kill or be killed against these folk.
After the speeches, there was a break and then the Junior/Senior High play. It was an impressive spectacle. They had great costumes, props, backdrops, “special effects,” and what not. Of course, the dialogue consisted of Japanese with mangled pronunciation, but they had a computer with PowerPoint in order to project the script on a screen next to the stage. They also used it during the anniversary ceremony. This let the audience follow along pretty well. It was your basic plot really: Chinese girl leaves home, meets a hermit, is told to get gold from a rock, wastes the money on parties, winds up broke again, tries to become a disciple of the hermit, is told not to speak, ends up crying out when a demon king tortures her mother, goes back (there was just an earthquake as I wrote [ed.: aka on 10/24]) to the village and lives happily ever after. It’s a story we’ve all heard a hundred times before. The costumes were all colorful and Chinese-y (and thus exotic, unlike the kimono beclad women in the audience). They had multiple spotlights. It was definitely better than any of my high school plays, but that may be more because my school sucked than anything else.
After that, a ballet company from someplace came and danced for us. The dance “ＨＡＰＰＹがやってくる” was bizarre, and the shear number of dancers in the final piece can only be called Morning Musumesque. I think that I hadn’t heretofore thought about ballet as a dance in the same way that break- and dirty- are dances. However, reflecting on it, I can see what a bunch of dirty old Parisian men could find interesting about skinny girls in skin tight outfits jumping around on stage.
After that, I didn’t have anything to do, and I just hung out until quittin’ time.
10月24日 (日) 9:34pm JST
Friday afternoon, I went to a Zoobombs concert in Kanazawa. I didn’t have a map, and I hadn’t consulted the online directions in a while. Further, I had never visited Kanazawa before. So, I set out from the train station, heading south west and along river banks. I continued going a long like that for a while, then figured it was worth going into a shoe store to ask if they knew anything about the venue. Well, my senses of hearing and Japanese must have decided to collaborate with each other this time, because eventually they worked out what I wanted and found the name of the club in a phonebook. They guessed it was a 40 minute walk from the shop, or maybe an hour and a half if you don’t know the way. So, I ended up giving in and shelling out the ¥1,000 for a cab ride. The ticket was ¥2,500, the return cab was ¥1,300, the new Zoobombs CD was ¥2,700, and the round train fare was ¥1,140. Pricey stuff, but it was still cool.
The opening act, Peal Out, was insane. They created not a mere wall of sound, but a fortress with a moat and sharpened pikes. My left ear is still ringing. I couldn’t understand most of what the lead singer said/sang/shouted, but I instinctively understood his rock and roll swagger. The man was clearly and emphatically dangerous. He was skinny, with a ワイシャツ and tie, big poofed out Japanese Elvis hair, and huge gold framed sunglasses that he cast on the floor during the second or third song. When he dove into the crowd or rose his guitar up into the air, there was something powerful about the experience. When he said, “[The party won’t start with the Zoobombs— It’s already started!]” you knew he meant it. Very Dionysian! The thunder and tsunami of drum, bass, and guitar turned the crowd to some (mild) moshing. Around then, I realized that I was the only gaijin in the crowd (as I had been at the Deaf School as well), and that I could easily flatten half the women in the crowd with my heft.
The Zoobombs came next and did well. They stretched their songs songs out into a Mahavishnu Orchestra-esque set, so when they announced, “[This is our last song,]” the crowd let out a unison cry of, “Eeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhh!?” They responded, “[Well, it’s a long one,]” quite truthfully. The lead singer, Don, has soft, Koizumi-like features, but was still capable of getting keyboardist Matta’s attention with a smack to the head. Later, he started playing her keyboards from the wrong side both with and without her.
All fun, but yeah, I still can’t hear right.
10月25日 (月) 10:03pm JST
Saturday morning, the trend of bus stop encounters continued. A person was trying to ask the bus driver how much to get to the stop for the Deaf School, but since he was deaf, he mangled the pronunciation too much for the driver. So, I chimed in with “¥310″ and the driver was like, “[Yeah, ¥310.]” But since I was standing behind him and thus out of sensor range, I don’t think he noticed me then. Of course, we both got off at the same stop, so we ended up spending a fair amount of time trying to communicate. I eventually took it that he was mentally handicapped. Or maybe he just has an unusually strong interest in talking about the current time in Athens for no reason. Anyhow, he was apparently an alum come back for the school festival. Nice guy, but communication was sort of a chore.
Eventually, there were some more speeches then plays by the kindergarden and the elementary school before a repeat of the Junior/Senior High play. The preschoolers just flapped their arms around as part of a folktale about how the birds got their colors and the crow got stuck with black. The elementary school did a version of Snow White. One boy ended up doing the parts for both the wicked witch and the prince, for lack of more qualified actors. However, along with other changes to the story to take out death and sex, it made hash of the plot. For example, why was a wizard so interested in being the prettiest person in the world? And why did he ask the hunter to just take Snow White out to the woods, but not to kill her? And then why was he surprised when she was still alive? And then in the end, Snow White wakes up when the prince just sort of walks up to her. So why do they immediately get married after that? As part of the wedding scene, they unfurled a banner congratulating the school on 40 years of being around, and that was nice.
The second performance of the Junior/Senior play went similarly to the first, though the boy who entertained the Chinese girl during her wastefully rich phase by using a Chinese top messed it up on his first try, which was a shame. Overall though, it remained interesting. Except for the whole voice acting thing, it was really well done. Especially things like the hermit’s Pai Mei beard.
So, basically after that, I ate a ton of Japanese sweets, saw the deaf haunted room, and went home.
That night, while writing in my diary, Niigata Prefecture had a 6.7 earthquake. At first, I wondered if my neighbors were having sex. Then I thought that my apartment is too concrete to transmit such a vibration. Then, I went on the porch, but saw no panic in the streets. So, I surfed channels for a while before I finally confirmed my sanity. After that, there were a number of aftershocks. They felt like a momentary lightheadedness from standing too quickly, or a slightly unbalanced washing machine in the next room. It was only magnitude 3 here, so my suspended ceiling lights barely even swung. I spent a while glued to a website that showed pictures of the latest seismological data.
By ten o’clock, the aftershocks were long over, and I went to a dance party at the Brazilian club. That was pretty fun: drinking, talking, busting a move. I ended up going home early (2am) so that I could rest up for the karaoké competition in Toyama on Sunday.
10月26日 (月ー火) 1:19pm JST
I got up around 7:40am, onto a train by 8:30, to wait around Toyama for the rehearsal, that was supposed to be at 9, but turned out to be any time before the show started at 10. Things were pretty disorganized in the morning, but eventually, I did a mic check, and people started gathering.
They had built a stage in the plaza directly across from Toyama station. In the area in front of the stage, there were a bunch of folding chairs for the audience. On the rear edge of the stage was a single row of chairs for the contestants. All around the stage were booths for various international exhibits, mostly of native soups. There was a little TV and mic stand at the front of the stage for participants to read the words off of.
The participants were surprisingly diverse. Other than we three Americans, they managed to round up a Chinese, an Indonesian, a Korean, a Serb, a Paraguayan, and a Brazilian.
I went third and sang “Flower of Carnage” by Meiko Kaji. I did all right… but everyone else sang enka too, and I was too sober to really knock it out of the park. In the end, one of the announcers for the program ended up wining. Which was a total fix. Or so I consoled myself. T--- compared it to the sham of the English speech contest, in which an unremarkable boy ended up winning, while better competitors failed to place. Of course, T--- was too worn out from the Brazilian party to go, so it was just H-sensei and I. She said I looked different since I was half shaved and wearing camo pants and a fake pleather jacket. Afterwards, she bought me a conciliatory bowl of Borsch to help ease the pain.
If I do it again next year, I’m singing SMAP.
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