Day of Fried Things on Sticks

Happy Halloween! Not that today felt like it much to me, although the weather has finally begun to act like late October. The big news today, instead of Halloween, which the gaijin did celebrate in their own way, was Gaidai Sai.

Gaidai Sai is our school’s culture festival, much like the one I went to a Momoko’s school. It started today, and will be running all weekend. Like the other bunkasai, this one featured many small booths selling food run by the various clubs on campus. Everything was decorated, with crepe-papered windows, banners hanging from buildings, and even an intricate paper mural of dancing elephants posted on the auditorium stairs. Very cool. So in my two free hours after speaking class (which several people skipped, probably to be at the festival) I walked around with Jessica from Witt and explored the festivities.

College students are much more aggressive than middle school students about selling their products. You really can’t go more than ten feet without getting accosted by someone in an outrageous costume asking you to buy their club’s particular fried-thing-on-a-stick. Eventually I stopped listening to the sales pitches and just smiled in a vaguely “I’m pretending I don’t speak a word of Japanese” kind of way. So it was fun, but very loud and crowded. I was glad when Leslie and Jacinthe got out of class, because the four of us had lunch at McDonald’s, and it was nice to get away from the main crowd. Unfortunately, McDonald’s was packed with families with small children, because the festival is open to everyone so a lot of the campus neighbors come.

Art today was pretty cool; we’re studying the Fujiwara, or Late Heian, Period, which is a really interesting time for me. In particular, we talked about the Byōdō-in, so it was cool to get the history behind a place I’ve visited.

In Film and Literature today we watched a couple of cartoons from World War II. First was "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips," which was the most horrifically offensive thing imaginable. Bugs Bunny—the Bugs Bunny, like in Space Jam!—was on an island in the Pacific selling fudgecicles embedded with live grenades to identical, monkey-like Japanese soldiers, saying, “Here’s one for you, Bow-Legs! Here you are, Slant-Eyes!”

Later we watched a Popeye cartoon called "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap!" where a small fishing boat turns out to be but a small part of a submerged Japanese warship run by a group of, again, identical, monkey-like Japanese men who keep saying things like, “Vely solly, vely solly.” Then we contrasted it with another disturbing, albeit in a different way, reinterpretation of "The Three Little Pigs” called "Blitz Wolf" in which Adolf Wolf wages war against the pigs. There were no racist caricatures of the Germans, only specific jibes at Hitler. It was interesting. Also, there was some really bizarre phallic imagery going on. Not sure what that was about.

On the way home I grabbed some mediocre takoyaki from a booth at the culture festival. I took a nap, and got ready for the evening. With it being Halloween, especially, I wasn’t going to stay in on a Friday night. So William and I had planned to round up some friends and meet for karaoke at 7:00. Too bad neither of us could find other people to come! Luckily, right when we met up we saw a group of our friends who happened to be off on their own karaoke mission, so we joined them and headed to Hirakatashi for singing at a place called Ring. Like I said, many of the foreign students were celebrating Halloween, so for this outing Chris was dressed as what he said was a raccoon but what I think was a red panda. Tammy and Jamie were maids, and we also had a cat. Jamie, being a guy, had to get me to readjust his sock-stuffed bra for him. Oh, Halloween....

Drinks are expensive at Ring, so we stopped first at this pretty cool izakaya where everything costs ¥280. We got a few cheap drinks each and split some bar food. (Really, I think I’ve eaten more fried-things-on-sticks today than I have ever before in my life.) The French fries were good, and so was the thing that tasted like meatballs with mayonnaise. We also got something that I suspect was fried chicken skins on a stick, although I didn’t try it so I’m not sure. By the time we finished eating and were ready to head upstairs to the karaoke place, about half of us, including me, were ready to go home. So I took the bus back with Brian, showered, and now here I am.

I’m getting up early tomorrow so I can go to Nara (or, as Dad has taken to calling it, Narnia) to see the deer in the park, go to the annual Shōsōin exhibition at the art museum, and see Tōdaiji. I’m pretty wiped out because I also woke up early today for a Skype date with David, so I think I’m going to go to bed now.