August 6, 2002 - 9:32PM
Wes Ehrlichman

First of all I have an explanation: My email has been messed up because I was trying to send an email with my contact information in it to a bunch of people. For some reason Outlook didn't like this, so I probably won't send it out. The good news is that if you're reading this you can get my contact information right now by clicking in the upper right hand corner where it says "contact." Easy enough, eh?

Now that that's out of the way I have another funny story for today. Last last week I was told not to dress up for work on Tuesday because I would be going to "junbi suru" for the 1000 firecrackers that will be shot off Wednesday at Lake Imuta. "Junbi Suru" means preparations. This is the same word that was used when describing what we would be doing when I went to Miyanojô over the weekend, so I wore some shorts and a nice t-shirt so that I wouldn't look like such a slob when I was dancing. I got to work and was joined by a bunch of guys and one girl that were all wearing Jeans and work pants. It was clear that this type of preparations wouldn't include Hawaiian shirts and dancing. I asked what we would be doing and they replied "putting up tents" (actually that sentence's Japanese equivalent). Oh crap. This was actually preparations!

We got into a van and went to Imuta Lake. The first thing that I noticed was how beautiful it was. This is camp Material people. Check out the picture:

I think that's the van we took too. Anyways, the first thing we did was pull all of the tent stuff out of a small shack and put it in the back of a group of trucks. Then we hopped into the backs of the trucks and drove to where we would set up the tents. We set up around six small tents. I realize that so far this is boring for everyone that doesn't know me. If you do know me though you realize that so far this is more work than I've ever done in my life.

Next, I watched as the group flung around small striped stakes. I couldn't figure out what in the world was going on. They were tying together two striped stakes and handing them to me. I must have looked really confused. They kept razzmatazzing me about different things. The way people do when you start a job with people that all know each other but not you. Nothing too bad, just sort of initiation stuff. They kept trying to get me to talk to some white girl that was going into the nearby aquarium. I wouldn't have talked to her in America so I wasn't going to talk to her in Japan. Anyways, this kind of Razzing happened on and off for the whole day. I had fun with it though.

A few minutes later I figured out what the striped stakes were. They were using them to measure the length that a parking place should be. We were going to chalk the road with new parking places for the festival. This was sort of fun. We were making diagonal parking places out of one lane of a two lane street. Cars in Japan are really small so this can work. We made about 150 spaces then we went to lunch. Lunch is boring so I won't talk about that. I will talk about some nutty things that happened when we got back from lunch though.

When we first got back from lunch we started making parking spots again. By this time the groups had split up and I was with two guys and their boss in a group of four. We moved down the road and made around 50 more spots, then we moved to another part of the road. I guess we looked confident because the boss drove off and left us to make parking places. This time we were making them on a highway that was barely a two way highway though! I mean it, there is no way a good sized car could squeeze by if a car was parked in one of these spaces. I didn't quesion it though, mostly because I had no idea how! We made around 20 more spots and as we rounded the curved street it became even more narrow! The guys I was working with started asking each other whether we should make spots there. We sat down for a while in the sun. I noticed now that I was getting a really good tan! Not bad. You can really tell now if you look at where my watch was.

Anyways, we took a short break and the boss returned with drinks for everyone. The boss said that we can keep making spots. He even parked the small truck in one of the possible spots and we ran an imaginary tape measure in the area between his car and the mountain wall on the right. It was barely enough for a car to fit by, but he had us make a few more spaces anyways.

When we finished I was about ready to go home. We headed back to the campsite and my group left again. Again I had no idea where we were going, but there was no more space for parking spots, so that much was out.

Soon after, we reached our destination, which was right next to a pool. It looked so good. I've never wanted to swim as bad as I did then. Incidentally it was also next to the lake, which is where our next job was. In the middle of the lake was a long swimming lane rope running from where we were standing to the other side of the lake. Apparently the lake is 1 kilometer from one side to the other and around 3 kilometers in circumference. Here's a picture to give you a rough outline.

It's really big and our job is to pull the one kilometer swimming lane rope (complete with big white styrofoam floaties) out. This is where it gets really funny. If life were a cartoon how would you get the swimming lane rope out of the lake? I'll give you a minute here to come up with something.

Give up?

You tie one end of the rope to the back of a car, use a tree as a pully, and drive until the rope is completely out of the lake.

Apparently these people thought that life is a cartoon because that was what we did! The were some other problems that existed in our particular use of this method. First of all there was a big puddle of mud at the edge of the lake right in front of the tree we were using as a pully, so every one of the foam floaties had to go through the puddle of mud in order to get out of the lake. Second of all there was a short fence made of rope and a few pickets on our side of the tree that every foam floaty would have to make it over. These problems would have swayed me from using the car method, but not these guys!

We tied the rope to the back of the car and the boss drove the car a few feet. Immediately a section of the fence came down, but apparently it wasn't a problem because he kept on driving. We were trying to guide the rope away from the fence but it was burning our hands so we had to let it go. Soon, the car stopped and we began to manually pull out more of the rope. Once we had a sizable amount of rope out of the water the car started again and drove a few feet, only slower this time. This actually worked well until he reached the end of what we had pulled out. At that point he completely tore down the fence. He kept driving though. A lot slower this time though, and one of the workers was manually pulling out some of the rope as he drove. He pulled out a few more feet of rope and a big freaking brick flew out of the lake and almost hit him in the arm!

I was standing back and saw the whole thing. "Brick!" I screamed. The second worker chased the boss' car down, as he was out of sight and still driving, brick-in-tow. Apparently the Japanese word for brick is "block" because he was yelling "Block, Block!" as he chased the boss down. Shortly thereafter the car stopped going. The remaining worker and I began to manually pull the rope out again. When the other guy failed to return I asked how far away the car was and he said that it was almost one Kilometer away. About 20 minutes later the other worker returned. This time the plan was for him to call the boss on his cell phone when enough of the rope had been manually taken out and could be safely straightened out by the truck.

We continued to manually pull out the rope and eventually the worker called his boss for him to start pulling again. The truck pulled what we had manually pulled out and almost immediately after reaching the end of what we had manually pulled out another brick came out of the water. This time it was stuck on something and somewhere between where we were and where the truck was the rope broke! The worker called him on his cell phone to tell him to stop the car and when he hung up we manually pulled out the rest of the rope.

With the rope completely out of the water and no boss to be seen we washed our hands and started following the rope to its end, pushing it to the side of the street along the way. We reached the end and still no boss. He had driven further with it than we thought. One of the other bosses called us from a road one level higher on the mountain and we walked through some woman's driveway to meet him. She ran out, gave us some canned coffee, and apoligized. I'm not quite sure what she apoligized for, but I thanked her for the coffee and we met up with the second boss. He drove us to where the other half of the rope was and we pushed this rope to the side of the street as well.

If this story doesn't make any sense than you're understanding it very well.

At any rate, we were finished with the pool rope and we went back to the lake's entrance. We made some finishing touches by hanging some banners and blocking off the lake's real parking places with orange cones before heading home.

It was a lot of work, but tomorrow a lot of people will be there for the fireworks. I have heard that there are 1,000 fireworks. I can only imagine how good they'll be. Japan must have some insanely good stuff. I think it will all be worth it. I'll put some pictures of the festival up tomorrow.

Learning Corner - The Japanese word for Firecracker is Hanabi. Which translates to "Fire Flower." Here is how you write it.

Just thought I'd pass that on.