November 20, 2002 - 8:16 AM
Wes Ehrlichman

Please ignore the time at the top of this journal. In reality I wrote 90% of this journal on Nov. 20th, but didn't have the time to finish it until tonight. So the Journal title should read December 5th, but it reads November 20th instead. Oh well.

Christmas is coming soon it's about time to drop the bomb known as my list onto everyone. If you don't really know me that well don't be alarmed at the size of the list. I won't get anywhere near everything that's on it, but I like to put a lot of things on it so that I have some sort of surprise. By the way the bigger the number is in the ratings column the more I want that specific item.

(right click here and choose "save as" in order to save my list to your computer)

My friendships in Kedouin are pretty nutty for the most part. They all seem to fit into stereotypes that have yet to be invented. The most interesting of all people in Kedouin is perhaps the dentist. Perhaps the Mayor as well, but that's for another journal entry. When I first met the dentist he seemed a little nutty, but as I slowly found out more about him he just got more and more intriguing. Here is a good time to mention where I met the dentist, who asked me to call him "Hiro" which I will henceforth spell "Hero" because it looks cooler.

Every city and town in Japan, no matter how small has at least one festival every month. Usually more than one. It can be for anything. Last weekend there were two culture festivals and last month there was a sports days for every possible institution in the town. I went to the Junior High, the four Elementary Schools, and the town's sports day, but I skipped the town hall, the kindergarden, and the second one at one of the Elementary Schools. I thankfully missed out on October's rice picking festival altogether.

At any rate, after the town sports festival I went to an Enkai, which is at one time the best and the worst part of the festivals. Enkai's are drinking partys and if there's ever any reason to have a drinking party Japan is all over it like white on rice (hmm interesting choice of analogy there Wes). These drinking partys are good because there's free beer and you can meet a lot of Japanese people. They're bad because after a long day of not understanding what the heck's going on during some sort of festival I usually just want to go home and relax. The night I met Hero I felt more like going home and relaxing than usual.

During the town sports festival I had just been walking around all day talking to kids, eating flavored ice, and trying to keep busy. I participated in one event that day, and it was fairly low-impact, but I was still very tired. When we got to the enkai I was thinking that I just wanted to make an appearance and get out of there. I sat down next to all of the old women and started eating the enkai food. I was picking the fish off of the salad to make it edible when the mayor called me over. When I went over next to him and sat down he started telling me to drink more. I took a few more sips then I explained that I was planning on driving to the city the next day, so I didn't want to drink too much more (which was true). I took a few more sips though, and the mayor kept telling me to drink more. I wasn't obliging so he got up and talked to other people. A few more people from around town sat down next to me, including a man with glasses that spoke very good English. The man across from him held up the beer bottle and offered to pour me another. I motioned with my hands that I didn't want anymore, but he poured me a glass anyways.

The man who spoke very good English saw my hand motions and said, "Oh, you don't want to drink anymore?"

"No, I'm driving somewhere tomorrow."

"It's ok. You don't have to make excuses. I am ok with you being an individual. Many people in Japan aren't, but I'm ok with it."

That man was Hero and that's how it all began. It's kindof a misunderstanding of Hero's has that everything is an issue of being an individual with Americans, but the fact that he is willing to put aside his Japanese group tendancies to accept me really makes him a great guy.

I spoke to Hero for the rest of the night as he batted off at least five more people that tried to pour me more alcohol. When the party started to die down he asked me to come over and meet his family. He said that his wife would be at the place to pick us up soon so we went outside to wait. While we were waiting for his wife to show up we started walking back to his house. Eventually we ended up at the front door. It turns out that his wife had been drinking and couldn't pick us up anyways.

Hero's family lives in a huge (for Japan) log cabin-looking house very near the Junior High School. When you first step into the house, you are greeted with a few shelves with various cool looking clay cups and pots in front of you. A few steps further into the house you'll notice that the entryway is actually a long hallway that stretches around for seemingly the entire front half of the ground floor. Around the corner, included in the entryway is the pottery wheel where the exquisite pottery was made. Hero's wife, it turns out, has a penchant for art, and not only does she make some fabulous pots and cups, but she also does some photography (I think... I still can't totally understand our conversations).

When I finally reached the end of the entryway and took my shoes off I noticed that the entire indoors of the house is made of wood. From the floors to the ceiling, everything including the dinner table is made of wood. It makes the house feel very interesting.

We sat down and as his wife and kids were finishing dinner and they offered me some tea, some oranges, and some crackers. Their family seems to always have amazing tea brewing and some really good oranges on the table. I recognized one of his kids from middle school. I had taught his class earlier in the week. We sat and talked for a while as his kids finished eating and eventually I spotted a beetle that had been preserved in plastic near the staircase.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Oh, you think that's interesting?" he said. "Have you seen the beatle at daigo middle school? That's mine." I had seen a beatle in his sons class at school. They made it a point to show me and it was a pretty big beatle. Around two inches long and an inch and a half wide.

"Yeah, It's very cool," I said as he took the plastic beatle down from its spot on the shelf and handed it to me. This one that was encased in plastic was at least 4 inches long including the massive antennae on the front.

"So you think this is cool?" he said, studdering on the word cool.

"Yeah, very very cool," I said again.

"Good, let me show you something."

He started to take me upstairs for the tour of the house when something caught my eye. They have a fireman's pole in the middle of the kitchen so that the kids can just slide down whenever dinner's ready or whatever. How cool is that?!

When we finally got up the stairs something very large and american caught my eye. These guys were the first people I've seen in Japan to actually own an X-Box. To be fair they also had Playstation 2 and Gamecube, thus putting them very high on my list of cool people I've met since I got to Japan. It's supposed to be for the kids apparently.

He brought me around the corner and to a big dresser. He opened a few of the drawers and inside of each of them were various Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals. Then he finally reached the drawer he was looking for. He opened the drawer and inside were about 20 or 25 different bugs encased in plastic. Everything from an inch long bee, which he apparently found in Kedouin, to an Egyptian scarab beetle, to various dragonflys and millipedes. He asked me which one I liked and I pointed at one. He told me that he would make me a name-stamp out of it and bring it to me at school on Monday. Sweet! Free bug encased in plastic name stamp.

"Do you think these are interesting?" he once again asked.

"Yes, they're very cool."

"Cool?..." he muttered to himself, and we continued on the tour of his house.

Since his house is so new and so wooden his tatami room contained only two tatami mats, and they were set into the middle of a floor that was otherwise wood. This struck me as very innovative for Japan. I've been in houses where every room has Tatami floors except for the kitchen. The two floor tatami makes the house almost seem even more modern.

He continued taking me around the house, showing me every room including the kids' play room (complete with transformers), and the place where his kids and wife sleep.

"Where do you sleep?" I asked him.

"Oh, let me take you there," he said, and we walked into a small room on the second floor.

"This is where I sleep," he slid open a sliding door that led into a small room about half the size of my bedroom at home. There was a small lamp, several reading books, and a closet door.

"And this..." he flung the closet door open, "is my hobby."

The closet's walls were lined with shelves stacked with fish tanks with no water, preserve jars with celophane strapped over them, and the plastic buckets that multi gallon ice cream comes in at the grocery store. I didn't even need to ask what's inside, but I was told anyways.

"I have many many beatles in here."

"What in the world?!" I said out loud, censoring what I was thinking.

"I have them color coded by who the father is, see this small jar is red, and this fish tank is also red. So the one in the fish tank is his father."

He took the lid off of the fish tank and inside sat a 4 inch long horned beatle. Yes, horned beatle. I was freaked out but intrigued at the same time. "It's safe," he said as he pet it on the back with his finger. He then asked if I wanted to touch it, and since I'll probably never have the experience of petting a beatle that's as big as my hand I went ahead and touched it. It was pretty much what you'd expect. Just a hard shell with whatever a beatle actually consists of inside of it. It was pretty nuts.

After this we went back downstairs and drank some more awesome tea and ate a few more oranges. I had a conversation about guns and freedom as well. There's a common misconception in Japan (and much of the rest of the world actually) that everyone in America carrys guns. It's so strange to me that this misconception exists, but I don't ever watch American TV shows from an outside perspective.

Hero's perspective is that Americans ability to express their opinions freely without persecution is a good thing, but he doesn't like the fact that guns exist. I tend to agree with him for the most part. I did get the chance to tell him that not everyone in America has guns and that I had never seen a gun outside of a policeman's. This isn't totally true, but it's much closer to the impression that they had so I told them. The truth is that I once saw someone with a gun hanging out of their blue jeans when I worked at the Electronics Boutique in one of the shadier malls in Indiana, and if you count rifles and stuff I've seen a few. But these were all things that I just happened across. Not something that affects my every day life. I don't know anyone who's ever been shot by a gun outside of war either.

I also disagree with the fact that in Japan you aren't allowed to speak your opinions. I think that it's a lot closer to America here than the Japanese people do. The bigger problem is most definately in Japan's self confidence as a country. But America pretty much took a lot of that away from them after the war, so it's somewhat understandable.

At any rate. I had a great night and on my way out I was asked to come back over and do some pottery in few weeks. That's a journal for another time though...

Oh yeah! I almost forgot! Here's my bug stamp: