Voyage Junkie

My best Vanna White. In November I went to Club ID in Nagoya with a great group of gals.  The boys who get left behind may be wondering what goes on during so-called "girls' nights."  Well, we get all dressed up to go dance together, and we get hit on by pervy guys who don't have girlfriends because they're awful people.  That part is pretty well-known.  What makes this night special is all the Japanese touches we enjoyed throughout the evening.  Beware!  What follows is not for the faint of heart. Club ID is pretty large.  It had at least 4 upper floors and 1 or 2 basement levels.  Nicely, they provided lockers for our things, which was great since we'd all worn heavy coats and scarves to the club.  Each level of ID is differently decorated, and the poor bartenders are made to dress up in all manner of costumes.  Case in point: somehow Ronald McDonald and Marilyn-Monroe-done-Andy-Warhol-style go together?  Other levels includ...

For our group Halloween party, we decided to go to Nagoya.  We dressed up and headed to a soba restaurant, which ended up being extremely traditional and as such not amenable to doing something gluten-free past plain 100% buckwheat soba and tofu with salt.  The cook actually told me that if he made vegetables without panko (bread crumbs), they wouldn't be delicious, so he wouldn't make them for me.  I was halfway through the food they would bring me when the irony hit me: salt tofu and plain soba was definitely much more delicious without non-breaded veggies than it would have been with said veggies.  Oh well, I'll just stick to making my own soba from now on.  The party was still great fun! Matt went as Harry Potter, which you can see close-up to the left.  He dressed up for school on Monday, too, and his kids went nuts for the costume.  My costume requires a bit more explanation: I dressed as the titular role from the ballet Giselle . ...

  We went to Nagoya on our second cat cafe adventure, this time with a gaggle of our local friends.  To the left, you can see us pictured before our trip, in front of the promising sign of the cat cafe.  From L-R: Saya, her boyfriend, me, Rachael, and Mari (Matt is behind the iphone taking the picture).  We were all so excited!   Then we went up.  This cat cafe left a lot to be desired, in comparison with our other, wonderful, experience in Yokohama over the winter holidays.  At the cafe in Yokohama, the worker knew each cat and treated them all as individuals, with love and care.  Also, the cats all got along, and were allowed to roam free in the main room of the cafe, disappearing when they felt like it to the back room for some chow or a bathroom break.  At this cafe, the workers treated the cats with supreme disdain, and kept them locked into one room with stacked cages and litter boxes. What's more, we went at 5pm, and a...

We went to Atsuta Shrine on our way to what ended up being a strange hip-hop/clown performance/Japanese idol group/carnival thing produced by the Brother company in Nagoya.  Bit of a set-up, right?  Well, if you're looking for crazy clown pictures, I can't deliver - although one did say "hello" to us - so you'll have to settle for pictures of an incredibly old and famous shrine. The large performance hall. The grounds of the shrine are set in the middle of Nagoya city, but when you step inside, it feels like you've taken a portal away from the city.  The noise of cars disappears, and you're surrounded by thick woods.  Stone-lined paths wind through the trees, crossed by dirt paths, leading to small lesser shrines, museums, and tea houses on the compound's grounds. First, we walked through the museum.  This area of Japan is famous for its swordsmaking, and we looked at many ancient and fearsome examples.  Supposedly, the Kusanagi no Tsurugi , ...

Yesterday I went to see a solo dance performance at Aichi Arts Center in Nagoya with several of my dance colleagues.  An internationally renowned artist, Motoko Hirayama , presented After the Lunar Eclipse , a dance first premiered in 2009 in the same space.  In it, she collaborated with lighting designer Takuro Osaka  for an hour-long installation work pairing dance with light. Everything goes black.  Rhythmic pounding and crashes of bass instruments commence, and in the darkness the pounding reverberates inside my head.  A diagonal path of light appears, and in it, a dancer enters stage left.  Slowly, she is pulled toward stage right, performing a series of slow walks punctuated by regal lunges and rond de jambes.  Although she quickly approaches stage right, she constantly leans backwards as if she's simultaneously fascinated and frightened by what she'll find.  When she reaches her destination, she breaks into a robotic, doll-like dance...

To Live in the Moment Without Fear  is a work by Yuko Shinoda from Gifu, Japan.  Danced by six women, the dance investigates what it means to be a part of a community threatened by a disaster that takes a life.  Premiered June 5th 2011 in Nagoya, Japan, the dance features a strong movement aesthetic that draws from traditional Japanese dance as well as contemporary styles and contact improvisation.  Shinoda's use of space and timing, as her dancers flow in-and-out of solos, duets, trios, and unison, creates a sense that the dancers are unified and alone at the same time.  In the end, Shinoda's view of life is clear: we must tend to the fallen, but we must never surrender ourselves to fear while we are still alive.

Nadeshiko, Mako, Rie, Sachiko, me, Yuuko, and Shio On June 5th, I was in my first performance in Japan.  It was a crazy affair of epic proportions.  The process was a mixture of frustration and fun, as were all dance projects I've ever been involved in.  I danced with ModernDanceYou Co, a small company run by an adorable woman in her late 60's named Yuuko.  This makes the company name even cuter, because her name sounds like "You Co." Our dance piece was a reaction to the May 11th earthquake.  I saw the dance as a story of a community dealing with an imminent disaster, one they did not consciously know was coming.  Apparently the lights were a color that accentuated our earth-toned and water-colored costumes, making it appear that half of us were representing the earth and half of us were representing the tsunami. Getting ready was a trip and a half.  I arrived later than the others with Yuuko, and I was still ready a good hour before everyone ...

Matt with Roo, very kind and fluffy bunny. Over Golden Week, which is a week that has three holidays in a row (Tues, Wed, Thurs), we went to Nagoya again with a few friends.  This trip's specific purpose?  To visit a rabbit cafe located in a really pretty part of the city.  We discovered it when looking up cat cafes in Nagoya after visiting one in Tokyo.  Since Matt would love to have a bunny if he could, it made sense to visit the cafe and see if we enjoyed actual bunnies as much as the concept of bunnies. They did not disappoint.  The cafe is set up differently from a cat cafe, mostly because bunnies are a bit... dirtier.  The cats are allowed to roam around actual cafe space, but they can be trusted to hold their bodily functions until a litter box, and they're fastidious with personal hygiene.  The bunnies, while they can be trained to go in a specific place, don't mind peeing and pooping anywhere.  At one point, a very calm l...

A few days after the earthquake catastrophe, our friend Nik (featured on this blog in many previous posts) came to visit.  He escaped the rolling blackouts and possible heightened radiation of Yokohama by visiting first Osaka and then Gifu.  The next few posts will be dedicated to our many travels, but first, here are just a few Engrish signs we happened upon. On 3/17 we headed to Inuyama.  On the way to the train, we saw "Bakery Cannon."  Nik and Matt decided to go in and get lots of bread-centered brunch food.  It was unbelievable food, very French in style.  Matt had a small baguette with salami, then a foccacia pizza, then a melon pan.  Nik had a bacon and cheese croissant sandwich and a apple fritter-esque croissant-based pastry.  The name did indeed reference cannons, and purposely: the baker's name is Taihou , which can mean cannon in Japanese. In a few blocks from Bakery Cannon, we happened upon SPIC salon.  I may...

My kyoto-sensei  gave me two tickets to a modern art exhibit featuring Japanese artists in Nagoya, so Matt and I headed to the city a few weekends ago to see what it was like.  The exhibit was fairly large, covering an entire floor of an impressively large building.  First we visited a room that held many modern multi-media pieces including sculptures, screens, felt and acrylic paintings, etc.  It was a small room and relatively crowded, so I did not get to spend as much time standing in one place in front of the towering works of genius as I would have liked, but I fixed that problem by making a few cycles around the room.  I was very impressed by the use of color and space in most of the works.  Many of them were attempting to create works that were busier by far than any Western artist would even think about doing (in today's minimalist postmodern era).  Some succeeded and some did not, but in each case I admired the courage it took to create ...