Dragon Boat: The Half-Year-Old Post

I've been so negligent of my journal that I'm lucky Journal Services hasn't come out of the woodwork to give my site to a foster-blogger, somebody that will feed it more than a bucket of fish-heads every third fortnight. Am I bad blogger? Yeah, but that fact was established ages ago for anybody unlucky enough to be my friend on Livejournal (hell, even my Facebook account is gathering more dust than my Gamecube [which must have a lot of dust for those of you not in the know]). Still, I haven't totally abandoned it... just let it air out a little, right?

Maybe.

I actually had a pretty good idea of something recent to put in here, but wow, 6 months in Japan. It certainly doesn't seem like 6 months. I'd probably be able to establish a more tangible sense of the passing time if I had updated this thing consistently, which is what this ridiculously roundabout introduction is trying to lead into - the best moments of Japan '06! ...or at least a few of them, one at a time.

Behold, the majestic Dragonboat! A few people at the actual event told me the race originated in Japan when a Buddhist monk came over from China and for some reason had to win a boat race to keep practicing his religion, or to preach it, or something. Wikipedia says this theory is totally bunk, and I'm much more inclined to believe this fairly reliable internet source over whatever I heard earlier. The First Dragonboat theory doesn't hold water (hyuk hyuk hyuk), but just go with whatever puts your mind at ease.

Anyway, I had signed up for this dragonboat race over a month in advance, and it was some of my first contact with people I would be getting to know a lot better as the year went on. I had very little idea of how it would work or what would be involved, but that's par for the course as far as Japan is concerned.

"But Brett!", you say in an overly surprised way that just makes you look silly. "Are you sure that's in Japan? The picture is chockful of foreigners!" Astute observation, reader - you'll be awarded a gold star! It's in the mail.

That would be because this boat is the official GAIJIN POWER boat. Or at least one of two. We were able to fill up two entire teams with foreigners (and our Japanese coordinator, who filled his boat with all the biggest foreigners in an attempt to steal all the glory. AND the flag I made. Isn't it nice?... and brown?). Saga's foreigners apparently did the same thing last year, and actually placed in the top 10 out of 30-some teams, and that with little to no training. We thought this year we'd be a shoe-in with a wider selection and more practice. Or at least, that was the plan.

The larger part of the day was spent milling around. With so many other competitors, we had to wait through heat after heat of other racers before our chance. It was a nice chance to learn a bit more than just everybody's name with sometimes surprising results. It turns out one of the Chinese girls on our team went to school in Colorado. High school in Colorado. CHERRY CREEK High School in Colorado. The odds of us meeting in those conditions is pretty ridiculous, and though you would think that would result in a lifelong bond of ghost-story filled sleepovers and I Love Lucy-esque shenanigans, I'm not sure if I've even so much as seen her again since the races. Ah well - ce'st la vive.

When the first team went, we thought it would be a piece of cake for both boats to hit top 5. Not only did the gaijin boat get off to a wicked fast start, but they beat the other boats with probably more than a minute's lead - COMPLETELY ridiculous given the fact that it probably took no more than 10 minutes to run the entire course. The catch? All the other boats had smacked into each other at the turn, meaning the gaijin boat's lead was juuuust a wee bit skewed. Oh well - victory was victory.

I was actually on the second gaijin boat, Team Rakko (or sea otter. The first boat [and the one I made the flag for] was Team Tanuki, or raccoon dog). Most of you know that I'm not exactly a huge guy - while I'm tall, I favor the distance-runner's build over the football mass so many foreigners are famous for. Thus, I was relegated to the task of the rudder, which I did not mind in the least. There's a lot of pressure for you to not totally screw up the steering, but it's about 1/10th as strenuous as the rower position. And when the person with dragonboat experience says "hey, you have a good rudder's build," by God you work that rudder like it was making sneakers for you at 5 cents an hour.

Our race was a bit trickier. Our start was not quite as dominant, and actually left us fairly even with another boat. However, it turns out I'm a total bastard when steering a boat in a race, and I cut off the other boat like you would not believe. Seriously - after the race all of our rowers were remarking on how amazing it was that "the wind" had blown us directly in front of the other boat, which would have otherwise overtaken us. Hooray cutthroat dragonboatmanship!

The dashing vixen on the right is Elisabeth, one of the main coordinators of the whole dragonboat affair and Rakko boat's captain/drummer. It is unlikely the Kasekawa has seen a more waterworthy tamer of waves - the hurricane determination of a saltworn seadog is writ across her face in lines colder and deeper than the Mariana Trench. That guy on the left is Jonathan. It is not altogether uncommon for him to paddle. When the fancy strikes him. And that's just two of our motley crew!

Though this was early in my Japan stay, I was beginning to detect the "hey everybody drink beer" mentality that has been the undercurrent of every single gathering I've been to since. This made things more interesting as a few of the teams went off the deep end even if the boats were nestled safely in the shallows. During one race, the drummer dropped the back of his pants down to his knees and mooned the teams (none moreso than his own) as they rode across the finish line. A gallant display of dragonboatsmanship (MAN I love that word) that made me proud.

Although both of our teams went on to get defeated in later heats, the real highlight of the event actually happened when there was no racing to be had. An impromptu rainstorm left all the teams huddling under their various tarps and tends. The gaijin tent in particular was so jam-packed that sitting was not an option, and being right on the edge of our little refugee squatter's party let me watch as the dirt-covered ground underwent the obvious transition to mud-covered ground. As one patch of dirt in particular became more muddy, I began to think...which, when I'm idle, is a dangerous thing.

SLIP AND SLLIIDDEE! While this picture picture basically shows the upright, tool-crafting, fire-making brigade of hooligans we evolved into, the shot I'd REALLY like to show you is the bright eyed monkey who started these ill-advised escapades...me. The rain didn't seem to be letting up, nobody was walking in it, and who knew how long it would be until we were racing. Before even I knew what was going on, my shirt was hung over a rail under the tent and I was skidding fifteen feet on my chest through a thin patch of mud.

Emphasis on thin - I ALSO don't have pictures of this, but WOW did it hurt. It turns out that this isn't the Smooth Jiffy mud, this is Peanuts-N-Rocks Crunchy Jiffy mud. The first slide left me with a sore, red chest and bruised hip bones (too...damn...skinny...). The second slide (which seemed like a good idea) sheered some of this irritated skin away, and definitely did a number on the hips. The third slide (which seemed like a terrible idea, but wow can drunken Japanese people be persistent) left me feeling a little less sorry for all the poor people who thought that sliding through mud on your stomach looked like too much fun to pass up. They would cruise on the rock gauntlet once, realize how stupid it was, and give up. My three-peat actually left me bleeding a bit, although it was hard to tell through the caked rocks and mud that decided to hang out on my chest. Good times!

As muddy as we all got, the only reasonable thing thing was to leap into the river. This, too, was repeated three times, one time marked by me and another JET colliding dramatically in mid-air, another time by someone landing ON me, and the third by the new addition of a slew of Japanese people who decided to join us. This would prove to be the climax of our shenanigans that day: both of our teams lost, the rain let up but the weather remained dreary, and I got a bit of a sunburn. The nice thing about posting so late - I'm that much further from our defeat, and that much closer to sweet, sweet revenge.

Tis the Season

I've been even busier than usual, and thus my list of "Things Done" has even further eclipsed my list of "Things Blogged". The reasons are sundry and AWESOME (mostly), and you'll be privy to all of them in due time. But for now, a little aside to whatever few readers visit this site with regularity.

First off, sorry! I should be updating more, eh? Consider it a New Years Resolution!

Second of all, please donate to Child's Play! Child's Play is a charity that focuses on providing hospital-bound children with various games to improve the quality of their life, which means a whole lot when you consider why they might be in the hospital in the first place. The organization lets you choose which hospital you would like to donate to, and then provides an extensive "wish list" provided by those hospitals, further letting you specify your donation. Shoving money into a red Salvation Army bucket is a fine way to donate, but maybe the gift would mean more to you - and to the child - if you have chosen both the hospital AND the item.

The link, if any of you are looking to spread the word, is http://www.childsplaycharity.org/ . This has remained my favorite charity over the past few years for reasons that should be obvious to anybody who knows me, and so it's my honor to try and spread the word to all of you.

Thank you, best wishes, and Merry Christmas!

"What are you thinking about?" "Nothin`"

Believe it or not, it's been a long-standing dream of mine to run off to a monastery (preferably of the Asian variety, largely due to the awesome mysticism that surrounds them) and just meditate/train/whatever for a year or so, leaving everything else behind. There are quite a few reasons for this: I respect and - to a degree - yearn for that level of asceticism, never seem to have time to just sit and think about the deeper issues of life, and want to know if I could endure it. There may be a few other incentives I left out, but that's the meat of it. Needless to say, I was intrigued when I learned I might get the opportunity, even if it was for only five days.

Initially I was undecided on whether or not I should go. The whole affair ran at around $400 for only 5 days, and that was 5 days of sitting and doing nothing. Still, it was not a rare chance and the weekend was already one extra day long, so I would have to take minimal vacation days. I can actually pinpoint the moment I "decided" to go. I was talking to my friend Jeff, who likewise had ambitions of attending the Zen weekend. The exchange went something like this.

Jeff: "So how close are you to coming to this Zen retreat?"
Me: "Really damn close - 80 or 90%"
Jeff: "Well which is it?"
Me: "I think...yeah, I think it's 90% right now"
Jeff: *SLAP* "THAT'S your other 10%. You're lucky you didn't say 80%, I don't even know what I would've done then."

Is there any way to refuse a gesture like that? I submit that there is not.

So off we went. The trip itself was actually interesting in that A) it was my first time driving in Japan, and B) I haven't driven a manual transmission in a few years. I didn't tell my unfortunate passenger (who neither had an international driver's license nor knew how to drive stick) that I Googled "how to drive a manual transmission car" the night before we left. I actually learned a few things that I didn't know even when I was driving stick back in the day, so the search was well worth it. Also, as if those shenanigans weren't enough, we managed to get a parking ticket in the 30 minutes or so we spent eating while our car was parked in front of a nearby building. Some other foreigners who lived there said "it was probably okay," because a lot of Japanese people did it, but we must have missed the memo saying what time the ticketeer (as I henceforth like to call them) came, as a ticket we could not understand was posted on the windshield when we came back. Undeterred, we found our fellow Zen enthusiasts, and rode up into the mountains.

After about thirty minutes of blocking traffic and nearly driving off the road, we reached the temple. Tetsugyuji (translation - METAL COW TEMPLE[or Iron Ox, if you're lame]) has a quaint setup in the mountainous area of Oita. It has everything you'd need to survive - plus a meditation room, minus a bathing facility. The plan was to spend most of our time in the temple proper, ie the meditation room, where we would practice zazen for more than nine hours a day and sleep for less than eight. Super!

Although the sesshin (as such a retreat is called) has a cap of 25 people, it proved unnecessary - this year the retreat only garnered the masochism of six Zenners, Jeff and myself included. We soon learned that even though there was only six of us, the odds of all of us staying were slim. The head abbot, Reverend Silverman, told us that having everybody stay was the exception rather than the rule. It was around this time that I first began to grasp just how difficult it was going to be.

Our guide for those five days was one Paul Tesshin Silverman. He left Pittsburg at the age of 18 to fly to Japan and train in Zen, and was eventually ordained as the first non-Japanese abbot of a Zen temple. Now he does not live at the temple save the times of the year he runs the sesshin (I think it's twice a year for five days each time), but still acts as head Abbot. He seemed very much like a normal person when I first met him - so much so, in fact, that I did not guess he would be running the show after we left the station. But the more you're around him, the more you seem to realize there's an aura of content, control and purpose that directs all of his actions. But you don't understand this until a few days of zazen.

The last thing you need to know is what exactly zazen is, or at least the style we were practicing. Zen (and everything that I will say from here on out is still mostly armchair theory - this might be the only temple that does it this way, or it might be like every other temple) is the art of thinking of nothing. Nothing aside from what you're doing. The meditation involves thinking of nothing but your breathing, and I say this without exaggeration. The idea is that you sit on a cushion (in any style of sitting you like, although half-lotus/full-lotus/seiza are recommended), let your eyes relax (ie don't stare at any fixed point, but don't let your eyes close or wander either), and then...breathe.

Every breath should be deep, controlled, and tranquil. We were also counting every breath, but the catch is that the second you think about anything besides counting your breath - and I mean ANYTHING - you go back to one. And holy crap, is it ever frustrating.

*inhale*.....one....*exhale*...my leg kinda hu- DAMMIT!....*inhale*....one....*exhale*

The best part is that getting past number one is such an accomplishment it immediately leads you to think "WOW I'M PAST ONE! .... DAMMIT! ...*inhale*....one....*exhale*" I think my record was three, MAYBE four, but I'd be pretty lenient with myself to say that. I only once made it to twenty when I allowed my mind to wander the whole way through, although I tried many times. You quickly forget about counting at all if you let your thoughts swim around.

We first meditated the night we got there. It was fairly dark, a little cold, but we were fresh enough from civilization to not know or mind. After a paltry hour or so, we hit the sack, sleeping in the same place we had just meditated. Although I was in bed by 9:00 or so, I rolled around until midnight, and even then my sleep was not exactly fitful. Come 4:15am, Abbot Silverman ran down the adjacent hallway like a bat out of hell, ringing a bell as he went, waking all of us up to start our first day without solid foods, without speaking, and without bathing. Let the fun begin!

Our first real meditation block began at 4:30am. It was dark outside and it was cold. In my remarkable foresight I had only brought one thin pair of pants, a t-shirt, and a track jacket. You are also not allowed to wear socks inside the tatami room where we meditated, but it was just as well - your socks get a mighty funk when neither you nor them see any cleaning for several days in a row.

Only 15 minutes into the meditation I began to feel dizzy and nauseous. The cold, the lack of sleep, my numb legs and my hunger were all stacking on top of each other, and before I knew it I was being pulled up from the wall that I had fallen over headfirst into. I've rarely passed out before, although I'm not so foreign to the experience to not know what happened; but wow, was it ever hard to continue sitting in that position, hungry and cold, for another hour after I was pulled upright again.

I think I can safely say that this was when I most considered quitting. Yeah, I know, only 2 hours of meditation into a full three and a half days of it, but I was pretty shaken. When the session was over and we went on with chores (for my friends who know, it's very much like what you see in anime - running down the hallways with a rag on the ground, rapidly sweeping off the tatami with brooms, banging on the paper screen doors with odd dusters, etc) and finally had breakfast. As I said before, no solid foods, so we juiced a ton of oranges and carrots, and that was our meal.

Mmm...juice. Without any food at all, I wouldn't have made it - but I drank that juice like a fish drinks water, and a few full bowls found me reinvigorated. Once we started the second meditation (2 1/2 hours long interrupted only by 3 sessions of standing, walking in a circle while still meditating, and then sitting down and starting all over again), I felt a lot more confident about staying. It was probably for the best that I had such an awful experience within the first few hours - after that, whenever I considered leaving, it was very quickly followed by "well, at least you're not trying to headbutt a hole through the sliding door," and my doubts fluttered away like leaves in the wind (yes - it was that dramatic).

Every day was full of meditation, food preparation, chores (outside and in - in the middle of the day when it was sunny we would often go outside and weed the place, which is more or less impossible, but no moreso than counting to 20), a bit of eating, and one lecture from our resident Abbot. Routine sets in quickly with days like that, and even over just a few nights you begin to become accustomed to everything.

At least, most of us did. Two people left the very first day. One of them was the only girl in attendance, who had some recurring leg problem that made sitting in that particular fashion really painful for her. Or at least, that's my guess. The other guy, probably in his mid or late 20s, just couldn't hack it. We learned later that he rationalized why other people were staying while he was leaving, and told Silverman "Well, those two guys came all the way from Saga, so that's why they're staying..." which we found pretty funny later. Sure, we had come in the same car, and thus used each other as support for staying... but there ARE trains and buses that take us back home, should the need have arisen. This brought our numbers down to a paltry four. So much for the 25 limit.


You find a lot of ways to communicate when you can't talk. Pantomiming was huge, as was any kind of gesturing. We actually left with a lot of really good inside jokes that I'm laughing about even as I write this. Not being able to talk really only makes things more ridiculous, which - if you know me - really says something about how silly you can get just before bed, after all the meditation is done for the day.

Now so far, I've only told you about what happened around me...but inside my head is another story entirely. The goal of Zen is very simple, but difficult - it's to completely embody whatever task you set yourself to without considering a single other thought. When you are pulling weeds, you are pulling weeds. You're not thinking about how hungry you are or the food you'll eat or how much you'd like to sit down. You aren't even thinking, "I am only thinking about pulling weeds" - you just ARE. At least, this is the goal. I think I accomplished it on occasion and by accident, but it was always a flicker, and like so many things you destroyed it by examining it.

The same went for meditation. Your mind is a flurry of thoughts, and mine perhaps moreso than some others. My humor usually takes advantage of this by jumping to bizarre tangents all on its own, but for zazen meditation, this is exactly the opposite of what you want. The goal is 100% focus, completely undisturbed, unconcerned with everything that is not your present. It. Is. HARD.

But it's not a goal without benefit. As Silverman said, "we are absent from most of our lives," and in a way it's very true. Every single day we think of where we'd rather be or what we'll be doing or what we've done, with the result of wanting to be somewhere else. But what we don't realize is that by even thinking about those things, we remove ourselves from our present situation. We are no longer completely where we are meant to be, and it dilutes our present experience. This wandering can creep into any aspect of our life, which is why zen isn't a religion per se, but more like a philosophy or a discipline. It brings you back into your moment, back into your life.

To jump back into the practice of Zen, one of the most interesting parts were the daily one-on-one meetings you could have with Abbot Silverman if you felt up to the task. The first goal was to show that you had proper breathing. My first meeting proved that I had a lot of work to do on it, but the second time it was good enough for me to receive a koan. Almost everybody who reads this knows what a koan is, but doesn't realize what it's called. The best two examples: What is the sound of one hand clapping? And if a tree falls in the forest, and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? I was given neither of these koans, though the answers are probably completely different than you would think...I know that's what I found, at least. Here are the three koans I got in the time I was there -

You walk into a room. There are three tables. On the center table is a football, on the right table is a baseball, and on the left table is a basketball. Which ball is best?

The window is dirty. Clean it.

You approach a great castle. At the top of a castle is a flag. Is the wind moving the flag, or is the flag moving the wind?

I won't reveal the answers here, though as I said before, they are very, very different than what you would think. I had hours to consider each of them, and still the "solution" was difficult to grasp.

This post has gone out of control, so I'm going to wrap it up. I finished the course in its entirety and everything was glorious for the following week or two. Taking a bath was exquisite. The blandest potato tasted like filet mignon. Words came more carefully, their meaning felt more deeply. Unfortunately, this feeling was fleeting, particularly because real life grabbed me and shook me. I haven't had the time or presence of mind to sit since then, and it now feels ages ago. But I know that one day I will get a cushion, I will dim the lights, and I will sit and stare at a wall for an hour. When that's one of your greater ambitions, life comes easy.


Note: This post is super late in coming. The actual dates I went up to Ooita to do this is - October 6th - 10th. Also, this post is brought to you courtesy of Min Deng, who proved to be the final straw that broke this camel's back and finally got me plodding through to completion.

In my country there is problem

Let's cut to the chase - I'm a little drunk right now.

And that doesn't even cover it. I've had a LOT to drink. This is only weird for one reason - it's a Wednesday night.

My friend Nirav invited me out to a yakitori restaurant where he received special treatment maybe a week or two before for being so great at Japanese. So he decided to take me along for run #2, and a random bhuddist decided to not only join us at the table, but handle our entire beer tab...which only became large because he continued on INSISTING to buy more beer for us. I only understood maybe 20-30% of the conversation he had with Nirav, but I understood the part where he said "your friend is like an animal, and he reads your face for the reaction he should have," hahaha which was enough to make the guy realize that I wasn't COMPLETELY clueless. Anyway, several beers later he left, after which the owner of the place provided us MORE beer and bought us a taxi to go eat with him at a local gyoza haunt.

Another beer and a lot of sake later, we were still chatting at 2am. The TV happened to be showing some....ah...risque material, and when I commented on it in English, it happened to be the only thing our Japanese escort understood. Funny thing, fate. Still, he bought us more than our fill in gyoza, and we would not have paid one red cent if not for the fact that we hid (I'm not even kidding, we had to HIDE about twenty bucks) some money back at his restaurant to pay for part of our meal. Japan. Is. Amazing.

Anyway, as I said, I'm a little gone right now, and only posting because one SAM KORTZ (that's right, Sam, live in INFAMY) put me up to it. Hopefully this won't look so bad in the morning.

G`night everybody, I'll post more soon, I swear.

<3 Brett

Chotto mate, ne

I know I started this with ambitions of nearly daily posts and now I'm hardly seeing one a week, but let me assure you it's not for lack of effort. I have one post that's nearly done, but thought I'd whip out a little "one day in the life of" filler to let you all get an idea of how things roll here.

6:45-7:30am - Wake up, prepare a few things for class, etc, etc
7:30-8:00am - Bike to school.
8:00-noon - Three classes with class-preparation before and in between
noon-5:00pm - Speech contest. I've been training 6 kids for the past month, every day after school for about 1 hour and sometimes on Saturdays for 2 hours. Not a minute counts as work time. Today they finally competed - I had a kid place in every age-group. Yay!
5:00-6:30pm - Back to school, where I prepare for more classes with a teacher and try and organize my desk
6:30-7:00pm - Bike back into the city. It's drizzling, dark, and on the way my bike chain jumps off the gears twice. My hands are covered in grease.
7:00-8:10pm - Christmas Charity Party Board of Directors planning meeting. I am (hopefully) designing the flyer, playing the role of Santa, and taking charge of the decoration planning. Until the party (Dec 10th), I'll attend at least 5 more meetings, and probably more to talk to other volunteers.
8:15-9:45pm - Ballroom dance class. I just started up, but it seems like it could be fun.
10:00-present (around 11:30pm) - Get home, eat a simple dinner (something I had half-prepared earlier), clean dishes, etc...and hop on the internet.

I do have a lot to write in this thing, but right now I don't have a lot of time to do it. I hope you will all continue to check back, and leave posts - I will respond to the old ones soon enough, and it's good to know people are checking in.



Translation of the title - whoa, wait a second!

Natsu Matsuri

While I'm making you all wait for a recap of my Zen experience (which should come tomorrow), here's another blast from the past.

Natsu Matsuri! Or "Summer Festival," if English is your language of choice. Japan has a glut of festivals - even the most rinky dink village tucked away up in the mountains has at least one special festival to call its own, and more often than not has such a celebration for each one of the seasons. When you first get here, you think, "oh boy, festivals! I must go to ALL of them!", but after awhile, you realize that they mostly sport the same offerings. Food stands, a few dances, and maybe some drums. This isn't meant to suggest that the festivals aren't worth going to - it's just to say that they aren't worth going out of your way to get to. (Except for big crazy festivals, which we'll get to sooner or later)

As hot dogs are to America, so squid/chicken/octopus-on-a-stick stands are to Japan. They sell these things in abundance with a price tag you'd expect (ie. high, but barely not high enough to prevent you from buying it). Also in attendance are shaved ice stands, which aren't quite the same as the sad little sno-cones you get in the States. Asian shaved ice is usually grated to smaller, finer chunks, and the syrup selection can be intimidating. Now that fall is quickly giving way to winter, these stands are becoming a memory... but they are absolute godsends in summer.

I had to take a picture of these guys because their sticks looked too much like some kind of double-ended battle-mop, which invokes nostalgia of the funniest sort (note: If you were not my friend in high school, you will probably have no idea what I'm talking about. But just roll with it and pretend you do, then everybody wins). The Japanese really do make it a habit to clean up after themselves, so I guess translating your primary cleaning utensil into some kind of weapon is a logical step in the fight against dirt.

Aside from the street shows, there was also a huge stage on which a variety of groups performed to traditional Japanese music mixed with the occasional guitar or synthesizer. Some of the dances got pretty complicated, but that didn't stop me from losing interest and idling elsewhere.

Back on the subject of things you can buy at a Japanese festival, these huge beetles can be found in the strangest of places. During my first trip to Japan, there was a claw machine (or UFO Catcher, as they're called here) in which little plastic cages held live beetles for you to catch. At the matsuri, there were at least three stands offering the big black critters. It's a favorite pastime for kids here to catch the beetles in the wild and raise them over summer. Sometimes the kids will have the beetles fight, as I think there's something of a stag-complex in the horned insects. Regardless, the owners were more than happy to let me take pictures of their bounty. Also note that next year I hope to capture and train one of the bugs of my own. I'll take suggestions for a name when the time comes.

Last on the agenda: fireworks! I remember hearing a lot about the marvels of Japanese pyrotechnics in the States, but I have to say I was a little underwhelmed. There were the occasional surprising bursts of color and different patterns, but it was nothing I hadn't already seen in America. I guess it's important to note that Saga is not what most people think of when they hear the word Japan, and thus probably has hanabi-lite (hanabi = firework(s)), but something was better than nothing, and it made a good way to cap off the evening.

Well, that was the summer festival, which I think was somewhere around August 5th, 06. Sorry for the big delay - expect the next update soon.

You're Not Hardcore Unless You Live Hardcore

Unfortunately I didn't have time to post today...but I will go ahead and give you the heads up on what will keep me occupied this weekend.

Zen Sesshin - 5 days.

• Wake up 4am
• Morning meditation 4:15 – 5:45am
• Cleaning/ Chanting 5:45 – 6:30
• Morning meal/juice 6:30
• Break until 7:30am
• Zazen meditation / Dokusan 7:30 – 10:30am
• Break 10:30 - 11am
• Meal/juice 11am.
• Break 11:30 – Noon.
• Chores Noon – 1pm
• Lecture 1pm – 2pm
• Break 2pm – 2:30pm
• Zazen meditation 2:30 – 4:30
• Macha break 4:30 – 5pm
• Break 5pm – 5:30
• Zazen meditation 5:30 – 7:30 pm
• Evening soup 7:30 – 8pm
• Preparation for bed
• Lights out 9pm.

This splendid little get-together will be taking place in the mountains in an adjacent prefecture. There will probably be just a handful of us, with a max of maybe 20 or so, staying at a temple there, living a ridiculously simple life with 9 or so hours a day spent sitting in a meditative trance...or at least that's the plan. Don't expect any updates before the 11th unless I'm blessed with a spare hour tomorrow.


Tsutzuku. Zettai.