Kanpai is the Japanese equivalent for the English word "Cheers." This fall, I will be attending Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. The following accounts are the events of my journey as they unfold.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Tell your kids...sChOoL is cOoL

*Note to self. Do not attempt to write blog after consuming any amount of alcohol.

If any of you have read my last blog post, you will understand why I needed to remind myself this.

Today I am not Tequila Tuff, and that's a good thing, because I got a lot to talk about.

I want to rewind back to mid-December. At Sophia University I am enrolled in three courses; language, literature and leligions.

Haha, I know its :"religions," I just wanted to keep the alliteration.

One of the assignments of the religions course, was to get with a group, attend a Japanese shrine/temple festival and then give a presentation to the class, detailing those events.

My group went to a festival called Gishi-sai, at Sengakuji, in Minato. The festival honors the true story of 47 ronin (leaderless samurai) that avenged their master's death and then eventually were ordered to commit seppuku, which is a ritual form of suicide. Despite what you may think, this was considered an honorable death for warriors. (Has anyone seen The Last Samurai? Great movie BTW)

If you want to know more about the event, just type in "Forty-seven Ronin" in google and read the Wikipedia page, it is very interesting.

At the temple are the actual gravestones of these Ronin and so we went to pay our respects, but also to indulge in some good foods and to see the parade. There were many vendors, selling souvenirs, food, and sweets and many other things.

Here are some pictures from the event:

This picture was taken shortly after we arrived and we had just entered the main temple area, and if you look to the right, those tents set up are the just a few of the vendors I talked just about.



We still had some time to kill before the parade was scheduled to start, so we decided to go visit the gravestones of the fallen warriors.







This was the line that lead to the gravestones. Good thing we had plenty of time before the parade because it took nearly 40 minutes before we actually made it to the gravestones.













At the entrance they were selling bundles of incense to place as an offering to the gravestones. I did not buy any and almost immediately regretted it. Fortunately, an older gentleman was kind enough to offer me some.

Burning incense is a very common practice in Japan when visiting temples, family gravestones, etc.





After visiting the gravestones we went back to the main temple area to wait for the parade to arrive.





The parade had started at another temple across town, and ended at Sengakuji. The parade represents the actual path that the ronin took, way back in 1703. They brought the head of their master's enemy and offered it to his tomb.







This dude looks so cool. I want this outfit and his swords.













I think its great that I was able to attend this festival for a school project. I never thought that school could be this much fun. Also, our presentation went well enough so all in all everything was worthwhile.

This happened over a month ago, so you can see that I am running behind on my blog posts. There is still more I want to talk about regarding my trip to Osaka, and some other things I have done over the last couple of months that I have not shared yet.

However, I am in the middle of exam week so I am going to wrap things up here. After this upcoming Monday, I will have almost 2 and a half months off before the start of the second semester, so I will have plenty of time to catch up on posts.

I am going to leave you now with a picture of what I was snacking on while I was writing this post.

These are called onigiri. Simply put, onigiri are clumps of rice that can contain a variety of inner contents and then are typically wrapped in seaweed.

Before you say, "ewww gross seaweed" I got to tell you I would probably be dead with out these things. To be completely honest, for the first week or two that I was in Japan, I didn't even know people were supposed to eat the seaweed. I thought it was just some sort of thing that kept the rice balls fresh. Anyway, after I tried it a couple of times, I really came to like them.

Onigiri are sold everywhere, and when I don't have time to cook, oh wait I never cook.... When I don't have time to go somewhere to eat, I usually grab one or two of these to hold me over.

The one that is partially eaten has salmon in the inside, and then the unopened one has cod.


I am really going to make an effort to put up a couple more posts next week after the semester ends, but for today, this is all I have time for....