The streets and subway station were more barren than I’ve ever seen them before as I walked to our first culture class. I was among the first of the Americans to arrive at the KCP building, which had people working in the main office even on a Sunday morning. It initially seemed as if there were only going to be six Americans attending, since attendance in the culture class is basically optional if you decide to audit the class, but nearly all of those from the orientation eventually showed up and filled the desks of one of the classrooms.

The room had small posters of major historical figures: Emperor Meiji, Commodore Perry, Francis Xavier, Tokugawa Ieyasu… There were also posters of Noh and Kabuki plays. The instructor for this class, Mr. Koji Yagino, soon arrived as well. He was 11 when World War II got over, meaning that he is about 75 years old. He spoke English competently, but with the strong Japanese accent that is very difficult to shake. He studied English for a long time, but he had never had a native English speaker teach him English. The demand for those native English speakers, he said, is still as necessary today as it was back then. And here I was starting to wonder when the Japanese would get sick of all these Americans coming to Japan to teach English. It turns out that it’s a black hole of employment need. Especially since the government has recently passed a law to go into effect in a few years that extends the required age for compulsory English education from the three years of middle school to include six years of elementary school. The demand for English teachers will get even larger. Not a bad way to make some money after college, I would say.

As for the lecture itself, we were told that it would be a preliminary lecture on Kabuki in preparation for the performance that we would watch in the afternoon, but Mr. Yagino seemed to want to cover everything else about Japanese culture under the sun before finally playing a VHS about Kabuki during the last half hour. He spoke with a ton of enthusiasm, like someone who was really happy to be talking about something he loved. He talked about everything under the sun, so the best I can do is run off a list of things he mentioned. Although he spoke with a ton of authenticity, and I would hate to second guess anything he said, I have to note that most of what he said was the first time for me hearing it. It may or may not be 100% correct, but I’ll assume it is until I hear something otherwise.

*He learned baseball from an American soldier two months after the war. (He joked that he was Japan’s first baseball player)
*The reason they love baseball is because General MacArthur said that to know baseball is to know democracy.
*Women loved democracy because it meant equal rights for them, rather than the near slavery they experienced
*At some exposition in Osaka in 1970, KFC and Coke were introduced as “the thing to eat and drink together.” Mr. Yagino was quite taken with this.
*As a result of Western food’s proliferation in Japan, the average height of Japanese rose 10 cm from after the war until now.
*Smoking in Japan is a very profitable monopoly by the government, and the minister of health says things like “Japanese smoke much more than Americans, and have a longer life span. Thus, smoking = good for you.”
*He said that 90% of Japanese adult males smoke. (It’s actually 43 percent, but still)
*Japanese teachers have a screwed up way of operating. They push rote memorization very strongly. As a result, Japanese students are very intelligent, but they “can’t come up with their own ideas.”
*As a result, Japanese companies all steal ideas from other countries.
*”You can trust Japanese 95% of the time, but you must watch out for that 5%.”
*There is an earthquake once a month, that lasts about 5 seconds each.
*There are over 60 active volcanoes in Japan.
*Japan is the size of California, with half the population of the entire United States.
*Shinto was the original religion of Japan, but Buddhism soon arrived from India via Korea. One of the emperors consolidated the two so that the “good things” would be covered by the Shinto tradition while the “bad things” would be done in the Buddhist way.
*The Emperor’s family is screwed up. So, the current Emperor is Akihito. He has two sons. The eldest one has one child, a daughter. The younger one had two daughters and then finally a son in 2006. They absolutely would not let the eldest son’s daughter be an Empress, so instead she will be the head Shinto priest at the shrine in Ise. Currently, Akihito’s elder sister (who has to be in her 70s) is the head priest, so when she dies, it will go to this (currently) teenager.
*Akihito is the first emperor to marry a commoner’s daughter. The eldest son also married a commoner’s daughter.
*Akihito is “a big fan of democracy.”
*One of the past Prime Ministers sang Elvis’s song “Love Me Tender” to Bill Clinton, but it sounded like “Rub Me Tender.”
*Young kids think McDonalds is way cool.
*There are a lot of Japanese who hate the Japanese national anthem.
*Japanese textbooks don’t adequately cover the period around World War II, and teachers don’t know any better than the students.
*Mt. Fuji is 12,365 feet tall.

As you can see, it went all over the place. It was very lively and fun, though. We’re going to have another lecture with him on the 25th.

As for Kabuki, we met at the subway station at 1:00 after I ate Yoshinoya for the first time (good!). I’m still not a fan of travelling in a pack of American, but it was pretty close. As I mentioned, I walked past the National Theater on Saturday on my way to Shinjuku San-Chome station. We waited in a museum until the doors opened at 2:00, and sat down in our clump of Americans. We had really good seats.

So, what is kabuki? If you were to take the elements of old Japanese movies that most Americans find slow, exaggerated, or confusing, and then distill that down to a pure essence, you would have something resembling kabuki. I guess you could call it a play, but the story sort of serves a minor role compared to the aesthetics of it. There’s a lot of focus on the movements of the actors, the set design, and the music. It’s a good thing to do if you’re in Japan for a short while, but don’t expect to understand what you just watched by the time you leave.

With that, my first weekend is over. Tomorrow it’s back to school. I’m going to turn in a little early so I can study in the morning. These blogs really do take quite a while to write…