Masami's Other Island

I thought we had killed Masami the day before with our hiking through the Shikoku village (it was a lot of walking for her, as you can see from the last blog's pictures). She hit the sack as soon as we got back to the hotel and didn't move until the next morning. But then she was ok, so we went to visit a nice Japanese garden in Takamatsu called Ritsurin Koen. 

It's an old villa garden started in the mid 1600s and added to over the next 100 years. The paths wind around a series of ponds with various scenic points, tearooms, bridges and islands.


There was even a fake waterfall that was fed by bucket wielding servants every time the nobleman walked by. Now, thanks to modern plumbing, it runs from 7AM-6PM daily April through September. 

There was a nice iris garden, too with hundreds of irises. We also saw a few grey herons hanging around, frozen like statues.
The garden was up against the mountains, so that added to the scenic value of the place and also to the birds that were attracted. (We saw a pygmy woodpecker and a Common Kingfisher.)

The real animal stars of the garden were the fat carp. Some of them had to be 3 feet long. They call them koi here, and they are very colorful, but to see a seething mass of these monsters with their greedy gaping mouths makes you instinctually draw small children nearer to you and hold them tightly.

We took the train to our next town, Tokushima, and arrived in the drizzly afternoon. Toku is Masami's last name, and shima means island, thus our little joke about it being Masami's island. (There are actually a few islands with similar names.) Our hotel was by the river, and we had a second floor suite looking across the street to the river. It was nice and soothing watching the raindrops falling on the river at night. The hotel had a neon sign with a suitcase carrying toucan that said "welcome back." It was too late to really do much, but there was a free boat ride around the island, so we decided to do that. When we got to the dock, we saw that they had cancelled the rides due to the drizzle. There was a group of guys just hanging out on the dock, so Masami asked. Since we came all the way from America, one guy went to ask someone if he could take us out. So we ended us with a private tour around the island. It wasn't all that inspiring, in that peculiar way that urban Japan isn't, but it was kind of fun going under the low bridges under which the boat barely fit. And Theo got to pose as driver.

Tokushima is famous for its folk dance, called Awa Odori. We attended a performance one evening. Like folk dances everywhere, it was a little silly, with the women dancing around on their tiptoes in wooden sandals (geta), wearing what looked like upside down straw tacos on their heads. They were accompanied by big drums, a flute, metal percussion instrument and shamisen (Japanese banjo). But after all, folk dances are not really meant to be performed for an audience, they are meant to be danced by common folks. So there were opportunities for audience members to participate, and many people crowded the stage, including the three of us. It was more of a shuffle in wide circle, like sardines swimming against the current on the packed stage, with some flailing of the arms. As you can see in the first picture of this blog entry, I received an award for the best dancer of the evening. Well, actually, some would say that I received an award for being a gaijin (foreigner) again, but you can look at the evidence provided by the video below and judge for yourself. Actually there were four of us chosen to receive gifts, and I actually have no idea what they were saying. I just listened for my cue to tell them my name and where I was from. Nothing like an audience to put the pressure on my pitiful language skills. My award was one of the nifty head towels worn by the male dancers. I think the emcee was as nervous as I was, as he scanned the audience for Masami, imagining that this gesture could go horribly wrong. But Masami had deserted me, as usual. Her method of helping me learn Japanese is throwing me into the fire, and you can hear her titillation on the video. After the awards were all handed out the music started, and I looked around to see what to do. The guy next to me yelled, "dance!"

So I danced.

P.S. Let me know how this blog looks to you. Do you like the style of the previous entry with the text more together or this style with the pictures more intertwined? Unfortunately, I can't really format it the way I like due to the restrictions of the site (or possibly the limitations of my knowledge of it). Are the pictures big enough? I can also put them on another website and link them, but I kind of like having them on the same page.