From Hertfordshire to Hyogo-ken: My Melodramatic May

Good evening readers. I am joining you with a glass of red wine from my hotel room in Hiroshima where I am having a weekend away. But before I get onto that (you can always just scroll down to the pictures i'll never know) I'd just like to say sorryyyy for not updating in god knows how long. May has been a bit 山あり谷あり(yama ari tani ari "with hills and valleys"), the Japanese way of saying 'ups and downs'. If i can explain....

It all started back on the 3rd when I was asked to take part in the orchestra's 3-day 合宿 (gashuku=training camp). As I later found out, all university societies run a training camp and it is an integral part of the year. Anyway I was only told about going a couple of weeks in advance which wasn't exactly ideal especially since the price was £150 and it was pretty much compulsory.

"Ok, if its only once..."

My god it was rough. Woken up by an out-of-tune trumpet fanfare every morning at 7am to get up and play my part to absolute death, made to go over the same line again and again and again even though I can play the second flute part perfectly with my eyes shut at this point. This is just the Japanese way of learning though I knew that already...

It was a tough but a very authentic experience of Japan for me that I'm proud to say I did, with 60 other Japanese students and without a single other foreigner.

Beside the point anyway, two weeks later I get a text from my fellow flautist asking me for another £150. This time to pay for the conductor's upkeep fees since she's not from around Kobe. Firstly it seems really wrong to me that broke students have to support a conductor from far away who seems to be living quite lavishly if its costing this much (£150x60ppl=loads of money), especially since she's clearly gonna put this on her CV too.

Secondly, I obviously couldn't pay this much money at such short notice. There was nothing I could do. I tried sending a text explaining my situation and all I get was a passive aggressive response saying 'please find a way, I'd like you to pay this'. Anyway, since the time commitment (also much more than I was led to believe) was having a negative impact on my studying I decided it was time to throw in the towel with orchestra. I offered to do the concert if they wanted me to this I thought this would be reasonable.

The reply I got to this message was pretty extreme, verging on psychotic, basically along the lines of "SEAN YOU WILL PAY THIS MONEY AND COME TO EVERY REHEARSAL BECAUSE I SAID SO. DO NOT WIND ME UP ANYMORE"

To which my reply was along the lines of: "i'm sorry this isn't working out"

To be quite honest I did not really feel like a particularly valued member anyway. Only a very small handful of people bothered to say anything to me at all. The thing that upset me about the whole debacle was that the people who did make an effort to include me, the other flute players, are the ones who will probably be most inconvenienced by my departure. I think the overall conclusion to draw is that it was a cultural misunderstanding more than anyone's fault in particular. When the head flautist let me in she was unaware of how different the culture of university clubs is compared to the UK. Without any information I assumed the commitment would be a couple of hours a week, when actually this was about 12 hours a week and a price tag of over £300.

Well at least I tried anyway

so yeahhh if you're reading this as a friend of mine in Japan expecting to see me in a concert on the 15th of June that I invited you to, you might wanna make other plans.........

This ongoing saga took it out of me a bit this month, I was also in and out of hospital this month but don't worry it was nothing serious just a regular infection. However there have been some really nice trips including the one I am on now which I'll write up tomorrow. On the 15th I went on the University's annual bus trip for foreign students. This time it was a place called Kurashiki, Okayama prefecture.

Kurashiki is a lovely little city with a very traditional feel and a tradition in pottery. I believe some call it a mini-Kyoto. The lady in charge is one of my favourite teachers at our faculty, Dr. Jeong. She is a Korean lady who specialises in Japanese literature. She's incredibly friendly and goes out of her way a lot to help foreign students, and regardless of the trip it was nice just to be able to spend some time with her.

We also got a chance to make some pottery which was quite novel. (Dr. Jeong is the lady standing behind)

what its supposed to look like

We then stopped for lunch where we were treated to a bento meal of tuna, squid, octopus and mackerel Sashimi (sliced raw fish)...and a spherical thing that looked like an orange but I think was actually mochi (rice cake) with meat and wasabi inside. I had never seen this before but it was really tasty! In true Japanese style I couldn't resist taking a picture.

Somewhat incongruous to Kurashiki's reputation for traditional Japanese art and architecture, it is also home to Japan's first Museum of Western Art, Ohara Contemporary Art Museum. Unfortunately photography was prohibited :(

We then had some free time where we decided to hike up a hill to visit a temple which I can't remember the name of (i've seen so many temples now!) but nevertheless was beautiful especially because of the hilltop location. Temples and shrines now account for most of my favourite places in Japan as I think since, as cliche as this sounds, you can just lose yourself in the serenity of the temple grounds and let your thoughts run free in any direction. For me its a great place for self-reflection and allows me forget about stresses to do with uni.