The Face of Gunma TV

The beginning of January was a pretty busy period for me, in a supremely positive sense. After we got back from the onsen on January 3rd, I immediately packed a bag of clean clothes and the next day was on the train to Tokyo for another concert. This time it was a Versailles concert, but a rather special one, the memorial concert for Jasmine You, the bassist that had died last year.

I don't have too much to say about this concert. I had a terrible terrible ticket number and was just lucky to be by the bar outside the pit, so I could see the stage. Kaya was also performing at the memorial, but it was his usual stuff, and after seeing him perform that jazzy blues house music, the one-man pop music didn't really have quite the impact it should have. I thought it was quite appropriate that during the intermission between bands, they played Mozart's Requiem. I wondered how many other people appreciated the significance, and if You had been a Mozart fan. I did enjoy watching Versailles perform; There was certainly nothing wrong with their performance.. so... I couldn't tell you why, but I left this concert feeling really dissatisfied.

The disappointment of that night was followed by excited expectation a few days later as I planned an outing to Takasaki with Chingyi. It was January 6th, the first day of the festival Daruma-ichi, and we took half the day off to go enjoy it. Daruma-ichi is a festival that Gunma is well known for, and Takasaki's was biggest Daruma festival in the country. Another JET, Tricia, and her friend, Anthony, came with us and we met up at the train station in Takasaki to head out together.

A Daruma is a round red doll made out of paper and hand painted with a face, the main feature of which is two big empty eyes with no pupils. The story behind the doll is rather horrific, so I wont burden your mind with the graphic imagery, but suffice it to say that it is a representation of the founder of Zen Buddhism. The tradition is to buy a Daruma-doll at the beginning of the year, make a wish, and paint in one black pupil in his left eye. If the wish comes true, you paint in the other eye. Come the next year, you bring your old Daruma doll back to the festival to be burned and buy a new one for the coming year.

The whole road leading up to the temple was lined with stalls. Most of them were selling food, primarily squid-on-a-stick, takoyaki, taiyaki, and okonomiyaki. The only thing I eat on a stick is a hot dog; I hate takoyaki (fried octopus balls), and I was too full for okonomiyaki, but I loove taiyaki (fish shaped pancake batter-like sleeves filled with red bean paste) so I bought a couple of those to snack on.

This cute little display of toys was propped up at one vendor. I might hate takoyaki but these killed me they were so damn cute. (As they say, "Hate the sin, love the cute-little-plastic-octopus!")

Arriving at the temple, we had to walk up two big cases of steps. There were a lot of people there of all ages, and there were police with loudspeakers standing mid-way up the steps saying "If you get tired, please come and stand behind me," which I thought was really hilarious. Maybe you had to be there.

At the top of the steps, the space around the temple was crowded by tents and PILES of Daruma dolls. Piles and piles of them in plastic bags. The traditional color for the dolls is red, but there were ones in every color: black, white, pink, purple, blue, green, gold, silver, and a special yellow tiger one for the Chinese New Year. They weren't cheap either. The average size, about 8 inches, was 2000 yen. That didn't stop us, tho. We are forever in the mindset of "hey, how many times are we gonna be in Japan" and tend to buy things we never would in the States, at a price we would never pay! The perfect consumer. and consume we did. I think we all bought at least 3 Daruma of various sizes. Some of them were gifts. Some were just an obsessive compulsive need to buy.

One of the most entertaining things about the whole day was how completely fascinated people were by the presence of myself and Anthony, the two white people of our group. At first I noticed it while Anthony and I were bargaining; Well, HE was bargaining -he speaks Japanese quite well- and I was standing there for moral support and looking around. Undistracted as I was, I saw two or three Japanese people pointing their big SLR cameras in our direction, snap pictures from the other side of the tent. It amused me to think that they might actually be taking pictures of us, the fabulous people that we are, but more realistically I assumed it had to be something else in close proximity, like the temple behind us. So, Anthony had finished his bargain, we paid and moved on. Except, as I had kept my eye on the resident amateur photographers, I noticed that the black eye of every lens was following us! I tried to get someone else to notice this, to prove to myself I wasn't crazy, but everyone was distracted by the colorful scenery.

However, it soon grew impossible to deny that we had a certain presence. One of the vendors was a particularly funny, crazy little man (NOT the man in the picture to the right), who saw us and called us over loudly by shouting in Japanese "hey, weird foreigners!" Amused despite the fact that it was a little bit of an insulting phrase in Japanese, we went over. By this point, I didn't have to point out the people that were following us; they were impossible NOT to notice! People would stop, turn around in front of us and take a picture like we were some kind of escaped zoo animal. It was totally bewildering and bazaar to us, but we rather enjoyed it. Meanwhile, the vendor was still calling us "weird foreigners" and animatedly trying to persuade us of his good prices.

Our exchange was loud, funny, and in a mix of Japanese and English, so it was probably for these reasons that we drew the attention of one of the TV crews scoping out the area. A man with a huge TV camera perched on his shoulder was circling us, filming our entire exchange with The Crazy Vendor Man, a fact that we all tried to look unaware of. Immediately after we paid, a woman with a microphone approached us and asked if she could interview us in Japanese. It was painfully clear she wanted Anthony and myself to do the interview, but I was definitely not up to that challenge, so Anthony and Tricia agreed to answer questions. I have to say... it was the MOST AWKWARD interview I could ever have imagined!! The woman would ask Anthony a question, he would answer and then.................................................................................................................................... ten seconds of awkward silence later, she would ask the next question. Over and over this would happen, every time he answered a question, she would just continue to stare at him blankly until we were all kind of looking around at each other nervously, wondering what was going on. Poor Anthony. I felt so bad for him. It haunted him for the rest of the day, wondering what else he should have said during his 15 minutes of fame.

We were approached by several other people that day. Another TV crew, actually, but they just wanted to have a look inside our bags to see all the Daruma we bought. One funny man came up and asked if he could take a picture of us. We assumed he meant all four of us but then he kind of... nudged Chingyi and Tricia out of the way. Gods, it was so funny, I think we all bruised a rib swallowing our laughter. He asked us, Anthony and myself, to "act natural", which was the last thing on our minds at that moment. So, holding our Daruma to our chests like it was the most natural thing in the world, we had a fake conversation in English (ever had one of those moments when someone says "say something in English!" and suddenly you only speak Spanish? Yeah) about how funny the whole situation was while he got his shot. Would have loved to get that picture.

...instead, here is one of all of us. We are mostly blocking it, but those red blurs behind us are piles and piles of Daruma dolls:


On the train home, Chingyi got a surprised text from one of her friends: she had just seen on the Gunma TV channel! Immediately after getting home, I looked up when the news would rerun that night, so I could record it. When it finally came on, it was so short, it was absurdly funny! The Gunma TV people must have agreed that it was a terrible interview, because they had shortened it to only about 2 seconds and a single one-word answer!

Ah well. Guess that means we still have 14 minutes and 58 seconds of fame left!

(If you want to watch the news clip, I've uploaded it here. Sorry the sound isn't great)

Cheers,

famous Baer