#wadaiko

Cute Commandment do mês de abril: hoje eu vos apresento a diligente, resiliente e obstinada Mariko☀️😈 Instrumento: nagado daiko 🥁

April's Cute Commandment: today I present to you the diligent, resilient, and obstinate Mariko☀️😈 Instrument: nagado daiko 🥁

Top o’ the morning to thee and thine, O droogs.

Day three began with me waking up at the usual Way Earlier Than Necessary Or Reasonable time. So, knowing that there would be no morning run, I quietly showered, got dressed, and went for a wee walkabout to see what secrets the ‘hood was hiding.

First, I climbed up the double-kiss-your-ass-turn road that winds up the hill directly behind the schoolhouse, which is where I shot the above video from. It was just around 6am, so aside from a few cars and bikes already out for fun and possible death on the twisty mountain roads in the area, it was mostly pretty damn tranquil. Just the sound of the birds, the wind, and the river. What an environment! The schoolhouse is situated in a sort of valley, with just a few houses sorta nearby, and a temple directly across the street (Chōkei-ji if I remember correctly). Interestingly, there were tea fields behind the temple. This struck me as a real coincidence, as one of the gifts I brought for Ondekoza was a selection of powdered green tea from Furukawa Seicha, a tea grower based in Uji (Kyoto) that has been around since the Edo Period and whose middle daughter is a former student (just graduated from elementary school in March), and one of my favorite students ever. Super sweet kid. I wish they were all like her. Anyway. Lemme blab on about the tea for a sec. One member (Naoto) studied agriculture at college, and spent time in the US doing so in Salinas, California. He’s a fantastic cook by the way—Naoto, those scones rocked the house, man! He’s also pretty goddam knowledgeable all around when it comes to the culinary arts, and when I said “here’s a little something I brought for you guys,” he knew from like a 0.5 second glance it was green tea, which took me by surprise. Ms Furukawa also hooked me up with a bamboo whisk for preparing the tea, and Naoto was stoked about that as well, so I was stoked too. Much stokage! Thanks a million, Ms Furukawa and Hoyuhoyu!!!

On my way up the road behind the school, I spotted this monument tucked away in the woods, just at the foot of the first turnback. I thought “Cool! Creepy shit! I’ll hit that up on the way down.” Turns out it was a monument erected in memory of the local boys and men who died as soldiers during WW2. Yikes. There’s a weird monument like this near my place that has a freaking howitzer type large bore gun made into a sort of flagpole, with the base of the monument having shells stood on end placed every so often around the thing. Weeeeeeird! Far less creepy than this one, obviously. Anyway, my walkabout continued.

Found a few oooold rusty signs. The rectangular one says Unauthorized Vehicle Entry Prohibited—West Elementary School. The round one has English at the top. I also found two other WTF things. First:

Is that not a gas-guzzling full-blooded ‘Murican car or what?! I dunno if the house was even being lived in as it was hard to tell if the debris strewn haphazardly around it had been disturbed at all recently. Weird! Next was this: