As requested by a certain someone who will not be mentioned, but whose name rhymes with the French word 'toucher', I have decided to upload a few photos. There are a lot more I still want to add, but these are the most recent, and the most interesting. I bought a yukata in Kyoto for only 2500 yen (I'll call that 25USD), and so on Saturday I went over to my friend's house and she showed me how to put it on. They also showed me how to make mochi, a Japanese sweet made of a rice flour dough and a sweet adzuki (not atsugi!) bean paste. I say 'not atsugi' because the first time my students asked if I knew what adzuki was, I said, "Yes! It's where I live! Atsugi City!" They thought this was a riot. I love making my students laugh.
Anyway, the yukata is like the sumer kimono. Unfortunately, I was very hot wearing it as I hadn't remembered to bring a tank top or shorts, so I basically had on two layers of clothing.
This experience also taught me a very valuable lesson. The past few weeks in Japan, something had been bothering me. I guess it's normal when you move to a new place for certain things to start irritating you early on, and for me, it was people's feet. It wasn't the smell at all, it was actually more the gait. Perhaps it was the hours I spent climbing the subway stairs, staring at the fifty pairs of feet at eye level, but I started to notice that many people had mild to serious orthopedic problems, and were not wearing proper footwear. Some had a rolled ankle and were sporting high heels, others had serious blisters festering around straps that obviously served no purpose other than fashion, and then there were the pigeon-toes. It seemed that an unusually high number of people were pigeon-toed, including children, and I did not understand why this was not corrected or even addressed. I know this seems so arbitrary, but I thought about it every time I was in a crowded place, which here happens at least twice a day.
So, on the day that I tried on my yukata, I slipped the Japanese style wooden slippers onto my feet, and stood up. The women helping me took one look at my feet and said, "turn your toes in. You'll lose your balance in those shoes if you walk like that." Suddenly, every picture of every woman wearing a kimono that I had ever seen flashed in my head: hands folded in front, toes pointed in. I stood there, pidgeon toed, with my foot in my mouth.
Enjoy the pictures!
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