reynakakehashi2018

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Starting to get the sense that our host dad is a big deal around Madarao. For the past 12 years he has been the organizer for the Madarao Jazz festival. According to him, Madarao is renowned throughout Japan as the “Mecca of Jazz.” This morning he started playing Louis Armstrong on the soundsystem throughout the whole house because “Breakfast begins with Louis Armstrong.”

#Kakehashi2018 #MadaraoJazz #Japan

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A beautiful and delicious dinner from our host mother. Followed by exchanging our omiyage. 

My host mother lit up when she saw the pistachios--I owe my mom the credit for that idea--and exclaimed, “These go great with beer!” In the future I’ll know that Japanese families like good coffee as well as my host craft beer.

#Kakehashi2018 #japan

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Lunch in Nagano, personal hot pot!

I am bewildered by the science of using paper as a vessel to hold boiling liquid...over a direct flame. It sure tasted fancy. 

#Kakehashi2018 #japan

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Our first morning in Nagano, we learned to make Washi paper which is produced from the bark of paper mulberry

#kakehashi2018 #japan

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"Turbo Baby”

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This is the view we woke up to in Nagano

#madarao #nagano #Kakehashi2018 #Japan

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LOOK AT THESE TOILETS ON THE SHINKANSEN (bullet train)

there is a bidet. 

#Kakehashi2018 #Japan

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Some snapshots of the Japanese Overseas Migration Museum! 

More background from Wikipedia:

Japanese Brazilians are the largest ethnic Japanese community outside Japan (numbering about 1.5 million, compared to about 1.2 million in the United States), and São Paulo contains the largest concentration of Japanese outside Japan. 

In 1907, the Brazilian and the Japanese governments signed a treaty permitting Japanese migration to Brazil. This was due in part to the decrease in the Italian immigration to Brazil and a new labor shortage on the coffee plantations.  Also, Japanese immigration to the United States had been barred by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907.The first Japanese immigrants (790 people – mostly farmers) came to Brazil in 1908 on the Kasato Maru. About half of these immigrants came from southern Okinawa. They travelled from the Japanese port of Kobe via the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

In the first seven years, 3,434 more Japanese families (14,983 people) arrived. The beginning of World War I in 1914 started a boom in Japanese migration to Brazil; such that between 1917 and 1940 over 164,000 Japanese came to Brazil, 75% of them going to São Paulo, where most of the coffee plantations were located.

Japanese have lived overseas since at least the 16th century. After the Portuguese Empire first made contact with Japan in 1543, a large scale of slave trade developed in which Portuguese purchased Japanese as slaves in Japan and sold them to various locations overseas, including Portugal itself, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

#kakehashi2018 #japan

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Good morning from Tokyo! This is the view out of our hotel room, you can see the Tokyo Skytree in the distance. Today we’re headed to the Japanese Overseas Migration Museum, and then we catch the bullet train over to Nagano.

#kakehashi2018 #japan

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OH another cool finding in the UTokyo Gift shop! This soda, guaraná is the most popular flavor in Brazil, and must have come back to Japan through those Brazil-Japan connections

#Kakehashi2018 #Japan

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This afternoon we visited the University of Tokyo. The architecture resembled very much what you might expect to see at the older universities on the East Coast, or even in the UK at somewhere like Cambridge.

We were all quite taken by the carpets of golden ginkgo leaves and the fall colors all around us. Our host lecturer joked that winter had waited for us to arrive, in time to see the most beautiful season.

We met with students from the university and exchanged Ghirardelli chocolate squares for Matcha Kit-Kats. I was asked by our JACL group leader to get up and say a brief thank you speech on behalf of the Kakehashi group so I got a chance to practice my 30-degree bow.

#Kakehashi2018 #Japan

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Lunchtime today! All dressed in our “smart casual” (i.e. business casual) attire, after a morning of intros to Japanese culture and the history of the Kakehashi program, we sat down to a lunch of miso soup, karaage and mango custard. Getting to our reserved lunch room required tucking around corners, maneuvering up stairways and past cigarette smoke clouds wafting out of rooms reserved for serious businessmen. The final step before stepping into our traditional-style lunch room involved each of us slipping off our shoes and tucking them into a wall of shoebox-sized lockers. 

The japanese restroom confusion continued with fellow participants dispensing lotion into their hands instead of soap and sitting on more heated toilet seats.

This morning’s lecture taught us about the proper angle at which to bow (the lower, the more reverent) and the phrase “Shashin, ii desu ka?” meaning “May I take pictures (of you)? It’s illegal to take photos of strangers without their permission, and socially frowned upon. 

#kakehashi2018 #japan

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We have most definitely been eating well so far! This is the bento we received for dinner upon arrival at the Sunshine City Prince Hotel. 

Six elevators ferry guests to and from to all 37 floors, so snagging a ride can take some waiting and determined sardine-ing. 

#kakehashi2018 #japan

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I can see Russia from my window!

Snapped these photos out of the emergency exit window, while waiting in the airplane lavatory line. 

The San Francisco Kakehashi group had plenty of time to get acquainted in the hour spent in the TSA Security Check line, and during the 10+ hour flight. Movies were watched, participant temperatures were checked, meals were served, and jetlag and time zone confusion were entered. (Tokyo is 17 hours ahead of San Francisco, meaning that we entered our plane at 11am on December 12th, and landed in Tokyo at 4pm on December 13th.)

#Kakehashi2018 #Japan