Kabuki 1

Today was day1 of a special Kabuki seminar for my Japanese Culture field work class. We will in the coming months go to actual performances, but this was a 2 day talk by a kabuki actor along with costume demonstration and video. The actor, Shimanojou Kataoka, knew some english so tried to keep Kristine and I more involved. This included giving our impression of kabuki at the beginning (neither of us had seen it), then doing some read-alongs later where we repeated the japanese after he had told it to us. The videos, especially the first one which was a long montage from different performances, were incredibly interesting, with highly prescribed movements, intricate costumes and impassioned dialogue. I could not understand the vast majority of the language, but because of the delivery and movements one could almost figure out what was going on. If you didn't already know, kabuki is performed only by men, but you could barely tell under the makeup and movements, one play in particular, about a soldier leaving for battle and his betrothed, I was fully convinced that was a young, passionate, beautiful woman on stage. Our sensei for the class gave us free tickets to a kyogen performance (related to but different from kabuki), and we plan to go with a classmate (who speaks some english) next saturday.

In the evening, met up with a group of teachers from the JET program (english language teachers), had some drinks, then went to, of all places, a spanish tapas bar. Steven knew the owner and they were relocating, so this was the final night send off. Food was good, even the squid paella, there was music and a good time by all. After some confusion and discussion about going into Kyoto for some nu-jazz , those of us staying in Nagaokakyo walked to a nearby establishment for some food and drinks before eventually parting ways.


Morning came way too early I'll tell you that.