The Moment I Wake Up; Before I Put On My Make-up

I've written before about playing dress up at Yumekoubou Studio, and was delighted this week when, in the process of packing and purging some of the junk I've accumulated over the years, I found this series of photos documenting the change from "Tourist" to "Tourist in a Kimono."

It's a bit liberating to have all that make-up on your face, ghosting over your features like a mask.  I'm a bit camera shy (read: a LOT camera shy), but after all the paint and powder, I don't even look like myself, and there's a freedom to that.  It's a little anonymous, looking into the mirror and not recognizing your face.  Who cares about a camera then?    

I'm sixteen in these pictures, which sounds a lot closer than it feels.  I ended up finding a whole bag of photos and maps and English-language brochures for the temples we visited while in Kyoto, and was shocked at how much I had already forgotten.  The names were completely foreign, though some of the illustrations brought back hazy memories of Torii Gates and water blessings.  Truthfully, I don't even remember Fushiko taking these pictures. 

I wish I could find that picture of the four of us - Me, Julie, Fushiko, and the blonde teacher (whose name might have been Elizabeth, or it might have been Lauren, but I truly can't remember any more) standing in front of the yellow backdrop with our hands under our chins, palms down and fingers out.  The teacher would be tearfully leaving Japan on our flight home after having lived there for over a year, Julie and I were both terribly homesick, and though we didn't know it at the time, Fushiko was struggling through what would end up being terminal cancer, but in that photo, nothing shows.  

We are carefree, and happy.

Turning Up and Turning Down and Turning In and Turning 'Round

WARNING: this post contains my big fat face.  It may be the only time this ever happens, though, and it's covered with make-up, so don't be too scared, but proceed with caution.

Kyoto, Japan.  Summer, 2003.

After Julie and I are settled into our (gorgeous) hotel room, Fushiko knocks on our door.  She has a surprise for us.

The sign over the door says "Yumekoubou Studio," but there's not sort of indication as to what it's a studio for.  Until we walk down the hallway, and every inch of the wall is covered in pictures of geishas.  Geishas on the street, geishas against a backdrop, geishas on the temple stairs.  There's a rack of kimono's against the far wall, next to a line of make-up mirrors, and across the room from a colorful back drop.  It's a dress up studio.  Julie and I get to be made up like geishas. It's somehow more elegant that those tourist trap studios on every boardwalk, the ones where they drape garments from the Old Timey West over your real clothes, then sepia tone the pictures. 

One woman puts a hairnet over my head when I sit down at the mirrors, and sets to work geishafying me.  It looks pancake thick, but that white make-up is a powder.  I barely feel it go on.  I'm more concerned about that hairnet.  My hair is the shortest it's ever been at that point (not counting that time I was bald, several years later), but it's just long enough that being crunched under a hairnet and stuffed under a wig that I'm going to have such fly-away hair by the end of it.  I'll ask for a comb when the wig comes off, any thing to push it back into shape, but to no avail.  I have to walk back to the hotel looking like I've stuck my finger in a socket.

The make up goes on quickly.  It's the wig an kimono that are the difficult parts.  My head's not quiet the right shape for these (heavy) headpieces.  They put on and take off at least three different pieces before they find the one that doesn't pull away from my face and threaten to fall down my back.  It takes three of us to put on the kimono: I hold my arms up away from my body like an airplane, and the first woman folds the sleeves around my elbows.  She then folds the heavy silk skirts up against my stomach while a second woman circles me with strips of linen, tying it all in place.  The obi sash is relatively painless, until they hook the big bow onto the back.  Between the wig, the bow, and the heavy kimono, I must be wearing an extra thirty pounds.  I avoid stepping into the high platform sandals as long as possible.

"Look here," says the photographer.  "Don't smile."  Not that I would.  I take pretty good care of my teeth, but against the white make-up they look horrifyingly yellow.  If you didn't know me, you'd think I'd smoked since birth.  Hauptmen Sensei, my Japanese teacher back in the states, says that you don't see many smiles in Japan; she told us it was because quality dental work used to be hard to come by, and no one wanted to show off their less than perfect teeth.  I don't know if that's the reason, but I do know this - I have a series of photos taken of Julie, Fushiko, and myself as we visit the temples of Kyoto.  Julie has a big, toothsome smile in all of them.  I smile in most of them.  Fushiko doesn't even grin in any of them.

Julie's Vietnamese by blood, so the whole thing sits on her much better than it does on me.  It really emphasizes just how much this geisha make-up is designed to highlight the natural beauty of Asian features; the roundness of the face, the shape of the lips, the slope of the eyes.  Look at the pair of us - Julie looks beautiful. I look like a rogue Cirque du Soleil performer.  But I feel beautiful, too.  

After, when the make-up comes off, and I'm running my fingers through my hair, trying to make it lay flat, Fushiko tells us to pick our three favorite photos, then surprises us with bookmarks with our faces on them.  Julie's photos look a bit more authentic than mine, which I remember at the time thinking wasn't quite fair, but there's really nothing I can do about being so achingly caucasian.  No, I wouldn't make a very pretty geisha, but after all the trouble to trying to look like a fake one, I don't envy those women who do.  

You Look Happy to Meet Me

Numazu, Japan.  Summer 2003.

Midori teaches music class at the elementary school, and today I've followed her to work. 

A group of about twenty second-graders file into Midori's room straight away, and they chatter excitedly when they see me.  I think my reputation precedes me.  Midori shushes them, and urges them to take their seats.  She pressed the play button on the CD player, raising her hand when the music starts.      

It's "Edelweiss" from The Sound of Music.  In Japanese, of course.  There's an extra syllable on the end of the word, and Midori laughs just a bit when her kids put at little extra emphasis on it.  E-del-wa-i-SU!  E-del-wa-i-SU!  Every morning you greet me.  I hum along, because don't remember much beyond "small and white," and it's not really my song to sing.  The kids sing the last note and hold it long after the music stops playing.  They giggle, trying to see who can hold it longer than everyone else.  A boy with close-cropped hair and too-big glasses just manages to outlast a girl with her hair tied back with pink ribbons, and he bows deeply in his victory.  Midori claps her hands, and they scurry to the back of the room and start pulling things from their bags.        

Midori asks if I have every played the recorder.  I nod, because I did in third and fourth grade, but I try to mask my fear when she hands me an extra one.  The kids are already running back to their seats, their own Yamaha recorders in their little hands.  I haven't played a recorder in years, I don't even own one any more, and while I may still have the muscle memory to play "My Heart Will Go On," I've long since forgotten how to read the music.  Midori rattles off another round of instructions, and the kids flip through their pamphlets.  I didn't catch the page number, but I don't want to ask her to repeat herself. 

The little girl in the chair next to me helpfully turns the pages of my book until she hits what must be the right one.  "Edelweiss" is written along the top of the page in English and katakana, and that's the first and last thing I recognize.  The rest of it might as well be braille for as much as I understand it.  Midori starts the music again, and the kids play along.  I rest the recorder on my lips and move my fingers, but I don't blow.  I think Midori can tell I'm faking.  As long as she doesn't ask me to perform a solo.     

After lunch, I follow Midori into another classroom.  It's the kids from this morning - they've been working with their teacher on a special song for me, and they're ready to show it.  Standing at the front of the classroom, they sing, in English, a song about happy trees, how they grow in the sunshine, how they love the rain, and how they'd love to give you a great big hug.  They raise their little arms high above their heads - look how tall the tree will grow!  I applaud when they've finished.  It was very cute, and I think I spy some of them trying to hide a smile as they bow.

Sensei tells them to sit down, and they gather in a semi-circle around me; they are allowed to ask questions until the end of class.  They ask little kid questions, the ones that are easy to answer, and Sensei translates them for me.  How long will you be here?  Two weeks.  Do you have any pets?  Yes, two cats and three dogs.  Do you like Japan?  Yes, very much.  Is it different from America?  In some ways, yes.  In others, not at all.  

One little boy asks if I speak Japanese.  "Hai," I say.  "Watashi wa chyo-to Nihongo o hanashimas."  Yes, I speak a little Japanese.  It's formal, probably way to formal for speaking to a child, but they are suitably impressed.  And excited round of whispers moves through the group.  I won't tell them that, unless their next question is "What is the weather like today?" that might be the extent of my conversational Japanese.  

A bell rings - it's the end of the day, and it's time to clean up.  I've read about this, but never seen it in action.  At the sensei's nod, the students run to put their chairs up over their desks, then go to pull brooms, dust mops, and towels out of the closet.  Some stay in the room, starting at one corner and sweeping their way across the floor.  A handful run out into the hallway - from the window I watch them get down on their hands and knees and push their towels and dust mops down the corridor.  I wonder if anyone is cleaning Midori's room.  

I'm not a student, so I don't have to clean.  Midori takes me back to my shoes (no shoes in this school, either), and reminds me that Fushiko is coming this evening to take me and Julie to Kyoto for a few days, and that I should be all packed by dinner time.

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Follow the Leader

Numazu, Japan.  Summer, 2003.  

Mariko has taken me to Johoku High School with her, and now I'm surrounded by calligraphy students, listening to the Sensei explain the day's exercises, trying to pick out any familiar words.  I speak enough Japanese to carry on a conversation with another person who's just beginning to learn Japanese (these conversations never seem to get beyond the weather, though,), but the sound flies so fast off a native speaker's tongue, I can't tell when one word ends and another begins.  I know I hear "mina-san", which means "everyone," because Hauptman Sensei says that many time a day, trying to get our attention.  Mina-san, mii-te kudasai.  Mina-san, kii-te kudasai.  Everyone please look.  Everyone please listen.

My shoes are somewhere else.  You're not allowed to wear shoes inside the building, so we've left them in a cubby down at the school entrance, and I'll be able to get them back when Midori, Mariko's mother, picks me up for lunch.  Now I've got school issued slippers on my feet, and I wish I had worn socks.  Mariko brought her own pair from home - they're a bit more festive than my baby-girl pink ones.  

"Do you know any kanji?" Mariko asks.  I do.  I take the brush laid out in front of me, and paint the handful of simply kanji I know.  Eye.  Sun.  Fire.  Water.  Child.  I write my name in katakana in the bottom right hand corner, then again in hiragana, just to show off what I know.

It's time to paint.  Sensei draws the first character on the blackboard.  It's much more complicated than anything I've had to do in my level two Japanese class..  I watch my host sister deftly put the ink to paper, drawing the delicately complicated kanji figures.  I pick up my own brush, holding it awkwardly between my thumb and forefinger, the way the other students do.  I copy Mariko's movements exactly.  My kanji may not be as confident as hers, but it's cleanly done.  Precise.  You can tell what it's supposed to be.

Sensei stands behind me, waiting to approve my work.  He shakes his head at my paper.  "Too neat," he says.  "Calligraphy is about brushstrokes.  We should see them."  He loads up the brush with ink and paints like a pro.  His kanji looks different than mine.  Just enough to make it look human.  "Like that," he says, and hands me the brush.

I load my brush with too much ink, and move too slow across the paper.  The ink leaves big wet blotches on the paper (thank goodness we've all laid newspaper down first), and all the shapes bleed together until the form is almost lost.  Sensei nods his approval.  "Much better," he says, and writes "GOOD" across the top of the page in red cursive.  His penmanship is better than mine.  I might be a little jealous.   

Sensei projects the list of to-be-practiced kanji up on the wall; Mariko shows me the stroke order, so that I know how to paint them.  (Every kanji has a natural stroke order, and to not follow it would be to draw the kanji incorrectly.)  My technique improves just a little bit, but I'm not anywhere as skilled as the other students.  The boy on my right flies his brush across his paper.  He must have been doing this for years.

Mariko waits until I finish the last stroke, then she and a handful of other students gather around to paint the translations in the corners of my papers.  This one means "smile."  This one means "blue sky."  Tanoshii means "funny."  Kokoro means "heart."  Sensei circles back around with his red pencil.  He writes a few quick notes on Mariko's own pages, then a second round of Good on my papers, above what I consider my sloppiest kanji.  A paper like that would get thrown out in my language class.  He must see how confused I am, because he leans close and says, "Calligraphy is human.  It is always beautiful, especially when it is not so pretty."   

At the end of the class, Sensei gathers up my good and not good papers, and layers them between sheets of newspaper.  He hands me the bundle with a kind smile.  "Good work," he says, and throws me a thumbs up.  I might be a little proud.

Mariko takes my hand, and leads me back to my shoes.  Midori is here to take me to lunch.