Fiery kanji on the mountainside

I learned something last night. We have just had 0bon here in Japan. This is the three-day national holiday when by tradition the spirits come back and visit. It is the middle of the hot season, a good time to get out in the countryside and enjoy bon odori (folk dancing), matsuri (festivals) and such.

Last night, Kyoto did their giant burning kanji on the mountainsides. This is one of the celebrations at the end of Obon. We've seen it before, but this year the national television people did a really good digital show. So we were watching that, and they had a priest explaining the meaning of this.

The kanji, incidentally, are created by lines of bonfires which are made of sticks with names and poems and well-wishes written on them by people who have contributed them. (in most cases - there are about five of these giant kanji on the hillsides around Kyoto) The task of laying out the wood and setting the fires using flames from a central prayed over fire are carried out by traditional families, who raise their kids to do this. One of the kanji has iron fire-holders which have large bundles of faggots that are started in a firepit, then run up to the fireholder and set onto the spike in the center, but that's a refinement - most of them are just lines of bonfires. Oh, and one kanji is in trouble, because the families that do the fires are dying out. This year it only had 18 people to handle the fires for that kanji, and one of them had flown back from Spain just for this! Sounds like it is time to figure out a different method of getting acolytes than simple inheritance.

Anyway, back to the meaning - it turns out that the kanji are intended to help guide the spirits back to the spirit world. It's more than just good clean fun at the end of the holiday, it has a strong intent. Apparently spirits who have been visiting might get lost on the way back, so this helps to guide them. It's an interesting concept that the visiting spirits need someone to point them back at the spirit world.

I wonder what happens if they get lost on the way back?

The problem with consumer electronics is that you get macservers selling them

(This is Wednesday's posting - I wanted to sit on it overnight to make sure I really meant it.)

Mitsuko and I spent four of the worst hours I think we've had recently today. See, Saturday we had taken ourselves over to Softbank, one of the local cell phone dealers, and spent about two hours looking at models and plans and such. Of course, we picked models that they didn't have in stock - despite this being the dealer's own store, where I would expect the stock to be somewhat broader. In fact, we were there because our first foray into a stand in a local electronics shop had ended with questions that the very attentive people couldn't answer, but they were sure that the dealer's own store would know. So we went over, and they were somewhat more knowledgeable. At least we picked models and colors, and they said they would expedite things.

So today (yes, it took four days for them to get the right models) we went in to pick things up. And about three questions into things, I realized that our little buddy didn't have a clue. When I asked him whether my sister in America could call on my new service or not, and he started pawing through the sales literature to try to find an answer, I wondered. But then I asked him about connecting the new phone (which apparently does allow some kinds of data exchange) with my pc - and he dug through the box, and then looked as if he was going to faint, but agreed that maybe I could get the necessary USB cable somewhere else (because he certainly didn't know what it looked like or whether they had one).

Sadly, every time we asked something, it broke his set routine, and added to the time it took for him to get even simple things done. So what should have been - worst case - 30 minutes - took 4 hours. And then to top it off, after he had finally finished all the paperwork and odds and ends, Mitsuko remembers to ask him about the promised feature of having her phone show the time on its front (which appears to be a sheet of thin metal). And he presses a button, and tiny numbers appear, dimly, in the fluorescent bright room. Mitsuko goes "Is that all?" and gestures to the stack of phones beside us with large numbers in a display on their front (since that's one of the big features this season). So we go back and forth about whether or not she can change the phone now (after transfering phone books and everything else). And he gulps, talks with his manager, gulps, tells us it would be very difficult, well, no, really can't, no . . . and finally we walk out, with Mitsuko angry.

One of the points that I realized later - early on I had insisted on taking my box out of his hands and actually looking at the manual and phone. He was very uneasy about that, but let me do it. However, he didn't let Mitsuko even look at her phone until we were finished with all of his paperwork - which is a cute trick, because then he insisted that we couldn't change it because all the paperwork was finished! And of course the front time feature doesn't work on the non-functional samples that they show you ahead of time.

Not good. But when I thought about it, I realized he was a macserver - following the set routine, he probably does fine. Any question that's slightly off his track, though, and he's lost.

The phones, and the service, seem to be good. Lots of features, and now that I've dug up English language manuals (on their website, despite his assurance that they didn't have any - I think he meant he didn't know of any), we can even make them do tricks. But . . . beware the macservers, for they do not know what they are doing.

How do you react?

That's amusing. When I got home, my wife was upset because the rice had bugs in it. See, we have a kitchen rice dispenser, and buy 5 or 10 kilos at a shot, and pour it in. Then press the little dispenser keys to get one, two, or three servings. But there were little clots of rice in it this evening, and when I mashed one, sure enough, there's a larval something or other (probably the moths we've been noticing recently).

So my wife wants me to clean out the whole X kilos, and she's griping about having just recently filled it, and there's lots of little clots in the rice.

So I joked that maybe we should just go ahead and cook it up, and consider it protein-enriched.

My wife's jaw drops, and I thought for a moment she was going to vomit on me. "WHAT! We can't do that. It's BUGS! That's disgusting."

I went ahead with cleaning out the rice, and agreed that we are probably not going to be able to put rice in the dispenser for a while during the summer heat and humidity, and was very quiet about ideas like just eating the bugs.

I think she's still suspicious. I wonder if I'll hear again that such an idea is just disgusting.

We've eaten pickled grasshoppers (a delicacy in the right part of Japan), I've had chocolate covered bees (which I believe are actually larvae), and Mitsuko happily eats various things which I don't like the taste or texture of, but even the notion of eating rice bugs is disgusting?

Where do we learn these things?

And why do I have this odd mental image of a . . . nun? female teacher, at least . . . smiling and saying that the reason she knows what an ant tastes like is that she tried it?