betsuni
betsuni's JournalSetsubun (Feb. 3) Japanese festival driving away demons -- the red ogre is Trump.
Paper demon (oni) masks with packages of dried soybeans or peanuts are sold to take home, someone puts on the mask and acts scary and everyone else throws the beans or nuts at them yelling, Demons out! Good luck in! (Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!). I think everyone in the world should adopt this custom and scream TRUMP OUT! DEMOCRATS IN! while throwing nuts at Trump when his evil visage appears on screen. Just in case it helps.
Here's Setsubun festival at a shrine with Trump & oni friends driven out by a Shinto priest with an arrow and then bean-throwing.
A new death, an old birth, and a walk through two historic Nakasendo post towns in Nagano prefecture, Japan.
The Nakasendo is one of the old official highways between Tokyo and Kyoto, the central mountain route, and some of the post towns have been preserved. Tsumago is first on the video, tourists can walk along the old trail to Magome. I've been there many times because my husband Sam was born on a snowy day in January in one of the first Western-style buildings constructed in the area, not far from Tsumago (was originally a government office, post office, prison, ended up owned by Sam's family until it was moved and is now the Mountain Historical Museum next to the Fukuzawa Momosuke Memorial Museum in the main town of Nagiso). I think it's fabulously historical to be born in what's now a museum. Family ancestors rest in the cemetery overlooking Tsumago and there's a monument for the war dead. Sam's father's older brother's name is on it, died in a Siberian prisoner of war camp in 1946.
Sam went to the funeral of his elderly aunt yesterday, who was also from those mountains. The old towns make it easy to imagine what life was like ninety years ago, thinking about the past. Sam just came home from his aunt's house to say goodbye to her children and grandchildren before they return to the cities and found out the New Year's lottery ticket auntie had him buy for her and promised to spit with him had won ¥3,000. Not much, but she would've been incredibly excited! So now that's Sam's birthday present on a snowy day in January.
Beautiful thatched-roof house villages in deep snow and a snowman festival, Japan's Snow Country.
UNESCO world heritage sites, the villages of Shirakawa, Ainokura and Suganuma in Gifu Prefecture.
Snowman Festival in the little mountain village of Shiramine, Ishikawa Prefecture.
New Year's Eve visitors, from Suzuki Bokushi's "Snow Country Tales" (1835):
"The New Year always finds us still buried under the snow. It is packed hastily onto the elevated snow pathways that run between the houses, higher than their roofs in many places, and naturally many slippery dangerous spots are bound to appear. One New Year's Eve I set out with my friend, Tokakishi, to pay a visit ... . As the talk wandered pleasantly from topic to topic, my host's wife addressed a question directly to me: 'I've heard that in Edo ...on the eve of New Year ... demons are bound to make their appearance that night.'
"The thirteen-year-old daughter ... interjected: 'Have you ever seen a demon?' 'Sure I have. Quite a variety of them exist, believe me,' Tokakishi replied. 'In general, demons are either red or blue. Those with white faces are a little less frightening and are called white demons. The roly-poly black ones are called black demons. Now if demons are around and about on New Year's Eve even in bustling Edo, you can be sure that there are plenty of them here for our snowy New Year's Eve. Why, one might be peering into the window at this very moment,' he hinted darkly, and glanced up at a high window that was directly above where the three women were seated. ... Just then there was a great crash as the window behind them burst open and an avalanche of snow came thundering into the room, carrying with it a dark figure. At this the women shrieked and threw themselves prostate on the floor, shaking in terror.
"And now, as all stared at the strange creature buried in the heaps of packed snow from the collapsed pathway outside, they recognized the little blind masseur Fukuichi (whose name, you must know, means 'Good Fortune'), a frequent visitor to their home. 'Well, if it isn't Good Fortune!' they all shouted, laughing -- as Fukuichi did, too. But the daughter and the daughter-in-law were of one voice: 'We thought you were a demon! How dare you scare us so.' ... Fukuichi ... said to Tokakishi, 'I've composed a poem. Would you write it down for me?' Fukuichi's verse went like this: Out of the lucky direction, Fukuichi, the little blind man comes tumbling --with a foolish thump on his rump. But the poem could also be read to mean: Out of the lucky direction, Good Fortune! -- A rice barn appears with the festive pounding of rice cakes sounding. Everyone was immensely entertained by this, and they applauded Fukuichi ... as the sake cups were passed around again."
A big thorough cleaning before the New Year is essential to the celebration in Japan, but I choose to put it off until the lunar new year according to the old calendar, or keep finding other cultures' New Years and postponing it indefinitely.
Ode to Joy! Choir of 10,000 performs Beethoven's 9th, end of the year Japanese tradition. Powerful, beautiful!
The 9th is tremendously popular, played in supermarkets and shops from the 26th on, the sound of New Year's.
The story is that the first 9th Symphony was performed by Germans held at the Bando Prisoner of War camp in Naruto, Tokushima prefecture (southern island of Shikoku), on June 1, 1918 (June 1st now commemorated as Ninth Day in Naruto and there's a museum and reconstructed camp building where you can buy German beer and Ninth Hot Dogs, white sausage on a rye bun).
Osaka-based beverage company Suntory began the 10,000 amateur singers performances in 1983. I couldn't find this December's, but Expo 2025 opened with it in April, Yutaka Sado conducting (starts at 1:50):
Here's a little documentary, Mr. Sado visiting the Bando Prisoner of War camp ruins in Naruto (did not eat hot dog or drink beer as far as we know) and a young first-time participant in the 10,000 choir performance.
James Joyce, "The Dead":
"A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and besides this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals.. . While Gabriel and Miss Daly exchanged plates of goose and ham and spiced beef Lilly went from guest to guest with a dish of hot floury potatoes, wrapped in a white napkin.
"His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. ... A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. ... Yes, the newspapers were right snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
The Mystique of Lutefisk, a Christmas tradition, from John Louis Anderson's "Scandinavian Humor & Other Myths"
"Every nation has at least one inedible national dish that its people cherish with perverse sentimentality. ... Undoubtably developed during a period of cruel famine, lutefisk is codfish dried on racks in the icy Nordic air, and then soaked in lye... . While it's understandable that our poor, starving ancestors ate lutefisk to stay alive throughout the long, hungry Nordic winters, it's a cruel mystery why the emigrants brought it with them... .
"With up to half the population of various Scandinavian countries emigrating to America, the Pan-Nordic Lutefisk Lobby recognized that there were unlimited profits to be made... . They were well aware that there were no codfish fleets plying the waters of South Dakota. ... What the emigrants wanted was a reminder of how terrible conditions were back home. The Lobby ... set out to stir up a false sense of nostalgia for Lutefisk. After the nostalgia for eating lutefisk started losing its grip, the Lutefisk Lobby began a new campaign stressing the macho aspects of eating something so disagreeable. Eventually ... the whole campaign just fell apart when the makers of a Tuna Hot Dish mix put up posters depicting a Christmas feast disrupted by nausea after the Lutefisk was passed around.
"Now lutefisk is making another comeback. ... We have forgotten our grandfathers' stories of biting into a chunk of unwashed lye during Christmas dinner. We are lulled by the claims of the New Lutefisk Lobby (Neo-Lutefiskians as they are known) that lye is no longer used in the manufacture of lutefisk... . Lutefisk's qualities are hard to describe in mere words. At least in decent words. It's surprising the word 'lutefisk' hasn't become an expletive itself, considering how often one reverts to vulgar and base language to describe the experience of eating it. ... It's time we stopped thinking of this dangerous substance as a test of our courage, or a public proof of what ordeals we will endure to prove our membership in the Scandinavian/American gang."
Christmas tree, from Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days":
"The tree enters a few days before Christmas, a fresh one bought from Mr. Fjerde or Mr. Munch, two adjoining bachelor farmers ... . Mr. Munch will talk your ear off, and to hear him tell it, he never meant to raise Christmas trees, they simply snuck into his property one day, and if he ever has the time he'll clean them out with a backhoe. 'They grow like goddam weeds, you know,' he says, 'and they eat the hell out of your soil ... . Goddam, I think next spring I maybe oughta get in there with some herbicide. ... Or I could burn them.'
"Mother can't bear swearing, so she sits in the car with the windows rolled up and a choir singing on the radio. 'You stay here,' she tells me, but I go with Dad up to Mr. Munch's back door for the thrill of it. Bachelor farmers disobey just about every rule my parents laid down; the yard is full of junk under the snow ... . A hill of old tin cans sits about a can's throw from the back door. Mr. Munch is unshaven ... his clothes are dirty, brown juice runs down his chin, his breath smells of liquor. 'He's not fit to live with decent people,' my mother told me when I asked why he lived alone. And yet he seems to have gotten away with it; he is as old as my grandpa.
"He ducks into his little house to get two dollars' change ... and I see he does not clean his room either. He carefully counts out the two dollars into Dad's hand and says, 'You be careful with that tree now. Those things are like explosives, you know. I sold these people a tree, I think it was last year, and two days later they was all dead. It blew up one night and burned them all so you couldn't tell one from the other. I tell you I wouldn't have one if you paid me. Even fresh -- they can go off like a bomb, you know. Boom! Just like that.' 'Merry Christmas,' Dad said. 'God help you,' said Mr. Munch."
Winter. From Nigel Slater's "The Christmas Chronicles":
"I love the crackle of winter. The snap of dry twigs underfoot, boots crunching on frozen grass, a fire spitting in the hearth, ice thawing on a pond, the sound of unwrapping a Christmas present from its paper. The innate crispness of the season appeals to me, like newly fallen snow, frosted hedges, the first fresh page of a new diary. ... Without their leaves, deciduous trees take on a sculptural quality; we get the opportunity to see their bark more clearly, the dance and flow of their branches, their character and form. ... Some things actually smell cold. But there are also smells ... that we connect with this season alone. A tray of mince pies in the oven; an orange studded with cloves ... or a shallow dish of potato Dauphinoise, calm and creamy, baking.
"Eating winter -- the food of fairy tales: Gingerbread biscuits with icing like melting snow, steaming glasses of glow-wine; savory puddings of bread and cheese and a goose with golden skin and a puddle of apple sauce. There are stews of game birds with twigs of thyme and rosemary; fish soups the color of rust and baked apples frothing at the brim. Winter is the time for marzipan-filled stollen, thick with powdered sugar, pork chops as thick as a plank, and rings of Cumberland sausage sweet with dates and bacon.
"Ginger, aniseed, cardamom, juniper and cloves. The caramel notes of maple syrup, treacle, butterscotch. Fruits dried on the vine, and preserved in sugar. Ingredients too that hold the essence of the winter months: red cabbage, russet apples, walnuts, smoked garlic, chestnuts, parsnips and cranberries. Winter cooking is clouds of mashed potatoes flecked with dark green cabbage, roasted onions glistening like brass bed knobs and parsnips that crisp and stick molasses-like to the roasting tin. The food of the cold months is fatty cuts of meat ... that we can leave to braise unhindered in a slow oven, with onions and thyme, wine and woody herbs, plodding silently towards tenderness."
Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" ballet first performed in St. Petersburg, December 1892.
"The Nutcracker is Tchaikovsky's masterpiece. He said beforehand that he would write music that would make everyone weep! [from his diary: 'As it always is after a weeping fit, old crybaby' 'slept like the dead and awoke refreshed, but with a new supply of tears which flow ceaselessly.'] I danced in The Nutcracker as a child in the Mariinsky Theater. ... Tchaikovsky remained a child all his life, he felt things like a child. He liked the German idea that man in his highest development approaches the child. Tchaikovsky loved children as themselves, not as future adults. Children contain maximum possibilities. Those possibilities often do not develop, they are lost. In every person the best, the most important part is that which remains from his childhood.
"The Nutcracker is a story by E.T.A. Hoffman that was incredibly popular in Russia. ... a serious thing wrapped into a fairy tale. The girl Marie gets a Christmas present, a toy nutcracker. At night she learns that the Nutcracker is a bewitched prince, on whom the Mouse King has declared war. Marie saves the Nutcracker from the mice. The grateful Nutcracker brings her to the kingdom of toys and sweets and then marries her. Of course ... Marie may have dreamed the whole thing. Petipa [choreographer], since he did not read German, got all the names wrong in his Nutcracker. Petipa calls the girl Clara, while in Hoffman Clara is the name of Marie's doll. ... Petipa was French. He never did learn how to speak Russian well. People say that when Petipa tried to speak Russian, he came up with all sorts of inadvertent obscenities.
"The second act of Nutcracker is more French than German ... at the time in Paris there was a fad for special spectacles in which various sweets were depicted by dancers. Actually, Nutcracker's second act is an enormous balletic sweetshop. In Petersburg there was a store like that ... had sweets and fruits from all over the world, like in 'A Thousand and One Nights.' I used to walk past and look in the windows often. ... Everything that appears in the second act of Nutcracker is a candy or something tasty. Or a toy. The Sugar Plum Fairy is a piece of candy and the dewdrops are made of sugar. The Buffon is a candy cane. It's all sugar!"
Soloman Volkov, "Balanchine's Tchaikovsky"
After Clara/Marie saves him from the wicked Mouse King and breaks the spell, the Nutcracker becomes a real boy and they dance a beautiful innocent young love pas de deux. The Royal Ballet.
Waltz of the Snowflakes ends Act 1. The New York City Ballet, George Balanchine's 1954 choreography.
Act 2. Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The Bolshoi Ballet.
Sugar Plum Fairy and guy we don't know what candy he is pas de deux. To me the music expresses bittersweet loss, the end of childhood and fairy tales and innocent dreams of candy and toys, music to make everyone weep. The Royal Ballet.
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