In only a week here in Chiba with the tsuma's sister and her three boys (5, 3, and 1 and a half) before they return to Okinawa, we're trying to pack a full summer's worth of fun. This includes:
1. Suika every afternoon. Japanese watermelon is the best!
2. Fireworks every night we can. Last night was just sparklers in the driveway but tomorrow night we're shooting for the real thing, if we can get the middle cousin over last year's trauma. Hey, don't tease him--ever since onechan was caught outside in that mini-typhoon with her mom and little sister, she's been afraid of strong winds! I had to talk her down during the Matsuri festival one of our last evenings in Fukuoka when it got windy enough for her to exclaim "sugoi kaze!" and suggest that everyone get inside immediately. (In her defense, she did hear that a typhoon was near Japan that week.) Which reminds me that she was also afraid of the sparklers because of the fire safety lesson she got at her yochien.
3. Speaking of typhoons and Fukuoka, we managed to get out of town before Typhoon Usagi went almost straight northward up the eastern side of Kyushu. It's hugging the northwestern coast of Honshu--good thing Chiba is on the southeastern one! Dodging typhoons is good summer fun. Being in them, not so much.
4. More summer festivals. Today we enjoyed the ancient and revered Pokemon Festival right by the Chiba Marines baseball dome/stadium. Well, I guess less than ten years isn't quite ancient, but when upwards of 25,000 people were there in the first three hours of a three-day event, that's some serious reverence. We're talking elementary school kids, their younger siblings, and their moms (and even some dads) hiking in a kilometer or more from the parking lot in high 20s C (at 9 am) and sunny post-rainy season heat wave to go through at least that much in lines just to enter the main arena, which is filled with 8 or so stations, each of which involved waits of 10 minutes (for the free Nintendo DS new Pokemon adventure game) to 4 hours (for who knows what). We waited about 45 minutes to get a Pokeball and go in with a group of kids and moms trying to "catch" some new Pocket Monsters. Only problem was, neither the tsuam and I paid any attention to the directions the attendant was giving the kids, so when onechan got scared (of course), we had little idea what to do and only caught 2. Whatever. Then we avoided the 4-hour line and onechan and I tried the Nintendo DS game, which basically involved hitting the A button whenever hiragana appeared on the screen (which was often). I did accidentally discover you could move the character by touching the screen, which was cool. (You could say I've been out of the gaming world for a while, I guess.) Then the family waited a half hour for photos with and postcards featuring Pokemon characters, while imoto and I checked out the crowd outside that station, while some kind of concert went on about 200 yards away. This was the best part of the event, for me, at least. I jokingly referred to the whole thing as "three hours of crowd watching and kid herding" in a cell phone email to a friend, but I can't say I didn't have a good time doing that. I've been to Tool at the Buffalo Civic Center, but this crowd dwarfed that one. More litle girls in this one, too. As much as I hate Pokemon, I have to admit it provides a unifying generational experience for the boys and girls between 3 and 12, who were the majority of the crowd. Sorry, no outre otaku sightings to report, but as Kung Fu Monkey pointed out, the .1% of the crowd that fits the bill gets 99% of the media attention, so why feed into that even if I did see some?
5. Lots and lots of free play for the cousins. Imoto and her male counterpart are beginning to get old enough to almost interact--they had an impromptu tea sucking contest (her cousin learned to use a straw for the first time at lunch today) outside a Costco food area, fight over/share prized toys and whatever else they find on the floor, climb stairs together, and get jealous when any of the adults pick up any of the other kids. Onechan continues to tag along after her gosai otokonoko cousin and gang up with him on his three-year-old younger brother, but the difference is now they all can have real conversations, as her Japanese has improved light years since the beginning of the year when they were last hanging together.
6. Watching Japanese kids' tv together--including late evening stuff like Kurayon Shin-chan, which featured tonight a great parody of the Sunday morning live-action Kamen Rider (Masked Rider) show, using the voice talents of the actual actors from the show. This deserves a post of its own.
7. Oh yeah, and I am definitely staying up to watch the second round of the Women's British Open on Japanese tv tonight. Definitely.
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