Halloween in Japan

Spouse and I spent two weeks in Japan, from September 28 until October 12.  While Spouse attended two physics meetings, the first in Kobe, the second in Osaka, I toured Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, a few museums, and shopping streets. 

For an outsider like me, Japan seems like an art form.  Sweet shops abound, and small cakes are packaged as if they were jewels.  Little things, like socks, are placed in small paper bags that are taped closed and handed with both hands by the sales clerk to the purchaser. Dry napkins are hard to find in cafes and restaurants, but I didn't miss them, because the moist ones sealed in plastic seemed luxurious to me.  Streets and sidewalks are free from litter, but we couldn't find trash cans when we had something to throw away.

I knew that Japan is a country that celebrates festivals, like the Cherry Blossom Festival in the spring, a children's festival and a doll festival, as well as New Year's, and other seasonal holidays.  After World War 2, Japan adopted and adapted Christmas.  What I did not expect were jack o'lanterns, witches, and "Happy Halloween" signs in stores, malls, buses, and hotels.   

In Kobe, Kitano Meister Garden:
 an old elementary school
 turned into a crafts and food gallery

Sweet shop in Kitano Meister Garden with Halloween decorations

Entrance to the Mitsui Garden Hotel, Osaka

Lobby, Mitsui Garden Hotel, Osaka

Lobby, Mitsui Garden Hotel, Osaka

Lobby: Mitsui Garden Hotel, Osaka (reflection of CERN Wife in sign)

Flower shop, Osaka

Bus, Osaka

Preparing Halloween display, Kyoto train station

Another 100 yen store, in Kyoto

Shoe store, Kyoto mall

Halloween shoes, Kyoto

Although I'm not in Japan to see what happens on October 31, from what I've read, kids don't go trick-or-treating (that's American), but teenagers and young adults dress in costumes and go partying and carousing around town. But from the Halloween decorations in stores, I would assume that merchants are pushing gift-giving on Halloween, a festival that's been in Japan for fifteen years or so.

Have a Happy Halloween, and may the ghosts and witches bring you candy, donuts, apples, and all things pumpkin. 

P.S. - I think blogspot is spooked: It wouldn't let me edit the photos, and kept putting frames around pictures around pictures.  So I gave up.  It's Halloween.  Nothing I can do about it.

My Melancholy Birthday

Today's my birthday.  This isn't a contemplative gaze-at-my-navel post to lament the aging process. Or to bemoan all the months that have gone by since I blogged last (I cringe: 8 months).  I'm pleased to celebrate this day.  But I'm feeling sad because my treasured friend, Laine, passed away exactly two weeks ago.  This is my first birthday since the age of 9 without a long phone call from her.  

Laine (R) and me 2012

The first time I noticed Elaine was at our kindergarten Sunday School Purim party.  I walked over to a group of costumed children who were standing in a circle.  There in the middle was Queen Esther sitting on a chair, wearing a long white dress, her chestnut hair cascading down her back and her head crowned with a rhinestone tiara.  Her smile illuminated the room.  That was Lainie.

The two of us became friends in kindergarten, although we were in different classes at W.W. Smith School in Poughkeepsie, NY.  I remember one noon when we were dismissed for lunch.  We held hands and skipped down the sidewalk and noticed our shadows skipping along with us – silhouettes of 2 little girls with long braids and slips of curls surrounding our heads like wispy halos.  Our shadows were identical twins.

From 7^th grade through high school, we were inseparable.  We’d go home from school and then be on the phone with each other for a minimum of 2 hours nightly.

As 14-year-olds we became Candy Stripers, volunteering on Sundays at Saint Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie.  One of the white-garbed nuns, whose face was imprisoned with a wimple, once asked us if we had gone to church that morning.  Laine and I looked at each other.  I replied that no, we’re Jewish.  The nun said, “Oh…that’s nice.”  Another woman working in the room came over to us and peered at our heads.  I knew she wouldn't find horns.   

In high school, we’d take the train on a Saturday from Poughkeepsie to Manhattan, and shop for clothes at stores like Orbach’s and Alexander’s, gaze with amazement at overpriced accessories displayed in Bergorf-Goodman’s windows, and flip through art books at Brentano's, where we'd feel sophisticated and refined. Then we would eat lunch at Lord and Taylor's, like grown-up ladies.  

Something else happened in high school.  We sat with 5 other girls for lunch every day during our senior year.  Once at an assembly during National Brotherhood Week, we looked at each other – a motley group of girls of different backgrounds and identities - and realized that that’s what we are: a Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood, 1985
Nancy, Betsey, Donna, Laine, Jan, Me, Jule
and Becky (Laine's and Howie's daughter)

One thing that always amused the two of us was how people who didn’t know us that well got us confused.  We didn’t look alike.  In high school I had short hair.  Hers was long.  In MY high school yearbook, one acquaintance wrote under his name, “Elaine, I hope you have a great time in college.”

During our last high school reunion in 2011, Laine's name tag had my photo on it.

Our classmate, Dell, and Laine with a name-tag with my photo, 2011

Laine's high school reunion name tag - with my high school photo

Even during Elaine’s and Howie’s wedding, the rabbi, who knew the two of us forever, came over to me, the maid of honor dressed in a long yellow gown, and asked me how I had met Howie.  “From Elaine,” I responded.  The rabbi walked away with a baffled look on his face.

We took separate paths starting in our twenties, with Laine a married woman settled in Albany, NY, and I a wandering anthropologist who lived in Iran, Israel, Boston, San Francisco, and France.  Laine became a graphic designer.  I became an academic and then an ex-academic.  She - my bff before bff became a term of endearment - was the matron of honor at my wedding in Berkeley, CA.  

Laine, Howie, and me in Albany - September 2014

 

This past July 4 weekend I visited Laine and Howie.  Another Brother, Jan (and her husband, Dovid), joined us for the day.  Laine was her animated, funny, vibrant, and optimistic self.  People who did not know her would not have guessed that she was ill.   Her kindness, wisdom, humor, and tact – as well as that glowing smile – drew people to her. It was that positive nature of hers that refused to let cancer define her and made her the person we all loved.

Jan, Laine, and me, July 5, 2015

At the end of the weekend, Laine drove me to the train station.  When we hugged our good-byes, I told her that I want to come back to Albany the last week of August to see her.  We’re joined at the hip, she said.  Yes, I responded, we are.

I did go back to Albany the last week of August.  To kiss my beloved friend goodbye.  Now Laine's memory is a blessing.  And my birthday is melancholy.

#Je Suis Juive, #Je Suis Charlie

This afternoon (January 11) I attended a vigil at San Francisco's Civic Center to demonstrate solidarity with the French people, to commemorate the 17 murdered in Paris this week by Islamist terrorists, and to support freedom of the press.  

Police closed off the street in front of City Hall in order to accommodate the 2,000 people who came from different parts of the Bay Area to attend the rally.  Participants - most of whom were French - stood on the steps of City Hall in front of the gilded doors and held "Je suis Charlie" signs and pens (as symbolic of press freedom and Charlie Hebdo, the satirical paper whose editor, cartoonists and writers were killed on January 7 by Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, French-born radical Islamists who also killed Charlie Hebdo's maintenance worker and 2 policemen). 

Hand-made signs stood out, such as "Je pense donc je suis Charlie" (I think, therefore I'm Charlie) and "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" (in French) held on a giant pencil, and one small "Je suis Juif" (I'm a Jew). 

  

I had thought more Bay Area Jews would be attending this rally and not seeing anyone I knew from the Jewish community disappointed me, although I did meet two people from San Mateo, south of San Francisco, who held signs made by one of them, a French Jew named Michael.  One side said "Je suis Charlie" and the other side read "Je suis Hyper Cacher" - in reference to the kosher supermarket where another Islamist terrorist, Amedy Coulibaly, killed four Jewish shoppers on Friday, January 9, as well as a policewoman named Clarissa Jean-Philippe.

France has seen its share of anti-Semitic incidents which have been carried out by Islamists, many who were born in France to North African immigrant parents and who live in the banlieus, the suburban slums where gangs, drugs, delinquency, and despair rule.  These young men see no future for themselves, are not integrated into French society, and fall prey to the preaching of Islamists.  They are the perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence in France, such as the murders in Toulouse in 2012 and the attacks on a synagogue and Jewish shops this past July.  

This violence is frightening.  I wish that the hundreds of millions of Muslims who are embarrassed and appalled that ISIS, al Qaida, Boko Haram, the Taliban and others are hijacking their religion would stop shaking their heads and saying that these terrorists aren't Muslims, because they are.  My wish is to see hundreds of millions of Muslims marching in the streets wherever they live - France, Germany, Denmark, the US, Egypt, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mali - to condemn the terrorism that has been plaguing their religion. 

In Paris today over a million Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists marched against terrorism.  And in San Francisco today one young Frenchman held his unique hand-drawn placard that expressed hope for humanity. 

May peace be upon us all.

    

The Appropriation of CERN Wife

CERN Wife in Ferney-Voltaire apartment, April 2012

Curiosity poked me: where is “CERN Wife” in Google’s search engine?  I checked, and there it was, on the very top of the first page.  But what is THAT?  Below the listing of my blog is www.lifeasacernwife.blogspot.com.  Life as a CERN wife?  Couldn’t whoever this is have thought of something other than CERN Wife?  That’s MY blog name!  And she uses it on blogspot, no less.

I clicked on this usurper’s URL and found the title of her blog: “A Year in France: Life as a CERN Wife”.  This is not quite plagiarism, but my blood pressure rose to the top of my head because my original blog title was “CERN Wife: Spending a Year in Ferney-Voltaire” – the town in France where we lived.  My first blog post was February 1, 2012.  Hers was September 3, 2012, less than two months after we had returned to the U.S. from France.

Her blog set-up is similar to mine as well.  Although fonts and template design are there on blogspot for the choosing, she selected the same font for her text, but a lighter color than the one I’m using, and her photographs, centered in the middle, like mine, are outlined in grey rather than black.  I don’t have a photo on the top of my blog.  She has one – a scene of undulating hills in autumn, which I suppose was taken in the nearby Jura Mountains.  This blogger’s content, as a young wife and new mother, is different from mine – so in reality she didn’t plagiarize, but still… 

One can’t copyright a title, whether naming a book, blog, or business.  The rational me has convinced the creative me that there is no reason to be perturbed that someone has appropriated my blog title.  I suppose I should be flattered that I am an original, and she (in all likelihood intelligent and pleasant) is derivative.

The Last Shah's Penultimate Birthday: October 26, 1978

I am in the process of revising my memoir, Phantom Iran, which is about life in Iran during the political turmoil of 1978-79, when the Islamic Revolution was brewing.  Today I am posting part of a chapter from the memoir which describes an event that occurred exactly 36 years ago:

Thirty-six years ago, in the fall of 1978, I was an American graduate student doing research in Iran during a time of frequent anti-Shah protests.  One of these protests, on October 26, 1978, was the day of Mohammad Reza Shah’s sixty-ninth birthday.

I remember seeing photos of the Shah and his third wife, Farah Diba, perhaps when Life magazine covered his 1967 coronation.  To me, the two Persian royals appeared dignified and glorified, he in gilded military regalia, she swathed in jewels, both draped with gold-embroidered cloaks.  Farah Diba’s green velvet cape, with its extended train, was embellished with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds.  On their heads rested crowns heavy with gemstones.  Between them stood the seven-year-old Crown Prince Reza. 

Coronation of Mohammad Reza Shah, October 25, 1967

This official coronation occurred twenty-six years after Mohammad Reza Shah had taken over the throne from his father, Reza Shah, during World War II.  The Allied forces, afraid that Reza Shah’s policy of neutrality during the war made Iran too close to the Nazis, forced him to abdicate in 1941.  Mohammad Reza, then just 22, became the monarch of Iran.

During his opulent 1967 coronation, Mohammad Reza Shah took the title “Shahanshah” (King of Kings) for himself.  He rendered its translation in English as “emperor.”  The Shah designated Farah Diba—his other two marriages had ended in divorce because the wives did not produce a male heir—the “Shanbanou,” or Empress.  He also had himself referred to as “Aryamehr”—“Light of the Aryans.”

The Shah enjoyed being the center of opulent pageantry, the most pompous of which took place in 1971 to celebrate 2500 years of Iranian monarchy, from the rule of Cyrus the Great of the 6^th century BCE to his own sovereignty in the 20^th century.  The Shah invited world leaders to a hundred million dollar lavish festival held from October 12 -16 at a 160-acre tent city created at Persepolis, the ancient capital of Iran’s Achaemenid dynasty (550-330 BCE).   French chefs prepared exotic dishes for the guests, who ate off Limoges china and drank from Baccarat crystal.  The villagers in the vicinity lived in mud-brick huts without electricity or running water.

Tent at Persepolis tent city

Parade in front of Persepolis 1971

By October 1978 anti-Shah political turmoil was spreading, and the Shah realized that public ceremony celebrating his birthday that year was imprudent.  Gatherings to glorify him had been revoked.  Instead, the Shah said he would contribute money meant for his birthday festivities to the 2,000 survivors of a 7.8 earthquake that had occurred six weeks earlier in the town of Tabas.  That earthquake had devastated the town and killed 15,000 people.

Tehranis I spoke to that week in 1978 had anticipated trouble on the Shah’s birthday.  Demonstrations, many said.  Overthrow of the Shah, some professed.   Formation of a constitutional monarchy, others hoped.  I didn’t know what to expect.

I was staying in central Tehran at the hostel of the American Institute of Iranian Studies, whose function was to help American academics with some of the bureaucratic entanglements they inevitably encountered. The hostel compound, which was an old house and yard surrounded by a high wall, was located across the street from the Institute’s main building where the Institute’s director lived.

By 9 AM the morning of the Shah’s birthday young men were marching near the American Institute’s hostel, bellowing "marg bar shah" (death to the Shah) and denouncing the kharaji and farangi, two terms meaning "foreigner."  Sometimes the demonstrators ran down the alley in front of the Institute.  Even boys ten or eleven years old joined in.  The four of us staying in the hostel took turns watching through a large keyhole in the door of the compound’s wall.  Helicopters flew low, as if spying or poised to shoot.

            

The young men we watched from the peephole were protesting against the Shah.  They were not rallying for an Islamic state.  They wanted the Shah out of power, and some wanted him dead.  The Shah had been a dictator for decades, loved by some, hated by many.  His autocracy emerged in 1953, twelve years after he had taken over the title from his father.  At that time his popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.  This action pleased the Iranian public.  The British and Americans, though, were furious at having lost their control over Iranian oil.  They ousted Mossadegh in a coup d’état in August 1953.  After the coup, the Shah’s rule became more imperious.  His CIA-trained secret police, Savak, imprisoned and tortured thousands of political dissidents. 

By ten thirty that morning the director of the Institute entered the hostel compound.

“Don’t go outside,” he warned as he walked in.  “Soldiers are everywhere.”  He sat down with the four of us in the courtyard.  He folded his hands, rested them on the metal table, and continued.  “Apparently, the demonstrators knew the soldiers were coming.  They moved cars into the street to block them.  But the army materialized some vehicle that could lift the cars and put them down by the side of the road.”  He looked at us as if he were waiting for a response, but none of us said anything.  “Okay, just stay inside the compound,” he cautioned.  Then he left.

            

We heard gunshots.  Demonstrators and soldiers raced through our neighborhood.  My heart was pounding so loudly that I feared the demonstrators could hear it and would demand to be let into the courtyard.

            

By two in the afternoon everything was quiet.  I wanted to use the Institute’s phone in the main building to call friends of mine who lived in a northern Tehran neighborhood to find out what happened there.  Bob, an archeologist staying at the hostel, decided to join me.

            

I wrapped myself in the black chador that I had bought on my first trip to Iran in 1975.  My right hand held the chador clinched around my chin.  With my hair covered, my body concealed, and my face exposed, I opened the hostel’s metal door two inches, then pushed it wide enough to stick my head out.  I saw no protesters on the street.  Three young men were talking to each other several houses away.  Garbage bags were piled outside the door of the American Institute waiting to be picked up. 

Bob and I crossed the street.  In less than no time, the three young men were standing next to us.  They lit matches and set the garbage on fire.  I rang the Institute’s doorbell, once, twice, three times.  No one answered.  My knees were shaking.  I felt weak.  I was perspiring.

            

I was wearing a chador, but my American sandals were showing and they were flat with thick straps—a good-for-walking style, the type that no Iranian woman would wear in 1978. 

            

One of the men lit a paper bag.  He thrust it so close to my face that its heat tingled my skin.

            

"Come, lady...come, lady...come, lady..." he taunted in Farsi.

            

My feet were barely holding my body upright.  Sweat soaked me.  My hand trembled as I pressed the doorbell again.

            

At last the Institute's director peeked out the door.  We rushed in, pushed him out of our way, and slammed the gate behind us, leaning on it to make sure it was shut.  The director stared at us.

            

“Sorry about that,” he said.  “ We didn’t see you, and we didn’t hear the doorbell.”  He led us into the dining room.  “We were on the third floor watching what was going on in the streets.”    

            

He made me a lime vodka drink with the refreshing tart lime juice particular to Iran.  I sipped it, relished it, needed it to calm my pounding heart and the intense disquietude I felt.  In spite of Islam's taboo on alcohol, pre-revolutionary Iran had decent vodka.

            

By four in the afternoon, tranquility permeated central Tehran.  In the early evening Bob and I walked to Govinda's, the local Hare Krishna joint, for dinner.  How strange—on that birthday, that day of riots—to smell the incense and the mélange of Indian spices, and to talk to English-speaking Hindu-practicing Western waiters dressed in saffron robes.  After dinner we strolled back to the Institute.  Stores were open.  Men, women, and children were walking on the streets, talking, smiling, and laughing.  It was as if nothing at all had happened that day.

©Karen Lee Pliskin, Ph.D.