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.