Hello again! It has been kind of rainy the last few days. Sometimes it rains really hard which is cool and there is lots of lightning (雷)(かみなり)(kaminari). This week we had a Rakugo master, Mr. Sankyo, perform for us and show us some of the incredible aspects of the art of Rakugo. Rakugo is pretty much performing a story that involves multiple people, but you do it by yourself, sitting down the whole time, and only using a small towel and a fan as props. Here is a video of the same master that came to us, the video shows him performing rakugo. I was blown away by how amazing it was, and we got a chance to try to perform a rakugo story (there are really short ones), and I probably should have practiced more beforehand. Mr. Hatasa, a Purdue Japanese Professor, and previously the head of the Japanese language school (I think) at Middlebury, helped explain rakugo and the performances. This was on Thursday.
On Wednesday, Kuo-san and I had time left on our JR passes (so trains were free), so we took the shinkansen to Toyama which took 20 minutes, saw Toyama fountains and castle and pretty garden in front of the art museum, then took the shinkansen back. We spent less than an hour in Toyama. Then we rode the Thunderbird (slower than shinkansen but still fast) to Fukui, where we saw the dinosaur robots in front of the train station and we saw the ruins of Fukui castle and another park (although when I return to Fukui I would like to go inside of the pay-to-see park because we didn’t have time). The Hokuriku Arch Pass is an incredibly good deal, it pays off if you go round trip Kanazawa to Tokyo, then you have free JR trains for a week.
This afternoon I will see some kind of performance at Noh Theater, which I probably won’t understand. Before that I have a meeting for Komatsu Summer Seminars, because I am teaching a seminar on the philosophy of AI after PII ends.
See you soon!