Market

On Sunday a couple of friends and I decided to go to the Kitano Tenmangu market, held every month on the 25th, weather permitting. Unfortunately, because it was still a 3-day weekend for all of Japan in a place famous for beautiful leaves and an unseasonably warm day, the place was absolutely mobbed. There was no where in the entire flea market (which raps around the entirety of the Kitano Tenmangu shrine, which is pretty big) where you could turn around without bumping into at least 4 people, but it was still fun to be out in such nice weather with my friends. For some reason, I’ve made it out to the Toji market twice, but never before to the much closer one at Tenmangu. Anyway, no one really bought a whole lot, which is fine, though we saw a lot of entertaining things and tasty-looking foods, and we did eventually choose lunch out of things of the second category (I had takoyaki, which is octopus heavily battered and baked). After that, I went with one of my friends to see the student festival at my college. Student festivals here are amazing to me, especially because they really are entirely put together by the students themselves. We were actually too early for this one, but we did get to see people setting up their stands, practicing the acts that would be on the two large stages that had been set up, and painting signs, testing equipment and all matter of other industrious things. Essentially, school clubs decide on their fund-raising method of choice and fully plan and execute it themselves, which is interesting enough when college students manage it, but extraordinary when you realize that most every school of Japan from elementary-on has one of these every year. Doubtless the first-graders have a certain amount of help, but it’s still pretty cool, in my opinion, that they are given responsibility for something like this from such a young age. Anyway, that was pretty much what I did on Sunday.
-I heard once from someone that Japanese people will not wear clothes that have been used by someone else, but this is clearly a fallacy, as there are massive numbers of used kimono booths at these flea markets, at which the vast majority of shoppers are Japanese.
-I had here my first bad experience with someone, though I could be over-reacting. I was perusing a box of hair ornaments in someone’s booth, and went to pick up one from the tangle when the shop woman jumped up and forcefully yelled “No! Only look!” which surprised me and annoyed me enough that I just left. I don’t know that it was just because I was a foreigner, but it really felt that way. Too bad for her though, because I had money in my pocket that could have been hers.
-Japanese college students (not all of them, but far more than in America) do not do much work or go to many classes. Basically, the goal is, through years of stressful testing, to get into a good college whose name alone is proof of your intelligence and will help you get a job in the future. Once you’ve actually entered college you essentially devote all of your time to your club of choice, which accounts in part for the students’ zeal in fundraising at the festival.