Sunday!

The crowd at Harajuku. By the way, if you click on the pictures, I've upped the quality so you can see more!
Be careful not to smork or tout in Harajuku. Either would be considered a grave breach of the law.
This is why I'm going out with her. Sexy is sexy.
Somehow, this just struck me as funny. It reads "WE WILL NOT OVERLOOK CRIME (The eyes of individuals are the eyes of the area)." Essentially, it's just a badass Japanese "neighborhood watch" sign, except it's got blood-rimmed kabuki eyes ftw.
The immaculately maintained kyuudo range at Meiji Shrine
A fine example of Harajuku high fashion.

Ah. I'll try to keep this post a little bit more focused and a little bit less rambley than some of my previous ones. I think I'll leave out the details of my classes, though I have finalized my schedule. So! Sunday was awesome. Why, you breathlessly inquire?

Alas, the suspense was for nothing, as the answers are unremarkable, if pleasant :(

I met Maya at Harajuku station in the early afternoon, and we walked to Meiji shrine through an unusually dense crowd of mid-afternoon loafers and tourists. There were some colorful street performances to draw the attention of the even-more-colorfully dressed fashionistas (think transsexual goth pop-rock mixed with the clothing you'd find on the porcelain dolls of hundreds of years ago). Actually, Harajuku has gained quite a reputation for the extreme fashions you can find there.



The shrine itself sprawls within roughly 175 acres of evergreen woodland, and is home to the world's largest wooden torii gate. "Torii" is written 鳥居 in Japanese. The literal meaning of the characters is "bird residence." I think that puts "torii" right up there with the cutest Japanese words ever.

Anyway, it was just nice to stroll under the strong spreading branches of trees for a change, and the woodwork of the various gates and courts was worth admiring. But here's the thing! There's this beautiful full-size Kyuudo range in the middle of the shrine, and we happened to pass by just as the tests for gaining 6th dan (the level six levels above the equivalent of "black belt") were being held!

For the few of you who know me and thus are reading this blog, and yet don't know what kyuudo is, it's a very ritualized form of Japanese archery. The emphasis lies in beauty and precision of form, rather than accuracy of aim.

The test (the part we watched anyway) unfolded with elegant ceremony, to match the immaculate range itself. Ah! Such stiff dignity! It made me miss the loose camaraderie of my archery club at the University of Maryland. Damn straight. My club.

Afterward, we pressed through a terribly thick crowd to obtain crepes, then devoured them relish-ingly near a temple.

And then...

I set off alone for C.C. Lemon Hall in Shibuya, which is a very professional orchestral performance space with tiered seating and two floors that just happens to be sponsored by the extraordinary Japanese soft drink C.C. Lemon (50 lemon's worth of vitamin C in a 350ml can. Yes, 50 lemon's worth. Why did they need to put such a seemingly dangerous amount of vitamin C in a single can of soda? Ah, the mysteries of Japan only increase). In my pocket, I had an invitation from the Keio Mandolin Club's Morikawa- who answers the emails for the club but happens to play the acoustic bass- to attend the end-of-semester performance of that club.

So, I imagine you're imagining the same thing I imagined. Something like... maybe twenty of the best performers of the mandolin club, sitting in a semicircle, plinking merrily away at their instruments. Well, the fact that Morikawa plays contrabass, in hindsight, ought to have clued me in.
I was floored, drop-jawed speechless at what I saw and heard. The "mandolin club," hah! Imagine a full string orchestra in concert dress, their numbers swelled with wind players and tympani. Now replace all of the violins with mandolins, the violas with octave mandolins, and the cellos with nylon string guitars (and add six more guitars to be safe). It was a full-blown mandolin orchestra! And they were phenomenally good! I can't tell you what a gratifying musical experience it was.
There's a certain acoustic property that mandolins achieve in chorus, influenced by the same "smoothing out" phenomenon that violins achieve when played in unison, that I've never heard before.
So, looking over the pamphlet during the second-to-last intermission (it was a nearly four hour concert), I found myself wondering at a seemingly superfluous intermission right near the end of the performance. The concert resumed, finished the set (from Georges Bizet's L'Arlésienne), and then broke up once more to leave the stage.

Ten minutes later, I hear giggling and astonishment from my left, then from my right, and then I look up from the program. At this point, it would be good to mention that the last item of the concert was a "Disney Medley."
Fully four out of five of the performers came back on stage in some ridiculous Disney-themed costume, or at least wearing some strange Disney-themed hat or carrying a doll version of some Disney character. Some of them were even barefoot, dressed up as Winnie the Pooh or Stitch. There were people dressed as Belle from Beauty and the Beast, or some creature from Monsters, Inc. The first chair mandolin had changed into a Minnie Mouse dress and mouse-ears, and the conductor strolled up to the stage with huge Mickey Mouse gloves over his hands.
After making a comedic try at turning the manuscript with one oversized paw, the conductor turned, bowed in apology to the audience, and removed the left glove in order to open the manuscript.
At one point, every single light in the hall was extinguished, for a period of perhaps ten seconds. The music had stopped. Then a blue light appeared, waving in a rhythmic semi-circle. It was the conductor, and the orchestra started playing in the dark! After that, the red lights alone were briefly brought up, so the audience was greeted with the bizarre spectacle of a blood-red menagerie of Disney characters, with the blue pulse of the conductor's light. Then normal lighting was restored, and the concert wound down, very slowly, with about four finales, just like "The Lord of the Rings."
One of the songs touched on in the medley was, fittingly enough, "It's a Small World After All."