Like a kancho to the heart

Long gap since my last post - I've been busy. Here's an update with some pictures, though!

Last weekend, myself and a slew of other JETs traveled north to attend to the Northern welcome party, in a town (village(intersection)) called Nakagawa. Nakagawa station, three hours into the mountains, looks like this:



We arrived Saturday afternoon and proceeded to dick around the town and set up camp before nightfall, at which point we hit the hot springs (pictures omitted) and commenced doing the sorts of things adults generally do while camping.

In the morning, several JETs had signed up for the local festival, which entailed many spirited rounds of log-pushing. Log-pushing is essentially a tug-of-war in reverse; teams hold on to each end of a large log, and attempt to push the other team out of the playing area. I didn't get to take any pictures of it, but this poster sums it up:



Hooray! One of the JET mens teams managed to make it to the semifinals, which was probably due to their fetching lumberjack costumes.

Here's some other random pictures from the train ride back and the night in Asahikawa before heading back to work:




In other news, I had my first experience with "kancho" today. For the blessedly unversed, kancho is an important part of childhood in Japan and is enjoyed by boys and girls of all ages. It consists of clasping the hands together with the index fingers outstretched, and then attempting to ram the resulting projectile as far up the rectum of any given adult as you can. Yeah, I don't get it either. I knew about kancho previously, but today was my first time having a kid actually go for it. It's not a one-time thing, either - this kid was really earnestly dedicated and it's quite hard to keep an eye on a specific 8 year old when you are surrounded by thirty of them.

Ah, Japan.