More Search Queries

I really don't understand how some of these end up with people getting to my blog - or rather, how my blog ends up on the results page for them, but I guess it did. Here are the last 20 queries people used to get to my blog, in order of recency:
japanese bucket pudding, japan nuclear waste, tofu, tofu, tofu, tofu, tofu, kanji, kyoto Paradole Saiin III, kyoto Paradole Saiin III, kuso atsui, where can i buy sex toys in yokohama?, japanese いいお天気ですね。, rice cooker at jusco japan, ATSUI TOWELL KANJI RYOKAN, mamachari bike for work out, how to use yabari, japanese people-pictures, judo, American electronics in japan 3 prong

I can understand the first one. I can understand the tofu searches, given all the stupid ideas I try with tofu. kuso atsui means "fucking hot". I don't know where to buy sex toys in Yokohama. いいお天気ですね ii otenki desu ne means "It's nice weather today, isn't it?", roughly.

I'm a little baffled by atsui towell kanji ryokan, but I think the person is trying to find the kanji for お絞り, a hot (atsui), moist towel that many places will give you before eating for washing your hands. A 旅館 ryokan ("Japanese-style inn", lit: "travel house") is one such example of a place that might do that.

I don't know how to use Yabari, and I don't see why someone would buy a mamacheri to work out, but... Well, tofu.

Cleanup Discoveries

I was cleaning out my temp folder and found a set of picture I had taken of the Tokyo tower with the hopes of doing a panorama of them. I gave it another shot just now and got them to come together a little bit better this time. Anyway, here's the result.Yes, you could take that picture with just one shot if you had the right gear, but the shortest focal length I have is 18mm, and it's very poor for low-light work. That said, a brightly-lit tower can hardly be considered "low-light", so I used my 18-55mm, the cheapo kit lens that comes with every low-end DSLR for the past five years.
it would take at least six separate pictures at that focal length to do this from where I was standing, and I was far back as I could get without standing (too deeply) in shrubbery/gardening. This picture is taken from 17 of the 20 or so picture I took from that spot. You'd think with that many, I could've got the tower to expose properly in one of them. Unfortunately, though I did, I took those picture from a slightly different viewpoint, so I can't match them. Cool, huh?

I'd like to go back and try this again with the proper gear, ie: a tripod, but I don't think I'll be able to afford it this trip.

Test Weirdness

So my test today with the pile of kanji and sentence patterns and whatnot was today. They totally didn't test us on what I thought they were going to, and in fact tested us for being able write a bunch of characters that we thought were reading-only characters.
When I turned in my test I confirmed this with the teacher, who agreed that it was strange. She decided that they wouldn't count, but if you were able to write them anyway, you get a bonus point per word. So 0-4 points, depending on how much you over-studied. At most, that's nearly an eight-point difference, so I'm glad I mentioned it.

They tested us on a couple of random things that I completely forgot they had explained - pure luck I remembered them anyway, I guess.

The sentence pattern ones weren't so bad, though I'm not sure if my "Sometimes you get tasty kuriimu-pan, sometimes you get not so tasty kuriimu-pan" sentence will do well.
In the end, I knew all the kanji we were actually supposed to know, and all the ones that came out on the test, and I can only think of one other place that I messed up, so if it were anything else, I'd think a low A would be very possible. It's Japanese, though, so I expect a high C at best.

「日本：その土地の2つだけのProngs」

So... machine translation.

I went through and corrected some errors I saw right off, but it seems in general much more lucid than the going from Japanese to English. I mean, there are plenty of errors, and I'm sure I'm just missing a lot of weirdness because I'm not a native speaker, but at least what it spews out makes grammatic sense more than half the time, which is more than I can say for most other languages to English.

If you don't have Japanese font support installed, you can still see what this page looks like in terrible, machine-translated Japanese.

Statistically Kanji-ing...

For the test one Wednesday, we have to know 172 new words comprised of 271 different characters and a total of 344. Here are the top four kanji by frequency:

Character | Count | Chinese readings | Japanese readings | English meanings
的　7　テキ　まと　bull's eye, mark, target, object, adjective ending
迷　5　メイ　まよ(う)　astray, be perplexed, in doubt, lost, err, illusion
地　5　チ／ジ　ground, earth
動　4　ドウ　うご(く)／うご(かす)　move, motion, change, confusion, shift, shake

Statistically Speaking...

I was just looking at the statistics for pictures I've posted. I can see, for the most part, how often all the pictures on the site are viewed, and I was look at these so often when I ought to be doing other things, like studying, or not burning dinner.

The picture of the Shana figures has held the top spot since I posted it three months ago and nothing has displaced it that I know of.After that, these two pictures of girls dancing at the 外大際 gaidai-sai are tied for second place and have held steady about there for the past few weeks. For the record, I think the girl in this picture is the hottest of the ones on stage. Bonus for the amazingly sexy outfit, yes? I don't usually like lace, but... rawr, you know?

A clear fourth, though not until recently, is the panorama of the izakaya party that Miso arranged. I still don't know who Miso is, though I recall that she had a cool name. I think her last name was "Woo" or something like that, which just makes her whole name sound like an exclamation from someone who likes miso soup.

Miso, woo!

After that are a bunch of pictures that are all about even, and after that big set is one picture with me in it.
Slightly ahead of that picture is this picture of the molted exoskeleton of a cicada on a log, I think. As in, I don't know what kind of bug it is/was. Apparently, "In North China cicadas are skewered or stir fried as a delicacy." (Wikipedia)

At least I know where I stand.

Recon

Since Jes is coming to Japan - and more specifically, coming to Kyoto - in a few weeks, I did some reconnaissance today for churchy things. I managed to accidentally take a different path that led me to a taiyaki stand. Deliciousness.
I also saw the first usage of the character ゐ wi since I got here. It was removed from the language prior to World War One, but I guess you can use it if you want. I asked an old man about it and he didn't seem to think it was strange at all. I have a picture, but I'm honestly too lazy to upload it right now. The sign was written in red and read やすゐ薬局　yasui yakkyoku ("cheap pharmacy").

「紅葉」 or "It's fall. The trees are dying. Yay."

The Japanese celebrate the changing seasons like... well, like the Japanese celebrate the changing of the seasons. Partly, I think it's an excuse to party and generally make merry and, more importantly, imbibe some final alcohol before it's too damned cold to go buy beer. In any case, trees changing color is a Big Deal here. Photographers come out in troves, and festivals are had all around the city on every other day. If you imagine Leavenworth, but with 1.5 million people living in it, you have the right idea.

Anyway, I'm here, so I have to take pictures of the trees going into a coma or people look at me funny - er, funnier? I don't know.

Fine, it's an excuse to take pictures. Here's what I got today, whatever the reason.

This (above) was a place that looked nice and was on the way, so I stopped to take some test shots. It started raining just as I was finishing up, so I hurried to get packed up and move on.

Totally random trees. I photoshopped this one pretty hard, and I'm not so great with Photoshop, so there are quite a few artifacts, but if you look at it like this, it looks good enough.

Don't worry, I don't intend to put all the pictures up in this massively space-consuming fashion, but I spent a long time between taking these four and doing the post work, so they're getting the annoying treatment.

Random bridge where I took advantage of my waterproof boots to tromp around in a shallow river that runs through town and get this picture. Boots, boots. I didn't like the view from on the bridge is why, in case you're wondering.
I'm kind of kicking myself for not getting the left-side pillar, but it looks really weird if I crop out the right-side one, so...

This is one of places we've done parties, and it was my goal for heading out to the middle of nowhere. I saw some friends boating along, so I photosniped them and headed to where I thought they were going and helped pull them ashore and got to show off my super-cool waterproof boots. Muahaha. Danner boots: Mmm, mmm, good! No, seriously!

And now is time for yet another picture spam.
Really, there's not that much to be said for momiji ("crimson leaves") 'cause I think almost everyone in a temperate climate knows what fall looks like.
Random flower picture, because it was required. It's a shibazakura, which means someone thinks it looks like a cherry blossom. Kind of.

(Far left) Probably the prettiest single tree I saw, and it was a Japanese maple, which my mom seems to have some kind of fetish for, so, again, required.

Some more pictures taken while tromping around in the river. Dunno what the weed-ish things at the bottom arm, but they looked kind of wheat-y. The far right tree looks... like I need to leave the 9th grade.

Still tromping around in the not-quite-a-river, I found this random fish and about six of his buddies. I wasn't sure it was a real dead fish until I poked it with my shoe. It felt real enough. And no, I don't know why someone would scatter fake dead fish around. It's Japan; you never know.

Mun, the guy at the paddles, finally squinted at me in recognition, so I gave myself up and waved at them. They went and bought some random sweet wine and passed it around.
Some more people came, and we took a bunch of pictures, and my tripod got passed around like...

In any case, I need new similes.

Mundane Bike Repairs

My poor, poor bike brakes have been getting worse and worse of late. A few weeks ago, some an old woman in a in a tiny car passed me, swerved in front of me, then stopped suddenly so she could s-l-o-w-l-y turn into the parking lot. I had a garbage truck approaching on my right, and a curb that I was at too shallow of an angle at to jump onto, and you can't safely stop even a bike with good brakes in three feet, but you can at least slow down the impact.

I was fine and only left a trail of tire-smudge across her bright white back bumper. She was almost kind enough to roll down her window and ask if I was okay, but not quite.

Anyway, after ten or so trips up near Kinkaku and back, plus my two-three times daily commute to the school and back, my poor V-brakes were not so much braking anymore as much as slowing. More useful than a kick in the pants, but not nearly as useful as working brakes.

The mechanic was a little confused about why I wanted my old brakes, but I managed to wrest them away from him and flee. Anyway, you can see them at right.

Learned today that the mechanic that usually does work on my bike worked for five years as a racing pit mechanic and spent most of his life working for Nissan as an engineer. Can't remember his name, though.

Bike Repair

I don't know why I have such poor luck with bikes here in Japan. I've had a brake failure on a used bike, fixed that, and that bike got stolen - $120 total expenditure for the first bike. I bought a new bike for $250 with some metal pedals ($20) because they slip less and I just destroy the plastic ones. Too fat, I guess. Then that bike was stolen - $280 total expenditure for the second bike, bringing me and those I leech off of (ie, parents) up to $390. $125 of this was refunded as insurance, fortunately, for a new total of $255.

I'm currently on my third bike ($250), but I'm using two locks now ($12 for the extra lock - one comes standard on almost all bikes) and have the normal plastic pedals. All is well with this bike, until someone got a little overzealous trying to park their bike and managed to snap off the upshifting lever. Kind of them, I know.

At right is the part that was broken off. I was fortunate enough that it happened to fall on the ground in a gutter, so nobody stepped on it or anything. I stuffed it in my pocket and headed home. At left is what remains of the shift lever that is attached to the bike.

A few days later, I took it into a bike shop and asked them what it would cost to fix. They said they'd have to replace the whole unit, which, after some runaround, turned out would be $60. I think $5 of that was labor, in case you're wondering.

I'm not upscale enough to make this kind of repair worth $60, nearly 1/4 the original cost of the bike, worthwhile to me. But you know what is?

A $3 tube of superglue and some duct tape. Yeah, classy. I know.

So I dabbed some superglue on a few contact points and fixed the whole thing in place with duct tape, then let it set for about two hours.

It seemed pretty secure at that point, so I turned the whole thing on its side and filled everything that didn't look like a moving part with superglue. Then the duct tape again. My bike is back outside, nursing its wounds, but I can now shift up again. It's not a Knife Man Dan level of glue-ninja, but it holds the thing on.

Total cost of materials:
$4 - Scotch-brand superglue
$3 - クリームパン等 - Tasties
$20 - Incidental costs in visiting a hardware store. IE, "Look, gloves!" and "A non-slip pad! I can freem that on the bottom of my DDR mats and make for bonus goodness!" and... Well, you know. I bought a six-pack of chopsticks, for some unknown reason, and almost spent $10 on glow tape.

I very nearly bought this flashlight, as well, and I think most of you can understand why. It's 5W, making it nearly three times as powerful as my current 1W belt-carry. The thing looks so nice and Mag-Lite-ish, too, as you can hopefully see through the cellophane wrap. I may buy myself that for Christmas if I have money left...

As a last random picture, I also found these hammers. They completely outnumbered what I consider to be normal hammers. Out of frame is a massive wooden mallet, various sizes of crowbars ranging from six inches to 3.2 feet, and a Japanese couple running away from the gaijin with the 1-meter crowbar in his hands.

Pudding/プリン

So Chikari, my cute パン屋 (bakery) girl brought me some yummy apple pie and...
this, a half-liter bucket of pudding. The pudding was delicious.

旅行茶碗 - Trip Chawan

My school's study abroad students all - minus one or two - went to Shiga Prefecture on a day trip. One of the things we did was to make these rice bowls, or chawan. chawan is written with the characters for "tea" and "teacup", so your guess is as good as mine as to why it's a rice bowl.

Anyway, we were allowed to make one piece of random pottery. They recommended a chawan because they're fairly simple and hard to mess up. A lot of people did cool artsy stuff, I'm sure some people did not-so-cool artsy stuff, and... then there's mine. It's an ugly beast, but it does successfully keep my chopsticks on the top of the bowl where I want them, and that's all I was trying to do.

Mission accomplished, I guess.

Calligraphy Ninjing

[I have more pictures than things to actually say about them, but it's not enough to put in a separate gallery, so I'm just going to interject comments or info about the pictures wherever happens to be convenient.

By the way:

If you're in any of these pictures, I can get you higher-quality versions with no trouble at all, so drop me a line if you want 'em.]

I snuck my camera into the calligraphy class today during some free time I had today and I got some pictures.

(To the left is Cristina (Italian) and to the right is Alessia (also Italian). Or at least, I think that's who they are. I also get the two of them mixed up.
Far right is Valentina (also also Italian), my partner in level four.)

After this class is a tea ceremony class, and a bunch of the students wear kimono to it, purportedly because it makes the teacher happy.

(Far left is Yanavy (French), our French-/German-/British-English-speaking language ninja. I have recordings of her accent, which is probably the cutest of the students I know, but there are something like 32 different death threats if I ever show them to anybody, so they're just going to ferment on my hard drive.
Right is Cassie (American, by the window) and Magi (Canadian, closer, light purple kimono).
You can see Sara (Australian) and a guy from level two whose name I don't know in the middle picture.)

(This last picture is of two of the three Koreans in our level four class, Park Sou Jong and Park Min Ji. I honestly have no clue how to romanize their names, so I hope they will forgive me if they see this. Sou Jong is the one with the hat.)

The two characters they were writing that day were 山 yama/san/zan ("mountain") and 寺 tera/dera/ji ("temple"), pronounced together as any combination of the above, or even other random readings I don't know, like 山's yano reading, which is only used for names. That said, if you're rendering it as a normal word, it's pronounced yamadera, meaning "mountain temple".

I believe I may have mentioned that kanji and I are not on the best of terms.

More Slow Days

Nothing particularly of note has happened in a while. Been studying and learning lots of words and kanji, but news of that doesn't make for the most interesting blog posts. Yes, I still hate kanji.

We have kanji vocab quizzes every day in Basic Japanese, ranging from 15 to 42 words per quiz, averaging about 25. That's not so bad, but studying up ten of those, plus ten sentence patterns with one to four sub-patterns each, miscellaneous stuff we've done in class, a presentation, and a short paper in Japanese... I'm not looking forward to our next collective test.

I studied for the last one for four hours and scored a 78% on the test and 84% on the presentation and paper. Best score in the class was 93% and the worst was 70%, which says to me that they targeted the test's difficulty pretty damned well.

Thinking about going to Kiyomizudera with a friend and checking it out during momiji (leaf-changing time). That's supposedly when it looks the best.

Just ate a huge lunch - tofu will not burn easily, by the way: even if you drop it in boiling oil, it takes a good 20 minutes - and am feelin' that "just ate a huge lunch" need to take a nap. Class in an hour, though, makes that not the best of ideas. Probably just watch some anime or something.

Or fall asleep on my laptop.

King of... Spades? Nah.

Apparently, the king of Spain is in town and giving a speech at my university tonight.

It follows that that means Spain must have a king. Who knew?

Still Not Dead Yet

As you can see from comments, I'm not dead, just busy. I have two kanji tests to study for and a paper that I need to get done.

Still alive.

And yes, I'm listening to the song.

Safety Cone

I took this picture during Jidai matsuri, but I guess I forgot to put it up.

It reads "Center Line Here"

Strange Day

Today has been interesting, despite not starting until a good deal past 11AM. I hung out with Yanavy and her group who just sort of dropped by around 10PM and we all watched a movie and sat around and slacked off until 5AM, when we collectively realized we ought to get some sleep. My room still smells like Magi's (sp?) perfume very faintly. Could just be a little left on me, though.

That sounds bad, but nothing happened. She sprayed some around at one point.

Anyway, everybody went home and I... was at home, so I just fell over and went to sleep.

On my way to practice today, I stopped and stared at some pigeons, and found one with a peg leg - or at least no toes. I did my best to take his picture with my cell phone camera, but... Cell phone camera, so...

Once I got there, I found out practice was canceled and there was an art show. Random, no? I bought a scrunchie (シュシュ) I liked and headed back home.

Upon returning, I was summoned to go do some tech support. But on the way, I saw a wallet lying on the ground, open, stuffed full of money, in the road. I stopped my bike, parked it off to the side of the road, grabbed the wallet and immediately signaled a nearby guard and explained the situation. He wanted me to hang out for a while so the wallet's owner could thank me, and while I was saying how I was in a hurry, the owner of the wallet came out of the store looking confused and patting his pants pockets. The guard flagged him and we returned his wallet, they both thanked me, and the guy gave me $30 for my trouble. He said I should go buy some ramen or something with it. I thanked him and we went our ways.

So I got to the Cristina's apartment, where Valentina, Betta, and Daniela were waiting, and was able to figure out why they couldn't get on the Internet (they were connected to the wireless router as a gateway instead of the router plugged into the VDSL modem - and their modem had locked up at the same time). Being somewhat short on time, I set up their computers to use static IPs and assigned the gateway and DNS settings manually, and left them with instructions on how to power cycle their setup. It's nice to be able to help like that.

Oh, and I'm currently waiting for Chise and Mikako to show up, and we're going to make okonomiyaki and play some Super Smash Brothers.

Barring anything really bad happening, this has been another pretty decent day. This makes me worry a little bit about tomorrow, but...

女失敗な人

I went to ramen last night at Kurofune with some friends. The ramen there was a lot better than I remember it being, and used my last 千 ($10) bill for the next few days, but I haven't had ramen in quite a while and hanging out with that group is pretty fun. Well, due to the seating at the place, I ended up around the bend of the counter from them (three of the four of them were female, by the way) and the chef commented 「女失敗だなあ」 onna shippai da naa. This translates roughly to "Wow, you're a failure with women, aren't you?". I responded with something like an enthusiastic "I know!"

On top of that, some cute Japanese girls came in about half an hour later and I traded contact info with two of them. The chef was then like "Wow, you're fast!"

Unfortunately, he was rather more on with the first one, but... しょうがないのね。

今日のいい言葉

The nifty words for today are the following:
二進法　－　ni shin hou - binary number system
十六進　－　juu roku shin - base sixteen

Test of Doom

We had a test today in Basic Japanese that was pretty much a dastardly test all the way around.

First off, we had a three-page test. Not so bad there except that they printed it on double-size pages so they would have more room to mark errors. Kind of them, right?

Once that was finished, we were to write a 作文 sakubun ("composition") about a saying from our native language. We were allowed to write this beforehand and simply had to copy it onto the test, and we were further allowed to use our dictionaries and pretty much anything except the fellow students.

Here it is:

私の選んだことわざは「Rome wasn’t built in a day」ということわざである。　これから、その英語の言葉の意味を説明する。	The saying that I chose is "Rome wasn't built in a day". Now, I'll explain the meaning of those English words.
まず、「Rome」はローマ、または有名な古代の都市である。そのローマは雄大なところで、このことわざでは、都市じゃなくて、何かいいものか価値があるものを表す。次の「wasn’t」とは「じゃない」の過去受け身形で、「建つ」と意味する「built」とつながると意味は「建たれなかった」になっている。	First, "Rome" is "Rome", the famous ancient city. That Rome is a grand place, so in this saying it means not "city", but something good or something that has value. The next "wasn't" is the past passive form of "not" and when combined with the word that means "to build" "built"(1), the meaning becomes "wasn't built".
残っている言葉はべつべつでさほど意味がないのに、分けられるので、そうしようと思う。四つ目の「in」と言うのは「ある間うちに」のことである。次の不定冠詞の「a」を「日」のようの「day」と合わせると意味は「一日」になる。	The remaining words don't have that much meaning on their own, but we can break them up, so let's do so. The fourth word, "in", means "in a certain period"(2). The next word, the indefinite article "a", when connected to the word like "day", "day"(3), changes the meaning to "one day".
もし前の全部をつながって直訳したら、「ローマは一日の間に建たれなかった」になる。それでも、本当の意味は「価値があることが時々遅くできても大丈夫だ」あるいは「いいもの作るのは難しいよ」とだいぶに似ていると思う。	If you take all the previous pieces, connect them, and translate them literally, you'd get "Rome wasn't built in a day". In spite of that, I think the true meaning is similar to "It's okay if things that have value take a while to finish" or "The creation of good things is difficult".
日本語でこのことわざの意味を持っていることわざ、確かあると思っても、探してみたのに、等価のことわざをみつけることできなかった。多分、「頑張って下さい」と言ったら、十分に近い意味があると思う。	Even though I think in Japanese that there is definitely a saying that carries this saying's meaning, I looked and was unable to find it. Probably, if you just said "Keep trying!" it would be close... enough.

I'm not a big fan of tables and Blogger handles them particularly poorly, but this makes it look like I wrote more than I did, so you get a table.
1) Keep in mind that these were translated from Japanese, so where it says "built means built"
2) Recursive definitions suck, but this is another part where the fact that it's a translation sort of changes things. It'll make sense if you look at the paragraph that's from.
3) See (2).

On top of that, we had a stand-up presentation that was supposed to last for 5-10 minutes. I did mine and recorded myself to time the length and I think it was about 2 minutes, and only that long because I screwed up a couple of times. I have not mastered the art of writing these frustratingly long compositions and speeches that everybody else seems to be able to do. I think it's a combination of a lack of Japanese proficiency and my lack of oratory proficiency.

Only since I started this blog have I gained the ability to talk about length about nothing in particular. I've considered doing something similar in Japanese, but there would be no readers and it would be a lot of work. It would be great practice, but unless I can convince someone (Japanese) that they want to proofread crappy posts everyday for free, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

「いいお天気ですね」

I was talking with Mr. Yamada, a guard at my school, today.
Anything not in parentheses is exactly as it was said, or at least as close an approximation as my memory will allow.

Me: おはようがおざいます！げんきですか？ ("Good morning. Are you well?")
山田: So-so.
Me: 今日、いいお天気ですね～
山田: Breakfast.
Me: ...
山田: It's...
Me: "... good weather today"と言っていいと思います。 ("I think you should say 'It's good weather today'")
山田: イッツ、グー、ウェザー (ittsu guu weezaa)
Me: Er, that's pretty close.

And then I explained how to make a TH noise. The mechanics of it aren't so hard, but there is no TH sound in Japanese, so many find it very difficult to say words with TH in them, such as "the", "them", and "thespian".

外大際

This weekend was the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies festival, AKA, the 外大際 gai dai sai. It included a lot of live music and dancing and some cafe's and stuff. If you've ever seen the cultural festival episode of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi or - though any anime about high-school will have a festival episode or two - you know the basic idea.

I went on Saturday for a bit, but the act was not particularly good, so I left about only being there for about half an hour. They were supposedly doing go-go dancing, but it looked much more like para para than anything else. Further, they didn't seem to be really confident of themselves, but it was probably the first time they did their routine in front of a hundred (maybe two hundred?) people, so that's fairly understandable.
I took some pictures, but they didn't really come out well. The harsh sunlight was making it hard to get their faces to expose properly. If you look, you'll see the exposure bias was set to +2/3 stops, and I'm not really sure when that happened, but it's another thing I need to watch out for in the future. I very rarely use positive exposure biases.

After this, I went to a shiatsu lesson, but I wasn't in the right mood for it, and I felt like "Urgh, end already...". Probably because I stayed up until 5AM that day playing games with Yanavy, a French girl from my school's level two class. I think she speaks four or five languages fluently.

Wake up, go to club stuff, and got this picture of Melissa lookin' good, as she tends to do, while we were all getting ready to leave. Taken simply as an excuse to play with my new flash, though. The SB-600 has a head that both twists and rotate on the vertical axis, so you can do bounce shots while holding the camera vertically. I don't know quite what I did in this picture, because I certainly didn't bounce it. I guess it's direct flash?

Came back later on Sunday, around 7PM, and watched an hour of people dancing around. They were much, much better than the first group I saw, but they had quite a bit more invested in it and it was a larger group. This is probably why they were put on the main day of the festival during the peak of the students being around.

They had maybe eight different outfits for each of the ten or so different people, and a couple of times they just changed on stage behind a big pink tarp.
The thing that confuses me about this: where do you find a big pink tarp? That's not really a standard color for tarps, you know?

Now, I don't want you to think the entire set of dance routines was just a bunch of women in short skirts shaking their stuff around - though it was, for the most part.
Two guys came on stage and did some breakdancing, which I couldn't see due to being fairly far back. They looked fairly in shape, but they didn't really have any costuming, which might have helped.

They did a bunch of songs that I would consider serious for breakdancing, but they also did the theme song from 崖の上のぽにょ Gake no Ue no Ponyo which is pretty cutesy, as well as Cruel Angel's Thesis from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. Both were met with cheers.

One of the performances had this chick (right side of the left-aligned picture) in it, and she's probably the most buff Japanese woman I've seen yet. She also gets bonus points for being pretty cute anyway.

At the end, I saw a bunch of the dancers (right) kind of... dancing around, in the open, and I took the opportunity to actually get a picture of a few of the whole outfits.

I also spotted one of the other study abroad students trying to pick up some girls. I don't know how this turned out, but I think he was fairly drunk while they were fairly not. Note the expression of the girl to his right.

While the obon dance was going on, there was someone providing cues for the announcers, but I guess she didn't have them in a useful format to read from a distance, so she was furiously scribbling away on this big notebook and showing them their cues like that. Pretty nifty idea, I thought.