The next few days were spent hanging out around the Inami farmhouse. We ran errands to neighbouring cities to sort everything out for Satomi’s imminent departure from Japan, as well as experiencing some of the world-famous Japanese craziness.
Sunday kicked off with the usual cooked breakfast, before sitting down cross legged in the living room with Satomi and Otosan (Dad). The night before, we caused a minor furore by blithely and rather arrogantly (in hindsight) blurting out to the family over dinner that we were getting married, and showing off the ring. While it was no secret at all within the Nagai family what was happening, we totally underestimated Otosan’s conservativeness and traditional leaning. While initially I was quite taken aback by his aggressiveness and the argument that followed, I soon relented and realised that despite the age we lived in, this was still his home, still his country and still his first daughter that we were talking about. We decided to drop the subject that night and revisit it properly the next morning, without the emotional affects of the vast amounts of alcohol we had both consumed.
So here we were, Satomi and I sitting across from Otosan and trying to negotiate our way through this cultural maze. Through tears, Satomi was able to translate my words of love and happiness and my request to have his permission to marry his little girl. A long heartfelt speech followed from Otosan, which roughly translated to a blessing. He granted permission for me to marry Satomi and welcomed me to the Nagai clan with a deep bow and a two-handed, firm hand shake.
With the formalities over with, we set about the day. We made a quick, but all encompassing, tour of Satomi’s Important Places, including her schools and workplaces over the years. Ending up in the cobble-stone streets of the Inami township proper, we scaled the steps to the town’s huge temple – the Inami Betsuin Zuisen-ji Temple, originally built in 1390 before being destroyed by fire (there’s a theme amongst temple fires… ancient Japanese people were pyros, I tell ya) and rebuilt in 1885. It’s huge sloping roof was certainly impressive, but boredom of old buildings was still active, so we decided to climb the slight hill to the festival which Inami is known for world wide (I’m not kidding!) the Inami International Wooden Sculpture Camp 2007. Sure, wood sculptures probably wouldn’t rate too high on my list of cultural activities… but this stuff was impressive. Held every 4 years, the invitation-only camp brings together the world’s best wood sculptors in the one place.
We wandered around, checking out the progress of each artist, before stopping for a long chat with Zambian artist Flinto Chandia. Satomi volunteered as an interpreter during the first couple of days during the camp, being teamed up with Flinto. The brief chat revealed a couple of interesting facts, including that this man is pretty widely known in artistic circles, and is responsible for the pieces of public art on show in the foyers of some or Europe’s biggest banks. The enlightening chat over, the sunburn started to severely kick in, so we hightailed it out of the park and down to the local sports oval for something even more enlightening… the community sports day.
I can’t even begin to explain to you how bizarre this thing is. Almost the entire community turns out for this regular event, which is a mix of school sports carnivals (complete with team colours!) and drunken work Christmas party games (minus the drink). Both Okasan and Otosan were competing in various games, which are hard to describe on paper… but you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway. To give you some idea – the first game involved a team of people running up one at a time to dress their team leader in an array of clothing to basically make him look like a 1940s German housewife. I’m NOT joking.
So anyway, after the 2 most cultural disparate events, we trailed home via the supermarket to get ingredients for the family dinner I was cooking up that evening (the oh-so-Aussie spag bol!). The next two days were very uneventful, running errands around Kanazawa and Toyama cities, as well as spending some quality time around the Nagai house and getting to know the family more – through a round of the ubiquitous card game Uno. As much as we probably should have been sight seeing and doing the tourist thing, we were both very happy to spending time with the family and basically relaxing. Besides, the next 3 days were shaping up to be pretty exhaustive with a road trip to the other side of the country.
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