No normalcy for ye - Weekend 1: Beach-based Brain Surgery and Filming

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On Friday, I finally found out what I was supposed to do with Bessho-sensei. He sent me an email, and though I got the idea correct (capture a critter for unknown neuroscience purposes), I got the location incorrect. I met Bessho-sensei at his lab, met the other 6 people I'll be working with this summer (all students, unsure of approximately how old), grabbed some snacks, and hopped in a car. We began our three hour roadtrip then, which was an experience in itself. Speaking Japanese is still exhausting for me, and though we spoke mixed English-Japanese, it was still mostly Japanese and extremely tiring.

We soon arrived at the *beach* to capture our prey - the sea snail Aplysia. Turns out these sea snails only have around 20,000 nerves in their bodies and they are all pretty well-mapped. I sorta thought that scientists in white lab coats ordered subjects from an equally sterile company, but, instead, I and six buddies were scraping sea snails off the sea walls with nets, plopping them in styrofoam coolers, and grabbing them when they began squirming away. Hands-on

Soon, Bessho-sensei approached me and began describing something in Japanese. I caught a few words here and there: "cut," "left," "right," "be careful," and "deep." Then he hands me a pair of surgical scissors and plops a squirming sea snail down on a dissection plate.

Uh, yeah. I'm now supposed to perform impromptu brain surgery in Japanese. Thankfully, I'm pretty sure the subject doesn't have to survive.

Well, I didn't see any way out of it, and Bessho-sensei had already begun pinning it in place (accompanied by screams of "it hurts!" provided in Japanese by my co-workers), so I prepped the syringe. I made sure the bubbles were out of it, then jammed it inside the snail (while wondering how deep is too deep: it's like sticking a needle into jello, it all has the same texture) and slowly began emptying the syringe.

Syringes take a surprising amount of force. Accompany that with the fact that I'm a techie and not really used to killing things, and my hand felt like it was shaking like mad. The poison we used was a neurotoxin that prevents nerve spikes, so the entire snail essentially just relaxes ... until there's no brain activity anymore. As the plunger pushed the liquid out, Bessho-sensei was slowly whispering "Relaksu ... relaksu," but the subject of his sentence, whether the snail or I, was quite unclear to me.

After the impromptu dissection and REALLY obscure Japanese lesson ("gastrointenstinal ganglion," "automatic gill-withdrawal reflex"), we packed up and headed back. I stupidly forgot to bring my camera, so you don't get any pictures, only my words. The trip back was at least as exhausting as heading out, and the conversations eventually proved too much for me. I just sat back, shut up, and tried to recharge before heading out to the river that night with my buddies. If this is any indication, summer will be most interesting but most exhausting.

The next day was filming with Kevin. Kevin Kuo, from Sty high school in NY, is a real smart guy, well-motivated, and very grounded. He's really into cinematography and joined a cinema circle at Kyodai, for which he made a 5-minute short film. He brought a pretty impressive professional video camera with him to Japan (which, incidentally, he bought using money from his *two* part-time jobs while going to school), and decided he wanted to do a self-development piece about an American in Japan. For that role, he asked me to play the lead. Thankfully, there are no lines in the movie, it's only 5 minutes long, and it's being shown in a Japanese student film circle, so it's nothing too big. Just because it’s five minutes long, though, doesn't mean there is only five minutes of filming. I spent the entire day, starting at 11 and ending at dinnertime, filming scenes in the movie.

Kevin's a pretty good director. Because of the way he structured filming, the movie opens with me passed out on a couch, so I don't even have to make eye contact with the camera. It then follows me around my daily routine, behind me, so I don't have to confront it. These scenes take long enough to film that I began to be used to having a large eye staring at me, recording my every move. It's a very awkward feeling at first, but I definitely became inured to it. Overall, playing the lead in a film was fun, built some confidence in front of those accursed things known as cameras, and there were definitely funny moments when filming a scene in public. People would turn around to watch me simply being me (only, in front of a camera and a crew), stare, and point. More people than I expected showed up to help out, so it definitely had that mini-pro feel.

A few scenes still need to be re-shot, but I'll post the Google Video link when it's done.


Anyway, we spent the entire day in filming, and wrapped up in time for dinner. Purely out of coincidence, a Doshishya girl who knows Han saw the three of us walking to a subway station near the hub of Kyoto, Sanjo-Kawaramachi. She told us that Doshishya's English-speaking club, DESA, was having its annual reunion dinner tonight, and we were invited. Kevin and I looked at each other, shrugged, and said sure.

Soon the two of us walked into a fairly nice restaurant and crashed a dinner party of around 35 Japanese people. They were all smart and kind, but walking into that room, having conversation stop - and then having someone whisper "Introduce yourself!" was pretty intimidating. By this time, though, I have used up a lot of my this-is-awkward sense along with the I'm-uncomfortable feelers, so it wasn't that bad. After we were seated, it was a great time, delicious food, and good company.

Afterwards, we went to Seika, an art university in Kyoto. It's actually one of only two universities in Japan that offer manga art degrees, so if you're looking to do manga, you pretty much have to go there. Additionally, it's the location of the U.C. Davis in Japan program, so they invited us to their legendary 24-Hour Drinking Matsuri.

It is, in fact, what it sounds like. It begins at 7 p.m. on Saturday and ends, ostensibly, on Sunday at 7 p.m. (but I hear that no one goes to class on Monday, so they often continue it for an extra few hours). Nonetheless, it is not the coarse, bawdy event you might be imagining. On the contrary, it appears to be an annual event of artistic self-expression for the students, and simply one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Unfortunately, my camera can't capture its coolness. A lot of the impromptu avant-garde cardboard/wooden buildings were cool not only because of their bold shapes and stylized designs, but because of their innovative lighting solutions. Since I was unfortunately there only at night, if I fire a flash to capture the shape of the constructions, you miss the color; if I capture the color, it's too blurry to see the shape. Regretful.

In any case, the campus seemed to be arranged as a series of buildings making a circle around an inner campus. In the inner campus, students had built tents, cardboard structures, bars made of scaffolding and tarps, lounges with couches moved outdoors, a club projecting visualizations onto an appropriately ad hoc ceiling, etc. It's damn cool, filled with interesting artsy people, and generally a good time.

So after the DESA dinner, Kevin and I went to meet Christina (one of the U.C. Davis girls) at Seika University. After being snuck into the girl's dorm (this being a cool enough event to merit a lockdown of the school, preventing access by anyone who does not have a school ID), we hung out in their rooms for a little bit. Then after some chat and meeting more cool people, Mike, Tafiti, and Max met up with us so we sojourned out into the festival.

Remember that this is an art school. To get to the party, we walked through a wooded unlit mountain path (inhabited by released monkeys who swing past occasionally, we were told), past the wild bands of roving peacocks near the quad, and towards the mass of strange hues and buildings of unfamiliar shapes. We wandered around, met lots of cool artsy people, hung out, listened to some traditional instruments, explored the event, and enjoyed ourselves. I enjoyed not being in front of a camera for a change, and reflected on the ridiculousness of the past two days (road trip, Japanese brain dissection, starred in a movie, went to a Japanese dinner, now hanging out at an art school) and felt satisfied. I got home around 5:30 a.m., after wandering through rice fields for half an hour (Seika is way far from Kyoto proper, as is my house) and fighting the morning light.

~Danny

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Photos

Filming
Story: Yamizaki-san finds my wallet and begins looking for me. Check out the awesome transformation of my bike into professional video mount. Enjoy the mic-guy crouched down behind, trying to make zero noise while walking on gravel. These guys are skilled.

Filming: subway
The subway shots were hard because of all the other people that actually use the subway to commute. Nonetheless, Kevin appears to enjoy the challenge.

Filming: the whole crew
Here's everyone involved in the production. Yamazaki-san, the female lead, and I flank the rest of the crew. Good times.

DESA dinner
A little blurry, sorry: a candid shot of the dinner.

A dorm room!
Holy crap, it's a dorm room! I haven't seen one of those in a while. Kevin and I hang out and meet some cool U.C. Davis people.

Kevin has a good time
Kevin is the master of interesting photos. He's actually not inebriated in this photo, despite the suspect-looking can. Ignore zombie-Japanese guy and check out cool cardboard and scrap wood booths.

Cool people
The overarching greenish background hue fights aginst the orange lantern on the table. Check out the pineapple chillin' here.

Cool bar
Unfortunately, this picture does not do justice to this bar. It's constructed of scaffolding and blue tarp, and the ground level is actually around 5 feet off the ground, so it's sort of suspended in the air. A good idea considering the grossness of bar floors.

Picture from afar
Dim picture of the many-hued event.

Christina and I
Christina and I get a picture. For some reason, I decide flash is unnecessary. Enjoy.

Comments

[yeelyn]

snails. eww. poking snails. double eww.

[Z]

taking the plunge
injection expert say that angle, depth and pace of push impact result we have much manga @library, it has a big following as does anime have you had time to visit a book shoppe and check out the local publishing scene?