drama

Tokyo hr659

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The tiny close community of a small village used to be the whole world for me who was born to a farming family living in a rural area of Japan. The sole window to the outside world was TV through which I had encountered what I had never seen in my daily life.

Back in those days, Japanese TV dramas were made and shot in the capital city of Japan, Tokyo. The city view and the people’s way of living in Tokyo looked so cool. Everything from fashion to lifestyle was completely different from things in Kyoto where I lived. On TV, Tokyo seemed like a future world decades ahead to me. I was hooked by one particular weekly crime drama which was shot on location all around Tokyo. Every location looked as if it had been in a Western country and the detectives in the drama were extremely stylish. I was absorbed in seeing that exotic world every week and had spent the other six days of the week waiting for the drama. As soon as I finished watching that show, I would rush into my room and write out the entire show in the notebook. I reproduced all the lines of characters and all the settings by depending on my memory. Since there was no way to record a TV program as a video cassette recorder was yet to come, I read my notebook over and over again to watch it inside my head until the next show was on air. In hindsight, the world of TV dramas was fictional which didn’t exist even in Tokyo, but I was too young to realize that.

Years went by and I became a musician. By the time two years have passed since I joined my first band, the band not only had played gigs around Kyoto but also had made guest appearances and had our songs played on local radio shows from time to time. We had made some connections with music producers who came down to the western part of Japan from Tokyo as judges for some live contests. However, our progress was limited because all the major music labels of Japan were based in Tokyo. My partner and I began to consider moving our base to Tokyo as we were geographically too far off to make a career in music.

Moving to Tokyo was a big deal to me. While I seldom attended, it meant I would quit college once and for all. As a much more serious matter, an old Japanese custom didn’t allow a successor of the family, that was me, to leave home. For me, leaving home meant abandoning my family and all the privileges. Although it seemed crazy to throw away everything when I had no idea how to live on as a musician in Tokyo, I felt living there would be better than staying in my family’s home for the rest of my life. I preferred eating hamburgers and french fries from McDonald’s to eating home-grown vegetables from my family’s fields every single day. I knew it wouldn’t be healthy, but at least I would be able to eat what I chose, when I wanted. To sum up, moving to Tokyo was all about freedom. I was more than willing to jump into the free world where I would make all choices by myself instead of the old fixed rules and customs. 

Oddly enough, things went unexpectedly smoothly once I made up my mind to move to Tokyo. Various kinds of obstructions that had been seemingly difficult to be cleared resolved themselves almost magically. The moving day arrived sooner than I had imagined.

I was waiting for the bullet train bound for Tokyo on the platform in Kyoto Station. A friend of mine came to see me off. She was surprised that she was the only one for me there. “Even your parents don’t see you off?” she sounded bewildered. I wondered what awaited me in the outside world of my window. I was both looking forward to it and afraid. 

The Katsura River hr658

Hidemi Woods2 Comments

Back in those days of my childhood, a person who was going to commit suicide always took his or her shoes off and put them together neatly before jumping from the top of the building on Japanese TV dramas. It seemed Japanese people wanted to take off their shoes even when they tried to kill themselves just as they took them off at the entrance of the house. I somehow feel convinced.

There is a bridge called Katsura-ohashi Bridge over the Katsura River about a twenty-minute walk away from my family’s house that used to stand in Kyoto where I was born and grew up. The bridge is about 400-feet long as the river under it is quite big and wide. On one summer day in the fourth grade, I went to the bridge with seven or eight friends of mine to play by the Katsura River. Because it was probably the first time each of us played at the riverside without a grown-up chaperon, the outing was felt like an adventure and we were having so much fun by the river.

After a little while, one of my friends seemed to have enough spree to suggest we walk in the river along the bridge piers  toward the opposite bank. It was midsummer and the river banks had widened with less water. To us, the river looked shallow and easy to walk in and go further. Since we were all feeling adventurous, we persuaded ourselves that a fourth grader was a big, old kid for whom crossing the river on foot was a cinch. We started splashing across the current with a war cry.

In the beginning we were only ankle-deep in water, but soon water reached to our knees. Our walking speed dropped tremendously. By the time our thighs dipped in water, the stream got fast. It was hard just to stand still without holding onto a bridge pier although we had trod across merely one third of the river. The fast stream crushed against the bridge pier and my thighs, splashing big waves. Suddenly, fear sprang out from the bottom of my guts and yelled at me, “You’re in real trouble! You can’t possibly move ahead. What if you get swept away? Not to mention the opposite bank, you’ll drown to death right here!” Panic engulfed me. I looked back to return, but I was too scared to move, feeling that with this one step I was going to be carried away by the current. There was no way either to go forward or to go backward. I was stuck in the middle of the strong current. Thinking that wasn’t what was supposed to go, I looked around other kids. They also had stopped walking with a scared face just as I did. As if a tacit agreement, we slowly tried and managed to move backwards. When we finally returned to the riverbank where we had set off, our spree had thoroughly gone. Dejected in heart, without talking, we plodded our way home.

About ten years later, I was looking at the Katsura River again from the edge of Katsura-ohashi Bridge after taking off my shoes and putting them together neatly. It was when over a year had passed since I started my career as a musician despite dissent from my parents and friends. Although I had tried harder than I had ever done before, nothing had worked. On the other hand, I didn’t want to live doing what I didn’t want to do. I was stuck without either way to go forward or to go backward, again. I leaned over the parapet and stared at the surface of the river, seriously intending to jump into it. Then, something came into view. I saw three ducks swimming out from under the bridge. They stopped right down below me and just floated there. I vaguely thought I might strike and kill them when I jumped and hit the surface. All of a sudden, that thought drove me out of a daze. I came to my senses and pulled myself back away from the railing. Until that point, the world around me had been completely silent, but noises came back to my ears all at once. I noticed some cars honked at me while passing by. I hurriedly put back on my shoes.

You should challenge at the risk of your life if you wish to fulfill your dreams. Only after you brace yourself for death, can you live your own life. To attain that understanding, I had had to do a few more suicidal attempts in the course of my life. I understood after all and keep challenging, thankfully. 

Podcast: an ordinary ping-pong table

Hidemi WoodsLeave a comment
Episode from My School Days in Kyoto: A Japanese Girl Found Her Own Way  by Hidemi Woods 
 
Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 
Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 
Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total. 
 
When I was a ninth-grader and a leader of the ninth-grade play team for  the homecoming at school, I devoted myself to dramatization and  direction in the run-up to the homecoming. The teacher in charge of our  team praised my first dramatization. He said it was a good script and I  had a talent. While I was motivated, other members of the team didn’t  have a whit of interest or enthusiasm. They tried to make me decide  everything. I took care of the set, the props and the costumes while  teaching the lighting and acting. Above all, their acting was terrible.  They were just reading their lines in a monotone. No matter how  strenuously I explained, they simply couldn’t act. I acted every role  for them and asked them to mimic me. As I needed to tell every member  what to do and how to do, I felt like I was working with a bunch of  robots in the team. At last, they started suggesting that I would be  better off if I did everything in the play alone by myself, instead of  giving them each and every single instruction. Maybe it was true, but  there was one exception among the cast members. The girl whom I cast as a  leading roll tackled her acting earnestly and seriously. She followed  every instruction and advice from me. Other members were still sardonic  for my casting of a non-pretty, unpopular girl as a leading role, but  her acting got better and better. It seemed she felt an obligation to me  for the casting. She even brought a present for me on my birthday  although we had never been close and had hardly talked with each other  at school until the play team got going. With her and my effort, our  team successfully put on the play at the homecoming and it was much  better than I had expected. This curriculum play was part of a school  competition. The faculty would vote to decide the best play among the  seventh, eighth, and ninth-grade team’s plays. It was a school’s  tradition that a ninth-grade team won every year. As a ninth-grade team  leader, I was sitting at the auditorium, preparing myself for receiving  the prize out on the stage when the winner was announced. “The  eighth-grade team!” the announcement filled the air. 

Podcast: the homecoming event

Hidemi WoodsLeave a comment
Episode from My School Days in Kyoto: A Japanese Girl Found Her Own Way  by Hidemi Woods 
 
Audiobook 1 : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 
Audiobook 2 : My Social Distancing and Naked Spa in Japan by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. 
Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in total. 
 
Back in my schooldays, there were required curricula specifically for  the homecoming event. Students must participate in either an exhibition,  retail, or a play. I chose a play every homecoming when I was a junior  high school student. When the homecoming’s preparation began in my ninth  grade, my passion for the theater was at its peak since I had been  regularly cast for a major role in the drama club at school. Other  students knew that and I was appointed as the ninth-grade play team  leader almost automatically. Everyone had no interest in a required  curriculum and I had to put together a play by leading fifty unwilling,  reluctant team members. From the first meeting, I encountered  foreseeable difficulties. No one brought up any suggestion of what play  we would show at the homecoming. When I uttered a Japanese classic  novel, they unanimously shouted, “That’s it! That’ll be our play!” in  order to finish the meeting quickly. Our play was decided like this and I  dramatized the novel for the first time in my life. I had thought it  would be difficult, but it was unexpectedly so much fun. I finished the  script quite fast. And then, the casting. I had decided not to be cast  in the play myself because I had been already cast in a play of the  drama club for the homecoming. I didn’t want to appear in every play at  school like an attention freak. I thought it was cool that I produced,  dramatized and directed for this curriculum play. But in the team,  everyone had neither experience nor skill in acting and they didn’t want  to be cast. It was again left to my sole decision. While I was choosing  some students who seemed to like appearing on the stage, a girl timidly  raised her hand. She said she wanted to act. Although I finally got a  volunteer, I hesitated to cast her for a moment. She was not pretty.  Other students started giggling at her brave attempt. Instantly I came  to myself and remembered the fact that I was also regarded as an ugly  girl at school. My bad looks contributed to continuous typecasting as an  old, wicked woman in drama club’s plays. As I had been weary of  disadvantage of appearance, I cast her as a leading role. My decision  made other students gape. Thus, I had trying three months for the play  with totally amateur actors and backstage staff…