Your Japanese word of the week is...

"kusai". It means "smelly" or "stinky". In recent memory, the most literally smelly thing around has been the farmer's gardens or fields. They work very hard, no doubt, but it appears that they favour smoldering piles of waste-flora as opposed to garbage removal (although that's fine, since it doesn't take up space in landfills) or, better yet, compost. So on occasion, perhaps once or twice a month, I end up biking past what looks like a mini-teepee of vegetable stalks sending smoke signals to the heavens. They do a good job of keeping it under control but it doesn't change the fact that as you bike into the smoke, you realise that while it doesn't smell putrid, it isn't exactly pleasant. It smells like necessity and I can usually smell it a few minutes out, especially since the wind always seems to blow against the direction I'm biking. That last one is something that continues to perplex me as I huff and puff my way across town much slower than I could be going because, it appears, I'm disastrously un-aerodynamic. Maybe it's the glasses =)...........

Thankfully, I need not have to bike to my recent outing this past weekend in Shinagawa, conveniently (if you call a nearly two hour train ride convenient) located in the southern end of Tokyo. I was there because a friend (really "a" friend, as in, one of two friends thus far that I talk to that I didn't meet from karate or work) invited me to her friend's daughter's dance show.
The dance school was called Soul and Motion and had probably 150+ students and nearly 20 teachers. The show took place in a wickedly high end hall with a massive stage, tons of stage lighting, a smoke machine, and a projector. How a simple dance school could afford such a place is beyond me, though having tons of students and charging almost $30 a ticket probably covers the expenses.

Regardless, it was a pretty great show. The choreography was pretty good even if, at times, there were some moves I recognized from lots of music videos. And the costumes were always interesting. The really interesting bit was that since I've arrived in Japan, I don't like I've heard as much swearing, sexually driven lyrics, and flat out gangster themes, let alone hearing 3 months worth of it in an hour and a half. Oh the bliss of not understanding the language =).

But then again, that's what is perceived as the current trend in western culture and so the Japanese assimilate it with much haste. And they ALL assimilate it. It's ok when anyone of the legal age wants to do it, and even I don't mind the music as it's great to dance to and not any different than what I'd hear in a Vancouver club, but when little 8 or 9 year old girls are gyrating to reggae music in pseduo-bikinis or 11 year olds waving home-made "Brooklyn" flags and pretending to "busta cap in yo ass", I can't help but laugh. Especially when half the audience is parents and grandparents. But it only looks weird when the children do it. It just seems to suddenly look more natural when the 18+ year olds do it. Even the 40+ year old adult class doing hip hop wasn't too bad =).

Which goes back to the not-understanding part. No one really knows what the words mean and in the lyrically twisted world of hip hop, even fewer can connect the dots to flesh out the true meaning between the lines.

And!... everyone loved it. No one found the scantily clad 10 year olds disturbing. They all comment on how cute they look or, as my friend proclaimed in her Japanese laced English, "sekushii ne!". It could, really, just be praise for the parents and their children which is ok, but I couldn't really bring myself to say such a thing. I think they genuinely like seeing people, especially their children, have a chance to break out from the world of school uniforms to really do something that captures the feeling of the world their in, in this case, hip hop. I think I genuinely think too much................

But prepubescent costumes aside, it really was a great show. The dancing was great overall, even down to the kids, and the final act by all the teachers was really great in that it wasn't just a 5 minute try out for a Snoop Dogg video. There were lots of different styles of dance and themes and, my most favourite bit of all, I noticed that the teachers had varying styles they preferred, but all made an effort to try all the other styles. It was easy to see since it never looked as natural as some others, but variety is the spice of life and I liked that the teachers embraced that.

So kusai the dance show was not, figuretively and literally. I would even go as far as to say the $30 was worth it. Well, some costuming aspects aside =). Hey, at least no Janet Jackson style wardrobe malfunctions......................