Me and Uke

"Just try to write short posts," Ellie advises me, "don't try to fit it all in, just talk about something cool that happened."

The difficulty is presenting your story without presenting a lot of backstory, and it plagues every wish-I-blogged-more-regularly diaryist, but for me the issue is context, not just exposition. I always feel like there's so much surrounding information that someone needs to know before they can understand any of what's going for me, why things feel the way they do over here. This feels like a pretty alien landscape quite a lot of the time, and even as I accomodate more and more to living here, I become more convinced that so much of it is untranferrable; when context is everything, it feels like my experiences will be lost in translation. But tonight I'll try - TRY - to skip the backstory, skip the context, skip the translation sagas and tell you with no great long preamble or leadoff that...

When I got to band practice tonight, JUST on time, relaxed as the whole thing is (how could you have an uptight Hawaiian band?), the guy who's the main ukulele player and thus the one who's doing the greatest share of the teaching-me-ukulele-during-band-practice, which is what I'm ostensibly there for, thought that I had done a great job practicing this week (little does he suspect) and that I'm learning it all really quickly and really well! This meant that tonight's lesson had a totally different structure than last time. You see, since they all speak in a very colloquial, relaxed, quick Japanese and this old guy in particular speaks very colloquial, relaxed, old-man Japanese, there ends up being very little useful verbal instruction he can give me right up front. We apparently suppose. Anyway, this would contrast greatly with the traditional Japanese method of ukulele instruction, which consists mostly of shouting at you and hitting you when you do something wrong. Which would be intimidating if it weren't so hard to take anyone seriously when they're wearing a Hawaiian shirt, not to mention brandishing a tiny little guitar.
So today's lesson had a lot less of the normal angry/frustrated/yelly kind of ukulele instruction and a lot more of the showing-me-chord-changes kind of ukulele instruction: yay! "Ya'tta," as we say over here: means, "yay, I did it!" And aside from these more traditional pillars of Japanese pedagogy (these being, remember, hitting and shouting), there's also a lot of taking my hands and putting them in the "better" positions on the frets, although this never, never works, and just leads to a great deal more shouting. Shouting which is related to hitting.

For all of the turbulence they're a bunch of really warm and good-natured people and I really really love the idea that I'll get to spend more time with them - it's a whole totally new group of people to get to know, and I get to see and talk to them in a way that is, A) totally new to me and different than any of the way's I've already got to meet and see people, and B) feels really natural and good. Like, we're all living here and we all share this interest, and now we get together. None of the other band people speak English, although one of the ukulele girls seems to remember a little of her JH vocabulary (see, my job does make a difference ... kind of). None are below thirty-five-ish in age. But they like playing music and they also like that I want to learn from them, and play with them. It feels kind of real, despite the Hawaiian shirts. Oh, did I mention that they all wear the shirts? They all wear the shirts. Matching shirts. Maybe "surreal" is a better word for this new part of my life, but if so then I should feel right at home, right?

Mostly the band plays Hawaiiany music, some songs performed in what may have once been Hawaiian and then others which are sung in Japanese which sounds exactly like it. With the exception of one song which I join in and butcher (it's only my second week), I spend the time they're playing practicing my own set of chords, whatever the hitty shouty man tells me to work on. Sometimes I just sit and listen. Tonight they start up one number and I just sit back to bask in the feeling of it, the thick amateurish bass and deft pedal steel wafting their sounds out behind the big guitar. And I think, "gosh, I know this song." But what could it be? They play through the intro but I jut can't place it until Ya-Chin steps up to sing. Ya-chin is the front man for the group, ubiquitously described to me as "very difficult" by anyone who knows him; I got introduced by friends from the radio station. It's his bar, the place we practice at, and probably it's under his good graces that I've been welcomed into the practice sessions. He plays this enormous guitar. Not like a Miriachi band's swollen, fat guitar, those things are really big. This is more of flat, wide big, with waves that spread out like the thick wings on a manta ray; it's the big kind of big that those huge, low-slung old Cadillacs were. Classy too, two long f-holes and a cherry-wood glow, a professional's guitar. All this classiness seems orchestrated against the rest of Ya-chin's personal appearance, the highlight of which is usually his shaved-on-the-sides/ thick-on-the-top flat mohawk, thick like a tire-tread across his scalp. When he sings it's usually just right for the kind of music they play. Syrupy and sweet, unfollowable and melodic; sleepy, coconut-drink-on-the-beach kind of singing, enjoyable and easy to forget. But this song seems different. And when he steps up to the microphone and starts to sing, he sings:

"Bei miiir bis du schon..."

And this is a great song. My eyes bulge out and my head feels all happy - I look over to the uke guy, who's been watching from one of the bar stools and he beams this big smile at me: "dozo." "Go for it." So I jump up out of my chair to the other mic and pick up the line. I do know this song alright, we used to have this on the jukebox for goodness sakes! It's a great song to sing. I take the main line, as Andrews Sisters as I can muster up, and Ya-chin and the Uke guy sing back up harmonies: ya'tta! They take a long solo-ing break for the pedal steel and then we come back in to close it, and when we stop singing everybody bursts into big applause and cheering. They said it sounded great, and they want me to sing that one with them and maybe more. They loved it. I'm in the band.

I think I need to get some Hawaiian shirts.