What A Wonderful Night

Last night was such a wonderful night...

I teach English every Wednesday night in Hijiori. Yesterday, a young couple who evacuated from Sendai offered to hold a "Wine Tasting Class"

The wife is working for a Wine importing company, and her boss had just sent her some nice bottles of wine to cheer her up! So we got to taste some really expensive wines!! 

About 15 people participated, including the evacuees staying in my Ryokan from Fukushima.

Before starting the class, our "teacher" said some words in English. 

"We live in Sendai near the coast. Tsunami took my parents' house, and my husband's car. We were so scared and anxious. But We came to Hijiori, and we were so relieved that  people were extremely supportive and warm... "

She cried, and so did everybody else...

I love wine and I was always interested in learning wine tasting, but I never imagined that I would have the opportunity to do it in Hijiori!

She turned out to be a great instructor full of knowledge, and we learnt a lot about wine!

After half an hour, everybody became much more talkative, very Japanese of us :-) 

So we were all a bit tipsy, and happy. 

And all of a sudden, an incredible surprise!! One of the "young" wife from Fukushima appeared from an elevator, in the most peculiar costume of a man!!

She was wearing a mask of "Hyottoko", and her belly and butt were puffed with bamboo basket. 

The funniest part was, she was wearing "Tokkuri", or a pottery Sake bottle, between her legs (!!!), and kept dancing to music, tapping the Tokkuri with kind of a lacker plate. 

It was just HILARIOUS!!! I hadn't  laughed that much after the earthquake!

They invited all of us to dance with them. Even the kids were dancing with funny wigs and glasses!!

Just for your information, these two strange dancers are both beautiful women! 

Wow, women in Fukushima are unbelievable!! :-)

The thing is, this family also own a hotel. A very nice hotel right on the coast of Soma city, in Fukushima-ken. When they had elderly people's group as guests, they used to show this dance as an entertainment.

The young wife was telling me that she wanted to show us the dance. She said, "people here have been so good to us. Dancing would be one way to show you our gratitude!"  

A couple of days ago they went back to Soma city for one day to check out on their hotel, and they found the costume for the dance! Their 5-story hotel wasn't swept away by Tsunami but everything on the 1F was gone.... They came back that night, with 3 big bags of clothes that they found from the rubble.

In this very hard times, it felt so good to laugh. I think we all feel like it is inappropriate to laugh out loud. But feeling that "pure joy" gave me strength. 

Many people's lives have changed after the earthquake. But it is also true that tonight wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the earthquake. 

Let us focus on the positive side... 

Last night was a magic! Minasan ARIGATO!! Thank you everyone!  

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