Diary 4: Christmas Choir

I was invited to Christmas Concert by my landowner. Her daughter is a member of one of the big choirs in Vancouver. I sometimes heard her happy singing voice through the ceiling of my basement. She was going to perform on the stage as a member of youth choir.

On the same day, I heard there was big parade downtown to celebrate the days coming close to Christmas; consequently, some streets to the Orpheum Theatre were closed. My landlady said she took Skytrain for the first time in these few months. She usually uses a car. Arriving at the theater, I was surprised to see and enter the inside of the building. It looked proud of European architecture.

Our seats were on the third floor; the landlady said she was sorry because it was far from the stage. She had ordered the seats closer to the stage, but the family tickets seemed to be disadvantageous in the priority. I felt ashamed because I had joked in my mail to say thank for the invitation by writing that I couldn't find her daughter on the stage, I meant, because she might not be the same on the stage as usual. To my embarrassment, actually, we were not able to find her on the stage! I used my camera's enlarging function to find her among more than three hundred singers on the stage. Finally I found her standing near the stairs to take care of children on the stage.

The youth choir of about twenty members including her sang three songs: "Fum,Fum,Fum", "Christmas Lullaby", and "African Noel." It was beautiful sound. She sang impressively in the middle of the front line.  I took videos for her. The choir and chorus were by all generations from small children to senior citizens. The audience seemed to consist of their families, friends, and neighbours. I'm sure that it must be one  of the great events until Christmas as every house in the neighbour decorates the house with colorful lights. I enjoyed again an important part of West American culture.

There were a lot of kids with their parents, but no one made interrupting noises; they were all surprisingly in good manners as listeners. I thought they might get more used to participating in this kind cultural programs in churches than the children in Japan. I took a tour in the theater during the intermission. Kids were running around; I saw more kids in number than I had expected then. I saw a mother telling her child not to touch the mirrors on the walls with his hands.

Between the performances on the stage, the whole ordience stood up and sang Christmas songs such as "The First Nowell" and "See, Amid the Winter's Snow." I only stood up and hummed to the others.It was surprising and a lot of fun. It was a good way to feel religiously united as if we were in a church. It was my first and unusual experience to me. We stood totally six times.

Since moving to West Vancouver, my experience in the Western culture has been getting comperetively deeper.

Diary 3

I was invited to Halloween dinner by my landlady. She and her husband wanted me to experience children's activities in the Halloween night. During having dinner, a group of children from neighbourhood visit the houses to say "Treat or trick!". We welcomed seven or eight groups during the dinner, which were totally more than twenty children. Among the groups, there were teenagers who asked for canned food for Food Bank instead of asking for candy. I had listened to the lecture about Food Bank in the Friday workshop at ELI. The children were dressed up for a various characters, which made me enjoyable. Their parents were walking with them and enjoying watching them apart from them and sometimes instructed them what to do. They had spent so much for their children's clothes for this time of the year. In this areas (Dunbar, Vancouver), I feel strongly that people in this area (Dunbar, Vancouver) have tried to keep and develop their  community more friendly and comfortablly. My landlady's family, who are from diffeent culture, also try to get involved in the community. After dinner, we walked around the houses which were decolated humourously. People were dressed up in scaring clothes and making tricks  for children. They were talking happily until late at night. I had only known the facts about Hallooween from books or media so far, but I was lucky and happy to know it directly here.

Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet": Individuals and Families

In the period of Renaissance (14c-16c), lots of Giants like Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) were turned out and made a lot of creative jobs. They were not only experts of limited fields, but also multi-talented geniuses who were excellent in many fields at the same time. The free and liberated atmosphere of that age enabled humans to make extraordinary human development in such huge scale. I am interested in the description of humans by Shakespeare because he himself was one of the great playwrights in this period.

The love story of "Romeo and Juliet" has continued to be remembered among people and performed on stages or screens around the world as well as other works by Shakespeare(1564-1616). That is because it treated one of the comprehensive themes in terms of marriage or love, especially, the problem between the individuals and their families. This problem has been deeply rooted in religion, culture and succession of the family around the world.

The Western cultures were basically originated by Greece and Rome. However, they made revolutionary changes at Renaissance, and since then the importance of individuals has been swinging back and forth, and coming to the present situation. In such a process, the following words spoken by Juliet were truly significant and epoch-making and the words still sound new in some parts of the society.

'O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name! ...

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor any other part
Belonging to a man...

Here, she wants to liberate the individual (Romeo) from his family (Montague). She stresses the physical body of an individual compared with the family which has no body parts, but is an abstract and heavy pressure to the individual.

In the modern society, the word such as "family" and "love" seem to be talked softly and comfortablly. Ironically, these are now considered to be the last forts to protect humans from the dangers of the highly industrilized society. It seems that "the forts" have been getting more and more faragile in the excessively competitive societies.

Thanks to Romeo and Juliet, the problems between family and individual are no longer the severe obstacles to develop the freedom of human beings. However, some people insist to such old-fashioned, momentary ideas, which often causes serious problems to individuals around them. Other people only enjoy watching them expecting the happy endings.