ill in japan + bunraku

im currently sitting here in bed, tapping on my neighbour's wireless - legally though; he's one of the JETs - and trying to recuperate from fever and a sore throat.. everyone in school is falling ill, and i think apart from my fever having gone down - for the moment - im having body ache at a severity i've never experienced before :P not sure what this means, except that i perhaps should spend even more time sleeping. i was in bed since 9pm yesterday though, and think i need a break from lying down and doing nothing :P

it's times like these that i miss my mum, for obvious reasons. haha. always nice having a mother to, if not fuss over you (she doenst quite do that), cook proper, healthy food to speed up your recovery. stay away from home, and i forget that i shouldnt eat chicken, milk or eggs when having a fever :P i hope my temperature's down for good as well though, cos the doctor whom i've visited once before isnt open in the afternoon today, and it would be a pain to call around the other clinics and hospitals here looking for an english-speaking doctor.

that particular doctor is somewhat interesting. he looks very chinese and sounds american, asked me if i'd spent some time in singapore cos i have a singaporean accent - when most people would usually ask if you're singaporean, considering im a foreigner in japan, loves singapore quite a bit cos it's the one place in asia he and his wife can "speak english and get away with it" and hates the way the doctor-patient relationship in japan is one of customer-service provider, rather than that akin to the more casual chit-chat familiar feel it is in america.

nothing much has been going on recently - as i've been saying for the longest time i think :P - although some of us went for a bunraku performance two weekends ago. it was kinda interesting but lasted for way too long - 3 shows over 4 hours - and certain parts were boring too because we didnt understand the japanese. i dont quite get bunraku though.. humans manoeuvre puppets, but it takes about 10 years of training to learn how to move each part of a puppet (legs, head, hands), so by the time you get skillful enough to control a puppet properly you're already an old man - at 15 years you're already considered too old to begin learning how to control puppets! and considering how a lot of bunraku is focused on the life-like movements of puppets, and that they do dance and so on, how did bunraku come about? whoever came up with the idea of using puppets to imitate human movements when it would just be far easier for a human to execute all the moves?

there was this dance section on one of the shows that would have been so gorgeous if it were a real person performing it.. which really puzzles me, cos it definitely wouldnt take a human as many years to move in that fashion as it took for the puppeters to learn how to control that puppet, and a human would look nicer to boot! most of these master puppeters are really old as well, so i wonder what will happen when they eventually kick the bucket :P