Our Home, Aosagi - Part 2

To continue last week's post on our home sim of Aosagi, this week I took some pictures around the region to show off this beautiful place. I hope you enjoy this quick look around Aosagi!

A partial view of the Gion Kobu Hanamachi
home of the Karyukai Teahouse. One of the senior
maiko just became a geisha here!

One of the two shrines at Aosagi. Not pictured is
the Buddhist shrine and the large zen bell nearby.
We did a fun Setsubun performance here and threw
beans to the people gathered.
We should make a tradition of that!

The village; this is usually the quietest part of the
region, but we should really make more use of it.
Did you notice the capsized fishing vessel on the left
side of the picture. Wonder what happened there? 

Finally, the largest structure in Aosagi is Ookuma-sama's
castle. I have only been inside once, but the building
is amazing and fits a Daimyo's needs.

Our Home, Aosagi - Part 1

Just over a month ago, I attempted to start a series of posts concerning the different locations that Shinmachi calls home or holds performances. This post will restart that series beginning with Our Home, Aosagi - Part One.

From the words of Ookuma-sama, the Daimyo of Aosagi, the sim is themed as a region of Japan in the Edo period (1603-1868 AD). It is designed to support a number of cultural, educational and roleplay groups for the benefit of all. Aosagi is divided into four regions: Gion Kobu Hanamachi, Minato Machi, Ronin no Kuni and Shiro Yama. The next post in this series will look more around Aosagi as a region, but for now we will focus on the area we call home.

The Yukaku Ryukin building, a gift from Ookuma-sama

The Yukaku Ryukin building is a two-level building; the bottom floor is reserved for entertainment and contains our ozashiki room. In the hallway leading to our ozashiki room, you will find a board with the names of all the courtesans in our group. Upstairs is our meeting area, changing space and a private room for formal ceremonies.

The outdoor stage designed by Jinchi-san

The ozashiki room is rather...intimate and not the best place for large formal events. Pictured above is our large outdoor stage, which the kabuki actors utilize for the performances needing more space. As I mentioned above, our next post will look at the larger region of Aosagi. I hope you enjoyed this series restart!

Changing Seasons, Kimono and Realities

By the old calendar of Japan, summer began on May 5th. We courtesans and apprentices of Shinmachi have already begun wearing our summer kimono and yukata. I personally have been aching to wear a bright red kimono I recently purchased from my favorite store. I have always found shopping to be cathartic, so after I learned the news below - I spent a good chunk of my reserve L$.

You may not have heard, but our home sim of Maruyama recently closed its doors. The sim was amazingly beautiful, but such are the realities of SL that RL finances often prevent the continuation of such splendor. From all of the various locations Shinmachi has called home in SL, the loss of this sim affected me the most.

Officially, our home is now Aosagi, in the Kurogawa Machi district near the Gion Kobu Hanamachi. Here, we have our teahouse, the Yukaku Ryukin, and a formal stage which was designed by the head of our kabuki program, Jinchi-san. We will continue to provide a home and RP area for oiran and tayuu in Second Life.

We haven't forgotten this series...

No, we have not forgotten about posting on this blog. Shinmachi has been experiencing a few transitions and I (Aisya) have had to deal with the last three weeks of my master's degrees in RL (so happy that's over). Starting next Monday, the regular series of posts will resume and soon we'll start getting back on track with our regular performances and events.

Thank you for your patience.
- Aisya

We interrupt this blog post series...

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog post series to bring you images and information from our two performances this weekend.

On Saturday afternoon, Pearly Dynasty invited us to perform for her Qingming Festival, part of the grand opening for World of Jingju.  Her sim is amazing, and if you have the time you should definitely check it out. We performed an OOC show based on Chinese Ballet and the traditional folk tale "The Spring of Butterflies." We utilized music from real (and modern) Chinese ballet. It was a lot of fun and you can see the pictures below.

Kara-san and Medusa-chan dancing; they were the ill-fated
lovers, the focus of "The Spring of Butterflies."

This is me, dancing on a small pond of water. 

That pond was later raised to reveal a full fountain.
You can see the entire stage and the seating area here. 

On Sunday afternoon, Sengoku invited us to perform in their stunning teahouse. Sengoku is mostly focused on combat and has daily raids with other groups; every now and then they have a cultural element, and Shinmachi was pleased to be part of it. Jinchi-san and Gnosis-san performed Daffodils - I neglected to get any pictures, but I do want to end this post with the haiku that began that beautiful show:

Silent trumpeter

Your yellow shout promises 

New life and summer

Maruyama, part 1

Last week, I talked (probably too long) about how Shinmachi went from being a full sim recreation to a guiding concept for our group. This week, and for the next few weeks, I want to give you a glimpse into the different sims Shinmachi is involved with and what we do there. Should be fun, right?

Our current home is Maruyama Hanamachi and we are active at Aosagi, in Kurogawa Machi. Beyond those two locations, we travel to a variety of sims to perform and RP in. I don't expect that this series will cover all of those locations, but we'll see how things progress. 

Starting with Maruyama Hanamachi and the well crafted speech about the sim:

Looking through the great gate of the Maruyama Hanamachi

 Maruyama is a unique destination in SecondLife with a vibrant range of groups and activities that will appeal to those interested in learning about Japan. A treasure best discovered in the early morning mist, or by lantern light as they are lit after sunset. A glorious land, nestled between mountains and the sea, where Geisha and Tayuu appear of an evening.

With the glow of the sunrise...
through the trees of the small grove, you can see the  shrine

Our Hanamachi is based on old Japanese pleasure quarters, mainly the Maruyama District of Nagasaki. Our sim is not set in a specific era, but meant to resonate the beauty of history as a backdrop to performance and education opportunities from different periods in Japanese History. 

Two piers near the rice paddies, 
where a boat awaits the return of its owner

Next week, I'll talk more about our place in this magnificent place. Hope you enjoyed the pretty pictures!

What's in a name?

A question I often get is why Shinmachi doesn't have its own sim. After all, Shinmachi literally translates as 'new town' and by choosing such a name, surely the group would have at least a 1/4 sim dedicated to the recreation of its namesake.

Well, Second Life is a complicated world. Shinmachi started off as a full homestead sim at a place called Harborside; the buildings were simple and the landscaping ... well, nonexistent; it was pretty much a flat land with a pond, but it was our first home. We had our own kabuki theater, courtesan residence, market area and even a few buildings open for rent. This Shinmachi at Harborside was a labor of love and a small scale version of the pleasure district it was named after.

One day, the leasing company accidentally deleted the sim. To this day I have no idea how that happened, but months of work (including some of my treasured Rumi instruments) was suddenly gone. The company apologized profusely and offered to give us a few days free at a new sim to compensate us for the disruption. The leaders at the time came to the conclusion that if the company was unable to figure out how one of their sims was deleted, what will stop them from accidentally deleting another one?

So, we improvised and a few days later we opened a temporary location at Sorrento Moon. This place was also a recreation of the real Shinmachi, though on a far smaller scale than Harborside. We kept our kabuki stage, made a smaller courtesan residence, had only a few market stalls and a pond (of course). We downsized even more with our move to Keisei, where Shinmachi was simply a rather large courtesan residence. By this time we realized that Shinmachi had become more of a conception, an idea which led our group then and continues to guide us today.

Though our name suggests a full town, Shinmachi of SL focuses on recreating different aspects of the real district, and not on making a full version of it in this virtual realm. In short, we're not a town nor are we a pleasure district; we're a performance and role-playing group that hopes to preserve some of the culture from its namesake in a virtual sense.