A Thousand Suns

(or At This 11th Hour, a Note of Thanks)

With less than 42 hours remaining in Canada, I feel that I need to spend some time thanking some people. This is going to be rambly, but its also the best attempt I’ve made at chronicling how I wound up on my path to Japan, so I’ll dub it appropriate.

First off, a thanks to Erica and Nam. Were it not for your animated bad influences, I don’t know that I would have been introduced to Japanese culture. Sure, you guys just uncovered a vein for me, and I followed it down the rabbit hole, but I still think those initial episodes of DBZ and EVA and all the giant-eyed, over-dramatized, seizure-robotted adventures since were influential.

A very special thanks to The Four who all contributed to landing me in Japan: Sir William, Allison, Coop-Kate, and Heather-chan.

Brave Sir Will, you came back from your travels in Japan, and you told me that I needed to go there, and you told me that—should I need a travelling companion—you would be it. You inspired me to set a deadline: that before my passport expired in January of 2011, I would go to Japan.

Allison, you came back from Japan and told me that, in some way, you knew I was meant to be there. You opened the door and you gave me this odd, unshakable confidence about travelling to Japan.

Kate, you gave me that picture of Tokyo, and on the back you wrote “Tokyo – April 2008/ For your hope chest”. You gave me a concrete goal and set me on the path. From that start, I was already brewing ideas about applying for the JET programme.

Heather, you have been my advisor through all of this. You used your own experiences from JET to both calm and educated me. Throughout my whole application process, you were ALWAYS eager to help me in any way you could, and though you deny it, I firmly believe that, without your help, I never would have made it into JET.

Thanks to Amy and to Allison and to all of their fun friends. You guys put me up in BC, showed me around, and assured that 1) I would have some stunning memories to take with me to Japan and 2) I had a little bit of paradise and a little bit of sanctuary for a few weeks before all the madness really started. No matter how wicked-crazy-amazing-cool Japan turns out to be, BC will really be the sunny jewel of this summer.

Thanks to all my friends, from Leaside, from MHS, and from everywhere in between. For the last two weeks, you have all dropped your own important bits of business to make time for me. We’ve gone for beers and burgers and babies and breakfast and bands and bad Michael Bay movies, and you’ve all made me feel like I’m loved and like I will be missed. I’m slow, so, of course, it is only hitting me now how much I am going to miss all of you, and I imagine I will only truly know how much when I am firmly half an ocean away.

Thanks to my family for making time and helping me out as I schizophrenically got ready. And a special thanks to Eric Jones: my brother and my cousin and my nephew. Though you said it was nothing, you completely rearranged your plans for me, drove up to Newmarket, picked up your whole family, and reminded me just how important the Joneses are. I think it was seeing you and Jenn and Jill and Steph and Evan that made me realize just how long I was going for, and just how far away it would be.

And, to accompany all the thanking, I would also like to apologize to all of you fine people who I wasn’t able to find time for. Leaving myself less than two weeks to see everyone and get ready was less ambitious and more foolhardy. Please forgive me my idiocy and send me your addresses so I can try to make it up to you with postcards!

Now I should quit wasting time and get back to the task of fitting my whole life into four far-too-small bags!

We want to thank you sooo much!

Modern Myths: Unagi

One of the seemingly least appealing dishes in Japanese cuisine to a western palette is Unagi—or, in layman’s terms: eel.

Of all the Things Japanese that show up on menus over here in Canada, I seem to get the best squeamish reactions by proposing Unagi to people. I’m not sure what it is that is so unappetizing about the idea of eating something that is half snake and half fish, but westerners seem to want no part of it. And this has worked out great for me since, fairly early on, I discovered that the stuff is delicious, and the negative western associations with eel seem to assure that I get any Unagi I order entirely to myself.

However, I’m screwed once I get to Japan. They know better, and over there Unagi is a full-on delicacy. The reverence that the Japanese have for the stuff makes it expensive at Japanese restaurants here, and I shudder to think what kind of delicacy markup eel is subject to in Japan.

Foolishly, I never stopped to wonder why Unagi was so expensive. I must have subconsciously decided that the tastiness somehow validated the price point. However, the reality is that, just like in any other supply-demand equation, Unagi is expensive due to its scarcity.

Didi—Sonomi’s mother—was the one who turned me on to the scarcity of eel in Japan, and something about the way she spun the tale struck a chord with me.

She told of how eel has to be caught in the wild, rather than bred in fish farms like some other popular seafood. She claimd that, despite numerous attempts to mate the creatures, the Japanese fishery has been unable to breed eel in captivity and unable to explain their failures. This means that the market must rely on caught eel and must pay for the labour and luck involved in catching it.

This rarity, combined with the inability of humans to essentially domesticate eel by breeding it gets me going. The Shinto in me always seems to resonate when it comes to stories of nature staying wild in spite of man and his conquering tendencies.

The story of the Unagi, in particular, harkens to a remarkably vivid dream I once had that featured these majestic sea creatures that were unlike anything I’d seen before. The best word I have for them is “mythical,” and the best approximation I can come up with was that they were part lionfish, part eel, and part dragon. They were the kind of thing that could only ever exist in dream, complete with smoky, glasslike, trailing fins, and unnaturally vivid reds, golds, and greens in their scales. But, despite being impossible creatures, they had this inexplicable air of reality about them. It was as if we could find them if we delved deep enough—as if they were the rare creatures that were once glimpsed off the prow of a ship and from which the idea of sea monsters descended. In the dream, it felt as if they existed somewhere in our world, but it was a place we could never hope to reach.

When I hear about the rarity of the Unagi; when I hear about how we are wholly unable to breed them—unable to make them adhere to our dictates of supply and demand—I wonder if they might not be the distant descendants of those majestic creatures from the dream. The Unagi: bred in the oppressive heat of undersea vents by the closest thing this planet ever came to dragons; left to swim up into the cold seas above, where man plucks them from the water and scratches his head, wondering where eels come from and how they are made.

We've got your gods right here

Turns out that when you’re heading somewhere for a year, everyone and their brother wants to recommend books for, about, from, and only loosely inspired by that place. Such was the case with Japan, and I have been hard pressed to stay on top of the flood of book titles that have been thrown at me over the last few months.

Luckily, one of the recommendations stuck out. The book was Hitching Rides with Buddha, and it was recommended by the president of the company I used to work for. When I looked into the book, I discovered that it had been written by Canadian humourist Will Ferguson, who had traveled to Japan to teach English in his youth. Will used his hitchhiking trek from the southern Cape of Sata to the Cape of Sooya at the far northern tip of Hokkaido as a framing device for the book. Under the guise of chronicling his pursuit of the Sakura Zensen (Cherry Blossom Front) as the trees flowered from south to north, he presents a good humoured portrait of Japanese culture.

That being said, this isn’t meant to be a book review. I’m only about 50 pages in thus far, but Will just blew me away with his explanation/depiction of the indigenous Japanese Shinto religion, so I thought I’d share an excerpt from the book for anyone who has ever wondered about Shinto. Will’s description may just have nailed me because I tend to go in for that kind of world-worship, nature-hippy, odenic-pagan stuff, but I think there’s something pure and organic about the animate nature of Shinto beliefs that will appeal to people tired of theistic belief systems.

The following italicized passages are in no part my own and belong entirely to Will Ferguson, his publisher, blah blah blah etc. If you think you like his writing, well then help a Canadian brother out, and buy his book.

Of Shinto

…As a faith, it grew from the natural awe, the fear and trembling, that humans have for the world around them: the fertility of womb and earth, the natural forces and the mysteries of life.

In Japan, the world is filled with primordial spirits. The kami are everywhere. The unseen world is pregnant with them, rich in life and charged with energy. Historical figures have been elevated to kami, and so have abstract nouns and animals.

Deeper still, Shinto is about being Japanese. One is not converted to Shinto. One is born into it. One simply is Shinto in the same way that one simply is—or isn’t—Japanese. The idea of Shinto proselytizing is absurd. During World War II, the Japanese Empire built massive Shinto shrines in the countries it occupied: Singapore, Korea, Taiwan. But, removed from its Japanese soil, Shinto withers and dies. It is perhaps the only religion in the world that failed to convert the people it conquered.

Although it was used as a propaganda tool during World War II, and still contains heavy imperial connections, Shinto has largely returned to the more earthly, joyous roots from which it sprang. Shinto celebrates life. It is optimistic. Buddhism [the other widespread religion in Japan], in contrast, is gloomy. Shinto is for weddings; Buddhism is for funerals. Buddhist festivals are somber. Shinto festivals are freewheeling, drunken affairs, intent on entertaining the gods. Buddhism worries about the afterlife. Shinto is concerned with the everyday and the here-and-now.

Now that’s a religion I can get behind. “…It grew from the natural awe, the fear and trembling, that humans have for the world around them” sounds just about perfect.

Photographic Evidence

Most people who know me know me to be a bit of a photo nut. I try the patience of my friends on a regular basis by taking whole scads of pictures. Those people likely won’t be too happy about the news that my father bought me a Nikon D60 Digital SLR recently to assure I would be capturing Japan in its full, RAW glory. On the surface, I’m a lucky, spoiled git that just got a pretty clicky thing. But getting this from my father…it means a lot to me.

My father has always had cameras around. Video cameras and underwater cameras and SLR cameras and point-and-shoot cameras. To call him a photophile would be a bit of an understatement. The guy almost missed my birth because he was out stocking up on film.

Throughout my childhood, my father’s Big Black Camera was a staple. A big, black, heavy Nikon F3, back in the days when they were still making the bodies out of brass and not plastic. The camera's omnipresence--as well as the beautiful photos he pulled out of it--bred this tacit belief in me that this camera was the pinnacle of photographic elegance. My father and that Nikon inspired me to strive for something more than snapshots of parties or token attractions. From his example, I held SLR cameras in the highest esteem, and I viewed Nikons as the kings among SLRs. Tacitly, I would dream of one day owning a REAL camera like his.

And now he’s come through: my dad--encouraging me again with this Nikon he's bought me. So, it is more in my eyes than a fancy new toy. It is my part of a kind of photographic legacy that my dad passed down to my older brother Curt, and that he has now passed down to me. The history, for me, makes this more than a camera.

So thanks, Daddio.

Thanks a lot.

“Welcome to Hokkaido. You will never be warm again.”

Well, that’s not really how the JET Alumni we spoke to on Sunday June 21 started her presentation on what it’s like to live in the part of Japan I’m heading to, but it might as well have been. Despite my attempts to play down the threat of the sub-siberian Hokkaido winters—pleading that, surely, we people from Canada would be steeled against the cold—she would have none of it. She told us of houses offering little insulation and absolutely no central heating, of cars totally erased by snowdrifts overnight, of towns being snowbound for weeks, and of a damp, costal cold that can only be burned away by the sun of summer months.

“Once winter hits, you’ll never be warm again,” she summarized. She seemed to punctuate every sentence with a dour portent, giving a vague impression that we eager, uninitiated JETs were so many stary-eyed children who saw Hokkaido as a paradise of Dragons and Samurai. It felt as though she’d made it her mission to soberly bring down every one of our optimistic misconceptions about the place.

It didn’t work though…at least not for me. She emphasized each syllable of her sentences by shifting her gaze from one of us to the next, seeming always to land on me as she closed her most shocking statements.

But her every revelation just energized me all the more, and invariably I’d be smiling when she turned her emphatic gaze on me. Call me a serial optimist, or a hopeful fool, but everything she told us just seemed like one more part of a grand adventure. Even as she told us how the isolated northern island boasted the highest JET attrition rate, all I could think about was how phenomenally lucky I was to have landed in a part of Japan that promised an authentic experience unlike any I’d had before.

And this excitement didn’t diminish any as I and my fellow Hokkaido JETs moved on to the session for JETs placed in rural areas. The session itself seemed like a dry run for our sparsely populated towns as, presenters included, there weren’t more than ten of us in the room. We handled the mandatories, such as discussing the emotional consequences of prolonged isolation, as well as the odd kind of infamy and publicity that a foreigner can expect to be subject to in rural Japan. The presenters cautioned us to GET OUT, as often as we could, so as not to be strangled by the tight-knit communities. However, unlike our earlier encounter with the very serious Hokkaido JET Alum, these Alumni were wholly optimistic and encouraging.

At one point, the one presenter I had pegged as the more serious/dour of the two turned to us, and—without a shadow of doubt in her eyes—promised us that, as rural JETs, we could look forward to having the most authentic, the most integrated, the most fulfilling cultural experiences of any of the JET participants.

“Anyone can visit Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto,” she said, “but how many people get the chance to become a part of a real Japanese community. That is exactly what you guys are going to do.”