Adventure The Fourth: Abashiri Ice

This makes the fourth and final installment in the It’s February—GET OUT! adventure series. When this all began, we were getting some of the coldest days of this winter. Now, at the month’s end, the sun is beating down on the snow outside, and last week we had a good couple of days of melt going on (though we’re still getting a bit of snow, from time to time, which keeps me from going into full-out mourning for winter’s passing). From that freeze to that thaw, it would seem that whole seasons have turned. Somewhere over the course of The Busiest Month Ever, dastardly plans were hatched and common threads became salient in ways I had only ever hoped they might.

Abashiri is located on Hokkaido’s north east coast, right on the sea of Okhotsk (don’t bother; I can neither remember or pronounce it, and I live here).

Its geographic location means that every February its shore gets plugged up with pack ice that originates in a Siberian river across the way in Sakhalin.

The sight is something to behold, and local harbour towns run icebreaker tours several times a day during the icy season. I’d been aiming to get out to see it for some time, so when some HAJET kids decided to host an ice-viewing weekend, I had to get in on it.

There was only one problem:

No ice.

Damn.

However, being adventurous, wayward souls, the ALTs of Hokkaido weren’t going to let a little inclemently warm weather stand between them and a good time. We’d taken a five and a half hour train ride out of Sapporo to get to this distant corner of the island, and we weren’t leaving until we got something out of it, whether icy or otherwise. Both nights in Abashiri were mad, high-school-like affairs with BYOBooze, impromptu YouTube dance parties, and apartments/houses absolutely carpeted in futons and passed out foreigners.

We got a little culture and a little onsen in during the days, and on Sunday afternoon we ditched the train back in favour of a afternoon drive to Asahikawa through the rolling foothills around Daisetsuzan National Park. Just outside the city, we came across the Sounkyo ice castle, and it provided all the ice we could have ever asked for in Abashiri.

But that’s all the words I’ve got for the weekend, so maybe I should just let the photos speak for themselves.

P.S. I'm retconning this back to February.

Today seems alchemical in a way that I can’t elegantly express: like it is the confluence of things, like the world has developed some kind of consistent rhythm. In the UK, women are coming across rooms named after plants that are also named after people. In Whistler, disparate points in my scatterplot of friends are aligning in fiery Olympic spirit. Different men are finding different women in inexplicably similar ways, in places where they never thought they would. In Japan, salient names are appearing in English lessons where they had no right to be, and off Abashiri the expected Siberian pack ice is nowhere to be found, the victim of a possible early end to this glorious winter.

And throughout it all, this song is echoing inescapably in my mind, playing like an eerie, repetitive soundtrack for whatever this all is.

This sudden alchemy

has got me holding on

Adventure the Third: Words, words, words

This is the third instalment of the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series. It's about the HAJET winter conference in Furano. However, it's also one for Craig, who asked for his brother to send him some words (“as many or as few as you want”). What I wrote him was far more elegant than any of the stilted, formal stuff I tried to bang together as a summary for an excellent weekend. Call it brotherly love; call it the inspiration that comes from unconditional fraternal faith.

I found a new word for family this weekend:

HAJET.

It describes a force that pulls you out of your cold little corners of the countryside and forces you into warm spaces with people who were only mere acquaintances before. It feeds you and it entertains you and it makes evident your commonalities so nothing can stand in the way of meeting and greeting. It describes a degree of responsibility as you are elected to the role of Social Coordinator in this family, and it falls to you, now, to make sure the reunions happen, to make sure that all the distant relations are invited and attending. In the end, it describes a support structure for when you’re in distant lands, living in the future of all you used to know—when all of the people you once counted on now seem to live only behind windows in computer monitors.

I found a new word for beauty this weekend:

Furano.

It describes a sunny, blue-sky day, where the blizzards from yesterday have assured that all of the trees in the alpine have come to curves under bulbous, weighty clouds of snow. It describes taking in the width and breadth of a grid-paper agricultural valley from on high in a ski lift, climbing the back of a mountain you’d prematurely decided wasn’t worth it. It describes the thick grey of snowclouds just skirting before the sun, enough so that they can release the first crystalline trailers of their vast loads of snow, and yet they can still let that sun shine through to gild the flakes as they fall: vibrant stars on a sea of blue mountain shadows.

I found a new word for grace this weekend:

Snowboard.

It describes a condition of having your feet securely fastened to a plank of metal and fiberglass and plastic. It describes how you hook the thing into your very bone structure at the ankles, making it one further extension of your spine, so that you can eventually control it like an appendage of your self. On this thing, you ride mountains with control and ease unlike anything ever accomplished on two planks, and should you hesitate and fall it is only the beginning of your next rise, your next ride. It is a word that provides so much confidence as to be consummate; a word that avows that your only obstacle is yourself.

I found a new word for inspiration this weekend:

Yoichi.

It describes a place that is so void of people and spirit on the surface as to be the perfect hiding place for dreams and ideas. It is a terminal for words, and ethereal, Ghibli-esque cat-trains pull up to disgorge walking, talking metaphors and smiling similes. The ghosts of poets and philosophers haunt the rafters of it and call forth images from your weekends with phantom voices. As you sit, immobile, in such a place, if you have eyes enough to see them, the ideas pile in around you: standing one on top of the next so thick that they eventually have to suck in their guts to squeeze a few more in through the sliding doors. In this place, you feed on all of them like a verbiage vampire: typing them all into that little touchscreen keyboard in a way that builds momentum until your fingers are firing across it at the speed of thought. As your bus pulls up outside, and you’re forced to leave the place, you hasten to cram all the words you can into your Tupperware containers and your Ziplock bags, trailing them out behind you like cigarette smoke as you bolt through the doors.

And I found a new word for affection this weekend:

It describes a book that is all illuminated with bright illustrations of kindness and caring and love for all things, and yet you can’t make out the text worth a damn. It describes fingers that will crawl over and entwine with yours like tarantulove, seeking out your prints and lifelines with a dexterity and dedication that only you yourself ever seemed to espouse. It describes unexpected revelations, set in formal, theoretical languages that only amount to so many arbitrary letters when you’re speaking in tongues. This new word speaks of voids between arms and the forms that fill them; of the earthquake, gooseflesh shivers that can be set off by the most tentative of brushes; of soft, butterfly kisses that resound with the force of avalanches.

But that’s the word I can’t share with you; not here, not yet. For you see, brother, these words of ours, they have power. The Allfather hung, and died, and was reborn on The Tree, a sacrifice to himself, for but a handful of words.

So some of these words I’ll give you, but some I keep for myself. Regardless of whether I share them with you or not, these words are my words, and if you ever tried to use them, they'd be my words still. However, if you need words of your own for these things, then take heart because they’re out there, and you’ll find them.

Mountain Days 5, 6

Vancouver Twenty Ten

This Winter Olympics thing is finally catching up with me.

For some reason I hadn’t been that excited about it until right now. I think it had something to do with being in the complete wrong time zone for it and being utterly convinced that the Japanese media was only ever going to cover Japanese athletes.

But I’m thinking maybe all of that was a defensive snowjob. You see, I’ve been a big fan of the Winter Olympics for as long as I can remember (Albertville? Lillehammer?). I think it was an outgrowth of the infatuation with snow I’ve seemingly had for my entire life. However, it also might have been that I was young and impressionable at that wondrous point back in 1992/4 when the IOC decided that it would stagger the winter and summer Olympics, meaning there would be a games every 2 years, and in ’92 and ’94 there would be back-to-back Winter games.

I remember trying to emulate the bobsledders on my GT Snowracer. I remember all the guys using the minitramps in elementary school to emulate the acrobatics of Canadian Aerials/Moguls Freestyler Jean-Luc Brassard. I remember being amazed at the chimeric fusion that was biathlon, with the combination of guns and snow seeming to be tailor made for the mind of a kid like me. And names like Myriam Bédard, Ed Podivinsky, Kerrin Lee Gartner, Elvis Stojko, and Alberto Tomba still hold places in my head that should probably be reserved for hockey greats.

Where was I?

Defensive snowjob. Right.

For all my love for the Winter Olympics, my spirit has been pretty lackluster this year. That seems like madness as Canada is hosting the games in the city that I keep describing to people over here as the most beautiful one in our nation. What’s more, the second half of the games is taking place in a mountain town that competes with Pacific Rim and Algonquin for the title of one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in North America. Not only do I love both locales dearly, I have fantastic friends permanently located in BOTH cities. Hell, I’ve even got a pair of those phenomenal red Canadian Olympic mittens that were sent over from my aunt to make sure I could be a part of the Olympic spirit.

It all stacks up to a pile of Olympic fever on paper. So why haven’t I been into it?

I think my disinterest must have been a vain attempt to guard against the remorse I’m feeling now. As I read Allison and Amy’s facebook updates and stare at their pictures from the two raging hearts of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic games, it becomes clear what I’m missing and just how close I could have gotten to the games. The two of them are a couple of my closest friends, and to share my very favourite of sporting events with them, at home in Canada…calling it something as highfaluting as a “once in a lifetime” opportunity still fails to capture the all of it. Never again will this opportunity arise.

Never Again.

But I suppose I should take heart. It would seem that my bread and butter these days is Never Again. I likely couldn’t have had both the Olympics and Japan. To trade two weeks of patriotic Canadian wonder for two years of hedonistic Japanese adventure may not be such a bad bargain.

Adventure The Second: Friends Board

This second instalment of the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series features our intrepid group of JET adventurers hitting the hills at Niseko United for some snowboarding. The lion's share of our group were doing it for the first time, so when the already-reluctant Japanese snow school told us that their morning classes were full, it fell to Perry and I (but mostly Perry as I'm still a newb) to get The Ladies up on a board for the first time.

There's something simple and fulfilling in helping your friends.

No matter how many times I had to haul one of the Ladies up on their boards this weekend; no matter how many board-knee collisions I had to endure; it was worth it. At one point I sat on the slope just below the An'nupuri gondola in the blowing snow for what must have been half an hour to make sure each of the girls got up and got going. It was exhausting, it was cold, and it might have been a high point of the weekend. Every time they got up and got going on their snowboards, I felt good about it, and I got a decent amount of practice in myself from having to shadow/avoid them. I'm not sure I truly taught them all that much, but I know I kept them practicing.

What's more, boarding with Perry and Random Aussie Andy, who we met at The World's Greatest Hostel, pushed me to try harder at this whole snowboarding thing. You try chasing someone who is better than you down the hill, and all of a sudden you're cutting faster and roving wider across the surface of the mountain. Hell, I followed the two of them down a black diamond mogul course and into an old narrow riverbed strewn with trees. I handled neither gracefully, but they were the kind of places I never would have ventured without Perry and Andy pulling me on.

Burt the Board performed magnificently. When I told Andy that I'd picked him up, bindings and all, from a recycle shop for the equivalent of $100 CDN, he was floored, which I guess bodes well for my uninformed snowboard impulse buy. Andy told me that Burt was likely a 2000-model Burton Charger that looked like it'd seldom been used. I think Burt was one of the main reasons this weekend went so well. I find myself all the more invested in snowboarding now that I have my own gear. The fact that a lift ticket is the only cost keeping me from the hill makes this whole thing rather addictive.

Or maybe it's the conditions that make it so addictive. Before I got here, I was informed that Niseko, one of the closest mountains to where I live, is known world-wide for the quality of its powder. My limited, uninspiring time spent skiing years ago left me clueless about the significance of "powder." It sounded like some snotty word ski bunnies used to illustrate their prowess.

However, it would seem that our area of Japan is subject to nothing but powder snow. Gone is the slushy, sleety, damp mess that falls from the skies in and around Toronto. Everything that comes down here is light and fluffy, and Niseko seems to be at the heart of the light and fluffiest of it. Granted, I've only spent two weekends on the mountain, but it snowed every one of those four days. Niseko gets so much quality, consistent snow that they don't own snow making machines—devices that seem to be requisite at all the Canadian ski hills I've ever been to. With the snow dumping down day and night on the mountain, you're hard-pressed to find an icy patch on Niseko. When you rove out to the edges of the runs, as Perry and Andy taught me to do, you find deep, essentially unspoiled drifts of powder snow. And's that's on the shoulders of the runs, mind, not the treed sections between runs where the powder is so deep as to stop you dead if you're not ready for it.

Long story short, in the four mountain days since I started snowboarding, I feel like I've progressed exponentially. And for that progression, I mostly have my friends to thank. Over the course of this board weekend, my extended ALT/JET family made the times off the hill as enjoyable as the times on it. I'm glad we all found each other in this northern, snowy outpost of Japan, and I'm glad we were all able to take the time to do this thing together.

Adventure The Next: we all descend on Furano, another skiing destination in Hokkaido, for a little work and a lot of fun on the hills. Maybe the snow at the geographic centre of Hokkaido will be even more epic than that at Niseko?

Maybe, but I'm not holding my breath.

Mountain Days 3, 4

Ai Ryori

I started writing this immediately following Valentine's Day, but it got lost in all the excitement of the Busiest Month Ever. It was inspired by the Man Cooking lesson that me and a bunch of townies received from some culinarily experienced 'bachans. It was, in part, a Valentine's gift, I think. In Japan, Valentine's Day is a one-way thing: women use this day to honour their men by buying/making sweets for them.

And before any feminists cry foul, it should be noted that Valentines Day in Japan is followed by White Day a month later, and on White Day it is the men's turn to reward their ladies, and they are meant to pay back everything they received with interest. I don't know how exactly they calculate it, but the return gift from the man to his lady is meant to be of three times greater in value than what he received from her on Valentine's Day. Fortunately, as my lady hadn't yet accepted the position back on Valentine's Day, I'm free to reward her with three times bupkiss. However, I'm sure I'll find some way to honour her this weekend.

Four diminutive Japanese ladies in pink kerchiefs and aprons take the reins, sporting crests that are half hana half shuriken. In this men's cooking lesson, they are the senseis, and indeed it would seem that most of the men can't go too far without needing one of our matrons to bring us back in line.

Token foreigner boy is placed with the heads of board of education and vice principals, all the power they wield laid low before a tiny Japanese woman, as is often the way. Still, my 次長(Jicho) performs masterfully, seemingly better suited or more adapted to domestics. I spin it out into a harmonious, balanced relationship with his wife, while I picture the rest of the men calling for dinner from their armchairs.

I "soo-ka, soo-ka, soo-ka" at our printed recipes in jest, the hiragana I can read not forming up into much of anything. From between hieroglyphics of kanji, I piece together "go-ma--a-e" in readable kana, and demand to be put in charge of this one thing I've made before. Murakami-san boils the spinach for me, and Jicho fires the sesame, pouring the toasted grains into a vast mortar. I take to pestle, and the dark seeds are ground together into something that looks like smoke and tastes like sin. Taken straight, the paste is an anaphalactic shock to your tongue. I reflect that if the devil eats peanut butter, it's surely made from this. With sugar and with shoyu, the paste comes to look almost purple when mixed in with the limp spinach, giving the small dish a flavour that is at once arresting and alluring.

With the proper direction of diminutive Japanese ladies, we work all kinds of alchemy. Sauces from scratch, and rabbits from apples.

But then the women stand aside as it comes time for man's work: for taking something that was once living apart with a knife. Buri, whole fish, are produced from slick, slimy newsprint in styrofoam cartons. With blades that appear deceptively old and notched, these fishermen and farmers glide through sinew and bone, their wooden cutting blocks growing steadily more maroon.

As they separate food from corpse, the buri lacks the near-display quality of sashimi. It is pink and grey and brown and marbled with fat. Were it to be served to you on a platter alongside other fish, it would surely be the last you chose. As we sit down to eat with our lady sensei, the buri hits my tongue and it's slippery and soft, and it tastes thick and wet.

...and Grace, too

Today one of my students came to me and asked what “Grace” meant in Japanese.

I had to do a double take. I paused so long before asking him to repeat the word that it may well have been a triple take. You see, I’m used to the students in this class asking me to translate words like “masturbation.” And when I refuse, they take vengeance by screaming the word at the top of their lungs in class and in the hallways, knowing only that it’s something they probably shouldn’t be saying.

That this student, in the midst of such a hellish class, would come to me and ask me about a word as delicate and nuanced as “Grace” is evidence that he has not yet succumb to the cruelty, racism, or, possibly worst of all, indifference that the majority of his classmates currently espouse.

My own grasp of Japanese being only moderately more advanced than his grasp of English, I had no idea how “Grace” translated, so I tried to build it out of the words I did know: kireina, jyozu, yasashi, but for all my listing, they weren’t “Grace.” I tried to relate it to something I knew he was into: baseball. I told him that if he was all these things when he played, then he would know “Grace.”

The exchange really struck me, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the danger of asking a completist English major to translate a word for you. Maybe it’s my affection for this particular student, for his obvious brilliance beneath a defeatist attitude that has been built up around him by the real troglodytes in his class.

Or maybe it’s the words: the perspective created at the place between two languages, wherein the deep, attenuated meanings of a word can explode in your head like a box of kittens. And there’s you, surrounded by their magnificence, and utterly powerless to round them all up and push them through the door into the next language.

Sounds for Sights

I know this has little to do with Japan, but I figured I should probably put more music in here. Not Japanese music, necessarily, just the stuff I'm listening to over here in case people are interested. In our iTunes age of playlists, I tend to listen to particular things for particular seasons, then switch 'em up when leaves fall or snows melt or the nights bring the cold, crisp smell of seasons turning. Also, it would appear that what I listen to is closely linked to the people who tell me to listen.

So here's some stuff from Falling Furubira:

Dan Mangan - Fair Verona (A contribution from Amy out in Vancouver)

The Knife - Heartbeats (I had this song, but Mark turned me on to its awesome)

USS (Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker) - 2 15/16 (compliments of Garcia, seeking to keep me current and Canadian; the lyrics make it for me)

Beast - Mr Hurricane (also contributed, though indirectly, by Amy as her friend's brother directed the fantastic music video that was, sadly, robbed of a grammy by the Black Eyed Peas)

And, because they're my boys and it's one of the most beautiful music videos I've ever seen:

Hey Rosetta! - Red Song

Adventure The First: Of the driven snow

Apparently this is the first installment in the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series, and it begins with a group of us JETs heading out for a snowshoe hike last Saturday February 6 as part of the HAJET (Hokkaido Association for JETs) Sapporo Yuki Matsuri (Sapporo Snow Festival) festivities (party). The destination was the fairly large city of Otaru, but our guide took us just outside of town and up into some hills that run along the Sea of Japan.

We started our trek in sunshine, the unfavourable weather forecast for hubuki a distant something that we try hard to ignore, avoid, and repress. Off the bus with two tied stacks of snowshoes and up through neighbourhoods we went, dodging the big yellow Tonka trucks in the process of digging them out.

The locals didn’t seem accustomed to having whitie visitors tromp past them, and they leered most strongly at our burly kiwi guide with his mountainous pack on his back. The undecided grey-shine we’d had on the early train in from Sapporo set up into full-on blue-sky glare just as we all finished strapping on our shoes and we took to the untouched rolling white.

Ken and I, the only Canadians, were given the biggest shoes of the bunch, and we chose to believe Leon when he told us it was for our Canuck prowess rather than for our bearish forms, far burlier than the gaggle of galls who were accompanying us. I wind up in Leon’s old shoes, which I deem an honour as he explains that they’ve been up so many mountains in Hokkaido as to likely have grown a sympathetic kind of EzoGPS.

Mere meters in, we hit our first hill, and you’d wonder if Leon, Kiwi guide and fearless leader, might now be testing us. That first mountain takes the measure of the only other guy in the group and finds him wanting. Just over the hill, we part company and he takes one of the last roads out back into town.

And then it’s just me and Ken and Leon and the Ladies. At a fairly nice lookout, indigo interesting clouds scuttle far out over the Sea of Japan, and from that cliff-top vantage point Ken damns us all by proclaiming, in jest, that it looks like a storm’s coming on.

Like the storm caller, he brings it down around us. We aren’t done another kilometer, taking in the last of the sun and blue on a completely unspoiled field of white that Leon saved for us special so we could do our own thing and blaze our own trails, when the grey comes in and the first of the flakes start falling in the woods beyond, as if beardy dustings down from the trees. We’re zipping our zips and we’re hooding our heads and we’re grabbing for gloves as the sun goes out and the cold comes in.

Thicker and thicker the white, and the wood is disappearing more and more. We break the last of the trees into another of those perfect fields, but in the ever steadier snow it stands like negative space, and anyone who isn’t a few steps in front of you gets negated in it.

Coming up on another of the many shrines we keep passing on the cliffs, in the woods, the wind kicks up for the first time, and the methodical vertical dumping starts to transform into an inconsistent, moving, almost-living thing. Amidst the gales of it, Leon has us hold up in the lee of the shrine, seeking some shelter as we food and we water. We’re more than an hour out from lunch, he advises, and the storm is here to stay.

And from that gaggle of ladies—from balmy States and British Isles—not a peep. Almost all of them are alien to such blustery abuses, and there’s not a modicum of dissent among them, not a suggestion of retreat. “On” they say in silence, and on we go: deeper into the woods and higher up the mountain.

Somewhere between tree and slope, the storm breaks, but seemingly only long enough for Ken to remark on it and, in so doing, call it all back down around us. Leon yields lead to Heather and I, and we take turns fighting the bluster to blaze our trail, sticking to breaks in the trees in this high place where Leon’s trail-cutting tracks from Tuesday have been obliterated utterly in the gusts and storms that have lashed in off the Sea of Japan.

The storm eventually causes Heather and I to yield, and Leon strikes out ahead again, making the last icy approach on our lunch site at the mountain’s summit. Only 400 meters of elevation, but that seems enough to have thrust us up into the clouds, where gusts of snow-studded wind roil with the form and rancor of lions.

Two o’clock, and we hunker in behind the base of a transmitter tower for lunch, Rambo Leon fashioning us a table and chairs out of the very snow itself before producing pots, stoves, water, cups, bowls, hashi, and all the ingredients for a fine nabe from his monstrous backpack. He serves us tea and hot chocolate with a civility unexpected at the heart of a raging blizzard, and we are all forced to master chopsticking with gloves on (no easy thing).

By the time we’re done and up and ready to go back out into it, our gear has almost vanished under all that’s fallen during our short break.

From the peak, we head down the far side of the mountain, through an open area where the storm blows strongest of all. The tone of it is set by Leon, who tells us to bunch up and to follow only when he waves us on. He ventures off into it, and he’s almost completely vanished in the white before he waves us to continue on: half walking and half sliding down the slope, the 80km/h gale robbing us of what little form we may have managed to glean over the course of the long day.

The hurricane gusts tear at our jackets and mitts and scarves, finding any crack where they can gain purchase, forcing in the white. Our every outer surface grows thick and white until we start to disappear into negative-space in the falling light. We pull our hats down low and our scarves up high against the driving snow, our small exposed eyeslits reminiscent of inuit explorer goggles.

And, somewhere between trees caked in ice and the growing drifts on our hats and shoulders and bags, we become one with the driven snow.