Board of Education Daze

Right now in Japan we’re between school years. Just as a September to June school year seems like blasphemy to the Japanese, I’m sure you western kids will be surprised to hear that the school year in Japan starts in April and ends in March. It’s a weird thing until you wind up in Japan in March, and you see that it’s the perfect time for a year to end and April is the perfect time for a new year to commence. The days start to get longer and you remember what the sun was like as the snows of Hokkaido finally slow, allowing the massive drifts on the ground to begin to break up and melt. In other, more southerly parts of Japan, this is cherry blossom season, and those flowers become deeply woven into the graduation ceremonies of March.

And though schools close for about a week and a half between the ending of one school year and the starting of the next, all of us ALTs are still expected to be on the job.

In Japan, unlike in Canada, teachers and students don’t share the same holidays. When school is out for the students, the teachers and Board of Education staff are still expected to be sitting at their desks, dutifully working away at preparations for when classes resume. If teachers want to be off during these breaks, they need to schedule paid vacation days, or nenkyu. As the majority of us ALTs don’t get anywhere near as much nenkyu as the teachers do, we wind up with Board of Education Days: hours spent sitting in our Board of Education offices in town halls or cultural halls, trying to fend off boredom by studying Japanese or preparing materials for classes or obsessively checking our email. A lot of other ALTs seem to loathe these days, but I must say I don’t much mind them.

That’s because my town uncles come in to visit on Board of Education Days. There is Shinkai-Sensei, my kendo instructor, who sometimes rolls in to go over complicated branching hierarchies of kendo styles and strikes, and other times to discuss the finer points of a healthy Japanese diet. And there is Aami-San, who’s name, I must confess, I don’t actually know. I’ve taken to referring to him by the noun he first associated with himself: pointing to his nose in that Japanese way and saying the Japanification of “Army.” Between his militant English vocabulary and my anarchic Japanese, we have conversations about fishing and white water rafting and his years in the service. Or at least I think that’s what they’re about as my imagination tends to flow into the gaps in understanding, colouring the exchanges in ways that could be miles from their actual meaning.

Also, I get to go home for lunch on Board of Education Days. On my way in the door, I often find postcards from Tokyo or letters from Aomori or distinctive other treasures from all of you back home. For lunch, I do my best to be a good little Nihon-jin: supping on miso soup and flavoured rice and Japanese pickles. For all of the convenience of the provided school lunches (kyoshoku) I receive on other days, there is something simple and fulfilling in being able to make my own lunches on these days. And when I finish my very Japanese lunches, I jump onto skype and sometimes I talk to you at odd hours of the night where you are. When it comes time to return to work, it never seems like that much of a chore as the very short walk back to the bunka kaikan always seems to be particularly sunny and glorious.

Everything just seems to be light-hearted and chilled-out on Board of Education Days. People roll in and out of the office, and my wacky BOE coworkers joke with them, and they joke with me. When they use Japanese I can understand, we all laugh together. And when they use Japanese I can’t fathom I smile along, too, simply because these people would be just as entertaining in Urdu. We share tasty omiyage, and we share goofy photos, and ムんムんさん　and むらかみさん　tell me about how they’re going to be my chaperones with Heather because we can’t have any rabu rabu going on as that would be dame.

In the end, the days spent being Bored of Education wind up being just as welcome and necessary as the days spent having elementary students climb all over me, and I find myself not minding their slower rhythm in the least

Yuki

Somewhere between the parking lot and the summit, Maggie comments on how this is the second weekend she’s skied with me, and this is the second weekend that the sky has settled low over the mountains, the clouds breaking up and coming down in torrents of flakes.

I smile and point to the yellow symbol on the crown of my snowboard helmet. I tell her how a kind witch of the north placed it there, as if in celebration of her novel discovery of her icy birthright. She placed it so that it would call to the skies, and she called it a sigil: a guidepost for gods of winter. With it, they would find me, wherever I may go, and they would let their blessings fall around me in cloaks and curtains of powdery white.

“So long as I wear it,” I tell Maggie “where I go, the snow will follow.”

And as if in evidence, the wind whips up, and the clouds settle in closer. They consume what remains of the mountains and fill the space in between with white until the banks of electrical light have to blaze prematurely and the skiers around us pass in and out of view like ghosts.

Mountain Day 11

Alpine Equinox

Me and Becca, Roz, Maggie, and Kyle spent the first day of spring on the mountain. Well, we spent the day before and the day after on the mountain and would have done so on the Vernal Equinox as well were there not a first-class, hurricane-strength blizzard raging across the mountain. It was a good weekend to be among friends, though, shacked up in a warm little school house hostel while the storm kept us from what we'd intended.

With the impending equinox, the melt had begun in the low parts of the group of mountains that make up Niseko. As the snow turned from ice to water to vapour, it began to slowly release the spirits of summer and autumn that it had taken captive all that time ago when it first fell in November. They swarmed up, newly awakened as spirits of spring, and they wove themselves into clouds and fog, their movements slow, languid as their sharp spirit minds were still waking from their long hibernation.

As the day wore on, the warmth from below rose, beating back the alpine chill, and the spirits thawed out and awoke ever higher on the mountain, spreading their still, sleepy mist and crowding in thick between one another. By the late afternoon, they had grown so thick in the air around the mountain that they began to rain down upon it again as water. But the sun soon set behind the clouds, and as the warmth went out of the day, the water turned back to snow.

And then sometime in the night, those spirits awoke fully, and they realized that the cold ghosts of winter were trying to imprison them anew—to lock their bright hearts away for an ice age, if they could. And the bright spirits of spring weren’t about to allow it, and in the dark witching hours, they took their warm resistance to where winter huddled, at the very peaks of those mountains.

At the peaks, they clashed: at Niseko, at mountains all over Hokkaido and down into snowy Tohoku. Throughout the night and into Sunday, the first day of spring, the spirits of spring and the ghosts of winter fought, and their clashes set off wind storms all across the snowbound stretches of Japan. The combination of cold and warm setting off typhoon winds that kicked up snow to dance in the air until one could almost see the forms of titans in it.

As little snowboarders huddled in their schoolhouse hostels, outside the seasons raged against each other all day and long into the night. Those brave enough to venture out in low-lying areas did so in full snow gear, and none were allowed up onto the mountains, where the true battles were being fought.

By early Monday morning, most of the fight had been fought out, and the first vestiges of sunlight began to beam through the torn clouds. The winds would gust up form time to time, snow would pelt down, and those brave enough to take to the higher altitudes on the selectively open mountain lifts were treated to glimpses of the kind of driving whiteout that can cause even the most hardy of mountaineers to curl up and go to ground in the face of it.

The mountains opened more and more by the hour, and by the afternoon, when sun and blue sky shone strongly through intermittent, patchy clouds, it was clear that spring had won out in the clash.

But when you rode the lifts as high as they would go on that day, to the foot of the still-shut peak chairs, and you witnessed the blizzards that would blow in fitfully, temporarily eclipsing the white peak, there was no doubt that, though they’d begun their retreat from the low lands, the icy ghosts of winter still reigned at the mountain’s summit.

Mountain Days 9, 10

Teine

The Teine Mountains are located about an hour from downtown Sapporo by train/bus. If you had a car on you, you’d find them significantly closer; perhaps closer than you’d think a mountain of such substance had any right to be to a metropolis like Sapporo. It was this proximity that was part of the reason Sapporo/Teine was awarded the 1972 winter Olympics, and it was this proximity that had Lindsay, Mark, Heather, and me so excited to get out to Teine for the first time over the weekend. Sapporo is, in case you haven’t noticed, our main urban base of operations, and to have a quality mountain so close now that we were all well into snowboarding would be, well, prime.

So the weekend was spent at Teine during the days and in Sapporo at night with Heather and, alternatively, with Mark and Lindsay. The two adoptive siblings of mine seeming to be in a polkaroo-ish relationship as Mark missed Saturday due to what was likely full-blown alcohol poisoning, and Lindsay reactivated her UGG-related (god, how I want to burn those ‘boots’) ankle injury by taking a particularly bad spill on the hills, assuring she’d miss Sunday.

Lindsay, all smiles before our first run down the mountain.

Our jackets really shouldn't be allowed that close to one another

Lindsay, down and lost in a cloud on the Confidence Builder.

Waiting.

Apologies; these would have been more awesome were they not taken on an iPhone

Lindsay almost taking out a dude

View of Teine, from Teine, at the close of day 1

Storms blew in and out both days as the elevation of the mountains guarded us from the slippery melt going on in Sapporo Proper. The best one struck in the wee hours of Saturday night, continuing on into Sunday morning. It dumped down powder so fine that it elicited expletives from Heather, who was nursing her tailbone and practicing her toe-side in the low-lying Olympic zone.

Further up in the Highland zone, Mark and I were just as happy with Sunday’s conditions. We discovered a run I’d avoided on Saturday and dubbed it “Columbia’s Finest” for the way it seemed to gather the powder into piles for us. And then there was the run beside it, which I Nicknamed “The Confidence Builder”: a course that switched back and forth across the face of the mountain.

It was only a green run, but its mix of well-groomed flats and sharp turns inspired something in me, and I took to bombing down it ever quicker, keeping my board straight and tucking down close to the ground until I could hear nothing but the wind in my ears. I’m pretty sure it’s the fastest I’ve ever gone on a board, and though the course couldn’t be described as challenging, I feel like taking it at speed developed something within me, building my confidence until I would crouch so low on the board during the straight-aways as to be able to skim my glove across the snow.

Mountain Days 7, 8

P.S. I'm behind the times. This should have been posted immediately following the weekend of March 6-7th, when we went to Teine.

It's the end of rent-a-movie weather

I noticed it, too, this morning, when my circadian rhythm woke me an hour early so I could turn on the heater and crawl back into bed. I noticed it in the quality of the light, which was less night-like, and in the quality of the cold in my apartment, which was less bitter.

I intentionally avoided wearing long johns for the first time in as long as I can remember, and I abandoned my warm and dry, calf-high Sorrels for the adventurous soles of my hiking shoes, which had been gathering dust since my trip south at Christmas. Leaving my apartment, it felt warmer outside than in the shaded genkan, and in the full sun I read the same spring that you had—in the drips of snow and the smokey smell of the melt. I cued up “Heartbeats” on the ol iPod as it seemed fitting for this world that is slowly coming back to life.

The children are thawing out, too. If being at an elementary school is the best way to spend a Friday, then the walk to school is the best start to that day. I always pass so many students on the trudge up the hill, and I like to genkily scream the wonder of the day at them in English as they respond with teeth-chattering “bikurishita!”s. Today they screamed it right back at me, and a roku nensei dragged me into some kind of break-neck race up the hill, terrorizing all the little giggling girls we passed with our cries of “GOOD MORNING!”

And in the elementary entranceway, the perfect punctuation to your statement that spring has sprung. The concrete and cobbles are dry; the recessed area is free of rubbers and snowmobiling boots: the more sensible shoes that this first day of spring allows fitting conveniently into our matrix of shoe lockers.

Carnage/Creation

Today the town of Furubira started construction on the new elementary school. I had known this was coming down the pipe pretty soon, and I’d been told that the location for the new building would be right beside the current elementary. However, I hadn’t realized exactly where the new building was going up until today when I was on my way to class. Just outside the windows of the bathroom wash stations, two large pieces of construction equipment were laying waste to one of my favourite bits of forest (an area that is possibly one of the prettiest views from my elementary). From the windows above the wash stations, I was treated to a perfect, overhead view of the carnage/creation going on outside.

Some of the students who come to the wash station look out on the scene and see only carnage. The stand of evergreen that once served as a vertical canvas for the falling snow now lies in a dense tangle of the green of boughs, the brown of bark, and the raw yellow of living wood. All around it, the unspoiled white has been chewed up by the steel treads of the lumbering machines, leaving tracks vaguely reminiscent of rampaging buffalo or marauding Hollywood indjuns. One of the machines sweeps its mechanical claw out in front of it like an arm, brushing aside the deep snow until it reaches a lone remaining sapling. With a dexterity that might make one mistake it as an extension of his own arm, the operator reaches out with the mechanical claw and closes it around the small tree’s trunk, snapping the thing off instantly with a crack that can be heard from high above. The arm tosses the piece into the knot of fallen trees, and the claw digs in again at the base of the splintered trunk, pulling up the root ball like a dandelion stem. The black of its earth sprays across the snow white as the arm hefts it, too: cart wheeling through the air to land in the pile of slash.

Another student comes to the wash station and can hardly notice the carnage for all the creation going on around it. He sees the tracks of the machines making the land more and more level with each pass, their action on the trees removing the chaos from the soil and instating order. He draws vectors between the construction-capped workers rambling through the disorder. From the rough plans he saw in his parents’ copy of the town newsletter, he already begins constructing the new school in his mind’s creative eye. From out of the snow and dirt and twisted trees rise vertices of potential, and in the empty space in the forest outside he can already picture how he will run the circuit of the new building’s halls, counting the windows and the walls in its many rooms. He can already smell the fresh plastics and the drying wood glue, feel the light plaster dust in his hair.

While a third student stands at the wash station with her back to the windows. She can see only the ancient architecture in this place: this giant, rambling school that was built for a different age of this town—back when there were movieplexes and supermarkets and sprawling herring mansions. In this aging elementary, mere motion is a covert act as you’re more likely to be lost in it than found. In the scene outside, this student sees only the end of the old girl: this vast, often cold, sometimes lonely classroom castle that has been the birthplace of dreams ever since she wandered into it as an ichi nensei. It is a place so empty that it happily allows itself to be filled with anything you like; where past is so very present that it has to be kept in check least the yesterday should muscle out the today.

But on the lowest floor, the wash station windows are still boarded over. Ostensibly, it’s to protect the windows from the mountains of snow and ice that avalanche down from the rooves of buildings in this northern outpost; the vast loads of white piling up in glass-threatening quantities. However, with the melt now begun and winter on its last legs, I wonder if the boards might not have been left up to shield the eyes of our youngest students who make their homes on the first floor: their new minds still too impressionable to make much sense of the carnage or the creation just outside. Instead, they are treated to furtive glimpses through the cracks between two-by-fours, and their fertile imaginations attribute the grinding cries and flashes of orange beyond to dinosaurs just as often as to steam machines.

Why Japan Always Wins

With this being exam time for my junior high school students, the awesome school lunches that they and we teachers receive have been cancelled for the next few days. I was dutifully informed of this when I was given my schedule for this month, but as that was about two months ago, I promptly forgot and showed up with only an orange and an apple for lunch today.

Crap.

No matter, though, as apparently I wasn’t the only one, and a bunch of teachers lumped together and placed an order with the very delicious Minato Sushi in town.

When one of the proprietors showed up with our delivery, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t to have the orders bundled to serving trays with tied handkerchiefs, the food within still steaming in real, non-disposable bowls and plates from the restaurant. They delivered the food, took our cash, and left, only to return about an hour later to collect the flatware.

That they would bring the food in real dishes and leave them with us…It’s not a big thing, but it’s a nice thing. It’s a small-town-home-made thing; a fresh thing and a real thing.

It’s the kind of thing Canada just can’t compete with.