Kaerimashita

After days of travel that started at Toronto Pearson on Thursday July 29^th at 13:00, I finally got back home to Furubira at 16:00 today, after sojourns in humid Tokyo hostels and on the floor of Maggie’s wind-swept apartment in Sapporo. The clouds that had been grey and ominous from Otaru through to just past Yoichi are riven in blue and white as my bus passes through that high, narrow tunnel and down into the rocky, coastal roads of the Shakotan peninsula. Having heard tales of flooding in Furubira while I was away from Mark, I half expect to come back upon my town as a ruin.

As I pass through the last tunnel, I find it to be anything but. It is the same sun-and-clouded, tree-choked-mountains-of-green place that I left. The only evidence of the torrential rains of last Thursday lingers in the spindly and still-green trees up-ended in the shallows where the Furubira river empties into the Sea of Japan.

I climb the stairs to my apartment for the first time in three weeks to find that some of me has gone out of it. In my absence, it has settled back to the dusty smell of tatami mats and sunshine that I remember so keenly from when I first arrived here a few days shy of a year ago. It is a smell that was once tinged with the anxiety of finally being on my own in this distant land. However, now the same smell comforts me. It is a smell of the relatively clear spaces in this apartment—a smell of traditional, tiled shower rooms and warm, astroturfed sun rooms. It is a smell of golden light through sheer curtains and of vague tinkling from unseen wind chimes.

And that smell makes me sane, on this Sunday end to my long adventure home—when all of my emotional history screams that I should be mourning the end of a vacation; mourning another year away from all that is familiar and Canadian.

But I don’t.

And I’m not.

And I’m wondering if it has to do with the overwhelming sense of right I felt when I walked off flight AC001 and into Tokyo Narita for the second time this year, this time very much without the support of dozens of other Toronto JETs. I wonder if it has to do with how all of my consternation over training my way into sweaty Tokyo and finding my hostel fell away, only to be replaced by a profound and irrational love for the Japanese people—by a strong desire that I never knew I had to be back home with them.