I'm a Lumberjack, and I'm okay

This past weekend we made the long, long 5-hour drive up to Nakagawa for the HAJET Northern Welcome party. It's only about 300km, but when you remember the Hokkaido speed limits are set at 50km/h year round, that is a long, long drive. Even when you feel like pushing that speed limit, it's hard to do so as even the toll expressways in this place are mostly just one lane.

And, there's always the cops, as Lindsay found out rather unfortunately.

Despite the distance, I was determined to make it out to the party. It was a modest, camping thing until the ALT in Nakagawa offered to host it, and her town backed her 100%, offering to make us food and to even move their town festival up by a month in honour of the attending ALTs. To take the ridiculousness even further, Nakagawa's mayor turned up to welcome us to the camp site and to give us advice for the log pushing even that some of us had signed up for the next day.

Nakagawa Sue's glorious mexican cuisine.

God damn, I miss mexican cuisine.

The pretty nice onsen hotel beside our campsite because no one roughs it in Japan without a hotspring bath on hand.

Sue's hero of a supervisor who spent all of Friday fishing for us and Saturday night cooking us chanchan yaki and yaki soba. Delicious.

Roz, me, Kevin, Lindsay, Mark, and Brian. All of the 2009 Hokkaido ALTs from Toronto. We all recontracted for a second year, and this is the first time we've all been in one place, really, since Sapporo Orientation last year.

With welcome parties come drunken bake sale auctions to raise funds for the HAJET-run Hokkaido English Challenge/Camp/Home stay program. You'd be surprised how much someone will pay for western baked goods in Japan when they've been drinking. I paid $60 for a pumpkin pie.

God damn, I miss pumpkin pie.

The food that Nakagawa served up was phenomenal and got us log-pushers good and energized for the competition we'd blindly signed up for at 9am on the Sunday morning. I'm pretty sure the two teams of guys and one team of girls signed up for a laugh, thinking that this log pushing would be fun and not too challenging to us big, burly gaijin.

Once we had to show up to weigh in and saw what we were in for, I think we all got a little worried:

(sorry about the Photoshop photomerge munching the log)

Those Kanji across the back there actually proclaim this to be a sumo competition, and you wouldn't doubt it once you saw how seriously some of the teams took the competition. It's a reverse tug-of-war, where the goal is to push harder than your opponents and to drive the red centre marker on the log over their baseline. Oh, and the log's pretty heavy, even with ten guys on it. Teams are weighed in as the limit is 400 kilos per team. Our own team came in at a cool 389kg.

Back before we realized we had anything to be afraid of, we came up with a jaunty, setting appropriate team theme: The Lumberjacks.

Chi, Alan, me, Brian, and Spencer. The MIGHTY LUMBERJACKS!

That would, of course, be the Monty Python Lumberjacks, complete with women's clothing (compliments of Simon Daly and the Engaru Free Store) and a bra (compliments of Heather...strangely no photos of that have showed up yet).

The other team of ALT guys went up first.

...and got rocked as they had the unfortunate pleasure of drawing the team that would eventually go on to win the whole thing as their first opponents. To give you an idea of how hard core this other team was, that dude on the end of the ALT log in the pink shirt, who's barely touching the ground, weighs about 110 KILOS, to say nothing about the rest of his team. Thankfully, we were able to learn something from their defeat (stay low, get as much of your skin on the log as you can), and when it came time for us lumberjacks to get on the log.

We knocked the fancy-coloured pants off of our opponents from Hokkudai University.

We weren't so lucky when we faced The Architects in the third round (we'd had a by into the second). Though we denied them a sweep by taking one win from them, they beat us twice and went on to the next round. Still, with the other men's team and the women's team having been defeated in their first match-ups, we were pretty proud of our showing in this event we knew nothing about and had signed up for as a bit of a joke.

Just before we were defeated by The Architects.

Though we were all kind of concerned about splinters, what with rubbing our nakedness up against a log, the log was pretty damn slick--hence why you needed your skin on it for traction. And traction there was as, writing this now on Thursday (I'm retconning it back to Monday), I still have a fairly livid bruise under my right arm from all of the friction of the log.