(a contribution to Rebecca's on-going Photo of The Week Facebook group...while also being a photo of Things Japanese)
This past week was supposed to be HEC camp; otherwise known as the Hokkaido English Challenge Camp; otherwise known as one of the things I had most been looking forward to for the past few months (or had I been looking forward to it ever since I came to Japan two years ago and it was mentioned in Hokkaido orientation?). HEC camp brings together first grade students from junior high and high school for a 100% English experience at a camp run entirely by us ALTs. What's more, these are the kids who did the best in our ALT-organized English challenge, so all I've heard is how much of a riot they are as they are not afraid of English.
Last year's camp had sounded like a blast, but I had missed it as I'd been in Canada. Come hell or high water, I was determined to make it to camp this year...that was until a freaking BEAR made it to camp before us, on the very day that we were all meant to ship out (last Friday). Hairy bastard got the camp site closed for a week, and camp got cancelled because, for all that Mark and Heather tried, they could find no other place to host it.
But, in a hero move meant to salvage something of the weekend, June threw together plans for a bunch of us to go camping in Hamamasu, along the sea of Japan coast north of Sapporo. That's the long story for where this photo comes from.
I feel like trying to take credit for sunset shots is a bit of a dick move. So long as your camera is half-decent, you're only making a best attempt at capturing an event that is entirely the responsibility of the earth, sun, etc. Basically, I feel like it's pretty hard to take a terrible picture of a sunset.
Thus, here's my cop-out for this week: put forward more because it was a particularly glorious sunset rather than because I did anything particularly exceptional other than pointing my camera at it.
(in which a lot of photographic bullshit goes down--the kind of stuff that won't be of much interest to anyone who does not drool over lenses. Consider yourself warned.)
Back at the beginning of June, the Nikon D60 that had been a gift from my Dad before departing for Japan--the camera that had served me loyally for pretty much two years exactly--died on me.
Becca has got me onto a Facebook initiative she's started. It's a group she made with photographer friends to encourage them to post their photos somewhere other can see them. There are no rules or categories: just the idea that you should post a photo a week: one that you think is the best you've done. I have further limited myself to chose a photo I actually took that week. As I've been neglecting the blog of late, I thought it might be the kind of thing I should post up here.
This week, it was a two-way tie between the photos below, each of which were taken in Sapporo this past weekend as I was hanging out with Perry, Lindsay, Max, Mark, and various other folk like Nick Small. Then, out of nowhere, I realized that neither of them compared to the sexy focus of the following picture of Perry seated in the window of Kyosuke's Hookah Bar, located on the second floor of a restaurant, right where Tanuki Koji 6 turns into Tanuki Koji 7 in downtown Sapporo.
Becca has got me onto a Facebook initiative she's started. It's a group she made with photographer friends to encourage them to post their photos somewhere other can see them. There are no rules or categories: just the idea that you should post a photo a week: one that you think is the best you've done. I have further limited myself to chose a photo I actually took that week. As I've been neglecting the blog of late, I thought it might be the kind of thing I should post up here.
Here's my first week, taken just after I got home from the Furubira International Exchange Association's Sobetsukai (farewell party) held in my honour. I was contending with a misty sort of rain and annoying little biting insects, but I managed to shoot the following hand-held. The web was on one of the metal railings that encircle the park outside my front door. These railings seem to be a popular hang-out joint for spiders.
It's been a dog's age...again, but I haven't exactly been idle. Two weekends back, Mark Mowbray, Mark Rostrup, Lindsay, and I returned to Rishiri, determined to finally summit the mountain we first attempted to climb in our first September here. It was tough going, but we made it, and there's more of a story to it, but for the sake of expedience, I give you the first cut of our Rishiri Adventure, accompanied by the wonderful Johnny Flynn from his album A Larum:
Alright. I retconned this into my post about Asahidake after the fact, but the video is so fine and Sam did such a good job that I need to give this thing a post of its own. This is shot on the highest mountain in Hokkaido, and one of the finest mountains I've boarded on in my time here. This is one of the reasons I stayed in Japan for two years and why I'm fortunate that I get to leave this place in the summer. Were I to have to terminate my contract in the deep, fluffy, white of February, I'm not sure I'd have the strength. To be able to leave this place, I've had to ready myself for the possibility that snowboarding will never be this fantastic in any other part of the world.
Oh, and Sam's the one in the blue pants, green pack, and white jacket.
Back at the end of May, Mark and I took an impromptu drive around the Shakotan Peninsula (which extends West and North from Furubira and curves around to Mark's town of Iwanai). We had some unfinished business with the peninsula: when we were doing our Four Points Road Trip of Awesome around the coast of Hokkaido last September, we had to cut inland at Furubira and skip the Shakotan because it was getting late.
At the time, Mark had promised me that we'd drive the Shakotan before we left, and he followed through on that promise back on Friday May 27th. We got around just in time for sunset on his side of the world, and we couldn't have asked for better conditions. Here are some photos of the whole thing:
Last week at this time, half the ALT population of Hokkaido was descending on Sapporo to take in the Yosakoi/Soran Matsuri(festival). The whole thing started out with a dance: Yosakoi...or was it Soran? Regardless, it was a dance developed down south in Japan meant to draw from the motions of fishermen hauling in nets and the chants that they used to keep time. But that's a bit like saying that Glee was developed from Christmas carollers. Yosakoi/Soran has grown so far beyond its beginnings that it is now little more than a vague musical/gesticular pattern within which the Japanese LOSE THEIR SHIT.
Randomly, though he'd already been to Japan for an episode of his fantastic Travel/Food documentary series, Anthony Bourdain came back this past February to do an episode focusing solely on Hokkaido. Well, it's mostly Sapporo as he didn't rove further than about a 20km radius from the city. However, he heads to places I've told you about before, like Niseko and Noboribetsu, and when he talks about "Uni" and "Tarako," those are two things that my town is famous for catching. The video is a little wintery compared to the weather here today, but I figure it's still a great way to get a video glimpse into the part of Japan where I live. What's more, this is the full episode, so you don't need to go hunting for other parts.
Hope you like it. As it is making miss this place even when I am still here, I can attest to its accuracy.
I’ve been so hit and miss on the old bloggerino (mostly miss) that I neglected to commemorate two years of blogdom last week. Thus, inspired by my more timely post last year, here’s a belated, バラバラ sort of update that should cover a number of things in a random sort of manner.
As I posted a long, long time ago to show photos of my first, hideously expensive apartment here in Japan, I figure it's likely about time that I post some photos of my current, far newer, far cheaper, far cleaner and warmer and nicer apartment. It's a great place, and I'm really fortunate to have it for as cheap as I do. My only wish is that I hadn't been burning money on that other monstrous place for a full year of my time here >:(
Asano-Sensei, my Japanese Mum, charts the progress of the Arab Spring across her laminated map of the world with post-it notes. And in this country where it is sometimes a little too easy to over generalize how internationally ignorant the Japanese can be, my Japanese Mum does a better job of understanding this revolution than me. I try to put into words how it makes me feel as she explains the kanji on the post-its: that this one on Tunisia says that here is where it all started; that this one on Egypt says that here is where the people achieved their independence; that these ones on Syria and Libya say that the people are still fighting. I tell her that I’m proud of her, but that doesn’t quite manage to capture the half of it. I should be telling her that I feel guilty that, even in all my news watching, I haven’t been anywhere near as geographically diligent as she has. I should be telling her that she has likely paid closer attention to all of this than a whole pile of foreigners out there who fancy themselves internationally-minded.
Part two of the Great Tokyo Tour To Heather's Former Haunts!
Kamakura and Kita Kamakura make up a collection of shrines and temples a short train ride out of Tokyo. When she lived in Tokyo three years ago, Heather used to come out to Kamakura all the time. She thought I'd like the place, and with the combination of old-school Japanese architecture and TREES, she was absolutely right.
Heather and I headed to Tokyo for Golden Week 2011 (from April 29th to May 5th), but I'm only getting around to posting the first batch of photos from the trip now. As I've, apparently, swung my fickle/obsessive interest set out of writing and into photography, let's call this a Photo Essay of the Yokohama leg of our trip...
This past weekend Heather and I headed to Niseko for our last runs of this season, and likely the last runs in Hokkaido for a little while. The island was clearly as sad as I was about the end to the long, glorious, deeply snowy winter as it was raining, off-and-on, pretty much all day.
Though I think it's an aspect that Heather finds unsettling, I can often find there to be something awe-inspiring in catastrophe, in horror. Maybe that's the same side of me that often thinks the most interesting stories--the most moving and affecting--are the darkest ones. Whatever it is, it manifests when I try to put myself in the shoes of someone watching Hitler's rise to power, try to imagine what it would be like to have the realization dawn on you that a man you thought to be a charismatic dictator was actually a genocidal maniac.
I try to imagine what fits of imagination were required to assimilate the scale of destruction wrought by the atom bomb when nothing like it had ever been seen before--I try to imagine that watershed moment when the realization sinks in and your view of the world is upended by a weaponized piece of science fiction. I try to flesh that out to wonder what weapons we could never imagine are currently out there in development; I try to imagine what it will be like when they are released and we have to reformat our worlds to make them make sense.
Mark, Lindsay, Max, and I spent this past weekend at the top of Hokkaido, snowboarding (and skiing, I guess, as Max was there) on Asahidake, the tallest mountain in Hokkaido.
At the entrance ceremony today, the new elementary 1st graders are sandwiched between their new peers to the back and The Stage with The Flag to the front. They are drowned in the dreary droning of the haunting melody and words of the antiquated, imperialistic, controversial Japanese Anthem. It is a dirge that has always given me the eerie impression that it lingers in time: never starting or stopping, just existing. It fades in, gradually building to a see-sawing, moaning climax, before fading--or flowing--away, back to that place of shadow and light where it waits in time.
Don't get me wrong; there's beauty in it. It's just a beauty that harrows more than it inspires. I am relieved when it fades out, and the lost-looking new 1年生 are fished out of the dark by the nothing-but-sunshine-and rainbows Furubira Elementary school song: a song I'm so in love with that I not only want to learn it before I leave, but I kind of want to ask if I can sing it with the school--if I can bathe in their sometimes-screamy, midget-melodious light.
I realize it when I, guiltily, pull myself away from my order-in lunch at the junior high school today, put my suit jacket back on, and file into the school's genkan with the other sensei. We welcome one of our students--the last of the third graders to graduate--back to the school for the first time in months. We all follow her into the principal's office and cram in around furniture to be the witnesses to the presentation of her diploma. In this small office, they do it with all of the pomp and ceremony that they used when the rest of her class graduated "normally" this morning in the cavernous gym. With the exception of the odd setting, there is no mention or recognition of whatever demons have kept her from school these last months. Her homeroom teacher announces her just like any other student, and the principal hands her the certificate just as woodenly as he's handed all the others, and then we teachers--us small posse--we clap like it was the most regular thing in the world.
In the parts of Japan untouched by the recent tragedy, life goes on.
First off: I'm fine. Completely. Didn't know there'd been an earthquake until it exploded all over my Facebook just after 14:50 on Friday afternoon. I didn't feel a thing, and when I turned to my co-worker at the Board of Education to tell her that there'd been a big earthquake down in Iwate-ken, she seemed completely unperturbed. I left work at three like I was supposed to, rode a bus into Yoichi (mostly along the Sea of Japan coast), and then jumped another bus inland to Kutchan where I'd be meeting Mark, Alistair, and Ross for some nightboarding at Hirafu.
The view from a bus in Hokkaido at pretty much the exact time that the world was falling down.
If it hadn't been for my phone, I never would have gotten any indication that anything was amiss in other parts of Japan.
It was that uneventful here. When I spoke to Mark, he told me that he hadn't felt it, either, over in Iwanai. Ross and Alistair had felt it on the mountain, near Kutchan, but they had no idea about the scale of the craziness that was going on down south.
I'm trying to go back and fill in the giant gap I've left here since about mid-February, so these are going to be mostly photos.
Friday night and Saturday were spent with the HAJET folks, taking in the winter meeting at Freedom Inn in Hanazono (near Niseko). It was at this meeting last year that Heather and I had quit all our dicking about and had finally gotten together, so the meeting held a certain salience for us. Personally, it was also salient as it was at the winter meeting in Furano last year that I'd taken on the role of HAJET Social Coordinator, and next to all of the madness that I get up to with my friends and the sun-eclipsing light of my elementary school kids, being a part of the HAJET Prefectural Council has been one of the most fulfilling parts of this JET experience. So it was with a bit heavy heart that I accepted that my time with the council was at an end as our council handed off responsibility to the newly-elected council, and I handed my Social Coordinator role off to Andy Suvoltos.
Sentimental bullshit or not, we still managed to have ourselves a good 'ol weekend between the parting with all the other Hokkaido ALTs and the snowboarding.
Ours at Alpha Tomamu was a fit of fantasy thanks to our over-generous Japanese teacher friends springing to put Heather and I up in that mad suite with the jacuzzi and the sauna and the three rooms.
The city of Otaru is only an hour bus ride away from my town of Furubira, and in February they host a week-long snow lantern festival. Here are some no-bullshit photos of it.
I tend to take a lot of pictures and sandwich them into blog posts. I thought the pictures might benefit from a little less distraction and a little more in the way of concrete context.
So, here are some views of and from Hirafu in Niseko. It's the main ski resort on Mount Niseko An'nupuri, and it's one of the best places from which to stare at neighbouring Mount Yotei.
My new supervisor (left) cooking with my old supervisor (right)
Another Valentine's Day, another RABURABU Man's cooking class with the Furubira townies. Last year we made Gomaae, one of my favourites, and this year we made Bibimbap, which isn't, strictly-speaking, Japanese, but it is FREAKING DELICIOUS, so I didn't mind.
In February of 2010, I was voluntold onto the HAJET (Hokkaido Association for Japanese Exchange Teachers) Prefectural Council in the role of Social Coordinator. At the time, I wasn't sure what to expect for I largely saw the HAJET organization as little more than a group of people interested in setting up parties for Hokkaido ALTs.
Nightboarding over at Hirafu, after we'd finished giving our Snow Festival/Yuki Matsuri Tour snowboard lessons, Mark--in his fox suit--takes us down through the trees just between runs.
We must seem some wondrous wild things in the woods to the casual observer: galumphing down through the powder in our furry suits. Fox and Pikachu, Gizmo and Marimokori with the occasional flashes of metal and fiberglass at our feet. We must look like animist spirits scared to leave the safety of the trees as we only ever break from them briefly before barreling back into them.
Down through mist and snow.
Down the paths only Wild Things know.
A solid cornerstone of any foreigner's Japanese experience.
It is also the Japanese kryptonite to invincible Gaijin everywhere. All of their blonde-haired, blue-eyed, booming-voiced sexy might reduced to nothing in the face of four words:
“Can you eat natto?”
Posed by a Japanese national who you’d previously considered your friend; posed with a vague smile on his face and a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
While you, the uninformed foreigner, still try to hang on to your exotic power, ignorant to what’s about to be sprung on you.
Fermented soy beans. Sickly beige and chilled into a solid mass. The Japanese’ll serve it to you with hot sauce or mustard or soy sauce or kimchi. If you’re truly unlucky, they’ll serve it to you with raw egg.
The pungent odor of gym socks will waft over you, and you’ll have to hold back the urge to gag. You’ll gird your loins and tell yourself that there’s no way that anything could actually taste that bad.
And you’ll be right. The danger of natto is not in the taste. The danger of natto is in the smell and the look of it; the slip-slimy consistency of the mucous-like liquid that holds it all together and trails out streamers like feathery silly putty as you stretch your first mouthful away from the mass of it.
And that is only if you can get the slide-y natto to stay on your hashi, which is as much of a challenge as overcoming the smell of it. Woe betide those who had the misfortune of being served natto mixed with raw egg and the consistencies of the two seem to synergize when combined, creating something so much slimier than the sum of its parts: a slippery slurry that you can only ever hope to eat with hashi if you combine it with rice to lend it a bit more substance.
But if you’re lucky to be eating it straight, or with some of the stink of it masked with mustard or hot sauce, as you celebrate your victory over consistency and triumphantly bring the tenuous hashi-full of it to your mouth, you feel streamers of slime settle sickly across your chin. Looking down, you realize that they’re not only resting wetly on your chin but are running like long life lines back down into the styrofoam package of natto on the table before you.
ネーバ ネーバ
neba-neba. The unique Japanese expression for describing the slime-y, wet-web-like consistency of natto and one of my favourite random Japanese terms.
Those same slime-y strands are also now linking your hashi in your outstretched hand back to your mouth, and out of necessity you learn the action that all Japanese practice from birth: the fervent tornado spinning of your hashi hand through the natto strands to wind them up and free your face and your hand from the hair-thin umbilicals hanging down from them.
neba-neba.
Whatever you do when eating natto, it should never be eaten with anything else. The slime that comes off the fermented beans in natto is an parasitic, virulent thing that may just possess the vaguest inklings of sentience. Should you introduce natto-slime-covered hashi to any other sauce or liquid, the slime will spawn and multiply, and perfectly fluid sauces will quickly begin to manifest the same viscous, mucous trailers that natto has. And each further food you introduce this contaminated sample to will take them on, too. No matter how far the slime moves from its parent beans, it never seems to dissipate—seeming instead to only grow more powerful by the introduction of fresh liquid.
In the end, I’m convinced that eating natto comes down to a determination to succeed in a war of wills rather than a gastronomical motivation towards deliciousness. The only foreigners who eat natto are those with something to prove: the ones who, when that gleam comes into a Japanese friend’s eyes, and a sly grin creeps across his face, relish the ensuing crestfallen slump when they are able to proclaim “はい！なとがだいすきです！”
And then there’s folks like me, who got told once that natto was good for you, and in a draconian adherence to hearsay and folk wisdom that might just border on the alchemical, have decided to eat the stuff for breakfast every day.
But not with raw egg.
That would be just weird.
I call this 'Bachan Brand natto. It's the best I've found, and it's all I eat.
Air holes in the top of the individual styrofoam packages so that the sentient slime doesn't suffocate.
What natto looks like in the package.
Soy sauce and hot mustard. The best way to go.
Dressed and ready for mixing.
Whipped up to the desired frothy consistency. I'm not sure why Japanese folks do this, but it seems to make it easier to catch larger blobs of natto with your hashi, and it does a little something to control the neba-neba. That being said, even when it's frothed up, you've still got to slurp the stuff like ramen noodles!
The first weekend in February, we took another road trip out to Abashiri since the drift ice situation had been so damn disappointing last year (I covered it in detail last year, likely out of frustration from not seeing it).
Fortunately this year was a little more ice-filled than last, and when we got out on our sunset icebreaker cruise, it was looking damn near like the north west passage out there:
As the drift ice may drive you to believe when it floats in close and chokes up the town's harbours, Abashiri can seem a pretty grim, pretty bleak place. Its second biggest attraction is a prison, which I'd like to believe says something about the tone of the town. When we passed through Abashiri in September on our Four Points Tour, we were certainly unable to find anything more exciting in the place (well, we hit the very nice Museum of the Northern Peoples for a second time, but that hardly makes up for the generous amounts of boring going on in town).
However, each time I've rolled up on the place for the past two Februaries, I've wound up having a blast. Last year we had a giant slumber party (for what else can you call it when you carpet the floor of a small-ish Japanese apartment with about 18 people) on the Friday night, and then an even giant-er blow out at Caroline's on the Saturday night. This year we caught some nepalese food for lunch, some blue beer on the sunset ice cruise at dusk, and then we crashed at June's again on Saturday night, and it was a night filled with hot wine, pizza, and excellence.
Set against that grim backdrop of ice and lowlands and sea, it really has got to be the people that make Abashiri so habitable.
Taken from my front door before heading out to work at about 7:54am
The currently vacant teacher house behind mine, belonging to the high school. Notice the kind of damage snow build-up can do along the side of the roof. Roundabout the same time as the previous.
An Odajima construction worker, working to clear the huge buildup of snow from my elementary school's roof on Friday. These guys were very securely tied off to shovels embedded in the snow further along the roof. I'm not sure how much good that would have done should one of them have gotten lost in the world of white ground and grey sky on that melty Friday.
All in a night's work. These are taken just over an hour apart on Tuesday night, out my back sliding door. I had been away all weekend, it had kept snowing, and I had to clear the build-up of snow that had avalanched down from my roof. What you see in the lower picture is the meter of solid snow that has accumulated since I had a guy in to remove all the snow from behind my house on January 19th, which I can't be bothered to dig out as the wood across the glass of the sliding door does a good enough job of holding it back. With the amount of snow that has been coming down this winter, I've had to dig out the back of my house for at least three hours every week: not because I actually use the back of my house but to make sure that the snow doesn't build up to the point where it blocks my heater exhaust, threatens to break my windows, and keeps aditional snow from sliding down off of the roof.
