A Post Apocalyptic Tokyo

As I've been spending my two days in the Bored of Education between my winter vacation in England and my long weekend away boarding primarily crawling across the whole breadth of the internet, rather than doing anything truly sensible, I've been gifted with a lot of time to find interesting things. Here's one of the most beautiful things I've come across: post-apocalyptic reimaginings of prominent bits of Tokyo. Below are some of my favourites, but all of them can be found over on the Pink Tentacle.

Moving

As if preparing for Four Points next week wasn't enough, last Friday my boss also sprung on me the fact that, as my new apartment was ready ahead of schedule, they would be moving me into it starting Monday after school. I had expected the whole process to occur after I'd returned from Four Points, so I had, of course, packed nothing. I was able to delay them until Tuesday night to give me Monday to pack and get ready. That involved finally getting rid of a lot of cardboard and plastic bottles and general junk that the complicated Japanese waste systems prompts us whities to collect in our spare rooms. For example, here's all of the milk I've drank in my apartment since I showed up in this place:

Despite waylaying my eager movers, I was still caught with my pants down when my boss and three of my coworkers from the sports center erupted in my apartment not a minute past 5:30pm on Tuesday. They set to work like efficient monkey home invasions or Grinch Who Stole Christmases or sentient black holes: wandering around and removing anything that wasn't nailed down, heaping it like spoils in the backs of their tiny Japanese pick-up trucks. As we ferried the surprisingly large loads to my new place, the lawnmower go-kart engines in those two-seater pick-ups would bemoan with a voice like a thousand bees my fat gaijin ass and all of the useless gaijin crap I'd accumulated over the last year.

My coworkers were relentless. There were no breaks, there was no standing around talking about what to move next. Up and down the stairs they went, stopping only to suck their teeth at how I hadn't packed more. When they saw that the load I'd prepared for them was mostly furniture with no boxes, I heard them mutter "dorumbo" and "hako" and "yakuba," and then one of them would run off, only to reappear not five minutes later with all of the boxes a person could ever need. They broke me to their unyielding pace, and the result was an apartment's worth of junk (including huge china hutches, refrigerators, and washing machines) being relocated in no more than four hours over two days. I'm still reeling from how quickly they accomplished it.

All of the hubbub does have its benefits: a freshly renovated apartment, with shiny new bathrooms and sinks and stoves and tatami floors. And then there's the sunrise, knocking at the window of my new bedroom, the best housewarming gift I may have ever received.

a year in The Life

Well, it’s been a year since I started this thing. I figured I’d commemorate it with some updates. This is the pretty straight forward, year-of-blog update. I've got something a little more linguistically interesting in the offing, but it will have to come a bit later.

First, I ain’t coming home

Despite thinking I was pretty clear on my decision in the Christmas cards I sent to most people, as well as in my six month post, it appears that there are some folks who are still getting surprised by my news that I recontracted with JET and will be hanging on in Furubira as the ALT until July 2011 at least. So here it is; one more time:

I’m not coming home in August 2010.

Right now I’m scheduled to be back in August of 2011, but there is always the possibility of extending my contract for a further year.

That being said, I’m coming home soon

Sorry to be contrary, but I’m coming home for a visit to Canada this July. The first bit will be in Vancouver for Amy’s birthday (that’s two years running, Thede. I hope you’re keeping track…) and Amanda’s wedding, and the second bit will be in Toronto to catch up with the family and all you mad city rats. However, for reasons of paid vacation limits and planning to work at Tokyo Orientation (even though they decided I wasn’t genki enough >:( ), it will be a very short visit. Therefore, I’m really hoping I can set up some kind of mass do so I can make sure to see everyone.

So where is Furubira, anyway?

I took a look back at those first posts and realized that I got the location of my town pretty wrong. So, though Amy’s likely the only one to care, here are some revised maps to show where I’m at in this mad archipelago.

Further, Furubira is a small fishing town of 3,800 souls—far less than the 14,000 it boasted at its prime, back when we had movie theaters and herring mansions, back before a change to off-shore fishing laws started a steady bleed of our fisherman population. I’d love to make a romantic comparison to the outports of Newfoundland, but the reality is that the fish processing our town is still engaged in seems to keep us running.

The Schools

The junior high school second graders who used to alternate between telling me to leave and telling me to die are now third graders who tell me I’m cool and that I should stay. They’re also entertaining themselves by yelling “hige!” at me from time to time and laughing as I stroke my beard in epic fashion. The junior high first graders who used to be the apple of my predecessor’s eye have slowly degraded into junior high second graders who are only now discovering the joys of telling me to die. Thankfully, my new junior high first graders became far less straight-jacket insane in their transfer over from sixth grade at the elementary school, and there are some among their number that completely blow me away with their level of English acumen.

The Elementary students are angels, like always. Well, the new fifth graders have inherrited the manic mantle from the old sixth graders, complete with the dubious honour of having their homeroom teacher leave on undisclosed, yet surely unrelated, indefinite leave. The new sixth graders are developing some attitude, but it can’t get the better of their genuine interest in learning. The new fourth graders continue to prove themselves to be wunderkind in the interest and ability they demonstrate in our twinning with my mother’s second grade class. The third graders are as fun as third graders should be, the second graders are suffering bit from a possible Sensei-Importance of English disconnect, and the first graders are the light of any day. God, that I could spend my every day trying to come up with new and creative ways to make them explode into those uninhibited peals of laughter. I’m convinced exposure to my first graders could cure cancer, those kids are so cute.

The High School is as a slowly closing High School should be, I guess. Since the year change in March-April, the third graders have graduated and moved on, the seconds have become thirds, the firsts have become seconds, and the first year class is no more. With only two classes to teach there now, I spend even less time at the school, and when we go through the whole process again next March, I’ll have only 50 minutes to teach at the high school, once every two weeks. It will be worth it, though, as the now-second-and-then-third graders at the high school have always been my very favourite students, and my Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) there is unquestionably my most manic, most entertaining teacher. He makes mad things like this on the regular.

The BOE

The other half of any ALT’s job: The Board of Education. Or, perhaps, the Bored of Education when we have to report to it on days when the schools are out and make work to do as our coworkers seem just as confused about what we’re doing there as we are. Thankfully, my BOE seems to be better than most: it is just the right mix of invested in my well-being while not being overbearing in my life. The people there are also as muppet-like as I am.

I’ve got hair

Didn’t say all these updates were going to be particularly interesting, but I’m thin on material, and this is the most hair I’ve had in a while, so deal.

And I’ve got a lady.

Which seems like a fundamentally impersonal way to talk about it, but just like with the recontracting thing, people still seem to be surprised by the news. I guess my less-than-subtle implications could have stood to be far less subtle. Her name’s Heather, and she’s from the UK. She showed up over here in the same JET group as I, and we’re placed not too far apart up here in Hokkaido, with Sapporo as a convenient meeting point between us. To quote the Barenaked Ladies, “she loves me, and her body keeps me warm…”

And since it's what started all this off, here is my own, snowier take on that photo by that Bassguitar guy on Flickr; the one that was my first image of Furubira. I'd been meaning to photograph these rocks for a while, and I finally got the chance in early April. Back then, I said that the picture had convinced me that Furubira was the kind of place I wanted to be. Now, twelve months later, I'm still thinking the same thing.

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