I can’t comment what things are like in other prefectures, but on this New-Brunswick-sized northern island of ours the JET family seems pretty tight. Realities of size and space mean that some of us are—at best—distant relatives, but when we all come together for the semi-regular reunions, you wouldn’t know the distance to look at us.
Among all of these people, I’ve been fortunate enough to cling to a few small pieces of home. When we all came over last August, the shallow bits of history I hung onto took the form of Mark and Lindsay, two Toronto JETs (though they’d tell you they’re Georgetown and Mississauga JETs, respectively) who wound up being placed, essentially, in my backyard. For all our common geographic origins, I never thought that we’d wind up being much more than fellow Canadians over here. And yet, here I am, writing about these two as pillars of this experience.
Mark
My first thought when I met Mark at the Toronto orientation, and I found out that he would be placed near me in Hokkaido, was “what a dud.” Between the glasses and the ginger hair, the gangly frame and the weird suit/tie, Mark had “dork” written all over him. At that early point, what verbal interactions I had with Mark failed to sound his true depths, and what I’d seen of his sense of humour left me more confused than anything.
But it wasn’t long before Mark made himself known. I think it went down some time at Tokyo Orientation, when I was forced to share a room with him and Brian from the Toronto group. Victims of the hideous jet lag, Mark and I woke up almost simultaneously at 5am one morning, and when it was clear we weren’t getting back to sleep any time soon, we fell to discussing a shared love for Chrono Trigger, heedless of Brian trying to sleep in the next bed. Throughout the day, our conversation continued and ranged onto other topics, eventually turning to Mark’s university days and the mad, booze-fueled antics he’d gotten up to at the time. Rather quickly, I lost my first impression of Mark as some kind of square, replacing it with an image of him as a wild party animal.
And I think the reason I thought Mark a dud when I first met him in his business duds is that Mark isn’t meant to wear business duds. Mark is better suited by blue jeans, bush jackets, and bandanas. This was a man who had lived and worked for months in the northern reaches of Canada, where us soft, whities of the south often fear to tread. He had become a part of Inuit communities and had drank his way through the midnight hours of neverending days.
Pretty much as soon as he got set up in his high school ALT position over here in Hokkaido, Mark set to work trying to press the limits of the smart business attire demanded by the high schools. He bought hideous skinny ties and scratchy wool cardigans.
The cramped confines of his monkey suit on that first day also hid Mark’s madness. I have heard more “your mom” jokes from Mark—honestly delivered—than from any other source, and this stream of misogynistic filth seems to inspire similar outbursts from me as I try to keep up with Mark.
The lion’s share of the adventures I’ve had in this place, I’ve had with Mark. He seems to be the very definition of “ride or die” as he comes up with new, crazy ideas for adventures daily, and he’s rather good at convincing you that you want to accompany him on them. Mark’s the reason I climbed Rishiri, and Mark’s the reason I fell in love with Shikotsuko. Mark’s been my wingman since before I realized I needed one, and Mark gets a Best Supporting award for one of the loveliest things to yet happen to me out here.
Lindsay
Though I was never blessed with a genetic one, I seem to pick up surrogate sisters wherever I go. I also seem to pick up Linds(a/e)ys. The name, for me, has become a bit of a signpost—a hint or, perhaps, a warning that this person is meant to figure heavily in my life; that, if I’m not careful, this person may just be the end of me.
From fairly early on Lindsay struck me as an echo in my life: when I met her, I felt instantly comfortable with her and I felt a bit like I’d known her before. When I met her at Toronto Pre-Departure Orientation and when we would run into each other at events after it, we always seemed to fall into a kind of chill rhythm with each other. Even as she yakked in a plastic bag next to me on the bus from Keio Plaza to Haneda airport after orientation, and I bought her the Japanese equivalent of Gatorade to hasten her recovery, we were chill.
So, yeah: Lindsay has definitely become my surrogate sister in Hokkaido, but she’s been known to play the part with the hard-nosed, don’t-take-no-shit attitude that one might more accurately expect of a brother. Hell, she has taken to calling me “Princess” when the time comes for us to be out the door, but I’m still busy faffing about.
Though Lindsay might not be as ride-or-die as Mark, she’s definitely a close second. The majority of those adventures I’ve had with Mark have also been adventures I’ve had with Lindsay. When Mark and I scaled Rishiri with our hiking packs and hiking boots and rain gear and extra clothes and emergency food and at least 2L of water, Lindsay made it up with us (and made it down faster than us!) in skater shoes, a school bag containing a couple of onigiri, and a hideous jacket she’d picked up on clearance.
Lindsay can pick up Japanese guys with the deft skill and non-challance of a strapping Gaijin lad picking off giggling Japanese girls, and then she’ll go and surprise me with just how big her heart is when it doesn’t work out. She’ll dress up nice in heels and a dress, only to speak to you in a language written in video games. She’ll make you a card from scratch for your birthday when you all go out to celebrate, and then she’ll drink you under the table. She’s also one of the few people I know who actually reads this blog and seems to like it as much as I do, for which I’m very grateful.
One of the most profound things Lindsay ever told me about her and I and this whole JET experience is that, no matter what happens and who stays for how long and where they wind up along the way, when it’s all over her and I still come from the same place. And, should we ever find ourselves pining away for Japan in distant years, we’ll likely have the benefit of each other to reflect on the wacky foreign experience we shared.
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.
Well, this is me six months into this mad thing.
On August 2nd, 2009, I and my fellow Toronto JETs landed at Narita airport in Tokyo a good 2-3 hours later than we were expected. Night had fallen, but the humid heat of Tokyo still had the Japanese cicadas singing. As we wound through the airport, Sonomi reminded me we were now in Japan (a good thing, that), and she asked me if I was excited.
I told her I didn't know, that it all didn't seem real.
Here now, sitting in the teacher's office at the end of a day at the junior high, with the snow still coming down outside (as it has done for something close to two months straight), I realize I've been here for six months now: half of the one-year contract I signed on for.
I try to get a handle on that: six months past. Six months living in a foreign country for the first time with only the internet and one brief visit to provide me with pieces of home. I try to take a bearing from those six months, but it's just like day one:
I still don't know, and it still doesn't seem real.
Well, I should say it doesn't seem real. Now it all seems a little too real. It doesn't seem strange or different or life-changing and unique in that epic way that you may think such things should. Those strange and different and unique things are still happening; lives are being changed, but it is all happening in increments. Gradually and behind the scenes; not in epiphanies and revelations.
What I do know is that it's different enough to force timelines to be revised, to cause the Master Plan to be altered. I've become wrapped up in the experience, and something that I swore would only be a year long has grown to two.
Here: at a time of year when Hokkaido is at its least hospitable; in an apartment that is so unreliably heated and insulated as to force me to sleep on the living room floor; during a winter so deep and snowy as to make one forget what summer was ever like; with a class that tells me to "go home" on good days and to "die" on bad days...
Here, at the heart of all this, is where I am asked to make my big decision about the next year of my life. At this cold, bleak point, the fact that I can still happily make the decision to stay on for another year says more about how the last six months have been than any detailed timeline or list that I could hope to give.
With less than 42 hours remaining in Canada, I feel that I need to spend some time thanking some people. This is going to be rambly, but its also the best attempt I’ve made at chronicling how I wound up on my path to Japan, so I’ll dub it appropriate.
First off, a thanks to Erica and Nam. Were it not for your animated bad influences, I don’t know that I would have been introduced to Japanese culture. Sure, you guys just uncovered a vein for me, and I followed it down the rabbit hole, but I still think those initial episodes of DBZ and EVA and all the giant-eyed, over-dramatized, seizure-robotted adventures since were influential.
A very special thanks to The Four who all contributed to landing me in Japan: Sir William, Allison, Coop-Kate, and Heather-chan.
Brave Sir Will, you came back from your travels in Japan, and you told me that I needed to go there, and you told me that—should I need a travelling companion—you would be it. You inspired me to set a deadline: that before my passport expired in January of 2011, I would go to Japan.
Allison, you came back from Japan and told me that, in some way, you knew I was meant to be there. You opened the door and you gave me this odd, unshakable confidence about travelling to Japan.
Kate, you gave me that picture of Tokyo, and on the back you wrote “Tokyo – April 2008/ For your hope chest”. You gave me a concrete goal and set me on the path. From that start, I was already brewing ideas about applying for the JET programme.
Heather, you have been my advisor through all of this. You used your own experiences from JET to both calm and educated me. Throughout my whole application process, you were ALWAYS eager to help me in any way you could, and though you deny it, I firmly believe that, without your help, I never would have made it into JET.
Thanks to Amy and to Allison and to all of their fun friends. You guys put me up in BC, showed me around, and assured that 1) I would have some stunning memories to take with me to Japan and 2) I had a little bit of paradise and a little bit of sanctuary for a few weeks before all the madness really started. No matter how wicked-crazy-amazing-cool Japan turns out to be, BC will really be the sunny jewel of this summer.
Thanks to all my friends, from Leaside, from MHS, and from everywhere in between. For the last two weeks, you have all dropped your own important bits of business to make time for me. We’ve gone for beers and burgers and babies and breakfast and bands and bad Michael Bay movies, and you’ve all made me feel like I’m loved and like I will be missed. I’m slow, so, of course, it is only hitting me now how much I am going to miss all of you, and I imagine I will only truly know how much when I am firmly half an ocean away.
Thanks to my family for making time and helping me out as I schizophrenically got ready. And a special thanks to Eric Jones: my brother and my cousin and my nephew. Though you said it was nothing, you completely rearranged your plans for me, drove up to Newmarket, picked up your whole family, and reminded me just how important the Joneses are. I think it was seeing you and Jenn and Jill and Steph and Evan that made me realize just how long I was going for, and just how far away it would be.
And, to accompany all the thanking, I would also like to apologize to all of you fine people who I wasn’t able to find time for. Leaving myself less than two weeks to see everyone and get ready was less ambitious and more foolhardy. Please forgive me my idiocy and send me your addresses so I can try to make it up to you with postcards!
Now I should quit wasting time and get back to the task of fitting my whole life into four far-too-small bags!
We want to thank you sooo much!
Well, that’s not really how the JET Alumni we spoke to on Sunday June 21 started her presentation on what it’s like to live in the part of Japan I’m heading to, but it might as well have been. Despite my attempts to play down the threat of the sub-siberian Hokkaido winters—pleading that, surely, we people from Canada would be steeled against the cold—she would have none of it. She told us of houses offering little insulation and absolutely no central heating, of cars totally erased by snowdrifts overnight, of towns being snowbound for weeks, and of a damp, costal cold that can only be burned away by the sun of summer months.
“Once winter hits, you’ll never be warm again,” she summarized. She seemed to punctuate every sentence with a dour portent, giving a vague impression that we eager, uninitiated JETs were so many stary-eyed children who saw Hokkaido as a paradise of Dragons and Samurai. It felt as though she’d made it her mission to soberly bring down every one of our optimistic misconceptions about the place.
It didn’t work though…at least not for me. She emphasized each syllable of her sentences by shifting her gaze from one of us to the next, seeming always to land on me as she closed her most shocking statements.
But her every revelation just energized me all the more, and invariably I’d be smiling when she turned her emphatic gaze on me. Call me a serial optimist, or a hopeful fool, but everything she told us just seemed like one more part of a grand adventure. Even as she told us how the isolated northern island boasted the highest JET attrition rate, all I could think about was how phenomenally lucky I was to have landed in a part of Japan that promised an authentic experience unlike any I’d had before.
And this excitement didn’t diminish any as I and my fellow Hokkaido JETs moved on to the session for JETs placed in rural areas. The session itself seemed like a dry run for our sparsely populated towns as, presenters included, there weren’t more than ten of us in the room. We handled the mandatories, such as discussing the emotional consequences of prolonged isolation, as well as the odd kind of infamy and publicity that a foreigner can expect to be subject to in rural Japan. The presenters cautioned us to GET OUT, as often as we could, so as not to be strangled by the tight-knit communities. However, unlike our earlier encounter with the very serious Hokkaido JET Alum, these Alumni were wholly optimistic and encouraging.
At one point, the one presenter I had pegged as the more serious/dour of the two turned to us, and—without a shadow of doubt in her eyes—promised us that, as rural JETs, we could look forward to having the most authentic, the most integrated, the most fulfilling cultural experiences of any of the JET participants.
“Anyone can visit Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto,” she said, “but how many people get the chance to become a part of a real Japanese community. That is exactly what you guys are going to do.”
Also, I want to go on record stating that I think the whole peace-sign thing is getting a little out of hand. I mean, I'm sure that sharing in that particular Japanese meme could be argued to be an essential part of integrating over there, but I ain't going to do it.
