This is Kamakura

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.

This is Yokohama

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...

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.

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.

東京 (Of Tokyo)

Tokyo isn't big.

It isn't huge or giant.

It is monstrously massive. It is a vast, grey smudge that can be seen from space on the surface of otherwise green-ish Japan.

The distant boundaries of the city are ringed by mountains, and the broad plain between them is almost completely choked with urban development. If you're looking at a satellite photo of the city up close, you're hard pressed to locate any particular area to orient yourself. You're forced to pull back until you can catch where the dense grey of concrete eventually starts to peter out and let in some green. And only by interpolating from this green periphery can you begin to guess at the location of the heart of the metropolis.

So dense and vast is Tokyo that it is easy to think of the thing as some relentless virus of progress: infesting and repurposing the land. Had it not been kept in check by the geographic realities of mountains and ocean, it might have succeeded in sprawling further, eventually transforming the whole of Japan into a single cybernetic network of commuter trains, concrete, and power lines.

If Tokyo is a living thing, then its arteries are the JR and Metro lines that move commuter trains on its surface and beneath its skin. And in these arteries flows blood made up of millions of the black-suited Japanese Sarariman. To try to see something of Tokyo, we piled into the flow of Sararimen and took the circulatory Yamanote line around the city's heart. The names of stations might as well be the names of the metropolis' organs: Shinjuku and Shibuya, Harajuku and Akihabara, Tokyo and Shinagawa. We jumped off and on the train, wandering around these centres, trying to get a feel for what this place was, but our every stop was one more densely developed downtown vista for all of the 30+km of the line.

...and I think that's all I can really say about Tokyo. In our two and a half days in town, we saw barely a fraction of it. I tried to capture some of it on film, mostly to satisfy Sarfaraz's obsession with the lives of cities. Oddly, I took fewer pictures than expected. Here's hoping that I caught something with them.

Of Time Travel on the Shakkotan Peninsula

This was inspired by Amanda when, upon asking her how the painting of her new house had gone, she reminded me it had been less than a week since last I’d seen her, and the painters were still very much hard at work.

My god; you're right. It’s only been a week.

It's a strange thing, but with all the change in my life over the last week, it kind of feels like I've lived lifetimes in the interim. The idea that exactly a week ago I was finishing up my farewell dinner with my family and heading back to my mom's place to do the very last of my packing seems so incongruous as to be fictional.

That I could have spent 17 hours on a plane (only 13 of them actually in flight); that I could have lost 12 hours somewhere between Saturday and Sunday--somewhere between Toronto and Tokyo in a never-ending day; that I could have spent three nights in Tokyo and met all the people that I did, that I could have flown to Sapporo, met my new supervisor, and come all the way out here to Furubira to get settled in my monster apartment and work two days at the Board of Education...

That all this could have transpired over the span of a week is a feat of science fiction. Time travel or quantum singularities or boogeymen or something along those lines.

If a week could feel so very long, if it could be filled with so much change and growth and difference, what will I be like at the end of next week? What huge and remarkable things will I have accomplished? How will I have grown and changed? Weeks like this make me wonder if I couldn't be completely fluent in Japanese by this time next Saturday--if, perhaps, I will have met and become friends with everyone in this town. I mean, sure, such feats are impossible for one person to accomplish in the span of a week, but, with the way I've watched time balloon and ebb and fluctuate over the last week, I can almost convince myself that those were attainable goals.

Though, funnily enough, thinking about how one week could stretch out to become like a month gives me my first real pangs of homesickness. I wonder how I could possibly live in this place, detached from you and all of those like you who I love and need in Canada, for another 51 weeks?

HA!

Then again, when you put a number like that on it—51 weeks—it all of a sudden becomes fleeting and totally surmountable. When you do that, all of a sudden it's a countdown, and it brings out the very converse feeling: that I'm running out of time and a year will be up before I know it; that there is so very much I wish to accomplish in that year, and how could 51 weeks possibly be enough time to do so!?

Regardless of whether my time here is too short or too long, I’m here, and every so often stuff like this happens to remind me I’m in the right place at the right time:

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The Tortures of JETlag

knock

knock

BAMM!

Mark is sitting bolt upright on his bed in his suit. The scene behind him is an office-light-pixelated canvas of Tokyo night. My brain, still coming out of its REM fugue, thinks it strange that when I layed down (which feels like not five minutes ago) the sun was getting prettily low behind the buildings out our hotel window, but now it’s full on night. As Mark, who seems to be a little more with it than I, goes to the door, my foggy mind comes around enough to realize what I meant to be a short nap turned into a longer sleep, and I’m grasping frantically for anything with the time on it so I can run down my mental schedule of just how much I’ve missed.

Damn you, JET lag. I guess you do exist after all.

Fortunately it’s only 7:30 pm, and that’s not so bad. Fortunately Lindsay noticed the conspicuous absence of her co-ice-cold-north-JETs and saw fit to come check how deep a coma we’d lapsed into. Fortunately 7:30 is still early for the H-K JET do later this evening.

So, long story short, I made it to Japan…more or less in one piece.

But my usual resilience when it comes to vanquishing jet lag seems to have met its match with the whole thirteen-hour-flight thing. Or maybe the problem was the four hours before the flight when we had to sit, inactive on the tarmac as oxygen systems were rebooted, electrical systems were cycled, and pilots were switched. Or maybe I was overstimulated from having Japanese immigration screw up and grant me a three month visa instead of the intended three year visa.

Regardless of the explanation, I got painfully little sleep after arriving in Tokyo last night at about 10 pm local time, and that lack of sleep repeatedly bit me in the ass today as I tried to keep my eyes open through all of the very important JET orientation sessions.

However, I’ve now got some unintended sleep, so I figure I’ll head out with the other Hokkaido JETs and attempt to booze myself into a comfortable slumber tonight.

Wish me luck.