Departures (Of Pre-Departure Orientation)

This was originally written for the JET Alumni Association of Toronto's Monthly Newsletter as a report on the Pre-Departure Orientation event that took place in June for the 2013-2014 crop of Toronto JETs. However, as is my way, I couldn't resist the temptation to do a little more with it, and I feel like it rather accurately captures the sometimes-sad, sometimes-amazing roll of being an active JET Alumnus.

Over the weekend of June 22-23, The Japan Foundation of Toronto opened its doors for the 2013 Pre-Departure Orientation for Toronto. More than a dozen Toronto JETAA executives and members welcomed the 60-some new ALTs, presenting detailed sessions on all aspects of the JET experience.

It was the material you would expect: the kind of thing we all encountered at our own PDO events or Tokyo orientation: how to travel, how to teach, how to save, how to survive, how to not get konchoed. Each presenter made the material his or her own, seeking to add spice to the same material we teach every year.

What I believe to be remarkable about PDOT, though, has little enough to do with the content of the session. For me, the most salient, most worth-writing-home-about thing about PDOT is the feel of the event.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to volunteer at PDOT, it is part blessing and part curse.

Two Sundays: The Souls of Cities

or “Two Sundays: Sunday The Second”

This should likely be retconned back to here to go with the other Sunday, and I'll do that eventually, but I figured I'd post it today as I likely won't be posting much while I'm off in Van, and some of the Torontonians might be interested. Also, it's not Japan-related, but it is meant to contrast with that other Sunday. Though I took my sweet ass time agonizing over this, all of these thoughts materialized concurrently with all of that sweetness from the Sunday spent camping.

In Canada, or Toronto, specifically, Sunday was spent in tense anticipation of the kind of madness that had gone down the day before under the cover of the G20 protest. The kind of stuff I came home to find out about my city couldn’t have been a starker contrast to the leisurely, amicable weekend I had just spent in Japan. Witnessing the coverage of everything that went down in Toronto, I find the whole thing depressing and perhaps even a little sickening. It’s been kind of haunting me since, like a nebulous storm cloud over my head, and the first time I tried to sort through what I was feeling and thinking was in an email to Saff.

Sorry, sir. Was away all weekend when all the G20 stuff/messages from you dropped. I looked at all your tweets and a bunch of the pictures you took, and it only served to depress me, so much so that I've been completely unmotivated to read any of your blog posts.

You see, I'm a pretty passionate guy, and I can set myself on fire when it comes to ideas or certain beliefs, but...I don't know. I can't get behind either side on this G20 thing. I'm angry with the security force for making my city something it's not, but I'm angry with that black block bullshit for doing the same. If it's true that the cops were baiting the black block to legitimize themselves, then I'm pissed at the black block for being stupid enough and juvenile enough to take the bait and revel in the opportunity for destruction. They ruined everything, and they single handedly damaged the image of all of the other peaceful, legitimate protestors. The conflict seekers and the drama queens baited the police and cast their shadow over all the people behind them with real things to protest about.

I think it comes down to the fact that these people described themselves as Anarchists, and I don't think I can ever get behind Anarchists. I don't care what end they're trying to justify with their means: in my eyes they are devoid of beliefs. Their only god is chaos: their only moral, destruction. Anarchy is a cop-out masquerading as beliefs. To have beliefs, you have to be accountable to something.

If you’ll permit me a tangent, it reminds me of a university course I took in the Rhetoric of Dissent. As a group project, we were asked to start our own resistance movement. There were anti-smoking groups and anti-cell-phone groups and anti-meat groups, but the one I’m remembering now was the “X” group. It was populated by the hipsters and the counter-culture kids in the class, and it was…well I don’t really know what it was. It was anti-anti, I guess, and thinking themselves clever the group did little in their presentation other than sit at the front of the class, doing little, delighting in how much more clever and ironic they were than all the rest of us with our predictable, so-very-yesterday causes. They were the black block of our class, and they were a cop-out. They took advantage of their freedom, and they worked towards nothing. They claimed the nothing to be their cause, to be their end goal, but all they succeeded in accomplishing was a void. They insulted everyone who had come to that class with a purpose, and they mocked the authority of our professor.

The black block anarchists are as unwelcome in my city as the riot cop darth vaders that clashed with them. The only way I can adequately express my distaste for both sides is by saying I want them both to not exist; I want them all teleported to Mars where they will never again trouble Toronto the Beautiful.

At the same time, I don't want to dwell on this. It has affected me more deeply and more inexplicably than I would have thought it had any right to. I'm not someone who comes to depression naturally, but this has depressed me. Even if the Toronto police/the security force were unconstitutional and truly cruel, and even if there is some way they can be held accountable for their actions, I don't care.

I don't give a flying fuck.

The damage has been done to the soul of a city, and to drag it out with investigations and finger pointing and attempts to justify the violence and the cruelty will do nothing to heal that bleeding gash in what our city is.

A lot of people fucked up in all of this, and the Free City, as you call it, was the only one that paid the price for those fuck ups. No matter what either side tries now, after the fact, to validate their actions, it will never make it up to the city.

The main point that came out of all this, though, for me was the idea of the Soul of the City. Maybe that can be the kind of thing worth posting up here; the kind of thing worth sustaining with the madness of Toronto as an illustration. The notion of the Soul of the City if something I’d touched on before, with dutiful thanks to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Read this book. Why haven’t you read this book yet?) and Neil Gaiman’s Worlds’ End.

If cities were to have souls, they’d likely be mostly people-based. There is the city’s architecture and its infrastructure and its ecology, but I’d like to think these constants compose a body, and it is the people who breathe the life into that body. That being said, without the body of architecture and infrastructure and ecology, those people would be other than what they are within the body of the city.

Just as the souls of cities can become hot, running fevers that infect their bodies, they can become protective. Even if they’re composed of thousands if not millions of individuals, the souls function as one. The many, fractured views of what the city should be that are held by those millions of individuals average out and harmonize into an overarching identity just below the surface of the city. Its soul lives in their beliefs, in their impressions of what the city is.

And when the city is threatened, this collected soul reacts.

In Berlin, Germany, a hundred or so German Nationalists (Neo Nazis) need a cordon of officers to protect their freedom of speech as a crowd of thousands of ordinary Berliners gathers around them to silence them. They are the soul of the city, demanding that the same mistakes should not be made again.

In Tallinn, during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, the Estonian people in the capital created their own, non-soviet radio station and would broadcast from the former legislature building. A group of hundreds of Russians, possibly organized by Soviet authorities arrived to ring the building, attempting to force their way through the gates to silence the Estonian voice within. The radio station sent out a call to the city, telling it that their freedom was under siege. And it was the soul of the city that responded. Thousands of Tallinn residents of Estonian descent peacefully descended on the legislature building, ringing in the Russian protestors with a force dozens deep. In the end, Estonian police had to escort the Russians away through the gathered mass.

In each case, the city defended itself through its latent soul: through the tiny magic that it holds in the minds of its residents—a guarding enchantment disguised as municipal patriotism and an investiture in the clear notion of “home.”

However, when a violent darkness descended on Toronto, and it needed its soul to protect it, that soul was drained away. The foolhardiness of the few was favoured over the averaged wisdom of the many. Ahead of the G20, great walls were erected through the heart of the city, obstructing its natural flows and pushing the residents that made up its soul out of the city’s heart. Soldiers were fashioned out of peace keepers: they were armed, they were encased in armour.

I think John Cruickshank, Publisher of the Toronto Star, said it best in his article immediately following the madness over the weekend in Toronto. I think it was the following statement from him that set me off down this contemplative path about cities and their souls. I think it was the following statement that was the only sanity I’d heard in all of this:

“The only force that can prevent vandalism and mayhem in a city is the presence of its population.”

The soul of the city responds.

When the city is in peril, its citizens move to protect it.

When the nihilistic black block infiltrated our city, we didn’t need riot cops: we needed civilians, living in the city and making it alive as they do every Saturday and Sunday. In the presence of civilians—in the presence of the soul of the city—violence and anarchy will not be tolerated.

And let it not be the case that people think the black block as the only threat to this city—the only force that the soul of the city would have rejected. Though the authorities would tell you that they emptied the core to protect the civilians, I don’t doubt that they made this decision to protect their force of Darth Vaders as well. Just as the Soul of the City would not have tolerated the black block, I very much believe that it would not have tolerated the gas-masked and plexiglassed black cops, either.

Gah. I’m not sure what this was meant to be, and I know it has little to do with Japan, but I’ve agonized over it for long enough, so here it is as it is. Here’s hoping something in it speaks to you, even if it isn’t as artfully wrought as it could have been.

Autumn's Here

“you can tell by the wind
by fresh cut wood
all stacked to dry
that autumn's here
and it makes you sad
about the crumby
summer we had…”

I think the fall is a season of nostalgia for me.

Fall is nostalgic like the afternoon is nostalgic. I remember when I was a kid and was most keenly afraid of the dark and most keenly susceptible to homesickness. I would always feel the pull of home most strongly in the late hours of the afternoon. The world around me would be gilded in the long, fat rays of the setting sun, and all I could think about was how I wasn’t heading home, how I wasn’t sitting down to dinner with my family. Looking back on it, I think homesickness is all about nostalgia. It is the remembrance of what is familiar, what is comfortable, and a longing for things to be like that now.

If you were to ram the four seasons into a day, autumn would be the late afternoon, and just as the afternoons would get to me when I was a kid, the autumn gets to me now.

That’s probably because the fall has always been a season loaded with gatherings and fond memories. From the time we were kids to the time we finished university, fall was our new beginning; the start of the school year when you saw all your old friends and got to make some new ones. Then, just one month after we’d started school, there’d be thanksgiving, which was always a time for family with my relatives. And, in recent years, we have made it a time for friends by creating FestivUS as a phony holiday excuse for all of us friends to get together when we all came home from our various Universities. And when you cram my birthday in there, between the start of the school year and the break at thanksgiving, it’s clear that autumn has always been loaded with friends and family for me.

And when autumn rolls around, random bits of nostalgia start swimming through my head:

There’s the kids from East B and Beechlawn and Lester and all the other places our Uni community squatted over the years—memories of our walks to and from the bars and pubs and Oktoberfests of Waterloo, shuffling through the fallen leaves. There’s a wet-yet-warm fall spent with Lindsay Frith on the edge of Mary Lake. There’s leaf fights with my maternal cousins, and there’s thanksgiving dinners with my paternal niece and nephews where they’d drink all the chocolate milk we had in the house. There’s the weddings; you guys and your bloody weddings injecting more memory into my autumns. And, like I’ve already mentioned, there’s FestivUS—how it was one more way our high school group stuck together through all of the drama and madness over the years.

It is for all these reasons that, as the days in Japan cool, the trees begin to turn, and the nights fill with the first whispers of woodsmoke, I am really feeling afflicted by a nostalgia for Canada for the first time. It seems to have kicked off with my birthday—a little bit of a bummer at the end of a road trip filled with fun when I finally realized that I wouldn’t be spending my birthday with all of you wonderful people back in Canada. And now Thanksgiving will be coming up, when you Torontonians will be feting FestivUS back home, my family will be feasting on turkey, and I will be the foreigner in Furubira. I mean, it looks like the international society here will be pulling out all he stops to make it a fun weekend, but I can’t help thinking that I am still going to feel more than a little separated from a great many important things back home.

Long story short, you can all rest assured that I miss you most in the fall.

Now here’s a little ditty from Hawksley Workman that might as well be the official anthem for my autumnal anxiety. What can I say, man; he definitely gets me.

“…i guess that autumn

gets you remembering

and the smallest things

just make you cry.”

A Thousand Suns

(or At This 11th Hour, a Note of Thanks)

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!

WE'RE ON A BOAT!

Last Thursday there was some kind of Nipponofile boat cruise organized. Among the scantily clad japanese girls, dread-locked japanese guys, grizzled exchange veterans, and dancey weirdos, us Toronto JET newbs tried to eek out a spot on the boat.

However, as with any group of freshly greened newbs, we were eager and, with some help from my general social whoredom, we were all able to connect with people we recognized from various info/training sessions, and by the end of the night we had assembled us a bit of a 2009 Toronto JET posse:

(some of) JET T.O. 2009

It's kind of unfortunate that, as of August, all of us Toronto kids will be scattered to opposite corners of Japan. These kids are alright, and we had us a crazy time Thursday night. Here's hoping the burgeoning JET Toronto couch surfing network pans out and we'll be able to leverage it for some further nights of madness in Japan.

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.

You can rest assured that if you ever see me throw up the ol bunny ears, I'll either be sauced or ironic.