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.

Six

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.

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.