Golden Week, Post Mortem

Despite having seven days off between April 29^th and May 5^th for Golden Week (Japan's version of March Break...sort of), I didn’t get up to any great adventuring as the cost of my plane tickets home this summer convinced me to stay closer to home.

I did manage to make it out to Heather’s neck of the Inaka for a couple of excellent days inside (thanks to the rain).

I also put up a fellow Canadian JET/ALT who what biking roughly 600km across Hokkaido in 8 or 9 days, and I took him out to see Kamui Misaki, one of the prettiest (and on that Monday, windiest) parts of my corner of Hokkaido.

On the Tuesday, I went on to bike from Furubira to Lindsay’s town of Ishikari, on the outskirts of Sapporo, with him. We did the 65 kilometer ride in one day, and it was easily the furthest I’ve ever biked. There were also a fair few more mountains between here and there than we’d both expected, which was…fun. The weather was good to us, though, and I wound up with my first sunburn of the season at the end of the day.

Despite the burn, there is still snow on Teine, and Heather's friends from the UK proved that Niseko was still skiable on that same day that we were biking and getting sunburnt.

The following day was spent biking around Sapporo for the first time with Heather, talking in the mad people in Maruyama park who were drinking and barbequing to celebrate the as-of-yet non-existant sakura (cherry blossoms).

This girl was my hero.

Also, there was spontaneous madness afoot.

Test for Echo

I’ve been trying a lot of things over here in J-Pan, and getting into a lot of things I had absolutely no interest in before: things like biking and snowboarding and mountain climbing. These days I regularly get completely naked in front of good friends and complete strangers, sitting around in a tub with them and not giving it a second thought. That’s not the end of it, either. These initial forays have got me mulling over things like surfing and skydiving and white water rafting. It’s getting to the point where pretty much every time Mark asks me about trying something crazy, my default answer is “yeah! We should do that!”, and the truly crazy thing is I actually mean it.

Sometimes I wonder what it is that's driving me to try these new things in Hokkaido: to try to pick up these new hobbies or sports. Me, the guy who hadn't seriously ridden a bike in over ten years goes out and commits to a $700 road bike at the chilly end of October. And, before the snow flies, I ride that bike like the devil: deep into the Furubira valley and up the mountain towards Kamoenai. As evening temperatures dip, I'm layering long johns and tshirts and sweaters so that I can strike out at night, riding up the dark valley with only the full moon and my meager handle bar light to guide me. And it's cold and it's exhausting and it's beautiful.

In January, as the snow was piling up, I finally followed up on my promise to myself to pick up snowboarding here in Hokkaido. With skiing as my only experience to go on, I asked Mark to book us in for three days on the hills of Niseko. I resigned myself to take lessons and learn from Mark and not leave that mountain until I could ride a board. It kicked the crap out of my body (so much so that I bowed out on the third day and returned my gear—so much so that I wound up having to take my first sick day at work to recover from the aches and the pains and the chills of two solid days of falling on my ass), but I loved it, and there were moments when I would shift smoothly from backside to frontside—heelside to toeside—in an action mere fractions from a loss of control, and in those moments I felt agency; and I felt unity with the mountain and the scene spreading out below in a way I don't think I'd ever done on skis. With two days on the board I already loved it more than I had my many years on two planks.

And now, in a fit of adventurous madness that is becoming all-to-familiar over here in Japan, I am buying snowboard jackets and boots and old boards with old bindings. I'm throwing myself into it with the same hope and hair's breadth of control that I throw myself into my turns.

But what is it?

The adventurous madness?

Where does it come from? Why does it grip me here? What feeds it?

The unimaginative might brand it a "quarter life crisis," but I would tell you that attaching such a cliché to it curtails your ability to better understand it—to learn more from it. To give it that overused name is to avow to understand it, through and through, and I don't believe that we do.

I think these so-called X-life crises are cries for creation, or re-creation. They come from the realization, whether overt or subconscious, that your life has begun to go on without you. The crises are cries for Agency, as we notice that our day-to-day has shifted to auto-pilot: that all of those smart life choices we've made over the years have formed up as soundly as we'd hoped into this vast supporting structure in our lives that would just keep on running if we just sat back and followed along its predetermined path. The structure isn't a prison or a gallows or an oppressive regime. Whether we admit it or not, we choose this auto-pilot course as we build it up one good decision at a time.

However the realization of this structure in our lives, and the way that its self-sustaining processes almost make our decisions for us, can be shocking. It's from this shock that the crises come.

As individuals find themselves tangled up in such an automated framework, they crave to wrestle back control. They feel they must regain Agency in their lives. In the clichéd examples, they take this Agency by buying sports cars or motorcycles: they regain a sense of control by making decisions uncharacteristic of them—decisions that the automatic structures they've developed could never precipitate.

Unfortunately, it would seem that our society only really perceives the material in these matters: we see the sports cars and the motorcycles, but we only scratch the surface of the true motivations behind them. We label the whole situation an X-Life Crisis, and in so doing we pretend to have a firm grasp of the event. In labeling it, we profess to understand it, and we forget it in our drawer of loose-ends-securely-tied.

So, in the snowboards and the bikes of my adventures here in Japan, you might tell me I've had myself a little quarter-life crisis. You might tell me that this is a phase: that this, too, shall pass.

But, me, I'd tell you that you’re wrong: that what I'd experienced here is a phenomenal opportunity.

In Canada before I came, as well as during my first months in Japan, I would wish on stars for something meaningful to come of Japan: for something to take home from here, whether it be a Love or a Revelation.

Now I wonder if I've already received what I'd hoped for, and I'm thinking it's the fertile gift of rebirth.

Highfaluting, grandiose, and sweeping, yes, but, to ground it a bit, I find myself in an alien country with only the meagerest of responsibilities tying me to home, and I have been given world enough and time to recreate myself in any way I so choose. I have been given license to do whatever it is I feel, for there is no one here who has known me long enough to tell me such a course would be uncharacteristic of me.

Most important of all, I think I’ve managed to free myself from a control more oppressive than peer pressure or group consensus. I’ve managed to break down part of my own expectations for myself: my own internal concept of what is and isn’t characteristic of me.

And so has Japanimated Jones been born into the flesh of what once was me. He eats less and writes more. He's training to be a samurai with ceremonial armour and shinais. In the summer, he rides bikes, and in the winter, he rides boards. On weekday evenings he convenes with the stars and the moon in an utterly silent town, and on the weekends he sets off on wild adventures with his fellow foreigners. He's growing hobbies where before he only had interests. The change isn't perfect and all-consuming. There are still the pitfalls of procrastination and good intention, but we're working on that.

It’s lead me to think that transformations like this are made easier by geographic distance from the who and what you used to be. I have a friend who lost her job in Toronto, and took the whole thing as an opportunity to relocate out west. At that distance from home and what she was, she found the possibility to create a new is for herself. Now when I visit her, I sometimes don’t recognize her new present when I compare it to the past I remember. She’s got all the care and the love she ever did, but she’s existing in new places now, with new interests and new opportunities, and she seems to glow as a result of them.

These shifts in perspective, inspired by shifts in setting, cast our lives in new light. What is important remains, while what is superfluous falls away. And in that falling away, we are treated to openings for the new and the different: time to pursue the things you said you always wanted to but never did.

And I recognize that not everyone can just up and relocate for a bit for that necessary shift in perspective. I’m just saying that I’ve seen first hand what such a shift can do, and, in the end, I feel like I have been given a gift in the shift, along with the money and the time to seize the opportunities that precipitate from it.

Finally, because this last realization precipitated from all of this, but I couldn’t find a clever place to slot it in, I’ll leave it as the final word on this rambling tangent:

In Canada, I used to think myself a rather lucky person.

In Japan, I have fully realized that I live a charmed life.

Thanks to all of you who make it so.

An Ode to the Chatti

As the cost of a car in Japan began to seem more and more prohibitively expensive, I started contemplating getting a bike. I wanted to get something reliable and hardy like a road bike in the hopes that, with some practice, I might be able to get into Yoichi (the bigger town down the road) with it for grocery shopping and the like. However, once I had decided that I wanted to get a real bike, I realized that I would have to go into Sapporo to get it as it seemed the only bikes that they sold in Yoichi and Otaru were Mama Chatties.

When a friend first warned me about the Chatti culture in Japan, I didn’t believe him. I assumed that only Obachans would ride around on those things. Worst case scenario, maybe some elementary and junior high school girls could be seen riding around on them. However, there was no way in hell that any self-respecting Japanese man would be caught dead on one of the things.

Then, very soon after I had arrived in Furubira, I was stopped in the street by one of the younger guys from the town office. He looked like some smooth operator straight out of an anime, with his styled spiky hair and slick black suit. He even whipped out a space-aged Japanese keitai so chunky and uber-masculine that you’d think the thing doubled as a lethal weapon when he wasn’t making calls on it. He was the very image of a virile Japanese male…

…except he was riding a Chatti.

I mean, it wasn’t as bad as some of them. It didn’t have the front basket or the mudguards on both the wheels. But the frame was most definitely powder blue, and everything metal on the bike definitely gleamed like chrome.

Initially, I tried to rationalize all the Chatties I came across as very old hand-me-downs used by people too lazy or too frugal to upgrade to something more modern. Then I came across my first Chatti shop in Yoichi. As I stared at row upon row of befendered, bebasketted two wheelers, I realized that the Chatti might as well be the official bike of Japan.

I still don’t get it, though. Is this another bit of Japanese Modernization Hipocrisy—like how the Japanese bank machines have in-built money counters for deposits that will even accept coins, but you’re out of luck if you want to find one that has the technology to stay open past 6 pm. This is Japan: the land that fixed the automobile and is currently working on replacing us all with robots. However, as far as the Japanese are concerned, the Bicycle was perfected in the 1950’s.

Japan: WTF?!

In related news, I did wind up picking up a road bike in Sapporo. I likely won’t be riding it for very much longer this year before the snow flies (Thus does my love affair with seasonal forms of exercise continue), but it has treated me nicely thus far and allowed me to explore a little more of the area around my town.

Most interestingly, I've used it to get up the valley that runs away from Furubira, up into the mountains to the south. Since Amy asked me what there is to see up the valley, I figured I'd take my camera with me.