POTW: Hamamasu

(a contribution to Rebecca's on-going Photo of The Week Facebook group...while also being a photo of Things Japanese)


This past week was supposed to be HEC camp; otherwise known as the Hokkaido English Challenge Camp; otherwise known as one of the things I had most been looking forward to for the past few months (or had I been looking forward to it ever since I came to Japan two years ago and it was mentioned in Hokkaido orientation?). HEC camp brings together first grade students from junior high and high school for a 100% English experience at a camp run entirely by us ALTs. What's more, these are the kids who did the best in our ALT-organized English challenge, so all I've heard is how much of a riot they are as they are not afraid of English. 


Last year's camp had sounded like a blast, but I had missed it as I'd been in Canada. Come hell or high water, I was determined to make it to camp this year...that was until a freaking BEAR made it to camp before us, on the very day that we were all meant to ship out (last Friday). Hairy bastard got the camp site closed for a week, and camp got cancelled because, for all that Mark and Heather tried, they could find no other place to host it. 


But, in a hero move meant to salvage something of the weekend, June threw together plans for a bunch of us to go camping in Hamamasu, along the sea of Japan coast north of Sapporo.  That's the long story for where this photo comes from.

I feel like trying to take credit for sunset shots is a bit of a dick move. So long as your camera is half-decent, you're only making a best attempt at capturing an event that is entirely the responsibility of the earth, sun, etc. Basically, I feel like it's pretty hard to take a terrible picture of a sunset.

Thus, here's my cop-out for this week: put forward more because it was a particularly glorious sunset rather than because I did anything particularly exceptional other than pointing my camera at it. 

I'm a Lumberjack, and I'm okay

This past weekend we made the long, long 5-hour drive up to Nakagawa for the HAJET Northern Welcome party. It's only about 300km, but when you remember the Hokkaido speed limits are set at 50km/h year round, that is a long, long drive. Even when you feel like pushing that speed limit, it's hard to do so as even the toll expressways in this place are mostly just one lane.

And, there's always the cops, as Lindsay found out rather unfortunately.

Despite the distance, I was determined to make it out to the party. It was a modest, camping thing until the ALT in Nakagawa offered to host it, and her town backed her 100%, offering to make us food and to even move their town festival up by a month in honour of the attending ALTs. To take the ridiculousness even further, Nakagawa's mayor turned up to welcome us to the camp site and to give us advice for the log pushing even that some of us had signed up for the next day.

Nakagawa Sue's glorious mexican cuisine.

God damn, I miss mexican cuisine.

The pretty nice onsen hotel beside our campsite because no one roughs it in Japan without a hotspring bath on hand.

Sue's hero of a supervisor who spent all of Friday fishing for us and Saturday night cooking us chanchan yaki and yaki soba. Delicious.

Roz, me, Kevin, Lindsay, Mark, and Brian. All of the 2009 Hokkaido ALTs from Toronto. We all recontracted for a second year, and this is the first time we've all been in one place, really, since Sapporo Orientation last year.

With welcome parties come drunken bake sale auctions to raise funds for the HAJET-run Hokkaido English Challenge/Camp/Home stay program. You'd be surprised how much someone will pay for western baked goods in Japan when they've been drinking. I paid $60 for a pumpkin pie.

God damn, I miss pumpkin pie.

The food that Nakagawa served up was phenomenal and got us log-pushers good and energized for the competition we'd blindly signed up for at 9am on the Sunday morning. I'm pretty sure the two teams of guys and one team of girls signed up for a laugh, thinking that this log pushing would be fun and not too challenging to us big, burly gaijin.

Once we had to show up to weigh in and saw what we were in for, I think we all got a little worried:

(sorry about the Photoshop photomerge munching the log)

Those Kanji across the back there actually proclaim this to be a sumo competition, and you wouldn't doubt it once you saw how seriously some of the teams took the competition. It's a reverse tug-of-war, where the goal is to push harder than your opponents and to drive the red centre marker on the log over their baseline. Oh, and the log's pretty heavy, even with ten guys on it. Teams are weighed in as the limit is 400 kilos per team. Our own team came in at a cool 389kg.

Back before we realized we had anything to be afraid of, we came up with a jaunty, setting appropriate team theme: The Lumberjacks.

Chi, Alan, me, Brian, and Spencer. The MIGHTY LUMBERJACKS!

That would, of course, be the Monty Python Lumberjacks, complete with women's clothing (compliments of Simon Daly and the Engaru Free Store) and a bra (compliments of Heather...strangely no photos of that have showed up yet).

The other team of ALT guys went up first.

...and got rocked as they had the unfortunate pleasure of drawing the team that would eventually go on to win the whole thing as their first opponents. To give you an idea of how hard core this other team was, that dude on the end of the ALT log in the pink shirt, who's barely touching the ground, weighs about 110 KILOS, to say nothing about the rest of his team. Thankfully, we were able to learn something from their defeat (stay low, get as much of your skin on the log as you can), and when it came time for us lumberjacks to get on the log.

We knocked the fancy-coloured pants off of our opponents from Hokkudai University.

We weren't so lucky when we faced The Architects in the third round (we'd had a by into the second). Though we denied them a sweep by taking one win from them, they beat us twice and went on to the next round. Still, with the other men's team and the women's team having been defeated in their first match-ups, we were pretty proud of our showing in this event we knew nothing about and had signed up for as a bit of a joke.

Just before we were defeated by The Architects.

Though we were all kind of concerned about splinters, what with rubbing our nakedness up against a log, the log was pretty damn slick--hence why you needed your skin on it for traction. And traction there was as, writing this now on Thursday (I'm retconning it back to Monday), I still have a fairly livid bruise under my right arm from all of the friction of the log.

Two Sundays: Icebergs

or “Two Sundays: Sunday The First”

This is the first of two related blog things about Sunday because Sunday was very much two days for me: one in Japan, and one in Toronto. The Toronto bit has got more thought to it, and it is on the way. However, for now, here’s the first Sunday:

In Japan, this weekend was spent with the other HAJET kids (Hokkaido Association for Japanese Exchange Teachers), “camping” at Shinshinotsu, which is maybe forty-minutes-to-an-hour outside of Sapporo and just a short drive down the road from Heather’s town. I say “camping” because it was more pitching tents in a well-manicured park, as seems to often be the case with Japanese “camp sites.”

There were meetings carried out in cavernous town hall halls, and there were informational seminars carried out in gusty, faux castle turrets. When we weren’t meant to be doing anything, the glaring sun drove most of us to cling lazily to the shifting shade or to try and eek out some sweaty peace in our tents, which had become less tents and more solar ovens.

A highlight was definitely Saturday afternoon, when I and Norther Rep Doug took up the challenge to man the grills and feed the other 54 HAJET members and friends who were in attendance. We took to it like Japanese fast food chefs, letting our calls of “IRASHAIMASEEEE!” ring out across the campsite, confusing all of the Japanese folks who had made the mistake of camping next to our gaijin settlement.

And then it was Sunday, and we washed off some of the sweat from the night before in the nearby onsen before saying our lazy goodbyes under the grey, muggy day. I rode home with Heather for as far as her town, then the rest of the way with Perry and David—other ALTs from my part of the Shiribeshi sub-prefecture. The sun came out on our ride back out west, along the Sea of Japan, and I dozed in the back of David’s tiny red Toyota while he and Perry talked a bit but were more often comfortably silent in the front.

Stopping just outside Otaru at a Seicomart for some mint Crunky, David asked if I ever bought bananas from Seicomart, and if I, too, felt guilty about forgetting the 20円　banana coupons they were constantly handing out. He talked about how he had been so unnerved by the silent brow-beatings he received from the high-school-aged employees of his local Seico when he forgot his coupons that he would actually set out for the Seico, realize he intended on buying bananas but had forgotten his coupon, and he’d actually walk all the way home to get it before heading on to the kombini.

It was an insignificant anecdote that I could empathize with, but it stuck with me until later that evening when I emailed David to thank him for the ride. In the cast of that Sunday night—which was all mountain-eclipsed sunsets, and fragrant seaside humidity, and old men at the pool asking for English lessons—the banana coupons caught on something and hauled up a thought that I hadn’t been looking for. It was a beautiful thing, though, and it seemed to highlight the kinds of weird, deep, but ultimately fleeting relationships that us JET/ALT kids form with one another. What’s more, I think it’s likely the perfect thing to say after a weekend spent amongst my adopted foreigner family over here, a realization that I had about my relationship with David but which could have easily applied to a large segment of the people with whom I spent the weekend.

“When I think back to the seemingly insignificant detail of your story about forgetting Seico Banana coupons and having to turn around to go back to your house for them least the Seico employees should yell at you for your carelessness, I realize how very much we have in common, you and I.

And that detail is insignificant, and it could be the kind of thing I have in common with a lot of other ALTs in Hokkaido, but there's something about it that seems salient today. There's something in it that makes me keenly sadder about your decision not to recontract. For all of my excitement for you and for Ari and for Stanford, a sentimental, selfish part of me is going to miss car rides with you, David, and miss discussions of forgotten banana coupons. They are the pedestrian crystalizations of the kinds of relationships that we ALTs form in this place. They are the tangible tips belonging to the deep icebergs of emotion that go floating off into the blue when people in our kinds of situations part.”