Modern Myths: Cold Cellar

As the snow really piles up in Furubira, I see the ‘ba-chans dealing with it by dumping it down into the crevase-like open storm drains. The drains run along the roads on either side and are covered by concrete slabs with slots between them to allow drainage.

However, the slabs aren't so large that you wouldn’t be able to, say, drag one of them off to expose the deep, trough-like drain below. And this is exactly what the ‘ba-chans do. They prop the slabs up, like giant cement trap doors, at the edges of the square, black holes in the otherwise perfectly uniform whiteness of the hard-packed streets and sidewalks. I watched as whole snowplows full of white powder vanish down the square voids with the efficiency of those Acme-brand, moveable black holes from the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

There’s something arcane about it for me: the dumping of all that snow down those holes; out of sight, out of mind, and with no indication that it’s piling up or that there will ever be any end to those cavernous spaces under the streets.

I picture a massive cold cellar; an icy furnace beneath Hokkaido that is stoked with snow by the shovelful throughout the long winter.

And, at the height of the hot Japanese summer—when the people of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu are quickly turning to puddles in the oppressive, humid heat—in Hokkaido cooling breezes blow forth from forest caves and river beds. They link up to the expansive ice caverns beneath the island, where there is still snow that has sat unmelted since the times of the Ainu—ice that is older still, from down dark paradigms of time, to back when these islands were ruled by something other than men.

"Oh the weather outside's delightful..."

"...and the fire is slightly frightful!"

I’m blown away by the snow today.

It’s been snowing, off-and-on, since yesterday. I say off-and-on, but a better description might be “bipolarly.” I was out running some errands yesterday, and when I went into the Post Office ATM just a few flakes were drifting down, giving the impression that the storm had petered out for the day. But in the time it took me to extract 3-man, the snowmachine had ramped back up into an icy gale.

It would have been a damn cold night in the apartment had it not been for the translative powers of my okasan (Japanese mom) and the swift generosity of my Board of Education. Last Friday, I had elected to try to get something done about the icy conditions in my bedroom. With the help of aforementioned okasan, I asked the BOE if they might not be able to install another kerosene heater in my bedroom as all of the required gas lines and ventilation pipes were already present, and the current temperature back there was lingering icily close to zero.

Where I had expected the universal Japanese diversion/negation of teeth sucking, I instead encountered a remarkable gusto for getting the problem solved—post haste! My supervisor quite literally jumped onto the phone and started calling around about heaters. In the span of a minute, he had found one and was already apologizing to me that they couldn’t have it installed that very day as it needed to be cleaned and, thus, might not get installed until some time later this week. I assured him that was fine by me.

And then at the high school yesterday, just after my and Nishida’s first class, we get a call out to my apartment by my supervisor. By the time we get there to let him in, he’s already gotten a key from my landlord, and a team of no less than four dudes is busily fixing light fixtures in my hallway (HAL 9000 got an upgrade, apparently) and installing heaters in my bedroom.

That was fast.

So when I was finally able to turn the heater on last night, it registered the inhuman temperature of 2 degrees in the room, but it quickly got to work firing it up to something more habitable. Sure, the heater’s a bit old, and it’s got a vague air of burning about it, but it’s a comforting kind of burny smell—something like throwing your childhood blankie into a roaring fireplace on a cold winter’s night.

To celebrate the victory, as well as the three other problems she solved for me last Friday, I had my okasan over for dinner last night. She was my first dinner guest, and she routinely has me over for lavish spreads at her place, so I made sure to do it up right. She had requested something Canadian, so I made her one of the things I’m most proud of: Jonezer Chilli. I rounded it out with salad, rice, Japanese pickles (tsukemono), daikon kimchi, and some COSCO-bought-and-actually-drinkable red wine. When it was all arrayed on the table, there was a distinguished air of presentation about it, something ol daddio would have been proud of as neither he nor I are much for presentation when it comes to serving up grub.

As my okasan was leaving last night, I took a last look at the snowstorm before heading to bed, seeing that it had not let up and was settling in to a steady rhythm for the night. When I woke up this morning, I found that a good 10cm had settled in on top of the 8-or-so-cm that had fallen yesterday, and the snow wasn’t showing any signs of letting up any time soon, coming in on a near-horizontal angle at a near-whiteout clip. Needless to say, I was all smiles by the time I got to my junior high school this morning, and, seeing me grinning widely with no less than a good few centimeters of snow accumulated on my shoulders and bag, the second years who greeted me must have thought I was some special Canadian brand of crazy. With this much snow coming down this early in December, I’m thinking I definitely got placed in the right part of Japan.

And then I get into my desk in the teacher’s office and find that the big Alphonse Mucha print I’d torn off my brand new calendar...

…had spontaneously spawned itself some offspring in the form of another random Japanese act of kindness.

With the snow still coming down outside the teachers’ office’s tall, panoramic windows as I write this, it would seem as though it’s shaping up to be a great day, and the bitchy, disrespectful second years that I have in last period are going to have to be pretty crappy indeed to bring me down from this high.

Not that I don’t think they’re up to the challenge. They’ve shown themselves to be more than capable.

"Once winter hits, you'll never be warm again"

Tanaka-San, the successful banker-cum-custodian in my dwindling town, strides through the elementary, head held high, broad shoulders practically brushing the walls of small corridors. Clouds of breath before him herald his passing, and the rubber soles of his shoes stick where they don’t slide on the icy corridor floor. He takes huge, metal scrapers to the crystallized interiors of windows in the more remote parts of the school, assuring that the ice never gains too much purchase. Using ample elbow grease, he cracks the frost in the doorjambs of classes, and inside he kick-starts each of their six suns. Though the monolithic heaters blow warmth and fill their individual worlds, with the lights above casting brilliance, the glow and the heat doesn't flow far beyond the doorways, dying out in the cold dark of the corridors beyond.

Navigating the place is an exercise in island hopping, where one must plan his pockets of warmth along the way to his destination least he should freeze up in transit. Even the thick, polar bear hide of a Canadian is not used to such extremes as we tend to have a decadent reliance on insulation—something the Japanese seem to eschew. The children, though, seem as unphased by all of it as I was at their age. They still gambol throughout this half-abandoned, frosty hulk of a building with all the effervescent joy that they had in the late days of summer. They are a plague of leprechauns unleashed in this place, and my every turn yields a little warmth in the form of a new smile or some new mischief.

With the onset of the Hokkaido winter, the seeming complete lack of insulation in my apartment has lead to me losing more and more territory in my large-ish pad. I make fewer forays out of my front room, where I have my desk, kitchen, sitting area and a real mother of a kerosene heater. I would spend most of time in the front room as the days got colder, only braving the icy hallway beyond when I needed to dress, bathe, shit, or sleep. But even then I had to rely on an electric blanket and two small electric space heaters to get my bedroom to a functional temperature. However, when the room got to the point where my breath would linger before me in icy clouds, I decided it might be best to relocate my sleeping quarters to the floor of my main/front room until the Board of Education can scrounge me up another kerosene heater for my bedroom.

So it would appear as though, for all my boasting about being Canadian and being up to the cold of a Hokkaido winter, I had really taken for granted wondrous Canadian inventions like insulation, double-pane windows, and central heating.

“Welcome to Hokkaido. You will never be warm again.”

Well, that’s not really how the JET Alumni we spoke to on Sunday June 21 started her presentation on what it’s like to live in the part of Japan I’m heading to, but it might as well have been. Despite my attempts to play down the threat of the sub-siberian Hokkaido winters—pleading that, surely, we people from Canada would be steeled against the cold—she would have none of it. She told us of houses offering little insulation and absolutely no central heating, of cars totally erased by snowdrifts overnight, of towns being snowbound for weeks, and of a damp, costal cold that can only be burned away by the sun of summer months.

“Once winter hits, you’ll never be warm again,” she summarized. She seemed to punctuate every sentence with a dour portent, giving a vague impression that we eager, uninitiated JETs were so many stary-eyed children who saw Hokkaido as a paradise of Dragons and Samurai. It felt as though she’d made it her mission to soberly bring down every one of our optimistic misconceptions about the place.

It didn’t work though…at least not for me. She emphasized each syllable of her sentences by shifting her gaze from one of us to the next, seeming always to land on me as she closed her most shocking statements.

But her every revelation just energized me all the more, and invariably I’d be smiling when she turned her emphatic gaze on me. Call me a serial optimist, or a hopeful fool, but everything she told us just seemed like one more part of a grand adventure. Even as she told us how the isolated northern island boasted the highest JET attrition rate, all I could think about was how phenomenally lucky I was to have landed in a part of Japan that promised an authentic experience unlike any I’d had before.

And this excitement didn’t diminish any as I and my fellow Hokkaido JETs moved on to the session for JETs placed in rural areas. The session itself seemed like a dry run for our sparsely populated towns as, presenters included, there weren’t more than ten of us in the room. We handled the mandatories, such as discussing the emotional consequences of prolonged isolation, as well as the odd kind of infamy and publicity that a foreigner can expect to be subject to in rural Japan. The presenters cautioned us to GET OUT, as often as we could, so as not to be strangled by the tight-knit communities. However, unlike our earlier encounter with the very serious Hokkaido JET Alum, these Alumni were wholly optimistic and encouraging.

At one point, the one presenter I had pegged as the more serious/dour of the two turned to us, and—without a shadow of doubt in her eyes—promised us that, as rural JETs, we could look forward to having the most authentic, the most integrated, the most fulfilling cultural experiences of any of the JET participants.

“Anyone can visit Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto,” she said, “but how many people get the chance to become a part of a real Japanese community. That is exactly what you guys are going to do.”