Tiny False Prophets

The Yuki Mushi clamour in the air most days now, crying snowy WOLF to anyone who will listen. I barely notice them at all these days, or I dismiss their existence spitefully. I see what were once romantic harbingers now more as aggravating liars: tiny false prophets who will swarm your eyes and your nose and your hair to tell you...

nothing.

For there is no snow for them to herald, and all we've got to show for this end of November is a drawn-out, leafless indian summer. Under icy nights so clear as to cause the stars to pierce your eyes like pins, I pray to the full moon in the cloudless sky: that the cold she brings in the midnight hours should seep int the days; that it should cause all of this rain to fall in unrelenting curtains of white on the mountains; that its icy claws should ply our autumn coats, sneaking in through cracks and gaps until it forces us to once again pull on our woolies.

Yuki Mushi

The Yuki Mushi are thick in the air today.

Look at that. I say it like I'm some kind of expert; like Heather hadn't only just taught me what yuki mushi were.

Yuki Mushi (雪 虫): Snow. Fly. Insects with an indexical relationship to winter so precise and unwavering that they have become iconic of it: their tiny white filaments, their lazy, almost wind-blown flight path. The snow(adj) flies(n) are so iconic as to have become literal: "how long now unti snow(n) flies(v)?"

Though I never noticed them last year, now that I know about them, I see them everywhere--just like you do when you're a kid and you get your first dog, and all of a sudden you can't believe how many dogs you've been missing in your neighbourhood: like the bloody block is chock ablock with the mutts all looking to sniff your crotch and pee on your tree.

It's like that with the yuki mushi now. Where before they were fleeting glimpses, almost thought to be greying fruit flies at the corner of your eye, now the flurries of them hold my eyes ransom as I try to scan past the windows. With the grey clouds unbroken above, and the icy Hokkaido nights starting to crowd into the autumnal Hokkaido days, I am given to wonder if we might not just skip the interim this year: go straight from unseasonably warm summer into unbelievably siberian winter with only the meagrest of falls from one into the other.

That inbetween lingers just long enough to give rise to the snow flies: our harbinger of not long now 'til snow flies. That middle ground between sun and snow will fall away so suddenly that not even the yuki mushi will see it coming: fall from that perfect equilibrium that breeds and sustains them to a chitin-shaking cold to make their tiny corpses into first flakes as the dancing swarms of them fall, too. They will blanket the fields and the roads and the houses like their namesake. Like stubborn spectral soldiers, they will hold their ground in death; not able to melt away until the long months of this winter have come and gone.

And, even though we've hardly had a fall at all, I'm ready.

The Halloween that Wasn't

Well, despite the fact that the Japanese most definitely do not celebrate Halloween, I'd be damned if I wasn't going to hook it up for the kiddies over here.

I figured my greatest Halloween victory would occur at the Elementary School. They're usually the ones who have the least structure, meaning I have the most freedom of what particular Englishism I want to impart to the littleuns. I envisioned an all-day Halloweenfest, with the kiddies showing up in whatever costumes they could smack together. I didn't expect much since, as I already mentioned, the Japanese don't celebrate Halloween. And apparently my coordinator at the elementary thought the same for the same reason. She told me that there was no way we could have a Halloween extravaganza on the Friday before Halloween because A) all the students would be far too busy diligently preparing for their school festival on Sunday November 1st and B) there was no way any of them would have any costumes to wear to school.

I tried to negotiate a visit to all of the grades, rather than just the grade 5 and 6 visits I had scheduled for the day. I figured It'd be a pretty easy negotiation that would go something like this:

Me - "I want to teach every period of the day next friday, taking over each of the grades for a period and giving each of their homeroom teachers a break."

My Coordinator - "You want to work your ass off and you're not making any more work for any of the teachers? Sold. Go for it. Job's a good one."

Unfortunately, I'd clearly underestimated the importance of this ruddy festival, and the best I got out of her between bouts of teeth sucking (a patented Japanese form of "well...I don't know...") was something along the lines of an "I'll ask the other teachers, but they're all pretty busy...and the grade 5s and 6s have an established curriculum, so we can't deviate from it for something like a Halloween lesson."

So I went to my other schools from Monday to Thursday, expecting little form the Elementary on Friday. I wore my cowboy outfit to the High School on Monday as a bit of a dry run since my JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) at the High School is chill and is amenable to the bouts of English mayhem I try to create. The students at the High School are this wonderfully chill brand of kids. I mean, their English ain't so hot since their school isn't all that academic, but I swear the worst these kids could ever throw at me would be a half-hearted sneer. They seemed to rather enjoy my outfit.

For the Junior High School on Thursday, I dressed up like a matrix reject. Very shortly after I started at the Jr. High back in August, some of my third year students had told me that, if I slicked my hair back and wore my sunglasses, I would look like this character named Albert Wesker from the the Resident Evil/Biohazard series of survival horror games. Well, I say they told me that, but when you factor in their broken English and my rudimentary Nihongo, it was more like they were communicating by smoke signals, and I was responding in semaphore, but somewhere in the middle I got "Hair. All back. Uesuka!" from them. I googled the guy, and when I saw his picture I thought "well. That's easy."

Some black clothes and some bicycle gloves later, I had all the students who had played Biohazard thinking I was a cool dude, and all the rest of them thought I was some freak who liked the Terminator movies an awful lot. (In Japan, if you're a white male wearing sunglasses, and you're a bit brawnier than the standard Japanese build, everyone tells you that you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger) Either one was fine by me.

Then I headed to the Elementary this morning, expecting little of the day but planning for the worst. I figured that since I had offered to teach all the grades about Halloween I should at least be ready to do so if my coordinator had managed to swing it. Plus, I'd had previous experience with her telling me something might change, only to inform me that it had, infact changed ten to fifteen minutes before I needed to have a completely new lesson ready for a completely different class.

And today was no different. I rolled in this morning, and she informed me that I would be visiting all six grades today. Surprisingly, all of the homeroom teachers had happily agreed to let me take over each of their classes for a period, saving them the lesson planning and teaching time.

Imagine that.

So I was able to bring a bit of Halloween to all of the classes today, doing things like drawing paper pumpkins, teaching them to Trick or Treat, and showing them pictures of all my mad costumes over the years, and all the mad costumes my friends had donned. The following picture of Alex was a real hit with the kids. I don't think you can say you've lived properly until you've seen a first grader imitate that rocker face.

I also told a ghost story to the older grades. Despite having to tell it through a translator, the kids were genuinely freaked out, so I don't think it lost any of its creepiness. What's more, I got them going and they told some ghost stories of their own.

But, what made the whole day was the one particular class where, without any prompting from me, the teacher had helped the students to build makeshift costumes. When I showed up to their class, they were sitting orderly in their seats, and every last one of them was wearing a costume.

Shit, man.

When Halloween means as much to you as it does to me, and it seems you have to fight tooth and nail to convince some of your friends/coworkers that there's a unique joy in throwing on a costume, to show up in a classroom in a country that doesn't celebrate Halloween and to find every last one of your students wearing a costume that they made from scratch specifically for your 45-minute visit...

James Donald Jones captured it best when he said "well. That just makes me feel about ten feet tall."

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.”