The History House

Heather's fantastic History House in Historic Warwick.

Heather's picture storybook house, wherein every wall in every room is hung with a profusion of sketches and pictures and paintings.

Wherein father Martin will follow you around, unlocking each work in turn: swinging back their frames and glass, and pouring out their unique stories upon you.

I return to rooms, and the art appears to be breeding: multiplying and migrating--new works jumping out behind their hung brothers to surprise and delight when you think you've seen them all.

As we open our mountains of presents on Christmas Day, Martin and Frances deal out art to each other and to all of us as if it were the banal everyday of CDs and DVDs. Small-run, woodblock prints and imitation scrimshaw locking boxes and 1940's silver lipstick containers and copper ingots melted down from historically-salient sailing ships. From the treasures they produce out of their bottomless sacks, you'd think them less father and mother Christmases and more pirates or explorers: dealing in the lossless media of yesterdays.

And a Jolly Good Christmas to You

Whereas my brother and father flew over to Japan to inject a little more family into my first Christmas away from home, this year I'll be borrowing Heather's family for the occasion. After months of planning and waiting for our first big trip together, it is now only a week until we fly from Tokyo to London before heading on to her hometown of Warwick.

Ever since we came up with the idea of me accompanying her when she headed home for the holidays, I've had Dickensian visions of a white christmas dancing through my head. I've been trying to ready myself for the actual thing being far less Halmark Idyllic (though with the wacky, snowy weather the UK has been having of late, who knows), but I'm still expecting the experience to be pretty swell as Heather's parents live in a big old house in a town that has its own castle. Also, she tells me that her dad places as much importance on cooking as my own father does. Finally, my cries for Fish and Chips, Indian Food, and good cheese have not fallen on deaf ears, and she's promised me all of the above, perhaps with some delicious baked goods thrown in for good measure.

Long story short, I'm expecting to come back to Japan a good deal fatter than I left it.

Now I just need to keep myself from going squirrelly as I play the waiting game for the next week. I also need to reign my brain in and plan some Christmas classes for the elementary as I'm already getting into cerebral holiday mode.

Brothers & Sisters

In Japan, on a thing like this, you make your own family. Relations of blood get replaced by relations of proximity and of commonality. The only history you can hold onto is the group of people who accompanied you on the plane from home to here, and you find yourself praying to god that at least a couple of the cool ones wind up in your backyard.

I can’t comment what things are like in other prefectures, but on this New-Brunswick-sized northern island of ours the JET family seems pretty tight. Realities of size and space mean that some of us are—at best—distant relatives, but when we all come together for the semi-regular reunions, you wouldn’t know the distance to look at us.

Among all of these people, I’ve been fortunate enough to cling to a few small pieces of home. When we all came over last August, the shallow bits of history I hung onto took the form of Mark and Lindsay, two Toronto JETs (though they’d tell you they’re Georgetown and Mississauga JETs, respectively) who wound up being placed, essentially, in my backyard. For all our common geographic origins, I never thought that we’d wind up being much more than fellow Canadians over here. And yet, here I am, writing about these two as pillars of this experience.

Mark

My first thought when I met Mark at the Toronto orientation, and I found out that he would be placed near me in Hokkaido, was “what a dud.” Between the glasses and the ginger hair, the gangly frame and the weird suit/tie, Mark had “dork” written all over him. At that early point, what verbal interactions I had with Mark failed to sound his true depths, and what I’d seen of his sense of humour left me more confused than anything.

But it wasn’t long before Mark made himself known. I think it went down some time at Tokyo Orientation, when I was forced to share a room with him and Brian from the Toronto group. Victims of the hideous jet lag, Mark and I woke up almost simultaneously at 5am one morning, and when it was clear we weren’t getting back to sleep any time soon, we fell to discussing a shared love for Chrono Trigger, heedless of Brian trying to sleep in the next bed. Throughout the day, our conversation continued and ranged onto other topics, eventually turning to Mark’s university days and the mad, booze-fueled antics he’d gotten up to at the time. Rather quickly, I lost my first impression of Mark as some kind of square, replacing it with an image of him as a wild party animal.

And I think the reason I thought Mark a dud when I first met him in his business duds is that Mark isn’t meant to wear business duds. Mark is better suited by blue jeans, bush jackets, and bandanas. This was a man who had lived and worked for months in the northern reaches of Canada, where us soft, whities of the south often fear to tread. He had become a part of Inuit communities and had drank his way through the midnight hours of neverending days.

Pretty much as soon as he got set up in his high school ALT position over here in Hokkaido, Mark set to work trying to press the limits of the smart business attire demanded by the high schools. He bought hideous skinny ties and scratchy wool cardigans.

The cramped confines of his monkey suit on that first day also hid Mark’s madness. I have heard more “your mom” jokes from Mark—honestly delivered—than from any other source, and this stream of misogynistic filth seems to inspire similar outbursts from me as I try to keep up with Mark.

The lion’s share of the adventures I’ve had in this place, I’ve had with Mark. He seems to be the very definition of “ride or die” as he comes up with new, crazy ideas for adventures daily, and he’s rather good at convincing you that you want to accompany him on them. Mark’s the reason I climbed Rishiri, and Mark’s the reason I fell in love with Shikotsuko. Mark’s been my wingman since before I realized I needed one, and Mark gets a Best Supporting award for one of the loveliest things to yet happen to me out here.

Once I started to get the hang of Mark, one of my first thoughts was “my brother’s going to LOVE this guy.” However, it wasn’t long before I realized that my brother WAS this guy, and this guy was my brother: some strange ginger echo of Craig, as he’d have turned out in some alternate reality. Though they’re different enough to be distinct, Mark and Craig’s areas of overlap are more than a bit unnerving. I guess that’s why it’s not such a stretch for me, now, to call Mark my adoptive Hokkaido brother.

Lindsay

Though I was never blessed with a genetic one, I seem to pick up surrogate sisters wherever I go. I also seem to pick up Linds(a/e)ys. The name, for me, has become a bit of a signpost—a hint or, perhaps, a warning that this person is meant to figure heavily in my life; that, if I’m not careful, this person may just be the end of me.

From fairly early on Lindsay struck me as an echo in my life: when I met her, I felt instantly comfortable with her and I felt a bit like I’d known her before. When I met her at Toronto Pre-Departure Orientation and when we would run into each other at events after it, we always seemed to fall into a kind of chill rhythm with each other. Even as she yakked in a plastic bag next to me on the bus from Keio Plaza to Haneda airport after orientation, and I bought her the Japanese equivalent of Gatorade to hasten her recovery, we were chill.

So, yeah: Lindsay has definitely become my surrogate sister in Hokkaido, but she’s been known to play the part with the hard-nosed, don’t-take-no-shit attitude that one might more accurately expect of a brother. Hell, she has taken to calling me “Princess” when the time comes for us to be out the door, but I’m still busy faffing about.

Though Lindsay might not be as ride-or-die as Mark, she’s definitely a close second. The majority of those adventures I’ve had with Mark have also been adventures I’ve had with Lindsay. When Mark and I scaled Rishiri with our hiking packs and hiking boots and rain gear and extra clothes and emergency food and at least 2L of water, Lindsay made it up with us (and made it down faster than us!) in skater shoes, a school bag containing a couple of onigiri, and a hideous jacket she’d picked up on clearance.

Lindsay can pick up Japanese guys with the deft skill and non-challance of a strapping Gaijin lad picking off giggling Japanese girls, and then she’ll go and surprise me with just how big her heart is when it doesn’t work out. She’ll dress up nice in heels and a dress, only to speak to you in a language written in video games. She’ll make you a card from scratch for your birthday when you all go out to celebrate, and then she’ll drink you under the table. She’s also one of the few people I know who actually reads this blog and seems to like it as much as I do, for which I’m very grateful.

One of the most profound things Lindsay ever told me about her and I and this whole JET experience is that, no matter what happens and who stays for how long and where they wind up along the way, when it’s all over her and I still come from the same place. And, should we ever find ourselves pining away for Japan in distant years, we’ll likely have the benefit of each other to reflect on the wacky foreign experience we shared.

They're fine folks, the both of them, and I look forward to the hijinx we'll get up to in the coming year.

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.”

Of Bonding

Angry Chibi Buddha

The subtitle for this one should probably be "(A Rant for Saff)" since he's, likely, one of the only people who will be motivated to follow this through.

I think it's appropriate to go here as it's about my trip with my brother and my Dad, and it's about New Years Resolutions, and it's about being repressed (as the Japanese sometimes are), and it's about the ways that our society approaches certain things--approaches that really piss me off.

What's more, it's about something I believe in very passionately.

So, without further screwing around, here she be:

You have to realize something:

The majority of our Supercalafragilisticexpialidotion Father-Sons Miracle Bonding Vacation was spent in silence. We'd walk around, we'd look at stuff, and, if pressed, Dad would reveal how amazed he was about the construction of the stuff we saw. We didn't sit around, crying and giving each other hugs. It's not how we do things. Not ever. It's not who we are.

You go on and on and on about how we need to have this epic, father-son bonding vacation together. What you have to realize is that we don't need it because we're beyond it. We don't need to have two weeks together in a foreign land to tell each other how much we mean to one another because we do it every time we have dinner together. I don't need some big bonding adventure with Dad because a long time ago I realized I needed to see him and talk to him more, so I made a point of going over there every week for dinner, and we'd talk for hours thereafter. Every time Craig, Dad, and I sit down together around Dad's table, we're bonding. We've been doing it for years.

People who don't talk about their feelings and don't tell their loved ones that they love them often enough need big, epic, bonding experience adventures. They need a new setting to share their feelings because they are, for some reason, too afraid to do so in their standard settings. It's like the Japanese when they drink to let go: relying on a change of state--whether it be a mental one from inebriation or a physical one from travel--to break down the barriers you've set up around yourself.

People who talk about "Bonding" need an excuse to do it. They give intimacy and sharing a name, set it on a shelf, and they keep telling themselves they need to get to it some day. And, in so doing, they never get to it. It's like making a New Year's Resolution: you realize you're not doing enough of something, and you set that something on a shelf as a lofty goal and one of two things happen:

1) You achieve your goal by forcing yourself to do it. You don't do it because it's natural or right or it moves you. You do it because you have to, and you're motivating yourself with guilt.

OR

2) You never achieve your goal precisely because you've set it on a shelf. By making it your Resolution--your Goal--you endow it with an extra bearing...you make it bigger than it ought to be by making it something that's so hard to do that you need to make a resolution to do it. It carries all the guilt of you not having done it before, and that guilt makes it seem all the more insurmountable.

People who never mention the word bonding are, in all likelihood, the people who are already doing it. Instead of attaching a name to it, putting it down on their list of things to do, and saying they need to get to it one day, they do it naturally--organically: just like breathing, just like circulation. They go to the people they need to go to, they say the things they need to say. I'm not saying it's easy to do. I'm saying that when you do it, you have to do it naturally.

If you slot in "bonding experience" on your calendar, and you schedule a defined amount of time for it, you are destined to fail. The exchange will be stilted, synthetic, defined. At 11:00 am The Bonding will commence, and at 1:00 pm The Bonding will be completed. You cannot bond with someone on a schedule. It's not a matter of gaining bonding points through scheduled interactions until you gather enough to trade in for a bonding level.

I guess what I'm trying to get down to is a cliché:

Talk is cheap.

Don't talk about bonding. Don't talk about New Year's Resolutions.

Just do it.

I don't like talking about bonding; I just try to do it.

So, on our Jones Family Trip, what we did was spend time together and see stuff together. There was nothing overtly deep and meaningful about it in the instant; that kind of stuff comes with time. The kind of Hallmark, saccharine sentimentality that you seem to be hoping for never transpired, and I'm glad it didn't as it would have been false--for all of us. Any bonding or life changing that occurred occurred silently, inside our heads, and it's the kind of bonding and life changing that Daddio will seldom if ever talk about, but it's the thing that will occur to him with a smile when he's sitting on his own somewhere.

We are what we are, and this trip will be what it will be. To try to force it to be anything else--to try to force it to be meaningful in a loud, showy, let's-talk-about-it way would be to counterfeit the experience. The meaning exists inside our heads. It's as real in there as our names and our passions. To try to make broad, sweeping, heart-warming statements about it is to cheapen it.

In short, I don't think I can give you the answer you're looking for because that answer would be a lie. Just know that this was good. I enjoyed it, and I think Craig and Dad enjoyed it, too.