In the One Year of BLOG thing, I commemorated the birthday of this blog, but this blog started as a necessary evil for me—something I had a love-hate relationship with—and I gradually grew into it. I realized that I could channel some of my loathing for “guess what I ate for dinner today!” banal blogging into a motivation to do better. Yes, I’ve been guilty of banality (see: “BTW: Pocky, banana, and milk is AWESOME”), but I like to think that I’ve been guilty of more beauty. I try to put a lot into this thing, and I try to write things that are a little more interesting: things I would like to read.
But anyway. The Blog isn’t where it all started. The blog only served as a channel for the outcomes of the real inception:
My notebooks.
The Claire Fontaines.
The ever-present bundles of exquisite lined white that people infuriatingly insist on calling Journals or Diaries or Day Timers. Infuriatingly because, for some anal retentive reason, I believe branding them as such decreased their net worth—brands them as something much less than what they are. You label a thing with a loaded, clichéd word like that, and it becomes the label, losing all of its unique and inexplicable trappings. To call my books of writing "journals" or "diaries" is to render them less than what they are. It is to cheapen them in thought and risk that cheapening spreading to their bodies—to their physical stuff.
That’s a lot of English nerd talk for the idea that you can’t judge a book by its cover, I guess. I’ve always wanted these books to be something more than journals or diaries, just as I’ve wanted this place to be something more than a blog.
So though I might not have a concrete term for what these books are, I know what they were born of. Their ancestors started as Travel Writing, back in OAC (2001) when we went to Greece on a school trip and I needed a Writer’s Craft Independent Study Project. I took a random black notebook and a random black pen, and I held myself to writing in the notebook every day. People asked if it was a diary or a journal, but even then, roughly a decade ago, I aspired for it to be more than a day-to-day account of the quotidian. I tried to use the days events only as starting points for tangents of thought, grounding myself in the real and here and now only when it’d been a proper adventure. I called it Classical Studies.
It was the first, but when I went to Norway (and Sweden and Amsterdam and Denmark) with Amanda in 2004, I took a random red notebook and a blue pen with me. Though I didn’t keep to the same regimented schedule, I made sure to write as we traveled. I called it Viking Ghosts.
Then I did it again on the trip to Estonia, Finland, Germany, and Sweden with my mother in 2006: this time with a leather-sleeved, Estonian-designed, spiral-bound notebook number and the too-fancy pen mom had bought me for grad. I called it Baltic Son.
In 2007, when MHS sent me to the UK for the ICEI Conference we were hosting, and I took advantage to spin the free ticket out, for good or ill, into an English adventure, I took a blue notebook like the Norway one and a blue pen. I called it A Bit of Stuff.
Hell, when I headed out to BC in July of 2009, even then I had an insignificant—as of yet, unnamed—notebook with me, and I used it to note the thoughts and stories that all that ocean and trees and mountains bred in me.
It became like clockwork. Sure, I kept notebooks, and I wrote when I was kicking around Toronto. Sure, I had ideas. However, something about them was different: the consistency…the flow. I guess nothing inspires more uniquely than the unknown.
So that’s where they came from—their lineage, I guess. But what are they?
They are a record.
A record that I try to make as multi-faceted as possible by pasting in pieces of this or that, adding random pictures people print for me, scribbling stray thoughts and big ideas, noting banalities like (failed) budgets and useful Japanese words. I hold to dating most of the entries, and I hold to only using a particular kind of notebook (frustratingly, Made in France) and a very particular kind of pen (fortunately, Made in Japan), but other than that it’s no-holds-barred. A lot of the things that wind up posted here start as scribbles in there. They are blood samples or cores of wild and unknown trees. They are man made things that have been submerged in a flow of thoughts and experiences, and when they’re brought back up out of that flow you can see where bits of it have latched onto them—have become pressed between their pages or caught up in their spines or blotted into their paper.
As for the books I’ve brought to Japan, specifically, they are still a work in progress. I’ve never held this travel writing regimen for this long before (as this is the longest I’ve ever been away from home). There are, of course, questions of whether this is still travel writing at all, if I might not be considered settled here and if some of the wonder might have gone out of the pages over the months. Regardless, I’m sticking to it, and I’ve filled four of them since I was accepted to JET and started attending pre-departure sessions last May. They still don’t have a name, but ideas like “Hokkaido Nights” or “I Was Promised Robots” have bubbled up from time to time. Some day I’ll do a better job of documenting them photographically, but they’re there if you want to see them, and here are some photos if you’re not kicking around Japan.
Apparently Canadian food is comprised of spare ribs and nothing else.
First, I ain’t coming home
Despite thinking I was pretty clear on my decision in the Christmas cards I sent to most people, as well as in my six month post, it appears that there are some folks who are still getting surprised by my news that I recontracted with JET and will be hanging on in Furubira as the ALT until July 2011 at least. So here it is; one more time:
I’m not coming home in August 2010.
Right now I’m scheduled to be back in August of 2011, but there is always the possibility of extending my contract for a further year.
That being said, I’m coming home soon
Sorry to be contrary, but I’m coming home for a visit to Canada this July. The first bit will be in Vancouver for Amy’s birthday (that’s two years running, Thede. I hope you’re keeping track…) and Amanda’s wedding, and the second bit will be in Toronto to catch up with the family and all you mad city rats. However, for reasons of paid vacation limits and planning to work at Tokyo Orientation (even though they decided I wasn’t genki enough >:( ), it will be a very short visit. Therefore, I’m really hoping I can set up some kind of mass do so I can make sure to see everyone.
So where is Furubira, anyway?
I took a look back at those first posts and realized that I got the location of my town pretty wrong. So, though Amy’s likely the only one to care, here are some revised maps to show where I’m at in this mad archipelago.
Further, Furubira is a small fishing town of 3,800 souls—far less than the 14,000 it boasted at its prime, back when we had movie theaters and herring mansions, back before a change to off-shore fishing laws started a steady bleed of our fisherman population. I’d love to make a romantic comparison to the outports of Newfoundland, but the reality is that the fish processing our town is still engaged in seems to keep us running.
The Schools
The junior high school second graders who used to alternate between telling me to leave and telling me to die are now third graders who tell me I’m cool and that I should stay. They’re also entertaining themselves by yelling “hige!” at me from time to time and laughing as I stroke my beard in epic fashion. The junior high first graders who used to be the apple of my predecessor’s eye have slowly degraded into junior high second graders who are only now discovering the joys of telling me to die. Thankfully, my new junior high first graders became far less straight-jacket insane in their transfer over from sixth grade at the elementary school, and there are some among their number that completely blow me away with their level of English acumen.
The Elementary students are angels, like always. Well, the new fifth graders have inherrited the manic mantle from the old sixth graders, complete with the dubious honour of having their homeroom teacher leave on undisclosed, yet surely unrelated, indefinite leave. The new sixth graders are developing some attitude, but it can’t get the better of their genuine interest in learning. The new fourth graders continue to prove themselves to be wunderkind in the interest and ability they demonstrate in our twinning with my mother’s second grade class. The third graders are as fun as third graders should be, the second graders are suffering bit from a possible Sensei-Importance of English disconnect, and the first graders are the light of any day. God, that I could spend my every day trying to come up with new and creative ways to make them explode into those uninhibited peals of laughter. I’m convinced exposure to my first graders could cure cancer, those kids are so cute.
The High School is as a slowly closing High School should be, I guess. Since the year change in March-April, the third graders have graduated and moved on, the seconds have become thirds, the firsts have become seconds, and the first year class is no more. With only two classes to teach there now, I spend even less time at the school, and when we go through the whole process again next March, I’ll have only 50 minutes to teach at the high school, once every two weeks. It will be worth it, though, as the now-second-and-then-third graders at the high school have always been my very favourite students, and my Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) there is unquestionably my most manic, most entertaining teacher. He makes mad things like this on the regular.
The BOE
The other half of any ALT’s job: The Board of Education. Or, perhaps, the Bored of Education when we have to report to it on days when the schools are out and make work to do as our coworkers seem just as confused about what we’re doing there as we are. Thankfully, my BOE seems to be better than most: it is just the right mix of invested in my well-being while not being overbearing in my life. The people there are also as muppet-like as I am.
I’ve got hair
Didn’t say all these updates were going to be particularly interesting, but I’m thin on material, and this is the most hair I’ve had in a while, so deal.
And I’ve got a lady.
Which seems like a fundamentally impersonal way to talk about it, but just like with the recontracting thing, people still seem to be surprised by the news. I guess my less-than-subtle implications could have stood to be far less subtle. Her name’s Heather, and she’s from the UK. She showed up over here in the same JET group as I, and we’re placed not too far apart up here in Hokkaido, with Sapporo as a convenient meeting point between us. To quote the Barenaked Ladies, “she loves me, and her body keeps me warm…”
And since it's what started all this off, here is my own, snowier take on that photo by that Bassguitar guy on Flickr; the one that was my first image of Furubira. I'd been meaning to photograph these rocks for a while, and I finally got the chance in early April. Back then, I said that the picture had convinced me that Furubira was the kind of place I wanted to be. Now, twelve months later, I'm still thinking the same thing.
I noticed it, too, this morning, when my circadian rhythm woke me an hour early so I could turn on the heater and crawl back into bed. I noticed it in the quality of the light, which was less night-like, and in the quality of the cold in my apartment, which was less bitter.
I intentionally avoided wearing long johns for the first time in as long as I can remember, and I abandoned my warm and dry, calf-high Sorrels for the adventurous soles of my hiking shoes, which had been gathering dust since my trip south at Christmas. Leaving my apartment, it felt warmer outside than in the shaded genkan, and in the full sun I read the same spring that you had—in the drips of snow and the smokey smell of the melt. I cued up “Heartbeats” on the ol iPod as it seemed fitting for this world that is slowly coming back to life.
The children are thawing out, too. If being at an elementary school is the best way to spend a Friday, then the walk to school is the best start to that day. I always pass so many students on the trudge up the hill, and I like to genkily scream the wonder of the day at them in English as they respond with teeth-chattering “bikurishita!”s. Today they screamed it right back at me, and a roku nensei dragged me into some kind of break-neck race up the hill, terrorizing all the little giggling girls we passed with our cries of “GOOD MORNING!”
And in the elementary entranceway, the perfect punctuation to your statement that spring has sprung. The concrete and cobbles are dry; the recessed area is free of rubbers and snowmobiling boots: the more sensible shoes that this first day of spring allows fitting conveniently into our matrix of shoe lockers.
Today the town of Furubira started construction on the new elementary school. I had known this was coming down the pipe pretty soon, and I’d been told that the location for the new building would be right beside the current elementary. However, I hadn’t realized exactly where the new building was going up until today when I was on my way to class. Just outside the windows of the bathroom wash stations, two large pieces of construction equipment were laying waste to one of my favourite bits of forest (an area that is possibly one of the prettiest views from my elementary). From the windows above the wash stations, I was treated to a perfect, overhead view of the carnage/creation going on outside.
Some of the students who come to the wash station look out on the scene and see only carnage. The stand of evergreen that once served as a vertical canvas for the falling snow now lies in a dense tangle of the green of boughs, the brown of bark, and the raw yellow of living wood. All around it, the unspoiled white has been chewed up by the steel treads of the lumbering machines, leaving tracks vaguely reminiscent of rampaging buffalo or marauding Hollywood indjuns. One of the machines sweeps its mechanical claw out in front of it like an arm, brushing aside the deep snow until it reaches a lone remaining sapling. With a dexterity that might make one mistake it as an extension of his own arm, the operator reaches out with the mechanical claw and closes it around the small tree’s trunk, snapping the thing off instantly with a crack that can be heard from high above. The arm tosses the piece into the knot of fallen trees, and the claw digs in again at the base of the splintered trunk, pulling up the root ball like a dandelion stem. The black of its earth sprays across the snow white as the arm hefts it, too: cart wheeling through the air to land in the pile of slash.
Another student comes to the wash station and can hardly notice the carnage for all the creation going on around it. He sees the tracks of the machines making the land more and more level with each pass, their action on the trees removing the chaos from the soil and instating order. He draws vectors between the construction-capped workers rambling through the disorder. From the rough plans he saw in his parents’ copy of the town newsletter, he already begins constructing the new school in his mind’s creative eye. From out of the snow and dirt and twisted trees rise vertices of potential, and in the empty space in the forest outside he can already picture how he will run the circuit of the new building’s halls, counting the windows and the walls in its many rooms. He can already smell the fresh plastics and the drying wood glue, feel the light plaster dust in his hair.
While a third student stands at the wash station with her back to the windows. She can see only the ancient architecture in this place: this giant, rambling school that was built for a different age of this town—back when there were movieplexes and supermarkets and sprawling herring mansions. In this aging elementary, mere motion is a covert act as you’re more likely to be lost in it than found. In the scene outside, this student sees only the end of the old girl: this vast, often cold, sometimes lonely classroom castle that has been the birthplace of dreams ever since she wandered into it as an ichi nensei. It is a place so empty that it happily allows itself to be filled with anything you like; where past is so very present that it has to be kept in check least the yesterday should muscle out the today.
But on the lowest floor, the wash station windows are still boarded over. Ostensibly, it’s to protect the windows from the mountains of snow and ice that avalanche down from the rooves of buildings in this northern outpost; the vast loads of white piling up in glass-threatening quantities. However, with the melt now begun and winter on its last legs, I wonder if the boards might not have been left up to shield the eyes of our youngest students who make their homes on the first floor: their new minds still too impressionable to make much sense of the carnage or the creation just outside. Instead, they are treated to furtive glimpses through the cracks between two-by-fours, and their fertile imaginations attribute the grinding cries and flashes of orange beyond to dinosaurs just as often as to steam machines.
With this being exam time for my junior high school students, the awesome school lunches that they and we teachers receive have been cancelled for the next few days. I was dutifully informed of this when I was given my schedule for this month, but as that was about two months ago, I promptly forgot and showed up with only an orange and an apple for lunch today.
Crap.
No matter, though, as apparently I wasn’t the only one, and a bunch of teachers lumped together and placed an order with the very delicious Minato Sushi in town.
When one of the proprietors showed up with our delivery, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t to have the orders bundled to serving trays with tied handkerchiefs, the food within still steaming in real, non-disposable bowls and plates from the restaurant. They delivered the food, took our cash, and left, only to return about an hour later to collect the flatware.
That they would bring the food in real dishes and leave them with us…It’s not a big thing, but it’s a nice thing. It’s a small-town-home-made thing; a fresh thing and a real thing.
It’s the kind of thing Canada just can’t compete with.
As they separate food from corpse, the buri lacks the near-display quality of sashimi. It is pink and grey and brown and marbled with fat. Were it to be served to you on a platter alongside other fish, it would surely be the last you chose. As we sit down to eat with our lady sensei, the buri hits my tongue and it's slippery and soft, and it tastes thick and wet.
