After days of travel that started at Toronto Pearson on Thursday July 29th at 13:00, I finally got back home to Furubira at 16:00 today, after sojourns in humid Tokyo hostels and on the floor of Maggie’s wind-swept apartment in Sapporo. The clouds that had been grey and ominous from Otaru through to just past Yoichi are riven in blue and white as my bus passes through that high, narrow tunnel and down into the rocky, coastal roads of the Shakotan peninsula. Having heard tales of flooding in Furubira while I was away from Mark, I half expect to come back upon my town as a ruin.
As I pass through the last tunnel, I find it to be anything but. It is the same sun-and-clouded, tree-choked-mountains-of-green place that I left. The only evidence of the torrential rains of last Thursday lingers in the spindly and still-green trees up-ended in the shallows where the Furubira river empties into the Sea of Japan.
I climb the stairs to my apartment for the first time in three weeks to find that some of me has gone out of it. In my absence, it has settled back to the dusty smell of tatami mats and sunshine that I remember so keenly from when I first arrived here a few days shy of a year ago. It is a smell that was once tinged with the anxiety of finally being on my own in this distant land. However, now the same smell comforts me. It is a smell of the relatively clear spaces in this apartment—a smell of traditional, tiled shower rooms and warm, astroturfed sun rooms. It is a smell of golden light through sheer curtains and of vague tinkling from unseen wind chimes.
And that smell makes me sane, on this Sunday end to my long adventure home—when all of my emotional history screams that I should be mourning the end of a vacation; mourning another year away from all that is familiar and Canadian.
But I don’t.
And I’m not.
And I’m wondering if it has to do with the overwhelming sense of right I felt when I walked off flight AC001 and into Tokyo Narita for the second time this year, this time very much without the support of dozens of other Toronto JETs. I wonder if it has to do with how all of my consternation over training my way into sweaty Tokyo and finding my hostel fell away, only to be replaced by a profound and irrational love for the Japanese people—by a strong desire that I never knew I had to be back home with them.
Well, this is me six months into this mad thing.
On August 2nd, 2009, I and my fellow Toronto JETs landed at Narita airport in Tokyo a good 2-3 hours later than we were expected. Night had fallen, but the humid heat of Tokyo still had the Japanese cicadas singing. As we wound through the airport, Sonomi reminded me we were now in Japan (a good thing, that), and she asked me if I was excited.
I told her I didn't know, that it all didn't seem real.
Here now, sitting in the teacher's office at the end of a day at the junior high, with the snow still coming down outside (as it has done for something close to two months straight), I realize I've been here for six months now: half of the one-year contract I signed on for.
I try to get a handle on that: six months past. Six months living in a foreign country for the first time with only the internet and one brief visit to provide me with pieces of home. I try to take a bearing from those six months, but it's just like day one:
I still don't know, and it still doesn't seem real.
Well, I should say it doesn't seem real. Now it all seems a little too real. It doesn't seem strange or different or life-changing and unique in that epic way that you may think such things should. Those strange and different and unique things are still happening; lives are being changed, but it is all happening in increments. Gradually and behind the scenes; not in epiphanies and revelations.
What I do know is that it's different enough to force timelines to be revised, to cause the Master Plan to be altered. I've become wrapped up in the experience, and something that I swore would only be a year long has grown to two.
Here: at a time of year when Hokkaido is at its least hospitable; in an apartment that is so unreliably heated and insulated as to force me to sleep on the living room floor; during a winter so deep and snowy as to make one forget what summer was ever like; with a class that tells me to "go home" on good days and to "die" on bad days...
Here, at the heart of all this, is where I am asked to make my big decision about the next year of my life. At this cold, bleak point, the fact that I can still happily make the decision to stay on for another year says more about how the last six months have been than any detailed timeline or list that I could hope to give.
And then my father and my brother (and, at times, Sonomi and Lindsay along with them) came here to stay over the Christmas/New Years break. My expansive apartment, thankfully, had room enough for all of us.
However, I didn’t realize just how fully all those people filled the place until I returned to it after I’d left my father and brother in Tokyo.
In the absence of all those people, there seemed to be a tangible emptiness at the centre of the rooms in this place. They were the same rooms they’d always been, with the same furniture they’d always had, but they’d had those people filling them with their life for so many days that the rooms now seemed to be hurting for the people. It was almost as if I felt the absence of the people as something present in the rooms of my apartment.
And it’s no different today, after a weekend spent in Furubira with some of those excellent people who helped me decide to stay on here for another year. They’re some of the best people I’ve met over here, and they lent their scents and their energies to the apartment for a weekend.
Now, in their absence, the place seems twice as large and twice as quiet. For the first time, I find the leisurely, me-paced, solitary existence that I’d happily accepted here in Furubira for the past five months start to show signs of wear. Back in Toronto, it would often seem as though you couldn’t keep me in my apartment. I’d always be off, trying to socialize with someone. After years of that, I managed to adapt rather well to the introverted social vacation that my sleepy town has provided. It was a rest, and I felt like I needed it.
But now, I wonder if the combination of never-ending winter and good friends has finally gotten to me, setting off the first blush of cabin fever. Thankfully February looks to be shaping up as the busiest month yet in terms of weekend social commitments, so I won’t have to worry about getting too squirrelly by being shut up in my town, in this apartment that seems to be getting only bigger by the day.
"...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.
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.
