If, on an icy night, a boarder

Niki Skijo, Thursday, 5pm.

I've been fortunate out here in Japan to have some really awesome ALTs really close to where I live. Though I don't spend that much time with my closest ALT over in Yoichi, the next one down the road in Niki has come to be a good bud of mine. Perry often accompanies us on our mad adventures around the island. He's a very laid back dude from Edmonton who arrived in Japan at the same time as our JET group back in the summer of 2009, and he always seems to be game for pretty much anything...particularly when it involves snowboarding.

As Perry's fruit-growing town of Niki (know for its apples, mostly, but also its cherries) is only about an hour, at most, by bus from Furubira, I jumped on an invitation from Perry last week to come in for some night snowboarding at the tiny Niki skijo. In Hokkaido, pretty much any town with a hill near it has its very own ski hill. However, in cases like Furubira's, or neighbouring Bikuni's, many of the ski hills in the smaller towns no longer operate due to a lack of steady enough business to keep the lifts running. Fortunately Niki has managed to keep its skijo open while the rest of us have been shutting ours down.

Niki hasn't got much in the way of lifts (only a single, one-person chair), but the hill is planned out in such a way as to make maximum use of that one dinky lift. As a mid-winter warm spell had hit these parts on Wednesday and had driven the temperatures above freezing for the first time in what seems like months, all of the snow heaped about had started melting. This meant that, by the time Perry and I reached the hill on Thursday evening, the temperatures had dropped back down below zero and the surface conditions were pretty damn icy.

Fortunately, I managed not to fall flat on my ass where it counted, despite the runs at Niki being my first on my new Ride Revolt bindings (which I had to buy to replace the 10-11 year-old Burton bindings that had come with my 8000円 Charger board). I imagine that would have been significantly less fun than all of the hurtling down the hill we did on the slick surface. We were able to find a few pockets of powder...ish, but the warm temperatures had caused it all to go heavy, making turning in it a herculean task.

It was a really good night of boarding, even if the conditions weren't perfect. We were able to get in about three solid hours (which felt a lot longer), and it was enough to convince me to head back to Niki when the conditions are a little better.

The sun setting just as I arrived at Niki Skijo.

Same, as seen through rose-coloured goggles ;)

Perry on the littlest lift that could, above the icy, icy slope below.

2010 - 2011 Mountain Day 11

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.

The Four Points Tour: Know the Players

To be sure that this year’s attempt at the ever-elusive Four Points Tour of Awesomeness succeeds, we have assembled a crack team of Roadtrippers—individuals with years of experience in holding it for the long haul. In this Four Points update, we’ll meet this team of shadowy professionals and plumb the depths of their wanderlust.

Operative 01: Nicholas

AKA: The Architect
Codename: Princess
Specialty: Documentation
Roadsnack of Choice: Bananas

Princess has had an itch to circumnavigate this island ever since he didn’t request it as his placement on JET. It’s still unclear whether it was he or Fire Bush who initially came up with the idea for the original Four Points Tour of Awesomeness, but it is definitely Princess who held so tenaciously to the idea of circumnavigating the island, becoming so obsessed with the idea of performing the roadtrip solely on coastal roads that he was caught trying to “liberate” a section of coastal highway long-ago fenced off when a much more convenient tunnel was built to bypass it. If anything of note happens on the Four Points Tour, you can bet that Princess will be documenting it photographically and with a “Dear Diary” entry.

Operative 02: Lindsay
AKA: The Driver
Codename: Padfoot
Specialty: Rapid Evac
Roadsnack of Choice: Seico-brand Fried Chicken

Padfoot has been a seasoned roadtripper ever since the initial team of her, Princess, and Fire Bush set out to blaze across the island of Hokkaido one year ago. Though many of the operatives on the Four Points tour have driven the narrow, winding roads of Japan, Padfoot is the only one who can claim to have racked up hundreds of hours on the wrong side of the road. She holds the dubious honour of having christened a stretch of highway through Sarobetsu the “Hokkaido Autobahn” by virtue of having blown down it at speeds the road had never imagined and hasn’t seen since.

Operative 03: Mark
AKA: The Pathfinder
Codename: Fire Bush
Specialty: Cartography and Logistics
Roadsnack of Choice: Volcano Rings and Ninja Chips

Though Princess may have been the one to dream up a circumnavigation of Hokkaido in nine days, Fire Bush is the one who will make it happen. On last year’s voyage, it was Fire Bush who guided Princess and Padfoot to the summit of Mount Rishiri and back again in an impossible time of seven hours. And, when it comes time to venture into the dark, bear-infested wilds of Shiretoko on the Four Points Tour, it will be to Fire Bush (and his massive set of low-hangers) that the operatives turn to find their way out of the forest alive.

Operative 04: Heather
AKA: The Voice
Codename: Dubbs
Specialty: Japanese Decryption
Roadsnack of Choice: Oden

Dubbs is the operative on the Four Points Tour with the firmest grasp on the Japanese language. So complete is her mastery of Nihongo that she was once refused her own reservation at a hotel because the hotel manager refused to believe that she was the same Japanese native speaker who had called to reserve the room. Dubbs has already put her decryption skills to work securing transport for the Tour, as well as lodging and food for the operatives along the way. Should the operatives be faced with a linguistic impasse once their mission is underway, it will be Dubbs who saves their bacon.

Operative 05: Sonomi
AKA: The Outsider
Codename: Sonomo
Specialty: Japanese Infiltration
Roadsnack of Choice: PAN!

Though not technically based in Hokkaido, as are the rest of the Four Points team, Sonomo’s ties to the island run much deeper than any temporary teaching contract. She is able to trace her lineage back to a secret sect of fishermen samurai who once inhabited the then-bustling fishing town of Furubira on the Shakotan peninsula. She is the only operative who was born in Japan and the only operative who, in a pinch, could probably pass for a Japanese national. Exactly why the team would prioritize including a cultural infiltrator is unclear, but as they have planned for every other eventuality, you can be sure they had a good reason for appointing her to the job.

Ross Nickle (or Death: The High Cost of Living*)

Death is quick.

Back in Mississauga, my good friend Ross Nickle was struck down in an instant. His story is one so common as to be cliché: Loving husband and father of one, seemingly perfectly healthy, dies suddenly sitting at home on the computer on a Monday night.

Just like that, it’s done and he’s gone.

But, Death is also slow.

I joke that I’m living in the future over here in Japan, but news of this death only reaches me now, when it is already in the distant past. March 22^nd. Two weeks to the day, for me. In our digital age, it happens upon me in an email so brief and strange as to resemble comedy. I accuse it of being a bad joke—April Fools lost somewhere in the complications of email and time changes—so I check facebook for proof of life. And, sure enough, your profile is your pulse, and Ross’ has been showing signs of death for days: filled with a litany of eulogies from his friends, each eerily addressed to him in the second person:

“Ross, you will…”

“Ross, you were…”

“Ross, you always…”

And I am faced with another reality of Japan for the first time.

People have gotten sick while I’ve been over here, and I’ve contemplated having to make returns for them should situations turn dire. People have died while I’ve been over here, the sad outcomes of long, old-aged declines. In those events, I’d felt the distance between me and Canada growing. However, those were, essentially, all warnings. They all gave me time to react if I needed to: time to say things that needed to be said. They were conclusions slowly drawn.

This is a fragment. This is a story that ends mid senten

What’s more, I am too late for this by an order of magnitudes. Ross’ death is now past tense. He has died; he was mourned; he was buried. No matter how many planes I jump on, no matter how the paradigms of datelines can land me in Canada an hour after I left Japan, none of it can bend time back two weeks plus a day.

Yes, it's a truism of wishing I had made more time and wishing I had said what I’d always meant to, but I maintain that the frustration of it all is compounded significantly by being so far away: mentally just as much as physically. As his friend Norm informs me when I question him on not telling me all this when he added me on Facebook, this news was sitting, waiting for me, on Ross’ profile for two weeks. However, I was too caught up in all of this Japanification to ever notice it. I now wonder what earth-shattering things I might discover should I go looking at all of your profiles…

And here’s one more thing while we’re on the topic of online presences. For those of you familiar with the terminology, had Ross and I not lived so close to one another, he surely would have been another of my internet boyfriends. We were both mixed up in the same dorky worlds, and now, as the one from those worlds who knew him best, it falls to me to go out and inform them of his death. Should that seem like some meager thing in your eyes, then I would tell you that you know little of the worlds that exist out in the digital cosmos; know little how someone like me or like Ross can grow to be many times our size and extend our reach to touch many more lives around the world than we ever could have hoped to in the worlds of flesh and bone. That’s not a boast; that’s a truth. His passing will happen there, again, tomorrow when I have to tell them, just as it happened again for me today, and how it happened initially for his family and friends two weeks ago.

Eventually I want to say more about Ross here, as it seems as good a place for it as any, but for now this is all I’ve got.

* It should be noted that I stole the alternative title for this from a Neil Gaiman comic of the same name. I take no responsibility for the man’s brilliance.

Adventure The Second: Friends Board

This second instalment of the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series features our intrepid group of JET adventurers hitting the hills at Niseko United for some snowboarding. The lion's share of our group were doing it for the first time, so when the already-reluctant Japanese snow school told us that their morning classes were full, it fell to Perry and I (but mostly Perry as I'm still a newb) to get The Ladies up on a board for the first time.

There's something simple and fulfilling in helping your friends.

No matter how many times I had to haul one of the Ladies up on their boards this weekend; no matter how many board-knee collisions I had to endure; it was worth it. At one point I sat on the slope just below the An'nupuri gondola in the blowing snow for what must have been half an hour to make sure each of the girls got up and got going. It was exhausting, it was cold, and it might have been a high point of the weekend. Every time they got up and got going on their snowboards, I felt good about it, and I got a decent amount of practice in myself from having to shadow/avoid them. I'm not sure I truly taught them all that much, but I know I kept them practicing.

What's more, boarding with Perry and Random Aussie Andy, who we met at The World's Greatest Hostel, pushed me to try harder at this whole snowboarding thing. You try chasing someone who is better than you down the hill, and all of a sudden you're cutting faster and roving wider across the surface of the mountain. Hell, I followed the two of them down a black diamond mogul course and into an old narrow riverbed strewn with trees. I handled neither gracefully, but they were the kind of places I never would have ventured without Perry and Andy pulling me on.

Burt the Board performed magnificently. When I told Andy that I'd picked him up, bindings and all, from a recycle shop for the equivalent of $100 CDN, he was floored, which I guess bodes well for my uninformed snowboard impulse buy. Andy told me that Burt was likely a 2000-model Burton Charger that looked like it'd seldom been used. I think Burt was one of the main reasons this weekend went so well. I find myself all the more invested in snowboarding now that I have my own gear. The fact that a lift ticket is the only cost keeping me from the hill makes this whole thing rather addictive.

Or maybe it's the conditions that make it so addictive. Before I got here, I was informed that Niseko, one of the closest mountains to where I live, is known world-wide for the quality of its powder. My limited, uninspiring time spent skiing years ago left me clueless about the significance of "powder." It sounded like some snotty word ski bunnies used to illustrate their prowess.

However, it would seem that our area of Japan is subject to nothing but powder snow. Gone is the slushy, sleety, damp mess that falls from the skies in and around Toronto. Everything that comes down here is light and fluffy, and Niseko seems to be at the heart of the light and fluffiest of it. Granted, I've only spent two weekends on the mountain, but it snowed every one of those four days. Niseko gets so much quality, consistent snow that they don't own snow making machines—devices that seem to be requisite at all the Canadian ski hills I've ever been to. With the snow dumping down day and night on the mountain, you're hard-pressed to find an icy patch on Niseko. When you rove out to the edges of the runs, as Perry and Andy taught me to do, you find deep, essentially unspoiled drifts of powder snow. And's that's on the shoulders of the runs, mind, not the treed sections between runs where the powder is so deep as to stop you dead if you're not ready for it.

Long story short, in the four mountain days since I started snowboarding, I feel like I've progressed exponentially. And for that progression, I mostly have my friends to thank. Over the course of this board weekend, my extended ALT/JET family made the times off the hill as enjoyable as the times on it. I'm glad we all found each other in this northern, snowy outpost of Japan, and I'm glad we were all able to take the time to do this thing together.

Adventure The Next: we all descend on Furano, another skiing destination in Hokkaido, for a little work and a lot of fun on the hills. Maybe the snow at the geographic centre of Hokkaido will be even more epic than that at Niseko?

Maybe, but I'm not holding my breath.

Mountain Days 3, 4

Ai Ryori

I started writing this immediately following Valentine's Day, but it got lost in all the excitement of the Busiest Month Ever. It was inspired by the Man Cooking lesson that me and a bunch of townies received from some culinarily experienced 'bachans. It was, in part, a Valentine's gift, I think. In Japan, Valentine's Day is a one-way thing: women use this day to honour their men by buying/making sweets for them.

And before any feminists cry foul, it should be noted that Valentines Day in Japan is followed by White Day a month later, and on White Day it is the men's turn to reward their ladies, and they are meant to pay back everything they received with interest. I don't know how exactly they calculate it, but the return gift from the man to his lady is meant to be of three times greater in value than what he received from her on Valentine's Day. Fortunately, as my lady hadn't yet accepted the position back on Valentine's Day, I'm free to reward her with three times bupkiss. However, I'm sure I'll find some way to honour her this weekend.

Four diminutive Japanese ladies in pink kerchiefs and aprons take the reins, sporting crests that are half hana half shuriken. In this men's cooking lesson, they are the senseis, and indeed it would seem that most of the men can't go too far without needing one of our matrons to bring us back in line.

Token foreigner boy is placed with the heads of board of education and vice principals, all the power they wield laid low before a tiny Japanese woman, as is often the way. Still, my 次長(Jicho) performs masterfully, seemingly better suited or more adapted to domestics. I spin it out into a harmonious, balanced relationship with his wife, while I picture the rest of the men calling for dinner from their armchairs.

I "soo-ka, soo-ka, soo-ka" at our printed recipes in jest, the hiragana I can read not forming up into much of anything. From between hieroglyphics of kanji, I piece together "go-ma--a-e" in readable kana, and demand to be put in charge of this one thing I've made before. Murakami-san boils the spinach for me, and Jicho fires the sesame, pouring the toasted grains into a vast mortar. I take to pestle, and the dark seeds are ground together into something that looks like smoke and tastes like sin. Taken straight, the paste is an anaphalactic shock to your tongue. I reflect that if the devil eats peanut butter, it's surely made from this. With sugar and with shoyu, the paste comes to look almost purple when mixed in with the limp spinach, giving the small dish a flavour that is at once arresting and alluring.

With the proper direction of diminutive Japanese ladies, we work all kinds of alchemy. Sauces from scratch, and rabbits from apples.

But then the women stand aside as it comes time for man's work: for taking something that was once living apart with a knife. Buri, whole fish, are produced from slick, slimy newsprint in styrofoam cartons. With blades that appear deceptively old and notched, these fishermen and farmers glide through sinew and bone, their wooden cutting blocks growing steadily more maroon.

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.