Vancouver Twenty Ten

This Winter Olympics thing is finally catching up with me.

For some reason I hadn’t been that excited about it until right now. I think it had something to do with being in the complete wrong time zone for it and being utterly convinced that the Japanese media was only ever going to cover Japanese athletes.

But I’m thinking maybe all of that was a defensive snowjob. You see, I’ve been a big fan of the Winter Olympics for as long as I can remember (Albertville? Lillehammer?). I think it was an outgrowth of the infatuation with snow I’ve seemingly had for my entire life. However, it also might have been that I was young and impressionable at that wondrous point back in 1992/4 when the IOC decided that it would stagger the winter and summer Olympics, meaning there would be a games every 2 years, and in ’92 and ’94 there would be back-to-back Winter games.

I remember trying to emulate the bobsledders on my GT Snowracer. I remember all the guys using the minitramps in elementary school to emulate the acrobatics of Canadian Aerials/Moguls Freestyler Jean-Luc Brassard. I remember being amazed at the chimeric fusion that was biathlon, with the combination of guns and snow seeming to be tailor made for the mind of a kid like me. And names like Myriam Bédard, Ed Podivinsky, Kerrin Lee Gartner, Elvis Stojko, and Alberto Tomba still hold places in my head that should probably be reserved for hockey greats.

Where was I?

Defensive snowjob. Right.

For all my love for the Winter Olympics, my spirit has been pretty lackluster this year. That seems like madness as Canada is hosting the games in the city that I keep describing to people over here as the most beautiful one in our nation. What’s more, the second half of the games is taking place in a mountain town that competes with Pacific Rim and Algonquin for the title of one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in North America. Not only do I love both locales dearly, I have fantastic friends permanently located in BOTH cities. Hell, I’ve even got a pair of those phenomenal red Canadian Olympic mittens that were sent over from my aunt to make sure I could be a part of the Olympic spirit.

It all stacks up to a pile of Olympic fever on paper. So why haven’t I been into it?

I think my disinterest must have been a vain attempt to guard against the remorse I’m feeling now. As I read Allison and Amy’s facebook updates and stare at their pictures from the two raging hearts of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic games, it becomes clear what I’m missing and just how close I could have gotten to the games. The two of them are a couple of my closest friends, and to share my very favourite of sporting events with them, at home in Canada…calling it something as highfaluting as a “once in a lifetime” opportunity still fails to capture the all of it. Never again will this opportunity arise.

Never Again.

But I suppose I should take heart. It would seem that my bread and butter these days is Never Again. I likely couldn’t have had both the Olympics and Japan. To trade two weeks of patriotic Canadian wonder for two years of hedonistic Japanese adventure may not be such a bad bargain.

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.

...and Grace, too

Today one of my students came to me and asked what “Grace” meant in Japanese.

I had to do a double take. I paused so long before asking him to repeat the word that it may well have been a triple take. You see, I’m used to the students in this class asking me to translate words like “masturbation.” And when I refuse, they take vengeance by screaming the word at the top of their lungs in class and in the hallways, knowing only that it’s something they probably shouldn’t be saying.

That this student, in the midst of such a hellish class, would come to me and ask me about a word as delicate and nuanced as “Grace” is evidence that he has not yet succumb to the cruelty, racism, or, possibly worst of all, indifference that the majority of his classmates currently espouse.

My own grasp of Japanese being only moderately more advanced than his grasp of English, I had no idea how “Grace” translated, so I tried to build it out of the words I did know: kireina, jyozu, yasashi, but for all my listing, they weren’t “Grace.” I tried to relate it to something I knew he was into: baseball. I told him that if he was all these things when he played, then he would know “Grace.”

The exchange really struck me, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the danger of asking a completist English major to translate a word for you. Maybe it’s my affection for this particular student, for his obvious brilliance beneath a defeatist attitude that has been built up around him by the real troglodytes in his class.

Or maybe it’s the words: the perspective created at the place between two languages, wherein the deep, attenuated meanings of a word can explode in your head like a box of kittens. And there’s you, surrounded by their magnificence, and utterly powerless to round them all up and push them through the door into the next language.

Sounds for Sights

I know this has little to do with Japan, but I figured I should probably put more music in here. Not Japanese music, necessarily, just the stuff I'm listening to over here in case people are interested. In our iTunes age of playlists, I tend to listen to particular things for particular seasons, then switch 'em up when leaves fall or snows melt or the nights bring the cold, crisp smell of seasons turning. Also, it would appear that what I listen to is closely linked to the people who tell me to listen.

So here's some stuff from Falling Furubira:

Dan Mangan - Fair Verona (A contribution from Amy out in Vancouver)

The Knife - Heartbeats (I had this song, but Mark turned me on to its awesome)

USS (Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker) - 2 15/16 (compliments of Garcia, seeking to keep me current and Canadian; the lyrics make it for me)

Beast - Mr Hurricane (also contributed, though indirectly, by Amy as her friend's brother directed the fantastic music video that was, sadly, robbed of a grammy by the Black Eyed Peas)

And, because they're my boys and it's one of the most beautiful music videos I've ever seen:

Hey Rosetta! - Red Song

Adventure The First: Of the driven snow

Apparently this is the first installment in the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series, and it begins with a group of us JETs heading out for a snowshoe hike last Saturday February 6 as part of the HAJET (Hokkaido Association for JETs) Sapporo Yuki Matsuri (Sapporo Snow Festival) festivities (party). The destination was the fairly large city of Otaru, but our guide took us just outside of town and up into some hills that run along the Sea of Japan.

We started our trek in sunshine, the unfavourable weather forecast for hubuki a distant something that we try hard to ignore, avoid, and repress. Off the bus with two tied stacks of snowshoes and up through neighbourhoods we went, dodging the big yellow Tonka trucks in the process of digging them out.

The locals didn’t seem accustomed to having whitie visitors tromp past them, and they leered most strongly at our burly kiwi guide with his mountainous pack on his back. The undecided grey-shine we’d had on the early train in from Sapporo set up into full-on blue-sky glare just as we all finished strapping on our shoes and we took to the untouched rolling white.

Ken and I, the only Canadians, were given the biggest shoes of the bunch, and we chose to believe Leon when he told us it was for our Canuck prowess rather than for our bearish forms, far burlier than the gaggle of galls who were accompanying us. I wind up in Leon’s old shoes, which I deem an honour as he explains that they’ve been up so many mountains in Hokkaido as to likely have grown a sympathetic kind of EzoGPS.

Mere meters in, we hit our first hill, and you’d wonder if Leon, Kiwi guide and fearless leader, might now be testing us. That first mountain takes the measure of the only other guy in the group and finds him wanting. Just over the hill, we part company and he takes one of the last roads out back into town.

And then it’s just me and Ken and Leon and the Ladies. At a fairly nice lookout, indigo interesting clouds scuttle far out over the Sea of Japan, and from that cliff-top vantage point Ken damns us all by proclaiming, in jest, that it looks like a storm’s coming on.

Like the storm caller, he brings it down around us. We aren’t done another kilometer, taking in the last of the sun and blue on a completely unspoiled field of white that Leon saved for us special so we could do our own thing and blaze our own trails, when the grey comes in and the first of the flakes start falling in the woods beyond, as if beardy dustings down from the trees. We’re zipping our zips and we’re hooding our heads and we’re grabbing for gloves as the sun goes out and the cold comes in.

Thicker and thicker the white, and the wood is disappearing more and more. We break the last of the trees into another of those perfect fields, but in the ever steadier snow it stands like negative space, and anyone who isn’t a few steps in front of you gets negated in it.

Coming up on another of the many shrines we keep passing on the cliffs, in the woods, the wind kicks up for the first time, and the methodical vertical dumping starts to transform into an inconsistent, moving, almost-living thing. Amidst the gales of it, Leon has us hold up in the lee of the shrine, seeking some shelter as we food and we water. We’re more than an hour out from lunch, he advises, and the storm is here to stay.

And from that gaggle of ladies—from balmy States and British Isles—not a peep. Almost all of them are alien to such blustery abuses, and there’s not a modicum of dissent among them, not a suggestion of retreat. “On” they say in silence, and on we go: deeper into the woods and higher up the mountain.

Somewhere between tree and slope, the storm breaks, but seemingly only long enough for Ken to remark on it and, in so doing, call it all back down around us. Leon yields lead to Heather and I, and we take turns fighting the bluster to blaze our trail, sticking to breaks in the trees in this high place where Leon’s trail-cutting tracks from Tuesday have been obliterated utterly in the gusts and storms that have lashed in off the Sea of Japan.

The storm eventually causes Heather and I to yield, and Leon strikes out ahead again, making the last icy approach on our lunch site at the mountain’s summit. Only 400 meters of elevation, but that seems enough to have thrust us up into the clouds, where gusts of snow-studded wind roil with the form and rancor of lions.

Two o’clock, and we hunker in behind the base of a transmitter tower for lunch, Rambo Leon fashioning us a table and chairs out of the very snow itself before producing pots, stoves, water, cups, bowls, hashi, and all the ingredients for a fine nabe from his monstrous backpack. He serves us tea and hot chocolate with a civility unexpected at the heart of a raging blizzard, and we are all forced to master chopsticking with gloves on (no easy thing).

By the time we’re done and up and ready to go back out into it, our gear has almost vanished under all that’s fallen during our short break.

From the peak, we head down the far side of the mountain, through an open area where the storm blows strongest of all. The tone of it is set by Leon, who tells us to bunch up and to follow only when he waves us on. He ventures off into it, and he’s almost completely vanished in the white before he waves us to continue on: half walking and half sliding down the slope, the 80km/h gale robbing us of what little form we may have managed to glean over the course of the long day.

The hurricane gusts tear at our jackets and mitts and scarves, finding any crack where they can gain purchase, forcing in the white. Our every outer surface grows thick and white until we start to disappear into negative-space in the falling light. We pull our hats down low and our scarves up high against the driving snow, our small exposed eyeslits reminiscent of inuit explorer goggles.

And, somewhere between trees caked in ice and the growing drifts on our hats and shoulders and bags, we become one with the driven snow.

Test for Echo

I’ve been trying a lot of things over here in J-Pan, and getting into a lot of things I had absolutely no interest in before: things like biking and snowboarding and mountain climbing. These days I regularly get completely naked in front of good friends and complete strangers, sitting around in a tub with them and not giving it a second thought. That’s not the end of it, either. These initial forays have got me mulling over things like surfing and skydiving and white water rafting. It’s getting to the point where pretty much every time Mark asks me about trying something crazy, my default answer is “yeah! We should do that!”, and the truly crazy thing is I actually mean it.

Sometimes I wonder what it is that's driving me to try these new things in Hokkaido: to try to pick up these new hobbies or sports. Me, the guy who hadn't seriously ridden a bike in over ten years goes out and commits to a $700 road bike at the chilly end of October. And, before the snow flies, I ride that bike like the devil: deep into the Furubira valley and up the mountain towards Kamoenai. As evening temperatures dip, I'm layering long johns and tshirts and sweaters so that I can strike out at night, riding up the dark valley with only the full moon and my meager handle bar light to guide me. And it's cold and it's exhausting and it's beautiful.

In January, as the snow was piling up, I finally followed up on my promise to myself to pick up snowboarding here in Hokkaido. With skiing as my only experience to go on, I asked Mark to book us in for three days on the hills of Niseko. I resigned myself to take lessons and learn from Mark and not leave that mountain until I could ride a board. It kicked the crap out of my body (so much so that I bowed out on the third day and returned my gear—so much so that I wound up having to take my first sick day at work to recover from the aches and the pains and the chills of two solid days of falling on my ass), but I loved it, and there were moments when I would shift smoothly from backside to frontside—heelside to toeside—in an action mere fractions from a loss of control, and in those moments I felt agency; and I felt unity with the mountain and the scene spreading out below in a way I don't think I'd ever done on skis. With two days on the board I already loved it more than I had my many years on two planks.

And now, in a fit of adventurous madness that is becoming all-to-familiar over here in Japan, I am buying snowboard jackets and boots and old boards with old bindings. I'm throwing myself into it with the same hope and hair's breadth of control that I throw myself into my turns.

But what is it?

The adventurous madness?

Where does it come from? Why does it grip me here? What feeds it?

The unimaginative might brand it a "quarter life crisis," but I would tell you that attaching such a cliché to it curtails your ability to better understand it—to learn more from it. To give it that overused name is to avow to understand it, through and through, and I don't believe that we do.

I think these so-called X-life crises are cries for creation, or re-creation. They come from the realization, whether overt or subconscious, that your life has begun to go on without you. The crises are cries for Agency, as we notice that our day-to-day has shifted to auto-pilot: that all of those smart life choices we've made over the years have formed up as soundly as we'd hoped into this vast supporting structure in our lives that would just keep on running if we just sat back and followed along its predetermined path. The structure isn't a prison or a gallows or an oppressive regime. Whether we admit it or not, we choose this auto-pilot course as we build it up one good decision at a time.

However the realization of this structure in our lives, and the way that its self-sustaining processes almost make our decisions for us, can be shocking. It's from this shock that the crises come.

As individuals find themselves tangled up in such an automated framework, they crave to wrestle back control. They feel they must regain Agency in their lives. In the clichéd examples, they take this Agency by buying sports cars or motorcycles: they regain a sense of control by making decisions uncharacteristic of them—decisions that the automatic structures they've developed could never precipitate.

Unfortunately, it would seem that our society only really perceives the material in these matters: we see the sports cars and the motorcycles, but we only scratch the surface of the true motivations behind them. We label the whole situation an X-Life Crisis, and in so doing we pretend to have a firm grasp of the event. In labeling it, we profess to understand it, and we forget it in our drawer of loose-ends-securely-tied.

So, in the snowboards and the bikes of my adventures here in Japan, you might tell me I've had myself a little quarter-life crisis. You might tell me that this is a phase: that this, too, shall pass.

But, me, I'd tell you that you’re wrong: that what I'd experienced here is a phenomenal opportunity.

In Canada before I came, as well as during my first months in Japan, I would wish on stars for something meaningful to come of Japan: for something to take home from here, whether it be a Love or a Revelation.

Now I wonder if I've already received what I'd hoped for, and I'm thinking it's the fertile gift of rebirth.

Highfaluting, grandiose, and sweeping, yes, but, to ground it a bit, I find myself in an alien country with only the meagerest of responsibilities tying me to home, and I have been given world enough and time to recreate myself in any way I so choose. I have been given license to do whatever it is I feel, for there is no one here who has known me long enough to tell me such a course would be uncharacteristic of me.

Most important of all, I think I’ve managed to free myself from a control more oppressive than peer pressure or group consensus. I’ve managed to break down part of my own expectations for myself: my own internal concept of what is and isn’t characteristic of me.

And so has Japanimated Jones been born into the flesh of what once was me. He eats less and writes more. He's training to be a samurai with ceremonial armour and shinais. In the summer, he rides bikes, and in the winter, he rides boards. On weekday evenings he convenes with the stars and the moon in an utterly silent town, and on the weekends he sets off on wild adventures with his fellow foreigners. He's growing hobbies where before he only had interests. The change isn't perfect and all-consuming. There are still the pitfalls of procrastination and good intention, but we're working on that.

It’s lead me to think that transformations like this are made easier by geographic distance from the who and what you used to be. I have a friend who lost her job in Toronto, and took the whole thing as an opportunity to relocate out west. At that distance from home and what she was, she found the possibility to create a new is for herself. Now when I visit her, I sometimes don’t recognize her new present when I compare it to the past I remember. She’s got all the care and the love she ever did, but she’s existing in new places now, with new interests and new opportunities, and she seems to glow as a result of them.

These shifts in perspective, inspired by shifts in setting, cast our lives in new light. What is important remains, while what is superfluous falls away. And in that falling away, we are treated to openings for the new and the different: time to pursue the things you said you always wanted to but never did.

And I recognize that not everyone can just up and relocate for a bit for that necessary shift in perspective. I’m just saying that I’ve seen first hand what such a shift can do, and, in the end, I feel like I have been given a gift in the shift, along with the money and the time to seize the opportunities that precipitate from it.

Finally, because this last realization precipitated from all of this, but I couldn’t find a clever place to slot it in, I’ll leave it as the final word on this rambling tangent:

In Canada, I used to think myself a rather lucky person.

In Japan, I have fully realized that I live a charmed life.

Thanks to all of you who make it so.

Six

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.