North Sea Road: The Houses of Spiders

I've started writing something that may or may not wind up being something like a book, based on a lot of the stuff that shows up here, over on Wattpad.

Here's the opening chapter of the work, which is a bit whimsical and was very much inspired by a random caption on this photo.

Modern Myths: Gaijin

Only just realized that, though I wrote this up for the Hokkaido Polestar E-newsletter, I never actually posted it here, so here you are:

There is a race of super humans walking among the ordinary rank and file of Japanese Society.

They are The Gaijin: creatures from a distant world, brought to Japan by shadowy government organizations so that the Japanese people could learn from them. In a crowded subway car, they stand apart, high above all those around them. The Japanese are at once fascinated and terrified by the other worldly beauty of these fey creatures. By day, these creatures patronize Japanese schools; instilling wonder in Japanese children with their odd customs and tales of their distant homelands. By night, the Gaijin congregate with one another, observing their strange rites and conspiring in their oddest of languages:

English.

Like the last sons and daughters of krypton, these individuals who had been unimportant nobodies in their homelands took on unimaginable abilities in the light of Japan’s red sun. Their blonde hair turned golden, and their eyes of blue and green shone like sapphire and jade. They would tower and sway over the Japanese like giants, and their booming voices would echo across crowded rooms. Men dreamed of being like them, and women of being with them.

One is hard pressed to find a soul in Japan who has not heard tales of the Gaijin Smash: the glowing foreigner’s ability to plow through layers of Japanese bureaucracy or social courtesy with just as much ease as their giant bodies plow through the wedged-in masses on the Tokyo subway. There is the Gaijin Force Bubble: an impenetrable field that surrounds the giants at all times, making it impossible for the Nihonjin to sit beside them on crowded buses and causing criticism to slide off them in a haze of misunderstanding. There is the Gaijin Stare: the ability of their wide, rainbow eyes to surprise and terrify the Japanese with a glance. And, of course, many a tabe/nomihoudai restaurant has gone out of business in the face of the Gaijin Hunger: a unbridled gastronomical need for booze and meat that has been known to drink whole breweries dry while feasting on the livestock of entire prefectures.

But it will not always be so for the lofty Gaijin. As they begin to age and acclimatize themselves to the Land of the Rising Sun, they will start to whither and fade. The novelty that used to glow around them like a halo will grow dim with normalcy as ever newer and more exotic waves of strapping young aliens land on these shores, distracting the locals from those foreigners who have already settled in their midst. Eventually like broken and forgotten gods, they will pull up to the counters at Gaijin bars, joining in the litany of tales from their grey and haggard brothers about the golden days, when the Japanese still believed them capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound. From their slumped positions on their high stools, they will cast baleful glares at their younger, harder, taller, blonder replacements, who now catch all the stares.

POTW: Hamamasu

(a contribution to Rebecca's on-going Photo of The Week Facebook group...while also being a photo of Things Japanese)


This past week was supposed to be HEC camp; otherwise known as the Hokkaido English Challenge Camp; otherwise known as one of the things I had most been looking forward to for the past few months (or had I been looking forward to it ever since I came to Japan two years ago and it was mentioned in Hokkaido orientation?). HEC camp brings together first grade students from junior high and high school for a 100% English experience at a camp run entirely by us ALTs. What's more, these are the kids who did the best in our ALT-organized English challenge, so all I've heard is how much of a riot they are as they are not afraid of English. 


Last year's camp had sounded like a blast, but I had missed it as I'd been in Canada. Come hell or high water, I was determined to make it to camp this year...that was until a freaking BEAR made it to camp before us, on the very day that we were all meant to ship out (last Friday). Hairy bastard got the camp site closed for a week, and camp got cancelled because, for all that Mark and Heather tried, they could find no other place to host it. 


But, in a hero move meant to salvage something of the weekend, June threw together plans for a bunch of us to go camping in Hamamasu, along the sea of Japan coast north of Sapporo.  That's the long story for where this photo comes from.

I feel like trying to take credit for sunset shots is a bit of a dick move. So long as your camera is half-decent, you're only making a best attempt at capturing an event that is entirely the responsibility of the earth, sun, etc. Basically, I feel like it's pretty hard to take a terrible picture of a sunset.

Thus, here's my cop-out for this week: put forward more because it was a particularly glorious sunset rather than because I did anything particularly exceptional other than pointing my camera at it. 

All in the System

(in which a lot of photographic bullshit goes down--the kind of stuff that won't be of much interest to anyone who does not drool over lenses. Consider yourself warned.)

Back at the beginning of June, the Nikon D60 that had been a gift from my Dad before departing for Japan--the camera that had served me loyally for pretty much two years exactly--died on me.

POTW: Framed

Becca has got me onto a Facebook initiative she's started. It's a group she made with photographer friends to encourage them to post their photos somewhere other can see them. There are no rules or categories: just the idea that you should post a photo a week: one that you think is the best you've done. I have further limited myself to chose a photo I actually took that week. As I've been neglecting the blog of late, I thought it might be the kind of thing I should post up here.


This week, it was a two-way tie between the photos below, each of which were taken in Sapporo this past weekend as I was hanging out with Perry, Lindsay, Max, Mark, and various other folk like Nick Small. 


Then, out of nowhere, I realized that neither of them compared to the sexy focus of the following picture of Perry seated in the window of Kyosuke's Hookah Bar, located on the second floor of a restaurant, right where Tanuki Koji 6 turns into Tanuki Koji 7 in downtown Sapporo.

POTW: Spiderwebs

Becca has got me onto a Facebook initiative she's started. It's a group she made with photographer friends to encourage them to post their photos somewhere other can see them. There are no rules or categories: just the idea that you should post a photo a week: one that you think is the best you've done. I have further limited myself to chose a photo I actually took that week. As I've been neglecting the blog of late, I thought it might be the kind of thing I should post up here.

Here's my first week, taken just after I got home from the Furubira International Exchange Association's Sobetsukai (farewell party) held in my honour. I was contending with a misty sort of rain and annoying little biting insects, but I managed to shoot the following hand-held. The web was on one of the metal railings that encircle the park outside my front door. These railings seem to be a popular hang-out joint for spiders.

Leftovers: Back to Rishiri

It's been a dog's age...again, but I haven't exactly been idle. Two weekends back, Mark Mowbray, Mark Rostrup, Lindsay, and I returned to Rishiri, determined to finally summit the mountain we first attempted to climb in our first September here. It was tough going, but we made it, and there's more of a story to it, but for the sake of expedience, I give you the first cut of our Rishiri Adventure, accompanied by the wonderful Johnny Flynn from his album A Larum:

Sam's Boyfriend Asahidake

Alright. I retconned this into my post about Asahidake after the fact, but the video is so fine and Sam did such a good job that I need to give this thing a post of its own. This is shot on the highest mountain in Hokkaido, and one of the finest mountains I've boarded on in my time here. This is one of the reasons I stayed in Japan for two years and why I'm fortunate that I get to leave this place in the summer. Were I to have to terminate my contract in the deep, fluffy, white of February, I'm not sure I'd have the strength. To be able to leave this place, I've had to ready myself for the possibility that snowboarding will never be this fantastic in any other part of the world.

Oh, and Sam's the one in the blue pants, green pack, and white jacket.