Sayonara #6

Tuesday was hot, really hot. It was like the Japanese summer had hit with a true vengeance. None of these sissy 34-35 degree days any more. Time to crash through the 40 degree barrier.

Yuka and I had been talking about going to Kurashiki since we had been to Hiroshima, over a year before. The town where she grew up, it lies just over the bridge next to Okayama. Many years ago it was the central rice store for Japan, and the traditional architecture has been preserved and attracts phenomenal amounts of tourist, especially during Obon!





The historical quarter is centred around Kurashiki Gawa (river) which was used for transportation of the rice. Now the area is littered with restaurants and arts and crafts shop. We found a shop devoted entirely to pickles, which have become one of my favourite Japanese foods, and another with a zillion different types of beans.


I bought some souvenirs for my family and soon to be new boss, but not giving any hints away here. Yuka wanted to buy some murasuzume for her mum, and managed to find a shop where they teach you how to make it. Murasuzume is one of Kurashiki's speciality sweets, sweet bean paste folded inside a pancake style mixture.

The final product looks like a less plastic version of this:


All this food was making us hungry and we were already exhausted from the heat so we found the busiest place in Kurashiki to have lunch. They made a version of udon, local to the region, that is thicker than the Sanuki variety, and although I was really dubious about eating udon outside Kagawa, it was actually really good.

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I rocked up to my last ever karate training early for once and on the verge of tears. However I wasn't given much time to be sentimental as we skipped normal warmups and went straight into hard core combination practice up and down the dojo, the sweat streaming off everyone before we had even started. The dojo was helping by doing a good impression of a wet steam room.

Then I realised the reason for my new gloves. As a goodbye ritual I had to fight everyone in the dojo, from the youngest little kid to Kunikata Sensei himself. Thank the Dojo Kami it was Obon and people were remarkably scarce. It started off really fun, messing around with the little kids. But the heat was killer and before I had finished off three of them the heat had me, my dogi was drenched and my face was so red it was almost green.

About half way through the ordeal it did go green for a while, see if you can spot the photo, and I had to go outside and get some fresh air to avoid throwing up. Then Irikura Sensei aimed a well executed kick at my head, I didn't get my defences up in time, somehow he didn't pull it back and I went crashing to the floor with a ring of birds circling my brain that had ended up on the other side of the room.

I ended up fighting 15 people on one of the hottest nights of the year. I kept joking that was the same test I would have to do to get my ni kyu, my brown belt which is the last before a black belt, known in Japan as shodan. However, whilst everyone laughed and appreciated my humour and my effort, no new obi was forthcoming. Instead they tried to make me promise to come back and get it.




Kunikata was taking photos all night and at the end of the evening burnt them all onto a CD for me. It was really really hard to leave and for the first time I cried. I was catching the shinkansen up to Okazaki the next day and my last night was unbelievably cool and sad at the same time.

Thank you so much everyone.

Sayonara #5

Monday was Saying Goodbye to Country day. In a whirlwind week of lunches, coffees and packing, this was my down time when I truly realised I was leaving. I'd purposefully left the whole day free and mid morning headed off down route 32 towards Tokushima and my favourite hang, Iya Valley. Yoshino River runs through Tokumaisha and is famed throughout Japan for its lusciously clear turquoise waters. I stopped off for some traditioanl Iya Valley soba noodles and then hung a left over the blue bridge and down the old route 32 towards my favourite swim spot. This is where I used to come to cleanse myself of "city" grime and stress before heading up to Chiiori when I was volunteering up there most weekends.

It was a beautiful hot summer day. Perfect for going up into the coolness of the mountains and frolicking in a fresh water river. As if the yama-kami knew I was coming they had filtered the river especially for me and it was clearer that I'd ever seen it. In the midst of a severe drought in Shikoku it was also a lot lower than usual. The temperature was perfect and I spent almost a couple of hours swimming, sitting on rocks in the midddle of the river, drying off, jumping in again and playing in the rapids further up. Eventually a sand fly came and reminded me I had other places to say goodbye to and no matter how far underwater I swam it persistently bugged me to get a move on. I dried off in the sun on a rock, said thank you to the river kami, and feeling at peace with the world headed on down the road.

The rest of the day turned into a road trip of my favourite places and routes. The old route 32 winds along one of the subsidiaries of Yoshino Gawa, barely more than one lane for much of the time with hair-raising blind hairpin bends and steep drop offs down the cliffs. Even though it takes all concentration to stay on the road and you don't really get much time to check out and appreciate the view, its one of my favourite roads to drive on ever.


I headed out to Higiashi Iya, past the road that leads up to Chiiori, and up towards Tsurugi San, the second highest mountain in Shikoku, which I am ashamed to say, I have never climbed.

From Tsurugi I headed back home, down through a different section of Tokushima with its own unique charms and vistas. When I finally got home I was in a state of melancholic contentment. when i first came to Shikoku i said I wanted to try and get to know one region of Japan well, rather than see as much of possible of the country, and these mountains have been one of the prime instigators of my love for this island. Thank you.

Sayonara #4

Sunday was busy, crazy and beautiful. I woke up reasonably early for once and went to say goodbye to Akate Sensei and Akate Sensei, my shodo senseis who have tried hard to transform my dodgy unbalanced squiggles into something approaching a decent attempt at representing the Japanese character set. Sometimes my blodgy lines even made pretences at art. I rushed back to have lunch with my landlords, and I might add, the best landlords I have EVER had the pleasure of doing business with. It’s a pretty rare and top be treasured circumstance when you become friends with the people you pay money too. We went over to the local wood fired pizza place where they have made a pretty good attempt at reconciling the western and Japanese palates for western food. I think the giant burger monopolies are one of the only other establishments to have imported a cuisine and not completely bastardised it. Not that Asian food in the west is any less guilty of masquerade! However we all emerged from the restaurant fully deffuts and barely able to walk as we entered the sun fired oven that is Japan in August. Which was lucky because then I had to go over to Yukas and get my hair cut for the last time.

In the evening I went out with the senseis from karate; it was possibly the most fun night out I've had in Japan. We met up around eightish, and spent the next hour driving around Marugame looking for an izakaya that wasn't full, because it was Obon and everyone who had come home for the weekend had chosen this particular evening to go out drinking with their mates. Obon is a shinto festival where it is practically obligatory to go back to your "born house" where you meet up with you family and pray at the shrines of your ancestors. This its also a really good opportunity to catch up with all the school friends you haven't seen since you all moved off to different big smokes.


Eventually we found somewhere and spent the next few hours doing some serious eating and drinking. It never fails me how expansive Japansese people become in an izakaya and an normal going out for dinner always turns into a mini banquet. An izakaya is like a cross between and pub and a restaurant. At the former you go to eat, and maybe have a glass of wine or beer on the side and at a latter you go to drink and perhaps eat anything from a shared bowl of chips to a full gourmet meal on the side. but its still a pub, a place for drinking. At an izakaya both seem to have equal priority, and anyone and everyone orders what they feel like, when they feel like it. In some places like this one, you have your own little room with shodo paper doors and a bell on the table to summon an attentive waiter.

At others, tables are crammed on top of each other and service is achieved with a very loud "sumimasen" yelled at the number of employees running around frantically. Ironically, the "sumimasen", which literally means excuse me, becomes more and more belligerent sounding at the night wears on. Even more amazing is how the seemingly endless array of dishes that pours through the door generally gets finished.

As a goodbye present, the guys had got me a pair of cool leather gloves for fighting. And I foolishly wanted to try them out at my last training session. Stay tuned.

I already miss these people sooooo much. Thanks for everything guys.

clockwise from back left: Irikura, me, Kunikata, Hiro, Yumi, Kunishige.

Sayonara #3

KONPIRA SAN

Sat morning I went over to Sugimoto San's house to give him his last private Japanese lesson. I have been teaching him for well over a year and in that time, due to his hard work and diligence, it has been a pleasure to watch his English, especially his conversational ability, bloom. At the beginning I was trying to teach him using my very broken Japanese and conversations required heavy simultaneous use of both our electronic dictionaries. In recent months he has been conducting business via fax with a contact in China using their only common language, English.

After class they took me over to Konpira San so I could ask the Gods for their blessing in person. Sugimoto San is a marine engineer, so it was a fitting location as we share a love of boats and the sea. Unfortunately, it was the first real scorcher of the summer and we managed to arrive in the hottest part of the day. His wife, well into her first pregnancy, went off for a relaxed coffee whilst we battled the 785 very steep steps to the top. I paid my respects to the Kami Sama and we headed back down for some of the best udon I have ever had in a beautiful old wooden building. After checking out their favourite "private" beach in Nio, which happened to be packed, we headed back, thoroughly exhausted, for shaved ice, an unsung Japanese speciality.

Sayonara #2

I spent Thursday and Friday morning packing up stuff maniacally (now there's a word I haven't used in quite a while) and followed Geoff's advice (my soon to be skipper) "if in doubt, chuck it out" but it was still so hard. I had been living in this apartment for two years, almost to the day, the longest time I have spent in one abode for a very long time. Naturally there was a huge accumulation of stuff.

Kumiko San, Yukari San, Reiko San and Chiu San all came over shortly before lunchtime to help out. And they were all fortunate enough [sic] to see me at my most relaxed. The biggest dramas of the day were trying to sell my stuff, especially my fridge, to second hand stores, and figure out how to ship my bike. It turns out, that since buying my fridge second hand, new laws have been enacted in Japan which means that second hand stores can only legally buy stuff with a specific serial number, which my fridge didn't have. At one stage it looked like I was going to have to PAY the equivalent of $70 for the privilege of recycling it. At that point enough was enough and I decided it was lunchtime. Stress levels were rising at the same rate my blood sugar level was dropping and I needed to get out of the house.

After lunch we investigated shipping my bike up to Okazaki. I went over to the bike shop where I had bought my bike, and where the day before they had promised to set aside a bike box for me. But the shop was firmly closed. Aargh. Luckily I went back later and they had me a box, and good news, it was somewhat wider than your normal bike box. A sure way to reduce me to tears is to give me a box and bike to put in it. Its an engineering impossibility! Then I had to move it. In Japan they have this really neat courier service called hakyubin, where companies will transport stuff around the country for comparatively minimal rates. But again, large boxes seemed to be exempt from this and the first few quotes I got were around the $80 mark. If I was going to ship it down to the airport and bring it home, I thought it would probably cost a similar amount and the bike wasn't really worth that much. Finally we found out (or my excellent friends did) that if I took my bike to the main depot in the area they would ship it for about $30. Even better the box was so big I managed to stuff a bunch of other stuff into it as well!

They all divvied up my stuff and we ran a mock auction for some of the nicer furniture I had picked up and my plants. Reiko fell in love with my favourite cactus and decided to call it "green." My cool little succulent that has an amazing purple stem like flower with other little flowers that branched of it we called Yukari, which means "purple" in Japanese. They were all on strict instructions to love my plants with extreme care and attention!

Meanwhile Chiyu talked to the guy who runs the community centre and they were quite happy to take my fridge off my hands. They even arranged to come and pick it up the next day. Yattah!
Then followed final goodbyes with these beautiful students who had become good friends and I managed not to cry.

Sayonara #1

Somewhat late in its update, I feel compelled to document my last week or so in Kagawa, and the beauty and angst over so many goodbyes.

I finished classes late in July amidst dinners and lunches and last classes with all my students, may of whom have become amazing friends in the past year or two. There is a shrine in Kotohira, 20 minutes from where I live, called Konpira San. It is famed for being a potent of good luck for seafaring journeys and sailors and fisherman from all over Japan come to ask for blessing before embarking upon the ocean. Not one, but two of my classes went to the effort of buying me good luck charms for my upcoming transoceanic journey. As one class happily informed me, there is a custom that once one has returned safely from the sea, it is proper to return to the shrine to pay respects and thanks to the Gods. Thus ensuring my obligation to return to Kagawa at some stage!

After finishing classes I was contractually obliged to report to work for the next two weeks until I could take up the rest of my holiday time and leave on the 8th August. At the same time, we had a wave of exchange students coming and going and everyone in the office, except for me was frantically busy and continually exhausted. Unable to help I sat going slightly nuts, studying Japanese and surfing the internet. On my last day, because of the officiousness of Japanese bureaucracy, I had to go in for two hours, but ironically no one was around!

However I had a lunch and art gallery date with my excellent friend Yukari, and we trotted off together to see the amazing new exhibit at Marugame Genichiro Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art where they had an exhibition showing by Ernesto Neto, Brazilian installation artist extraordinaire.

He makes room like spaces using a variety of fabrics, mainly cotton and nylon using mainly white with splashes of colour. Unlike so much art where one is expected to appreciate from afar his works are sensual pieces that invite the viewer to play and become supremely involved. For someone just released from the bondage of office incarceration it was a playground for big kids. Huge beanbags filled with plastic balls like one finds in ikea playrooms for kids, beanbag dresses you can try on, tunnels filled with strange nylon tubes stretching from floor to a low ceiling you had to stoop under. Rarely one was also allowed to take photographs, and after playing for a while Yukari ran downstairs to grab her cellphone, whereupon we played some more taking stupendously silly photography. Here are some of the prints she later gave me:





This was definitely the coolest exhibition I have EVER seen.

http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/neto.html
http://www.bombsite.com/neto/neto.html
http://web.infoweb.ne.jp/MIMOCA/index_e.html

Decompression sickness

I think Huxley would understand, except he had substances to mess with his brain. I feel like I’m the white rabbit being dragged backwards through the hole and everything is happening in reverse. I’ve never been attached to a place like this before and had to leave. And I’ve been thinking way too much, and drinking some too much, which is all compounding the problem.

Perry may have forced his way in, in 1853 but to a large extent the Japanese still follow a course of self enforced seclusion. Its not that they don’t like the rest of the world, they’re just scared of it. Imagine never breaking free of an over protective mother and then growing up to realise that the whole society around you is that mother. Except its all you ever know, so there’s nothing weird about it.

After my own self enforced seclusion from the world; time to heal and become me again without outside interference, I found myself plunged into limbo about three weeks ago when all my classes abruptly stopped for the summer vacation, but I still had thirteen days to serve and was thus incarcerated in the office with absolutely nothing to do. Bad news from home served to further dampen my spirits and heighten my frustration, but after the first couple of days of throwing TVs and chairs out of the window I decided that it would be much more profitable to put the time and the internet, printer and photocopy access to good use.

First priority was, of course, Japanese study, but I started reading to break up the tedium of grammar exercises. I’ve been listening to some of the lectures from the new iTunes U section, and focussing on political science, with respect to globalisation and especially america-middle east foreign policy. This has led to downloading papers from weighty think tanks and trying to get my head around the basics of what some of the smarter people in the world are discussing in regard to fixing up the world's current mess. And I’ve been thinking too much. After being wrapped up in this cosy bubble for so long, with warm hearted Japanese to hang with and warm fuzzy forests to play and hang in, I’ve just jumped into an icy cold shower of global reality.

I think what is most taxing at the moment is that I've lost all grasp on perspective. As I come out of the Japanese bubble, I know the world isn't nearly as scary as my current peers would have themselves believe, but I seem to have acquired this superman syndrome whereby I'm undefeatable. My old fear of pain has shrunk considerably since being beaten up regularly for fun and the only thing left to be really scared of is my brain. The irony being that this self same bravado may be self fulfilling as it leads me into a tricky corner!

At the same time I’m saying goodbye to a whole host of beautiful people whilst approaching one of the biggest cross roads of my life. I can do anything I want from here on in and that’s simultaneously liberating and frightening. Sailing, university, film school, hiding under a doona indefinitely are some of the possibilities that have been flickering across my consciousness more often than most and I've become the proverbial kid in the candy store. This emotional tsunami is creating havoc with my zen.

Thus confusion is the word of the week, with greater confusion being the most likely modus operandi for the next few weeks as i submerge myself into full time Japanese study from Thursday onwards.

Please write and lend me some perspective. Will return it soon I promise.

Naoshima II

The last weekend in July, just before leaving Kagawa I went back to Naoshima, once more with Yukari San, with Chiyu San and Kumiko San too. We all met at Nio Marina where Chiyu San's husband and some of his fishing friends took us over to the island by high speed fishing boat. It was to take about 2 hours to get there and Chiyu had made some onegiri (Japanese rice balls) for lunch which we ate under the Seto Ohashi (bridge). The guys threw some lines out and after catching a case of seasickness Yukari joined in too. After we started the engines up again Kumiko caught Yukari's seasickness and spent the rest of the trip trying to put a brave face on it but was clearly relieved as we approached the island.

Kumiko and Yukari

Kumiko

First off we went to Chichu Art Museum. It was Chiyu San and Kumiko San's first visit to Naoshima, and this is definately the must see. The "Monet Garden" that they were fixing up when Yukari, Hisako San and I went there, was now in its full summer glory and it truly was a living piece of art that conveyed the sense of Monet's paintings surprisingly well.

I wanted to leave the Monet for last, because it had impressed me so much. After seeing it, the others wanted to line up again to see the James Turrel piece, a very cool work that relies and the shock of having your preception fooled. This time I hadn't enjoyed it nearly so much as six months earlier so I sat quite happily on the white marble cubed tiles in the middle of the underground Monet room lit by natural light and feasted on the colours which just got more amazing and intricate the longer I looked at the main piece.

Of course, being an art gallery, photos aren't allowed, but Yukari hapenned to have her keitei on her and took an illegal photo of one of the coolest sections of Tadao Ando's amazing concrete space that the shop doesn't have a postcard of. Some nice person has also uploaded the postcards that you can buy in the shop so click here for pictures of the art work.

We headed off to Benesse House, the gallery another creation of Tadao Ando, so it was fitting that I was with the Ando twins: Chiyu and Kumiko. Ironically, Hisako San, who came with Yukari and I last year, is also an Ando, one of the more common names in Japan after Tanaka! I don't think I actually know any Suzuki's. Benesse House has some nice pieces, but if you find yourself on Naoshima one day, and limited for time, go the Standard Project, which I saw last time and Chichu Museam. I think we were also all getting quite tired and hungry so we headed off to find a cute little cafe and say goodbye to Kumiko who was catching the last ferry back so as to be able to go to work the next day. Whilst eating dinner an amazing storm crossed the island and it suddenly belted down with torrential rain. This was the last of the rainy season before the killer heat set in for the next six weeks or so: Japan is just starting to cool off as I write this, early Sept. Whilst waiting for the bus, truly ear splitting cracks of thunder sundered the sky directly over our heads and while I laughed maniacally and danced in the rain and the green hues, one of my friends cowered in the doorway screaming everytime the storm whipped the sound waves.


After waving Kumiko, we went off to our Minshuku to find the power down, which was somewhat exciting. A little one room hut with tatami flooring and attached bathroom, the view made up for the slight shabbiness and the rock hard Japanese pillow filled with little round beads. As we draink beer, ploughed through mounds of nuts and chocolate and told stories a terrible screeching, not unlike a possum, announced itself outside, whereby I got myself a first time real look at the fabled Tanuki. About the same size as a fox, an odd little creature with mythically large balls that the Japanese translate into English as racoon dog. One of Studio Ghibli's early films is called Pom Poko and is an interesting ecological critique of the economic boom and subsequent development in Japan. But I divert.

We awaok far to early the next morning so that Yukari and I could get to work by the afternoon. Whilst waiting for the ferry we took photos of the famous red pumpkin, icon of Naoshima and I introduced my new friend Schnapps, star of my next blog, to the camera.

Yukari and Chiyu