Goodbye Okayama

This is going to be the last entry here. I’ve returned to the UK now and am settling back into British life. But I wanted to properly close off this record of my time in Japan.

I sometimes get asked what made me decide to drop everything and move to Japan for a year. It’s a question that I find quite difficult to answer convincingly. In truth, the kernel comes from a very young age when I loved videogames almost as much as I love music now. I would read all the magazines, buy games the week they came out and generally sat in front of my Nintendo for as long a period as I could get away with. At that time, Japan was THE place for anything to do with computing and video games. Nowadays, changes within gaming have meant that the US is very much on a par with Japan when it comes to game development but at the time, Tokyo was to a videogamer, what Detroit must have been to a fan of Motown. My burgeoning obsession was boosted by a series of articles in gaming magazines and a particularly mindblowing episode of the TV programme Bad Influence in which the beautiful Violet visited early-90s Tokyo.

As I got older, I played games much less. But at the same time, Japanese culture remained trendy, alien and rather baffling in many ways. Some Japanese people have a total misconception of why people like myself come to their country. They think their country is famous around the world for its temples, tourist attractions and food. Whilst that’s true to some extent, it’s the shallow, disposable kerrazee Japan that attracts a large number of tourists. I have to admit that this was true in my case. The beautiful nature, constantly surprising culture and friendly people were not really relevant to my choice of Japan as a place to live.

Another reason why I chose to visit Japan was that I needed a break from my UK routine. I had always wanted to take a gap year but for various stupid reasons had never done so. Even having done my year abroad now, I still wish I had taken some time after university to travel or do something similar. It’s baffling as to why I didn’t do this, especially as I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life around that time.

So I made it. I got on the JET programme. At the time, getting on the programme seemed like a great achievement, given the volume of people who are rejected. But in retrospect, as someone who had already been in the workplace for a few years and knew therefore, how to approach job applications with a professional attitude, it should never have been that difficult. Nonetheless, I can still remember the thrill when I got accepted and got given a year’s leave from my job in the UK.

That’s another thing. I was tremendously lucky at being allowed to leave my UK job for a year. It would have been tough to return to the UK without a job to go back to. If I had quit my job, I think I would definitely have wanted to stay longer in Japan. As things turned out, family reasons mean that a second year would never have been viable so it all worked out nicely. But I could happily have stuck around longer than I did.

It was tough clearing out my apartment. I was very aware that my predecessor, whilst generally awesome, had left a lot of junk behind that I’d subsequently had to dispose of. At the time I’d been annoyed but when I came to pack myself, I suddenly became aware of how incredibly hard it is to dispose of anything in Japan. You can’t just take stuff to the dump-you have to plan weeks beforehand so as to put your trash out at the right time for the refuse collectors to pick it up.

I insisted on arranging my own travel to the station. I like to be self-sufficient and I hated the idea of being seen off at the station. In some ways I’d come to doubt the sincerity of the kindness that some colleagues had shown towards me. I appreciated their generosity, was incredibly grateful for the effort they’d made but I never really knew what they thought of me. It was so rare to be able to have a frank, open conversation with work colleagues that I never really knew where I stood.  One part of Japanese culture that I struggled with is the compartmentalising of certain subjects and issues. I like to be able to talk about anything with my friends, without it making them uncomfortable. But that just isn’t the Japanese way. I could never adapt to the idea that giving opinions is a problematic thing to do.

I was a little sad that I somehow couldn’t manage to see Fuji from the shinkansen. I made it to my Tokyo hotel in Nakameguro. After a year of staying in inconvenient parts of the city, I’d finally been recommended a cheap hostel in a perfect area-just right for exploring the parts of the city I was interested in. My time in Tokyo was dirty, frenetic and exhausting. It contained all the things I love about city living and all the elements that make Tokyo so appealing to me. At times it felt like a non-stop headfuck-like a series of baffling episodes that have now merged into one. At the start of a Tokyo night out, anything is possible. 

I paid a visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and museum. The museum is very interesting but certainly isn’t the same history of the second world war that I was taught at school. It was definitely worth seeing though. I also really liked the Tokyo Museum, finally saw the Meiji shrine, hung out in Yoyogi Park and got introduced to some very fashionable cafes. All good stuff.

Leaving was no massive trauma. I feel like I’ll be back. I know it’s no hassle to return to Japan in the future. Okayama will always be there. What’s difficult is the occasional sense of loss that you feel living back home. In particular I miss how easy it was to eat great food without expense or hassle. I miss the bright lights at night and the tiny bars. English customer service is certainly a massive shock to the system too. I miss the beautiful countryside that I wrote about repeatedly. The friendliness of the people, the chaotic city centres on a Saturday night, the ease of travelling around. Sigh.

I got a lot out of my time in Japan. I will always have a love for the place and all its silliness. I envy the new JETs but I know I’m in the right place, with the right people now. I hope you enjoyed reading this blog and that it wasn’t too dull or self-centred. Goodbye Okayama.

Let's Go!

No time for blog updates recently. That’s because I’ve been frantically busy as I prepare to leave Japan. On Saturday I will be taking the shinkansen up to Tokyo. There, I have 4 days to wallow in nostalgia and stuff myself senseless before boarding my British Airways flight back to London.

There have been many, many leaving ceremonies, presentations and parties. I have received a mountain of beautiful and thoughtful gifts. I have visited Korakuen, Kurashiki, my favourite ramen restaurant, my favourite yakitori restaurant and all the cutest cafes in town. I’ve got wasted with the other JETs and done karaoke for a mammoth 5 hours without any problems. Approximately 1 million photos have been taken of rice fields.

I’m ready to go.

Ikimasho….Let’s go!

Forever Delayed

What a few weeks it has been. Too busy to update but filled with a mixture of stress, fun stuff and seriously awesome stuff.

To start with, I have been cleaning like a maniac, packing stuff away and generally doing dull tasks. None of that has been fun, but I have been reasonably well organized which has made stuff less irritating. Also, my supervisor has been excellent at helping me to make leaving arrangements. Once again, I feel guilty at how much other people do for me here. But I also feel relieved that I will soon be able to take responsibility for my personal arrangements once more.

My Junior High English Club did a leaving presentation for me and I felt quite emotional really. They have the tear jerking mixture of being both overly-earnest and very cute indeed. I’ve also started to receive a range of beautiful gifts. My favourite so far has been a set of two lacquered cups. I like them because they will definitely be used and look identifiably Japanese in design. Also, the person who gave them to me wrote  a very sweet card.

One strange aspect of Japanese gift-giving protocols is that receiving gifts can sometimes be slightly depressing. That’s because the routine of gift-giving is so ingrained that many gifts are based on a societal obligation rather than an individual act of kindness. A lot of the time people exchange rather thoughtless gifts that involved the minimum of effort in purchase. This can sometimes be a little upsetting if you have given a thoughtful gift in the opposite direction. Also, a premium is placed on the financial value of the gift and I generally feel that shouldn’t be too important.

Remember this place? Well we returned last weekend. This time we decided to stay for 2 nights so that we could relax and take it easy. I could easily have stayed for a week without getting bored. The surrounding area is so lush and encapsulates so many of the things that I love about Okayama. I had a great time talking about Japanese pop music with East Asia’s drunkest man. We walked up a mountain in a slightly blissful mood. On the way back we stopped off at what might be rural Japan’s only Iranian pizza restaurant. And a fine place it was too.

So now that we're back from this very romantic stay in the mountains where it was just the two of us, idyllic and romantic. I thought I should post the following song, for no obvious reason...

A Final Visit To Hiroshima

Last weekend, I visited Hiroshima with some friends to spend some time together before our departure and to see that great city for the second time.

I’d already been to the Peace Museum, which is extraordinary, but I decided to give it a miss this time. We did sit by the dome at night and I was again struck by its emotional impact and the horrible jagged edges.

I prefer Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki to the type that you get in Osaka. I like it because you get a fried egg and because it’s a big mess, rather than a pancake. On this occasion, we went to a pretty average restaurant to have it, but I still enjoyed it. I still think it’s one of the least healthy foods that I’ve ever eaten. Everything about it is bad for you, but maybe that’s a good thing.

In fact, this was not a healthy weekend. For a start, I slipped up on the smoking and felt guilty about it as I puffed my way through the two days. Secondly, we really did drink an awful lot, eat unhealthily and get very little sleep. I don’t regret any of the above, but it did take its toll as the weekend rolled on.

The first epic night out was spent drinking ridiculous “Skytree cocktails”, stuffing our faces with izakaya fare and then heading to the nightlife centre nearby for 2 hours of karaoke silliness. You can’t beat a bit of karaoke silliness. I measure any karaoke session by whether or not I start climbing on the furniture and on this occasion I did not. But I did discover that I enjoy singing Ceremony by New Order which wasn’t something I knew beforehand.

The following day, we went for a full English breakfast at Hiroshima’s cheesiest “English Pub”. I don’t usually go to themed English stuff but I did enjoy it as a novelty and it was great to have proper streaky bacon. I guess that if you’re on holiday in Greece or whatever, then UK/Irish themed places are pretty much the crappiest thing you can do and should be avoided. But now I live here, there’s definitely something to be said for it, provided it’s rare. It can actually be fun to have a break from Japanese culture sometimes, whether that’s a pub, a decent hamburger or whatever.

The Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art had a great exhibition of Art Brut on, backed up by a 90 minute documentary on different artists from the movement. I’ve been interested in art brut ever since seeing a Jarvis Cocker documentary on it back in the late ‘90s (even then, Jarvis was always doing “worthy” stuff outside the band, which used to annoy me because the gap between Pulp albums was so long, but which I now realize was just part of a slow descent into Radio 4 dull-ery where he doesn’t actually need to create anything decent artistically at all but can instead just bask in Guardian adulation for Being Jarvis Cocker…) and I enjoyed the exhibition. There was also a cool Henry Moore sculpture outside and a little park area that overlooked the city and had a map of what it had looked like immediately after the bombing.

Saturday night was even more epic than the Friday. In Japan, you often get nightlife areas which consist of 7 or 8 floor buildings. Outside the buildings there is a sign that just gives the name of the bar. You can’t see into the bar from outside or get any impression of what it’s like, other than from the location and the name. I find these bars quite forbidding because you never know what you’re gonna get. A lot of them are Hostess Bars, which doesn’t really apply to me as a) I don’t speak Japanese and b) I don’t want to pay someone to make small-talk with me. Some of them are basically strip-joints, some are a mix between the two and some are just ordinary bars.

So on this night, we decided to each choose bars from the street and then visit them, as a way of breaking through this barrier. The only condition was that it couldn’t be anything too seedy. This led to us discovering a range of odd places. There was the darts bar, The Beatles-themed bar, the bar with misogynistic posters about beer being better than women plus many bars where we poked our heads round the door only to quickly reverse at first sight of a freaked out barmaid.

I felt sad to leave Hiroshima. It’s definitely one of my favourite cities in Japan and would certainly be a place I’d consider living if I ever relocated here. When I tell Japanese friends that I’m visiting Hiroshima, they immediately ask me whether I’m going to visit the shrine at Miyajima, as if the city itself is something not to be talked about. But this is a shame because whilst Miyajima is pretty enough, Hiroshima represents so much that is great about Japan and whilst the history can be saddening, the redevelopment of the city is one of the great Japanese achievements. Hiroshima-I shall miss you and your strange ways. It’s all about the jagged edges.

Don't Mention The War

Typical. My favorite group of students have spent the post-April period morphing into a band of noisy spawn hell-demons, much to my regret and disappointment. And then, when it comes to the week where I tell them I’m leaving, they revert to being the friendly, warm, earnest young people that I fell for in the first place. This would all be much easier if they could just revert to the brat-mode of a few weeks ago.

I think there’s a tendency amongst ALTs to exaggerate their closeness to students and/or the esteem by which the students hold them. ALTs do like to boast about:

a)How cool the students think they are.

b) How beautiful the students think they are.

c) The level of trust and intimacy they have with their students.

d) How much their students fancy them.

It can be a bit unattractive and ties into the supposed “film-star” status that some ALTs feel on arriving in Japan. I could write a lengthy post about the self-esteem boost that male ALTs receive on arriving here to be treated like movie stars by elements of the local female population. It’s a bit more complex than this, but we can’t pretend it’s not both played up to and a boost to the ego for some.

Anyway, one aspect of returning to UK life will be the absence of otherness. We will once again be just one of the crowd. In Japan, we are really only defined by our otherness. We are not Japanese and that’s what makes us stand out. But in the UK, it’s our own dress style, personality, interests etc. that mark us out as individuals. I’ve joked on this blog about my increasingly dodgy dress sense in Japan. Part of this might be that I have a 30 year-old’s increased focus on practicality. But it’s also in part due to the fact that no-one from home will ever see me in my waterproof jacket and stupid hat. So one part of my readjustment on returning to the UK is that I will again make more effort in what I wear and how I present myself-and this is mainly due to external pressures rather than any idea of “looking good for myself”.

Since arriving in Japan, I’ve taken part in a monthly English-language discussion group attended by some English teachers in Okayama. For the past few months, they’ve been reading  the book of The King’s Speech and having little discussions about it. The book itself is alright-it’s utterly fawning towards both the king and Logue, but it’s interesting enough if you like that kind of thing. One problem with the book is that it covers the outbreak of World War 2. This means the War is a difficult subject to avoid and it has come up intermittently in our discussions. I’d love to have full and frank discussions about Japan’s wartime and immediately post-wartime history. It’s kind of fascinating. But that’s never going to be feasible in this country. Any time the subject comes up, it feels uncomfortable. People aren’t especially comfortable talking about their opinions here anyway, so it’s a subject you have to be careful around.

Also, if you want to know just what a lot of made up monarchist crap, the film of The King’s Speech was, just listen to a recording of the actual speech here. See, it was a rubbish speech. The guy took half an hour to string a sentence together. That’s who we had as our ceremonial leader at the time of our greatest ever national crisis. If the head of state had been elected we’d have chosen someone who could string a sentence together, with better health, a less foreign background and a sprinkling of charisma. Instead we were left with this guy who couldn’t even read a speech that was laid out in front of him. And it may sound as if I’m picking on people with speech impediments here, but it seems to me that if the main duty of your job is to make speeches, then we ought to have had someone who could fulfil that function competently. So this story is actually the tale of a dysfunctional political system and the coaching of someone who clearly wasn’t up to the job, like a low grade civil servant on ineffective performance management measures. Sigh.

A Trip Round The Islands - Shodoshima

We climbed a gorge and made moody poses!

A few months ago we decided to do a series of island trips during our final months in Japan. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, we have to save money for our return to the UK and island trips are relatively cheap since they don’t involve hopping on the super-pricey shinkansen. Secondly, we’ve found the islands off mainland Japan (I’m not sure whether you can correctly describe the larger islands of Japan as “mainland Japan” but anyway…) to have a character of their own compared to the mainland. Usually they have been more laid back and there seems to be a larger number of “characters”, in our experience, anyway.

So last weekend, in the final part of our island odyssey, we made our way to Shodoshima. Shodoshima is the largest of the Seto Inland Sea islands (again, this is questionable geography, because I don’t know whether Honshu itself could count as a Seto Inland Sea island, but anyway…). It takes about an hour by ferry, which was enough time to consume my own weight in overly-salty snacks and sandwiches. The bagel that I bought from Bagel and Bagel was not a patch on either Carmelli or the Brick Lane Beigel Bake (sic) but it filled a hole nonetheless. We made the wise decision to rent a car, which gave us a lot of freedom over the weekend and meant we could do some cool drives along the coast and pretend we were in Thelma and Louise. I was Thelma of course, because K Chan never lets me be Louise.

Poser

Now there are an awful lot of things to like and admire about Shodoshima. But it is a Japanese tourist destination and that means you do have to wade through a lot of tacky nonsense. As I’ve said before, Japanese tacky nonsense can have a charm of its own. Shodoshima is “famous” for olives. In that spirit we visited the Olive Park where there was a history of olive production on the island, some Greek ruins and er, a Dutch-style windmill. There really were “Greek ruins”, honestly. We also admired the Visitor Centre’s reproduction of “The Venus of Milo”.

For some reason, the caption on this re-production amused me.

I was continually frustrated by the gift shops on Shodoshima. They sold every type of olive-based product imaginable: olive bread, olive-flavoured seaweed, olive oil, olive jam, olive chocolate etc. But they did not sell olives. The only thing I wanted to buy was olives. This was frustrating.

Also, I had been told to try the olive ice cream. Unfortunately, there seems to have been some terrible olive ice cream related production crisis on Shodoshima because every shop we tried had run out. I did try the soy sauce flavoured ice cream though. I know that sounds dreadful but it was actually delicious-the salt and sweet flavours go together really well.

We hopped into what may well be our last onsen/sento visit in Japan and I enjoyed the excellent views over the ocean whilst chatting to a random Japanese retired gentleman who had previously been a professor of African-American literature and knew a lot more about Langston Hughes than I did. I absolutely love speaking to Japanese academics who have studied English as their range of knowledge is usually amazing and they often have an international perspective that very few people have here, in Okayama at least. This guy had lived in Harlem for several years during the 1970s which is fascinating in itself, but he also talked interestingly about the social and academic stigma of studying African-American literature when virtually nobody in Japan had even met an African-American, let alone read any African-American literature. He had apparently just read a Langston Hughes poem one day and loved it so much that he had decided to spend the rest of his career studying the guy. Man, I love enthusiasts.

We also took a drive along the coast to visit the recreated set of Twenty-Four Eyes, a famous Japanese film, itself based on a book and set on Shodoshima. We wandered around the 1930s-style school room and vegetable patches, wallowing in nostalgia for something we hadn’t even seen. It was pretty though and I really enjoyed the drive.

The Twenty Four Eyes "Set"

I don’t know if we’ll make it back to the Seto Inland Sea. I’m heading to Hiroshima next weekend and then that’s probably it for big trips until hometime. But I’ll always have fond memories of our island adventures. One month to go. We’re nearly at the end now.

There's absolutely nothing profound to be said about this picture of our dinner.

The teacher desk was a little small for me.

Onegaishimasu

Rain that lasts for 24 hours

A typhoon is heading our way. With luck, it should pass just south of Okayama and we’ll avoid the worst of it. I’ve enjoyed the rainy season so far-you get some uncomfortable humidity, but it gets relieved by the rainfall in the evenings. However, I don’t enjoy my commute to school as I get soaked cycling through the rain and then have to immediately change my clothes on arrival since I don’t own any waterproof trousers. I could buy some I suppose-it might just add to the rash of unfashionable but practical clothing that I’ve happily adopted in Japan, along with tights, silly hats and a variety of Uniqlo undergarments.

I shaved my head for the first time last week and I quite like the way it looks and feels. However, having to shave your head every 2-3 days is incredibly dull and it takes me about 20 minutes to do it. It’s almost as if you have to plan your evening round it. I hope that it becomes something you can do quickly once you are better practiced. I’m relieved that I don’t have a weird shaped head with my spinal column sticking out the top like a stegosaurus or anything like that. Although I’m happy with how it looks, it is a little strange since I feel like the appearance doesn’t quite match my personality. I don’t feel like a skinhead, but I do look like one.

Last night I stayed in and watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I was really impressed by it. The effects are excellent, particularly the way they’ve drawn the monkey, Caesar. It’s not really an action movie as there’s no real jeopardy or fighting until the final third of the film. Meanwhile, much of it feels like an SF drama in the style of Contact or Outbreak. James Franco is great as usual and it’s helped by a strong plot that sets things up nicely for the sequel.  No love of science-fiction or knowledge of the previous films is required.

I’ve also rented My Neighbour Totoro from Tsutaya. I sometimes feel that I’m the only person in Japan who hasn’t seen it. I’m doing my research Ghibli-wise as we will soon be visiting the Studio Ghibli museum near Tokyo and I want to know a bit more about the films before I go.

I’m not gonna be running tonight…