Wednesday, November 30, 2005

My first (and possibly only) Japanese post

Assuming my Japanese is legible, the following will appear in the New Year's edition of the Nakasorachi newspaper.

昨日、私はアメリカから中空知の歌志内市に戻って来ました。家族に会うために十日間行っていました。日本に来て15ヶ月間たちましたが、今回初めて日本から出たことになります。しばらくぶりのアメリカは、あまり変わっていませんでしたが、日本に来たことによって、私のものを見る目が変わりました。 
日本では、ほとんどの場所で日本語が話されています。アメリカでは英語がぺらぺらと話せない人がたくさんいます。なぜなら、アメリカはいろいろな国の人が集まっている国なので、色々な国の言葉や文化がたくさんあるからです。日本から来た人たちもいます。だれでもアメリカ人になれます。日本人になれるのはもっともっと難しいことです。
アメリカにはいろいろな祝日や行事があります。例えば、12月にはクリスマスをやる人とユダヤ教の行事であるハナカーをやる人がいます。日本には、色々な行事があります。宗教に関係なく、ほとんどの人がお盆やお正月をしていると思います。
今年のお正月、私は友達の家で美味しい食事をいっぱいいただきました。12時に神社へ初詣に行きました。すごく楽しかったのですが、ちょっと寒かったので、来年のお正月には、暖かい南アジアのカンボジアに旅行する予定です。
中空知に住んでいる間にたくさん親切なことをしてもらって、本当にお世話になっております。世界中には、面白い場所や親切な人たちがいっぱいいますが、北海道の人たちの親切なところは素晴らしいと思います。このALTの仕事が終わったても、もう一度中空知に来たいと思っています。

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Distance

I can't decide if Japan and America are far away from one another or very close by. Three plane rides - Sapporo-Osaka, Osaka-Dallas, Dallas-Boston - and I'm back where I started, hugging my parents in the tired confusion of an airport lounge. On the one hand, with no effort on my part, the transition is incredibly sudden. You don't need to climb a mountain to get to America, don't need to pack food and water, don't even need to wear a hat. The whole process is more like standing in line for a very long time. And yet the ground I didn't travel in between - Kamchatka, the Aleutians in Winter, the Coast Range of British Columbia, the Utah Desert and the Appalachians - is all so vast and wild and impregnable...

Which is farther away, downtown Tokyo, or the ridgeline of the mountain you see from your window every morning but have never climbed?

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Photos

I'll be going home for Thanksgiving tomorrow and may not be able to post writings next week. Until then, here are some photos courtesy of Mark.




Morning clouds from the peak of Ashibetsu-dake. You can see our tent on the saddle below, where we spent the previous 16 hours shivering through a September rainstorm.




The bear.




Salmon struggling up a Shiretoko stream.



Zazen on Shiretoko-dake.



Buddha Cliffs - if you look closely, you can see one of the Buddha statues as a spot of bright white tucked against the 3rd spire from the right.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Photos from Shiretoko

These are courtesy of Pete. My write-up of our hiking trip is in the archives, under the title 'To the Ends of the Earth...'



Wild Shiretoko coast line, approaching the Buddha cliffs.



The Buddha on top of the cliffs.



Watanabe-san.



Looking out over the disputed Kuril Islands (occupied by Russia).



Clearing skies on the way home.



Following a game trail through high pine scrub forest.



Soaking sore muscles in a remote hot spring.



Wind-twisted birch trees.

Friday, November 04, 2005

Serendipity

A continuation of the previous post..

Having biked up and down the same street in this small town every day for over a year, the excitement of living in Hokkaido has faded away. In new places, during the Honeymoon stage of cultural adjustment, surfaces alone are fascinating - the landscape, the buildings, the people - when I first arrived last year, even riding past the vending machines at the bottom of my driveway was enough to send a little shiver up my spine. That feeling is gone now, for the most part. A place can only be exotic for so long, especially a former coal mining town of 5,000 people after a winter that stretches into the middle of May. I'm looking forward to moving on, continually refreshing my surroundings, embracing movement, because just being somewhere for the first time is the best sort of entertainment. When traveling, adventure is only as far as the next street corner.

Of course, as I've written before, exploration is more a matter of mindset than geography. Wading down a stream with no flashlight in the middle of the night and hoping that it would lead me to civilization before dawn was more of an adventure than hanging out in the Pizza Hut at the base of the pyramids, even though the stream was only a two hour bushwhack from my house. Finding adventure is often as simple as looking for it.

Biking home through town last Monday was not an adventure. The things I saw were interesting not because they were new, or exotic, but because I know them, because I have come to understand the connections between people and places, the underlying context of life in Utashinai. Living in a place long enough to cultivate this kind of awareness is the opposite of extended travel, but, riding home, I wondered if paying attention long enough to appreciate the details was no less rewarding than simply refreshing a broader perspective over and over. Could travel - the act of movement - be a lazy way of interacting with the world, counter-intuitive as that might seem?

And then I was home, with three hours of daylight and no pressing chore. Back out the door, back down the driveway and up the dirt road toward the coal fields, confident that something would come along, some moment new, or beautiful, or somehow worthwhile. The same rows of old wooden homes, some occupied, most empty. The same red apartment block, big white radishes hanging off balconies to dry. The same garden, the same stream. I stopped halfway up the road and watched the same old woman puttering around in her garden, so lonely and so old, bundled up in scarfs and sweaters with her loose-framed little house catching the cold October light. A fox howled somewhere up on the ridge. There's the moment, I thought. That's what you came out walking for.

The road dead ended soon at, the same overgrown meadow and the wooden house, much like the old woman's, except this one abandoned and collapsed under last winter's snow. I've poked around here before - but this time I walk gingerly over what was once the roof, brushing past weeds and stepping carefully down into the living room. There is a pile of books in one corner, spilling out of a soggy cardboard box, pages stuck together and mildew spreading down the spines. Some comics, old textbooks, a junior high-school notebook that might be interesting if I could read Japanese.

Another stack of books, on the other side of a collapsed wall. Rusty nails poke out through the boards, and I wonder if it's worth it to pick my way across and check them out. But of course I do, testing my weight on each board, holding onto what was once a windowsill....and wow I'm glad I did, because check it out - that's English! "The Silent Language," says the cover, which tears off when I gingerly pick it up. Little bugs crawl out from the binding - the whole thing is soaked through, and I can't turn the pages. They come unstuck where they want to - on page 86 - where the author, an American anthropologist who worked in the Pacific during World War II, is explaining how a major barrier to understanding a new culture is that nothing is spelled out for the newcomer - over the years, a context develops, so that locals, aware of the connections between people, places and events, feel no need to talk about them. The Silent Language. Exactly what I had been thinking about during the bike ride home.

There was still some light. I tossed the book back on the pile and lumbered off into the brush, pulling myself up the ridge by grabbing a hold of sturdy bamboo grass, coming out twenty minutes later near the coal pits. From up there I could see over the valley wall to where the sun was setting. After a few minutes I heard a truck rumbling near, so I stuck out my thumb and hitched a ride back down to the valley. The driver was from Utashinai, and I'm sure he thought he had seen it all. I was glad that I could be there to pop out of the woods - white face and raggedy jeans - bringing just a little uncertainty to a road he had hauled coal down for years.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

In the Details...

There is only one road in Utashinai, running the length of the narrow valley from the sprawl of Sunagawa to the Akabira tunnel. Back before the coal mines closed the town was big enough to support several neighborhoods that filled out the hills and hollows, but now the roads leading up into the hills are unused and overgrown, houses reduced to scraps of plywood, rusty nails and moldy fragments of straw tatami mats. The town is drawing in on itself as it wastes away, shutting off non-vital functions like a starving body until someday, probably before too long, only the road and a few gas stations will remain.

These days, one trip along the road is enough to see pretty much the whole town, and after 15 months of riding my bike up and down the valley I know every bulge in the sidewalk by heart. Navigation is reduced to two dimensions – up valley for trips to the grocery store, pub and elementary school, and down valley for the junior high, high school and public bath. When I move on to a new town, it will take some time to get used to the added complication of width, the ability to travel from side to side.

Last Monday, pedaling home from the high school on a gusty afternoon, I struggled with the question of whether to stay in Utashinai for another year. Familiarity is cousin to sterility, but on the other hand, by seeing the whole town every day for over a year I am privy to a depth of understanding, an awareness of context and connection, that enlivens my ride home in a way that traveling a new road every day could never provide.

The building on my left now, that little yellow house wedged between a barber shop and shuttered liquor store – see those geraniums in the window, bright and cheerful, see how the entranceway is swept clean? The single mother who lives there will be out front shoveling snow again this winter, her face as red as the flowers. Her son is the best athlete in his class and was elected student body president last week.

The gas station up ahead – the girl running out into the road in a bright orange uniform to block traffic for a car leaving the pump - she graduated from the high school last year, one of the few who might have gone on to college. Looks like that didn’t work out, but at least she has found a job.

Or the girl and boy across the street, walking as slowly as possible down the bike path in the blue jumpsuits that mark them as junior high school students. No wonder notes were flying around English class last week. I wave and the girl – Miki Iwasaki, volleyball captain – throws her hand over her face and giggles with embarrassment, while her new boyfriend – Takuya Sasaki, baseball catcher – waves back and yells, “Hamu, Hamu,” his variation on my name. I’m almost home when I realize why Takuya’s homework (and handwriting) have improved so suddenly.

These are little things, details impossible for a stranger to notice, layers and links that form the fabric of community. Living on a desert island with just a few people can be as stimulating as watching the world go by from the MTV studio in Times Square. Gilligan’s Island anyone?

Time to go to class – but I’ll post a continuation of this train of thought soon.