Sometimes it's difficult to know where to start. You can size something up as much as you like, peer at it and scrutinise it from every angle and still hesitate to kick things to life.
2 years in Yamagata is nearly up so I feel I can justifiably write about where-it-all-started on this jolly vaunt. It started not so much with the sizing up and the peering and thinking, but a leap into a big blue screen, perhaps looking like a leap off a cliff on the silver screen months later. I didn't know what I was getting my self into, I didn't know what was ahead. I didn't know if I'd land on my feet or fall flat on my arse. If you can spot a parallel looming, full marks and ping pong to you.
SundaySaturday I went to an ultimate frisbee tournament with students from Yamagata University. I missed a farewell occasion in Sakata with a lot of other English teachers and a lot of friends in order to go. Chatting Skype with one friend, Sakata was karaoke til the sun came up and a cupboard in the karaoke booth and I felt wholly content straight off I'd not gone along but headed the opposite way to a frisbee tournament. A little piece of Japan I'd carved out for myself, not another inherited friend, not something prepared, something I'd found and worked hard to make good.
But let's hop back to the start and sizing up something or rather a jump off into the blue. Saturday was swelteringly hot and I crispened and flattened out from fingertip to foot-sole for lack of water inside me. Sunday the teams were jumbled up, in the spirit of the game, and I found myself playing with strangers. At the death of the game, I threw a bum pass that was intercepted. He who'd marked me raced into the end-zone to receive the scoring pass that would take the game away from us. Markee now marker and lagging behind, I tracked my man and saw he'd just beat me to the pass. Nothing for it, I threw myself into the air, I took off with one last thump of a leg, I flew,
I flew,
I'd learnt to fly.
I still missed the pass, we lost not tied the game seconds later and our team slipped down a position in the final tot-up, but that's not the point. I'd learnt to fly.
For the rest of the day, I dared someone to throw a pass I could fling myself at, desperate to try it again, to leap off into the blue. The grass was very soft after all. I didn't have another opportunity, but being as I wasn't hungover Sunday and everyone else was, I pulled a blinder out of the hat (!) in the final game, with my team-mates from Yamagata University again.
Sunday en route back sat in an aluminium chair in the buff and the spit coming down before a torrential summer shower, at the onsen, I felt wholly content. Facing a bare wall plastered over with pictures of beautiful places somewhere else slowly drying off, I took one more dip inside and a large man passing barked out one single shout in my direction with a face held steady. The sound swelled fullsome, as sound keeps in a bath-house. Later Junji explained he was Yakuza, paying respect to another Yakuza, possibly the boss, sat 2 yards next to me in the scorching water but that there's one other of those stories.
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