Shinagawa, Tokyo

I've landed up in Shinagawa Ku, Tokyo. Thee are 23 'ku's in Tokyo, comparable to London's boroughs. I quite like my Ku. There are two kanji for Shinagawa. The first is three little boxes, one piled on top of the other two and squashed a little more horizontal, like someone sat on it and hid it away out of reach. The second kanji is three vertical lines, signifying river, the left line bent a little. I quite like the simplicity of it in such a crazy crazy city.

I'm slowly coming to grasp the sheer number of people in Tokyo. I get on a train at 9.30 at night thinking by that time the crowds are bound to have thinned, and I end up with my face in someone's armpit for the journey. Thankfully only a few stops. I get on the train at 10.30pm a few days later and experienced exactly the same pattern of emotions: faint hope, mild self-reproach that seems hand-in-hand with 'I told me so' and of course slight discomfort upon being mashed into contact with eight other people.

What a fantastic location I thought, what splendid transport links, I can get up here and down there and over to there in but a blink of the eye and 7 stops. What I failed to realize, of course, was that the more spokes that sprout out from a transport hub, the more people the more are likely to use the station more, at more and more varied and unexpected hours.

With all those people, strange then that I should jump at every foreigner I see. There's been quite a few of them. I live in an apartment building of 10 single-person rooms, all of which are occupied by foreigners. Every time I see another foreigner, I find myself kidding myself they must live in my block. Although I've now seen more than 10. Breaking old countryside habits appears to take longer than I'd reckoned on.

Leaving Yamagata and the countryside and the north, I left a lot of things behind. Computer speakers? Too much space, get rid. Spare t-shirts? Need some new style if I'm going to cut it in the city anyway, chuck em. Plastic drawers and bed sheets, potato masher and coat hangers, tea-towels and trainers, I gave it away and binned a lot and when I missed the bin day for big things, my friend Akiyoshi took me to the place where all rubbish goes and dropped his mate the demolition man's name and I dropped the rest of my stuff. Trouble is, I didn't think about how I'd recoup all my losses in Tokyo...with no money.

Tokyo is brimming with possibility. It's so alive, there are people and exhibitions, festivals and nights, sports clubs and gigs, gigs!, coffee shops and department stores every where, but it all seems a little inaccessible. I've all the time on a part-time job, but not the money to tear off too much from this great gargantuan.

A new home, Hakodate Market Crabs, Lilies and bridges, Hokkaido

 
 
 

A week with the Hommas

A week with the Hommas! Mayumi the consummate housewife and Yasu the picture of his son Yosuke, perched on the front of the couch watching T.V. or when eating, quickly, silently, until he'd finished. Yosuke is a good mate from University and frequently stayed at various friends' homes for the summer holiday instead of flying back to Japan. I think his parents were only too willing to welcome me into their home for the second time.

The first time I stayed in Eda with the Hommas, I had a foot the size of a football and was freaking out thinking I'd contracted Deep Vein Thrombosis. It was the start of the year and my friend Julia and I had come back from a sun-kissed holiday in Thailand. Waiting on the platform for the train to Eda Julia read out the symptoms of DVT after my foot had grown in size and my pain threshold had shrunk correspondingly. It turned out to be just an infection caught from dirty sea-water and bad sandal grazes but Mrs Homma diligently took care of me nonetheless.

This time round I got a better taste of the Hommas' day-to-day life. Both work hard. At the start of the week, Yasu would return late and collapse in front of Kitajima Kousuke or Fuahara or another of the Japanese Olympians. A couple of days he returned very late, eating supper after ten and retiring to bed soon after that. On Saturday and Sunday, he worked at his laptop typing minutes for meetings held with the lawyers. A company had fiddled the books, the chief exec had fled to Greece (his last known whereabouts) with a few million and Yasu was on the case discovering new lies and scandals on a daily basis. He said it was the most interesting thing he's ever had to do at work.

Mayumi got up at 5 or earlier to prepare breakfast for Yasu and me each day. She taught a couple of Japanese lessons each week, volunteered at a hospital for children sick with cancer and discussed plans to write more childrens books with her partner, the illustrator, also sick with cancer. They've already co-authored one. Last Saturday was a house-warming party for one of her old students, Nuala from Liverpool. I was invited along too and saw a completely different side to Mayumi, excited, bustling and flitting around like she was half as old as I suppose she really is. It was nice to see, especially since I met a lot of other foreigners at the party who all made me feel like I need to grow up and start thinking of the Future and making a Plan. Each had their own story to tell of just how they'd wound up spending over 10 years, 15 years in Japan. More than one of them identified the point at which there was no turning back and several were married to Japanese spouses or carrying babes in arms. I met a few guys who met for golf and wished I could play better than swiping at the ball with clumsy, steely-eyed strokes. It was alarming, in a way, to meet people who'd stopped thinking about when they were going to return home and starting thinking about when they could holiday home.

Mayumi kick-started Japanese study seriously again for me. The evening I arrived she started tugging out and throwing at me textbooks and thick kanji books from a cupboard full of them. Before a spare key was cut for me, she encouraged I study at home when she was out, until lunchtime or whenever she'd return. In fact, it's probably time to look at some more kanji now.

Odds and ends- last last weekend

I spent a lot of time on trains, in train stations in the back end of beyond, hanging around waiting for lifts, going from Mamurogawa to Sakata and Nishi-Hama last last weekend. The football team of the school I work at were crowned champions of the city a couple of months ago and the prefectural tournament finally came around, held in Mamurogawa. The three day event clashed with the last chance I'd have to spend some time with friends up in the north and had me poring over train schedules and pleading for lifts that all came good.

It was a scorcher last last weekend. Now it's lifted a little, just right now. On the commute back from school the other day there was one beautiful moment when I startled a flock of swallows or small birds from a verge beside a great expanse of rice fields. They took flight, darted across the path and weaved over the rice thrushes that were whipping and billowing in bunches to the play of the wind. Beyond, the mountains smudged into dark clouds grown fat with rains that would come suddenly and shortly. There was a real feeling of tranquillity, and of threat, made keener for the earth's recent bouts of jiggery-pokery, quakes and trembles. It cools with rain.

I spent a lot of time in Shinjo station. In the station building they had a Shinjo Experience Centre, full of plastic boxes of the most monstrous beetles and bugs I've ever laid eyes on. They had horns and pincers bigger than mice. They swiped pathetically against the plastic walls. I soon got bored and went for a coffee and wrote this:

Sometimes the end of the day would roll around at 4.30 and I'd high tail it out of school. Sometimes I would have planned to stay for soccer club and wouldn't. There'd be something special I wanted to cook for dinner, or someone I'd have to call back home on their lunch break, no other time would be possible. Sometimes I'd stay for soccer club, right until the end, until the meeting at the end when Coach Yamakawa would murmur a few words and Mamuro Sensei would too, until the 'Ground Aisatsu', lining up facing the pitch and bowing and saying thank-you to an empty space and the mountains in the distance, a rugged horizon and a great expanse of sky above. Once, I stayed until 5 minutes before the meeting, decided resolutely that I was having no fun at all and left.

A long time ago, it seems, suddenly Coach Yamakawa was there. One time, after a long absence, he came sporting a metal-grill eye-patch. The kids raced over to the ground fencing and crowded round and it transpired he'd had an operation. He smirked and wasn't very responsive to me when I asked after it.

I wasn't very sure if he could strike a ball well until recently, when I watched him volley in a stray ball off the crossbar and the back of Shunichi's head. Shunichi is the keeper. Another time I watched him kick a dead ball from a one pace run-up and place it precisely in a corner, rolling down the inside of the goal frame and settling innocuously with the merest bounce.

The time that Naoya's big brother started coming I can place more precisely. That was more or less a year ago, once Naoya became a senior player, as he started to become a star amongst the senior players. Naoya's brother has also grown his hair out and wears it better than I and drives a Golf and commands the respect of the team and encourages them and advises them. I once tried to give some words of encouragement to the team in English, at the bidding of Mamuro Sensei. I noticed Coach Yamakawa chuckling and whispering to one of the kids as the team circle broke up and wondered what he'd been saying.

And that's as far as I got in the place I got a coffee in Shinjo station.

At the tournament, there wasn't a place on the bench for me, like at previous tournaments. There are strict regulations about numbers- I remember the first tournament I went to, two years ago, and being ordered from the technical area by the referee and linesman, after behaving exactly as an Englishman would, pitch-side to his team. So I got over that a long time ago.

I watched them win on Saturday and kill off a game they deserved to win at the death, 3-2, on Sunday. Siobhan gave me a lift through the mountains to the beach on Sunday afternoon. A large group of us spent the evening barbecuing, wallowing in the sea and swimming out to a point for no other reason than the fun of reaching it and turning back. There was Suica-Wari, a blindfolded hunt with a stick for a watermelon. We danced around the campfire to Dorrie's old Brownies camp-site sing-a-longs. And we toasted marshmallows and called them smores between biscuits. The next day I woke before the sun had warmed itself. I waved a silent goodbye to all my friends in Sakata, still slumbering in tents and waited at a train station with no-one else, to get to Mamurogawa and watch the team squander a 2-0 lead in penalites to lose the semi-final and a possible place in the North Japan tournament.

Odds and ends- End of Term

Last day at school. I've been out drinking and farewelling since last Wednesday, a bender I just can't get my round. End of term ceremony, farewell ceremony for me. The Kocho Sensei (Head), Harada Sensei had written a song and performed it live at the ceremony, piano and all. Later he presented a cd recorded version of it. Up on stage there was a speech in English then Japanese by Jun Hasegawa, a Third Grade kid I coached for the Recitation Contest last year. This year his classmate Yuto Takeda will represent NanaChu school instead, with a speech about his trip to Italy and Switzerland with the Japanese Red Cross. He talks about not having the words to communicate with a lady called Chris and how it was ぎごちない. As we translated the speech into English, Fujita Sensei explained　ぎごちない　isn't a word Japanese people are comfortable using, nor a condition they like to express. It translates to 'awkward' or 'clumsy'. That really would mess with the Wa.

I think Yuto's speech trickled in one ear-hole and gathered somewhere deep inside in a little well. My speech turned out part response to Yuto's speech, part advice to the students about studying English, part expression of my feelings about studying English, (the methods and joys of studying English in Japan), partly inspired by Max's account of his speech to 1000 High School kids, partly inspired by Julia's account of her speech to a whole lot of girls somewhere in Sakata. Here it is.

暑いから、少しだけ話します。先生方に、誠にを世話になりました。日本の中学校の生活に関してよく学べました。私の母校に比べて、あらゆる事が違います。もし私も日本人なら、どんな学生だろうとよく考えます。

生徒達に英語の勉強についてアドバイスして上げたいんです。先ずは、英語は学校の教科としてだけと思わないで下さい。その上に、通信手段です。「勉強」として思わないで、「自分の考えを述べる手段」として大事してみて下さい。英語であっても、日本語であっても、人のよって考え方や言い方は違います。自分の言い方探してみてください。

また、日本語の何千何万もの漢字の読み方などを知ることが難しいように、英語をすべて学ぶことも本当に大変です。それで、話している時に分からないことがあったり、伝えたいことをうまく言えなくても心配しないで下さい。七つの「しん」のことを考えて、特に「信じる」の「しん」。話している時に自分を信頼して、自信を持ってみて下さい。自分のベストを尽くして。

最後にいっぱい楽しい思い出本当にありがとうございました。心に残っている。以上です。

I wanted to tell the kids not to worry about not having the words, or enough words. You can never have them all, it's like those cereal packet collectibles. For some reason there's always one or two missing from your collection. There's too many and myriad. People have their own way of thinking and speaking, so as much as we think we communicate, really we just take the words as we see fit, where someone else might see a different cut to them. I wanted to tell the kids to find their own way of speaking, of expressing their selves with words.

I also wanted to tell the kids to have conviction in what they do say. I borrowed from the student council's slogan for the academic year- SHIN + ING, Shining 7. Ridiculous to look at, but quite profound to think. 7 different kanji, each with one of their readings reading, 'Shin'. The kanji all occur in word like 'Belief' and 'Depth'. I picked on Belief and bullied it til I made it my own.

So you see, for Yuto, I had to believe what I was saying, because that's what I was advising. I also had to try and set a decent example of speaking in a foreign language for him. How could I coach him for a week (until the contract expires) about public speaking if I myself was incapable? For Jun, I had to believe and have conviction too- after all, he had just delivered a speech in English to me up on stage, in front of his peers.

In terms on content, the get-out clause was that it didn't matter if it was perfect Japanese or not: this was my own way of speaking. But then the flaw was that this was a foreigner borrowing Japanese words for a speech and perhaps using them in roles unfamiliar to anyone there- who knows if our manners of speaking collided with each other, who knows if the message got through or not.

Pure Poetry

Ramen
Tastes good.
Chaashuu, Miso, Tonkotsu,
I love them all.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Yamagata
Mountains, people,
Snow and sweat.
Did I live here?
Nda.

Japanese
Itchy knees
One two threes
I still don't understand!
Moozooi.

Orang-utan;
Big, orange,
A lot of fun.
But why so hairy?
Thinking.

Run the four poems I came up with in the 3rd grade classes yesterday and today.

It's fun translating what the kids want to write. One kid wrote about steak and finished his poem with the word 'MEATGOD'. Another wrote about morning, a new day starts and ended it 'Good Morning', the quintessential English class refrain, which I thought was really quite clever.

The atmosphere is completely different in class. All of the kids rise to the challenge of expressing themselves in a foreign language and they're proud of what they've created when they're done.

For something as fluid as poetry, it's funny to see how the textbook goes about encouraging it, and how effectively teachers are invited to stamp the life out of it. Poems must begin with one word and follow from there and there are assigned topics for each line. Rules are set and where so much poetry thrives on undoing such fastenings, Japanese-English-Junior-High-Poetry does not belong.

I read in a book of one case noted by one Teruhisa Horio a while back 'in which the Ministry of Education failed to approve a well-respected work of literature because it did not use the official onomatopoeic word for a river's sound; "We can only conclude from this that the Ministry's inspectors feared that the children might get the idea that it was all right to play with the national language in ways which would encourage them to think of it as something belonging to them rather than as something whose use is controlled by the State for them"'.

Perish the thought they might consider what they've learnt of English as anything belonging them either.

The Day I Learnt to Fly and Other Stories

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.