Interview

I can write this now because the interview is over and a week has passed.

The job wasn't something I was necessarily interested in, but then isn't that what a lot of people say about the field of work they end up in? 'I'd never thought of the business and then one day I looked around and saw I'd become a Black Sea fisherman'. Not so many, 'I just knew the day I went to the circus I'd end up reading fortunes from strands of hair, and here I am'. Besides, I had a good referral and was asked to submit an application, so I did.

I've worked for the company in question before, but on an ad hoc basis as a database entry to be called upon at weekends. Each seasonal stint presented different work- Halloween parties in October, Christmas in December and a range of interview and speech competition judging work too. Each time there was the same mandatory orientation session, which would find us trainees bouncing around the room at some point, proving we can lead a game designed for kindergarten and elementary school aged children. Everyone must play the part of the kids when not demonstrating their assigned activity.

And thus enfolds a scene of bizarre role-playing, with much squawking about, bad impressions and mouths bending around words carefully and slowly e-nunciated to a group of intelligent, young adults. You always leave the room a little lighter, for having shed a skin of dignity.

This all happened at the interview for this latest, more permanent job too. There was also a special someone flown in on the shinkansen from Osaka, a man high enough up the ranks to present the introductory, promotional video screened at the orientations and interviews. The video was screened and the man in the video was the man in the room was equally bizarre as the game demonstrations. More of a 'rub your eyes and blink twice' bizarreness rather than a 'screw your eyes up tight and hope it ends soon' leaden-feeling-of-sorrow kind of bizarreness.

The presenter of the video then interviewed us with one other man, one-by-one. It came to my turn, the others had already been discharged en masse and the man from the video began questioning me. Now, I haven't attended too many interviews before, but I can tell even in my own relative naivety that if the interviewer starts to look beyond you, at the wall behind you, as if reading a camera-mounted prompt whilst you're answering his questions, that can't be such a great sign. I found out a few days later I didn't get the job, but I have another one, so it's ok.

CICADAS

Your days are numbered.

Tom

I started taking Japanese classes. In my former life in Yamagata, once a week I would meet 'Kiki', or Tokiko Suzuki to give her her real name. She and I would chat in Japanese for an hour or more and that was as far as my schooling went. Once or twice she took me out for something to eat. Once we went to a soba noodle restaurant called KiriKiri tucked away in a quiet suburb near Tendo. The home-made tofu was so fresh it was still warm. Soft and grainy and eaten with a smooth wooden spoon. The tempura was crisp, the soba cut to perfection and the surroundings seemed like a refined farmhouse restaurant. On the way back she let me drive her top-down sports kei-car (one of those cars with a teeny engine) and I only felt a little bit like a toy-boy chauffeur... Anyway, a brief period of lessons with a Japanese lady from the International Centre who had time and a textbook aside, I taught myself Japanese, as is the fashion in the north.

I was excited to join MLC. I joined a class specifically orientated towards passing the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December, so I guess I have no reason to complain about how dry the lessons can sometimes seem. We study by grammar point. We read through example sentences using the grammar point and then try to come up with sentences of our own, cold. There are listening tests and kanji tests and to be honest, as materials I can't readily get my hands on, those and the expensive fee I paid at the start for the month are the only reasons I'm still going to the classes.

My classmates: an American girl and a Vietnamese girl, both of whom I was excited to meet at first. I foresaw heads knocked back in laughter by the water-cooler, a shared discovery of the finer points of Japanese, perhaps going out for a drink after a lesson to chat about life in the big city. But they scarper as soon as the lesson is done. There's no interest in any kind of conversation before the lesson, in awkward moments when we've arrived before the teacher has. It's not exactly what I expected.

With this in mind, on Tuesday I welcomed Tom, the perennial absentee. A slightly older guy with a thick cotton shirt and glasses and a very quiet demeanour, I thought Tom would balance things out a bit in the classroom. Tom could read kanji very well, but when it came to coming up with example sentences of his own, he struggled and passed several times before the teacher apparently decided he shall not pass. He agonised over it for a while. The teacher tried to prop up a sentence, probing him for words and suggesting the correct verb form. Tom carried on sweating it out and then suddenly, he started to gather up his books. He'd had enough. He packed his things quickly and awkwardly squeezed out of the tight, souless classroom while the teacher remained bemused and completely at a loss as to what to do.

I don't think we'll see Tom again. Which is a shame, as I won't have a chance to congratulate him on the bravest thing I've seen anyone do since I've been in Tokyo. Tom, I salute you. It's time I followed your example, quit the bland lessons and found another Kiki.

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.