brycewordsfromjapan

On the Train

2010-12-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

     People talk on trains in China. I remember this being very strange to me after living in Japan where people don't talk much at all in public. I think Vancouver lies somewhere in the middle of the talking spectrum between Japan and China. People are also quite friendly on trains in China. Some people sit in the seats that face each other around a small table each other, maybe slurping on some instant noodles they bought from the food cart going up and down the aisle of the train; some stand beneath the luggage rack, waiting to take someone's seat when they stand to go to the toilet or have a smoke between the cars, only to give the seat back when they return; or they'll lay newspaper on the floor, half in the aisle, and half under a row of seats, and lay down to sleep as much as they can before the next meal cart passes through the aisle.

   They seats that we bought were cheap, so they were also crowded. When we bought our tickets a few days prior, we wondered just how hard our "hard seats" were going to be. The train itself turned out to be much nicer than we expected. It was very clean, the seats were a decent size, they were also padded, and there were different kinds of music that played through speakers during most of the trip. What is meant by "hard seat," is that the seats don't recline -- instead, they're one piece of fixed hard plastic with a cushioned material over top. This is because the seats are placed back to back so that four seats will face each other around a small table. Janice and i had seats on one side of the table, and on the other were two Chinese men who would be our traveling companions for the next 20 or so hours.
   One of the first things that the guy across from me did when the train started to move, was put his feet up onto the side of my seat. When I looked at him, he nodded at me with a big smile on his face. "I guess so," I thought to myself. For the rest of the journey, they picked their noses, lift their shirts up over their bellies and pick the lint from inside their bellybuttons. They brought their own grocery bag full of shrink-wrapped meats -- usually some kind of sausage or chicken's feet, that they chewed with their mouths open and drank beer with big smiles on their faces. Then one of them used a toothpick to pick his teeth, which he also used to pick his ear and his bellybutton. When one of them would get up to go for a smoke between the cars, one of the standing passengers would come to sit in the seat while he was gone, but the other guy would shoo him away and stretch himself out across both the seats, and his legs would hang into the aisle where the food cart came and pushed his legs aside.
   The two of them spoke no English at all, so most of our communication was limited to nodding, smiling, and pointing at the things that interested us. I would point at his tea container on the table that was full of yellow and orange flowers -- every once in a while a steward would come and fill it up. He pointed at my book on the history of China. We'd smile and nod, and then return our eyes to the hazy landscape outside our window.
   Even though we were far from the major city centres, passing by villages made from brick or cratered concrete, into farm country where we often couldn't see much because there were tall trees and brush that grew alongside the track, still, there was always a haze of smog.
   Someone told me once that ten percent of California's air pollution comes from China.
   At one point during the ride, I had my camera out, taking pictures out the window, I turned to the two fellows across from us. I pointed at them and then gestured with my camera as i put it to my eye. The one on the right shook his head at me, but the other had an unsure grin on his face, sat himself strait, and then nodded his head quickly. Sitting there in his blue collared polo shirt, I snapped the shutter and now I'll never forget him.
    Afterward I turned the camera around to show him the image I got and both of them smiled. He was disappointed though, when he asked for a copy of the photo (he thought it was a Polaroid camera) and I couldn't give it to him. I tried to ask him if he had an email address, but this didn't register with him.

   Something I haven't mentioned yet is that the night before embarking on our 20 hour train ride, I got quite sick. I was up most of the night with my arms wrapped around the toilet and in the morning, i wasn't sure if I was able to transport my body to the station on time without having to expel some sort of bodily substance. Janice looked into buying plane tickets for the next day because if we didn't make our train, we'd be stuck in Shanghai for a few more days. At the last minute, I figured that I had finished purging everything from my body, and I said, lets go.
   On the train, I hadn't used the toilets yet, but I knew that even under the best of situations, I didn't want to have to stick my face into a public toilet. So for the 20 hour ride, I drank about 200 ml of water and ate about 4 sesame crackers. If nothing went in, then nothing could come out. I ended up making a short trip to the toilets at some point, but it wasn't anything that I couldn't stand up for. I was glad because the toilet was nothing more than a hole in the floor that opened out to the tracks outside. And there was a sink just outside the door, but a couple of people were sprawled across the counter and pressed into the basin.

   Despite feeling awful for most of the trip, the experience was very rewarding. Most of my traveling in Asia had been in planes or bullet trains, or even buses, where everybody sits facing forward. Aside from looking out the window at the passing landscape, there's not much to see other than the back of the seat in front of you. We would end up taking a sleeper train from Xi'an to Beijing, and then a flight from Beijing to Guangzhou. Although they were more comfortable, they were not very memorable.
   Walking around the streets of a city, or sitting in a restaurant or bar, our glimpses of people are very superficial and brief. When you sit on a train for 20 hours with someone, or with a family, you get to see them open up a lot with each other. Even sitting across for a person, watching them sleep, can be very intimate as their heads bob up and down and their eyes flickering beneath the eyelids. It's a side you don't often see as people push and shove through busy intersections or crowded subways.
   The two men across from us spoke no English, but there were other people in the train who spoke some. We received the odd, "hello" from somewhere on the train. It was usually someone curious to try a few words of English. Often mothers would encourage their sons to try some of the English that they had leared in school, but they were often shy. We would say hello to them, and we'd be all smiles, but they would hid behind their seats or jump into their mother's arms. I had some paper with me, so we took to drawing pictures with simple greetings and then passed them to some of the children around us. This seemed to win us a bit of celebrity amongst the people around us. People would turn their heads towards us as they passed the papers around, reading the small messages aloud and laughing. I remembered that i had printed some photos from Vancouver to show family in China, so I took them out and passed them around. At this point, even the older men who sat stone-faced, trying not to show interest, had to turn their heads and reach for the photos.
   Somewhere around this time we made friends with a man named Liu Ziyang, or Kyle Lau as was his self-professed 'English name.' He was a graduate student from somewhere in the west who was doing research for a professor on the coast. His English was pretty good and he said that he read a lot of English books, but i think our tastes were a bit different, because we didn't recognize any of the titles that we offered each other. I felt bad because at about the 15 hour mark, Janice and I were both pretty fatigued and our upright seats becoming torturous. Kyle wanted to talk, but our ability to communicate by this point was minimal. We did our best, and Kyle made sure that we got off at the correct station.

Lineups, Shanghai World Exhibition, and All That...

2010-12-07T15:10:00.000-08:00

Buying our tickets

A diligent reader of this blog will have remembered that i left off the last post with Janice and i trying to buy Expo tickets from the 24 hour convenience store beside our hostel, but finding it closed. The next morning, we woke early to pick up the tickets and then take a taxi to the exhibition grounds a few minutes away. Unfortunately, when we entered the shop that morning, the woman couldn't understand a word we said. We thought that "expo" would hav been one of those words that sounds the same in every language. We finally found a magazine with the expo on the cover, but when we showed it to her, she said that they were sold out.

Waiting to line up

We figured that we'd be able to buy our tickets at the gates, so we took a taxi to the grounds. When we arrived, there were signs that pointed us to a building across from the gates. The ticket booths didn't open until 8am, another 30 minutes, but there was already a lineup that snaked its way through a roped off area in the building. There was no airconditioning and we had trouble finding the end of the line. Most of the Chinese people stepped in, over or under, the retractable belt barriers wherever they liked. When the ticket booths opened, there was a great surge forward of bodies, filling all empty spaces, and with most people jumping the line. Despite being hectic, and having a couple hundred people in front of us, the lineup only took us about 10 minutes.

Liming up

   Once we bought our tickets, we rushed across the street to wait in line at the gates. People in uniform directed us into small holding pens outside of the main buildings where the security checks and the main part of the lineup was. I don't know how many of these large security check buildings there were, but there was one on either side of the one that we waited outside of.
   Under the hot sun, we waited shoulder to shoulder with everyone else for 45 minutes. We made a few friends with some students in the lineup who asked to have their picture taken with Janice and then gave us one of their maps to the Expo grounds (we seemed to be the only people in line without one).
   We were eventually let into the building, which probably fit two thousand people -- all winding their way through retractible belt barriers to the security check at the end. It was a little cooler in here because they had installed sprinklers in the ceiling that periodically sprayed mist over everyone. And again, the lineup moved quite quickly -- within a few minutes, we had moved almost to the front of the line.

China Pavilion from afar

Inside, the grounds were huge. The side that we entered, had a lot of corporate pavillions and across the river was where all of the national pavilions were located. There was a bus that took us through an underground tunnel to the other side, where when we arrived, we quickly realized that most exhibits had lineups of more than an hour. The event sees an average of 30,000 visitors every day, and even though this was a 'world exhibition,' encapsuling cultures from all over the world, the only people that visit the event, are Chinese people. Chinese people came from around the country to see the Expo. Everyone spoke Chinese. The only people that spoke English were the people working at pavillions hosted by English-speaking countries.

Inside the Morocco Pavilion


Inside the Morocco Pavilion

Everywhere we looked, there were massive lineups of Chinese people. The organizers for the event did a fantastic job at managing crowds, but that's mostly what the event was about: managing crowds. Outside of each pavillion, people lined up in undercovered areas next to a building. Some buildings like Japan, we couldn't even get near because the lineup circled around the building several times. The grounds were divided up geographically, within Asian coutnries in one area, European in another, and then the Americas and Oceania. I think some of the African, Middle East, and India were grouped in with, or maybe beside the Asian ones. And in order for people to get from one area to the next without having to wind through buildings, or bypass the standing people barriers that trailed off from each one, they had built a pedestrian highway that was probably a good 50 meters wide and that ran the length of the grounds.

Mongolian Woodcrafts

   And of course, there was the massive China pavillion that towered over the rest of the grounds and was virtually impossible to get into. I heard from friends that we would need to wait in line to make a reservation for a time in which we could begin to wait in line. In order to qualify for this reservation, I think we would have had to fill out a passbook by collecting stamps from other pavillions. We saw in many of the less-busy pavillions that we went to, people would run in with their passbooks in hand, collect their stamp, and then leave. The pavilions of countries like: Mongolia, North Korea, Brunai, Bangaladesh -- these places had short lineups that filed in and out within a few minutes.    We did get to see some great exhibits. The first pavillion we went into was Morocco. We were walking by, looking at the building and it's massive lineup, when a man in traditional Moroccon robes made eye contact with us and waved us over. As we approached him, he lifted the velvet rope and gestured towards the entrance.
   "Can we go in?" Janice tried to ask the man, but her words were cut short when I shoved her in the back, urging her to go in with a polite smile. Either we were allowed in, or the man had made a mistake and we weren't allowed in. Either way, i figured we play the part, and hurried us in.
   After walking around the Expo grounds for about an hour, having eaten a few kebobs from Pakistan, and some samosas from Sri Lanka, we were very curious as to what could be inside these massive structures that embodied very unique architectural designs. The different countries varied in what they presented in Shanghai: in the case of Bangaladesh, they featured mostly food from their country; Brunai, they shared their econimic development plans for the near future; North Korea, a fountain and books on the glorious Kim Jong Il; Thailand, dancing and martial arts. For the most part, each country basically provided a showcase of culture unique to each country.

Outside of South Korea

Inside the palace-like building of Morocco, the first floor was dedicated to the shocasing of authentic artifacts from the country's historical culture. Within the many glass cases, we saw collections of pottery, jewleries, musical instruments, clothes, and weapons. This area all surrounded an inner courtyard with palm trees and small pools that glistened in blue. On the second floor was a Market-Bazar type exhibition, where different products and handicrafts were on display in small, shop-like spaces. Each display usually showed several kinds of textile, foods, or craft items as well as a video on how each item was made. My favorite were the spices -- not only were they rich in texture and colour, they smelled amazing.

This is as close as we got to Japan

   We also visited the Canada pavillion during mid-day when it began to rain. We had heard something about Canadian being able to get preferential treatment at the doors, so with our passports in hand, we approached one of our fellow Canadians. "Are these worth anything to you?" I asked, gesturing with our Canadian identification.
   "Sorry, but those are worth absolutely nothing," he said, and then opened the gate and let us into the building, where they welcomed us with Canadian flags and lapel pins.
   Inside, the first area featured a Cirque du Solei-inspired decor, with video screens broadcasting various elements of Canadian culture. The screens fit into themselves so that they could each display a single image within a large mosaic of images, or the could be blended together into a textured image of a totem pole. There was an emphahsis on the Winter Olympics and hockey in Canada, but also our cityscapes, landscapes, cuisine, and cultural events/personalities like the Gay Pride Parade and Bill Parsons. There were also small pools with projected images beneath them that people could send ripples through, and a bike tour of Canada -- where visitors could sit in an excercise bike and as they rode, a video screen took them on a coast to coast visual tour of the country.
   In the next room, There was a video presentation of various photo collages and some strange audio tracks over top. The visuals were intimate and unique, and they showed some cool scenes of Urban Canada. I think one of the images was a view of Downtown Vancouver and the North Shore as seen from Fraser Cemetary, with various people from the locale fading in and out of the panoramic.
   To finish the exhibit, there were a few paintings and photographic works on display, as well as a gift shop and restaurant where people from around the world could experience various Canadian cuisines. On the menu were things like: Bacon Cheese Burger with Fries, Fish and Chips, Waffles, and of course, Poutine.

Later in the day, when the sun started to go down, all of the buildings began to light up, which added some very cool ambiance to the scene. The sun seemed to set for hours and i wished that i had brought a tripod to steady my camera while I balanced the architectual lighting with the dusk. I ended up having to settle with a little bit of high ISO noise and some motion blur. As it turned out, with all of the lights and the low-lying smog covering the area, the sky never seemed to get fully dark.

The largest building ever?

   This was about the time when a lot of people started to leave the grounds (probably to see the view along the Bundt) and when some of the lineups became manageable. One of the more interesting exhibitions that we saw in the evening was Chile.
   Inside of the Chilean building, the bulk of the showcase was encapsulated in a large wooden sphere where we walked through on several different levels. The exhibit featured a theme on technology, communication and our relationships with each other. There were tunnels and corridoors with beams of light that illuminated webcam portraits. In a room, the designers had taken all of the possession of one Chillean apartment and fastened everything to the ceiling, complete with coffee cups and fashion magazines on the coffee table. The idea was to provide alternate perspectives on our living spaces. Outside of the room was some kind of mirror and portrait view, where looking outside of the window had the effect of looking into an adjacent apartment building that stretched to infinity in all directions. Also, because Chile lies on almost the exact opposite side of the planet, they built a well-like-structure into the floor of the building that was supposed to metaphorically stretch through the centre of the earth to Chile. The well was sunk into the floor less than two meters, and in the bottom was a video screen and web cam that connected the pavillion to a bakery somewhere in Chile. The idea was that people could look through the centre of the Earth to the other side and talk to people face to face. Apparently, people in Chile give a lot of "thumbs-up" gestures and form small hearts with their thumb and index fingers.
   When Janice and i first planned on seeing the Expo, we were unsure of how many days we wanted to spend there. Even though we barely scratched the surface of the event, the one day was enough for us. We enjoyed seeing what a World's Fair offered in China, and the many cultures that were on display, but we only had so many weeks in China, and there's only so much that you can see in a glass box from the back of a lineup.

Saudi Arabia and India (notice the people standing below the palm trees).

Europe Area

Inside Canada

Inside Chile


Inside Chile

Looking at Chile

The ferry back

Hardware, train tickets, and how much can you fit on your scooter?

2010-11-25T11:02:00.000-08:00

One of the first things that we knew we needed to do was to buy train tickets to X'ian. Tickets are often sold out a few days ahead of departure, and with the World Expo happening in Shanghai, we figured the number of people traveling to and from Shanghai might make it difficult for us to leave.
According to our Lonely Planet guide book, we had two different options: there was the train station, was far enough away that we would either need to take a taxi or subway to get to, or there was a train ticket office that was somewhat in our neighborhood, and that would give us a chance to explore a bit of the city on foot.

Our journey took us to a hardware district that was about an hour's walk away from our hostel (a bit further than it looked on the map). Each storefront in this area was packed from floor to ceiling with various wrenches, drills, piping, electrical wire, couplings, screws, nails, floorboard, window panes, door panels, siding, power tools, steel chains -- or whatever a resourceful Chinese man might need to jerry-rig a scooter to carry 10 times its own weight. If we walked by a plumbing store, we would walk by 3 more that were identical before we saw an electrical store. Most of the shopkeepers either talked animatedly into a cordless phone or played solitaire on the computer while the wife and kids sat on the floor, playing with some of the inventory.

Walking through the city, it was interesting to see how the city organized it's space. Most areas were divided into large city blocks, where on the main city streets surrounding these blocks were small shops, and on the inside and upper levels of the block, were residences. Going into these large blocks, there were small alleyways that were often just wide enough for a small vehicle to travel down. Sometimes steel gates, or even guards blocked the entrances to these alleyways. It was clear -- even when there weren't steel gates, that these were private areas where we probably weren't welcome to take uninvited strolls. People would often be lounging outside of their front doors, or hanging laundry, or bathing their families with soap and water from a garden hose.

We learned very quickly that the Lonely Planet can only get you so far in China, as we ended up chasing places that appeared to have moved a block or two down the street, or across the street, or that simply didn't exist. In the case of the ticket office that we were trying to find, we eventually found it between two streets that supposedly did not exist, and it had closed an hour before the listed times in the book. This turned into even more of a disappointment when we ended up having to take a taxi to the train station, which turned out to be something of a madhouse.

Aside from being a massive structure with lineups pouring out of its very orifice, and having people strewn about the pavement outside with their luggage, sleeping on newspapers, there was virtually no English to be found. Taxis whipped in and out of the drop-off zone, where we took our first steps towards the station, and our first task was to figure out which line we needed and then how to ask for the tickets that we wanted. We ended up finding a series of small signs that led us across the street from the station. We looked into the building across the way, where we saw more lineups of people, but this time, in front of ticket windows there were large screens full of scrolling Chinese characters above them. We weren't sure if we were in the right place yet, but a girl in a red dress probably saw the looks on our faces and asked us in English if we needed help. She said that we were in the right place, but that the people here probably wouldn't speak any English and that there wouldn't be many tickets available. She suggested that we go online and buy plane tickets instead.
    Feeling quite unsure, so we waited in line anyway, while searching out the Chinese characters for the place that we wanted to go. The lady at the window seemed to understand us, and she even understood words like, "seat," and "sleeper," but they were repeated back to us as "no seat," and "no sleeper" for the day that we wanted to leave. "Only standing" was her suggestion. It was a 16 hour train, so we asked about the next day. Looking back, I think we were lucky to find our "hard seats" on the 20 hour train ride that left the day after we wanted.
    It was getting dark by the time we left the station, so we took a subway to the People's Square, which looked interesting on our map and wasn't too far from where we were staying. The subway was crowded, but efficient overall -- except for the security check that had metal detectors and that ran everyone's bags through an x-ray machine.
    We found a series of restaurants on our way home and had dinner at a place where everyone seemed too nice and eager to help us. Although we were used to people paying more attention to us in Japan because we were foreigners, in China, this attention often took the form of shameful excess. If we didn't have 3 or 4 servers around us, wide-eyed and grinning, they would be sure to gawk at us from across the room -- only to smile and nod profusely whenever we made eye-contact. But i guess it's to be appreciated.
    I seem to remember the food being good, but i usually end up ordering food that's too spicy for Janice and i think that this evening was no exception.
    On the way home, we stopped at the 24 hour convenience store beside our hostel to buy our tickets for the Expo the next day, but it had already closed its doors. (What? Open 24 hours and they were closed? Yeah).

China: First Impressions

2010-11-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

Even the river was busy as our boat entered the crowded Yangtze that would lead us to the heart of Shanghai. The water was filled with fishing boats, navy vessels, ferries, tugs, coast guards, and barges that housed families who strung their laundry on lines that went over top heaps of garbage -- and all of them loosely followed lanes and that cut in and out from each other in the slow, drifting manner of water travel. We waved to the passing boats, where small children sat from their wooden chairs, eyeing us through binoculars. Even with our escort flashing blue and red lights 30 metres ahead of us, our captain laid on the foghorn against the oncoming boats that seemed always eager to play a game of chicken. We drifted up the river for an hour -- between the refineries and loading docks with blue and red shipping containers that were stacked a dozen high. There were shipyards with cranes that lifted entire ships out of the water. Every inch of the river's shoreline was crowded with industrial or trade complexes that kept busy in supporting the world's second largest economy.

    The last leg of our tour took us to the heart of Shanghai's downtown. The iconic skyline approached us with it's various shapes and colours. The buildings glistened in silver, hues of blue and gold, and had massive names like Aurora splayed across them. There were structures that appeared to have been cleaved into two halves, another that turned into itself, another that resembled a bottle cap opener, and the needle-like TV tower at the point. As we pulled into an area not far from the Bundt, the clouds opened up slightly and we all did group shots in the diffused sunlight. Then with our cameras hanging off of our wrists, we quickly exchanged emails with people that we would probably never see again.
    The city itself seemed less crazy than the river at first. People somewhat obeyed traffic laws and waited at lights and such, but there were bike lanes that appeared and disappeared along the side of the road, and blended with the sidewalks that we walked on. We kept on our toes as bicycles, rickshaws, scooters and motorbikes, all dipped in and out of pedestrian areas.
    The boat that we arrived in seemed to have set the appropriate tone with its foghorn, as Chinese people were definitely not afraid to use their horns. There were people everywhere with no shirts, or at least with the bottoms of their shirts hiked up to their chests -- as seems to be the fashion for many Chinese men. There were also vehicles that were often loaded beyond their capacity as scooters carried entire families, or possibly the merchandise of a small business, precariously tied together with twine. The smell was one of the more immediate impressions. There was always a metallic tinge to the air, interspersed with random pockets of rancidity.
    Overall though, the city streets were clean. The buildings may have looked run down or aged, maybe showing signs of water damage amongst large junctions of electrical hardwire, but there was generally no litter anywhere on the streets.

    It wasn't far to the Bundt area, which was made up of Art Deco buildings dedicated to banks and finance. The shore alongside the river was well groomed with a walkway, flower beds, streetlamps, river tours, and ferry boats that docked all along the shore. In the evening, when people left the World Exhibition grounds, many of them seemed to flock to the Bundt where they could get there photos taken with the city skyline, amongst the buskers and vendors selling bottles of water for 30 cents each -- or cold bottles for twice the price. On top of a small brick building near the water, was a cafe/bar with a saxophone player housed on the roof, playing jazz music to the crowds.
    Our hostel ended up being just a block behind the Wall Street-like buildings along the water and between the dingy buildings a few blocks behind. The hostel was called "the Captain's Hostel," and it had a seafaring theme, complete with blue waves imprinted into the carpets, roped guardrails in the hallways, lifesavers hung on walls, and portraits of mythical sea captains. The washroom came with toilet paper -- although only one roll at a time, and whenever we took a shower, the whole bathroom flooded.
    As it turned out, when Janice went to pay for the room with her credit card, the girl at the desk wasn't able to work the chip function in her card. We tried it a few times, trying to get her to give us the pad so that we could put in the code, but when she finally gave it to us, it still wouldn't work. The card didn't end up working for the rest of the trip and my card expired a few days later. It wasn't until we returned to Vancouver that we learned the girl at our hostel caused our card to deactivate after her third failed attempt at running the card without a PIN.
    In the area behind our hostel was where there were small restaurants with faded menus in the windows and families sitting at wooden tables. There was no English in these places, so we were always limited to the picture specials displayed behind the cash register. When the waitress would come to take our orders, we would have to lead them to the front of the restaurant and point at whatever image looked like it wouldn't have any mushrooms (mushrooms are no-good in my books). These pictures were often deceiving however, and we often ended up with one mushroom dish or another.
    One of our best meals in China however, came at our first lunch in Shanghai. Around the corner behind our hostel, there were a couple of noodle shops: one that was empty, and another that was full of Chinese people. The one that was full of customers had part of its kitchen located outside the front of the restaurant, where the cooks boiled soup and fixed dinners for the people inside. On the other side of the burners, we could see another chef who pulled wads of dough and then cut them into the noodles that were put into the soup. As we walked by, one of the servers stepped out of the door, dressed in his apron and a handkerchief tied over his head: "You come eat!" he said.

There had to be a reason why this place was busier than the one beside it. We walked in and were quickly seated at a table with a few older men who sat across from us, slurping noodles out of boiling hot broth in the humidity of the 30 degree afternoon. I assumed that they knew what they were doing, so I pointed at their bowls when the waitress came to take our orders; Janice pointed to a picture of a sauteed beef and onion dish that was on the wall in front of us. As we ate, a family stood over us, waiting for a table. While their two children open-mouth-stared at Janice eat her lunch, we asked ourselves what could make the food taste so good. We figured it was either because of how hungry we were, or based on the headaches that we developed afterward, it could also have been the copious amounts of MSG.

Open Waters and Nostalgic Digression

2010-11-14T14:27:00.000-08:00

We woke up in the morning surrounded by nothing but open water. With the new oceanscape also came the rocking of the boat and eventually, i would end up with my head in a dizzying state of motion sickness.
    It was shortly after breakfast that we met with a mother and son who we shared a meal with the day before. The mother was a Chinese woman who lived in Tokyo with her son, who identified himself as Japanese. Both of them spoke a bit of English and I still had a bit of my Japanese. The woman was also kind enough to teach us a few simple Chinese phrases, and even gave us an introduction to the nuances of Chinese tones and inflection.
    Anyone who hasn't tried to learn another language however, may not be aware of how taxing communication can be -- especially on the first day of study. When she suggested that we play a numbers game that her son had invented, and proceeded to explain it to us in Japanese, English, and Chinese, for some reason I found it difficult to concentrate on the numbers. It was also at about this time when I realized that the floor beneath me moved itself in ways that were entirely new to me. I always figured that boats rocked back and forth with the rise and fall of the ocean. What I learned is that boats will rock not only back and forth, but also to and fro -- and then everything in between, so that, there was always a constant lift and fall and sway and then a lilt and sometimes even some heave that was inescapable.
    Our faces began to zombify before the numbers and the languages, but our companions were eager to play their game and practice their English. We had to exaggerate our condition a bit and politely escaped to our room where we fished some Gravol out of our luggage and attempted to cope with our new environment in motion.
    When I eventually became somewhat accustomed to the motion of the boat, I went back to the cafeteria where there were tables and I could write in my journal. I managed to catch up with Darren, a guy we had met earlier, but hadn't acquainted with yet. Darren is from Hawaii, and has taken a few months off from his work as a school councilor to travel around the world.

You can read about his world travels at his blog: http://comealongwithme.wordpress.com/

    We talked for a few hours and one thing that stuck with me from our conversation, was his mention of some photos that he had seen of some old theaters being demolished. These were old theaters that he had grown up with and gone to see many movies. He told me about how amazing these buildings were and how surreal it was to see them being gutted and torn apart. Seeing the upholstery from the seats, and the colour of the walls, and the silver screen -- everything looked the same as it did when he was growing up. We talked about how a theater is an interesting place full of distinct textures and aromas. It's also a place of many places -- a place where we can see many places real and imaginary. Often, we'll have seen a film that will have changed who we are and the way we think; we leave the theater a different person than when we entered, forever changed by this place of places.
    There were two theaters in my neighbourhood growing up. One of them is still there and i haven't been to it in years. The other closed down years ago, but the building is still part of the mall and was refurbished into a framing business. I went looking for a frame a few years ago, and I remember walking along the theater complex walls that we had lined-up against to buy our tickets at the box office, and then opened the glass doors where they had torn our ticket stubs, and then into the foyer where they had sold popcorn and put up movie posters.
    Inside the place was filled with displays of empty frames. They didn't have what i was looking for at the time, and so the saleswoman took me to one of the storerooms, which was actually one of the old theater rooms. The doors were the same, hidden in an enclave, so that the light form the outside wouldn't disturb the show -- the movie ambiance. The same doors with the massive handles running the length of the door were still there and the hinges felt as smooth as ever. All of the lights were on in the theater, illuminating the place in a way that i had never seen before. The chairs had all been taken out and the screen at the front of the room was still there, but someone had cut a line across it from one corner to the other -- probably in the interests of avoiding competition. As we walked down the steps to the front of the theater, boxes of frames were stacked across the terraced floor where the seating used to be. The lady tried to show me some of the other frames that she had, but I was focused on trying to remember which movies I would have seen in this exact room. All of the rooms were the same though. Interchangeable. Theater 3 could have been the same as 8. Did we turn left out of the theater that day, or right?
    The lady didn't have what I wanted and we left the room. I asked if i could use the washroom and saw the same rows of urinals against the white tile. In the time that i was in the building, it was just the woman and me, and i wondered why all of the urinals were still there. We used to line-up outside of the theaters because they were so busy. We paid money -- $6.50 in the evening, and $4.50 for a matinee (I know because i still have the ticket stubs) just to enter those glass doors. We'd arrive early to get good seats. Beat the crowds. Now the place is full of empty frames -- empty spaces, and i can walk in anytime during store hours.

I found an article and some photos on vintage theaters being demolished in Hawaii -- maybe the same ones that Darren used to frequent? http://cinematreasures.org/news/13069_0_1_0_C/

Photos from the Shanghai Ferry

2010-11-09T13:37:00.000-08:00

Something's up with my photo uploader, and i can't situate any of my photos properly in my posts. I wanted to put a few of these photos in with yesterday's, but here they are instead. These are from the Shanghai Ferry as we leave Japan.

In Transit

2010-11-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

Stuffed/crammed into the middle seat, between two aisles, and the seats in front and behind, I sit partially reclined with my feet in a small cubby, in the dark, with the bus stopping and starting, or turning, and people waking up to use the washroom -- Janice one of them, crawling over top of me, before arriving in the sunlight of Osaka at 7:30 in the morning, where we enter a massive train/subway station with standing room only, for men and women in suits going to work, eyes forward, hips swaying, nobody talking -- one train after the other unloading and loading, wave after wave of people flooding spaces between pillars, up escalators, through turnstiles; we wait in line and the doors open and we walk in, and then we are pushed further in, and then more people wedge themselves in; the next train the same: i hesitate to step on and the man pushes me in the back -- when i turn around there is nobody behind him -- he's pushed me on onto the train on his own accord and now his back is toward me, silent and unapologetic.
    We step out of the station and it's hot and it's humid, and we have no concept of direction, and we get directions from a bald man in glasses who is eager to help and to practice his English, but we're in a hurry and when we get our information, we run.
    "Thank you," we say with a wave and then we're off to find our boat.
    The international ferry terminal is air conditioned and not many people are there yet. "Wait a minute, please," says the man at the counter.
    We sit down in a row of seats near the tall windows, looking out at the gangway and the massive boat, and cargo containers stacked everywhere, and everyone around us, over the age of 8, is quiet and sitting still. People under the age of 8 are running, climbing, laughing, and adventuring. I try to be all smiles, but nobody responds.
    I make eye contact with a a French-Canadian guy, but both of us seem unsure. Maybe next time, i think to myself.
    I ask Janice what language the couple beside us are speaking and she says, "Czech." They're old-school with aluminum poles sticking out of their packs and socks pulled up to their knees. Across the way, a girl walks to her seat in tight spandex shorts -- they don't leave much to the imagination. I tell Janice, but she already knows, and i'm impressed.
    Customs is easy, boarding is easy -- wait, except for the man yelling in Japanese at the counter -- something about not having a boarding pass. He eventually gets it and seems happy. Talkative even.
    We find that our room sleeps 4, but we are only two. Soon, a French couple joins us in our room and they've been cycling Japan (Tokyo to Miyajima) for the past two months and are on their way back to France, via the surface. We make friends easily and the guy leaves his wallet in the open, on the top bunk while he takes a shower.
    On the deck, the air is still humid, but the breeze is nice. The water is beautiful and Japan's shorelines are endless and serene. I wait for the openness of the ocean, but i don't want Japan to disappear just yet. We cross under bridges and i hold back on taking too many photos -- in order to save space on the memory card.
    The cafeteria food is great -- the first thing I eat is boiled duck, and the beers are huge and they only cost $1.50.
    Eventually the sun goes down and everybody heads to the deck to see the show. The air has cooled a bit, and the sun is orange and spectacular as it sinks behind the mountains.
    The moon is equally magnificent on the other side of the boat (portside) as it reflects, sparkling, off of the water, and lighting the deck. A very drunk Japanese man joins us and he tells us about his import/export business and that he "loves Japan."
    I tell him I do too.
    Soon, he leaves us, and Janice and I share a kiss in the moonlight, and a stranger stumbles upon us only to run away when he sees us.
    Eventually we're back in our own bunks to talk with the French about China.

Last Days II

2010-11-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

     I suspected that the landlady had changed my door code to the same "1234" that it was when i first moved in, but i figured it best that i not go where i wasn't wanted. The air conditioning was probably disconnected anyway.
    It was 36 degrees by 9 in the morning that day, and almost 40 degrees by noon. In my hand I had a shopping bag with the remaining contents of my fridge: 2 water bottles, a bun, a quarter bottle of tomato juice, and a quarter bottle of peach vegetable juice.
    I still had my phone connected, so i phoned James who was often at home when he should be at work. It turned out he was at work at the time, and he didn't answer his phone on account of a free cell game.
    I figured i better drink the peach vegetable juice while it was still cold.
    Eventually my phone rang and it was James. We had circled around to his school by this time, to the gym where the band was playing "A Whole New World." James could hear them too and he sung a few of the lyrics for me before telling me that his apartment was unlocked and that we could hang at his place for an hour until he got off. He had lost his key, so his place had been unlocked for the last few days.
    James and Lauren weren't leaving Japan for another week, so their apartment looked the way mine did the week before -- maybe a little worse. James had lived there for 3 years, and he had a bit more baggage to take care of.
    We had some time to kill, so we sat on the balcony with a can of Asahi that i had left there from the night before. The fourth floor was nice. It had a breeze and a good view of my neighborhood.
    We eventually went inside and I played guitar for a bit and looked through some of the books on the coffee table. I started to look at a book on India, but Janice wouldn't approve of any destination-based literature until we got back to Vancouver.
    When James arrived home, it was time for me to meet Shike Sensei to tie up loose ends and then to meet with everyone again for a last sushi dinner. James found his apartment key at dinner -- it was buried in his wallet.
    We rushed a bit for dinner and said some hurried goodbyes in order to make it to the staion by 8, but it turned out that our bus didn't leave until 8:45.
     "Get used to it," I told Janice, as we prepared to start the first leg of our next month in China together.

Last Days In Japan

2010-11-05T11:36:00.000-07:00

    Underneath the hot sun, Janice and I sat on the bottom steps with our packs on the asphalt in front of us. We had over six hours to kill before our bus left for Osaka. Within 3 days, we would be in Shanghai.

    My supervisor told me to wait at my apartment until 2 p.m., when utility people would come to shut off my gas, water, and electricity. He also told me to have money ready in case I needed to pay any bills up front. It was good to know that these things were going to be taken care of.
    During the morning and early afternoon, Janice and I still had some packing/throwing-away-of-things to do. There was food left in the refrigerator that was going to get us through the afternoon. Everybody wanted to throw away my cooking oils and spices, but when you put them all together, they amounted to quite a bit and I wanted to leave them for my successor. Most of our things were packed and ready, but there were boxes laid everywhere that needed to be taken to the school for when the cleaners would come the next day. Lots of furniture had to be moved out of the apartment as well, so we had to figure out what was allowed to stay, and what had to go. And then the things that were to stay, had to be put in certain places. I remember someone posting on their Facebook at the time, "when you're moving out, everything is burnable."
     I also had to cancel my phone and pick up some pension forms. One of my teachers, volunteered her time to help us move some of our things around and to deal with various Japanese Language-oriented errands that we still had to run. If this early part of the day sounds like it was chaotic, that's because it was. I also realized that I left something out of my cover letters that I uploaded the day before for some jobs in Vancouver. This meant that i needed to do some re-writing and some Internet time.
    It was 2pm exactly when my doorbell rang and the 2 teachers (my supervisor had also showed up to help) were in my bedroom packing futons into the closet. I was just putting together my last cover letter, but I went and answered the door. I expected utility people, but it turned out to be my landlord who stepped into my apartment. She wore the same business suit and heels that she did the day before when she checked my apartment and said that there were no problems. She didn't speak any English and my Japanese was terrible, so I let my teachers deal with her while I put the final touches on my application. Apparently, she was here to check my apartment again.
    At 2:03, I clicked the button to finish uploading my files and then turned off the computer. When I turned around, I noticed that many of my possessions had in the meantime been gathering a lot of kinetic energy. Many of my things had either been put outside, or thrown away.
    It was about this time that my supervisor told me that everything needed to be removed from the apartment and that once the landlady finished her check of the apartment, I would have to leave my apartment, and that I "could not come back." I think that technically, I had paid my rent for the day, and that i should have been able to live there for a few more hours, but it turned out that this wasn't the case.
    From the bottom steps leading to my apartment, while we listened to my landlady change my door code -- so that we wouldn't be able to get back inside, I looked up to the windows on the second floor and said goodbye to what was my home for the last 12 months.

Sinking

2010-07-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

I was watching the beginning of Battle Royal with a friend the other day, when an image of a school sink appeared on the screen. When i said that the sink looked just like the sinks at my school, he said that he saw a show once, where it said that all of the sinks in Japanese schools are the same.

Here it is:

10 Minutes in Harajuku

2010-07-01T01:31:00.000-07:00

Before going to the Photography Museum on Sunday, and after my experience in the Manga Café, I figured that I would need some coffee to make it through the day. I spent the morning in the park in Harajuku, and also figured I might need to buy another shirt because mine still reeked of tobacco and beer. I didn’t end up buying a shirt, but I grabbed a coffee at the Starbucks and found a great seat at a corner window. It was about 10 in the morning, so more people were on the streets, while I looked over some of the photos from the previous day. I took a few photos of people through the window, but decided that I was probably a bit conspicuous lifting my camera to my eye every few seconds, so I decided to set the camera on the table and do some time-lapse photos of the sidewalk in front of me. There were times when I was itching to take control of the camera to get the frames that I thought were important, but at the same time, it was nice letting the images come as they would.

Some of the most interesting aspects of being in Tokyo is the people that you see walking the streets. This was in a sense, a random sampling of these people in Harajuku. Unfortunately, this was a bit away from the heart of Harajuku and the interesting people that can be seen there, but I think I managed to capture some of the diversity in character and attire than can be seen on the streets of Tokyo. After my coffee I brushed my teeth quickly in the bathroom and was on my way to the museum.

I had my camera set initially to take photos every 30 seconds and then eventually every 15 seconds. I had the focus set manually to the area near the edge of the building, but in hindsight, I should have put it on auto area-focus mode. Here are a series of photos that represent about 10 minutes on a Sunday morning on the streets of Harajuku.

Tokyo Museum of Photography

2010-06-30T02:17:00.000-07:00

After staying in the Manga Café and getting only a couple hours of sleep, I planned on visiting the Photography Museum in Ebisu. The museum had a few exhibits – all of which interested me quite a lot. One exhibit was the first in what will be a 3 part series on portraiture. This instalment was on the earlier developments on photographic portraits in Japan. Even though there was a lot of scepticism towards the technology leading into the 20th century – it was a common belief that taking a photograph was a means to stealing one’s soul, it grew in popularity because it was much cheaper than having a portrait drawn or painted. In fact, several samurai had their portraits taken in full samurai garb for the preservation of their cultural identities. There were a few samurai who actually travelled abroad and had their portraits taken in San Francisco. These portraits are nothing short of amazing. After showing a friend the book I bought from the exhibition, he commented that there was something almost jarring about seeing actual representations of real samurai in photographic form. The katana and the camera, both presented according to their inceptive purposes, just don’t seem to be technologies that fit together in the same particular frame.

Another exhibition was the 10th instalment of the World Press Photo. I think that this was/is something of a contest where an organization chooses the most relevant documentary photos from the previous year. They were arranged according to categories such as, ‘confict,’ ‘personal lives, ‘sports,’ etc. There were too many great photos to try to mention here.

The third exhibit was a collection of photographs from the memoirs of Seiichi Furuya. Furuya is a Japanese photographer who moved to Austria at a young age and married a European woman. The exhibition was mostly a documentation of his relationship with his wife who eventually committed suicide in 1985.

The series begins with photos of his wife (there are no self portraits, so we never actually get to see Furuya) in the late 70’s in Austria, probably early on in their relationship. We see them in their apartment, which sets a voyeuristic scene of the microcosm of their lives. Very quickly a child enters the picture and almost every frame contains both his wife and his son. In her arms the boy looks happy – and very uninterested in photography as he rarely looks at the camera. Instead he can be seen looking off to the side of the frame, or head down in a pillow, or looking through keyholes. The woman, from how she directs her eyes, seems to have only two interests, the person behind the camera, and her son. With her son, she seems always warm and caring, inquisitive, and often a bit goofy. In front of the camera, she is someone who is comfortable in front of the lens – either willing to exhibit herself and her personal life, or able to look at the photographer through the lens.

As the child begins to age, we can see the wife begin to lose weight and bags begin to form under her eyes; seems to lose a lot of the humour in her expression that she had when she was younger. Eventually, she appears with a shaved head, and there are a few frames taken in rapid succession after each other where she is standing over her child – her child in his own infantile world, and her face is filled with tears and anguish.

In 1985, the wife disappears from the frames and we see the son begin to grow up without his mother. One of the first frames where the child is alone, he is lying on his stomach beneath a window. He probably has chicken pox or the measles because small white dabs of ointment are dotted across his back, which beneath the light of the window, look like they’ve been applied with ethereal care. Another frame shows the boy, maybe a couple of years older, sitting on the floor in the living room with a few toys and a book on the coffee table; in the background is a large framed black and white print of his mother. Eventually, we see the boy at his graduation. He is standing alone in the shade and even though his visage has distinct resemblance to a Japanese father, his piercing look into the camera is a clear reminiscence to his mother.

This graduation photo is the chronological culmination of this memoir, but from here, we revisit new photos that take us back in time to when the wife was much younger – probably back to when they first met. We initially see her at her worst, lying in a bed beneath white sheets eating an apple, but then her hair comes back and the bags under her eyes disappear, and eventually she smiles again. One of the more iconic images from the collection is a photo of her standing with a camera around her neck and a stick in her hand, standing in front of a great body of water with a brilliant youthful smile on her face – it is also one of the last photos from the collection, leaving us with what seems also to be the most quintessential to her personality.

Throughout these photos, I remember searching for some tangible vein of personality, or character-trait that could be present in each photo – traceable within this small window of her life, possibly linking her to the circumstances of her eventual death. I wanted to see if there was some indication, some visual proof of a quality that was always inherent to her person that could demonstrate or foreshadow what was to happen. I wanted to see some element that could tie her life together. I think such an expectation was unrealistic given the diverseness of any person’s character.

What was interesting though, was that after following the progression leading to the wife’s death, and then continuing through the series back towards her youth, there was very late in the collection an image of the young wife with what looked like her mother, and in the light of the photo, there was a large scar across her neck. In this light, the scar is very conspicuous and given that she is very young in the photo, I had to retrace back to the beginning of the exhibit to confirm that the scar was in fact there from the beginning. It wasn’t until the end of the exhibit, when she is very young for the second time, that the scar is less hidden, or more pronounced. Maybe early on in Furuya’s career, which is represented at the beginning and end of the exhibit, he wasn’t quite as savvy to the details of his compositions, or maybe he wanted to reveal more in less heavy-handed composition. After these early portraits of his wife, there is some quite deliberate covering of the scar, either with the high necks or scarves of her attire, or with lighting, where she is often lit from the right side in order to cast a shadow over the scar. I suspect also some burning/blurring effects were performed on this part of the image in the darkroom. It’s a very minute detail, but having only noticed such a conspicuous – and potentially symbolic mark, only at the tail end of the series, made me re-evaluate all of my previous interpretations of both the subject and the author of these photos. The presentation or concealment of such a scar represents such important decision of representation, and I think it draws attention to both the attention to detail of the photographer to his craft, as well as to his relationship with the subject of his photos.

There was a lot for me to think about at the museum. Something I have a new appreciation for is to see actual prints of photos – rather than print or digital representations. I’ve definitely become accustomed to looking at my photos through the glow of my computer screen – probably a trend that will only continue to grow. I look forward to going back home however, and making some ‘real-life copies’ that I can look at without plugging into the wall.

Manga Cafe

2010-06-29T04:40:00.000-07:00

After the baseball game on Saturday, I spent most of my weekend alone in Tokyo. I figured that because I was alone, I had more options in terms of where I would sleep for the night. Having stayed in a regular hotel many times, I figured I would try sleeping in a capsule hotel or manga café. Both are much cheaper and offer very small compartments for sleeping.

Capsule hotels basically offer a small cubby, or capsule, where one can slip into for the night. I’ve heard that you can often have internet and television screens included in them as well. I think that they usually go for about $40-50 a night. I wanted to go to the photography museum the next day in Ebisu, and most of the capsule hotels that I knew of were in Ueno, so I opted for a Manga Café in Shinjuku.

Manga Café’s can be even cheaper because they’re not exactly intended as a formal means of accommodation. Still, people often spend such extended amounts of time, and often sleep there, that it’s often considered an alternative form of accommodation. I paid less than $20 for the first six hours and because I needed the extra hour, I paid another $7 or so for the last. Even though many Japanese people seem to frequent the place for several hours at a time – both men and women, for the average visitor, it’s a cheap place to crash after a night of heavy drinking. Not having had anything to drink except for a coffee earlier, however, I was in for a bit of a rough night.

The café itself was called “Popeye’s” and was recommended to me by a friend I met the night before. I also read on a few sites that this one was one of the more expensive, but more decent café’s to spend a night. It also had free showers and a soft drink bar.

The reception was on the ground level and its floor was covered in clean white tile. After booking a room, there were stairs in the back that led me down to the third basement floor where my room was. Each floor was very dimly lit except for the stairwells, which radiated funky colours that I think changed every few minutes. Each floor seemed to house about 50-60 small rooms. As I walked past bookshelves full of manga (Japanese comics) books, I could hear the tapping of keyboards and clicking of computer mouses beneath the buzzing fans in the ceiling. There was also the odd page rustle or murmuring – I think, if I read the menu correctly, the ‘floor rooms’ could fit up to 5 people.

The first basement, which is the non-smoking section was full, so I ended up in the third basement level, which smelled of beer and tobacco. The bathroom also reeked like vomit. And aside from smelling bad, the bathroom was very small and awkwardly laid out, so that anyone at the sink could see you doing you’re business at the urinal, and when someone ‘really’ had to use the toiled in the morning, there was still barely enough room for him to get by as I moved aside for him, “mid-stream.” Both of us awkwardly bumped into each other as we fought over the immediate square footage that seemed to hold the double duty of providing a place for someone like me to stand while peeing, and also serving as a swing space for the door leading to the toilet. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t get any on him, but of this I can’t be sure.

The room – if you can call it that, I opted for was a “floor room” rather than a “chair room” where the floor was covered by a soft cushion. The “rooms” themselves are not much more than cubicles, where when someone tall like me stands up, can see partially into all of the other cubicles on the floor. When I stood up on the raised floor of my cubicle, I could probably see much more. There was also a small floor chair where patrons could sit in front of the screens and then lay down on the floor when they got tired. The floor itself was a decent size; when I laid across the room diagonally, I could stretch out fully head to toe. The computer and television were on a platform over where I put my legs.

I’m usually pretty good at falling asleep anywhere, and with the jacket and towel I brought for my pillow, I was relatively comfortable, but unfortunately, I just couldn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the strange noises and rank smell around me, or if it was the coffee that I drank earlier, but despite feeling exhausted, I don’t think I fell asleep until about 5 in the morning. I was off to a rough start, with my clothes reeking like tobacco and beer when my alarm went off at 7:30 and I was on my way without brushing my teeth (by this time, there were clear signs of vomit in the bathroom sink).

Go Tigers!

2010-06-28T04:17:00.000-07:00

I went to Tokyo last Saturday to watch a baseball game. The Hanshin Tigers, from the Kansai region near Osaka were playing the hometown Swallows. Despite playing as visitors in the stadium, the Tigers are apparently very popular in Tokyo, and probably had more fans than did the Swallows. The friends I went with were Tigers fans, so they came adorning yellow baseball jerseys and towels. They also carried with them plastic tubes, which they call “megafuon,” or I guess megaphones. I imagine that they are intended to amplify one’s voice by shouting in one end and then directing it from the other end. Most fans however, carry two of them and use them as clappers, which are essential for the numerous cheers that the crowds are involved in.

During Japanese baseball games, the fans always stand up when it’s their team’s turn at bat. The stadium is divided into two sides so that each team’s fans sit apart – although on Saturday, there were plenty of Tigers’ fans wearing yellow shirts amongst the Swallows’ fans. Each player who steps up to the plate also has their own personal cheer – complete with percussive clapping and hand motions, that all of the fans memorize. I think that each time the team makes a big play, or scores a run, there are separate cheers for these as well. Even though the fans all seem to know what to do, there are a sort of “cheer-leader” in each section of the stands who where uniforms, white gloves, and blow a whistle in order to direct the fans in their cheers. There is also a small brass band at the back of the stands that play accompanying music.

No matter which team is up to bat, one side of the stadium is always on their feet, performing orchestrated cheers for their team – it makes for a very lively scene.

Aside from the temperament of the crowd, most of the baseball scene is pretty much the same as in North America. The field looks the same, the rules are the same, they sell hot dogs and hamburgers (although they are of Japanese equivalents to those found at home – and you can bring your own food/alcohol into the game), and there are several girls in uniform walking up and down the aisles selling beer and snacks.

As an added bonus to the day, someone somewhere also decided that we, as participants at the event, would also try to break the word record for the largest toasting of drinks in the world. The previous world record was set at 26,564, I think by a crowd somewhere in Europe. We managed to shatter the record with 27,126 people. For our toast, we were all given a small bottle of Coca Cola and a special plastic cup made for the event. Then, an old celebrity pro-wrestler came onto the field to lead our toast. At the end of the fifth inning, we all raised our glasses and shouted “kanpai!” and then held them for about 30 seconds so that some could “count” (?) our numbers. I’m not sure if they were actually counting, or what, but we held our toast for quite a while and the results were announced a few innings later. I think the results will be in next year’s Guinness Book of World Records.

The Tiger’s ended up losing in the last few innings, so there were no songs of celebration after the game. Either way, it was a great day!

Here are a few videos as well where you can hear some of the cheers!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJGifqmRfoQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWX3IBy6CH0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8iDc4WUy5U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDm-dlGzDEo

ひさしぶり!

2010-06-27T06:33:00.000-07:00

It’s been over 20 days since my last post – I think my longest hiatus yet. I’ve been pretty busy lately, and also haven’t been sure of what to write about – not necessarily because there’s nothing to write about, but more because there’s too much to write about.

Although I may have insinuated it, I don’t think I’ve made an official statement on this blog about my leaving Japan. I opted not to re-contract for a second year and will be returning to Vancouver August 20th and then attending a wedding celebration on the 21st. The biggest reason for my not re-contracting is that I’ve been living away from my girlfriend for almost a year now, and the prospect of going through another year apart is too much. There is a reason why many couples who plan on continuing a long-distance relationship end up re-evaluating themselves and each other; it’s not a practical way to build a life together. The relationship issues aside, professionally, I’m also interested in getting a job that is more long-term career oriented.

Otherwise, my year on with the JET Programme will probably always be one of the best things that I’ve ever done with my life. I hope that this blog will serve as somewhat of a testament to this. I originally set a goal of reaching 200 posts by the time that I leave, but it looks like I will fall a bit short.

I originally had very little idea of what this blog would be about when I first came to Japan. Part of the reason was I had very little idea of what to expect in Japan. In the broadest terms, this blog has been a record of my life living and working in Japan. From this point however, it will be about me getting ready to leave Japan and to return to Vancouver.

I’ve been trying to make the most of my last few weeks here in Japan. This last weekend, I spent in Tokyo. Here’s a random photo I took in Ebisu today.

Yokohama

2010-06-06T03:22:00.000-07:00

When Sean was here during Golden Week, we spent a day in Yokohama. Janice and I stopped there on the way back from Kamakura on New Year's Day, but everything was closed and it was very dark. During Golden Week, it was sunny and beautiful.

I've been trying to manage the colour better on my photos, which involves a lot of trial and error and takes a long time. As such, I only have a few photos to share.

ESID

2010-06-04T04:54:00.000-07:00

The other day, a teacher told me a story about an experience she had with an ALT in her past. I’ve tried to write down what she shared with me:

The JET Programme first started 20 years ago. I was 15 years old and still a junior high school student. We had an ALT come from Canada. I can’t remember her name. When she first came to our class, she asked my friend a question, but my friend would not answer. We all waited for 10 minutes, but she stayed silent. She didn’t like to speak English.

The ALT was only here for 1 year before going back to Canada. I think she was very tired. She did not like to speak with the Japanese English teacher. She had to live with him in his house. We lived in a very small town, so they lived together in his house. It was a very traditional house, so it was too much for her. My other friends spoke English very well and they would speak to her during class. The ALT would come to class with the teacher and then sit with my friends. The teacher would teach the class and the ALT would speak English with 2-3 friends for the entire class. They had learned English in their after-school study-school. I envied them. I wanted to speak with the ALT.

After living with her teacher for about 3 months, my friends helped her to find a new house. Her supervisor that she lived with would not find her a new place to live. And she did not speak any Japanese. So my friends helped her to find a new place to live. She lived with another family until she went home.

I found this story fascinating. The experience of this ALT seems so primitive compared to my experience with the JET Programme. My teacher mentioned that the town she was living in was very small and that there were no apartments that the ALT could live in on her own. I wonder if there are ALTs living in their supervisor’s houses as of today? Otherwise, the blatantly inadequate use of the ALT seemed like such a waste of resources. I’ve heard that in the 20 years of the JET Programme, the ALT’s salary has yet to increase. My salary is quite reasonable for what I’m expected to do here in Japan, and with inflation, ALTs 20 years ago must have been living very comfortably. For a school to pay so much money to have someone sit in a room and talk with 2 or three students in a day seems like a waste of everybody’s time except for the 2 students who spoke with her.

When I think back to the months leading up to my departure for Japan, I think the most useful information that I received were the stories that previous JET participants shared with us at the preparatory seminars in Vancouver. While the mantra for all of these seminars was the seemingly unhelpful “ESID,” or “Every Situation Is Different,” it seemed like every speaker was trying to shirk any responsibility of explaining what Japan would be like. I can remember people asking questions like: can I get yogurt in Japan? will the clothes fit me? can I wear a skirt to work? How big was your apartment? Having lived in this country for almost 1 year now, I feel confident in being able to answer these questions – in my case, the answers to these questions would be: yes; sometimes, but mostly not; yes; and pretty big. Now however, I can appreciate the ‘ESID’ conditioned responses from these Q and A sessions. I would hesitate to suggest that any of my answers will be representative of anyone’s experience in Japan. The country has over 130 million people, and they are as varied as anywhere else in the world.

Being able to hear of these individual experiences from ALTs who lived and worked in different parts of the country at different types of schools not only reinforced this idea that everything is different for each person, but reminded us that the most important thing was to keep an open mind. Every work situation has its challenges whether in Japan or at home. The best advice that I remember from these seminars was, “just enjoy it.”

I don’t know if I could have been able to enjoy living with my supervisor in the same house for a year, but I think that at least in today’s JET Programme, this was a very extraneous situation. For the most part, there is more to enjoy than can be taken in within a year. So, let’s enjoy Japan.

He doesn't lose rain, doesn't lose wind...

2010-06-03T02:13:00.000-07:00

Last week, I mentioned an assignment where students wrote about their future dreams. We continued the lesson with other classes this week and this one student’s writing really stood out for me. I liked it so much that I copied into my notebook to bring to parties and such. Anyway, I should let him speak for himself:

He doesn’t lose rain, doesn’t lose wind. He doesn’t lose winter and he is hot as a summer’s day. He has a strong body, and he doesn’t have desire, never got angry, always smiles quietly. He eats some rough rice and a few vegetables every day.

I want to be a man such as he.

Warm Fluids

2010-05-31T03:41:00.000-07:00

On my desk at work, there were these green forms sitting in a brown envelope for the last few weeks. They were papers that were required for the medical examination that takes place for all teachers and students in Japan’s education system. The students had their checkups earlier in the year and just last week the teachers had theirs done.

The forms on my desk were all in Japanese of course, so I couldn’t understand anything except for where to write my name and birth date. There was also a woman in a long white coat, one of the school nurses, who kept coming to my office for updates on how I should go about my examination: where and when to go, which forms to take, and such. The bulk of the examination took place last Friday, and today, I went to a clinic to have my chest x-rayed.

For the check up, I went with another English teacher to a room where stations were set up each portion of the exam. The first thing we did was to each hand over a small plastic vial filled, to the appropriate line, with our urine. We were supposed to take these vials home to get a sample of our first pee of the day, but I didn’t know this, so mine was quite fresh and still warm. I had also taken a multi-vitamin in the morning, so mine was the most neon-yellow of all the vials placed in the plastic tray.

Next, we handed in our forms from the brown envelope to make sure we filled them out correctly. I can’t read Japanese and hadn’t filled any of it our, so the teacher helped me through each form. I diligently answered questions about my allergies and medical history; I told them that I am not a smoker and that I consume about 3-5 servings of alcohol per week.

After the completion of the form, we had our height and weight measured. Everything is metric of course, so my numbers were 182cm and 80.9 kg. I can now respond to my students’ questions in numbers they actually understand. The person who took the measurements, marked these numbers down on my form, handed them back to me, and I was off to the next table where I had my vision checked. To check my vision, I looked into a small device and reported the position of a certain circle with a hole in it over a series of trials. It was either facing ‘ue,’ ‘shita,’ ‘hidari,’ or ‘migi’ (up, down, left, or right). As the examiner, this time a woman, marked my results, which she told me in English were “perfect” (with my glasses on), my good eyes managed to spy 3 glass vials that had been slipped into my brown envelope. I turned to the teacher beside me and asked, “are they going to take my #$%@ing blood?” He told me that they were and when I looked across the room, sure enough, two stations over, there was another teacher with a needle sticking out of his arm – at which point, more profanity ensued.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with having my blood taken – although I do generally avoid it whenever I can, but isn’t this a procedure that I would normally have to agree to in advance? Maybe I overreacted a bit – and maybe I could have been a bit more proactive in establishing for myself just what this medical examination entailed, but to me, it seems common courtesy to inform someone in advance when they are going to be punctured by a sharp object.

In all fairness, after having my blood pressure checked, the man who took my blood was very quick and I hardly felt anything. Nonetheless, the teachers behind me enjoyed laughing at me when I turned my head so as not to see the stabbing-through of my arm.

The test finished with a hearing exam and then I went for an x-ray of my chest today. I’m not sure when I’ll get my results, but I’m pretty sure that this is something that I’ll have to ask about.

For today’s photo, I was preparing to do a portrait workshop with the students of the photo club on Wednesday. I thought that I would take the opportunity to photograph my kitchen knives. My apartment came mostly fully-loaded with everything except knives and futons. I bought these shortly after I arrived and they’ve been excellent to me.

***On another note, my pen ran out of ink today and my pencil ran out of lead, so when I wrote most of this post at work today, I used mostly borrowed ink.***

Neighbours

2010-05-30T04:39:00.000-07:00

I live in a quiet neighbourhood within a fairly quiet city. There is a part of the downtown area that stays busy late into the night, but for the most part, when I walk down the streets of Iwaki after 8 or 9 o’clock, there are very few people on the road. Even Friday and Saturday nights are quiet.
My apartment is generally very quiet as well. Some of my neighbours in the building across from me moved out recently. There used to be a young couple with a small boy living there, but now there’s just a clothing rack full of dresses and a small stereo component lying on the floor. They were the few people that I would see come and go during the day, although I was never outside at the same time as them, so I never got the chance to say hello. Now, I rarely see any of my neighbours. The parking lot only ever has about 7-8 cars in it and whenever one of my teacher’s drops me off, he always asks me, “why are there never any cars in this parking lot?” One of these days I’ll have an answer for him.

I live in a corner apartment, so I only have one neighbouring unit, which I know people live in because every weekday I can hear someone coming home and punching in their door-code just before eleven o’clock. They also play a lot of video games, which I know because their living room is on the other side of my bedroom wall and I can hear them playing whenever they’re home. There’s also someone who lives below me who I saw shortly after I first arrived in Japan. He was parking his bike beside where I usually park mine – under the stairs, when I rode up behind him and said “konichiwa.” After glancing at me, he quickly jumped around the corner and went into his apartment.

I sometimes see people coming or going in their car when I’m also coming or going, but I rarely see anybody face-to-face to say ‘hi.’

The other day it rained all day only to let up in the evening when I went to grab some groceries for the next day. Walking through the streets at night is usually quite nice because it’s so quiet – kind of like when it first snows and everybody stays indoors. On the way back I noticed that the lights from all of the buildings and streetlights were reflecting off of the pavement very nicely and I could see white clouds hanging low in the sky; I had a feeling it would be a good night to take some photos. I spent about an hour walking up and down the streets of my neighbourhood and got a few good shots. There was still a light drizzle, which got on my lens, but the light reflecting off of these spots I don’t think was a total loss. A clean lens might have been ideal, but the raindrops added a bit of a cool effect.

***As usual, please click on each photo to see it in a larger/better format!***

Fish

2010-05-29T05:31:00.000-07:00

We went for sushi today at a sushi bar in some town up the coast today. It’s a bit of a shame that I don’t have more disposable income because I think I spend too much time trying to figure out how to get my favourite foods for prices that don’t do these foods justice. At home in Vancouver, I would always frequent the typical “All-You-Can-Eat” sushi restaurants that can be found all over the city – and which are usually run by either Chinese or Korean restaurant owners. In Japan, typically, I get my sushi from the kaiten-shushi restaurants where the food comes around on conveyor belts. Alternatively, I’ll wait until after 7pm when all of the prices for the ready-made food in the super market are marked down. All of these places at home and here in Japan are good in the sense that I really like sushi, but to sit down in front of a sushi chef while he prepares a meal of fresh fish is an experience unto itself.

I spent several years working in a restaurant back home – a fish and chips restaurant actually, so I’ve had experience working around fish all day. I know how precious a good knife and a clean cutting board can be. I wonder if these sushi chefs ever cut themselves at work. The chef at this place I think said that he had been living and working in the same place for over 40 years (this number sounds a bit crazy to me, so I want to think that I’ve got the number wrong, but at the same time, I remember the number being quite crazy, so I’ll leave it as is). I used to cut fish for hours some days, and I got pretty good at it; I never fully cut myself, but sometimes, when I got pressed for time and the knife was moving quickly in my fingers, a slight graze of the blade would leave the smallest cuts on the end of my fingertips. I wouldn’t notice until after when I was washing my hands. I also wonder if his hands smell like fish all day even when he’s not making sushi. I remember coming home from work and my hands would smell for hours after. There were many days when I would finish work, exhausted, dehydrated and malnourished, with cuts on my hands – usually with a few fryer burns, and my hands smelling like fish, but there was also a sense of satisfaction that I had put together good meals that many people really enjoyed.

Being a chef is such a wonderful profession and I have a lot of respect for them. I think all restaurants should have open kitchens so that we can fully appreciate the work that goes on in them. I like the idea of seeing food in front of me being turned into a meal. It’s work, and it’s art, and it’s all a little bit magical; sometimes all the ingredients may come together in the right form, but still, something could be missing. I’m reminded of a memorable phrase from True Blood, where the chef mentions something along the lines of, “you can taste it when someone puts love into their food.” Cooking requires a certain presence of mind that keeps one in tune with the food that’s coming together. There’s been many times when I go through the motions of cooking without really paying attention, and it won’t turn out the way I want – and I won’t know what went wrong. I hate this. But I think that if you really care about the food that you’re making, and really make an effort to care about the people that you’re making it for, it makes all the difference in the world. This isn’t something that’s easy to do when working at a restaurant for several hours in a day, but again, I think it is very noticeable when it’s there.
My Japanese is still terrible, so I couldn’t understand much of what our sushi chef had to say, but he seemed to enjoy talking to our more Japanese-savvy party-member, and he seemed to enjoy cooking for us as well. I think this post is a testament to this.

Down by the river

2010-05-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a few photos I took down by the river a couple of months ago and have neglected to put up for some time now. Things are looking a lot greener now.

There are many great things along the river. Baba's is along the river. The bakery is just before the river. Many friends live along this river. Sometimes i ride along the river to get sushi or tonkotsu ramen. It's also where i like to run when i feel like running.

What goes up... well let's leave it up there for a while.

2010-05-20T02:15:00.000-07:00

We’ve been doing a lot more writing in my classes this school year than we did previously. This means that I have a lot more marking to do between classes, but it also means that I get to read about my students more thoroughly.

We had students write about their future dreams this week in class. This entailed that I read paragraph after paragraph about students wanting to either be a teacher in the future because they liked a particular subject and enjoyed working with children, or they wanted to be a pharmacist because they wanted to help sick people; I estimate about 60% of assignments were completed as such. There was a fair bulk that also aspired to be doctors and lawyers (not such a big stretch considering the academic focus of this school), and the rare gems who wanted to be concert piano players and cartoonists. There was also a student who wanted someday to be a pilot, which I thought was cool.

I think that my favourite of the lot however, was this one:

I want to be a magician or a juggler. Because I like to surprise people. When I told my friends, they said “if you become a magician, you won’t get enough income.” It is not a well-paying job. But I would still like to be a magician.

I have to make efforts to realize my dreams. For example, the No. 1 juggling club is in the University of Tokyo and the No. 2 is in Kyoto University. It is too difficult for me to enter these schools. But, I’ll never give up! I will realize my dreams!

Thank you for listening.

There are a few things that I like about this piece of writing – my favourite being the acknowledgement of the adversity he faces and the persistence in spite of this. Not only do his friends not support his dreams, but also the future prospects of the career itself don’t appear to be very self-sustaining. Even the pursuit of the dream itself appears to be unrealistic in his eyes as the academic requirements to enter Tokyo or Kyoto University, which will allow him to truly excel in his chosen profession and to study with the best of juggling talents, seems beyond his means (last year, only one student from Iwaki High School was able to enter each of these universities respectively).

There is also the irony, which I can’t help but mention, in attending such a rigorous school as Iwaki High School in pursuit of a dream to study juggling, of all subjects, at Japan’s top academic universities (where most students go to pursue successful and highly distinguished careers in areas such as medicine).

I’ve been doing some reading on autonomous learning practices lately and I’m also very appreciative of the fact that he’s taken charge of his learning. He knows the prospects; he has a clear picture of where he needs to go and what he needs to accomplish this; and I saw him the other day from a second-floor window, practicing his juggling in an empty classroom after school – a further demonstration of his persistence in achieving his dream (as a once juggling hack-enthusiast myself, I can also say that he was pretty damn good).

Anyway, I probably won’t be around long enough in Japan to see him realize his dreams, but the inspiration is nonetheless comforting.

Thanks for listening.

Words of Advice

2010-05-18T06:30:00.000-07:00

We did an exercise in class a couple of weeks ago where students shared their words of wisdom. First the students would share a story that held a lot of meaning for them and then, in the form of advice for the rest of us, they would tell us what they learned from this experience. Here is my favorite story from the bunch:

My grandfather had a cute bird. I liked the bird very much. One day the bird disapeared. I asked my grandfather "where is the bird?" My grandfather said, "it is on the table." I was sad when I saw the bird. Because it was cooked!! I ate the bird and I said "thanks you." The bird was very delicious.

--We are given life by animals.

On another note...

2010-05-17T02:46:00.000-07:00

On another note, I've been following another blog -- one that probably not enough people are reading, about an English teacher's experience in the heart of Bangkok, where probably not enough people understand the conflict and bloodshed that is happening right now.

Please check it out and give her your support: http://princessinaka.blogspot.com/