Magic / Turmoil

it's a little bit like watching a storm roll across a lake from the safety of a cottage view.

except it seems like everything is happening on a bigger scale these days, and the proverbial cottage is my distance from all of it happening. the storms are bigger; the clouds more conspicuous, gathering suspiciously when they lurk. in japan, we are at the onset of the typhoon season of september, when regular typhoons whip across japan's resilient shorelines and its urban stretchmarks. i was forewarned repeatedly while in canada of the risk of going to a country laden with disaster from below and above, and yet the country has not turned into a terrifying place. right now, global concern rests appropriately on hurricane victims and men and women younger than myself dying for white men in offices. i haven't felt and earthquake here since valentine's day earlier this year. i am told i sleep through the other ones, including the recent sendai one i mentioned already. i received an email from my friend phil today with photographs of a skymonster in calgary. while the earth is certainly trying to tell us something, i think some of us are listening to different translators.

when i was in shizuoka, i learned a card trick and have been practicing it with my students. you'd be surprised at how effective an icebreaker magic can be. i have also discovered that in social situations, alcohol is an effective conductor of awe. intoxicated people are more cynical before a trick and more surprised after it happens, giving (even) the (most amateur) magician an increased sense of accomplishment. more important than anything else, it's a great way to get people to communicate around a language barrier because it is so interactive.

being shy is about losing confidence in our ability to pilot our ongoing situational performance. language is a very real part of our ongoing theatre act of self. the breakdown of a language barrier can be accomplished in using alternate acts of performance to communicate. i think that this even goes as far as entertainment that is cross cultural. my limited japanese and my limited card trick ability prove to be strong allies.

also, last week i attended an open-jam night at a bar in akashi with my friends kelley and scott. it was apparently only for real musicians though, as everyone on-stage was incredibly gifted. sample visuals above.

Ins & Outs

this past week, the return to work was easier than i had anticipated. doing my best to incorporate fun into everything i do, i have deprived myself of sleep over the course of the last two weeks in order to find the time to hang out with the folks i haven't seen in some time. most nights involve the sun coming up before i have time to hide in the den of sleep. i think that seeing the sunrise from the top of mt. fuji has given me a taste for 'morning fire' and my immune system isn't liking it very much.

i faced a 6-day work week last week, and the wednesday involved an epic journey to a small pocket town named wadayama where i got to team teach with tim, my newest colleague. we exchanged magic tricks and teaching tips and the other experiences we encounter under mutual circumstances. his classroom is inadvertantly a wireless hotspot, so he brings his computer to the classroom with him to get internet access. just amazing. it's hard to believe that i went through a month and a half of having this computer without having the internet and so i had seek pockets of connectivity around himeji. anyone else in japan with a wireless internet card can look at this site to find out where restaurants and hotels exist that provide this service for free. it's handy, especially if you're traveling around the country and you'd rather not pay through the nose for internet access if you want to send home an email. i hope that on my pending cross-canada tour i will be able to find the hotspots across our vast nation that will allow me to update a weblog to keep the journey documented.

yesterday at a beach i lost my house key. this created a difficult situation because i had no way of contacting my landlord and wouldn't really know what to say if i did. i discovered the empty key pocket at an hour when my company was unable to help me, so my friend scott graciously offered me shelter at his home last night so that i could call my employer today to sort it out. i have returned and i am safe.

there was a large earthquake in sendai while i was away at fuji. thanks to all of you who heard about it and thought to check in on me. i assure you that i am safe and sound and, like the other eathquakes i have experienced while living here in japan, slept through it. i'm a sound sleeper.

i've decided to post some old pictures that might not have been shared back at the old yahoo! photo post i was using before i set up this blog. that site is still active, but updates are few and far between now that i have a new photo storage site and this website. also, a treat: i'd like to dedicate this following photo to l. ron hubbard and all the scientologists out there. cause hey, cults are hip. it's worth the wait so let this load up:

Fujisan Noborimashita

needless to say, the entire experience took some time to digest. i also simply haven't had time to sit down at the computer and attempt to meticulously recall every pertinent detail of my trip to shizuoka to you, the loyal masses. i apologize for the delay. truly the sheer magnitude of both the event and the mountain itself has made chronicling the adventure quite the daunting task. i would have thought that nothing could be more difficult than the 10 hour climb that i made, but the idea of sitting down and expressing my feelings about it actually seems more challenging. in an attempt to be honest with my memory, i haven't consulted jacob's blog on the ordeal, but if you're interested in his recolllection of the same event, it can be found here. i'm sure that i'm forgetting a lot of things so reading his side of the story will fill in a lot of gaps. i look forward to reading it after i am done with this massive entry-to-be.

i feel i would be committing a grave injustice to my own experience if i simply produced a virtual tour of the climb by way of this blog instead of honouring the memories that made the triumph unique to me in anecdotal events. so forgive me if i refrain from mentioning the details you might be expecting to hear from someone who has just conquered the summit of a world-renowned peak.

last weekend was a nation-wide holiday in japan called obon, a japanese-buddhist festival which is a time that people return to their hometowns to honour their dead ancestors. by its very nature it is a peaceful, reflective time and a time to be with family. i have heard it compared to the mexican observance of "el día de los muertos". this makes traveling anywhere in japan difficult because the transit systems are all bogged down with weary pilgrims. my pilgrimage was quite different, as (to my knowledge) i have no predecessors in japan and could take the weekend as a well-deserved holiday from work.

my journey begins early in the morning on saturday august 13th, my brother shane's birthday. i had stayed up the entire night on friday attempting to finalize my preparations and ensure i had everything packed. the shinkansen trip went off without a hitch and jacob met me in shizuoka. we would climb fuji the following day.

jacob is stationed in fukuroi, a small city in shizuoka prefecture over an hour from the base of mt. fuji. the first night i visited him we took it easy and got started the next morning, well-rested and ready to go. we started the climb from an area known as a "fifth station," an area part way up from the base of the mountain that you can access via bus. some fifth stations place you far enough up the mountain to climb to the summit in about 4 hours. being the healthy young men that we are, jacob and i opted for the longest and most unforgiving climb from gotemba, which is clocked at 7-10 hours in climbing time. we made incredible time the whole way up, but a few times decided we would give ourselves extended rest periods.

forgive the aside, but i should take a moment here to note how small my world really feels. i trained for my current job in nagoya, where my company cycles all the trainees through before sending them off to their job placement. i met a couple of the trainees in the group that followed my group on one of my last days in nagoya. well, when jacob and i were on the bus from gotemba station to the fifth station, the bus stopped for reasons unclear and two other white people got on an otherwise empty bus with us. sure enough, they turned out to be two people who recognized me before i recognized them, from the nagoya training group. their names are cole and tracy, and they were climbing fuji that same day. small world, huh?

at the onset of our ascent, around 5:00pm, an old lady at the first rest station informed us that there were two cute girls climbing ahead of us, and that if we sped up we could surely catch up to them. we thanked her for being thoughtful and we all enjoyed a laugh. the first leg of the climb was really exciting. we couldn't see the peak anywhere in front of us because it was obscured by the clouds. a number of times we located what we believed to be the true top of the mountain only to have something more massive revealed to us beyond it. but we were full of energy and unwavering in our pursuit. dressed in light clothes at the bottom with a full pack of winter gear in our backpacks, we were sweaty messes as we tried to hurry out of the humidity that hovers at low altitudes. there is a soon-to-be famous photo of jacob that i took which shows the stripes of sweat on his shirt where the backpack was.

the early climb was simple enough, mostly soft soil and volcanic gravel. we caught up and surpassed the aforementioned females, who were slow climbers and even if they were to make good company they would have slowed us down to an irreparable pace. we had a mountain to climb here. the sunset was happening behind the mountain fuji looked beautiful and epic in twilight silhouette. we couldn't wait to see what the sunrise was going to be like from the top, which was the main point of the pilgrimage. as light faded, we knew that the bulk of the climb would be done in the pitch black of night and that fact alone offered its own unique challenges you might not normally encounter climbing a mountain. fortunately, there were no sheer sides or cliff faces where we were climbing so we really only faced the peril of exhaustion and the cold. and, of course, we had a flashlight.

we climbed and climbed and climbed. when dusk enveloped us, we estimated that we had passed quite a few people along the way and felt like we were making really good time. we were wary of going too fast, as we knew it would mean an even longer time at the top of the mountain in the cold while we waited for te sun. i remember the exact moment when all of a sudden we felt like we had outclimbed the grip of urban reality. there was a sudden silence. no sounds of technology at all, and the cities below us had shrunk to faintly lit patches across the landscape. to be in japan and not hear traffic or the pulse of metropolis was refreshing to say the least.

we climbed towards the night sky and the clouds began to thin out and revealed a sky of brightly burning stars. living in himeji makes it easy to forget about the billions of stars out there because they are bled out by the cityscape. but here, part way up the epic fuji, we were afforded a view of the constellations and witnessed quite a few shooting stars that made the journey all the more magical. it was all so epic, and i felt like i was a part of some really long, old and important story, attached to a part of japan that was significantly older than the markings of japanese early culture. i have since seen photos of mt. fuji from space and realize just how incredible this mountain must have been throughout the ages. it's like japan's oldest and most significant castle.



a few times during the climb jacob and i heard the sounds of massive explosions happening over the foothills to the east of us and as night fell we would seem huge balls of fire that appeared to be hovering in the distance. at first we had no idea what they were, but were taken by their intensity and confused by the repetition. imagine fireworks going off that don't spread and fade, but rather hover in an incredibly bright yellow glow for 20 seconds at a time. when i finally mustered up the courage to ask another climber in broken japanese, i think he tried to explain that they were like fireworks but a part of the seasonal night festivals happening in the fuji area. we were so far away and yet the intensity of the light was staggering. i snapped a picture or two. shortly after this, we were able to see actual fireworks going off farther in the distance. it's so neat to see something like that from above and far away. they seemed so small and we could only find them on the horizon when they were at their brightest point. we were higher up than the reach of the fireworks, so in essence we were looking down on them. truly spectacular.

while we had made all of the arrangements before climbing to ensure a comfortable and safe journey, we under-packed with regards to food because we were told that there would be food available at the rest stations along the way. this turned into a sham, unfortunately, as we weren't on trail for tourists so when we did find a rest station it was usually just holding an old man and some tired climbers who were willing to pay the extra $55 to sleep for a little while on the way up. we did manage to purchase a $6 cup of coffee, served in an old jar and made with nescafe crystals. again, sham. my advice to anyone thinking of climbing fuji is to pack lots of food, water, and maybe even a thermos of something delicious and hot to enjoy as the night and altitude steal the warmth right from your bones. by the end of the trip, we were labelling mt. fuji as sham-a-yama (yama being japanese for mountain) because of how hungry we were and the way we were gouged by rip-off deals the whole way up and down.

we rested a number of times towards the top, made a few movies with the digital camera and took pictures when the light would allow for it. one particularly humourous movie was done blair witch-style with the flashlight as jacob and i describe the shooting stars.

we reached the summit at around 3:00am. the previous ten hours were really catching up with us, and the top of the mountain was freezing cold and really windy. i found a thermometer attached to a utility shed up there which stated that it was around 2°C. i hadn't brought a toque with me so i had turban-wrapped my scarf around my head to keep warm. sunrise couldn't come fast enough. at one point we were embraced in a man-cuddle beside a tank of kerosene to keep warm while we waited for the sun to rise. there was absolutely nowhere to hide form the cold, as all the buildings that weren't charging a ridiculous amount of money just to keep warm were locked down until morning when an overpriced morning meal could be sold to all of the ragged pilgrims. the sky got really bright in the east around 4:15am, i think, and jacob and i used the new found daylight to find a better vantage point to watch the sunrise on the east corner. it was breathtaking. we somehow managed to regroup with tracy and cole, the two teachers we ran into on the bus ride from gotemba station.

we did it. dekita, as they say in japanese. our pilgrimage complete, we felt like heroes. jacob treated the journey up as a chance to quit smoking for good, like frodo and sam ascending up mount doom to toss in the one ring. i just wanted to see if i could do it, and it was high up on my list of things to do while in japan. so it was finished. great. we were feeling good, though really hungry and sleep deprived. we thought that the descent would be easy, but it turned out to be almost as difficult as the ascent. while gravity was on our side for the return journey, the rocks in the path and the crowds of people made the journey back to the bus stop a 4 hour ordeal. the terrain doesn't really afford you the opportunity to go barrelling down the mountain in a sprint, so you have to be careful to dodge both the rocks and the old ladies as you descend. it also got hotter as we approached the ground, wearing away at our patience and stamina. it sure felt good to get off of that mountain in the end.



and fuji was thus conquered. two 25 year-old guys vs. one big rock. it was a true pilgrimage and i'm glad i did it, though now i see why the japanese have a saying that a wise man climbs fuji once, but only a fool would climb it twice. it takes so much out of you that you really get a sense of your own impermanence and mortality, but you gain such an appreciation for the breadth of your journey and the natural beauty that the earth paints all around us.

Dressed, it Seems, in Blues and Greens

first of all, thank you to all of you who have had to endure my half-assed attempts at describing my current modest abode. i would imagine hearing the words "nice," "enough," and "small" as many times as i have said them in description must really be trying. at long last, i have posted pictures of the "bedroom" corner of the apartment. on the other side of the bookshelf, there is a small kitchen alcove with a hot plate burner and a sink with a water filter that i installed all by myself. the kitchen also consists of a rice cooker, a toaster oven, two microwaves, two fridges, a garbage can and a whole bunch of empty cupboards. living alone makes shopping in japan more expensive than you would realize, so i end up eating out a lot. i know i must spend a fortune on food this way, but i just couldn't stand to see food go bad because i didn't have enough time to eat it. besides, i am told that japan has the highest per-capita restaurant ratio in the world, so i like to get out and try what i can find.

tomorrow i finish a four-day week only to embark on a four-day weekend, one that shall culminate in the ascent of japan's highest peak, mt. fuji. standing at 3,776 m above sea level, the great fujisan will be waiting for me in shizuoka when i go there this weekend to visit my friend jacob and climb the stubborn old thing. this piece of landscape has been an integral part of japanese artwork for over a thousand years. it stands waiting for me, and i expect to conquer it.

i am happy with how this blog is turning out. i regret that i feel no more informed regarding the ongoings of the lives i have left behind back in canada, and hope that you people will make an effort to contact me whenever you find the time (you know who you are).

time now for a mass email to advertise this little website i have put together.

Good-bye, Old Friend

tonight i deal with a concept quite foreign to me by way of luck: grief. i am paused at the loss of a dear friend and family member who fortifies the bridge of my adolescence with her years spent with us as the family pet. this new gift of life was discovered by my 6th grade eyes at the onset of my confusing, pubescent years and she remained an unsurrendering presence until today, the onset of my adult life. i must count myself as one of the more fortunate people i know: i come from a strong and caring family of six and all of us are in good health. the loss of jingles, our family dog, after thirteen years as a staple and contibuting member of the family comes painfully but not without forewarning. her health had been in steady decline, dear thing, for many years now. many of her ailments are found typically in her breed; there were things we anticipated and things that surprised us along the way, but we knew what to expect with her and things were getting difficult. at the end she wasn't eating or drinking, and i would see no other option. i wouldn't have allowed her to suffer.

many of my friends are dealing with loss and its imminence as it gathers around their friends and families in the form of terminal illness coupled with unexpectancy. a close friend of mine kills himself incrementally with cigarettes. one friend's mother suffers a stroke in canada while her daughter is here, overseas. another watches her best friend die of a disease that women never get, but she's dying of it anyway, and there's nothing to be done. so often you can see death coming, but we're no more comfortable with it, and we continue to do what we can to make its presence invisible as best we can. a friend of a friend is watching her entire family, the environment and structure of her youth, die of lung cancer simultaneously. it is horrific. it is relentless. it has yet to arrive.

to lose a pet. it was time for jingles anyway, and there was nothing that we could have done to reverse her condition so she would have only gotten worse. we did everything we could for that little dog, and she reciprocated to the best of her ability. but we knew it was best and for that i feel fortunate. being all the way over here in japan has prevented me from seeing the worst of it. the dog we knew and loved had died long ago and, when she became more of a skeleton without a passion for even life's most primal requirements, we knew she had given up. as a family we had unanimously decided that should should never be made to suffer. that dog was our family's little girl.

there was nothing more important to my adolescent development than having a network of love all around me at all times, so that even when things got arduous and tensions mounted, there were more important things than the present moment. that dog was a constant reminder of the joy we as a family could bring to each other by way of surprise and sincerity. jingles met most of my high school and university girlfriends, was avidly protective of the house and its residents and was quick to spot a fake. i learned not to trust her judgement in her later years, after taking a long time to accept the fact that she was nearly blind and might have been a little bit racist when it came to greeting guests at the door. my father paints her disposition in a more elegant light, claiming that her resistence to be friendly to andrew yap in my younger years was because his presence indicated my departure from the household whenever he would arrive. i still think that she just didn't like asian people. she mellowed out as she got older.

that miniature schnauzer changed my life. while i would never label her a good listener, she would overhear a lot of my youthful ranting without storming out of the room. she didn't complain when i would take her for a walk to have a cigarette back in my super-secretive days, but you could tell that she never approved. she was a good dog. and she loved carrots.

that miniature schnauzer could eat more carrots than any creature i have ever known. her night vision must have been spectacular. she would eat carrots until she was sick, and on more than one occasion i witnessed that dog contemplating reconsuming her carrot binge. we usually tried to call her off of it. she wasn't very good at fetch because she didn't like to share when she was younger, but when the game moved indoors she wouldn't leave you alone. loved the attention, and loved more than anything to have all six of her packmates home and gathered in the same room. christmas. elementary school summer. exam breaks. family emergencies.

that miniature schnauzer would raid the garbages in our house to get gratifying revenge if we left her alone all at once. she really didn't like that. it didn't matter what was in the tissues in the bathroom refuse. she would stir it up nice and well for us to have to pick up when we returned to her. usually by the time we got home she had all but forgotten her outburst of tantrum and her ears would press to her head in that "oh-my-god-what-have-i-done" kind of way. we loved her too much to ever strike her so we had to condition that dog with guilt. if any family knew how, it was ours. she would usually get sent outside and usually just seeing her ears go down was indication to us that she understood and she was sorry for flipping out, like an alcoholic having a moment of clarity or defeat at an intervention.

that miniature schnauzer was conditioned not by foodbell but doorbell. that miniature schnauzer was conditioned to react to the words "biscuit," "carrot," "outside," "walk," "who's that," "daddy's home," and "where's 'so-and-so'?". she could spot another dog out the front window before we could and always whined with a sense of identity conflict, torn between the need to be outside eating garbage and sniffing strangers and the desire to be at home, just another human like the rest of us. that miniature schnauzer would wake my mom up for her breakfast so early. that miniature schnauzer had a pacemaker but, in a way, there was never anything wrong with her heart and i loved her. that miniature schnauzer would run away from home and not look back and we would panic but if we couldn't find her she would always find her way home and bark stubbornly until we opened the front door for her like anyone else. that miniature schnauzer saw us as one of her own, and we will always lovingly see her as one of us.

i'll miss you jingles. i wish i could have been there.

Solo Missions

my journey to hiroshima was a partial success. i did it all by myself, without help from anyone else. i'm feeling brave. i failed to make it to miyajima in time to watch the sun go down 'neath the beautiful torii at the shrine, but i suppose it gives me a reason to return to hiroshima and see miyajima.

the city itself it beautiful; the reconstruction of the city for the ground up has given it a much more modern feel than many places in japan. the a-bomb dome was once known as the hiroshima prefectural commercial exhibition and was designed by a czech architect. though now in ruins, the building still manages to give hiroshima a very european feel.

the city was filled with tourists and for once i felt like one with my backpack, water bottle and digital camera. i wasn't shy about taking pictures and managed to get a few nice ones. as per usual, i have posted a variety of photos from that day, though some of my favourites failed to make the cut for the sake of variety.

the peace museum is both magical and horrific. it chronicles the events of august 6th so thoroughly that you are astounded at the amount of information that exists regarding the dropping of the bomb. while i have always recognized how horrific the atrocities of war are, it took seeing the charred remains of children's tricycles and fingernails and school uniforms to put a human face on the tragedy. these were all individuals with names and families and adventures that would never be realized. and in an instant they and their entire world was wiped out. they say that the people killed instantly were the luckier ones, because the radiation poisoning and searing of skin and the other echoes of mass violence are hauntingly real and quite surely the most tragic thing i have ever witnessed. seeing all that death and suffering reminds you of the fruitlessness of war. it can only ever take away, and there is nothing to be gained. it must be easy for men of greed to assign the death sentence to any number of human beings from the comfort of an office chair with the reassurance of a committee or senate. remove yourself from the atrocities of war and you can treat it like a game.

i think that it is time we cease from canonizing our war heroes and generals of death and remember that the mission of peace is much more difficult and honourable. every time a nuclear test is performed somewhere in the world, the current mayor of hiroshima writes a letter of protest to remind our often-blind leaders of the perils and tragedies born out of an appetite for power.

The Intermittent Journey

after much ado, the trip to hiroshima will be a go. i imagine that the experience will drain me quite thoroughly; yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of the americans dropping the atomic bomb on hiroshima, and there were memorial services throughout the city. i would have liked to be there.

the americans choose to remember this tragic event in history in a different, more glorious way: the enola gay (the airplane that carried the 60 kg of uranium in bomb form) has a display in the smithsonian , though the original exhibit was closed down in 1998, later to be reopened in 2003.

hiroshima is the first leg of a small tour of japan i am going on over the next 10 days. tomorrow i will be visiting hiroshima and hopefully miyajima on monday before i have to return home to himeji to put in another week of work before earning my four day weekend in shizuoka with jacob and the epic mt. fuji. i must remember warm clothes, and to respect the greatest mountain in japan.

today in himeji, the annual castle matsuri was underway and there were hundreds of people dressed in yukata. i even bought an inexpensive yukata for myself to really catch the mood of things, but as my companions had to depart from the festival early, i didn't even get a chance to try it on. maybe i'll wear it around my apartment over the next week or so. the yukata is a casual style kimono outfit worn by japanese people to summer events. there are different yukatas for both men and women, as the men have a wrapping cloth worn like a belt called an obi (like obiwan kenobi) that ties quite differently than the female version and is without a bow. they are typically worn with hard wooden sandals called geta. as for those who were in yukata today, they looked fantastic and it was a really nice feeling to see the city i live in get all decked out in history and celebration. there are a number of festivals over the course of the summer in japan, including a few spectacular fireworks festivals, but this is the only one i know of that is focused specifically on the castle. ironically, i didn't bother going to the castle to see what was happening; i found that the events immediately around me as i was killing time were compelling enough to keep me occupied.

in small world news, i met a young man today who is currently attending my alma mater, the university of guelph in ontario. his name is hiro and is returning to canada in september to resume his educational career in environmental sciences. he afforded me the chance to reminisce about my university days, though it sounds as though a lot has changed back in guelph since i was there.

as usual, pictures are above and comments below. you know i'd love to hear from you. wish me luck tomorrow. at least i'm not drinking this time.