Makinasu Kurisuchan

25 Minutes To Go

2007-06-18T16:38:00.001+09:00

Well, I actually have something closer to 18 hours, but the sentiment is the same. I'm about to leave Asia for a while and head back to Canada. I'll be there for an undetermined length, but I'm looking at trying to get from one coast to the other while the weather stays warm.

I'm sitting in the lobby of my hotel in Bangkok and trying to pass the time. The city itself smells like a combination of feces, urine, and anger. It's an impatient city with a driving pulse and fortunately it's really raining hard which may or may not wash some of the stench away.

I've talked to a lot of Japanese people on this trip who make a point of visiting only Bangkok when they're in Thailand, and I absolutely cannot see why anyone would do this.

The internet clock says that I have three minutes left before I'm cut off so I'll say only this: I miss all of you who are reading this, whether I left you behind in Canada nearly three years ago or met you along the way on my Asian adventure. I'm coming home and looking forward to it, especially considering that the travels won't end until I decide that I have to come out of retirement. I'm going to try and link some photo albums from Facebook to the blog, but if you're really antsy sign up over there and explore all you like.

I'm coming home!

A Taste of Laos

2007-06-07T17:20:00.000+09:00

Each morning at around 5:30am in Luang Prabang, hundreds of monks set out to receive alms from the locals. Here's a quick taste of what that's like.

Sometimes the merchants of SE Asia can be pretty demanding.

After staying a night with a band of villagers, the four of us set out on a quest to find a waterfall and a remote Lao village near Muong Ngoi Neau, but didn't have any luck. Instead, we made a short nature video!

A Post You Can Read

2007-06-06T20:12:00.000+09:00

Well, I've gone bananas with Google Video, haven't I?

The joys of technology have allowed me to broadcast an intermittent reality to all of you, thirty seconds at a time. I've avoided putting up pictures on the blog because there are just too damn many of them, and until I discovered Facebook I wasn't able to find a place that would host all of my thousands of photos without charging me for the extra space that they take up. I opted to compromise my own privacy because I like the attention and it's been really useful in allowing everyone I know (or nearly everyone, surely) to see me in a picture as soon as I put them up. It's also great that the people I know can tag me in photos and then everyone sees every photo of me that's ever been taken. I boycotted MySpace for so long that when Facebook came around I just assumed it was the same network of child-sex offenders acting in a predatory way. Facebook is actually just good for stalkers, I suppose.

At any rate, it's proved useful for me because I don't have to email a single photo out to anyone, except for those who are still burning the stubborn candle in protest. Those of you not on the Facebook train are welcome to check into this blog periodically to see the videos I throw up on Google Video, though now that Facebook has a video option as well I may start neglecting that as well.

So where am I? I've returned to Thailand after nearly a month in Laos. I'm nearly at the end of my Southeast Asia adventure, as I've booked a flight to Vancouver on June 19th and will be landing there just in time to attend the wedding of Alex and Liz, a couple I met while I was still living in Japan and teaching English. From there, I plan on spending a few weeks in British Colombia before starting the long journey back to Toronto, where I will attend yet another wedding that's not mine - this time of my oldest friend, Sheri Jackson. August will be all about Ontario, I think, and from there I'll continue my cross-Canada tour through Quebec and the Maritime provinces, stopping along the way to take in all the great sites in Canada I've never seen. I'm especially excited for New Brunswick, where the lovely and talented Michele Morrison (who I met during my first leg in Thailand) will attempt to prove that there's more to that province than simple bilingualism.

This trip has really been the best thing I've ever done. While it would seem inaccurate to include my experiences in Japan as part of this trip, I really look at that fateful day in January 2005 as the beginning of all of this; leaving Canada has reshaped my thinking and my personality in so many important ways that this trip really has been a two-and-a-half-year exercise in personal exile. I've seen more of Asia than most Asian people see. Counting Japan, I've visited seven countries since January of this year and couldn't be more pleased with the way I executed the journey. Jacob and I timed it perfectly in regards to the rainy and the high-traffic seasons. I avoided the notorious Full Moon party on Koh Pha Ngan and fell in love with each country along the way for different reasons.

I write this email now from Chiang Rai, a city in northern Thailand and the third-to-last stop for me on this crazy Asian backpacking tour. I entered Thailand with Scott Hetherington (a Canadian I met in Vietnam), Naasicaa Larsen and Treezie Moynham (two Australian girls who keep finding me along our mutual paths). It'll be tough to part ways with them, just as it was tough to lose Jacob in Saigon and Phil and Alex in Hanoi who both went their separate ways as we finished our Vietnam tour, leaving me to conquer the winding roads of Laos with just a 6'6" Canadian to keep me company.

I should mention that Laos, while I only really saw the northern half of it, holds a quiet charm unlike any place I've been on Earth. Famous for being one of the most-bombed places on Earth (U.S. Forces led a carpet-bombing campaign over the course of nine years that killed over 350,000 people), Laos is a peaceful and gentle country with a delicateness to both its people and its grand landscapes. I felt as though I needed to tread lightly wherever I went as not to disturb the magic of the place. It remains one of my favourite places, and will sit near the top of my favourite places and be included in my best memories from this trip.

There are so many things to talk about, and I could dedicate all sorts of long-winded blogs like this one to each country I've visited. But for now, I'll say only this: If I had to do it all again, there'd be some changes but absolutely no regrets. I'm looking forward to coming back to Canada to continue my travels on home turf. It's a dream I've had since I landed in Japan, and I can't wait to do it. If you're in Canada in the next three months, drop me a line and I'll pay you a visit.

Until the next one...

Beer and Gravity

2007-05-23T15:10:00.000+09:00

This is the best and only way to drink beer. Taken in Vang Vieng, Laos.

Jacob Heads Home

2007-05-12T21:40:00.000+09:00

Cookie

2007-04-16T22:39:00.000+09:00

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Prasat Preah Vihear

2007-04-10T19:31:00.000+09:00

A musical scene at one of the oldest Angkorian temples in northern Cambodia. The entire temple complex is perched high on a mountain overlooking a beautiful valley.

Urban Cambodia - Phnom Penh

2007-04-10T14:26:00.000+09:00

Phnom Penh as seen from the rear of a tuk tuk cart.

Angkor Wat

2007-04-09T22:55:00.000+09:00

From Cambodia

Some photos from Angkor Wat. Go ahead. Have a look.

What a Month in Thailand Will Do

2007-03-19T23:19:00.000+09:00

I'm not dead. I think I may have come close a couple of times. But for the record, I'm all right.

I think that I've avoided doing this thing because, well, I was in Thailand. Sorry. Things kind of came up.

I arrived in Thailand on Valentine's Day and then just disappeared into the swing of island life.
I spent some time observing the madness of lunar cycle parties, disappeared into the hammock-surfing life of northern Koh Pha Ngan. I spent hours a day living underwater and achieved my advanced diver PADI certification. I watched my travel companions get tattoos. I arrived in Bangkok and declared it Hell on Earth. I survived it, but I died a little bit inside every time I saw Khaosan Road.

I disappeared. But I'm okay, and there are tons of photos to post here. My Thai visa ran out and we headed to Cambodia.

I watched the sun come up at Angkor Wat. It changed my life.
I've become a vegetarian. It may not last, but something told me it was time to give it a shot.

Our number reached six travellers, but we parted ways with our Norwegian friend Lars in Siem Reap and today we arrived in Phnom Penh. Life is very, very good.

Stay tuned. Internet access in Thailand was sketchy because we were always on the move, but I'm going to be doing some volunteer work with the local Cambodian children here in Phnom Penh and I think I'll be sticking around long enough to get some photos uploaded.

- UPDATE -

Georgetown, Penang - Malaysia

2007-02-13T11:15:00.000+09:00

Our final stop in Malaysia is here in Georgetown on the island of Penang in the north, close to the border with Thailand. We checked into the Western Oriental hostel and managed to grab the last triple room in the place. We're only halfway through February at this point, but the heat and humidity are really starting to set in and all three of us are eager to get back to the water. Once we get to Thailand, our first stop is going to be in the Surat Thani province where we're going to get our scuba diving certification so that we can explore the underwater worlds of Thailand and Australia. Here in Georgetown we've been exploring the historical sites as we did in Melaka, as Penang is important for the colonial implications it had in both Malaysia and Thailand.

Most of the population in Georgetown is of Chinese descent, so we were hoping to arrive in time for Chinese New Year, but it turns out that the real celebrations won't get underway until the 18th, and we can't handle another week away from the beach. An appreciation for the sights and sounds of Georgetown notwithstanding, we're going to pack it up and move on tomorrow. We did get out yesterday to visit Fort Cornwallis on the edge of town as well as some different Hindu and Buddhist temples. The ladyboys are out in full force here along Love Lane, the street that runs perpendicular to our road. Some of them are more convincing than the actual women! We're trying to avoid eye contact.

The Cameron Highlands - Malaysia

2007-02-12T19:35:00.000+09:00

We decided to escape the balmy filth of Kuala Lumpur for a little while to kick back and relax in the mountains - a cool retreat into the Cameron Highlands was a nice reminder of what life was like before the humidity set in. We realized that we had stumbled into a retreat geared towards couples seeking a quiet time away from the city, and a lot of the couples we met up there looked surprise to see three single dudes and no female counterparts. It was a nice place and we had our first experience sleeping in a dorm situation. The longhouse dormitory slept twelve people in total, and we had to take a bit more caution when leaving our personal belongings behind.

We opted for an arranged tour that took us around the area of Brinchang, the town next to our base camp in Tanah Rata where Father's Guest House was located. Our first stop was Sam Poh Buddhist Temple. The sculptures looked a little bit like plastic, but I was impressed with all of the different symbols that were worked into the design of the temple as a whole.

Next, we visited a giant rose centre full of all sorts of different floral life. The best part of visiting the centre was the view it offered of the surrounding highlands if you were willing to hike up a long stone staircase. We then checked out a small strawberry farm where we each indulged in a fresh strawberry milkshake, some dried strawberry snacks and a batch of the fresh stuff. After that we visited a live butterfly farm full of all sorts of different creatures and a nearby local market.

Our second-to-last stop on the day trip was at the Boh Tea Plantation, where we learned all about the exploitative methods of employment akin to all plantation work. It turns out that the people working on the tea farm are paid a humble pittance to collect tea leaves by the kilogram. "An expedient worker," our tour guide explained, "can earn up to RM44 on a good day." That's close to $14 in Canadian dollars. Most of the employees are foreign workers from Indonesia or Bangladesh. At the gift shop they sell hot cups of tea, and Phil and I were wondering what it must be like for the people working to watch a family of tourists spend the equivalent to a day's wage on snacks in the cafe.

We concluded our day trip in the Cameron Highlands at a lacklustre bee farm where we saw no honey. The evenings at our guest house were spent watching movies with all of the other travelers. We watched a pirated copy of The Inside Man and half of My Super Ex Girlfriend, but I was so disappointed that I left to write in my travel journal. At least the beer was cheap. If I ever return to Malaysia when I'm married, I'll definitely head back up to the highlands, but I don't recommend it for people looking for a party scene, unless you need some rehabilitation after partying too much.

Atop a Big City - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

2007-02-08T17:02:00.000+09:00

While Kuala Lumpur is no Tokyo, it is a wide-reaching metropolis of glitter and lights. What makes it even more unique is that it's one of (likely very) few cities that can boast about having its own rainforest throughout its scattered urban areas. In order to get a really sense of what it was all about, the three of us ventured into the city for the day and took a ride up the 421 m Kuala Lumpur Tower to the observation deck and awaited the imminent dusk. Seeing a city of such grandeur in daylight was really cool, but to watch the sun set over a city and a rainforest was truly amazing. Adding to the spectacle was the nearby Petronas Twin Towers, which stand nearby and are the other major defining object on the KL skyline. From the angle of the KL Tower, you're really only able to see one of the two Twin Towers, but getting a birds-eye view of the entire city and the PTT's steel and glass framing makes for an incredible sight.

Like most of SE Asia, a trip to the top of the KL Tower was reasonably inexpensive at a mere RM 20, which works out to being around $6 in Canadian dollars. Compare that to the minimum charge of $25 to get to the main observation deck in Toronto's CN Tower and you can appreciate why it's a worthwhile day trip to make. And the photos we snapped from the deck during sunset alone were priceless.

The Batu Caves - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

2007-02-07T21:24:00.000+09:00

This statue of Lord Murugan is 42.7 m tall and was completed only a year ago.

Today we took a bus out of Kuala Lumpur to the nearby Batu caves, located about 13 km out of the city centre. Kuala Lumpur is a crazy city with lots going on so we decided to take a break from all the street hawkers and Islamic food stalls to visit this famous natural landmark which was discovered in the 1800s. At the front of the cave is the giant statue that marks the beginning of a 272 step climb into the mountainside. Inside we were dismayed to find that piles of trash had accumulated from the recent Thaipusam festival and the whole area stunk like garbage and sour milk. There were mangy roosters and cats lurking about the area. I was amazed at the natural elements of the caves but found some of the temples in and around the cave itself disappointing. It didn't stop us from taking lots of pictures, though I let Jacob and his superior camera do most of the work.

On the way out of the caves we were surrounded by hungry monkeys who were used to being fed by tourists and would snatch at anything you dangled in front of you. I nearly had my water bottle stolen right out of my hands.

The entrance archway on the road leading up to the Batu Caves

A view of the caves, the statue and the 272 steps we had to climb to go inside

Looking up from the inside of the cave to the extremely hot Malaysian sun above.

One of the hundreds of monkeys that live in and around the cave. You can buy peanuts or bananas to feed the monkeys, but they'll snatch things right out of your hand if you're not careful.

At the Cafe Limau-Limau

2007-02-06T14:16:00.000+09:00

We were searching through Melaka, an old colonial town in southern Malaysia, for something - anything - to eat when we stumbled across what at first appeared to be a bar. Noticing the specials posted outside, we decided to venture inside. We had found the Cafe Limau-Limau, and as we walked deeper inside the bar we thought we had found morphed immediately into a small art gallery with a sunny patio in the middle of its main room. Beyond the patio were chairs and a back room with moss-covered deco and incredible natural lighting. Switching our cameras to black and white, we snapped some awesome shots of the different elements within the room and decided, just as my battery was dying, to get some interesting head shots to capture our physical state. The food was fantastic and my photos turned out fairly well also.

Tioman Island, Malaysia

2007-02-03T13:49:00.000+09:00

Life in the slow, slow lane. I'm surprised there is no beer anywhere in this photo.

Now here's a life I could get used to. Other that a nauseous three-hour tour across bumpy seas to get to the island in the first place, Tioman Island was absolutely paradise. We arrived pale and seasick after spending a night in the quiet Malaysian town of Mersing. Everyone who stops over in Mersing is usually waiting for a bus out of there or a ferry to Tioman, because it's otherwise not a destination for really anything at all. But the locals were really friendly and we played some cards to pass the day before our early-morning journey to Tioman the following day. On the island we went snorkeling, did jungle trekking and passed the nights away with the company of the Air Batang villagers and the local (and only) bar that was open on the island. Phil, Jacob and I shared a wonderful chalet right on the beach (the picture of me below was taken by Jacob from the patio of our hut) for about $30 CDN/night for all three of us. I can't really do the experience justice with words (and a limited time frame in this Kuala Lumpur internet cafe) so I'll post some pictures for now and append to the story in a few hours. For now, feast your eyes on the magic of Tioman Island, and go if you ever get a chance.

Tioman Island is considered by some to be one of the top ten most beautiful islands in the world.

This is the view from our hut chalet in Air Batang (ABC) village

This is the view from near Monkey Beach on Tioman Island

With free roaming monitor lizards, Tioman is its own little Lost World

Sayonara and Southeast Asia

2007-02-02T15:17:00.000+09:00

Well, I realize that I owe everyone 8 additional December blog posts. They were written, I'll have you know, but never published. I have them saved somewhere on the laptop that used to belong to me but now belongs to my friend Dave. I sold off my belongings and left Japan. I'm tempted to start a photoblog or a myspace page so that everything I do will be centralized, but that would mean two blog spaces that I would neglect.

There's much to be said about January in Japan. There were more good-byes and good-bye parties and farewell photos taking place for a whole lifetime. And, in a way, leaving Japan was like leaving a very special life. My social footprints will fade eventually and it will be up to me to maintain the network of friends I've built up there. I'll not hesitate to say that I'll return to Japan at some point in the future. It was just too important to neglect.

But let's focus on the present, shall we? I left Japan on January 27th and flew into Singapore, where Jacob, Phil and I stayed for three nights before departing to Malaysia. Singapore is like a souped-up version of a Japanese city but with English, tropical weather and people from India, China and other major corners of the globe. The food is exceptionally good and relatively cheap. Singapore is the most expensive destination in Southeast Asia and was the gateway for our entire journey. Our hosts were fantastic. Yuliana and Voldi not only put us up for free but showed us around the city and took me to a clinic when I had a health issue. We enjoyed a night of eating and Tiger beer in Chinatown where we met some other travellers and made some friends. The next day we spent at the Singapore Zoo and Night Safari which was great because I got to witness the feeding of giraffes, which are pretty much my favourite animals.

After leaving Singapore we decided we would enjoy some island life on beautiful Tioman Island, but after crossing into Malaysia and arriving at Mersing (the port city gateway to Tioman) we learned that there were no ferry boats going that day because the sea was too rough. We spent the day in Mersing playing cards and drinking beer and unsuccessfully attempting to use the internet cafe through 3 separate blackouts. Fortunately Gin Rummy requires no electricity.

The Tioman Island trip deserves its own entry, so I'll post some photos now and leave it at that. I'll write a second post later tonight once we've toured around Melaka, which is where I sit now after a 3 day vacation on arguably one of the most beautiful islands in the world.

I'm happy and I have a tan. I could get used to this.

How Christian Lost Himself

2007-01-24T16:32:00.000+09:00

I owe you all 9 posts from December. I know. There's a story for each day, so I will get around to it eventually.

I leave Japan on Saturday. I've had two going-away parties and two going-away nabe dinners. Thank you all for being so great to me while I'm here. Here's a few memories that my friend Take took with his camera. I received the CD of his pictures of me last night.

I'll continue to use this blog for my southeast Asian travels which begin on Saturday. First stop, SINGAPORE!

Where It Started

2006-12-22T23:42:00.000+09:00

Kyoko-sensei, Christian and Masa-sensei, reunited in 2006 at Aitas Japanese Language School, Toronto.

Just after graduating from University, I decided that if I was going to make this Japan thing work, I had better start studying the language. I had been told by a lot of people that an English teacher need not worry about studying Japanese; English was written everywhere and most people would assume that I knew little to no Japanese and would be willing to struggle it out with hand motions and broken English. It was probably the worst advice I never heeded.

I was scheduled to spend a month in Quebec City on the French language bursary program that the government of Canada awards to Canadians interested in becoming bilingual. More than anything, it was a chance to pull myself out of the English cocoon of Toronto to see how I would fare in a place where my native tongue was not primary language spoken. It was also a great excuse to get paid to party en français. But I had some time to kill before that fateful July of 2004, since it wouldn't make much sense to try and get a job if I needed to ask for an entire month off right off the bat. I needed to make good use of my time.

I took a course on teaching English overseas and received my TEFL certification after a few long weekends in May. One of the instructors had asked me where I had planned to go with my new desire to teach and I explained that while the money sounded good in Korea, Japan had been my Asian destination-of-choice since I was a young lad. Though he had taught in Taiwan, he was really excited at this because he had visited Japan and studied Japanese independently while he was still a traveller. After asking him to recommend a good textbook on Japanese to get started with, he took it a step further and recommended a sensei.

I called Aitas Japanese school not knowing quite what to expect. Would they speak any English when I called or would I have to struggle even to set up lessons? I had spoken only English my entire life, and while the desire to learn more was alive within me, I wasn't sure if the skills required would ever surface. Could I be saved? As it turns out, I could.

From the moment I took the free trial lesson, I knew that I would not only enjoy studying but that Japan was probably the place for me. Kyoko-sensei and Masa-sensei were both so polite and excited to meet me that it was the absolute best first-impression of Japan that anyone could experience. In my heart I secretly wished that everyone in Japan would be this awesome when I landed overseas.

After a month of lessons with Colin Moock, another Japan-bound student of Aitas, I had a firm grasp on the basics of Japanese that would lay the foundation for everything about the language I know now. It was a sad day when I had to part for Quebec City and Colin was going to continue into Level 2 without me, because we had had a lot of fun trying to communicate with each other using only Japanese (as was the rule in the classroom) despite our obvious lack of practice.

Just before I was to (secretly) return home for Christmas of 2005, I received a newsletter from the school. Kyoko-sensei mentioned that life was getting pretty cold in Canada and it was unfortunate that Canadian drug stores didn't stock hokairo; in Japan, the ubiquitous hot packs for your clothes and shoes that keep you warm were a required purchase during the winter months. I decided I'd better bring some home. While visiting Amber Ebert in Toronto, I stopped by the school with a pile of hokairo for her and she was ecstatic at my return. My Japanese had really improved, Kyoko-sensei explained proudly, and it was fantastic that I was enjoying life in Himeji so much.

This year, with Japanese girl in-tow, I returned once again to Aitas school to give my best wishes to Masa-sensei and Kyoko-sensei. This year, I'm proud to say, the entire interchange we had was done in Japanese. It wasn't until Miki and I left the school that I realized this, for Miki hadn't heard either teacher use English and so she wasn't entirely certain that the couple could speak it. I suppose that this was a testament to my Japanese ability. But my Japanese ability is a testament to Aitas Japanese school, who laid the groundwork for not only my understanding but for my love of all things Japanese.

December is (still) update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

Prick

2006-12-21T21:04:00.000+09:00

Jacob: It's done.

Southeast Asia: Here we come.

Today I went to the travel clinic to get my shots done. Feeling a little bit faint and a whole lot of nervous at the prospect of getting a bunch of needles stabbed into me, I was relieved when the doctor told me I should really only get a single shot because we had timed our travels perfectly: the dates and route that we have chosen will keep us outside of the rainy seasons, thus limiting our exposure to the really bad stuff. Mosquitoes, though they will continue to pose a significant threat, will be reduced so drastically in number that all I really needed to get done was the initial vaccination for hepatitis A and typhoid fever. As you can see, it was a fairly painless procedure.

No follow-up shots for a year. Now all I have to do is pick up some doxycycline for the malaria and I'll be good to go.

December is (still) update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

Yatto Kitta

2006-12-20T21:47:00.000+09:00

Miki has arrived.

After a long autumn without her, I finally have the opportunity to share my world with her; after she so graciously showed me around her home town of Himeji, it's the least I can do. Now studying English at Carleton, Miki has accepted an invitation to join my family and I in the Toronto area for the Christmas break, and the MacInnis family gets to host its first international guest.

This is Miki's second time to Toronto, but the first time that she's had the opportunity to stay for an extended stay. We've got a lot stops to make and a ton of people to see, so if you're interested in hanging out with a beautiful and talented Japanese person who just loves Canada, be sure to track us down.

Canadian friends beware: we're going to be talking trash about you - in Japanese. Just so you know.

December is (still) update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

Hisashiburi

2006-12-19T23:23:00.000+09:00

As if to say, "Who is this guy?"

Sorry about that. This post was sitting saved as a draft for a long time before I realized that I hadn't published it online for you. So for those of you who are thinking that I'd already failed at my post-a-day promise, you'll be pleasantly surprised to know that I'm actually just somewhat incompetent making sure they get out there.

Well, things are back to the way they used to be. The gang was reunited in and everything fell back into place. Having slept on the plane I've suffered little jet-lag, though I'm exhausted from the excitement of seeing all of the old faces I know so well. It's good to be home.

The feeling of normalcy was the most abnormal part of seeing everyone. Brit ordered chicken wings. I ate a roast beef sandwich and drank a Stella Artois. At one point, I felt like taking a picture of an English stop sign because it was just so foreign to me. I realized that it probably wouldn't mean to same thing if I looked at it out of context, once I had been home for awhile.

Knowing that, yet again, I'm not here to stay makes these moments with these people all the more precious. Hopefully we'll have quite a few more before I take off once again.

Nice to see you again, dudes.

December is (still) update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

Crash Landing

2006-12-18T23:17:00.000+09:00

or, How it Took me 24 Straight Hours to Find My Way Home.

I left my apartment just before 4:50 a.m. and carried more than my own weight on my back, shoulders or rolling behind me. Catching a 5:15 a.m. train to Himeji - in order that I might be on a 5:30 bus that would get me to the airport at 6:50 for my 8:o0 a.m. flight - was no easy task. Following that with two additional flights and traveling around the world in a 24 hour time span has completely killed me.

I slept (albeit cumulatively) for about eight hours between Himeji, Japan and Toronto, Canada. And I managed to do it in all the right places. I'm not sure if I slept on that early morning bus, nor do I remember sleeping on the first flight that took me from Osaka to Tokyo, but I secured a broken but gratifying six hours between Tokyo and Dallas. I knew I would need the rest and my body, having been deprived of sleep in any form the night prior to this heavy-handed exodus, collapsed after finding my spot on the plane.

I stopped in Dallas. The U.S. Customs Agents were polite to me and to my Canadian passport.

One of them let me line up in the U.S. Citizens' check-in line because it was shorter and I had a flight to catch.
Another one said that moving to the front of the line was not an issue because I didn't need to be fingerprinted.
One told me to have fun in Toronto as he scanned me for dangerous metallic objects with a large magnetic device.
One of them searched my bag and threw away my toothpaste because it was too big.

I was almost home, and I knew that being as polite as possible would get me through Texas and back home to good old Canada. Sprawled across three empty seats on a 737, I slept for two sweet hours during a two and a half hour flight from Dallas. I slept through the free beverages and I slept through the on-board movie. I slept through pleasantries with the stewardesses and neighbouring passengers. I woke up just in time.

I watched with amazement as my home city's skyline came into view, appearing like a miniature village of familiarity on the lake as I coasted home.

In Toronto, a customs agent was polite to me and to my Canadian passport. He told me how to speed up the customs process next time so I could get home faster. With a two-in-one question ("Japan? Teaching?") and a pleasant nod, he wished me on my way. At 3:00 p.m. on December 18th, 2006, I was home. It was 5:00 a.m. in Himeji once again, and I was home.

Mount Fuji is that white blob in the middle of the photo, as seen from my airplane

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

Wiped

2006-12-17T23:02:00.000+09:00

As you read this, assuming it's not July 2007 by now, I'm probably in transit. Admittedly, that's the story of my life. Most of the time I spend "at work" here in Japan is actually time spent on the trains or buses getting to where I need to be because I teach all over the Hyogo Prefecture at different schools wherever a handsome young Canadian is needed to teach the Japanese leaders of tomorrow how to speak English. In short, I'm always on the run.

But today is a special kind of transit. Tonight and tomorrow morning I'm getting ready for my big return to Toronto. It's been an exhausting process. This is the last airplane trip I'll be making to Toronto while living and working in Japan. As a result, I've had to pack up most of my belongings in the suitcases to avoid having to ship everything home. When I get back to Japan on January 3rd, it's back to the grindstone until the 20th when I finish my contract and get ready to leave on my huge Asian adventure. Essentially, anything I want back in Canada I have to take now. This wouldn't be so much of an issue were it not for the fact the my single suitcase is already loaded with Christmas goodies and souvenirs.

Half of my clothing is rammed into my carry-on and I've also got a heavy guitar to bring with me. And the world's heaviest laptop. I'm pretty sure that if I was to actually use this computer on my lap it would completely burn out all of my gametes, both now and forever. So it's going to be an exercise in perseverance. over the next 40 hours. My route runs as follows:

Osaka -> Tokyo -> Dallas -> Toronto

I'll be a sleepy panda when I get back, but don't let that stop you from reaching me if you want to hang out. You know I'm good for it.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

Tim's In Charge

2006-12-16T23:58:00.000+09:00

Well, we're all leaving Japan for the holidays. The whole crew and company of people are leaving the city. Scott and Angie of Vancouver, Canada, are probably already home by know and partaking in the local fun. Jon left without saying goodbye and will be getting a swift kick in the ass when I see him in Markham, for he could have at least told us he was leaving. Not even a group email! Kelley and Satomi departed for Oregon on yesterday, stopping over in San Francisco in the process. The Himeji ranks are dwindling. And, of course, I'm leaving Monday morning (Japan time). All that being said, poor lonely Tim is staying here without anyone to keep him warm over the holidays.

Tim's dad will show up just before Christmas and they'll be taking a trip around Japan and up to Kinosaki where I took my parents when they were up last month. It should be snowy and beautiful by now. This is the second lonely Christmas in Japan and once again we've all abandoned him. This blog entry is dedicated to Tim.

Tim's in charge. Have a good one, mate.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

Packing It Up

2006-12-15T23:12:00.000+09:00

Clothes go in the suitcase.
Christmas shopping goes in the suitcase.
Photos go on DVDs.
Books go in boxes.
Guitars go in cases.
Time goes in cycles.
Earphones go in the ears.
Garbage goes out.
Non-perishables come in.
Clocks go 14 hours back.

I go to bed.

Twice more, and then planes take off.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

Japan Without Me

2006-12-14T23:27:00.000+09:00

I suppose that the title of this post could be interpreted in a number of different ways. If "Japan" was a verb, for example, the title could be seen as some sort of abstract imperative (depending on what it means when someone tells you "to Japan").

Example: I'll probably be working on these reports until midnight, so you Japan without me and I'll catch up with you later.

I think I typed it out at first thinking about me without Japan, but it came out in reverse. It's also more correct, because as I pack things up I realize that Japan with be very much without me once I am gone. Whether anyone or anything will notice is a completely different issue.

I know that Himeji will be different. The new differences, like superficial lacerations, will heal over before anyone notices. That's part of the reality of teachers employed by big eikaiwa companies like mine: turnover is guaranteed and there are always fresh faces who want to try their luck at this whole teaching abroad thing. So while the employee number of the next tenant of this apartment will be different, he or she will undoubtedly perform the same duties that I did while I was here and we will be considered temporally different examples of the same body.

In Japan, the nail that sticks out gets nailed down, as the saying goes. Conformity is important in maintaining the relationships between people in this small island nation of communities. The population is so culturally (and, to an extent, ethnically) homogeneous that being a foreigner and (very) visible minority here makes conforming absolutely impossible. There are pros and cons to this of course, but I would be lying if I told you that I hadn't been regularly noticed simply for being the white guy during my time here. As the next foreigner moves in to take my place, will people ask about that gaijin who wore a lot of blue and rode his bike everywhere, rain or shine? Will they inquire about the nice Canadian boy who seemed to love sushi more than a Japanese person and would never stop raving about onsens? Will the people of Himeji speak in quiet whispers about the new foreigner and the whereabouts of that other guy?

Some just might.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

The Incremental Departure Plan

2006-12-13T22:21:00.000+09:00

I hope that someone plays a somber tune on the koto as I leave Japan for good.

It's kind of hard to picture myself living somewhere other than Japan. The irony of this statement is not lost on me, for it should be noted that prior to my arriving here it must have been hard to picture myself actually living here.

To help me deal with the shock of leaving, I've moving away in little pieces. First, my parents took a big load of things home for me in a suitcase so I wouldn't have to ship it all back to its temporary home in Canada. I've gathered bags of clothes I don't need and am searching for a place to recycle them. The Christmas gifts I've purchased have found their way into another suitcase with the last of the clothing I plan on keeping. The permanent knick-knacks around the apartment are being offered, if not with wanton carelessness then with seemingly little forethought, to any visitor who enters the apartment at this time. Today I wrote a letter to the new tenant of this apartment offering to sell them the whole lot for a very fair price, which saves me from having to throw it all away should he/she accept my offer.

Then there are the items I have to schlep across the ocean in my luggage during my vacation to Toronto.

I stare at my bulky guitar and its heavy hardcase with a series of mixed emotions - some of love, some of resentment.

Realizing that I am flying out soon has induced a state of panic. There are Christmas gifts to be purchased and there are errands to be run. There are gifts already purchased and there is nary a square centimetre of space left in my modest suitcase. There will be only three weeks of life in Japan upon my return after the Christmas holidays. There is great reason to be terrified at this.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

What Two Years Will Do

2006-12-12T23:07:00.000+09:00

Two years will change your mind. Two years will change your views. Two years will take away your friends and family. Two years will threaten the fragile nature of love. Two years will age you, but in slow gradual ways that you're not noticing until you stumble across an old photo of yourself. Two years will change your weight. Two years will change your mind. Two years will pass and you'll still be there. Two years will change your sense of humour. Two years will happen as you stand around wondering what's next.

Two years of bathroom-mirror self-portraits. Two years of drunken photos. Two years of terrible karaoke videos. Two years of washed-out clothing and hanging up your clothes to dry. Two years of the foreign that becomes the familiar after two years. Two years of children and two years of teaching. Two years of fantastic food and an improved lifestyle.

Two years of questioning the paths of old love. Two years of hesitating in possibilities for new love. Two years of passing on opportunities that could have been if you were staying for more than just, say, two years.

Two years will challenge what you know. Two years will improve you, assuming you choose the correct two years.

Two years will change your mind.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

June Of Your 25th Year

2006-12-11T20:34:00.000+09:00

Picture this: It's June of your 25th year. You've been away from home for about six months. You haven't seen anyone from home or had any sort of regular Internet access for the whole time you've been away, but you manage to make due because you're good at meeting people and have met some new friends. Things are good, the weather's great and a change in your surroundings has really done wonders for your health. Your diet is better and your days are longer. The change hasn't ceased from offering its share of surprises, but you're starting to get used to the language barrier and the general course of action you have to take to get things done.

Then your best friend visits. With him he brings nostalgia, a sense of a life left behind and a freshness to this foreign world. He also packs a laptop computer that you have purchased by proxy from someone in Canada, albeit with a little help from your friend. You can already sense how the laptop is going to come in handy. You promise yourself you'll start storing all of the digital photos you've accumulated in some sort of online folder so that all of your friends back home who are dying to hear from you can see what the hell you've been up to over the last six months. Your new lifestyle, kept secret behind a shroud of vast irreconcilable distance until this point, is about to be part of the global broadcast. To top things off, your best bud is on this side of the world with you now and you can't imagine what the future is going to hold.

After a few days together, your friend departs for his little corner of existence via a train leaving from a different city than your own. Curious about your new surroundings and energized by the sudden availability of free time at your disposal as his train pulls away, you commence filming the world around you without quite knowing why. There is traffic and sound and pulse. There are people and lights and shops. There is laughter and there is music. You're aware of the energy though not familiar with it. You move and divide the particles all around you as you walk. You can feel them recollect behind you in your wake.

There is a girl standing on the street announcing that the karaoke box she is employed at is an all-you-can-drink deal. You can sing and drink your heart out. There are people crossing the street and coming towards you, interested in the obvious filming you are doing as an obvious foreigner. They wonder where you're from without asking. There are young people gathered near a train station watching the local talent jam out their goods; keyboards, guitars and amplifiers are generator-powered and ready to be played by the band members who are waiting their turn.

A band of young gentlemen is playing a pop-rock number and there is an old man bouncing enthusiastically to their song. He must be in his late sixties and stands at about 5'0" in height. Your camera goes instinctively to him, though all you're consciously interested in is the gathering scene of young people in this far-away land. But the old man continues. At first, you're apprehensive about filming him, for fear that you might embarrass him or scare him off, but you soon realize that this is no ordinary old man and, by golly, this is no ordinary dance.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click here!

Close Quarters

2006-12-10T23:33:00.000+09:00

(Actual Size)

There are a lot of people in Japan. Most of the land here is mountainous or slivered apart by rivers, severely limiting the total of habitable space that they have to share. Sure, it wasn't always like that. Before the Japanese needed to deal with a huge population, there were feudal wars and rival clans all going after what land there was and it tended to sort itself out. But now there are 127 million people strong (that's about 1.94% of the world's current population) and they all have invented some pretty creative ways to fit everyone into a meager 377,873 km² of space from tip to tip. This nation of islands is no Canada, let me tell you.

It's in the way they greet each other on the street. It's in the way manners have built the language. It's in the way the Japanese bow in lieu of shaking hands. It's in the way they respect their elders and revere their children. It's in the way Japanese people avoid confrontation by taking an "apology-first" approach in their daily lives. It's in the way that they keep crime to a near global-low.

Also, it's in the way they stack hotel rooms on top of each other that are no larger than a luxury casket. But it was an incredibly comfortable way to sleep. There was a communal bath and sauna on one of the floors, and beds and beds in stacked rows and rows. My second night in the capsule hotel, they were playing Star Wars on the tiny little television that is built above the bed. It should go without saying that these hotel "rooms" are single-occupancy spaces. I was surprised to discover that the bulk of the capsule hotels are men-only. I think it's the best way to spend a frugal night in Shibuya, which is renowned for being one of the most expensive areas in Japan.

I'll be spending another night or two in the capsules just before I take off to Singapore on January 27th. Tokyo is going to have to deal with Makinasu-san one last time. At least, for this leg of my Japan life.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click on December 2006 on the right-hand side of the screen!

Everything's Cute

2006-12-09T23:40:00.000+09:00

In Japan, there aren't many domesticated animals that don't have a fully-stocked wardrobe. Dogs are pampered with such lavish threads that I am starting to worry that I'm under-dressed when I visit the pet store in downtown Himeji. But no number of skirted chihuahuas or pampered dachshunds could have prepared me for these absurdly-dressed rodents who were standing around with their owner at Himeji castle one day last year. What was more striking than their outfits was the harsh way that the man (who was clearly responsible for their wardrobe) was ordering them to stand upright for we spectators, lest the prairie dogs should embarrass him in front of a curious public. If I had to wager a guess regarding the working conditions for prairie dogs captured by crazy Japanese men, I'd have to say that they were berated with a wanton cruelty but quite well-fed.

Life can be really unfair. Millions of years of evolution will eventually sort out and refine the genes you carry in your DNA and render your various abilities accordingly. You're an example of successful genes. Maybe you're tall or blond or have an incredible aptitude for mathematics. Or, just maybe, nature's gradual game has kept you a small mammal with strong teeth and the ability to stand upright to watch for the predators who want a taste of your juicy, fleshy hide.

But nothing can prepare your genes for the moment where you are taken from your woodland home and dressed up in a display of anthropomorphism that rivals even the peanut butter lipsmack of that mean ol' horse, Mr. Ed. These traits, while cute to human eyes, are not present so that you can be captured and renamed Edna or Morris. You're supposed to be watching for hungry carnivores with quick wit and sharp fangs. Instead, here you are. Dancing for the public like the village idiot.

Japan's love for cuteness is ubiquitous. There are cartoon mascots for everything from construction signs to bars to lip balm brands. There are anime characters who thank me for using the bank machine and a sickly-cute frog reminding me to look both ways before I cross the street. There are piles of stuffed animals arranged in an effeminate manner across the dashboard of many vans driven by otherwise unruly-looking characters.

Hello Kitty is cute. Doraemon, a robot cat from the future, is cute. Anpanman is so cute you'll wretch. Pikachu is cute. Pooh-san (known also as Winnie) is a sticky kind of cute. Small dogs are not only practical if you have a small home, but they're fashionable. Why? Because they're so cute. Children are expected to be well-cared for and healthy. When they're cute, it's an extra delight.

Everything is acceptably infantile and playful. Governmental by-law signs and national airline jets are adorned with cute cartoons of some kind or another. Each ward has a cute and unique "don't-let-your-dog-crap-here" sign, occasionally with a cute dog and his cute owner examining the cutest pile of poop that was ever shat. Do all of these soft corners help to promote a harmony within the busy lives of the average Japanese person? Does a nation with this many people crowded into small urban spaces need the soothing cuteness to relax a mechanical populace? Or is it simply a trend that a Westerner can't be expected to truly understand?

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click on December 2006 on the right-hand side of the screen!

9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980

2006-12-08T11:02:00.000+09:00

Sayonaras Begin

2006-12-07T23:23:00.000+09:00

There have some really, really great people that found their way into my life over the last two years. I don't know the names of the people in this photo. They are an older couple who run a barbershop beneath one of the schools where I work. For a long time, I would just nod and be polite when they talked to me because I simply couldn't understand what they were saying. As my Japanese ability improved, I began to follow what they were often trying to convey. In turns out, at least for some time, they had been inviting me into their shop to have a cup of coffee before I started a class, and I had been inadvertently refusing each time in my ignorance.

Occasionally the husband would appear at the door of the classroom as I was preparing lessons and make some motions towards his shop downstairs and speak in frantic tones that I assumed could only refer to an impending disaster. I tried to smile and nod in hopes of appeasing him before he left, finally surrendering to the language barrier. My company rents the upstairs room in his building as a classroom space, so I assumed that he was trying to explain something about the electricity or water that I should know. I decided that if whatever he was trying to tell me was truly important, he would either call the head office of my company or wait until the Japanese teacher was there the following week.

When I finally clued in, I discovered how kind and generous the Japanese are to strangers. The teacher who I replaced had also been friends with the couple in the barbershop and would visit them from time to time. After that initial visit for coffee, I began getting offers to park my bicycle in their garage out of the rain, or a take-home umbrella in case I didn't have one. The offers for coffee continued because I think they found me interesting to talk to after I could hold my own in a conversation. My Japanese is broken and stammering at best, but they were able to ask me about Canada and my travel plans.

I took this picture today because I'm now in the last cycle of schools before I finish my contract. After this week, work will not bring me back to the school, but friendship will. I plan on framing the photo above and giving them some Canadian souvenirs as a gift for all of their kindness since I arrived in the country, a nervous and confused young Canadian in search of friends. And although I still haven't learned their actual names, I know now that I had found some.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click on December 2006 on the right-hand side of the screen!

I'd ask my friends to come and see

2006-12-06T22:37:00.000+09:00

An octopus's garden, so to speak.

Oh what joy, for every girl and boy, knowing they're happy and they're safe.

If I had to tell you the exact number of times being a Beatles fan in Japan has come in handy for me, I simply couldn't do it. Perhaps it's my ability to find Beatles elements in the things all around me whether intended or not; I have quite a profound sense of cognition and perception when there are even slightly Beatlesesque things about, and it's proved to be very helpful in a place like Japan.

I should note some obvious discoveries that I have encountered:

The closest hair salon to my home (about 45 seconds from me on foot) is named, simply and without explanation, Beatles. There are models of the four boys circa 1964 in the front window beside their fish tank. While I've never actually been to the place for a two-bit shave and a haircut, I get the sense they could give me a mean bowl cut if I went in there with a serious look and asked in a really, really intense tone.

The closest pachinko parlour (Japan's quasi-gambling venue of choice, not that I play) to my home is called The Pachinko Apple (or Apple Pachinko, depending on how you read it) and used to have the lyrics to Let it Be and Imagine painted in stencil on the walls. Given that I'm not even inclined to gamble, despite the somehow-sickening allure of the lyrics, I found it a brash and sacrimonious juxtaposition against a backdrop of smoke and sin and stink. Pachinko parlours are often where dreams go to die, though from what I understand,there are ways to make some cash off of them. Recently, The Pachinko Apple underwent some exterior renovations to what I thought I would be my relief. Instead, the Beatles motif is larger and louder. The building is now pink with a pixelated representation of John at the keys and the words "Tomorrow Never Knows" splayed across the front. That misappropriation is also used in all of the advertising for the parlour that I see around Himeji. Either Yoko Ono is raking it in from the suffering of gambling addicts or she's not aware. I bet that's some fan mail the Beatles would still be interested in. I'll post some pictures, I promise.

A café near my home is full of John Lennon paraphernalia, and I only somehow discovered it last week.

One of the first and best bars I visited outside of Himeji is a music bar in Nishi-Akashi, adorned wall-to-wall with everything Beatles, including a huge music notation book on their piano filled with - you guessed it - Beatles songs. And only Beatles songs.

I have eaten at a Beatles-themed okonomiyaki restaurant in Kakogawa.

I have impressed German people with my renditions of "Sie Liebt Dich" and "Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand" because they also like the Beatles. It should be noted, however, that they did not like my German.

Jacob found me a Beatles paraphernalia shop in Shibuya, Tokyo within a 5 minute walk from the capsule hotel where we were staying. The capsule hotel itself, unfortunately, was a void for Beatlemaniacs.

I have made friends with people with three words: Let It Be.

While I have yet to visit the John Lennon Museum in Saitama that Yoko opened, I have managed to meet a few Yokos while visiting a small city called Ono.

A fantastic guitar player I know offered to give me discounted lessons because I promised to learn the complementary vocal harmonies in many songs that we could jam together. Neither of us has had time to indulge.

I have been referred to as being "gay for The Beatles" by Jacob Goldfarb, and I'll have you know that I personally find the expression both endearing and somewhat accurate. In fairness, I was gay for The Beatles long before I set foot here.

In attempting to explain and translate the lyrics and concepts of "Across the Universe," I have brought a young woman to tears (in a good way).

Nearly the entire scope of my relationship with my friend Ai Yamamoto stems from the fact that she first saw me wearing a Let It Be t-shirt and then later heard me talking Beatles with a bartender.

There is a fantastic shot bar in Himeji where they serve absinthe and play super-convoluted Beatles elements with an Korg Kaoss Pad, but only on Sundays.

Fujifilm Japan currently is running an ad campaign that simply states, in English, "Photo is Love." The graphic is a famous picture of John and Yoko sharing a kiss.

The references don't end here. Some of the first Japanese friends I made were a small group of young people in Nagoya who we approached on the street when looking for a nice place to drink and they took us to karaoke for the first time. I had been in Japan for only a week, but I could safely say that I had sang the Beatles with people who didn't even speak English and it was fantastic. The ¥600 Hard Day's Night t-shirt I bought last summer is still a popular accessory for my wardrobe that always draws intriguing comments from the Japanese and Westerners alike.

It's really important to remember the things that you loved back in your home country when moving somewhere new. Having my guitar here and an inextinguishable obsession with the music kept me sane when home felt really far away. I will refrain from mentioning any names here, but there are people I've met here where the only thing we have in common is a particular opinion about the Beatles, though otherwise we little to do with each other.
have changed.

The Beatles were really there for me for the first time, in 2002, when I lost the woman I was absolutely sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Granted access through her eyes I learned some amazing things about myself and the world I occupied, a love for jazz music and romantic stillness. I was really messed up when we broke up and for whatever reason The Beatles worked their way into the music I was listening to until they were all I listened to. And it got me through it. It's still getting me through it, though the circumstances of personal strife have changed. I feel really bad for giving my brother Darby such a hard time about listening to them ad nauseam when we were younger, but I think he understands.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click on December 2006 on the right-hand side of the screen!

Paperworked

2006-12-05T23:44:00.000+09:00

Like it or not, it's here to stay. Today, in lieu of actually teaching a class, I was stationed at the local office to get some paperwork out of the way. The term paperwork, in this case, carries more than the usually singular meaning of filling out and filing forms. Today, I was papered.

Over the course of two years, you tend to accumulate a whole lot of stuff. Not the least of which are the seemingly-important company memos that you receive. For fear of tripping and breaking an ankle in a policy loophole, I kept every piece of paper ever handed to me while working for my company. I have a closet that, until today, was dedicated to housing all that sheet.

But my days here are now very briefly numbered. Considering that I'm coming home for two and a half weeks in December, I have less than an entire work-month left in my contract before I'm thrown into the fray of my Asian adventure. And that paper needed a new home. To my delight, I discovered that the plastic bags in the paper shredder were now transparent, (hopefully) to indicate an intention to recycle the kilograms of paper that leave the office in confetti form every day. It was time.

I arrived at the office with three huge plastic shopping bags of old notes, faxes, obsolete agendas and outdated policies. And charged with my task of cleaning house, I shredded. I shredded a cathartic shred for every handout I was forced to read and file over the last two years. I managed to condense my hold to a tiny pile, and much of that is being handed over to someone needing printer paper - one side of some sheets were blank and ready to be used again - while the rest of it is currently being reintegrated into the recycled paper market.

It's not all fun and games, you know. I occasionally run the risk of a pretty serious paper cut if I'm not careful. Today, I escaped from the office unscathed.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click on December 2006 on the right-hand side of the screen!

Itadakimasu

2006-12-04T23:12:00.000+09:00

If I had to sum up my entire culinary experience in Japan into a word, that both adequately described what I had intended to consume here and subsequently how I realized it, that word would have to be simply: sushiro.

There is not another restaurant like it. I'm sorry. That's not true. There are a handful of different restaurant chains in Japan that offer a customer the chance to pick his sushi from the conveyor belt that whips through the entire length of all the tables and benches in the place. And there are countless independent restaurants that have adopted the same practice for expediency's sake.

But there's something about sushiro. Maybe it was the first place I ever completely gorged on nigiri sushi, but I've never looked back. All of the other sushiyasans in Japan are good and I've never disliked an experience at a sushi restaurant, but colourful, friendly sushiro has me eating there four times in a week if its convenient and I am in the greatest shape of my life. This is also largely due to a diligence to remain active and the fact that I'm riding my bicycle nearly everywhere that I have to go to, even if it's four times on the occasional week that I'm riding to sushiro. There are two such restaurants within a short bicycle ride from my house.

I want to open a sushiro in Canada. It's based a little bit on the honour system: you take what you want, you eat the selected delicacy and then at the end of your meal a friendly young woman arrives at your table to count the plates. I just wonder if I could trust the Canadian public to not try and screw the system by hiding empty plates when it came time to pay up.

There are some things to consider in doing this, of course. It's obvious that we as Westerners need some major lifestyle changes in the kind of food we consume, and sushi is one of the healthiest meals you can eat. I don't support the practice of over-fishing that destroyed the marine-based economy of Eastern Canada, either. But I think if we were responsible in the execution of a Canadian-based sushiro, it could really take off.

And the greatest thing about sushiro? It's only ¥105 a plate. That's about a buck for two pieces of the most delicious nigiri sushi I've ever had in my life. At that price, I tend to eat a lot of it. My current record is 14 plates. All that rice is pretty filling, and after tossing a nice ¥105 bowl of udon soup into that, you know that I was dragging my feet out the door, dizzy with omega-3 acids.

And it was worth every yenny.

December is update-a-day month! To read all the posts this month, click on December 2006 on the right-hand side of the screen!

Marketing

2006-12-03T23:49:00.000+09:00

It's true what you hear. The truth is stranger than fiction. My first encounter with Pocari Sweat was shock, awe, and denial. Who the hell are the Pocari and what kind of money are they making in all of this hydrating and perspiration? And what makes you think that I'm willing to pay ¥150 for a bottle of it? As it turns out, it's not sweat. But it's incredibly close. This sports drink is made up of electrolytes and all this other goodness that we lose during activities, so someone in the marketing department figured that they would latch onto the trend of using completely random English in hopes of "cooling up" the product. And Pocari Sweat was born.

I'm not going to lie to you, either. It tastes just delicious. But the smell reminds me of a high school change room for reasons I cannot explain.

My father's first reaction was to take a picture of the vending machine, so the credit goes to him for that. I've been staring at these vending machines for the last two years, but grew gradually acclimatized to the oddity and it took some fresh Canadians to make me realize just how absurd this and other anglo-misappropriation I was seeing on a day to day basis.

We expatriate residents of Japan do, in fact, have a fond name for such widespread misuse: Engrish.

An Unlikely Stop

2006-12-02T02:52:00.000+09:00

If not for the fact that I had heard some great things about the Osaka Kaiyukan (Aquarium), I wouldn't have included it on the things-to-do list for when my parents came to Japan. Here's a picture I took of the school of fish that was swimming above me as my parents and I walked through a transparent tunnel surrounded by water and aquatic life on all sides.

We were trying to get organized and decide on what we were going to do for the first day in Osaka. Still a little bit jet-lagged, I thought that the aquarium would be a tranquil choice for a late afternoon adventure. For some reason, I can't stop thinking of David Bowie songs being sung in Portuguese.

The Backlog : or, A Series of Events I Neglected to Tell You About

2006-12-01T02:53:00.000+09:00

What are you doing?

Oh. That.

Hey. That's cool. I bet a lot of people take pictures of that.

Digital tourism and the suspended decay of memory-based experience.

There's really so much - so very, very much - to say. There are weeks and weeks of neglected moments and memories that will never get out of my head for one blog.

Wouldn't you rather hear about these things in person?

I suppose for posterity's sake I should attempt to record what I do here. Why I wait until late, late at night to do these things is beyond me. I fib and tell myself that it's because I'm busy, or that I'm trying to adjust my internal clock to Toronto time in anticipation of returning home, or that I'm simply an irreconcilable nighthawk, so I should just deal with it.

None of these are completely factual, however, and the truth is that I am the most irrationally fearful person who ever considered writing publicly. Looking back on all the fun I've had in Japan, I realize that at times I've acted as though my life here was temporally exclusive or private beyond consequence. I've tried not to hurt anyone along the way. It's hard to go a full two years without stubbing your toe on another person's existence. I'd like to think that all I've accomplished here in Japan is noteworthy beyond the scope of what a blog can help me express. But that's just another excuse I trick myself into believing.

I used to write papers in school. I would write drastic, frantic, last-minute papers that occasionally scored me a mediocre mark but rarely truly rewarded me with one. I was so entirely worried about my self-indulgent faux-eloquence collapsing under the strain of honesty that I became a written invention. Everything I was obliged to do was a makeshift presentation because, like in everything I've ever written, I'm deeply terrified of honesty. My explanation for this is two-fold, though you might argue that one reason is an incarnation of the other.

First, in being afraid to be honest with myself I limit my ability to express myself. I can always tell myself later that I hadn't really tried and that is why I failed. If I wrote a researched, thought-out and organized piece and subsequently discovered a resulting mediocrity - despite my actual best efforts - I am then destined to that judgement of myself. At times I underachieve to avoid having to discover myself as sub-par. I fail to commit to an effort and never taste its realization. Incidentally, this is also why I think I know a little bit about a lot of things as opposed to knowing a whole lot about some important specifics. I'm also very modestly proficient in a lot of different areas but don't particularly shine at most things the way a committed effort would allow me to. A fear of commitment is, at least partly, a fear of failure. Somehow, this attitude maintains a protective shield between me and what I am actually capable of, but eventually you get tired of thinking about what you might be.

Secondly, writing in verbal tapestries and pedantic whims or in sprawling gusts of masked meaning, I maintain a degree of privacy. How elusive. I know that no one is expecting me to be completely open in the writing I do on my blog. And no one really wants a play-by-play of the events that make up my everyday. You all have your own important and worrisome lives to lead. But I'm rarely to the point about anything here unless I know I'll be safe from everyone who might read it. The illusion of privacy keeps me sane in Japan; I imagine that if no one else tends to stand out then neither will I, despite my visible differences as a minority. In coveting that somewhat-transparent privacy I prevent myself from honestly expressing myself, whether it be here for the digital archives or in my day-to-day interaction. As though if I didn't post it on my blog no one will know that it happened. In a sense that's true for you fantastic folks from home who have a very limited and narrow window with which to see into my life here. But that attitude discounts the very real life that I'm living with the people I know here in Himeji.

I know most of you who are reading this. I've met you face-to-face at one time or another, and you have at least a fleeting desire to know what I'm like outside of the person you met on the street or the train or the bar or on the job.

I'm not dedicated enough to this blog. I never wanted it to be play-by-play. But the lack of updates that this receives stems from the lack of honesty I ever give out. I'm not quite comfortable enough to explode across the public space I've created so I let the photographs and the videos and the newspaper articles entertain those of you who have a web-based interest in what goes on in my head. Trust me: I owe you a lot more than you ever receive from me.

Perhaps - but no promises - I'll try to make December the month where I tell you an anecdote once a day. I've accumulated a lot of experience here in Japan, and this leg of my life adventure is coming quickly to a close. There's less than two months before I am in the nation of Singapore to being the Asian journey of a lifetime, but I'm managing to squeeze in a two-and-a-half week stretch in Canada for the Christmas holidays. I'd love to see as many of you as possible, so drop me a line now. I'll do my best to set things up as well, but you know how I hate group emails. I'm not trying to surprise anyone this time around so make sure you just drop by.

Home: December 18th - January 3rd.
Japan: January 3rd - January 27th.
Southeast Asia and Life: January 27th onward.

Why People Visit Japan

2006-11-16T21:40:00.000+09:00

Tokyo and other Worlds

2006-11-14T18:23:00.000+09:00

Well, 12 days and 1300 photographs later, the parents and I have made it through the following locations relatively unscathed:

Osaka
Himeji
Hiroshima
Miyajima
Kinosaki
Kyoto
Nara
Tokyo

and the adventure is almost over. Rather than attempt to describe the entire journey, I'll post a photo or a few hundred of them when we return for a night in Himeji tomorrow before the parents depart back to our home and native land. We've visited nearly every Starbucks along the way (apparently the only place in Japan where you can reliably purchase decaffeinated coffee) and experienced all sorts of nonsense, poorly-translated English and extremely good hospitality from our Japanese hosts, both in the hotels and the ryokans we've stayed in. Stay tuned for more.

Shinsaibashi

2006-11-07T11:02:00.000+09:00

2006-10-30T05:01:00.000+09:00

We think the same things at the same time
We just cant do anything about it

Even Part of the Time

2006-10-24T04:20:00.000+09:00

It was worth it

2006-10-16T16:14:00.000+09:00

One return flight home from Osaka to Toronto: ¥103640 (roughly $990 CDN)

It's worth it.

In November, Lynne and Larry are coming up for two weeks. And I'm getting paid for it.
In December, right near the end of my second contract, we're given two weeks of off time. And I'm going home for it.

So get all the gear you need for a celebration, because I want to give you all a reason to celebrate. I'm coming back. And Toronto will never be the same again.

From there, the remaining money I've accumulated here will be spent in every little corner of southeast Asia that I can find. If all goes according to plan, they'll be enough money to get me started up again in Vancouver. Because the west coast has never seen the likes of me before, and that's where I need to live. At least for a little while. Maybe some more school. Or some nude modeling. Maybe open a vegan restaurant or two. Get back to acting.

Acting. Can I do it? Sure. Will I? Probably. But, unlike the aforementioned two-week vacation I'm taking across Japan with my parents, I may not bet getting paid for it.

And that's A-O.K. Because it might be the one thing in the world that I could do for free and still feel the need to do it, no matter how deep I find myself in the red. Passion.

Art.

Red Alert

2006-10-12T16:23:00.000+09:00

Good news, everyone!

I'm coming home for Christmas... again!

That's right, I'll be in Toronto for a whole two weeks starting on December 18th, returning to Japan on January 3rd, 2007 in the wake of my 27th birthday.

God. 27. That's starting to sound old.

No concern. I'm healthier, wealthier and wiser than I've been in past years, so I'm ecstatic about the chance to walk again through the historical chronicles of the life I had before I turned 25 and escaped from Ontario. I realize that it's only going to be about two weeks but it's the best I could do with my job schedule. After a short winter break in the hostile Canadian cold, I'll be back to Japan to finish the last 3 weeks of my contract before I depart to the exciting world of Southeast Asia with my reliable wingman Jacob Goldfarb.

27, though? At least it's not a prime number. Like, you know. 29.

Well, I'm off to work. Today I have quite a bit of free time to study, and my friend Ai told me that if I can memorize 20 new kanji characters, I win a free beer. Not a bad deal!

Start thinking of the things you want to say to me when you see me...

This just happened outside of my apartment as I was writing this:

See you next year!

2006-09-30T03:08:00.000+09:00

Liz and Alex have left Japan and my life - for the time being. Next year in June they'll be getting married in Vancouver and I'll be there. Alex proposed to Liz a few weeks back in Bali when they went on vacation shortly before leaving the company we all worked for. Congrats to them and I can't wait to see them again.

Part of the reality for any ex-pat is the fragile and often tentative nature of all the friendships you develop while living in a country you don't plan on making your permanent home. Somewhere like Japan, where there is a lot of money to be made if you come for a year and play your cards correctly, is especially notorious as a place that fosters good friendships between people and then people return to the reality of their old lives. I wish I could say that I will stay in close touch with everyone I've met here in Japan, but in truth, you can only hold the closest ones with you along the way. Sometimes that just involves knowing you'll see them again after some time apart.

And of all the Vancouver people I've already met in Japan, these two cats will definitely remain a part of my life. I miss you guys already!

Please send me friends from home

2006-09-23T00:06:00.000+09:00

I was blessed with a visit from Kat and Dan (as well as Marg and Greg, Kat's sister and brother-in-law) who were visiting from Korea on vacation a few months back. I have finally organized some of my photos so I thought that I would post this in tribute to them, as well as to guilt trip all of the rest of you who haven't found it in yourselves to visit me even though I make a great host.

(Just kidding!)

Big-ups to Alex and Andrew Yeung who DID come all the way to Japan for a visit, but didn't get to see me because of scheduling conflicts with my job. I love that you guys came out to Asia though.

Kathleen... Daniel... I still think about you day to day. Thanks so much for making it out here. It meant the world to me (and send me some of YOUR pictures already, would you?!)

p.s. I should mention that my parents have booked their plane tickets and will be vacationing with me here in Japan from November 3rd to November 17th! I can't wait!

Think About How This Affects You

2006-09-06T01:02:00.000+09:00

Here's the onion of realization shedding away with time.

If only we could all grow wiser as we grew older. I'm starting to think more and more about the sirens going off on every one of Mother Nature's watchtowers. There is a short-sighted selfishness to every crime; with each ill-conceived folly we forget ourselves in the giant ongoing tale of life. What's worse is the idea that there are people who make enough money in the errors we are making as a species that they not only refuse to change it but do their best to hinder any progress that we would otherwise be making. It won't be long before there are some seriously heavily populated countries who will appear on the map as needing an energy solution, and there's only so much weight this planet can handle.

Our time is quickly running out. I'm going to live in a house built into the ground that stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter, with natural light seeping in through skylights at the surface. I saw a house just like this in a documentary released by the CBC about green energy some time ago, and it sounds like an awesome thing.

In other news, none of you will believe how busy I've been. In the next few days, I'm going to try and publish the photos I took while I was in Tokyo over the Obon holiday and all the other nonsense I've been up to. Simply writing about what I've been up to exactly might in turn violate some contractual terms of the company I work for here, so I can't be too explicit. Just know that I've been working really hard lately. Really hard. So my absence from the blogworld is not entirely based around my social life. There's not been much of a social life lately.

Well, I'll be back soon. It's time to cook some dinner. Donburi, here I come.

And one final note: thanks Mom. The cookies from home were delicious and were consumed in a frenzy of child-like nostalgia. It's been awhile.

Please send me cookies from home

2006-07-28T10:32:00.000+09:00

Here are a few updates...

We're into the summer school stretch of work right now, which forces every native English speaker in my company into an eight-day stretch of work without a day off. At the end of this period, which makes the Japanese teachers quite wealthy because of the bonuses they receive for selling spots to the parents of the regular students, we do receive a couple of bonus days off. It's not really worth the grief of it though.
For my first leg of the summer school stretch, I was sent on a business trip to the Osaka area where I taught in an area of Japan I hadn't been to. The company put me up in a hotel in Wakayama City, which I've only ever driven through before when I went to the prefecture during the Golden Week holiday. The city is quite nice and I found a little bar called Faces which is run by a man named Ricardo who is half-Japanese and half-Brazilian. Nice guy, and definitely a place I'll go back to if I ever go back to Wakayama city.
My friend Jesse has returned from China only 3 months into his planned 6 month retreat due to visa complications. I guess in the time he was out there learning kung-fu he learned a lot and it would have been nice for him to stay to finish his plan, but stuff happens.
I'll be going to Tokyo for the first time in the near future during the Obon festival. We had originally planned to party in Tokyo on the Saturday nights and head north to Nikko after that but everything is all booked up. Obon is one of the most popular times in the Japanese calendar for Japanese people to travel, because the celebration is held as a time when people are supposed to return to their home towns and pay respect to their elders who have already passed on. It's a lot like the Mexican celebration of el Dia de los Muertos.

And nothing else is really new. Life is busy as usual, so why don't one of you send me a message or funny story that I can add to here. Your lives deserve to be written about, especially if there's nothing of note happening in mine! I'll try to find some interesting photos or videos to post soon. Assuming I can find something picture-worthy to capture. I might just be getting some urban-wasteland fever here in Japan.

When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads

2006-07-18T11:14:00.000+09:00

Well, as some of you know from my incessant ranting on the subject, the summer months in Japan are also the infamous rainy season, which is later interrupted by the arrival of the typhoon season in late September. Usually, there's a bit of a break between the rainy and typhoon seasons, but it's hard to tell when the weather's going to let up. For the last two months it's been torrential on a few occasions here in Himeji and I must admit that it's starting to try my patience. How I long for the soft summer evenings of Algonquin Park and how a Canadian summer morning on my screened porch in Markham feels as the dew evaporates away.

Of course, looking at the photos I've posted up here, you probably don't believe a word of this.

Now I realize that my memories are quite selective. I hear that Toronto has been facing some pretty extreme summer weather lately. I shall nonetheless continue to roll about in the patch of nostalgia I've planted for myself because it just helps me get through the wet, wet summer I'm dealing with over here.

Summer does bring some good news with it, of course. Everyone's in the mood for the beach! While most of the beaches in the vicinity of Himeji are pretty polluted (in the name of industrial enterprise) and are thus somewhat unswimmable, there are a few places to escape to if you play your cards right. This past weekend was once again a truncated one-day weekend, but I managed to squeeze in a trip down to Tokushima for a surfing trip. I haven't gotten any better at it since last year, but I'm committed to practicing more this time around. It was a fun-filled and exhausting day to say the very least. I was pretty wiped by the end of the day, and it probably didn't help that I went to a beach-themed party the night before.

At Coast, a sports and surf-themed bar just north of Himeji Castle, the floors were covered with beach sand and the owner Yumi threw a barefoot beach-style party that lasted until about 4:30 am. My friend Timmy and I decided that we would dress-up for the occasion in hopes of out-doing the many bikini-clad Japanese women who would be there, so we bought some bamboo curtains to fabricate some tropical skirts (there were no grass skirts to be found) and decked ourselves out in leis and touristy hats and sunglasses. Timmy even fashioned himself a coconut bikini top and we blasted into the party (quite) fashionably late to the shock and awe of everyone there. Being the only topless men in the whole place we attracted a lot of attention and the night was just fantastic. I think I snapped nearly 110 photos that night, although most of them were of Timmy and I in compromising poses, as you can clearly see.

As an aside, I might recommend that anyone thinking of converting bamboo blinds into pseudo-grass skirts have their head examined. The back of my legs are scratched to a bloody pulp, and the salt water surfing I did the next day didn't feel very pleasant. Never a dull moment in Japan.

Yesterday I had a big all-day meeting out of town so I'm still not completely recharged. Today should be an easy day, and all these one-day weekends have forced my company to give me some other days off at the end of the month, so I think I'm looking at a 4-day weekend coming up. What am I going to do with myself, I wonder?

Hope you're all well. Drop me a line or send me a photo if you find the time!

Just in Case...

2006-07-13T23:29:00.000+09:00

Konnichiwa!
Hello!
Christian (Kurisuchan) desu.
My name is Christian.
mayotteitara, byouin ni.
If lost, take to hospital.

Sore Thumb is to Hand as Christian is to Train

2006-07-11T02:09:00.000+09:00

Almost a day off...

2006-07-10T20:35:00.000+09:00

I finally have a moment to relax. If only for a second.

After not having a two-day weekend for over three consecutive weeks, it was nice to have only a short Monday due to an early morning staff meeting. I've just returned from it now and will make my way out again as soon as my laundry is done.

But in the meantime, an update opportunity! Oh, giggles!

The last month or so has been quite the adventure. My parents were due to arrive in Japan on June 17th where they would've been joining me on a two-week holiday across Japan. The prospect of which excited me greatly; not only could I see the parts of Japan I've yet to see (read: Tokyo) but also get to see Lynne and Larry after a long six months away from all things home. I started salivating at the thought of a surprise batch of Mom's cookies.

Unfortunately, my father had a bit of a heart "episode" which was later upgraded to "attack" and the trip was put off for the time being. It was a complete blessing in the way because old Dad's perfectly alright now, and the heart attack was so minor that he wasn't even completely sure he had had it. Larry's ticker is still tip-top and he's okay. I'm relieved. It could have been terrible if something had happened on the plane or even here in Japan. Confident as I am that I could get us both help and subsequently to a hospital if there was a health incident while my parents were here, the environs would have added to the stress of an already stressful situation.

In both the long and short run of things, I'm entirely happy that my parents were not able to come. Everyday there are people having heart attacks who lose to them immediately. Pops got a knock on the door and his heart attack even wiped its feet before coming in. No damage to the heart and a strengthened artery and Dad joins me in the ranks reinforced MacInnises (MacInni?) with Six Million Dollar Man upgrades (I for my hernia, now reinforced with some surgical procedure involving a damaged muscle wall and bionic Teflon mesh, and Dad for his remolded artery). How cool is science?

Saying all this, I still can't wait for them to arrive for their rescheduled November vacation to the Far East, which should be right near the end of my own adventure here in Japan. I was allowed to cancel the vacation time I booked and reschedule it for the end of my contract. Less rain then, and now we have more time to plan our agenda out. I now plan on arriving in Thailand come December. From what I understand, this should help us avoid the rainy season in some of the areas we're going while still allowing me to be back in Canada by June of next year. I'll be all traveled-out by then, so would all of you please-please-please come and visit me wherever I end up. I've decided I definitely need to be on Canadian soil for a little while. I was telling my friend Alex yesterday that I know and understand what it means to identify as a Canadian now more than ever before, but what its like to live the life is starting to escape my mental grasp. Being here has changed me. You all know it. For one thing, I have never been this bad at email in my entire life. And I'm more a citizen of the world, more a pacifist than I was prior to arriving, and living without an internal fear-gauge for the first time in as long as I can remember. Maybe I'm just finally coming into my own, but it sure feels good.

Back to the email thing, I suppose that I'm always just a bit busy. Were there countless university hours to spend in front of the computer? There weren't, but I managed to find hours anyway. As a result I slept in a lot, missed a lot of classes and probably got less than I should have out of some of my courses. At the time, I found this particularly easy to justify in my electorate classes. Missing them was a breeze. But I know now that if I do decide to return for some graduate work, it'll have to be all or nothing. I've learned a lot of discipline with this little stint in the workforce.

Now time seems to stretch a little bit between each commitment. I'm lucky in many ways because I know a lot of great people in the Himeji area. I try to see people whenever I can, but there's less time for everything as things are busy. A few of the teachers have been on vacation over the last little while so I've been working some extra days to fill in for them. It's hard to deal with, especially in the face of losing your own vacation, but I'm glad someone got to have some time with their folks in lieu of mine arriving for me.

Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head.

Some great people are leaving Japan before me, it seems. My American friend Jesse left to go to China and study kung-fu. Seriously. He's a good guy to have on your side. And so very amicable! But now, to lose two lovely people I've met here (and in the same week!) is heartbreaking! Both Miako and Miki are leaving this week to embark on their own adventures. Miki-chan is off to study at Carleton in Ottawa and in a playful twist of irony, this Canadian remains here in Japan; Miako is commencing her two-year round-the-world travel with about $20,000 to her name and time to kill, starting in Thailand and Nepal. I imagine that she's going to see it all. Selfishly, I don't want you guys to go anywhere, because we'll all miss you both. I nonetheless endorse your journeys whole-heartedly and demand pictures from time to time.

Miki and I did get to see Kyoto last weekend and I'll throw up some pictures from that trip shortly. It was her first time there, so I was her gaikokujin (foreigner) tour guide. It was kind of fun showing a Japanese person around Kyoto because it's such a cornerstone of old Japanese culture and incredibly well preserved. Our visit to Kinkaku-ji remains a definite highlight of the trip. The Golden Pavilion of Kyoto. Majestic. I regret to say that I have yet to see a kabuki show, and seeing as how I'm a theatre alumni, I find it disgraceful. Apologies to the following wonderful Guelph faculty: Alan Filewod, Harry Lane, Allan Watts, Ric Knowles, Sky Gilbert, Kim Renders, Judith Thompson, and Jerrard Smith.

Don't worry. I'll get there eventually.

Have to run. The laundry's finished and I have an appointment with punishment. More details soon.

Long Days and Pleasant Nights

2006-07-06T04:11:00.000+09:00

i'm still alive, 'naught should you fret
nor cry alarms from minarets
delayed are these - words so afew
partitions of a story new?

or should you find to have a laugh
distracted by a photograph?
it seems said path will run its course
this misdirecting sleight aforce

crawling through a country's old
time-insulated manifold -
but such tales deserve the time
i've not to give right now of mine

should patience now you find to wait
and i, time to elaborate
you'll find it here, so please return
and something new perchance you'll learn...

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

2006-06-19T15:47:00.000+09:00

Sh*tfaced

2006-06-15T02:07:00.000+09:00

Man attempts to foil breathalyzer by eating feces
From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!

March 31, 2005

A man accused of driving under the influence of alcohol stuffed his mouth full of feces in a failed attempt to foil the police breathalyzer.

The man was arrested Sunday by South Simcoe Police after his pickup truck was pulled over on Ontario Provincial Highway 11 in Stroud, Ontario, Canada. On the way to the police station for testing, the 59-year-old vomited, urinated, and defecated in the police cruiser. Sgt. James Buchanan said that upon arriving at the station, the prisoner grabbed a handful of his own waste "and placed it in his mouth, attempting to trick the breathalyzer machine".

Nevertheless, the man registered two readings of more than twice the legal blood alcohol limit of 80 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood in his system. He was charged with impaired driving and driving over the limit and was released on a promise to appear in a Bradford, Ontario court on May 12.

Sources:
* Ian Robertson "Potty-mouth man can't fool science". Toronto Sun (obviously), March 30, 2005

One of These Things...

2006-05-15T16:10:00.000+09:00

...is not like the other. Yesterday I went out with a few friends to try my hand at DiscGolf (golf with frisbees) and we ran into a wandering troupe of youth who came up to us and wanted to know what our favourite food was. Field research, I suppose. I managed to jump in and get a photo. Finally, a picture of me with students that aren't mine. Yay!

But having to go on a school trip on a Sunday? Dude. I think that maybe they were actually a goup of kids at a day camp of some sort. Nearby, a youth baseball game was going on and the whole community was out in droves to check it out. They love their baseball in this country. Here are some other snapshots of frisbee golf for you to enjoy:

Wakayama Weekend

2006-05-14T23:12:00.000+09:00

So Golden Week has come and gone. The trains have returned to their usual level of crowdedness and I've been able to find a seat here and there in my travels. At the end of the Golden Week holiday I went to visit Wakayama, which is closer to central Japan than where I live here in Himeji. It's just south of the Nara area. A few of my friends and I drove down there to camp out in a log cabin in the mountains. The old couple that runs the place actually built the place, including the bath (which was carved out of a single piece of wood!) and the dining shelter which had four grills staggered across the room in little fire pits. We did all of our own cooking and it was really reasonable. The bath was a private outdoor bath that couples can enjoy and it looked out over the valley beneath our area. The following morning, after a night of glorious feasting, I woke up suddenly at 7 a.m. to the sound of a gentle rain and went outside to sit on the small porch. A fog had crept in along the valley floor obscuring the village save for a few houses that were built on the mountainside above the fogline. The rain was a light drizzle and I sat cross-legged in silence for an hour before going back to bed. The whole experience was like being sent back in time 400 years. I listened to the sound of nature in a country where I'm always under the barrage of urban noise like buzzing lights and rumbling cars. I was back in nature and it was awesome. Unfortunately, my camera battery had died the night before so I couldn't snap any pictures of the scene, but in a way it's nice to have had that little moment to myself. What pictures I was able to take I've posted above. Enjoy.

The next day on the return trip home we stopped in at a small family run restaurant just outside of Wakayama and they had this huge crab (probably about a metre wide, from claw to claw) living in a pond that was built into the floor of the place. Right in the middle of the dining area. A few times an ambitious leg would slip over the side of the stone wall keeping the prisoner from taking off. I've never seen a crab that big in my life, and shudder to think at what a bad-tempered crab like that might be capable of should he managed to escape from the saltwater prison they were holding him in. His living mates were starfish, abalone and fugu, the famous blowfish that nearly killed Homer Simpson. I think it would probably cost about $250 to order that bigass crab, and I expect that they've probably grown somewhat attached to the guy.

Well, it was back to work this past week, and I'll be in the office all of this week hoping that my coworkers don't decide to call in sick and force me to go and cover at their schools. I simply must finish the Dark Tower books before they drive me insane.

Well, I'm off to have Chinese tea at a Korean restaurant with a Japanese friend. I love Asia.

2006-05-09T04:53:00.000+09:00

Yes! It's finally here! The winter is over and Japan is warming up! And in about 3 weeks, it will be unbearably hot and humid! Hooray for warmth! Hooray for humidity! Hooray for defying gravity in the shadow of one of the world's most epic castles! Hooray for Jacob Goldfarb's camera that can take 16 frames in about one second and capture this leap of joy! Hooray for leaps of joy! Hooray for superfluous use of an exclamation point! Hooray for short blog entries and late nights and for avoiding sleep on a work night! Hooray for two blog posts in two days! Hooray for Neil Young and his new CD! Hooray for "hurrah" and its variants! Hooray for legs! Hooray for you and for me!

SUVs - ExxposeExxon - Thoughts from Within - Thank You, Stephen Colbert

And what of March? And what of April?

2006-05-08T01:11:00.000+09:00

I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry. But things got out-of-hand-busy for awhile and the computer was giving me a lot of problems. Much has happened, including a long-overdue thaw of Japan's Cruel Winter of 2005. The cherry blossoms have come and gone and yet I remain. I'm working in different roles all of the time and trying to accumulate the money I'll need to embark on my Asian adventure. But I realized with a heavy heart that it was time to update this thing. I'll spare you further excuses. Just to mix things up, we'll use capital letters in this post. e.e. cummings can deal with it.

Well, I've been bad at keeping myself together. How about I post a few pictures and caption them with anecdotes?

I get along quite well with most of my students, and these three are no exception. I think one of them managed to wrestle my phone from my pocket so I used it as an opportunity to snap a shot of them. The technology of Japanese cellular phones (called keitais) is nearly unrivaled in the rest of the world. I don't know if it's the same now, but in October of 2004 when I was planning to come out here I was told that the keitais were about 18 months ahead in technology compared to North American phones. You can watch T.V. conference video call and take movies with most of the phones here, and they're not even top-of-the-line. My friend David's phone has three-point fingerprint recognition to prevent a would-be thief from accessing his emails or personal detail. Man. That's security.
Oh, and by the way, all eight of the photos posted above were taken with my keitai and I've only just now purchased a memory card that allows me to take them off of the phone and onto my laptop for the purposes of public consumption. Thank you for your continued patience

I had such high hopes for the Canadian men's hockey team this year that I would get all geared up to watch the games. I fell off the wagon pretty early and dedicated every appearance of the hockey jersey to the women's team. Yay! We won! Away goes the jersey, at least until the World Juniors tournament.

All the kids in Japan wear identical hats when out on a schooltrip for easy surveillance. I was just lucky and happened to have my camera with me when I saw this yellow tsunami of young'ins racing up the stairs. They were all so well-behaved. It's cute to see, especially when you see them walking two by two and holding hands with their partner, chatting away.

Some other treats for you to enjoy:

I miss all of you guys. Please write to me. I'm only feigning being busy. Really I'm spending most of my time reading Stephen King's DARK TOWER series, which is a 7-novel epic. I've been reading them at a pace of a book a week, save for part 5 which has taken me a lot longer than usual because I was entertaining guests on Golden Week (Jacob and Keiko came down to visit from Shizuoka and my friend Ai Miura returned from Vancouver to visit friends). (n.b.: If anyone has read all seven of the Dark Tower books and wants to chew the fat about them, email me. I'll even call you with Skype and we an get all into it. Those of you hoping to talk to me about Dungeons & Dragons, on the other hand, need not attempt a dialogue. I know nothing of the game and you'd be wasting your time.)

So yeah... Canada, America, Europe (not to mention DENMARK where my long-lost brother James is stationed) and the rest of the globe: contact me. It took my childhood best-friend Andrew Yap a few years to get around to it, but I recently even received a nice little note from him. He found me.
That's that for now. A bunch of pictures from Mt. Shosha and Osaka (where Jacob and I went on Golden Week) are still to come. But I'll try to get them up soon.

And before I forget: Happy 30th(!) Anniversary, Mom & Dad.

The Days Blend

2006-02-20T01:15:00.000+09:00

it took me a year here to figure it out, but i'm most worn out at the end of the month because of the distances i have to travel to get to the schools that i teach at. the first week is a long week in yamasaki which requires over an hour of commuting each day to get up to a quiet town in the mountains north of himeji. i haven't found anything incredibly interesting to do up there, but i'm told that there are some fantastic onsens. tomorrow i'll be in himeji tsuji, the only monday i work in the month, thus robbing me of two consecutive days off and any concrete weekend-like plans.

the southeast asian excursion is always in the back of my mind, as i plan and gather the resources in what little time i do have as well as make a point of saving money here. i believe that i will receive my perfect-attendance bonus at the end of this month after managing to arrive to every class on time for the duration of my previous contract, and that money is being stashed away so that i'll be comfortable when i depart from japan in october.

the olympics are upon us again and old rivalries between vancouver and toronto are temporarily set aside in the name of cheering the canadian hockey teams on. i have been seen sporting my oversized home-ice jersey for the team, though now that i've had a look at the black team canada jerseys that they wore against germany i want to get my hands on one of them.

i've all but quit drinking over the last three weeks; having drank too much in early february i decided to have only a light drink last night in the spirit of sending a friend off at a sayonara party and it was the first in a while. david and i have been attending a local gym which is keeping me focused on the need for positive goals and will hopefully make me the strong young man i'll need to be when i set out to trek through the world between japan and australia. and the act of not drinking has been proved quite revealing in how my attitude affects the choices i make in the time i have. why waste any of it away? i think it's good to relax but health and moderation share a strong affinity.

anyone have any cost-effective ideas for what i can do with my wednesday this week? it's the day off i'll be getting in lieu of my monday circumstance.

what's onomatopoeia, you ask? it's what happens when you name something based on the sound it makes, such as "buzz" or "whoosh". there are many such words in japanese. your japanese onomatopoeia for the day is beron-beron, meaning stumbling-drunk. it only takes being beron-beron once or twice before you understand why it's called that.

i received a great postcard from a friend in france who is now in scotland. thanks christine. all of you over there on other continents are making it difficult for me to quench my travel appetite. europe's next, but only after a stint in canada.

more later this week when there's time. i'm trying to take my camera out with me more often but it seems like i'm rarely doing too much that's new these days. forgive me. i'll get something up here soon enough. stay warm, everyone.

Riding Cockroaches Through Morality Plays

2006-02-11T05:52:00.000+09:00

“religion is an insult to human dignity. with or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
- steven weinberg, 1979 nobel prize winner for physics

i find it fascinating to think that altruism is a development that happened naturally; by process of elimination, it remained alive as a concept programmed into our genes that proved beneficial and remains as a result. science, in this way, and as richard dawkins adamantly explains, is the secret ingredient of atheism that makes it life-affirming. religion dwells in rigidly-asserted assumption while science seeks to constantly understand the truth by adjusting its outlook. religion, a restrictive life banking on eternal vindication in tired rehearsal and science, acutely devoted to the questions of the immediate and the now.

but in secularism and atheism we have also steadily advanced culturally, a process much like the very genetic on goings that brought us to where we are now. things have improved socially where we have abandoned the exhausted hollows of faith and allowed for liberal interpretation and interaction. progressive notions regarding the need for equality among all people regardless of gender, race, or sexual orientation have been attained through education and the questioning of a system conveniently focused around a patriarchal deity.

in learning to selectively follow conveniently applicable areas of text written thousands of years ago, one thus negates the integrity of the whole as an infallible source. and to follow the whole of any major theological text is simply a means to recalibrate a phallic assertion within the programming of our social structures and ongoing cultural story. religion seeks to extend the chapter of human history that has been drawing gradually - progressively - to a close.

religions and faith encourage us - sedate us - beyond the grasp of the experience we have at this moment. can you recall the names of your familial predecessors more than four generations ago? do you know the lives of each of your great-great-great-great grandmothers? their lasting legacy is you, the ongoing experience of your life in the perpetuation of the genes each of those women passed to you. indeed, you may have very little remaining connection to each of the contributing women in your history, aside from the genetic legacy you are proof of. this same process happens all around us on the earth - not in an unproven postmortem haven of bliss and reward for the rehearsal we had as organic matter. you feel that? life is happening to you right now.

the beauty all around us - in the earth, the stars, all life and its origins - cry out to us to explore and interpret the mystery of simply being something, anything. try to take in the vastness of the universe or consider the age of our incredible home planet. take it all in and see where we, each of us the product of countless genetic permutations that have occurred along the way, have come in making the world a better place through peace and altruism and recognizing the value of order and welfare and empathy. it is a behavior patterned that we are programmed to accept and pass on, not for fear of an consequential afterlife but instead for the benefit of the guarantee we have in the cognition of now. it is by no coincidence that we love - for it is by love that we are we.

"we are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. the number of people who could be here, in my place, outnumber the sand grains of sahara. if you think of all of the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and i are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. we are privilged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world." - richard dawkins, from the root of all evil

It's So Cold In This House

2006-02-09T01:03:00.000+09:00

tomorrow marks the first part of a new day.

it also happens to be a day off that i'm committed to having off. whatever that means. work has been busy and various other commitments seem to crop up everywhere. but not tomorrow. nope. no one is going to interfere with my thursday. mokuyobi is mine, baby.

so tomorrow i have to finish cleaning the apartment and do the laundry and i promised i'd meet dave at the gym and maybe attempt to record a song without actually knowing anything about music. yasumi. sweet. wait -- where did my day off go?

the apartment itself is freezing. while not canada-cold in japan, it certainly is vicious in its own right. is it a moist cold? some cruel joke of winter humidity? i don't know, but it rarely snows in himeji and yet i feel colder moment to moment than i ever really did in canada. i have decided in a non-committal way that this has a lot to do with the form of transport i use here. maybe more to do with the fact that i take the train or bus everywhere than it does with the climate itself. and to get to their respective platforms i use a bicycle. the population density here in japan gives the country an infrastructure to support an incredible public transport system and so i am rarely in a car. i am often outside, waiting my life away until the next train arrives. that being said, i rarely have to wait very long.

but the apartment is cold. this remains an issue, no matter how fast i can get to where i'm going when not in the apartment. large windows. thin (though incredibly soundproof) walls. cold faux-wood vinyl floors. no central heating. one large room. it's not all that winter-friendly.

ahh, so yes. the southeast-asian adventure planning is underway. jacob and i had our longest-to-date conversation on the telephone a week ago at a staggering (and approximate) 215 minutes in length. i decided i never wanted to speak with him again, and certainly not spend five months rocking the shores of southeast. he talked some sense into me, which took and additional 35 minutes and now i am ready for the adventure with a renewed vigor. above i have posted the maps to the countries we will be traveling through as well as our proposed route.

we start in thailand, move around a lot. check it out. it all begins in bangkok and we travel back and forth around northwestern thailand before moving to laos, for a landlocked stint, and then a long journey through the length of vietnam. from there we will be entering cambodia before moving back into thailand from the east border. you'll then see the long blue (bus) or green (train) line as we head south to malaysia and eventually indonesia. these are the plans tentatively, and jacob has been breaking his back checking out all the destinations and researching the places we are looking at going to. sometime i'll post a more finalized itinerary, but for now you just need to know how our colour-coding system works:

*dotted/checkered route lines indicate a return journey along the same path
red - air route
blue - bus
green - train
yellow - taxi (obviously)
pink - ferry (not intended as a joke but rather something i just realized was an inherent pun.)

the dots on the maps along each route are places where we're definitely stopping for more than just a night. so try to figure out what we're doing as best you can. if you've been to any or all of these places, jacob and i would love to hear your input, so leave a comment or send me an email. australia is still very much a part of this trip for me if the funding is right. i've heard of people living and working in australia on organic farms, which would be a good way for me to earn a bit more cash while i attempt to become a professional surfer/rock star/movie star/diplomat/philanthropist, or whatever it is i plan on doing down there before heading back to canada.

i've also posted a few pictures from a staff meeting i was at earlier this month and i think i managed to get a picture of just about everyone i work with at my company, at least while they were all in the same room. enjoy.

Sweet, Sweet Visuals

2006-01-28T13:18:00.000+09:00

well here you are, you lucky people you. after lazily posting picture-less posts over the last few intermittent entries, you are being handed a feast for your eyes. here is a small sampling of what's been going on in my life over the course of december and january. one of the other great surprises was the addition of molly to our household, and she's just sassy enough to fit right in with the rest of us. sadly, i probably won't get to see the little rascal again for around a year as after japan i'm going to be taking a massive trip through southeast asia to see what all the fuss is about. so, about going home to canada. i had decided that after being away for so long that it would really be tough to also miss christmas. it's the one time in the year when the whole family is around. i knew in august that i would be coming home, though i didn't start making plans to do so until around september and bought my ticket after returning from hong kong. when the day finally came, i had managed to keep it a secret from everyone with the exception of my mom and a few friends in guelph who were keeping tabs on everyone so that i could track people down to surprise them. something tells me that shawn and sticky may have leaked the big secret a little bit, but no harm was done. most of the craziness was worked by showing up at people's doors with presents from japan when they were expecting me to still be on the other side of the world. some notable surprises: sneaking up behind andrew on his driveway as he was returning to work 10 minutes after i had talked to him and mike "from japan" (i had called them using skype using my parents' internet connection and then borrowed there car to drive over); knocking on andrea's door with a bag of gifts when she was expecting my brother to come by and drop them off and so she mistook me for him even after about 10 seconds. ah, and carlos, where we managed to get up to no good within an hour of seeing each other. good times.

most rewarding was the staggered surprises of seeing each person in my family at a different time. shawn and sticky were kind enough to pick me up at the airport so that i could surprise jimmy when i walked in the door. a few days later my mom and i picked up my dad at the airport who had been in cape breton when i got home. and darby flew in from norway about an hour later, so the three of us sort of surprised him as a team. later that night, shane came home from kingston while i was out and wasn't aware that my stuff was in the house. i walked in and asked, "what did i miss?" and he looked pretty shocked. for a moment he thought that i had been kicked out of japan but then realized that he was really just the last person to know. kudos to my mom for not telling anyone about my pending arrival, but next time i'm home i'm going to make a big deal about it pre-emptively so that i can fit into everyone's schedule and maximize my visiting time. sorry alan. i really wanted to see you but things got hectic with my lack of organization.

christmas was fantastic. i did some magic tricks for the cousins and got to see my mom's side of the family. they were also unaware of my return to canada and i just walked in the door to my aunt and uncle's house in guelph to join everyone for christmas dinner. what a feast. half of me was hoping for some christmas sushi, but no harm done.

while in canada i think i ate sushi 5 or 6 times with people, plus a few trips to eat tempura at a fantastic vegetarian restaurant in kensington market and in a restaurant in markham with my friend christine. christine managed to make my surprise backfire because i didn't get to surprise her at her door and i just came clean with her to tell her i was in town. she later showed up at my door while i was still in my pajamas and caught me completely off-guard. you tricky girl.

new year's eve was the most relaxed new year's i've ever had. with my great friend andrew leaving for a south american adventure on january 4th i decided just to spend some quality time with him and dabble in the joy of indoor intoxicants without getting too tipsy. we watched a whole lot of hockey with his brother scott and his girlfriend. the next day i went home to have a birthday dinner with my family. my brother jim left for denmark on an exchange on january 2nd so i was really glad to get a chance to hang out with him before he took off. i didn't think that i would get to see him for a long time so coming home to see him before he left was one of the top bonuses of coming back to canada. we went for a steak dinner (something i hadn't had in over a year) and just relaxed.

and so i left canada on the 6th of january. that week was a whirlwind of emotions though all of them good. i got chance to reconnect with someone truly fantastic over the course of 36 hours. images flash through my mind like strobelight slides: secrets shared and kisses stolen in alleyways. broken televisions and fog and looming departure. rejected photos of marilyn monroe on a bedroom wall. the danforth. sigh.

leaving canada this time around to come back here was easier in some ways because i know that the people i care about will continue to care about me no matter how long i'm away, and i was reassured by how much canada felt like home. there are elements about japan that feel like home as well, but i realize that my future lies in canada, even if not in toronto. keep your head up, vancouver. you might see me soon. go leafs go nonetheless.

and so now, i'm back in the swing. it's cool here in a bone-chilling-damp kind of way. it was easier to get back to work than i had anticipated. the kids remembered me and didn't seem to miss me at all, but i am a bit of a dancing clown to them i suppose.

and on that note, i have to get to work. enjoy the pictures, post your comments, and please contact me. i'm sure we have a lot to talk about.

Capital Letters (because this post was originally a group email before I remembered that I don't do that anymore, and I'm too lazy to change them)

2006-01-14T19:11:00.000+09:00

Would it kill me to write an email now an then? No, it wouldn't. Is it too much effort or somehow illogical? Not at all. Am I still alive, having a good time, eating well, safe and learning Japanese? Yes, all these things apply. Is it for lack of challenge, story or excitement? No, not entirely.

So what's with the silent treatment? I think mainly that I refrain from writing to you all because I am keeping a blog. Or was, at least, until things got busy and/or normal-like and I found that sending an update just didn't make the priority list. And for this, as you all know, I am regualrly guilty. With a heavy heart, I request your attention at this latest posting.

Another reason might have to do with the fact that because I have regular access to the internet. I don't normally pass an internet cafe and consider popping in to let everyone know what the other side of the world is like. I'm somehow taking the internet for granted now that I have it and, ironically, use it less for sending home emails than I would if I had to go to a local internet cafe to pay for it.

So, where was I? The Asian autumn flew by in droves of colours. Classes went on as usual and the kids grew more and more demanding of my card tricks in class that I began to dedicate long periods to getting something new right before having to see them again. Fortunately I never have to see the same students more than once a month. To keep from getting rusty in that period I would flash a few at a bar for the sole purpose of hearing the recognizable sounds of Japanese surprise. Of the people I've met here, no one reacts to surprise more vividly than the locals at an izakaya after a few drinks.

In November I was the M.C. at my friend Kelley's wedding and then that month crept steadily along. Much of my time was consumed planning my then-pending trip back to Canada to surprise the family for Christmas and by not logging it day to day I've managed to forget a lot of what I was doing in the time. Fortunately, I have a few month's worth of keitai (cellphone) email history to try and jog the memory. Let's go through it together now, shall we?

Ah yes, here's a message about Kelley forgetting his sweater at my house after a boisterous night of drinking during his stag. The party was very low-key because in Japan, from what I understand, they typically throw the party after the wedding and there is a high probabilty that both karaoke and nudity will make an appearance, although not usually in a sexy kind of way. Kelley's party featured neither nudity nor karaoke; for a stint the bartender was nice enough to track down some adult-oriented Japanese material without being asked, complete with all the naughty bits censored out in behind a digital mosaic. C'mon now. You were curious.

Here's another entry completely in Japanese. And not in the child-like need-based village-idiot Japanese that I use on a daily basis. This is some craziness here. How did all that happen? Apparently I was signed up to help the Hyogo-Ken University conduct a map survey with other students. I'm entirely sure how they found out about my closet obsession with cartography and topography, but I have to be sure to high-five their investigative department. Unfortunately, they signed me up to help out while I was at work and thus went missing from the project. Surely in a panic over my safety, I received four or five more emails in lengthy "actual" Japanese that I was unable to decipher beyond the "from" address line. Oh, life is silly.

Ah yes, and here's the email to one of my supervisors about (deep breath) how my bicycle was stolen from right outside of the classroom, and how my house-key was with it and that I know I'm an idiot but will I really have to pay another ¥20,000 (about $200) for a replacement house-key when the landlady shows up in heels and "changes the locks" without the aid of tools of any kind and still demands that I return the old key if I recover it? Yes Christian. You will. Don't lose the key again.

Looking over this post, I realize that I've been extremely long-winded and we haven't even gotten to the 6th day in November when Kelley actually got married. That being said, I'll bring you to the present and post something or other about returning to Canada* at a future date. This evening I'm glad to be back and with a few friends we're hitting up Osaka so that hopefully I can lose all of my belongings only to find all of them still together - again. For this journey to be a success, I must surely wash myself off and get changed. Please be sure to tune in again next time. I promise that the network didn't cancel us. The producers are just foolish.

*Note from Christian: I went back to Canada for Christmas and it was one of the greatest times in my life because I was immediately reminded of all the great things we have and of all the people I love. The entire return trip home was a big surprise set-up by me and my mother, so I didn't advertise that I was home even once I had arrived. As a result, I didn't get to see a lot of the people I really wanted to and if you're still reading at this point and have it in your heart to forgive me for not calling or letting you know I was in town, then I'm really sorry about it. Next time. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year anyway.

Hong Kong'd

2005-11-04T00:46:00.000+09:00

well, having had a month to muster up the motivation to write a new entry, i wish i could promise a great story. maybe it's been busy. perhaps i've been lazy. i can't remember, frankly, but i nonetheless apologize for the delay. i've received a few emails accusing me of dropping away. perhaps the autumns of asia have dropped me into oblivion. i meant not to turn incommunicado but i've been unable to help it. sorry.

david and i went on a journey to hong kong in october, and what i found most intriguing about the experience was its similarity to being back at home. lots of english in hong kong. lots of cantonese. everyone is quite friendly and the driving looks treacherous. it's so much like markham it's hard to believe.

but what a time! the bars seem to run all night and we didn't even find lan kwai fong (the incredible hedonistic party district) until the last night i was there. my liver pulses gently in healthy relief.

i'll try to get some pictures up soon. i wrote most of this blog entry earlier this month and saved it as a draft, forgetting to post it. the silence must be broken. expect more regular entries soon.

A Tease

2005-10-02T16:14:00.000+09:00

just a quick update to break the silence. expect a real post quite soon. it's been a busy week. my friend vicki has left japan for a long trip around the world for over a year, and i lost all of my worldly possessions during a night in osaka. i paid an arm and a leg to have my locks changed on my apartment only to recover the bag with the key. i got my digital camera back. my friend brit was up from shizuoka after landing in japan the day earlier to begin her year-long stint as an english teacher out there. we had a blast. there are pictures, but you'll have to wait. i've been drinking a lot in the name of hosting a guest, but she's returned to her area now. i hope that she made it. i hope my liver will too. the hanshin tigers won the central league pennant, and the area is ecstatic. japanese baseball rules.

the weekend is here. a real post will be made tomorrow if all goes well.

Happenstance

2005-09-21T14:20:00.000+09:00

today was the first time in a long time where i had to work but didn't have any classes to teach. for some of the other teachers here, this happens quite often and we spend the day in the office preparing our lesson materials when this happens. today is the third time in the eight months i have been with the company where i get to do this. usually i'm covering at another teacher's school in lieu of having an office day so the only prep time i get occurs before my lesson. i have learned to get quite creative with this time and usually can conjure up some fun things to do on limited materials. but today i'm here at the office and pre-writing this blog entry instead of preparing. ironic. strangely, considering how renowned the japanese are for being tech-savvy, my laptop is the only computer in the entire office, which is the central hub for about 150 employees. one thing about the business environment in japan that drives me insane is the archaic use of the fax machine for nearly all communications. i'm interested to know how many computers the entire company has across japan, because i imagine they only have a few in the head office if our district office is in any way indicative of the whole. i cringe when i hear the starting whir of the fax machine and wonder if that's what trees would sound like if they could scream in agony.

i can't remember if i told this story in one of my notoriously long group emails, but it deserves a recapitulation. for brevity's sake i'll try to tell it quickly. in april i was invited to an outdoor music festival in osaka by my friend kelley. he was staying at his in-law's place that weekend and would be staying in osaka the night before so we agreed to meet there instead of traveling together as we normally would. i was forced to venture into osaka all alone and try to find the festival. for those of you who don't know, osaka is a metropolis with a population of over 25 million people, and is the third largest city in japan after tokyo and nagoya. i was a little worried i wouldn't be able to find kelley and his wife satomi if i flew solo, assuming i was even able to find the correct location of the festival. fortunately the outdoor venue was right outside of a train station so it wasn't too hard to find, though to my chagrin kelley was nowhere to be found for about an hour's time. in that time, while i was wandering around hopelessly foreign and hopelessly alone, i decided to employ my cell phone in hopes that it would help me track down my friend. just as i was about to write the email explaining my position, i heard a familiar voice that i'd not heard in a long time. i looked up to see an equally familiar face and without thinking i waited for her to pass by me and then called out "jen". she stopped, turned, and the colour drained out of her face. i opened up my hands in disbelief and made the same face back at her. it was jen neales, an old classmate and fellow guelph drama program alumus. we both freaked out. i didn't know that she was in osaka and she had no idea that i was even in japan. remember that this is a country of 126 million people. as i was trying to reenact the face i made when i saw her pass by me for her, i turned and made the same face to vicki hambley and corey liston, who had walked up separately behind me. it was the second time i made the face with geniune shock. i was blown away. it's such a small world.

this weekend i am going to have to cancel my japanese lesson because vicki and jen are having their sayonara party on saturday night. corey's still going to be here, thankfully, but it's sad that vicki and jen are both leaving so soon. it was a stroke of amazing luck that i would bump into them in the middle of osaka and i wish i had more time to hang out with them now that i've found them. but they're heading back to canada and i'll have to wait until i return to see them again.

it's nice to know that i have friends stationed all over the world, as my future traveling adventures will require places to sleep along the way. so get out there. i am still looking for people to be living in south america and africa when i set out. any takers?

Summer Breaks

2005-09-16T12:30:00.000+09:00

well, it seems that after a long, long period of incessant humidity and oppressive heat, the world beyond my air-conditioned room is starting to cool off. yesterday the air was said to contain a gentle cool breeze. the rice stalks are heavy with maturation and ready to be harvested. in a way it's a shame, because for many areas it's as much green space as you see and i hate the look of the empty dirt fields interspersed between the apartment high-rises and the run-down stripmalls here in shikama.

my hobby as an amateur runner has suffered greatly from the heat because i've had to change my regimen to avoid the sun, leaving me to run at night. typically this meant starting my run after work at 11pm or later. between stretching and the walking cool-off, i was lucky to hit the showers by 1:30am. last night, however, with the cool night breeze i set out to put myself back on track. there was i time when i was running 12km almost every other day, and i hadn't done a full route for quite some time. but something happened.

i'm now sitting in my apartment in a state of ridiculous pain. based on a brief internet search, i'm pretty sure i've managed to give myself itb, or iliotibial band syndrome. and it hurts. fortunately it doesn't look too serious and i should be able to treat it myself. but it's the first time i have sustained an injury from running and i guess i just tried too hard to jump back into my full route after taking time off. stupid.

well, i won't be jumping around with the kids today. hopefully i can find a way to teach from a stationary position and we can keep the dancing out of it. i suddenly feel 75 years old. i have to teach some of my wildest kids today. wish me luck.

But enough about me...

2005-09-12T04:11:00.000+09:00

i'm appalled at the way the american government has dealt with their ongoing disaster. that's not what you want to hear. most of the people reading on this website want to know how my life is going in japan. be assured that life here is both comfortable and adventurous. but i've become so complacent with the taken-for-granted freedom that i have been given that at times i forget about the strife of our american neighbours.

i'll say this, before i turn to partisanship: i am happy that i'm here instead of there, for fear of being imperialistically annexed by the united states. the name of their country has quickly become ironic. never has the u.s. been less united.

how has a single chimp of a leader managed to divide such an otherwise strong nation? god save the united states of america. it won't be long before your radical differences in politics and value systems tear you apart. i pray that civil war on american soil will never happen again. you are ruled by power-hungry idiots with money. they can afford the guns. attempt peaceful protest. avoid violence. don't give them the satisfaction.

your government has manipulated your value systems by acquiring control of the media and subsequently sedating you with it. think for yourself. question authority. never has critical thought been a more important asset in your history. never before have you been so bombarded with such extremist rhetoric. never before have you been so needlessly afraid.

i must pause, however, at this very point. for quite some time, on this side of the world, i have been ready to preach that the fear you have been programmed to arm yourselves with has been unnecessary. but i must refine my stance to let you know that i now feel your fear is misdirected. your fear is valid, though its current target is a scapegoat. fear the decisions your government is making. fear a leader who decides on your behalf that a war should be waged against those who have yet to attack you. fear those who instate laws to remove the people from the diplomatic process. fear those who demonstrate their incompetence to protect you by taking a six week vacation while your poor and disenfranchised drown in the tides of an aforeseen natural disaster. fear those who forget the poor, the black, the historically victimized. fear them because they are the least compassionate of all. but for christ's sake, do something about it. refuse to lose your agency to fear.

i wish i could update this blog with more pictures of me eating sushi, but it just wouldn't be fair. this disaster in new orleans is going to be a turning point for america; i know that right now, as i write all of this, george w. bush is taking this opportunity to mention 9/11 in whatever speeches he is making, but i want you to understand that this is only being done because karl rove believes that a 39% approval rating can be improved.bBoth of these men are criminals.

can you trust any leader who takes a six-week vacation while the citizens of his country are dying, whether they be in a remote country (fighting an unprovoked war) or at home? can you trust anyone who delays in taking action when people of his own country are dying or drowning on their own soil? can you trust a government who will dedicate time and money to impeaching a president with a cigar fetish but not one with the lowest approval rating in American history? can you trust someone who has been wrong time after time, or someone who makes a practice of ruining anything that he touches? can you trust a person who will abandon anything he gets tired of maintaining, whether it be an oil company or a baseball team or a nation? can you support a man who will wage an international war to resolve the unavenged grudge of his father? forget god bless america. somebody please save america. save america from themselves.

for anyone who has read this far, know that i am thinking of you all while i am here and you are all the way over there. i have learnt to appreciate human beings despite how often they let me down. i have learned to treasure the ones i love and pine for the ones who have lost themselves in the name of greed or fear or hatred. i may be far away, but my friends and family live deep within my heart.

remember that while you may know hardships and pain, you may never know the people who are lifelong victims. no matter what the media tells you, know that we are one people, and regardless of how you attained your current state of comfort there are people who are in need and it is your ongoing responsibility to ensure the welfare of everyone.

if there is a god willing to help out this secular era, please do what you can with your divine ability to redirect this tragically misguided human race. what a disgrace we've become.

Before the Glenfiddich sets in...

2005-09-06T23:58:00.000+09:00

outside of my apartment, there's one hell of a storm going on.

this is my first experience with a typhoon. apparently, september is typhoon season in japan. they have titled this particular storm "nabi" after the korean word for butterfly. she is my no means graceful. oddly enough, i was en route to work today when i noticed a small butterfly was hitching a ride on the train i was taking to work. i tried desperately to coax the small (albeit immensely beautiful) creature into the palm of my hand so that i could release it outside of the train car before a less compassionate passenger killed it, but it was wise enough to be wary of human contact and resisted my attempts. i had my digital camera with me but it never occurred to me to snap a picture of this timid and delicate insect. i was too caught up in plotting its escape.

half of my classes had been cancelled on account of the impending storm, but they sent me to work nonetheless to teach the classes that they could squeeze in before the typhoon was set to hit himeji. it didn't take a lot of arm-twisting for one of my coworkers to talk me into a celebratory "half-day" drink. after all, we were still getting paid for the classes we were supposed to be teaching by the time we got to the bar. but in the interest of customer safety, we had been set free on the town.

two interesting encounters with proprietors happened this evening. both of these gentlemen run bars in the entertainment district of himeji; one has just opened a sports bar and the other is trying to think of ways to attract more clientele to his hip-hop-style club. i was in a particularly generous mood and felt the overwhelming desire to contribute to their success. upon completion of this entry i will be researching new drink recipes for one man and attempt to unravel new means of advertising for the other. while this may seem like i am working within a conflict of interest, neither man has paid me any money and I would be equally happy to see one or both of them succeed. most of the party animals in himeji make a point of visiting osaka or sannomiya to have a good time, but all it will take is a reconstruction of the entertainment district to turn himeji into a happening place.

the wind whistles and whirrs and percolates under the mock shelter of my porch's cement awning. i gasp and sigh and yawn, all within the span of a few brief moments. the excitement generated by the natural turmoil is both fleeting and renewable. i am comforted by the safety of my apartment, and continuously grateful for the roof over my head. not all of us have been so lucky in the last few weeks, and we must hold the residents of new orleans in our hearts.

turmoil happens continuously; destruction and renewal are part of a natural process that is both irrefutable and unstoppable. but the victims are very real - their suffering great, their plight unexpected, and their homes destroyed. remember the people of iraq, the people of sri lanka and indonesia, the people of china and africa: the children of strife. we are but one people, continuously displaced. our geography reminds us of our differences, though feeble and trite that they are.

when we begin to see each other as one people, only then do the wars we wage wax meaningless and the dream of unity shine feasible.

i'm exhausted. be well. keep safe. listen to bob marley.

Magic / Turmoil

2005-08-31T00:02:00.000+09:00

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

2005-08-29T14:51:00.000+09:00

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

2005-08-21T20:17:00.000+09:00

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

2005-08-12T03:20:00.000+09:00

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

2005-08-09T23:08:00.000+09:00

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

2005-08-08T21:18:00.000+09:00

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

2005-08-07T02:47:00.000+09:00

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.

Change of Plans

2005-08-04T00:44:00.000+09:00

though today's attempted journey to hiroshima failed to materialze, the day was by no means wasted entirely, though i did spend more time in himeji than i had originally planned on. the highlight of the day was meeting hana gradie, the newborn daughter of my friends david and ryoko gradie. she was born on 1 august and weighed in at 3.3kgs. david has expressed his fascination with the magic of sharing eye-contact with his daughter and today i had a chance to experience it. four foreign men walk into a japanese maternity ward to see a beautiful halfanese baby girl and i'm sure the nurses were wondering which one of us was responsible. david's never been happier and he carries himself with an air of relief. ryoko is healthy and happy and doing very well. tomorrow the baby will be placed back in her care.

i cannot express how beautiful she is. soon she'll be taken around town in a baby stroller and wearing clothes and putting things into her mouth to the chagrin of her parents. and an entire life unveils.

i have discovered various other magic including wikiBooks, videoblogging and an amazing new way to put away my laundry here:

is there anything that the japanese haven't thought of?

Blow-Up

2005-08-03T13:24:00.000+09:00

today is my first day off in eight days, and while the plan was originally to go to hiroshima early in the morning, i drank too much last night and i'm still sitting in himeji at 1:15pm. last night was the final night in japan for a friend of mine who was a part of the JET programme, and he was also out on the town having a few drinks. when we finally met up with him, we went to a bar together where he proceeded to throw accusations at me. i suppose hostility is easier than simply saying good-bye for some. he even managed to send me an angry email this morning before cancelling his keitai. the experience has left me angry and confused but not scarred. if that's the way things need to be, then good riddance.

in other explosions, the other night was himeji's fireworks matsuri (festival) and i managed to get a few good pictures using an long shutter speed on my digital camera, which i will be posting here. i've seen many fireworks in my time, and found that the best thing about going to the matsuri was overhearing the japanese reactions to the explosions. they tend to express their joy with a regular "sugoi!" which can mean great, cool, awesome, wow, or a lot. some of the movies i have are filled with adults and children alike shouting "sugoi!" after every explosion. the japanese call fireworks "hanabi" which is a combination of the words "flower" and "fire". oddly enough, fireflower was also one of the main power-ups in an ancient japanese videogame.

i take it that i should probably be organizing myself to go to hiroshima. that is, if i go today. it's late.

One Hot August

2005-08-02T01:45:00.000+09:00

i anticipate that august will be the sauna that july was. to give you an idea of just how hot it is here, allow me to do that which i do best: digress, digress.

today i was running a little bit behind to get to my classroom at himeji tsuji and had to ride m bike really fast to get to the classroom on time. between the humidity and my exertion, i arrived at the classroom drenched with sweat. and by that i really mean drenched. i was able to ring some of the sweat out into the sink. fortunately, there was an inexpensive casual clothing store around the corner so i was able to pick up a new shirt that even matched my sweaty shorts.

still not convinced? i usually start sweating after i have a lukewarm shower as i'm toweling myself off. it's hard to stay dry here!

fortunately, the classrooms all have air conditioners, as does my apartment, so artificial cold is a nice way to beat the heat. tomorrow is the last day of an eight-day stretch of teaching the summer school curriculum and i am rewarded for my hard efforts with two days off after tomorrow's lessons. i have been planning on going to hiroshima for quite some time now and given my proximity to it i could probably see it all in a day-trip. i think that it is something that i must do alone, so i haven't invited anyone to join me. it is sure to be a moving experience.

my friend and co-worker david gradie became a father yesterday at 4:12am japan time. they have named the baby hanna, which means "flower" in japanese. apparently she's a beautiful 3.3kg bundle of joy, with strong asian features and irrefutable caucasian blue eyes. it will be incredible to witness this life grow up. david is the first of my friends (my age) to have a child intentionally and it marks a special point in my life. i hope i get to be known as uncle christian. what a trip.

well, here is another installment of random photos i have taken since arriving. i will try to add a few here and there to every post. click on them for more detail and description. they are being held on a photo sharing website. enjoy.

one last thing: i was informed that until now people have not been able to post comments on my blog posts. i assure you that this has been fixed, so write a comment if it pleases you. more to come soon. hopefully the hiroshima trip will happen because that should make for quite the entry.

Six Months Deep

2005-07-26T03:33:00.000+09:00

well, it's been awhile, hasn't it?

quite awhile. to date, i haven't set foot on canadian soil in over six months. but the internet only just finally arrived and i was never quite comfortable with the idea of keeping an online journal that i had to update from friends' houses or internet cafes. so here we begin.

i flirt with the idea of using this as an eventual novel or chronicle or simply choosing to let this exist as it will, which of all things shall attempt to remain honest but never claim to be objective. i'll even give you some pictures.

i need to do some redecorating. who would want to read anything on this site if i can't even stand to look at it.

i have been traveling a lot. highlights thus far include kyoto, nara, osaka, awajishima, shikoku, sannomiya, kobe, nagoya, himeji and the outskirts. all deserve mention but all will be recalled in anecdotal ways in no time. is this kind of thing an ideal way to practice your writing? do people become authors or journalists out of this? i lack blogsperience.

and well, one story at a time i suppose. tomorrow we start teaching the summer school curriculum which requires us to be working for eight consecutive days, though there is the possibility of a typhoon. i could use a rainy day but don't want to have to forfeit other days off later in the month over a plan that was not of my design. i'm supposed to be climbing mt. fuji in two months. i think i am ready. i need to go running tonight to measure my current fitness level. old people can do it; shouldn't then, i? has my grammar come undone as a result of speaking in tones of part japanese-part truncated english in true 101 form in hopes that someone else's children will pick it up?

most of them seem to like light blue. i mean, given the options.

splendid. japan hosts the best food i have ever eaten. i make a habit of eating as regularly as possible. even the convenience store food is delicious and fresh and occasionally healthly. it's difficult to describe is except as i have already done, countless times. i am going to miss it if/when i depart from this country and anticipate spending a lot of money eating out.

instead of that, i am inspired to take a japanese cooking class. my comprehension is still quite limited and if i am not feeling confident in my ability i will miss a lot of what's being said to me. i also find that many old men speak japanese in a particularly fast manner to me, and i have the most trouble talking with them. some of them know to slow down for me, but the experience is sometimes unnerving for both parties.

today, i was able to understand that i almost accidentally offended someone. i was trying to explain that a book i had borrowed was overdue, but she interpreted my statement as an accusation of her taking too long. i was able to sense the uneasiness and corrected myself. sometimes using a lot of japanese is a difficult thing, because what you say is so often misinterpreted.

here dies the mass email, because god, are they ever a hassle for all of us. comment if you will. communicate.