I’m back. Summer sure went fast. It’s cold here these days, carrying my luggage through Tokyo was the last time I’ve sweated in a week (only a week ago?).
The family vacation was good, my mom fell in love with Japan and my brother didn’t exactly (he’s a big old travel wuss, shared youth hostel bedrooms make him uncomfortable and communal bathing was out of the question) but they both thoroughly enjoyed meeting my teachers and friends and seeing the sights. And I enjoyed being their tour guide, I felt like I was genuinely useful in my ability to show them a few things that they most likely wouldn’t have experienced without the benefit of my background knowledge of the country.
Let’s see, I also met the Gaijin Girl, who doesn’t seem to be committing social suicide nearly as effectively as she claims and was actually quite delightful. I think I babbled her ear off. Sorry GG, too bad I missed you on my way out of Tokyo!
After seeing the family off, I met my travel buddy P-chan. We went to Sado Island for two days of a three-day concert series by the Sado native Kodo drummers and a guest group, Tamango’s Urban Tap. Tamango was cool, Kodo was hot. I actually saw Kodo in college when they came to my university, so I knew they’d be hot. Who can resist the pounding of a 10-foot drum that deafens you…by a nearly naked man whose muscles are stagelit most becomingly?
Weary of the sauna-like heat, P-chan and I moved north to begin my first (and her third) WWOOF experience. Willing Workers On Organic Farms is pretty much that–you choose a host based on their self-description in the guidebook, go there, and help them out every day in exchange for room and board and the family experience.
So I started at a horse farm in Aomori. The gig consisted of the expected poo shoveling, and also garden work, traded for riding lessons in the mornings. It had its ups (early mornings, cooking our own food, riding, breathtakingly beautiful night skies) and downs (bugs biting me on the ass, mentally scarring episode involving P-chan on a bucking horse and me on the horse it was bucking at). I don’t really wanna be a cowboy.
The farm’s specialty was therapy for mentally handicapped children through riding, which wasn’t really something we could help with. The garden was not so much organic, so we lived a somewhat afterthought existence in a warehouse as opposed to with a family per se, but got to watch hot chicks do yabusame, or horseback archery, and see the Milky Way every evening, so whatever, it’s all good.
Then we moved on to Nikko, to a guesthouse. We looked forward to yoga in the mornings and aromatherapy every other day. “It says vegan diet on the profile,” I joked to P-chan, “but I bet this guy pulls up in an SUV.” Lo and behold, what should pull into the train station parking lot at that very minute but a gigantic red Ford Expedition.
Driven, as it turns out, by an angry, sarcastic, and questionably insane Japanese man who also doubled as a 35-year veteran of California and conservative fucknut. The first thing he did back at the lodge was ask us about our politics and tell us (without bothering to wait for an answer) that we were spoiled. The next day he refused to feed P-chan the strict diabetic diet that she must eat, and that he had agreed in our email exchanges would not be a problem at all. To make a long, uncomfortable and in the end slightly scary story (that man has a road-rage problem and should not be in charge of a multi-ton vehicle) we told him we would leave the following morning.
Actually we left that very night. In between the blowup wherin we announced our decision to leave, and P’s and my frantic discussion of what to do next, I managed to sneak up to the customers’ computer and steal enough internet time to download a train schedule. There was one more train to Tokyo that night.
I said “come on P, I’m out of here in 15 minutes, are you with me?” She wrung her hands, “I don’t know, I can’t decide so fast, maybe we should stick it out, I can’t pack so quickly!”–but I had never felt more sure and more excited about a breakaway. Moments of my life that I could never get back, wasted in a hateful lodge with a hateful man; I was certainty embodied.
“Just think, we could go to Yoyogi Park on Sunday!” She stopped. “Alright then,” she said “you know, all I needed was a reason.” She started throwing her stuff in her bag, an assembling process that usually takes an hour crammed into 10 minutes, with a few spillover bits that I crammed into the top of mine. Another poor WWOOFer who had been sticking it out for a week already, looked on in dismay at our efficient getaway. We wished the stuck WWOOFer luck, marched up into the kitchen, requested a ride to the station in the sort of polite Japanese tone that left no room for argument, and left Nikko without a backward glance.
Incidentally, don’t ever go to Nikko Park Lodge, it’s a dive, there’s nothing organic in that cheap vegan diet, untrained volunteers (there is no hired staff, the owner is too cheap) do all the sheet-changing, building maintainance, scrubbing and cleaning and the poor yoga teacher who does the rest of the work is probably being held captive.
Tokyo was everything I dreamed it could be. It was the first time I really, truly enjoyed Tokyo.
Alas, our friends left town and we needed one more WWOOF host before our Japan time ran out. This time we went to Ibaraki-ken, on the Pacific coast. The kitchen was deplorably messy and the weeds in the garden unbelievably high (and the “short bike ride to swim in the ocean” was more of a 25 km roundtrip to wade at the ugly beach), but the lady in charge was wonderful inexhaustibly energetic and kind, and her family lovely, and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to round out my two years in Japan.
While there, I was also treated to dinner by a friend from junior high, my neighbor down the street in fact, now a JET. It was by chance that I ran into her at JET orientation in Chicago two years ago, and just barely that I recalled her mentioning a prefecture beginning with ‘I’, north of Chiba. Anyway, she’s staring down a third year…you go girl! What luck, that we could meet up?
Anyway, back to Tokyo, this time to stay with an old Tottori friend, recently promoted from the inaka to Sasazuka. He generously put me up for three nights, and even got me on the guest list to the reopening of the famous Absolut Ice Bar (where I chatted with the handsome Swedish designer of the bar’s icy interior). I spent most of my days in Shibuya, watching the bobbing unbrellas at the “tangle” crossing, worrying about whatever it is that I always worry about these days, anxiety having become the permanent state of my heart and chest. Not wanting to leave, wanting the flight to be over with, shopping with my remaining yen, despising the ambient media overload of Shibuya (I still hate you Beyonce). Feeling like I was losing my best friend when P-chan and I said goodbye. And then saying goodbye.
…
It’s weird to be back in the American Midwest. I feel out of synch with life here, and though the feeling gets less every day it’s nothing I can talk about without sounding like a worrywart and a whiner, dwelling on the past. Sometimes I wish I could express my true feelings, which are usually those of a worrywart and whiner who dwells on the past. Not that I’m the sort who worries about being thought of as a whiner who dwells on the past or anything.
I have to keep reminding myself that, though I was sad to leave Tokyo, I couldn’t have stayed–as GG said, sometimes Japan is what you need, but you gotta know when it’s time to go, before being a permanent gaijin sinks into your soul, before you get jaded and bitter and stuck. It was time.
Now what? Dunno, searching, thinking blah blah. Need to find ways to stay busy here while searching. It is easy to fall into depression when you’re living back at home and your friends are all busy with work (or dating each other, effectively cancelling each other out [or newly gone crazy and dysfunctional, also not useful]) and everyone you know is either married or already almost done with grad school or both.
In any case, “functionally illiterate and loving it” are days gone by, and the times, like this blog, must change.
September 23rd, 2006
Categories: travel, japan . Author: ximena . Comments: 3 Comments
