Curtain Call

Wednesday 23rd March - last chance to get everything ready and taken up with the tricky business of packing. I'm not sure if you've ever had to attempt to cram your life into one suitcase (with a weight limit of 20kg), dear readers. There must be some people in the world who are good at it, but I, alas, do not yet possess the knack. My belongings got distributed indiscriminately between the aforementioned case, a couple of cardboard boxes I intended to have sent on, and the treasure trove that the Community Room had become. This must be the third time I've moved out of student accommodation, and this is a common phenomenon. I think it's beautiful to see people desperately "donate" their excess to remaining flatmates; there must be a fortune to be made for whoever is the last to leave.

Back to those boxes I mentioned earlier. If you've been with me all the way from the beginning, you'll know that I'd never set foot in a post office these seven months, apart from my early disastrous attempts to receive an international money order. It may have been my final day in the country but there was still one new experience to be had. What can I say about Japanese P.O.s? Much like banks you can see a lot more of what's going on behind the counter than with their English equivalents. The place I visited was used to foreign students, too, and were lovely an patient with me, and after much discussion we got it sorted. In the main these boxes were packed with books, making them heavy enough to warrant my paying close to the same amount as a month's rent to ship them back to Albion. Needs must when the devil drives and all that.

There's only one more notable feature about this day, and that is what I ate for dinner. Leaving early meant forfeiting the marvellous buffet spread at Nanzan's end-of-term bash, so my last meal was more "Konbini Queen" than "Killer Queen." I made a simple enough fare and ate alone in my room, but it felt strangely extravagant. Looking back I suppose it summed up my time in Japan pretty well - I hadn't always been the most socially outgoing, but I had explored in my own way and discovered all kinds of new experiences. Writing as I am now, several moons after that night, I have not yet sought out or attempted to recreate anything from that final sup - inarizushi, chicken karaage, potato croquettes, onigiri, Meiji chocolate, gyoza, and many more. All quite commonplace to a resident of Japan but in England they sound rare and exotic, and their taste is but a lingering memory.

I managed to catch a few winks during the night, then had a frantic last-minute packing and tidying session to leave the room (alas, no longer my room) in a fit state. On opening the door I found that some of my remaining housemates had fixed a farewell message to the wall in the corridor, instantly warming my heart despite the chill early morning air. After penning a reply and settling up with the janitor (handing back keys, router and bedding) I hauled my suitcase out into the street and said goodbye. Goodbye to Yamazato Koryu Kaikan and those with whom I had lived, goodbye to Nanzan University and those with whom I had studied, goodbye to Japan. Yet I still remember that when my 'plane took off I thought "Goodbye for now, Japan, I'll see you again!"

There's not a lot to relate about the journey back; much of it passed in a blur anyway. But I remember eventually seeing the English countryside from above, thinking how flat and green it looked, yet full of twisty-turny roads and hedgerows and red-brick buildings, and feeling that I was really home.

And so the curtain closes on my Year Abroad in Japan and on this blog. I shan't weary you with an in-depth analysis of my feelings and experience, but it was a good year and I certainly intend to revisit the country in future. My sincerest thanks for your readership, and お元気で until we meet again!

The last picture I took in Japan. It's...?

さよなら、私の名古屋

March the 22nd, 23rd and 24th were my last days in Japan (at least this time around), but before I start on how I filled them, pray allow me to wax philosophical for just a moment. A friend of mine who left before me posted many photo's on Facebook during his last few days, claiming that the knowledge he was leaving made everything seem more significant. That sent me thinking along similar lines - I wasn't just leaving Japan, mysterious oriental island nation, nor just Nagoya, home of Atsuta shrine and birthplace of pachinko. I was leaving the place where I'd lived, laughed, cried, loved and lost; everything that had happened in the past seven months could be connected to this city. Furthermore I was reminded of the point put forward by Stephen Fry (and probably others, too) that a University is not a place, but a time - everything is always changing, so if ever I go back to Nanzan I will find it completely different from the school I attended. Although I was still set on leaving I determined to cram as much as pos. into my last days to help the memories stick.

You may recall that I was never too fond of Tuesday mornings, but this one fair trumped them all - a gloomy affair as I plodded toward the CJS office (newly relocated to the newly opened R Building) and filled out the forms for withdrawl from the programme. Admittedly the process was fairly quick and painless, the staff were really nice about it, and even gave me a bag with the school crest on it as a parting gift. I didn't manage to properly say goodbye to my classmates or teachers, though. My excuse was that I was too busy with all my last minute preparations, but the truth is that I was too scared. Scared of them being disappointed in me and scared to admit that I'd become closer to them than I'd first expected I would.

After confirming my withdrawl there was more to do elsewhere - the first stop being the bank to close my account. Again, it seemed so bizarre to think that I'd once spent a deal of time getting lost and navigating with map and compass just to find this building, which was now so familiar. Strange, also, after all the time I'd spent worrying about money and doing my best to live frugally, to be handed ¥340,008 in cash! The envelope containing this wad went into the inside pocket of my coat, and I wouldn't be surprised if I patted it to make sure it was still there once for every yen over the coming days!

Eventually I found a safe place to keep the money

Next was the Ward Office to cancel my Health Insurance and get a little refund for what I'd already payed up to this point. These bits of official business concluded I made my way to my favourite old haunts (taking pictures all along the route) and splashed out on some souvenirs and various things I'd seen in shops and thought of buying "sometime." This burst of retail therapy made me feel much better, and provided a bit of closure, too, for all I know. That evening I went to the supermarket, bought catfood and took away some empty cardboard boxes. I can only imagine what the staff may have thought I was up to.

Good times.

Take Your Hand And Walk Away

As the more astute of you may already have deduced, dear readers, shortly after the March 11th quake I terminated my studies and returned to England. Had the week running from the 15th to the 20th not been Spring Break I may not have come to this decision, and I will tell you for why. At first I was not worried about the possibility of another earthquake striking nearer to Nagoya - in fact, during an aftershock a few days later I calmly went to sleep while my housemates gathered downstairs and started filling up bottles of emergency water. Neither did the threat of a meltdown at Fukushima nuclear plant worry me - for every paranoid comparison to Chernobyl from a layman I seemed to have friends of friends with expert knowledge who could confirm that the situation was not even by the longest stretch of the wildest imagination as bad as it could have been. Before I continue let's spare a thought for the brave people involved in efforts to cool the reactors, who by getting so close to the highly radiated areas condemned themselves to an early grave for the sake of others.

One of the things my time in Japan has taught me is that having lots of time to oneself can be dangerous. My position may have been stalwart enough at the start of the week, but with no lessons to distract me from the many "what if"s I found myself wavering. The week is very much a blur to me; I passed it thinking hard about my options, wrapped up in melancholy and uncertainty. I had planned to attempt some travel, but I no longer felt I could do so with a clear conscience and found myself putting vast amounts into donation boxes. Eventually it was two things that sealed the deal for me. Firstly SOAS offered the option to come home and attend an alternative programme so I could still pass the year - if not for that I'd not even have considered leaving - after five years of trying to finish this degree I wasn't about to just quit.

Second was the exodus of other students, wither voluntarily or at the behest of their home universities. The first day back after the holiday was lonely indeed - our class was small to begin with, but our number was now reduced by half. I couldn't see myself having a very good time with so many of my friends gone, and from there all sorts of other arguments branched out - knock-on effect on my work, being able to reassure the folks back home, financial issues et cetera. Before I knew it I had made my decision, and my year abroad was prematurely over. I was sad, but there was an upside to the situation - Goodbye Parties!

With some people leaving Yamazato Koryu Kaikan of their own accord, others being forced to and others still graduating and moving on, there was a definite sense of fin-de-siécle in the house. We were always going to part ways, but who'd have thought it would be so soon? We celebrated for all we were worth, had a jolly good time and created a few more great memories to take away with us. One night we went to a sushi restaurant with a conveyor belt running all the way around the place, where you just take what you like when you see it and they count up your plates at the end to work out the bill. It turned into quite a competition as to who could eat the most - I was mocked for my slow 'n' steady approach at first, but soon had a respectable ten-plate-high tower. An added bonus, of course, was that conveyor belt sushi is slightly higher quality than supermarket sushi, and I was able to try a few varieties that were new to me, including the bizarre Meatball Makizushi. Om nom nom.

The End of Another Era

Another night saw us pool together the leftover food of those leaving to make a big rice-y salad-y fajita-y combination. We ate together at the table like a family, and it seemed strange to think of how much time had passed since we gathered around that table and introduced ourselves for the first time. Yet another night some of us visited an 居酒屋/Izakaya (Japanese-style pub), a place where you sit on cushions rather than chairs and press a remote-control-type-button to summon waiters and order drinks and food. What kind of food? All sorts, but the one that sticks in my memory is 鯛 (Tai - red snapper or red sea bream in English, according to Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/6ypatta), described as (quint/)essential Izakaya cuisine. In appearance it resembled crisps, was rubbery in texture, and as for the taste... it was fish. Very very fishlike. This fishy taste was a bit too much for the old sensitive English tastebuds, but I'm still glad I tried it!

かんぱい！

That's Just Ridiculous...ly On

On Saturday (March 12th) I slept in and after a while toddled off to Osu for a few hours. Sunday saw me conducting my routine of showering, shopping and idling very much as usual. Usual - now there's a word that is key in describing this weekend. To judge from the frantic kindly enquiries after my wellbeing from English friends and relations, the news seemed to imply that the whole of Japan had been thrown into pandemonium. Don't misunderstand me - the Sendai quake was an awful disaster, affecting, ruining and ending the lives of many, and people in the rest of the country were mindful of it. However, there was about as much indication of this destruction in Nagoya as there might be in Southampton after a hurricane in Glasgow. A river I walked past had become murky and smelly from the pits and pieces dislodged by the vibrations, a St Patrick's Day parade was cancelled, and donation boxes for quake victim relief had sprung up everywhere. Those were the only signs that anything out of the ordinary had happened. I suppose it's easy to think of "Japan" as a small country in comparison to, say, China or the USA, but in fact it's still a very big place.

Monday rolled around in time, and the mood in the first class was decidedly solemn. All I just said about it being difficult to connect what was on the news to the world around us notwithstanding, consciousness of the tragedy was still there, especially since we'd been hanging out with people from Sendai not so long ago. Although this funk hung over us like a heavy fog, we managed to have a normal sort of lesson before too long, carrying on with our lives. We even had some fun afterwards in the form of a photoshoot!

First some background explanation. Since before I arrived at Nanzan a new building had been in the process of being put together. The hard-hatted, be-overalled workers were as familiar to me as the big main gate or the fountain outside the CJS office, so it was something of a surprise to find the place ("R" Building) completed and almost ready for offices to move into. The University wanted some pictures of hip and beautiful international students in these shiny new premises for use in their next prospectus/news bulletin/whatever, and naturally we of IJ600 were happy to oblige. It was a fun experience, watching the photographers select and place everyone to make sure each photo had a reasonable distribution of colours and nationalities (e.g. not too many white people wearing black bunched together). The props used to give the pictures a "studenty" feel were also amusing; they included a dummy laptop, newspapers over a year old and textbooks thicker than my arm about subjects I'd never heard of. We also had a group picture taken, which, unbeknownst to us, would be the last time we would gather together like this...

Consequences Will Never Be The Same

Gotta get down on Friday. Sections had been rearranged, so morning lessons contained a slightly different combination of classmates. Our teacher dubbed us "S-Section," on account of her feeling a bit "special" that morning and in need of our support. The only other notable feature I can remember is that I was told I could probably be mistaken for a Japanese person from behind. But all this is beside the point; I'm sure you all know what I'm really going to talk about.

It was an ordinary day. I'd been sneezing a lot due to a cold I caught the day before and was a little disappointed at how the sections had been divided up. Lunch, homework, sitting in my room during the gap between my Japanese lessons and the Japanese Culture and Art lecture. Routine. Commonplace. Everyday. Words I can still use to describe how I spent the eleventh of March, yet for others it was anything but. I found myself feeling dizzy after a sneeze - was this a very bad cold? No, the movement had nothing to do with me. Rough tides, then? I was on land. Earthquake.

Some 300 miles away in Sendai carnage was being unleashed and people were dying as this "Mega-Quake" moved Honshu east, made the Earth wobble and speed up its rotation and who knows what else. Yet in Nagoya, where the quake registered a mere 3.5 magnitude, I cringe to say that I noted the moving of the earth with nothing more than amused curiosity. Does this make me sound callous? I must stress that I was completely oblivious to the disaster. In our high-speed information age, people across the world knew about it before I did. During my lecture an announcement came on over the speaker system advising people to contact anyone they knew from the Tohoku region and warning of incoming tsunamis (only about a meter high for Nagoya). It just seemed like a natural occurrence and that everyone went about their business as usual.

That's my safe and uneventful experience of this quake. The truth is Japan is a big place and I only got to hear of the real damage done when the news told me. Lots of people lots their lives or homes or families, which is a very sad thing. I feel like all I can do is spout clichés, but I'm sure we can try to honour the memory of those who have passed on, and I'm sure that as a country Japan will get back on its feet.

Encouragement

ニュース

As the week (March 7-11) drew to its end so too did our news-based project work. This week was a good one, and important for me - mainly because it taught me about all the problems there are in Japan. Why is this a good thing? In the Western world (or at least in Britain where we're so ready to condemn ourselves) it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of Japan as some kind of super-efficient utopia, which of course it is not (oops, spoiler!). It's a country like any other, real and flawed - in some areas it's doing well, in others there's room for improvement. Understanding this reality helps to demystify the place thus making it easier to stay here, and if I may pretend to some nobility of spirit, also gets one thinking about possible approaches to dealing with these problems.

Enough of my extolling the virtues of imperfection, on to the presentations themselves! I can't remember all the topics, but some that stand out in my memory include jury service (a bit complex, but I think it's been proposed to involve a larger number of people in it), security cameras (most people are content to sacrifice the small amount of privacy for the safety they provide, but apparently this is still something of a new idea), whether or not to have lessons on Saturdays and how English should be taught. That last one in particular made an impression on me. I haven't seen many examples over here of hilariously bad English ("Engrish," as the young people say), so I assumed Japan was getting on alright as regards proficiency in this most excellent and heroic choice of language. However, in a recent test measuring English ability in thirty Asian countries, Japan placed 29th (a few others for your information: Singapore 1st, China and Korea tied at 8th). There's as many as 8 years of compulsory English education, with plenty of reading aloud, learning vocab and translation, so where could the difficulty lie?

Well, imagine, for example, if I were to tell you that 傘売り場はどこですか(kasa uriba wa doko desu ka) means "Where is the umbrella department?" You could then say that you know the Japanese for "Where is the umbrella department?" and if anyone were to say Kasa uriba wa doko desu ka to you, you would know what they were asking. But you may not know that は marks the subject of the sentence, that the particle か changes a statement into a question, that です is a polite form non-past tense et cetera et cetera. Upscale this sort of problem to apply to a whole system of education, throw in some lack of practice communicating with native speakers and you have the current situation. Yet what has the government proposed to set this right? More hours of lessons and more vocabulary to be learned. Double-yew very much tee heich. I found this issue surprising as I've always found Japanese to be taught to foreigners very well, and would thought it would be simple enough to follow the same principles in an inverse way.

I suppose I must also mention how my own presentation went. Writing now it seems as if it passed by in a flash, but I remember being nervous of over- or under-running and stuttering and hesitating quite a bit. Perhaps I put too much faith in my powers of improvisation, maybe it would have been better if I'd written a script for my parts so I'd have had something concretely structured to fall back on. Still, no use crying over spilled milk, and others commented that it went quite well, so perhaps I'm just being paranoid. The inescapable fact of the matter is that one more piece of project work is over, roll on whatever comes next!

"Three little pups from school are we..."

運 Vs 努力

Dear Readers, have you ever had a day, morning or even an hour when all goes right? Things click into place and you start to "fire on all cylinders" and feel really good about yourself? Tuesday 8th March was just such a day for me. In that seemingly vague, improvised way of structuring lessons that I don't think I'll ever get used to, we were given three hours to research, ponder and discuss the idea of 運(un) Vs. 努(doryoku): in other words, which has more influence on our lives - luck or effort?

At first we were invited to recall a few of our own experiences and consider which could be attributed to luck (good or bad) or effort (sufficient or lacking). We then read an article about how people had answered to a similar question in a certain survey, along with some case studies - a fellow falling in love and marrying someone he met on a train as an example of luck and someone who filled in a ridiculous amount of competition entries to win a car as the scion of effort. Having warmed up to the theme in this way, the last task before the break in between sessions was to compose an argument in favour of one view or the other. For a moment I considered playing Devil's Advocate and write in favour of luck, but in the end came down on effort's side of the fence.

I was fairly happy with my composition; if I remember aright my main points were that we humans can't control luck (so why worry about it?), that the right amount of effort can overcome bad luck, and that concentrating on luck creates opportunity to abandon responsibility for one's actions. The next step was dividing the class according to their alliance, then each person read out their argument, and we had challenges and discussion after each one. This was the part which had me feeling so good - in general, to churn out the essays quickly, one writes in more plain Japanese, but to show proper respect speaks in polite form. Somehow I managed to make the changes really well on the spot; it felt a bit like reading from a script - the structure and words were already there, but an element of improvisation regarding to say them.

So, a fairly stimulating day intellectually, plus a decent amount of success, and some social interaction after class (that person will probably never realise how much our casual conversation of barely a few minutes meant to me) all added up to make me feel on top o' the world! I'm sure everyone needs a day like this every now and then to keep them afloat.

Japanese Snacks Vol. 12 - Honey Lemon Fanta. Smokey, robust but sweet taste which makes one think of honey despite it not being at all viscous.