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...