Thursday, March 06, 2014

Japan as Narnia (or You Can't Go Home Again)

He tells us that he’s going to apply for JET again, and we all smile politely, and we tell him that’s exciting, and I wonder if everyone else is reeling inside, as I am. 

It strikes me as a painfully desperate measure, wrought out of being lost in his current life here in Canada and thinking that returning to Japan would be his answer.

It will never work.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Departures (Of Pre-Departure Orientation)

This was originally written for the JET Alumni Association of Toronto's Monthly Newsletter as a report on the Pre-Departure Orientation event that took place in June for the 2013-2014 crop of Toronto JETs. However, as is my way, I couldn't resist the temptation to do a little more with it, and I feel like it rather accurately captures the sometimes-sad, sometimes-amazing roll of being an active JET Alumnus.


Over the weekend of June 22-23, The Japan Foundation of Toronto opened its doors for the 2013 Pre-Departure Orientation for Toronto. More than a dozen Toronto JETAA executives and members welcomed the 60-some new ALTs, presenting detailed sessions on all aspects of the JET experience.

It was the material you would expect: the kind of thing we all encountered at our own PDO events or Tokyo orientation: how to travel, how to teach, how to save, how to survive, how to not get konchoed. Each presenter made the material his or her own, seeking to add spice to the same material we teach every year.

What I believe to be remarkable about PDOT, though, has little enough to do with the content of the session. For me, the most salient, most worth-writing-home-about thing about PDOT is the feel of the event.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to volunteer at PDOT, it is part blessing and part curse.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Reblog: My Japanese Name


Stumbled across the following on the Crackbookverse, and was utterly blown away at what an authentic representation it was of a certain facet of the Japan experience. Though my own Junior High was not this bad, I can empathize with a lot of this. My Elementary school, on the other hand, was DEFINITELY this good.

http://jasonporath.com/blog/2013/06/my-japanese-name/

Friday, September 13, 2013

North Sea Road: The Houses of Spiders

I've started writing something that may or may not wind up being something like a book, based on a lot of the stuff that shows up here, over on Wattpad.

Here's the opening chapter of the work, which is a bit whimsical and was very much inspired by a random caption on this photo.


Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Modern Myths: Gaijin


Only just realized that, though I wrote this up for the Hokkaido Polestar E-newsletter, I never actually posted it here, so here you are:

There is a race of super humans walking among the ordinary rank and file of Japanese Society.

They are The Gaijin: creatures from a distant world, brought to Japan by shadowy government organizations so that the Japanese people could learn from them. In a crowded subway car, they stand apart, high above all those around them. The Japanese are at once fascinated and terrified by the other worldly beauty of these fey creatures. By day, these creatures patronize Japanese schools; instilling wonder in Japanese children with their odd customs and tales of their distant homelands. By night, the Gaijin congregate with one another, observing their strange rites and conspiring in their oddest of languages:

English.

Like the last sons and daughters of krypton, these individuals who had been unimportant nobodies in their homelands took on unimaginable abilities in the light of Japan’s red sun. Their blonde hair turned golden, and their eyes of blue and green shone like sapphire and jade. They would tower and sway over the Japanese like giants, and their booming voices would echo across crowded rooms. Men dreamed of being like them, and women of being with them.

One is hard pressed to find a soul in Japan who has not heard tales of the Gaijin Smash: the glowing foreigner’s ability to plow through layers of Japanese bureaucracy or social courtesy with just as much ease as their giant bodies plow through the wedged-in masses on the Tokyo subway. There is the Gaijin Force Bubble: an impenetrable field that surrounds the giants at all times, making it impossible for the Nihonjin to sit beside them on crowded buses and causing criticism to slide off them in a haze of misunderstanding. There is the Gaijin Stare: the ability of their wide, rainbow eyes to surprise and terrify the Japanese with a glance. And, of course, many a tabe/nomihoudai restaurant has gone out of business in the face of the Gaijin Hunger: a unbridled gastronomical need for booze and meat that has been known to drink whole breweries dry while feasting on the livestock of entire prefectures.


But it will not always be so for the lofty Gaijin. As they begin to age and acclimatize themselves to the Land of the Rising Sun, they will start to whither and fade. The novelty that used to glow around them like a halo will grow dim with normalcy as ever newer and more exotic waves of strapping young aliens land on these shores, distracting the locals from those foreigners who have already settled in their midst. Eventually like broken and forgotten gods, they will pull up to the counters at Gaijin bars, joining in the litany of tales from their grey and haggard brothers about the golden days, when the Japanese still believed them capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound. From their slumped positions on their high stools, they will cast baleful glares at their younger, harder, taller, blonder replacements, who now catch all the stares.

Friday, July 29, 2011

POTW: Hamamasu

(a contribution to Rebecca's on-going Photo of The Week Facebook group...while also being a photo of Things Japanese)


This past week was supposed to be HEC camp; otherwise known as the Hokkaido English Challenge Camp; otherwise known as one of the things I had most been looking forward to for the past few months (or had I been looking forward to it ever since I came to Japan two years ago and it was mentioned in Hokkaido orientation?). HEC camp brings together first grade students from junior high and high school for a 100% English experience at a camp run entirely by us ALTs. What's more, these are the kids who did the best in our ALT-organized English challenge, so all I've heard is how much of a riot they are as they are not afraid of English. 


Last year's camp had sounded like a blast, but I had missed it as I'd been in Canada. Come hell or high water, I was determined to make it to camp this year...that was until a freaking BEAR made it to camp before us, on the very day that we were all meant to ship out (last Friday). Hairy bastard got the camp site closed for a week, and camp got cancelled because, for all that Mark and Heather tried, they could find no other place to host it. 


But, in a hero move meant to salvage something of the weekend, June threw together plans for a bunch of us to go camping in Hamamasu, along the sea of Japan coast north of Sapporo.  That's the long story for where this photo comes from.



I feel like trying to take credit for sunset shots is a bit of a dick move. So long as your camera is half-decent, you're only making a best attempt at capturing an event that is entirely the responsibility of the earth, sun, etc. Basically, I feel like it's pretty hard to take a terrible picture of a sunset.

Thus, here's my cop-out for this week: put forward more because it was a particularly glorious sunset rather than because I did anything particularly exceptional other than pointing my camera at it. 



Hamamatsu Sunset

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

All in the System

(in which a lot of photographic bullshit goes down--the kind of stuff that won't be of much interest to anyone who does not drool over lenses. Consider yourself warned.)
Dorky Photogear Stuff
Back at the beginning of June, the Nikon D60 that had been a gift from my Dad before departing for Japan--the camera that had served me loyally for pretty much two years exactly--died on me.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

POTW: Framed

Becca has got me onto a Facebook initiative she's started. It's a group she made with photographer friends to encourage them to post their photos somewhere other can see them. There are no rules or categories: just the idea that you should post a photo a week: one that you think is the best you've done. I have further limited myself to chose a photo I actually took that week. As I've been neglecting the blog of late, I thought it might be the kind of thing I should post up here.


This week, it was a two-way tie between the photos below, each of which were taken in Sapporo this past weekend as I was hanging out with Perry, Lindsay, Max, Mark, and various other folk like Nick Small. 
Curiously strong drink
Grateful Dead
Then, out of nowhere, I realized that neither of them compared to the sexy focus of the following picture of Perry seated in the window of Kyosuke's Hookah Bar, located on the second floor of a restaurant, right where Tanuki Koji 6 turns into Tanuki Koji 7 in downtown Sapporo.
Perry in a window