Two Sundays: Icebergs

or “Two Sundays: Sunday The First”

This is the first of two related blog things about Sunday because Sunday was very much two days for me: one in Japan, and one in Toronto. The Toronto bit has got more thought to it, and it is on the way. However, for now, here’s the first Sunday:

In Japan, this weekend was spent with the other HAJET kids (Hokkaido Association for Japanese Exchange Teachers), “camping” at Shinshinotsu, which is maybe forty-minutes-to-an-hour outside of Sapporo and just a short drive down the road from Heather’s town. I say “camping” because it was more pitching tents in a well-manicured park, as seems to often be the case with Japanese “camp sites.”

There were meetings carried out in cavernous town hall halls, and there were informational seminars carried out in gusty, faux castle turrets. When we weren’t meant to be doing anything, the glaring sun drove most of us to cling lazily to the shifting shade or to try and eek out some sweaty peace in our tents, which had become less tents and more solar ovens.

A highlight was definitely Saturday afternoon, when I and Norther Rep Doug took up the challenge to man the grills and feed the other 54 HAJET members and friends who were in attendance. We took to it like Japanese fast food chefs, letting our calls of “IRASHAIMASEEEE!” ring out across the campsite, confusing all of the Japanese folks who had made the mistake of camping next to our gaijin settlement.

And then it was Sunday, and we washed off some of the sweat from the night before in the nearby onsen before saying our lazy goodbyes under the grey, muggy day. I rode home with Heather for as far as her town, then the rest of the way with Perry and David—other ALTs from my part of the Shiribeshi sub-prefecture. The sun came out on our ride back out west, along the Sea of Japan, and I dozed in the back of David’s tiny red Toyota while he and Perry talked a bit but were more often comfortably silent in the front.

Stopping just outside Otaru at a Seicomart for some mint Crunky, David asked if I ever bought bananas from Seicomart, and if I, too, felt guilty about forgetting the 20円　banana coupons they were constantly handing out. He talked about how he had been so unnerved by the silent brow-beatings he received from the high-school-aged employees of his local Seico when he forgot his coupons that he would actually set out for the Seico, realize he intended on buying bananas but had forgotten his coupon, and he’d actually walk all the way home to get it before heading on to the kombini.

It was an insignificant anecdote that I could empathize with, but it stuck with me until later that evening when I emailed David to thank him for the ride. In the cast of that Sunday night—which was all mountain-eclipsed sunsets, and fragrant seaside humidity, and old men at the pool asking for English lessons—the banana coupons caught on something and hauled up a thought that I hadn’t been looking for. It was a beautiful thing, though, and it seemed to highlight the kinds of weird, deep, but ultimately fleeting relationships that us JET/ALT kids form with one another. What’s more, I think it’s likely the perfect thing to say after a weekend spent amongst my adopted foreigner family over here, a realization that I had about my relationship with David but which could have easily applied to a large segment of the people with whom I spent the weekend.

“When I think back to the seemingly insignificant detail of your story about forgetting Seico Banana coupons and having to turn around to go back to your house for them least the Seico employees should yell at you for your carelessness, I realize how very much we have in common, you and I.

And that detail is insignificant, and it could be the kind of thing I have in common with a lot of other ALTs in Hokkaido, but there's something about it that seems salient today. There's something in it that makes me keenly sadder about your decision not to recontract. For all of my excitement for you and for Ari and for Stanford, a sentimental, selfish part of me is going to miss car rides with you, David, and miss discussions of forgotten banana coupons. They are the pedestrian crystalizations of the kinds of relationships that we ALTs form in this place. They are the tangible tips belonging to the deep icebergs of emotion that go floating off into the blue when people in our kinds of situations part.”