Saying Sayonara

I find that sayonaras are difficult in Japan, and I’m not talking about the etiquette of bowing or the tongue-twisting nature of polite Japanese. The sayonaras I have seen have always been rather formal, especially ceremonies like graduation where even the tears appear to be on cue. Formalizing the sayonara process has its benefits: there’s no room for gaffes or awkward displays of affection and such a ceremony can be impromptu if needed because everyone knows how it should go.

Such an impromptu ceremony was held for a part-time teacher who left shortly after winter break. She had been at my junior high school for two years, filling in for a teacher who was taking care of her dying father. The father passed away and the day after the funeral the part-time teacher was out, farewell ceremony and all, and the next day the grieving daughter was back at work. The transition was seamless. And utterly jarring. It felt strange and even a little wrong that death can be so meticulously organized and seem so natural.

The third years need a PE teacher but it seemed of little matter who the PE teacher was from one day to the next. In itself this experience is noteworthy given its stark contrasts to similar transitions of personnel back home. But as a JET who’s not re-contracting, seeing this transition made my heart drop a little. In the hierarchy of teachers, I am the most forgettable, my role the most ornamental. How much less fanfare am I to expect in my transition out?

My time in Japan was been amazing and amazingly frustrating, invigorating and exhausting. Certainly impacting. And as my time draws quickly to an end I am a bit disturbed to think how little my leaving will be noticed. I have fostered relationships that are bound to last well after I say my last sayonara but just as many or more that surely will not.

For my own sanity I thought I’d compose a list of my sayonaras, things I will miss and ones I will not. Of moments great and small. I will create my own fanfare, damnit! But mostly because I know these last weeks will be rushed and it’s not just Japan’s fault that my good-byes may be incomplete.

So without further pontification, I say sayonara:

to the Docomo man who would not sell me a phone charger without calling my supervisor beforehand to make sure I knew what I was doing. I will NOT miss you.

to the Dalmatian next door whose constant barking I rarely notice these days and who has replaced his policy of growling with one of tail-wagging. I will miss you.

to school lunch, with your fish heads, unidentifiable vegetables and obscene proportions. I will NOT miss you (though I will miss curry and pumpkin doughnut days).

to playing cricket in winter on the bank of a river. I will miss you, Australia Day Cricket!

to the Kyoto-Sensei at my junior high school who cleans the staffroom with me and laughs with his shoulders. I will miss you.

to face masks during cold/flu season. I will NOT miss you. You are ridiculous.

to speaking tests when students exhibit moon-walking skills, tell Japanese folk tales in English, and ask about my love life. I will miss you and the opportunity you always provide for laughter.

to simultaneous road construction on all the roads leading to my house. I will NOT miss you.

to maps from road construction crews delivered to all the mailboxes in the neighborhood, displaying alternate routes and asking for our patience during construction. I will miss you.

to extremely helpful and enthusiastic sales people. I will miss you!

to the teeth-sucking textbook salesman that visits school three or four times a month. I will NOT miss you. You seem good at your job but, for the love, you are obnoxious!

to my granny bicycle with its glorious front basket and cheery bell. I will miss you.

to riding to and from school in pouring rain. I will NOT miss you and your day-ruining properties.

to my kotatsu. I will miss you more than words can say.

to my unheated shower room in the winter. I will NOT miss you.

to the yakitori stand couple who ask me about my country and always remember I prefer salt to sauce. I will miss you and your husky irrashaimase.

to Mt. Misen in Miyajima. I will NOT miss your fiasco-causing capabilities.

to Mt. Misen in Miyajima. I will miss your monkeys and the view from the ropeway.

to Kobe, with your Chinatown and Harborland attractions and glorious night view from Mt. Rokko and general grooviness. You rock and I will miss you.

to the rugby, soccer, and baseball fans I’ve seen at games. I will miss your impressively coordinated and dedicated cheering sections.

to crutching around a school without ramps let alone elevators. I will NOT miss you.

to Sanfrecce Hiroshima FC. You changed my mind about soccer. I will miss you.

to being packed like sardines on the second-to-last train home. I will NOT miss you.

to the amazingly efficient and user-friendly public transportation. In two years, I can recall only three times that my train was so late that it was inconvenient. I will miss you!

to the Shinkansen. I will miss you!

to paying 6 sen ($60) for a Shinkansen ticket from Osaka and standing the whole way back. I will NOT miss you.

to getting a hearty “Good morning!” from the PE teacher who’s English skills more or less start and end with that greeting. I will miss you.

to delicious restaurants and friendly staff: Manao (Thai) in Hiroshima and Pizza King in Wake. Oh how I will miss you!

to vacations to Arima Onsen, Kyoto and Nara, Nagasaki, and the Philippines. I will miss you.

to the confusion and awkwardness of taking leave to go on vacation. I will NOT miss you at all.

to Henry, the mangy stray that lives in the stairwell of Stephen’s place that we give food to. I will miss you. Take care of yourself old girl!

to my drafty and impossible to heat/cool house that is prone to dust bunnies the size of my head. I will NOT miss you.

to the first place that lived in by myself; you’ve kept me safe as I cried and never complained when I cursed you and you’ve kept me alert by having lots of creaks in the night and you’ve kept me busy by not cleaning yourself up and you’ve been great to my company since you’re so roomy. I may actually miss you in the end.

to Okamoto Sensei who is the perfect teacher, encouraging participation and excitement by her own insatiable enthusiasm. I will miss you.

to another Sensei who told me my hair isn’t blonde because blonde hair is more brilliant than mine and who looks disapprovingly at me anytime I don’t finish my lunch. I can’t express how much I will NOT miss you, at all. I may throw a party.

to the students that break teachers’ fingers and noses and classroom windows and the ones that say mean things to me in Japanese that they think I can’t understand and the ones that deliberately move far away from me when I am seated next to them at lunch. I will not miss you, mostly because I wish I could have done more to reach you.

to the students that smile brightly as they greet me in the morning and the ones who tell sex jokes and the ones who draw me pictures and the ones who tell me they miss me and the ones that dare to ask questions and the ones that talk to me outside of class. I will miss you!

SANYONARA!

All the things I will miss I might forget and the things I will not miss I may remember forever. Either way, how wonderful and sugoi (great/terrible depending on context) it is to have lived and taught in Oku, Okayama for two years.

Marathon in 109 Days!

I will be running The Quad Cities Marathon on Sunday, September 26th! Read my running (mis)adventures here :)

Let's PURIKURA

What started as just curiosity has now become a new obsession. Almost a hobby. I've gotten purikura in almost every city I've visited. This is purikura:

Purikura is the Japanese version of photo booths. You slip coins into a slot, and several small photos are taken. Usually friends and lovers take them together. And that's where the similarities end.

In purikura you have a choice of several different booths, sometimes over twenty. They're often in multistory arcades but just as often they are attractions in and of themselves. They are most popular with young crowds but even college graduates will get some purikura with their friends to celebrate the occasion.

Once you insert the coins the madness begins, and quickly. You need to select how you want to be tinted and if you want your eyes to be colored/sparkled. Then you decide which 4-6 backgrounds you want out of about 100. Some are just plain colors or patterns but others have cute images like on my example of purikura.

Once you decide how you're gonna pose (before each shot you're shown models posing in your selected background in case you can't come up with anything on the spot) and the photos are taken it's only half over.

Then you go to a smaller, adjacent booth with two chairs and a screen with two "pens" attached. Now you go about decorating your tiny photos. There's tons of hearts and stars, cutesy sayings in Japanese and English (the one above is, "Suki, suki, daisuki: Like, like, love"), date stamps, pen color choices for writing your own message, and hoards of cute images like puppies and cakes and smileys.

It's incredibly overwhelming at first but the more you go to the purikura dens the more you're used to what they offer and pretty soon you're purikura-ing just like a giddy group of high school girls.

Purikura is probably not a legitimate hobby nor is it probably what the JET Programme has in mind when it recommends getting involved in cultural activities. But it is fun, really, really fun. And, as if it couldn't get better, you can peel off the backing and your purikura becomes a sticker!

Oh, Christmas Tree!

I'm staying in Japan for Christmas this year. I'm going to miss family, friends, and delicious food that simply can't be replicated despite my best efforts (au gratin potatoes, for one). However, being away from home for the holidays has some perks.

Packages!

My family has sent two packages full of presents that are now over-taking my tiny tree. This makes me very happy.


In the second package there was a present that had "Open B/4 Christmas" on it. This made me very very happy.

I thought I'd document the occasion so my family could see my excitement. Also because I don't have much else to do with my time but that's really besides the points, isn't it?

Watergate in 2009

One year in Japan turned into two. It will not turn into three.

So what now?

I studied English Writing in college, wrote for and then became the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper there, with the intention of writing for a newspaper one day. (To be honest, no one else wanted to be EiC and so I fell into the position as opposed to fighting for the spot like most other EiCs do. It was still a crazy amount of work and all that jazz. Just sayin. Truth is truth).

But they tell me newspapers are dying. My own beloved Chicago Tribune, the paper I grew-up watching my parents read as I flipped through the comics (skipping Calvin and Hobbes half the time because there were too many words) has been bought up and renovated, to resemble--I assume--a less prestigious form of USA Today.

I'm idealistic, though. I'm a child of the 90's. I don't know economic hardship or world wars or presidential assassinations or the break-up of the Beatles. I know Popples and college education and a car and license at 17 and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the absurd impeachment of a president and the absurd re-election of another (ok, wasn't actually a child for G. W. Part II, but I couldn't resist the parallelism).

My parents raised me on the belief that TV rots your brain but I guess decided it was too cruel to ban the whole thing altogether. Yet, despite the one-hour-a-day-except-on-special-occasions regimen I was on, I would have to say media is one of the greatest sources of inspiration in my life. Specifically movies.

In journalism class during the second year of college we spent a class watching most of "All The President's Men." Not getting to finish the movie (and knowing only the vaguest bits about the scandal that changed American politics and journalism forever) I rented the movie and watched it with my roommate.

It was inspiring. When deadlines bogged me down or budgets didn't line up again threatening printing, I would recall the tenacity of Woodward and Bernstein, the ups and downs, and I was able to press (HaHaHaHa) on. And even though I knew the world journalism was getting a bit more complicated, the energy in the story, in the newsroom, captivated me.

What what the Watergate of 2009? Where's my contemporary inspiration gonna come from?

I just finished watching State of Play a couple hours ago. Starring Russel Crowe and Ben Affleck, it's a story about political scandal surrounding the mysterious death of a Senator's mistress just as said Senator is in the process of conducting hearings regarding allegations of misconduct and extortion by a corporation responsible for sending military contractors to Iraq and Afghanistan.

SPOILER ALERT! read further at your own discretion....


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Ok. So this whole complicated, inter-connected story is handled by a veteran journalist played by Crowe and the unlikely side-kick of a blogger for the news paper played by Rachel Adams.

A fascinating story involving the conflict of capitalism and a war effort, public and private lives of politicians, and print vs new media, not to mention how trustworthy friendships become when power is inserted into the mix and perhaps even a slight rebuke against the military and how it handles discharged soldiers. The Senator ends up in the middle of the scandal as a key, though wholly indirect, player in the murder of his mistress as well as clearly having manipulated his friend, the veteran journalist, to tell the story with e favorable bent toward the Senator. In the end, blogger chick smiles to the veteran and says that this story is so big that people should read with with print between there fingers.

Victory for old journalism despite changes in ownership and form as well as for truth and justice in the land of the free and home of the brave. Take that!

Meanwhile in the reality, we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan as the causalities mount. The contractors haven't been rooted out or held accountable in any real way for the lives they've put at risk. Rupert Murdoch owns all of our souls if we watch TV news. Print news can't get it catchy enough and online news can't get it relevant enough, leaving a huge information gap that MTV is all too happy to fill up with utter and addicting garbage.

Like only Hollywood can deliver, it was an intense thriller tied to current events with a melancholy, though chummy ending that left you feeling that "it" (whatever that means to you) was getting taken care of by someone out there.

Devoid of a real enough connection to current events (namely, victories for print journalism or truth and justice), it was simply an entertaining movie. No real meat to it, I suppose.

Though it's got me thinking. And writing. And planning my next step that won't be in Japan.

So maybe like Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, this movie serves as an inspiration for action in the direction I was heading even if it isn't--in itself--connected to anything substantial.

Maybe the point is there is no Watergate in 2009. There is no one big issue. There are hundreds. It's our move. To not tune out. To take small bites and plan our next steps, in faith.

Dear IRS...

Dear IRS,

Thank you for my rebate check.

After months of nervously anticipating having to do my taxes from overseas and then days of pouring over forms hoping I was doing SOMETHING right (or at least right enough) it's nice to reap an unexpected, if small, reward.

Now I will promptly send my check back to the States where you sent it from days ago so that it can actually be deposited into my bank.

It's the thought that counts, though.

Sincerely,
Claire Brakel

Things One Learns While Recovering From a Sprained Ankle in a Foreign Country

1. Ingesting seven month old jelly beans, while a new low, really does the heart good.
2. When you are in the vicinity of a mountain, wear appropriate footwear because you may find yourself accidentally climbing down said mountain
3. Upon hurting your ankle while accidentally climbing down a mountain, don`t continue to walk on it hoping everything will be fine. RICE, man, RICE!
4. Worry about your taxes after you`re healed. That`s just too much stress at once.
5. Though you may find yourself being X-RAYed without a protective lead-jacket by equipment that clearly states it should have been replaced 2 years ago and though you may be put into a plaster cast despite the absence of any broken body parts, it is completely possible to go into an inaka (rural/countryside) hospital and make it out alive.
6. The quaintness of indoor and outdoor shoes is lost on those with a cast. You spend 5 minutes getting the damn shoe on at home only to take it off 5 minutes later at school and struggle another 5 minutes to put a different pair of shoes on. But we wear outdoor shoes outside and indoor shoes inside. No exceptions. Not even for a cripple.
7. Discovering a way to make pasta despite a cast and crutches is a very liberating thing to do
8. Having a friend make you Mexican food for dinner is a very wonderful way to spend a weekend if you find yourself with limited mobility
9. Hitchiker`s Guide to the Galaxy is an enjoyable read
10. In case you haven`t garnered enough sympathetic looks and gestures by crutching around school for two weeks, pass out during a lesson. They`ll really worry about you then.

Now that I find myself happily without a cast or crutches (a fact that almost made me cry in the doctor`s office) I will be making my way to Tokyo to meet my parents at the airport. We`ll be taking Japan by storm for the next week or so. Their guide will be yours truly--one without much skill in the language, in traveling, or in walking without looking like a hunchback. The trip of lifetime.

Ikimasho! Let`s go!

Kumquat. What, What!

This is a kumquat. It's in a tea cup. It's cute.

And it's a for real fruit! Five days ago the only thing I knew about "kumquat" is that it's a funny word to call someone. That's all. If I had to take a multiple choice test and the question was "What is a kumquat" I might have gotten it right, depending on the other choices.

I probably would have picked "fairy tale villain" and "1970s anime character" over "a fruit" but other than that I think I would have come out on top. But if it was a fill in the blank test I would have been at a loss. And I never would have guessed a kumquat looks exactly like an orange for dolls. Who would think a fruit with such a sweet, sweet name would be such a poser in the looks department?

For lunch there is occasionally dessert and sometimes that dessert is fresh fruit. Fresh fruit days are always good days. When I looked down at my lunch tray and saw two mini oranges all I could say was kawaii (cute). The office lady informed me that it's called kinkan. Awesome. No idea what it was but at least I knew it's name.

As I watched the students eat their kinkan I gleaned nothing further about my mystery fruit. Most students looked like they were just eating the peel. Weird. A couple were peeling their kinkan only to be laughed at by the other students. A kid next to me was eating the whole thing, making a terrible face. The other students were laughing at him and shouting oishii?! ("is it good?!") As I do with anything in a wrapper (the fresh fruit comes packaged to guarantee freshness) I took the tiny oranges back to my desk. I'd give it a try when I got home.

The teacher in the desk next to mine happens to be one of the English teachers and was eating her kinkan. She saw mine on my desk and pointed it out, asking if I could eat kinkan. Well, I said, I don't know. I've never eaten one before. At this Andou Sensei got out her Japanese-English electronic dictionary and I was introduced to the fruit kumquat! I couldn't hold in the laughter. Kumquat. A tiny orange. Just great.

Apparently kumquats are very good for you, especially the peel. The fruit, however, is a very bitter-sour taste, akin to grapefruit on steroids I would say. The peel is even less thick than a clementine peel and tastes just like the fruit of an orange. I was told that Japanese people eat kumquats as a snack and also use the peel in homeopathic medicine.

After trying my first ever kumquat I heard a bunch of laughter and exclamations of nihonjin janai (not a Japanese person). Apparently the head teacher of the second year students had never eaten a kumquat before and, like a a couple of the students I ate with, tried to peel it and eat the insides. His response to their exclamation was to question the logic of a fruit of which you eat only the peel, his closing argument being that "Japanese people are strange."

Kumquat. Best lunch ever.

Afraid of a Prize?

Well, despite living in a country where congratulating oneself is a bit unseemly I will proudly say that my Japanese is improving.

Like a lot of things in life, it took a bit of getting over myself and my fears but eventually I found myself in the position I am now where 9 times out of 10 I'm celebrating a little victory.

One thing that helped was buying a couple phrase books and relying on those more than my textbooks (read: I am no longer studying from a textbook). What's so encouraging about studying from phrasebooks is that these are the things people say everyday.

Unlike "I have been to the places marked in red on this map" which I am confident I will never hear or say in Japanese, I've already heard two people at school use "That surprized me" since learning this sentence three days ago. Eventually I'll need to get back to learning grammar, when I become constricted by the inflexibility of set phrases, but that's not now. Now I just need some things to keep the conversation going as I brush my teeth after lunch with the middle-aged music teacher.

Yet despite this encouraging progress there are still some things I fear. Today I discovered that there is such a thing as a scary prize. I know, I know. Normally I would be all about free things, especially in the form of a prize. However, not all prizes are 100% fun.

As I got in line today in the convenience store, or konbini, I noticed the woman in front of me was offered a box with Dragon Ball Z characters all over it. She reached into the box and pulled out 4 tickets (I was able to understand that the clerk had instructed her to do this). One of the tickets was a lucky one; she got a free drink. However, in order to redeem this free drink she was asked a series of questions and I wasn't able to make out even the gist of any part of these questions.

Oh crap.

I considered my options (dropping the chapstick I came to buy and running out the door, pretending to be deaf and/or blind, staring at the clerk blankly until he gives up on me) but I couldn't make a decision and found myself at the counter with the terrifying prize box taunting me and my poor Japanese.

Chapstick rung up. 313 yen paid. Now the moment of truth.

"Take one ticket," he said with the same smile all konbini clerks have. I pulled it out and noticed it didn't look like the lucky one the lady in front of me had. I was safe. I was instructed to please keep that ticket because.....and then I lost him but I just smiled back and said Hai, hai (though it means "yes, yes" this is totally noncommittal and does not denote understanding like it does in English). I made it out. Safe!

So, until this Dragon Ball Z promo blows over I might just have to avoid the konbini and the terrifying prospect of a prize.

Happy Holidays!

I'll be home for the holidays!

"Yoiotoshio!"
Have a good year!