Vanishing

I got off work at three, hopped a ferry to the mainland and then caught a bus down to central Nago. As I tend to carry more and more distractions with me (books, iPod, DS), traveling has become increasingly easy. I'm encased in my own little world of audiobooks, word games and fiction. The iPod in particular has paid for itself; you can go further and longer when you're not bored tearless.

Elina picked me up at the game store in Nago where I snatched up a copy of Mario Strikers to play in downtime I increasingly don't have. Between writing thank you notes to my Japanese friends, the pile of reading I brought back for myself, exercise and all the myriad details that scream their importance, there's been little time for gaming. But I'll gravitate back toward games when I get tired of reading. I can already feel the pull, but I'm enjoying my books too much.

But reading was why Elina picked me up Nago. This month's book was Starship Troopers and for a novel with no plot, I was completely engrossed. I'm not sure if that's an endorsement, since I could say the same thing about the last four books I've read and am reading: Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Starship Troopers and currently Salem's Lot. This either means I've picked good ones lately or I'm looking for some escapism. I think the latter, perhaps.

There was a problem, however, with this month's book club: our meeting place Celluloid Cafe had vanished from this earth in the span of a month. In honor of this cozy, seaside locale, I present the obligatory "wtf photo":



We reconvened at a burger joint down the street, where I enjoyed a tasty goya burger and a spirited discussion of Troopers. Fascism and Nazis were absent from discussion, but American--and a touch of British--military policies were at the forefront. Our discussion was concise. Either people liked it or hated it and they could tell you why and probably go off for five or ten minutes, lost in their own thoughts.

It was a short meeting though, since we then hightailed it to one of the three movie theaters in Okinawa for a showing of I am Legend, which had been discussed the previous month. I'd seen it before, but this time I had the pleasure of a frightful young lady clutching my arm.

I was rather pleased with this.

"Okinawa's war time wounds reopened"

My island itself was invaded by Americans; I've met people that experienced it. The wounds are still there, so to speak. And I've felt guilty, being an American in Japan. Guilty for the bomb when the 9th graders make their yearly trip to Hiroshima. Guilty when an American causes trouble for Okinawans.

I feel guilty for this too, because I'm feeling indignation over it and I know that America's deeds in Okinawa aren't without shame.

Lunch with the 9th Graders

"You have tests next week? What tests?"

"English. Math. Social studies. Science. Japanese."

"I see. It sucks to be you."

"Yes."

"Do you understand what that means?"

"No."

"Well, 'it sucks' means it's bad. Kinda. 'It sucks. 'The movie sucks.' 'To be you' is like, anatani natteiru. Being you, it sucks. Understand?"

"Yes, I do."

"Well, sucks to be you."

"Yes."

ikitaina

Octopi

Yujo handed me the small octopus. "Tako." He said.

"Octopus." I laughed as the invertebrate tried crawling up my arm. It held on and struggled against me, but I finally had it cradled in my palm. It calmed down sufficiently and I carried it along as we waded across the shallows, looking for more octopus.

I'm not sure how they did it, but Toshiki seemed the best hunter. He led the other boys--I followed behind with my octopus friend--and pointed into the clear water when he spotted something. He and Okuma-sensei warned us a few times of puffer-fish and another nasty lobster-looking creature with barbed stingers.

We collected six more octopi. Then we returned to school, Satsuko-san threw them on a skillet and we ate them.

Raining Flowers

Recent e-mails from family and friends asked about my sudden silence. March has been a busy month. It's the end of the school year and everyone is busy with preparations and leavetakings. In honor of that, here's the 9th grade class:

Sick and Absent on Ie-jima

Not me. At least, not at the moment.

I was out sick on Tuesday from a cold that crept up on me over the weekend. It was possibly the best sick day I've ever taken. My coworkers actually brought me breakfast and lunch straight to my door, and though I didn't eat it all, it was a thoughtful and effective way of checking in.

I had a surprise though when I went back to work on Wednesday: twenty 8th grade students were home sick with influenza and the principal had gone ahead and cancelled all their classes for the rest of the week, the Minnesotan equivalent to five consecutive snowdays.

Lucky little bastards. What American student wouldn't kill for that?

Seeing as the 8th graders are the majority of my schedule from week to week, I suddenly had a lot of free time, which I effectively devoted to origami flowers. Since the 8th grade is in charge of making decorations for the graduation ceremony next week, the responsibilities fell to the teachers. However, I'm still bored, and having studied Japanese, worked on my taxes and prepped for next weeks classes, I find myself updating my blog.

My Place

I've been cleaning a lot, so I thought I'd show a couple pics of my place while I have it reasonably clean.



I have two tatami and two hardwood floor rooms. So what you see is about half of my apartment.



Most of the rooms are clean except for the room which has my desk. That whole room is currently a mountain of papers.

I'd show pictures of my apartment building, but like most buildings in Okinawa, it's short, squat and vaguely fort like.

The Week in Review

It's official: another year on the horizon. I will finish here in July of 2008. I'm sure, at this juncture, that three years will be enough and it will be time to get back to American and Life As You Know It.

Life As I Know It continues more or less how I left it: curiously absorbing. I can't ascertain if its a quirk of island life or of living in another culture. I think some might find it suffocating, but part of me finds it comforting. I almost view it as an extended hermitage.

For certain, the other teachers don't look at it that way. Ryoko, the 9th grade English teacher, has inferred that living on ie-jima is restricting. Of all the teachers, she is perhaps the most cosmopolitan and most informed of what's OUT THERE. I can recall few teachers in my junior high or high school years that saw far beyond their immediate surroundings. I can understand why now, more than I care to admit.

In her defense, it is restricting. There's stuff to do, of course, but the variety is sparse. It isn't easy for a young teacher either. How the system works here in Okinawa is that, every few years, a teacher moves to a different school and starts again. On the Okinawan mainland, the tenure is five years, but since ie-jima is an island off the coast of a larger island, the length is three years, and on some of the farther islands, two. When your time is up, you're shifted somewhere else and someone new moves into your position. Nice job security, but going from a larger city to a small island that might have less than a thousand people, or even a few hundred, and you can begin to imagine how isolating it can be. I know at least three of the teachers have spouses that live off island they only see on weekends.

So you make your own entertainment. This week I've plowed through the first season of My Name is Earl and about half of the second while catching up with House. Thankfully my books arrived today: (Catch-22, 1984, The Thirteenth Tale. "Thankfully," since I'm going through The Lord of the Rings for the third or fourth time in the last year.

Those will keep me busy for a bit.

I've been back in Okinawa for three weeks. I'm torn though; in the next few days I'll either turn in the paper work to stay another year or go home come July. I don't know which to chose.

I miss home, certainly. Without question, friends and family are at the top of that list. I neglected visiting some people while I was on vacation--for which I blame Enterprise and their car rental policies--and it pains me to think that I might not see them for a year or more. Yukito, when asking whether or not I was re-contracting, mentioned if I'd be interested in staying for up to 5 years.

This stunned me. My motivation for not re-contracting results from a feeling of inferiority: I'm not good enough and I'm not making much of a difference. That I might be good enough to stay for a fourth and fifth year. It overwhelms me a little.

I will probably be staying. I don't think I'm ready to give up this life yet. But now I see an end, and begin to think what's waiting for me.

Eventful

I'm usually always doing something now. Nights are getting busier, and weekends in September are crowded with sports events, speech contests and whatever else the other JETs can pull out of the event suggestion box.

This coming weekend looks to be either a time of sports and comraderie or a time to lockdown the house and wait for the storm to pass (click on the TC Warning link). A typhoon is coming, and it looks like it's on a direct course for Okinawa.

I ventured to the mainland this past weekend, which was something I hadn't done, I realized, in over a month. The last time was sometime in June, for an book club meeting in Chattan Town to discuss Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. I alternately love and hate Nabokov's narrators; they are equally dense and well-formed as well as misleading and deceitful. It had been awhile, and I looked forward to meeting a lot of the new JETs that had arrived. I don't see them a lot; an island life can be restricting, but I often find reasons not to visit the mainland simply to save myself the trouble and money of not going.

Elina, the leader of our block of JETs, organized a weekend of events that I could not ignore. Saturday consisted of a BBQ at the beach with some swimming, a couple hours at the bowling alley, a midnight run through an Okinawan playground and a final cap to the evening with karaoke until three a.m.

It had been years since I'd been bowling--though I suspect that, if there was a bowling alley on my island, I would probably be there a lot--but after the first game I started to actually remember how to roll the ball down the alley. After the alley was the real fun though: Japanese playground equipment is crazy and sue-worthy, and it's a blast to play on. The best part was the loop constructed of rope that some of us (half-drunk or mostly-drunk) climbed through. Well, all of us climbed through.

The karaoke afterwards was typical karaoke: splendid and rousing. I will really miss it whenever I come back to the states. It's an experience that has little to no rival.

On Sunday we went sea kayaking. My first time. It was easier than I thought, but it wasn't as back-breaking as it could have been. After the kayaking was over, I trekked back to my island and pretty much zonked out for the rest of the day.

Elina has pictures of all the events posted here. Considerably more than I took, but I'll post some of mine later.

Karaoke Horrors

I really like Paul. He's from Kentucky and one of the new ALTs. The girl dancing in front of him was also a new ALT, from Alaska. And what do ALTs, fresh to Japan, do? Karaoke, of course.

I'm no karaoke prince--though my "Time Warp" rendition was quite dramatic, I was told--but I got a kick out of Paul's singing here.

It was an eventful weekend. Full post forthcoming. Until then, enjoy.

Incident

(This is a post I wrote sometime ago. Enjoy or don't enjoy.)

I have Friday afternoons to myself. So far its either been a time to clean my place or catch a ferry to the mainland for drinking and hanging out. But this one Friday, the third after arrival, I went out walking.

I walked all over the island: the lily-field (sans lilies, so just "field") and the rocky cliffs there, the western beaches and tide pools, which I walked through against my better judgement; a false step meant complete lasceration of my feet and legs. At the southern beaches I swam in the ocean for the first time and enjoyed a grape slushee.

On my way home, I passed the home of a friend on the island, and she invited me in for a drink. I accepted, not wanting to insult or commit some little social atrocity. Her daughter was watching TV, and soon Aladdin was playing in the background.

Disney characters are everywhere; you'd think Disney himself had a hand in writing their constitution.

I asked for a water, but soon the water was gone and there was an Orion beer in front of me.

"Do you like to drink?" She said."Sure." I didn't tell her I don't drink a lot. That "don't want to insult" mentality again.

"Our impression of Americans. Drink all the time. All day."

"Well, some of them. But they're the minority. On the job," I crossed my arms, the "no" gesture.

I finished my beer and she was on her second when she brought out the wine. I drank slowly; I had no wish to be drunk in front of her or her daughter, who I have occasionally in class. We just chatted, she showed me the ashes of her husband's grandfathers who died in WWII and I tried my damnedest to be a good guest and ask questions.

Aladdin was putting the moves on Jasmine when her husband came in.We introduced ourselves and he sat down on the tatami with a beer.

(misete age yokagayaku sekai)

We were chatting amiably enough, enjoying ourselves. Sushi appeared, we ate. The day was cooling down, and cold drinks and the rotating fan helped. I had another glass of wine while the husband and wife downed another beer or two. Like those at my welcome party a week ago, these people liked to drink. And my glass was never empty.

"Dozo," any quick Japanese will say if they see your drink vanishing. And you'll do a little bow as your glass fills and say, of course, "Domo." That said, I'm careful now to drink as slow as I possibly can lest I drink too much.

I fear my loss of self-control.

(suteki naatarashii sekai)

We had cigarettes about the time a guest arrived and sat down, another friend of the wife, a young Japanese man only a year older than me with that particular Japanese cockiness that doesn't seem threatening, just outgoing, a sun-ray. He beamed.

I'm a social smoker, meaning if someone will offer, I'm there. Sometimes it will be months between cigarettes, sometimes a few weeks. In the last year, I marked time between one and another with a death.

The wife would translate for me, but often we would just be talking ourselves as the husband and the guest conversed. I began to feel awkward as I realized either the wife couldn't hold her drink or she didn't know what was appropriate to say in English conversation.

"I'm so bored here. I've lived on the island for 14 years. So boring."

"No, I would never divorce him. I love him, but if we did, I would take my daughter and go. She's mine."

"She's our only one. My husband, he has no seed for more."

I nodded. If I have one talent it's one that allows me to go with the flow with minimal interruption. I nod, smile, offer sympathies and empathize. Minnesota nice, you might say. And it served me well. At least until the shouting started.

The daughter had popped in Finding Nemo, and the husband started to argue with his wife about her constantly watching the film. Over and over again she would watch it, and it didn't seem to be a good thing to do when guests were present.

He may or may not have liked me casting glances at the television. I'm a sucker for Disney movies, especially Pixar, and I couldn't help but look.At first it was just that murmuring arguing. Not loud, but insistent, and the wife would often stop and translate. I would catch words, eddies in the waves, indistinct and confusing. The other guest took this in stride, so I tried to follow his example.

I snapped up a piece of sushi and drank a little wine, but it was fast losing any appeal. The guest and I exchanged a look as our hosts continued. The daughter's eyes were darting between the onscreen fish and her bickering parents.

Then they were louder, almost yelling. The daughter got up and sat next to her mother, clutching her arm. The husband remained cross-legged on the floor, wine glass in hand the pet parakeet on his shoulder, murmuring. It was the wife who was shouting.And then it faded, fast and unexpected. We sat picking at our food, sipping wine, and exchanging words. The daughter still clutched her mother's arm.

Another guest arrived and the arguing renewed. He paused in the doorway but came in after. He was smiling before he entered, but as he came around and sat on the sofa I saw it was gone.

Then the wife was on her feet, moving toward her floor-bound husband. She hit him, once, twice, three, maybe four times. The daughter was up, screaming "Okaasan! Okaasan!" The first guest moved; this had happened before and he went to intervene.

They separated. The husband was on his feet, the wife pacing around him. The daughter was near the television, her hands clutched under her chin. There was a flow of Japanese and they were grappling with eachother again ("OKAASAN!"). The guest moved, separated them.

The wife kept moving toward the cabinet where the urns of ashes were kept, and before any of us could move to stop her, there was ash in the air and broken urn on the tatami. The ash went soaring into the fan and shot through the air. There was a piece (bone, oh my god it's bone) in my eye.

Five minutes later, guest #2 and I were out the door, the husband and wife offering apologies and us accepting.The first guest stayed behind, picking up urn shards.

Little Girl Dancing