light vessel automatic

Well, I’m back from the big city. The things I did there included:

1. having my first really good cup of coffee since coming to Japan (picture of cafe, below);
2. buying a jacket while mildly drunk (which I think might be the key to successful clothes shopping – I made the decision so quickly!);
3. taking part in, and winning, a pub quiz. I was in a team with three other teachers from remote islands, and we were clearly destined to win (the clearest indication of this was when team-mate Alex said ‘Montreal’ – the correct answer – before the question had even been asked). When our victory was announced I was suddenly handed a microphone and managed to come out with something along the lines of “while it’s always nice to win, it wasn’t our really our knowledge that won this quiz for us so much as the extreme ignorance of our enemies.” Great: this to a roomful of people who might otherwise have been my friends…

Almost as soon as I got back something typically bizarre happened on the island. On Tuesday evening a local man went out fishing on his own, and didn’t come back. The sea was extremely rough, and so, fearing the worst, the fire-brigade and various islanders launched a search party. On Wednesday afternoon they found him, and the news came through a bit at a time: first – that they’d found him; second – that he was alright; third – that they found him at the top of a hill; and fourth – that he was running around up there without any clothes on.

While it seems unlikely that the story behind a man’s decision to tear off his clothes and run for the hills is a happy one, and I don’t want to laugh at mental illness, I still find it pretty funny just because of the huge discrepancy between anything you might expect to have happened to a man who disappears while fishing in rough seas, and what actually happened…

This is just to say I’m going away tomorrow (Wednesday), and I won’t be back until Saturday at the earliest. And I owe quite a few people emails, but I won’t be able to write until next week now. So please don’t think I’m ignoring you. I’m just not here, is all. I hope you’re all doing well, though. Here is a picture of an island.

At last! I finally know what lizard shit tastes like!

This weekend I had an extremely bad cold, which necessitated: (a) spending almost the whole weekend in bed, and (b) drinking a lot of hot boiled-up ginger and honey to make my throat feel better. At some point on Saturday afternoon, I threw a spoon into an empty coffee cup that was sitting in the sink, and then, sipping my ginger drink, realised it needed a little more honey, and, therefore, that I needed the spoon again. I fished the spoon out of the cup I’d just thrown it into, and – because I was carrying a hot mug with my hands – put the spoon in my mouth. “That’s funny.” I thought, “This spoon has acquired a strangely savoury flavour^* in the thirty seconds or so that it occupied that cup. I’m not sure I like this.” So I turned round and looked in the cup, and found the source of the flavour – a small lizard turd sitting at the bottom of the (otherwise dry and empty) cup. A turd on which my spoon had, briefly, rested. Obviously, I spent the next five or ten minutes spitting and rinsing, and brushing my teeth with nice, minty-fresh toothpaste.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, to be quite frank.

I should say, though, that the presence of lizard shit in my sink is not, in itself, surprising – my house is full of lizards. They shriek like birds, which is annoying from time to time, but they also eat insects, and so, on the whole, they are a good thing.

Except when they shit on my utensils.

*in case you’re interested, it tastes a little like mushrooms, only somehow… earthier.

Last Friday was the full moon, and that brings with it an extremely low tide, along with extremely bright moonlight: the perfect conditions for an octopus hunt.

So, at ten o’clock several dozen of us gathered at the beach and equipped ourselves with torches and small three-pronged spears before wading out towards the reef. The tide was astonishingly low – not more than knee-deep for close to a kilometre – so we just walked and walked across the fields of broken coral, spears in hand, looking for octopi.

It was pretty exciting, at first – the other octopus hunters becoming just little bobbing lights as we fanned out across the water. From time to time a little round puffer fish would dart, unpuffed, around my legs and then disappear. Puffer fish are strange-looking and quite cute – to the extent that fish can be cute, anyway. The more I walked, though, the more I realised that although hunting them was fun, I didn’t very much want to actually kill an octopus. But at the same time, I was thinking about a conversation I once had with Alfy, his point being that if you are willing to eat animals, you should be prepared to kill them too – that there’s something wrong with being willing to eat something that you wouldn’t also be willing to kill. Which I think is a fair point, and since I would be willing (pseudo-vegetarian that I am) to eat an octopus, I knew I was going to have to be prepared to kill one, too. But I like octopuses, and by the time I came face to face with one, my heart wasn’t really in it any more. I let the social science teacher, who I was hunting with, take the first one, but I knew that if I didn’t want to be a hypocrite then I would have to catch the next one myself.

When I found it, I didn’t have the heart to spear it, so I decided to just pluck it out of the water and throw it, alive, into the bag we were carrying. That seemed more humane, somehow. (I found out the next day that octopuses can give you a pretty nasty bite, which allowed me to tell myself, with hindsight, that I was giving the octopus more of a chance, catching it the way I did…)

So, having caught my octopus, I lost interest in the hunt. I wasn’t in any hurry to find another octopus, and I was beginning to get cold (although the weather is still quite warm, the sea has cooled a lot since September). But there was still a lot of hunting time left before the tide came back in, and since I was sharing a torch with Matsumoto-sensei, I couldn’t go back to the shore. So the next hour or so was spent trudging around knee-deep in increasingly cold water, and treading on sea urchins. I was wearing special sea-shoes (no-one goes in the sea in bare feet here, because there are plenty of things in the sea that you really wouldn’t want to step on) but they were very cheap, and, I quickly discovered, weren’t thick enough to fully protect my feet if I stepped hard on an urchin. So I got spiked quite a few times, and a couple of times had to stop to lever the urchin off my shoe with my spear (luckily no spines actually got far enough in to get stuck in my foot, though). By the time I got back to shore, I was cold, tired, bored, and depressed.

When the evening’s catches were all tipped into a big trough at the beach for cleaning and counting, an absolute little fucker of a thirteen-year-old came along and picked up my octopus – which was still just about alive – and squeezed one of its eyes out. I was about as furious as complete exhaustion would allow me to be. While I’m not entirely sure that eating animals is always wrong, I am absolutely sure of the importance of treating them with respect – even molluscs, and especially if you are going to kill and eat them. (This is one area where I’m beginning to get the impression that Japan does rather badly compared to Britain. Not that people in Britain are particularly kind to animals, but at least in Britain saying you don’t eat meat (for example) is not generally met with bafflement – which is the usual reaction here).

So, octopus hunting, then… it sounds exciting and romantic, but in reality it is cold, tiring, and miserable. Next time I’ll take a camera instead of a spear, I think…

This weekend I went to visit Kim on the volcano she lives on. This was my first trip out of Okinawa, and in order to get the big plane to Kyushu, I first had to take the small plane from my island. It’s a very small plane – only room for eight passengers – and it flew very low across the sea, allowing some beautiful views of the Okinawan mainland and various surrounding islands.

The big plane then took me from Naha, the capital of Okinawa, to Kyushu, where Kim lives – across about 400 miles of ocean. Kim lives on the lower slopes of an extremely active volcano. I went expecting it to be picturesque, but when I saw it I discovered how malevolent a mountain can look. It’s definitely an angry mountain. It’s extremely large and wide, but the trees that cover the lower part of it come to a sudden stop half way up and from there on up it’s just black scree that the volcano has spat there. Nothing grows there, and no-one goes there – it’s too dangerous.

One of the perks of living on a volcano, though, is the abundance of onsens (温泉) – baths of hot spring water. These are extremely popular in Japan (and being a very volcanically active country, there are a lot of them), but I had never been to one before. It was fantastic – an outdoor pool full of large rocks, and the temperature of a hot bath. Usually a visit to an onsen involves nudity (generally less of an issue here than in Britain), but this one has a small shrine in it, and so nakedness is not appropriate, so everyone entering the onsen wears a plain white yukata robe. Walking into the blissfully hot water in a white gown, with other people slowly wading about in similar gowns, it felt like I was joining some sort of cult. We stayed in the onsen for nearly two hours, watching ships come and go, and listening to the sea crash against the rocks thirty feet from where we were bathing. The whole sea glittered under a bright moon. On Sunday evening we went back a second time, and this time it was drizzling and the onsen was fairly empty. We sat in the hot water with cold raindrops splashing around us and, once again, listened to the waves.

On the Monday, there was a huge festival in the city, and so we travelled across with Kim’s taiko drumming group. They were great, and I was pretty jealous that Kim’s already playing in public, and practicing twice a week. There don’t seem to be very regular practices here on my island – I’m hoping they’ll start up again sometime soon because it’s about a month since I last went to one. Anyway, it was great to see Kim play taiko, and her group were particularly impressive because they’ve got the second biggest drum in the prefecture, which must be about eight or nine feet across. She looked very cool in the blue and orange costume – look! there she is on the right! And that’s the big drum on the left. Sadly, I only had time to see their first set before I had to leave for the airport.

Something almost unimaginably horrible almost happened.

Last Saturday afternoon I decided to try to find my way to the top of one of the hills on the island. I’ve tried a couple of times before, but never been able to find a way up (they’re mostly pretty thickly-covered in small trees and scrubby bushes), but this time I was luckier. One of the hills seems to be a sort of park – it has a number of little paths winding up it, and it’s dotted with picnic benches and little roofed viewing areas. It’s a really pretty place, but – like a lot of other places on this island – it has the feeling of having seen better times (a few decades ago the population was more than twice what it is now). The picnic areas still seem to be maintained, but a lot of the paths are becoming overgrown, and here and there you can see rusting noticeboards with no notices on them.

Anyway, by the time I had got anywhere near the top, and finished taking photos of the sunset (again), it was, obviously, beginning to get dark. I didn’t want to have to find my way down in darkness, so I decided I needed to get a move on, and I started jogging. Because the path was overgrown, and, being on a hill, had lots of steps, I was looking down at my feet as I ran along. I suddenly remembered the big spiders and thought maybe it would be an idea to look up from time to time, and so I did. And about a foot in front of my face was exactly the sort of fat, shiny black and yellow spider that I’d just been thinking it would be really unpleasant to run into. I had to throw myself backwards to stop in time. If I’d looked up a quarter of a second later, I would have crashed through the web and had an angry spider about the size of my face hanging onto my forehead.

I managed to take a photo of it, but the light levels were pretty bad, and my hands were shaking, so it’s a bit blurred, and I didn’t feel like hanging around long enough to get it right. Anyway, here is the actual spider. Doesn’t it look just like the thing that attaches itself to John Hurt’s face in Alien? Next time I will get a decent photo…

It’s been five weeks since I left my island, so this weekend I decided to visit the mainland. I went with two other English teachers – Gina and Anna – to a very excellent aquarium. The highlight was an enormous tank, which must have been about fifteen or twenty metres to a side, in which huge mantas, silver tuna, and three massive whale sharks drifted about. On the lowest level of the aquarium was a dimly lit cafe where we sat and had coffee and watched huge animals glide about on the other side of the thick perspex windows.

The other thing I did this weekend was buy a new bike. It’s a very small folding bike with gears and suspension and everything. So I’ve finally given Mrs. Y back the bike that I borrowed from her a couple of months ago. Now I’ve got some gears, exploring the island won’t be such an epic task – and there are still a few places I haven’t been yet…

I took a wander into the woods, looking for a way to get to a beautiful deserted beach which I had seen from the road, and I suddenly found myself face to face with the largest, fattest spider I have ever seen outside a zoo. It had slung its web right across the path, and it was sitting right in the middle, at about face-height. I turned round and went back to the road very quickly and continued cycling round the island. I’d got right round to the north side, when on a straight stretch of road I spotted another huge spider, on the side of a small palm tree. This time I was out in the open, so I stopped, got off my bike and went and peered at the spider. It had long, shiny black legs that tapered to a point at each foot, and its body was strangely box-shaped, and alarmingly large. It was mostly grey-black, but flecked with yellow. It had big jaws.

So having seen these spiders, I was obviously curious about what they were, and – more importantly – the extent to which they would kill me if I accidentally put my hand on one. Or one fell off a tree and landed on the back of my neck. Or something. So I’ve asked some people about them and so far the votes are: 1 for ‘very dangerous’, 2 for ‘oh, they’re fine – don’t worry about them’, and 1 for ‘well, it could bite you, but it would just hurt a bit’. They were probably ‘Joro Spiders’, which is じょろうぐも in Japanese. At any rate, they looked a bit like this.

Last night I went for a ride on my bike down to the south edge of the island. A woman saw me running around trying to photograph crabs, and came to talk to me. She was waiting for her husband’s fishing boat to come back in. When he got back she told me to come and take photographs of him. I did, and they gave me these two red fish, which I later ate.

Afterwards, I cycled a little way round the island, and got to the beach (the one in the photos below), where once again I took photos of the sunset. Dig!

Something very, very strange happened today.

I can’t figure out the best way to tell the story so here are an assortment of facts:

1. The taiko drumming group I saw accidentally when walking along the South Bank, London, two years ago, and who were so astonishingly good that one of the main things I wanted to do in Japan is to learn taiko… are in fact the taiko group of this island. To fully understand how unlikely this is, you should be aware that the island I live on has a population of about 2000, and that Japan has a population of about 120 million, and that for my job I could have been placed literally anywhere in a country that is getting on for two thousand miles long.
2. The leader of the taiko group is in fact my neighbour, Mr. K. That may not be quite so strange, but…
3. I discovered facts (1) and (2) when I went round to Mr. K’s, and he showed me the photos he took in London – including some of his group performing on the South Bank. When I first saw the photos I didn’t recognise them as the band I’d seen, but they reminded me about it. Another photograph of a newspaper clipping dated it to a few days before my birthday, in 2001. I realised that it would have been a few days before my birthday that I saw the taiko band, because I visited London for a couple of weeks then. The next photo was of the stage, and the giant flower backdrop suddenly jogged my memory. A couple of photos on, I discovered fact 4, which is perhaps the craziest of all.
4. My nearest neighbours on this island have a photograph of me. Taken two years ago. From the stage, Mr. K took a photo of the crowd watching. I knew that I was standing at the back, on the right, and… there I am.

Nuts. Believe it or not, that’s actually the third time in a year and a half that something that strange has happened to (or in close proximity to) me…