light vessel automatic

Argh, keep meaning to write but time seems to have been slipping through my fingers lately — I’ve been having a busy month, and have been off-island most weekends. At the end of March, Graeme came from Tottori prefecture, on Honshu (the largest of Japan’s main islands), and we had an excellent, though sleep-deprived time wandering around Naha and the island. Just as he left, Alex came over from Sapporo with his friend Mark, and while they were here we went to an uninhabited island and a concert by my friend Teru’s metal band, which was ripping. So long since I’ve seen a live band, let alone a face-melting rock band!

This picture was taken the day Alex and Mark arrived – the day before Graeme left. The four of us sat at an outside table in front of a little bus that is actually a bar, and drank cold drinks in the warm evening. That morning Alex and Mark had been in the sub-zero temperatures of Hokkaido. The couple who run the bus/bar have a two-year-old daughter who already seems to know almost all the dance moves. She danced in front of the bus the whole time we were there, waving drumsticks around and obviously revelling in the attention, and posing for our photographs. Too cute. She’s the little spinning blur in the middle.

And soon: more visitors! On Thursday I’m going to Tokyo to meet Andrew, who is coming from far away on another part of the Earth’s surface.

A strange weekend. I went across to the mainland to do a couple of dives on Saturday, which meant that on Friday I was sitting in a bar in Naha when a bunch of US marines walked in. A couple were shirtless, one had a split lip, and so the barman asked them to go somewhere else. I didn’t notice the resulting confrontation until, as the marines were leaving, one of them took a kick at the glass door on the way out. The barman—a large bloke—flew out and wrestled him to the ground, and suddenly there was an intense stand-off, involving lots of shouting between the (five or so) marines and the (two) bar-staff, while the customers watched uneasily, hoping it wasn’t going to turn any nastier. Fortunately, the other girl working at the bar stepped between the barman and the marines and told them firmly to go. Which they did, though with a fair amount of cursing.

What exactly happened next, I don’t know for certain. Possibly the marine who had kicked the door stumbled drunkenly on the steps. I suspect he tried to go back up to have another go at the barman and one of his friends pulled him backwards. Either way, what happened was that he went flying down the stairs and smashed his head against one of the lower steps. Which resulted in an unconscious marine lying in a pool of blood on the pavement of Naha’s main street.

What happened then was this: two of his friends did a runner. The others panicked and started giving him heart massage (the fact that he was breathing being apparently lost on them). When the police came, it seems they told them that the barman had physically thrown their friend down the flight of steps. Which was a straightforward lie: about half a dozen people in the bar, including myself, saw the barman come back in while the bloke was still standing at the top of the stairs. But it did mean that the barman and the other girl working there were taken in for questioning by the police. In fact, they were, it seems, questioned until about lunchtime the next day. All because of a couple of marines deciding to lie about their friend’s accident — presumably either to pass the buck or to get back at the barman for refusing to serve them.

I doubt there’s any need to bother trying to express the extent of my contempt.

This weekend broke previous records for prolonged taiko playing. On Sunday night, the taiko group did a concert / workshop in an elementary school on the mainland. We practiced from 10am until 6pm, with a few half-hour breaks, and then played for an hour. On Monday morning just about every muscle in my body hurt.

Back on the island, the third year Junior High School students graduated a couple of weeks ago, and within days most of them had virtually shaved their eyebrows off. Eyebrows shaved to a needle-fine line is a fashion that goes against school rules, so it seems most of the kids had been waiting for graduation to remove those pesky eyebrows. Ach well, at least this year, unlike last year, none of them have gone for a mullet.

The other day I decided to try out the CDs that came with one of the Japanese grammar books I’m studying from. I spent an evening repeating phrases that illustrate various if-then constructions. And now I find they’re stuck in my head, like pop songs. I keep muttering to myself phrases like the catchy “if there is an earthquake now, the city will be destroyed”, and the sweet “if you love her, you should tell her how you feel”. It’s doing my head in.

Odd things have been getting stuck in my head lately. A couple of weeks ago I read ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, by Margaret Atwood, and I was whistling that for a couple of days afterwards.

Off-topic, but still… When I was back in the UK at Christmas, I picked up a copy of The Corporation by Joel Bakan. I read it last week, and I’d highly, highly recommend it. It’s an interesting, well-written, easy read (I thought), and it’s powerfully argued. The fact that its ultimately optimistic—ending with some very interesting, constructive thoughts about how we might go about protecting democracy and human rights from the profit motive—left me feeling, and hoping, that it might actually prove to be an important book.

While I’m on/off the subject, I also liked Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. I opened it with fairly low expectations, mainly due to the slightly fuddy-duddy sounding title, half-expecting a collection of spluttering essays on the ridiculousness of the things some people believe. In fact, he puts forward a pretty coherent argument that lots of apparently-unconnected modern trends (from free-market economics to deconstructionism to alternative medicine to the popularity of ‘management gurus’ and self-help books) reflect an underlying turn against the values of the Enlightenment, the implication being that if we’re not careful, we could find ourselves heading for a new Dark Age.

Further and further off-topic… this man’s experiments in information visualisation are the sort of thing that make doing a PhD seem seriously tempting… Following links from that site, I arrived (via here) at this utterly beautiful series of pictures, created through a hi-tech form of time-lapse photography.

Last weekend I had a particularly bizarre and interesting few days on the mainland. On Friday I bought a very cheap djembe drum from someone who’s leaving Okinawa next week, and I stayed with a friend whose labrador has unnervingly human mannerisms – the weirdest being her habit of nudging your arm with her paw if you’re not paying attention to her, and then staring chidingly into your eyes with an expression of utter disappointment in you.

On Saturday, I went to see DJ Kentaro, who I had never heard of, but who it turns out was the best DJ in the actual world in 2002. I nearly didn’t go, on account of my head hurt, but after some peaceful time in a pub, woke up a bit and decided to go along. And was very glad I did, because I have a soft spot for record scratching, and he was a total scratchmaster. I then ended up sharing my hotel room with two girls I met that night (they were JETs from Sendai, in the north of Japan, who’d had no luck finding a hotel room of their own), in a weird, slightly David Lynch ryokan full of aging red linoleum and gently-illuminated fishtanks (and which I was staying in because it was the only place I could find that wasn’t fully booked). In the morning, while looking for the shower, one of them was chased down a dimly-lit laundry corridor by a furious chihuahua dragging one leg in a plaster cast that was almost as big as its tiny body.

On Sunday the ferry wasn’t running due to bad weather, so I couldn’t get back to my island. So I stayed at another JET’s house, and since the school he was teaching at is near the port, I went to school with him the following morning. My ferry doesn’t leave till mid-morning, so the plan was to just sit around the staffroom and have some coffee. In the end, though, the kids thought I was some special guest teacher, so just as we were sitting down with some coffee, one of the English teachers came in and said “Um… you know they’re expecting you to be teaching them…”. So, I ended up doing an impromptu double-act lesson with Mike, the bloke whose flat I’d been staying at. It was the first time I’ve ever taught Senior High School, and the kids were really funny, and I came out wishing I’d put more thought into the possibility of doing a third year in the big city… Ach well.

Better still, going back on the first ferry, there was an announcement over the ferry’s PA system that everyone should please go and have a look off the ferry’s port side, because a whale was going past. A whale! Unfortunately, it was too far off to get a decent photo, but as I stood there watching, the black hump would appear, spout a jet of water, and then disappear again, only to appear, further off, thirty seconds later. I stood watching for it long after it submerged for the last time.

In Hokkaido, I experienced many interesting things, most notably being naked in air temperatures of minus 10°C and tasting meat-flavour caramels. Thankfully, the sub-zero nudity occurred in the context of a pool of naturally hot spring water. The meat-caramel experience was an unforeseen—though with hindsight, embarrassingly predictable—consequence of my buying a packet of caramels for the amusing picture of gravy-covered meat on the box.

In fact, both bathing in a hot spring bath surrounded by snow and going to the Sapporo snow festival were two major items on my list of “things to do in Japan” that I brought with me inside my mind when I came out here. I think that leaves me with only two more items, and they both involve being beneath the ocean waves: I want to see a manta ray in the wild, and I want to dive off Yonaguni-jima, the last island before Taiwan, to see the bizarre, ancient underwater structures there that may or may not be man-made.

In Hokkaido, I stayed with my friend Alex, who is nominally doing the same job as me, only he’s living in a city of nearly 2 million people in Japan’s northernmost prefecture, in a climate that is below zero for about half the year, while I live on an island of about 2000 people in Japan’s southernmost prefecture, where the temperature is above 20°C for all but about two months of the year. Although they’re in the same country, Hokkaido and Okinawa could hardly be more different.

Unfortunately, though all the snow and whiteness was very pretty, it was also viciously cold, and I didn’t take as many photos as I otherwise might have done, just because of the pain involved in having my hands out of my pockets for any length of time.

Decision made: I’m going … but staying. It occurred to me that, given two options that you can’t choose between, there is the possibility of doing neither. So, I’m going for a third option: I’m not recontracting, but rather than leave Japan when my job finishes, I’m planning to move to the city and just make it up as I go along for somewhere between a few weeks and six months, depending on the cost of living, how quickly I get bored, whether I can find a good sanshin teacher, how strong the pull from China becomes, and all sorts of other factors. With hindsight, the decision seems obvious: although I love Okinawa and this island, another year and a half of this job would almost certainly be too much, and I’d much rather leave feeling I could have stayed longer than wishing I’d left earlier.

So, now that’s sorted, I’m flying off today into the frozen North, for the Snow Festival in Sapporo, Hokkaido, right up at the other end of Japan. Enough of this warm Okinawan weather for me. The thermometer in the school corridor is currently reading 22C. Today’s forecast in Sapporo is -6C …

A few weeks ago, I finally made it across to the neighbouring island. I went with my friend Teru from my taiko group, who also plays guitar in an Okinawan metal band. We visited a metal friend of his who lives on the next island. It’s a beautiful place—only about a kilometre or so from my island, but with a really different feel to it: it’s larger, with a smaller population, and more mountainous and windswept. Before the sun went down, I went for a walk along the coast, climbing over huge rocks and past half-submerged seaweed nets. The photo is of my island, over the nets.

Teru’s friend is into the sort of ‘progressive metal’ that only (certain types of) guitarists seem to listen to. The thing is, he can actually play it, too. Really well. While progressive metal isn’t really my thing, if there is a time and a place for ridiculous-speed, screaming guitar solos then it’s probably behind an outdoor stage on a sparsely-populated, windswept island at 2 in the morning.

Right. Lately I’ve been busy and distracted, but it’s time to remove the lightvesselautomatic dust-sheets, because I have a difficult decision to make, and only you can help me.

A week on Monday, I have to decide whether to extend my contract by another year, or whether to finish up here and leave this tiny island this August. I can see so many reasons for doing both that it makes my head spin to think about it. Over the last month I’ve leaned towards staying, then swung back towards going. Then, last week I decided I was definitely going, and for about three days it was a relief not to have to think about it any more. But then I suddenly swung back towards staying, and now I just have no real idea. I don’t usually go in for lists (or at least bothering other people with them), but my thinking is such a mess that I think maybe an emergency list is called for. So. Here are my reasons for staying and reasons for going. Having read them, if you have even the vaguest idea about what you think I should do, I’d really like to hear it.

I wish, I wish, I had one of these fancy non-homemade web things with comments and everything. But please do email me if you feel like commenting… even just unhelpful, rude nonsense. Anything!

Right. So…

Reasons to stay:

• I’m living on a small and beautiful semi-tropical island surrounded by a warm, shallow, and extremely blue sea. Who knows when that’s likely to happen again?
• There are a lot of people here that I like a lot, and that I’m not likely to see very often once I leave.
• There’s a lot more I could learn here – Japanese, taiko drumming, sanshin, and so on. In particular, another year would probably make a huge difference to my Japanese. And I’ve recently started having proper lessons in classical sanshin. And to leave earlier than I have to would also be spitting in the face of the Great Coincidence…
• There is an excellent JET community in Okinawa. I like being part of it – being part of a community is one of the things I missed most about being an undergraduate before I came here. And it’s really only since last summer that I’ve been leaving the island regularly enough to really be part of it.
• I love Okinawa.
• I have only the vaguest of ideas of what I’ll do if I leave.

Reasons to go:

• I’m bored of my job. I have no real interest in being a teacher, and I know another year is likely to be more of the same. It’s a means to the end of being here, but it takes up the largest part of my time. I’m ready to do something else.
• Although I love this island, I am essentially confined to it for all but about three weeks a year, plus the occasional weekend. I miss walking aimlessly round cities. I miss pubs and noise and being able to go to see live music when I’m in the mood to.
• I suspect a third year would be pretty similar to the second. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but one reason for staying a second year was that I was only just beginning to get the hang of things at the end of the first.
• There are quite a few people elsewhere that I’d like to see again soon.
• Laugh at my foolish idealism if you want to, but I’m worried about the state of the world, and I want to find something to do that somehow matters, in at least some small way. I have no clear idea what that might be, but in the scheme of things, I suspect it won’t have much to do with living on a small, warm island.
• Plus, I want to be in a rock band!

So, what should I do?

• Stay in Japan for another year, turn to page 117
• Finish up this summer and find something new to do, turn to page 83
• Stop bothering people with your so-called problems, you tit. Some people have real things to worry about. turn to page 72