Autumn Travelogue : Unzen

Part 3

Epic Vagrancy & The Bathtub Buddha

The halls of the hostel Akari stood empty and quiet in the sunrise. But noise carries so well through the thin walls of Japanese buildings that even though we tried to repack our bags and leave quietly, I am certain we woke the rest of the guests on the top floor as we banged and clanked our way through the morning regimen.

It was so early that there was no one staffing the front desk, so we stuck our room keys in a mailing box and just hoped they'd find their way back into the right hands. The air was cool and the streets quiet. Again we find ourselves awake and outside far too early in the day. This episode can be directly blamed on the Nagasaki bus terminal and their refusal to sell us an advance booking on the first bus out to the tiny hot springs town of Unzen. The woman said tickets were first-come, first-serve and since we're in Japan, we know that there will be nothing stopping these people from turning up at least half an hour before the terminal doors are even unlocked to get their yellow paws on the non-reservable tickets.

Winning at life is just like winning a game of chess, it takes premonition, forward-thinking, and confidence that you're smarter than your opponent (even if you're not).

Turning up at the bus station at dawn, two hours before our bus would depart, was a tactical move, but it worked out for us in the end, for we ensured ourselves seats on the first bus to Unzen and avoided having to wait for the second departure at midday.

The highway bus was nearly full when it rolled away from the terminal and out in to the sprawling green hills of Nagasaki Prefecture. We sped across coastal roads flanked by a sea of rolling green hills, it wove into the forests and out to the ocean. Rows and rows of tiny homes popped out from the green hillside, as scores of tiny fishing vessels sailed out into the blue. The bus rolled up and down and around the twisting rural roads, giving those who managed not to be lulled asleep by the sway of the bus a grand tour of the Nagasaki countryside.

The bus made a brief stop at Obama station, which is only relevant because of last year's election and the obvious coincidence of the names of this place and America's leader. A larger than life, inflatable Obama stood in a welcoming pose at the station door, a comical, somewhat apish grin upon his inflated face. This was probably one of the least racially offensive tributes to Obama I've encountered in this country. They undoubtedly like the guy here, but sometimes their goodwill comes off as thinly veiled racism, like when they dress a monkey in a suit and put it behind a podium in front a a wild mob of thousands with signs reading CHANGE.

And then we rolled onward, towards Unzen, buried deep in the hills.

We arrived and alighted our bus, and no sooner than we could check our packs with a hyperactive woman at a tourist centre, did we board another bus bound for the trailhead of Unzen-dake, the highest and (due to a volcanic eruption not far off in the past) newest peak in the vicinity.

The road up the volcanic mountain was laced with more hairpin turns and deep, sweeping es curves than an automobile race course. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, the driver was able to negotiate the turns and curves, slamming the clutch and dropping the bus in to its lowest gear differentials with seemingly expert timing. We were sitting the last row of seats, watching the world sink below us, and there were times when it felt like the whole back end of the bus was going to fishtail off the road and send us all into a tumbling death spiral down the mountain. But luck and fate were with us that day, and the bus kept pace and assented quickly, leaving the town and great blue ocean thousands of meters below.

The bus arrived at the trailhead and the driver told us that he'd be departing in one hour. We checked the bus timetable and realized that if we did not get back on within an hour, the times of the next buses would not mesh with our well-thought-out plan of the day. And as soon as we realized that making it back in an hour was not a real option, we hung up our gloves and gave in to fate. We made it this far, and the least we can to is make it back down. Bus or not.

We we carried nothing with us besides a plastic sack with some water and balls of rice. We had no packs, no sticks, no proper hiking gear, and we had a long way to go to the top. But, for better or worse, Japan is a culture of convenience and therefore a strategically placed cable lift not far from the bus stop was ready and waiting. And it took us so far up, so high above the green mountain trees and well-beaten paths below, and when we got off and walked a short while to the spectacular summit, it came to us that we had just summitted a 4500 foot peak and only hiked about 15 minutes. We at least thought to wear hiking shoes, but had we known it was going to be this easy, we'd of opted for high heels like so many of the others chose to do.

By the time we took in the view and enjoyed the mountain air long enough to decide it was time to leave, we made it back down again to the car park via ropeway and realized that we just missed that bus and that an hour would have been plenty of time to do what we did. But with the bus gone and the next one not coming for at least two more hours, we stuck our thumbs out and started walking down.

The long road down was steep and winding and whenever we heard a car approaching from behind we slowed our pace and tried to look desperate. A lot of people looked like they were going to stop, slowing down as they rolled by Marasco, but as soon as they got a load of me and the beard and the hair, unshowered and sweaty, chest hair poking out of my singlet with a lanky arm wildly waving my thumb in the air at them...they just kept on going by. Go figure. This happened again and again. I saw one guy see us, slow down, say something to his wife, see her look at me, then shake her head and instruct the guy to lock the doors and step on it.

Things kind of went on like this for a quarter hour or so and we began to start feeling hopeless and contemplated walking back up and waiting for the late bus.

And then a little red car flew past us and suddenly rolled to a stop about 20 yards ahead.

We ran towards it. They let us inside. Two Japanese girls heading back to Kumamoto after an afternoon on the volcano. We made quick time down the mountain while making small talk with the girls. They were surprised by how far away from home we had come and made it clear that they would take us anywhere we wanted to go.

For as often as I become frustrated with this country and its people and their way of doing things, I must never forget or fail to recognize that, at the end of the day, the Japanese are perhaps the most generous and hospitable people on the planet.

The girls were nice and normal and spoke typically little English and there is really no story to tell of the ride down, which is a good thing, I think, especially when speaking of hitchhiking. It could have gone a lot worse, and I wonder if I'd ever have the balls to try such a thing in a place like America.

They let us off at the tourist centre where we arrived earlier in the day. We said our thank yous and goodbyes and then they drove off and we never saw them again.

We were at the base of the volcano.

The air smelled sulfury, eggy. It was thick, heavy air, covered in some places by rolling clouds of vapor. All over the place, huge flumes of steam rose out of boiling pools of water in the broken earth. It was like we were in hell. Except in this case, the devils were the people more capitalistic and industrious than us, who decided to pipe the water from these boiling hot springs and into the the numerous luxury spa resorts in town.

How often are you ever in a place where water is boiling out of the ground? It was a rare opportunity and we had to take advantage of it. However, we had no reason or money to check into one of the luxury resorts. But after a bit of wandering through narrow alleys and back lots, we managed to find a public bathhouse where entry was merely a 100 yen coin.

I bought my ticket and a small towel out of a vending machine and walked in to a dressing room that was more or less completely viewable from the outside. A bunch of naked Japanese guys were standing around and fanning themselves, seeming not to care. I undressed and folded my clothes into a wicker basket and stuck it into a cubbyhole. Then I went to the glass sliding door at the end of the room and pulled it to the side and immediately ran into a thick wall of steam coming out of the bathroom. The heat fogged my glasses and I couldn't see well. There were a couple of guys soaking in the tub. A long pipe coming from the outside was pouring a steady stream of boiling water into the tub. Various other cold water faucets were around to maintain the temperature of the tub at a degree that way just shy of skin melting. As custom, I began preliminarily washed myself before getting in the steamy tub. But I realized that I had no soap and that there was none provided by the cheap bathhouse, but I made a go of it anyways and once I felt like I had spent enough time splashing cold faucet water on myself, I climbed into the tub.

It was so hot. I could feel the day's dirt and grime evaporating off my skin. The thick sulfury smell was stronger than ever and I closed my eyes and let it envelope me. Let the water soak my hair and open my pores, infusing my body with natural minerals and energy. In the steam I could make out other men doing the same, enjoying the intense heat.

And then, through the steam, in the corner of the room adjacent to the tub, I saw him. He was sitting semi-crosslegged, with one foot dangling in the water and the other tucked into his crotch, precariously maintaining his modesty. His glowing, massive belly was resting on his legs, not far below his powerful breast. He was bald and nearly toothless and he a long cord of soapy plastic mesh that was stretched at length between his arms and he was using it to scrub back and forth against his giant back. He was like some great bathtub buddha, sitting on a soapy alter above his temple of hot spring water.

I tried not to look, for it's a sin to gaze at an idol, but my eyes kept wandering back to the bathtub buddha. I watched him scrub his body with the soapy cord of mesh, scrubbing his back and his hands and feet and balls with distinguished shamelessness. This went on for some time.

And then he stopped.

And he balled up the soapy cord in one hand and in one great motion, threw his arm in my direction and held it out to me.

'Wash' he said.

I looked at the other guys in the tub. They looked at me, then to him, and back again to me.

This was not an offer or suggestion. It was a command.

I was reluctant to use the same soapy cord that has just been used to wash the buddha's balls anywhere on myself. But it was the only option. Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride, is all I can think.

I take the soapy cord, taking care to not to get the thing anywhere near my face or penis, I scrub and rinse and scrub and rinse, mimicking same series of ablutionary motions as the buddha himself.

When I think I am finished, I hand him back the cord. And he takes one of his fat fingers and points it at my naked body.

Red! he laughs out.

I look down at myself, and indeed from the abrasive scrubbing cord and the boiling water, my skin has gone redder than it it would after a day on a Malaysian beach without sunblock.

I put my hands together and give him thanks, then get back into the tub and soak until the heat becomes too great to bear.

Later on, after I'm dried and dressed (which took a long time, for the towel I bought became soaked in hot spring water and I had to air dry Everything), I meet Marasco back outside and we return to the tourism centre and catch a bus to a ferry terminal on the other side of the mountain.

We buy tickets for a highspeed catamaran that will take us across the bay to the ancient town of Kumamoto.

Our timing was perfect all day, and the boat ride was our reward, for as we sailed east, the sun was falling behind the mountain we summited just hours earlier, casting our small corner of the world in a veil of burning red and shadowy blue.

The boat ride was luxurious and once the sun was down we watched sumo on hi definition televisions while relaxing on the leather couches of the upper deck of the catamaran.

It was a long day, a long story to tell. And when we finally reached our destination, the trusty Toyoko Inn, we were beaten and grungy smelled like sulfur and eggs and certainly in need of a shower and rest.

But when the clerk offered me a discounted room rate if I signed up for their Members' Club Card, I jumped at the chance to save some yen.

The result, my friends, is an image of absolute vagrancy:

Autumn Travelogue: Nagasaki

Part 2:

Warm Brandy Nights & A Run at Gonzo Journalism

OR

Fat Man & The Drunken Dwarf

We land in Fukuoka about the time I'd usually get out of bed on a day off. There's still plenty of morning left, which is good because we still have a long way to go. And we're on deadline.

A few weeks before we left, back in August, I was commissioned by a reputable magazine in Tokyo to write a piece about an abandoned island off the coast of Nagasaki. There has been plenty of journalism on Gunkanjima, also called Battleship Island, in the past, but it was all done covertly, for entry to the island was forbidden by law. Now, for the first time in 30 years, it's open to the public via a chartered tour. I saw an opportunity to get back into the magazine game by doing the first English piece on how to visit the island legally.

So after successfully pitching the article, I was on assignment with editors back in the city eagerly awaiting my report.

However, in my preparations and research, I completely overlooked the Japanese tenacity to make their reservations and preparations for everything well in advance. The original plan was to visit the island on Sunday after spending Friday and Saturday in Fukuoka. But when I inquired about going on the tour earlier in the week, it was already booked all weekend as well as the following Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. The only available option was going on the Friday, the day we arrive in Kyushu.

The charted boat would set sail at half one and we were at least a hundred miles away and the clock was against us.

We left Fukuoka as soon as we arrived. We would have to come back another day.

Fortunately, the biggest hangup in all of this was that when we rang Nagasaki to change our hostel reservation, they did not have a double room to give us on our second night and we'd have to sleep in a four-man dorm. The plan was otherwise executed flawlessly and we arrived in Nagasaki and found the port terminal with time to spare.

Not long after, we were sailing through the blue water and the sky was clouldless and everything was beautiful.

The ship cruised along, cutting its way through the sea until the captain told us to look out starboard at what appeared to be an old defeated battleship anchored out in the blue distance.

As we sailed closer to the ominous silhouette, its image began to unravel. The gun turrets and towers and hull of the battleship were slowly revealing themselves to be old apartment blocks and industrial ruins and mountains and mountains of concrete piled high in the sea.

Long ago, this island was a thriving boom town in the height of Japan's industrial era. Once coal was discovered at the turn of the 20^th century, a mine was built and workers were boated in from the mainland (many of them foreign laborers working against their will). As their ranks grew, so did the infrastructure of the small island, making way for 31 apartment blocks, two schools, a cinema, several markets and eateries and even a swimming pool. By the time the island reached the peak of its occupancy in 1958 it was the most densely populated place in recorded world history. But once the mine depleted, so did the need for anyone to be on the remote island. A mass exodus followed. The buildings and possessions left behind in the wake were left in the hands of god and time. Decades of typhoons and torrential rains blasted the island, leaving it in a constant state of erosion and decay. Our boat docks along the southern edge of the island, and the lot of us—at least 50 people, mostly older Japanese, save for me and Marasco, climb ashore.

The silence is eerie. This place is dead.

Entire facades of apartment blocks reduced to piles on the ground, exposing countless tiny black windows into a world that once was. Crumbling stone and broken stairways to nowhere seem to be everywhere.

Warped steel rebar and corroded shards of metal jut out of everything left standing, while an incomprehensible sea of broken concrete and shattered infrastructure has washed away any notion that people could have ever lived here.

I want to see more. I want to climb inside and explore the dead city for myself.

But I can't. Even though walking tours of the island began in April, they only include a small portion of the southern perimeter, where from three viewing spots, I can see dilapidated ruins of apartments, a school, a belt conveyor, and various workshops.

It’s similar to watching a teaser for a movie; it’s exciting, but also disappointing there’s not more to see.

It obviously unsafe for a boat full of tourists to be traipsing around the island unabated. But restrictions placed upon the tour itself are enough to make one jealous off all those who covertly explored the place before it was crawling with tourists.

The tour was over almost as soon as it began and suddenly we were back on the mainland with an afternoon to kill. We took a street car to a intersection where footpaths were lined with cherry trees and got off and started walking. At the end of the road we reached a river and crossed an old stone bridge that seemed like it belonged in some quaint European village more than it did in Nagasaki, Japan.

We reached the heart of the city. The long river cut a defining line through town and flanking it on each side were an array of shops and eateries and little holes in the wall selling odds and ends. The avenues were wide and non of the buildings were significantly taller than any other. The streets were neither crowded nor desolate. Nobody around seemed to be in a hurry to get wherever they were going to, it was as if these people were just out and enjoying the end of a beautiful day.

The hustle and bustle of the neon city is long gone, left behind in that concrete jungle on the other side of the country. Neon lights have been exchanged for red brick and stained glass; the endless maze of subways and overgrounds have been reduced to just a streetcar system with a handful of lines. The whiteshirts and mannequin girls, too, have been replaced with people that seem more honest and real than anything we typically see in money-driven, fashion-obsessed Tokyo. Yet still, with the buildings and people there is a sense of bourgeois sophistication that is a world above anything we see back in the boogan hills of our local Iwaki.

'It reminds me of Paris,' I say to Marasco as we stand in the middle of the footbridge above the river and take in this newfound city.

'Yeah, it does. That or San Francisco,' she replies, smiling.

We cross the old stone bridge and walk to the nearby hostel Akari and check into a room with arched doorways and a vaulted ceiling above a full sized bed.

We have a nap and get cleaned up and then leave the hostel Akari and go out into the night. On the way, as we change into our shoes in the antechamber of the artsy yet unpretentious hostel, we see a white dwarf man who seems to be eager to start drinking and smoking his night away.

Even though we have exactly the same intentions as him, we quickly leave him in our tracks, for something about dwarf men, no matter how well intentioned and eager to drink they may be, makes us inexplicably uncomfortable. (I would later windup brushing my teeth next to the dwarf in the common washroom and subsequently have to entertain a conversation with Marasco about how striking it is to see a man of my size standing in his underwear next to another who's head is level with my waistband.)

The night was warm.

There is a bottle shop adjacent to the hostel Akari and I walked in and bought a liter of French brandy for a thousand yen, and, upon exiting back out into the night, I realized immediately the profitable symbiotic relationship that must exist between the bottle shop and the endless stream of travelers coming and going from the hostel Akari night after night.

We walked the bottle down the river until we saw a corner shop where we could buy ice and plastic cups, which we did, and then sat down by the river and had a drink.

We watched the night go by. Girls walking their dogs. Couples having a jog. Boys on their bikes. Students roaming in packs like feral beasts. People going to and fro, from here and there. I saw what might have been The Biggest Spider Ever and when I told Marasco she demanded that we move, even though we could not see it again and it was probably just an illusion played on us by the night. So we got up and re-sat ourselves on a stoop next to the river and kept on with the brandy. The sky was dark and off in the distance, the great blue ocean was now shrouded in the dark blanket of the night. A glowing suspension bridge broke through the darkness, somewhere out in the bay.

An older man wearing a sweat-drenched white t-shirt jogged past us, then stopped and backed up.

'Good evening, may I ask where you are from?' he asks us in hesitant but unbroken English.

We tell him our story about being Americans living in Fukushima and that we're in Nagasaki traveling, which is about as probable a story as an Alaskan deciding to vacation on the tall grass prairies of Kansas.

It turned out his English was quite good because he had been to the States many times because he was the head of the Sister City co-operative between Nagasaki and St. Paul, Minnesota. We made typical small talk and he said Marasco was a beauty and that I should consider myself a lucky one. I thought he was a lucky one to, for at his age of 60 he was older and—judging from the distance he must have jogged to perspirate such a great sweat—in better shape than either of my parents, and will probably live on for decades to come.

It wasn't long after we bid goodnight to the old man that we finished off our glasses and retired for the night ourselves.

The next morning was beautiful and cloudless. We left the hostel Akari and had breakfast at a cheap cafe and watched people over coffee spiked with brandy.

Then we took a steetcar to the Nagasaki peace park and stood in the spot where the warplane dropped the A-bomb on this lovely coastal city one summer morning long ago.

Of course most everything has grown back or been reconstructed and you'd be hard pressed to realize the level of destruction that bomb wreaked upon this place were it not for the abundant monuments and tributary plaques and literature that spell out exactly the horror that fell upon this fair city.

The Bomb Museum adjacent to ground zero houses relics from aftermath, things like glass beer bottles fused into indiscernible lumps from the intense heat, photos of burn victims, clumps of carbonized rice, an array of clocks all stopped at 11:01-- the same time the bomb Fat Man exploded over the city on the morning of 9 August 1945.

Not far away from site, up a staircase behind a twisted back alley now overgrown by condominiums, is a concrete torii gate, blown apart by the blast. One half still stands tall and proud before the shine beyond, the other half lay fallen on the ground, a mere shadow of its former self.

Seeing all this is enough to give us pause. What could cause man to unleash such horror and carnage and destruction upon his fellow man? A compelling argument could be made for either side, but I have yet to be convinced that war has ever been the best answer.


This is all getting too heady. We need to get out, refresh our minds, feed our hunger, drink our brandy.

We take the streetcar back to the hostel Akari and then walk to a champoon restaurant recommended by one of the staff.

Champoon is a dish famous in Nagasaki. The story goes, that back around the war time, food was scarce and people were constantly on the run, never knowing what or when their next meal would be. As such, when there was food available, the horde mentality set in and they took everything they could get their hands on and threw it into their meager bowls. The result was a hodgepodge of noodles, vegetables and assorted meats and sea creatures in a steamy broth, called simply, champoon.

It was delicious and cheap and we had a bottle of Chinese blueberry wine to go with it and after we feasted, as were walking outside, we bumped into an Aussie woman and her son eying the menu indecisively.

'It's delicious. Do it,' I say to her, and walk off into the night. I hope she took my advice.

We were full of food and booze and the scarring images of the war museum. Trying to walk it all off was the best idea.

We took a back road that led up to a graveyard on a steep hill. It was dimly lit and slightly spooky, but there are no bodies in Japanese graveyards, just stones and ash spirits and that alone was not enough to deter us from walking all the way up to the top of the hill. We sat up there on bench and watched Nagasaki glow beneath us in the night. We shared the last of the brandy and talked about life and death.

It was a good time in Nagasaki.

Autumn Travelogue: Tokyo

Part 1:

Highway Robbery & The Neon City

We were somewhere, lost in the maze of the neon city, as the red sun broke through the concrete sky.

'Are you awake?' she asks so quietly, so as not to disturb the sunrise.

'I can't sleep anymore,' I reply. 'We need to get going, we can't be late.'

The sun was just peeking into the windows of the top floor of the highrise, a thousand miles below, the sleepless city pulsed on and on, neverending.

We readied ourselves and broke out into the morning. It was too early to be awake. Everybody already on the streets was certainly still out from the night before. No one in their right mind would willingly be up so early. Except maybe those who were being paid to be awake, like the cab drivers. We hailed one instantly and threw our packs in the trunk and climbed in.

'Haneda airport,' I tell the driver. 'It's not far, right?'

'No, sir. Maybe 20 minutes if we take the highway.'

I tell him to make it happen, and we roll away into the neon sea.

The city flies past us, through the windows, in the dawn. This place never sleeps. It can't. If it were to stop and rest for just a second, it would collapse upon itself. The people here are merely cogs in the greater machine, dividing life into ceaseless shifts of work, all for the benefit of the neon city, Tokyo.

The cab speeds down the streets, swirling the neon into a blurry myriad of colors, twisting the lights of the towering karaoke boxes and the glowing snack bar-lined alleys and the everpresent conbini anchored to every convenient corner, always bright & open, always willing to take your money any time of day. The cab speeds down the highway, passing fleets of other cabs exactly alike, all taking somebody, somewhere. Besides taxis,every other car on the road, at this hour or any other for that matter, is a service vehicle or luxury automobile. There's no room for clunkers or junkers. It's simply a matter of economics: for the price of owning an operating a car within the city is prohibitively expensive, and only individuals with a luxurious amount of yen in the bank can afford the luxury of owning a car in Tokyo.

We reach the Rainbow Bridge and while the cab is crossing the bay we are offered the closest thing this city has to offer in the way of a skyline. Two twin office towers, flanked by an army of other skyscrapers looming sentry-like over the vast concrete sprawl that covers the metropolis, coming right up to the water of the bay in the morning light. The city would have kept on going, but the water stopped its spread, creating a definitive juxtaposition of pure natural water backed by the never ending neon metropolis.

But not even nature can stop the great neon machine. For at the end of the bridge is Odaiba island, a place man made to fuel the evergrowing neon monster.

Everything from high-end shopping and dining, to resorts and beachfront escapes and even a gigantic life-sized Gundam are here on Odaiba. We taxi past all this and reach the airport, which is Japan's busiest, even at this foul hour of the early morning.

The fare for the 20 minute cab ride is more than 7,000 yen. This sum is considerable, and signifies what is only the beginning of a journey that will cost much more than any reasonable person would like to pay.

We give the man his money and get out, feeling robbed and angry.

'I can't believe it cost that much! That's almost a quarter of what I brought to spend on this trip,' she fumed.

'At least we could split the cost,' I offered, too shocked by the highway robbery to say anything more helpful.

She had reason to complain, Marasco. The day before we took a bus from our coastal homebase north of the city. That bus ride undoubtedly took longer than 20 minutes (hours longer, in fact) and only cost half of what we paid the taxi. Tokyo is notoriously expensive. It was time to leave.

We walked in to the departures lobby and breezed through security. The whole process was streamlined and noninvasive and I may as well just have walked unchecked through the terminal and on board the plane. Haneda is largely a domestic airport, serving clientele that is ostensibly 99 percent Japanese. This nation's relative trust for its own kind is demonstrated nowhere better than right here, where we were not once asked to show identification, take off shoes or made to throw away or conceal our liquids and creams.

Terrorism is a real threat to the Western world, but Japan is still safe for now.

Once we were buckled in to the enormous Boeing 777 (which was filled to capacity for the 6 a.m. departure to Fukuoka, all the way down in Kyushu, at the bottom of the island nation) we settled back into the cramped chairs and tried to catch back up on the sleep we were fleeced of earlier.

tuesday, 10 a.m.

clouds look pretty today, as they cast great shadows upon the hills.

what an incredible sun, and how lucky we are to share its warm light.

Full House

Marasco has officially moved in. This all happened two or three weeks ago, probably around the beginning of October, back before the leaves began to change.

It was a smooth transition and it made the most sense. I am happy she is here.

I have three rooms in this modest top floor apartment, and when I moved in more than two years ago I could not believe I would ever use all the space.

I realized just now that I've been living here longer than I've continuously lived anywhere since my junior year of high school.

Back in those days I could fit all my belongings into a compact Japanese made sedan and quite literally move myself with ease.

I wonder if I could still manage that.

The longer you stay in one place, the more baggage you accumulate.

Marasco was just in her last apartment for a year and before she moved in she put a lot in storage in America. So when Peter and I got in his Van and drove over to move her out, it took us longer to drive from mine to hers than it did to actually complete the physical moving.

Marasco has a negligible amount of baggage. This is good. And it raises the potential of our successful cohabitation, for I have ample room for her in every conceivable way.

But come Friday we'll have a houseguest. For 10 days.

I'm looking forward to having a good, solid chunk of time with my friend Rich before he moves back to England. But two boys, one of whom is neat and tidy and fit and the other capable of wallowing in his own filth and alcoholism for days on end, and a hot girlfriend who's being circumstantially forced to cohabitate* with them for the duration of the clean one's stay, will make for an bizarre situation.

I've formulated at the very least a scenario for a sitcom:

We can be the three main characters, and the show will take place in the three rooms of the modest top floor apartment. There will be various competitions and digressions into lengthy and witty banter. And we'll communicate with the outside world via a Skype video feed connected to always-on laptop of Baba the Indian curry guru who works and lives and sleeps in his shop down by the river. We'll also have to somehow incorporate my yellow trash neighbors who live as one family but spread between two separate apartments so that my downstairs and next door neighbors in effect are the same people (this is true, I'm not even making it up). And there will be frequently drunken & high volume conversations between myself and the big Aussie bloke who lives one floor down and across from me, as our verandas are within earshot of one another and, much to the Jap neighbors' chagrin, it's cheaper to scream across the quadrangle than the bother with the telephone.

The show would likely air in an off-prime time slot due in large to foul or inappropriate racial epithets directed at the fucking Jap neighbors as well as semi-regular full frontal nudity (mostly from the Aussie) and a frequent portrayal of episodes that may contribute to the delinquency of minors.

Things seem to be shaping up well.

Now all we need is a video camera.



*(Note: I don't think cohabitate is a word, it's not in Websters and it's underlined with a red squiggly on Firefox. I'd check the OED but I can't afford to even buy a pass to the online edition. But it should be a word. It makes perfect sense and reduces wordiness.)

Tokyo: from a 2.0 megapixil phonecam

pandemic paranoia, disgrace & misunderstanding.

At my desk at the Dirty Primary School, alone with my thoughts:

(presently there seems to be a air of general confusion and chaos. Something has gone afoul in the schedule and I think the rain has ruined some plan or another and everyone seems like they have no idea what's going on. I have not been consulted for my thoughts on the matter.)

( now I can see children on a swing set and one of them is flying so high. She must be absorbed to a world all to her own. How high she flies. I wonder what she dreams of .)

(I realized just now that I am not as dumb as I previously thought. I've spent countless hours sitting at my desk at Dirty Primary School with only the vice principal to keep me company. I generally have no idea what he is talking about. It's not because I don't understand Japanese. It's because I don't understand him. I don't get his Japanese. But it dawned on me just now, as he was talking to the groundskeeper and bumbling through conversation so horribly that he makes Sarah Palin sound eloquent, I looked up from my desk into the face of the groundskeeper and saw that he too had no idea what this rambling fool was on about. So now I'm convinced that my Japanese isn't bad. But that his isn't good.)

(I imagine first graders to be something sort of like a marriage gone sour. At first, it's all love and kisses, a general sense of happiness. But as the year passes, and you realize that the children are still asking you the same questions they were asking you 10 months ago, that they haven't learned anything you've tried teaching them.)

(I sit down at a table in the classroom with my lunch box.

Student: James sensei, today you have a lunch box?
Me: You're very observant. Yes, I do.

Student: Did your wife make it for you?
Me: I don't have a wife.
Student: Do you have a girlfriend?
Me: I do.
Student: So your girlfriend made it for you.
Me: No, she didn't. I made it myself.
Student: You made it yourself!?!?!
Me: Yup.
Student: That's great !!
Me: Not really.

I open the lunch box. Inside is a salad and leftover pasta.

Student: You eat vegetables and kimchi ??
Me: This is salad. And this is pasta, not kimchi.
Student: Where is your rice?
Me: I don't have any.
Student: What about bread?
Me: Nope. Just this.
Student to another Student: James Sensei doesn't have rice or bread.
Other student: Maybe he's poor.

Male home room teacher walks up to the group of students I'm eating with.

Teacher: James sensei, did you make your lunch box yourself?
Me: Yes, I did.
Teacher: That's great !! Just amazing !!
Me: Thanks, but no. Not really. It's just a salad and leftover cold pasta.
Teacher: That's wonderful !! I can't make my own lunch box. I never do it.
Me: You are a disgrace of a man.)


The effort to 'internationalize' these poor boogans is really meaningless. Our differences, which can and should be used as stones to break down the closed doors dividing our two worlds, have instead been turned into weapons to use against the foreign enemy.

The other day I turned up to teach two morning classes at Clean Primary School. I was prepared for a light workload, knowing that I would be leaving the school unusually early to attend a meeting downtown. But one of the classes turned out to be canceled.

Me: Oh, Y. Sensei we have a class this morning, let's make it a good one.
Teacher: Sorry, James Sensei. We cannot have class first period today.
Me: Oh, that's cool. We'll I'm free the third hour too, why not then?
Teacher: No, we can't do it then either.
Me: Is there some sort of event going on?
Teacher: No. You cannot teach the class because all of the students are at home.
Me: Haha, really? Why?
Teacher: Well three of them have the NewFlu, and one of them has the old flu. And so the entire grade is to stay at home. All week.
Me: Dang, that's crazy. Well, hey, at least you've got some free time.
Teacher: No, I am very sad. And I am very busy.

The next day I turn up at the same school. Everybody is wearing a face mask. It's raining out. The halls are quiet. This place suddenly resembles the contagious ward of a hospital more than it does an elementary school.

I sit down at my desk and start getting stuff together for the day's lessons. Masked teachers come and go from our shared office space, and as I chat with them they all have the same thing to say, that they Fear getting the flu, especially the New Flu. I perceive tension in the air between us. I know they are thinking how horrible it is that I am not wearing a mask like everyone else. They think I am putting others at risk. I am a threat to the system.

One of them offers me a white surgical mask. 'You can wear it, to prevent the spread of illness,' they say.

I took it smiling, in the same way I'd smile whenever someone gives me something I don't want. I imagine the look on my face to have been similar to a little boy who got a hold of a condom a few years too soon; a wry, silly expression: What the hell am I supposed to do with this? or, You want me to put that where?--That's probably how it looked as I fumbled with the floppy cloth, trying to secure the elastic straps behind my ears.

Now I'm stuck in a cotton box. There is some horrible, unbreathable wall in front of me. I feel strong surges of bashful self-consciousness. My face is now itchy and scratchy and the elastic bands are pulling at my hair in all the wrong places. The ergonomics of this the cotton barrier, I'm afraid, were designed for a squatty, turtleish Asian face--one lacking the prominent nose and veritable facial hair of a person such as me. The way this mask lays on my face, not matter how I adjust and finesse its position, causes my trapped, hot breath to rise up and out the gaps created at the top between my big nose and the itchy cloth, thus causing my glasses to fog up like a cold window on a frosty morning.

I can't see. This is not making me or anyone else any better. I pull the mask down below my nose, leaving myself exposed to the supposedly contaminated air of the school. The fog on my glasses reduces to nothing and now I can see again. And so I sit there, with half my face covered by this ridiculous mask and half of it exposed like it would be any other day. And then it occurs to me that while I'm sitting there, my mouth is closed. My eyes are not closed. Nor are my ears or my nostrils. The only part of my face being covered by the mask is a part that I can open and close at my pleasure. It's not like I sit around at my desk with my mouth wide open like some boy with Down's syndrome, though I suppose the mask would allow that option for those who are so inclined to sit around with their mouth's wide open. But I don't need that. Nor do I need the mask.

I take it off and put it in my pocket. I proceed to be shunned the rest of the day. At some point, hours into my repudiation, the school nurse approaches my desk (masked) and offers me a packet of three new masks.

'Oh, no thank you,' I say. 'I already have one,' I pull the crumpled mask out of my pocket.
'Well, James Sensei, it's just that we are very worried about the New Flu and everybody is wearing masks to prevent the spread of illness.'

I become flustered because I cannot conjure up good Japanese substitutions for words like Over Reaction or Pointless Pandemic Paranoia or that wearing a mask will do nothing other than bring the wearer a comforting peace of mind that I happen to already possess without the aide of one.

'I don't like wearing a mask,' is all I can muster.

Nobody talked to me the rest of the day.