I’ve been to Sapporo three or four or five times, depending on how you want to count visits. It’s a hard place to avoid when coming to Hokkaido. I know the station area well enough, and the layout of the city in general. But I’ve always been a poor, solitary traveler, with no guide and no money to blow. Well not this time! Last week, the Hokkaido Midyear Conference for Assistant Language Teachers took place in Sapporo on December 1st and 2nd. I took the train in early on Friday evening, and spent the weekend and into the week spending money frivolously and enjoying myself.
Two weekends ago, I had a nice visit from a good friend. Well, she wasn’t technically my friend at the time, but I don’t see how she couldn’t have eventually become so. Natsuko is from Hokkaido, born near Saroma, and grew up near Sapporo. She went to school in North Dakota with my best friend, and has visited Alaska on her own. I met her three years ago when I stopped in ND to visit, and she’s been a Facebook friend since. Facebook is designed to mirror your friends in reality, but we meet so many people once and then never again, that you end up becoming facebook friends, where you can follow along with what that other person is doing but without actually having any contact. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing overall, but in this case it was. Natsuko was coming back to Japan for a vacation and wanted to see her family up in Hokkaido. Well, sheesh, I happen to live here in Hokkaido, right where she was going to visit! We had a great weekend, discovering we had a lot in common. I grabbed her from Memanbetsu airport and drove back to Saroma via Abashiri and Tokoro, where we stopped to walk on the beach, and found an old man harvesting scallops that had been kicked up onto the beach by the waves.
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Life, Snow and Finns
It’s been snowing here as life is taking hold of me once again. An update is daunting yet necessary if this blog is to continue and I figure it should. I was talking to John, the ALT in Kamiyubetsu about blogging this week (his blog is linked to at the right in the blogroll) and I was musing that I simply didn’t have any more piercing observations about Japan at this point. I’ve been here for a year and almost a half and there are still things I love and things I hate, but they’re kind of just part of the days that go by. I’ve been less than excited to write about the same old things, making observations that I’m not particularly qualified to make.
However, this morning is one of those lit by the extraordinary power of new snow, the kind that breathes fresh energy into old attitudes and makes an ordinary living room seem like home. I’ve also got a lot to talk about. Last night Dad asked me what was new in my life, and I had to think for a while before answering:
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Early Election Results
Partly to further purpose of cultural education and internationalization, and partly as an outlet for my electoral frustrations, I had the 3rd graders at Saroma Junior High vote for the US President yesterday. The 14-15 year old rural northern Japan demographic could turn this election. First, I handed them an information sheet, which introduced the two candidates as well as new words. Party, Age, Family, Hobbies, Slogan. I left out policy matters. Even if the English wasn’t too difficult, I doubted they would much care. Then they did a fill-in-the-blank paragraph using the new words they had learned. After, we spent 15 minutes watching some campaign commercials from both sides (stupid ones from both sides too), a few minutes of the third debate, a few minutes of the SNL parody of the third debate, and an “Obama Quest” Daily Show clip.
Then they voted. Across both third grade classes, Obama won in a landslide: 49 votes to 11 for John McCain. That’s a 64-point win! I think we can all feel relieved from this new poll that Obama is in good position for victory.
In addition to their vote, I asked for a short explanation of their decision. Essentially an exit poll. McCain wins on experience, and Obama wins on youth and coolness, with McCain’s age a big deciding factor for this demographic. Here are some of the more interesting ones:
I’ve been to Hokkaido a few times before, but didn’t really appreciate it until this weekend. Having lived in Honshu for a year, I have developed an image of Japan and the Japanese that I’ve had wiped clean by this place and its geography. I went east to Nakashibetsu for an ALT party but was astonished by the landscape.
It reminds me so much of so many other places that are nothing like Japan: Alaska, the American Midwest, Australian Pasturelands, the German Countryside. Cows, Corn, Hay, Potatoes, Onions, Cabbages, Horses, Unused Forest, Wild Animals. There is room here. Niigata feels like a closet in comparison.
Really, does that image remind you of Japan?
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A Fun Photo Pun Poem
Hokkaido
It’s like moosic
to my ears
I lake it a lot
because the views are spoketacular
I’ve been here in Saroma almost a week now. I am an Assistant English Teacher for the Saroma Town Board of Education as part of the Sister City relationship with my hometown of Palmer, Alaska. It’s a pretty sweet deal, and everything is going well enough, but I somehow haven’t found the right adjustment knobs and levers for my brain and emotions, respectively. The schedule is a lot harder to get used to than I feel it should be. I have to relearn everything about the house and town. It’s almost as if I still haven’t allowed myself to mentally reenter this life place. I really cranked down my Japan thoughts while in America. Like shut it off. I think maybe cultural transition is like a coal-fired power plant: it takes a lot of time to start up and is really hard to make similes with.
I have a nice house though. I’ve been spending a lot of time sleeping in it.
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27 Days Back in the States
Even though this blog is mostly for my family and friends back in the states, I feel the need to write a small post about the series of trips I took to visit all of you just last month.
First, thank you so much to everyone who I saw, who picked me up at whichever airport, or bought me a beer, breakfast, lunch, dinner, helped tow my car, let me marry you, took me to the airport, or just made the time.
Home for almost a month, rather than stew in month of inactivity and again develop the wanderlust that drives me abroad, I applied that energy, with the help of Katya from Vladivostok, to America. We had a good time.
No more words are necessary.
On Sunday, at the urge of Julie, a couchsurfer from Montréal and former ALT in Hyôgo Prefecture, I visited Kannon-ji Temple in Murakami, about 300 meters from my base school and a very short walk from a 7-Eleven. The significance of this temple is that it contains the last monk in Japan to attain sokushinbutsu, the attainment of buddhahood during life. The shingon sect of buddhism achieved this through a gruesome and bizarre process of gradual self-mummification. The monks would essentially deny their bodies of nutrients and self-preserve their flesh using natural toxins over an arduously long period. Effectively suicide, it was outlawed in the second half of the 19th century.
The Thinking Blog gives this succinct and graphic description of the process:
For three years the priests would eat a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another three years and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the Urushi tree, which contains Urushiol (same stuff that makes poison ivy), normally used to lacquer bowls. This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, where he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed.
The very last monk to successfully attain sokushinbutsu is enshrined at Kannon-ji temple in Murakami, and is named bukkai which literally means like Ocean Buddha. The loud, nutty old wheelchair-bound woman who showed us the mummified corpse of Mr. Bukkai told us that we couldn’t take pictures, which is probably all well and good. It was like staring at death. Death behind double-paned glass, wearing a strange ceremonial hat, sitting in proper cross-legged position with hands clasped in prayer, head facing down. The mummies of Egypt are impressive, but I find this far more so. It’s a lot easier to have someone else do the job after you’ve had a nice easy death. Try doing it all by yourself!
Here’s the front of the temple:
This is the tomb that the monk finished things up in:
