Watching the Hourglass

Hello everyone! I'm back for post numba 2!

First, an update. My lack of heat has been very thankfully solved. Turns out that the gas was off for some reason and, to fix it, all I had to do was press a button. Which was, of course, the only button on the gas box. *headdesk* There was, apparently, no need to suffer through three days of winter camping inside my own house.

Hot showers are awesome. That's all I'm sayin.

And it just snowed. Literally, as I was writing this, the staff room erupted into "sugoi! yuki!" and I turned around to discover that, indeed, there was much yuki falling from the sky.

Another update: I finally (FINALLY!) posted another video on youtube. This one is about the daimyo gyoretsu in Yakage that I went to about a month ago. As you can tell, I've been slightly lazy about editing and uploading it. Anyway, they moved really slow, so I sped up the video to 300% it's normal speed and cut out a lot of repetitive stuff. In totally, the raw video is just over 20 minutes while the edited video is about 3 minutes. I am ze master editor. (Watch out for Lauren's wiggle dance. It's fun times.)

Interestingly, I have apparently posted material that is copyrighted in Germany. They pounced on that thing. Literally, about two minutes after I uploaded the video to youtube, I got an email saying my video was blocked in Germany. Sad times. I apologize to all my (non-existent) German viewers. I promise to be more careful in the future... sort of.

Tomorrow I go home for Christmas/New Year's break. Do you know what that means? That means that I've been in Japan for four and a half months. That's insane! It feels like it's only been about a month. I mean, I only just arrived, right? How can I be going back already?

There's so much more that I still plan to do in Japan, it seems odd to suddenly take a break from it all. On the one hand, it'll be nice to eat some good pizza and have a real, North American style breakfast. On the other hand... Asia! Hell, I haven't even gotten out of Japan yet. And I've only been in three prefectures in Japan. The explorer in me is crying out for more. There's so much, SO much that I want to do and haven't gotten to yet.

Here's a short list of things not yet done. Let's call it my New Year's Wish List.
- Onsen
- Kobe beef
- Niimi caves
- Tottori sand dunes
- Skiing in Japan
- Spend a night in a love hotel
- Spend a night in a temple
- Discover the night life of Tokyo
- Buy a kimono
- Visit Beijing and see the Great Wall of China
- See the Forbidden Palace
- Witness the conversion of sunny sky to polluted sky in a Chinese city
- Spend a week on a Thai island in the sun
- Get a tattoo from a Buddhist temple in Thailand
- See the hill tribes of northern Thailand

It's a good thing that I still have 8 months more here after I come back.

~Jeffles

In The Frozen Tundra

Hi there everyone. Sorry for the lack of new post last Thursday. I do have a good reason, but I'll try to do two posts this week to make up for it.

What's my reason? Well, as I'm sure several readers know, there was a midyear conference to improve our teaching skillz. Did it work? Who knows. But then, it's not even midyear yet, so obviously the name is already a misnomer. Which means, of course, that the premise of the conference is suspect. If so, it follows that whether or not my teaching skillz improved may actually not matter. Emphasis on the possibility aspect.

Yeah, I know. That's a load of bull. Anyway, because of this conference I didn't have access to my computer last Thursday. You see, the conference lasted for three days (Wednesday to Friday), every evening of which involved a night time drinking adventure for me, and the last two evenings of which I didn't even make it back to my town. Try saying that sentence five times fast. Then, on Saturday, there was an end-of-year party hosted by one of my schools that I had to attend.

This all added up to an exhausted Jeffles with a liver pleading for mercy. I'm pretty sure the last couple weeks have knocked an equal number of years off my life. So yesterday was, essentially, a write off. Thus today is the first day I can actually post something here.

I'm trying to decide what to talk about now. The cold and my lack of heating? A story from the last four days? A deep account of how I feel separated from the world here? I don't know. So I'm gonna eenie-meenie-miney-moe it.

Here we go...

...

...The cold and my lack of heating it is!

This is going to sound like bitching, moaning, and general complaining. That's because it is. As probably anyone who knows me is aware, I'm a summer guy. Winter and cold times really aren't my thing. It is, in fact, the entire reason why I never want to live in Canada again. Enough of this winter crap, I'm ready for a lifelong summer. Starting now.

Of course, that's not going to happen. So my method of fighting off the winter is to crank up the heat at home, take lots of hot showers, and do my best to wear clothing that cuts the wind when I go outside. That and get drunk. Even if it does actually make you colder, it also makes you too numb to notice the cold.

But as I said, too much drinking lately, so that last option is currently out. And, thanks to god knows what, I am also unable to crank up the heat or take a hot shower. I arrived home after my short trip to Okayama City only to find that I had no working heater and no hot water. I don't understand why. They were both working fine before I left. They both use gas to heat up, though, so maybe something happened to the pipe? Froze over or something? I don't know. I'm gonna ask one of the office people about it tomorrow.

So after spending one night freezing my ass off, I went out yesterday to equip myself with the items necessary to use my kotatsu. For those who don't know, a kotatsu is basically a table, a heater, and a blanket to keep the heat in a limited space. Think of it as like turning your table into a pillow fort and keeping it heated inside. (Yes, that's what I'm thinking every time I use it.)

While I was still in the kotatsu, it was very nice. Very nice indeed. But then, of course, I eventually had to go to bed. That was okay, because I was still feeling quite toasty. But waking up in the morning was TERRIBLE. There was no escape. I could see my breath inside my own damn house. Nothing quite like getting changed into cold clothes when you're already cold.

For a little while, I was wondering just how I would shave. As many of you probably are aware, I'm kind of a hairy guy. If I go to work without shaving, that don't look good. Hell, even in high school my teachers wouldn't let me get away with not shaving for a day. And believe me, I tried. So this morning I boiled some water, poured it in the sink, and used a hand towel dipped in the sink to soften my face. It also worked pretty well for the razor (shaving with a cold razor SUCKS). So this is a good thing to keep in mind for the future.

I'm really hoping that this lack of heating and lack of hot water doesn't last all winter. I'd really like to take a shower at some point. Deodorant can only work for so long...

There ends my complaint. Japan is cool, but they need to get their winter equipment sorted out. I fear things are only going to go further downhill from here. But that may just because I have to leave this warm room and go back to a cold home in a few short minutes.

Sigh.

~Jeffles

P.S. Gonna try to put up a new video tonight. I'll edit that link in later.

Culture Shock or Increasing Awareness?

(I apologize in advance for this rant. Perhaps I actually am in stage 2! Oh the irony...)

When you're a new arrival to Japan, or a soon-to-be new arrival, people talk a lot about culture shock. It's described as a process that takes four stages.

The first one being Euphoria, or unending love with the country around you. This is basically the stage of touristic wonder. Then there's the second stage, which is when you start to notice all the quirky things that bug and annoy you. Soon you're gathering in dark, dank pubs, bitching about all the little things that have just been building up and up and up. Then there's the third stage: depression. This is when you start thinking that life in your new country is hopeless and you might as well give up and hop on a plane home 'cause it ain't gonna get any better. Finally, there's acceptance of your situation. That's when you basically say, "you know what, nothing's perfect and I'm just gonna make the best of what I've got."

Matador has a really good article describing the four stages.

The thing is, everyone says that it's impossible to avoid culture shock. It's just one of those things that's a given about any traveling experience. And the way everyone talks about it, it's something terrible, a horrible sensation that WILL come to you and WILL depress you. I don't agree with that.

Maybe I'm just weird, but when I came to Japan, I was not struck with a sense of how awesome the place was. If anything, I was a little disappointed with it. Since then, my sense of wonder has only continued to grow with every passing day. Yes, there are little things that bug me. Like my heater that refuses to stay on for more than five or ten minutes, or the lack of any good, flavorful wine or beer. But every time I read the news, I'm reminded of how much life sucks back in North America, too.

Between Occupy Wallstreet, a shitty economy, politicians that seem to have lost all connection with that actual population, a vast well of ignorance and prejudice that spans the country, and a winter that is almost certainly going to be colder than whatever I experience here, I really feel like I have nothing to complain about. Life here is good. It's interesting. I learn things, I meet people, I feel like I can actually accomplish things while I'm here.

So there's one of three options. One: my honeymoon stage is abnormal in its bitchy tendencies and is longer than normal and I'm going to soon be hit by a ton of bricks. Two: for some reason I simply skipped the first three stages and jumped straight to the last one. Three: it's not true that everyone always succumbs to culture shock.

In all fairness, I think I did get hit pretty hard by culture shock when I lived in Scotland. But there are lots of reasons for that, mainly the prevalent British attitude of "this is our isle and why would we care about anything from outside it?" Yes, I lived in Scotland, but more specifically I lived in Edinburgh, which is filled to the brim with British people. And I've spoken with lots of other foreigners who have lived in England - many of them have the same opinion. Nearly every Scottish person I met, though, was quite a bit more welcoming. Even when I couldn't understand half of what they were saying. I can only think of maybe two exceptions.

This is of course not to say that all English people are like that. In fact, many of them were initially warm and welcoming. And some English men and women were extremely friendly the entire time and I'm glad I could count them as among my friends. But alas, they were in the minority. And unlike many other foreigners there, mostly due to my living circumstances, I was only rarely not hanging out English or Scottish people, so I didn't have a foreigner group to vent with.

By the time I left Scotland, I was almost certainly in stage 3. I loved the land more and more and wanted to explore the rest of the British Isles and Europe, but I was really not keen on the population at large. In fact, after that year, I just wanted a break from Europe. That may be part of the reason I've ended up here.

At any rate, I wanted to suggest a different model for Japan. Something other than that normal culture shock model. I call it the model of Increasing Awareness. (Just came up with that now... it's a work in progress.) Maybe it could apply to other countries, too. I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyway, I don't think this focus on the positive and negative feelings about a country is accurate. What's more accurate, I think, it a focus on the gradually increasing awareness of what's happening around you. When you first arrive, you can only notice a few things here and there. You notice what aligns with your preconceptions and what runs against them. Then you start to notice a few more things that you didn't expect at all. Like when your colleague takes you out one night to eat live squid. Or when you finally learn your bike route to school and realize what the main roads are in your town. Then you notice some details, because you see some of the blank spots in your knowledge and start to investigate them. Then you notice more and more bits and bobs in increasingly fine detail. Eventually, you reach a point where all those bits and bobs, the good and the bad, become normal (i.e. you become desensitized).

The way you react to the increasing awareness of your surroundings, whether it's positive or negative, is a reflection of yourself, in my opinion. There are, of course, extenuating circumstances. Someone who has never lived away from home before is going to be feeling homesick, which may likely paint in a negative light all those bits and bobs they are increasingly noticing. Where you're living could actually be a hell hole and your coworkers could actually be utterly incompetent. But on the whole, the experience is not necessarily going to go through the negativity implied by culture shock. Whether or not that happens depends on your own mindset, not some unavoidable psychological process.

Just today, on the train, I noticed the gaijin bubble. To explain, the gaijin bubble is what happens when a foreigner enters a crowded area. All the Japanese people nearby will arrange themselves so that there is a little bubble of empty space around the foreigner. It doesn't really matter how crowded the train is, they will always attempt to form the bubble. Occasionally there is the Japanese person who pretends to not see the foreigner and simply stand there, as if they could simply wish your existence away. At any rate, I could either get upset at this apparent discrimination or not get upset at it. In fact, I'm somewhat thankful for it. Back in North America, I always found it annoying when people would stand unnecessarily close on the subway, or when there would be plenty of unoccupied seats on a bus and the passenger would come and sit right next to me. So now they give me my space and, you know, I'm cool with that.

People often ask me if I miss North America and if I want to go back. Honestly, I don't. I may have to go back due to extenuating circumstances, but I'm not particularly looking forward to it. This country is amazing. And there's so much more of Asia to see. I'm far from depressed about being so far from "home." Quite the opposite; it's depressing to think that I have to go back. Really, I just wanna explore.

~Jeffles