New Blood and Hurricanes

So, upon my return to Japan, it wasn’t long before the autumn/winter school semester cranked its way into life and I found myself standing in a series of classrooms beside a stack of expensive audio visual equipment, delivering a PowerPoint presentation on ‘Talking About My Family’. Yep, my return to teaching happily coincided with the ‘Family’ unit of the textbook giving me a good chance to show various photos and videos of my parents and grandparents to my resolutely nonplussed students. I must have done it about seven or eight times in all, but it was worth it to see their expressions while watching the footage of my cat frolicking in the hallway. “Kawaii ne!” quoth they, which roughly translates as “Cute, huh?”

The weekend of that initial first week back consisted of, as I dimly recall, a WAJET (Wakayama’s chapter of AJET, which in turn is a kind of JET equivalent of a student’s union which organizes social events, councilling services, help, advice and stop me if I’m boring you) bash at Shirahama Beach way down in the south of Wakayama Prefecture. Much fun was had by all, splashing about in waves and dealing with the horrible gungy mess that sticks to your legs when sand and sunblock inevitably meet.

I may have laboured the point before (and I thoughtfully left it out of the ruminations on my home country elsewhere) but the drinking culture here in Japan really is fabulous. All of us who went (20 at the very least, possibly more) were able to stock up on cans of beer and chu-hi (nuclear-strength alcopop that would instantly cause an urban apocalypse if ever introduced to Britain’s Saturday night high streets) from a convenience store located just off the beach and happily quaff them while sitting mere feet away from families with young children who were doing much the same thing themselves (the parents, mind, not the kids – it’s not that liberated). No fights, no shouting, no drowning, no abuse, no trouble – incredible. They have a secret to having civilized fun with booze out here, and I’d love to know what it is.

Anyway, after a long, lazy afternoon, our assembled mass of foreigners piled into a fleet of cars bound for Assistant Language Teacher Hailing Originally From New York Peter Katz’ house where a largeish scale barbecue party was planned.　The party proceeded in a thoroughly pleasant manner with much drinking and consuming of chargrilled food, marred only slightly by my managing to get hopelessly lost for an hour and a half in the unfamiliar surrounding neighbourhood in an attempt to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Still, the day’s combined festivities gave me a chance to get to know a number of the new JET recruits starting this year, and thoroughly good eggs they were too, as far as I could see. The extent to which drink may have affected my social skills remains unknown, but I certainly remember feeling very at ease and chatty, in a marked contrast to last year when a mixture of confusion and disorientation over my first month or so caused me to be a great deal more cautious, reserved and uptight. I can safely say that I no longer occupy that same peculiar headspace, for which I’m thankful.

Aaaaanyway, it was good to meet some of the new blood billeted at my end (sort of) of the prefecture then and on the days that followed; Brits Sarah and Hannah, Americans Zack and Mercedes and Irishmen David and Donal. May there be more good times to come.

Finally in this little subsection, a word about hurricanes – I don’t really need to chime in with my two cents worth on Katrina, its subsequent fallout and the fate of New Orleans, but I will say that we out here endured a storm of the exact same size and only marginally less magnitude earlier this month. The news had cast warnings that it would strike at night, so what did I do? Join Mercedes, Sarah and Hannah in the early evening for a trip to the combined onsen (Japanese hot baths, like what the Romans had back in the day) and brewery complex Nohan No Sato half an hour away from me by train. A foolish course of action, not only because my soak was a somewhat solitary one (men and women’s areas being obviously segregated) but because while reclining in the bath located outside with a roof open to the elements, one could see the sky starting to boil. Quite a cool sight, but like I said, not a very sensible thing to do.

After emerging freshly scrubbed and having imbibed flagons of the exceptionally good European-style pilsner brewed on site, we caught the train back to our respective towns, with me just making it up the steps outside my apartment building before the storm's full fury was unleashed, while being buffeted by rather strong winds. Once inside, across came my steel window and door shutters, on went the Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ (which has become something of a tradition, don’t ask me why, I just find it quite soothing during times of meteorological carnage) and the pounding commenced.

Having drifted off somewhere around the outro of ‘Have a Cigar’, I awoke the next morning to howling winds, the sight of an almighty gash left in the rice field outside my apartment and an email from Iwai Sensei (Kii Cosmos special needs school supervisor and aikido partner in crime) requesting my presence at school, assuming the trains were running. With no students of any age attending any school in the entire prefecture due to Wakayama being on ‘alert’ status, my usually claustrophobic train ride in was an absolute breeze, happily.

With the winds pretty much gone upon my arrival and the beginnings of a beautiful sunny day slowly emerging, the Powers That Be were nevertheless taking no chances and kept all our kids at home for the whole day. Thus it was that I busily occupied myself with some half-hearted kanji study, voracious reading of Dan Brown’s Deception Point and a bout of self-flagellation after getting so much enjoyment from that literary equivalent of a Big Mac. A visit to a restaurant with Iwaii for an unagi (that’s Japanese style eel – don’t knock it til you’ve tried it, it tastes fab) lunch relieved the tedium slightly, but truth be told, the day was rather dull.

The point of all this detailed description? No one died, at least not here anyway. I think maybe ten or so people got washed away by swollen rivers and surging seas down in Kyushu, but that was about it, as far as I know. The Japanese at all levels, from the highest official to the smallest child know that their country gets a regular battering at this time of year and have sensibly chosen to take all relevant precautions, namely providing adequate annual public funding for really important stuff such as warning systems, emergency response teams, infrastructure design, drainage implementation and a number of other things I know nothing about, seeing as I’m no expert. The thing is, does all of the US suffer from regular hurricanes? No. Does one particular region there get hit hard every year? Yes, the Gulf coast. There are lessons to be learnt from the way the Japanese appear to have made a pretty good fist of learning to live with the harsher things that nature can throw at its people, and it would seem to me that other countries around the world might want to start paying attention.