...and so it ends.

Well, been back in England now for almost a week, and it's high time to finally put this blog to bed. Since both Ogura and my time spent there already seem so far away, it makes sense to wind up this corner of teh interweb and start afresh. Thus, I hereby announce that a blog aiming to detail my no doubt considerably more humdrum existence in the land of my birth is now open for business in the form of Pickled Flex. More info after the jump.

Moving on from pretentious self-promotion, then, how have things been? Well, after all the excitement of the Kokawa Matsuri, there was little left for me to do besides throw my things into the bags I was taking home and hope that getting to the airport the following morning wouldn't be too difficult. Thanks to the selflessly generous offer of ex-colleague Yamamoto Sensei to drive me all the way to Kansai from Naga Town I needn't have worried. He was at the local train station considerably brighter and earlier than I was and got me to Kansai in record time, almost three hours before departure.

Further satisfaction was had when I glided through check-in without needing to pay so much as a penny of excess baggage, despite my 23kg+ packing opportunism. From there I was reminded why Kansai is so meh compared to other international airports (my main gripes being the lack of foreign media at its news stands and difficult-to-locate smoking areas) until before I knew it, I was back aboard a plane in leaving Japan for the final time, at least for the forseeable future.

Mixed emotions really - I find flying internationally to be such a dazing, spacey experience that I wasn't really able to focus on what it meant to be going home for good. That said though, I certainly felt a bit of a twinge when I had to hand over my gaijin card at immigration. I wanted to keep it as memento, as you do, but it can't be helped.

So, 15 hours of flying and a one hour stopover in Amsterdam later and I was back once again in the family nest, seeing little that was all that different, and happy that all of my boxes had arrived ahead of me.

Over the past week I've been taking it pretty easy to say the least - pottering around the house, wandering around town, seeing mates, going to the pub - and so far it feels much the same as the two-week visit home I made last year. I expect it to be at least a month or so until it properly dawns on me that this is what life is going to consist of from now on - no more living solo in a cosy flat, no undemanding job, no late-night chu-hi dispensing combinis, no Gemma, Sean, Sarah, Mercedes, Jared, Noel, Rich, etc. etc...

But that's all yet to come. Otherwise, my initial observations indicate that first and foremost, news of England's all-consuming heatwave appears to have been greatly exaggerated. I've had to unearth my beloved flea-bitten leather jacket whenever I've ventured out the house and have spent time shivering in my local's beer garden. It's damn cold. People here assure me that I missed it all, but that there'll be some kind of second wind within the next fortnight. Bloody hope so, it'll make adjusting to the climate of Northern Europe a damn sight easier if it's hot.

Also, following a conversation with the similarly recently-returned Mark, we both observed how casual everyone is when you're out and about in town. No one expects to walk into Debenhams or M & S to a chorus of shrill 'irrashaimase!'s, but the random conversations I had with sales staff when ordering a cheque book from the bank and buying a new keitai (it sounds so much cooler than the word 'mobile') were like nothing I could ever expect from Japan, even if I had ever mastered the language fluently.

There's a certain ease and informality here that's utterly at odds with the Japanese way - an obvious thing to say, but you do start to miss the 'customer is God' philosophy a little when you leave a cafe, as I did, eliciting no response at all from the staff and wondering if it's because you said or did something wrong.

Oh yeah, and not to forget the mild case of information overload that comes from actually being able to understand signs and comprehend overheard conversations. The latter is especially distracting after two years of automatically filtering out incomprehensible Wakayama-ben chattering in school staff rooms and on the JR Wakayama line. My attention filters need a considerable amount of work, I feel...

Overall, it's still early days yet. I don't doubt some of CLAIR's dark warnings about reverse culture-shock will come true, but I just have to take things as they come. What matters now is formulating some kind of plan regarding what I'm going to actually do with the rest of my life. The past two years have been great and no mistake, but they're gone and it's time to look ahead. So, signing off here for the very last time, sayonara to you all...

Going Loco in Kokawa

Bringing things full circle, pretty much a year to the day I first started this ‘ere journal, I’m writing once again about the goings on at Kokawa Town’s annual summer festival. Yesterday evening the great and the good were out in full force to mingle, eat, drink, be merry and to watch the pushing and pulling of the traditional carnival floats known as danjiri.

Huge, bedecked with lanterns and often containing large numbers of children with a taiko drummer or two thrown in for good measure, these oversized wooden death traps are raced along the town’s narrow streets without much warning – several men will suddenly run towards you blowing whistles and gesticulating wildly, which is your cue to get the hell out the way and watch as the danjiri lumbers past, accompanied by shouts of what sounds like san-ri-yo – no relation to the manufacturers of Hello Kitty merchandise, I’m sure…

The Kinokawa/Wakayama Shi massive was out in full force of course, with numbers swelled even larger than usual with the addition of Gemma’s brother Robert, Hannah’s boyfriend Jan and two high school buddies of Jared’s. Not only were we numerous, we were nearly all dressed for the occasion, with yukattas for the girls and jimbes for the guys. Alas, I have no pictures at all of our sartorial hi-jinks, but Mercedes is likely to post plenty over on her blog some time in the next few days.

As one might imagine on a night involving a large group of people attending a crowded festival and drinking rather a lot in the process, it wasn’t long before the group fragmented and the night became increasingly random and chaotic.

Having taken a stroll up to Kokawa Temple (with all the assembled people there loudly praying and the myriad food and trinket stalls, it was by far the rowdiest temple I’d ever seen) myself, Noel and Sean took a leisurely stroll back along the main street where all the action was, stopping every now and then to say hello to students we recognised from our classes and marvel at the lithe young girls whose job it was to hang off the danjiris and give a hand pushing them. We then had the good fortune to run into a colleague of Sean’s, who invited us back to the shop owned by his family, where we were treated to lashings of sushi and draught lager and partook in animated conversation spanning arcane Japanese popular culture and obscure kanji characters.

Following this, we managed to reconvene with some of our lot from earlier, looking slightly the worse for wear. Thoroughly smashed by this point, several of us struck up conversation with some of the aforementioned lithe young girls loitering beside an idle danjiri, who’d taken the unusual step of accessorising their traditional uniforms with Jamaican scarves and face paint because they ‘liked reggae music very much’. Much stilted banter later, I was extremely excited by their suggestion that some of us drunken gaijin assist them with the pulling of their mighty danjiri. After a couple of beers beside the temple, the call came for Robert to join them, and not wanting to be left out (and drunk enough to care who knew) I ended up foisting myself into the crowd.

To the cries of san-ri-yo Rob and myself did a fairly cack-handed job of helping a dozen or so people push the thing down the street at steadily increasing speed until we slowly ground to a halt a hundred and fifty meters or so later. There then followed a lengthy san-ri-yo call-and-response session between the danjiri’s female passengers and their largely male mules, during which Robert and I were finally rumbled. A short, bespectacled and extremely agitated man pointed at us, demanding that we leave, ostensibly because we both had incorrect footwear (sandals and flip-flops, as opposed to the Japanese wooden sandals which are all but impossible to run in) but the racial subtext was impossible to ignore. (though of course, he could have just been pissed off that two drunk, British idiots were lowering the tone). As I remarked to Robert on our way back to the temple to rejoin the others, what we’d just experience had been the very best and very worst that Japanese hospitality had to offer.

Feeling somewhat ill after the danjiri dash, it was clear the night was finally starting to catch up with me. Accompanying the others to the 24 hour supermarket to pick up some late night munchies was about all I was good for by that point, and abandoning my original plan to walk back to Sarah’s, I instead opted to crash on the floor at Hannah’s.

So, here I am, feeling slightly tender but otherwise good and finding it a little difficult to believe that the sun is finally setting on my two-year-long Japanese adventure. This is the last time I shall be posting from the land of the foreign sun, my final postscript will be from England’s green (well, rather barren and parched if news about the weather is to be believed) and pleasant shores. Due to me having passed out by the time the others briefly returned to Hannah’s later that night, I’m slightly upset to have missed saying goodbye to Gemma, Sean and Noel for the final time, so I’ll do it here – take it easy guys, thanks for some pretty damn good times and stay in touch.

All that’s left for me now is perhaps one final okonomiyaki in a nice little restaurant here in Naga, and then a long flight home tomorrow morning. Here’s to hoping my excess baggage costs don’t bankrupt me and that I make it back in one piece.

Nihon…sayonara…

The horror…the horror…

It should be noted that as of now I am no longer in Ogura, nor alone for that matter. Since leaving my flat for the final time yesterday, I am temporarily based in Naga town, staying at the home of generously hospitable fellow ALT Sarah, ahead of my return to England’s green and pleasant lands next Monday.

This temporary homestay is mainly intended to give me a chance to properly appreciate the fact that I’m leaving after two years, and allow me to see friends and do things out here for the last time without constantly thinking about the stress involved in sorting out my place, arranging final bills and all the other horrifically complicated and tedious things anyone has to do before they permanently move away from somewhere. All that’s done now and finally, I can afford to relax a little.

What stress it was though…with four generations of JET behind me and no one new coming to take over, it was up to me to dispose of everything in my small two bedroom flat and Wakayama High to pick up anything I couldn’t get rid of myself. A combination of lack of forward planning, two years of laziness and Japan’s restrictive waste disposal laws meant that yesterday caused me levels of stress and frustration the likes of which I never want to experience ever again. Don’t be fooled by the diminutive size of my former dwelling, it boasts an interior of TARDIS-esque proportions containing dizzying quantities of crap that filled bin liner after bin liner in the absence of anyone else wanting it. Anything usable went into cardboard boxes that I soon ran out of, everything small went into bags and several cupboards had to remain full. I fully anticipate an irate phonecall from Wakayama High’s head of administration any day now.

And all that was just the stuff I was leaving behind – there was still the issue of everything else that was coming back with me. Having packed a suitcase, a backpack, a small rucksack, a guitar case and laptop shoulder bag with all my worldly possessions it quickly became apparent just how optimistic it was to think that I could get it all on a plane. I was to find out just how optimistic when nihonjin buddy Daisuke came over in the morning, ostensibly just to pick up the oven I was giving away for his mother, bringing with him at my request a set of weighing scales. The horrible truth soon became clear – the combined weight of my baggage came to 46 kilos, exceeding my 20 kilos allowance by more than double.

(Brief note – if anyone can explain to me why it is that residents of Canada and the US are given 32 kilos baggage allowance on international flights while the rest of us mere mortals have to make do with 20, I’d love to know).

Bitterness aside, I was left with a rather large problem to say the least – if I wanted to avoid crippling excess baggage costs at the airport, a radical solution was called for. I decided to try and send my suitcase home through the post. An insane idea, admittedly, but I didn’t have much of an alternative.

So, to my profuse thanks, Daisuke agreed to come with me to the local post office and act as interpreter. Driving there on his father’s open-top pick up truck with me hanging on for dear life in the back we entered and endured an interminable ten minutes or so while we waited to be seen, another fifteen for the young guy behind the counter to say whether it was possible to do what I had in mind (it required two phonecalls and a lengthy perusal of his Post Office employees user manual – to be honest I’m not certain whether he actually worked there, such was his level of ignorance and nervousness) and another thirty for me to do the weighing and filling in of the relevant forms once we were given the go-ahead. Standard shipping costs applied, which meant fifty quid on surface delivery, expected time of arrival at destination roughly 4-6 weeks. Furthermore, I was unable to lock the case, nor insure the contents – something that could only be done at a larger branch in the next town over. Hopefully I won’t have clapped eyes on that case for last time – time will tell…

Daisuke and I then went for a pleasant lunch at the local Chinese (the owner of which had been the happy recipient of my oversized Sony television) before he had to dash off to work at a private tuition school. That left me to clean, pack and tidy for about six hours solid until the arrival of Gemma around 8pm, after which time I was all but spent.

So, here I am in Sarah’s scrupulously tidy and well cared for abode which has flowers on the balcony outside and everything. All mine had was an overflowing bucket for the water pumped out by my temperamental A/C unit. Later today I should be dropping in on the family of Morimoto Sensei for dinner, perhaps kicking back by the river tomorrow afternoon and with any luck hooking up once more if possible with a couple more erstwhile colleagues by the end of the week. Let the home straight begin…

For a limited time only - an audio blog!

Sorry to get all techno gee-whizzy on you folks, but have had a rather eventful evening tonight, and instead of writing it all down in my own inimitably convoluted way, I've poured out my thoughts into a diddy little dictophone thing. Why? The answer is contained within the somewhat lengthy (about 7 minutes long - sorry) mp3 file that you can download here courtesy of the fine people at YouSendIt.com. Hurry though, this offer is only available for a seven day period as of now...

“Thank You So Far”

As my time in Japan draws to an end at frightening speed, I’m naturally finding myself doing many things I’ve become used to over the past couple of years for the very last time. No longer will I drop in on the kids at Kii Cosmos special needs school, nor teach classes at Kinokawa High ever again.

There are also the classes themselves of course, though in the case of Wakayama High, I’ve only known the 16-18 year olds I teach for several of months, seeing as the academic year out here runs from April to the following March. In spite of this, the students from two of my classes have been very kind in handing me collections of small thank you notes (though the mean-spirited, cynical side of me suspects that this has more to do with my teaching colleagues needing some activity to fill up their end-of-semester lessons on the days I’m not around).

Either way, receiving these testimonials is a very lovely thing, though I can’t help thinking that the phrasing and choice of words in some of them speaks volumes about the general standard of my teaching. I don’t know, take a look below and see what you think…