The Missing

With three months left in Japan, I’m already starting to wonder what I’ll miss. The people are what I miss most about the States (except for Gray Wind) and I imagine that’s what I’ll miss most about Japan. Only so many weekends are left of drinking at the Greatest Bar on Earth or falling asleep under Eric and Nolico’s kotatsu (a coffee table equipped with a built in heater and a blanket that I never want to leave behind even though it’s next to useless in Texas). I finally went snowboarding (more on that next week) so there’s not much left on my bucket list.

Instead I’m left to wonder what I’ll miss the most. I think it’ll probably be the little things. Of course it’d be easy to say the sushi and the seasons (though I won’t miss the cold) but I think it’s all the minute strangeness of Japan that has worked its way into me.

I imagine I’ll miss walking into businesses. Every one greets you with shouts of “Sumimasen” and says goodbye with deep bows and cries of “arigatoa gozaimasta,” even if you leave having only purchased a bottle of cheap whiskey and a package of horrid gummy candy.

I won’t miss that when returning a movie late can almost shut down an entire store. A day before, they’d called to tell us we’d accrued 500yen in late fees, or about 5 bucks. Undeterred by this amount we ventured back to the store for more movies (there’s not much to do when it gets dark at 5:00) only to cause the checkout girl to suffer a panic attack. She scanned our card, saw something awful flash on the screen, and malfunctioned. She looked from the screen to us and back again, unsure of how to proceed. Her manager noticed her plight and came to her rescue, but he too had to consult a clipboard with a handful of violators on it and had to enter an override code before the computer and the check out girl self-destructed. To think, in Austin they just asked us to pay it down to 8 dollars.

I won’t miss the snow, but I’ll probably miss the way it brings together the community. I never felt the sense of community to be terribly genuine in my neighborhood in the States. It seemed our relationship as neighbors revolved around keeping the front yard looking trim, an activity that always felt a waste of time to me. Why grow it at all if only to cut it back? It’s not like people were playing soccer on it. Mowing the lawn is truly a Sisyphean task; shoveling snow is no less repetitive, but it’s much more useful. If I don’t shovel out my car, I can’t leave the house, and besides that, I never had a neighbor mow my lawn for me or smile if I decided to mow theirs. Here, all the sixty year olds and I take turns unclogging the creek bed from the snow our insane landlord dumps into it. My neighbors know that my car may not be shoveled out as early as theirs, but by god I’ll clean the lines between our parking spots before they get home.

I doubt I’ll miss being in a land with a language I don’t understand, but even that has its advantages. It’s easy to read on busses, for no snippet of conversation will distract me, and I can speak freely anywhere and about anything I like. True, some Japanese speak English well enough to understand my complaints about the texture of the raw shrimp or boiled squid, but they’re so damn polite they’d never confess and embarrass me. Not even when discussing lingerie with my wife in department store did the little old lady my wife had been talking to in English for the last twenty minutes bother to tell me she understood every perverted word that left my mouth.

There’s a thousand other little thing I may miss: bowing instead of shaking hands (weird), NEVER tipping (awesome), the thousands of men’s hairstyles as diverse as tropical birds (strange considering women’s single hairstyle: long), women wearing short skirts under the down jackets even though it’s snowing, men shoveling snow and scrubbing windows in business suits, sitting on the floor at a fancy restaurant, udon for breakfast, and on and on.

Yet who can say what will stick? There’s dozens of things I’ve already forgotten about in the States that during the first month seemed barbaric to go without.

What I still miss about Austin is the people. My hippie parents, my hippier sister, Raquel’s mom’s cooking and her dad’s made up words, her sister and her boyfriend and their outrageously delicious hipster meals, drinking beer with Tam and Cole, playing D&D with Mike at his corporate headquarters, talking chickens with Organ, Mitch and Robyn and their baby who won’t be a baby by the time we get back. I miss y’all and so many more so much. I can’t wait to be back to see everyone (especially Grey Wind), yet each day closer to seeing you means a day less with the people here. 

So I must be strong and talk aliens and God with Chaba, hoist penis effigies with Steve, pick Kensei’s brain for the origins of rock and roll, and tag along to Nolico’s parties always drinking and talking, drinking and talking with Eric and Alex, for my time is short, and I don’t want to waste a moment of it.

J. Darris Mitchell will live in Takayama, Japan for a while yet. If you enjoyed this post please share with the people you like sharing with.

The Perils of Not Speaking Japanese.

Six months in japan and I have my regrets about moving here from Texas. I suppose it’s to be expected, after all my wife and I picked Asia because it would be different-whatever we thought that meant, and different it proved to be.  

My friend Cole once said, “Japan is different down to the smallest detail, but the big picture is the same.” Wise words. Truly descriptive of being in a land where people pay handsomely for bar-b-q’d chicken skin yet balk at the idea of eating eggs and god forbid- not rice- for breakfast.

However my friend Tam noticed something else about Japan, “The language is different.”

Truer words were never spoken.

The Japanese language is not easy. There are two alphabets, one for local words and one for imports, plus thousands of Chinese pictographs called Kanji that are said to possess some sort of logic that eludes me. And then there’s the pronunciation. Syllables almost always have two parts, a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, and if that pattern is not respected, my words are not understood. It’s Ka-zu-ki not Kaz-u-ki, ya foreigner!

And thus my knowledge of the language has been laid before you in its entirety. I understand less than little. I have kindergarten students who speak better English than my Japanese. I can read the numbers on cash registers and nod during appropriate points in conversation (hint-nod when the speaker frowns, laugh when they smile) so people think I can survive here, but this is a farce that has worn through. Already the cashiers see me for the liar than I am. Even if I pay and nod at the proper times and smile my most competent smile, they always give the receipt to Raquel.

Not speaking the language of the locals is awkward at best, and terrifying at worst. If I’m lucky, and with some of my friends who do speak English, they’re cursed to translate everything I say until the group eventually splits in two, those who want to talk English with Joe the bearded fool and those who don’t. If I’m without such lifelines, not speaking Japanese can be truly terrifying, like when the bus driver doesn’t turn of the PA system on the bus and mutters under his breath for miles without anyone getting up to stop him. I realized then, that he could be threatening his passengers, telling us all to remain quiet or he’d drive us off a cliff, or he could be worshipping the benevolent supreme god of kittens and I wouldn’t have a clue.

After being here for six months, I dread meeting new people, Japanese or not, for they always ask the same question: “How’s your japanese?”

It’s not. It doesn’t. Its existence is negative. As in no, I can’t speak a lick. I can’t read it, write it, or anything else. The only thing worse than my Japanese is some of my students English.

I must have invoked the wrath of the Japanese god of language, for my last six weeks of teaching English been saddled with 3 extra classes each week, each with a group of students with more abysmal English than the last.

Please don’t misunderstand, not all Japanese speak bad English (I wouldn’t survive here if not for them) but, much like myself, some just don’t have the touch of tongues (my japanese is so bad when I try to speak a word of it to my six year old students they laugh and heckle me).

This week I asked a new student, “How are you?” to be answered with panicked breathes, wide eyes and “mudi-mudi-mudi-mudi-mudi-mudi!” Or “impossible-impossible-impossible-etc-until-your-breath-runs-out.” I mean, my japanese is bad, but I can at least say “Genki-des” at the appropriate point in conversation (though I’m probably saying that wrong too).

Another group of adults panicked when, I asked them to repeat pairs of difficult sounds. I separated “L” and “R” into distinct sounds, made in entirely different parts of my mouth. They looked as if I was asking them to make paper cranes out of starburst wrappers using only their tongue. They attempted to repeat the throaty and guttural, “R” and the tongue-titilating “L” and were met with only by my unenthusiastic support (its hard to fake being impressed when you see a group of grown men bite their bottom lip and attempt to make a ‘v’ sound only to spray saliva all over eachother). No one enjoyed those moments, except maybe the same god who likes watching me suffer any time I introduce my wife “Raquel” (there’s an L and R for those counting) to blank confused stares.

So, yeah, I have my regrets. Language is a big deal, and hard to get around. Not speaking the local language is a serious handicap, and has made me appreciate those who do speak my language. And yet, the very ability that I treasure in them, dooms me to not learning Japanese and not being able to speak with anyone else.

Aw well, as they say in Japan, mudi-mudi-mudi-mudi-mudi.

The Snow Won't Melt my Heart

Ah, a month in, and still the snow fascinates me. 

Bearded Kaiju, seen here fascinated by snow.

 

I am from Austin, and have only fleeting understanding of the cold. Wow! It rained and all the streets are covered with a thin film of ice! Chaos! Wow! It’s so cold you can leave the beer outside! Hyuk hyuk hyuk!

Here the cold is stronger, a bitter god angry at the joys of summer. I know there are fiercer gods of cold out there, “All you who live south of the Wall are Southerners,” but I don’t ever want to meet them.

Here, the cold is an entity, not a number that measures the absence of heat. Pah! I feel myself relating more and more to the ancient philosophers who believe cold was a force and not the base state that modern physicists define it as. To think the sun is the aberration in our universe is counterintuitive to the human experience. When the sun is shining and the ‘natural state’ of the universe is melted away if just for a cloud free afternoon, my world feels right, not alien. And the neighbors agree, albeit in their obsessive hardworking Japanese way. A sunny day means a day of watching sixty year old men scale rickety ladders up onto their roofs and hurl mountains of snow atop their sixty year old wives. A sunny day doesn’t mean less shoveling, it means a joyful day spent scraping away the bottom few centimeters of ice that make the road truly treacherous. Ah, a recent convert to Celsius, I relish the 5 degree days, and positively bask when its 8 degrees outside.

For the cold will return, it has each and every time so far, and I suppose if the physicists are right, it always will, soon as we shift out of the light of our freakishly optimistic sun, the cold returns, as inevitable as the dark.

I try not to get angry when someone from Austin tells me, “oh, its’ the same temperature in Takayama as it is here right now!” I understand. I’ve made the same righteously unsympathetic statements to a friend living in Boston and my family in Michigan. A moment of equality only drives the abject misery of living in the cold deeper into my frigid bones. For a moment when—gasp—it’s a few degrees above freezing in my home town and my current residence represents a huge difference in experience. For 3 degrees Celsius in Austin is one of the colder nights, here in Takayama, it’s a warm afternoon. That difference may seem pedestrian but it is not. Cold is not something that can be thwarted with a scarf and a cup of hot cocoa. It is a merciless, relentless enemy, who sees no attack upon my sanity too insidious to employ. 

A man must shovel the snow. Even in the face of more snow
This is right, and as it should be.

I’ve woken to find all the windows frozen shut, with a shirt hung carelessly close frozen to the glass, as if it’d reached out to lick the frost and been trapped there. I’ve woken to find the olive oil frozen into a brick (It’s been too cold to put honey in my coffee for months). I’ve discovered my washcloth frozen to the shower tiles, the shampoo beyond unusable. I’ve had entire days ruined because I’ve run down stairs at the crack of dawn to turn on the kerosene heater in the kitchen (no central heat for me) only to seek refuge thirty minutes later and discover the cursed thing was out of fuel and my kitchen still a frozen wasteland. I sleep with a hat, every night. I wear two hats and six layers during the day. I rant passionately about my heated coffee table (my beloved kutatsu). I value soup above all other foods. And, when given the opportunity to spend the night in a repurposed bakery up in the mountains, I leap at the opportunity, not because a bakery sounds warm, but because a night away from home will give us enough time to wash our sheets and let them dry.

So my wife and I found ourselves whisked away, up into the mountains, towards Mastumoto. I told my students of my plan to sleep in an old bakery in the mountains and they warned me of the drive.

“Be careful, the way between here and Matsumoto is very treacherous. Its full of twisting, frozen roads and haunted tunnels.”

I nodded, thankful for the terrifying advise, but explained that in fact I wasn’t going all the way to Matsumoto, I’d be stopping somewhere along the way.

“Oh! We’ll watch the news!” one of my students exclaimed, “If a bear comes down out of the mountains, we’ll know it’s you!”

Everyone laughed at the dire predicament I’d soon find myself in, and I lamented that despite my time here, I have not developed a Japanese sense of humor.

Still, the promise of adventure stirred my frozen bones and I packed my bag with enough calories to survive a hike out of the mountain.

The drive was spent in second gear, climbing six hundred meters along mountain roads that were only ploughed when they straightened out. Between harrowing turns and bone rattling bumps of ice, we found ourselves in old twisty tunnels. I always imagined tunnels to be pushed straight through mountains, but these beasts were like something from inside an ant colony. Dull flashing lights warned us of approaching walls and sharp turns. I mistakenly asked Eric why the tunnels were haunted.

“Because so many people crash and die here,” his wife Nolico said from the steering wheel before popping out of tunnel, running a red light and smiling, “oops!”

When we arrived at the bakery, I had never been so happy to set foot on an iced over road.

It turned out our host was far from a baker. He was a guitar player that—everyone but him likes to remind us—used to tour with Deep Purple. He kept the wood burning stove stoked as he wailed on his guitar, Eric played the harmonica and I did my best to insult Eric through rhyme between sips of sake. More people showed up, including Steve, who assured me that this was as good as it got, and even though we’d only been here a few months, we better damn well recognize that.

And you know, after getting slush in my boots, and snow down my coat, after paying for tank after tank of stinking kerosene, I got it, loud and clear. Nothing is better on this earth than warmth.

Warm people, music so loud it heats your bones, and fire. Be it from the sun, that unnaturally optimistic aberration, or from wood burnt to keep out that most vicious of gods, it doesn’t matter. For warmth, in all of its forms, is as good as it gets.

Sushi: 100 yen or 100 dollars?

Sushi.

That one word was enough to bring me to Japan. It is a global food, an international delight, known for its simplicity and its freshness, but I must say:

 I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

Sushi is a different beast in Japan. To begin with, there are no sushi rolls. They just don’t do that here. Sushi means rice with vinegar, fish and a touch of wasabi. They look at California rolls and cream cheese with the same disdain you’ll feel for pizza with shrimp, corn and mayonnaise (yeah let me know when you try it). I have been served something wrapped in seaweed paper, sure, but it was masticated fish parts and rice, nothing more, no cucumbers, no jalapeno slices, and gods no mayonnaise. Get over the mayonnaise.

And don’t worry! You won’t miss all that crap designed to hide the quality of the fish. Sushi is omnipresent and hard to avoid in japan. It’s as ubiquitous as beef in Texas, and served in as many ways.

Mountain woman excited about massive tuna



Now, a disclaimer, I don’t live on the coast. In fact, I probably live as far away from the coast as possible, up in the mountains in the center of Honshu, the main island. Yet I am still closer to the coast than I was in Austin, and while I’ve had better in Tokyo, if you come to Takayama, the sushi is worth trying.

 There are many levels sushi.

At the bottom of the list is the stuff from the grocery store. The packs of six or eight pieces of seafood on rice is good for the price (think dollar burger at your favorite corporation) but the novelty wears off quickly. The tuna’s not the greatest, the salmon’s not the freshest, and they tend to lump a few too many pieces of mollusk in there for my taste.

 

Chicken, radish sprouts, miso soup, edamame, rice and
of course, tuna. Slice it yourself and its still good sashimi.

The best thing about the grocery store in Takayama is when they buy a tuna or two from the coast and haul it up for us mountain-folk. When the tuna appears, madness descends on the grocery store. Old ladies jostle for position in line, old men outbid eachother on who gets to take home the enormous fish head. If there is a whole tuna fish at the grocery store, you buy a cut because—even with inferior knife skills—you can prepare the most delicious fish you’ll ever eat at home. For about ten dollars, you can get a piece of lean red meat, the most popular of all cuts. Though if you’re feeling lavish, get the orange stuff from the same fish. It’s fatty and wonderful, and a bargain considering all you have to do is put it on vinegared rice with a touch of wasabi to make it as good anything from a restaurant.

Next up is train sushi. These restaurants literally parade pieces of sushi past your nose on a conveyer belt. Take all you want! They’ll count the plates when you leave. There are of course, varying degrees of quality at these places. I would avoid the restaurants that advertise ‘everything for 100 yen’ and go to the more upscale places that charge 2 or 300 yen for a piece of fish on rice (I know, big spender). The conveyer belt places are a great first stop for sushi because you can try all the weird stuff you’ve never seen in the states without a chef watching to see if your palette is refined enough to handle it (trust me, it’s not). I’ve tried baby squids, fish organs, a variety of fish eggs, raw shrimp, raw crab claw, raw scallop, as well as a handful of unidentifiable fish (my favorite is the purple one). Be sure to try the weird stuff in the beginning of the meal, otherwise you’ll be left with the taste of raw crab claw on your tongue.

Above that is the fancy restaurants with display cases of their favorite creatures chopped to pieces. While expensive, I’ve never been disappointed at one of these places, even in my mountain village. Though I’ve learned there is a difference between fine sushi in the mountains and fine sushi in Tokyo. When my friends from America came to visit we went to the best sushi restaurant in Takayama one day, and a fantastic sushi restaurant in Tokyo the next. Both were delicious, but the difference is clear. Here in Takayama, the fish was at the forefront of the meal. They served big slabs of whatever they’d had trucked in that morning, tuna, salmon, eel, and of course, the local specialty, Hida beef. The emphasis was undoubtedly on the quality of the fish, which was far fresher and richer than anything I’ve had in Austin, and I know, freshness is not the mark of great sushi, but I live in the mountains OK? Cut me some slack, the sushi chef in Tokyo sure didn’t.



In Tokyo, sushi masters can make even this mass of
revolting tentacles delicious!  

In Tokyo, the emphasis was on the interplay between the fish and the rice. Sushi is supposed to be about the rice, and Yazuda certainly followed this rule. His rice had fantastic texture and a subtle vinegar flavor that accented the fresh seafood marvelously. He didn’t focus on serving great hulking slabs of fish, instead he’d pair a piece of shrimp with just the right amount of course salt, or add a pinch of lemon to some creature I’d never heard of and bring tears to my eyes. He chastised my palette at first (a nice way of saying he talked a lot of shit) but I grunted at the appropriate bites so he left me alone.

As a Texan, I’d say the difference is like good steak versus good brisket. Steak is undoubtedly about the meat. You see the meat, you chew the meat, you swallow the meat, and damnit its good. Brisket though, is less about the meat and more about the entire sensory experience. The meat is still there, of course, but there’s also spices and smoke and fantastic texture, perhaps even a touch of sauce. Expensive sushi is like the finest brisket, it’s a labor of love that transforms the fish into something beyond fish, something transcendentally delicious that still somehow is unmistakably simple and familiar.

But, that being said, there’s still a conveyer belt place in town I haven’t been too… and sometimes there’s nothing better than a burger.

The Magnificent Tourist Trap in Halong Bay.

Halong bay is the most utterly gorgeous tourist trap I have ever visited. To appreciate it, one must charter a cruise and venture out on the water, where the natural splendor outside of the boat will distract you from your urge to abandon ship to escape the lack of substance within it.

Halong bay is made by the same forces that carved the Grand Canyon, yet is so different in composition it boggles the mind. As we sailed past massive boulders spattered with lush vegetation and hidden caves, I couldn’t help but think of the creatures that must live in the 1,969 islands. If Japan (where I currently live) is the land of Kaiju crashing through mountain passes into cityscapes; Vietnam is the home of dinosaurs. As our boat cruised between massive thrusts of limestone, I kept my eyes peeled, sure I would see a pterodactyl hunting a giant squid. It’s a place from another time, a world all of its own that can only be appreciated by chartering a boat, and going in, but therein lies the paradox: It is impossible to appreciate Halong Bay—kayaking through caves into hidden coves, boulders big as skyscrapers floating past each other, the screech of caca monkeys at sunset—without crowding onto a boat with exactly the things we go in to nature to avoid: drunken Spaniards, pretentious Frenchmen, and loudmouthed Australians.

Really I felt like the people on our boat must typify every experience that has ever taken place on a tour bus, boat or any other confined place with limited choice of weapons.

There were: a gaggle of horny, wine drinking Spaniards, an adorable family from Korea with adorable children that needed constant reaffirmation of their own adorableness, a British photographer bent on convincing me photographs weren’t realistic, loud mouthed Aussies, a French family that hated the food, various honeymooners desperate to hide from the rest, and us- the sneering tattooed American hipsters.

So close to paradise, and yet so far away

While we cruised around the bay, desperate for a glimpse of a rare caca monkey or perhaps a brachiosaurus, I overheard debates about the history of the word selfie, complaints about how the Australian booze was—surprise!—more expensive than the local brew, and lamented how my fellow travelers’ comparison of the food on the ship to a TGIFriday’s was appropriate, but their enthusiasm for the same meal was not. 

But the bay was always there, eager to reveal hidden secrets that have been discovered a thousand times over by a thousand different people and will inspire a thousand more thoughts of our humble place in the natural world.

And, despite the company, we still managed to have a good time. When the crew offered to take us swimming, and the men on the boat (your narrator included) eyed each other warily, no one wanting to jump in and no one wanting to lose face in front of his lady on this tropical cruise, Raquel dove over the edge of the boat without so much as removing her glasses. Everyone shrieked in surprise, and despite my best efforts to follow her, the two French teenagers managed to pause the games on their cellphones, strip down, and dive in next to my grinning wife before I could so much as get my shirt off.

Oysters so fresh you need box cutters to get inside

When the cruise took us to a fishing family’s floating home, we all laughed at the family dog that lived on the nearby island, enjoyed the strong-as-battery-acid rice wine, and let our jaws drop at the enormous fish the family was fattening up to be sold on the mainland. I was first in line for the oyster the grandmother of the family dredged up from the bay and handed to her son to be cracked open with a box cutter. It was seasoned only with the salt of the Pacific Ocean, and grown by this last of the fishing families. It was delicious. Once the bay was filled with whole communities of people like this, complete with schools and shops, but Vietnam—in its communist glory—deemed the natural splendor of the bay and all its creatures and coves more valuable than the traditional lifestyle it once afforded the Vietnamese. Aussies, Europeans and the errant American are willing to pay enough money so that the people here can protect the creatures instead of hunt them.

The quagmire of this family being allowed to stay on the bay because of their ties with the tourism industry that pushed the ‘genuine’ fishermen out bothered me less after seeing the oil floating around the houseboat’s engine. I don’t know if it’s a good thing exactly, but hey, it makes for glorious views and protected habitat.

The contradiction of clinging to a traditional lifestyle and embracing the conveniences of the 21^st century is a way of life in Vietnam. It doesn’t seem the façade that Japan sometimes touts so proudly. People here harvest their rice by hand because they have to, not because it’s the way grandmother did it. Our guide in Sapa had a cell phone, while in the capital of Hanoi entire city blocks sometimes have to go without power. That seems to be life in this crazy country, where a cheap beer costs $.30 and an expensive one costs 50,000 Vietnamese Dong. I don’t know if my presence as a tourist helps or hurts, but I know it’s a hell of a lot better than America’s history over here, and if all they want from me is a few extra bucks so I can experience the magnificence of Halong Bay, what am I to do but pony up with other tourists, snap as many pictures as I can, and tip handsomely.

Good evening Vietnam. I can’t wait to come back.

J. Darris Mitchell lives in Takayama Gifu with his darling wife. This is the third installment of a series on Viet Nam. Read about the rice paddies of Sapa or about Hanoi the communist capital