1/2

Yesterday was the half way point of my time in Japan. Despite how cliché it sounds it really has gone faster than I expected. I’ve found myself in similar situations before, being faced with a task which at the beginning seems enormous and undoable but progressively becomes less daunting as time goes on. I said it to myself when I started secondary school; “there will come a point after all the endless hours of study and stress where everything else falls away and at the climax it will be just me and an exam and I’ll be staring back at the better part of a decade that has just flown by, wondering how time could have gone so fast and yet so slow”. I may not have said it in as refined a way as I was twelve but the thought was definitely in my mind. This warped perception of time however often leaves me looking back and thinking that it all went so fast. I said it when I finished school, I’ll say it when this year is over and more than likely I’ll say it on my death bed.

I’ve learned many things from my time here so far but perhaps two that resonate especially strongly with me are that the world is not as big a place as one thinks it is and that time will slip by you if you do not make the conscious effort to do something with it.  Far too many Sunday evenings in the past I’ve found myself  drifting into conscious thought as I stared longingly out a window thinking “Why didn’t I do something worthwhile with my time or try something new or do something meaningful even if it was just as simple as acknowledging a homeless mans existence with a brief nod and a two Euro coin in his cup”. In the past it was my weekends that we’re my free time, where I wasn’t constrained by obligations or tasks that were a means to an end. Now however as I’m becoming older and gaining more control over my own life I see that freedom that was once restricted to my weekends extending into the rest of my time. It’s dawned on me that being white and middle class means that I have more opportunities and potential than many less fortunate people around the globe could ever hope for and with so much opportunity laying before me I cannot and I will not let myself slip quietly into the Sunday evening of my life whilst starring back at the time gone by and asking myself the same questions that I would on any other Sunday.

The Northernmost Point

Several months ago myself and James journeyed to the northernmost part in Japan. It all started one evening when we we're sitting around bored and the Hokkaido winter was beginning to take hold. I was looking at random places on Google maps when I thought I'd see where the northernmost tip of Japan was. I vaguely remember my reasoning behind this being that even in a place as stunningly beautiful as Toya, the sub Arctic winter was beginning to make things look a little grim and that things could only get more intense further up north. Sure enough when I found it there was a small town by the name of Soyamisaki dotted on the map. I went into "street view" and honestly it looked bleaker than starring down the barrel of a gun. Me and James spent a good five minutes laughing about how despicably horrible the place looked and wondering why anyone would dare to try and scratch out an existence in such a God forsaken part of the world. There was a long pause before James looked at me and said "Do you actually want to go and see it?". And sure enough I couldn't turn down an idea as mind blowingly stupid as that one.

Just another lovely day in Wakkanai

Soon enough we found ourselves booking train tickets and hotels. The general reaction of any locals we told was to laugh and go "Samui!!" which directly translates as cold but what I think they really meant was "You fucking idiots why would you want to do that!?". Nevertheless though we managed to shrug these warnings off and were soon on a train. Although the Snow had only just started falling in Toya the further north we went the deeper and deeper it got. As well as this things started to look less and less like Japan and more and more like 1950's Siberia. As the train ripped through air that was so sharp with the cold it could have probably cut skin, I shuddered to think of what the temperature was outside. Endlessly white, flat plains surrounded us that were occasionally broken by stiff pines or mountains that look like pieces of the earth that had tried to break away, but had become frozen solid before they could separate. It was certainly a far cry from the gently sloping green hills I was used to at home.

For all it's flaws Northern Hokkaido is still amazingly beautiful

After a total of eight hours on trains me and James arrived at Wakkanai, the northernmost city where we would spent the night before pressing onto Soyamisaki in the morning.  As I stepped out of the well heated train station into the dark night I was hit with a disorientation like none I had ever known. The first thing that hit me was the cold. To say it was cold is an understatement. Coldness implies discomfort, this went beyond discomfort. Basically my body was screaming at me to get out of the cold immediately or it would start shutting down. There weren't too many street lights lining the streets and all the signs were in either Japanese or Russian. English speakers have little or no presence in this part of the world but with the region being remarkably close to both Russia and disputed territories between Japan and Russia there must be a significant Russian community. This was quite a strange feeling for me as now I was in a weird spliced community of two cultures one of which I knew little about, the other I knew absolutely nothing about, at night, lost and cold, hundreds of miles away from my house and thousands away from my home. I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my entire life. Fortunately James appeared at my side hastily pulling a printed off map from his pocket and explaining to me through clattering teeth where the hotel was.

A sign detailing all the lovely places that are not Soyamisaki

I soon found myself in the merciful warmth of the hotel in which we were spending the night and quickly drifted off to sleep. In the morning we grabbed a light breakfast and decided to brave the conditions outside. Hastily finding a bus to Soyamisaki we clambered on board and sat at the back basically straddling the radiators. As the bus chugged on out of town it was battered mercilessly by howling winds and icy temperatures. I found myself wondering how any living thing could survive here and tried to imagine the prehistoric Ainu people who were the first to settle here. We stopped outside an elementary school that looked more like a bunker to let on some school children. As it turned out the door had been frozen shut so the driver had to get out via another door in the bus so he could pour anti freeze on the door and let the young children on board. I found myself laughing at the how tragic the whole affair seemed to me. Soon we reached the small town of Soyamisaki and disembarked. As we stepped out into cold midday sun we were greeted by a triangular monument with the words "The Northernmost Point in Japan" carved into it. Without hesitation we ran up a proceeded to get some cheesy tourist photos with the monument. James standing just behind it attempted to make some calls professing with disproportionate pleasure to anyone he could get through to "I AM THE NORTHERNMOST MAN IN JAPAN!" partly because of excitement and partly because of the deafening wind. 

Yay cheesy photos!

We spent the remaining two hours walking around looking for a cafe. However in this process we discovered a huge monument to an air crash disaster and a gift shop in which James bought some typical gift shop crap.In an effort to buy us some shelter until the bus came I bought some noodles in a seafood shack that looked like it hadn't seen business since the reign of the Tsar. We spent the remaining fifteen minutes in a bus shelter in which several visitors books had been left. Flicking through them we found a handful of English notes from several years ago. One that stood out to me was "The bus driver is a motherfucker!" and as I felt my limbs going numb and noticing that the bus was late I began to feel a certain sense of empathy with this random stranger. Very soon, however the bus arrived and we were back in Wakkanai before we knew it.

 The Air Crash Disaster Memorial and the supposed motherfucker bus driver

Although I give pretty much all of North Hokkaido a lot of abuse in this post I do want to say the place has a certain beauty to it. However the people there are clearly made of sterner stuff than I am because after a weekend of it I felt like bits of me were about to start dropping off so I was most certainly thankful to be going. All in all we got exactly what we expected from the trip and that was a really fucking weird weekend.

New Years

New Years was an interesting time for me as I was still feeling a little raw from Christmas yet thoroughly excited to go on holidays. It's an unwritten tradition that every Christmas all the volunteers in Japan go to Hokkaido, however it's also tradition for them to all go down to Tokyo afterwards for New Years. From my time in Tokyo so far, I've noticed that one of the biggest differences in between the Tokyo and other Japan projects is that, obviously enough, it's located in the middle of a huge city. This has positives like a vibrant social scene and fast pace of living but draw backs such as the fact that you are in a city so unbelievably condensed you feel like your drowning in concrete. Regardless of these things though, I was dying to get back to a big city and taste the delights of urban sophistication and/or arrogance.

I just realised that absolutely none of us have any pictures from New Years 

so I'm just going to use one from when we we're in Tokyo at the beginning of the year. 

If you look very closely you can see the fire in my eyes which is a tell tale sign of someone 

whose soul consists solely of hellfire, malevolence and marmite. 

Unfortunately, while the girls from Kyoto were allowed to stay in the Tokyo volunteers apartment, we being men, were not. This was primarily because we are not considered adults by law here (more on that later) and also because our superiors aren't the most liberal when it comes to things like this. However the people whom the Tokyo volunteers work for were kind enough to put us up in a Hotel...on the opposite fucking side of Tokyo, but free accommodation was not something I was prepared to turn down. So after a plane, a train and a lot of wandering around lost, we managed to get settled into our hotel and meet up with the girls. We soon found ourselves in an Izakaiya (Japanese style bar) with some of the Tokyo volunteers co-workers. One who stood out to me in particular was a man named Paul who for some strange reason struck me as being an odd half way point in between Gandalf and grounds keeper Willie. As you may have discerned from that statement, he is unimaginably Scottish. Soon after this we headed to a Irish/Scottish themed bar called "The Celt". Now normally I have nothing to do these kinds of places as me being Irish already, I go abroad to get away from Irish bars. Furthermore there is just something so nauseating about "ye olden Irish" themed pubs but on that night I wasn't aiming to be cultured, I was aiming to get rat faced and I achieved that goal magnificently. I do admit though, it was very decent place and there was just something so climatic about bursting through to doors to hear "8!..7!..6!" after having to run from the local train station in order to make the countdown.

Came across this while wandering around Tokyo 

and yet I'm not surprised in the slightest

One thing in particular that I remember from New Years was a discovery of one of my own preconceived snobberies. I am not what one would call a "club person". Generally speaking when I go out to clubs or bars I find my self surrounded by people with gelled up hair and extra tight t-shirts to highlight the fruits of their gym attendance having conversations about fucking lots of apparently "sexy bitches". Now this is not always the case, however it gets me into apathetic mind set where I often find myself thinking  "ugh, fucking idiots...".  This however was not the case for me on New Years. Anybody that I got talking to was like me a foreigner in the midst of their own traveling. Unlike me though they didn't all come from the English speaking world, they had become fluent in English during their childhood. Many more had not only become fluent in English but we're also speaking Japanese as well as a few other languages. I had just figured out that this random man I was talking to was quad lingual when it dawned on me "I may actually be the stupidest person in this bar", and that was a deliciously humbling experience. 

 One day James decided to take a walk in the most Yakuzza ridden part of Tokyo,

 Kabukicho...Doesn't seem to bad.

For the rest of our time in Tokyo we followed a pattern of shopping and sightseeing during the day and going out to Izakaiyas at night. This was great fun and it allowed me to witness some of the weirder aspects of Japan and believe me, there are many. But I will save these for another post.