“Experience itself is an extremely imperfect teacher. Experience does not tell us what it is we are experiencing. Things simply happen. And if we do not know what to look for in our experience, the happenings often have no significance to us whatever”. -Language in Thought and Action- S.I. Hayakawa

It rains at the most opportune times these days. This afternoon I have to attend a training session for being a judge for debate competitions so I was told that I didn’t have to come into work in the morning. It is raining off and on and it’s a great time to reflect on the past months.

I believe my last journal was sent off two months ago so it would seem that have quite a bit off chronicling to do. I guess the best way to start is with concrete things and perhaps those will lead to the more inner depths of my experience here. It stayed hot in Japan until exactly the fall equinox again this year. It may seem too eerily to be true but it did in fact change two years in a row from summer to fall on exactly the calendar date for the start of fall. This year we had a typhoon sweep through and after that it just hasn’t been summer anymore. All in all, the summer did not seem so long and harsh as last year but still I am very pleased to be sitting in a sweater and pants as opposed to naked and still sweating. It has also meant that we could get back on our bikes, which is something we had been avoiding since our trip to Hokkaido at the end of July.

My first trip out of Chiba was to see my friend Lucas who has just moved to Japan and is living northwest of me in a prefecture called Gunma. I had visited Gunma in the early spring for a short camping trip and was so impressed by its landscape and was/ am so happy to have one of my best friends in the world living there now. I was even more thankful when I researched how to arrive at his house and found it to be a very easy two hour train ride away. Ben also came along for the trip so we were three university friends finally reunited and living in a foreign country together. It still seems too good to be true. After a first night of catching up and exploring Lucas’s amazing and very new apartment (he has a bath tub that fills up at the touch of a button and that will maintain the water temperature throughout your bathing experience), we decided to go exploring the mountains around where he lives with our bicycles.

Our wandering pedals eventually took us 70km away and up into the mountains along deserted rolling back roads to a town called Nikko which is one of the more famous towns in the vicinities of Tokyo. We had planned on just biking there and back in a day but when we arrived at 5PM and the cold mountain air started to nip at our under-clothed and tired bodies, we decided to bite the bullet and pitch in some money for a cheap hotel room. It turned out to be a great decision because it allowed us to explore the beautiful temples that make Nikko famous the next day and to fully enjoy the almost completely downhill trip back to Lucas’s house. I spent my time at the temple being blown away by the complexity of designs and patterns of these buildings (see pictures above). No matter how much you try to take it in and look for details, there seems to always be some detail that you miss and are unaware of. Our last day was spent exploring his cute little town where people were so friendly and very willing to talk to our group of dorky American boys. I look forward to having Lucas back in the same country as I am and exploring more the natural beauty of the mountains where he lives.

Other nights have been spent doing projects that I have wanted to complete for some time now. One of those was a shelf which was a long process to be accomplished but which now stands leaning against my wall in five tiers all covered with books, plants and little memory pieces that I have found on my travels here. The first step involved meeting Chika’s father for the second time in my life and trying to communicate, completely in Japanese, the measurements and process of how I planned to assemble this shelf. Luckily I am a decent drawer and I came very prepared with everything measured. This encounter turned into Chika’s mom suggesting that the two of us go downstairs to the bar and have a drink and sing karaoke together. So there I was, alone in an underground bar along with my girlfriend’s fairly taciturn father attempting conversation completely in Japanese while trying to hear over the drunk guy in the back belting out songs two octaves above what he should have been singing. Her father is a carpenter by profession and after our stint in the bar he presented me with perfectly cut boards even better than I imagined. Afterwards the craft teacher at my school (who I have always wanted to get to know better because he holds the keys to the ceramics studio at my school) lent me every tool I needed to complete the job (which included access to a drill press which was super fun to use) and I was able to bang the shelf together in no time. All in all, from idea to putting the books in the shelf took about 2 months. Yes, I could have just went to a recycle shop and bought a three dollar shelf, but this overly drawn out method allowed me to talk with people I have wanted to talk with for a while and it gave me confidence in my own light carpentry skills which is something I have always wanted to explore.

Here are some other small things that are maybe not worth mentioning but I will anyways to give a more complete vision of my life here. I have bought my first pack of brown rice which is extremely delicious and I am told my Wikipedia better for me than standard white rice. I have also figured out the kanji for “additive free” products which has led me to find additive free body soap, shampoo, laundry detergent, dish soap and miso paste. Lastly, I have been trying to study jazz, as I have some free time at my disposal, and to supplement my reading, I just acquired 50 jazz albums (a box set for a very reasonable price) to help me appreciate what I’m reading about. I am very excited to listen to those as the weather gets colder and colder and I can be outside less. I am also making lots of journals to sell at Chika’s restaurant which requires lots of sitting and doing tedious work so it is nice to have some new music to listen to. Actually lastly now, last weekend we went biking for the first time in the mountains just west of Tokyo, starting at Higashi-Agano, if you care to look it up on Google maps, and it has opened up a whole new world of bike exploration and nature appreciation opportunities. It is a two hour, very easy train ride away and it puts us into mountains, rivers and lakes that are difficult to imagine exist within sight of the largest city in the world.

The students have been taking tests for the past month so I can’t remember the last time I taught in an actual class, but that will change very soon and the second part of October until the New Year’s break will be back to real teaching and an actual work schedule. Apart from that I am looking forward to my first cooking class with a fellow teacher, more art festivals, a weekend trip with Chika to the mountains, a possible poetry night that I am organizing, leafs changing color and Halloween, but more than that I look forward to the simple cool air and peace that I am feeling at the start of this season.

Keeping my eyes open,

-James