People tend to take everything too serious. Especially themselves…and that’s what probably makes ‘em scared and hurt so much of the time. Life is too serious to take that seriously. Tom Robbins-Skinny Legs and All

Today was my first day back to work for the New Year and I am already back home at ten in the morning. My vice principle was kind enough to realize that I would be doing absolutely nothing today, although technically it is a work day but no teachers or students come, and told me I could leave whenever I wanted. Thank you Komatsu sensei. It is sunny and cold outside today, and I am snug as a bug under this nice heated table of mine, sipping away at my newly arrived mate (thank you Justin and Hannah). The second half of November since I last wrote a newsletter, I was incredibly busy but with little interesting anecdotes to write of. I mostly spent my time getting ready for the end of the year and for the arrival of my parents. Since I was sending home a great number of books with them, I wanted to go though and do a thorough review of all that I had learned and enjoyed this year and to jot down any specifically valuable excerpts. It was fun to have all of those books sprawled everywhere around my apartment and also an interesting feeling looking though them knowing that they would be the first things that I would be sending back to the United States after a year and five months of having things shipped over here. The reversal slowly begins. I should be more specific and say that that I was offered a contract to renew my position here, which would bring me to three years and after a very brief contemplative period I happily signed, which puts me here in Kunugiyama until August 2015. There are still a great number of mountains to climb in this country and I have wonderful company to climb them with. Another little events was our end of the year party here with my school which was very nice but always very deceiving. On Friday night at this party, people become instantly warmer and more open and come and talk with you(drunkenly of course), but then on Monday if seems your relationships with people seem to have been completely unaffected. Regardless, I had a wonderful time afterwards with two teachers at our “afterparty” where the biology teacher ordered us some cow tongue, pig uterus, pig foot and pieces of cow and pig head at a bar where I was definitely the only non-Japanese person in attendance. All of those parts were completely legitimate parts of an animal to eat, yet I found them rather repulsive. Other than that I spent my time sewing Christmas presents and pillow covers, cleaning and writing and sending out lots of letters to try and start this year with a clean slate. So the real big event of this month as you can now guess was my parent’s visit to Japan. It was their first time to come to My mother’s patented two Japan and I tried to show them a little bit of everything that I love handed chopstick technique about living where I live, tailored to fit my parent’s taste. So we which quickly translated went into Tokyo lots and saw big Tokyo and little Tokyo, pretty into her carrying a fork with little houses and big soaring lit up buildings. I took them to my her always favorite restaurants and we got treated very nicely by people that January 7th, 2014 I really like. They got to meet my friends and I brought them to my school to visit and we had coffee with the teacher that I really like here and also buttered up and in turn was buttered up by my vice principle here. In there also they went to a cooking class with me, rode bikes (one of which I found in the trash and fixed up which I was especially proud of), went to an enormous fish market and ate most types of Japanese foods readily available, my father becoming a connoisseur of all Japanese meats on sticks for some unknown reason. We were able to take a short trip farther south in Japan to visit one city that I knew, Kyoto, and two where I had never been before, Nara and Osaka with my girlfriend Chika. We started out in Osaka and got to see the big white Castle there which overlooks the whole city and is surrounded by moat upon moat. It is a very cool city and we stayed in what seemed to be a very young part full of cafes, bars, record shops and used clothes boutiques. It is also an enormous city and we couldn’t really tell that until we were on our way out of the city towards Nara and we could see it in the distance from up on mountains. We were only there for a day so it was hard to get a real feel for the city, but it seemed like a very livable city. Everyone enjoyed it and my mother was especially happy because we allowed her to eat a hamburger and to have a break from the culinary adventure we had been subjecting her to. Our next stop was Nara which is one of the oldest cities in Japan and is quite small. We stayed at this wonderful inn that was a converted old Japanese house built 100 years ago. It wraps around a perfect little garden and had a “kotatsu” (that little heated table) that was sunken into the floor which made my father’s bad knees quite happy, and it was just such a novel idea and so comfortable. Looking back it is actually quite a bizarre city because there are deer that freely walk around these huge parks. People pay a dollar and get a pack of special deer rice crackers and then a big herd of deer come butting you with their hornless heads or give you a little nip on the butt if you aren’t fast enough dispersing your crackers. It is quite enjoying to watch the process over and over again, of tourists buying the crackers and trying to give them gently to the deer only to be rushed by five or six of them and then inevitably trying to run to escape or simply throwing the crackers to get these ultra aggressive animals away from them. The city is also home to the largest indoor Buddha statue in the world in what is advertised as the largest wooden building in the world, all built about a thousand years ago. It is awe-inspiring in a way that is normally reserved for some beautiful natural sight like an enormous mountain or tree. It is just on such a grand scale, both the building and the Buddha contained therein that I think most everyone would be forced to have a “moment” gazing upon them. Afterwards, having endured the rain again during the day we relaxed in a very old hot spring that was right around the corner from where we were staying (which did not save us from getting lost for a half an hour on our return to the hostel). It was one of those ancient ones where a little old lady sits in the middle and can watch and service both the men and woman from her perched chair. My dad and mom were both really good sports about the whole getting naked and bathing together thing, I with my father and my mother with my girlfriend. Chika even learned some Spanish while taking a bath with my mother, “el agua es caliente”. My father preferred the more silent, pretend he isn’t forced to stare at his naked son’s body approach. To each his own. The next day we visited a museum of national treasures which really did seem like treasures. It was filled with priceless old statues of Buddha and spirits and gods which are always on posters and in textbooks here. We took a train over to Kyoto, the only city that I had visited beforehand and we ended up staying at a house that a woman rents out entirely to families which was an interesting place to stay and intrinsically very homelike. During our stay there we visited a new temple for me called Sanjuusangendou (三十三間堂). It is home to a thousand, multi armed Buddhas( they are named 1000 armed Buddhas but I think they only actually have 44), with a huge beautiful 44 armed Buddha in the center. This place is just on another level. Its old, its huge, it complex, it’s meaningful and full of history and above all of that it is just genuinely ascetically beautiful. The highlight for my parents I think was my mom getting dressed up like a Maiko (think Geisha but from Kyoto, not Tokyo). She got to wear a kimono which was something she wanted to do anyway, and get all done up with the traditional make- up and wig. I personally found it terrifying, which my mother did not help by continually making witch faces at me, but the general consensus was that she was very beautiful. We were also able to go to a big market Nishiki- ichiba (lots of meat on sticks for my father), a huge temple overlooking the city called Kiyomizu temple and return to one of my favorite hot springs, which turned out to be too crowed this time to really get the full effect. My father resorted to amusing himself with the electric pool which sends electric current through your body (think underwater electric fence). Coming home my father was quite ill with a really bad cough, cold and fever, which turned into me getting very ill, so the rest of their stay here was much quieter. We did manage to celebrate New Year’s at a temple within walking distance of my school with one of my best friends Lucas and Chika joining my family to bring in the new year. Although we had to cancel on one of my teachers because both my father and I were too ill to be good company, we had a blast going to this simple little un-famous temple near my school. We thought we were just going to be able to listen to the monks ringing the bell at the temple, but in fact we were able to ring it ourselves for a small donation. So my mom and Lucas put forward their 5 dollars and were able to ring the enormous bell themselves which was an unexpected surprise. We were also surprised with a very interesting Buddhist service that was going on that I assume was some sort of bringing in the New Year ceremony. It consisted of the most hauntingly beautiful and hypnotic music consisting of this really repetitive beat pounded out by a little mallet on some sort of metal or ceramic bowl and this really rapid fire monotone harmonic chanting with unexpected inflections and growls. Lucas and I just loved it and stayed sitting and listening for quite a long time. We were rewarded for our curiosity when everyone from our group left and the priest came around and blessed everyone individually with some sort of tasseled cloth covered stick that he pressed really hard against our backs. Whatever it was and whatever he was saying felt pretty good. Our last real day we spent in a group of 6, Chika and I and our respective parents. Despite the very real language barrier, Chika and I were able to do translation for everyone and most of the goodwill towards each other shone though without any need for translation. We went and did our first prayer along with a million other people at a temple called Narita-san and then out to eat yakiniku, where they bring you a big plate of raw meat and vegetables and you get to grill it yourself on a little coal grill right at your table. I think both sets of parents were very pleased with the outing and I’m sure I will hear about it for a long time to come. It also passed the test for food that my mother enjoyed from Japan which made me happy. My parents have left now and I have my apartment all back in order and after going to the hospital for the first time and getting some medicine for this horrible ongoing fever, I too am back in order. I have been here for almost a year and a half, and now that my parents have left, I feel like like I am on the other side of my experience here. As I am now planning on staying for three years here, although it is a year and a half away, I am very slowly starting to think of what could be next after Japan, and to try and plan to make sure there is nothing that I would regret not having had the opportunity to do during my time here. But it definitely feels like another chapter closed and I am beginning another which I am quite looking forward to. Thank you everyone for your continued support in all that I do and I hope the New Year starts off splendidly for you all. Arrivederci, -james