Summer

The holidays have finished now and summer will end soon but it’s not all bad news. My school will be doing exams later on this week so it’s going to be more free time for me!

I’ll go through my eventful holidays since I was busy enough to not have time to sit down and write this. The summer holidays in Japan mark the “Festival Season” which is the best time, in my opinion, to be in Japan. They’re interesting and fun for the most part, especially for children and parents.
The Fireworks Festival in Obihiro is apparently the biggest event of it’s type in Hokkaido every year. Obihiro hosts Japan’s fifth biggest fireworks show, over the Tokachi River, which attracts all the surrounding locals from around Hokkaido to come and watch. I have some incredible photos of the lines to the public toilets which my friend told me took a whole hour of waiting to arrive to. The fireworks themselves were like all fireworks. I’m not a big fan of fireworks. However, it was a fun night that I spent with two other exchange students. We walked from my house which is close to the river and watched the fireworks over the Tokachi bridge which is pretty considering it’s in the middle of nowhere. Families were preparing yakiniku (Japanese barbeque) on the mosquito infested long grassy river bank and girls wearing kimonos and their boyfriends wearing tank tops and shorts walked past with arms linked. Teenagers in big groups with large assortments of Disney blankets and miscellaneous Crap that might prevent any discomfort pushed through the incessant throng. I’m sure it must be the biggest night of Obihiro in the year, everybody was there and the traffic afterwards was unbelievable. Both by the severity of it and the efficiency with which it was solved by the hundreds of traffic police who were everywhere in the city. It reminded me a lot of Australia Day in Perth, except here in Obihiro not many people were drunk, nobody got arrested, the cars finally moved and the litter was minimal. The heat was the same, however.

Apart from the fireworks we had the Tanabata Festival which I really have no idea what it was. Giant paper floats were hung from the roof of the outdoor mall in Obi downtown and everybody wore their kimono. The floats were mainly popular cartoon characters. I was on the front page of the newspaper wearing my kimono in front of one. There were also little stalls on the sides of the road which sold fairyfloss, miscellaneous things, turtles, enormous beetles, children’s toys and all sorts of things you would expect from a cheap roadside children’s fair. It was pleasant to pass through.

The Heigen Festival was the most memorable for me. The famous traditional Japanese drums were set up all down the main road in Obihiro and separate teams of drummers performed amazing beats which could be heard from my house.
The Bon Dance night which signified the end of the Heigen festival and the summer festivals altogether, was by far the most fun because I participated in it. All the foreigners in Tokachi were invited to wear their kimono and dance the festive bon odori down the street among the parade of other special groups in Tokachi, such as the old people’s assocation, the farmer’s assocation, the mayor’s office, professional traditionalists, the local girl’s baton team and other specific groups. All these different appreciated societies had to wear masks or provide a special eye opening monument, such as a float or a six-manned dragon or a very energetic dance or traditional drums. The fifty or so gaijin just wore our own faces and we attracted the most attention despite our constant grumbling in the 30 degree heat and the pain we went through having to wear the kimono geta which are wooden sandals (very uncomfortable). I thought it was a lot of fun but I wasn’t shown on TV.

When all the festivals ended all the AFS Exchange Students in Hokkaido had to gather in Sapporo and we attended the summer camp together. That was definitely the highlight of my holidays. Talking to everyone about the experiences up to now was very nice. Knowing that everybody is having the language issues and the same communication issues is reassuring. We didn’t do any extremely exciting things but we did go horseriding. We also split into little groups and visited tiny primary schools all over the mountains surrounding Sapporo. I went to a school with only nine students from ages eight to twelve all in one class. I was the only boy in the group and the children were most excited to talk to me for some reason. We had a question and answer session and all the boys looked at me as if I was going to tell them that I played baseball professionally. Finally one boy gathered the courage to actually ask me something, “Do you know who Ichiro is?”. Of course I had no idea who he was so I said “No”. If I ever saw a boy’s hopes being crushed it was then. His shoulders slumped right over and he looked at the floor in front of him as if he was going to cry. Someone told me later that Ichiro is some baseball superstar that all young boys in Japan idolize. More boys asked me about other baseball players but I had the same answer for each and a struggling sensation in my cheeks that was pulling my cheeks down so I could no longer smile at them! By the end of the question and answer session I was pretty drawn out and stupefied by their expectations of me, but don’t worry – we then played dodgeball! I had never played a dodgeball game with rules and points before so I wasn’t really sure what to do except dodge the ball, but when it came directly at me I had no choice but to try and catch it. I’m not very coordinated and in a spectacular moment of absolute inelegance the ball bounced off my arms three times after which I actually caught the thing. The boys in the gym looked at me in awe as I looked at the ball sitting in my hands in wonder. When the day ended with everyone discussing what they appreciated the most about the day all the boys (six out of the nine students) said that my amazing catch was the highlight of the day with us. I felt a little dead inside after this revelation and the girls in my group laughed at me non-stop on the way back to the camp.

When the Sapporo camp finished I only had one day back at my house before I went to Kushiro, a city on a par with Obihiro in a measure of ugliness. Kushiro is twenty thousand people more populated than Obihiro, but rather than a central city for all the agriculture in it’s surrounding region Kushiro is an industrial city with enormous factories pumping gassy clouds into the sky 24/7. I suppose that was beautiful in it’s own way, I had never seen actual before I visited Kushiro and I was impressed by their impression on the cityscape and the sea harbor that highlights Kushiro. In Kushiro I stayed with a temporary host family for two nights which was a nice experience. They took me to Lake Akan which was very interesting. This lake is the only lake in the world which is inhabited by green balls of moss called marimo (Cladophora). It’s an amazing plant, moss which grows into a spherical ball which can sometimes gets a little bigger than a tennis ball. What’s more amazing is the industry that marimo has grown into. At Lake Akan everything there is characterized by a green sphere. Every souvenir that you could find in Japan is there, except altered a little to include a green hemisphere. The brick paving, the buildings, the food, the clothing, everything there is green and spherical and has a cute face. It was very weird. It’s not the fact that they’re capitalizing on these phenomenal algea, it’s just that they made a ball of moss cute! I won’t go into it anymore but it just struck me that it’s not the scientific phenomena of a spherical ball of moss that sells the products but the smily face attached  to it.

I’m back at school now and myself and the other exchange students are feeling melancholy after our fun holidays speaking English. Now back in class I find myself unable to strike conversation with any of my classmates. They just seem vacuous and empty to me. Japanese school students are exposed to a lot less than most of the exchanges students who come here, and it is a common perception even among the Japanese adults that the teenagers tend to be immature. This creates difficulty for me because I find it impossible to adapt to their sense of humour and conversations which, to me, seem simple.

Speaking of school something interesting finally happened. I’m still excited that an event occurred at school that continued to linger on my mind afterwards. My Business and Management teacher got angry at me for not doing any of the work in class. He is the only teacher of mine that cares that I do no classwork and only Japanese study. He’s a horrible man, he loves to watch the students suffer and he never raises his voice, but his tone always sounds malicious somehow. He told me that I need to catch up on the whole years notes that take up about ten full pages of the students’ notebooks. Keep in mind that Japanese notetaking and English notetaking is very different. For one thing it’s all in Kanji which is more than complex to someone who has no idea what it means. Most of the kanji I would be copying down would be at least six stroke characters. He told me I have to copy all the notes and this would literally take me about six hours. It was a confrontation which neither of us gained anything from. If I do this work I will not get anything out of it. No marks, no education, no knowledge, no peace of mind, nothing. What would my teacher gain from it? Nothing, except maybe peace of mind. I’m in Japan to learn Japanese and about Japanese culture, I’m not attending school everyday to learn about Business and Management let alone learning about it in a language I cannot understand no matter how much I want to or try to. I know it sounds like a spoilt teenager complaining about his schoolwork, which it is, but I still feel troubled that I will have to spend my free time copying redundant scribbles.
So now I’m faced with this problem. The truth is I’m too lazy to do the work. I would rather get endless afterschool detentions than actually do it, can’t he just fail me? It’s ridiculous and irritating. It was the first time I actually got angry here and the first time I used sarcasm in Japanese. Most of the Japanese don’t understand sarcasm unless it’s obvious and I’m not sure my teacher understood that I was insulting him when I told him he was a very kind and pleasant natured man after he told me that it was due on Monday. It didn’t solve my little problem though. I showed him a sample of my kanji notetaking and he told me he couldn’t read it. I told him I couldn’t read it either - which led to another awkward confrontation where it dawned on him that what he’s trying to get me to do is useless. Now he can’t go back on his word so we’ll see what happens.
Apart from that nothing interesting is happening at all – which is not very nice since I sit at school wondering whether it’d be better spending my time on an aeroplane directed to Perth. I still haven’t felt homesick yet which makes me a lot more comfortable compared to some of the other exchange students but I think six months here is enough.

Or is it? Everyday I learn something new. Like the other day when I was riding around Obihiro with a friend and we stumbled upon the Second Longest Bench in the World. That was an amazing experience. The fact that I had been living here for five or so months already and nobody had mentioned that this bland city is home to the World’s Second Longest Bench. We took photos of the bench, of us sitting on the bench, of the grass underneath the bench and Japanese people sitting on the bench. It stretches for four hundred metres in a park and is made of recycled wood. I’m now inspired to visit the Longest Bench just so I can say that I’ve seen and sat on the world’s longest seats.