The Pull of Japan

Try as I might, I can’t quite leave Japan behind. Spending the lion’s share of my 20s in the Northern reaches of Japan has all but guaranteed that I will always long for those “halcyon days of my youth”. There is no doubt that a lot of my time in Japan was central to shaping me into an adult, something my driver’s license assures me I am. So maybe it is to be expected that I still feel the pull of Japan - or more specifically Aomori - despite now having a career, a home and a family all rooted here in Canada. That said, I worry that the call of Japan may just be a siren’s song.

Memory is a faulty and often outright false mechanism in even the best of minds, but it’s all we got. I remember the unbelievable pink of the cherry blossoms along kanchogaidori, the main street running past city hall in Towada. I remember biking down towards what was then Towadako Machi and seeing the freshly planted rice fields quilted across the landscape, butting right against the feet of mountains. I remember walking the Oirase Gorge paths under trees dense with leaves and every surface being covered in mosses, like a forest ripped from deep time.

Many of my best memories are like that. A bit of alone time in what has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. What memory tends to omit is that these moments were necessary for me. They were the times when I could drop all the different characters I played in Japan and just enjoy the moment. Many of these moments were in the early years of my stay, before I was able to get beyond some of the interpersonal layers and genuinely connect with a small number of people. But that took years. Years.

That’s not to say there weren’t great moments despite the distance most Japanese people kept. I remember finishing teaching a class and walking away from the school vibrating with the energy the kids throw at you when you are absolutely killing your delivery, feeling like I wouldn’t sleep for days. There were also too many acts of kindness to list, part of an overall desire to make sure the latest long-term guest in town enjoyed his time. Some were anonymous, like the bags of vegetables, rice and even apples I would find on my porch. Others were obvious like the time the local brewery stayed open with staff on hand so I could take a visiting friend there well after they were supposed to have closed for the night.

To be clear, I wouldn’t trade my time in Japan for anything, and not just because that is where I met my wife. It shaped me like few experiences did before or since. Going there, I started with the disadvantages of being illiterate and barely verbal, essentially the mind of an adult with the communication skills of a toddler. Building up to where I could function as an adult in Japanese is still one of my proudest achievements, even though I never achieved true fluency. The experience of being involved but always apart was also incredibly important as it focused me to reassess many parts of my personality and what I really needed to be happy. And even playing all the characters - the inquisitive tourist, the entertaining foreigner, the eager worker, the properly awed cultural adventurer, the grizzled ex-pat - has made me much better at adapting on the fly to whatever professional or personal situation I find myself in.

With time, the upsides of even the worst parts of my time in Japan stick with me, as do the best memories - and my overtaxed brain minimizes or outright deletes the downsides. I had to go back to old notebooks and journals to remind myself how tired I was of standing out wherever I went and recall the angst that the bureaucracy of Japan caused in me. There was also the career limitations inherent in the position I held.

Again, there is my tendency to emphasize the upsides. Those career limitations were one of the reasons I was diligent in keeping up my freelancing, avoiding the skill/experience gap that can lock an ex-pat into staying because it is all they know. But it was soul crushing at the time to think that there could never be space in Towada - the only place in Japan I wanted to live - for me to do anything other than teach English. I loved Towada and still do, but I wasn’t convinced that the feeling was mutual enough to leverage my future on it. I imagine it is hard to get kids excited about learning fruits and numbers in English when you are past middle age with arthritis creeping in.

I do wonder about the alternate universe Andy that never left Japan. I can make some fairly informed guesses based on the experiences of fellow ex-pats who stayed. We would probably be making ends meet with my wife still teaching and myself stitching together teaching gigs, some freelance work and overseas contracting. We would likely not own a house, but we’d be renting one at a ridiculously low rate. Our cost of living would be less and our food fresher and more varied. We’d be a part of the community and still actively participating in sports, riding our bikes around town and looking forward to a different regional event or festival every month.

What I don’t know is if that healthy, happy couple - not wealthy, but doing ok - has any children with them. Is my wife still working 12 hour days and weekends going above and beyond what a Canadian elementary teacher would consider reasonable or even sane? Am I still leaving my classes every day feeling like I am making a difference? Do we still love our jobs or just our lifestyles? I wish alternate universe Andy would tell me some of these things. Because I still hear that siren’s song and in moments of struggle here in Canada, I feel like pointing our sails east again, come what may.