March 21–25雀始巣 Suzume hajimete sukū - Sparrows start to nest
March 26–30櫻始開 Sakura hajimete saku - First cherry blossoms
March 31–April 4雷乃発声 Kaminari sunawachi koe o hassu - Distant thunder
Acting like an ass at hanami is something of a time honoured ritual among the local natives.
Thirty years ago this month, I made my first deliberate trip to Nagoya. It was early March, and my third journey to Japan in as many years.
When I'd left after a relatively brief stint living and working in Osaka back in 1990, I honestly hadn't expected to return. It had been a bit of a tough transition returning to Vancouver; getting my feet back on the ground had taken a bit of doing.
Then I met the Nagoya girl who would later become Mme. Lord Vader, my ex-wife.
Alas, we get ahead of ourselves.
When the fates threw us together, the Nagoya girl was on her second 'working holiday visa', and living in an East Vancouver basement suite with another Japanese girl, Noriko. As far as East Van basement suites went, it was a pretty nice place - clean and spacious. The landlady was an over-bearing Chinese woman named 'Lily' who belonged to Sokka Gakkai - a lay Buddhist organization/cult based here in Japan. As there were no locks that could keep her out, she'd routinely barge in to the girl's flat at all hours, and seemed to enjoy exercising an almost parental degree of control over their every movement.
The situation had been driving them both crazy. The'd wanted to say something, but being Japanese (notoriously averse to confrontation), and completely out of their element, they had no idea how to go about it. Things ultimately came to a head one afternoon while I was over visiting.
The two of us were sitting at the kitchen table just after lunch when the landlady burst in unannounced, and started going ballistic. First off, it seems that she'd removed a load of the Nagoya girl's laundry, and in the course of nosing around, found one of my socks (!) mixed in with her stuff. She started yelling about not 'running a laundry service' for 'whoever' the girls decided to invite over without asking her permission, adding that she'd been keenly aware of my recent comings and goings, and didn't appreciate my visits one bit. Then there was the suddenly urgent matter of a small ceramic steeping pot for green tea that she'd loaned the girls, and claimed they'd broken the handle off of and tried to hide from her. We both sat speechless.
Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition.
I don't think the Chinese woman ever made eye contact with me - instead referring to me in the third person derogative...like I was some sort of 'criminal', out to take advantage of the helpless, naive Nagoya girl. Apparently, she wasn't going to be tolerating THIS under her roof. It seemed that her objective was to lay down some kind of ultimatum, primarily that henceforth, the girls were to have NO unvetted male guests or visitors - and that I was to be the house's first official 'persona non grata'.
Never mind the fact that Noriko's boyfriend had been out visiting from Japan a couple of months earlier, and not only stayed there with them - but had Noriko do his laundry multiple times.
It was easy to see what was happening. I was being racially stereotyped. A 'white male' on the make with an 'innocent' asian girl. One could see this woman's imagination going wild with lascivious images of what 'must be' going on downstairs. Then there was the Sokka-Gakkai angle. These people are members of a cult that operates in much the same way as The Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons or Scientologists. In Japan, they've cultivated a shady reputation that precedes them outside of their own immediate circles.
In other words, they're creepy, and are known to have ulterior motives for whatever 'good deeds' they do.
Through it all I kept my mouth shut. I didn't want to risk making things worse, or have the woman call the cops or something. These types are just waiting for an excuse.
The Nagoya girl lost her shit and let the woman have it. She furiously ran down a litany of all the violations of privacy she and Noriko had been forced to endure during the course of their tenancy. Her English was impressive, and on point. The Chinese woman looked flustered, and attempted to gaslight her, telling her that it was, "all her imagination". That didn't wash, so she started in on the, "after all the things I've done for you" business. When that fell flat, she finally asserted that it was HER HOUSE, so she could make the rules, and do as she liked.
The Nagoya girl's counterattack had obviously taken her by surprise, and put her on the back foot. I'd never seen a Japanese girl freak out on anyone - let alone in English. I was witnessing a side of the Nagoya girl that I had yet to see in the brief period of our acquaintance. She got this wild look in her eyes. She went after every excuse and weak point the Chinese woman came out with like a dog jumping and snatching at a frisbee.
It was kind of scary, to be honest.
It was then that I'd got my first glimpse of her wielding 'the dark side of the force'.
Ten years later, when her Sith-dom had become more pronounced, I'd reflect back on that afternoon in the East Vancouver basement suite, and wonder if I should have paid a bit more heed to what I'd witnessed.
Gradually consumed by the dark side after her return from life in Vancouver, she'd ultimately be christened 'Mme Lord Vader'. A figure of dread.
One half expected her every appearance to be accompanied by the Imperial March.
I think my room-mate drove over and helped me move her out of the Sokka-Gakkai basement the next day. I'd been sharing the rent on the main and third floors of a three bedroom house with two friends, just across from the Community School I'd been assigned to work at. They'd agreed that she could join us, provided she threw in her monthly quarter, which she had no problem with. We both felt bad for her room-mate Noriko; but it seems that she'd already made up her mind that she was done, and left pretty soon after. I think she ended up going back to Japan to be with her boyfriend.
The pre-Vader Nagoya girl had all kinds of things planned...first and foremost, attempting to get a high enough score on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) test to gain entry to a 'regular' Canadian college - where she ultimately had her eye on a degree in business administration.
Six months later, with the clock ticking out on her visa, she decided that she was going to have to make a trip back home for a couple of seasons. She'd applied for a third one year working holiday permit, and needed to go and wait for her papers to be processed before she could return.
She'd also made up her mind that I was to join her in Nagoya, and meet her family. The time had come, and she'd been evasive about her living arrangements in Vancouver for too long. It was time to 'rip off the band-aid', as it were. Moving forward, she wanted everything to be out in the open, so she could focus on passing that test.
The plan was that I could come in early spring, stay on for three months without getting any special visa, and find some part-time work teaching English. I'd then return to Vancouver in early June, get an apartment set up and organized, and wait for her to come back with her third working holiday visa in hand. She'd continue working at the same Japanese restaurant that she'd been at for most of the previous year. The boss liked her, and promised to rehire her. She got on well with everyone on staff, and they treated her like family.
The tips were good, too.
My limited term training position at the Vancouver School Board would be wrapping up early in the new year. It hadn't panned out into the full time position that I had hoped for, and I'd be at loose ends. The timing couldn't be better. I'd go back to my family's house for a few months to defray expenses, stockpile my unemployment insurance cheques, and book the cheapest ticket I could find. I was fairly confident that I'd be able to find some teaching work over there. It had only taken a week of serious looking before I'd landed a teaching position the last time. While Japan's economic 'bubble' was starting to look as if it was on the wane, according to friends I had that were still over there, the English teaching business continued to have a pretty strong pulse.
While I did have some reservations about landing in on her family, she assured me that everything would be fine. Being the youngest of three daughters, she was well accustomed to getting whatever she wanted.
Which she ultimately did.
As for Nagoya...I wasn't a complete stranger to the town. Back in the spring of 1990, I'd made a brief (albeit un planned) ten minute visit to the Nagoya Station Shinkansen platform. My Canadian girlfriend and I had got on the wrong train en route to Osaka from Tokyo early that morning, and the only station where we could jump off and hop a Hikari Limited Express bound for Shin Osaka was Nagoya.
It must have been around 10:00 am when we hit the platform, and we were dead tired... having pulled an all nighter after seeing David Bowie at Tokyo Dome the evening before.
All I knew about Nagoya was that my art college pal's girlfriend Lisa had gone there with her bestie to work as a hostess a few years earlier. This had been back at the height of the late 80's 'bubble' period, when word of mouth was spreading that Japan had suddenly become accessible - and a cool place to go to make money. Lots of money.
When Lisa came back, she regaled us with all kinds of amazing stories. It sounded fascinating. Along the way, she had made some friends in a Japanese metal band by the name of 'Outrage', and brought copies of their albums back with her. The dubs my friend made of her vinyl records were in heavy rotation on the painting studio tape player for most of our senior year at art college.
I'd always been big on music, and remember being impressed - so much so that when I was in Kyoto in the autumn of '89, I shelled out ¥3000 for an 'official' cassette tape of their sophomore album from a little music shop on Kawaramachi-dori, the city's main shopping street. I had no CD player at the time, and the shop didn't have a vinyl copy - so cassette tape it was.
While thirty bucks was kind of steep for a tape, I figure that I more than got my money's worth. I treasured that thing. Apart from Lisa, I was the only one back home who had it. In 1989, an actual physical copy of an album meant everything.
I'm pretty sure I played it until it disintegrated.
All I really remember about our brief, bleary-eyed visit to the Nagoya Station Shinkansen platform that morning was staring at the urban sprawl of the Meieki station area beyond the bullet train tracks, with the guitar line and refrain from some Outrage song swirling around through the clouds in my head.
So...THIS was Nagoya. Certainly not much to look at.
Within moments, amid the shuffle of commuters and a myriad of chimes, klaxons and piercing bell whistles, the Hikari Limited Express rolled in. We limped on, planted ourselves in some non-reserved seats, and were on our way back to Osaka, and the old gaijin ghetto in Tsukamoto we called home at the time.
I'm pretty sure both of us slept all the way to the Shin Osaka terminal.
At that point, I had absolutely no idea the extent to which Nagoya, or that Japanese metal band would figure into my life over the next three odd decades.
Fast forward thirty two years. I'm sitting at my computer table in our rarified little corner of Deadbeat City, hammering away on the keyboard. Today is the Shunbun National Holiday, in observance of the spring equinox. This winter was brutally cold, and I'm not a bit sorry to see back of it.
The news on Japanese television this morning announced the 'official' arrival of cherry blossom season for large swathes of the Japanese archipelago...six days later than last year; but around five days earlier than tradition has it they should start to appear. Of course, there are lots of different types of sakura. Some are early blooming. A certain variety even comes out around the new year holiday. This is basically the official chequered flag dropping for the blossoming of flowers on the mainstream cherry trees one encounters in most parks and along most scenic riverside walkways.
While I love this time of year, and the sakura, I'm not really big on all of the stupidity and loutish behaviour that the season inspires in many of the local natives...leading me to dub it 'Baka Tsubomi' (Idiot Buds), as opposed to 'Ohanami' (ostensibly Flower Viewing - but more precisely, binge drinking and acting like heathens in parks and public spaces).
The reasoning here is that seemingly normal people literally 'bud' into completely irrational idiots at the first sign of cherry blossoms in the local parks. They lose their shit. This is all fine and dandy; but moving into the second year of a pandemic that seems to be going from strength to strength, the last thing we need are a bunch of un-masked drunken blithering idiots ignoring Covidian etiquette, and upping the viral ante for the entire population.
In other words, lord help us.
Looking at our third sub season checklist, Keichitsu (insects awaken) and its three microseasons pretty much played out as 'ancient wisdom' dictated it/they would.
'Hibernating insects surface', March 6-10th
Well, Mr. Insecthead did make a brief appearance as I was coming through the kindergarten gates on the morning of the 11th. It was an unusually nice day. He seemed a bit distracted. After dispensing with the obligatory niceties, he informed me that the four year old's class would be suspended for the second time since my return on Tuesday...due to the cluster situation. He then told me to 'be careful', before rubbing his knees together and click-clicking away to do whatever it is that Mr. Insecthead types do at 10:15 in the morning.
"Be careful"
His tone had been very deadpan. It wasn't like, "Take care" or "Take it easy". It was a bit un-nerving.
I did the five year olds first, and they were all their usual, rambunctious selves. Their class is in the largest of the seven classrooms in the school. Windows open, and a nice (albeit slightly chilly) cross breeze made the whole thing a little less stressful.
In lieu of the usual four year old class, I was informed that I'd be doing a bit of an extended session for the three year olds, and was directed down to the smallest class at the far corner of the building. This is where things started looking really dodgy. The floor area in that class is maybe a bit smaller than my living room, and with all of the stacked tables and rolled up mats against the walls, it seemed even tighter. There must have been fifty kids crammed in there. I mean...three year olds are small, but even at that, they were basically elbow to elbow and almost sitting on top of each other. Then, for some unfathomable reason, six or seven teachers were also crammed in. Usually there are only three. It seemed that the teachers from the suspended four year old's class had decided to join us. All of the windows were closed, and appeared to covered in posters and alphabet charts, anyways. Only the narrow sliding door at the front was open...and that was blocked by two teachers who apparently had nowhere else to be. What on earth were these people thinking?
No wonder the school had been beset with clusters and illness. It was like a case-in-point example of everything not to do. These classes aren't silent study affairs, either. It's all yelling and singing. Hands-on. I was beyond happy that I'd got that expired booster jab the week before. As I'd suspected, none of the other teachers had.
'First peach blossoms', March 11-15th
While I can't speak to the minute differences between peach and plum blossoms, this microseason was exceptionally mild - even warm. I got up the canal three times, and there were lots of early flowering trees of assorted varieties coming to life in the park, along the promenade and in the precincts of the Dampusan burial mound.
'Caterpillars become butterflies', March 16-20th
I did actually note a single butterfly around the entrance to the park last Wednesday morning. I mean, I assume it was a butterfly. It could have been an errant moth...but for the sake of this microseasons thing, I'm going to go with butterfly.
This all brings us to back to today. The Shunbun equinox long weekend holiday Monday.
There was a time - even a few years ago - that these long weekends were happy things that we looked forward to. we'd get out for a drive or bike ride, peruse the local gardens, snap photos, and grab something to eat. Now the fates seem to have us hosting okasan on almost every one of these 'breaks'. This weekend was our turn yet again. The original program was going to be a bit more palatable. Mayumi and Mina had planned to drive okasan out to Shiga to visit their father's grave. They were to leave early this morning - so Mina arranged with Mayumi to take the old lady back after we'd got her fed and watered on Sunday evening. Okasan could sleep in her own bed, and Mina would go back out there in the morning, and they'd all drive to Shiga together in Mayumi's van. I'd stay behind here, clean up, then go for a run - weather permitting.
Alas, the best laid schemes of mice and men...
After breakfast yesterday, okasan suddenly announced that she wanted Mina to take her to the ¥100 Daiso Store over at Shanpia Port - the local low-rent strip mall place about five minutes east of us by car. I guess she had her eye on some stuff for craft projects, and wanted to grab them while she had the chance. In any case, no sooner had Mina got her out there, than she started feeling faint and shitty. A quick check of her pulse and Mina said that it was all over the place.
They came back, and measured her blood pressure (she has her own little device for that business), and it was dangerously low. Long story short, we had to keep her over night again, the drive out to Shiga was shelved, and Mina's been over at her workplace with the old lady since before noon waiting to talk to a doctor. It being a national holiday, that's not happening quickly at all.
Fortunately they're both triple vaxxed. That place has been crawling with COVID infections recently. In the worst case, we'll have to keep her here again tonight, so Mina can take her back in the morning to get a proper going over.
As far as the old lady's bi-weekly report card goes, this week she squeaks through with a sympathy 'C'. Though we ended up with the shit end of the stick, none of this was her fault. Had it happened on Mayumi's watch, Mina would have had to drop everything and rush out there. The fact that okasan was here was kind of a lucky stroke...depending on how you look at it, I guess.
There we have it. All the bits that matter, and a lot that just don't. A wrap until sub season five, Seimei - Pure and clear. That'll be in two weeks (or thereabouts).
As always, you'd do well to remember that, "No matter where you go, there you are".
There, and nowhere else.
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