June 8th, 2006
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Three years abroad
Today I took the day off because I have a fever; it hurts to swallow. Usually when I have a free day, I want to really get a whole bunch of stuff done and have a time. However, today I’m so lethargic that I don’t even feel like playing games. I’ve just been cat napping from the bed and the sofa, in between my irrepressible ambient cleaning. At this point now things are fairly clean at all stations, though I still have the great clothing purge to do. But for now, that can wait.
I have been in Japan for three years. The exact date was two Saturdays ago, a day where it was raining and I didn’t do much of anything then either. But in any case, my three years are up. I’m awaiting visa extension now, but I don’t expect any problems.
When I started here, three years ago, I was a week out of graduate school, and full of fire and expectations. I had a weekly rental at Takaido, and bought Chinese tea from a liquor store vendor on the way home from work. I found my green Ralph Lauren shirt for five dollars, and everything I had was dust free. I didn’t speak very much Japanese at all, and meetings at the time made me so exhausted. Just listening to everyone talk made my mind run wild, trying to grok what it I was hearing. I was a child, my haircut was short and clean, my smile was fresh, and the corners of my eyes were markedly devoid of crow’s feet. I couldn’t eat a lot of Japanese food, and I didn’t have a bicycle. Things were tumultuous, noisy, and full of conflict.
Now, I’m twenty-six, the age when my parents were starting to prepare for a family. I have a small, but suitable apartment next to a park. Right now two boys are playing by the runoff stream, in the same way middle school boys around the world play; the same way I played make believe with Chris Bando, and went catching crayfish in the creek behind our housing development.
I still take photographs, although the level of quality of my tools has improved dramatically. Like all of my art though, the pictures I take today carry only a passing resemblance of the ones I collected when I first arrived here with that little Casio. I do less post-production, and more simple looking. Maybe you think they have less passion than the ones I used to take. Maybe they look more generic, or don’t strike you as much, I don’t know. All I know is that they’ve changed along with me.
I read more on average, but seem to go through intense periods of reading after I get my hands on a group of new books about history or Asian religion. One constant though is that I can never just eat during my lunch. I’m always planning something, writing, or studying at the same time. I’m not so sure if this is a good thing, because it devalues the ritual of eating, of being conscious and aware of all the effort that has gone into the meal.
I still love bicycles, more and more in fact. I recently upgraded my basket-bearing commuter with a cyclometer and successfully changed my first tube. By my estimates, I’ve ridden over 5000 miles on that simple little one hundred dollar bike, with less than fifty dollars total for part replacement. If that’s not value, I don’t know what is. It may even exceed the glory of my Rip Curl t-shirt that I got from Aunt Grace at Christmas in 1992 and still wear to this day. I’m on the cusp of buying another bike, one more suited for touring, because there’s something romantic and pure about living on a pauper’s resources, travelling about, seeing the fat of the land and the beat, rural temples scattered along the way. But I don’t want to jinx it, so I’ll leave it at that.
I have a window garden, and grow a number of things, including mini-radishes, mini-carrots, mini-tomatoes, and mint. The last of these is my pride and joy; three seasons on the same seeds, although much more of a testament to the mild winters of Tokyo than any botanical skill I could assume to possess. But to my credit I’ll say one thing, my success in gardening is for the same reason that I have success with bicycle maintenance, home planning, budget balancing, and cooking: it takes an analytical mind. I thrive on thinking about all manners of things as systems, a spanning ball-joint pipe network of cause and effect. Everything happens for a reason, and if you have the appreciation to understand those reasons, you can tune and shape anything to your will. Sunlight, water absorption, pH, tensile strength, boiling points, perspective foreshortening, contrast, and the limits of digital and print media. It’s all there, just waiting to be learned. Look at anything from a glance, then break it down into the simplest of variables for one to manage. But don’t forget to look at it in a wider sense as well. You focus on all the details all the time, and your world shrinks and passes you by. This zooming from the micro- to macroscopic, along with the catalyst of experience, has made me a much quieter man, I believe– that and the fact that I still live alone. Solitude is a double-edged sword, but like all the details of my balanced systems, probably not something worth worrying too much about.
Three years abroad, three years alone, three years away, drifting in another current, having left the comfortable world of youth behind. Now a new youth, a new innocence, but one with tempered respect. Thank you everyone involved, for these three years. They have been magnificent. They have been remarkable. And here’s to many, many, more.
