Tag Archives: Tokyo

年末年始 The end of one year and the beginning of another

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I see with some consternation that the last time I wrote a post was this time last year.

I have been reflecting over the last month about the last year, and have come to see it as the second half of a two-year period of lots of upheavals and changes. There have also been quite a lot of articles about the end of the decade, the awkward teenage years of this century.

In 2019 I left Japan, after twenty-seven years. I returned to the UK, and went back to college. I am no longer a teacher, but an ordinand training at the College of the Resurrection in West Yorkshire. Rather hilariously though, I am squeaking this post out in the remaining minutes of the year in . . . Tokyo. I am back for a short visit, because although I don’t miss living here, and I certainly don’t miss teaching, I do miss friends. So here I am, catching up with friends and eating as much sushi as I can, stocking up on yuzu kosho (柚子胡椒) and laundry bags with zips and enjoying an extra ninety minutes of daylight every day compared to the UK.

I have seen friends posting photos on social media of themselves ten years ago and now. I suppose it’s an end-of-a-decade thing. And quite a decade it’s been. 2011 was the year of the earthquake and tsunami, when I started sending long e-mails to family and friends, which led to me starting this blog. The decade has taken both my parents and left me a middle-aged orphan. The last five years have been a radical re-orientation of my life; a discernment of a call to ordained ministry and the long process of preparation, selection and finally beginning training. My life is a very different shape to what it was ten years ago.

I shall not be sorry to see the back of 2019. It has been a year of so much change, and I am exhausted. I think I wrote something similar last year, so don’t want to sound like I’m wishing my life away. I hope that now that I have moved back to the UK, that I am training at college, that I am done with swerves and speed bumps . . . but I suppose life isn’t really like that.

New Year’s resolutions: to blog more. Really. I want to write about everything from discernment to training over on my other blog, and I still have to write about grief and leaving Japan and being back in the UK and so many other things. I don’t know if people still read blogs; there is so much out there, who has the time to read even a fraction of what they want to? But I know that I enjoy writing, and so I shall do it anyway. I am going to read more, and not only the books I need for my studies.

Tomorrow I am starting the new year with Mass at the Anglican cathedral in Tokyo. In the afternoon I am going to do a Seven Lucky Gods walk with friends (and another one a few days later). Somehow by January 17th I’m going to produce three essays.

Off you go, 2019. Off you go, awkward teenage years of the twenty-first century. Time for a new year, and a new decade. Life is good. May 2020 be a good year for everyone.

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My heart is not here

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stile-and-signpost

Jet lag is a funny thing. I got back to Tokyo last night after an almost 24-hour journey back from the UK. After a pot of tea and some toast I thought I’d be ready for bed, but nope, at 4am I was still wide awake. I finally managed a couple of hours sleep and then my eyes popped open again and by  7:30 I was out in the windy sunshine, off for a walk round the lake at my local park.

This year I have been walking every day, and as well as making me fitter it has also opened my eyes to the beauty and wonders around me. Tokyo is a great city to walk in, but in the summer, walking around the village I grew up in I realised what a country girl I am. I recognised the crops, I was thankful for the good harvest, I fretted whether the harvest would be in before the rain came. Walking in my own childhood footsteps I had a new appreciation for the village and the surrounding countryside.

Just as I did in the summer I spent the last fortnight taking the same walks. My favourite takes me all the way up the village, past the primary school I attended, along the top road and then a long walk down a farm track, through a hamlet and back out onto the main (actually only) road. I walked through the wood where bluebells bloom in the spring, past the field of Jacob sheep (and the alpaca that lives with them), past the church where I was confirmed. On Sunday I walked 4 miles to the parish church, something that feels like a mini pilgrimage every time I do it.

And then, on Wednesday, I left again and flew back to Tokyo, and I have the same feeling I did when I came back at the end of August: my heart is not here. My body is here (even though it refuses to sleep), my mind knows I’m here, but my heart hasn’t caught up yet. My feet are walking on the pavements in Tokyo, but they are missing the farm tracks, the mud and the soft fallen leaves I was walking on a few days ago. I see herons at the park and miss pheasants, I smell car exhausts and miss woodsmoke, I see smart pedigree dogs dressed up in little outfits out for a walk and I miss the farm dogs who come out to bark and see me off as I walk past their home.

My heart aches for the landscape that shaped me, for the memories, for my roots. I feel like I’ve been wrenched away from the soil that I belong in. Having spent most of my adult life in large Asian cities I thought I was a confirmed city dweller and it has come as a surprise to understand that I am very much a country girl; a north of England, tiny village, muddy-booted, crop-watching, blackberry-picking country girl.

view-from-steps

Time to be gentle with each other

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plum blossom

This morning on the train I annoyed a commuter. I didn’t mean to, and I suspect his day had already started badly by the time he encountered me, but I annoyed him all the same. He was around sixty and wearing a mask, since the hay fever season has started. I am fortunate to not have to face the daily crushed commute, but when I do get on a rush hour train I like to listen to music to block out everything else. Armed with my trusty iPod I squeezed onto the train and turned on some music. He immediately fixed me with an icy stare and I quickly hit stop. He looked away, so I pressed play and his eyes swivelled back to me. Music off again, he looked away. I started to listen again, and this time waited a few seconds. He fixed me with a venomous, beady-eyed stare, he was definitely annoyed with me. I turned the music off and could hear him muttering, ‘urusai’, ‘noisy’ and not wishing to incur any more wrath I stood in silence for the rest of the journey.

Now, I didn’t take out the ear buds, I was not going to surrender so easily, but as I stood music-less in the great crush of people, and looked at all the other commuters happily plugged into their smart phones and iPods I wondered what I had done to upset him so.  Maybe I was the closest noisy person. Maybe I was more easily separated from the crowd because I’m not Japanese. Maybe he had bad hay fever this morning. Maybe he hates his job. Maybe he didn’t enjoy his weekend. Maybe he doesn’t like Monday mornings. I hope I didn’t spoil his whole day.

Living in Japan it’s easy to forget how to roll with the more feisty approach to interaction I encounter in Europe. Here we are aiming for wa, harmony, and the education system inculcates this subjugation of the individual to the group. Students learn to work together, in club activities, for sports days and culture festivals. The individual who, for example, asserts his right to be hissy on a crowded train is not playing by the rules. His safety catch was off and I didn’t know what he might do next.

Standing there wondering what on earth could be going on, listing all the possible stressors, I realised that there is a tiredness in the air. We have had a cold winter and we’re ready for spring. The plum blossoms are blooming, so are the early cherry blossoms, but it’s still cold. For students and teachers it’s almost the end of the school year, bringing tests and grading with it. Tree pollen is already in the air, starting with the most dreaded of all, Japanese cedar, planted widely after the war to counter deforestation and now widely responsible for the itchy misery of millions.

Most of all, tomorrow is March 11th. The 3rd anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the M9 earthquake and the monster tsunami that devastated Tohoku.  I wrote about this last year, and it is frustrating to write that there are still 267,000 people living in temporary housing.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/267000-still-evacuees-three-years-on/#.Ux3JTtw-ATs

While we all say we have not forgotten about Tohoku, we (collectively) seem remarkably able to live with this fact and more. Of course, we don’t live with the reality. The people of Tohoku do that. On the Japan Times website there is this heartbreaking article about the children of Fukushima, unable to play outside:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/life-indoors-exacts-toll-on-koriyama-children/#.Ux3Jxtw-ATs

and this one, about junior high school students:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/tohoku-kids-stressed-haunted-by-trauma/#.Ux3KaNw-ATs 

So how did I get from an irritated commuter to this? I have been thinking today about a quote from the writing of Lu Xun, a Chinese writer I studied at university. I have been trying to track down the piece where the quote occurs, but so far I’ve had no luck. I think it’s somewhere in Wild Grass or A Call to Arms.

‘My heart is extraordinarily lonely.’

Are we taking care of each other? Do we see individuals in a crowd? Do we really listen to each other, really connect with each other? I am glad I annoyed my fellow commuter this morning, because it made me stand in silence and wonder about what was going on for him. Deprived of my music, the bubble I usually choose to put myself in I stood there and made a list in my head of what could possibly be upsetting him. How often do I do that? Squashed in the middle of the carriage I found myself in fact in a space to think, and it was such a gift.

There is plenty of news in Japan to distract us from the ongoing challenges in Tohoku; the economy, a right-wing government rattling its sabres at South Korea and China over territorial disputes, various members of NHK’s board of governors making outrageous revisionist statements about Japan’s recent history. We can be squashed into a crowded news cycle and not remember what life is like for the people whose lives changed on March 11th, 2011.

We need to make space, for ourselves and other people, even in a vast crowded city like Tokyo. We need to be gentle with each other every day, but as the clock ticks towards midnight and we get ready to mark another anniversary, we need to remember ourselves, three years ago. This evening the lights on Tokyo Tower have been spelling out ‘kizuna’ (絆), chosen as the kanji of the year in 2011 and meaning ‘bonds’. Three years ago there was a feeling that we were all together in the days following the earthquake. One of the most common questions we asked each other was, ‘Were you with other people?’, because I think we recognised that being alone made everything much harder to bear.

‘My heart is extraordinarily lonely.’ Is that how the people of Tohoku feel?

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/photos-tohoku-three-years-after-the-311-earthquake-and-tsunami/#.Ux3LNNw-ATs