Graduation Season

Right now, Japan is thick in the Graduation Season.  Up and down the country, schools of all sizes and levels are seeing off their leaving students in a great flourish of formal pomp.

The world at large perhaps became very familiar with the Japanese Graduation ceremony last year, as the Tohoku Earthquake happened during the midst of that season.  Graduation is an emotional time for students as it is, but for those schools heavily effected, it was a truly heartbreaking time.

The traditional ceremony is highly standardised, and anyone who has attended one in, say, Kyushu will likely tell the same story as someone from Hokkaido.  It's a very formal, stiff-backed ceremony.  Everyone is dressed in their finest suits or kimonos, and there is a lot of bowing and speeches.  That being said, it usually takes place in the largest building in the school: the sports hall.  Nevertheless, the airy hall is dressed up for the occasion with great curtains of red and white, and a stage heaving under the weight of flowers.  There is usually a sign denoting what number graduation ceremony this is in the school's history (again tying it heavily with tradition), and each and every graduating student will make their way slowly and solemnly up to where the Principal stands to bow, collect their certificate, bow, leave the stage, bow to the teachers...an then promptly drop their certificate back onto a table.

Then come the speeches.  Of course, there's the Principal, but there are also members of the PTA and the BOE, people who the students may only ever meet at ceremonies like this.  Near the end comes the singing: the 1st and 2nd year students sing farewell, then the 3rd years get their own goodbye song.  Then they exit in double file to polite applause.  The whole ceremony takes about 2 hours.

Now, I know I've made the whole thing sound very long-winded, ostentatious and boring.  And it is, to be honest.  But I do like it.  As I said in a previous post, it seems like the UK is deeply against anything that isn't deemed absolutely neccessary.  There's some pros to this mindset, of course, but then again I spent 7 years in one school.  I knew people there for 7 years.  And yet we never had a proper sending-off.  Yes, we had an informal party, and a prom.  But this was all manic fun, where everyone segregates off into their usual gangs and there aren't really any goodbyes - and of course, you don't really get to say farewell to the rest of the school, either.  Your time at school just kind of...fizzles out.  The Japanese graduation ceremony, on the other hand, gives a very clear-cut ending to your time at that school, and is a chance to say goodbye to everyone, familiar or not.

It's not perfect, though.  My biggest problem I have (and I'm not alone in this) is the lack of any real meaning in a Junior-High or Elementary School graduation.  But it's not graduating in the sense we know it: it's not about passing test results (and if it is, they are tests where the bar is set deliberately low so everyone will pass), and it's not really a Big Send-off into the wide world - all Elementary School kids go on to Junior High, usually the same one, and effectively all Junior High School students go on to High School or other studies.  With this is in mind, all the pomp and bluster and speeches and "Omedetou"s (Congratulations) seem oddly hollow and lack any real sense of acheivement.

But I do like the ceremony.  Yes, it may not be very meaningful, but it does give students a point in their school life to build to, rather than petering out like I did after 7 years.  And it gives one last chance to say your farewells - and for some schools around the country, that gained true poignancy last year.

The Tohoku Earthquake: My Day (Part 3)

When I got back to my apartment, I was relieved to see that everything vital was still in tact.  True, there was a broken mug here and and some dents in the furniture there, but these are mendable, replaceable things - it chilled me to think that even at that moment, not too far away, people where losing things that could be neither mended nor replaced.

That being said, from my own personal viewpoint, it was still creepy to see my apartment ever so slightly shuffled around.  Imagine if you came back to your home: which would disturb you more, to see the whole place upturned, or just a few things moved around?  To have your own personal space disturbed by nature itself was a weird feeling.

Mercifully, my power was working, and I immediately fired up my laptop.  While I waited, I switched on the TV and tried my phone again.  Now I had access to media, I needed to feel as connected as possible to what had happened.  I still didn't completely understand what had happened.  I still couldn't get through to my family on the phone, and the Internet was temperamental, but it was better than nothing, and again I had to remind myself that there were bigger problems unfolding elsewhere.  I watched NHK with numb horror as fires erupted seemingly from the middle of a newly-claimed ocean, and entire towns were being swept away.  Even after the main event of the Earthquake, the facts were still blurred, but seemed to be escalating in scale.  It had been upgraded to a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest Japan has ever experienced, and the tsunami warnings were growing ever higher.

Finally, I got through to my family, who were understandably relieved and tearful.  I quickly relayed what I knew to them: how far I was from Sendai, how far inland I was...in hindsight, it seemed unbelievable to even think a tsunami would reach this deep into the Kanto Plain, but it was a day that anything seemed possible.  Even in the back of my mind, I was preparing to evacuate to the nearby hills should the worst come to pass.

The aftershocks never stopped, and they were muscular enough to be considered standalone quakes in their own right.  I hadn't showered.  I hadn't changed out of my work clothes.  I hadn't eaten.  I could only stay glued to my screens and try to absorb what was going on.  I still didn't truly believe it: were entire homes really being pushed aside by a towering tsunami?  Was that ever-growing death toll true?  It seemed all the more surreal to think that this was all happening so close to where I was now, which by comparison seemed so peaceful.  I'd pulled myself away from my apartment long enough to head to the supermarket to buy provisions for the shortages I knew were coming.  It was all so quiet, so...normal.  Music still played in the shops.  The shelves were still, at that point, full.  The cashier greeted me as always.  Only the occasional shudder underfoot seemed to tie my experience to the worst-affected.

As the night wore on, I knew I'd have to turn in for the night.  I felt that horrible sense of uselessness creep up on me again.  How could I even think of something as comfortable and normal as sleep at a time like this?  But I could barely keep my eyes open by 1am.  I crawled into bed, and with the TV still struggling to keep up with the unfolding tragedy and the never-ending quakes, I fell into an uneasy sleep.

And that was my day.  That, of course, was barely the beginning.  But that's for another time.

The Tohoku Earthquake: My Day (Part 2)

There was no time to learn more.  It was time to evacuate.  I followed the march of stunned students out of the doors onto the school grounds.  Suddenly the outside world seemed more antagonistic than it had only minutes ago.  Where had the warm Friday afternoon gone?  Seemingly out of nowhere had come billowing clouds, a howling wind and a bitter cold.

The students huddled on the floor in groups to stay warm.  There had been no time to grab warmer layers.  There were no outward displays of panic, but I can read the air well enough to tell the difference between calm and a brittle tension.  Personally, I felt outside of myself, as though I were experiencing everything second hand.  Pulling my jacket tighter around me, I waited impatiently for the Vice Principal to finish talking to the students.  Now the initial shock was morphing into anxiety.  All I knew was that there had been a massive earthquake, even by Japanese standards, that there was a tsunami warning, and understandably dazed newsreaders were telling people to get away from the ocean.  This was all I knew at that point.

How was I feeling?  I don't know.  Perhaps I still had that dull roar pounding in my ears.  Was I scared?  Yes.  Not just for myself, but for everyone I knew, too.  I checked my watch.  3:00pm.  6:00am in the UK.  Would my family be awake yet?  Would it even be news over there?  And what about my friends?  Were they safe?  I knew nothing about how massive the Earthquake had been at that point, but I knew instinctively that it had hit them all.  From Niigata to Osaka.  And hard.

Finally, the students stood, and they filtered back into school.  They were all to leave immediately.  No student was to travel alone.  Teachers would follow shortly after.  At least, that was the plan.  For by the time half of the students had re-entered another building, there it was.  An aftershock.  I could see the school move, and I could feel the ground sway underfoot.  Myself and some other teachers dashed back inside to re-evacuate.  We ran up and down the corridors, shouting for anyone else remaining to get out as the shaking subsided, strengthened, then subsided again.

There was nothing left to say now.  All we could do was wait, watch, and feel.  Everything seemed to be curiously over-focused and saturated in colour.  It was a thick overcast but everything seemed as violently colourful as a blazing summer's day to me.

At last, we all re-entered, more wearily this time.  The staff room filled up, and the TV was once again switched on.

Whirlpools.  Water charging down streets like a flash flood.  Cars tossed about like toys.  People stranded on rooftops as the raging water lapped at their feet.  My Japanese ability told me enough of the facts: An estimated 8.5 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture, in North-East Japan, with tsunami warnings of over 10 metres in some places.  There was already a death toll.  It was in double figures then.

I and many other teachers reached for their phones.  They too had friends and family to check upon, but we all hit upon the same snag: we couldn't make calls.  Whether it was because of the Earthquake or because the millions of other people in Japan were trying to reach out at once, I didn't know, but I more than ever I felt that horrible sensation of being in the middle of something huge and terrible that everyone would talk about later, perhaps even for weeks after, but for now I was cut off from everything and everyone I cared about.

Then there was lots of bags and jackets zipping up and laptops clicking shut.  It was time to go.  And never before have I been as frustrated with the slowness of my bicycle than I did then.  The 4km bike ride back to my apartment is lengthy at the best of times, but today it seemed to drag on indefinitely.  Yet the journey felt...normal.  Cars drove by as normal, the trees still swayed and yes, the rickety old houses I'd grown used to passing each day were still there.  It was only when I passed through the thickest part of the countryside did I realise the one difference, the smallest one, and yet perhaps the worst: the birdsong had gone.

The Tohoku Earthquake: My Day (Part 1)

It was Friday afternoon.  There was no 6th period on Friday, so students were already swelling the corridors, bustling around and cleaning (or pretending to clean).  It was, of course, just like every other Friday.  There was a bustling, cheerful air about the place, with everyone looking forward to the weekend.  I'd made plans to meet up with my friends to go to the Plum Blossom Festival in Mito that weekend.

I was in the staff room, helping the students stationed there to clean up.  A couple of students were pulling the vacuum cleaner around while I would pull out the chairs from under the staff tables so they can sweep under them.  Then I heard a word: jishin.  Earthquake.

I looked around.  The curriculum coordinator teacher, Mr. Ogawa, was pointing at one of the telephones that stood on a plastic stand.  It was indeed shuddering.  It wasn't a big deal for the first few seconds we stopped to pay attention.  Earthquakes are a part of life in Japan.  But I'll admit that this was the first one I'd felt during school, for I was feeling it now, under my feet, and getting stronger.  It was only when another teacher ordered everyone to duck under a desk did I register, numbly, that this was serious.

I cannot describe to you what it felt like.  The whole building felt as if it had snapped from it's foundations and was sliding around on marbles, back and forth, back and forth, for the longest two minutes of my life.  It's not even so much the earthquake itself so much as what it does to you: it makes you feel completely disconnected from anything solid.  You ever had those nasty, plunging sensations in your chest, when you feel panic, real, wild panic set in?  Imagine that feeling, continuously, for two minutes.

But there was the added effect that, even with my complete lack of experience, I knew that I was in the middle of one of Japan's biggest Earthquakes.  I knew there and then that this would be international news.  And I was in the middle of it, right now.  It wasn't a thrill: thrills are positive feelings.  Thrills make you feel powerful and pumped up.  This was an anti-thrill: sure, my heart raced and I felt very aware of myself and my surroundings, but I felt weak, useless, tiny and insignificant up against nature at her most cruel.  I was stuck in the middle of something big, and there was nothing - nothing - I could do but hold on.

This was, as best as I can put into words, how I felt.  But this is all analysis and after-the-fact.  At the time, all these feelings clashed simultaneously, continuously over those long, two minutes, compressing into a dull roar in my ears.

Then, slowly, the shaking tapered away.  I couldn't be sure if the shaking truly stopped, because my hands hadn't.  We waited.  There's no reason or rhyme to earthquakes, and another one may well have been on it's way.  But it didn't.  We'd gained respite at last, or at least, a chance to try - and fail - to comprehend what had just happened.  Teachers and students alike stared at each other in silence.  One teacher regained enough sense to grab the TV remote and switch on the staff room TV.

Newscasters in hard hats.  Studios in a frenzy.  Prefecture after prefecture scrolling by with levels of earthquake strength.  And in the corner, a map of Japan, nearly the entire coast surrounded by an angry red line as if the entire country were under quarantine.  Tsunami Warning.  Head to higher ground.

The Tohoku Earthquake: Introduction

 March has arrived.  And with it, the cold weather has begun to lose it's sting, and spring is in the air.

But when March finally arrived, there was only one thing on the collective minds in Japan.  Even if we didn't want it to be, it was thrust upon us upon the morning of the first, as the ground shook with yet another muscular quake.  I'm talking, of course, about the Tohoku Earthquake, which as of this Sunday, March 11th, at 2:46pm, will be one year in the past.

I've hinted at the Tohoku Earthquake in previous posts, but I haven't really delved into my experience in full, for experience I did (though I was lucky enough not be in the most heavily scarred prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima).  I want to be clear, though, that this isn't because I didn't want to talk about it: I remember when I returned home for Christmas, and my friends and family were curiously quiet on the subject until I breached it.  It turns out that they thought I didn't want to talk about it.  A kind gesture, to be sure, but I think they overestimated just how bad it was for me personally.  Sure, it was bad.  It was terrifying, unnerving and left me with a pervading sense of dread, but it wasn't so bad that I can't bring my myself to relive it.  Which I will do this week, in parts, culminating on Sunday itself.

RIP The Cynic In Me

There are many, many things I love about Japan.  Well, of course there is; I wouldn't fly thousands of miles from my native country and spend so much money, time and effort setting myself up here.  Admittedly, over time the delights of Japan fade into the background of daily living, but they're always still there, albeit more subtle.

One of these things is the lack of cynicism in Japan.  It's true that I am a naturally cynical person: you can ask anyone who knew me back when I resided in the UK that my default mindset was that of being mildly irritated.

I wasn't the only one.  It seemed to me that so many things exist in the UK just to make you angry or frustrated.  Television, for instance.  It was quite telling, for instance, that one of the programs on just before the New Year's countdown was 'Most Annoying People of 2011', which we actually watched for a few minutes.  It seems I, along with so many other people, get a grim kick out of sneering and sniping at others, and I play right into the provider's hands time after time.

I cannot even describe to your the overriding atmosphere of cynicism in UK, either.  Maybe it's because the native tongue is my first language, and I understand all that I hear, that could be a factor.  But that couldn't just be it: on the two occasions I've returned to the UK to visit family, within days I feel my new sunny outlook clouding over with it's old feeling of annoyance.

But this simply doesn't exist in Japan.  Much is made of the unreadable Japanese, but I will tell you something, there can be no doubting that the people are definitely happier.  There may indeed be a level of putting-on-a-face, but even with that, I can guarantee that if you could measure how mollified and calm people are, Japan would rate higher than the UK.  Far higher.

It just seems that whenever something nice happens in the UK, or there's a great idea, it gets moaned over and shouted down.  The Olympics, for example.  I'm as conscious of white elephants as the next man, but anyone who denies that the Olympics are a force for good are kidding themselves.  Yet kid themselves they do.  Ask any man on the street in the UK, even London, what they think of the upcoming Olympics right now, and there's a good chance your majority response will be a negative one.  There won't be an overriding reason for the negativity, it's just that cynicism and pessimism are the default.

And this is for something big, mind.  I feel like the UK misses out on so many good initiatives because of towering cynicism sometimes.  We Brits can't seem to welcome anything that won't be free, of benefit to everyone and have an amazing point to it.  Take the Melody Roads in Japan, for example.  Here and there, in Japan, is a stretch of road covered in strategically-placed ridges, and if ran over at the right speed, the reverberations in the car will sound like a song.

Is it useful?  Hell no.  Does it benefit anyone or have a point?  Or course not.  But it's a lovely little touch that can put a real smile on your face.  There's thousands of examples like these in Japan, little visual and interactive trinkets that would never have worked in the UK for moaning about eyesores or pointlessness (and of course, for the chance of a good old moan.  People famously complain about things they have no idea about).  But it's these little touches, these little curiosities, that can really lift your mood.  Doesn't that make them worthwhile.  Look at the huge Gundam statue in the picture above, for example.  You just couldn't get away with this kind of thing elsewhere.  But you can in Japan, and Japan is all the better for it.

Naturally, being more passive to crazy ideas has pros and cons.  Japanese people could be accused of being easily swayed into agreeing with something they don't necessarily agree with.  For example, nobody could deny the brilliance of the train system, from a pedestrian's view they can be terrible eyesores sometimes, carving right through a city like a river.  Chances are it was met with minimal resistance, too.

But on the whole, I love that Japan and it's people are, on the whole, less cynical than the UK.  Some things may be so mind-numbingly daft and stupid but I can't help but roll my eyes sometimes, but on the whole it's a nice feeling to be less angry at everything all the time.

The Long Haul

As March approaches, we are approaching the period known in Japan as 新生活 (Shinseikatsu, literally meaning new life).  It's a time of general upheaval and change for people's lives, be it starting a new school (school years start in April in Japan), a new job, going to university, and/or moving to a new place altogether, probably to cater for the former.

Well, after nearly two years in Japan, it looks like I will be experiencing my first real 新生活.  Don't get me wrong, I've already become accustomed to spring-time being a period of major changes in my life (two years ago was when I moved to Japan, and last March...well, I think we all know what happened there), but this will be my first proper physical move within Japan.  I will have a new job and a new apartment, and generally, my circumstances look set to get much better - not that they were bad in the first place!

I'm stupidly excited, but also quite nervous.  True, this isn't the plunge into the unknown as it was two years ago, but it feels like I'm properly settling myself into Japan now, no longer in limbo.  I'll admit, the toughest period for me was around October/November time, when I had to do some serious soul-searching to decide, as Mick Jones once sung, "Should I stay or should I go?" It was the hardest decision I had to make, far harder than the transition from 1st to 2nd year, because I knew that if I decided to stay this time, it would mean Japan for the long haul.  There comes a period when you have to start calling a place home.  Was I ready to call Japan that?  In the end, I found the answer was, yes.

Since then, it's been a flurry of activity.  The next couple of months will be hectic, stressful and vital, but ultimately, I know I've made the right decision now.  I miss the UK, my family and my friends there, and if I had Zeus-esque powers I'd move the UK and plonk it nearer to Japan so I'd be closer to them (and cheaper too!), but in the end, I found I just wasn't ready to end my time in Japan quite yet.  I'm quietly proud of just how far I've come in just two years, how much I've seen and experienced, and I'm not ready for that to end yet.

To all who read my blog, I hope you will join me as we plunge deeper down the rabbit hole...