First off, I’d like to offer a warm welcome to the incoming bloggers! I can’t wait to read about what adventures your semester or year-abroad brings. Also, I should also offer my apologies for my lack of posts – I have only one excuse, and sadly, it’s not Godzilla. It is the fact it’s been rainy season here. See, most people don’t know Japan is actually a tropical island; so from the beginning of June to mid-July, you get a lot of rain, humidity, and high temperatures all the time, which makes just about everyone miserable, so much so that even the crime rates go up. So, apart from dragging myself to class at 9am on Saturdays and attempting to memorize every possible way of writing “economic meltdown”, I was also dealing with constant, dreary weather. Which left me, in my free time, groaning on my bed to my imaginary butler Jeeves and praying for sunny weather. A horrible excuse I know, but I wasn’t quite expecting the scenery out of a ‘Nam movie when I envisioned my last month here.
Also, June constituted the last full month of classes, so man, did the teachers pile it on. Exams are coming up next week, so I figured I get in a good post before the madness of studying and the return to good ‘ol America. Luckily, my one outing worthy of mention in June wasn’t completely rained out…
A returnee friend told me about a bus tour in the countryside that took advantage of the seasonal irises (for those of you who don’t know, “returnee” means someone who’s lived outside of Japan, because that makes them no longer “truly” Japanese. Yeah, it’s that xenophobic.) So, on a gloomy Sunday, we boarded a bus with 20 elderly Japanese people and drove out past Narita Airport (which translates to just a little over an hour out of town by bus).
The first stop was a traditional sake maker, one of the few remaining in Japan today. Its brews have won national and international awards, but since the entire tour was in Japanese, I have no idea which ones. The place has been around since the early 1900s at least, and everything in it is quaint; as you can see in the pictures, none of its tools or machines are the stainless steel thought of when the word “brewery” is mentioned.
Next up was a boat ride down the small, man-made river running down the center of the next town over. You can probably tell from the photos, but once you leave Tokyo, you can see a real difference in the way people live; it’s much less modern – some would say more traditional, some would say more inconvenient. It’s one of the things I warn people about who want to get into the JET Program just to get to Tokyo – usually, if you’re recruited as an English teacher, you’re getting to get sent to the ass-end of nowhere. Most people this happens to are miserable, because they expected to be in Kyoto or Tokyo, so if you are considering JET, be prepared.
Anyway, back to the boat. It was powered by a small engine, but steered by an elderly woman who had lived in the town all her life. She explained to us what all the places we were passing by used to be – a medical practice, a post office, a theater – before urbanization usurped the place of all its wealth and young minds. Obviously, as crowded as the town was on a Sunday, it lives off of tourism now. And while I knew I was helping the people of the town by being there, and taking part as a tourist, I also knew I was hurting their town by stepping into the place as a weekender, as someone who only wants to be there for the sights and leave when Monday comes around. This, I suppose, is the plight of a lot of the non-urban areas in Japan, though few are even as blessed as this one to get tourists. Everyone comes to Japan expecting everywhere to be like Tokyo, and then is surprised when the country is just as hard to look at as our own forgotten places.
Last was the highlight of the bus tour, the Iris Festival. According to the brochure, there was apparently an entire town that lives off this one event, and have dedicated an entire field to it. I was incredulous, but just look:
That my friends, was a lot of irises.
Overall, while the day was fun, it wasn’t quite the relaxing day-off I’d been envisioning. In the end, I ended up with more food for thought from seeing all the small towns suffering under the weight of urbanization and the bad economy than anything else. Hopefully, my last post won’t be this depressing…
