I think it is time to admit defeat, to the effect that I haven’t succeeded in writing about Japan. It’s not been a case of procrastination or even of not finding the right words or register, but simply that I wanted neither to summarise the experience to a series of highlights (with bullet points, perhaps, included) or to write an exhaustive narrative in which every feature was detailed. It’s more than a month since I got back and it’s still a fresh memory. I remain uncertain of what else to do other than to write about the more recent past.
November is the month in which my teaching load lightens, but before I can feel the effects of this in a reduction of workload, the gap is often flooded with something else. First it was student exams, then social events above and beyond the usual calendar, new friends, dog shows and now a UTI that has laid me low and drawn my attention to the way in which I may have let my levels of personal stress rise, of late, beyond that which is wise. I feel as if the last two months have extended me in all kinds of directions involving both happy and testing experiences—sometimes simultaneously—and I am dreaming of some respite in which I find my feet again.
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I did not think, in truth, that I would ever go to Japan. A school friend went there when we were about nineteen to visit her sister, and came back with tales that seemed to me all tinged with dismay: the urban onslaught, the masculinist the culture, the mixture of fascination with and disdain for foreigners. The Kobe earthquake hit while she was in air, en route, and much television time was taken with scrolling lists of the names of those who had died. The whole experience seemed too much of an assault on her sensibilities, and I took from this the thought that I, notably less adventurous than she, would never thrive there.
But there is a big difference between being nineteen and now, of course, and the cultural ground beneath my feet has shifted considerably since then. The wonderful (and sometimes not) students I have had from many Asian countries in the last few years have seeded in me first a curiosity about their home countries, metropolis giving way to megacity in a westward procession from Japan, to the eastern seaboard of China, down to Taipei, back through the inland provincial cities of China and down, travelling south-west and then south, to Hong Kong and the cities of south-eastern Asia. And beyond the cities, the agrarian and industrialised countryside and hinterland, the weight of centuries of Buddhism and native religions, human aspiration and art and war … When the students from Yokohama came this autumn to do their semester abroad and brought with them their sweet natures and sharp minds I wanted nothing more than to see them at home, on campus and in situ, to find out what made them tick so well when they were here.
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To get ready for Japan required a lot of preparation in a relatively short time, which was stressful. It was the first time I’d travelled significantly abroad for work, and the feeling that I was not only representing Concrete University but also responsible to my many bosses (my corner of the campus is hierarchical indeed) was frazzling if I though about it too much. Not least among these concerns was the fact I was travelling with my immediate boss. When I get tired, I get mouthy; I was worried about saying something that might incriminate me later, either about myself or someone else.
What I hadn’t thought about in all this is how I would feel when I got back, other than that I would be relieved to have a bit less work on my plate till the end of the year. I hadn’t thought of the possibility that everything would go brilliantly, or that I would love the city and the region, or that the visit would seed a desire in me to return as soon as possible. Coming back after just these experiences, with no source of further funding yet secured, meant what I might politely describe as a big downer. The myriad systems, networks and deadlines of Concrete University seemed to be combining to keep me down, and my rapid, passionate attachment to Japanese food saw me wandering ruefully the aisles at the local Asian grocery looking for ingredients which I still don’t know how to cook with.
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There’s a set of parentheses in the middle of the last two-and-a-half weeks, within which I went to Japan. That experience—surely among the best in my history of both travel and work—deserves its own entry, possibly even its own page. But, as I keep telling my students, even the best texts need their contexts too, and so this entry is a tidying up, a noting down of what happened before I set off for Tokyo-Yokohama, and what’s happened since my return.
When I came back from Wellington, three weeks ago now, I was lightly abuzz thanks to tentative plans made with Particle Man. Within a week these had not so much gone awry as been revealed never to have been plans at all but instead words, palliatives, not the truth but something close to opposite. So he has his new girlfriend and I have the moral high ground, which could be a lonely place except that I have too much to be getting on with really to dwell on it. Still, I get weary of functioning as a kind of mirror in which my companions-of-choice discover their lack of mettle when it comes to being straight with me. I’m not sure one ever gets used to it, but such revelations pack a little less of a punch than they once did, and that’s something.
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The number of near (or moderately near) and dear readers who have murmured to me (politely) of late that they would read these pages if only a new entry were posted is, erm, increasing. I think it’s probably a sign of how content I am with things at present that I feel less like writing, since self-narration tends to function for me like a form of wrestling: I in the lucha libre mask and boots, and whatever worries are eating away at me pinned to the mat by wordy prose. These days, a lot of that struggle takes place in my own head, not on the on-line page, which means, by the same token, less entertainment for the tiny slice of the masses that congregates here.
So, no solution; but I can say that I am enjoying spring, even when it’s an icy, snowy, wind-chilled sort of spring as this month has so far been. On return from MelSyd three weeks ago it was as if the neighbourhood itself had both grown and shrunk: the streets seemed wider but more empty at the same time, the skyline broader and the people quieter. It was a couple of days before I recovered from the headspin of the change of scene, including long hours spent waiting for harvestbro to return from various assignations and adventures, but the break threw me back on my own resources and left me calmer for it (once I recovered from the sleep deprivation).
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