Things I See When I Run From Zombies (flashback Friday)

I'd read great things about the Zombies, Run! app, but my phone is too old an crap to run it. Last year I discovered that I can use the 5k training version, and since I can't actually run further than a block without collapsing in a gasping heap it was probably the better choice anyway. So, I loaded up some tunes and headed out. While most of the episodes are timed and will just interupt your music when the time is up, the prologue episode goes by songs. This was a bit of an issue... what was estimated to be a 45 minute work out took me an hour and a half. My playlist contained Iron Maiden, Amon Amath and Blind Guardian~ the guitar solos alone are the length of a whole pop song! Still, I loved the app and I loved exploring my neighbourhood. I saw so many awesome things on that first day that I was hooked (it was that time I encountered a wild pheasant). As soon as I got pregnant the running had to stop (I started vomiting 12 hours after conceiving and didn't stop until just before his head emerged), but here are some pictures from the couple of months I kept it up.

Misty farms

Caution: snakes

Stabby bamboo of death

Bloody moon

I had no idea there was a shrine in the middle of that patch of trees

So Cyberpunk- Koi under and oily film in what looked like an abandoned gated community

Hobbits?

Early sakura

Terrifying-alien-egg-plant

Oranges rotting on a tree before falling into the well. A sweet, sickly odor fills the still air. Zombies are close.

Old roofing tiles reclaimed by nature

I swear I heard moaning behind me...

Definitely a zombie lair

Hiding in the walls, perhaps

Wild wisteria

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Dog on Back- Flashback Friday

Enjoying the view while the human does all the work... excellent shiba-ing!

Back when we just had the one dog... and no kids... and no car, we were a bit stuck on how to transport him around. We found this carrier which is actually for toddlers but modified with a dog insert and thought it was the perfect way to get around by bicycle with dog safely on one of our backs. Like most things we tried with Hayate, it didn't work out quite as planned. He enjoyed it, but his favorite part of the experience was biting the back of the man's head. The man tried wearing a helmet to discourage this, but then Hayate developed motion sickness and vomited all down the man's back. The man called it quits at that point.

Many thanks to Helen of Inn by the Sea for giving me a kick back into blogging with the "five days challenge". The idea is to post five photos, one per day for five days, and to write a story or poem to go with each photo. For each day that we post we are supposed to invite one person to participate.

Today I am tagging Yurikachan for the "five days challenge". Yurika, if you would like to participate, post a photo every day for five days and write a story to go along with each photo. Your story can be fiction or non-fiction. It can be a short paragraph, a page, or a poem. Each day, please select one person to carry on the challenge. It's just for fun, there's no pressure to join in ;)

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Look at me, watch me, see me (Flashback Friday)

Winner of an children's poetry contest, written by a first-grader:
Hey, mum...
Don't look at your smart-phone
Look at me

The thing kids in orphanages said to us most often wasn’t “play with me” or “carry me” but “look at me, watch me.” Whenever we went to play there would be a cluster of children around us all the time, calling out “watch me do handstands!” “Look at me run to that tree!” At school they would be in a class of 30 to 40. They’d come home to an institution where again, they’d be one of 50, 60, even 100. What they wanted most from us was our undivided attention, our focus on them and them alone, even for a few minutes. Look at me, watch me, see me. Tiger’s orphanage had kept a photo album for him, and when he first came to live with us he loved pointing to group photographs and asking me to guess which one was him. It blew his mind that I could identify him as a five year old in his kindergarten class photo or that I recognised him in his baby pictures. How did I know it was him? He would ask me to do it again, over and over. Look at me, watch me, see me.

 In my first year as an ALT I taught a 4^th grade elementary class and noticed a gregarious boy with shocking bleached-blond hair who had a gift for languages and was generally charming and hilarious. The home room teacher was going out of her way to be nice to him, and I had been at that school for nearly a year but had never seen him before, so I assumed he was a new transfer student. He was barefoot; maybe he’d brought the wrong shoes for the new school and taken them off in embarrassment, I thought. I asked about him after the class finished. “Oh no, he’s been here since kindergarten” the teacher told me. “He is often absent though. He has many younger siblings and they’re abused, so he stays at home to look after them.” I stared at her, blankly. What did she mean, they were abused? If the school knew about abuse and had for years, why had nothing been done? A few months later the boy, I’ll call him Shouma, moved up into 5^th grade, meaning I saw him more often (5^th and 6^th graders have more English lessons). He was the kind of boy every Shonen Jump manga features; always smiling, throwing his head back to laugh in an exaggerated “HAHA”, holding his rice bowl to his face and shoveling food in so fast you feared he’d choke then demanding seconds with his mouth still full. He loved to make everyone laugh, and he was universally liked, but close to no one in particular. I asked him once about his lack of shoes, and he told me that it was painful to wear them. He pointed cheerfully to cigarette burns on his feet before running off to play. 

At the time I couldn’t understand why no one seemed to be doing anything except being extra nice to him. Shouma is part of the reason I initially did the research that led to this post on the situation regarding child abuse and institutionalisation in Japan. Although ALT support has been reduced even from the low level we had when I was on the JET Programme, we did at least have periodic meetings where we could discuss issues with our peers. I raised Shouma at one such meeting, and another ALT told me that she’d been asked by her school to be particularly encouraging of one female student, because “her uncle rapes her but she doesn’t have anywhere else to live”. We sat silently, not knowing how to help each other. For a long time I was simply angry, and felt betrayed by the school. Surely they had some training for this, why was I the only one who seemed to be worrying about him? As I learned more, I began to understand their position a little better. 

There would be relatively little a social worker could do to intervene. If the parents could be persuaded to give up the children voluntarily they would almost certainly have been separated and placed into different care situations. For an older child who has been responsible for keeping younger siblings alive, feeding them and sheltering them from blows with his or her own body, to be separated and have no idea what had become of them would be the cause of intolerable anguish. The most likely outcome for Shouma would be placement in a large orphanage, with all of the attendant issues that come with institutionalisation. I don’t want to suggest that abuse is ever OK, but there is some research to indicate that abused children may fare better than neglected children and even the best large scale orphanages offer little more than benign emotional neglect and at worst are sites of abuse themselves. I don’t know what the school’s reasoning was, but as I did more research I came to feel that perhaps trying to get social services involved would be unhelpful and potentially damaging. I moved from rage at the teachers to rage at the entire system. There are many wonderful individuals who have dedicated their lives to trying to improve the system, but Japan still fundamentally fails its most vulnerable. I watched Shouma whenever I could. When the kids were working quietly at their desks and he no longer felt the centre of attention, his face changed. I saw a different Shouma. He seemed much smaller, somehow. 

When he graduated elementary school I cast my eyes around the auditorium throughout the ceremony, wondering what his parents looked like. Wondering if I had the courage to try and say something to them in my imperfect Japanese, which becomes even worse when I am trying to communicate something emotional. I watched him as everyone gathered outside afterwards for photographs. He parents weren’t there. No one had come to watch him. He kicked off his shoes and walked home alone, his diploma in one hand and his shoes in the other. 

A few weeks later junior high began. The rules are stricter there; he had to dye his hair back to black. He took the opportunity of the new environment to ramp up his class-clown act. I remember one class in particular he’d taken down a wire coat hanger (we use them to hang cleaning rags to dry in the classrooms) and twisted it into the shape of a giant erect penis, which he held in his crotch and complained loudly about how stiff it was. The teacher said “put that down immediately” so Shouma used his other hand to try to bend it downwards, but as soon as he released it, of course it flicked back up again. “I’m trying” he yelled brightly, “but it just won’t stay down”. The entire class was in hysterics and even the teacher had trouble keeping her stern face on. As the year progressed, though, cracks began to show. He was an incredibly clever kid, and the pace in elementary school is so slow you can probably pay attention 10% of the time and keep up if you’re bright. By junior high though, everything accumulates quickly and if you missed the key point last week you’ll find yourself with no idea what is going on in this week’s class. His innate intelligence stopped being enough to carry him through, and he grades dropped badly. His need to be the centre of attention and make everyone laugh became increasingly painful to watch, and as the other kids got used to him he began pushing his behaviour to further and further extremes trying to get reactions.

My desk at the junior high was opposite the school nurse’s, and she would often treat minor complaints there rather than in the infirmary. We saw a lot of Shouma. One morning he came in early, before classes had begun, asking for a dressing for what looked to me like a large burn on his arm. As she patched him up the nurse quizzed him in her kind but firm way: “How did you get hurt like this so early in the morning?” “I fell on the way to school” he answered. “If you fell outside there would be dirt and debris in here, but it’s clean” she chided. “I feel in the corridor, inside school but on my way to class” he amended. “It’s pretty bad” she said, “shall I send someone to clean up the blood in the corridor?” He shifted uncomfortably. “I cleaned it up before I came here” he said, looking at the ground. I listened curiously. I assumed the elementary school would have notified the junior high about his home situation, it’s the kind of information teachers are usually careful to share, but I wasn’t sure. I asked the nurse if she knew he was being abused and she said “oh yes, I know, he lies about all his injuries. But until he tells me for himself there’s nothing I can do except treat the wounds.”

Second grade junior high (8^th grade) is hard for most kids. Helpfully, in my experience, they all go through puberty at once and get the nasty moody part over and done in the one year. It makes them not very fun to teach, but it does mean they are back to their usual lovely selves by third (9^th) grade. Shouma lost something that year. I don’t know how to describe it, really, except that he had always been so bright, and the light seemed to go out. Around that time we were well into our adoption application. Our social worker asked us bluntly “how old are you willing to go?” and hating the idea of having to say no to any child, we settled on 12. I was 28 and in principal in Australia the adoptive parents should be 18 years older than the adoptee, so we were pushing it, but we assumed (erroneously as it turned out) that we’d be waiting for a few years before a placement anyway. Nevertheless, when we said “12” I immediately thought of Shouma. There are children like him all over Japan, and although he wasn’t being placed for adoption I still felt like we’d just said “no” to him. It’s an awful (but necessary, I do understand that) part of the adoption process, listing the children you will say no to. “Yes” I wrote for cerebral palsy. Under autism I wrote “yes if high functioning”. Under Down’s Syndrome I wrote “no” and struggled with myself for days.

A couple of months before the summer holidays in Shouma’s second year of junior high I got a call that we had been matched with a little boy. I was given just a few cursory details over the phone in that initial call. The little boy is now our son, Tiger. But his real name he shares with Shouma, and that shook me profoundly. It was my last term teaching with the JET Programme. On my last day at Shouma’s school he had a fever. He was sitting, slumped on a chair in the infirmary waiting for permission to go home, and missed my farewell class. I wanted to say goodbye but I didn’t want to wake him up. I tried to write him a letter. “I’ll always think of you as the boy with blond hair” I wrote. “You are very special to me. You share a name with my son, and I think about you when I see him.” What else could I say? Like every other adult in his life, for the past four years I had been a bystander to his abuse. I left the letter beside him without waking him up.

I looked at Shouma, I watched him. I saw him, and I did nothing.

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Orientation Meeting for Prospective Adoptive Parents (Flashback Friday)

The gorgeous image is by Brett Davies, taken from here.

This is a post I wrote over a year ago, and it has been sitting in my draft folder because I was worrying about potential invasion of the privacy of the other people I discuss. After a log time thinking about it, I'm confident that it would be impossible to identify any individual mentioned here, so I am publishing it.

It’s interesting how telling people we were adopting opened floodgates of infertility stories. I wonder how many Japanese couples are struggling to conceive while feeling like they are the only ones. One teacher I worked with who had recently had her first child told me that she tried for eight years, another for five. One of my naginata friends and her husband were never able to have a child. I feel like an interloper in this world of private pain and monthly disappointments. I’ve never tried to conceive and have no reason to believe that I couldn’t. We are adopting as our first choice, not as a last resort after all else has failed, but the people around me always assume the latter. Early in our exploration of adoption in Japan we attended an orientation meeting with a private adoption agency. It was a pretty eye opening experience. Our cheerful responses about looking forward to adoption seemed incongruous in the atmosphere of sadness. At the start of the meeting we all introduced ourselves, and the other attendees all discussed the length of time they had been trying to conceive and the fertility treatments they had tried. After the introductions we realised that the majority of couples there were not potential applicants but successful adoptive parents who were there to help with the orientation. In fact, only one other couple was there for the orientation, which was the only meeting in Kyushu that year and was compulsory for applicants with the agency.

After the introductions we watched a video about the agency that outlined their policies, after which we were expected to give 感想, responses or impressions. There seemed to be an expectation that we would object to the policies, for example not being permitted to request a specific kind of child (age, race, sex or ability). We then watched a second video about a couple whose adopted daughter experienced some delays in her physical development, and how they felt about it. Again we were asked for feedback, and again there was a heavy expectation that we would be uncomfortable with the possibility of adopting a child who may be disabled. When we responded that if we conceived a child naturally we would have no control over sex or ability either, there was some surprised murmuring around the room, as though the comparison hadn't occurred to anyone else. I learned later that the government agencies (CGCs) often prefer to keep infants in institutionalised care until they are old enough to access if their development is "normal" before placing them for adoption; a policy that becomes a sort of self-fulfilling-prophesy since it is a well documented fact the institutionalisation in early life causes developmental delays.  After running through the policies in greater detail and also going over the costs, we broke for lunch.

The afternoon session was "small group time", and we sat with a group of parents who had successfully adopted through the agency. Most had brought their children with them, and the kids had a fine time playing together while the adults talked. This ongoing support network was the thing we most liked about the agency, although we later learned some less positive information and are happy that ultimately we did not proceed with them. After telling us about their experiences the "sempai" parents then asked us some questions and encouraged us to ask them anything. In a slightly humorous moment, one gentleman asked us earnestly if we were comfortable with the agency's policy that required us to tell our hypothetical future child s/he was adopted. Trying to keep a straight face I responded that a Japanese child with two white parents would probably not find that to be particularly shocking news. This led to some questions about race; were we really OK with not having a say over the child's race? One woman explained that while she was OK with the rule when it came to disability, she had difficulty agreeing to accept a child of any race. "What if the baby were black?" She asked. "I mean I don't mind, but other people might be so cruel and I really worried about if I could handle that."

In the late afternoon we merged back into a single group and the two prospective adoptive couples were asked, again, to make some comments. We said we'd enjoyed seeing all the children playing together and that this ongoing support was wonderful. The other couple said they had decided to try a few more rounds of fertility treatments before revisiting the idea of adoption.

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Vindicating My Face (Flashback Friday)

OK, my face can be kind of scary, but I've got nothing on this terrifying "training baby" doll!

The infant home we spent a couple of years visiting had a very progressive attitude toward having people through for training purposes. University social work students, prospective foster parents and all sorts of other interested parties were able to spend time there getting first hand experience of the system and of the children's needs. Some were timid and earnest, wanting to learn everything and assume nothing. Others, usually women who had experience in education or childcare, were overly confident that "all children are the same" and that exactly how they had always interacted with other children would be just fine with institutionalised kids as well. On one occasion I had a slight run in with one of the later kind of visitor.

The very first baby I held at the home was a little boy just a few months old who I shall call Napoleon, because his real name is equally grandiose and also because he was particularly tiny. While a lot of babies were in and out of care, or stayed for a month or two then left for good, no one ever came back for Napoleon. Visiting every week, I was able to develop much more of a bond with him than with kids I saw less frequently. One day, when he was about 15 months old, Napoleon was having a hard time. He was teething, he had a slight fever, and another kid had hit him over the head with a wooden block. I was giving him a cuddle but he was crying very hard. At this in-opportune time, a staff member came in with a new "observer", an older lady who took one look at the situation and announced "He's scared of you because he isn't used for foreign faces, I'll clam him down." She confidently strolled over, plucked Napoleon from my arms and spun her back to me to shield him from the terrifying sight of my big nose and lack of epicanthic fold.  "There there" she said, "you're OK now."

Actually, for a few seconds Napoleon did stop crying. I guess being unceremoniously grabbed by a complete stranger will have that effect. Before she could congratulate herself on her success, however, the "observer" copped a punch to the face (from Napoleon, not me). He punched and kicked and squirmed until she put him down, upon which he ran back to me, threw himself into my lap and buried his face in my neck.

Miss you, Napoleon. My scary face thinks of you often.

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Loving Libraries (Flashback Friday)

Some time last year I was at the university discussing my upcoming employment. Since I wasn't actually employed at the time, I didn't have a library access card, but a friend snuck me in with a sneaky swipe of his. Unreasonably afraid of being discovered, I climbed the tiny back stairs instead of going through the main entrance. The staircase was so small I doubt my man's shoulders could have squeezed into the narrow space. The staircase opened into an area I'm used to calling the stacks... books so rarely requested that they are stored out of the way in a less accessible part of the library. The room was dark, with motion sensor lights flicking on slowly row by row as I tip-toed, enjoying the silence after an intense few months of stay-at-home parenting a child who needs constant noise to feel safe. The still air was filled with that special musty smell of old books. I may have cried, a little. There are a few places guaranteed to make me feel at ease: mountains, rivers and libraries. Nowhere really compares to a proper university library, though.

When I was ten, my father started his PhD and he, my younger sister and I lived on and off in an ex-ambulance parked near the university library. Dad fitted out the ambulance with bunk beds, and we showered at the university swimming pool. We had movie nights in the AV section of the library, where the selection of films was geared towards screen studies, meaning that although we weren't allowed to watch Sesame Street, we saw Thelma & Louise and Thelma & Louise. In the day time we lived in the library while dad was studying. We took dolls and built multi-story doll-houses on empty book shelves. We found the children's literature section and read all of it. The library was massive and one day we explored too far and got lost. After walking for what felt like hours Verity started crying and refused to go any further. I piggy-backed her, desperately trying to remember the Dewey Decimal codes near our starting point. Eventually we found a water fountain in a study hall and ran to it like desert explorers finding an oasis. I finally remembered the title of a book I'd seem near dad's desk, entered it into the catalog and despite no experience using a computer, we figured out the location. When we got back, triumphant at the trials and tribulations we had over come, dad hadn't even noticed we'd been gone. Universities in general, and libraries in particular, have been under my skin ever since.

These literate little birds have built a nest in the kanji for "tree". Picture thanks to Furiida.

Of all the emails I've had as a result of this blog, my favorite is from Vincent the librarian, who emailed me with a book recommendation. Because that is the magical power of librarians, guardians of the promised land. They reach out and tell you what you were looking for even before you know it yourself. Or, as he said: "I'm a librarian.  It's what I do.  Then walk off into the sunset." Thank you Vincent! One day I'll get around to writing about the book, Yokohama Yankee: My Family's Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan by Leslie Helm. It's a great read.

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When I Was Mongolian (Flashback Friday)

You may not be aware that I was, once and many years ago, Mongolian. It was just for a couple of hours in the mountains of... Gifu? Possibly Aichi or Mie but probably Gifu. See? I had a hat and everything.

I have been trying to impress on my international students the difference between gaikoku in Japanese and any translation into English. "Foreign countries" or "abroad" just don't carry the same connotations. The time I was Mongolian is a good example of the difference, I think.

A small village in remote mountains wanted to invite some foreigners to attend a festival and liven things up, so the community leaders very kindly paid for a bunch of international students (myself included) to travel into the mountains, stay at a ryokan, have a big beery party/karaoke night with them, then attend the festival the next day. There had to be some sort of purpose beyond just attending while foreign, so the solution hit upon was that we would run a Mongolian booth, selling Mongolian cookies while wearing the kind of things you can see in the picture. Our little band included Australian, American, Chinese, Korean and French students... but no one from Mongolia. At the end of the day, though, we were all gaikokujin from the gaikoku, and Mongolia is in the gaikoku, so it totally made sense. Apart from the deep awkwardness of dressing up as a nationality, the situation became even more confused when well meaning villagers asked us to teach them Mongolian words and phrases.

It was actually a lot of fun and I have fond memories of the kindness of the village leaders ("you're vegetarian and can't eat any of this food? Let's order more beer for you!"), but it remains one of the weirder things I've been asked to do.

For more articulate musings on "the gaikoku", click here and visit This Japanese Life.

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The Tea Ceremony of Awkward (Flashback Friday)

This is basically a slightly-edited version of an email I sent friends a few years ago, so the tone is a little different from my usual posts. I debated about posting the story because it seems ungrateful of the kindness we were shown and that really isn't how we felt... it was just very, very awkward! So, while reading please keep in mind that we were very grateful, and our desire not to too obviously reject the hospitality we were being shown is in fact the source of most of the cringe involved in this tale of woe!

On my last day of the winter holidays 2009-2010 the then-secretary of my Naginata club (and mother of one of my co-workers) had invited me and my little sister Verity (who is also vegetarian and was visiting Japan at the time) over to her house for afternoon tea. We got a lift with an English teacher I'll call Nunally who did Naginata with me. The secretary had a huge house on a steep hill overlooking the bay on one side and the city on the other. When we arrived she was wearing a beautiful kimono, and it turned out that “tea” actually meant a full tea ceremony. She had a dedicated tea ceremony room in her house. Verity is not a fan of green tea at all, let alone matcha, and she hates red bean paste, which is often in the sweets served with the tea, so we were a bit nervous. It went beautifully though, and Verity even managed to down a second cup. When it was over we signed hugely with relief and patted each other on the back. Little did we know. 

We left the tearoom and were ushered into the dining room, where our hostess had prepared a full New Year’s meal. Why she didn’t mention she was feeding us I have no idea. It was all exquisite and hand made- the soup had spinach leaves that she had grown in the garden and tied individually into little knots- and every last dish had seafood in it. We sat there petrified as she brought out dish after gorgeous dish that we couldn’t eat. She even made steamed shrimp custards in antique cups garnished with roe. She had hand rolled sushi which was vegetarian except for some crab cake, so we tried to subtly poke that bit out and eat the rest. Watching us mangle her dainty sushi she kindly suggested that if chop sticks were too hard for us we could use our fingers. Verity took a bite of something that looked like a segment of citrus fruit but turned out to be herring roe. I attempted the salad but it had shrimp AND spam (an ancient traditional Japanese ingredient). She brought out some chicken which we declined. It was excruciating. We managed to drink the soup despite the fish stock and crab cake, then pleaded fullness; so she packed it all up into Tupperware for us to take home. At that point we just wanted to die but we retired to a sun-room for three hours of attempting to make conversation (our hostess and her husband couldn't speak English, my Japanese was basic and Verity's non-existent) while being served half a dozen kinds of black tea each in a different antique cup (the monetary value of each being the main talking point each time). During this conversation I stupidly responded to a question about beef in Australia that we were vegetarian. “That’s why you didn’t eat the chicken” our hostess commented, then after a moment Nunally asked “what about seafood?” “Well, no, we don’t eat seafood” I squirmed. “What about in soup stock?” she persisted. “WOW this tea is GOOD” Verity chimed in. Argh! We felt that nothing could ever feel more awkward than that conversation.

Then they asked what sights I had taken Verity to and I explained that we hadn’t done much because I was sick, and had to go back to work the next day, but that before going back to Australia Verity wanted to try an outdoor hot spring (rotenburo). “Yes” they exclaimed, “you must! We’ll take you to one tomorrow while Sophelia is at work”. Now, hot springs are naked affairs, and before hopping in you all sit on a row of stools washing and thoroughly rinsing off any soap. For some reason Japanese people think that this is too complex for gaijin to understand, so I had visions of Verity being surrounded by old naked Japanese women trying to school her on the finer points of soaping. I tried to subtly diffuse the situation by saying to Nunally in English “Verity has her period now, so she can’t go.” Rather than tactfully transmitting this to our hostess Nunally just directly translated it into Japanese, including our hostess's husband in the announcement.

“What a pain” said our hostess, “will it be finished by Thursday? We could go on Thursday.”

“She doesn’t know when it will finish...”

“Well when did it start? How long are they usually?”

We were wrong about the vegetarianism being the peak of awkwardness.

Eventually feeling fairly safe that I had got her out of it, we headed to Nunally’s car for a lift home only to hear our hostess say “See you at 11 tomorrow then.” They had decided to take Verity sight seeing but had neglected to tell us. For me, it was over, but Verity got to enjoy another full day of awkward.

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