A blog about adventures, academia, adoption and other things starting with the letter 'A'. I'm a geek, a metal head, a shiba inu wrangler and a vegetarian, and I write about all of the above. You have been warned!
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.
On our way to see a famous waterfall we saw a hand-made wooden sign with excited red lettering pointing to a waterfall we'd never heard of. It was only a little detour, so we decided to take a look.
The waterfall itself was impressive, but look at the ruins! Like an abandoned cathedral... Christianity has a long history in Kyushu (there's a statue of Francis Xavier outside the prefectural government offices), but it seemed an unlikely explanation. We climbed down to take a closer look.
Braving some fallen trees and slippery rocks, we found we could actually go inside.
I wish the photo showed how lush the green really was.
In fact, the ruins were of an old hydro-electric station, but no less beautiful for their utilitarian past.
Soy milk and sesame nabe for dinner~ perfect end to a rainy day of exploring and a goodbye to a much-missed sister.
Reason #2 for the long time between photos is that my older sister came to visit so we have been busy hanging out with monkeys, ninja and playing in the snow.
Love Japan's sunny winters
We were chased by this ninja, but Tiger defeated him
When I read great blog posts I usually share them on facebook, but this is a nice way to share them all together with a bit more room for commentary. Not all of these posts are from this week by the way; I have been so busy that I am pretty far behind with my reading.
I'm joining Authentic Parenting and Hobo Mama for Sunday Surf. Share your best reading of the week, and link up your post at either blog!
For more great reading, visit Hobo Mama or Authentic Parenting for the latest Sunday Surf and linky. Happy Surfing!
Wise Words (Tim Minchin's Occasional Address at UWA)
Don't seek happiness. Happiness is like an orgasm. If you think about it too much it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy and you might find you get some as a side effect.We didn't evolve to be constantly content.
http://www.findingmagnolia.com/2013/09/some-thoughts-on-adoption-preparation.html
We had some discussion about whether or not we would have a biological child before adopting. From a health point of view, it would be better for my body to have a pregnancy before I'm thirty. On the other hand, I am so so glad we didn't. We could not give Tiger what he needs with other children in the picture, especially younger children.
I am not here to judge those who have faced very hard choices, because I
know what it feels like to try to get your child to sleep for two and a
half hours, while she screamed and cried and raged, every night for
I-don't-even-remember-how-long, and I know that none of the pre-adoption
training mentioned that possibility. I know what it feels like to be
unable to do anything else for an entire day because the one thing my
child needed was to be strapped on my back and taken for a very long
walk outside, or else she would scream her lungs out. I honestly cannot
imagine what it would have been like to manage that if she had not been
an only child at first, and had I not been able to be home with her. I
know I speak from a position of privilege. But I think that privilege
was something that Zinashi needed and benefitted from, and there was no
way to know before we brought her home with us if she would need more
intense help or not. We need to be preparing families for the
possibility that their child, regardless of age at the time of adoption,
might end up having some very big needs.
http://www.fineandfairblog.com/2013/09/dear-judgey-mcjudgerson.html
I share this humble as a now-reformed Judey McJudgerson. All parents I have glared at in disgust in the past: I apologise. Sincerely. And also that snarky article I once published in a local magazine about people pushing their older kids in strollers because they were too impatient to wait for the kids to walk at their own pace? Yeah, sorry about that too.
Dear Lady Judging Me At The Playground,
You seem to be reading a lot into the very tiny slice of my life that
you see. You see me vacantly tapping on my phone, and are apparently
filled with sadness for my children, whose lives you assume are slipping
away without me noticing. (I wonder what your own kids are doing that
you're missing while you sit in judgment of me?) You see my daughter
twirling in the sunlight. You see my son smiling and cooing. You see me
not noticing.
Would it be okay if I filled you in on some things you didn't see?
You didn't see this morning, when I greeted my waking daughter with a
smile and a kiss. You didn't see when I painstakingly helped her pour
her cereal and milk, then help her wipe up the spills. You didn't see me
cut up her fruit. You didn't see me dance like a ballerina while doing
so. You didn't see me smiling and baby talking to my son while I changed
the nastiest diaper you could imagine. You didn't see me grit my teeth
when he bit my breast, testing out the new teeth on the way, then sing a
silly song about how we don't bite Mama.
You didn't see me do all that before I'd had even a drop of coffee.
http://www.nohandsbutours.com/2013/09/05/dealing-with-grief/
I want to write more about this when I can. I was prepared for some feelings of loss... the loss of the lifestyle we had been enjoying and loss of some of the ideals and plans I had about family life that would necessarily be unattainable when we decided to adopt an older child. I was not prepared for what has been the biggest source of grief though, and that is the loss of the dream of the kind of parent I would be. Put simply, I guess, I thought I'd be better at it. It's hard to accept "doing the best I can" when what I want to be doing is "the very best that can be done".
But one thing that doesn’t get talked about very often is how an
adoptive parent should respond when they find themselves grieving.
Because…no matter how happy the adoptive parents may be or how much they
love their new addition…when a new child enters the family oftentimes a
part of their old life is “lost” for the adoptive family as well.
Suddenly the home that made sense and ran like a well-oiled machine is
thrown into chaos and confusion by things like a grieving child,
orphanage behaviors, attachment struggles, processing disorders, medical
needs, night terrors, or other children in the home regressing due to
the addition of a new sibling. If an older child joins the family, then
things like language barriers and cultural differences come into play.
It can feel like the magic trick where a magician quickly pulls the
tablecloth away…only you’re left wondering how and when the pieces will
fall into place again.
As a feminist, I should make clear that I believe in the true definition
of feminism … “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other
rights of women equal to those of men.” But this assumes that men have
rights.
In the case of Baby Veronica, her father did not have the rights that
her birth mother did. He was misled. Birth fathers should have equal
rights and protections, especially in the welfare of their children.
If a birth mother decides she cannot parent her child, and the birth
father wants to raise his child, he should be given the opportunity to
do so. No other adult should be given that right unless both birth
parents have relinquished it.
Dusten Brown has proven that he loves his daughter. He has provided for
her, cared for her, cuddled her and nurtured her for almost two years.
Baby Veronica knows he loves her, and she wants to stay with him. Her
right in all this is paramount. She deserves the love of her birth
father, the man she will never forget.
Lets [sic] look at incentives Stern (and others) may have for wanting to avoid confronting the realities of the procedure.
Like most circumcised men, Stern probably does not want it to be true
that his circumcision means that he is missing out sexually. Or that as
he ages, he will likely notice diminishing sensitivity in his glans. Or
that profit incentives played a role
in the push to remove his erogenous tissue; or that other people
altered his sexuality in a permanent way when he was still too young to
do anything about it.
But the facts are what they are.
Over 50% of penile nerve endings are removed during a circumcision,
including one-hundred percent of the Meissner’s Corpuscles, the unique
fine touch nerve receptors found only in fingertips and on the ridged
band of the penis.
Mucous membrane exposed to the air for decades does callus.
Many physicians earn sizable compensation for performing circumcisions.
And it is true that your circumcision means that someone surgically
altered your body in a permanent way without first having obtained your
consent.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to believe that all of these
sacrifices were not in vain, that they bought you some greater good? It
would, but we can’t just believe things because they are appealing. We
can’t in good conscience marinate in denial when that means asking
future generations to pay the price by allowing a harmful practice to
continue to play out on their flesh.
According to a recent story in the Japan Times the city’s Board of Ed has recalled a junior high school
textbook due to its “descriptions of the mass lynching of Koreans following the
1923 Great Kanto Earthquake.” During
the aftermath of that massive temblor, fear mixed with old hatreds to create a
tornado of violence that swept up Yokohama’s small ethnic Korean community in a
path of death and destruction. In his book,Yokohama
Burning, Joshua Hammer writes that army commanders “whipped up rumors about Korean well
poisonings.” The lies added more fuel to the fire as vigilantes roamed the
streets, hunting for human prey.
To get to the bottom of why, we need to define what makes someone
happy or unhappy in the first place. It comes down to a simple formula:
It's pretty straightforward -- when the reality of someone's life is
better than they had expected, they're happy. When reality turns out to
be worse than the expectations, they're unhappy.
And
Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched this,
finding that Gen Y has "unrealistic expectations and a strong
resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and "an inflated view of
oneself." He says that "a great source of frustration for people with a
strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel
entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren't in line with
their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the
level of respect and rewards they are expecting."
For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the
interview question, "Do you feel you are generally superior to your
coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?" He says that "if the
candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the 'why,'
there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement
perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and
deservingness. They've been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous
self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow
special but often lack any real justification for this belief."
There's a lot I like about this article, but there's a lot it glosses over too. After-all, every generation this century has bemoaned the terrible failings of the next. It isn't a new story. The following blog post gives a very nice reply:
I graduated in 2008. Remember 2008? Oh, right. The housing market
collapsed. Global stock markets plummeted. The Great Recession happened.
I had $25,000 of student loan debt and a liberal arts degree in English
and Theatre.
In other words: Oh, Hey, Real World. I’m Katherine. I’m HERE! What’s that, you say? We’re all kinda fucked? Oh. Okay. Neat.
And, furthermore
I exist in a world in which I don’t understand what a 401K is all about.
Social Security will not likely exist by the time I will need it.
I will never have a pension.
I’ve never even filed for unemployment. Because as a freelancer, I’m never in one place long enough to qualify.
This is not unique to my job description.
This is unique to my generation.
I live in a world in which the teachers in the city of Philadelphia
are on strike because their budget issues are so rampantly unresolved
that they are returning to work without contracts, paper, or desks. I
live in a world where we’re slashing budgets so that the kids of the
next generation won’t know a childhood with art or music classes.
I’m a woman in a generation fighting insane battles for reproductive
rights that we didn’t even know until recently that we needed to be
fighting, because we had simply assumed that we had already won them.
I live in a world in which we have a black president and yet we say
hateful racist shit on Twitter when an Indian-American woman takes the
Miss America crown. I live in a world in which we give a fuck about
Miley Cyrus.
I live in a world in which we perpetuate the unpaid intern system.
I live in a world in which, since 1979, the average American worker
has seen a 75% increase in productivity, and yet wages remain flat.
I live in a world where the top 1% of earners have seen their income quadruple since that exact same year.
I live in a world that simply seems too crazy for me to handle some
days. I live in a world that sometimes makes me simply want to hide
under the covers and not come out until it’s fixed.
And here’s what’s super fucked up:
I live in a world in which I still believe there is hope for the future.
This is the rather unpleasant skeleton in the closet that the police
would rather keep hidden. A bygone era of intensive, frequent protest in
which mistakes were made on both sides. Scapegoats and quick fixes were
found, and then people were quick to move on. Injustices and false
convictions happen in every justice system in the world. However, the
Japanese state has a lot to lose and will only backtrack and grant
retrials through firmly gritted teeth. It took mild-mannered bus driver Toshikazu Sugaya
over seventeen years to win his freedom in the Ashikaga murder case of
1990. Years of campaigning to get DNA evidence re-examined were only
begrudgingly acknowledged, since the prosecutors knew that then the
truth might come out — that Sugaya’s “confession” had been bullied out
of him. He had been an easy target: divorced and a bit of a loner. Hours
of interrogation and physical abuse, and the police had their
confession. It was not until 2010 that the flawed DNA evidence was
accepted as proof of innocence, in spite of the fact that Sugaya’s
stories of his apparent multiple crimes — made, he said, in order to
assuage the duress from the police — did not concur with the witness
accounts, and that he had failed to identify the sites where other
purported murder victims’ bodies had been found.
Although there have been some vocal scandals recently and a few very
belated victories such as the Sugaya case, the situation remains
essentially unchanged. For one, Hosei University, long a site for
radical student activism in Japan, has recently been suffering under the
fist of the police, who would arrive and pick out the activists they
had already pre-planned to arrest. Campaigners say that over 100 have
been unlawfully arrested in the last few years.
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the country
of no crime, the police and judiciary rule supreme. Heaven help you if
you get arrested.
Travel and Adventure
We all have friends we live vicariously through, right? I am currently living out an eighteen-year-old-me fantasy through the travels of an ex-JET friend. You can read the background to his current adventures at http://joshwalden.blogspot.jp/2013/07/introduction-to-gepaq.html
We set out with torn out pages from a Rand-McNally map of the USA
(pre-smart phone days!), tents and sleeping bags on our bicycles, as
well as big packs of Clif bars and 2-3 changes of clothes. Around an
hour before sunset each night, we'd start eying homes for nice yards.
We'd knock on their doors and ask if we could set up a tent, that we'd
be out in the morning. Every night after setting up our tents we'd sip
on some homemade whisky from a mason jar we'd received in Kentucky and
plan the next day.
Five years later I want to have that feeling again.
Milan Kundera has this amazing book called "The Unbearable Lightness of
Being." The main gist is that we feel free and light in certain points
in our lives .. free from the gravity of our decisions... but this lightness is unbearable. We have a need for something heavy,
something dark to anchor us to the world. That is why lightness is
unbearable.
A: Oh, that's cool. (Awkward pause,
look around the room, shuffles feet) Uh,what are you going to do with
that?
I am pretty sure that dialogue is
repeated approximately every 18 seconds on every American campus.
It's trite. Anyhow, three years out of college I found an
appropriate response to this commonplace: “I am going to travel the
world, learn a ton of languages, drink my weight in local beers and
eat amazing food, meet beautiful people and make lifelong friends.
Et toi?”
Plans for after college. Makin' ya proud mom!
I've had a few friends and relatives
ask me about how I am doing it, how I am financing the trip, other
practical details. I was working on a farm in Poland and talking
with my friend Craig from England (Hi Craig!) as we cleaned the goat
stalls. He said a lot of his friends back home had this real wonder
about how he was able to travel, have these experiences. He gets the
vibe from them that it is this unattainable opportunity, this secret
skill that he has.
The Australian School
Your friends will be called Cheryl and Angela. You will drive badly
because you are on the wrong side of the road. You will need a big
enough back seat for the esky and the keg of beer. When you drop your
child off at school you'll hear someone yell out "Hey, bloody sit still
while I tie your shoelaces back up will ya?" There is no embassy, you
will create your own informal embassy in the tuck shop which now has a
bar. It's highly possible a few bottles of champagne will make their way
to the PTA coffee morning and the participants will need to catch the
bus home with the kids at the end of the day. The school is littered
with pictures of Opera Houses, Kangaroos and Aboriginal art. All
fundraising will involve a keg of beer and a sausage sizzle.
The central force behind all profitability is supply and demand, and child exploitation isn’t an exception.
Nobody would buy an “I Heart Nepal” T-shirt knowingly produced by an
exploited child, and likewise, neither should we buy the “product” of
begging children.
This sounds, and feels, inhuman. We want to do the right
thing, we want to help the orphanages. We feel good when we fundraise
from friends and family, when we connect with children and use our
wealth to improve their lives. We want to soothe our conscience by putting money into the hand of a begging child.
This feeling of doing the right thing, however, through the force of a
dark human ingenuity, is precisely the illusion that child begging
rings are selling.
When we hand 500 rupees to a child with a sick baby in her arms,
these guys profit, and then reinvest. They recruit more kids, and earn
more profit.
And Now For Something Completely Different
Love My Neighbor Totoro and Death Metal, but unsure how to enjoy both at once? This age old dilemma has finally been solved!
This weekend is the 16th Annual Oita AJET Charity Bike Ride, a big event on the Kyushu ex-pat calendar. Both foreigners of a
dozen nationalities and Japanese participants travel from all over the country
to take part (eight different prefectures are being represented this year). Riders
and volunteers fund-raise throughout the two-day, two-prefecture-long ride. In the
past the ride has supported tsunami victims in Japan and raised enough in one
ride to build a primary school in Sri Lanka through Room to Read. This year the
ride is supporting Foundation 18, a charity whose primary focus is an orphanage
(with a second soon to be built) in Indonesia. Foundation 18 is providing a
culturally appropriate upbringing for the girls in its care (rarer than you
might think) and also has a range of other activities in the broader community
including helping women escape from human trafficking and caring for elderly
people without families.
If you would like to support Foundation 18 you can donate as little or as much as you like via paypal here. If you donate after reading
this, please write Oita Charity Bike Ride in the donation comments and leave a
comment here too so we can include you in our tally ;) If you want to help out Foundation 18 and also love buttons,
check out SkullButtonry. The profits from this lovely Etsy shop all go to
Foundation 18. International shipping is reasonable (I bought a bunch myself).
So why do bloggers matter? Well, this is a very small blog
and it really doesn’t matter. However, being an occasionally lonely ex-pat some
time ago I searched for other Australian ex-pat blogs and found the wonderful 4 kids, 20 suitcases and a beagle. One day Kirsty posted about the also wonderful Edenland, so I
followed the link and started reading that blog as well. Eden blogs from time
to time about Cate Bolt, Foundation 18 and SkullButtonry. It was as a result of
all these loosely connected events that I was able to suggest Foundation 18 to
the Oita AJET committee as a charity to consider supporting with this year’s
bike ride. So in summary, a charity in Indonesia run by an Australian is being
supported by a bunch of people from all over the world cycling through Japan as
a result of a chain of blog posts beginning in Doha.
For a couple of years now I’ve driven past a road sign
pointing to a river pool, with a picture of someone swimming. Every time I saw
it I imagined a deep still rock pool, or possible natural rock slides under
waterfalls like the ones I grew up swimming in. I had a rare couple of hours
free the other day, so on the spur of the moment I turned off and headed down
the highway to the pool. It felt like a mistake very quickly.
Burned out abandoned ute? CHECK.
The signs quickly
pointed me off the highway and down a narrow winding dirt road through the
mountains. The speed limit was 30 kmph but every now and again a huge truck
rumbled by in a cloud of dust at 80 or 90, overtaking me on a road barely wide
enough for a regular car but somehow not plunging off the edge into the ravine.
I was fearful of the surface and dark rainclouds began to close it. I started
having flashbacks to a traumatic experience when we tried to dive to a campsite
high in the mountains and got stuck on an impossibly narrow winding road with a
sheer cliff on one side and forest on the other. I felt like I might get stuck
in the same situation, but I decided to give it another ten minutes before
turning back, and just as the time was up I saw a sign for the pool.
Rather than the rock pool I had imagined, it was more like a
regular outdoor swimming pool beside the river, although on closer inspection
it seemed that the water would feed in from the river when the pool was open.
The river
Promises of fun
but no fun to be had
The combination of remote mountain location and complete
silence except for the crows somehow made the bright colours and dry shower
heads seem sinister.
I pulled google maps up on my phone to see if there I could
keep going and come out the other side of the mountain rather than going back
the terrifying way I had come, and lo and behold it turned out that the road I
was on climbed the mountain and joined with the very same frightening track
we’d got into trouble on looking for the campsite. The way back was scary, but
nothing on the danger of continuing into the forest! I turned around and rode
home.
We took a spontaneous trip last weekend. We can do that now
that we have a car. Having a car is seriously awesome. We headed to Miyazaki
prefecture for a one night and visited the Takachiho gorge and the near-by cave at Amano-Iwato shirine
that features in Japan’s foundationalmythology.
Preparing nice and early for that up-coming right hand turn! Oh, and yes, that is Vader's TIE bomber displayed... it also speaks in his (officially licensed) voice. He gets very grumpy when you deviate from the dark side.
Driving pretty much anywhere in Kyushu results in gorgeous scenery
Especially when the rice is ripe for harvest and the sunlight is golden
Takachiho is stunning. The rock formation is caused by layers of lava from a volcanic eruption, and the water is clear up close but brilliant blue from a distance.
Obligatory tourist shot of row boats in Takachiho Gorge
Clear, sparkling water in a shallower section
Takachiho from above
At the gorge we got caught in a tourist trap and ripped off
500 yen; not a huge amount of money but a bit of a shock to experience. We drove
to the gorge on the Saturday of a long weekend, and it was packed with cars and
tour coaches. There were uniformed traffic guides at all the turns, separating
small from large vehicles and directing them to different car parks. As we came
into the clearly marked entrance to the car park we had been directed to a man
in a visibility vest holding a traffic directing baton leapt in front of the
car and directed us to turn left. We followed his instructions and pulled into
a small private car park, upon which he charged us 500 yen. It was so sudden
that we paid up and only realised as walked away from the car that the car park
we had been heading into was free, and the man’s “uniform” was purchased from a
hardware store. I was pretty angry about it, but my more forgiving husband
forbade me from making a scene. Spoil sport.
Nagashi somen near the gorge: usually this is a special summer thing but for some reason it is offered all year round at the gorge. You try to catch chilled noodles with your chop sticks are they flow down the halved bamboo.
If that isn't to your taste, try dango (grilled sticky rice balls) are fish so fresh that their friends are still in the tank nearby looking for them :(
We opted for delicious hot tea from a bamboo pot
Takachiho Shrine: 600 year old cedar trees surround the shrine
I have never seen one of these with babies before~ I would love to know the significance (if any)
While the gorge was beautiful, the real highlight was Amano-Iwato. It was less touristy, wilder, and held a sense of real power and emotion even for a cynical atheist like me.
Looked a lot like Tasmania, actually.
The stones are piled by pilgrims
As I said, the trip was unplanned so we hadn’t booked any
accommodation. That isn’t an issue in Japan, since there are always rooms
available in love hotels and car parking is included free of charge. I used the
handy love hotel finder website www.love-hotels.jp
on my phone and found one nearby that would allow is to take a room from 8pm
(overnight stays are usually only permitted after 11pm, any earlier and you pay
an per hour rate not a fixed fee). We’ve visited a number of love hotels
(that’s a whole other blog post), but this one was by far my favourite.
View from our love hotel jacuzzi
Our
“room” was a newly-built free-standing two story unit that was three times
bigger than the entire apartment I rented in Nagoya. From 8 pm to 11 am was 6000 yen, about $60, and the “room” was equipped with: a theatre room with
massage chairs, a huge projection screen and karaoke, a spa overlooking the
beach, a microwave, ice box and kettle, a king sized bed, brand name amenities
(Dove body lotion etc) and a pokie machine. If you find yourself in the
vicinity of Nobeoka I recommend Uno Hamayu. I took a cider from the fridge so when we
left the next morning a staff member dropped by so I could pay for it. She was
wearing the kind of apron that kindergarten teachers or child care workers
wear, and I wonder if she goes straight to work at a nearby pre-school after
finishing her love hotel shift.
Parking is not only free, but also discreet
Theatre room with karaoke and massage chairs
Second TV in the bedroom, also with karaoke, and a gambling machine
AND just in case there weren't enough TVs, the bath also had one
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