Japan

I know it's a bit of a cliche, but "second home" is a term I've taken to using to describe my feelings for Japan. The moment I touch down at Narita or Kansai, I'm invariably overwhelmed by a sense of euphoria that's a strange mix of nostalgia, relief, and anticipation. This feeling usually lasts until around the time I reach the immigration hall and join the long queue that seems to snake permanently from the hopelessly understaffed counters reserved for non-residents. But I inevitably have a good time after this, and throughout the nearly 25 years I've been a visitor to Japan, I've very rarely looked forward to leaving.

My love affair with Japan began in the early 1980s. I made several Japanese friends thanks to my parents' connection with an English language school here in Christchurch, and as I wasn't doing much else at the time, in 1983 I enrolled in a part-time Japanese language course at the local polytechnic. This was around the time of the TV series Shogun, starring Richard Chamberlain, Toshiro Mifune, and Yoko Shimada (the entire series has recently been released on DVD, and I would seriously consider buying it if I saw it on special somewhere - purely for nostalgic reasons, you understand), and of 240 yen to the US dollar. I was into Yasunari Kawabata and ukiyo-e (including Hiroshige, whose series The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido is one of the recurring themes of this walk/art project). Anyway, I enjoyed the course, and was picking up the language quite quickly, so the next year I decided to enroll in a full-time course at the same school.

At the end of 1984 I got a job in Queenstown as an inbound tours coordinator, and by April the next year I had saved enough money for a return ticket to Japan. I still remember clearly the Blade Runneresque scenes that greeted me as I exited Narita airport and was driven into Tokyo for the first time. For all I knew, I could have just touched down on another planet. Unfortunately I had very little idea what I was going to do in Japan, and while just being in Tokyo, traveling around the country a bit, and living off various acquaintances was satisfying enough at first, my lack of a job (this was before the introduction of the working holiday scheme, so I was on a 90-day tourist visa) and lack of initiative resulted in my living a rather meaningless existence for several months while being put up by a former student of my parents in a small town near Kurashiki city in Okayama prefecture. Things deteriorated to the point where I had to get my father to transfer me the money to pay for my ticket home (the return portion of the ticket I bought in New Zealand was no longer valid).

Back in Christchurch, I worked as a tour guide until September 1986, when I decided to go back to Japan, this time with a working holiday visa. I stayed for a year, living in a tiny apartment not far from Matsubara-danchi, famous as the site of one of the first large-scale, low-rent apartment complexes ever built in Japan, in Soka city, famous as the home of Soka senbei rice crackers, in Saitama prefecture, famous as one of the most boring prefectures in the whole of Japan. I worked as a day labourer for a company that supplied workers to furniture removal businesses, and later as a porter (and, briefly, receptionist) at a hotel in Tokyo.

I arrived back to New Zealand in September 1987. It was over the following summer, while working as a tour guide again, that I met my future wife, Keiko. In 1988 I went back to university to finish the B.A. I had started in 1980. I graduated in 1990, and in October that year headed back to Japan to study Japanese language and culture at Nagoya University for a year. Keiko joined me mid-way through the course, and when it finished we decided to stay on in Nagoya. I got a job as a translator, and Keiko was already working at an English language school. After a couple of years in Nagoya, we moved to Keiko's hometown of Mishima in Shizuoka prefecture. I continued translating freelance, and Keiko got a job with another branch of the same English language school she had worked for in Nagoya.

In early 1994, a new teacher named Erik arrived at the school from the U.S.

(To be continued...)

Distance walked today: 3km
Total distance walked since blog began: 19.5km