Letters From Matt #11: Haramachi, Japan: Bubbly Things

 

Postcard from Matt, July 1991. Japan.

Letters From Matt are letters from my brother, Matt, from various of his domestic and international travels. The letters span decades, and I share them on Living Rootless at intervals, in no particular order. 

September 1991
Haramachi, Japan

Dear Mzuri,

Yesterday I bought a plastic aquarium and some inexpensive fish (by Japanese standards, they were cheap, anyway). I was really excited about the purchase and am right now listening happily to the bubbles vibrating the plastic container and making a noise that anyone else would consider annoying 

I set up the project on my big windowsill in my classroom. Hopefully, it will generate a few words of English from my students like maybe "Would you turn that noisy thing off," and maybe some words of admiration from some. 

Not wanting to buy a bag of rocks to cover the bottom, I rode my bike to the beach for my own selection. Surprisingly, I bumped into the new English teacher from the next town. She's a pretty blonde (I told her all your blonde jokes. Ain't I the suave one.) from Connecticut. 

She helped me collect rocks. We oohed and aahed at each one as if we were buying art objects.

As we were hunting for rocks, I spied one of those hand-blown green glass bubbles that were used to keep fish nets afloat. I lunged for it greedily, yelling "Look! It still has the net wrapped around it." I wonder how long it had been floating in the ocean. A typhoon passed through just one day earlier so I guess it brought the bubble along with it. Maybe it had sunk to the bottom of the ocean with a big rotten fish in it and finally after all these years came loose and washed ashore. It's a small glass bubble just bigger than my fist.

Matt's Japanese fishing bubble, years later. Credit: Matt

This morning at 6:30 a friend picked me up at my apartment and we went canoeing in his 13 ft Coleman canoe. The river was high and fast and the canoe not very stable. Water lapped into the boat as we cut through bumpy water. Today is a holiday because of the Autumn equinox, even more special because a full moon has come at the same time and that's good luck. We have a holiday at every solstice and equinox. 

Thanks a lot for the book. I just started it and it's very interesting reading for me now. 

Take care, 

Brother Matt

Letters from Matt #10: Guam

Letters From Matt are letters from my brother, Matt, from various of his domestic and international travels. The letters span decades, and I share them on Living Rootless at intervals, in no particular order. 


September 1990
Guam

Dear Family,

The weather in Japan has finally started to cool down. Today it’s about 70 degrees F and cloudy. They are talking on the news about typhoon #20 which will hit the southern coast some time today. The last typhoon hit the day I left for Guam. It killed 28 people. In my town, however, the only casualties were a couple of TV antennae.

My trip to Guam was fun. First, I went to Tokyo and visited the zoo. I saw several pandas, and a black panther that roared “save the rainforest”! as I passed by. I used the train to get to Tokyo and connected to the subway system to get to the international airport. The trains are very clean and always on time down to the last second. When the train stops a man jumps out with a watch in his hand. They wait one minute for people to get on or get off. Then he blows a whistle and waves a flag. All the doors on the train close at once and off we go again.

When the train reaches the very last station on the line, a crew of custodians rushes aboard and tidies up the train. After cleaning, the conductor presses a button that automatically rotates all the seats to face the other direction, then he goes to the other end of the train and takes off again. This way they never lose time turning the train around.

My friend, Chuck, who is a junior high school teacher on Guam, picked me up at the airport. He teaches in a small school on the less populated south side of the island.

The island is about 250 square miles (about 40 miles long by six miles wide). Population is about 125,000, 42% of which is Chamorro, a people who inhabited the island about 4000 years ago. They are thought to have originated from Malaysia. The school Chuck teaches at is mostly Chamorro.

They are culturally a lot like Filipinos because Magellan landed in Guam in the 16^th century and it became a colony. After the Spanish-American War, the U.S. ruled it under the authority of the Navy. In the 50s, Guam became a territory and now it has a booming Japanese tourist economy.

There is a university in Guam that is fully accredited. The public school is constantly looking for teachers, so they will pay full scholarships for those who want to be teachers. The starting pay with no experience is 24,000 a year. That’s for 184 days of actually showing up to school. I picked up an application and some other info. I’m considering it as a possibility.

While I was in Guam, I taught Chuck’s students about rainforests. They seemed to like it. I wish I had my rainforest rap tape, though.

I made a petition to George Bush for them to sign and located a place they could recycle aluminum cans for money. It felt good for me to do something like that.

Among other activities on Guam, I found time to go snorkeling several times near the coral reefs that surround the island. I don’t think I could ever get bored of looking at such beauty.

Well, I just looked at the clock and realized it’s time to go teach a class. Until next time.

Matt

Letters From Matt, #9: Haramachi, Japan: Fire 'n Ice

Letters From Matt are letters from my brother, Matt, from various of his domestic and international travels. The letters span decades, and I share them on Living Rootless at intervals, in no particular order. 

December 1990

Haramachi (now part of Minamisoma), Japan

Dear Family, 

 

 

…. There are many paradoxes in Japan. One of which I am experiencing this moment. The Japanese are more efficient than Americans when it comes to cars, hot water, and home heating. For instance, the average home does not have a gigantic hot water heater that is constantly keeping large amounts of water at 160 degrees. Rather, they have a very small gas-powered water heater that turns on only when you need the water for a bath. I must heat water on the stove to clean my dishes. Nobody I know ever uses hot water for washing clothes. And it is not unusual to see a solar water heater on top of the house. 

The winter is cold here and yet very few houses have a furnace. Most houses are very cold inside, but they have something called a "kotatsu." It's an electric heater that fits under the dinner table. A blanket is fit between the table top and the kotatsu so that it drapes on the floor trapping all the heat under the table. I am sitting on the straw mat floor this instant with the blanket over my lap and my feet toasty warm under the table. The rest of the apt. is cold. This is the Japanese way. 

Not only does it save tons of energy, but it undoubtedly keeps the family closer together. 

Here's the paradox. 

THERE'S NO INSULATION. NONE. IN THE WHOLE DAMN HOUSE!

So on one hand they are very miserly with generating heat but on the other hand, none of it stays inside the house. 

SO I'M FREEZING! except for my feet, which are burning hot. 

Oh well, I guess every culture has its idiosyncrasies, certainly including our own. 

Matt

 

Letters from Matt #8: Haramachi, Japan: Tea and Toes

 Letters From Matt are letters from my brother, Matt, from various of his domestic and international travels. The letters span decades, and I share them on Living Rootless at intervals, in no particular order. 

11 March, 1993

Haramachi (now part of Minamisoma), Japan

Dear Family,

This morning I went to my last tea ceremony for the next couple of years. One of my students, a 67-year old man, had one of his kimonos altered to fit me and today he presented it to me. He and several others wore kimonos and the ladies helped me get dressed into mine.

The tea ceremony takes place in a very clean, simple room with paper and wood sliding doors, tightly woven straw mats, and a small brazier with hot charcoal and a tea pot sunk into the floor. We sit on our feet like we don’t notice there isn’t any blood getting to our feet. We wait silently while tea – not black tea but a green pasty solution is served to us one at a time. When the person next to me receives his tea he bows to me before drinking it. When I am served mine, I bow to the person on my left. Before slurping the tea down in three (not four) noisy slurps, I must rotate the tea bowl three one-quarter turns. After my slurps, I rotate the bowl again back the way it was.

I then put the bowl back on the floor and inspect it as if it were a wondrous piece of art and not just a very plain looking bowl.

After we’re all finished, I can sit on my side for awhile allowing blood to rush into my feet. I’m invited to stand up and move to the next room, but I decline and say, “I just want to sit for awhile” (at least until I can feel my toes). At another time someone told me that at that moment after the tea ceremony, some people are injured with sprained ankles.

You probably would never have thought that going to a tea ceremony was flirting with danger. Fortunately, I escaped the event with no damage.

Letters from Matt #4: Haramachi, Japan: Fear in My Eyes

Letters From Matt are letters from my brother, Matt, from various of his domestic and international travels. The letters span decades, and I share them on Living Rootless at intervals, in no particular order. 

8 July 1990

Haramachi (now part of Minamisoma), Japan

Dear family,

… Today was a beautiful day. I went to the beach with about a half a dozen students and friends. The people here are so nice to me. (But I have to be careful – last night at a party, some girls asked me what my blood type was.)

We went swimming in the ocean. I got sunburned on my face and legs. I can feel the heat now, especially on my legs, as I lay on my futon writing this letter. The waves were enormous, frothy, and crashing down on me – filling my nose and mouth with salty water. After getting out, my skin was sticky with salt. Many Japanese were surfing today. One of our friends brought two surfboards. He offered for me to try, but I had already swallowed enough ocean for the day. Maybe next time.

One of the girls made lunch. It’s amazing how carefully prepared Japanese food is. She made egg salad sandwiches with white bread - sounds simple, but she sliced the crust away from each sandwich and arranged them neatly and tightly; packed in a box as if they were made for astronauts.

She also made fried chicken drumsticks. The skin and meat from the smaller end of the drumstick were peeled upward so as to leave bare bone on one side that could be used like a handle for eating without getting your fingers greasy. It was like a popsicle sort of. The end of the bare bone was wrapped in foil to be sure no grease touched your hand.

After a nice long day at the beach, we went out to a restaurant. While we ate, they taught me some Japanese phrases like – Anata wan han sai des? means how old are you? and biru kudasai means I’ll have a beer, please. The latter phrase could be quite useful, so in gratitude, I taught them a couple expressions such as I drank like a fish and I’m going to sleep like a log. 

Oh yeah, at the beach I started to build a sand castle. The girls were very curious of my strange, child-like behavior I guess, but they started to bring me water to help make the sand wet for me. Then a couple of guys built a wall around it. When finished, it was about a meter tall (we’ve gone metric in Japan; so sorry) with towers and flags, a moat with a drawbridge. When we left, the tide had just begun to slosh water through the gates and into the moat. It was cool.

Last night, at my suggestion, all the adult students (mostly female between the ages of 18 and 28) joined in a party to celebrate Independence Day, a farewell to a student leaving for Australia, a birthday, my one-month anniversary of Japan life, and Tanabata.

Tanabata is a Japanese holiday that has something to do with some sort of stellar convergence that happens once a year on about July 7th. Anyway, part of the tradition is to have a tanabata tree, a leafy top section of a bamboo (which grows abundantly in these parts). The tree is decorated almost like a Christmas tree with little pieces of colored paper folded into many different shapes. Then everybody writes a wish on a piece of colored paper and attaches it to the tree. This ritual, along with the stellar convergence, is supposed to make all of your dreams come true.

Well, anyway, one of the girls brought a Tanabata tree to the party, along with lots of little pieces of colored paper. She showed me how to fold the paper into a paper balloon and I and others made a wish to place on the tree. It was fun.

The party, at my suggestion, was held on the roof of the school, one of the tallest buildings in town. The moon was full. You could see the shadows of mountains in the distance, a few kilometers away. (So sorry, metric again neh. Eeeeee. I think I’m turning Japanese neh.)

G*, a girl who I’ve got a crush on, brought a big plate of sushi. She fixed a big plate for me. Oh no!!!!!! The raw fish kind of sushi is no problem. I even like it kind of. But she honored me with the more expensive delicacy of raw salmon eggs wrapped in seaweed. 

Salmon eggs --> Human delicacy. Photo credit: Randy Johnson

Because of the way it is here, you are supposed to put the whole thing in your mouth all at once. Somebody sensed the fear in my eyes so they rushed the video camera and spotlight over to me. The whole group watched the barbarian almost gag on what they consider heaven. All I could think of was, yeah, I’ve seen this stuff before in jars in the sporting goods department at Sears – used as FISH BAIT! 

Salmon eggs --> Fish bait. Credit: OLX.

I almost threw up, but didn’t. My honor was left intact and I soon recovered after a few beers. …

Sayanara,

Matt