I wrote this a week ago, except for a few new comments…

 

Hi everyone!

 

It’s the end of Golden Week here, and I have just had the laziest Saturday I have experienced in years. Yesterday I got a massage from Keiko, a friend of my manager Ryoko’s and a regular at Kaya. She practices her own blend of reflexology, reiki and qigong. She said I had a lot of tension in my body, which was no big surprise. It was a good experience, but I’ve been drained of energy ever since. Aside from some general cleaning and a trip to the grocery store, I’ve spent the whole day at home reading, sleeping or on the computer. SATY was a terrible, crankifying experience. It’s the biggest department store in town, but a competitor will be moving in soon, so it is remodelling on a grand scale, thus making it almost impossible to approach from any angle. On the plus side, SATY seems to be aggravating motorists, cyclists and pedestrians equally – I don’t think anyone is enjoying their shopping experience these days. SATY also took down one of the buildings on their, property, a baikingu restaurant called Ro-an. Baikingu, or “all-you-can-eat buffet”, comes from the word Viking, I guess because it’s assumed that Vikings ate a lot. This was a lovely, inexpensive place with lots of vegetarian options that I went to once just before Christmas with Yumi, Martin and two of Martin’s co-workers, a Canadian couple named Julia and Bill Sparrow. The Sparrows live in Yonago. Julia is from Calgary but lived in Truro once, and Bill lived in the Valley somewhere – it’s a very small world sometimes.

 

Golden Week has been relaxing, for the most part. My second day off, I went to the beach with Martin, Yumi and Cody. I’ve talked about Yumi and Martin before. Yumi is a freelance translator from Matsue, but she lived in Australia before and is thinking of returning there for a year. She is small and delicate, and I think she’s quite elegant but I’m sure she wouldn’t agree. She’s my closest female friend in Japan. Martin is a teacher at a children’s English language school. He’s from Iceland originally, but he has travelled a lot and he studied physics in Vancouver before coming here. He’s sporty, deeply inquisitive, unintentionally funny and up for anything. He is presently hitchhiking across Japan with Cody on their week off. Cody is the newest addition to our ‘gang’. He’s a young guy from California who started work with Martin’s company about two months ago. Martin brought him around to ARGO when he first came, but he was so quiet it was hard to read him. Then Cleve ran into Cody at the dollar store and was prompted by the encounter to ask Martin, “Is he the most boring guy in the world?” I’ve gotten to know him better now. He’s not boring, just incredibly laid-back and quite sweet. Also, a very good Frisbee player. I really like spending time with these guys, and I want to enjoy it while it lasts. Who will be the first to leave Japan, I wonder? Martin has a touch of wanderlust, so he could go anytime. Yumi might leave for Australia in the fall, and I probably will go, too.

 

I didn’t get my contract offer yet. I was supposed to receive it before Golden Week and have the holiday to think about it. Unless the money is significantly more, which I don’t expect, I will probably turn it down. I’m thinking of finishing my contract, coming home for three months, then returning to Japan again to work with another company. I have a lot to think about, though.

 

I have been jogging since the end of February, following the plan in the Beginning Runner’s Handbook, which I found at the International Centre library. I fell a couple of weeks behind because of a combination of bad weather and sheer laziness, but I’m still at it. I now jog for about an hour, in intervals of running for five minutes and walking for one. It’s going to get harder, though, as the weather gets hotter and stickier. It’s already hot some days. I’m as red as a lobster when I get home, and ready for the shower!

 

When I first started running, I ran all over the city – north to the university, west to the castle and its gardens, southwest over the bridges to the art museum, wherever my feet took me. I started in late February, when it was still cold. Then the weather changed and the earthen paths and rocky steps around the castle were strewn with red tsubaki (camellia) blossoms. I ran through cherry blossom season, the most beautiful season in Japan, breathing in perfumed air from the flower gardens and temples. I liked running through Ishibashi, a very old neighbourhood where old men smoking on their doorsteps and beaming old ladies tending their gardens would wish me good morning. Now, because I am running for longer stretches and don’t want to interrupt my run to wait for traffic lights, I run on the fields behind my house, to the east. I run past the firehouse, sometimes slowing down to watch the fire fighters conducting drills. Behind the firehouse, they have a cement structure, eight stories high, where they practice various rescue operations. At least one of the fire fighters is a woman, although with her short hair, white helmet and orange jumpsuit I could only tell her apart from the others from her voice as they shouted. Past the firehouse, over or past countless canals, past the local pool, past an elementary school and a small industrial park, and I am on a small dirt road winding between rice fields, with a river on either side. At this time of year, in early May, the fields are being flooded and planted. I watched water being pumped into some of the fields last week. This week, they are planting the rice. The small white pickup trucks parked at the side of the road are loaded with flats of tender rice shoots. I watched smooth fields of water reflecting the blue sky take on a green tinge from the uneven rows of rice plants.  There are always farmers working in the fields, using modern farming methods now but often dressed in work clothes that wouldn’t have seemed out of place a century ago. Typical clothes include cotton tunics and baggy cotton trousers tucked into rubber boots, and headgear is usually a straw hat or a white cloth bound at the forehead. I often pause or slow down to see what they are doing, but they take little notice of me. I imagine they share, along with other farmers all over the world, a disdain for joggers passing through their fields.

 

The birds of Matsue flock to these open fields and canals. There are many ducks, although fewer now than there were in the winter. (In January, hundreds of ducks collected on the lake and river; I used to pause on the bridge on my way home at night to look at their shapes, blacker than the dark water, floating near the island.) The herons stand sentinel by the canals, only their beady eyes moving as they watch for fish. Sometimes they notice me and grow restless, lifting long delicate legs tentatively as they consider flight. The kites, or tombi, are also waiting for fish, perched on fence posts or telephone poles. They are often rewarded. Although I don’t like to disturb them, I love to watch them in flight. This part of Matsue reminds me powerfully of home, of the dykes and green fields stretching to the water where I spent my childhood. It’s very peaceful out here, despite the construction. Matsue has a passion for building bridges and dams, and there is a dam being built close to my home, and a very large bridge being constructed over the rivers and fields. Part of the reason for the construction mania common throughout Japan is the bureaucratic rule that if cities or prefectures don't spend their entire budget, they get less money the following year. The canals make sense to me, in an area where the rice crop demands constant irrigation. The bridge seems to me completely unnecessary. The workers, however, are generally friendly and usually greet me in the morning with “Ohayo gozaimasu”, a greeting I return. On the hotter days, it's a relief to cross the fields and turn for home under the moist, green shelter of the bamboo groves on the hills.