From Kanoya to Mt. Fuji, 自転車 で (by bicycle)

Well, the day has finally arrived.

After numerous good bye speeches, last classes, and final goodbye parties with teachers and JETs, it is finally time for Mil, Tyler and I to hop on our bicycles and make our way up to Mt. Fuji. About 800 miles.

Route: The first leg of the journey will consist of the eastern coast of Kyushu, mostly in Miyazaki prefecture. We will head from Kanoya up to the small town of Saiki where we will catch the ferry over to Shikoku, another of the four main islands of Japan.

From Sukumo in Shikoku we will head along the southern coast, eastward. This is the part I'm most excited about- it is one of the most rural areas of Japan, and boasts some spectacular scenery.

Once we do the length of Shikoku, we'll catch another ferry over to the Ki-Hanto peninsula on Honshu. From here we'll head up to a famous monastery on top of a mountain, Koya-san. Depending on funds, we might stay in temple lodging there. From there we'll cycle down down down to Ise, which is home to maybe the most famous Shinto shrine in all of Japan.

From there we'll catch our last ferry over to the mainland, in Aichi prefecture. There we'll meet a good friend of ours Barbelle, for a festival (?). Then we'll head up up up to Mt. Fuji, climb the thing, and be done! Here is a link to our route:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=210802384754313558540.0004a8e46677b5e7892ce&msa=0&ll=36.332828,138.647461&spn=10.38271,22.368164

Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to post to this blog with my phone, but here is a link to my mobile blog. Just go to this to see sporadic updates about our trip!

http://jugups754.blogspot.com/

Nothing but open road, rice paddies, and undoubtedly many many conbini stops ahead of us! I hope we make it!

Student Work

As I finish up my last few classes at my three schools, I thought it only appropriate to post some of my students' best work up here. From these pictures you can get a pretty good idea of my students' level of english (high school students), which is, well, pretty minimal. The activity was for the festival Tanabata, which usually involves writing wishes on a certain kind of paper and then attaching them to a bamboo tree, then burning the bamboo tree to set the wishes free.

I always jump at the chance to do something crafty with my students, mostly because I love being crafty. While this activity elicited a lot of responses of "eigo de?! Majide?!" ("in english?! Seriously?!") some of my students still got pretty into it, at least as into any class activity as high schoolers can get. Below are some silly wishes from some of my students. Common wishes include "mony, manneee, or money", white skin, or to be tall or big.

This student's omission of the verb "to be" really took his wish in a whole other direction.

This girl wrote "each otter" instead of "each other". Kawaii!.

This first year boy surprised me by proclaiming his love for his girlfriend, first by writing it, and then by reading it to the whole class! I always find it interesting that while the students are deathly shy and terrified of speaking or giving their own opinions, almost all of them won't mind proclaiming how badly they want a girlfriend or boyfriend.

I don't really know what this is about, but one of my classes of almost all first year boys decided it would be funny(?) to write that they wanted babies. I honestly wasn't sure if they were joking or not, but seeing how this is the inaka and a fare amount of them will probably be getting married out of high school, I wouldn't rule it out as a common desire, even for fifteen year old boys!

I can't say I'm going to miss being called "kawaii", or constantly being asked whether I'm married or not, but I am going to miss my students, all 1, 500 (?) of them!

Koyama Koko student, hanging her wish.

Sakurajima

I found myself taking the ferry to the city midday last week, in order to pick up my keys from the police station (drunken foolery at the leavers party resulted in me losing my keys...) and Sakurajima began to erupt, as it so often does. Here are a few shots I took...

It still amazes me that I live in such a geologically unique place. When else in my life am I going to live just a few miles from active volcanoes and magical island rain forests?! Whatever the pitfalls are of living in Kagoshima (distance from all civilization, thick ash fall, lack of people under the age of 96...) the beauty of this place makes up for it. Most of the time anyway!

Bound In Japan Bookarts workshop

This past weekend, a few Kagoshima JETs were lucky enough to participate in an artist workshop put on by a visiting artist and JET alumni, Thien-Kieu Lam. The daylong workshop was hosted by Yanedan, the local artist commune just outside Kanoya.

Kieu is working on a project called Bound in Japan. Using bookarts as a medium, the artist wishes to explore the many variations of the expat experience in Japan, as well as internationalization through the workshops themselves. If you are still curious, check out her website here: 

http://boundinjapan.com/2011/06/30/star-books-at-yanedan/

We made star books, which are going to be displayed in her upcoming exhibition at a gallery in Kagoshima City. From there she will go north and do more workshops in Kansai and other areas. It felt great to be making art again, and it was really nice to make a piece that was in some way representative of my experience in Japan. Although Mare Blocker (amazing bookartist and Whitman professor) would probably look disapprovingly at my glue job and messy cutting, I made the whole thing in about four hours! So under the conditions, I’d say it went pretty well. In fact all the participants made really great pieces!

Content was supposed to loosely revolve around making a sort of guidebook for our area, i.e. some of our favorite places around Kagoshima, and our ideas of home/what home means to us.

Thanks again to Kieu for letting us participate in such a great project! Below are pictures of the cover and each of the pages of my book:

Cover page: photos sewn together were found ephemera, which I nicked from an old abandoned restaurant on Cape Sata. I used these found photos through out my book, and I’m guessing they’re anywhere from 15 to 25 years old, taken mostly of the Cape Sata area in southern Kagoshima.

Page One: Center picture is Nogyo Koko, my base agricultural high school, which has truly been a home away from home for me this year. The blue pieces also came from the found pictures (they were pictures of plates of food).

Page Two: Shrine Beach- one of the beaches closest to Kanoya on Kinko Bay, which we often go to. It has a little shrine up on the hill on the outcropping rock. 

Page Three: The spliced picture is of one of my favorite restaurants in Kanoya, Takete, which serves the absolute best tonkatsu in all of Kagoshima (all of Japan?!) Tonkatsu, which is fried pork, is a specialty of Kagoshima. This restaurant has the most wonderful atmosphere, and everything from the meat to the miso to the fluffy rice is top quality. I especially love the head chef there, who we call the mustache man due to his outstanding mustache, which sticks out about two inches on either side of his face.

Page four: The back picture is of my friends Anna and Fiona, outside of Joyfull. I wanted to incorporate this picture, because I kind of think that Joyfull, which is a pretty gross family restaurant chain in Japan (kind of equivalent to Denny’s or Sherry’s in America) is really an important part of the inaka (rural) Japan experience. They are EVERYWHERE, and open twenty-four hours, so we often find ourselves at Joyfull simply when we have nothing better to do, or when we need some late night greasy food. Joyfull saved Tyler and I many times when traveling on the rural islands, we found ourselves in desperate need of refuge from the rain. I’ve had so many times of just ridiculous silliness in Joyfull. Anyhow, it’s truly inaka. The top photo of the power lines is again a found picture.

Page five: For the last page I decided to use a poem by one of my favorite Japanese poets, Saigyo. 

"If I can find

no place fit to live

let me live "no place"-

in this hut of sticks

flimsy as the world itself"

While maybe the whole Buddhist theme of transience doesn’t really have to do with Kagoshima as a home for me in particular, I do think the poem reflects this place in some way, which is to me so beautiful in its rustic state. Sometimes it feels as though the derelict buildings around here will be taken back by nature at any moment- half falling apart and forgotten. The Japanese people really live by the mercy of nature: it permeates all aspects of life here.

 messy workspace...

participants and their final books!