Bound For I Don't Know

Summer vacation amongst the JET community is an opportunity to put those hard earned yen to work.  Many people use the week off in summer, as well as some of their precious twenty vacation days, to tour other countries in Asia.  Flights to China, South Korea, Cambodia, and especially Thailand are all, of course, much cheaper from Japan than they are from everyone's home countries, half a world away.  People also use the break to return home.  In general, summer vacation is a great time to get out of Japan.  

But, when Ryan and I sat down to discuss our plans, our conversation never left the borders of Japan.  It didn't even cross our minds to go elsewhere.  For whatever reason, we can't bring ourselves to leave.  Maybe we love Japan too much.  Maybe everything that we have seen, eaten, touched, and experienced so far has been so impressive that we want to wring as much of it from this country as possible while we are here.  Every different area of Japan has a speciality food.  Ask a person from Iwate what food you should eat in Okinawa, and they will tell you 'anything pig and goya champloo,' even if they have never been to Okinawa.  Ask an Okinawan what you should eat in Iwate, and they will probably say Morioka reimen, even if they have never left Okinawa.  It's like every Japanese person knows exactly what foods are good in what area, regardless of their personal experiences.  And, perhaps, Ryan and I have bought into that. Maybe we really do believe that the best miso ramen is in Sapporo, and the best tskemen is in Tokyo.  And, maybe we really do believe that to 'experience' Japan, we have to eat all of these foods from all of these different places, and do all these things in all these different places. 

Or, maybe we don't leave Japan because we're not ready.  Maybe we feel like we haven't yet caught the Japan we were hoping for, and visiting some other country for vacation would be an acknowledgment of our failure.  After all, if we love Japan so much, why should we want to leave?  

When I first found out, back in New York about a year and three months ago, that Iwate would be my home, I looked forward to getting away from everything familiar and starting over.  As one of the most rural prefectures in Japan, I envisioned, however misguided I might have been even at the time, dark nights in a house with no other houses around.  I saw myself reading and writing and studying and retreating from people.  At the same time I was nervous about withdrawal from society but also relishing the cliche, semi-romantic hermetic lifestyle.  I quickly found out how wrong I was.  Delivered to my city of 100,000 people, two gigantic malls, a movie theater, a train station (bullet train included) connecting me easily to any major city, and even an amusement area called 'American World,' complete with batting cages, movie rental store, Baskin Robbins and a ferris wheel, my nights and weekends have been anything but monastic.  This schism between my expectations of a quiet and disconnected lifestyle and the reality of my actual lifestyle, which is scarcely discernible from the one I had hoped to leave in America, readily affects my travel plans.  It's almost like my life is too good, and too comfortable here.  My seamless transition has left me wanting more of a challenge.

Perhaps that's why, when my parents came to visit, I dragged them to a town in the middle of nowhere to see some run-down temples that we had to walk quite a ways for.  I didn't want to see the giant, touristy temples of Kyoto.  I wanted to find something tiny and secluded, something I could call my own discovery. 

Perhaps that's why, for this summer vacation, Ryan and I decided to disregard standard JET policy and travel against the current.  We chose a place that prompted people, Japanese and foreign alike, to exclaim, 'What?  Why?!' when we told them of our plans.  We chose a place whose name's pronunciation sounds the same as 'I don't know.'  We went to the northern-most point of Hokkaido, the most sparsely populated island of Japan, and then went even further. We went to Wakkanai.

To get to Wakkanai, we travelled through Sapporo.  Sapporo is a fantastic city, and not small by any means.  The first day there, we met up with a college friend of mine who is also on the JET program.  The whole weekend, unbeknownst to us, was Sapporo's summer festival weekend. We ate, drank, and were generally merry.  There's no real reason to bore you with those experiences, since that was standard city party stuff: karaoke, an all you can eat/drink lamb buffet, outside festival with dancing and singing competitions, playing guitar in the grass with a Japanese blues man, and meeting other foreigners and walking loudly through the streets.  So, I'll just show a couple pictures of that part of the vacation, collect my thoughts, and get into the meat of the vacation - Wakkanai - in the next installment.

In fact, this is all that you need to know about Sapporo.

The next two pictures are of the famous canal in Otaru, which is a city about forty-five minutes by train west of Sapporo.  There is a lot of European architecture along the canal, like the gas lamps that line the canal.  The canal was nice, although a little too romantic for Ryan and my tastes.  We had to do something manly after walking the length of the 'darling canal' together. We hung sheet rock and drank a beer.