The Far East Chronicler - Gunma - Part II

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19/04/2009

When I awoke today I discovered that my nose, eartips and neck were burnt red raw from yesterdays sun. But on a plus note my poo schedule was back on track and I was back on morning shifts. The toilet here is quite a scary place, it is a western style toilet in a shed outside in the garden, it appears to be somewhat of a bottomless pit as once you err.... loosen up no further sound plays any part of the equation, plops just don't feature. If one had been on the beers and took the wrong step then the boghole was definitely big enough to consume a whole human. I expect that one would never be found down there, and probably wouldn't want to be found.

After loosening up I set about cutting some wood with the chainsaw. I was working next to the house today and the kids were home and every so often they would come racing past me totally unaware that I could quite easily take a limb in a matter of seconds, the point when I decided to stop was when young Takeru began throwing sticks at me when I was halfway through cutting a log.

I found Masaru kicking about near a greenhouse not far by and asked him 'Nokogiri ga arimasu ka?' ('Do you have a saw?'). I knew a few names for tools you might find laying around a workshop as on one wet, windy and wild day up on the Herbrides I spent a day in the workshop revising the names of tools in Japanese with my dictionary, yes it's true that was how I spent my spare time when the rest of you were down the pub. But anyway I was quite chuffed with myself in remembering the word Nokogiri for saw and thought that Masaru might be impressed with my little bit of useless knowledge. Alas he was unphased by my Japanese tool vocabulary and simply handed me a saw and said 'Hai' (Yes), at least I was making myself understood though, that's always plus. I also tried to explain the reason as to why I had opted to now use just a saw as opposed to using a chainsaw and carving his children up by mistake. It fell on death ears though which was fast becoming a common practice between us he didn't really know what an earth I was banging on about just like half the time I didn't know what he was on about, we do normally just about manage to muddle through these little scenario's though.

Just before lunch I cut my finger slightly on the Nokogiri, it was only a minor flesh wound but Nanami came running over and was quite concerned, she pointed to my finger and said 'Doshite?' (Why?). I held up the saw and said 'Nokogiri' (saw). She immediately ran off and I carried on with my duties. About 30 seconds later she reappeared to issue me with a plaster. It was a nice gesture from the 6 year old even if not totally necessary. I put the plaster on anyway and said 'Ima, iee desu' (Now, is good). I get the sneaking suspicion that when I speak in Japanese that I come across as a bit of a caveman. But anyway Nanami seemed happy that I was fixed up and then proceeded to mercilessly smash a big fat bug to death with a stick.

20/04/2009

This morning I awoke to the sound of Takeru screaming and crying, this seems to be his morning ritual. He will seemingly throw his toys out of the pram at any available opportunity, and even when there isnt an opportunity he will still give it a good try. The kids life must be very stressful with the balancing of playschool and kids TV programmes, I can see how he would feel the need to crack up every 5 minutes. It is a dire noise and one that really won't be missed.

Thanks to the kids I now also have a hideously chesty cough and snotty nose, they have had some sort of disease over the past week or so and they have a terrible habit of coughing with mouths wide open directly into everyone's food over dinner. So what ever skank was in them was now in me, that combined with a bit of leftover jetlag didn't make me feel quite the ticket.

Regardless it was on with the farming today, carrot seeding, 10,000 of the buggers! Really don't think that I was built for such a chore, or many westerners for that matter, hours on end in the Asian squat position really didn't do my legs and back any wonders. I knew that this as well as other ailments would be felt tomorrow when I woke up.

After each working day finishes resting is a bit hit and miss. Takeru the youngest will often climb onto my shoulders whilst I'm sat down and demand a piggyback OR throw a paper mache water melon at my head OR shove an action figure in front of my nose and expect me to fight it. Another game which we have appeared to have developed between us is to flick through my dictionary and stop at a random entry and say 'Anata wa....' (You are a ......), buta - pig, natto- fermented soy beans, masui - anesthetic, etc etc.

Over dinner Nanami asked me why I had blue eyes, I wasn't to sure how to answer this so I just pulled a stupid face at her and she seemed quite content with the answer. Also Masaru was trying to strike a deal with me to come back in June to help out in the plum picking season in exchange for Okonimiyaki, a southern Japanese dish which is a particular favourite of mine. I left this open but chances are I probably won't, so much to see so little time....sort of.


During the night my furry little friends were beginning to get more friendlier and raucous, there was a plastic bag placed in relatively close proximity to my head and it russled, I shot up and flicked the light on to reveal yet again.....nothing.

21/04/09

Today it lashed it down all day, spent the majority of it in the greenhouse planting eggplants. In the later part of the afternoon Nanami taught me some Kanji. Tomorrow would be my day off and I planned to cycle 9km uphill to Lake Haruna!

22/04/09

Today was my day off and I took it upon myself to accept Masaru's offer of using his crap bike to attempt the 9km, uphill path to Lake Haruna. No easy feat, after a mile I was wrecked and Masaru's crap crap bike would only work in a low gear setting making it extremely hard to pedal. At one point coming down hill from the opposite direction was a fully kitted out racing cyclist who shot past me in the blink of an eye, this made me quite jealous and made me even more determined to keep at it. So I upped the anti from 2mph to 2.6 mph which changed my life insignificantly. I was feeling particularly rough today it has to be said, still carrying some sort of cold and my head felt like it was going to hemorrhage, felt as if someone had hammered a nail into it and every now and then was tapping on it, not a nice feeling.

5km further and a couple of hours later I had made it to a shrine called Haruna no Jinja. From here I discovered that there was a nature trail that one could walk that led all the way to Lake Haruna. This suited me down to the ground so I ditched Masaru's crap crap crap bike near the shrine and walked the rest of the route via the nature trail.

It was a pleasant walk amongst the shade of the trees and the cool breeze coming off of the lazy paced river. About 2km from Lake Haruna I stumbled unintentionally back out onto the road. The heat blasting down upon me and made for quite an uncomfortable stroll. I stopped by the side of the road at one point for a little sit down as I thought that my head was about to explode, I really felt like a bag of shit and my body was strongly urging me to have a little lie down....in a ditch.....on the side of the road. Thankfully I talked myself out of that one and rose to my feet and trekked the rest of the road to Lake Haruna successfully.

Upon arrival at Lake Haruna I treated myself to a vanilla ice cream which acted as good medicine for my throbbing head. Lake Haruna is a crater lake descended from Mount Haruna which is a dormant volcano which last erupted c. 500. Scanning across the lake Mount Haruna is not hard to miss, some 1391 metres in height. I had the option to either trek to its summit or take the cable cart, any other day I would have probably been up for the challenge of trekking it but my physical condition wouldn't allow for it on this day, so I opted for the cable cart.

The views from the top were spectacular, allowing for microscopic views of Takasaki City and distant snow capped mountains, one apparently being Mt. Fuji. My geographical boundaries were corrupt however and I wasn't quite able to establish which one. The altitude at this point was really compressing my head, this fen boy just wasn't used to such heights. So I retreated back down to Lake Haruna and rewarded myself with a Royal Milk Tea from a vending machine, shortly followed by another vanilla ice cream. It had suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't had any dairy products since being in Japan and it appeared that I had some sort of sub conscious dairy fetish on my hands. I'm not a Dairy Queen of anything but being an Englishman I'm used to my daily ration of milky goodness, milk in my tea, on my cereal and a dabble of Angel Delight as and when appropriate. Well anyway I had my Royal Milk Tea and Vanilla Ice Cream and sat around the lake and did a bit of writing and when my belly started making funny noises I decided to lay off the dairy produce for the day. I still had 9km back down the hill to tackle and I didn't particularly want to do it with poopoo pants.

I made way back to Haruna no Jinja shrine via the nature trail without incident where I was reunited with Masarus Crapx4 bike. It was from here however that the bike gained itself back some dignity. The 5km downhill ride was fricking awesome, I wouldn't like to say what speeds I was hitting but it was pretty damn fast and if the brakes hadn't have worked on the bike then I would have been in some sincere trouble. I made it to the bottom of the hill in about 1/5th of the time it took me to get up it, the hard work had paid off.

When I arrived home in the evening I discovered a new set of doors in my room separating me from the night animals. This allowed for a much more comfortable sleep. Although I could still hear some sort of orgy scuffle coming from the other side of the door, but knowing that they couldn't get to me was a satisfactory feeling.

23/04/09

Its probably been just about long enough now to be able to pick out a few mild discrepancies. It has to be said that at times Masaru can be quite the scatterbrains. Ive worked for English bosses whose heads seem to be all over the place which is bad enough as it is, but a Japanese one with limited English can be quite frustrating at times. He will set me a task of say splitting a bunch of logs with an axe which I must say I find extremely satisfying and then about 3 minutes in he will ask me to stack some wood in the shed, so I begin that, several minutes in, can you plant some egg plants, ok, I begin that. But then I get completely random ones thrown at me like can you now build me a swing for the kids, took me a while to work out what he was going on about with that one. With me I like to get the job in hand done and to leave any unfinished business just bugs me.

Another is the kids, I really like them and they are great fun to be around but Takeru and his endless random outbursts of crocodile tears is enough to drive one insane, it just goes on and on and on. Nanami for the best part is relatively quiet but has random angsty outbursts of pure rage which could become an issue in later life if not treated at an early age. Quite often I will see her launch an unwarranted attack on Takeru when the parents are not about, it usually consists of her throwing him to the floor and kicking and stamping on his head.

Then there's the coughing with their mouths wide open at the dinner table which I have previously mentioned, but also one day Takeru thought that it would be perfectly reasonable for him to run around outside with naked feet on the muddy ground and then come back inside and stick his dirty stinking feet in my bowl of rice.

On another fine day after returning home from work I learnt what the alternative to my bedroom being a bedroom is, it's actually a children's playground but with all my stuff spread all over the place and kids hitting my ipod with birch for a lark, drawing in my books, stuffing toy cars into my backpack and all sorts of childish madness, great stuff!!!

Privacy can be a bit of an issue, as a whole I do like my 'ME' time. The family seem to be around each other for the majority of the time. I'm pretty sure if this was a British family then things would be a lot different and they probably would have all stabbed each other by now.

For the absolute best part though the family are a very warm and welcoming family, their hospitality has been nothing short of fantastic and over the past couple of weeks I really got a great insight into traditional Japanese life. My sincere thanks to the Sakamoto's for providing me with this unique experience. I was sad to be leaving and find it hard to imagine any future hosts living up to this one. We shall see.

When I departed Masaru managed to find me a free ride back to Takasaki City from some sort of mental welfare hospital, a nuthouse perhaps, I wasn't to sure, there was a few oddball characters on the bus including myself. I wasn't to sure what/how/why I was being allowed to ride the bus for free but the fact that it was free made the whole experience pleasantly satisfying. A penny saved is a penny gained and all the guff, especially in Japan.

Next stop Ibaraki prefecture for a spot of rice farming.

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Photos

Me
Taking a moment

Gunma
Takasaki City in the background

Comments

[David Is Dead]

[Insert racial slur right here]
I like the previous bit where everybody was gonna look at your junk. I roflmao'd ftw.