Two days ago Chris arrived to take up his year as the Fellow, so now I’m finally going to bring my year-long blog as the Fellow to a close.
I’ve got a lot to catch up on over the last few weeks, but I’ll try to do it quickly.
Before I forget, here’s the picture of us climbing on the roof last month with Kel and Nikyuu and stuff.
I’ve mostly just been tying up loose ends from the Fellowship and the year, moving all my stuff over to Sawa’s place and spending time with her and with Oli and the ryosei. I did lots of little errandy things like sending off all the wedding thank-you cards and taking the GRE (on 0 hours of sleep!). Sawa and I finally combined both our living stuff and our finances and it feels nice to finally be living together as husband and wife. We saw my mum off the other week and then spent about a week just enjoying hanging out together without work or obligations. We did a lot of eating really great food, like this amazing steak and this great sukiyaki Sawa made. We also found this wonderful café called Weekenders that made me nostalgic for awesome Wellington cafes.
Last weekend we went up to Tochigi prefecture with the past and present ryosei for the “otona no ryo ryoko” (adult dorm trip). It ws good fun to see everyone again, especially Junpei and Nikyuu. We did all kinds of fun stuff like playing ultimate Frisbee, swimming in the river, cutting open watermelon (“suika wari”), barbecuing, being naked, , being obsessed with our awesome colourd hats, being mean to Hayao, etc.
For the last few days I was preparing my Japanese resume and looking for jobs as a host.
I even started my first job, but after the first “day” (I started at 11:30pm and finished at 9:30am) I decided I just couldn’t do it. The idea of host bars is that they are the opposite of “cabaret clubs” where men come and pay to drink with women and have them chat and entertain them (all non-sexual). I had been wanting to try being a host for a while, but I guess the actual job itself was a little different from what I had been imagining. In my mind, it’d be just like being paid to be at a party and drink and chat with people and it’d be great, but having it be my job to make awkward small talk just ened up being much more draining than I had anticipated, not to mention that I couldn’t understand what people were saying all the time and didn’t have the linguistic skills or understand the pop culture references well enough to make smooth small talk and entertain people.
Actually, despite that all being very difficult, I think that if those were the only problems of the job, it would be a great experience, because I would be being paid to speak in Japanese full-time and I’d learn how to become good at making small talk, but the real problems were the lifestyle ones. I had been imagining that the hours might be something like 7pm-3pm or something, which I could’ve handled, but 11:30pm-9:30am just seems like a great way to make myself feel miserable, not to mention the fact that then Sawa and I would end up on completely different schedules and not get to spend time together. There’s also the fact that you are paid mostly on commission based on how much alcohol you get your customers to buy, and since the girls don’t drink much you’re basically doing most of the drinking, which seems like a wonderful way to develop alcohol problems. Then there’s the fact that the place was all smokey. Oh, and possibly worst of all – definitely most bizarrely – there was only one bathroom in the bar and that was for the customers. “Where do the hosts go to the bathroom?” you might ask. The answer is: in three buckets set out on the fire escape. One of them was also vomiting profusely in one of the buckets at one point. Also, three buckets was not enough, so by the end of the night two had overflowd onto the stairwell. And guess who’s job it was to clean this up at the end of the night? Yeah, that’s not the kind of work I want to do on a daily basis.
Here’s the one photo I took there, of me and three other hosts at 9:30am, ready to go home and go to sleep.
Before we go off on or honeymoon in a week, I want to try to land a more sedate job at a café or something that I can start straight away when we get back from the honeymoon.
One other very important thing to mention is that, the day after Chris arrived, he and I went to have a meeting with Morita-sensei and Dean Kuroki from the International Centre which turned out to be the most important meeting we’ve had all year. Basically, Dean Kuroki said that they’ve decided to let us admit new students so that there are 6 guys living with the fellow. They’ll let us continue the Fellowship with the Fellow living in the Friend Peace House with 6 Japanese guys, but they’ll review the situation every year. The goal is to eventually move it to a place more like the old Amherst House, where guys and girls lived with individual rooms but shared common areas. Instead of letting the ryosei choose the people they’ll live with by themselves, a committee consisting of Residential Life staff, Morita-sensei, the Fellow and a representative from the ryosei will make the decisions.
This is really great news and means that Chris won’t have to worry about being left alone, and that it sounds like Doshisha is willing to work to make sure the Fellowship continues to happen. I’m really glad that I was able to stick around long enough to see that this was safely worked out.
On that happy note, I think the time has come for me to draw this to an end. Getting to see Chris again has been very nostalgic in several ways – first it’s great to hang out with him again and to reminisce about the Zumbyes and all the great times we had here in Japan last year and everything. Secondly, seeing him arriving and facing a year as the Fellow not sure what’s going to happen, not used to speaking in Japanese or knowing his way around Kyoto made me realize just how far I’ve come in my year here and remember how lost I was trying to get around in those first weeks, and all the times I’d be sititng in the common room trying to make a little conversation with the ryosei but mostly just hearing a fast babble of unintelligible Japanese. It’s going to be great to get to still be around and hang out with him and the ryosei for the next few months, although I think it’s important that I don’t get in the way and that I leave him time to be with the ryosei without me and to figure some things out on his own.
My feelings about the Fellowship are still essentially the same as when I wrote my “final report” back on July 31st. The main difference is that, now that it seems that the Fellowship continue safely I’m not as negative and worried about that future. Having the freedom to explore myself and Japan this year was an amazing opportunity that I’m sure I will always be grateful for, and I feel much more confident now than I did before I started about the big things that are most important to me for the rest of my life: trying out living in New Zealand with Sawa next year and then deciding where we want to live a happy and balanced life together after that, and eventually getting back into academia and becoming a professor so I can continue to teach and learn about music and why it’s so fascinating.
Finally, I’ve chosen a bunch of my favourite photos from throughout the year (mostly in chronological order) and thought the feelings and memories they show are the best way to wrap up this record of one special year as the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow. I hope Chris has as much fun as I did.
My first trip up Daimonji, with a bunch of others from the Full House
Matsueda Matsuri at Sawa’s apartment
Fatcat dinner w President Hatta and his geisha
Full House
Biking through the Kyoto backstreets
One of many French toast parties
Snowball fighting on the winter dorm trip
Me and Sawa on the winter dorm trip
Calling across the valley in Kumano (taken by Kimura-san)
The beautiful penguin at Asahikawa zoo in Hokkaido (taken by Sawa)
On the Great Wall
Biking through the Imperial Palace with the ryosei
Spraying the graduating ryosei with beer at the graduation party
Climbing Daimonji with Loren at sunset
All-night karaoke to say goodbye to the graduating seniors
My family sitting in on my class the day before the wedding
The wedding
Tour guide Sawa leading my family through Shibuya
Shoji, owner of Bimota and my personal saviour
My Gion debut with the old men of the DAC and the young hostesses who I would later entertain as a host.
Mid-semester karaoke for extra credit with my class
Singing with the Zumbyes, past and present, at the wedding reception in Amherst
Busting out our Zumbyes moves at karaoke with Dean
Dessert party with new Full House residents
My other Gion debut – in the Gion Festival
Summer dorm trip to play in the river a little north of Kyoto
Teaching my brother the timeless tradition of drinking iced coffee after a bath, as passed down to me by Junpei
At the summit of Mt. Fuji with my mum, brother and Oli
At the Nebuta Matsuri with Sawa’s family
Dam jumping in Kyoto with Kel and Oli
Barbecue on the veranda
My shamisen and koto concert
“otona no ryo ryokou”
My third Gion debut – as a host
Now, like this photo, I step forward into a new life beyond the Fellowship, a little vulnerable and naked without a job, but without looking back, confident in the wonderful friends and family and wife I have and that the time I’ve spent this year exploring and enjoying life will serve me well wherever I end up next. Now it’s time for Chris to do his thing.
Thank you to everyone who’s read this, everyone who’s visited and staye d in touch and befriended me, and everyone who’s helped make this year so wonderful. Life is good.
