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.

Time for a big photo update of the last week and a bit, mostly of when Kel came to stay for a week with Misa. Nikyu was also here, but I don’t have any photos of him right now. I think when I get Sawa’s photos she has some with him.

First, here’s a photo of a surreptitious midnight dip in the elementary school pool next door. On that note, another illicit but awesome place to hang out is the roof of the dorm, where we hung out with Nikyu when he was here.

Here’s us going to the Fushimi-Inari shrine followed by a barbecue and the greatest game of all: Settlers of Catan. Mum came along, as did our old homestay Yuko and her sister Hiromi.

The next day we climbed Daimonji, which is always awesome.

The following day, we played at the Kamogawa river, where Kel and I wrestled like the old days to try to get the ball that this awesome kid threw to us.

Incidentally, we met the same kid on Saturday night when we climbed the roof of what turned out to be his apartment to see all 5 of the kanji lit in the mountains of Kyoto. For any future fellows, definitely go to this roof to see the Daimonji Gozan Okuribi festival!

Later that day, we watched Batman (Heath Ledger’s was so awesome as the Joker!) and went to this beer garden – all you can eat and all you can drink!

After Kel and Misa got back on Friday from their trip to Kobe and Osaka (where we met up with them one night to go clubbing), we went up the Kamogawa river a little way to this cool place you can swim and, best of all, jump off this huge dam!

The next night was the Daimonji festival.

And then on Sunday it was my shamisen & koto recital, after which Kel said goodbye and headed off to Saitama for the final leg of his trip.

As I right this I think he’s in the air on the way back to New Zealand now! It was so awesome to be able to hang out with him in Japan!

For a couple of days Sawa and I had no big plans, so we tried to catch up on all the errands we hadn’t had time to do: writing wedding thank you cards, officially changing her name, my address, getting a new seal with our name for signing documents, etc.

As always seems to happen as the Fellow, though, before I knew it Hayao invited us to his hometown in Kagawa Prefecture in Shikoku island and Oli and I went with him and Kei. We mostly just ate lots of the delicious udon Kagawa is famous for, slept, and ate more udon. It was cool, although it was little weird in that Hayao invited me and Oli to his place, but then he and Kei spent the whole time chatting together in their own little world, as they’ve been doing for the last month or so. I don’t know exactly what’s going on or if Hayao’s still with his girlfriend or what, but it’s been a little weird.

When we got back this afternoon I spent the afternoon and evening with Sawa. We realized that although we’d been spending a lot of time together lately, it’s all been in the context of entertaining friends and family and we’ve had almost no time just the two of us, so it was great to have the afternoon to ourselves for once. She had to go off this evening to Yokohama to receive an English prize, but when she gets back we’re planning to try to set more boundaries between work and not work, spending time with others and spending time with the two of us, which I think will make things feel much less stressed.

I finished doing the final tallies on my budge, and here are the graphs of the final breakdowns (it’s two weeks shy of a full year’s worth, but this waas a good time to do it, and most Fellows would be leaving around this time anyway)

I actually ended up being closer to my original plans than I had thought. The only real things I should really point out for future fellows are:
-don’t forget to budget in the cost of outward plane tickets! Like I kind of did!
-be careful about the phone bill – I ended up spending about twice as much per month as I had intended to. Calls are expensive.
-Some food and travel costs were cheaper than they should have been because of the many times I was treated by various people, including most of the times I was staying with Sawa’s family.
-Travel ate up WAY more of my budget than I had intended or anticipated. It was all fun, but be aware of how much it adds up.
-Incidentally, I somehow wildly miscalculated my research expenses in my last budget, which is why it was so high then. It ended up being in the range I had intended, although I had hoped to buy a shamisen and given my overspending in other categories, that seems unlikely right now.

As you can see, the regular updates I once had are now long-gone. For a couple of days after we returned to Kyoto, I had no real excuse, I was just catching up on stuff in Kyoto  – music practice, cleaning my room, applying for things I’ve been meaning to for a while, etc. – while Sawa frantically finished her big translation project. Then on Saturday Kel and his friend Misa arrived, followed by our friend Yuko and her sister, and in various combinations Sawa, Oli, Mum and I did various activities together, including having a barbecue, sightseeing at Fushimi Inari, a beer garden, playing Settlers of Catan, watching the new batman movie and going clubbing in Osaka, while trying to squeeze in a little bit of music practice for my concert on Sunday. I don’t have the photos now, so I think I’ll put up a whole heap next week once my concert is over and Kelly’s gone off to Saitama.

Since at that point all the activities I started while the Doshisha Fellow will have finished, I will do a final update with a final tally of my budget and then officially consider my Fellowship done and wrap up these blog posts. After that, I think I’ll probably give myself a week or so to just be alone with no obligations, then I’ll try to get a job to last me till January. So, until then…

After a day of just resting up and catching up on some errands back in Yokohama, on Sunday, Sawa and I hopped onto a train with her parents for a three-day trip to the Tohoku Region up in the northeast. We ultimately hopped through three prefectures and many delicious meals and pretty sights, but the highlight was definitely the Nebuta Festival in Aomori.

I didn’t really know what to expect when going in, but as we got ourselves into position to watch the festival and saw everyone setting up, it seemed that, just like the festivals in Kyoto, the basic idea was to have lots of people dress up in traditional-ish clothes and pull giant floats through town.

Although it was the same in this respect, it was also very different in a way I really liked. While the Kyoto festivals were all pretty tame and had a sort of elitist sense of elegance, this festival was very raw and exciting. Probably the biggest difference was the huge drums they pounded, echoing through the town and giving a powerful energy, but the energetic dancing, the chanting, the dark night, brightly lit floats with warriors and demons, and even the rain that started falling halfway through all helped to give the whole thing an air of excitement that I didn’t feel in any of the Kyoto festivals. Most importantly, it just seemed that everyone was there to have a good time, there were all these people, young and old, dancing around and having a grand old time.

Of course, there were still a few cute floats, like this Totoro!

Here’s me getting all excited.

It has been an extremely action-packed week. I’ll try to recap as quickly as possible and let the photos do most of the talking.

Last Wednesday I headed off to Wakayama to visit my brother and his current and former host families. We mostly did the same things we always like to do when we’re together: played basketball and made some cookies for his host brother’s birthday. Sawa joined us on Thursday and we all went off to the beach. It was good fun for us, but I don’t think beach going is really a big thing for most Japanese women, because except for Sawa, neither the host mothers or daughters seemed to want to swim, or tan, or do much except sit in the shade.

Afterwards we did the old onsen thing and Kel and I got our first chance to drink iced coffee together after an onsen.

That night we had a birthday celebration for Kel’s host brother, where we had kimchi nabe and then ate the delicious cake and cookies back at their house.

On Friday, we all got up at the crack of dawn (which was to become a theme of the next few days) to take the bullet train up to Yokohama, where Mum was meeting us that night. Kel had to go off to see some friends in Saitama and the following day me, Mum, Sawa and her parents and grandparents all went off to Hakone for the weekend. It was super-nice and ridiculously luxurious, with an amazing inn and amazing food and great baths and sightseeing.

After a delicious breakfast and a quick bath, I had to leave everyone behind and rush back to Tokyo for the wedding of my old friend Yuriko who I’d only seen once in the last 7 years. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten to bring all the appropriate clothes, so I’d had to bust some pieces of my own wedding tuxedo when we were back at Sawa’s place, but I didn’t have a jacket and I had to make do-it-yourself cufflinks from a pin and a piece of plastic I salvaged from a trash can at the train station. It was really cool to see a couple of old friends from my exchange trip days, and hopefully now I have their contact info we can stay in better touch.

The following day (Monday), Mum, Kelly and Oli all converged on Sawa’s grandparents’ apartment in Yokohama and we did our last-minute shopping and packing for our ascent of Mt. Fuji, then woke up at 5am the following day to get on the bus to take us to our target.

We were all a little uncertain of what to expect, because many people had been warning us it would be too much for my mum to handle, but there are so many people who climb Mt. Fuji and the Japanese tend to be a little over-protective. As we started our tour and saw that there were plenty of middle-aged and even elderly people, plus one 7-year-old kid in our group, we started to relax and think it would be a breeze. This was confirmed as we started taking excessive breaks after just a few minutes walking, and we started laughing at how easy it was and these silly Japanese people who were all kitted up with hard-core mountain climbing gear and water-proof packs.

Of course, after we’d gone for a couple of hours there was a huge hailstorm, the temperature started dropping and the thin air started getting to us, and we realized that maybe it would’ve been a good idea to bring rainproof packs, and that maybe the excessive breaks had prevented us from getting altitude sickness. It was a good thing that it was only a 24-hour kind of hike because the warm clothes I had packed got totally soaked in my bag, which would’ve been a serious problem if it was a longer hike.

After a 7-hour hike up to our mountain lodge, we had a funny face competition with this awesome kid

Then grabbed a few hours of sleep and woke up at 1am to trudge the final 2 hours to the summit. Seeing the line of headlamps of the thousands of other climbers snaking up and down the mountain side in the dark was pretty cool. The feeling of arriving at the top and then watching the sunrise over the unkai (sea of clouds) was pretty awesome.

We climbed down in about a third of the time it took us to get up, but because it was so steep it was actually more painful on the legs than the climb up. At the bottom we napped for a couple of hours, then our group all took a well-deserved clean-up at an onsen, where I taught Oli the joys of the post-onsen iced coffee (well, just milk in his case).

After returning, Kel and I wanted to have an epic experience, so instead of collapsing after Mt. Fuji like we probably should have, we went out for an all-nighter to a club in Shibuya, where we saw this awesome Engrish sign.

It rubs the lotion on its skn…

After taking the first train back and meeting Mum on her way to catch the first shinkansen back to Kyoto, we collapsed for a much-needed sleep. Kel and Oli went their separate ways back, and I went to meet Sawa and watch “Gake no ue no ponnyo”, the new Miyazaki Hayao movie. I’d been super-excited, because I LOVE Miyazaki Hayao, and although it wasn’t as good as my favourites (Laputa, Spirited Away, Totoro), it was still really awesome and cute and much better than Howl’s Moving Castle and Gedo Senki. It turns out this is the first actual Japanese movie I’ve seen at a Japanese theatre. Afterwards, we had a delicious ice cream at Sawa’s favourite place at the mall.

Finally, yesterday we got up early to go see an exhibit of Sawa’s aunts in Tokyo then cleaned up the apartment and had a fun night with both sides of Sawa’s family, having a delicious dinner and then watching this big fireworks disply from Sawa’s grandparents’ apartment.

(Sawa’s pic, of course)

It turned out that this was the first time ever that both sides of Sawa’s family were all together just by themselves (the wedding was the first time they were together at all), and everyone had a good time.

With full bellies and happy memories, we went home and slept, and now this morning I got to sleep as long as I wanted for the first time since before I left for Wakayama. Yay!!!

I had been asked by Shinpei Ishii, a former Amherst House resident, to write an article for the DAC (Doshisha Amherst Club) News by the end of month, and just finished with 20 minutes to spare.

Since my official duties as the Fellow are effectively over, I decided to use this as an opportunity to write a kind of final report on my experience as the Fellow, since it seems like a waste that the only report the fellow usually writes is in the form of a “Mid-Year Report” written about a month after the Fellow starts. I’m including it below.

There is much that I still need to catch up on from the past week, but I’ll leave that until I’ve had a bit of a sleep, since I’ve watched the last two sunrises from the top of Mt. Fuji and outside a club in Shibuya, respectively. More on that tomorrow.

After the Amherst House:
How I enjoyed a year of great change as the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow

Last week, I did my last batch of grading and submitted the final grades for the students of my English class, thus officially ending my responsibilities as the 2007-2008 Amherst-Doshisha Fellow. However, while I learned a lot about teaching and about myself from doing so, what really made the Fellowship special for me was the time and the opportunities it gave me to develop and nurture special relationships and explore myself.

Looking back, it seems that my time as the Fellow can be divided into three fairly distinct periods:

Life with Sawa and the ryosei:
From the time I arrived in September until the end-of-year dorm trip, I got to spend a great deal of time adjusting to a new life in Kyoto, spending a lot of time with my new dorm-mates and my then-fiancee, now wife (!) Sawa. (Because I was living in the Friend Peace House with three other male ryosei (dorm-mates), Sawa found her own apartment a couple of blocks away, but it was more like we had two houses to live in together.) I remember having a lot of frustration at the time, with things like how limited my ability to communicate was in Japanese, late nights grading and preparing classes, and being dissatisfied with the choir I joined, but that was greatly outweighed by how much fun it was to explore Kyoto and get to know the ryosei. Even now, I can’t believe it was only a couple of months, because I have so many wonderful memories of all the temples, shops and special places Sawa and I explored, biking through the back streets of Kyoto, and all the wonderful French toast breakfasts, all-night karaoke sessions, midnight climbs up Mt. Daimonji, late-night bike expeditions to sento (public baths) followed by hearty steaming bowls of ramen, and even slumber parties complete with hide-and-seek, that we shared with the ryosei.

On my own:
After our end-of-year dorm trip, Sawa and I headed up to Yokohama to spend New Year’s with her family, which ended up morphing into a 3-month period during which Sawa started a job that kept her based at home in Yokohama, I entered into the two-month winter holiday and had a lot of time on my own to travel and work on my own projects, while the ryosei were often out and about themselves. During this period, I discovered the joys of the ¥650 teishoku restaurant “Bimota”, with its awesome owner and single, but ever-changing daily special. I got into a very productive schedule of studying Japanese, practicing the Japanese traditional music I was learning (shamisen, koto, and utai singing), exploring my new passions of geography and the meaning of music, and planning our wedding. In between these bouts of productivity, I went and collected fresh water from the well at Nashinoki Shrine each morning, had copious home-made latte breaks, and munched on my own trademark miso-butter toast and delicious dinners at Bimota.

When I wasn’t in one of these routines, I was off exploring various parts of Japan: Fukuoka with one of the ryosei and an Amherst House alum, the Sapporo Snow Festival with Sawa, and praying and playing with my friend Kimura-san and the crazy musical monk in Kumano. The climax of my travelling period was my two-week solo trip to China, where I visited old friends from Amherst and New Zealand for the first week and then explored on my own for the second.

Although it was a little lonely, having this time to find out what I really wanted to do if given the chance to do whatever I want was one of the most unique benefits of the Fellowship. Many people spend most of their lives being forced to do what needs to be done and not necessarily what they want to do, but I had the luxury of being free to explore my own passions. Through this, I found that I really love learning and missed the intellectual community I had at Amherst, which made me certain that I wanted to become a professor, as I had been contemplating.

Family and friends:
From the end of March, things changed drastically again, as half of the remaining former Amherst House residents graduated, I started teaching spring semester classes, and Sawa and I embarked on a period of frenzied social organizing, centred on our wedding in Kyoto in April and the reception we held back in Amherst for friends and family there who couldn’t make it, timed to coincide with the Amherst Commencement/Reunion period. Before, during and after these two events, there was suddenly a huge influx of friends and family, so that most of our time from the end of March until the end of July ended up being spent either preparing for one of these, making them happen, or catching up on the things we fell behind on while they were going on. In between, I also made an effort to take part in and organize inter-dorm activities with the other two dorms next door, like movie nights, barbecues, dessert parties and more inter-dorm trips.

This period, too, was very fun and rewarding in its own way. The wedding was such a wonderful experience, and it was so nice not to have the wedding planning be on top of a full-time job. We were both overjoyed to get the chance to go back and celebrate the happy occasion in Amherst with all our old friends and family. It was also a rare luxury to be able to spend as much as two weeks straight focusing almost solely on spending time with family or friends who came to visit, showing them the wonderful things, places and people I’d found in Japan and exploring the ones I hadn’t together. At times, especially after a whole bunch of friends came in a row, I would feel like I wanted a little more time to my own, but didn’t have the excuse of having to work. At these times, I think I got a little taste of what it would be like to be a wealthy aristocrat-type person, and could see how quickly a life of leisure can start to seem like a chore when you have to organize trips and dinners and entertainment and weddings all the time. However, it was still always great to spend a lot of quality time with friends and family and I know I’ll be especially glad later on as life gets too hectic that I used this time to enjoy being with people who I care about.

Looking back:
As I look back on the whole year, overall, I’m mostly just so grateful to have had this unique opportunity to enjoy living with wonderful people in this wonderful new country. Each phase of my time here was very rewarding in its own way, and I’m glad I got to taste a little bit of each – spending time with new and old family and friends, with even a little time just to be on my own. I don’t regret any of the time I spent on each. In some ways, I wish I could have been more consistent in studying my Japanese and gotten involved in more Japanese musical groups, but I think those are things that I can always work on more later after the Fellowship.

The one thing I really do miss is the time I spent in those first few months with the ryosei, because it’s the one thing I know I won’t be able to have again. After some of the ryosei graduated in March, life with only the last couple of ryosei wasn’t quite the same as the special community we had before. Since Doshisha forced the Amherst House residents out last spring and moved the Fellow and a few remaining residents into the Friend Peace House, that special connection that has continued between the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow and the Amherst House students through the decades has been stretched almost to its limit. It’s fun creating a new community with the residents of the nearby Richards House and Hawaii House, but it somehow wasn’t quite the same. It makes me very glad I was able to make the most of those special first few months back when I first arrived, but sad to think how much more fun it might have been if I could have stayed in the Amherst House alongside all 15 or 16 Japanese students as the other Fellows once did. Most of all, I worry that if Doshisha doesn’t let us rebuild a new Amherst-Doshisha community in the new Friend Peace House, I may be one of the last Fellows to know what a precious opportunity the Fellowship has been.

Here are the photos I promised last time from the Gion Festival and from me and Jiiko’s birthday:

Oh, and finally here’s a photo from the nomikai with my students last weekend after our last class:

Once again, I’ve been too busy to update. During the last 5 days I:
-had my Demachiya English class’s final presentation (by the way, they ended up paying me the full ¥50,000, not just the ¥25,000 I had feared. They’ve also offered to have me back next semester, and I think it will be a good addition to whatever more Japanese-involving job I get. One hour of teaching that earns me about as much as 6 or 7 hours of working some random minimum-wage job!)
-went out for dinner with my students
-got to spend just a couple of hours with Sawa’s mum while she was here in between all these things, where the two Matsueda women helped me pick out some new clothes, spurred by the fact that I was planning to make it through the summer with my one pair of shorts, which incidentally has a giant hole in the right pocket. I think if it weren’t for them or my own parents I would never buy any new clothes.
-went on a daytrip to a campground in Kuta with a another 8 or 9 Full House residents
-had my final basketball practice
-chatted with my Dad and three old Zumbyes on Skype
-finally decided to cancel me and Mike Kohl’s plan to tour Japan
-booked our trip to Mt. Fuji for next Tuesday
-had a shamisen lesson
-graded all my students’ final projects and handed back their final grades and comments
-called the NZ embassy and figured out the steps we need to take to sort out Sawa’s visa.
-wrote letters of recommendation for two students applying for the Nijima Scholarship (after Morita-sensei and I convinced Doshisha to advertise again for submissions while more clearly explaining the English test requirements).
-packed for the upcoming trip to: see my brother in Wakayama, go to Hakone with my mum and Sawa’s family, climb Mt. Fuji with my mum, my brother and Oli, hang out in Yokohama with Sawa’s family and then go to the Nebuta Matsuri way up in the north of Honshu.

As seems to always be the case, I am now catching up on all of this on the train, this one to Wakayama to hang out with my brother.

There’s been too much happening to recap everything, so I’ll just put up some cool photos and talk about a couple of cool/interesting things (to me anyway).

At this point, I’ve essentially just finished all of my formal obligations as the Fellow. I feel pretty good about the way I taught the class this time, and I feel like they started to get the idea of participating and in some of their final projects they actually did a really good job of writing interesting essays with good thesis statements and good use of specific examples to back up their argument. Of course, many of them still sucked, but I feel that even if just a few students get it, that’s a good thing. One student wrote this heartwarming little note at the end of her project:

Of course, she was probably just trying to grease me up for good grades, but it still made me feel great!

Incidentally, I largely followed up on my threat to fail students who didn’t start participating more in class. I ended up failing I think 9 students out of the 33. This semester writing down my policy at first and giving them especially harsh mid-term grades made me feel fine about following up with failures, and I think that’s an important lesson I’ll need to remember for future classes.

One thing I think I should have focused on more is pronunciation. I tried to work on it in our little games and told them to practice it for their final presentation, but I obviously needed to have a more explicit system of testing and grading their pronunciation, because no one really seemed to practice or improve much. For example, instead of telling them to memorize and practice the pronunciation of their final pronunciation (which made the few who actually put in preparation focus solely on memorization), I could have had a separate time where I gave them all a few sample sentences with difficult pronunciation, had them practice it and graded them all on their ability to pronounce them.

Also, in my English class, a similar thing focusing on them one by one might be good. Also, in the final class I had them play 20 questions and Celebrity, and those were great fun and good for them practicing English. Especially since I never know who will turn up on a given week, next semester I think it would be better to just play different games using English and not try to build much from lesson to lesson.

The dorm trip on Sunday was really a lot of fun.

We just happened to time it on the hottest day of the summer so far, so instead of roasting in Kyoto, we were up in the gorgeous mountains, jumping off of rocks and rope swings into the cool river, enjoying the non-humid but hot mountain air and hanging out in the shade at the campground while we had our lunch. It was a real blast, and much more the kind of trip that I liked than many other trips I’ve been on in Japan. It seems to me that when Japanese go on trips, they focus on seeing THE sights of a place and doing THE things you’re supposed to do there, which is great and all, but I prefer the idea of just going somewhere cool and kind of hanging around, goofing off and enjoying the situation, rather than feeling pressured to tick off all the sights to be seen and getting the obligatory pictures at each one.

Unfortunately, although I got heaps of photos of us jumping off rocks, they were all in multi-burst mode and I can’t figure out how to upload them properly, so this will have to suffice for now:

At the end of the trip, we had a ridiculous mad 25-minute dash with all this heavy equipment across this narrow mountain road to catch the bus, which we only just caught because Hayao had run on ahead and just barely managed to hold it for the last minute as we panted up the hill. This was also the last bus of the day. I still can’t believe we made it. I really enjoy those kinds of experiences though, they’re always so much more fun in retrospect than just a smooth trip that goes without a hitch.

One thing that I’m very glad to have decided on firmly now is to put me and Mike Kohl’s Japan trip idea on hold. I kept on vacillating back and forth on it for weeks, and I still feel really bad that I couldn’t commit to making it happen, but I think that realistically, trying to do it would put too much stress on me and Sawa’s final time in Japan and compromise my ability to complete a couple of things that are very important to me: ensuring me and Sawa get things set up for going to New Zealand, that we make the most of the time with her family before we go, and that I am able to use the last few months in Japan to really focus on my Japanese and pass this Japanese Proficiency Test. I really regret not being able to do the trip with Mike, but I think I would regret it more if I tried to push it, and I also want to make sure we do something along the same lines together in the future, whether in Japan or California or New Zealand or wherever.

Also, lately you might have noticed I haven’t been rambling on as much about my ideas about music and grad school in Canada. Partly it’s because I haven’t had any time to think or research about that, but also I’ve been thinking more and more about another possibility involving studying Japanese music at the graduate school of the Tokyo University of the Arts. Essentially, there’s a little bit of a trade-off between my work and family, but in the future rather than the present. What I am most excited about for my own career – this idea of studying music comparatively – and what would be the best for my future family – having some kind of professional specialty in Japan to allow me to potentially work in and out of Japan (not to mention forcing me to get my Japanese to the level where I could do academic work in Japan). It would be a shame to miss out on the opportunity to do the research with the Canadian guy, but I think in the long term it might be more important to have this Japan connection. Hopefully maybe after that’s done a spot in this guy’s lab might open up, or whatever. There are many different possibilities for the future. But anyway, I’m starting to lean towards this idea. If I can get it, the Japanese Ministry of Education offers scholarships for foreign students to come study there, which would be a really sweet deal. Maybe if I did that, me and Mike Kohl might get another chance to retry our Japan tour idea, and that time I’d have all the connections involved with going to the top music school in Japan!

OK, so that’s some of the most important happenings of late. To finish, I wanted to put in some of Sawa’s photos from the Gion Matsuri and from last month when we celebrated me and Jiiko’s birthday in the usual way – smearing cake all over each other’s faces. However, I don’t have time to upload any photos right now, so I’m just going to upload the text only and try to update the photos next chance I get.

16/7:
On Wednesday I had my final Noh lesson ever. Actually, I didn’t have a lesson, I just explained to my teacher that I was going away and at the end of my Fellowship and had to stop, and gave her a bottle of NZ wine as a thank-you present. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to understand what I meant so it took a long time till I finally made it clear. I felt kind of bad about springing it on her at short notice, but I think it would have been just as awkward no matter when I did it. I’m very glad I learned a bit about Noh, but I do feel at this point I could do other things that will be more beneficial to my learning.

After that, I went to do 3 hours of helping out at the shop whose float I would be pulling the next day. As cool as it was to pull the float in the parade, I was ever so slightly miffed when I learned that many Japanese students actually get paid to do it, while I not only did it for free but also did those 3 hours of selling entry tickets for free as well. It was certainly worth it for me, but of course it’s always nice to get money.

Here’s a photo from when this group of monks came by and did some kind of prayers for the shop.

During that job I got to speak in polite Japanese as I’ve been hoping to do in whatever job I eventually get after the Fellowship. It waas fun, but saying the same phrases over and over did get a little tiresome even after just 3 hours, so it would be nice to get a job where I actually have to say many different things in Japanese, not just the same things over and over.

After grabbing a quick meal at Bimota for the first time in over a week (!), Sawa and I went to a saxophone concert by Yasuaki Shimizu and his Saxophonettes, where we were meeting Sawa’s former dentist and family friend. It was a pretty random concert that I never would have gone to on my own, but I must say it was really cool. It was fairly avante-garde and there were lots of very strange progressive musical things going on, many of which I didn’t enjoy that much. However, some of the things he tried were actually really cool, and even the things that I didn’t like so much still had their own kind of charm, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for most avante-garde art.

After that I quickly changed into my jinbei, grabbed my shamisen and hopped on my bike to meet my brother, Oli and the Full House members who had just finished strolling through the Gion Festival and had made their way to the Kamogawa river to hang out and let off fireworks. While there, we took some cool photos, let off some fireworks, had some beers, and then ran into Kimura-san and his crew of crazy hippie drummer/dancers who were busting out their styles in front of a big crowd down by the river.

I had hoped to catch them before they left, which was one reason I brought my shamisen. Unfortunately, it turned out that the delicate sound of the shamisen was completely drowned out by the pounding of the djambe, but I still played along anyway, and when Kimura-san traded me his sanshin for a few minutes I was able to be heard a little bit.

17/7:
After getting back at around 2:30am, I had to get up at 7am the next morning to go pull a 10-tonne cart around the city in the beating sun all day. It was pretty sweet, although not exactly like I had been imagining it.

Here’s me and my crew of fellow float-pullers:

I had to write a short article about my impressions, so in lieu of repeating myself in my blog I’ll jus reproduce that here:

“I have two words of advice for any one planning to participate in the Gion Matsuri: wear sunscreen. Especially on your feet. Also, if at all possible, avoid having said feet be large enough to cause your entire heel to extend beyond the bottom of the traditional sandals and onto the burning hot pavement as you walk around the city for 6 hours.

Apart from those minor inconveniences, though, the Gion Matsuri was an amazing experience, although not quite in the way I had expected. From reading the descriptions of past participants on Doshisha’s web site and allowing my over-excited imagination to run away with itself, I had this image in my mind of being enveloped in a cocoon of camaraderie with the other 40 pullers of the Minami Kannon Yama as we ran along tugging mightily at our float, collapsing at the end in an exhausted but satisfied pool of sweat and brotherhood. It was true that there were times when the pulling was a bit of a strain, and it was cool getting to meet some of the other exchange students and Japanese locals pulling the float along, but to be honest the most exhausting thing was just being out walking in the beating sun for such a long time with a lot of standing around waiting in between bouts of pulling, and after a few hours I had had my fill of small talk.

Many of the past accounts also mentioned how they felt that the experience allowed them to feel their connection with the Kyoto of years gone by, but to me the most important part of the Gion Matsuri seems to lie not in preserving the past but in strengthening the present. The ridiculous ritual of pulling giant unwieldy floats in a huge circle through the city seems to have very little, if any, of whatever religious meaning it once had; it’s just an excuse to bring the community out into the streets and for them to bond together (although I wouldn’t be surprised if that community-building aspect of it was the real driving force even back in 869 when it first began). To be able to experience that from within, to hear the shouts of school children as they cheered us on from their classroom window or see the blissful, toothless smile of an old woman as she and her family cheered us down the home stretch from the second floor of their traditional machiya house, was a unique and powerful experience that I will never forget. Not only did I get to see the Kyoto community grow closer to one another, but by helping in this ancient but vibrant ritual, I felt welcomed into that community as one of their own. 俺は京都人や！”

(Here’s a photo of my foot immediately after the festival ended and I unwrapped the tape that had been protecting my foot from the sandals, and also the sun, providing a nice before and after contrasting effect for my ski colour)

Exhausted and sunburnt after the festival, I just wanted to lie down, but Kel and I had to pound out a coupel of batches of our famous chocolate-chip cookies – some for him to take to his final classes and host family in Wakayama, and some for me to take to my final class. (And or course, some to eat ourselves and share with the dorm people). Incidentally, there’s no overn in the dorm, so we had to cook them in Sawa’s microwave oven one very small batch at a time. However, I perfected the technique of making tiny tiny cookies to get the maximum number of cookies out of each batch.

Kelly and Mum had both been in town for the festival, but my Mum had to go back pretty soon after the festival to get ready for her research trip to Kyushu, and after baking a couple of batches Kel had to catch the train back to Wakayama. Then, after a delicious dinner with Sawa and Oli at Katsu Katsu Ton Ton, eating a batch of fresh cookies and getting a DVD of Zumbyes videos ready to show my final class, I went to sleep.

18/7:
Today was my last class, and my last day at the Kyo-tanabe campus in general, unless I come visit one of Chris’s classes sometime. It was kind of sad, and also just kind of unreal thinking that my entire year as the Fellow was essentially coming to an end. Here’s the final photo I took with Omata-san and Mizuno-san from the Kyo-tanabe English club:

In class, I had them all present the papers they wrote and I corrected/commented on. Theoretically, they corrected/rewrote them, then practicd presenting them until they had the pronunciation good and the speech from memory. In practice, only a few of them had it from memory, and for those few there pronunciation was if anything worse than the others. In retrospect, I wish I had made more of a point of them practicing their pronunciation and not worried about the memory thing, but oh well.
I had underestimated how long their speeches would take, so all we had time for in the class was to go through each one (I had to cut them off at 2.5 minutes too), and I just snuck in a brief clip of the Zumbyes singing “Thriller” at the very end. I wish I had maybe had a little more decompression time at the end, but all in all I was happy with this class as a whole. I still have to grade their papers and give them their final exams, but I feel like I conveyed the important things I wanted to, like having them participate in class, backing up abstract points with examples, and writing and thinking meaningful, interesting things instead of just bullshitting.