The Ricefield-Diary: December 2011

It has been a long time since my last entry, and of course by now I have already been back home for two months. Japan lies behind me, strange as it seems, 10 months gone, and it was such a short time in hindsight. But I will try to put together what happened in the last two months before I left Takaoka and returned home, starting with December of last year.

After my friends Tia, Sini and Annika, who spent their own exchange of three months in Tokyo at the Hiku Mizuno College of Jewelry, came to visit me in Takaoka for my school festival, I decided to go and take a trip to Tokyo to see them before they would return home on 12^th of December.

I took a night bus there, unfortunately just a normal bus, driving over night. Not very comfortable, but the cheapest option at that moment. And relatively fast. Oh well, with something like 7 or 8 hours not really fast, but I was in Shinjuku (part of Tokyo and one of its main transport hubs) already an hour earlier than I was supposed to from the timetable. I think it was around 6 o'clock or something when I took the subway to Koenji and Tia, pretty much sleepwalking, came to pick me up from the station. We pretty much just went back to bed when we came to their flat.

Really nice place, that one. A house the owner of which (who is Finnish himself, I think) rents out all the flats only to Finns coming to live in Tokyo, which was pretty cool. Small but nice, even with one traditional Japanese room included which the girls were switching through in their three months there so everybody could stay in it for one month.

It was great to see them and their school, see those spots that had become so familiar to them in the last three months. We had a 'Finnish Party' one evening where we made Finnish food and another night we went to club Air, a club that was also a setting in the movie 'Lost in Translation'. Very cool night, though I must admit the music wasn't as nice as I would have hoped. But it was fine enough to dance to and have fun. Another day, while the girls were at school, I went through Tokyo alone and later with Topi, who I had visited in Kyoto before, and one other exchange student from Kyoto.

We looked at the city from above from the Metropolitan Government Tower and also went to the Edo-Tokyo museum. I liked that one alot! It tells about the old Tokyo, then Edo and its transition to the city of today, how it changed when Japan finally opened itself against to the world around 1860. It was a huge exhibition. Pretty much impossible to go through in detail at once. We were in there about two and a half hours, if I remember right, and it was sooooo interesting but in the end my head just couldn't absorb any more information and at that point I had seen pretty much only the Edo part! It's a museum I would definitely recommend visiting, but preferably on two days, one for the Edo part and one for part about modern era Tokyo.

On another day we went to Yoyogi park, a place I had visited for the first time in spring 2009. At that point, seeing all those ginko trees I already knew I would have to come back to see them in fall, see them golden, and now I finally would! And it was definitely worth it. I loved it. The ground was yellow, the trees were yellow, the sun was shining and now and then in between there was the bright red of a Japanese maple; it was really, really beautiful. And so much more quiet than the city around. I'm generally not that much of a city lover and I'm getting pretty exhausted by the hectic ways of Tokyo. And while it was kind a lot of fun to move with that unbelievable vast crowd again, to board the trains and see the people just kind of flow, but it's still not something I would like to do every day for a longer amount of time.

In any case, it was a very nice trip. Great to see to see Tokyo again, even though it is such an ambivalent place for me. Great to see the girls before they had to go home, which really wasn't easy for them, and I can understand that completely. It really isn't nice, having to leave after only three months. I know I definitely wouldn't have wanted to leave after such a short time. To leave just when you have gotten used to the flow of life and work, when you start to be really familiar with the environment you're in and the people around you. Just when you have found those 'favourite places' (they frequented a tiny bar called Aburi very often, with an owner who cooked food one could die for... so cool!)...

Really not easy. I was still there for their Good Bye Party at school, and it was quite sad. Especially since I started to think about how it would be for me... saying goodbye in less than two months.

But then, that is time...

I went back to Takaoka by bus again, but this time I had an actual night bus with some kind of hood on each seat that you could fold down over your head so I actually got some sleep that time. And that was good, because I went back to school directly the same morning I arrived in Takaoka.

Not much more to say there, otherwise. At that time I began to realize that there was no way I would be getting all my school works ready so I started to prioritize on those things I knew I had to get ready and others that I knew I just would have to try and do back in Finland. At this point I started being at school pretty much whenever possible. Which meant basically from around 9 or 10 o'clock each morning to about 10 or 11 o'clock each night. It felt ok though, not actually as stressful as it sounds when you hear it. Most of my classmates were there too, so it was just like some tight community, all pulled together by so much work to do. For them it was their graduation work, for me it was the leave taking.

And then, before I really noticed the time passing, Christmas came along already. And yes, it was a bit sad being so far away from home, but it wasn't as bad as I had feared. Mostly because Christmas isn't as important for the Japanese as it is in Europe. Not nearly the same amount of a playing-your-ears-off, glittering-your-eyes-out Christmas mania as we have in Germany or Finland in literally each and every shop in the country. And starting in November. I definitely didn't miss that. There were a few Christmas decorations, yes, and of course the Japanese love glittering lights and pulsating lights and changing lights, and blinking-with-a-melody lights, but at least here in Takaoka it was still much less than what I am used to.

I had gotten a huge Christmas package from my family and so on 24^th, which was a Saturday, we, the urushi students that were at school that day, Hayashi-sensei, Takahashi-sensei and me, just sat around the table in our classroom by candlelight. We drank hot wine I had made and ate German Christmas cake and other good food people had brought and just talked. Later at night I talked to my folks at home and of course it was a little sad, but then I knew I would be back in Germany in less than two months already, so I kept consoling myself with that fact.

The Japanese really liked the Christmas cake and the wine, but the nicest thing I was told later on, was that one classmate said that she really, really loved the atmosphere of afternoon. Just sitting together calmly by candle light, talking and eating good food, she said it was something she had never experienced on Christmas before. It seems Japanese aren't that familiar with that kind of contemplative quiet that is something that is so typical for Christmas at least in my own family. Or then they just don't know it at Christmas. For them the 24^th is more for having a party or generally having fun with friends. For them New Year is the quiet, family-centered festivity that Christmas tends to be in Europe. In any case it was a very different 24^th of December than what I am used to and I do prefer my traditional Christmas with the family together, the tree alight and the fireplace warming the living room, but this was one more Japanese experience and I am glad of it.

See you nex time with talk about traditional Japanese New Year and January!