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By ADAM LAPIERRE
For the Hood River News
January 24, 2007
Growing up in the Valley, I heard many
times about Hood River’s sister city in Japan, and how, despite being
separated by six thousand miles of Pacific Ocean, the two towns are
quite similar to each other. And today, halfway through my first year,
I can say without hesitation that our two cities are far more
different than they are alike. Not better or worse than one another,
just very different.
I arrived here in the heat of the late summer, with blushing red
apples dangling from the trees and endless patches of bright gold rice
swaying with the wind. It was a Sunday afternoon, and after a long
flight from PDX to Tokyo, a night in the city and another flight to
Aomori, I was to report for my first day of work Monday morning.
Adam Lapierre’s self portrait in Tsuruta
during the first snow of the season in November.
"I was never able to visit
Tsuruta when I was in school. I wanted to but it was always too
expensive. Six months ago I gave up my job in Hood River, gave away my
dog, packed my material life into a storage unit and two suitcases and
said "sayonara" to Hood River and "ohayo" to Tsuruta to work as the
Sister City's Coordinator of International Relations. The job is one
year at a time."
Summer in Tsuruta translates to hot and
humid — inside and outside. To save money, the town office air
conditioning is used only during the very hottest days of summer,
making my second-floor desk space a sauna for my unacclimated body. I
remember showing up to work sweating from my short bike ride to the
office.
With my shirt stuck obnoxiously to my back, I bowed to my new
coworkers and presented gifts I had stuffed into my carry-on baggage:
three bottles of Pendleton Roundup whiskey, some Hood River Lavender
candles, a Gorge calendar and a hand-painted Mount Hood coffee mug.
The whiskey made a first-impression friendship with my department
head, who accepted with a friendly and now familiar full-toothed grin.
Behind that crisp collared shirt, tie and thick wire-rimmed glasses,
he is the biggest joker in the deck, and an absolute gem at our
department drinking parties.
A friendly local helped Adam Lapierre in
his first close encounter with this ditch.
First impressions are important in
Japan, so you could say I stuck out here from the very beginning. Not
in a bad way, I was just very different.
Nervous, flush and feeling quite clumsy and out of place, I had my
first kindergarten class at 9 a.m. that day. I taught sports
vocabulary, using photos I printed from my former work at the Hood
River News.
The kids brought me an immediate joy and energy I would quickly find
to be the best part of my job here. I am a celebrity in each of the 15
schools I teach at, from the pre-schoolers to the too-cool-for-school
fifth-graders. The pre-schoolers like to touch and hug, and,
subsequently, smear their little germs on anything of mine they can
get a hold of. I have become a skilled dodger of wet fingers. Getting
them to calm down enough to focus on learning a little English is the
challenge, so we play a lot of games and stick to the most basic
English vocabulary.
My oldest students, however, are far more serious, as the ensuing
pressures on them to perform are starting to become very real. Getting
them to relax enough to have fun with me is the challenge with them.
At that age I teach lots of vocab and simple phrases like “Can I have
...,” “Do you like ...,” and “Where is the ...” For all my students,
Sensei Says is by far the favored game.
A Tsuruta man shovels snow; the white stuff hangs
on for five months in northern Japan.
My first weeks here went by fast, yet
painstakingly slow. Even the smallest tasks presented me a new set of
challenges. I got lost almost every day. I broke rules and etiquette I
didn’t know existed. I forgot and mispronounced my-coworkers’ names. I
walked into ladies’ restrooms. I bought miso-paste instead of peanut
butter and peanut butter instead of toothpaste. I took the train in
the wrong direction and couldn’t ask anyone how to get home. I crashed
my bicycle and bought “Shrek” stickers instead of band-aids. I ate in
the wrong order, placed my shoes in the wrong direction, didn’t bow
low enough or eat my ramen loud enough.
One can only laugh at one’s follies and inadequacies for so long
before feeling frustrated and embarrassed. After the initial
excitement of being in Japan faded and my three days with a host
family was over, I was struck with the difficult reality that I was
very ignorant about the culture and language into which I had just
immersed myself.
I watched with heartache as my summer Gorge-head kiteboarding tan
faded from my arms. I daydreamed about sessions on the water with my
friends and evenings afterwards at Full Sail, watching the sun go down
from the restaurant deck and laughing at the unfortunate marooned
kiter who didn’t make it back to the sandbar before the wind died and
the water went glass. Daydreaming about being back home, I quickly
found myself questioning the decision I had made to move to Japan.
Then one afternoon it all changed.
Tsuruta girls pose during an autumn walk through the woods just
outside of town.
After a few weeks of waiting, I got my
insurance card for the Honda station wagon I purchased from my
predecessor for 100,000 yen — that’s slightly less than a thousand
bucks. I left work early that afternoon — vacation pay — and set off
with my kite gear for the Sea of Japan. I didn’t know how to get to
the beach, how to read the map I had or how to get gas, but I had a
quarter tank and I knew which way west was. I was nervous, my first
kilometers on the left side of the road. It’s not the “wrong” side, I
kept telling myself, “it’s just the other side.” Like many things
here, I learned quickly to accept the differences as just that:
different, not wrong.
After attracting a small crowd of curious and equally stunned local
fisherman toting poles twice the length of an American fly rod and
sporting wide-brimmed hats, plaid shirts and tall rubber boots, I
inflated my 9-meter Slingshot kite on the beach, only to hear the air
rushing out from a dime-sized hole in the air bladder. The trip from
Hood River and through Narita International Airport did its damage on
my gear. So my first attempt at kiteboarding in Japan was a failure.
No kite patch kits here, but inner-tube glue worked surprisingly well.
Try number two started off even worse. Excited by a perfect afternoon
wind, I drove my car into a grass-covered ditch a hundred yards from
the kite beach. An hour’s walk to the nearest fishing village, a lot
of miming and a very nice gas station attendant with a mini-van and a
rusted steel cable got me out of that pickle in time to catch a sunset
session, solo-kiting the warm salt water and onshore winds. Finally.
Aside from a small crew of surfers and windsurfers, people are
generally afraid of entering the open ocean. This explains the “Are
you crazy?” stares I get from onlookers and fishermen casting safely
from the massive cement tetrapods lining the shore.
My first familiar thrill in Japan, and suddenly life here didn’t seem
so wearisome. Being mobile again and able to drive brought me a
revived sense of freedom after feeling frustratingly dependent on
others for my first several weeks in Japan. It also allowed me go get
out and explore Tsuruta and the surrounding countryside. The landscape
more than anything is where our Sister Cities are similar. Like Hood
River, Tsuruta is located on the north side of a volcanic peak. Mount
Iwaki rises to 1,625 meters high. The soil here is rich and fertile,
so the area is lush with vegetation. Farming is very prevalent, in
particular apples and rice.
The heat and humidity curb fast after August and the next couple of
months are mild and very pleasant. The rice fields fade from their
bright summer gold and the farmers stay busy keeping the crows away
from their ready crops. After harvest people promptly prepare for
winter Aomori, which is notorious here for being five long months of
heavy snow and blizzards. Those who don’t ski or snowboard generally
despise the snow and all the shoveling and sketchy driving associated
with it.
I am thrilled to dig my car out of the powder each morning. Today, as
I finish writing this, I watch my coworkers sigh in distress as they
watch the snow build outside. None of them ski. I watch the flakes
fall from my desk with excitement and anticipation, like a true powder
hound, for the moment I bolt out the office and straight to the ski
hill. No need to go home; my gear is always in the car. The closest
resort is 30 minutes away and open until 9 p.m. seven days a week. No
complaints from me.
It’s cliché but true: It really is amazing what you can learn about
yourself when placed in a situation like this. Those who have done
similar things know about experiencing the warmth and kindness of
local people; about the personal growth found from being immersed in a
foreign culture; about the joys of making friends and the pains in
saying goodbye to them. I have certainly felt that in Tsuruta.
For me, the last six months have been at times great joy and
excitement, at times boredom and loneliness, and at times torment.
They have been about making the best of every day no matter what;
about shedding my judgments and ethnocentricities and breaking down to
my innermost self … and building up from there. |
