Random Memories: Brush with Terrorism

Have you ever seen one of those old detective stories in which a cop asks someone "Where were you on the morning of March 20, 1995?" Most of the suspects haven't a clue what they were doing and, if enough time had passed, they also would have little idea of where they were. We only remember where we were on specific dates is something special happened. I remember exactly where I was on the morning of March 20, 1995 because something very unusual indeed occurred.

Those with a head for dates already know that I'm referring to the date of the sarin gas attacks carried out in the Tokyo subway system. It was a Monday. I remember this very well because that Sunday and Monday were my days off from work and I generally stayed in my home area and avoided trains on Mondays. I wanted nothing more on that day to blissfully stay home and relax as I so often did, but that wasn't the way things were going to be.

I had a doctor's appointment in Hiroo that morning, however, and had to get onto the subway, the Marunouchi line, that morning. I dreaded not only going to the doctor because nobody likes going to the doctor, but also the profound physical pain that was going to accompany the trip. I was subjecting myself to medical treatment in service of my terrible back pain and it was always arduous enduring the walk as well as standing on super crowded trains. I knew that I had a great deal of agony ahead of me.

My appointment was rather early in the day, around 9:15 or so, and I'm one of those nervous types who likes to be no later than 15 minutes early. My husband is the sort of person who thinks that there's plenty of time if he believes he's got a minute to go before the train arrives. It has been a bit of a tug-of-war between us to find the happy medium between his pedantic adherence to punctuality which leaves no margin for the unexpected and my neurotic and paranoid desire to be early in anticipation of everything going wrong. On that Monday morning, "everything" did go wrong.

My husband's tendencies resulted in he and I leaving the apartment eight minutes later than I'd hoped to go. That meant that we missed the train I wanted to take to Hiroo and were one later. This meant my window of making the appointment was narrowed down to being "only" about five minutes early. It's important to note that my concerns weren't entirely due to a personality quirk. With my back pain, I often needed to find a spot even on a short walk to stop and rest to recover from the pain. I sometimes needed that extra time for good reason.

As we hustled out the door, I was more than a little angry at my husband for making us miss the train I wanted to make and very stressed out. I'm sure I was snarky with him and generally in a terrible mood for all of the aforementioned reasons. It turned out that my husband's lateness on that day may have saved our lives.

When we reached Ebisu station, everything stopped and there were crowds everywhere. We couldn't understand the announcements or what was going on, but things were utter chaos. All we knew was that we were stuck there and couldn't make our connection to the Hibiya line. It was also impossible to get a cab to Hiroo from there because of the stranded throngs. At that point, we didn't know the bus routes well enough to hop on one so we walked to Hiroo in a great state of annoyance.

As we headed around the block toward the clinic's location, there was a bakery with a T.V. on. There was an enormous crowd of people in front of it watching something, but we had no time to stop and see what it was. We knew something was going on, but we didn't know what. My husband said he suspected it related to what happened with our subway train.

When we arrived at the clinic, I profusely apologized for being so late, but they were quite nonchalant. They said something had happened and no one was getting there anyway. The doctor saw me and we had to figure out a way to get home using JR (the train line) and avoid the stopped subway.

It wasn't until a little later that we found out all of the details of what we'd barely missed being a part of. Had we made the train that I wanted to make, there was a good chance that we may have been on one of the exposed trains or in a station at which it stopped and station personnel were handling the packages.

I read later that a man who worked at one of the stations had picked up one of the paper bags and tossed it in the trash because he didn't know what it was. He later died because of his contact with the poison. The tiniest amount can kill and that poor man was just doing the job he did everyday keeping the trains tidy for the fastidious Japanese commuters and he paid with his life. Even if we hadn't been on the train itself, being in one of the exposed areas (like Shin-Koenji station) could have had a terrible effect on us.

I sometimes think back on that day and how fate kept us a few steps behind the worst of things either as more direct witnesses or as potential victims. I'm a lot less hard on my husband now for making us "late" and a lot less uptight about being early. The fact that I never went out on a Monday morning and probably hadn't done so for years at that point made the close call even more chilling and I haven't forgot that either.

The thing which has stuck with me the most though, and what compelled me to think back on this memory and write this post was the change in everyday life that followed. Because the attacks were carried out by placing newspapers wrapped around plastic bags of sarin gas (which were then punctured with the tip of an umbrella), the stations started telling everyone to immediately report any packages or items left behind on the trains. A random magazine left on the rack above the seats could incite fear and paranoia. An abandoned plastic shopping bag with the remains of someone's lunch that was abandoned by someone too lazy to find a trash can could compel one to walk from one car to the next one.

For many years after the attack, "wasuremono", or things left behind or forgotten, created an atmosphere of concern and paranoia. Signs were put up on the trains and stations warning people not to touch them and to inform personnel immediately. I don't remember at what point this sort of instruction stopped being issued, but it was definitely not for quite some time.

Recently, I was taking a walk around the park in order to clear my head. I do this at times to help me write. Creativity does not generally flourish in a state of mental chaos. As I exited the park, I walked through a parking lot. In the middle of a certain open area, there was an unlabeled red and black box. It made me sufficiently paranoid that a bomb might be in it that I walked more quickly out of the park.

Though my rational mind knows that it was a box left behind by someone who took part in the Fourth of July festivities earlier in the week, the irrational part is thinking "probably", "maybe", "most likely" instead of "definitely". I have no doubt that this was the mental tattoo left on me as a result of the sarin gas attack. It may fade as time goes by, but I don't know if it will ever completely disappear.

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A little reminder that a previous post contains a contest to win a free (and beautiful) book about Japan. Check out the last paragraph or so and leave a comment to enter. The contest will end on July 25, 2014. 

Random Memories #78 - the last weeks in Japan - part 11

This final installment is more of an epilogue than a memory, though it will include memories. I'm sure that people who have gone away for a short trip or even a somewhat long one imagine my return to the U.S. was like a breath of familiar air as I stepped out into the world into which I was born. It wasn't. It felt more like being expelled from the womb into the bright, noisy, painful light of day. Coming home taught me a whole new understanding of the phrase "gaijin bubble".

For those who are not Photoshop geeks and don't know what a gaussian blur is, I offer this example with the right half blurred and the left half clear.

The bubble that I lived in in Japan was one in which I was outside of society and not entirely aware of what was being said, written, or done in my presence. Because of my incomplete language skills, much of my life in Japan was like a version of reality that had had a gaussian blur applied to it. I could work out most of what was going on, but I had to focus and concentrate. If I didn't feel like paying attention or studying a situation, it was easy to not even know it was there. Tuning out was far easier than tuning in.

Suddenly, I had popped out into a world in which everything was crystal clear. I knew every word. I had to communicate with every person because I had no excuse for not doing so. There was no shaking my head and smiling while waving my hands and either pretending that I didn't understand in order to abdicate any responsibility or escape a situation or actually not understanding enough to fully take part in it. I was fully engaged and had no way to walk away that I didn't have to be fully responsible for. After years of purposeful tuning in, I was utterly out of practice when it came to tuning anything out and it was a full assault. Even now, two years later, I find it hard to place much in the background and remain hyper-aware. I can't undo over two decades of patterns in such a short time.

Living in Japan was like having spent 23 years in a cocoon that both protected and isolated me from the outside world. Sometimes, I hated it because I wanted to be more engaged with things and I resented the limits that shell placed on my life. Only after leaving it did I realize how well and truly it protected someone of my nature from things which would potentially do me harm. I'm a highly sensitive person, as I've said before. I see, hear, smell, and feel things more strongly than average people. I'm easily startled and my nerves are quickly jangled. I'm like a wind chime that tinkles in the slightest breeze whereas others are like rocks that are only moved by great force. I have no choice in the matter. It's the way my nervous system is built, but I didn't realize how being in a different culture buffered me in ways I did not appreciate until after I'd gone.

What was worse than being fully present in this seemingly new reality was the fact that I was a child in the ways it now worked. I didn't know how to use a debit card, work a gas pump, use a self-check-out, or when and how to pay for things in various circumstances. I didn't know that you could sign your name on a credit card transaction on a screen using an electronic pen or that you could tip on your credit card bill at restaurants (as I didn't have a credit card before I went to Japan and they don't tip).

I spent a lot of the first six months of my time in America apologizing to people for my ignorance and mistakes by mumbling about how I'd been out of the country for over two decades and didn't know how things worked. In essence, I fumbled around everyday things in the U.S. the same way I used to bumble my way through them in Japan in the early years. The only difference is that, there, I was a gaijin (foreigner) and my ineptness was excused because no one expected me to know what I was doing. Here, I was just an idiot who couldn't do or understand what even many kids knew and understood. A ten-year-old had greater mastery of the American environment than I did.

I've realized all too often, even now, that Japan isolated and insulated me in ways I failed to appreciate while I was there and being able to bumble and not be snorted at derisively was another piece of the gaijin pie. My foreignness kept me in and others out, but that had enormous benefits that I failed to see until I'd lost them. Yes, it was harder to keep and make good friends, but I've found that the free and easy access that people have to me here has been enormously disruptive and disappointing at times. People contact me when they need something from me and don't when they aren't in any need of my assistance.

Often, the lack of that old cocoon means people can be invasive and blocking them is awkward for me or impossible without alienating them. I'm sometimes taken aback at the vitriol that can be incited by putting up any sort of boundary with people in the U.S. It's as if there is no greater insult to them than failing to meet their needs. The attitude seems to be that I am obliged to give them whatever it is that they want to take and my not permitting them to barge in and grab as much as they want when they want it is an affront. There is frequently no consideration for me or my needs. There is little understanding of boundaries. The entitlement people display is shocking in its size and boldness. The boundaries in Japan were often frustratingly thick and often impenetrable, but they protected me, too.

While Japanese people often had curiosity about my life and asked about me, often because they saw me as an alien being that they wanted to understand - an objectified way of seeing me - people in America rarely express any interest in me or my life at all in social settings. Curiosity in the U.S., it seems, is dead, or at least wheezing its dying breaths. I have had social gatherings with people for hours and hours and often multiple times in which not one question, including "how are you," has been asked of me.

I've also had people act as if my asking them certain questions, ones that I routinely asked of people in Japan and an eyelid was never batted, is an affront or invasive. In social situations in the U.S., I'm not sure how we're supposed to talk to each other if they don't ask me anything and they're so touchy about what I ask them that I have to navigate a field of social landmines. Most people think you magically "know" what is right according to their values even when they are not explicitly offered and they won't offer helpful feedback about them when you trespass on their issues. There is an assumption that "correct" social mores and manners are their own private ones despite the lack of an organized social code or set of manners in the U.S. When you unintentionally step on one of their (often idiosyncratic) landmines, they are offended and hold a grudge, often acting out passive aggressively in future interactions as they continue to lick a wound you never meant to inflict or anticipated would be hurtful.

In Japan, this was far less of an issue for me. My foreignness engendered rapid forgiveness. Sure, I was the dull-witted pet gaijin, but the underestimation of me that accompanied their sense of my inferiority in comprehending their culture also meant that they forgave me when I piddled on their cultural carpet. The fact that the rules are more explicit and most people shared a common mentality also meant that, at least eventually, one could figure things out and act in rough compliance. If you screwed up, you were forgiven. If you did things right, you got a lot of credit. It wasn't always that way, but it often was.

There is less of such forgiveness in the U.S. in my experience. I'm simply supposed to be like everyone else magically in social circumstances while also being an individual who is unique and different from everyone else. Is it any wonder Facebook is filled with drama when we all operate by different unwritten and unspoken rules because we're all just so non-conformist and individualistic yet we expect others to read our minds? We expect order and are offended when life does not unfold in accord with our sense of it, yet the culture is incredibly chaotic. Having been outside of that long enough, I can see that about American culture now. When I lived inside of it, I had no idea that it could be any other way.

Since returning, America has very often felt like the "foreign" land full of people who have ways of living which annoy and frustrate me. Their unfamiliar ways cause me to hate it here sometimes and be angry and disappointed a fair bit of the time. Frankly, it's just like my early time in Japan when I was going through the stages of cultural adjustment, but it sometimes feels worse as this is supposed to be my home and it "shouldn't" be so difficult. Part of the reason for that is that this is supposed to be my home culture, but a bigger part of it is that I don't have that nice hazy, gaussian-blur-like filter of not understanding exactly what is going on to block out a lot of the annoyances or that big, comfy cocoon that separates me from the outside world.

Sometimes, it feels like I'm being pelted by hail the size of baseballs and there's nowhere to run for cover. This sense of being under siege by a culture I lost touch with has abated somewhat, but I strongly miss the odd sort of "protection" I had in Japan more than anything else. This, more than anything, in my opinion, forms the unconscious backbone of why many people find it so hard to leave Japan and the sense that it's a Neverland in which we can avoid the pain of growing up and responsibilities of the "real' world of our home countries.

Random Memories #77 - the last weeks in Japan - part 10

I wish that I had written my memories of the last weeks in Japan shortly after I'd lived them. Two years down the line, there are things I remember with perfect clarity and things that I'm sure have slipped away. The same goes for my early experiences after returning to America. There were some very important things which happened when I had just gotten back that I wish I had taken the time to type out, but I think that it was just too difficult to manage emotionally. Even now, two years later, it's a chore for me to go back to those last moments. It has been the case on more than one occasion that writing about my memories has brought  me to tears and I'm sure the writing on some of these posts has suffered for it.

The final day in Japan is still hard for me to write about and I don't know if I can really make others understand how difficult it was to just let it all go. I can say that I knew something for sure that I can't easily make others completely comprehend. That was that I knew without a doubt that I would never live in Japan again and I was nearly as certain that I'd never go back there again for any purpose. 

I've talked about that sense - that strong feeling of knowing - with others and they have generally misunderstood what I've meant. They seem to think I'm saying I don't want to go back or don't feel I can afford to. It's not that at all. I want to go back. In fact, I'd love to go back again, but I knew in my gut that the chances that I'd ever set foot on that island again were infinitesimally tiny. This "knowing" amplified my grief in the last day. It wasn't simply a "see you later" or "maybe... possibly... ", but it was "I'll never see you again." The book of my life there was finished and no new chapters were going to be added on. Everything that has happened since my return to the U.S. has confirmed this and I have not for a moment felt otherwise. What I want is not a part of the equation, but rather what I "know".

I had my last twenty-four hours completely mapped out long before the day came. As I mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to go to Akiyoshi for our last real meal and I wanted to wake up and walk around and have "choco cro" for breakfast. Those two things accomplished, it was time to face getting in the cab and heading away.

The landlord and his wife were incredibly kind and supportive of us that final morning. They helped us haul our four enormous suitcases out and put them in the cab. I am a person who believes in mindfulness of experience and not simply blowing past life or sleepwalking through it. This has not only helped me as a writer, but also helped me understand the world. The last thing I did was purposefully look around our home of the past 23 years and take in the atmosphere that it held for us. It was, as could be seen in the previous post, dirty and decimated of most of its belongings with nothing but trash left behind. It was also as or more familiar to me than the home I'd grown up in as a child.

I'd spent 24 years of my life in the same place in rural Pennsylvania and 23 years in which I was much more self-aware and verbally capable in our apartment in Tokyo. How could it be any less of a space that I'd strongly identify with than my family home? It wasn't. It was more of a "home", especially since my childhood home had long been sold and plowed to the ground and covered over with earth during my long absence.

I looked out the window of the bedroom where the osmanthus tree had grown, bloomed, and aged during our stay. The tree had some weathering or bark loss on the side that faced our bedroom and I always felt it had absorbed some of the negative energy of my life from the frustrations I'd felt living in Japan and taken on some damage. It also gave up its fragrance every autumn and reminded me that, though I lived in a concrete box, nature would find a way to be a part of my life.

The window behind the living room showed the view of the noisy old neighbor's entrance. I thought about how they'd stood out there so many times having loud conversations punctuated by "ne" so many times that it seemed as though that word constituted a quarter of the vocabulary. They also banged around their miniature garden and loudly snapped shut their screen door more times than I can remember, yet I never got used to it or learned to tune it out.

Of course, despite its poor condition, I looked at the space itself inside the apartment. I loved that small space and the way that it was shaped like a square and had sliding doors that opened or closed off compartments as needed to capture heat or cool air according to our needs. I loved how it was small, but felt bigger than it was. I loved that I could always feel my husband's presence no matter where he was and the sense that he was never very far away from me. Most of all, I thought about how much we loved each other and whether or not any of the positive energy of two people who felt passionately about each other would have embedded itself in the walls or the earth. We knew that nothing materially would be left behind, but would anything energetically remain for the next inhabitant?

As I stood at the door giving it a final look, I started to cry and cried all the way to the cab and during the loading of our things. The landlady looked at me sobbing away with such compassion and kindness that it made me weep all the more. We had always had a very cordial and formal relationship with the landlord and his family and I think that was the first time that we connected on a profoundly emotional level that quite clearly made us all humans rather than partners in a contractual relationship.

The cab drove along a route with which I was extremely familiar. It was along Ome Kaido avenue from Asagaya to Shinjuku. I'd traveled this path hundreds, possibly  over a thousand of times in 23 years and walked or ridden a bike the entire length dozens of times. When the big quake hit on March 11, 2011, my husband walked home along that large street. As the cab made its ways, I intently watched every building as it went by in an attempt to burn the experience as deeply into my memory as possible. I can still recall with perfect clarity how it felt as I watched those all too familiar buildings go by.

I hadn't gotten on a train for Narita in 20 years nor set foot in the airport since 1992. Things had changed a lot since then. Service had gotten far worse and more perfunctory as well as automated. We arrived early, as one is supposed to for international flights. It turned out that the United counter didn't open until 12:30 and we spent a lot of time standing in line watching the staff mill about doing nothing while they waited for the clock to force them to start managing passengers. We had hoped to check in to relieve ourselves of our heavy bags and then wander the airport, but some of our precious time was being stolen away by unexpected changes in availability.

When we finally were allowed to check our bags and get boarding passes, we were confused by the way in which you use machines to feed in your passport and get a printed pass. We were regarded as being dim-witted because we were unfamiliar with the machines and a woman who was in Japan as a tourist rather smugly instructed us in how to manage. At the time, I thought that I'd like to see her manage the Tokyo public transport system. Everything is easy when you're familiar with it.

Mochi sweets, explained in English (which is not usually the case in Tokyo)

I'm sure that being in an airport is not a meaningful experience for most people. For me, however, it was a way station between two worlds. It was the point at which I was in limbo in a spot which straddled life in Japan and life in America. The mix of travelers, the shops that catered to both domestic and foreign tastes, and the bilingual services made it feel like the last stop that would fully cater to the Japanese on the road to the rest of my life.

As we headed down the escalator after passing the security checkpoint and into the final area through which we'd end up boarding, there were signs (shown at the top of this post) saying Japan awaited our return. Seeing them made me start crying again because Japan will be waiting a very, very long time to ever see me again. It was an incredibly bittersweet moment when I saw what to most people was a meaningless PR move.

My husband and I had popped for the extra couple hundred dollars to get seats at the front of a row because my knees are pretty bad and the idea of keeping them bent in a tiny cramped space for nearly 12 hours was not a happy one. I had my plan in place for how to kill the time. I'd saved Baye McNeil's book to read on the journey. This was a good idea as the book was incredibly engaging and helped pass the time and distract me from thoughts of what was to come and what was happening.

I've flown away from Japan three times in my life and I spent two of those trips crying my way through the trip to America. The first time was because I was flying away from my boyfriend (later husband) and the last time was because I was leaving the place where I'd spent most of my adult life and had built a tiny little place that was "home". Japan wasn't home, but the space I occupied was all I had and could conceive of as home. I sobbed all that much harder when the plane touched down and I entered a world that was both familiar and alien. (to be continued)

Random Memories #77 - the last weeks in Japan - part 9

The, mostly, empty living room. That box is the cable box, which the landlord said he'd look after. I also realized that we left behind not one, but two carpets that we'd installed (layered on top of one another in that room) and that power strip mounted on the wall. Oops, but there were no hard feelings. The landlord has written to us a few times with nothing but positive feelings.

The last two weeks before we left Japan, besides being filled with goodbyes, were filled with whatever it took to get things done. My husband spent no small amount of time filling and rearranging our suitcases with our possessions so that they wouldn't exceed the seventy-five pound weight limit. We didn't have a proper scale for such things, so he'd get on our bathroom scale and weigh himself, then pick up the suitcase and see how much it added. He spent hours doing this to balance things across four cases. Part of the process was packing all that we wanted to take and then removing what wasn't essential when the suitcases were too heavy. 

The chore of packing and repacking was nothing compared to the grief of sorting out mementos, well-meant gifts from friends, and necessary possessions. Throwing out what didn't make the cut was difficult because of the mental energy spent on thinking about things such as how this student who I liked a lot and taught for a long time gave me this, but it's not as useful as that item and it's heavy so it gets left behind. Weight and bulk also was an issue. Anything that was flat or super light made the cut. Fragile items or things which weren't particularly Japanese (like a set of utensils which were pretty generic fork and spoon kits) were far more likely to have a date with a trash bin. All of the things made of fabric (and many of them were beautiful) made the cut.

My memory of the overwhelming generosity of those we knew - a lot of this made it home with us, but not all of it.

The guilt of this sort of culling was with me throughout the entire packing process. It wasn't only materially wasteful, but it made me feel as if I didn't fully appreciate the sentiment behind the gift. Nonetheless, we knew we'd be moving a lot in America and we couldn't be dragging a lot of "stuff" behind us like an anchor. I took pictures of everything both individually and en masse so that I'd remember what was given even if I couldn't keep the item itself with me. It was the best I could do under the circumstances.

I have to say that the student who gave my husband $200 in cash will forever have my gratitude. It's not that the money was useful, though it was, but that it spared any sort of emotional considerations. And, though the money is gone, he is not forgotten for his thoughtfulness. Besides, the money is no more or  less gone than the items I had to toss away (like the goofy eyeglass holder house that the woman who ruined our departure from Narita gave us).

The trash men, tossing out the desks we used for over a decade in our apartment. The was part of a multi-stage abandoning of our furniture. 

The next to last day saw one of my students dragging away my one-year-old washing machine. Her parents needed a new one and I was more than delighted to give them mine. It wasn't only that I didn't want to waste a perfectly functional machine, but also that it was one less enormous piece of furniture that we would have to arrange to have carted away. I tried to give away more of our stuff, but, as I said before, it was hard-going. It was supremely annoying that the old machine crapped out so near our departure time, but we figured it was no more expensive and far more convenient to just buy another machine than to schlep our clothes to one of the not-so-local "coin laundry" shops.

The worst and most difficult item to rid ourselves of was our sofa. I don't know how Japanese delivery people get things in through narrow walkways and doors, but I imagine they must have extensive training in puzzles in which they have to figure out a way to maneuver large and heavy objects through narrow holes without damaging either the orifice or the object. They probably start with trying to get a stick of gum through a keyhole and, if they bend the gum or get any residue on the keyhole, they don't get to move along to the next task.

My husband and I had a horrific time getting that sofa out of our place, and the men who brought it in seemed to do it so smoothly and skillfully that we had no warning that it would be a nightmare. Both of us were in our late 40's when we left and not especially strong (and probably both on the verge of developing stress-related colds). If you've seen the scene in Friends where Ross is trying to get his sofa into his apartment, you have only a small idea of how awful such an experience could be. By the time we'd wrangled our sofa (which you can see hosting all of our gifts earlier in this post) outside, we were hot, exhausted, and fairly close to being at each other's throats due to multiple failed suggestions to figure out a way to get it through the door and pivoting it down the narrow walkway. The fact that it was a sofa bed that would flop open if you held it at certain angles only made it harder.

The last night, we went out for dinner with my brother-in-law and his wife at our favorite yakitori place. In pictures from the dinner, I look as haggard as one might expect someone to look who had been in a state of stress and chaos and who was getting sick. That evening was an oasis of peace before the final morning. We reminisced and talked about what we were going to miss as well as talked about our plans for the future when we got "home".

The state of that wall is the product of 23 years of humidity behind our dresser and other furniture. Also, the closet floor is warped and cracking from the same moisture issues. Oh, and the closet doors fell off along ago, but we didn't bother to have them replaced because, you know, we didn't care - I just hid the doors behind some shelving and covered the front of the closet with a curtain. This was what our bedroom looked like on our last day. You can see the tatami is also worn through (we had it covered with a carpet for years). It never looked so terrible when we lived in it because those decaying bits were always covered with other things. It was monstrous when we peeled everything away.

We were lucky that our landlord agreed to manage getting our queen-size bed out for us so we could sleep in our own apartment up until the end, but also the memory of that sofa struggle made his kindness even more appreciated. If the sofa was that hard to remove, I couldn't imagine how tough it would be getting the enormous mattress and box spring out as well. We left them behind with the proper large trash ("dai gomi") stickers sitting on the shelf in the closet. Buying those stickers allowed us to pay the expense at least. We had to pay, but he or whoever he paid to clean up the place was going to have to fight their way with our bed through the door.

A small selection of items that I was giving to another student - that's an iPod speaker box there (a nice one), a relatively new microwave, and my coffee maker. I think the coffee grinder is in the paper bag on the right. Those post-it notes say that my student will take them after we leave. Of course, this had all been arranged already with the landlord, who graciously put up with all of this nonsense.

Just because the landlord was managing the bed did not mean the last morning was the leisurely affair I'd hoped for. I knew what I wanted to do and that was to buy a couple of croissants at ChocoCro, brew some coffee on the coffee maker we still had, but would be picked up by another student later on (along with the microwave that I was going to use to reheat the croissants), and take one last walk around the neighborhood, particularly the shotengai. I didn't think it would take so long to complete certain activities that last morning. We did take a little stroll around the neighborhood, but it was the calm before a considerable storm of activity.

The refrigerator was going to be picked up by a recycling shop (down the street from us) and those bags contain our sheets, pillows, comforter, and my winter coat which I abandoned at the 11th hour for weight purposes. The wall there is discolored from the toaster oven and years of various items being placed in front of it and, of course, moisture damage from the Tokyo summers and rainy seasons. I realize I also left behind my Apple magnets. :-(

There were things that had to be bagged and thrown away that final morning and I filled up an enormous space in our kitchen with "trash" - our pillows, sheets, and blankets that we'd been sleeping on for many years. It took a lot longer to cram everything in the bags than I'd thought, especially since everything was insanely bulky. If you ever get a job cramming bedding into plastic bags and you're paid by the piece, trust me when I say you'll make a lot less money than you think. It is like herding cats because they're so unwieldy due to being large, puffy, and squishy.

The way in which trash goes out in Japan (certain types of trash only on particular days) made it impossible for us to get rid of our garbage. I also had to abandon a pretty nice carry-on suitcase at the last minute due to weight issues. The bags are labeled by trash type so the landlords could sort it out and put each out on the proper day. That horribly dirty wall was created by the washing machine being in that space for so many years - it was humidity central with very little space between the wall and machine (which breeds mold). We never saw it until the machine was taken away, then it was pretty ugly.

Emptying a space sounds pretty easy in theory, but, in practice, it's the death of a thousand cuts. The time that we had before we needed to hop into a cab and leave for the airport felt ample when we mapped everything out. In the end, despite my best laid plans (and they were very good plans indeed) it was rather rushed and hectic. Our apartment also seemed to be in an enormous mess despite my thinking (hoping) I'd leave it relatively tidy and hollow for the landlords. I looked back for the last time at our dirty, crumbling apartment with no small sense of guilt at what I was leaving for them to manage as well as a great sadness of leaving behind this place I'd settled into for nearly 23 years. Be it ever so crumbled, it had been "home". (to be continued)

Random Memories #76 - the last weeks in Japan - part 8

Among the earliest of my tribe of returning students was a woman who contacted me late in 2011. She had studied with me for about six months several years earlier and had stopped when she ran out of money. I will call her "M", and the memory of how I finished my time with her is one I've been dreading telling.

"M" was almost the same age as me and, like me, she grew up in a rural area and in far less than the best of family circumstances. At the time that I taught her, she was in contact with her mother and had a brother who she infrequently talked to, but with whom she didn't have an especially close relationship. Her situation with her father was the type that you see in movies, but people don't imagine happen in "normal" Japan. All too often, I found that they weren't that unusual and that people just didn't talk about them because of the shame involved in revealing the skeletons in the family closet.

M's father hadn't been in her life since she was in her early teens. He had gotten involved with organized crime and had some debt because of a business failure. When she told me he had made a lot of debt, I asked specifically if he had gambled and she said he had not, but had pursued a business interest that was not profitable for far too long. In order to not taint his family with the shame that he'd brought upon himself - and possibly to isolate them from any strong-arm tactics or harassment - he divorced his wife and abandoned his family. M hadn't seen him since that time and had no idea where he was living or what had become of him.

From my ethnocentric viewpoint, the father's choices were an act of cowardice. This was an opinion that I did not share with M because it really was not my place to do so and I knew it was a culturally biased perspective. She felt that he'd done them a great favor and made a sacrifice for the greater good. This was despite the fact that her mother had to work hard at a relatively menial and low-paying job to support her kids. In fact, her mother, despite being around 80 years of age, was still was doing the same job. My vague recollection was that the job had to do with preparing bento meals. I imagined it was the type of work that is behind things like the super cheap bentos (400-500 yen) sold in stands in busy districts in Tokyo.

When I was teaching M. She focused on how things turned out okay for everyone in her family, but I thought about how things would have been better if her family hadn't been impacted by her father's mistakes. She saw self-sacrifice as a bigger part of the situation and I saw her father's poor judgement which lead to the need for the choices he made. This difference in our perspectives on life illustrated something very important that was to later become an issue in our lessons.

M's  English was fairly advanced. Her vocabulary and listening comprehension were quite high because she had lived in Canada for some time, but her vocabulary since leaving our neighbor to the North had atrophied to a great extent and her pronunciation could be rather tenaciously poor at times. Her katakana English was something she was aware of and wanted me to help her correct, and I did my best, but such issues are one of the hardest to overcome. In the years between her initial lessons with me and those taken before I left Japan, this problem had only worsened. Since she occasionally needed to communicate with guests from abroad at her work, and had sought me out specifically to prepare for certain guests, she wanted to be able to speak more clearly.

M's job was one of those non-descript office jobs that Japanese women tend to hold. It was so unremarkable and she discussed it so little that I cannot remember what she did besides sit at her desk and work with office software and do paperwork. She wasn't paid poorly, but she also wasn't paid especially well and I think she was conservative with her spending because she knew she had no support system if she didn't save her yen. Her mother had no assets to leave her and her brother was looking after his own interests.

I'm sure she saved a fair bit of money by Western standards, but not nearly enough for someone who was facing retirement alone and without property, prospects, or connections. One of the other things M and I had in common was that we had no financial safety net if our lives fell apart and we had to work hard and make our way entirely on our own. Sure, I am married, but my husband was in the same boat as me. No one paid our way. No one was helping us with anything and, no one would catch us if we fell. I knew why M lived a simple life and saved. I was doing the same thing for the same reasons.

From her description, M lived an small, old apartment with no air conditioning. Her style of apartment is called a 1DK (DK = dining kitchen) in Japan. She rarely ate meat and said she was fine living mainly off of tofu because it was a far cheaper source of protein. Unlike many people in offices who went out for dinner and lunch, she usually prepared her own meals because it was so much cheaper. Sometimes she felt quite vulnerable in that place as she'd been telephone stalked at one point by a former boyfriend, but she was generally okay with living alone.

M's social life wasn't vast and mainly seemed to involve the occasional meet up with old friends for lunch, but she complained to me that her life had become incredibly "small". She expressly said that she felt her life was stagnant and wanted badly to "grow" beyond her little life, but expressed fear at ever doing so. She couldn't bring herself to strike out in ways that might have improved her quality of life. She didn't have a cell phone (nor did I at that time) nor did she even have internet at her apartment. Her free time was spent doing daily chores or reading books, mainly second-hand English books that she purchased at a dingy old shop in Koenji.

It's important not to mistake her saying her life was "small" with seeing her as "small". She was not only physically larger than most average Japanese women - that is to say, somewhat taller and with bigger bones - but she was no wilting flower. M was much more assertive than the average Japanese person when speaking to me. She never mentioned much in the way of difficulties with her Japanese compatriots, and I suspect she knew where to draw the line with various people, but the fact that she had lived abroad for some time showed in her personality.

M was a curious mix of rigid Japanese mentality with Western assertiveness. I'm sure it got her in trouble from time to time with people, but it likely caused her more suffering than anyone else. She knew the box that Japanese culture expected her to live in, but she also had the impulse and energy to want to break out of it This is what happens when one has lived outside of that box for some time and knew what it felt like to be free of such thinking. I know this feeling well since I also lived abroad long enough to feel like an alien in my home culture. It creates internal forces that make you constantly feel at odds with everything around you, but you cannot act on your feelings without appearing strange or even crazy.

I've written before about women who dream of landing a Western husband, and M's path in life was an example of what happens when such hopes do not play out as planned. The reason that she had lived in Canada for some time was that she had been co-habitating with her Canadian boyfriend. They lived together for a number of years, but the relationship fizzled out. There were some cross-cultural issues, some of which I experienced with M in discussions in our lessons, and ultimately he ended it.

The problem with what happened to M was that Japan, at least at that time, was an especially unwelcoming place for women who allowed themselves to be "sullied" by consorting with a foreign man. She was essentially "tainted" after years of living abroad with a foreigner and she came home at an age that was considered too "mature" to be appealing. Keep in mind that the idea of "Christmas cake" (no good after the 25th - in the case, a woman lost her appeal after she passed beyond her 25th birthday) was still in play when M was younger, so she was fairly well past her sell-by date by the time her Canadian relationship had fizzled.

M invested a lot in a dream of marriage and life in Canada and I think she gave up to some extent after coming home to Japan. Part of the smallness of her life was likely related to pinning her future on the wrong person in the wrong place and finding the window of opportunity for a conventional path to happiness tightly sealed. She lacked the confidence or the personality type to strike out on an unconventional path. She knew the limits she was putting on herself, but didn't have whatever that special something is that makes people take risks - or she once had it when she moved to Canada and was burned sufficiently badly that she decided not to take such a chance again.

When M got back in touch with me, I told her immediately that I would be leaving soon. In the first lesson, she told me that she admired how I'd changed my life since she'd last talked to me and wished that she could take the risks that I was taking to move ahead with life and expand my life and experiences. I told her that I thought she could do it, too, and tried to encourage her as much as possible. She said she wanted to do so, and that my situation inspired her to want to try a bit more to branch out.

Since M only wanted to take lessons with me for a finite time - again - because she didn't have the money to do ongoing study, she didn't mind that I was leaving soon. She told me that she really thought I was a good teacher and was very happy to have the chance to study with me again. The truth was that she was one of the very few students who I'd taught who I saw as a true contemporary and the only Japanese person with whom I thought I could have been "equal" friends with had we not gotten to know each other at first through a business relationship.

When I say that we could have been "equal" friends, I mean that I felt there was a chance that I could be, at least to some extent, the "real" me with her instead of the me that was carefully designed to cater at every moment to the needs, wishes, interests, and limits of my students. In fact, I entertained the possibility that she and I might have a distance friendship of some sort after I had left Japan. Unfortunately, I blew it.

In my lessons with M, she was fairly candid with me in ways which other students were not. She would tell me that I was being impractical or unrealistic about what was possible in life and needed to simply accept what was rather than complaining or asserting that things could or should be different. At one point, during her next to the last scheduled lesson with me, we had a conversation about the medical system in Japan and America. This happened naturally, but it was a time in my life when such issues were very much on my mind. At that time, my sister had been diagnosed with stage 3 cancer and had lost her health insurance at work due to down-sizing. She was staring down the barrel of enormous medical expenses and her prognosis was uncertain.

M was lecturing me about how the medical system was what it was and that I should just accept that there were economic limits and some people simply couldn't get the best care. She was telling me how we had to live with what was rather than complain about what should be. I wasn't in any state to put up with her compliant Japanese mentality and instructing me with an air of exasperation to just placidly accept what was without complaint and I rather emotionally (holding back tears - not shouting or angry) told her that my sister had cancer and that, for some people, the issue was not just an academic topic. Real people were sick. Real people might die. Real people's lives were destroyed or damaged by such things, and my sister was one of them.

The truth was that I lost it and the way things turned out was all on my shoulders. She was being insensitive, but she didn't know that was what she was doing as she had no way of knowing what was going on with me. I allowed my real life and feelings to intrude on a lesson and, unsurprisingly, this put her off rather badly. She felt guilty for what she'd said and apologized at the end of the lesson. I could tell that she was very shook up and wasn't surprised with she cancelled her last lesson with me.

We also had arranged for a "goodbye dinner" at a local curry restaurant at which she was going to meet my husband. She apologized for not being able to make that engagement as well and gave some flimsy excuse that I'm sure she knew I wouldn't believe. She didn't say that this was because of what happened in the lesson, but I knew that it was. When I e-mailed her back, I told her little more than "I understand." "I understand" is frequently code in Japan for 'we're both lying to avoid the unpleasant truth and to spare embarrassment on someone's part'. If you ever deal with a Japanese company, "I understand" is a pretty loaded statement most of the time so consider reading between the lines when you hear those two words.

I left it at that, because, though I could emotionally justify what had happened, I could not do so professionally or humanistically. I closed the distance between us when I should have kept it intact. It may have happened because I had hopes of being friends with her after I left Japan. It may have occurred because I was on edge due to my sister's cancer and extremely tenuous situation. It may have been the result of my change in attitude toward life in Japan as the date of departure drew near. It was probably all of these things and more, but this memory of how I messed up has stuck with me and made the thoughts of the end of my days even more complex.

It's important to make it clear that I wasn't upset about what happened because of the lost chance to be friends with M. Chances were that not much could have been built through correspondence anyway. I'm not even especially angry with myself for a lapse in professionalism, though that is a tiny piece of it. I did pride myself on being able to keep my interests at bay with students and my feelings in check, but this was an unusual situation on my part. I don't often have my only sibling and closest family diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease and facing complete economic ruin. I still wish I'd done things differently, but I can "forgive" myself such a lapse as I would forgive anyone else in a similar situation.

The biggest piece about this that I'm unhappy with is how I left things with this woman with the small life. I'm concerned that she felt bad about herself for what she said and how it made me react. I'm unhappy that I could have been a small conduit through which she could have found the courage to make her tiny, boring life bigger and that was lost because I lost my composure in a situation in which I had no right to do so. One of the messages that I took away from my time with students in Japan was that, for the most part, my presence changed their lives for the better. In this case, I left with the sense that I certainly left M no better, and may have left her slightly worse. I'll never know for sure. (to be continued)

Random Memories #75 - the last weeks in Japan - part 7

My previous posts about goodbyes with students may lead my readers to believe that every student loved me to pieces and sobbed herself into a state of apoplexy at my impending departure. In fact, the reason for my focusing on those people in my initial posts about goodbyes was more about what left the biggest impression on me than an attempt to self-aggrandize or paint myself as someone who left an indelible impression on everyone who crossed her path. No small number of people simply did not care when I left, and one of those was a student who I taught for quite some time, went away for a year or so, and circled back into my life three months before I left.

When I first starting getting private students via a referral service, they sent me one student at a time. After I collected a few who gave me very positive reviews, I started getting offered more people more often. Anyone who knows the private tutoring game in Japan knows that building a stable of private students is difficult, but more profitable than teaching in a conversation school on an hourly basis.

Because of various health problems, I wanted to get as many students as possible to help build up an income that I could generate from my apartment. Due to my limits, I accepted nearly anybody who was sent my way regardless of their level. This was not only to pad my coffers, but also because I wanted to agency to believe that I would not arbitrarily reject anyone based on idiosyncratic preferences.

After about six months, I was offered my fifth private student and the oldest person I had taught to date. This student, who I often referred to as "little old man" ("LOM") to my husband, was 74 years old and had worked at NTT for his entire life. His life was a classic example of that of a middle class Japanese man. He started at the bottom, rose through management, and remained at the same company for his entire life. He made more money over time and did less work, and very likely was nearly useless by the time the door failed to hit his ass on the way out.

When retirement came around (at around age 65 for him, I believe), NTT did something which is very common in Japanese companies. They told him that he could keep working there doing the same job, but for about half of the salary he had been receiving. LOM decided he'd rather spend his days golfing and puttering around his house than put in a day's work at NTT for less scratch. He had a son and a wife, but neither of them factored much into his retirement plans or activities. Like many men of his generation, his family was something he had to fulfill specific needs and expectations, and he conducted much of his life separately from them.

In his lessons, LOM rarely talked about his wife or son other than to mention an occasional visit to his son's out-of-town home. When I asked about his wife, he essentially said the same thing so many older men do about their wives - they were more like siblings and stayed out of each other's way for the most part or they would argue too much. Even when they traveled together, they didn't tend to stick together unless logistics dictated that it be so.

There were a lot of things that LOM preferred to talk about and I spent lessons hearing a lot about golf and the tiniest details of his daily life. In one lesson, he announced that he wanted to tell me about how he brushed his teeth and meticulously described how he'd brush each part of his dental structures and in what order. "First I brush my top teeth on the left side, then I brush the top teeth on the right side. Then, I brush the front teeth." It was scintillating stuff.

He was much more interested in talking about what he did than how he interacted with anyone and the more detailed the talk about his mundane activities, the better. The only excitement that he ever talked about with me was when he had all of his luggage, wallet, and passport stolen from a rented vehicle during a vacation to Hawaii. They were stolen, in part, because he left his car unlocked, but he did so because he subscribed to the all-too-familiar notion that Hawaii is a part of Japan and not the United States. It's an easy enough mistake to make when the tourist areas cater so lavishly to Japanese interests, including providing Japanese language services.

It was my job to be the teacher that he wanted me to be, and he asked me initially to teach him English "from the beginning" and I tried to do as he instructed by starting with a low level English book. It's important to note that his English was not high level and he had a lot of grammar and pronunciation problems. His issues were the sort of dyed deep in the wool variety that is so common among older learners who never studied long or hard nor lived abroad. Though he asked me to teach him from the beginning, he soon grew impatient with the process and that's when he started planning his own lessons and talking about things like how he cleaned his house step-by-step using a floor sweeping thing which has a big roll of weak tape on the end (these are popular in Japan for picking up small particles on floors, but are usually used as lint removers in the U.S.) and how he conducted his dental hygiene routine.

LOM needed to run the show, even when he told me he wanted me to do it. On several occasions, he'd tell me he wanted a particular type of lesson and I'd comply only to have him change course shortly thereafter. First it was starting with a textbook from basics, then it was practicing various grammatical structures, then it was talking about everyday things, and so on. He knew what he needed or wanted to learn, but he didn't know what it would entail to actually do it so he kept rearranging the lesson structure and focus. I did the dance he asked for awhile, until he asked me to do a different one.

For most of the years that I steadily taught him, there was one thing which always made him happy and that was talking about golf. Much of his desire to learn English was based in his hobby. He had done a homestay in Florida at one point and met some nice folks there, but he did it not to meet those people, but rather to gain access to the golf courses at the retirement community there. Note that he did this homestay after retirement. While the image of the typical homestay person is that of a student who goes to school, it is possible for old folks to do homestays as well (often with other older folks). He needed to keep his English level where it was if he had any hope of communicating with these people and gaining access to their compound and accompanying golf greens.

LOM's lessons were very boring for me for a variety of reasons. One was that he wanted to talk about such mundane things. Another was that his English level was so low. Yet another was that he wasn't making much headway no matter what I did. This was in part due to his age and entrenched problems, but also because he never stuck with any plan that addressed his weak points. Since he had no compelling reason to improve (such as getting a TOEIC score or needing English for work), I never counseled him about how his inconsistent and idiosyncratic approach was derailing improvement. I think he already knew it, but he chose autonomy over better skill. Based on his demeanor and whimsical approach to study, I'm pretty sure that he would have stopped taking lessons if I pointed out that he'd never improve if he kept going as he did.

The biggest reason that the lessons were tedious was that LOM was the most self-centered person that I had ever known in Japan. He rarely missed a lesson, so I had nearly 300 lessons with him and he never once even asked a perfunctory "how are you?" He never asked me a question about myself or my life and it was clear from his focus that he had no interest in talking about his family or friends. It was always about him - every little detail was about him.

However, it was not a student's responsibility to amuse me or show interest in my life and I always knew this and kept it in mind. It was my job to give them the type of lesson they wanted and to show interest in them. That is what I diligently did for LOM until his interests changed and he decided to stop studying English in favor of his new passion. After years of learning English because he loved golf, he decided that he liked social dancing more than improving his swing or score. With a loss of his need to make annual pilgrimages to Florida, he stopped studying English except for contacting me once or twice a year to help him understand and reply to the occasional letter from his former homestay family.

In January 2012, shortly before my departure in March 2012, I got an e-mail from LOM asking about studying with me again. I told him that I would soon be leaving Japan and would no longer be available to teach him. The response he gave me was... nothing. He didn't wish me well in America. He didn't say, "thank you for your reply, can you recommend another teacher?" He didn't even say, "I'm glad you're going. You suck!" I was greeted with nothing but silence.

The truth was that I was a tool for him to use and he paid me for the privilege so I have no complaints or criticisms. For some students, that is what the teachers are, and he not only didn't shed a tear at the news of my departure, but didn't bother to put in a socially appropriate word. I was something useful that he picked up when he needed and put it down when he didn't. Now, that tool was going to be out of reach so he'd have to find a different one and that was all there as to it. (to be continued)

Random Memories #74 - the last weeks in Japan - part 6

The red bag has my name embroidered on the other side. It's from a well-known maker, or so I was told. K. also gave me a picture frame and rusks. It was quite a generous pile of gifts considering she hadn't seen me for a very long time.

Compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, human babies are born essentially premature and quite helpless. A calf will be up and walking soon after it is born, but a human baby takes between nine and twelve months to accomplish a similar feat. This is one of the many things that separates us from animals, and what may appear to be a big mistake on the part of mother nature is actually a means of accommodating an enormous advantage.

Humans have big brains compared to other animals. This is so because they have a highly developed prefrontal cortex. This is the part which essentially separates humans from animals and requires that our mothers give birth to us early. If we were more developed, our enormous heads wouldn't fit through the birth canal, so we are born in a more helpless state and take longer to mature than other animals. It's also speculated that this big brain is what allows humans to possess a certain consciousness. It is theorized that that is what has us talking to ourselves, speculating about the past and the future rather than living in the moment or acting only on current needs, and what allows us to weave complex philosophies of life.

I've spent a good deal of my life knitting, crocheting, and embroidering life philosophies. I'm not claiming that I have all of the answers. In fact, I'm not claiming that I have any answers at all - at least not for anyone other than myself. In the end, that's all any of us have and I do my best to respect that other people aren't going to share in my worldview or weave the same philosophical and, yes, spiritual cloth that I am choosing to wear. To each their own. I won't push my views on you, though if you're reading this, you're sort of asking for it to some extent, and I'd appreciate it if you don't force yours on me.

That being said, I can't talk about some of my parting experiences in Japan without mentioning a particular philosophical bent that I possess. My big human brain (which is no bigger than other human brains - they're all big) compels me to look for patterns and to find meaning, even if neither actually exists. One of the patterns that it has discovered and, in one of the conversations with myself that my unconscious has revealed, is that we are all in some way connected to one another. The longer and more strongly we associate, the stronger the bonds between us.

I tend to think this  has to do with energy and the way atoms and molecules communicate with each other beyond human sensory capacity to detect. If I feel linked to someone, I think that my molecules have formed some sort of atomic-level relationship. You can frame it any way you want, or reject the concept entirely as utter poppycock or new age drivel. However, I can say that, as my days in Japan dwindled, several of the chickens that had flown the coop came home to roost. That's my colorful way of saying that students who had stopped taking private lessons with me years before suddenly started popping up again near the very end. The timing was very peculiar, and the truth is that I hadn't actually "lost" that many students anyway. Only one that I had a long-term  (more than six months) relationship with didn't come back or remain with me throughout the 6 years that I was doing private lessons in my apartment.

One of them contacted me a few weeks before we left. That one was the biggest shock. For simplicity's sake, I'll refer to her as "K." She was someone who I had taught for about a year - an accountant for a French insurance firm who studied English for her job - and I hadn't had contact with her for at least two years. To my husband, I often referred to her as "the sad sack". She rarely smiled and every week when I started the lesson by saying, "how are you?" She'd reply with "not good".

K. was in her 40's, a little older than me, and lived with her father and brother. She wasn't particularly happy with them as they tended to be lazy and her father was prone to not doing any housework. The house she lived in was old and dirty, but she wasn't sufficiently unhappy to move out into her own place. It was bad, but not that bad.

When I first started teaching her, K. worked for a Japanese insurance company in the accounting division. She was often worn out and had little time of her own. Occasionally, she'd complain about her bosses or coworkers. She was the student who first introduced me to the concept of "amae", or someone who depends on others selfishly. In her office, she had a coworker who she said often behaved in that fashion and she resented this behavior, yet still indulged it as a means of keeping harmony within the office.

The truth about my feelings regarding K. was that I felt bad for her. She seemed to work hard and to not be appreciated for her less tangible qualities and had a low estimation of her own worth. Though she had a Master's degree and accounting certifications, she was unhappy in her career and talked often about changing jobs.

I think a lot of her sense of her lack of value stemmed from her physical appearance. Her teeth were bad, worse than even the somewhat average Japanese badness because some of hers were brownish and looked like they were decaying. I never asked her about her teeth, but she did occasionally mention trips to the dentist and how she had problems and toothaches. She also talked about her dental hygiene habits and I was certain that her issues were genetic and not based on a lack of personal care.

Besides her teeth, K. was slightly thick-bodied. For a Japanese, she may have been considered overweight, but she simply was not slender or petite. If she had extra body weight, it was minimal, but she wore clothes that constantly made her look older and frumpier. When she arrived at my apartment wearing pieces which I found attractive, as she sometimes dressed up to meet former classmates or colleagues after our Sunday morning lesson, I always complimented her on her choices. It seemed she got very little in the way of affirmation of her value, so I gave her what I could when I sincerely felt it.

K.'s English lessons were often more tiring than those of other students. It wasn't that she was incapable or didn't try hard, but I think she was often taxed in her energies before she even showed up at my door. She'd progressively rush through repetitions or words and not focus. Her problems were persistent and intractable. I don't know if I was helping her at all to progress. She possessed a high level of vocabulary already, but she often pretended to understand when she didn't and her pronunciation problems seemed set in stone.

I also found her negative outlook and energy exhausting at times. Though I wasn't pouring energy into pepping her up, it was hard at times to not be drawn into the grayness of her worldview. She felt trapped and unhappy, though she did actually get a new job at a French insurance company after some time. That helped her escape her old work environment for one at a foreign company that would follow a different working culture. I was very happy for her when she changed jobs, especially since she seemed to work a lot of overtime and weekends. After awhile, K. decided that she needed to invest much more energy in preparation for certain types of accounting qualification exams than English and she said she'd study English independently. I understood, and I was slightly relieved as it often felt as if she walked in with a storm cloud over her head that colored my day as well.

K. was with me for going on two years and, once she left, I never expected to see her again. I was shocked when, quite suddenly, she sent me a message asking if she could friend me on Facebook. When I replied, I told her that I was leaving Japan very soon. Much to my surprise, K. asked if she could come and see me to say goodbye in person.

I never felt especially close to her, but the day before I left, she showed up bearing gifts. While K. looked very much like herself when she came to my apartment, the cloud she'd carried with her seemed to be gone. Her face looked brighter, and her hair, clothes and make-up were done better. I told her that she looked great and she replied that she was making an effort to "look more beautiful". Her pictures on Facebook reveal that she challenges her body with weight training and she's going to parties and socializing more. I was so happy for her that she seemed to be doing better.

During her visit, the sisters that I'd said goodbye to earlier came around for another "goodbye" because they'd forgotten to bring their gifts when we met for dinner. It was a little weird having them all there, but handy in getting pictures taken since I could pose with one person/party while the other took the shot. The strangest part was that the sisters started crying when I talked to them which caused K., who I hadn't seen in ages, to also start to cry even though she didn't have nearly as long or intimate a relationship with me.

The fact that K. made the effort to come over and say goodbye to me personally as well as arrange for personalized gifts was a real testimonial to how generous the Japanese can be. It also reflected how much they value and nurture the connections they make with others. Her kindness in the 11th hour of my time in Japan is something I will never forget.

(to be continued)

Random Memories #73 - the last weeks in Japan - part 5

S's goodbye gift to me – a beautiful, colorful shawl and her lovely note which said, “It's very sad that you leave Japan. But is already decided with your husband. I understand because a Master wonderful to you is in a side. On Thursday, I remember, and miss you every week. Thank you for the great time. Please, don't worry, and don't hesitate. Everything OK!! Because it's you. I'm believe your future. I hope you and your family's happiness and health far from Japan. Keep in touch. See you again!”

At the start of my previous post, I mentioned that talking about my final weeks has been much more emotionally difficult than I expected. I feel that words are insufficient to convey the experience and that what I say may come across as overwrought and much ado about nothing, particularly to those who have not been in such charged situations. For an impassive people, my departure certainly brought out a lot of passion in those that knew me fairly well. Being on the receiving end of that over a compressed period of time was trying to say the least. Today, I'm going to talk about the hardest one.

One of my students was one of the best souls that I have ever known. For simplicity's sake, I will call her "S." S. is/was a nurse who was born in the countryside and came to Tokyo to work as a surgical assistant. She wasn't walking around taking temperatures, blood pressure measurements, and setting up bags of saline to go into I.V.s. She was setting up operating rooms, monitoring everything that happened and assisting, and cleaning up afterward. When a sponge was unaccounted for, she had to find out what happened and she had to do a ton of paperwork documenting everything that occurred. Sometimes, she'd do 8 operations in a single day. She also was called in for emergencies, not infrequently in the middle of the night. Her work was exhausting and required a high level of skill, ongoing training, and a lot of time on her feet.

S. had lessons with me in the evening after doing an early full shift at the hospital. On an "easy" day for her, she would assist with only three surgeries. Often, she would have the personality problems of her coworkers to contend with in addition to the rigors of the job itself. At the start of every lesson for each student, I sincerely asked about their week and how things went for them. For her, it always sounded exhausting, but she said it was okay. She said that she had chances to rest and spend time with her friends to help her relax. This often, but not always, included drinking and copious amounts of eating, though S. generally made up for the indulgences by eating little to nothing the next day and she only drank when she went out with people. She never drank alone.

When S. discussed her week, something which she had to prepare carefully to do as her English level when she started taking lessons with me was very low, I always expressed my admiration and sympathy for her. I was truly amazed at what she could do in a day, but even more impressed by her compassion for her patients. One case was when she told me that she recommended that an older gentlemen receive a particular pain killer injection because the more common type would be painful for him to receive. S. explained that old folks, with their thinner skin, couldn't tolerate conventional injections very well. The doctor on duty rejected her recommendation because that medication was more expensive than the conventional one. She told me she felt very bad when the man cried out in great pain when he received the shot.

I taught S. for about three years. She came on Thursday nights most of the time, and rarely missed a lesson. Despite her lack of English skill, I learned a great deal about her personally. She had a depth, warmth, and wisdom about her that was impressive for her young age - she was 26 when I started teaching her and I was in my mid 40's. I never had the sense that I was her "elder" in the lessons. Her energy and character were more mature than her age, even if she did have a tendency to wear clothes and make-up which were more akin to what you'd see in Harajuku like short shorts and tights and cat-eye eyeliner.

S's. limited English skills couldn't cover up the fact that she was clearly very bright. She was an expert on the abacus when she was younger and had won contests in which people did calculations on them. She carried a medical Japanese to English dictionary and used it to talk about her work and did her homework and improved markedly over the time that I taught her. Her progress was all on her. Unlike many students who expect to magically improve by sitting down for one hour a week with an English speaker and refuse to do anything else, S. put in the time at home, too.

Among the many things S. and I talked about were spiritual beliefs. I rarely talked about such things with students, and I didn't speak exhaustively about it with her. However, she had visited some psychics on occasion and I always asked her about what was said. Generally, she did it for fun, but sometimes she was told things which were on the nose or struck her as having a strong personal resonance. One of the things was that she was told when she was quite young that she'd be a nurse. This was no surprise to her as she told me that she had decided to be a nurse at the age of four, though she hadn't shared that information with the psychic. A few years into my lessons with her, she saw a psychic who told her that her soul was very old and that she'd been through at least 70 incarnations on this earth. Given her personality, it certainly wouldn't surprise me if that were true.

She had often struck me as an old soul in a young body. There was a peaceful acceptance and a calm warmth about her that was uncommon. That being said, she was not invincible and sometimes the pressure and difficulty of her day would break through in a lesson. We'd be practicing something and she'd burst into tears. The fatigue and psychological pressure of the day or week would just wear her down and she couldn't concentrate or focus on the lesson. I felt terrible when this happened, and she felt bad as well, but she also told me that she found studying English liberating and relaxing despite these (rare) breakdowns.

There was a bond between S. and I that built up through the time we had. It was one that she felt more acutely than me, though I was not aware of it until the end. During our last lesson, she told me that her time with me "saved" her. It was a beacon in her life that helped her get through the hardships. As she said goodbye, seemingly for the last time, at my apartment at the end of that last lesson, she cried and cried and I hugged her several times, but she could or would not leave. Standing there with nothing else to say, watching her sob and hold her hand on the door knob, all I could do was occasionally hug her, thank her, and tell her that everything would be okay. She would be okay without me.

It took ten minutes of emotion-packed talk and reassurances peppered with expressions of gratitude for what I'd done for her before she left. This was incredibly draining for me. It was a drawn-out process that came from a good place and displayed the meaning I'd had for her all too clearly. Dealing with that much emotion, and knowing that my decision to leave was taking something that she had found so profoundly important in her life, was extremely difficult for me to manage.

I'd like to say that that was the end of it and that that one exhausting goodbye was all there was, but she e-mailed me and asked to say goodbye the morning of our departure from Japan. I couldn't bear that on top of everything else that was to come on our last morning, so I told her that she could come by the evening before instead. I wasn't happy about this because things were so chaotic and difficult for us, but it was hard to refuse. Once more, I went through another emotionally exhausting goodbye with tears and talk of how important I was to her and how she could not have survived emotionally without me and my lesson to help her cope. It was an even longer and more difficult repeat of the first goodbye.

The truth was that, I did find her to be an extraordinary person full of strength, intelligence, and personality. Because she seemed so strong and capable of managing her life, I had no idea though that she would feel so strongly that I had "saved" her. She said "you saved me" so many times during those two wrenching goodbyes that her voice saying those words is etched in my memory. It was a compliment, to be sure, but it was also a burden.

This was a person who genuinely had a need for me above and beyond the trivial exchange of my teaching talent for increased English ability. What was more, she was a person who did an immense amount of good in the world and deserved support and kindness. She needed me more than I realized, and I was leaving her behind. The size of the hole in her life that I was leaving was made clearer by the need for the second incredibly difficult goodbye.

What was worse was that I knew that this was a relationship that had no future whatsoever at a distance. I wanted to keep in touch with her. I wanted even to continue to be a source of support, but I knew from experience that it takes an immense amount of effort and communicative capacity to conduct friendships by distance. After returning to the U.S., I tried to e-mail her and keep in touch, but her English messages were a word salad and I couldn't follow her much. I wrote to her, but I'm sure that she couldn't follow me well either. As bad as her English was, my Japanese was worse. It was pretty hopeless.

S. had talked many times in the last year - before she knew that I was leaving Japan - about moving out of Tokyo. It was clear that she wanted to advance her career and she felt her life's journey would be better served by moving on at some point. Because of this, I thought that I would lose her as a student long before she would lose me as a teacher and that telling her I was leaving would be easier because of her plans. She still cried and cried when I told her that I was leaving, but I didn't know that was just the beginning of her grieving process.

There was a truth about life in general that years of having and losing friends in Japan taught me. I was never happy about it, but I learned a long time ago that it is extremely rare to keep the same people in your life for the duration unless you stay stuck in one place and never move or grow. S. and my lives were never meant to travel along the same track indefinitely.They were meant to touch and we were to walk along together for awhile and learn and grow as we would, and then we were to separate again. I could understand this, and I think she understood it, too, but I think that she found the reality emotionally more difficult than I did. Part of that was that I had a significant other to travel on my separate path with, and she was spending much more of her journey alone. As the supported, it was harder for her to say goodbye than me as the supporter.

Many people think that English teachers are self-serving, greedy, and lazy people who reluctantly wile away the time in lessons and take the money from their students' pockets. I can say that I cared about every student who I taught. I cared about them as human beings and I approached how I managed them at all times with a regard not only for their English skills and their status as paying customers, but also as people who I had the privilege of impacting with my presence. When I asked about their lives, I did so with genuine interest. When I heard about their problems, I listened with genuine concern. I didn't realize this at the time, but this was a gift I gave those who needed this sort of presence in their lives - and many of them lacked such a presence.

The wrenching nature of no small number of goodbyes that I had with people who were generally composed and impassive illustrated this in a way that I could not ignore or dismiss. Much as I may desire to be humble (and much as others will desire to humble or degrade me), I mattered to people in Japan. I mattered in a way that I don't feel that I do in America because people treat others here as another disposable party in a conga line of people they can use and discard because it's so easy to find ears to forcibly bend in the U.S.

Since Japanese people don't impose themselves on people in general as it is not part of their cultural norm, my offering myself as I did was a rare opportunity. I didn't realize that then, but I do now. By and large, Americans don't wait for someone to make an offer to be there for them. They just impose upon you when they want something and make you wriggle free if you don't want to play that part for them. For reasons of culture or situation, my presence in the lives of my students was important in a way I expect I will never experience again, and nothing proved it better than the goodbye I had with S.

(to be continued)