Friendship Quilts

Asai-san and his family (also featuring Asami and Melody)

I have had the joy and privilege of crossing paths with innumerable people on my journey thus far.  Relationships blossom in the most unexpected of ways, and their courses seem never to follow in the footsteps of our preconceptions.  Weaving heart to heart and mind into memory at the spark of a word, chance misstep, glance, or the loving agency of a mutual friend, they are the stepping stones that bring us into the greater being beyond ourselves.  Be they animal, vegetable, or mineral, the interconnections I've helped spin transcend culture and species.

While some have lasted but a moment or two, a brief exchange in the unabashedness of a public bath (there's nothing like nudity to bring down barriers), others have been blessed with the promise of something greater, the hopeful sense that some distant circumstance will once more wed our parting threads.  I've met WWOOFers and farmers, karate instructors, software programmers, artists, chefs, reptiles, canines, arachnids, and a delightful old woman who survived the bombing of Hiroshima and now dances and sings for the customers at her restaurant.

Melody's pet turtle, Kame-pon

My first new friend was a turtle, appropriately named Kame-pon (kame is Japanese for turtle).  She lives in a small tank at Nathan and Asami's apartment under the faithful care of Melody (and Nathan and Asami).  I've never had the chance to develop a relationship with a turtle before, but I am grateful for this opportunity.  She has thoroughly charmed me!  She's big enough now that she can occasionally manage to pull herself up and over the top of her tank, falling with a thwack upon the wooden floor and promptly scuttling away to nestle in the warmth of a tangle of electrical chords.

Meanwhile, upon my return to Tokyo from my first farm stay, Nathan took me to Kanagawa to meet some old friends from his days as an exchange student.  We visited Asai-san and his wife, Eri-san, who was Nathan's old host sister.  Asai-san teaches karate and recently placed 2nd in the 50 to 54 age bracket of the Shotokan karate championship for the whole Kanto area (with a population of 30 million people, that's not too shabby!).  He also brews his own beer, which I had the opportunity to taste.  It was delicious!  We feasted on kaiten sushi, a style of restaurant where plates of sushi revolve on a conveyor belt about the tables, and afterward visited a playground with a giant slide stretching all the way up the hillside.

The next day we went to see Muto-sensei, Nathan's old home room teacher.  At his house I got a chance to meet an exchange student from Portland.  We all went for a walk along a nearby river, and Nathan and I took our turns reminiscing about our days as exchange students, giving her advice on learning a new language and overcoming the barriers we each had to face as greenhorns abroad.  Muto-sensei gave me advice on becoming an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) in Japan, and encouraged me to do so.  He has lots of connections, so if I should ever follow up on his suggestion the process will be a cakewalk.

Amelie and I: this is how we communicate

But perhaps the person I've enjoyed meeting the most was another WWOOFer, a Taiwanese girl named Amelie.  She arrived at Canadian Farm just a few days before I left, but she came to Tokyo afterward.  We had the chance to get together a few times during the week she spent in the city.  The first night she arrived, we met to go to karaoke.  She sang in Chinese, whereas I sang the likes of Billy Joel and Van Morrison (I made one attempt at Journey, but that didn't work out very well).  We spoke a stumbling mixture of Japanese and English, aided immeasurably by the dictionaries I brought with me.  I would look up the Japanese translation of the words I was trying to say, and if ever she didn't know the Japanese, she could just look at the characters and decipher their meanings.  I treated her to dinner at some cheap ramen shop in Ikebukuro the night before she went back to Taiwan.  We parted with vows of improving our language skills before we meet again; she will study Japanese and English while I attempt Japanese and Mandarin.  Lofty ideals perhaps, but hey, who doesn't like a challenge?

I've another month to go here in Japan.  This first half has been an incredible experience, and I look with bated breath toward the days and weeks to come.  Tomorrow I will travel to Tsuchiura, a city in Ibaraki prefecture, to visit Asami's parents and her sister, Rie.  I will be there a week before heading to Azumino for my second jaunt into the realm of WWOOFing.