Cold mornings, morning colds

I woke up this morning, to find the world outside of my little envelope of comfort to be super cold. I think there was frost last night, but I didn’t look outside early enough to tell dew from frost. It was cold though, and with the gaps in my windows I was feeling it. Sometimes I feel like my life in Japan is one big camping trip complete with a base camp and everything. The elements and I are simply in a closer relationship. We get to know each other intimately. The cold gets into my bones and during the summer, the heat found every pore my skin has, some it never knew about, and had each of them gushing sweat. Frankly I’m surprised the Japanese live as long as they do, given the actual physical stress of living in this poorly engineered amalgam of build and natural environments. One would think that insulation, in the minds of a culture that by all rights ought to be material-efficiency oriented, would be high on people’s list of technologies to ensure were widely utilized. I dunno, but maybe people feel that somehow by ensuring their buildings are limited to uncomfortable environments they find more pleasure in those little comforts. Then again, maybe it just gives them a peculiar sense of superiority. Given some of the literature I’ve been perusing of late, the latter wouldn’t surprise me, even if it maintained their manners, generosity and kindness. However, given what I know of the several dozen Japanese people I know, I’m inclined to think it the former likelihood.

Anyway, I’ve started eating Japanese breakfasts. I cook rice, miso soup, sometimes some eggs with a little sake and onions and coffee. There’s often a fair bit of seaweed and sesame involved in that arrangement as well as on occasion, some Japanese pickles, or tsukemono (漬け物). 漬け物 are delightful in small quantities and unbearable in large portions.

Ok, the coffee isn’t typically Japanese, but they’ve got inclinations towards the comforts it affords just as the rest of the world seems to have. The coffee is not always good in the various establishments that offer it, and I refer mainly, here to places where it’s an after-thought or actually from a vending machine (mmm… thick, syrupy, sour badness). The coffees in coffee shops here are actually quite nice, but they should be! I’ll put it in terms of sustenance. I can eat for a day, or I can buy a coffee with virtually the same number of yen. Sometimes I go for the coffee, though this doesn’t actually mean I don’t eat, it just means that I don’t eat out and that my day gets a little more expensive. That’s ok every once and a while, but mostly I make my coffee at home, where it only costs me the use of my stove and something like 200 - 600 yen per 100 grams of coffee, depending on whether I want it to taste like used tanning fluids or a nice, soul-soothing, full bodied bitter fluid worthy of the name coffee. Although I cut corners with money, like not heating my house, hanging my laundry to dry and cycling 12 kilometers into the countryside to find cheaper, locally grown produce, I don’t cut corners with coffee.

On my walk to school this morning, through my still gummy eyes, I watched the local pair of white something or other swans paddle under the bridge I had to cross, looking very serene against the reeds and grasses of the canal bank, despite the scores of people and vehicles bustling along the road bridging the canal beside the baseball diamond. It was kind of a surreal picture, as I’ve discovered most biological encounters are in Japan. It’s definitely a magical place, and the concrete only serves to make it all the more surreal.

At school, I joined the other 70 or so teachers in the teachers room for the morning meeting, which is for me, really just a Japanese listening exercise that I get paid to participate in. Still, it makes me feel and seem like part of the team, and that’s important. It’s probably more important for seeming like part of the team than drinking everybody under the table at enkais. Anyway, many of them shouldn’t have been there. There were very obvious fevers, remarkable pulmonary-sinus drainages and some very clear general malaise occurrences there in that room. It make me wonder about the social responsibility of quarantining oneself upon the onset of illness. Evidently the Japanese, at least when it comes to non-life-threatening illness, feel that a “ganbatte kudasai” is more appropriate than “go home before you make everyone else sick, you coughing, spluttering, shambling vector. And, oh, by the way, if you were able to avoid sneezing your goo on the keyboard that everyone in this office has to use, we’d think the world of you”. Today, my supervisor has a high fever, and she’s at school. While she’s super, a trooper and I esteem her greatly, the poor woman looks like she’s on the verge of tears. I wish I could convince her that being at home drinking soup and hot herbal tea all day would be better for her than wandering around a cold, drafty and frankly unsanitary place like this school. Anyway, I'll keep washing my hands and touching as few things here as possible, but as a backup, I think when I get home, I’m going to gargle with vodka and eat a bulb of garlic. Ganbatte kudasai!