I'm living and working as an ALT in Japan. I teach English, survive earthquakes and Typhoons, and try everything I encounter. I'll use this space to collect blogs, photos and other awesome artifacts of my adventure along the way. Some days, it seems like everything in this country is somewhat “limited edition!” Buy now, or forever hold your peace! It wouldn’t be quite so painful, if all of these things weren’t so unbelievably cool or tasty. My personal favorite thing to collect is the unusually flavoured kit-kats. I’ve collected quite a few. Off the top of my head I can think of a few standouts; Ramune (fizzy blue drink), ginger ale, yuzu chili, pumpkin, custard pudding, sakura (cherry blossom), pomegranate, strawberry, orange, wasabi, soya sauce, corn, melon, lemon vinegar, vegetable juice, salted caramel, chili pepper, apple, mango, afternoon tea, matcha, matcha sakura, and many more that I can’t even remember. Part of the joy of finding these is knowing that there is a finite amount in existence. Part of the pain of such fleeting joys, is that we can never find them again (save for the chance that they may reappear next year in season).
Kit kats aside, I recently fell in love with a newly arrived brand of yogurt in mango and strawberry flavours. It tasted like heaven in a pot. Unfortunately I was unable to continue my love affair with this particular yogurt, because the very next trip I made to the grocery store, it had vanished. It had been a one-off occurrence, a mere figment of my imagination; it had been replaced with a terrible fig flavour, that was both unappetizing, and cost quite a bit more.
When I first arrived, this particular trend caused me to become frustrated and mildly paranoid. I was convinced that someone was following me, observing my spending habits, and buying out everything I loved.
This early paranoia was quickly squashed, when I discovered the fleeting nature of seasonal “specialties.” It’s an interesting thing, to a westerner – who, when in her home country, couldn’t fathom why something as quintessentially seasonal as a Cadbury mini egg would disappear after the spring turned into summer- for the many mini-seasons of this country to effect me so.
I soon learned to appreciate the seasons in a new way. When speaking with Japanese people, one often gets the impression that they believe they are the only country in the world with four seasons. They listen to your stories of warm summers, beautiful autumns filled with changing leaves, frigid stormy winters, and life affirming springs, as if they are placating the tales of a schoolchild who had “visited the moon” that morning. They believe quite firmly, that one cannot know or appreciate the seasons truly unless they are in Japan. At first, I scoffed at such a smug and self-congratulatory opinion that my host country seemed to employ, but that was before I had lived through both the summer and the winter. I now have a full appreciation of just how intensely one experiences the seasons in this country.
This is not because Japan has more beautiful seasons, more unique seasons or more of them, but rather because they lack one key element that most of the rest of “first world” countries have long since taken for granted: insulation and temperature control. Here in Japan, the houses are not built to last; they are regularly erected and dissembled out of necessity to keep up with earthquake codes, limited resources, and fear of ghosts. The traditional Japanese home is built with wood, paper, tile, and limited concrete (with more modern homes using more and more concrete and sheet metal). These homes rarely use insulation, and subject their inhabitants to suffer extremely cold temperatures in the winter, and unfathomably hot temperatures in the summer. Many people do not have air conditioning in the summer, and no one has central heating. This is because of extremely high fuel costs. All of this is perfectly fine for many Japanese people, as they adapt to not expecting to ever really be comfortable, and instead set their lives around creating small pockets of warmth, and changing their body composition to somehow stop them from sweating in the summer. Not only are the temperatures so noticeable, but the selction of food from the most basic veggies and fruits, to varieties of tea, rice and other grocery items.
As the resident blundering gaigin, I’ve managed to fumble my way through one of the hottest summers of my life (and I grew up in Saudi Arabia), thanks in no small part to my proximity to the beach, and regular bursts of uncontrollable jumping into a cold shower with all of my clothes on. I now understand why the Japanese believe themselves to be so connected to the seasons. It’s because you do not merely notice their change, you live, breathe and consume them; they are inescapable.
