life on a stratovolcano ^{oshima edition}

In other news, Miyakejima was incredible. We have such a diverse and fun group of JETs here on the Izu Islands.

Rob, Rachel, and I all traveled to Miyakejima to meet with Paulette for the first Tokyo Island JET meetup this past weekend, and, amazingly, we all managed to arrive on time, albiet by very different means. Rachel was fortunate enough to be able to take a ferry directly to Miyakejima. I had but a short helicopter ride (very cool) on the way over. Rob, however, was less fortunate. Miyakejima looks huge from Rob’s island of Kozushima, as it is very close. Unfortunately, Japan, in its infinite wisdom, decided that there were not enough passengers to warrant a method of transportation between the two islands. This was unfortunate for Rob, as he had to go all the way to Tokyo, transfer, and then go all the way back to Miyake. It was a 400 kilometer trip for a destination that is only 20 kilometers away. I think the final total time was somewhere around 17 total travel hours for him.

Goto-san took me to the airport to catch the helicopter, and I entered the security area. Security in Japanese airports is notoriously tight, so I braced myself. I removed all metal from my body and walked into the room, where they proceeded to wand me down for several minutes, stopping at my belt five or six times and asking me to show it to them. Strangely enough, the woman doing the frisking grabbed my belt and shook it, as to see if it could be used as a weapon. They then allowed me to proceed, but they never checked my bag. I was astounded. Briefly, I wondered if they had simply forgotten to, but they did exactly the same thing with the next passenger, and the next. Five minutes of being wanded, and they don’t even check your bag. Typical Japan.

When we landed, I stepped out of the helicopter. Ducking to avoid the blades that were way too high to worry about, I ran around to the other side of the helicopter and saw Paulette and Rachel standing there, waving and holding a sign. I started walking toward them, but they started gesturing to the right and shouting things at me. The blades were too loud, so I didn’t know what they were saying. Suddenly, I was intercepted by one of the helicopter staff, and dragged toward the building on my right. Oops.

I waited in this building for several minutes while they unloaded the baggage. About five minutes later, they inexplicably opened the doors, and allowed everyone to leave. A shining bastion of efficiency Japan is not.

That night, we went to an onsen (hot springs), where I met Jun. Jun is one effing cool human being, because later that night, we went to the bar and he seriously hooked us up with a ton of sashimi, copious amounts of luscious beer, and a whole mess of other food, all for only 1,500 yen ($12) a person! I’d bet my ass that meal would have cost anyone else at least 5,000 yen at a minimum.

After much fanfare, we picked up some beers from a vending machine and headed to the beach. There we lit fireworks, and admired the gorgeous night sky. As Douglas Adams wrote, “Space is big - really big - you just won’t believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” This doesn’t exactly ring true until you’ve seen the night sky from a nearly deserted island. Huge swaths of stars covered the sky; it seemed that for every point of dark, there were two points of light.

We stayed out until midnight; pretty late considering we had to pick up Rob the next morning at 5:00. We jumped into the car, and Jun started driving in the opposite direction of Paulette’s house.

Paulette: “Where are we going?”

Jun: “Yama.”

Everyone: “Cooooool…”

“Yama” in Japanese means “Mountain,” which, in this case, means “Hyperactive-toxin-spewing-volcano.” Being inebriated, we thought this was an absolutely fantastic idea. We began our ascent of the mountain, and, after surveying the surrounding white, dead trees and rocky landscape as we passed, decided that we were in a horror movie. Seriously, this place was SCARY. Even scarier was Jun’s driving, as he saw it appropriate to drive at interstate speeds on the switchbacks up the mountain.

“SLOW DOWN!” Paulette would yell in Japanese.

“Ha ha!” Jun would reply at the obviously funny joke.

When we arrived at the summit, the fog was so thick that you couldn’t see more than ten feet or so, and that added to the super-creepy factor. The ground was made completely of rust-colored lava rock. I then pondered my situation: we were next to the summit of a volcano — one that makes the islanders keep gas masks, no less — walking around in the middle of the night on a Martian landscape. I was genuinely expecting to run into NASA’s Mars Rover.

A few minutes after we arrived, we decided it best to leave. We all jumped into the car, and rode back to Paulette’s apartment for a couple of hours of sleep. We had to get rested up before swimming with dolphins!

Okay, so I’ve redesigned the website — it should be much more streamlined, and easy to navigate, with comments and the like. Overall, it should be a much more pleasant experience.

On a more awesome note though, Jordan Santoni has been accepted for the Interac position on the island, and will be joining me on Oshima. He will be replacing Derek (the Canadian Interac). Jordan has been a great friend to me for quite a while, and I’m sure we will have a fantastic time here.

So a lot has happened in the past few weeks since I last wrote here. Dad came to Japan, I went to Tokyo, I was assaulted by giant screaming cicaidas, I found out that the moths here are actually poisonous, and I attended a pre-wedding party, where nearly naked men were dancing. But, this, by far, has been the most important discovery as of yet.

There is a Hello Kitty for everything in Japan. It’s kind of like the Japanese version of Beanie Babies,
only still culturally relevant.

Anyway, I found this gem in the Daimon subway station when I headed to the mainland to meet up with dad. He had booked us at a plush hotel in the Ginza district of Tokyo, which is known for its insanely overpriced designer stores, like Louis Vuitton and Tiffany’s.

After we putzed around in Tokyo, taking in as much neon light and overpriced beer as any human possibly could in three or four days, we caught the jet boat back to Oshima, where we proceeded to embark on such epic adventures as “Watch Tyler Climb the Volcano in Crocs Like an Idiot” and “Tyler and Scott, at Great Risk to Life and Limb, Battle the Great Mold Demon Which Resides in His Apartment.”

I’ll write more about this and fill everyone in on what I’ve been up to since August 9th later, as I have to catch a helicopter bound for Miyakejima (or, as the beautiful and talented Julia calls it, “Scary Death Island” because everyone has to carry gas masks due to high sulfur from recent volcanic activity.) I have plans to swim with dolphins and meet up with the other Tokyo Island JETs to discuss such important matters as the Japanese Education System, and whose island has the best homebrew whiskey (not necessarily in that order).

There are two high schools on Izu Oshima, Oshima Kookoo (high school) and Oshima Minami (south). Today I am sitting at my new desk, as it is my first day at Oshima Kookoo. The two schools are very different — here there seems to be an air of professionalism while still maintaining casual attitudes. Minami seems a bit more stressed. The building is also much nicer than Oshima Minami’s, and more of it is air conditioned, which is crucial.

So far I have met two of the English teachers here, Goto-san and Kose-san, and both of them seem to be very friendly and approachable. Goto-san speaks impeccable English with a very convincing American accent, but she still uses the sharp intakes of air and noises of surprise that I’ve become very accustomed to Japanese women using. I definitely like the building here more, but I am rather upset at one very important feature that is lacking: internet at the desks. Okay, maybe I’m asking a bit too much, but internet at my desk would supply my empty hours with at least a modicum of entertainment.

Fortunately, the teachers and students here are extremely friendly, and they seem to be much less busy than the teachers at Oshima Minami. It may be because Minami is a private, Marine Biology school with some pretty cool features, like sharks and pufferfish in tanks, while Kookoo is the high school for the local islanders.

It’s funny that at the moment I have a preference for Kookoo, even though there is no internet here. The fact that it is only five minutes drive from my house also helps (as opposed to the 30 minute excursion to the exact opposite end of the island for Minami). Also, my judo classes are at the middle school, which is attached to the building.

When blessed lunchtime arrived, the English teachers and a vice principal took me to a sushi restaurant right next to Motomachi Port. The restaurant was located on the second floor, where wooden stairs ascended to wooden sliding doors (they really like using wood here). We took a seat on the floor at our table. The most prominent feature of the room were the windows, which offered a wonderful panoramic view of the ocean and the Izu Peninsula.

I opened the menu, and, big surprise, it was completely in Kanji, the method of writing borrowed from the Chinese in which each symbol is an idea or word. Japanese uses four different writing systems that are used in different situations, often switching between them several times in the same sentence. I’ve got three of them down pat (considering one is Roman characters), but the fourth has approximately ten thousand different characters. Muy dificil.

Anyway, our food arrived at the table, but, to my surprise, it was served by a gaijin (foreigner). I wracked my brain for a few seconds, remembering how I was informed that there were exactly two foreigners on this island, Derek — a big rugger from Canada that teaches at the elementary school — and myself.

She glanced at me in the same curious way that Japanese people do, however, and I became even more confused. Bizzare. She left, and this gift from heaven was sitting in front of us.

Speaking of awesome, Dad is coming in to Tokyo for the next week, and I’m on vacation! I think we’re going to head down to Kyoto and Nara for a week, or possibly go up to Sapporo due to the stupidly hot weather that plagues Japan in August.

Today, as I was driving back from Oshima Minami High School, I was particularly annoyed at the degree to which the sun had intentionally sabotaged my drive home. Several factors complicated this, not the least contributory of which being the window washer at the gas station doing a particularly smudgy job cleaning the front windshield of the car. The fact that I left work at 6:25 instead of 5:00 helped the sun’s diabolical plans along nicely, as that’s the its prime retina-eating time for westward commuters. I made note to never, ever leave late again. I continued this way for a while, having several near misses with oncoming traffic (true story: they bow instead of honking), and eventually made my way to the bend in the island that slopes northward.

What awaited me was every bit as blissful as the abject horror experienced before. Hands down, the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen was lain out to my left. I gazed at it, longingly. Suddenly, the dense foliage obstructed my view, and I slammed on the gas, flying down the narrow road in order to get to the other side of the jungle tunnel before the sun was able to retreat. I emerged on the other side in Motomachi, and the sun was already dipping below the mountain, so I started looking for westward roads to turn down. Eventually, I saw a sign that pointed to the beach. I threw on my turn signal while simultaneously flinging the steering wheel to the left, much to the chagrin of a furiously bowing tailgater.

I made my way down the narrow road, which was flanked on both sides by weathered little buildings, and stopped right next to the beach. I threw the car into park and jumped out without even bothering to turn my lights off. I took a sharp breath of sea air, and started toward the harbor, which was obscuring my view. To my left were two women, one of whom looked to be around eighty, the other pushing a hundred. They faced away from the sunset, laughing and talking.

I continued down the path, and as I neared the edge of the harbor, I was privileged to witness the glorious splendor of Mount Fuji silhouetted against the bright sun. I had never seen Mount Fuji before, and the sight was absolutely breathtaking. Directly to the west lay the mountains of the Izu Peninsula, which emanated a golden glow so rich that it seemed to give a physical texture to the sky above. The illumination gave the heavens an appearance not of earthly beauty, but that of the storms on the planet Jupiter, swirling and dancing as if guided by a grand celestial brush. I stood there while the sun continued to set, and as it did, it passed behind sets of mountains that made different parts of the sky explode with fire. The flames roared and twisted, as if a grand director were swinging his baton wildly at a phantasmagorical symphony of light.