the two saddest words

So it's the end of the academic year.

Most senior high schools had their grad last week, and ours was no exception. The only graduation I'll ever see here.

It should have been both a happy and a sad event, but they managed to drain all the life from it. After a (solid) hour of speeches, some students stood to receive recognition of honours, but none crossed the stage. Certificates were not even handed out at the ceremony. They were distributed later.

I was also a bit miffed that I was discouraged from taking photos. The bright spot is that, as I was passing a stairwell on the way to the gym building, I found all the 3rd years packed into it, instructed to await the cue for their entrance. They were only too happy to pose for a picture.



Japan manages to be the only country I know of where people are genuinely happy to have anyone take their picture, and thank you warmly for it.

In any case, the morning was a bit long, the speeches sombre in tone, and we all returned to the main building and our kerosene heaters while the students began to show signs of life, gathering outside in the sun and chatting happily. There were few tears that I saw, but that likely came later. I hadn't realized they were having parties upstairs in the classrooms until wandering across a building catwalk and passing several students lugging huge emptied trays that, judging from the scraps, had been covered with some extravagant fare not long before.



That sounds a bit cold. I should add that I was a bit emotional about the graduates and would have been more so, but I've only had ten 3rd year students, so the vast majority of the graduating class I did not know. It would be different to be here next year and see my second-years graduate, or again the following spring and see the students I knew as first-years go.

We also had another "special lunch". I have to admit, the staff "social club" seemed like a bit of a ripoff when I first arrived. Membership costs according to salary; at my level, I was paying 2850 yen (that's $28.50 Cdn) a month, and yet there were no uses to which this money would be put until Christmas. But since then, we've had one or two special lunches a month, and they're fantastic. Given the strong value of community in Japanese culture, I wasn't going to decline membership in the social club regardless, but it's nice that something good comes of it.



I think I was in a bit of a funk that day, to be truthful. While some friends I haven't seen in a few months recently noted that I seem a "bit happier and more settled", it's still fairly easy to fall out of step here. For example, I've recently become persona non grata I think because I failed to attend a retirement party for one of the teachers. How long this will last, I don't know, but I'm tiring of this kind of thing. Which itself is probably alright, since the biggest issue Julie and I have had to deal with over the past month or month and a half is the decision whether or not to recontract with the JET Programme. We went back and forth on this a lot. A major part of the problem is that you are forced to decide six months in advance. It's hard to know how you'll feel then, having gotten past the winter and partway through a new year in which you actually understand at least in part how things around you work, both inside of the classroom and out. When it came down to it, I was slightly leaning toward recontracting and Julie was slightly leaning away. I tried making a weighted pro-con list, and the scores came out: Japan: 0; Canada: -1. Julie remarked wryly that that sounded about right.

In the end, we talked about it every night for a week, for anywhere from 3-5 hours at a time. There were some pretty heavy considerations being lobbed around. We have a dog at home that we need to get back to. But he's in good hands. I have a job at home to go back to. But it bores and depresses me. Julie has no job to go home to. But she could acquire one and is itching to move on in her career. A second year would allow us to move in together again, get a car, and explore more of Japan. But we would be merely extending the experience -- is it worth the cost? Added to that, with having to decide six months in advance, we weren't signing on for merely another year, but another year and a half from the point of decision. That's a long commitment to make, considering how highly variable our feelings were concerning our time here. Hell, a long commitment, regardless, and I'm a bit of an options-freak (but hey, it kept me out of the armed forces -- I couldn't say yes to nine years DEO). In the end, we grew tired of talking about it but lacked any way to make the decision. There would be regret with either option. Which would produce more?

In the end we declined to recontract. We made one small concession to keeping options open, and that was that we agreed to check out a few places for possible relocation if, approaching our actual finish we knew we needed more time for Japan. But that's a hard slog to be sure. Here we have apartments set up, bills being paid for the most part automatically, and steady work with people we mostly like. Elsewhere, we'd have to sort out the work visa, find work, find an apartment, and basically start all over again. Not something to do for a month or two, so again it would entail more time. 6 months we figure or not at all. One of the big downsides of JET is that you cannot choose where you go. Our own choices were marred by misinformation or lack of information, and perhaps the biggest downside of JET is that you cannot move between years. Not between cities, not between schools or levels of school. So you either have to like your experience enough exactly the way it is, or drop the program and strike out on your own. Not impossible, but difficult. We'll see. (Those backup cities, incidentally, are Tokyo, Nagano, Sapporo, and Hiroshima. It would be nice to try out a location of our own choosing, though I would miss quasi-inaka life near the rice fields.)

Immediately after sending in the paperwork with my answer I felt substantial regret. I needed work for the new year. I could go back to my old job (depressing), or to a new job (difficult and not lucrative) or to school (a probably impossible expense). So the question shouldn't be limited to: do I truly want to do this for another year, but also do I have a better option for the coming year? Where staying had originally seemed like pushing a luxury too far, it began to seem like the practical thing to do. To make matters worse, as I think I've described before, it's pretty much impossible to have a very bad time in my job for very long. Something surprising and pleasant is usually just around the corner, and in the meantime, the delight of the students to see you, to start a conversation or just say hello, makes it difficult to walk around feeling down. I knew that there would be days where I would think that refusing the option to recontract might have been a mistake. I didn't anticipate days where I was sure of it.

A little bit of time has passed since then. Cold weather has unexpectedly struck, bringing big, lazy flakes of snow -- more than we've seen all winter. And while it is beautiful, the cold helps remind me of the comforts of a Canadian home. (though the heaters used in yesterday's assembly were something out of science fiction and worth the chill on their own) Since arriving here, Jules and I have remarked that Japan has many virtues (many, many) but it is a difficult country to feel comfortable in. In addition, the recent social imbroglios, as I mentioned, have also left me feeling a bit detached, and now with classes finished until the new school year starts in April, I don't have these happy, smiling students to keep me feeling so connected to the place.

But regret is a highly variable thing. I usually have no problem with making decisions between bad options. It's the situations with multiple good options that are tortuous. If all else fails, I'll decide something daily and see if a pattern emerges over a week or a month and go with that. If pressed for time, I'll flip a coin (as I eventually did when faced with having to choose between a big law firm and Justice -- though that was more to produce an emotional result and take a read off that). So here's the new regret-o-metre, both to keep track of feelings about staying longer in Japan, and as a yardstick for how things are going here and to what extent I'm missing home.



Currently, I'm freezing in my living room (it was 8 degrees in here this morning) and doing a little research on South Korea for our upcoming trip -- this Friday! I'm very excited about it, though the food looks to be daunting (chili peppers in *everything*?!). Between South Korea, Hokkaido, and whatever we get up to for Golden Week, I'm going to need a new hard drive to store all of these pictures.