Is Any Of It Ever Clear?

Yet another quickie, fractured entry

Thank you all for the recent care packages. The green chile and beans and salsa and tortillas have been a welcome addition to a diet that has gradually been reduced to sweets from the students' recent trips, convenience store crap, and fruit and yogurt. I've eaten almost half the salsa, a third of the green chile, and all the instant refried beans. It was, in many ways, some kind of insistent reminder of a home that seems so far away now.

This week I went, during my break, to an exhibit of pottery. What the pottery was and where it came from and why it was sitting in the eighth floor gallery of a department store in downtown Tokyo is information that wasn't deemed necessary to translate. Although it looked vaguely Chinese and definitely old. Yes, you should be asking why I went to such an exhibit. Well, mostly it was because another teacher, knowing that I was a potter once (in another lifetime it seems), proudly presented me with a ticket. And what could I do but go? I went, and it was downtown Tokyo, and it was in the very hour before the exhitit closed and it was crowded and...I went. It is sometimes a beautiful and incomprensible place, Japan. (Who am I kidding? It's often a beautiful and incomprehensible place, this Japan.)

This week I exchanged emails with the Ex-Student. He had a question. Please tell me if this sounds strange, was the gist of the question, and then he asked about the name of a ship, the ship that his father is spending millions of dollars to have built even as we speak, the ship that won't be finished for another three yeears. Now, I'm always getting hit with questions like that in Japan. "Can I say...?" types of questions. The name he suggested did sound strange to me, and I wrote him an email to that effect. Yes, it sounds strange. (Yes, many ships names sound strange to me.) No, I would never put those two words together in the same sentence without expecting that it would sound strange to another native speaker of English. So off I sent that email. Then I was standing on my balcony, thinking about the name he had suggested. (I haven't included it in this entry because it is so unusual that a Google search for the name would lead someone right to my little journal, and we wouldn't want that, now, would we?) I was standing on my balcony thinking about the ship's name. Yes, I had Google searched the name, and I hadn't gotten a single result that made any sense in English. Why? Because it wasn't English. It was, at best, Japlish, or Japanese-English. But something made me try Googling it again--only this time with the name hyphenated. I typed it into Google and out popped a Rudyard Kipling poem written over a hundred years ago. The poem, strangelly, was set in Japan, in Yokohama in fact, where the ship is being built. It was about sailors sitting around telling stories. Huh? I emailed the Ex-student to ask if his father had ever read the poem.

Turns out that, no, he hadn't.

It is just that kind of strange and beautiful and incomprensible and coincidental place, my Japan.

And, um, there were drinks last night with the student that has a crush on me. And there were five of us. Because Japan is also just that kind of place.

Sigh.

Send more green chile. It's going to be a long winter!