Chapter Twenty One:
The lonliest Christmas
Things really didn’t go much better, as I began my new job in Japan. The job was ok, but the people with whom I worked were just (barely) okay too…. There were all kinds of rules set out by the ESL company, all kinds of contracts that I had to sign. And, beside that, they were always mentioning the “contracts.” They said you couldn’t fraternize with your students at any time after classes. They said you couldn’t do this, that, or the other thing. Nobody I was working with really cared about the contracts or the rules,..., and that was probably because the rules were really quite ridiculous.
Of course, I had already been to Japan three times prior to this trip, so I knew a good bit about the language and the culture. The first thing that I noticed that the ESL company tried to impress upon me was that If I stopped working for them, I would be forbidden to teach English within two train stations of where I lived. It was bizarre! They were going to tell me where I was allowed to teach? After I finished working for them? I doubted that.
There were a lot of rules…. For starters, I was to never speak Japanese. I understood what they wanted, so I tried to not use Japanese. Sometimes, I would speak it, because I wanted to be efficient and after all it was Japan. Instead of spending 5 minutes searching for a word in a dictionary, I would simply translate it into Japanese or English.
The lessons that had to be taught were either private (one student) or semi-private (two or three students). Part of the English teaching job was that I had to go around and canvas students who were on the list as students, and ask them if they would be willing to study English that day and then I would set up a time with them. I had to make a report with all kinds of numbers on it documenting exactly what I had done each day, they had devised a table of numbered topics they called “functions,” and they had hundreds of them. For example, #1 was, “talking about the weather.” #2 was “talking about baseball,” and #312 was “making small talk…. “ You were expected to document what you spoke about, for how long, and with whom. As well as the names and times that students studied each day.
It was laborious. I met the students and I taught English, with a firm resolve.The rules didn’t seem to matter to anyone, as much as they did to me, but they mattered less with each passing day. Teachers at my company broke the rules, going out for drinks with students, often, and sometimes even having romantic relationships with them. In the end, how could a teacher not want to go out to socialize with his students, when he was thousands of miles from home, in a foreign country, and didn’t know a soul, other than all of the students that he met with everyday! It was the natural and obvious thing to do. Indeed, the rules really annoyed me, probably because I didn’t like to break them.
One other thing that really began to bother me was the gnawing realization that the owner of the ESL company (Peter’s Friend) had, from the time that Peter had told me that his friend had a company in Japan, and that his friend was in need of an employee, that friend had only spoken to me once by telephone, for about one minute, since I had arrived in Japan. I knew him a little. We had met at a wedding a few years prior, and spoke very briefly, but I knew him to see him. We were, after all, both from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. I kept thinking and expecting him, Mr. ESL, to be giving me a call, to be saying “Hello, how are you doing? How is everything going for you? How do you like my company? Are you doing ok?” But, much to my dissappointment that phone call never came…. There was the one brief call in my first week, and when I got it, I said to myself, “ohhh ok! Here it is! He has been busy, but he never forgot about me,..., he is going to talk with me, and he is going to be my friend,...”, but that never happened.
At first I just kept telling myself that he was busy but he was going to contact me and we were going to get together maybe at Christmas time and have a nice meal together and a nice beer and drinks of rum, indeed, I really hoped for and looked forward to it. Christmas time is a special time of year for me, and I loved being with my family, just like I had been when I was little at Gramma Lilly’s and at Hungry Hill— but, this year was going to be very different. I was going to stay in Japan. I had borrowed about $3500 dollars from my parents, and I hated having a debt, and I thought I should be tough and stay in Japan and stay working to pay it off. I envisioned myself traveling, perhaps to meet with Mr. ESL,..., for Christmas, but as Christmas approached on the calendar, I began to sober-up to, and try to accept, the cold and bleak reality that Mr. ESL STILL hadn’t called back, emailed, or paid me any kind of visit since I had landed in Japan. My heart sank, and I was really sad. The sadness was so great that it combined with other stuff in my head and became a myriad of emotions. I thought to myself… “What kind of friends does Peter keep anyway?” It would be a nail in my heart that I would cling to and sharpen for many years—....
Fortunately, I had good friends in Matsumoto city, which was only about a 50 minute ride away, to the North of Komagane by highway bus. My friends were the Hirata family, and the Momose family. I had accepted the job in Komagane, precisely because I had those friends in Matsumoto city, and I counted on being able to go to visit them on weekends or holidays. Indeed, I knew that both of my host fathers were not against “raising a glass” at any time, and I wouldn’t need any special reason to drink at their houses,....
So, I would go to visit them on the weekends, and I would buy some alcohol and go and drink…. That was the reality of it. Sure, I visited with everyone and we spoke Japanese, and we caught up on events and news. I hadn’t seen them since December of 1997,..., but I used to go and relax with them, and I used to get drunk to relax. Christmas was no different. I was very fortunate that my friends welcomed me into their homes and treated me with the kindness that they did. I never told them about my OCD until after I met my wife, Sonoko, in 2002. I would often seek reassurance from someone, very subtly, so that no one would realize that I was obsessing, but I continued to obsess and life was exhausting as usual.
Everyday, life was beyond tough. I would get up and get ready for work. All the while my bowels were not really very good and on top of the job, I had to navigate my way through obsessions all the while. I dreaded using the stove, especially in the mornings, and the simple task of locking my apartment door in the morning, sent me into panic and angst, and as I walked down the hill, past the Nagano College of Nursing, toward Otagiri station, on the days I had to go to Miyada factory to teach, I would be walking and obsessing whether or not the stove top was not on, or whether the door was indeed locked, or how was I ever going to find a girlfriend and then be able to make love without “freaking out” about AIDS,…. To be honest, it is extremely difficult to give you an accurate description of the normal everyday circus that my mental events resembled. To say it was “demoralizing and extremely humiliating and exhausting,” is just scratching the surface. Don’t forget, also, that this was my daily experience and it had been like that since the summer of 1998.
I thought, at the times when I had the available mental bandwidth, that maybe I could talk to Mr. ESL and help him with his business, and bring him up to speed on the good points and not-so-good points about his company. I could be his eyes and ears,..., I thought that I could, with any luck, if I just worked hard enough, be promoted up into a managerial position. I saw some good and a lot of not-so-good in the company. Mr. ESL’s cousin said that they had “big plans” for me,..., but first I had to “work hard and show them and then,”.... I wanted to believe it,..., but the more I worked for them, the more I got a bad feeling about the company. Ultimately It really wasn’t that important. I was far more concerned with a much simpler and a much more important task: the task of not losing my mind, of continuing the march of life, and pretending to be a normal person!
Christmas holidays came and I went to Matsumoto city. I stayed with the Momose family. I drank beer all day everyday. I sat on the computer checking- (compulsion),…, and trying to figure out how to stop wanting to “figure out” my worries. I even wondered if I had OCD or I was just a “thinker,”.... One grey afternoon I came across a quote from Lao Tzu that caught my attention. It read:
“Stop thinking, and end your troubles.”
I was puzzled. What did that mean, “stop thinking?”
I sat and thought and drank. No matter what I did, I couldn’t stop the questions and answers and anxieties from popping up in my mind. I didn’t know about meditation, or the idea of slowing down the mind. I sat and wondered about home and what was happening with my family. I was single. I was beyond sad. How was I ever going to not end up alone, trapped in my own head, with no wife or children? I didn’t know…. The funny thing was, that in only two months from that time, I would enter my wife’s family business, as a customer, and meet my wife’s father and sister. Yes, In little more than two months' time, I would meet the answer to many of my silent prayers, my future wife, my darling- Sonoko