Hello people,
I’m
currently sitting here in Hiroshima, which is around 1250 miles away from where
I originally going to be, and a further 200 miles away from where I'm supposed
to be going. I have seen more towns in Japan in the last 2 weeks than I have in the previous 4 trips! And I have been asked by a few people… “What the buggery fuck are
you actually doing!”
The
simplest answer to that question is, I don’t really know, and nor does anyone
else, here’s how the whole adventure was supposed to turn out... I get
on a plane at Heathrow, fly to Hong Kong, Arrive in Sapporo, move into my new apartment,
spend 1 week doing company training, and then start working at 2 inner city
schools in the city of Sapporo for the following 12 months. However! The contract
for the Sapporo schools was pulled just 7 days before I was due to leave. The plan then changed and my new contract was in a small town called
Mashiki-machi, somewhere I had never heard of nor had most of Japan…at least
for the next week.
So the
plan became fly me down to Hiroshima, spend one week in a hotel whilst they
train me to learn them kids some darn good English, then take a short bullet
train down to my new town, and start working in 2 rural schools. Then I woke up
on the first day of me being in Japan, to an awful lot of texts asking if I was
okay, and where was I? Then I turned on the news to find out that there had
been a huge earthquake, directly under the town of Mashiki-Machi. A day later,
an even worse earthquake struck not far from the original epicentre. Roads were
shattered, houses collapsed, train services were cancelled and the airport
runway was cracked in two. In total 44,000 people have been evacuated from
their homes, 48 people have lost their lives, and around 3000 have been
injured. Japan has more earthquakes than anywhere else on the planet (should have done my researched and learnt that before I came) but the area around Mashiki-Machi is not one known for its seismic activity and thus many of
the houses were old and not built to modern earthquake proof standards.
 |
| Like I said, it was a really bad earthquake... |
So I flew to Hiroshima as planned,
and awaited news, so far news has still not come. I’ve spent precisely 2 weeks
in and out of Hotels, If you're curious they have been; The Mercure Sapporo, The Unizo inn Sapporo, The Yamashiroya Hiroshima, the Hotel Hokke Club Hiroshima and the Alpha 1 Miyoshi. The levels of comfort have been mixed, but the important thing is they all had the awesome butt wash toilets. If you come to Japan and your hotel does not have the awesome butt wash toilet, you should immediately leave!
This has then put at the point where I should have been teaching junior
high school for 2 weeks in the northern most island of Japan, I have instead
found myself having taught 2 days of elementary school in the small town of Miyoshi,
and 1 day at the even smaller town 50 miles to the north where there were 21 children in
the entire school. Though one child did ask me how snaked poohed, as we're not allowed to speak Japanese in the classroom, this required a lot of gestures...
After all of that tomfoolery last night I moved into an apartment that the company had going
spare for the next 2 weeks. Moving in was simple, you walk 25 minutes from the train station in Hiroshima, to get on a tram to go 15 minutes to walk 25 minutes, to get lost to end up asking a woman in her pyjamas walking her dog if she can help point you the way, she is then kind enough to take you and her dog to where it says it should be on your phone, to then realise it's not there, when she then goes and knocks on a neighbours door to see if he knows, they then tag out, whilst the neighbour walks you with his torch another 10 minutes to find your actual house. Super-convenience at it's best.
But it’s mine to live in and be in, and not have
to live out of hotel suitcases for until then. Which is such a nice feeling! It's not a tiny room and I can cook and clean for myself, and it has a butt wash toilet. Well, I mean, it's not a big room, but its marginally bigger than a hotel. And domestically, it's you know, not the easiest place to be a domestic god in, I have two electric hobs and precisely zero work surface in the kitchen, and when I say zero, I don't mean very little. I mean zero. There are 8 different types of rubbish all of which need to be taken out on different days and in different, but very specifically shaped, sized, and coloured bags.
 |
| Hiroshima is a beautiful city btw, if you find yourself in southern Honshu its definitely worth a trip |
But as far as plans go…this is
where they sort of run out. The town of Mashiki is not somewhere my company are
happy to send me for the time being, and even if they were communications are
fairly intermittent. So far they have so far been unable to reach the school board
for the town. Even if they did manage it I'm sure the town has other things on their mind other than the new rent a honky coming to stay. In terms of finding me accommodation this again presents a very
difficult task, with many homes damaged or completely collapsed, finding a safe
place to stay in the town itself may take some time.
So yeah, 2 weeks in, 50 to go, and plans are currently of a somewhat flexible nature...
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