Chikugo

          In 2002 I went to Japan for the first time and stayed for a year in a small city called Chikugo. It was inaka, a rural place. There wasn’t much to it beyond the main drag which led north towards Kurume and Fukuoka. It did, however, have a train station, outside which there was a statue of a dog.

          On the narrow road that led from the station to my apartment someone had a rooster. It would crow loudly when the sun rose, waking me up early every morning except on Sundays, when I typically got home at about 7.30 after a long night out. There was also a high school baseball ground next to my building, where the team would practice or have games on weekend mornings. I was therefore routinely roused by the metallic clink of hitters smacking the ball during batting practice, or by teenage players calling out during fielding drills. I liked to lie on my bed with the French window open, and feel the cooling wind blow in. 

           I worked as an English teacher in state schools. I guess most foreigners doing the same job around Japan wanted to live in Tokyo or Kyoto, but I had requested an assignment in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four big islands, as I’d read that the people were notably friendly and enjoyed drinking. The former statement was true, especially in relation to my later experiences in Tokyo. I once made a friend simply by standing outside 7-11. As for the part about drinking, that was also accurate. When my Japanese colleagues and I went on a trip to the frozen north, middle aged women were guzzling beers at 8.30 in the morning.

          In the summer it was hot and very humid. I would play football with my students during lunch breaks, after which I didn’t stop perspiring for at least half an hour. Female staff would fan me down before classes resumed, saying ‘Daijoubu?’ (Are you OK?), or set up the electric fan in front of me. I have a picture in which I’m shaking hands with a boy after lunch, my t-shirt soaked in sweat. Still, even though I was living in the hot south I never came across a cockroach or a spider of any size. Those treats would come later, when I moved to the crowded main island of Honshu. I did see the odd gecko, which liked to crawl along the wall outside my front door.

In the winter my apartment, which was large by Japanese standards, was bone-chillingly cold. There was no central heating, and for warmth I relied on an air-conditioning unit and a kotatsu. The latter is a low table with a heating device on the underside, along with a duvet which you hide your body beneath. The Japanese love kotatsu, perhaps because they are accustomed to sitting on the floor. For me, it was pretty uncomfortable, and my exposed head felt cold.

I loved some of the food I had in Kyushu. It was my introduction to spicy Korean fare such as bibimbap and yakiniku (barbecue). There were excellent fast food restaurants nearby like Mos Burger and a curry place called Coco Ichiban. Best of all, though, were the tonkatsu restaurants, where you got a cutlet of pork deep fried in breadcrumbs until it was kitsune-iro (fox colour), along with a bowl of rice and as much shredded cabbage as you could eat. The pork always came with a bowl of miso soup as well, but I never touched that. My other favourite food was yakitori, grilled skewers of meat, invariably accompanied by lots of beer. 

          I was unused to certain styles of Japanese cuisine in those days, however, and had a sticky episode when my colleagues took me out for a welcome dinner. It was a traditional meal, which involved us sitting on tatami mats beneath a low table while a lot of suspicious looking morsels were placed before us. After 5 minutes of sitting cross-legged, I was in agony. One of the last dishes was squid, which was alive just a few minutes prior to its appearance on the table. It was still twitching when they laid it out and I, as the guest of honour, was given the first taste. It was distinctly crunchy, and not at all pleasant.

          From Chikugo it took about thirty five minutes to reach the metropolis of Fukuoka. My Canadian friend and I frequented gaijin bars and clubs whose diverse clientele included American sailors from the base at Sasebo and young Japanese dressed like black rappers, who sought to mimic the speech of their idols as well as dressing like them. I used to drink Long Island Iced Tea poured from plastic jugs, which led to fearsome hangovers the next morning. The biggest problem was getting home, for the first express train used to leave at 6.57 in the morning. By that stage I could barely keep my eyes open, and I fell asleep several times. Once, I woke up just before Yatsushiro, which was about two hours beyond my stop!

         

          I never returned to Chikugo, although I spent more than two years in Japan in the years that followed. I suppose it has nothing to offer the visitor, even if it does now have a bullet train station! For me, though, it was a wonderful place to spend a year when I was twenty five.