This post details the events of May/June 2022. I have no idea how to write this like a normal person.

Shoutout to Derek Tepe for inspiring me to finish this post. Without him I don’t know when I ever would have. Thanks Derek and I hope you enjoy it.

Did you have fun today?

Make sure you have fun today.

Yesterday I got my fun by declaring that I would twist Mr. Parker Junior’s nipples every time he scratched himself. He’s been wearing shorts up to the mid-thigh, and all that exposed leg is being devoured by insects, and is now covered in bandaids because he can’t stop scratching his bites. In the ten or so minutes between declaring my intentions and moving on with life I got to twist his nipples several times. When I twisted them, he would curl up into a defensive ball and cry “Stop!” and then offer many and varied explanations for his unhealthy behavior, as is his custom. I would not have done this if I had not made a conscious decision then and there that I was going to have some fun, however I would get it. I did, and it changed the trajectory of my day. Sometimes a fun-jection is just what the doctor ordered. So, make sure you’re having fun. You’ve gotta have it. You should play every day.

I have recently spent several weeks of my life in the remote recesses of the mountains of Japan, in a lonely home with a wild Australian man, learning bird calls, following boar trails, hunting for owls, turning all faucets to the right, and unplugging all appliances when not in use. This home was located in a small town nestled in the hills of Kuju, Ubuyama, or the full name, Ubuyamamura, which means Ubuyama village. The kanji for Ubuyama is 産山, which could be interpreted as “Birth Of The Mountain”. I stayed under the good graces of James Cool, who we will henceforth refer to as Scrumpillion Wombus, or in full, The Lord Scrumpillion Wombus, as it is a perfect mix of regality and preposterousness that is the man himself. Scrumpillion Wombus was a gracious host – as long as I did not breathe too loudly, walked on the edges of the stairs so as not to make them creak, did not talk to him more than once every three days, set all faucets to the right and unplugged all appliances as mentioned, kept the royal laundry pole hanging, properly hid myself from the neighbors, showered at regular intervals, and blew my nose when necessary, I was free to do as I pleased, and come and go as I pleased. That is, until that fateful day when he said to me, “Well this has been fun, hasn’t it? You have until the 6th.”

I lived in the other room on the second floor of The Lord Scrumpillion Wombus’s fine estate. The room that was not The Lord’s. Prior to my arrival it had been Scrumpillion’s workout room, where he would carry out a variety of royal workouts, such as shadow-boxing, tabata, and manic cleaning, and where he would hang his laundry from the royal laundry pole. He graciously gave me this room for my stay, on the condition that I keep the aforementioned pole, a long metal rod precariously resting on protruding edges of wall near the ceiling. This request I of course initially obliged, and continued to oblige even after the laundry pole had fallen, entirely to my fault, as I had forgotten to lock it in place with the royal safety hangers (hangers hooked onto the pole at the ends between where it rested on the blind racks above the windows – if you attempted to slide the pole off, the hangars would keep it in place, stuck between the bars of the blind rack) (an ingenious security system that none less than The Great Wombus himself could contrive), and it had crashed into my enormous, precious new photo-editing monitor, that thankfully was built with resistance to thick steel laundry pole attacks in mind, this being one of the main reasons why I was attracted to it in the first place – even after this incident I continued to oblige, now having been instructed in the ways of The Lord’s failsafe hanger security system, that immediately failed, as I went to open the blinds and released the hanger, and the pole fell down onto the only spot in the room that it possibly could have landed between the mounds of camera gear, computer equipment, human craniums, and precious monitors, to strike absolutely nothing, and I took this as a sign from the divine, a being higher than even The Lord Wombus himself (if there really could be such a being), that for the remainder of the duration of my stay, the royal laundry pole really must go.

During this wild recursion at the Lord Wombus’s great estate, my best friends and greatest source of amusement, Scrumpillion aside, were not actually human. They were the feathered, flying, frenzied denizens of the woods – the avians. Yes, there is a whole ‘lotta bird goin’ on over in them mountains of Ubuyama. I could talk at great length about these birds, and I would love to do so, but I fear at the risk of alienating myself from those who are not as interested in these whimsical featherballs, like for example The Lord Scrumpillion Wombus, to whom I attempted to speak with about birds on many an occasion, and who would, in his very keen, very sharp intuition, understand immediately on what topic I came to him to discuss, and would upon perceiving it, reply, “Bird! Bird!” But, somewhat surprisingly, he did assist me with my bird investigations by sharing a find with me, when he sent me a photo of a bird that he dubbed the “fat stupid bird”. The bird that Wombus discovered was none other than the kojyukei, and I was personally aggrieved that in all my searching I was never ever able to find this bird myself; but alas, The Lord’s partridges reveal themselves only to The Lord himself.

I didn’t see this bird, but I heard it many times. This was a common with the birdfolk. You would hear them every day, hear them all around you, right outside the window, and yet, try as hard as you might, you may never see them. This particular bird, the kojyukei, I heard almost every single day that I was there in Ubuyama, and tried to track it down countless times, and never did I succeed. Then Scrumpillion, who couldn’t care less, see them, not only once, but several times, on his way home from work! What a scoundrel.

Had he known then the sounds this fat stupid bird is capable of, he may have labelled it a fat stupid shrieking bird instead.

We’ve now come to the point where I show you all of my bird pictures. These photos were almost all taken from The Lord Scrumpillion’s estate grounds.

There is a story behind every one of these shots. Some stories are short. “I saw the bird and took a picture.” That would be the Wombus way of storytelling. Some stories are longer. One of these such stories is the Aobato story. The Aobato is the Whistling Green Pigeon. The Whistling Green Pigeon was one of my favorites. For one, because it’s a green pigeon. Do I need to say anymore? When all you’ve ever seen are the classic grey pigeon (we did have these in Ubuyama, I was surprised to see them), seeing a green one feels like finding a shiny version of a Pokemon. (Shiny Pokemon are a rare version of the Pokemon that has a different color scheme and is of course, shiny.) However, as if being green wasn’t enough, these pigeons also have an allure in they they are extremely shy, and will never show themselves to humans. They sing their iconic songs all throughout the day, just to remind you that they do exist, and they are out there, you’re just not allowed to see them. You can see from the photo however that not only was I able to see one, but I also snuck a photograph, although I will not say I was allowed to do this. That little green pigeon absolutely did not want to be seen by me, and as soon as it realized it had been discovered, it jolted up, and flew off in a hurry. I have never seen a bird more startled or panicked by my presence. I had really given up all hope of ever seeing this bird, after so many forays into the wild in search of it, and in the end, I had found it through a new bird-sighting technique I had developed after many such unsuccessful hunts. This technique I call looking-for-birds-by-not-looking-for-birds, and I will explain what this means. Of course, it’s not really a good name for the technique, and it should probably be immediately renamed, because the whole point is that you are in fact looking for birds. The secret of the technique lies in how you approach the looking, and I can give you analogy that you don’t need because this is very easy to understand, and I just love analogies. Instead of walking around your house looking on every counter and under every pillow in search of your keys, with this technique, you simply sit on the floor of the living room, and wait for your keys to come to you. Obviously this does not work with keys, (although when you stop and think about it you’re probably more likely to remember where you put them) because birds are really nothing like keys. Birds move around a whole lot more, and birds are more perceptive than you and I, and have better eyesight and the higher ground. They will always see you before you see them, and they will probably hear you too. So, I learned through experience that looking for birds by walking around and saying, “Here birdie birdie birdie!” is pretty useless, but if instead, you pick out a nice spot on the ground and sit there and wait, you will have great success. That’s how I found the aobato, and a whole lot of other birds. I would go out into the meadow behind the Lord’s estate, and sit somewhere where I could survey all, and just wait. I would do this in the mornings, most often, when the birds were at their chirpiest and most active. It was amazing an amazing place to be, on these mornings, to see and hear the incredible whirlwind of bird activity, and it really was a whirlwind. It wasn’t always at the same time of morning. Sometimes it was the crack of dawn, as early as 4 am, other times they seemed to take it easy and relax for a few hours into the day before starting up, but whenever it happened, when it was decidedly bird party o’clock, they were all in, and every bird in the forest was a part of it. All the action happened at this time, and you knew it was happening because it sounded like every single bird in the forest was singing its little lungs out, and all kinds of different birdies would be shooting across the meadow every which way, perched in the trees, flittering in and around them. It is an incredibly joyful thing. It’s really hard to watch a bunch of birds in their morning joy and not be delighted. On one morning, I was truly awake for the very first call of the day. It was the morning of my first solo camping. A major achievement, and I had successfully survived (at one point in the night I had doubts if I would), and I had woken up even before the dawn, the pre-dawn, and watched the sky brighten through the tiny screen in the apex of the tent, that I gambled with and left uncovered by the rain flap, so I could do just such a thing, and I swear not a minute after, even thirty seconds after I had the thought, “I wonder when the birds will start chirping…”, right on cue the first chirp came. Soon after that, the Hototogisu came, the “lesser cuckoo”. Then there was singing all night long.

On one of my Aobato forays I found something else that I had been looking for. But really, I should say that it found me. We found each other, out there, two wanderers in the woods. The Aobato (the green pigeon) call is distinct and there is nothing else like it out in those woods. It was also loud, and I could hear them often from the house. I kept my windows open at all times to hear all the calls, and many times I would hear something new or strange and run over to the window, or outside if I had to, to see what I could see, and in this way I discovered several birds, such as the Ooakagera, the White-backed Woodpecker, who I heard, from a tree 30 meters out in front of the house, all the way from my bedroom, by the pure force of their banging into the tree, and the Kogera, the Japanese Pygmy Woodpecker, who also has a very cute chirp, and my ears were frequently delighted with both the light hammering and cute chirping of this tiny bird. Actually it was good luck that there are two dead trees right outside the back of The Lord’s estate, both in clear view from the window, and so I got to see woodpeckers too. Woodpeckers like dead trees because they have little yummy bugsies in them. In total I saw three different kinds of woodpeckers – the Kogera, the Ooakagera, and the third, the Aogera, or the Japanese Green Woodpecker. On the second day of my arrival I beheld it in all its colorful beauty as I stood at the window with Scrumpillion himself – and then to my dismay, never again.

This woodpecker was hanging around though, as many of these birds were, even if they didn’t show themselves. I spent many hours waiting at the window, for many birds, but especially for this bird, gazing at my dead trees longingly, camera on the ledge of the window, bug-screen slightly cracked. I had to keep the screen cracked, even at the risk of Giant Japanese Death Hornets (Suzumebachi) flying into my room, so that I wouldn’t scare the birds off when I opened it to take a picture. Giant Japanese Death Hornets did fly into my room, but actually they have never concerned me, because they are so big and giant and deadly that they must have nothing to fear, and are very relaxed and self-assured, and so they don’t care about me. That Aogera never showed itself again, but I knew it was out there, because one day, as I sat in my chamber and listened to various bird calls, when I came to the Aogera, I played the call, and immediately from the woods outside came the same call in response. I probably could have used the call to bait one, but I learned that this is not a good thing to do, as you are deceiving the birds, and that is immoral. (Really it is a problem because birds are A. very territorial and B. looking for love, and so when they hear the call they will either frantically search for the intruder, or frantically search for new love, and waste energy doing so.) If you die in Japan, and have been naughty, you will be sent to one of many various hells as punishment for the crimes you’ve commited in your earthly debauchery, with a creative and relevant punishment to meet the crime. I have seen some of these firsthand as displayed with cutting edge animatronics and state of the art plaster demon sculpting. I can only imagine the tortures one would be submitted to in the Hell of Bird Deception. (They deceive you?)

The thing that found me and I found it was a deer. I had wondered if and when I would see a deer. I thought some of these animals would be much easier to spy than they were. The boar included. But when I was least expecting to find a deer, I found one, which is the same with the Aobato, and maybe a general rule in finding things in nature, because you just don’t really get to have your way with nature. I was pursuing the Aobato call that I had heard from on the other side of the hill, down in a valley where some lumber work was being done, and I had just crossed the hilltop with the baseball field and the few homes and estate of The Lord and was descending a steep path that made an S-curve down into the valley. I heard the Aobato calling from here often, as well as the Aogera, but every time I had come through here I had found nothing at all. I was still at the top of this path, having just branched off the main road to the top of the hill, and was squatting there, peering into the trees, as I was currently on the same elevation with many of the upper-middles of the trees, where a lot of the branching begins, and I could see into the branches and up into the leaves, and would be able to see better if any bird flew into them, as that is a difficult thing with birdwatching, and why binoculars are so helpful, because at the bottom of a tall tree, even if you have good enough eyesight to actually spy a bird all the way at the top, you won’t be able to tell anything more than that it is actually a bird. I was just squatting here, peering out into the forest, waiting patiently for the Aobato to land on a well-lit perch right out in front of me and pose for the camera, when I had the sudden feeling that I myself was being watched, and so I turned to the right, looking down the trail, and saw just a few meters from me, coming up over the ridge, a large animal. It wasn’t moving, and it was standing in the shade, so I couldn’t make out what it was at first, and I thought initially that it was a boar, because I thought more often about boars, knowing them to be around, and not as often about deer – but then I saw its left ear flap down, just like a dog’s would, and I realized that it was a deer. This deer was staring right at me and seemed very much like it also couldn’t tell what I was, and was trying to figure that out, so we were both just stuck there, staring confusedly at each other. Only the top half of its body was showing, up over the ridge. I had my super bird shooter lens at the ready, and knew that if I could get the photo, it would be a real closeup, like the whole face filling the frame closeup, but I also felt that any sudden movements would scare this little deer right off, and I would have lost a magical moment, and for no photo, and so I just looked away (wild animals don’t like to be stared at) and continued to squat there. Another second passed, and I glanced over to see how things were going with my deer friend, and saw that not only was it still there, but it had even taken a step up onto the ridge, to get a closer look. I knew it couldn’t be long before it figured out that I was a big scary human and run right away. I decided it was now or never, and went for the photo. I swiveled, raised my bulky super deer shooter lens up, pointed it in the deer’s direction, looked through the viewfinder.. and saw nothing but leaves. I had totally whiffed, and now wiggled it around desperately, trying to catch a trace of brown, of fur, or snout, anything, and was still whiffing. I pulled my eye away to try and reset, just in time to see this deer wise up and bolt down off the ridge, into the valley, and out into the woods beyond. Actually I continued to squat there, both in sadness and in hope, for some time after. Yes, I was sad.. if that’s the right word.. I was pained that I had just had such an incredible opportunity to photograph a wild deer’s face and blew it, but I was also hopeful that it may have run only a short distance off, and then stopped to look back, as a curious creature might, and then maybe I could scavenge something out of the situation. But unfortunately I never saw that deer again, or any other one, in my time in Ubuyama.

One of my first notes from being in Ubuyama (I write a lot of quick notes down in a journal) representing a typical Ubuyama exploration session: “Morning うぶやま (Ubuyama, written in hiragana because I couldn’t write the kanji.) explore. Rabbit poop. Spiders. Beautiful rock hill under birch? Not confident that it was a birch with that one plant and ladybug larvae. (Looking back on it this is a confusing sentence.) A grove. Fly? (It was a fly.) with long curved tail, red eyes, yellow stripe on tail. A grove. (Grove written twice, I must have been excited about it.) Crashing out at the end. (I decided to climb down a hill that turned very steep at the end which resulted in me jumping off into some thick bush and grass.) Wanting to poop but not wanting to desecrate the place. Also concerns about wiping.”

Prior to the previous note in my journal was this one: “Set a trap. Got me with the MTG music. (YouTube MTG Arena music)“.

The Lord Wombus is cunning. At the time of my move to Ubuyama I was attempting to escape the extremely powerful orbit of the planet Magic The Gathering that I had again fallen into. Magic The Gathering is a nerdy card game for nerds. It’s very fun though. The physical card game itself is dangerous, but mostly in that it compels me to play the virtual one, which goes by the name of Magic The Gathering: Arena. The Lord knew that I desired to free myself from this planet, yet we had some good fun in the narrow space between the boundaries of Magic’s snaring gravity and the liberating void beyond. It was dangerous, but would bring me some small thrill to even speak the relevant words (“Magic”, or “The Arena”, or “Mono red”), and I would at times turn to The Lord Wombus and say, “Something something Lizard Blades..” Or, “Something something Experimental Synthesizer..” Or, “Can I play Magic now?” And he would of course say no. But The Lord himself, he was allowed to play, having the rock solid self-control that you would expect of such a noble and lordly figure (there is no weakness in him), and was a fan of card games, and so for some time, before we saw that it was simply impossible, would dabble in it (I had a brief stint as his MTG coach), and so it could occasionally be heard, wafting over from his quarters, the sounds that have become ingrained in me. The sounds of the Arena. One day, and I believe by then we had already established that no Magic was to be had in any possible form, no reference of any kind and no utterance of any related words, I was lounging in my room, safely, with the laundry pole out on the stairs, and I heard something that stops me completely. It is a siren song, piercing down to the very depths of my soul. Its power is overwhelming, and almost automatically I surrender to it, and seek the source. It comes from Wombus’s lair, and so I enter. I see no Wombus – just an empty chair, and a computer in front of it. A familiar sight, a familiar glow. Beckoning. I step further in, and the screen comes into view. I look at it excitedly, anticipatingly. Before me is not the home page of Magic The Gathering: Arena, but instead a YouTube page, with the words “MTG Arena music” in the search bar. The MTG Arena main theme is playing, and I see now that I have been snared like a rat by the cheese. A rat in the full throws of a cheese-crazed mania. In both rage and shame I call out, “You bastard!” Gleeful cackles emanate from the royal poo-chamber below. The cackles of a Scrumpillion thrilled at his success. Only a mind so devious and intricate as his would devise such trivial mischief for his pooptime pleasure.

What I wrote the morning after my first solo camp experience: “I have returned. What did we learn? やっぱり (yappari, meaning, “As I thought”) it got cold. Had no rain cap. (For the tent.) But no rain until the morning. Lucky. Choosing the spot is very important. My spot was not very good. Not flat at all. And despite the thick grass, quite hard. I heard things. Soft squeaking. Thinking it was mice. And at one point something dashed right by the tent. Then there was the boar. Or boars. Hard to tell how close they got but the grunting was unmistakable. Was that 2, 3, 4 am? I was nervous, even scared. Imagined myself in the middle of a curious and aggressive pack, out prowling for the night. I thought about them coming right up to my exposed head and sniffing it, kicking it. (My head was not actually out of the tent but was bulging out of the side because the tent was so small, and so felt very exposed.) Thought about them trampling the tent. About what I should do if any of that happened. Was thinking I could run to that “tree.” Good thing it didn’t come to that because there was no climbing that thing. Went out of the tent headfirst to pee. Not a good way to greet any マムシ. (Mamushi are an aggressive venomous snake living in these parts. The internet says their strike range is about 30cm. We will not try and test this number.) Hungry last night, hungry this morning. Smiling after the first bird [chirps]. (Accidentally wrote chips.) I feel alone in the middle of human town. In that apartment in 大津 (Ozu), in the middle of human world, I was alone. In the middle of the woods, when I am actually more distanced from anyone, and there are simply less people around, I feel completely connected. Because I am. Connected to the source, connected to what I know, what we all know... What you have been doing here, is research. Research into alternate ways of living, research into meaning, research into loneliness; very core, very essential components of the human experience. This is some of the most important research you will ever do. I wonder if putting up boxes would lead owls to come to this area. (I had been wondering if there weren’t owls because there wasn’t anywhere for them to roost.) Last night there was a moment where I realized exactly what I was doing, and I felt deeply, wholly, completely free. And I also felt that I wanted to play guitar.”

Directly before that particularly lengthy summary I have the two short notes. “The unexamined life [is] not worth living.” Followed by, “Black t-shirt fashion. Only black t-shirts.“

The difference between hawks and eagles was not confusing enough, and so all-knowing ornithologists created the mighty hawk-eagle, and we all became confused again. The crow-raven is coming.

I found this action again by listening. I heard this call come in through the windows of my bird box. It was a totally new one to me, and that was rare, now that I’d been here for two or three weeks. I immediately grabbed the camera and raced outside. An incredible scene greeted me. I had learned soon after my move that birds are territorially aggressive and will attack other birds that fly up in their space. Aerial turf wars are very real in bird world. Once when Wombus and I had taken a trip into the big city (that is compared to Ubuyama), Aso, we watched a pair of crows kindly escort a buzzard out of their airspace. Birds have such nice manners. I also saw a Hiyodori attack and kill another Hiyodori.. but Hiyodori be crazy.

Actually I have a lot of love for this bird. These are the noisiest and most fidgety birds in Japan. At least in Kyushu.

There were few birds I could count on seeing every single day, and the Hiyodori was one of them. These fiesty buggers were out fighting, squeaking, chittering, swooping, diving, sailing, soaring, and wiggling in the trees and meadow just outside The Lord’s Manor, at almost all times of the day. I couldn’t spot it (although I tried), but I think they had a nest in one of the tall cedars right behind the house. When the other birds had cooled their jets, the Hiyodori jets were still running very, very hot. I witnessed the bird murder at the spot I had chosen for my first camping, in the woods back behind the house, following the sounds of aggravated chirping, the bird equivalent of screaming, and at first only saw a scuffle, and not in clear view. When I walked over to investigate, I thought everyone had flown off, and stood there longer only to play peek-a-boo with what I think was a baby Mejiro. It was a teeny-tiny and unusually curious little Mejiro (but I read that young birds are typically more curious and less shy), who was hanging around and maybe a bit startled by the murder, which had happened right behind me, and I only knew so because the victim then spasmed a death spasm, and I spun around to find, having been initially obscured by low hanging cedar branches, a Hiyodori that was perfectly intact, and with a neck at a ninety-degree angle. That took the Hiyodori from being in my regard the bird with extreme ADHD to the murderous bird with extreme ADHD. I went and searched about this, of course. Apparently male Hiyodori are extra wild during mating season.

For what reason this Hayabusa (the Peregrine Falcon) was divebombing a Kumataka (Mountain Hawk-Eagle) I do not know, but it was happening, and it was a sight to see. The bird equivalent of David and Goliath. This little divebomber was giving big mighty hawk-eagle a heck of a time and big mighty hawk-eagle wanted none of it. Probably the most memorable takeaway I have from this experience aside from just the general emotional imprint that was left on me from witnessing such a bird battle was that more birds than just owls can turn their heads 180 degrees around behind them. And you can in the same photo see why this would be useful. (In that first photo, the Kumataka has turned its head directly around to spot the diving Hayabusa.) I wish I would have recorded some of this scuffle, but I hadn’t learned about recording video yet – that would not come until Ryoka’s great wisdom (“You should take videos!”) and the Kogera.

Luckily my special friend waited to appear until after I was a cinematic master. One day, as I stood in the Lord’s kitchen preparing my daily oats, I for no particular reason glanced out of the sliding glass windows to the right of me. You are extremely unlikely to see anything of interest out of those windows, so thought I, until that day – because what I saw then took my breath away. Right behind the house, in full view, snuffling around the base of a tree, was a large, furry, Anaguma – AKA hole bear, AKA badger. Boom, right there, a freaking badger. This was a lot for me to process. I had not expected to see a badger, I had never seen a badger, I had forgotten all about badgers, and without warning, here was a badger. The all-knowing Kihara sensei had prepped me for this moment by having shown me a video of a badger that she recorded, a badger that frequented her yard, and so I could recognize it at once. Upon seeing the badger, I had two thoughts. 1. badger, 2. camera. This badger had to be digitally recorded in the annals of history. I ran upstairs and grabbed my camera, while briefly debating over whether to change the lens or not, as I had the super zoom lens on (a 400x, so actual photographers will laugh when I call that a super zoom, but still that’s a lotta’ zoom) and I knew the shots would be closeups, but I didn’t know how long I had with this badger (and who doesn’t love a good badger headshot, am i rite fellas) and so I just went with it. I tried to open the window, and the screen, as gingerly as possible. The window was the easy part; the screen was the real challenge. It wouldn’t slide easily and made way too much noise. The scuffling of the screen would have certainly scared away any bird, but this badger was not nearly so timid. Actually, it really did not seem to give a hootenanny. It looked up, which really means it was just looking out. I don’t think that badger could have looked up at me if it wanted to, not without sitting down at least. I at once stopped sliding the screen, holding my breath – and then it went right back to snuffling. I then had a full two minutes, maybe three, to photograph this lovely badger. I think I did pretty good.

As you can see, it was really liking that bark. In the first photo especially I think our little friend looks almost boar-like, and on showing this photo a few people did think it was a boar, with that bristly fur and long snout. Look closely and you can see a tick on the right ear. It really bothered me that our little friend was being parasitized, but you will be pleased to know that in a photo just a bit later, as it trotted off, there was no tick to be seen. I’m sure that it just felt bad about parasitizing such a lovely creature as this badger, and decided to renounce its bloodsucking ways, as we all eventually do, and definitely did not crawl deep into the ear canal. I’m sure that’s what happened.

The badger mulled around outside the back, enjoyed some stump gnawing and grass frolicking, then meandered off to a thick bush behind the neighbor’s house, and presumably went down the hill and into the forest. I do not let special first time forest creatures go so easily. I pursued this beast to see if I could get any more shots. I was doubtful as it now must have heard me, as stealthy as I was being (not stealthy), but I had to try anyway. I was right that I had alerted it, because after leaving the house, I spied it between a gap in houses, having upgraded from a meandering trundle to a brisk trot, as it trotted along the trail that led into the forest. The way that it trotted, combined with the look on its face, and the fact that it did not bother to look my way, made me feel very much that it was still totally unconcerned with my presence, and had only picked up the pace because it knew it was still probably the smart thing to do. Because, you know, “Humans.” I put that in quotes because I’m imagining the badger rolling its eyes and saying to itself then, as it heard the door opening, and the footsteps on the gravel, and the smell of my musty mountain man self filling its piggie snouter, “Human.” Or maybe it was more of an, “Oop, gotta go!” I adopted a similar air of nonchalance and walked through the gap in the houses onto the trail, looking to the right, and saw nothing. It had ducked off into a patch of thick, tall grass on the edge of the forest, and was safe in badger world again. I would see this badger again, a few more times, before I left. It made me quite happy knowing that I had a loveable creature like that hanging around.

I also saw a cat. Look at those eyes. This is a crazy-eyed killa.

All in all, out there in the Ubuyama wilderness.. there were some tough days, where I was feeling lonely, when the weather was crap and I couldn’t go out, and I was stuck inside. I think that was the second week. For the most part though, I really enjoyed staying at this cabin in the woods, and with my pal Scrumpillion. What I miss the most is how easy it was to make cool nature discoveries. Mostly insects. Never in my life has it been so easy to find insects to photograph. It became a routine with me, that sometime near late afternoon early evening, I would pop on the macro lens and the flash, step outside, and go a’hunting, and after ten, fifteen, twenty forays into the wild, I was still able to find something new, several things new, every single time. I didn’t have to drive anywhere, or make any plans, I just had to walk outside. Having nature so accessible, being right in it.. When I reflect on it, that’s what I miss the most. Going out for a walk and coming face to face with a deer, looking up from your oats and seeing a badger in the yard, having an owl hoot right outside your window, hearing a wild new bird call and wondering what it could possibly be, trying not to step on newts during your stroll through the forest, finding a crab in the middle of the woods.. it’s an exciting life.

It’s very interesting, loneliness. You would think that living with so few people around, spending so much time alone would make you lonely, but actually, even though I was much more removed from human contact during my stay in Ubuyama, I wasn’t lonely. My almost sole source of face-to-face social interaction was Scrumpillion, and that wasn’t much – but it was enough. I did not feel lonely at Ubuyama. It might sound crazy to say it, but the birds and the bugs, the boars and the badgers were my friends. It comforted me to know that they were around. Also the Australian. They sung to me and entertained me. They did tabata and watched meme compilations on 2x speed. Their existence alone was enough to satisfy me.

There is something certain about nature. Something secure in it. Humanity doesn’t have it. We’re anxious and existentialist. We have emotional baggage. We don’t know what to do with ourselves. We crave meaning. How tiring. I imagine that simply by not having thoughts an ant spends its entire life in some state of Zen. Honestly, that must be pretty nice. And then you get super strength and the ability to feel no pain. Sign me up.

Call it a wrap? We can call it a wrap. Let me do one more scan through the old notebooks.

I really wanted to see an owl. I really wanted to see an owl. A few days into my Ubuyama stay, I heard one hooting. I went back to that spot on many nights, and once on a day, scouring the area for whitewash (white streaks on the trunk of a tree), a sign that an owl is roosting there. Never any luck. And then, on my second to last night, an owl started hooting right outside of my window. There were several hoots. I threw on clothes and raced outside. But of course, the hooting stops, and there is no owl to be seen. These birds were messing with me man.

Before I was brave enough to do the solo camping, I had set the challenge for myself to walk through the woods alone at night. All the way through. There was a path behind The Lord’s estate, that cut through the woods and went down into civilization. (The center of town, which was a school, a post office, a local city hall, a small general store, and like six houses.) Walking it didn’t take long, only about ten minutes. In the dead of night though, the forest is the forest, and it doesn’t matter how far you are from civilization. As you soon as you’re out of range of the nearest home or human, you’re alone in the woods. That was really spooking me, and I wasn’t able to get very far from the house at all before I got the hibee jibees. It was bugging me that I would get so freaked out by these woods just because it was dark, when I had spent so much time in them during the day, and of course you know logically that there’s nothing out here that’s going to hurt you, right. But still I got the hibee jibees. All those horror movies did something to me. But one night, after chugging my red wine and working up a good buzz, I grabbed the trusty flashlight and out I went. I powered through, no fear. Alcohol is a helluva drug. And after that, I was never scared again. I was a man of the woods. Until I tried to sleep out there. I was a little scared again then.

One day, I “went for a jog”. I really meant to do that. I ended up on a four hour excursion deep into the woods. That just happens out there. And once I’m on the trail, I can’t give it up. It’s a little bit addicting that way. I took it all the way to a clearing of trees in the middle of a few sizeable hills, and exhausted, with no clear trail to follow, finally called it the end. Then I spotted the most magnificent tree ever. There are some trees that just hit you right. They are the kings and queens of the forest. Older, bigger, thicker, gnarled, shapely trees. They’ve got a story and some secrets. This was one of those trees. And it was growing right out of the side of the hill, the steepest hill, angled out at about forty-five degrees, so that it could spread its massive branches out into the open space away from the other trees, and become a lord. This tree was an absolute boss, and when I saw it I had an overwhelming urge to climb it. Along that forty-five degree angle of the trunk, not far up there was the first of many thick branches, and that extended out horizontally over the valley below. If there were any big cats around, it was pretty much the most perfect spot ever for a big cat to lay and survey its kingdom, as big cats are inclined to do. I pushed my way through the tough bush at the base of the hill, slipped and slid in the soft dirt while scaling it, and finally monkeyed my way up onto the trunk, where I then, extremely cautiously, scooted myself up to that branch. This was high enough up where if I fell I would almost 100% break something important to me, if not die, and without a phone, would have to crawl pathetically for too many hours to someone who could help, and that was on my mind. It was very slow scooting. But when I got up onto that branch, and layed across it, I felt exactly like a big jungle cat would, secure on their perch in a tall tree, and looking out over all. I stayed there for I don’t know how long, just enjoying that feeling, and it was an incredible one. I was hoping to see anything come down into the valley below, unaware of me, a deer or boar or bird, but nothing did. Then I stayed up there a little bit longer, after I had wanted to go back down, because I didn’t have the nerve yet to attempt the descent. That was much harder to do. I tried to reverse-scoot my way back down, until it got too steep, and then slid the rest of the way down, clamping the trunk with my thighs, and tearing up a good amount of skin in the process. So that gave me something to remember the trip by.

Other highlights.. James gave me his thick canvas jacket to wander around in. It was dark green and had some faux fur hood. That thing was tough and warm, an absolutely perfect adventurer jacket. I’m sure no Australian would be caught without one. Behind the house, in the meadow where I would watch birds and bug hunt, there was some dense, springy grass on the side of a slope, underneath a line of trees. One morning, after going out there to see what was up with the birdos, wrapped in the jacket, I threw up that faux fur hood, plopped down in the grass, and took a nap. That was awesome. And I see how cloaks were so useful. Basically a wearable blanket/sleeping bag. On another foray, I found a crab in the woods. Yes, in the middle of the woods, I found a crab. It was peeking out of some lush grass down in a ravine where a teeny tiny stream ran through. That was an incredible thing, that forest crab. When you think of creatures that you’d expect to find deep in the middle of the woods, does crab come to mind? Not for me. But there it was.

I also spent a rainy day following boar trails. I was prepared to come face-to-face with one or several boars at any time. I stumbled on a trail inadvertently, when I was looking for newts. There were these little black newts with red bellies everywhere. They were very cute, and they liked it moist. Then I found a mud trail and followed it. There was a lot of slipping and sliding. Those boars like it steep. Nothing really interesting happened here. I was on edge the whole time, wondering if and when I would find the boars. And what I would actually do when I did. I knew that they don’t like surprises, and basically any boar that saw me out there would have 100% been surprised. I guess the reason why boars are particularly dangerous is because their tusks are right at about the average adult’s thigh height, so when you get gored, you get gored in one of the worst possible places. My plan to avoid this goring was to attempt to scale something nearby. It was a flimsy plan. I was really able to experience the boar life, traipsing around out here, but I did a very poor job of following these trails. They were low, so I was squatting most of the time, and it often became incredibly steep, and with the mud I would completely obliterate their tracks, turning those parts of the trail from stairs to a pure mudslide. I’m sure they came through later and saw the carnage, and smelled the dirty human, and were like, wtf mate.

I think that about wraps it up – my time in the Ubuyama wilderness. Thank you to The Lord Scrumpillion Wombus for hosting me, and thank you to you for reading all the way to the end!

My people.

Santa’s got a brand new bag.

I have returned to you after this long and grueling haitus with an expansive new vision for the future of this blog. It’s been half a year or more now, I believe, and I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but like everybody, I’ve been busy, and (mostly) I have been putting my time to good use, and it is in your interest, because I’ve spent the past few months enjoying my newfound photography life, and thus I’ve had the brilliant idea to merge my photos with my blog, and this means that I’ve had to do some heavy lifting with this blog, much heavier than you would imagine (than I did, at least), for just wanting to combine photos and writing, but heavy lifting it has been.

Let’s take a moment to enjoy some photos.

Do you enjoy them? Please tell me you enjoy them.

This post is long. You have been warned. It is so long that a table of contents has been requested. I’ll put that right here.

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I have stuck with this all because I know that in the end it will have all been worth it, for you and for me, who this blog is both for. I don’t know if I can still even really call it a blog, as I feel that we have risen up in the ranks, because I am now armed with the all-powerful WordPress Business account, and that means I am a business man, and can do all the business things, like download plugins that prevent people from right-clicking on my site to download my photos only to install it and see that it doesn’t work, or buy plugins that will give me really great slideshows and find out that the plugin crashes my site, and I can’t see the photos in the slideshow anyway, because something is wrong with my DNS cache, and all of the photos are grey, which I can fix by going into WordPress classic mode, but then I can’t use the new block technology, and also, none of my edits will save unless I smash the save changes button with my forehead while screaming “Save it you bastard!!” Of course that last part is a joke.. but given all that I’ve been through up until this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they asked me to do that. And by they I mean the WordPress support, who are wonderful people, and are only a chat away, offering 24/7 support, and you can see why that’d be necessary, because without it everyone would cancel their plans and flee the site after the 3rd incomprehensible popup that tells them “Sorry but you can’t do this thing you would like to do!” I think I am just having a particularly tough time because I have literally no idea what I’m doing. And YouTube hero Tyler Moore made it look so easy… I have stuck with it all, and we are finally going to see the vision played out in reality, a vision which is basically just me writing, but then also with photos. I feel that I have spent so much time “working on the site” and so much time thinking about it, and every time I visit it, I think, how, how is it possible that so little has been done? I am getting a rough introduction into the world of website design, and the larger computer world in general, I suppose. I have to say that I don’t really like it at all, and I wonder if that will ever change. I do now have a great appreciation for the engineers of the world, the digital masterminds, because they are doing the work of wizards.

Before we get into the meat of this real meaty post, I would like to share with you a little episode that happened to me a few weeks ago, to give you a familiar jumping off point, and to show you that while my life has changed in many respects, it also is basically the same, here in my little Ozu town.

I was sitting at my desk in the teacher’s room (big room with most of the teachers, open desks), with Kusuyama sensei sitting at her desk next to mine. She turns to me, opening a bag, and says “Miyamoto sensei brought apples. Do you want one?” And I was very surprised and pleased, because I haven’t had an apple in a very long time, I’m sure many months, could have been half a year, perhaps not since I’ve lasted posted. The reason for that being that apples here are, like strawberries, too pricey for my “poor man budget mentality” (budget is the incorrect word here, as apparently I am not poor, bur rather have the mindset of a poor man (i.e., frugal); as a rich man has recently told me) and so I go to the other fruits. In apple season they’re about 100 yen (one US smackeroo) which is reasonable and I will pay that. Off season they’re more. But this apple was a free and delicious-looking apple and I took it gladly. I said, “Thank you to Miyamoto sensei!” who then at that time happened to be walking right up to our desks. Kusuyama sensei says, “She’s right here, you can thank her now!” And she tells Miyamoto sensei that she just gave me one of her apples. And Miyamoto sensei looks at me, and I look at her, and I say, “ありがとうございます！はだを食べます！” (Arigatougozaimasu. Hada wo tabemasu.) I decided to add the hada wo tabemasu as a little bonus at the end, because I thought it would be fun, and she would enjoy it. I made a conscious decision to do this. However, as soon as those words left my mouth, I had a strong feeling that I had made a mistake. Miyamoto sensei’s reaction, of “Oh, that’s nice dear!” that you may give to a child who walks up to you and starts babbling incoherent nonsense, helped me to feel that, and my knowledge of the Japanese language helped as well; but it did not, however, help enough to save me from saying what I said. The moment passed and I immediately turned to Kusuyama sensei to confirm my suspicions. I said to her, pointing at the skin of the apple, “Kusuyama sensei, what do you call this?” She says, “Kawa.” And I said, “If I say, hada wo tabemasu, what do you imagine?” And Kusuyama sensei, laughing, pulled her arm out, and pantomimed biting it. And my suspicion was confirmed, that I had just said to Miyamoto sensei, “Thank you for the apple! I eat human skin!”

My mistake was that there is a specific word for skin, in Japanese, for human skin, and that is hada. What I was trying to say was that I would eat the skin of the apple, as Japanese people often don’t eat the skins of fruits, and I thought it would be fun, to say that. That I will be enjoying the skin of this fruit. I wanted to try and be fun. What happened instead is that Miyamoto sensei returned to her teacher’s room, and says to the other teachers, “Well, our ALT is a skin eater.” And someone probably replied with, “Yappari.” (I knew it.) And this is why I am still so wary of speaking. I just never know what exactly is going to come out of my mouth. But what I thought was quite interesting was that, if I had not realized my mistake myself, I never would have known I said anything wrong. I feel that Kusuyama sensei has some duty to protect me from making such grave mistakes, but she had already turned back to her work, and Miyamoto sensei had already given me a confused smile, and the moment was over. If I hadn’t personally recognized my error, I would have told Miyamoto sensei that day that I was grateful for the apple and I would be eating human skin, and I would have been entirely none the wiser. It just makes me wonder about all of the similarly incorrect things that have come out of my mouth. They must be innumerable. I have been here now for over two and a half years, and my Japanese is only recently not terrible. That is a lot of time to have been telling people I eat human skin.

So there you go. I still can’t speak Japanese (coherently). Now let’s get to the good stuff.

(For some context, these writings and accompanying photos are all in reference to a seven day trip to Okinawa I took with friends Juicy James Cool and Mr. Parker Junior in the first week of January this year.)

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On the eleventh day after our return, the trip felt to me like a distant dream. I looked at my photos and felt that I could hardly even remember when I took them. It felt like it could have been years ago, and I think I felt that way mainly because I had by that time fully reintegrated into my standard, pre-Okinawa way of living. That way of living has been, since the start of the covid times, relatively formulaic. The people have changed, some of them, and my work has changed, some of it, and my hobbies, and various events have peppered it throughout – but the scenery – where I live, where I work, shop, play – has all been the same. And so, on this now well-trodden landscape, you could pick out the Okinawa trip, and move it around, at any point on this treadmill, and drop it down, and it wouldn’t really matter. It would still only delineate itself by the primary fact that it just wasn’t here, where I’ve been for so long now, here in Ozu machi, Kumamoto.

I absolutely reveled in this freedom, the freedom that comes with travel. Freedom from the ordinary. From the plain dullness of my everyday life.

I’ve thought about this. I still think about it. In the days coming back from Okinawa, I was shocked. Shellshocked, I’ve been saying. The first night back, I drank a liter of wine. Alone, in my apartment. It was a coping mechanism. I was coping with the shock. You see, I had just tasted that freedom. I had just tasted joy, adventure, excitement, thrill, warmth, stimulation.. I had just spent over a week, ten days, free from this ordinary. Ten days in different places, and with people. Sleeping together, laughing together, exploring together, talking, bonding, arguing, eating, drinking. Doing what people do. I got ten days of it, glorious sociality, and upon coming back to my Ozu apartment, finding that I wanted still more, that I was just starting to find its rhythm, this new way of living, and it was gone, as quickly as it came. The social stimulation was one thing, and the joy of travel, and all the excitement.. New places, new culture, new sights, sounds, tastes, all of this, panoply of fresh experience, to be taken in. Okinawa shattered my monotony. And then, I was brought back. I resisted. I held out for as long as I thought sensible, taking another week of vacation. I schemed ways of escape, of protection, of deliverance, taking more time off, taking every single day off, quitting the job entirely, and getting out of dodge – but I deemed it all too drastic, too desperate, and my old life reclaimed itself, dragging me, at first kicking and screaming, then more dejectedly, back into the normal. It hurts, but each day that passes, it hurts less. So quickly I forget, forget the freedom I felt, the creativity and the imagination and enthusiasm, and richness, that had so infused those days.

In those days, after the trip, I really struggled to understand what it meant. What was happening to me. I reached out to friends for insight. On that first night back, the liter of wine night, I wrote to James and Parker, a drunken ramble, but all true, and with surprisingly coherent phrasing and with correct grammar (proud of this), that I found it just so incomprehensibly strange, that we all just, having spent all that time together, having becoming what I felt was an intimate tribe, that we just separated, and went back to our respective boxes, cordoned ourselves off from each other, us, as humans, social creatures, that we did that willingly, and that it’s not considered lunacy, but the exact opposite, in fact; it’s normal. I woke up the next morning with only a single message in response. “Health check?” I ran this all by Ryoka, the shellshocking, and she told me, “That’s called vacation crisis.” And she’s right. I read about it, that many people consider quitting their jobs after getting away on a vacation. I understand what is meant by vacation crisis. I don’t know if I would call it a crisis. I don’t really like how commonly that word is used. It feels flippant to me. But I do think that that this Okinawa trip laid bare that there are some things fundamentally wrong with my current way of living, and that may be what’s at the root of all vacation crisises, that once we are free to step back, get some distance, and with a fresh perspective, we take a good look at the lives we’re living, and find that we don’t really like what we see. Sure a vacation should be fun, but even at the end of the greatest vacation you shouldn’t find yourself recoiling in horror at the thought of returning to your pre-vacation life. If you do, then you must have a problem. For me, I have come to the conclusion that my problems are two, and common ones: lack of purpose, and loneliness. Loneliness is crippling, as they say – it undoubtedly is what has driven me to drink too much on those worst nights, and living in a small town, living alone, already having tenuous ties to the community as a foreigner (although I have always felt very welcomed and integrated here), and during a pandemic, as we enter a new phase of lockdowns, and yet another state of emergency, and it’s winter, and finding myself with an increasing feeling of uselessness at work.. it’s not a real shocker that I do feel isolated. I suppose the real shocker would be if I didn’t. Simply living alone is enough to put you in a high-risk demographic group: People who live alone have an 80% higher risk of depression. Anyways…

So yeah, Okinawa made me happy. Loneliness is my problem. There is great gaping hole in the spot that human connection is supposed to occupy in my life. In the days leading up to and on the Okinawa trip, that hole was filled right up. I spent ten days paired with companions, ten days surrounded by friends. Before leaving for Okinawa, we had a New Year’s party at Parker’s, and although I fell asleep early, and was woken up, harassed, forced to celebrate, shuffled around, finally landing in the middle of the floor, next to Mudra who refused to share the blanket, on a heated carpet that was too hot, listening to Rossi’s Mongolian drum ensembles, that I eventually, late into the night after all others besides myself had managed to fall asleep, had to turn off, then having to smush myself against the wall to let Daniel through to piss, Mudra now snoring, somehow drifting off, waking up to find heated carpet unheated, shivering, and yet upon waking, still feeling perky enough to join in the morning conversation, where I was immediately shouted down, silenced at once, (my voice being too powerful and masculine and loud); still, with all of that, inconvenience and irrationality, still I preferred it to being alone. I thought of families and communities where communal living was or is still practiced, the Iroquois in their longhouses, and the Moravians that all slept together in one big house, and I thought about how completely different that was from my way of living now, and what it would be like to do that every night, day in, day out. I thought it’d be nice, living in a community like that. And whenever I think about this, I think about a study that was done, a study on heart disease. Doctors were curious as to why the rates of cardiovascular disease were so low in a certain community, probing for secrets that they could take to the world, and what they found was that it wasn’t anything in the diet, and it wasn’t anything in the way of exercise – it was simply that they were all living together, with entire extended families parked together under one roof – and this constant belonging, constant social interaction, protected them more from cardiovascular disease than anything else. We know too that social interaction does more to lower rates of morbidity than anything else – exercise, diet, even quitting smoking – more important than anything else, are people. We have the data. We have the anecdotal evidence, I believe, as I’ve just gone through a period of constant sociality, and returning to my private home, depressed, isolated, and miserable. So why do we isolate ourselves? Why do we not view it as insane, as the actual health risk that it is, that we go off and willingly move into empty apartments and homes, alone? I think we should.

Let’s continue.

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First impressions of Okinawa. At one point, on our first day there, I said to Parker and James, “I had a dream that I was in America, and everyone was Japanese.” That is how I felt on that first day. Not only that I was in some kind of surreal Japanese America, but also that I was in a dream, or some kind of computer generated, synthetic reality. For as we walked, first through the park, seeing homeless people, many of them, mixed with families strolling right on by, with a man crawling out of his wheelchair to relieve himself in the grass, cats everywhere, coming to a beach, with people playing in the sand, a man with a metal detector hunting for treasure, the water just beyond the beach under an overpass, then walking out into a festival, now, surrounded by people, all kinds of people, the people of Okinawa, dressed in all manner of ways, eating cotton candy, and throwing darts, and frying food, with a woman giving strange eyebrows to Parker and James, then coming into another small park..

The dream. The first day there was like being in a dream. You know how in a dream, it feels purposeless, often, and you’re just wandering, guided by something, or rather something is guiding you, the dream is just unfolding out before you, with no real plan to its construction, or no indication as to why what’s happening is happening, and you’re just kind of in it, along for the ride, wondering where it will take you, and how it will unfold? I felt that way, all day, that first day. I just couldn’t shake that feeling. The gray, overcast sky did much to help evoke it. The lax, unhurried, meandering movements of all the Okinawans helped as well. The strange dress, the cats, the unfamiliar sights, of the man relieving himself in a bush, of a large woman with a metal detector scouring a small strip of beach, of an overpass placed over the water just in front of said beach, from the festival stalls, selling all kinds of treats, games, snacks, the festival filled with all kinds of people, with one of them making strange faces at James and Parker, guesticulating wildly with her eyebrows, to the large family, boisterously sauntering down the middle of the street, fanned out to span it in its entirety, the cousins, aunts, uncles, children, young couple in matching Fila jackets, carrying on as if they were in their own living room, the abandoned bike on the side of the road, the trash, and more cats, and now a procession of people waiting on a long stone staircase, waiting to pay their respects to the gods, some of them in t-shirts, some of them in parkas, short skirts, and suits. This entire time, taking in all of this atmosphere, taking in one strange sight after the other, bizarre and surprising visuals generated on repeat, one after another, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that this just wasn’t real – it was so familiar, and yet so unfamiliar at the same time. Perhaps, if we had just come from America, it wouldn’t have felt so strange, so off, that air of looseness, where nobody seemed to really care what anyone else was doing, as opposed to mainland Japan, which has a much more controlled, buttoned up, constrictive air about it, everyone so consciously aware of the face they put forward. It’s hard to describe this, as it is so intangible, this atmosphere, and what exactly it’s comprised of. Even the architecture was off – the worn, blocky buildings, the pastel colors, the strange shapes and designs, the plants growing out of the cracks, corners, and verandas, so that half of the houses looked like they themsevles were alive. The American, I saw in the homeless people. The variety of fashion, or lack of it – that was American (at least, Midwestern, suburban American). The relaxed air about the people. The large and loud family, parading down the street. The metal detector, even, was American to me in a way, as I haven’t seen one anywhere else. The Subway – American. But then, Japan was on display as well – in the cats, in the shrines, in (some of) the fashion, the food, the large, blank, yellow stare of the smiley face stuck to the side of the Smile Hotel, gazing out over the city. That was all Japanese. So what of the people? And the people, I didn’t know what to make of. Many, probably most were Japanese by nationality, but in behavior, not like the Japanese in Kyushu, or Tokyo, and in appearance, on a spectrum – for some of them looked like any Japanese you would have plucked right off the mainland, but others, if you saw them anywhere else, you wouldn’t have thought they were Japanese at all. And that’s because, I would learn later, many of them are not descendants of mainland Japanese, or are to varying degrees. Many of them are native islanders, the Ryukyu people. Many of them are of Chinese descent, or Phillipino, or Taiwanese, or another Eastern Pacific country. Some of them are American, and they’re often conspicuous, especially when dressed in military fatigue, and some of them are Canadian, like our friend Dan. And it is this strange hybrid of cultures, primarily the Ryukyu, Chinese, Japanese, and American, that forms the bulk of what is Okinawa today.

We got to know Okinawan culture more intimately over the course of the trip. We were quite lucky to have been able to see the people out in force, and to get a good look at them, celebrating the New Year. I learned quickly about the Shisa, as well. I had heard of that word Shisa, only a week before embarking, at a mochi making party with the Higashi family in Kikuchi, our first reunion in a long while. The Higashi family had just been in Okinawa, for the two youngest boys’ volleyball tournament, and in talking to English Number One about it, he mentioned the Shisa, and I said, is that an Okinawan greeting, and he said no, but Makisan laughed, and said yes, and then Eichi struck a pose, like a tiger bearing its claws, and said I had to do this when I say it. The conversation was quick, and I didn’t leave it really knowing what a Shisa was, only that it may be some form of Okinawan greeting, and if I say it the Okinawans may laugh at me. Well, it turns out that Shisa is not at all the Okinawan way to say hello – that’s haisai – but rather, the lion guardian spirit of the Ryukyu people. The Shisa, also called Shishi, meaning lion, come in all shapes and sizes (though they’re always.. lion-shaped, although with some of them you couldn’t guess it) and they always come in pairs, one with mouth open, and one with mouth closed. I would learn more about their history and significance only later – at that time, on the island, I only knew that they were special, they were funky, and they were everywhere. Shisa are stuffed into every nook and cranny of Okinawa, and it brought me great joy finding them; a great Okinawa scavenger hunt. You may wonder, really, how many different ways can you portray a lion guardian thing, and thanks to the boundless fountain of creativity that is the human mind, there are many – although there do seem to be some standard, convergent forms. Two types of Shisa, ones that looked like they were just made from fried clay, and another that had been glazed, seemed to be consistently made in the same form.

You will also notice this beautiful white and red roof, and this also I’ve only seen in Okinawa. Mainland Japan does not have Shisa, not commonly, but their own version of them, the komainu, which are typically seen guarding the entrance of shrines. They are not lions like the Shisa, but dogs. Both the shisa and komainu have their origins in China. Okinawa, or I should say the Ryukyu kingdom, at that time, ended up with the Shisa, and mainland Japan with the komainu, although mainland Japan does have the shishi in its culture, in the shishimae, the lion dance.

Let’s take a moment to enjoy some more Shisa photos.

I still felt like I was in a dream when we wandered down to the park under the underpass by the beach. It may not sound like the most likely place to be poppin’, but it was poppin’. Here too I felt strong American vibes. Maybe it was the Blondie blaring from a city PA speaker. Or was it the rollerblades? The b-ballers? It was a hive of activity. Skateboarders, tennis players, slamming the ball against the most indefatigable foe, concrete columns of the underpass. Parker gave a gasp and pointed. “Do you guys see that?” and ran away. We were strolling the beach when he recovenvened with us. “RC cars!”

So yes, those first days were spent in Naha, acclimating ourselves to this strange new place, and its strange new culture.

We got our first real Okinawa schooling from a Canadian. We met Dan as we were checking out of a local supermarket. He started to chat us up, and he asked us where we thought he was from. I made the mistake of saying American. James said I should never call someone an American, (reflecting our standing in the world, at least in the eyes of the Australians), but especially not a Canadian (which Dan was.) In my defense this was early in the conversation, before the “eh”s and the accent started popping out. Dan told us all kinds of things about Okinawa – about where to buy good Shisa souveniers, about why the Okinawans love Spam (they do love Spam, this was a major surprise), about how there is strong anti-American sentiment because of all the crime committed by American soldiers in the 80s and 90s. (I read about this crime, after returning. It seems that not only was there crime, but there was also a lack of justice. Many of the perpatrators were given meager fines, discharge from the army, or got off scot free. Nothing that you could call justice for someone who ran over your four year old. All enforcement and judicial affairs related to American military personnel were and still are carried out by the American military. This has been a great source of tension for the island.) About Okinawa’s economic struggles, being the poorest prefecture in Japan, and being a more popular tourist destination than Hawaii, having some ten million tourists annually, with four million of them being Chinese (Dan’s numbers). As for why Dan was here in Okinawa now: Love, baby. Dan met an Okinawan woman and got married. They spent some time in Canada and then came back to Okinawa. He said he liked talking to foreigners – he struggled to make friends in Okinawa because he doesn’t speak Japanese (which may be surprising to hear, given Okinawa’s diversity, but probably has a large part to do with his age, as in Japan, the higher up you are in age, the less likely you are to speak English).

Touching on the history of Spam in Okinawa, will lead us to covering everything I learned about Okinawa’s recent tumultuous history, which was this – the Ryukyu kingdom was subjugated by the Japanese in 1609, and Okinawa prefecture officially founded in 1879. The people of Okinawa were forced to fight along the Japanese in World War 2, to defend the island against the Americans, who were making it the last stop before the mainland, and everybody died tragic, horrific, senseless deaths (at this point in the war it was entirely senseless, for everyone except the emperor and his people, who just wanted to maintain as much control over Japan as they could after the war was over). The Okinawan people were forced to support and fight for Japan, and suffered greatly. I don’t know if I need to recount all of the horrible, gruesome details that I learned from visiting the various war museums, but I did feel that I learned something particularly important, which is that war memorials are necessary, and everyone should go to them. I have thought before, when visiting the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb museums, why we need these, why should we keep dwelling on such horror, why keep these gruesome images and facts alive and in our consciousness. And I think I felt the answer this time around, which is that, yes, we know war is horrible, conceptually, many of us – but you need to know, exactly, to see as best as you can, without actually experiencing for yourself, how horrible it really is – the black, charred flesh of crying babies, the journals of the high school girls holding down the arms and legs of soldiers as they’re amputated off, the journals recounting the moment when they were hit by mortar fire, seeing their friends blown to bits, seeing the videos of endless dead bodies and ruined buildings, ruin everywhere, everything black and grey and destroyed, all smoldering wasteland. The photo of the POWs, over a hundred men in a barbed-wire pit of mud, some of them standing, some of them dead, none of them smiling for the camera.

Actual horror. Hell on earth. By the last museum we made a stop at, I didn’t even want to go in. My suffrometer had been maxed out. I couldn’t take anymore.

Why keep the horror alive?

So that we don’t forget.

Because someday, the events of WW2 will no longer remain in any living person’s consciousness. There will be no one left to tell their horror stories. And that is why we need these museums. They’re also necessary, not only so that we remember, but so that we can understand. I think many of us feel intrinsically that war is horrible, and those of us with more active imaginations can perhaps to some degree simulate what it may have been like, or kid ourselves that we can – but I’m sure that it can still never get anywhere near the thing itself. Our imaginations on their own just aren’t powerful enough – but when aided with photos, videos, testimonials, journals.. with some help, we can begin to understand.

What repeatedly struck me was the senselessness of it all. High school girls being blown apart so that the Emperor of Japan can potentially stay in power after the inevitable defeat of his nation. What kind of leader, what kind of ruling party would ever trade power for the lives of their innocents? One who believes they are God, perhaps, and so have a right to decide how lives are lived, and how they are spent. One who is a madman. One who is both.

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Now, let’s take a look at this photo.

This photo won the mystery award from Ryoka. When I showed this in class, all the students would, in unison, squint and lean forward, intensely focused on the screen. I took the photo already knowing what it was, so of course I know what this is a photo of. But I’ve been surprised that most people who look at it can’t tell. What do you think?
If you can read Japanese, there’s a clue for you down at the bottom right. If you can’t read Japanese, or can’t read this yet.. Stevie’s here for you.

It says, “危険！手をふれないでください。マングース防除事業。”

Danger – don’t touch this – death to mongeese.

It’s a dead mongoose in a mongoose trap.

Now let me tell you a little bit about what was one of the most interesting parts of the trip for me.

The animals of Yanbaru are so threatened with extinction for, I think, two primary reasons: land development, and death by mongoose.
In 1910, 17 mongeese, known to science as the Herpestes auropunctatus, the Small Indian Mongoose, were released in Naha, southern Okinawa, to wage war on the Habu, Protobothrops flavoviridis, (a particularly fun one to say), a venomous Okinawan snake. I regret not taking a picture of any of the numerous warning signs placed in the habu hotspots (or the people hotspots, as they were ideal places to share the good word, that these snakes will mess you up), but I do have pictures of habu sake. The students were very interested in this. According to Wikipedia, the habu are often stuffed into the jar alive, and drown, or are stunned and gutted alive. Gruesome stuff.

Unfortunately for everyone and everything on the island of Okinawa, the habu are nocturnal, and the mongoose, diurnal, and so the two rarely ever meet, and so the people of Okinawa simply added one more problem animal to their list of problem animals. To me this just shows how little we understood about animal behavior and ecology, just over a hundred years ago. Although there may have been people who knew better and weren’t consulted, or someone just really got the idea into their head, that our snake problem could be easily solved if we just brought a pack of mongeese to the island. I do wonder how this ended up happening, but apparently the idea was a common one, because according to a pamphlet I received from the Kuina Conservation Center (we’ll get to this), the Small Indian Mongoose was “introduced into about 70 islands in tropical areas, including the Hawaiian, Fiji and West Indies Islands, during the late 1800s, in order to control rat and poisonous snake populations.” The rats were also brought by the humans, and were also extremely detrimental to island flora and fauna, like on all other islands they’ve been introduced to. Instead of hunting the habu, like intended, the mongeese hunt everything else, and because the top predator on the island was the habu, and no carnivorous mammal like a mongoose, the animals adapted only to defend themselves against the habu, and perhaps birds of prey, and had and have no adaptations against mongeese, and this is the same sad story on so many islands around the world. Feral cats and dogs are an issue as well, on Okinawa, to a lesser extent, but still enough that the government had to initiate policies limiting the freedom of cats and dogs in the Yanbaru villages, and institute a tracking program, requiring all pets to be chipped. The mongeese have thrived since their introduction, and have steadily pushed northwards, until they made it up into the Yanbaru region, where the rarest and most sensitive of Okinawan species live. It wasn’t until recently that people caught on to what’s been going on, that mongeese are eating all their special animals, and this is now an ongoing struggle, between the people of Okinawa, to save their endemic wild things before it’s too late, and the mongeese. When reading about the Kuina, in the same pamphlet, I’d read that it had first been described in 1981, which I take to mean that it was given its scientific name, as the Gallirallus okinawae, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought that must have been a typo, but no, it’s true. So this animal that is now the flagstone species, the centerpiece in the campaign to protect the wildlife of Okinawa, had not even been officially documented, known to the larger ecological community, until a little over forty years ago, which to me seems like just yesterday, as whenever I read about particularly interesting species like the Kuina, they’ve all been documented much longer ago, in the 1700s, by Carl Linnaeus, or some French guy (my history is weak here), and maybe the 1800s, but not EVER in the late 1900s. But so it is, that the wildlife of Okinawa has flown under the radar for so long, and once it got some attention, it must have been found that these animals are in serious trouble, and would be gone soon, some of them gone already (potentially the Okinawa Spiny Rat), without some intervention. The initiative started only in 2000, after 15 years of basic research, when the prefectural government started capturing mongeese, and they’ve since passed legislation, constructed three fences, many kilometers long, and have even started up a real life Okinawan Avengers, the Mongoose Busters. So what you see in the picture is a mongoose caught in what is listed in the pamphlet as a “kill trap”, deployed by the Okinawan Avengers. We found it down along the mangroves, where there were two traps, the first one being empty. When I spotted the second, I saw flies, then a tail, and knew we’d gotten lucky. (The mongoose, not so much.) We were witnessing history, really, a glimpse into the ongoing war between a slinky, furry destroyer, the repercussions of the misguided intentions of over a hundred years ago, and the people of an island, in a desperate attempt to protect their dorky, charismatic, flightless bird (and everything else threatened by the mongoose, like the Okinawa Spiny Rat, the Ryukyu Long Haired Rat, which is actually more a possum, the Ryukyu Black-breasted Turtle, the geckos, newts, frogs). The misguided acts of the past. Ignorant humans attempting to rectify an order that is beyond their understanding.

These photos are all from the Kuina Conservation Center. Although I desperately desired it we were not able to see a Kuina in the wild. Thank you to the center for having Kuina on display to satisfy the burning curiosity of animal people such as myself. This bird, I first heard of through the great omnipotent internet. I found, from some very brief perusing of the great omnipotent internet, that there was a forest on the northern end of the Okinawa mainland, and that there were wild things there. On searching Google Maps, I found the Kuina Conservation Center and knew right away that was a place I needed to go. I had to fight for it – after four days of letting James have his fill of parks and museums and McDonalds, when I said that we were going to go see the bird today, his response was, “No we’re not.” His reasoning being that we had already explored Yanbaru yesterday, and I got one day, and one day was enough. I had to put my talons down for this. I said, “James, we are going to go see that bird.” And we did go see that bird, and made friends with a nice man, knowledgable on all things Kuina, and friends with just about everyone in Japan, Kobayashisan, who spoke to us the entire time in good English, answering all of our questions, and educating us on the history of the project, to save the Kuina, and the Kuina behavior, diet, mating, about the Mongoose Busters, and about the lessons he was designing for classrooms around Japan. I felt that the Kuina is in good hands if there are people like him looking after them.

Driving up to the center, we saw many signs that warned of Kuina, and at the center itself, a sign that listed how many Kuina had been hit by cars last year, and this year. That is unfortunately another killer of these birds, as well as construction – death via car, and via falling down into places they can’t get out of, like trenches and ditches.

The Kuina is a dorky bird. Something about a bird without the wings is just funny. It is very much a bouncing, bobbing blob. It’s face is entirely expressionless, a face that has you wondering, just what, if anything, could be going on in that round nub of a head. The secrets of the universe. Certainly something is going on in that little nub noggin.

I guess you know I’m a nature lover when I say that the highlight of my trip was seeing a bird.

Did someone say birds?

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But I have not shown you the best one. And this bird deserves a story unto itself. First I will show you the photo.

I am sure that almost all of you do not know what you’re looking at. You do not know that this bird is a critically endangered bird and there are most likely less than several hundred left in the wild, perhaps less than a hundred adults. I did not know this, either, when I took the photo of this bird. The story is this (because I have to give you the story) (it’s the whole reason I made this blog): At the end of a three and a half hour hike to a waterfall and back, that could have been done in one, but you know, birds; at the end of this hike there was a trail going off down into a small, clear-watered stream, and we made the call to extend our hike “just a bit longer” (dangerous words) and venture down to it, thinking that we may get very lucky, and find some interesting critters. James had actually already spotted an interesting critter, a large, dinosaur-like newtbeast lumbering across a sandy spit in the stream, from the hiking trail – and that greatly peaked our curiosity. We ventured down to the waters, and immediately started making discoveries, which were, this beautiful butterfly, and these wiggly wet newts. When we had gone down into the streambed, I had noticed a bird fly out from above us, into the woods across the stream. I was hoping to see birds here, (I was hoping to see birds everywhere), particularly a kingfisher, and so was on lookout for them. We had our fun with the newts, a lot of fun with the newts, trying to feed them a sizeable many-legged thing, millipede or centipede, somethingpede, and finding out that it could crawl underwater just as well as it could on land. As we mozied back down the stream, I was constantly scanning the trees, hoping for any sign of birdlife, when I noticed a hole in the tree above where we entered the stream, and I formed a quick theory, that the bird that flew across the stream when we entered lives in this hole, and we probably spooked it off, and it probably wants to come back. And so, I having perhaps the most essential skill necessary for success in wildlife photography, decided to activate that essential skill, by standing still, and waiting. If I am close to getting a photo, or there is an opportunity at hand, I am extremely reluctant to let it go. I will hold out as long as possible. And in this case I had also got into that state. An extreme unwillingness to move. Parker did not last long – within minutes he was heading back to the car. James surprisingly lasted much longer – he is a man of nature but he also has limits on his patience, and when I broke my trance for a second to confirm if it was really alright that we were still standing here for so long, having now been rooted in place for at least fifteen minutes, (that time goes quick), and asked what he was doing, seeing that he was preoccupied with something on his phone, he told me that he was trying to get free Line Points from a bottle he had gotten from a vending machine earlier, and so I knew that we could press forward, both having a mission. Even then, I didn’t want to keep Parker waiting for too long, as I had already made them both wait quite a lot, extending that hike two hours past what would have been the norm if you did not stop to look for birds every ten feet, and so I was feeling so strongly that it was time to move on, but didn’t want to go without the photo, and I was locked in struggle, between acknowledging that I couldn’t stand here forever, and also wanting to stand there forever, and I had just started to move my feet, to leave, when the bird returned. It came right back across from the other side of the stream, and right back to that hole. And I couldn’t believe it, and I’m sure I audibly gasped, and most likely aggresively whispered, “It’s back!!” and whipped up the camera, and started shooting. And I really couldn’t get anything great, nothing pin-sharp, as they say, but it was enough to make out what it was, and that was all I needed, and we left there with a victory. And usually, if you wait long enough, it does seem that you will leave with a victory. I guess that the successful nature photographer really doesn’t leave without one. And so every time you leave, you leave with a victory. I did get lucky then, I felt it, but I didn’t realize how lucky I had been, until several nights after returning, when I started the long, long process of going through the three thousand photos I had taken, and culling them down, to the useable, to the edit-worthy. And that night, I had called it a night, and was sitting on the bed, flipping through some of the pamphlets I had taken from the Yanbaru Conservation Center, looking again at the cast of critters all at risk in the Yanbaru region, and my eyes landed on a bird, the Okinawa Woodpecker, and I thought, “I’ve seen this bird.” I had a strong feeling that I’d seen it. I knew that bird. And I thought, I think that’s the bird we saw at the stream. And I noted a big red CR posted under the picture on the pamphlet, CR meaning critically endangered. So, of course, I thought, well the chances are certainly against me, and I probably did not see that bird. Maybe a close relative. But those eyes looked so familiar. And that night, I went to sleep, wondering if I had really photographed the critically endangered Okinawan Woodpecker or not. Of course I could have confirmed it it right then, but a little anticipation can make things just that much sweeter, and again I thought I was probably wrong. The first thing I did the next morning was pop open the laptop, pull up the photos, and there it was, that I had seen the exact same bird, no question about it. And then I did the research, and learned just how endangered this bird really was, that it is on the fast track to extinction, and is very close to it already, and I had been able to not only see it, but photograph it, and I felt incredibly lucky. According to the IUCN’s Red List site, the number of locations where you can find this woodpecker is 1 (Yanbaru), the number of mature individuals is 50-249, and the continuing population trend is declining. The hole was a telling sign, as to why this bird is going extinct – it is meeting the same demise as so many woodpeckers around the world, that require old growth forests, with the gnarled and holey old trees, to make their nests, and the old growths of Yanbaru have mostly been felled, and so the woodpeckers have nowhere to make their homes. The Okinawans have done the right thing by designating Yanbaru a national park. I hope that they can continue to take the steps necessary to save this bird along with all of their other special critters, because it really is a beautiful bird. My guess is that the one I saw was either a juvenile or a female, as it isn’t as brightly colored as the one shown in the pamphlet photo.

These are the animals of Yanbaru, but there were discoveries all across the island. Particularly, there was one insect that brought me much amazement, and it was this one.

I have never seen a bug like this. I have seen a lot of bugs, but when it comes to bugs, there is always something that has not been seen, even for the bug expert extraordinaires. It is a great beauty of the bug world. This one I found essentially glued to a park sign. I say glued because as I hovered around, breathing all over it, running back to the car, grabbing my expensive and amazing SuperInsectShooter2000 macro lens, then coming back and shoving said lens right up in its face, this bug did not move a tarsus. The appendages, (legs?) that appear to have morphed into horns, were what were really throwing me for a loop. I spent some good time thinking about it. Guesses, anyone?

Wow I can’t believe you knew that it was a Pterophoridaen (plume moth)!! Specifically a Stenodacma pyrrhodes!! You’re doing better than me. Actually I was very surprised (well, I was pretty surprised) that it was a moth. A lot of twists in this world of bugs.

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James is a very peculiar person. To give an example: After our first full day of adventure on Okinawa, a beautiful day, a day full of new sights, tastes, culturing, adventures.. at the end of this day, I looked over at James, lying facedown on the hotel bed next to mine, and said, “What did you think was interesting about today?” And I thought this was a good question, as we really had seen so much, and I was curious to know what about it had made the greatest impression on him. And James responds, after taking half a second to think it over, “The weather.” (said as an Australian, so, “Tha’ wetha’.”) I said, “Give me more.” This time, a second passes. “Getting the rental car.” Now, I know that I am just as much a peculiar person – but in his peculiarity, James is certainly very different from me, because if you had asked me that question, the two things I would have absolutely not put on my list of interesting events of the day, would have been the rental car, and the weather. What is even interesting about a sunny day? How can you actually even list that as an interesting thing? You may think that James was being sarcastic. He very often is. And a normal person answering in that way probably would be. But sarcastic he was not. I knew James well enough by then to know that his answer was a completely genuine one, and that after our first action packed day on this exotic new island, the two most interesting things for James that day really were the weather and the rental car. I needed more; I pressed further. “What else?” But that was it. “That’s it.” (His reply). And then, as an afterthought, to himself, as he’s already answered the question, done his duty to the outside world, and is now once again devoting full attention to obliterating his Legends Of Runeterra AI nemesis, he adds, “The stone road was nice.” And that was an acceptable answer. The stone road was nice.

This entire conversation (if you can call it a conversation) was conducted over the sounds, over a cacophony of sword clashings, and spell castings, and customary catch phrases, and other such appropriate fantasy sounds.

This house, placed along the stone road, represented an aesthetic divide between James, and Parker and myself. Parker and I were on team yes, James on team no, and strongly so. What do you think? Attractive? Horrific?

When it comes to friendship, James can be a demanding individual. I was banned from driving the car because I drive too aggressively. I couldn’t play music because my music is displeasing. I couldn’t lay on his bed because I’m filthy. I couldn’t have a Calorie Mate (a quintessential Australian food) (“Want a calorie, mate?” James once said – not to me of course) because he has to order them off Amazon (for the best deal). Parker has a catchphrase, and it’s “Sheboigan” (not sure if correctly spelled). James has a catchphrase, and it’s “No”. I tried to convince James to start saying “Badabing badaboom” (I thought that would be fun for an Australian). He wasn’t into it. A tangent, but Australians really have an infectious way of speaking, perhaps in part because their words are so fun to say. I say their words, but actually the really fun ones, like Billabong, Diggereedoo, and Kookaburra, are all Aboriginal words. I had never thought of Billabong as being a word having origins in Australia, but after spending some time with James, I fancy that I could recognize it now. And fun fact, (I had always just though it was the fun name of a company, nothing more) a billabong is a kind of oasis located in the Australian outback. Words like wallaby and dingo are also Aboriginal. I’ve noticed that people (at least, Americans), are so tickled by the Australian accent, that when they meet a real life Australian they can’t help but to try it out, that most people when meeting James can’t resist unleashing their inner Australian, and James always takes it in stride. I’ve asked him if this ever bothered him, and he says no. I think he knows that it’s not done mockingly; we just can’t resist it. When with James I confess that something takes hold of me too, and am often seized by overwhelming urges to blurt out words and phrases in the Australian tongue, one of my favorites being “A dingo ate my baby”. Sometimes I’m able to surpress these urges, and sometimes I’m not, and whenver I’m not, James is right there with me, joining in to rant about dingos, and throwing in some “Aw yea”s, and “croikeys”, and other quintessential Australianisms. Once when asking James about Aboriginal words, he started listing some off, and on the fourth or fifth word, I was fascinated, and commented, “Wow.. I haven’t even heard some of these!” and he says, “Well, I was just making them up.” They all sounded like perfectly real words to me, I suppose because they all sounded like nonsense, and not being Aboriginal or Australian, I can’t tell the difference.

Another worthy tangent – James doing karaoke sounds like a horribly wounded animal in its death throes. There are times when you may accurately level the charge of hyperbole at me but this is not one of those times. It is something unearthly. Hearing it will touch something deep inside of you. His favorites are “Breaking The Habit” by Linkin Park, and “You Raise Me Up” by Josh Groban. And this is why James is such an enigma. He is a fun guy, while simultaneously being anti-fun. How does it work? He belongs to a very rare class of people who can pull this off. (Luka is another member of this class; but Luka is for another time.) On the drive home from the airport, I was doing some verbal painting for James, laying out for him a fantasy I was having, of me going to see him, in Okinawa, his future home, where he wants to move (for the weather), where he is now a successful Maccas magnate (Maccas, Australian for McDonalds; James sees great opportunity in opening McDonalds in Japan, “printing money”) and in me borrowing a fancy car from his fleet of fancy cars (he likes cars – flicking through Tinder for the first time, he swiped right on two profiles, both including pictures of cars), and I said, looking over at him in the backseat, “Doesn’t that sound like fun?” And he said, with a light touch of agony in his voice, “Not really.”

At another point on the trip, I turned to James and said, “Are you having a good time?” (At this moment, I was having a good time. It was ideal conditions for having a good time.) James was stoic, as usual, and so it was and is very hard to tell, if and when he’s having a good time. His response: “Better than being at home.” And that bar is very low, because James lives in the middle of the woods, surrounded by empty houses and tall trees and the bloodcurdling screams of deer (I’ve heard these), where he is this winter perpetually engaged in the existential struggle of trying to stay out of a hypothermic state at a reasonable price (the electric bill is quite high in his middle of nowhere).

I’m writing a lot about James here. Our relationship has been a great source of amusement to me, and hopefully not too much of exasperation to him. I am only scratching the surface, the surface of a very large and very fantastic iceberg, and however much I would like to, we just don’t have the time or energy for me to expound on every single peculiarity or instance of peculiar behavior on James’s part – but I can give you one more. James and I had a moment of conflict, of true conflict, laid bare, a moment of us forcing our up-to-this-point dysfunctional cogs into some kind of synchronicity, a more working order, and it was tense, Parker wide-eyed and mouth-shut, and after the climax, and tensions had relaxed, and consessions made, James made a comment, a pained one, one that suggested he had been harboring a deep and dreadful grievance for a long, long time; and James’s comment was: “Please no more jazz.”

Music was one of our greatest sources of tension. We had listened to jazz only once on that trip, as I was only in the mood for it once, that warm, relaxed morning, at the start of our drive up to Yanbaru, and because I had then been allowed to drive, as this was before the ban (I was banned for driving “too fast”) (our car liked to scold, and was quite quick to do so, and this was another great source of amusement on the trip, as Parker in particular did not handle the scolding well, and would respond to the car’s gentle robotic suggestions of “Please slow down” and “Stay in the lane” with a rising exasperation, gripping the wheel harder, and shouting various “God dammit!” and “Shut up!”s, which helped to load him with all those neurochemicals necessary for safe and proper driving, like adrenaline and cortisol), and we had a working rule that the driver got to choose the music (although I did have the ban revoked, and was allowed to drive once more, and yet Parker played the music – funny how that works). I had played jazz, stuff from the Vince Guaraldi Trio, only that once – but out of everything I did, out of all the atrocities I had committed, playing jazz in the car was one of the worst.

James is so particular about his CalorieMate that he knew, after a period of several months, spanning the full length of our history, since I had started making trips out to stay with him in his Ubuyama wilderness, during which I would often request to be fed (it feels weird to even write that, requesting to be fed in a friend’s house) and he would occasionally yield, some frozen vegetables, or a pack of instant ramen, and rarer still, a precious CalorieMate. After several months of Ubuyama visits, I had made a comment about my “consuming” (he likes that word; “All you do is consume!”) his CalorieMates, and he surprised me by stating the exact number of CalorieMates that I had swindled from him, and it was five. He had this entire time been keeping track. They’ve recently gone on sale, I noticed at the supermarket, and I have bought him four, one of each of the flavor’s he’s never tried (he only buys chocolate), to attempt to compensate for my wanton consumption. Around this time James messaged me, unprompted, about their going on sale. (I have since eaten one).

James and I had one more source of conflict, and it was McDonalds. It was not about his future ambitions as a Maccas magnate. I fully support those. Rather, it was about me not wanting to eat there, every day, if I could help it, and him wanting to eat there every day, if he could. James is undoubtedly a Maccas man. He usually would limit himself to Maccas once a week, on Sundays after he goes grocery shopping – but this vacation meant freedom, for the both of us, and for James specifically, it meant freedom to eat all Maccas, all the time. This was in direct opposition with what I had desired, which was to try as much of the local food as possible, as well as that McDonalds, even if I did want to go there, did not have anything for me, besides a pitiful ebi fillet. (Shrimp burger). I consider myself to be a compromising individual (James will laugh at this), so I humored them on the drive to the airport (I say them because Parker was always willing to climb aboard the Maccas train). I even humored them again in Okinawa, curious about whether they had any Okinawa specials, and they probably did, and it was probably just a Spamburger. But then, the second time it was proposed in Okinawa, I proclaimed that I would not eat there again, and so we debated, and settled on the plan, that we would first go to Maccas, where James and Parker would get their fix, and then we would go to a local place, where I could get mine (which was champloo). This was not ideal, but we both got what we wanted. It was a compromise of sorts, but James stayed in the car, for my meal, and it took twice as much time for us to eat, and so obviously was not better than us enjoying something we all liked together. The next time we were deciding where to go to eat, and the suggestion of Maccas was once again floated, potentially even by me, in jest (still a mistake), and I said I will absolutely not go to McDonalds, but if you must, we can separate again, to which James replied, “No more split meals. It makes me feel like I’m with my divorced parents.” And that made me think that while James and I have a great friendship, we probably would have a tough marriage, with such fundamental differences in culinary desires, opinions on the interest of rental cars, and loves of jazz music.

Spending time with other people has a usefulness in that it can help you to round out edges of your personality, fill in gaps in your knowledge, or help you to realize some of your personal quirks or habits that are or are not so useful. I say this because I learned a lot from James and Parker during these ten days, and I think (I hope) they learned from me too. At least I know that Parker made two lifestyle changes as a result of this trip. I have thought for awhile, and so has Parker, that he is too easily and too often flustered, and I thought that this was in some part related to his caffeine habit, which can be summed up as, he is a fiend for the feine. Parker’s natural state of existence had been, prior to this trip, a caffinated one. I had been trying to convince him to give up the caffiene, or at least cut it back, for awhile now, and I think he had tried it once or twice, but on this trip, we really went for it, because I was there to help. It’s harder to police yourself than to be policed by others. So we agreed that Parker would have no caffiene on this trip, and then many, many times a day, (basically at every vending machine, which, because we’re in Japan, was anytime we ever stopped or went out for a walk), I would listen to and weigh the strength of Parker’s relentless stream of requests for a caffinated beverage. Parker came up with many various reasonings as to why he should get his caffeine, including, “What am I supposed to drink?” (implying that he had to drink something and if he couldn’t get any other suitable option it would have to be something caffienated, because of course, he had to have something to drink, and of course it couldn’t just be water) (and this is how he became somewhat of a mugicha man, mugicha being wheat/barley tea, which I really love) and “Well if it does have caffiene, it can’t have much.” (this was for the apple tea, which we weren’t sure if had caffiene or not, because it wasn’t written on the bottle – and after a few days of steady drinking, Parker says, “It does.” He looked it up, after the few days of steady drinking) and “It’s for my can collection!” (which was him trying to get me to let him have a Dr. Pepper, which we’ve never seen in Kyushu, and to which I responded, “You have a can collection?” And he does. We settled on him having a few sips (they were gulps) and pouring the rest of the can out.) And during this trip, as we progressed, I swear that Parker had started to noticeably relax, except when he was in the car and being scolded. Parker also asked me, at one point, when I told him he shouldn’t pick his nails, what he was supposed to do when he sat, and had nothing else to do, and I told him, just don’t do anything. Because he had the habit, like so many people, myself included, the long habit of picking or chewing his nails down, and there was nothing left but destroyed stumps, and I told him about how if you just make the conscious effort to stop, that is half the battle, as it’s something that you picked up a long time ago and are most likely only doing it now as an unconscious holdover, an autopilot function, (although for him having a lot of tension it could still have been a response to relieve that tension), and it is a habit you can break, and he has recently sent me pictures of his new nails, and told me that the other day he scratched something with them, which was an experience he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time. I think that’s a good example of why it’s helpful to have other people around, in correcting bad physical and mental habits, because we fall into these patterns, and carry them out without even thinking about them, and because they’re so normal to us, we don’t realize that they’re not normal at all, or we don’t have the ability to pull ourselves out of them by ourselves, but could with a little help from another, who can see it objectively. Having people with different perspectives around you also helps you to cover some of your personal deficiencies. After spending time with James, and another friend of mine, Ikkei, who are both engineers, (machine people), I see that they view things, especially the machines, in a very different light than I do. Physical, mechanical things just come to them in a different way than they do to me. I saw the true similarity in them when, seperately, in their presence I complained about the issues I had been having with my laptop, and without any asking on my part, or even desire to have them fix it, they were both sitting down with it, having a look, and tackling the problem. I actually asked James, and this is a very rare thing for me to say, when he was sitting there deep into my computer’s bios, or whatever he was doing, “Are you having fun?” Because it seemed like he was. And he said yes. He was. And I realized then, that what is agony for me, which is solving computer related problems (I could see it only as a complete waste of time) is for them an enjoyable experience, like solving a puzzle. I think in part because they enjoy the problem solving component, but also because they just get it. They just get mechanics. And being friends with them has clearly shown me that I don’t get mechanics like they do, but I do see why they like it. I say this because on the Okinawa trip, I had made another comment, about how my boots had been giving me blisters, and I wasn’t sure why, whether it was too much walking, or they weren’t made for that much walking, or they just weren’t a comfortable pair of shoes, and James said, “Just wear two pairs of socks.” And since then I’ve only ever worn two pairs of socks with those boots, and have never had a problem since. I think it was very obvious to James, that it’s a friction problem, and there is too much empty space in the shoe, and wearing two pairs of socks will fill up the space, eliminate the friction, and there will be no more blisters, and I understand that too; but it was much clearer for him.

This makes me think of my newest friend, Luka (we’ve got to him), a big burly Croatian-Canadian bundle of joy and love, who also has the engineering mind, and who, on a drive to James’s for a hybrid Christmas/Thanksgiving party, when I asked about crumple zones, as we were talking about cars, and crumple zones, I think specifically because he had made the comment that old cars were much more dangerous because they didn’t have them, who replied to my honest question of whether a car needed crumple zones with, “Of course you need crumple zones, dumbass!” Of course you do! A car without crumple zones! What a joke! James and Ikkei both probably would not have to ask the question of whether you need crumple zones or not. They would immediately see the value. The mechanical mind.

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There is one more story I can leave you with. Okinawa was a gift that just kept on giving. One night, about a month after, Parker gives me a call. I answer the phone, and can tell immediately that he is exasperated, which is common, but I could tell immediately that in this case he was in a state of flustration of the highest order. I said, “Hey buddy,” and Parker says, in between hurried, panicked breaths, “Oh my god Steven. I think I pooped out a worm.” And Parker proceeds to send me a picture of a long, skinny, pink thing in his toilet. It does look like a worm. He then begins to tell me about how he had recently done the deed, gone off to a friend’s house, and had come back to find this worm in his toilet, that it must have been in his poop, and swam back up. He had come up with the working theory, with some help from another friend, Matt, that this worm was an Ascarid, and he may have gotten it in Okinawa, and he was now filled with them. It was alarming stuff, but still, I played the role of the soother, the de-hype man, telling him, ok, just relax, we don’t really know if you are filled with worms yet, and even if you do have worms, people get them all the time (not that I knew anyone who did), and dogs get them all the time, and I’m sure it’s not a big deal, and everything will be fine. He had sent me a link, to what he thought it was, an Ascarid worm, a type of roundworm, and the more I read, the more I was convinced of the probability that this was the correct worm, and that Parker did have worms. They were common in certain areas, specifically tropical and sub-tropical regions, as well as regions where sanitation was low. Okinawa was a tropical/sub-tropical island, and as far as sanitation level, who was I to say it was sanitary? The trash, the feral animals, the urinating homeless man, all flashed through my mind. It was said that one common mode of transmission was through eating unwashed fruits and vegetables. I thought, “But we didn’t eat any of those did w-“. And then I remembered the starfruit. I had wanted to stop at what’s called a michi no eki, which are fantastic places that carry all of the local flavors and trinkets, produce and sweets and mascots, and while there we had found ourselves the saataandagi, the Okinawa doughnuts that I had been hunting for, and after making the purchase, I had continued to meander, all the way around the perimeter of the store, with Parker anxiously hovering over me, concerned about making James wait for too long, but I was enjoying all of the uniqueness of Okinawa on display, when my eyes landed on some peculiar, star-shaped green and yellow fruits, and you know that I am sucker for exotic fruits, and so I went back to the register and bought them. And I was thinking now, how fateful it was, that I had ended up buying those fruits, the vehicle for our first worm infestation, and had taken them back to the car, and had opened up the back, so excited, offering one to James, who says, no kidding, “Are they washed?” His foresight astounding. I said no, but they had probably, maybe washed them before they gave them to us. “Aren’t they supposed to do that?” To myself, I thought, washed? Ha! My body can handle anything that nature provides. I really thought something like that. Seriously, I can handle a little unwashed fruit. But when I thought that, I was not including the malicious eggs of human-targeting parasitic Ascarids into my definition of nature. I was thinking about some dirt and maybe a dead bug. Me, the biologist. It’s pitiful I know. And so Parker and I happily scarfed those crunchy, juicy starfruits down. And now, flash forward a month, and I read, transmitted through unwashed fruits and vegetables, and I thought, my god, the starfruits! It was just like when Bill Murray eats the egg that he took back from the monkey in Osmosis Jones. The moment of compromise. So we had a vehicle. And I thought, alright, but how long does it take for the worms to mature. Does the time frame match? And it did, to the T. I read, what I did not want to read, on several sites, that it took about four weeks for the worms to mature – and it was just about four weeks since. The prognosis was not good, and I said to Parker, “The prognosis is not good.” I advised that he should go to a doctor the next day, tried to tell him again not to worry, that a lot of people do have this, over a billion people in the world have been infected, and that they’re not dangerous, usually, unless there are so many that they literally block your intestinal tract (I decided to leave that out), that everything would be fine, and try not to think about the small slithering creatures that are now sapping your vitality and infesting your bowels. But I too was now shaken, thinking the same thoughts that Parker had been thinking, but with less certainty – were these worms in me too, now? Just a few hours before I had noticed some intestinal discomfort, and boy it felt like it was really ramping up now. Like the worms knew that they’d been found out, and they had limited time to do their worm work. I gave James a call, and said, “Well, Parker’s got worms.” And I asked James if he had had a starfruit at all, and he said, yes, just one, and he washed it first. And I thought then how foolish I had been, how filthy I really was, going to bed filthy, because I prefered to take my showers in the morning, and being infected with worms, because I ate risky fruits, and how exonerated he was now, standing righteous, a night showerer, a fruit-washer. I said he should check his poo just in case, and then went to bed thinking that night about if, and how many, worms were inside my body. As much as I tried to suppress them, my powers of imagination led me to imagine myself, as I lay there in bed, completely bloated with worms, pushing against the confines of my intestines, as I was experiencing now what I believed to be great intestinal discomfort, and upon waking up tomorrow, going to the squatty potty at the school, and unloading them all, the great big mass, into the trench. I’m sorry to spell out such a graphic image for you but this was really what was going through my mind, and I think it’s only fair that I share it with you. My mind also flashed with images from the worst chapter in my entomology textbook – the chapter on parasites. I thought about the screw worms, the botflies, and the Leishmaniasis, and hook worms, the brain infesters, the wigglers, the burrowers, the devourers, and how one of those parasites that I had read about in my textbook was now giving me the honor of a private lesson, carrying out its life cycle in the most unfortunate host. (Me.) My primary consolation was that I imagined Parker going through similar things. We would be together in this unwanted adventure. And I did also think that it gave us a kind of badge of honor, an explorer’s badge, proof that we had been to exotic and foreign lands (I know this is a very romanticized way of looking at it), and I thought about how I could use it when playing Never Have I Ever, except that game is for things you haven’t done, and I have now had worms, and so actually I had just gotten worse at the game. I also thought about how we had taken a small risk in going to Okinawa, because it was during COVID times, and so all traveling is somewhat of a risk, even if case counts are low, but how while we were there, omicron began its rampant rise in Japan and particularly in Okinawa, and how we started to get messages, from loved ones, and coworkers, concerned for our safety, now being in the middle of the hottest place for COVID in Japan, with Okinawa receiving national attention, and everyone thinking, “Oh, my ALT is there!” and that we would now return from COVIDLAND to spread it all throughout our hometowns. And that was bad enough, dealing with the stress (mainly on Parker’s end) of being in a COVID hotspot, and then having to do the testing, upon returning home, and the quarantining, and that alone may have had us questioning whether it was worth the trouble or not, (I think for Parker, it may not have been, as we were reflecting on what we had learned from the trip, on the car ride back from the airport, and Parker says, “I learned a lot too. I learned that I like Taketa.” This had been his first real trip, which I was very surprised to hear, because I imagined that everyone who comes to Japan is hot for travel, but Parker has kept this entire time close to his Japanese home, which is Taketa, and his comment made me feel that the only thing he really learned from his big adventure out into the world, barring that initial move to Japan, was that he shouldn’t leave home at all.) And now, not only did we end our trip with testing, the quarantining, the concern, that we had been hoping to avoid, but now we really had something to cap it off with, the greatest omiyage yet, our very first worm infection. These were the things I thought about that night, as well as, well isn’t life interesting.

Now, the worm experts reading this, must have quickly settled on their own theory. Having read the clues: worm in the toilet, no excrement, long, skinny, pink; they are now proclaiming, “Why, it’s nothing more than a tubifex worm!” And they are entirely right. It was a tubifex worm.

I am embarrassed to say that I made the critical mistake of not ever confirming what an Ascarid worm actually looked like. But we would not have thought for a moment that we had them, had we simply asked the great omnipotent internet to show us what it was. We would have saved ourselves much consternation and exertion of imagination, had we only done this simple step. But I was duped; convinced, simply from reading, that we had found our worm. I blame Parker for this, having not done this step himself, and passing on his fear and his certainty to me, but when panicked, it is much easier to jump to conclusions, to make lapses of judgment. Because, later that same night, Parker went to a party, and told me that, while he had tried his best not to talk about the worm, that he wanted everyone to have a good time, and not dampen the mood with the lively talk of parasites, he was found out, not having a very good poker face, and his worm problem brought to light, to which his story was, he told me, scoffed at. “They scoffed at me.” (The Japanese). And they scoffed because they knew better. They knew better than us, that while Okinawa is exotic, and is sub-tropical, “It’s still Japan”, and so it would be almost impossible for it to have the lack of sanitation procedures necessary to harbor Ascarids, that it was an insult to the country to suggest it, and that Parker’s worm was probably a worm that someone had heard of that was a common worm that traveled through the sewers and occasionally popped up in people’s toilets. And this was the worm. The tubifex worm. Which to me sounded much more sinister, and is why as soon as I heard the good news, I sent James the message, “Don’t worry James. Only a tubifex worm.” Parker’s call prompted me, finally, to actually search images of the worms themselves, on which I found that the tubifex worm was exactly identical to Parker’s toilet worm, and the Ascarid was not in any way, and seeing the images of the Ascarid actually brought me back to the lab component of a zoology course, where we got our hands dirty with various members of the many-branched tree of life, and this worm was one of them, and I remember it so clearly, because my professor had said that when we cut into it, it would pop, as it exerted a strong outward pressure to match the pressure imposed on it when inside of the host’s body; and it did pop. So, like the pressure inside of an Ascarid when cut open by the sharp steel blade of an exactoknife in the hands of a curious young biologist, upon hearing that at the end of our worm story, none of us were bloated with worms, none of us needed to go to the hospital, and none of us needed to wash our fruits in Japan; we were relieved.

In the aftermath of this I thought about two things, which were 1. That my intestinal pain that fateful night may have been entirely fear or anxiety induced, which is interesting to see the effect that your mind can have on the body, as if my fear of having something in me making me feel bad itself actually made me feel bad, a self-fulfilling prophacy (although thankfully I can’t self-fulfill worms into my body), and 2. That we were lucky enough to not have been parasitized, but now had some small idea of what it actually would be like, which is horrible, and yet for many people around the world it really is a reality; it is happening to them right now, many of them children, and the psychological trauma of knowing that you are actively being parasitized aside, there are also obviously significant negative physiological effects. We were lucky enough not to have been infected, and I felt that this would be a good time to pay our luck forward, and give thanks, and help someone else to feel the relief that I felt when finding out that I was worm free. I made a small donation to Parasites Without Borders, although I really wanted to donate to the Schistomiasis Control Initiative, because they are directly supplying infected people with medicine. The Parasites Without Borders seems to be more focused on education. If you find yourself in a generous mood, and did want to donate anything as well, someone out in the world, many someones, do really have these worms, and would appreciate it. If you are just curious about parasites (hey, some people are) both websites have some good information regarding them. Be warned of course, there are graphic and potentially disturbing images (on the PWB site), especially if this would be your first introduction to Leishmaniasis.

https://parasiteswithoutborders.com/

https://schistosomiasiscontrolinitiative.org/

We can finish with some photos I took of skies and sunsets.

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There was also a very interesting building, the big street butthole, that became somewhat of a subject for me. (It was a decorative and magnificent exhaust port for a street running under the channel.)

And I had fun shooting buildings in general.

A collection of English sightings.

The final photos (I swear).