Last Thoughts on Gifu

In the last few weeks before I left Gifu, I was often asked, “Are you going to miss the place at all? Are you going to miss the people? Are you going to miss the job?”

I’m not going to miss the job. I was bored and tired at my job. That was no one’s fault but me. ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) isn’t a job you’re supposed to do for a long time. I simply stayed too long.

But actually the school did suck also. The kids were all right, but the school was just too big and I always had the image of so many kids being forced through the machine. The kids didn’t want to be there, and the apathy in the air was just depressing. The teachers didn’t want to be there either. And when I looked out the window I just saw factories and greyness.

I’m not going to miss the place. Bluntly speaking, Gifu was a dump. This isn’t just my opinion, but seems to be the opinion of most of the foreigners who live here, and even Japanese people who aren’t from the area.

Oita and Kyushu, where I spent three years, is a beautiful area. There were mountains, and rivers, and waterfalls everywhere. The countryside was filled with old Japanese style houses and rice fields carved into the mountain like steps leading up. There were rock formations made by prehistoric lakes, and in the spring and summer the thick green was gorgeous. Even after 3 years I never really got over how beautiful my daily drive out to school was. And just on the other side of the mountains was the blue ocean and palm trees.

My primary image of Gifu is the urban sprawl and factories. Just an ocean of pavement that seems to run forever. There were snow-covered mountains just on the edge of my town, and I could see them from my apartment on a clear day. But we had so very few clear days. Most of the time the air was thick with either smoke or fog or both. I remember Gifu as being just grey and depressing.

Gifu city, where I spent a lot of time, was dying fast when I left. Just as in America, the suburban sprawl in areas like Gifu is killing the downtown areas. Everyone goes in their cares to suburban shopping centers, and all the shops in Gifu were closing down left and right as I left. (Such as the local Starbucks, which was a popular hangout for foreigners). The Gifu city fathers had given up on the place, and were talking about either turning it into a bed-town for the nearby Nagoya city, or just making it into a really good town for old people.
(I’ve got nothing against old people, but my image of a really good town of old people is someplace warm and by the sea. Not cold, grey, smoky, landlocked Gifu. If the place is naturally good for old people, fine. If that’s the back up plan, then you know you’re town must really suck).

It’s the people I’m really going to miss. I felt like I really had a lot of good friends in Gifu. And in the end, it’s always the people who make the place, isn’t it? As a friend once said, “Gifu is a real dump at first, but once you get to know everyone it kind of grows on you. It’s like we’re all stuck in this together. Gifu is a dump, but it’s our dump, and you really feel close to the other people.”

Because of my reserved personality, I tend to make friends slowly. I usually have to be at a place for about 6 months or so before I have a good circle of friends. Gifu, just like every other place (High School, Calvin, Oita) was a rough start. But by the end I had a lot of good friends. In fact, given how long it took me to feel comfortable here, it seems like a waste to leave when I did. But it would have been stupid to stay for that reason alone. The turnover of foreigners is really high, and most of my Gifu friends will be moving on within the next year themselves. As for Japanese friends, there are only about 5 Japanese people in Gifu I’d consider really good friends.

I do feel especially bad about a handful of people I was just beginning to get to know, but that’s life, isn’t it? You never have enough time to form friendships with everyone, and always when you leave a place there are lots of cool people who it seems you could have been really good friends with if just given more time.

In the end, there are two things I feel really bad about. One is lying (or not mentioning) for the past year and a half about my girlfriend down in Kyushu. It’s hard to remember why I even did it. I never cheated on Shoko, although I guess I created plenty of opportunity too. Rather, I was just addicted to the “Charisma Man” type attention that a white single American male gets from Japanese females.
There were several times when I would have like to confess everything, but once you start that kind of lie you’re kind of stuck to it. Especially now that things between Shoko and I have gotten more serious, this now creates a gap between me and friends in Gifu.

The other thing I feel bad about was dropping out of the local Church I started attending. It wasn’t really something I planned out. There was just a series of Sundays when I was too busy. First last year I was back home for Christmas break. Than Shoko came up to visit me. Then some Japanese co-workers wanted to take me sight-seeing. Soon, it had been about two months since I was last at the church. And once you have two months, what’s another week? I kept thinking, “I’ll start going to church again, but not this week. This week I’ll sleep in.” And then 2 months turned into 3, 4, 5, 6 months, and pretty soon I thought, “If I go back now, I’ll have to make all sorts of excuses about where I’ve been the past 6 months.” So I just never went back.

Those of you who know me from Calvin, and remember the all the arguments perhaps, will remember that I don’t like Church anyway. I went through a phase when I wanted to give it another try, and I enjoyed the novelty of Church in Japanese, but after a while I found myself bored again, and I started remembering many of the reasons I had stopped attending in the first place. So I don’t feel bad about missing the church services, but it was a small congregation and they really fawned over me as the token foreigner. It was really rude to just abruptly stop coming with no explanation, and I’m sure I must have really confused them, and they must have wondered where I was.

Link of the Day
Pentagon block on move for safer water
The Pentagon stalled efforts to clean water supplies contaminated by a carcinogenic chemical despite evidence that it posed a significant health risk to millions of people, it was reported yesterday.