First Month in Japan - Karate, Beekeeping, Mental Turmoil

5 days ago
9 min read

As the title may suggest, this post is going to talk about karate seminars in Tokyo, beekeeping in Tokushima, and some of what's been going on in the ol' noggin. It's been a month and a bit since I left Paris and came to Japan, and to be honest it's been tough. The more time passes, the more I realize Paris left me in a weird spot mentally, and I didn't really enjoy my time there. I was too focused on trying to save up money for this trip and the only way to do that in Paris was to be constantly moving around and working crazy hours. Obviously there were good moments and I'm super thankful to the people that were able to make it feel more like a home.

So what has it looked like since!?

I had a 46 hour travel day from Paris to Tokyo which left me absolutely exhausted. But on the bright side, I forgot my wallet in Paris. I can't express how grateful I am that, upon landing and realizing that said wallet was not in my bag, other dojo members were landing right after me and could help me get a train ticket into the city. And grateful that my dear friends Ava and Sam in Paris were able to mail it to me immediately, even if it took three weeks to arrive due to customs hold ups. Thankfully most places in the city accept Apple Pay and once again I'm so grateful that my dojo friends were there to help me out (and lend me some cash aha). Not sure what I would have done otherwise. Probably walked around at the ticket booth asking people if I could wire them money in exchange for a ticket.

So anyway. I got in turbulently, and I didn't realize but the seminar started the next morning. If it's yet not obvious, I was very disorganized about this whole trip. We had two days of instruction that I'd been looking forward to since July, but between not training for seven months (I couldn't find a dojo that worked in Paris due to my hours) and being exhausted from the travel, I was completely overwhelmed. I'd forgotten things I used to do intuitively and that was really hard to realize. I felt so unprepared; stumbled through the trainings. In a way I felt really imposter-y. But I also took myself aside and reminded myself that I worked super hard to get here and that I should just enjoy the parts I could. Outside of the trainings, we mostly ate fabulous food and walked around in Tokyo. I can't thank the dojo friends enough for inviting me to some incredible dinners, the sort that you talk about for the rest of your life. It's funny because I think it's the first time my travel has focused on culinary aspects of the culture. Everywhere else I've been the food is pretty simple and sometimes for survival more than enjoyment. So that was grand, to say the least.

Food highlights:

Japanese grill at the Tokyo Hilton, with butter prawn, abalone, and wagyu as the most incredible parts, all cooked right in front of us
All you can eat wagyu (I learned wagyu just means a cow from Japan. A4/A5 is the denomination for quality)
Lots of grilled meats and skewers
So many noodles (soba, ramen, udon, somen)
Chicken butt, chicken breast, chicken tendons, chicken skins, fried chicken, etc.
Raw horse (somehow this was so much easier to eat than what I ate in Mongolia)
Gyozaaaa
Oden (slowly simmered vegetables and meats all in a big pot stew thing)
Wouldn't be fair to not mention 7-11, Family Mart, and Lawson's. These are the most popular convenient stores (konbini), but imagine 7-11 on steroids. Or a mini Trader Joe's with microwaves. They all have this one fried spicy chicken but apparently the "best" one is Family Mart's, which they call famichiki (family chicken). I ate so much.
Natto - fermented soybeans. Not sure I'd call this a highlight because after eating several bites I went from "this isn't so bad" to having a visceral gag reaction. It is so. slimy. And sticky.

After a week of Tokyo shenanigans, most of the others went back to Colorado and I went to Osaka with Ken and Mark and his wife Carla. We explored the city a bit, ate more great food, and did some classic tourist day trips to Nara and Kyoto. I realized at this point that I'm terrible at efficiently touring a place. I think in the way I visit places I leave things up to the last minute and see what happens, which is great for some things but makes it hard to make the most of a short time in one place. I also think I was just in a really exhausted state that made it hard to find the motivation to move around a lot. Which meant that while I loved everything we were doing, I was also really excited to go on to the next bit and do a work exchange.

One week later I was on a bus to the valley city of Tokushima, on the island south of Osaka called Shikoku. I stayed in a town called Awa for two weeks, volunteering for a beekeeper named Aki. He showed me how to feed sugar water to honeybees, check for eggs in the hive, make wax sheets, and bottle honey.

Here are some fun facts about honey and bees:

If you eat honey at over 60^oC it kills the medicinal antioxidant benefits. If you want to add it to hot water, the water should be no warmer than a bathtub (ish). Similarly, if you want to heat honey that has crystallized, try putting the jar in a warm place like on a car dashboard or in warm water instead of a microwave.
Most of the world uses Italian honeybees to make honey because all the other honeybees are less efficient. He also said Japanese honey bees are more aggressive.
Piggybacking: America has no native honey bee species!! There are native bee species but not honey bees, those came from Europe in the 1600s, although they are now extremely important to American agriculture.
The only animal competition for honey is bears because the sugar content is so high that most animals cannot properly digest it. So Winnie the Pooh is a beekeeper's only animal concern. There aren't many left in Japan (in his region) so Aki said he's never had that problem.
The sugar water fed to bees is dyed blue so that if you're using the sugar water to make honey instead of flowers, it will have a green tint and signify low quality.
Worker bees only live for about 40 days. The queen lives for seven years, even though they all have the same genetics. Super interesting to learn about how they come to be (pun intended). Here's a good explanation if you're interested!
Un-fun fact: the reason bees die if they sting something is because after their stinger pulls out, their whole internal organ sack falls out :(
Smoking a beehive kills their aggression pheromone that gets released when they're scared or angry. So it helps them stay calm when you open the hive.

Some things I learned (not bee-related):

Some towns have made wifi free throughout the whole town to encourage young foreign families to move to the country-side and work remotely.
A lot of solar in Awa is owned by South Korea in exchange for subsidies from Japan, so the money doesn't go into the community even though it is providing clean grid energy.
Samurai chose bugs as emblems because it's said bugs never move backward, only go forward.
Japan's gay culture is illegal and pretty closeted still (at least outside of major cities). Aki said he gets annoyed because a big part of tourists and foreign workers come for the anime subculture, and he says a lot of those people are gay and that they don't always respect local customs surrounding PDA and public behavior. It goes unappreciated.
If someone invites you to drinks or food, it's custom that they should pay.
We were talking about the prevalence of suicides in Japan, and he told me the only honorable suicide is by monks who slowly dessicate themselves, called sokushinbutsu. This is a monk who starves himnself for months, mummifying himself. You can see such bodies in Tokyo.
My favorite shared moment with Aki is when he showed me his list of words for becoming an "American Asshole". Under "Homes" he has trailer parks, motels, and "the hood (urban)". Under "Sports" was football, working out in your garage, demolition derby, and nascar. Under "Social Scene", tailgating, line dancing, creamed corn wrestling, barn dance, cruising (car hangouts weekend nights), and block parties (urban). Under "Nature": Quarry swimming, hunting with lots of guns and beer, fishing without a license, above-ground pools, slip-n-slide. "School": Dropping out during or just after high school. "Categorizing People": Trash or trailer trash, Sleazy, Redneck, Dating your cousin, wrong side of the tracks, dirt bag. I taught him words like "sup, dawg!" and "hobo" so he said "Great now I can go to New York and say 'Sup dawg, look at that hobo!'" and he pointed to an imaginary hobo. Top ten funniest things I've ever heard from someone learning English.
Aki told me his American Dream is to go to Montana and drive a huge truck and shoot guns out the window. I told him it's the first American Dream I've heard that sounds realistic.

I helped him for about five hours a day, and then we'd have lunch and go do some activities, like short hikes, onsen, and he took me to a beautiful waterfall. The first week he was down with a cold so I mostly just hung around in the afternoons and watched movies and cuddled with his cat Tonbo (dragonfly). I also visited an incredible temple nearby, which is part of a Shinto pilgrimage route that takes months to complete on foot. The temple was so serene, I can't describe it without sounding a bit hippie dippie. But the plum blossoms were blooming everywhere, and the combined smell of the flowers and the incense was so intoxicatingly calming. It really helped me slow down.

Also! I made a journal! I did this for the first time in Paris and it looked like poo at the end because the pages started falling out, but I've improved my technique. I found an old Japanese novel, gutted it, and then sewed in blank sheets of paper. I first made piles of three sheets of paper, called a signature, then sewed them together using this YouTube tutorial. Then I did a very janky job of sewing my text block into the cover, which in hindsight I should have watched a tutorial for as well. But I am very excited to have a journal again, that I made, and to use that for cathartic stuff as well as random junk.

I guess that's a good segue; I've been having a really hard time since Paris. Not really sure what I'm doing, or why. I've had an unshakeable head fog for months it seems like, maybe from eating foods that I shouldn't, drinking, from anxiety and stress, lack of consistent routine, from not seeing a mountain for so long... I don't really know. All of the above probably. A dear friend of mine told me to stop overthinking things. Stop overanalyzing. Just let feelings come and go. I realized that for years I've been trying to control emotions by stifling them when I don't want to feel them, which I think suppressed them instead. I don't know what "controlling" your emotions is supposed to look like, but maybe that just means allowing myself to feel them in healthy ways. Not dissecting myself for every single thing I feel. There's a healthy balance of introspection I want to keep exploring.

Anyway, ever since he said that, I've been feeling better. I think it unblocked something. I've been trying to let myself feel angry when I'm feeling angry, sad when I'm feeling sad. And since doing that, I've been able to actually feel happy when I feel that I'm experiencing happy moments. I'm not going to lie, it had been a while since I've felt my emotions clearly. I think I was so overstimulated with everything going on, it backed me up emotionally and I wasn't sure where to start unpacking. On the list: my grandfather passing away and not being able to attend his service, the sudden passing of our dear family friend Greg Cameron due to a freak climbing accident, the stress of Paris and moving housing every month, and other family stuff. I'm feeling very grateful that I was able to schedule an appointment with my counselor/therapist/whatever you wanna call them, guru, back home, and am looking forward to continuing sessions. Proud of myself for taking that step.

Annnnnnyway. I took a 19 hour ferry from Tokushima to Tokyo. I'm now volunteering at a mountain lodge in a small town a few hours north of Tokyo and will give more updates soon. But things are feeling good right now. Ta. Thank you for reading *hearts and kisses*.

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