Kaze no Tani no Gaijin

Ryan and I were in Japan not just to see sights but to visit our college friend Chris Browne. Chris decided after graduation that he was tired of America, so he moved to Japan. (He had previously spent a semester in Hiroshima, and taken several semesters of Japanese, so I guess his decision wasn’t entirely uninformed.) He now teaches English in Erimo, a fishing village on the southern tip of Hokkaido, hours and hours from anywhere and forsaken by Japan Rail.

Chris met us at the bus terminal with his friend and cooperating teacher Chiho, and a shrimp curry pizza. Okay, time out for a moment. What is wrong with our world that I wasn’t allowed to have a shrimp curry pizza until I was twenty-five years old? Was I being punished for something until now? The shrimp curry pizza was delicious—or oishii, as Chiho taught me that evening to say it in Japanese—and I highly recommend it to all who love shrimp, curry, and pizza; that is, all right-thinking people everywhere.

Erimo, like, I suppose, most remote fishing villages, is geographically large (at least fifteen minutes to drive across it, I think) but sparsely settled and modest in its economy. It’s very beautiful if you happen to like wind-swept coastal desolation. And don’t we all.

Ah, yes. The wind. According to a tourist bureau web site, “the museum in Erimo has an interesting exhibit on wind,” but the museum was closed when we were there, possibly due to excessive wind. It was windy. Erimo is (we were told) the windiest place in Japan, and I’m willing to believe it. It was almost continuously windy enough to blow my hat off. There are a lot of industrial-looking windmills, which add to the edge-of-the-universe feel of the place.

And yet we braved the wind and arrived at Chris Browne’s place, provided to him by the JET program. It was small but comfortable, and I only bumped my head a few times and got over my terror of the plumbing quite rapidly, really. And then Chris introduced me to milk tea and a new chapter of my life began.

After a new chapter of my life had begun, we stayed up and chatted for hours—it was the first time in nearly a year that Chris had actually spoken English with another fluent speaker—and then we went to bed on mattresses on the floor, something we’d be getting used to over the next few days.

The next day we visited Chris’s school, and then hit the road.