Down, But not Quite out in Rural Japan

Down, But not Quite out in Rural Japan

When you’re having tough times, it can be hard to stay positive. Negativity is like a poison that seeps into and stains every corner of your life. It not only steals your hope, it exhausts you mentally and emotionally. It makes your life a weak, pale reflection of what it could be. It’s like a dark smoke. You can’t see where you are, much less where you want to go. It hides your dreams from you.

But,  you have to keep in mind the simple truth that everything changes. ‘Change is the only constant’ is both an old, trite expression and one of the most profound facts of life on earth. The world is spinning on its axis right now. You can’t feel it, but it is. If you are having troubles in life you must keep that in mind. The Earth is spinning and circling the sun. And the sun is continually showering us with life-giving warmth and will continue to do so for another five billion years or so. The world turns and turns. Your life will turn also. If you’re depressed or having hard times, stay calm, stay as positive as you can be, and think about a better version of your life and how you might get there.

Almost six years ago now, I was arrested for growing and possessing cannabis in Western Japan, where I live with my wife, two children, and mother-in-law. This event caused a huge period of stress, hardship, and confusion for me and my family. I was in jail for six weeks, got out on bail, then got a suspended sentence at court. While my wife struggled, taking care of things on the outside, I was locked into in a cell with nothing except a blanket and cup. It was bleak. I took to pacing in my cell. Five hours everyday, walking in a square. Three steps – ninety degree turn – three steps – ninety degree turn. Switching direction every thirty minutes. Clockwise, counterclockwise, and clockwise again. Still, I was one of the lucky ones. Some people had to share their cell with another person, and all the unpleasant smells and sounds that came with that, and even less room to move.

Despite being lucky enough to escape serious jail time, my life was pretty much ruined. My small English teaching business evaporated. All of my students except for a small handful left and I had no income. I didn’t know what to do. It was quite the shock. That kind of thing is a life changer, but not necessarily for the worse. I decided to think of it as an opportunity, not a setback. My heart hadn’t been in English Teaching for a long time, and I wanted to use the arrest as a chance to try doing something else. After a couple months I started looking for work and found a job ad for an agricultural labor job very close to my house and was hired right away.

We live out in a rural area and good, well paying jobs are hard to come by. However, there are always agricultural labor jobs to be had because they are very physically demanding and don’t pay much. My first post-English teaching job was picking welsh onions (leeks). I hadn’t really been exercising regularly and the transition to daily farm labor was physically painful. The onions are in raised beds and you move down the row bent over pulling them out in bunches, banging the dirt off the roots, and laying them against the bed as you go. It kills your back. Moreover, everywhere you look there is nothing but dirt and onion scraps. You wear rubber boots and gloves and hats and sunglasses and farming clothes, and everything gets filthy, and the wind blows the dirt in your eyes, and you sweat buckets in the summer and freeze in the winter for very little money. I persevered and got used it, but the beginning was very difficult. It gave me a pinched nerve in my back that made the fingers in my right hand tingle continually for a couple months until it finally worked itself out.

Oh, it’s a dirty job, but someones got to do it!

After awhile, I got offered a different agricultural labor job and took it. This one was growing shiitake mushrooms. It was physically even harder than the welsh onion job, but I was mostly working alone in the mountains, in the middle of nature, so the working conditions were better and there was far less stress. This job mostly consisted of picking up and carrying logs around. Shiitake mushrooms grow on 1 meter long sections of oak and Japanese chestnut. Oak is a hardwood and oak logs are heavy as hell. In the summer, everyday we would soak different rows of logs in a small pond to get them to flush with mushrooms. In the fall and winter we cut down about 150 trees and cut them into meter long sections and hauled them out. I was mostly working alone, pulling the trees into a clearing one by one with an excavator and cutting them up with a chainsaw. Another guy would truck them back to the boss’ property. Later we drilled holes in them and put spore plugs in to inoculate them. It was hard, hard work, but overall I liked it. Pay was low, though, about minimum wage and the boss cut me after a year, because he really didn’t make enough at it to keep a full time worker on.

So, again, suddenly, I was out of work. I looked around and a friend introduced me to a guy that had a small rebar construction company that got subcontracted with other small outfits for larger construction jobs. We went to quite a few different sites; buildings, houses, and once along a highway. It was the middle of a very hot summer when I was working for that guy. Every day was 33 or 34 degrees (celsius). Rebar is not only heavy as hell, but it gets really, really hot when it’s laying out in the sun all day. Construction sites are dirty and noisy and the work was really hard. I could have put up with the physicality of the job, but the boss was very short-tempered and yelled at me a lot, so even though I needed the work and really didn’t want to quit, I had to tell the guy sayonara after only 4 months there. 

Job number 4 was at an elderly care facility. It was understaffed and I was running around almost all the time. I liked talking to the old people. They all spoke in a strong dialect and were all very nice. Besides that, it was sort of a depressing place to work. Old people are always about to fall over and have an accident, which then requires a great amount of paperwork that needs to be done when you are supposed to be leaving and going home. There was also a lot of toilet work; wiping peoples backsides, changing diapers, emptying bags of pee, etc…  And you had to wash them in the shower. And they’ve got skin problems, and dementia.  And people died. And I hated my boss. And it was minimum wage. I drank a lot that year and a half and gained back all the weight I’d lost doing the manual labor jobs, about 20 kilograms. Eventually, I quit that job, too. Too much stress for too little money.

I was also working nights a few times a week at a nearby pension. So, that made five different jobs in five years. A lot of it was difficult work and it was a constant struggle to pay the bills, but I feel the varied experience enriched me as a person and working with so many different people in very different professions also helped my Japanese language skills improve quite a bit, I think. 

When I was resting up after quitting the construction job and before starting the elderly care job, I started playing with a photo editing app on my phone. I majored in fine art in college many years before, but hadn’t really made any art for a long time. After messing around with a few photos, I tried to make a collage like piece. It felt like art and it felt good. I was immediately drawn into my own little creative world, where I could finally find some respite, some joy, and which quickly became what I now consider to be my life work. I made more and more digital collage. 2+ years later I’ve made over 1000 pieces. After a couple months, I got the idea that changed everything. This is what I wanted to be paid to do, or something like it. I decided to try and move into the graphic design field. I had an art degree. I was already doing something like graphic arts everyday. I enjoyed it and had some talent for it. So, I decided to take a six month course in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator while working the elderly care job. The idea, the dream, and the decision to pursue it changed my life.

Two years and a couple months later, I found work as a graphic designer in a small architectural firm in the area. Things have finally turned around for me. By some miraculous combination of luck, hard work, and a good idea I have managed to reinvent myself at the age of 52. Now I’m sitting at my desk in a very comfortable chair in front of my big iMac screen. Next to my desk is a big window overlooking the Sea of Japan waterfront. Pop hits play quietly in the background. It’s a very quiet, calm, warm place. It’s so relaxing and comfortable I sometimes have a hard time staying awake, to be honest. Starting pay is comparable to what I was making 6 years ago and should go up. Everyone here is very nice and my wife is happy again now that I have decent pay and a skilled profession. In an interesting twist we had been wanting to build an addition onto our house and are hiring the firm to do so. In just a matter of a few months everything has changed for me and my family. This year is poised to be the best year we’ve had in a long time. You never know when the sun is going to shine on you, so just keep working at it and keep your eyes on the horizon. The world will turn.

The world turns, the sun shines, and houses and lives get renovated.

2 Comments

  1. Doesn’t sound like you were down. Sounds like you were doing some livin’. Glad you’re settled.

    1. Thanks, buddy. Some hard times, some good times. It’s all good, though. I wouldn’t take it back. Even the arrest.

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