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Riff: Japan, working holiday visa, 1992 (& related circumstances)

the “working holiday visa which started my Japan life in Dec. 1992

Before arriving in Japan, I really knew very little about Japan, I didn’t have an interest in Japan, didn’t care about anime or manga or hadn’t eaten sushi, and had no interest in martial arts, though did have some interest and experience with traditional pottery (raku) techniques, familiarity with Japanese poetry albeit as introduced by *Western* writers, however my older brother had gone to Japan for “proselytizing reasons” and him being in Japan – in a roundabout way – is what brought me to Japan (via the working holiday visa paper of importancy pictured above).

In brief: after a several years of traveling around US & Canada for Grateful Dead concerts, hemp festivals, national park exploits, mountain climbing, canyon hiking, couch crashing, Punk shows, fake IDs, drum corps, university invasions, odd jobs, foolish hitchhikes and “doing my best” with the ladies… And then extending that vibe into Mexico for fish tacos and tequila mistakes and taking my VW bus in even more places it probably shouldn’t have ever gone but did, came an accepted application to Evergreen college which was thwarting by ignominiously *not* winning of any scholarships, not awarded of any bursaries, not accepted into any grants, not allowed any loans so (kind of a shock since i was really accustomed to winning everythings, (you wanna see all my elementary school ribbons, maybe you have?).

So, took the money saved from a summer of building bicycles at Sunrise in Logan, Utah while living in a tent next to the temple & went to Seattle anyway but instead of going south to Olympia to finish off a bachelors degree (with wide eyes of getting a master of fine arts in creative writing and likely a tweed jacket with elbow patches soon there after to go with my smoky pipe and intellectual airs), went North to my “for lack of a better term” hometown of Surrey/Vancouver, bought a one-way ticket to Amsterdam, found some ridiculously-colored hiking boots, obnoxiously-colored trousers and barely usable but very packable sleeping bag & mat on the clear-out table (obviously because of the color) at one of the dozen outdoor good stores in Kitsilano, and with a butane stove (loaded), pocket knife (dull-ish), cut off overalls, a travel sized wok pan, juggling sticks and a jester hat, headed off on a European adventure – not the sort of package tour with giggling youth on a graduation trip, nor the earnest guidebook-toting aficionado, just me, a patched up red wilderness experience backpack and the 1972 “hitchhikers guide to Europe” with vague plans to eventually meet up with my buddy Trevor who had gone a few months earlier (keep reading) and working as a waiter at a seaside something in England and seeing all these bands we loved at big muddy festivals.

At the risk of an extended digression, (& unsurprisingly, documentation of this trip exists in poems, paintings, two photographs, a wine label and at least one but probably more podcasts telling stories about getting deathly ill at Oktoberfest in Munich after hitchhiking from Amsterdam, meeting up with the Bad Yodelers band and being (yet again) a sort of uninvited guest on their band tour being a “roadie who didn’t do anything but smoke hash mixed with tobacco – yech”, then meeting up with Trevor in an idyllic fairytale town, picking grapes, gathering chestnuts for sale, partying in old castle dungeons, carousing with more people than should fit in a Citreön, a wild “new wine” festival [censored], hitchhike back to Amsterdam hostels & coffeshops, a bus to Belgium, a hazy ferry to England, rainy expensive London with Hare Krishnas and bad decisions and couch surfing (again) with New Zealanders (and an Australian who was convinced he was going to carry on a dozen beer steins for his flight home) after watching red dwarf… We ended up in Miami after hurricane Andrew on a cheap Virgin Atlantic flight – where we drank more than our airfare of fancy liquor & bought a bottle of scotch for a friend Who (yes, again) would be hosting us on his couch – on a fraudulent credit card. Then came all night Denny’s nursing coffees, Halloween hilarity, caught in thunderstorms, meeting sketchy friends of a sort, trying to exchange a Canadian hundred dollar bill which had been hidden in my boot for months, soggy and unvaluable, adventure down to Key West meeting neither Jimmy Buffett or Hemingway but eating some conch fritters, then a drive-away car delivery towards Dallas with at least three police incidents including a very thorough search on alligator alley none of which were nowhere near as frightening as dropping off the car to the very large, very agitated (and wearing very short shorts) recipient who was ummm concerned & confused about why the trunk wasn’t filled with a certain white powder and “who are we?” and why we were demanding he gave us $300… Somehow we ended up at the Greyhound station, scammed a scammer into a two-for-one ticket for a bus ride to Salt Lake City, i’ll never ride a greyhound again I said as I sat in the loser seat next to the toilet but still I remember every bus station was playing a different Neil Diamond song.)

Continue reading Riff: Japan, working holiday visa, 1992 (& related circumstances)

“Modernity and magical realism in rural Japan” / my photo in The Japan Times

Bob Olson writes, on Sept. 15, 2015:

This photo shows a mushroom farm in Tottori, Japan, where I worked a few days in 1991 with Tyler Smith and Jared Scott; and where my brother Dave Olson toiled for almost a year. Dave took the picture sometime in 1993, scanned it about 10 years ago, and stuck on his Flickr stream under creative commons license. Now it has recently shown up in a Japan Times article. You’d think the Japan Times would have a gazillion stock photos of the Japanese countryside, but they chose Dave‘s evocative image of a stark, cold winter along the Sea of Japan.

Modernity and magical realism in rural Japan

Shape-shifting: This village in Yazu District, Tottori Prefecture, is much like the fictional one in ‘Red Girls,’ which suffers from an aging population and changing customs. | FLICKR / CC BY-SA 2.0

Source: Modernity and magical realism in rural Japan | The Japan Times — Modernity and magical realism in rural Japan
BY JAMES HADFIELD SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES

i added in a comment:

This is Saji-san, Yazu-gun, Tottori. The boss was a collossal jerk and made my life miserable (his wife had just split, he had hemmoroids (which he talked about endlessly) and had been a foreign exchange student in Yakima WA and Couer d’lene Idaho in the 70/80s so think he was using me to exact revenge for the treatment he likely received.

I am hard worker and got paid shit (especially after rent in my bunker-like apartment) but man, this was repetitive, redundant and entirely un-fun after a couple of days.

I drove k-truck to market in Tottori down windy snowy roads and then figured out a way to feed myself and stay warm and do it all again and again. 6 days/week. I finally borrowed a bike, put in back of k-truck, and told him i was leaving. He shouted, “you have no visa, no return ticket and dont speak language!” – he was correct on all accounts but i stuck out my left thumb and had mighty adventures through Shikoku and as far up as Nagano where i found Japanese (and one ex-American Navy man) hippie squatters living in abandoned villages way up in mountains. Lived old timey. Hot springs, gathering mountain vegetables, harvesting rice and wandering high in the hills with my notebooks.