Bittersweet

This past weekend was bittersweet.

The sweet: I was invited by a former teacher to go up to the mountains in Nagano for some small stream flyfishing, not something I knew I could do around here. However, it's as popular as it is back home. I'm kicking myself for not finding this out in the first 3 years I was here, but now I know, and I'm going again on Wednesday. The weekend was great...it was a fishing 'club' of 10 or so guys who get together every once in a while to go up into the mountains in the spring and harvest wild vegetables, drink beer and whiskey, sit in hot springs and fish. We got a cottage way up in the peaks of Akiyamago. That day, Tamura sensei and I fished the Kitano river for small iwana and yamame, which are small wild Japanese mountain char and brook trout. I caught 3 yamame and he hooked 3 iwana, which we brought to the cottage for dinner. After I was introduced to everyone, they all suddenly disappeared with bags and came back a bit later with the bags filled with green stuff. It's sansai season in rural Japan, and I was treated to loads of fresh mountain veggies, which were eaten raw, boiled, or fried up in tempura. There was loads of beer and a nice onsen, and lots of fishing talk. It was the quintessential inaka mountain guy weekend.

The bitter: I carried a heavy heart for the weekend after getting some very sad news. At the end of the day, I received a phone call from another former teacher. She called to ask me about the 'incident' involving a teacher from one of my main schools. I didn't know anything about an 'incident', so she explained to me that a couple days earlier one of my teachers committed suicide. I didn't know about it because I had been at different schools at the end of the week. He was a young guy, and a good guy. I really liked him and he was one of the only non-English teachers to speak with me regularly. His English was great and he was a homeroom teacher. I don't know a lot about the circumstances, as it isn't being spoken of. The students were told that his heart failed and he died of natural causes, even though the truth is being reported in the news. I came to school Monday and everything seemed to be completely normal. Everyone was genki. The only reminder I had was an empty, cleaned out desk next to mine. Everyone is trying to pick up and move forward. It's so difficult for everyone, and hard for me to know what to do...there are levels of the Japanese language for every situation and I haven't the slightest clue how to correctly express my sorrow and support. I will probably never speak about it with anyone other than the English teachers, in private.

This weekend was so full of contrast. I was getting to do something that I loved, with life and greenery and rain and wild fish and fresh water and rugged beauty everywhere. I was very lucky, and life felt like such a positive thing. With the frightening rate of suicides by young people in this country, I felt the urge to communicate life's immediacy to my students ... that taking your own life - regardless of how complex and difficult to understand the motives for such a thing are - is never the right choice. I suppose at that time the school was right to put the focus on mourning for their teacher and not on teaching the students a lesson, and I respect it, but I'm not sure that it was right to alter truth when there is an opportunity for these kids to face and try to understand something so saddening which has just hit close to home. I just hope that's a dialogue that will be opened in Japan as time goes on.

It's such a heavy and sorrowful situation for the school and students, the truth is it's beyond what I feel I can grasp or be a part of as an ALT. I feel the desire to talk about it with the kids and the teachers and tell them how sorry I am, but I have to respect their desire for privacy and quiet, internal grieving. I guess the best I can do at school is just to keep the kids smiling.