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COLUMN: Returning to Japan after a vacation

I still don’t understand much, but I recognize it and am comforted by it

I am back in Toyokoro after two weeks in B.C., contemplating the differences between home and here, and the different way I view here compared to the same time last year.

I had been feeling homesick already when I got to the international terminal at Vancouver International Airport on my way back, knowing it would be almost a year before I would be home again, and was surprised and pleased at how reassuring the sound of the Japanese language was as I neared my gate.

I still don’t understand much, but I recognize it and am comforted by it.

The children are on their summer vacation, so were bicycling towards the schools as I drove to work at 8:20 this morning.

They were carrying instruments and heading for band practice or sporting full baseball uniforms.

As I returned to the school board office after my lunch, the same children were bicycling towards their homes.

I am now accustomed to seeing the structure of their lives, and yet their relative independence.

The middle school students are often without adult supervision, running their own practices and warm-ups.

Elementary students walk or bike to and from activities unaccompanied, much the way my generation did in the 1970s.

The temperatures that were in the mid-30s when I left for Canada have returned to the more moderate low 20s, and the humidity is in sharp contrast to the arid smoky conditions of B.C.

Forested Hokkaido is fortunate that the warm season is also the wet season.

Corn is high in the fields and trucks are laden with tight bales of hay.

More hay is rolled in the fields and covered by transparent plastic.

Rudbekia blooms along the roadsides.

Two cranes are fishing at the edge of the Tokachi River as I drive over the bridge, and I am still impressed by them although no longer amazed at their size.

The first time I saw one in a field, it looked like some kind of ostrich.

Since then I have seen them many times in flight and at rest and watched their mating dance from the side of a farm road.

I met my little friend Mahna in the parking lot on my way home for lunch.

She is almost three years old now and looking like a little girl instead of the toddler I met last summer. Mahna and her mother stop by to see me most Thursday afternoons, when nap time doesn’t interfere and they come to the library and play area next to the school board office.

Today, I handed her the bag with the Canada 150 T-shirt I had brought for her.

She waited patiently in her mother’s arms as we chatted, holding the bag by its handles and fiddling with the pink pipe cleaner I had looped around to hold it closed.

Then her mother says to her, in English, “This is a present for you.”

Mahna’s face lights up, she flashes me a smile, and with perfect pronunciation says, “Thank you.”

Her mother and I both gasped in shock. “Sugoi!”

Neither of us knew that she speaks English!

Janet Jory is in Summerland’s sister city of Toyokoro, Japan as an assistant English teacher.