#like what do you mean your nearest movie theater is 45 minutes away I literally pass mine on my way to work Tumblr posts

[hedgewitchnecromancer]

The more I talk to people at college the more I’m starting to realize that living in the suburbs in the middle of the three biggest cities in my region has had a pretty strong effect on what I expect the average town to be

[yuuudachi]

First

It’s weird figuring out how to start a blog, especially when you expect zero to a handful of people to read it. Most of you who do look at this likely already know me quite well, but in case not: Hello, my name is Brooke, and I have been living in Shimane, Japan for 8 months. 

One thing to know is that Shimane is the second to least populated prefecture in Japan, battling on and off for the number one spot with its eastern neighbor, Tottori. Have you heard of either of these places? If you’re not very familiar with Japan, likely not. I live in a very quiet and green village of barely over 3,000 people nestled in the mountain region of Shimane. It’s full of farmers, monkeys, wild boar, tanuki, the occasional bear (or so I’ve been told), and many, many trees and bamboo groves. On particularly warm and clear skied Sundays, the monkeys tend to gather around my apartment and on top of the detached garages in the parking lot and have a heyday. Eating bugs off each other, having random (and very loud) spats with each other, and just taking a nap on our cars. I shake loud plastic bags when I go outside to keep them a safe distance away from me, but despite this, I’ve adopted all of them as my children. There’s a word in Japanese that is “inaka.” It literally translates to “rice field cottage,” but it basically is the word for very rural areas. Now there are no rice fields in my village that I know of due to the mountains, but I am living the extreme inaka life.

Each weekend, I buy all my groceries from the local farmers market for about 2,000-2,500 yen (roughly 18-23 USD) and take frequent walks along the river, weather permitting. There are no trains here. The one and only train that was here closed down a few years before I arrived due to low usage but frequent environmental disturbances (fallen trees on the tracks from what I heard). There are a few sparse buses that go to surrounding towns randomly throughout the day, and most of the high schoolers here are actually recruited in from other prefectures and far away towns and live in dorms due to how low the local student number is. There are a few ma and pa restaurants in the “downtown” (a cluster of about 30-40 houses and small stores by the river), but I’ve only been to two. One was a curry house owned by an elderly couple, and the other is a recently opened cafe, right next to the water. Life here is very quiet, and the town is usually asleep at 7PM. Lights out everywhere, almost all stores closed except for the Lawson on the other edge of town, and silent streets. There are maybe 10 streetlights across the entire village or less, so the skies at night reveal more stars than any area I’ve been back in America. The nearest actual town is a 40-45 minute drive away. The nearest “city” with a mall, movie theater, and many restaurants is 1 hour and 20 minutes away. The nearest real city is Hiroshima, but it’s about 2 hours away by car. I’ve only been once. 

I live in the teacher apartment building on the family side despite being a single person, so I have a very roomy apartment with one bedroom (tatami), a living room (tatami), a large kitchen (wood flooring), a bathroom/wash room (wood flooring), and a spare room off to the side (tatami - it gets very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer, so I don’t go in there often). I have a bed instead of a futon because mukade (poisonous centipedes who are aggressive and have bites that hurt more than hornets’ stings and can be dangerous if bitten near vital organs. Fun!) are a frequent guest, and you’d be a fool to think I’d lie on the floor when I’m a first floor apartment next to the woods and many bushes hosting these fellows. I’ve also had a huntsman spider greet me at my genkan (the area to take your shoes off in all Japanese homes by the front door) and a few terrifying venomous spiders chilling nonchalantly on my patio and outside my bedroom window. The huntsman met his maker that day, but I let the other ones stay; I’m living a happy mosquito free life with our unspoken agreement. 

So that is a short rundown of what life is like here. I know 3 paragraphs doesn’t seem short, but do understand that it’s briefing over 8 months of life. It covers most of the picture living here, but I’m sure the rest will reveal itself over the next few posts. 

I’m starting this blog for one main reason. I am lonely. While what I described above may seem very picturesque and like a dreamy (and sometimes scary-- looking at you, mukade) adventure, it is very isolating. Despite knowing conversational Japanese, I have not had great luck making friends as most of the people here are families or elderly people with their own lives and tasks to attend to. While I enjoy their company when I have it, I could hardly expect anyone to go out of their way to spend time with me when they have children to raise or farms to tend to. So I spend most of my days quietly alone, trying to make the most of it, but ultimately beginning to lose a battle to a reticent sadness that is hard to overcome. I write this blog to not only remind myself but invest myself in the good that I have slowly become a bit blind to amidst the personal struggles I’ve faced.  

The name of my blog comes from  " 夕立 " , read as “yuudachi.” It means a sudden shower in the late afternoon/early evening, but could be literally translated to  "occurrence of the evening (meteorological) phenomenon.” I really love this word. The first time I learned it, there was a yuudachi around 4:30PM as I was leaving work, and my coworker explained the word and its kanji to me. It was a warm and sunny day with sparse clouds, so it was the perfect dictionary description of “yuudachi.” I walked home from work right after it ended during that golden time of the day, and saw a lovely rainbow above the mountains and met a cool little beetle outside my door. It was a very magical moment for me that etched itself into my memories, so when I was trying to decide on a name for this blog, the word 夕立 kept coming back to me. It was a lovely afternoon despite the storm. Grossly sentimental, I know. I’ll let you read into the rest of the meaning before I sound overly dramatic and emotional. For now, look at these cool photos I took on that day.