Today I finished working at my fourth ward at Nagoya Daini Red Cross Hospital, ICU/CCU. I’d been there for pretty much a month, but since that time was broken by my lengthy new year’s holiday, my working time there probably adds up to little more than two weeks. Having said that, it feels like more. I made some good friends whilst on the ward, especially Hiromi and Akiko, who I went snowboarding with in Nagano about a week ago.
Along with that, a lot of my working time was spent with the auxilliary nurse of CCU, called Katsumata Etsuko. I haven’t written that much about the work I do at the hospital, mainly because there’s very little interesting about it, but it basically involves assisting the assistant nurses with mundane tasks. On CCU, this included the neverending pile of towels to fold; going on a round of the hospital in the morning and afternoon to pick up medicine, post, and take back borrowed things; and making sure the patients’ rooms are well stocked up. Talking with Katsumata, whose personality makes her seem much younger than she looks, and who had an overbearing desire for me to speak proper, polite Japanese, helped the hours on the ward to pass by pretty quickly.
Despite just being an auxilliary nurse, she seemed to command a lot of respect from the nurses on the ward, often telling them what they should be doing, in a firm but not unfriendly way. I had a lot of memorable conversations with her, not least because she had a tendency to use proverbs in regular speech. “せいては事をしそんじる、急いては事を仕損じる”, is apparently a pretty flowery way of saying “if you rush things, you’ll screw them up”. She gave me a little leaving present today, a book of Japanese proverbs I can’t really understand at the moment, and a Japanese <-> English dictionary just as baffling. Needless to say, I’ll miss working with her.
Nevertheless, tomorrow I start working on my final ward, which is opthalmology, and a few other things. Regardless of what it is, I’m only there for about 12 working days. In a few days, Rhys and I are heading off to Kumamoto, Kyushu, for a short holiday to visit Lee-Anna and Lucy. Not long after that, we have a slew of other trips planned, one of them to the opposite side of Japan, Hokkaido. Things had become a bit routine living here, so being in the middle of a big series of trips has brought most of the excitement I held back in the first eventful month back.
The snowboarding trip I mentioned earlier itself was quite special. This was my first time to ride a night bus in Japan, but the first of many. Taking a night bus is the cheapest way to get around, bar walking or cycling, so it’ll be how I get around in my post-hospital travels here. Hiromi had suggested going skiing a few days previously at work, and I got the full details on the trip with less than half a day’s warning. Particularly for young people in Japan, travelling by night bus is popular, and when we got to Nagoya station at about 11pm, the many bus
terminals were packed.
We eventually found ours after a brief scramble and set off into the night. For the remarkably low price equivalent to fifty pounds, we had a return trip to the north of Nagano, it being two prefectures away from Nagoya, and about 7 hours on the snow. That includes lift pass, and extremely discounted rental prices of about three pounds, or ￥700, for a full snowboard/ski set. Due to that, I decided to board the morning and ski the afternoon. But, I’m getting ahead of myself a little here.
The journey itself owes it’s low price to a long journey, which is why it goes through the night. I’m not sure why the journey is so relatively long, but perhaps the bus takes a long route avoiding toll roads, or just drives slowly, to lower costs. Either way, after leaving Nagoya station not long before midnight on Saturday, we arrived at Takaifuji mountain and snowsports resort at about 7:30am. It wasn’t easy to sleep on the coach, and I couldn’t talk much with Hiromi or Akichan who were both soundly asleep from work. The bus was cramped, though not really a problem for someone of as short a stature as myself, and it’s constast yet unavoidable shakings made it difficult to get some shut-eye. There were plentiful stops, also.
At the first, Hiromi came to the service station with me, and she got a 2am snack, called something like ‘gohemochi’ I think, but I may be a bit off. Either way, it’s just a rice cake skewered onto a wooden stick, covered in something brown, sweet and sticky. I let her have most of it to herself. The second wonder of the service stations, something that wasn’t noticed until the second but never passed at subsequent ones, was a stand full of tacky Hello Kitty ornaments.
These range from small plastic figures to decorate everything from clothes to a piece of string around a phone, and have even insidiously infected the hospital, being found hanging off most of the nurses’ uniforms at work. Indeed, even I have a little ‘Kitty-chan’ that dangles from my name tag along with some little red chilis, a souvenir from the head nurse of the gastroenterology ward, from when she went on a trip to Korea last year (thus explaining the chilis, as Korea is well known, at least in Japan, for its spicy cuisine). At almost every service station we stopped at, Hiromi and Akichan both crowded around these small displays, saying nothing but “kawaii~”.
Thankfully, there was no Hello Kitty on the slopes. Instead, we were greeted by a beatiful, barely touched mountain with freshly covered snow. Compared to the heavily commercialised Dynaland of Gifu, Takaifuji felt a lot closer to nature. The rental house and restuarant at the base of the mountain smelt it too, with old fashioned toilets whose destination was presumably a large hole beneath the building, not unlike something you might encounter at a muddy music festival, albeit with a much more pleasant facade. We got our equipment and moved on to the mountain.
Like I said, it felt a lot more natural than Dynaland. The snow was completely powder, fresh and beautiful. And at least in the morning, the skies were clear. After we’d taken our late lunch break, the snowfall had become so intense we could only see a few metres into the distance from the cafeteria. 
Anyway, for most of the day I took out a snowboard and was amazed by how much more able I was, compared to the flailing mess I was little more than a month earlier. Yamashita must be a good teacher, after all. I’m now planning on just snowboarding on my future Japan trips. I’ve gotten a taste for it.
I decided to go on a snowboard because that’s what Hiromi and Akichan were doing, and Akichan was a total beginner, so I knew I’d be better than her at least. She was a much better beginner than I was, and by the end of the day was able to turn both ways, a feat I hadn’t mastered until my second trip. It’d be great to go again with them, but my time here has become so scarce and their working lives are so busy it probably can’t happen. We did go to a local Jazz bar last weekend however, called ‘Mary Poppins’.
The previous gapper’s legacy was playing guitar in some Jazz clubs whilst he was in Japan, including not only Mary Poppins but some even more upmarket spots in Tokyo. I’m a bit envious that he had a skill like that he could transfer across here to have some pretty out of the ordinary experiences, but mainly impressed that he managed it in a country whose language he must have been as unfamiliar with as I am - that said, the language of music is universal. After one of the gigs we saw there, the percussionist of the band came up to us to ask if we knew him. It must be nice to leave a definite mark like that behind, and I sometimes wonder if I will be remembered. It’s too late to worry about things like that, though.
Now only a single month seperates me and the time I’m kicked out of my apartment in Nagoya so it can be sorted out for the new volunteers, coming in March. I already have a flight booked back to England, but that’s not till late April and even then, is flexible. So, my time in Nagoya is definitely coming to close, but after that, it’s an open book with pages waiting to be filled.
じゃあね~
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