Taj Ultimate and Tottori Farewells:

I went to play in Tajima weekend before last; this is the same tournament i took an 8-hour road trip to play in back in the summer of 2005, when I first studied abroad in Japan, though this time it was only a 2-hour trip from nearby Tottori.  Another pickup team, another great time.

We had to book it back a day early, however, for our sayonara party with the other JETs.  Some superlative awards were given (I won for best dance moves, for reasons I'm sure you all are aware of), speeches were made, but generally we just had a great time with our last hurrah as this group of JETs.

Many of us are leaving and scattering across the globe, and though the goodbyes were sad...in a strange way, I feel like leaving will make us closer.  While here we were acquaintances, forced to be something more than that by circumstance (namely, the circumstance of being part of the .5% foreign population in Tottori); should our paths ever cross again, that same shared circumstance will lend us a camaraderie in many ways greater than the sum of our time together here.  It's not just the time with each other, but the shared experience of having lived and taught here, in our Tottori, that strengthens this bond.  No tears for these farewells, but strong emotion, in large part nostalgia.

Beach Ultimate in Akashi

A few weekends ago (June 13-14) I road tripped with a fellow Tottori JET to Akashi--about a 4 hour drive--to play some beach ultimate. The group was pretty similar to the people I played with in Awaji in April; lots of JETs from other prefectures, including Tokushima on the smaller island of Shikoku and Fukuoka, which is pretty far west on the island of Kyushu (in contrast, Tottori is on the northern coast of the southern part of Honshu, Japan's main island).

Saturday's play saw us all mixed up on different teams in a Hat Tournament (where you decide teams by drawing names out of a hat--in this case, we drew our team assignments out of a hat when we registered); most of the teams in Japan are colleges, so I got to chat and play with a handful of guys and gals around my age. I helped carry my team to a 5th-place finish out of some dozen teams. We spent Saturday night in a ryokan, a Japanese-style inn where you sleep on tatami floors with futon mattresses; all 10 of us shared a room together, which made it pretty fun, very nostalgic of sharing cabins at summer camp--thankfully there weren't any big snorers.

Rising Tide!

Sunday we played together on our own team, complete with spray-painted jerseys one of the guys had made. We played hard and well, and wound up finishing 8th out of some 26 teams or so; with a better format or seeding, we could've easily been in the finals though, since we only lost to the eventual champions. Altogether it was a great weekend that left me really excited to play more ultimate! I've only got one more tourney here (and can only make part of it), but I'm looking forward to playing some more once I'm back in the US.

Hot Disc Action

I finally found some consistent ultimate.  The last weekend of April, I played at a tournament in Awaji (fully 4 hours' drive from me) with a bunch of internationals, mostly JETs,  from the area; weather was terrible, especially on the first day, but we stayed at a nearby teammate's house and bbq'd on Saturday night, complete with bona fide hamburger meat imported from the states, which by itself was enough to make my weekend.

Coming up: Beach ultimate in June, and in July there's a big tournament in Tajima--I actually played in it back in '05 with some Tokyo folk, and I'm really looking forward to going back and seeing how the tourney (and by extension, ultimate in Japan) has grown.