“I can’t believe they pay you to do this!”
I’d hear that a few times a week, usually on a sunset tour after riding snowmobiles to the top of Vail Mountain in Colorado. Looking out over the white-turning-pink peaks of the Rocky Mountains, I’d agree — I couldn’t believe I was getting paid for this, either.
Our tours, run by Vail’s Adventure Ridge arm, were on the actual ski mountain itself. We couldn’t work while the mountain was open. I was free to hit the slopes all day, grab some heavily discounted food, set up the snowmobiles around 2:30 p.m., and then help lead three tours a day up the mountain.
I was making good money. In addition to a salary of a few bucks over minimum wage, we’d average 10 snowmobiles per tour, and $20 tips per snowmobile. That was split between the lead and tail guide, with the tail guide — me — getting 20% or about $120 a day.
For a kid fresh out of college with wads of cash coming in every day and living in company housing, I felt rich. That said, Vail was always supposed to be a temporary breather, a gap year of sorts, to save up money to achieve my real goal: moving to Japan.
I moved to Japan in 2001
I wanted to experience being a foreigner, an immigrant. I wanted to witness the melding of Eastern and Western thought. Plus, I’d already lived in Europe and visited South America — Asia seemed like the next spot I should hit.
When I got to Japan, the experience was something like this: You know how you can have a food item all your life, and then one day you happen upon a version of it that is so good, so superior, it becomes the Platonic ideal, and all others feel like cheap imitations? My life in Japan was a bit like that.
I discovered the US was not as technologically advanced as I thought. In Japan, I had a camera on my phone years before my stateside friends. I could pay for things using my phone a couple of decades before it became commonplace in the US.
The trains were faster and on time. The streets were cleaner. The cities felt safer. And everywhere I went, the people I met were welcoming and friendly.
For example, when I lived there over 20 years ago, before everyone had easy access to GPS, I could strike up a conversation by pulling out a map on a street corner. Within minutes, someone would offer to help.
I felt welcomed in Japan, but there was a limit
My first job was teaching English in Fukushima. Within my first year, I was invited to my first Japanese wedding and got my first house invite. By year three, after moving to Kyoto, I had so many friends I could barely find free time.
One family invited me over every Sunday to teach their children English for an hour, paying around $100 per session. Their house doubled as a public izakaya (Japanese pub) in the front, and after the lesson, we’d all sit at the bar, where the mamasan (female manager) would serve a new Japanese dish I hadn’t tried yet.
I encountered another couple while walking around my neighborhood. I ended up teaching them English, but within a few sessions, they were taking me to some of the best restaurants in town. They introduced me to a meal entirely made of fugu, or blowfish. We went to a turtle soup restaurant called Daiichi that still used the same unwashed bowls from the 1600s, each meal adding seasoning.
Despite the welcoming people I met along the way, I had to learn Japan’s cultural rules and norms through observation, not instruction. If a 4-year-old Japanese child stuck their chopsticks standing upright into their rice, they’d most likely be scolded since that’s how offerings are made to the dead during funerals and is considered taboo outside this custom. If I made the same mistake, no one would comment.
Of course, I could ask my Japanese friends the right way to do things, and they’d gently tell me every faux pas I’d made that day.
I cherish the five years I lived in Japan
I’d do it all over again if I could. Life in Japan was comfortable, full of culture, and rich in history. While I wanted to see what life would be like completely untethered from home, it is hard to live that way perpetually.
And Japan, as wonderful a place as it was, as much as I miss it and would leap at the chance to return, I always felt like a visitor. The more comfortable I got, the more I was reminded.
So back into the world I went — leaving Japan for places both new and old. My next stop found me living in Chiang Mai, Thailand — one of the few places I could afford on the salary of a fledgling freelance writer. I don’t regret that either.
Sometimes, I wonder how life would have turned out if I’d never given up my ski bum life and still counted the days by sunsets.
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