Hey JADE!

I don't have much time before a band of 13-year-olds comes to carry me away, rob me of halloween stickers, and make me play tennis, so I'll write really fast. Try to speed-read this letter so you get the right impression.

You have to tell me everything that's going on/has happened in Toronto (approximately). Really. Japan is so normal. Sushi-grade fish costs seven cents a pound, unflavored peaches and apples cost $20 each, and trains depart every five minutes from hundreds of stations along Kobe's four different rail networks (actually true) that can take you anywhere in the country in under 40 minutes or it's free. The usual! Boring!

Yeah, Japan is just a humdrum country full of lots of people and things where I wake up at 6 a.m. each night, work 10 hours (a half-day under Japanese labor laws), and then go to bed at 10 p.m. in the afternoon. But Toronto! I hear there's snow in Toronto right now, and that it's so cold you can't quite stay comfortable in just a T-shirt. Japanese people don't sweat, ever, and are all currently wearing sweaters and sports jackets in 20-degree weather, even indoors. I'm looked on as some kind of friendly ice gorilla, which is to say that I'm finally getting the respect I deserve. You've got to come and try it out. You could be a kindhearted frosty gibbon, or, if you prefer, a highly amused barbary apesickle.

Word reaches these shores about what happens in Toronto. They say in Toronto street bands play something other than jazz or cheesy love songs. Birds sing, children laugh, or so the stories go. Bureaucrats duel over zoning bylaw revisions, squaring off atop battle towers of the maximum allowable height for core buildings, and when one falls his landing is softened only by the whirlwinds of cheering and booing stirred up by the wild crowd! Asked what's their favorite building on campus, students inexplicably say Hart House, just to fuck with you! MPPs run over cyclists' heads and never get blamed! Douglas Coupland weeps for Keith Urquhart's generation! Dan Epstein lurks around every corner, whispering secrets! Jade Colbert sleeps with one eye open, in the shadow of a concrete turkey, next to a table made entirely of magazines. Is all this true? Is the city I've heard of out there somewhere, real like those living buskers painted to look like gigantic toys? Is Toronto the life-size bronze cowboy actually alive, or is that portable gas heater next to it just there for show? Tell me, but if the news is bad, don't give it to me straight—I couldn't take it.

Also. T-shirts. Every time I see a shop display of stylin' Engrish clothes I want to buy a box of them and ship it straight back to the Varsity, especially the copy editors. I very nearly picked up one with "Middle School" on it, and another that claimed, in sly brush cursive, to be a "Diversion." A racy girls' tee shouted "the energy was obtained by the thing!" in glitter, but along the back it preached that "loving others makes us deiform," so that's alright. Because deiform is good form.

My favorite, though, was one I would absolutely wear at every opportunity: "Miraculous! The word sincerely deprived is surely transmitted." I would like to believe that's true, especially considering how often I've been writing home.

I'll tell you one more thing about Japan if you tell me two more things about Toronto, which is fair, 'cause I already know all sorts of stuff about Toronto and you've barely seen anything here. Last week I went to the deer disantlering ceremony in Nara, which is a Japanese city made mostly of temples that served as the basis for much of Doctor Seuss and all of the Legend of Zelda. Nara, being so damned holy, is full of deer so sacred that no one is permitted to harm them, and the local monks have trained them to bow twice when they're offered food. So everyone feeds the deer, and there are deer everywhere, like the cats of Rome, but likeable. They are a sure sign that Shinto is a useful religion.

Anyway, the bucks get their antlers in fall, at which point they become incredibly dangerous. Not really, at all, but so deep runs the fear of these Bambyish woodland critters goring someone that Nara is practically wallpapered with cartoony posters showing one of the dog-sized deer killing a tourist. Judgments of what's safe and what's dangerous in Japan feel a lot like snap decisions. It's safe, for instance, to keep your school open when 40 per cent of the students have H1N1, or to make your kids stand on each others' shoulders in tottering human pyramids four storeys tall (fun!), but docile, handfed deer taught only to love become homicidal terrors when they grow a few inches of antler.

So, in a three-day ritual that's been performed annually 1,200 times, shinto monks lasso the bucks and wrestle them onto a bed in a grassy field, where a priest calms them by giving them water to drink and then saws off their antlers. As for the deer, once the rough treatment is over, they don't seem to care one way or the other. They just trotted off and went back to bowing and eating. A few of them even kept on bumping heads with just their horn stumps. But the ceremony was severe and somber. The antlers were passed from respectfully hand to hand and a hush fell over the crowd.

Those same killy posters also illustrate how manly the antlers make the deer feel. The one with the biggest rack has a gold medal and the fawning attention of a pair of lovestruck does, the king of the woods. Japan would have to be completely redesigned if Freudianism caught on here, so no one sees the antlers as overtly phallic, more like really flashy pieces of man-jewelery. But in a country with impenetrable gender boundaries, where men are men and grown women bring pink Minnie Mouse cell-phones to work, those deer are making a big sacrifice. It's like they're being forced to wear a blouse, I guess. Wacky? Anyway, afterwards I saw a Japanese girl strutting around with a set of the fresh-cut antlers on her head, showing off and head-butting people, so maybe the whole thing is more complicated than it seemed.

Alright, Ms. Colbert, the bell has rung and the kids will descend in a moment waving rackets and pulling my hair. Drop me a line sometime, postcard me, Skype me or something, 'cause though I've been bad at writing letters home, I'm starting to miss you guys so much that I'll shortly be holding imaginary conversations with you. What was that sound? The wind!


André

PS:
3-2-1-57-602 Minatomjima Nakamachi, Chuo-ku, Kobe-shi
650-0046
JAPAN