Friends

The stunningly handsome man you see before you is Mr. Hiroki, great and glorious Japanese friend of Yours Truly, who one day in April saw me failing to find a book in a bookshop but was too shy to approach me and help. The next time he saw me he very politely approached me and asked if we could be friends. Since then we have seen something of one another at least once a week.

Mr. Hiroki is in the faculty of engineering studying the design of low-power wind farms, an entirely wholesome whale-loving sort of a pursuit, and spends the remainder of his time madly studying English. Mr. Hiroki has also had the singular pleasure of having been to Australia, where (I think) he visited the Gold Coast and Sydney. Here we see him staring implacably across the sea of Japan to distant, inscrutable North Korea. Not quite the Gold Coast, but it has sand and waves. A short distance behind him his girlfriend Miss Kaori has just competed in a marathon.

Life in Japan at present would be a sad and unfortunate experience were it not for Mr. Hiroki and the other individuals who have decided I am good English practice despite my insane accent. When I am not spending time with these people I have to hang out with the foreign students, who are universally bad, bad people and who do everything they can to make me unhappy. Tottori is not so much fun as the big cities if you do not have a bit of local knowledge, and if you do not have a car the local knowledge is not very useful. Mr. Hiroki is a good source of both of these things, so we have done things together which I could not have done alone. We also drink together, watch soccer, and generally just get up to good old-fashioned boys-y mischief.

Other Japanese people I have spent some time with over the last few weeks are the irrepressible Miss Youko, never unhappy and always helpful with Japanese; the quiet and terribly shy Mr. Keigo, and now his friend Miss Ran; and the inseparable pair of Misses Hiroko and Kana, both of whom are extreme hippies blessed with an irrepressible streak of kindness. I spent some 4 hours in their company on Friday, alternately practising English and Japanese and discussing a diverse range of topics to the best of our limited abilities. Miss Hiroko is visiting England for 3 weeks and wants to rapidly improve her already quite good English. These two are English students in my Tuesday night "class" (if I may use the term loosely).

The hardest thing about being in another country - whether or not you speak the language - is, I think, missing your friends at home. Especially when because you do not speak the language you are very limited in your choice of who you can meet and what you can do with them. Not being able to choose ones friends is a terrible curse, and so I am glad that Mr. Hiroki has chosen me. Without him life in Tottori would be terribly dull, and what is worse it would be lonely. So let us all take our hats off to the kindness of strangers!