Bear Attacks

A black shape of a bear is drawn on a yellow background with big capital letters of ‘Beware of Bears!’. That is a poster I see everyday out of my apartment window lately. Not just one. It’s on the fence along a stream and at the little bridge over it so that I spot it everywhere sitting at my table. It has multiplied rapidly this year. On a bench at the nearby park, on the public bathroom wall in my neighborhood, at scattered vacant lots, the posters are rampant here and there that I’d never seen before in my town. Those are not just for warning. Those indicate the spots where bear’s foot prints were left or a bear was actually witnessed. From morning till night, patrol cars with loudspeakers drive around blaring out “Bears are spotted! Be careful when going out!” all day long. The car stops on the little bridge beneath my window and sets off firecrackers to scare off bears. Some members of the local hunting association fired blank shots there. It’s said that the reason why bears come down to a residential area from the mountains so often has to do with the climate change that causes a shortage of food for them.

About ten years have passed since I moved in this snowy town enclosed by the mountains. It’s been warmer and snowed less year after year compared to when I began to live here. That has helped make my winter days easier that I used to suffer from claustrophobia by the deep snow coverage.

Added to the climate change that affects my daily life, I also sense my own mind changes. I had feared if a monotonous country life rusted me away when I decided to move in here. It didn’t happen. Rather, the quiet life increased my concentration and contributed more productivity for my lifework than the time when I lived in the metropolitan area. I have a serener mindset than before and it gives me more understanding toward myself and the world I live in.

Recently, people have stayed home and worked remotely in Japan too. They have left big cities and moved to rural areas. More and more people from Tokyo have moved into my small town that I had expected nothing but to become desolate every year. There are many unfamiliar new residents in the apartment building where I live. The building used to look like a ghost house with dark windows, but it has almost no available room now. I had never imagined that would happen mere one year before. The unthinkable things occurred at the unthinkable speed. In this trend, we can’t tell what happens next. In three years, bears might be chasing after me. Not bears but people might start chasing people and killing each other. Or human race might extinct because of viruses. There might be days of a panic, or moments of danger for life. Even so, it could turn to be better. These unprecedented years have shown how much human imagination is limited. I myself have learned that a superficially dire thing can turn out to be a good thing in the end. Besides, I saw unthinkable things happen, so why not unthinkably good ones? I believe they could happen as well. They should.

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My Fear and Hope by Hidemi Woods

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A Fear of Aging

Before pains from my fall at the communal spa have gone completely, I accidentally got my foot caught in the heavy sauna door the other day. I felt an electric shock in my foot that was swelling in an instant. The pain was so severe that I could hardly breathe. I dreaded to think that I had a broken bone. While thankfully it didn’t seem broken, I bruised again, the arch and both sides of my right foot this time. I have been living in pain so far, putting poultices on my foot and walking in large shoes with a loosened shoelace. What shocked me more than injuries was my recent careless behavior. I have seen myself become a blunderer and lose my edge. Simply, I felt old.

Between the two injuries, there was another happening. I got a pin that commemorated Disneyland’s 60th anniversary when I visited there a few years ago. The limited-edition pin was sparkling and super cool. I loved it so much that I hadn’t worn it because I couldn’t imagine how devastated it might be if I dropped and lost it. I had displayed it on the shelf for years but one day, I summoned courage and put it on my sweater when I went out.

As I had thought, my courage had worn out by the time I headed home. I just couldn’t bear the fear of dropping it any longer. I took it off and put it in my bag. A couple of days later, I noticed it was missing. I knew I had been a little drunk when I put it in my bag, but I couldn’t remember exactly where I put it. I rummaged the entire bag through pockets and pouches but it disappeared. I haven’t seen it since.

It has lingered on my chest and I’ve launched a closet-wide search once in a while with no luck. Similar to the two accidents in the spa, my behavior shocked me more than a loss of the pin. I was upset over my mess incurred by a woeful lack of attention and my wretched state of concentration. I feared that my brain activity has begun to deteriorate.

I confided my fear to my partner. While I conceded that I had become old, he dismissed it easily. According to him, I had been like this since he first met me in my teens. Because he has seen my blunders so many, such as slipping on the wet sidewalk and opening the KFC’s automatic doors by doing ‘Home Alone’ which startled the salesperson, or, tripping on one of the stairs and rolling all the way down to the platform of a train station, he thinks my mess is better than in my twenties. He said that I was much more careless, messier and older in my youth than now.

His comment reminded me of a box of my scarves that I lost about six years ago. It was a cardboard box in which I stowed all my scarves that I had gotten through sales and outlets. The treasure box for me was kept in my closet. But one day, I found it missing. I had searched for years all around my apartment but couldn’t find it. The box was too big to be obscured by other stuff or to just disappear. I had developed numerous theories about the mystery during those years, for example, a thief exclusively for scarves took it, or my partner hid it out of spite, or it was sucked into a black hole of my apartment and gone to the galaxy far, far away. And then, it came out very unexpectedly, very casually. When I straightened up the closet, I put a label to each box. I mislabeled one box that was for scarves. All the while of my vigorous search, it had sit right in front of my eyes with a false label on it.

Like my scarves, I hope that my pin also appears out of somewhere, someday. It might as well though, I would have really grown dim by then and forgotten about that I had it and lost it to begin with…

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My Fear and Hope by Hidemi Woods

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Bruises

The reason I am excessively self-conscious is apparently because my mother hammered in my childhood how I should look and behave.

Appearance is the most essential thing in my mother’s life. She always puts face-saving first among other things. That inevitably leads to her daughter’s reputation. For it, she doesn’t care how her daughter feels or what she wants. People’s opinions are everything to her.

When I was in junior high school, the local public transportation bus I took everyday to school slammed on the brakes suddenly one day and threw me out of the multiple seat at the back. I hit my shin against a metal bar. After I got off the bus at the nearest

bus stop from my home, I did my usual 15-minute walk to my house limping. My parents happened to pass by in their car on that particular day. I thought how lucky I was to get a ride when I had a sore leg of all occasions. As soon as I got in the car, my mother bawled me out for limping without asking what had happened to me. “You’re walking like a vagabond. How embarrassing!”, she scolded. She ignored my say that I had a small accident on the bus and my leg hurt as if it wasn’t the point at all. She kept lashing out with her mantra, “What would others think if they saw!?” It must have been so shocking to her that she had grabbed every chance to bring up the way of my walking and nagged at me about that one-time-only limping for years. Now, the sight of my limping has haunted her strongly enough for her to believe I have a slight limp by nature.

Walk while eating used to be regarded as bad manners in Japanese society. My mother made me go to the cram school to prepare for an entrance exam of a renowned junior high when I was an elementary school pupil. The classes were three days a week after regular school hours and the cram school was far from home, which it took 40 minutes by train. It was usually close to 7 p.m. when the class was over, and we were all hungry. My fellow students would buy chocolate and eat at the platform while waiting for the train home. I had never done that as I didn’t have extra money and was forbidden to eat standing in public by my mother. One of them gave me a piece one evening. I stashed it to have it back home. But I became very hungry in that particular evening when I transferred to another train at the terminal station. I had put a piece of chocolate in my mouth when I arrived at the nearest station from my house. My mother happened to be there to pick me up for once. She almost screamed, “You’re chewing gum in public!” She ignored my say that I had never done this before and the thing was chocolate not gum. She kept wailing, “You chew gum in public! How embarrassing! What would others think if they saw!?” To this day, when she meets me, she still nags at me about how disappointed she was when she saw me chewing gum that evening.

Those instances could go on endlessly. She didn’t allow me to go to the school nurse’s room no matter how sick I felt at school because it looked bad in front of other kids. When we had our house robbed, she stopped me from calling the police because it looked bad to our neighbors. She made me wear the class president pin wherever I went during my term for show. I was raised by a lump of vanity like my mother and have become a vain person myself who cares too much about looks and behavior unconsciously.

My family took a trip by train early in my teens and I missed a step of the stairs at the station with my new unaccustomed high-heeled boots. I fell and rolled down the stairs over a dozen steps. I stood up at the bottom of the stairs despite pain. My mother walked down the stairs calmly and indifferently instead of rushing over to help me, and said, “I didn’t think it was you. I thought it was a stranger.” Not one ‘Are you all right?’ came out of her mouth that day. After we checked in a hotel, I saw my body in the bathroom. The half side of my body was covered with dark bruises. I imagine how wonderful it would be that someday the bruises on my mind finally healed and disappeared along with my massive self-consciousness…

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My Fear and Hope by Hidemi Woods

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My Hairstyle

I don’t change my hairstyle a lot. I’m quite particular over it, but once my inflexible details are materialized on my head, I stay that way for a long time. The problem is the length. Since I’m a cheap person, I keep frequency of my visit to a hair salon as low as I can. As a result, I need to have my hair cut short at every visit to make the next visit further. But it’s not a case that the shorter the better. Because my favorite particular hairstyle is feminine, I need to keep some length.

That causes tug-of-war with a hairdresser. When I go to the hair salon, my hair has usually gotten quite long and the hairdresser has to cut it more than ten inches to the shortest possible length for my style. He or she is always unwilling to do so. Although I request loud and clear, they try to make sure over and over. Then they bring an extra mirror behind my head. Showing and pointing my hair on the back, they still make sure the length I ask for. Despite my repeated confirmations, my hair ends up longer than I requested when it’s done each time.

A hairdresser once told me that girls sometimes cry when their hair is cut short. I suppose those experiences make them reluctant to cut hair drastically. I totally don’t understand those who cry just for an undesirable hairstyle. There is too much to cry for in this world beside a hairstyle.

My mother used to want me to wear a boyish hairstyle. While my younger sister had long hair, I wasn’t allowed it and my hair was always short like a boy. I got defiant and made my hair long when I was seven. My mother persistently told me to cut it, but I wanted to wear long hair for once. My uncle lived with us at that time. He saw our battle over long hair every day and said that he would cut my hair in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. He said it as a joke but I took it as a serious threat. I had suffered from insomnia and his remark made it even worse. I was too afraid to sleep, thinking he would come in to cut my hair if I fell asleep. I usually lay spreading my hair on the pillow but had lain hiding my hair tensely for some nights.

Now, I can enjoy a feminine style as much as I like. I went to a hair salon the other day. A new hairdresser unusually cut my hair to exactly what I asked for. It has finally gotten short and I feel tidy and refreshed…

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My Fear and Hope by Hidemi Woods

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Closed Down

There is a mysterious pattern that my favorite place is destined to be unpopular and eventually closed down. Shops, restaurants, theme parks and even attractions in popular theme parks have closed down once they became my favorite.

My favorite restaurant in this area used to be Red Lobster because of its chic interior and westernized menu, but as I feared, it fell into the cursed pattern and closed. The TV said Pizza Hut opened where Red Lobster had been, and people have flooded for all-you-can-eat pizzas baked with a stone oven.

Months later, I happened to have an errand near the restaurant and tried in. While the building remained the same as Red Lobster’s, the interior was remodeled into a casual style. The place was empty, except for a few servers having time on their hands. I had a wonderful time with delicious pizza and pasta, the reasonable price, and the quiet atmosphere above all. Soon, I started to be worried about the place. The fact that it was about to become my favorite and that my partner and I were the only customers in this large restaurant might mean the place wouldn’t last long. I was thinking about the fate of this restaurant when families with small children came in one after another. The place was quickly filled with clamor and we had to flee. A restaurant with families is all but closed down to me…

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My Fear and Hope by Hidemi Woods

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hobo mark

I started watching ‘Mad Men’ that had been recorded and stored in my HDD for some time. In an episode I watched last night, young Don found a mark by a hobo on an entrance jamb of his house, which stood for a dishonest man in the house.

A few years ago, when I still lived in my old apartment in the Tokyo metropolitan area, a man banged on the door in the evening. He said he was sent by a management company of the apartment and it was urgent. My partner opened the door and the man told him that a water filtration system had to be installed in my kitchen now. My partner found out right away that the man was just soliciting and had nothing to do with the management company. He was pushy and persistent while my partner was driving him off. In the end, my partner shoved him away.

Afterward, we noticed a small strange mark beside the door. Then a couple of months later, there was a Japanese news story on TV, which reported on a vicious soliciting scheme. Sales persons mark each house with a small sign to categorize by easiness of soliciting. That explained a mysterious mark at the entrance of my apartment. Based on the fact that I had never had any kind of soliciting again since the night my partner shoved a sales person, the mark on my apartment could have stood for something quite tough…

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My Fear and Hope by Hidemi Woods

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Vertigo

When I woke up in the morning and sit up on the bed, my room whirled before my eyes. Anxiety was what I felt first thing in the morning. I wondered if I had a serious illness, if I was developing a brain tumor, if my autonomic nerve was damaged and if I couldn’t live a healthy life any longer. I was swallowed up by the waves of all kinds of negative thoughts. It was how I started a brand-new day and I had been in this mess for over a week. I sometimes feel dizzy but vertigo rarely happens to me.

It occurred only three times to the best of my memory. The first time was when I was fourteen and dieting solely on watermelon. I had eaten nothing but watermelon for three days and had vertigo in the morning of the fourth day. The diet ended there and my weight rebounded, as is the way with dieting.

The second time was about two years ago when I continued lack of sleep for years to keep religiously my daily routine of taking an early morning spa. I had a massive attack of vertigo in the middle of the night and scribbled an instant will because I believed I was dying.

And this recent week-long dizziness was the third time. Since it has become my mantra that “there’s always an answer on the Internet,” I looked it up online. Most websites gave lengthy negative possibilities of serious illnesses that threw readers down into the depths of anxiety. They concluded that dizzy spells could lead to complete deafness or death. Those pieces of information weren’t what I was looking for. I wanted to know how to cure.

I kept searching for remedy, but all ‘How to Cure’ sections were the same; Go see a doctor. Do they think we don’t come up with that idea until we look up on the Internet? I wouldn’t have been online if I had decided to see a doctor in the first place. The point was, I was on the net not to see a doctor. I learned from my experience that going to the doctor would do more harm than good in most cases.

When I see a doctor, I need to get up early in the morning, wait for a long time at the hospital for my turn while being exposed to various viruses of other patients, go through all kinds of medical examination, get sucked my blood, take numerous kinds of medicine, get more ill by the medicine’s side effects and feel more stress and anxiety. I don’t trust especially clinics and hospitals in Japan.

I once went to the dentist for a root canal. Although the treatment was supposed to be done in one visit, the doctor divided it into four extremely short visits. On the last visit when the treatment was all done, the doctor told me to make another appointment because he found a cavity in my back tooth. As I didn’t notice it and it didn’t hurt at all, I said that I didn’t want the treatment and wouldn’t come. Then he told me, rather threatened me, that even if it didn’t hurt, leaving a cavity would be catastrophic. He added, “A cavity is cancer.” I was deeply intimidated by the sound of ‘cancer’, but still kept cool enough to judge that a cavity was quite different from cancer. I never went there again.

Since I had no intention to go to the doctor this time as well, I looked up my dizziness further on the Internet. I came across one US website that finally said about the cure for my symptoms. It illustrated how to move my head to stop vertigo and it cured my week-long dizzy spells instantly with one simple try. I had a pleasant morning without vertigo at last. Internet solved my problem yet again, big time.

I read on about what caused it after all and the site said stress. I don’t know any illness which causes don’t include stress. I don’t know how to live without stress either…

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My Fear and Hope by Hidemi Woods

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