Bob Sanchez’ BS

I’ve loosely mentioned golfing, and that’s because I recently picked up the clubs for the eighth time (after laying them down or throwing them into trees and lakes seven times).

Japan is a most unlikely place to rekindle the golf flame – equipment and facilities cost about three times what they should and there is five times less space in which to use said equipment and construct said facilities.

The Kochi Youth Center offered a weekly golf class last winter for ten bucks, so I took the bait and signed up. The highly prohibitive start-up cost included a rental club and seven lessons, and we were on our own for range balls. I showed up to the first class, got a seven-iron and a range card, and went to work.

The teacher, a grizzled golf pro who resides at the fabulous Tosa Country Club to the east in Aki City, had leathery skin and a gravelly voice abused by mountains of cigarettes. He spent two hours a week each Tuesday with the seven students and me, tinkering with our swings and offering more advice than we could ever use.

I got the sense that Golf Pro particularly liked working with me, and if he didn’t like it then at least he always went home with some question of mine on his mind.

I was concerned with him changing my swing after I’d find a groove that produced positive results. Golf Pro said it was like building a sandcastle as the tide went out; I’d get something going and then he’d have to knock it down and expose some flaw, then I’d build that up and he’d knock another part down, until the tide was completely out and my beautiful, fundamentally strong castle could stand unmolested.

Each time, I resented going from finally being able to hit a long, straight ball five times out of ten to shanking or slicing everything and only hitting it eighty yards. Then, each time, as I subdued the rage within, I improved until I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing or trying my hardest to hit the ball, which is exactly how one ought to go about hitting a golf ball.

None of this was real golf, keep in mind, it was just practice. Still, it felt wonderful to have some semblance of control over where the ball was going and to feel smooth, natural, and athletic in so doing.

Then, in the seventh and final class, Golf Pro passed out the pitching wedges and told us to work on approaches. He showed us how to do it and said that we needed to acquire a feel for hitting the ball with a certain loft and distance. We were to work on hitting the ball thirty yards, fifty yards, and seventy yards.

This is where the wheels come off the temper train for me. Nothing frustrates me more in golf than trying to hit a ball ninety feet and failing. I can spit into a cup ninety feet away, for cryin’ out loud. Why shouldn’t I be able to put a golf ball close to one?

It didn’t take ten swings for all of those feelings to return and make me wish there was a lake at the range to chuck my rental club into. I reverted to the only way I knew how to make a golf ball go straight for a short distance, which was to face the target with my body and take an awkward, short swing by drawing my arms out and pushing them forward. It’s not pretty and not very consistent, but at least the ball goes in the right direction.

Golf Pro told me that wouldn’t hold up at Tosa Country Club.

Golf Pro: Mac, you can’t do that at TCC. They’ll laugh you off the course.

Mac: Well, what if it works for me? Look, I can hit that target better by doing it my way.

I took five of his swings and shanked every one of them, and then five of my goofy swings and hit a sidewalk thirty yards away each time.

Mac: See? This works!

Golf Pro: Can you hit it fifty yards that way?

Mac: No, I’m sure I can’t.

Golf Pro: What would you do if you were fifty yards away from a hole, then?

Mac: Triangulate and hit it thirty yards twice.

I wasn’t trying to make him laugh; I was serious. I have the most fun playing golf when I walk up and simply hit the ball closer to the hole. Correct mechanics and scorecards turn a pleasant day outside with friends into a thorny, muddy, sandy walk through hell for me.

Golf Pro laughed and suggested that I do things the right way, his way. I told him that I wasn’t trying to be a professional and asked him if there wasn’t some middle ground.

I was able to admit that my way was dumb and inefficient and that I lacked the patience to suffer through thousands of failures, but I also believe that there is validity and importance in remembering that few of us are professionals. Par is by definition the number of strokes it should take for a professional to knock out a given hole, and by comparing ourselves to pros in that way, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.

This middle ground I sought did not exist in the mind of Golf Pro, and we went back and forth on the subject for the better part of an hour. I didn’t understand how there couldn’t be a way to improve without striving toward a meticulously professional swing, and, as is typical, kept on asking questions aggressively until I did understand.

Golf Pro finally said that golf wasn’t for me. He said the words,

You can’t play.

I almost believed him. I almost dropped the pitching wedge and left right there. Life certainly wouldn’t be any worse without golf. I could have left it all behind in that moment. I have so many other things going on, so many other activities that challenge me and bring me happiness and positivity.

But his words challenged me. Taking the entire conversation into context, he was saying that I lacked the mental fortitude to play golf. This had nothing to do with hand-eye coordination or anything physical; Golf Pro was saying that I was not good enough in the head to play his game.

Seething, I went back to my mat. I put my head down and took 400 approach swings, intending to do it his way until it worked. I didn’t get there that night.

I turned in my rental club at the end of class and bought a wedge for myself. I became a member at the dinky practice range near my apartment, the one whose owner leaves the door unlocked at all hours. I have budgeted an amount of money to spend each month on enduring the anger and frustration and learning how to toss that ball up to the cup with my club.

It’s working. Two months of sunrise practice later, life is much better. I’ve found ways to re-channel the rage and improve in golf, and can even use those methods in everyday life. I am going to continue to invest in this and use this as a way to leave behind my biggest problem. And I’m not far from taking money to hit a ball ninety feet.

There’s a bald old man at the range every morning, Mr. Doi. He’s even there when I go after school sometimes. The school schedule came out this week, and I have no class on Wednesdays. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him there when I start going Wednesdays at lunch.

This morning, as I toweled off and turned to head home and prepare for work, Mr. Doi stopped me:

Mr. Doi: Mac, going so soon? That was really fast!

Mac: Well, Mr. Doi, some of us have jobs.

Mr. Doi: (laughing) Yeah, that can’t be helped, I suppose. Say, let’s go golfing some time. You got a set of clubs?

Mac: (waving pitching wedge) You’re lookin’ at it.

We’re not going to get out together until summer vacation, but I really believe that it will happen. Seeing Mr. Doi at the range in the mornings is just one more thing that helps me deal with the frustration, and one more thing that makes Kochi home.

Life in Kochi improved dramatically after I moved to a new apartment last April.

Everything about the new place trumps everything about the old place, and the basic difference is that, while both apartments offer a roof over my head, the old one didn’t shelter me from much besides rain. In many ways, it resembled camping every morning and every night.

I spent my first five weeks in Japan without a home. I stayed at my girlfriend’s place in Tokyo and at a hotel in Osaka while learning the Japanese professional baseball league. The teaching job was to begin in late August 2007, and all I knew was that my assignment was somewhere in Kochi Prefecture.

The time came to begin teaching, so the Evil English Company trucked me out to Kochi and put me up in a hotel downtown. I arrived under cover of darkness and was eating whale and jellyfish at a local restaurant before I even knew what the city looked like.

The next morning, a correspondent for Evil English took me to a real estate agency to help me find an apartment. I did most of the talking and told the agent what I was looking for, but I think that Evil English had already prepared a list of options, none of which were fantastic. I was informed that I had until 5 p.m. that day to decide on one.

The agent took me to about eight different places, and each one of them had a dead roach or two somewhere inside the cramped quarters. The wallpaper in the last place was torn to shreds, but I didn’t see any roaches and it was only 200 yards from school, so I took it on the condition that the wallpaper be replaced before I moved in the following week.

I had chosen a second-floor apartment, priced at $350 (2007 dollars) per month for 258 square feet. It had a toilet room, a shower room, a tiny kitchen, a bedroom, and a balcony. Believe it or not, places in Japan get much smaller than that, and I’d easily pay double for that same apartment in Tokyo.

Everything about the apartment was wrong. It faced northeast, which I was actually happy about at first because it meant that the obnoxious morning sun wouldn’t wake me up at 5:00. Then I discovered cycling and actually wanted to wake up early. Then Fall fell and my laundry wouldn’t dry in one day. Then I got awfully sick and learned that the cause was a moldy futon mattress; the sun wasn’t in the room long enough every day to dry it.

I made a note: “Next apartment - south-facing.”

There was a cleaning shop on the first floor when I moved in, but it quickly left and the space stood empty. That made it a great place for drunk passers-by and taxi drivers to stop and relieve themselves on the side of the building knowing that they were unlikely to get caught.

Next door to the south (about ten inches away) was a battered building with corrugated iron siding, and its first floor was a small karaoke bar. To the west side of my building was another small karaoke bar, and there was no end to the cacophony. I struggled to fall asleep every night; the dueling karaoke bar patrons were just getting warmed up at bedtime.

I made a note: “Next apartment - pay attention to what surrounds the building.”

Ten inches out the kitchen window, in the rusty old karaoke building, lived an old couple who loved cats and nothing else. They left bowls of food out for the many stray cats in the area, which is a problem because Japan doesn’t do animal control and the strays have to go somewhere.

The alley cats chose the single, untidy room next door, not only for the food but for the kitty litter that the old couple lovingly provided. Unfortunately, the kitty litter was just strips of newspaper in a cardboard box, a poor substitute and no match for the odor of fresh cat poo.

I made a note: “Next apartment - get a peep at the neighbors.”

My balcony looked right out onto the street leading to and from the high school where I work. It took four minutes to get from my front door to my desk, but I found that I couldn’t leave work behind when I was at home. Students passed by right beneath my nose, and if I happened to be outside hanging laundry, they’d yell at me from their bikes. I lived way too close to work.

Across the narrow street to the east was the back end of a small market, and that doorway was home to more old lady gossip and cackling than I cared to hear. Without fail, on Thursday nights a grizzled old woman brought a mangy dog and tied it up outside, and the mutt whined and yelped at maximum volume until the woman would come back out half an hour later with one or two food items.

I made two notes: “Next apartment - farther away from work, farther away from the street.”

The worst thing about the old apartment was its paper-thin walls. The set-up of the building was such that my bedroom had three outside walls. They offered me absolutely no protection from the elements; it was as though I was always outside but couldn’t enjoy the two best things about being outside - sunlight and fresh air.

Winter hit and the room temperature was about the same as the air outside. I had to sleep with clothes on and I was able to see my breath in the room when I woke up. I’d make a little cave with my blankets and refuse to leave. I’m known for not being the clearest thinker when I’m in bed, and it regularly took an hour for me to bust out of the cave for irrational fear of the cold.

I made a note: “Next apartment - insulated.”

(It doesn’t seem possible in a first-world nation, but insulation is actually very difficult to find in a Japanese apartment building. I often like to say that these people can build robots who can talk to humans and cameras that can fit through train ticket machines, but don’t believe in insulation or clothes dryers. Just different, I guess)

I took my long list of notes to a different real estate agent last January and asked them to find a better apartment for me. I had a map of downtown Kochi and suggested some places that looked convenient, and they went to work on it.

The agent took me to four places, each of which was much better than my digs at the time. I finally settled on my current apartment, a 300 square-footer for $580 a month (2009 dollars).

With the move, I was able to address every problem on my list. I’m a mile away from school. I’m closer to Kochi Station for those baseball trips. My room faces south and overlooks a boat canal, not a street. Only one building neighbors mine, and it’s a noiseless two-story industrial frozen storage unit. There is a little bit of insulation, and a little more space.

It doesn’t stop there, though. The landlords live right across the street, and while they are a bit strange, they keep the place immaculate. The husband designed our building, which is only five years old. He needed a place to keep a few of his eleven vintage European motor vehicles and figured he might as well rent out some rooms above them.

They gave me a break on the deposit, which in Japan includes a month’s rent that the landlord takes as a gift. They didn’t require a guarantor on the lease, which is great because the only guarantor I could have gotten (Evil English) would have disappeared right before move-in. They give me little gifts like laundry soap and towels. They turn a blind eye to tenants bending Japan’s inane trash separating rules. And, bless their hearts, they’ve tried to hook me up with every single, young woman in their other buildings.

I’ve got a fantastic view of a mountain with a temple on its peak out the east window, and the wind passage in the apartment is superb. I didn’t use the A/C once throughout the summer. The balcony is big enough for my laundry machine, my road bike, a month’s worth of unburnable trash, and a mound of sunflower seed shells, and I can still sit out there comfortably and enjoy a beer on warm nights.

I wrote a whole entry on the smallest room in the apartment.

The shower room is made of shiny plastic and has a window in it, so it’s so easy to keep clean. The sink is separate, so I don’t have to hunch over a tiny washbasin in my bare feet to shave like I did in the last place. There’s more storage than I need, but not too much more.

There’s enough space to actually cook in the kitchen, and I can leave my fold-up table in there when I’m sleeping in the bedroom.

The area is very nice, too. My previous neighborhood wasn’t exactly a slum, but it was a rundown area of town. Now, I’m in a very clean quasi-industrial zone. A tiny warehouse across the street produces tubed fishcakes which I always accept with a huge smile before pawning them off at school. Rice Man has a warehouse on the street, and there is a fishing net manufacturer, a discontinued truck part carrier, and a pushcart vendors’ headquarters within a stone’s throw. Interspersed are relatively small apartment buildings and single houses.

The street runs alongside the canal and has no traffic lights on it, so it’s a popular bypass for the nearby national highway during rush hour but is dead quiet at night. I enjoy the long, straight ride to and from home simply for its aesthetic value. It’s much better than streets going every which-way, meaningless signals, and random piles of cat poo.

I love living on the water, and I guess that makes me especially White. The canal has floating docks along both sides, and I take a stroll down on the planks any time I go somewhere on foot. The naked trees in the picture turn into beautiful pink cherry blossoms around the end of March.

It’s truly amazing what a difference it makes to love where you live. I am happy to wake up in my room every day and look forward to returning home after a long haul. I don’t live in a fancy tent any more. I’ve got everything I need and see no reason to live anywhere else as long as I’m single and renting in Kochi.

Postscript: I went by the old apartment the other day and saw that the cleaning shop has been turned into an izakaya, which is a restaurant that serves small dishes and alcohol. But mostly alcohol. Three-way karaoke tournaments, anyone?