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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 me \u2014 getting 20% or about $120 a day.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> of sorts, to save up money to achieve my real goal: moving to Japan.<\/p>\n I moved to Japan in 2001<\/p>\n Toyokuni Shrine, a few blocks from Cole’s Kyoto apartment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Courtesy of Ryan Cole<\/p>\n 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<\/a> and visited South America \u2014 Asia seemed like the next spot I should hit.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> was a bit like that.<\/p>\n I discovered the US wasn’t 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n For example, when I lived there more than 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.<\/p>\n I felt welcomed in Japan, but there was a limit<\/p>\n A famous rock garden at Ry\u014dan-ji temple in Kyoto.\u00a0<\/p>\n Courtesy of Ryan Cole<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n One family invited me over every Sunday to teach their children English for an hour, paying about $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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> called Daiichi that still used the same unwashed bowls from the 1600s, each meal adding seasoning.<\/p>\n 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 it’s considered taboo outside this custom. If I made the same mistake, no one would comment.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I cherish the five years I lived in Japan<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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