I realised the other day that I may have given Ako a bit of a bad wrap on here. I certainly don't think I've bashed it, but I don't think I've ever really said much good about it either. So I want to clear things up! Bottom line is that I like Ako a lot, maybe even as much as Perth. With that said, does Ako have its bad points? Definitely, and I'll start there before moving on to why I still like it. The three main problems I have with Ako are that a) it's a relatively long way away from any big cities (75 minutes from Kobe and Okayama, 105 minutes from Osaka, 135 minutes from Kyoto), b) there don't seem to be many people my own age here and it's full of old people and c) although people are quite friendly, the community is quite close knit and hard to break into.

I guess they seem like pretty big problems, and at the start of my time here, they were. I didn't know anyone, couldn't get to know anyone and had nothing to do. Every weekday I just sat in my house and every weekend I got out of Ako on the first train I could. Not really a healthy way to live, and a constant source of stress. Thankfully, though, things changed over time. I began meeting new people and as my Japanese improved, it became easier to talk to them, hang out with them and meet their friends and hence more people. As I got more involved in the community, I found I had more things to do, which meant that I was looking to leave Ako less. Naturally the distance problem is insurmountable, but with enough to do in Ako, most of the stress related to that fades away.

Hehe, that's kind of ironic. I've said what I don't like about Ako but have found reasons why the bad things aren't really bad any more after all. Which is almost as good as saying the good things :) Speaking of which, here are some of the good things about Ako. It has a big enough population to support a great range of shops, cafes, restaurants and bars, afford you some privacy and give you a great range of interesting people to meet. It's inaka enough, however, to have that friendly, strong community feel to it and be extremely peaceful. Ako SHS, where I teach, is a wonderful school where the students are very well behaved and teaching is easy and fun. It has a lot of interesting history including being an Edo salt town and of course the 47 Loyal Samurai story. It is extremely beautiful thanks to good city planning and management, having mountains all around and being right on the coast. It's small enough to allow you to get around almost entirely by bicycle. There's plenty to do thanks to the excellent natural resources (beaches, parks, mountains, onsens) and other recreation facilities (sentos, karaoke, sports clubs and so on). It's on the Sanyo train line that is a fast, cheap and convenient way to get to those far away big cities. My house is decent. There's a small but friendly gaijin population. There's a university so lo and behold there are young people living here (I just have to find where they hang out!) There are 2 large hospitals so health care is excellent. And then there's a whole lot of little things that I could write on about for ages but can all pretty much be summed up under 'atmosphere' and 'day to day life'.

So all in all, Ako is a pretty rocking place. There's so much good about it, and if it was nearer Kobe, it would be nigh on a perfect place to live. I suppose at the start the difficulties I faced pretty much towered over even the long list of good things. When you have no friends in a town, are far from friends you do have and are finding it hard to meet people locally because you don't know your way around and can't speak their language very well, even the best of places is going to suck. I guess that's why it's all about toughing it out. Many people said to me how great Ako was and I believed them, even though I didn't feel particularly good at the time.

As I said before, I'm finally beginning to feel like I belong here and am getting a lot happier. For example, on most weeknights, I can actually find things to do. Japanese class, badminton, friends to see at local bars and so on. I feel like things are going to keep getting better too. As my Japanese improves and my friendships with people get stronger, I'll meet more people and then their friends and so on, until hopefully I know enough people to always have something to do or someone to see if I want to. One thing that should really help here is an extremely random thing that happened a few weeks ago.

My friend Darrell back home messaged me to let me know that one of his colleagues used to live and work in Ako and was coming across for a visit. Darrell passed my details on to him and he got in touch with me. I found out that he'd actually been a lot more involved in Ako than I thought he had been, mainly because he came as part of the sister city relationship between Rockingham and Ako rather than as a JET. He'd worked at Jusco and gotten very into the community and the sister city relationship. We emailed back and forth and he very kindly offered to help me out with finding anything in particular that I wanted to do in the community - kendo, judo, ikebana, sado and so on. He also said he'd introduce me to his former host mother, who is very active in the community. This was really exciting for me as it represents a great chance to get more involved in the community and meet some great new people, which I'm always up for doing.