From Death Row to House Pet

This is the story of Hank, who is not only a Fukushima survivor, but also a hokenjo (public animal shelter) survivor.

Hank was found by Japan Cat Network right before the hokenjo was going to gas him and a group of other animals, most of whom had collars still on, all of whom did nothing to deserve it.

He was a very shy boy, who made a best friend at the shelter while they fought for their lives against a terrible disease known as Parvo. Nearly 70% of cats their age who get it, die, but against all odds, they both pulled through it and became inseparable.Their close nature led us to later rename them Hank and Dean, after the Venture Brothers

Hank is orange, Dean is gray

But neither of them trusted people, and why should they? First they were both left to die on the streets, and one was almost killed in a gas chamber, what had people ever done for them?


Enter my house:
We decided that we were up to the challenge of socializing them, and took them on the 7hr trip home at the end of our visit in October.
It took some getting used to for them, and around a week for them to even emerge from under the couch, but over the course of the 3 months they lived with us, they not only learned to trust people, but both of them would beg and cry for you to scoop them into your arms.

Every night they were curled up in bed with us, and when we got home from work, they were right at the door, waiting.  This was great, but they were still just our fosters, not our pets. We both knew our apartment could never be their forever home, and they could never be ours, and worst of all, we knew come winter break, we would have to return them to JCN.



Enter an old friend in the USA:
Every now and then, I would take a photo of them, and post it to facebook to share with everyone, never thinking anything else of it. Just wanted to share their cuteness.
Then, out of nowhere I get a sort of joking message from a friend back in the states claiming she has simply fallen in love with the boys and wants them for Christmas. We begin to talk in depth, and it becomes more and more obvious to both of us that this isn't really a joke, she has honestly fallen in love with them through the power of those photos.
As luck would have it, we were heading to Virginia for winter vacation, so we talked it over with the shelter and it was agreed, Hank and Dean would go to America! The only catch, ANA, whom we had already purchased tickets through, are terrible with pets, and wanted to charge us 60,000Y ($650) to get them to DC, and my friend simply did not have that kind of money.

Enter, the kindness of strangers:
On a whim, I began a ChipIn page and spread it amongst all our friends and shelter groups, and before even one day had passed, the money was all there.  With messages saying things like "Merry Christmas" and "gambate," there it was.

So come December 22nd 2011, Hank and Dean went with us, from Yamanashi-ken to Narita airport, and then to the other side of the world, Washington DC

bathroom break at Narita

They endured a 4hr bus ride, a vet checkup to be deemed quarantine ready, and a 16hr flight without any food, water or a litter box. But you could never tell by looking at them, the whole time they only cried whenever they couldn't see each other.

At the end of the journey, there was my friend, waiting to pick them up and love them for the rest of their lives. And while it was so wonderful, I could not help but cry, because these two magnificent creatures had not only endured so much their entire lives while waiting for this day to come, but they had done so without either one ever complaining.

If you would like to help animals like Hank and Dean, please go to: http://japancatnet.com/

The Trek From Hell

Moments after leaving the Narita airport to begin our trek to our works office to get directions to the training site, it dawned on both of us that someone (me) had packed way too much and that this was going to be a very tiresome journey. Thankfully though, the start of our trip was a 90min bus ride to Omiya, followed by some very nice HS students helping us find the correct route to Borderlink, while giggling every time I told Debu to shut up about how I packed to much, so that was not too horrible. On top of that, Debu, being the amazing boyfriend that he is, carried my biggest bag for me.
Anyways, after a grueling trek to the office, we came to discover that that grid of Omiya was in the middle of a black out,* so I got to watch the luggage downstairs while Debu trekked up the pitch black stairwell in search of directions... it wasn't so bad waiting though, because during that time I got to see a bunch of Japanese office workers making ghost sounds and waving their flashlights around, which was quite adorable. Also during my time as luggage watcher, another man with a giant backpack came up and asked if I was there for Boderlink, and it turned out this random man was a fellow ALT who had actually been here when the quake happened and had decided to stay to continue his contract as a teacher, which I highly commend him for, since so many fled. He told me about how it was one of the scariest moments in his life, and how even though he was far away in Tokyo, it was still strong enough to give him horrible motion sickness, but the worst he said was the constant aftershocks that occurred.... the ground seemed to never stop shaking. Since he was also heading to the training facility, the three of us decided to travel together, and thank God for that too, because he helped carry my immense amount of luggage, and I am pretty sure that if it had just been the two of us, we would have never made it.

And so the trek from Hell truly began... for starters, we found out that to get to the training facility, we would have to travel back to the station that we had originally arrived at (oh joy), and then make two separate train transfers. This journey was made into an even larger issue due to the power conservations, which meant all elevators and escalators were turned off, and Japanese train stations have many, many, stairs in them, oh and by the way, two of our suitcases weighed about 70lbs each. Yea, this was going to be good. Thankfully, there were quite a few people who went far out of their way to help us get to our destination, including an engineer who was learning English to go to Europe and get women, and a 60yr old man who randomly grabbed my 70lb suitcase and just lugged it up a flight of stairs for me, but even with these advantages, it was still incredibly tough going, and it took multiple hours to make our way from Omiya to Kazo for training. By the time the three of reached our end destination, we were exhausted, sweaty and about ready to collapse. Needless to say, I bought the guys dinner as a thank you, and we celebrated the end of our long day at a local Okonomiyaki** place and a few cold beers.


*A lot of areas in Japan have been doing scheduled rolling black outs to try and conserve as much energy as possible after the disasters so that it can instead go to more necessary things then elevators and flashy billboards

**an Okonomiyaki is basically a Japanese pancake with anything you want mixed into it, for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okonomiyaki

The Big Move

It has been a little over a week since David (whom I know sometimes call Debu thanks to a joke during training), and it has been so incredibly hectic that I have barely even had the time to sit down and tell my loved ones that we are alive, let alone write an entry trying to detail everything, but now that we have moved into our apartment, there's a bit of down time... so I shall try my best to sum up what has occurred the past week and the amazing things we have seen.

So it all began last Monday morning around 4:30am (EST) when we arrived at the airport to begin or trek across the world... the airport portions were quite uneventful, minus the TSA breaking a zipper on my bad and Debu being lucky enough to manage to sleep most of the time. The flight to Japan was long, and mostly boring, Debu spent a good portion of the flight doing a combination of sleeping and talking to the 4yr old Japanese girl sitting in front of him, while I attempted to sleep and watched many in-flight movies. Due to the nuclear issues occurring in Japan, we had to take a slightly different course, which ended up being pretty cool since we flew over Alaska and Russia   

Then finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we were actually in Japan! The only highlight there was that I left a bag behind in luggage claim by accident and when I went to retrieve it, there was literally 10 guards protecting it and they were all incredibly polite and quite concerned, this was mostly hilarious because Debu and I had been joking for weeks that if someone dropped anything in the street that a policemen would be standing guard until the owner eventually came to retrieve it. This had me laughing hysterically for quite awhile since it was just so funny to see an entire station of people working to guard one single bag.


Now, I shall leave you with a view of Fuji-san from our apartment