This is my yellow jacket.
Photo by Lisa Wynne 2020
I found her in my local branch of Hard-Off (yes, real name), the Japanese recycle store where you can “sell” your old things for nominal yen and buy second hand clothing, electronics, and just about anything for reasonable yen. The charity shop donation-for-resell model we are used to in Ireland doesn’t exist in Japan, but there are many recycle/junk stores of varying quality and value and I furnished my life almost completely from them.
It was my first winter living in northeastern Japan, and snow had already blanketed the town. Living near the mountains, this also presented my first ever chance to try snow sports and after some limited success with borrowed or rented gear, I was keen to get stuck in. I had an inkling that if I could love snowboarding, the freezing, dark, and heavily snowbound winter would be survivable, even perhaps enjoyable (reader, it was, because I did).
This Hard-Off curated a small rail of snow wear jammed in the sports corner alongside jumbled skis and snowboards. The store was near my regular supermarket, and adjoined a 100-Yen shop (which are like pound/euro shops, but much better quality), so I regularly went in for a browse. I had been keeping an eye on that rail over increasingly wintry weeks, when that day, this enormous mass of yellow caught my eye. The bulky mass was made up of my jacket, a matching pair of salopettes, and a jazzy purple liner fleece, which attached inside the jacket with press studs at the neck and cuffs. I was in love. The jacket fit, the salopettes looked dubious, but the whole set was less than twenty quid; in Hard-Off price is set mostly by brand and tends to descend with age, and these were far from current. I couldn’t have been happier that they were considered bargain-basement, I thought it was the coolest jacket ever! Look at all those pockets!!
Ultimately, the salopettes never fit, and though the fleece liner served me for four winters in Japan, it did not make the cut when I packed up and moved back to Ireland in a series of cardboard boxes, two suitcases, and a board-bag. My jacket has done a thousand runs on my snowboard (also found second hand!), it’s been with me on summertime Mount Fuji and the autumnal beauty of the mountains of Yamagata, it’s stashed bars of chocolate for sharing with friends on ski lifts, and kept my chapstick handy in sunshine and biting winds. And it’s still here!
Photos (L-R in rows) Jessica Buntrock, Mandie Lee, Abbey Cameron x2, and Róisín Benson, 2015-2020.
Embroidery by me (Saturn Cottage Industries)
Text adapted from this Instagram post, contributing to the VOICE Ireland #WornWear campaign for #ReuseMonth October 2020.