The Trail of Tears

miniT fever, catch it!

2008-02-23T11:16:00.014+09:00

While I was teaching in Hamamatsu, I sometimes tutored individual students after school, typically in English conversation or composition in preparation for entrance exams. One day, I was approached by a homeroom teacher and asked to help one of her students. This girl also wanted English conversation lessons, but not for school. No, this girl needed to learn English because she was planning on moving to the US to become a rock star. I thought that was audaciously wrongheaded, and immediately told the teacher to have the girl meet me that day after class.

The girl that scuttled up to my desk that day was a second year named Kyoko that I had taught the year previously. Once I saw her I remembered her as the girl that did not speak or volunteer once in class the whole year only to suddenly deliver a flawless speech about her love of music for the final oral test.

We walk downstairs, find an empty classroom, and start talking. I am trying to be as delicate as I can, since she looks to be in danger of wilting under my gaze and going into a swoon at any moment. I ask her why she wants to practice English, and sure enough, she lets out that she's on her way to the States and, presumably, future rock godhead. She confesses to me that she already sings and plays lead guitar in a band called "miniT" with her two girlfriends. Tentatively - since I'm so excited at the idea of a student having a dream larger than working in a company that I'm hesistant to crush it, however incredibly absurd it may be - I ask her a series of questions: Does she realize she can't just go and stay in the US? How does she plan on getting a visa? Where will she live? Where in the US does she want to go? She is troubled. She doesn't seem to have thought very hard about any of these things. But, of course, she's just a 15 year old girl; she doesn't have to. I leave that for the next time, and instead we talk about music for an hour or so and call it a day.

We continue to meet at least twice a week after school each week. She becomes more comfortable talking to me - though never loses her nervousness completely, and, charmingly, always walks a step or so behind me while we walk downstairs to the classroom for each lesson, too self-conscious to walk together with me in front of other students. Gradually I convince her that the idea of just arriving in the US to instant stardom is a bit farfetched, but that if she's really serious about going, the easiest way is to go to college and then study abroad. That way, she'll be able to go on a student visa and see if she actually wants to live in the real country, not the US she holds in her mind pieced together from pop culture and popular prejudice. I point out that college is also a great place to meet other musically-inclined people, and if she wanted to form or join a band in the US that may be the easiest road. Finally, I make the obvious economic sale for college obliquely, asserting that realistically, only the most successful artists actually make enough money to survive on music alone, so she'll just have to do work of some kind. The difference is that as a college graduate she'll be able to do something easier and better-paid than waiting tables in between tours. I leaven these laudable yet leaden life lessons with lots of cds I burn for her from music on my computer. She proves receptive both to my advice and my musical taste.

A few months later is the school festival, and miniT is headlining the concert portion in the gym. Kyoko's band is playing 3 covers of American pop punk hits (some Avril Lavigne songs) along with one original composition, called "Let's Diet", that Kyoko wrote in English and asked me to correct for her, which I did to the best of my ability. Meaning I did so with the aim in mind of not making it into idiomatic English, since it would then lose the charm of phrases that no native speaker would think of. She also asked me for the specific pronunciations of different words in the songs, and then came to me constantly in the days leading up to the festival to double check her pronunciation and make sure she hadn't gotten it mixed up in the interim between meetings with me. There's actually a video on YouTube of her band performing this song in concert, along with subtitles:

miniT - "Let's Diet"

Needless to say, miniT was a big hit at the school festival. While I was pleasantly surprised by how capable and tight they performed their songs, I thought their problem was the material they were covering or being inspired by. Avril Lavigne and Hilary Duff aren't exactly fertile ground - in a musical sense, at least - and unlikely to inspire anything more than more cynical attempts to co-opt punk culture. What's strange or sad about Japan is that listening to Avril kind of would be punk there, since even American pop is quite hip compared to the insanely over-produced and under-performed sugar slurry of J-Pop. At least Avril songs have actual instruments in them.

For comparison's sake, here's a song by SMAP, the most popular pop group in Japan for like the last decade, none of whose members can actually sing alone, let alone together:

SMAP - "Sekai ni Hitsotsu dake no Hana" (The Only Flower in the World)

You'd think if you got 5 guys in a group together, you'd practice harmonizing, or at least, introduce the concept. But no.

There's also Ayumi Hamasaki, the "Empress of Pop," who has sold 50 million records and had a #1 single every year for 10 years, but does not look or sing like a human being. Or Def Tech, this unbelievably terrible rap group that had a hit with this one song for what seemed like the duration of my time in the JET Programme:

Def Tech - "My Way"

Shudder... I would often tell my students that if they didn't hate that song passionately they clearly needed to study more English to improve their listening comprehension.

Anyway, my point was that in comparison to this kind of "music," Avril is pretty fantastic. But like I told Kyoko, considering she's playing her own guitar, writing songs, and performing without intense vocal modulation, she's already cooler than Avril, so she should aim a little higher. I give her cds by bands that might be a little more suited for her goals - like Sleater-Kinney, an all-girl rock group - along with bios of each of the bands. Later, she tells me which songs she liked on each album and we talk about why, which leads to more recommendations. One day, she tells me she really liked the Pixies album Surfer Rosa, and it occurs to me that the song "Gigantic" is actually one of the few songs on the album sung by the female bassist. I do a quick search online, find the guitar and bass tabs, print them out, and pass them along to Kyoko.

Months later, after I've left the school and moved to Tokyo, I get a DVD in the mail with a note from Kyoko. She tells me the DVD is a recording of a recent concert in Hamamatsu, and I'm to specifically watch the part that starts about 9 minutes in.

And there I find miniT performing "Gigantic" by the Pixies:

In her note, she apologizes for the poor performance, saying it was their first try at playing it live. She also tells me that she's studying hard now so she can attend college next year and be able to study abroad in the US. I'm hoping the next time I see Kyoko will be playing a gig somewhere in LA or NYC, and though I'd love to see her play the Pixies live, I'm looking forward more to seeing what she's been inspired to write on her own.

"Hey, sloth! Get up! Today is Valentine's Day!"

2008-02-15T23:37:00.002+09:00

Over the summer, a student of mine was in Santa Barbara for an exchange program for three weeks. I invited her and her friends down to my house for a weekend (actually, I invited her and she asked if she could bring a friend, a single friend that somehow became 2 friends, likely thanks to Japanese's lack of plural signifiers for nouns, which leads to students making a lot of mistakes when producing English sentences, though typically they do not lead to the production of additional human beings).

I thought since Valentine's Day has just passed us by, I'd post the picture book she gave me that her older sister wrote and illustrated. I laughed until I cried as I read it and was yet inconsolable for some time afterwards. Her family apparently has some sort of strange obsession with sloths. They think they are adorable, despite the fact that the sloth is really one of the most singularly unattractive of animals in that kingdom. Of course, their depictions of sloths - which extend beyond drawings to actual miniature sloth dolls and even, in December, a Santa Sloth wreath - bear very little resemblance to the actual animal, so their image of the sloth is quite cute. I've scanned in pictures of the book and transcribed the dialogue below:

Boy: "Hey, sloth! Get up! Today is Valentine's Day!"
Sloth: "Good morning... Why are you so..."
Boy: "Oh, hurry up! Let's make a chocolate cake."
A boy took sloth to kitchen.
Sloth: "Why do you want to make a cake?"
Boy: "Well... I want to give it to a woman who I love."
Sloth: "Wow! You are precocious."

Then, they began to cook.
completion!
Sloth: "I'll taste the cake to see if it is sweet enough."
Boy: ...Wow... Yummy!!"
Sloth: "Really? Now, I'll taste it, too. ...Oh, yummy!"

They kept eating the cake.
...so they left little cake.
? (both Sloth and Boy, perhaps): "Oh no!!"
Mrs. Slow came there.
Mrs. Slow: "Hello. Are you making something sweet?"
"It smells good," she said.

The boy turn to red.
Boy: "Sorry... I want you to eat that... But..."
Sloth: "Mrs. Slow, would you like to eat this cake?"
Sloth invited her to eat the cake.
Mrs. Slow: "Oh, please. Thank you."
Sloth: "Boy and me made this cake.
Boy said, 'Today is Valentine's Day. I'll give it to a woman who I love.' However, we tasted it too much."
Sloth: "Wow! Sloth! You shouldn't have told her it!"

Mrs. Slow smiled.
And kissed the boy.
Mrs. Slow: "It's so sweet. Thank you."
Sloth felt, "Saint Valentine's Day is a very very sweet day."

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel (pt.2)

2008-02-05T00:55:00.001+09:00

This was actually written a while back, but I finally finished the last part so I could post it already.

Previously I wrote about the Japanese national anthem "Kimi ga yo" and how its adoption as an anthem seems to stand at odds with the goal of a modern and democratic Japan.

I was thinking about the song myself after one of the many school assemblies at which one is required to sing the song - where I typically moan along to the melody more than mouth the lyrics of the song itself (actually this is what I do with the school song too, since I don't know the words except for the last line where you say the name of the school, so it's just like "aaahhhhhh owwwwwaaaa ohhhhhhh ohhhhhaaaaaa ahhhhhhh...Hamamatsu Minami Koukou~"). I had English club later that day, so I asked a couple kids what they think about when they sing the anthem.

Student A: "What do you mean?"
Me: "Well, considering what the song is about, how do you feel when you sing it?"
Student A: "What do you mean, 'what the song is about'?"
Me: "You know, since it's all about the Emperor."
(Turns to another student next to him)
Student A: "Wait, it's about the Emperor?!"
Student B: "Yeah...something like that."
Me: (Incredulously) "Are you seriously telling me you don't know what the song is about? You've been singing the song at every school event for the last 10 years!"
Student A: (Whining) "But I learned it when I was like in first grade, so I didn't know what it was about!"
Me: "Are you arguing you still have the mind of a first grader?"
Student A: "No, but..."
Me: "...you just have no concern for the words coming out of your mouth? Clearly."

After this conversation - and telling the kid to go home and read a damn book - I decided I had to create a lesson about this topic for the next club meeting. At first I was simply going to talk about problems with the Japanese anthem, but I realized that direct censure of another person's culture typically does nothing but solidify opposition, even from those who might otherwise agree. People become defensive at the very idea of an American giving them a lecture, the boundaries between us harden, and the possibility for change or reconciliation approaches zero. Japanese people don't want to hear a lecture from an American any more than I want to hear one from some German on a train.

So I thought of a more roundabout way of addressing the topic: I began club that day by playing "Kimi ga yo" on a stereo, then wrote up on the board and explained the definition of national anthem: "a patriotic song officially adopted by a country as an expression of national identity." Each student received a copy of both the Japanese lyrics for the Japanese anthem and their English translation. I adopted a Socratic method, asking students what the anthem was about, what sort of tone it has, what sort of feeling it invoked in them, and why this particular song might have been chosen as the national anthem to begin with. Then, I split students into pairs and distributed to each group two of the English translations of the lyrics of the national anthems of some 15 or so countries - Canada, China, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Libya, Mexico, Norway, Palestine, The Philippines, South Africa, South Korea - without any country named affixed. I wrote the list of countries on the board and asked students to read the lyrics and try to guess which country their anthems came from.

This proved to be far, far more difficult for them to figure out than I would have ever imagined. Of course, I thought some countries may have proved difficult - Norway or Switzerland, for example - but though I had removed the names of the countries themselves from both the title and anywhere it might have appeared in the song itself, some lyrics contained hints so glaring I worried some students might find the thing easy to the point of boredom.

But my students really have a way of surprising you with their ignorance.

One girl calls me over and laments that no matter how many times she reads her set of lyrics, she just cannot figure out what country it is. I myself don't have all the songs and countries memorized, of course, but I take one look at the page and point out the second line: "Let our flesh and blood become our new Great Wall!" I point at it and give her a significant look. She frowns and looks down - in embarrassment, I think, which fills me with a blend of satisfaction and relief - but then turns her head back to me again and says, "e? wakaranai!" (Wha? I don't get it!) I take a pen out of my pocket and underline the words "Great Wall" and raise my eyebrows at her. She stares at me blankly. It takes a few minutes more - during which I am reduced to pantomiming arriving at and climbing a large wall - for her to figure it out.

Another student raises his hand and flags me down. He and his partner are completely baffled by one of their songs. I see which one it is and have to collect myself for a second because it is by far the easiest one. Here is the anthem that left these two kids stumped (where * is the name of the country appearing in the song):

"O! Dispenser of *****'s destiny, thou art the ruler of the minds of all people
Thy name rouses the hearts of Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, the Maratha country,
in the Dravida country, Utkala and Bengal;
It echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas,
it mingles in the rhapsodies of the pure waters of Jamuna and the Ganges.
They chant only thy name.
They seek only thy auspicious blessings.
They sing only the glory of thy victory.
The salvation of all people waits in thy hands,
O! Dispenser of *****'s destiny, thou art the ruler of the minds of all people
Victory to thee, Victory to thee,
Victory, Victory, Victory, Victory to thee."

Can you guess the country? I've bolded the key words above, to help you out. If you were this particular boy, you would guess, "America?" And you would then be ruthlessly castigated by me regarding your disconcertingly imprecise knowledge of world geography ("The Himalayas are in America, huh? The Himalayas stretch across seven countries, but America is most certainly not one of them. Are you even familiar with the continents of the world?"). Incidentally, this is the same boy - Student A above - that didn't know the Japanese anthem was about the emperor. He's a straight-A student, as far as that goes.

In the end, however painful the process proved to be, all the students were able to guess the anthems (many were aided greatly through the process of elimination). I then asked them to read over their anthems again and, as they did initially with the Japanese anthem, consider the tone of the songs, how they felt reading each, and think a bit about why these might have been chosen as a national anthem, in light of what they might know about the country in question.

Each group then shared their opinions and thoughts about their assigned anthems. It became an interesting way to explore and fill gaps in their knowledge about the outside world (rather than simply ridicule or lament them, as I am wont to do). One group read the Palestinian anthem (an angry refusal to surrender a homeland) while another read the Israeli anthem (a paean of joy and relief at homecoming), which segued easily into a discussion of the seemingly intractable nature of the conflict. Several students remarked on the violence of some anthems, while others noticed the absence of such in others; typically this aligned quite well with the policy of the country in question. The last pair brought up the parts of the Filipino anthem - which took its current form after WWII - about resisting invaders, at which point I couldn't help but ask the students who that line might refer to. Many were shocked to consider that most Filipinos singing the anthem would be thinking about Japan when they come to that line.

This last bit lead nicely back to my final point. I directed their attention once more to the definition of anthem written on the board: "a patriotic song officially adopted by a country as an expression of national identity." As I explained, the lyrics of national anthems are often inspired by specific points in a country's history - take the US anthem, which Francis Scott Key wrote after watching the bombardment of Ft. Henry by the British during the War of 1812. Sometimes, like in the case of the Japanese anthem, they are adopted from poetry or existing folk-songs. In that sense, anthems arise somewhat spontaneously as expressions of national feeling. However, they do not become the official national anthem spontaneously; it is a deliberate decision by the country's government. As the definition says, they are adopted as an "expression of national identity," and so their adoption can be viewed as one way of establishing or even creating an identity.

That day I left the students with two questions: "Does "Kimi ga yo" express your national identity?" and " What does it mean that it was chosen to do so?"

(Later, many replied on the English club blog with their reactions to that day's lesson. Some can be seen here, here, and here.)

Art and Cheese steaks

2007-12-18T13:10:00.000+09:00

One of the teachers I worked with at Hamamatsu Minami paints in his free time. It often seemed like several of the teachers had quite interesting personal lives that they never revealed to students - or even other teachers; this teacher a painter, another a jazz guitarist, another the head of the Japanese fan club for a Korean actor (admittedly, I find that one less cool than amusing. Incidentally, these teachers that have something outside of work that gives their lives meaning seem to be both better teachers as well as more agreeable people in general). I only found out about this teacher's painting after asking him specifically about what he had done one weekend, and he admitted it only furtively. Later he told me he paints regularly and has exhibitions in the city, and his wife is artistic as well: a published poet!

A couple weeks ago I received an invitation in the mail for an exhibition by his collective put on by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, so I went to check it out. As it turns out, one of his three paintings won an award in the exhibition. I walked through and found all three, which were titled Expectation 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Frankly, I was shocked. The paintings are of a series that seem to be following the pregnancy of his wife (hence, "Expectation"), who had just recently given birth to a baby girl, their first child. This teacher is an unfailingly genial guy, and it often seems like there's a goofy kid stuck in that 40-year-old frame, and to be honest, I wasn't expecting such a naked (pun not intended) display of emotional depth. The light and color change across the series as the child in the woman grows, while images of chromosomes and a fetus are arranged in a sort of cosmic backdrop (Expectation 2 is the above picture, and Expectation can be seen here). I left the exhibit pleasantly surprised to see a new side of a friend, and with a renewed appreciation for how little others may reveal to us about their inner lives. (You can see a selection of his paintings here, at his personal site)

And as I left the exhibition, I noticed the showing in the main gallery: Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Impressionism and Modern Art! This was surreal, since I had seen all these paintings about five years previously with my aunt, uncle, and cousin while visiting them in Philadelphia. To stumble upon them again in the middle of Tokyo was a treat.

And speaking of treats, this is what I found on my way outside the gates of the museum: Philly cheese steaks! A small van was parked right outside the entrance to the exhibit grilling up steaks for any takers, sponsored by the museum and thus, for all intents and purposes, an extension of the actual exhibit. A large poster alongside relayed the story of the steak for inquisitive Japanese minds: apparently it was developed by an Italian guy who sold hot dogs to taxi drivers in the 1930's. One day he tried thinly sliced meat along with grilled onions and cheese in a sandwich and the Philly Cheese Steak was born.

The last part of this surprisingly long and involved message on steaks - much longer and more prominent than the placards you might find regarding paintings in the museum - contains this final plea: "We sell these steaks to match the exhibit from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exquisite flavor combination of steak and cheese will call forth the spirit of Philadelphia to you, so please enjoy one in remembrance of your appreciation for the art here today."

Apparently, you can't really appreciate art from Philadelphia without a giant Philly sandwich jammed down your gullet. And that's not just my opinion, that's coming right from the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Enola Gay

2007-11-14T00:26:00.000+09:00

Recently, an obituary was published in the New York Times for Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the commander and pilot of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Naturally, this provoked another discussion of the morality of dropping the atomic bomb itself. Two extreme examples and a more moderate opinion can be summarized in the story in the link below:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/blow-up/

After reading this, I decided to write a reply, which I'll reproduce here:

Many people like to argue that if Eisenhower himself thought the dropping of the nuclear bombs was unnecessary, dropping them couldn't have been necessary. He has, after all, been quoted as saying the war would have ended shortly afterwards, even without the nuclear bombs. However, he based this on the assumption that conventional bombing - i.e., the continued firebombing of Tokyo and other major cities - would continue. The firebombing of Tokyo had claimed more lives - perhaps a 100,000 people in one night - than any individual atomic bombing, and continued firebombing (of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe) would have no doubt killed more Japanese civilians than the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Incidentally, firebombing - the indiscriminate bombing of civilians as a part of a campaign of “total war” - has also been considered a kind of war crime).

Eisenhower wasn’t naive enough to believe that the Japanese government, which had manifestly no interest in protecting the lives of individual citizens (since it considered them only important in their capacity to devote themselves to the Imperial house), could be expected to surrender based on the rational assessment that they could never win the war. The most reasonable politicians in Japan were able to make the assessment that they could never fully defeat the US before the war had even begun, and were simply hoping that the initial attack and advance of Japanese troops would succeed in just leading to a kind of truce wherein Japan would have free reign in Asia. But the militarists and the Emperor had beliefs about the strength of Japan and its inevitable victory unconstrained by any sort of rationality, and they were the ones to make the final decision about surrender. They believed that the Japanese would triumph based on superior spirit alone. And the only thing that made them reconsider surrender was the atomic bomb, since it was a weapon no amount of spirit could conquer.

There’s no doubt that many people in Japan, citizens and some politicians alike, wanted the war to end. Ascribing the spirit of “bushido” to all the people in Japan is a bit ridiculous, and I wouldn’t argue that all the millions of citizens would really have voluntarily gone out with their sticks pointed at our soldiers. Unfortunately, they were not in any sort of position to influence the government, barring some sort of revolution - which would require the kind of popular uprising and resistance against the government unthinkable then (and now, really) in Japan. Those ordinary people would likely have been compelled to fight - as were the citizens in Okinawa - or if unwilling, to commit suicide, by the true believers. And some people, kids who had been sufficiently propagandized, for example, would have done it willingly (this I know directly from my friend, who was a teenager at the time, and though now an incredibly genial and bright old man who went to the best engineering university in Japan, confessed he was convinced his duty at the time was to fight Americans to the last with a spear).

For me, living in Japan for the last few years, this has been a common topic. I’ve visited Hiroshima and wept at the pictures and exhibits in the Atomic Bomb Museum. As a high school teacher, it was impossible to look at the tattered remains of a schoolgirl’s uniform or a boy’s lunch box and not immediately connect this massive killing with the kids I knew and saw everyday. It’s much more difficult to try to justify the death of one person in that situation - not to mention thousands. But I feel like the decision to bomb Japan is a decision very difficult to take outside of the context of the world at that time. At the time, the US was convinced that Japan would simply refuse to surrender without a ground invasion. Plans were drawn up for the invasion, and hundreds of thousands on both sides expected to die. Our knowledge of Japan came from the words of the Japanese government, which promised a “hundred million bamboo spears” awaiting us. Having seen the kamikaze and the defense of Iwojima, we could believe them. Inside the country itself, the military and the Emperor were intent on continuing the war. The military wanted to fight until the end. The Emperor, though recognizing the impossibility of absolute victory, had rejected demands for surrender, as he was determined to wrest a promise from the Allies of protected sovereignty. Obviously, this was not something the Allies were willing to offer (would we have offered to allow Hitler to remain in power?). There may have been widespread discontent in the citizenry and in parts of the government, but not any from the people who actually would determine the country’s policy.

The decision was therefore made to drop the bombs. The bombs were dropped, the rational Japanese were able to convince the militarists to give up (though, as noted above, some still attempted to stage an uprising and take control of the Imperial palace), and the war came to an end. The bombs were a terrible thing to do to another country, but in a terrible time, a justifiable decision. With the belief that hundreds of thousands of Americans would have died, it was justifiable. It could also be justified to argue that millions of Japanese would have died. To argue that the atomic bombing may not have been necessary because the Soviet Union would enter Japan, or that conventional bombing would have eventually forced them to give up, or that unseen political turmoil in Japan would have rendered the bombing unnecessary, is analysis after the fact, and not information available at the time. To appeal to the rationality of Japan is to apply the current situation of modern democratic Japan or a peaceful world to a time and place that was neither democratic nor peaceful. People in Japan often seem to talk about the atomic bombings as though they just appeared out of nowhere, rather than as the final part of a long world war, for which Japan bore a large responsibility. That’s not to say that Pearl Harbor justified doing anything we wanted, but that the bombing should not be taken out of the context of the greater war. Terrible decisions had to be made in terrible times.

For me, it’s much more instructive to think about how the war started, and how it became so easy for us to kill each other. Neither side had a clear sense of the other as a similar human being before the war, and this was only further bolstered by the wartime propaganda necessary to make killing easier. Belief in Japan in the innate racial purity and superiority of Japanese made it possible to do terrible and insane things, and contributed to the refusal to acknowledge defeat. The breakdown of democracy as it existed in Taisho period Japan and the investment of all national power in the military and the Emperor was something that could not have happened without the involvement, or at least, inaction of the Japanese populace. Could Japan have attacked so easily if it were a true democracy at the time? Could we have so easily firebombed Tokyo and Dresden if we hadn’t vilified the people of both countries? Why are we able to be so cavalier about the deaths of thousands of people from bombing? These are the types of questions that are extraordinarily relevant, and we’re likely to learn a lot more and prevent similar tragedies in the future by thinking about why it all happened then second-guessing the past.

My farewell speech

2007-09-01T15:43:00.000+09:00

I moved to Tokyo last month and still haven't gotten Internet service at my apartment set up yet, so updating the blog has been impossible. Right now, I'm just stealing access from the Apple store in Shibuya, so I don't really have the time to write anything, but I thought I'd post a copy of the farewell speech I gave in Japanese on my last day at school. The Japanese is followed by my English translation section by section, but the translation may read strangely in some places because the speech itself was written in Japanese (that is, not written by me in English then translated into Japanese, but from the beginning conceived in and written in Japanese). I promise it's a much better speech in the original. Later, once I have my Internet set up, I'll write more about the reception my speech received and the whole experience of leaving the school. Anyways, here it is:

皆さんは、「アメリカ人」と言う言葉を聞くと、どんなことを考えますか。無意識に、どんな言葉が出てきますか。背が高い？白人？目が青い？個性が強い？思いやりがない？
When you hear the word “American”, what do you think of? What kinds of words come to mind unconsciously? Tall? White? Blue-eyed? Strong individuality? Lacking consideration for others?

あるいは、アメリカ人は、「日本人」と言う言葉を聞くと、何を想像するでしょうか。反射的にどんな言葉が出てくるでしょうか。背が低い？個性が弱い？思いやりがある？
When Americans hear the word “Japanese”, what do you suppose they think of? What kinds of words do you think come to mind for them reflexively? Short? Weak individuality? Considerate?

今の質問で、アメリカ人との違いについては考えましたね。と言うのは、「アメリカ人」と「日本人」という言葉は自分たちのグループと他のグループとの違うイメージをそれぞれが持っているからです。これはたいした問題ではないと思っている人がいるかもしれないですが、この違うイメージから、相手が違う人間と考えるようになる可能性があります。それで相手の人間性を忘れてしまう危険があります。
When you were asked this question, you thought about the differences between yourselves and Americans, right? This is because the words “American” and “Japanese” carry within them the image of the other group as different. There are likely those that don’t find this too important a point, but from these images of another group as different, there emerges the possibility of coming to think of the other group as a different kind of human beings. And with that, there is the danger of forgetting the humanity of the other group entirely.

毎日南校に行っていた私は、最初から毎日一日中生徒とふれあってきました。しかし、学校に来たばかりの時に、皆さんはただ「Hello!」と言ってから、笑いながら向こうに走って行きました。授業中に、私がいる生徒たちにじろじろ見られることが多かったです。ある時に、私は一人の生徒に英語の言葉の説明していた間に、その生徒は私が言っていたのを聞く代わりに、あっけに取られたような表情で、その子は自分の子犬のように腕をなでて、「すごい。。。ゴールド！」と言いました。
Coming to school every day, from the beginning I was interacting with you students all day. However, when I first started at school, everyone would just yelp, “Hello!” at me and then run off in the other direction, giggling. In class, you guys often just stared at me. One time, while I was explaining the meaning of an English word to a student, rather than listen to what I was saying, she got this wide-eyed look to her and started petting my arm like I was her dog. “Wow…” she gasped, “It’s gold…”

また別の日に、私はその日の活動を説明してから、その前にずっと私が言っていたことに集中したような生徒に「Do you understand?」と聞いてみて、その子は「アダムス先生の目がちょう〜青いね」と答えました。たしかに、よくほめてくれましたが、私が言っていることよりも、皆さんは私の腕の毛や目の色の方に興味があったようでした。あの二学期にはじめて挨拶として「でっかい！」と言われた経験もありました。あの時、私は生徒たちから見ると、人間じゃなくて、かわいくて、エキゾチックなパンダとして見られていたと思いました。
Another day, after I had explained the activity we’d be doing in class that day, I tried asking a student in front of the class, “Do you understand?” since she looked like she had been totally focused on what I was saying before. She answered, in a dreamy voice, “Adamusu-Sensei no me ga cho aoi ne…” or, in English, “Mr. Adams, your eyes are so blue…” Certainly, it was nice to be complimented so often, but it seemed like everyone was far more interested in my arm hair or eye color than in anything I might be saying. That term was also the first time I’ve ever had “Dekkai!” (“huge!”) used towards me as a greeting. At that time, I think from the students’ perspective, I wasn’t a human being so much as a cute and exotic panda.

でもだんだん見慣れてくると、普通に対話できるようになりました。朝皆さんが「Good morning Mr. Adams!」と言って、「Good morning!」と私が答えました。昼休みにしゃべったり、冗談を言って笑ったり、一緒にバスケットボールやテニスをしたりしていました。学校が終ったら、家庭教師として英会話を教えて、英語部の担当者として英語部の子たちと特に仲よくなりました。パンダから人間に変身したようです。
But gradually everyone got used to seeing me, and we became able to have normal conversations. In the morning, you all now said, “Good morning Mr. Adams!” and I answered, “Good morning!” We chatted during lunch break, told jokes and laughed, and even played tennis and basketball together. When school ended, I tutored kids in English conversation, and, as supervisor of the English club, became particularly close to club members. It seems I had transformed from a panda into a human being.
ほんの６５年前には、私と生徒のような若者は敵でお互い殺し合いをしていました。去年広島を訪ねた時に、どうやって人間がこんなにひどいことができたかと思いましたが、あの時に、アメリカ人が「日本人」を聞くと、神風、腹切り、ナンキン、１億の竹槍などを考えていたでしょう。あるいは、あの時の日本人が「アメリカ人」を聞くと、鬼畜米英、などを考えていたでしょう。一般的なルールとして、他の人間を殺すことは無理なはずですが、双方とも相手が同じ人間だとは思っていませんでした。だからこそ、人間を殺すことができるようになっていたのです。人間性を失っていたということです。
Only 65 years ago, young people you and I would have been enemies in a war trying to kill each other. When I visited Hiroshima last year, I thought about this and wondered how it was that we were able to do such horrible things to other human beings. I suppose when the Americans of that time heard the word “Japanese” they thought of words like kamikaze, hara kiri, the Rape of Nanking, or the “hundred million bamboo spears” reportedly waiting for us on the Japanese mainland in the hands of every single, fanatical Japanese person, all willing to fight to the death. Likewise, when the Japanese at that time heard the word “American” they probably thought of words like kichikubeiei, (“British and American Devils”). As a general rule, it’s impossible for us to kill another human being. But we didn’t consider each other human beings. As a result, it became possible to kill each other. This process is known as dehumanization.

もちろん、あの時は戦争のプロパガンダのせいでしたが、なぜ国民があのプロパガンダを信じていたかと聞くと、多分相手と会ったことがなくて、相手の具体的なイメージがないと、相手がすごく曖昧なものになってしまったのでしょう。相手の人間性を忘れてしまったと思います。今も私たちにとって同じ理由によって、今アフリカのダルフルで苦しんでいる人はただの新聞に出る記事にすぎない存在ですよね。あの人たちの具体的なイメージを持っていない私たちから見ると、あんな人たちはただの言葉の世界の存在で、あの人たちの死は数字としたしか考えられません。
Of course, at that time it was the result of wartime propaganda, but why were we all so susceptible to propaganda? It’s likely we’d never met anyone from the other group, and, unable to form a concrete image of the other, they became a very amorphous thing. And we forgot their humanity. In our lives today we can see the same attitude manifesting itself for the same reasons with the suffering of people in places like Darfur in Africa, a people who exist for most of us purely as articles that appear in newspapers from time to time. Lacking any concrete image of them, they exist only in the world of words for us, and their deaths are just numbers.

だからこそ、私にとって、このジェットプログラムは素晴らしいものだと思います。もちろん、英語を勉強することは入学試験のために大事ですが、皆さんも私もお互いの人間性を分かるようになることの方が大切な目標だと思います。これから、皆さんがもし「アメリカ人」という言葉を聞くと、「ああ、アダムス先生だね」と思い浮かべるからです。私の具体的なイメージを持っているから、アメリカ人の人間性を忘れることがないと思います。それに、アメリカ人だけではなくて、これからすべての外国人に対してもっと人間として見るという姿勢を持ってもらいたいと思います。一歩一歩、国際化と相手に対する理解は進歩していると思います。今ここにいる学生と先生たちが一緒に一歩一歩進んでいると思います。
It’s for this reason that I think the JET Program is such a great thing. Obviously, it’s important for helping students study English for their entrance exams, but I think the more vital goal is allowing us to understand one another’s humanity. Because from now on, when you all hear the word “American,” you’ll think, “Oh, Adams-Sensei!” Because you have a concrete image of me in your mind, you won’t lose sight of the humanity behind the word “American.” And I hope this isn’t just for Americans, but that you adopt this attitude towards all of the foreigners you meet in the future. Internationalization and human understanding towards the Other will move forward like this, step by step. I think all of us here today – students and teachers – are walking on this path forward together.

進むという言葉を聞くと、受験生の皆さんは進学ということを思い浮かべるでしょう。それに対して、今日のスピーチで言いたいことはもう一件があります。
To the third year students preparing for exams, when you hear me talk about “a path forward,” it probably makes you think about going on to university, right? Well, I have one thing to say about that too.

「私は早稲田で勉強した」と言ったら、「すごい！」とよく言われました。皆さんにも言われました。一方で、アメリカでも、”I went to UCLA”と言ったら、”Wow!”とよく言われました。たしかに、両方はエリートな大学です。たとえば、UCLAでノーベウル賞受賞者の教授がたくさんがいたので、ものすごく面白い授業があります。そして、素晴らしいUCLAの図書館でどんな本でもあります。それに、一緒に勉強している仲間は多様で、やる気がある人ばかりです。しかし、私から見ると、早稲田やUCLAのようなイリートな大学に入れるのはそんなに偉いことではない。もちろん、入学試験を合格するのは難しいですが、入れることよりも、入ってから何をするか、何を習うか、何をできるようになるか、ということの方が大事だと思うからです。UCLAのようないい大学に入ったら、偉いことができるようになる可能性があるかもしれませんが、機会を利用しないと意味がないと思います。
When I tell people I studied at Waseda University, people often say to me, “Sugoi!” (Amazing!) Many of you also said the same. Similarly, when I tell people in the US that I went to UCLA, they too often say to me, “Wow!” Certainly, both are elite universities. At UCLA, there are many great professors – several even are Nobel Laureates – so there are very interesting classes. And, you can find any book you’d ever want to read in the fantastic UCLA libraries. Your peers at the school are very diverse and motivated students all. However, from my perspective, getting into elite schools like Waseda or UCLA isn’t so impressive. Of course, it’s difficult to gain acceptance to the schools, but I think it’s much more important what you do after you get in. What do you study? What do you become able to do? If you get into a good school like UCLA, you may have the potential to do great things, but if you don’t take advantage of the opportunity, just getting into the school is meaningless.

というのは、皆さんはほとんどやる気があって、頭が良くて、頑張っている生徒たちだと思います。よく先生たちにも両親にもそう言われているでしょう。そして多くの人はいい大学に進学するでしょう。しかし、私にとって、大学試験に合格するのはまるで隠し芸を披露するようなものです。その意欲や頭の良さを実演しているだけからです。大学試験に合格したとしても、人としてなにを理解してもらえますか。東大に入れば、すぐに偉い人に変身しますか。最終的に、意味がありますか。
I think most of you here today are motivated, intelligent, and hardworking students. I’m sure you’re often told similar things by your teachers and parents. It’s likely many of you will go on to study at good universities. However, to me, passing the university examinations is nothing but a kind of parlor trick. It’s simply a performance showing off your basic intelligence and drive. What can you really comprehend about a person just from knowing they passed a university examination? When someone enters Tokyo University, do they immediately transform into a great person? In the end, does it really mean anything?

すごいと言われるためには、何かを成し遂げなければならないと思います。今、私はまだすごいと思わないので、そう言われると恥ずかしいです。皆さんも、誰かにそう言われると恥ずかしいと思うべきだと思います。
I think to be called, “sugoi” you must actually accomplish something. Because I don’t feel like I’ve done anything amazing, when people say this to me I become rather embarrassed. I think you all should also feel embarrassed if someone says “sugoi” to you.

すごいかすごくないかを決めるのは、大学に入ってから、どのように成長するかとか個人としてどうやって進歩するかだと思います。だから、試験の合格は目的としないでください。合格はチャンスだけです。合格は皆さんの将来の一歩だけです。
I think whether you’re really sugoi or not should be something based on your growth as a person or how you’ve progressed as an individual. Therefore, don’t take passing the examinations as your goal. Passing just gives you a chance. Passing is just the first step towards your future.

来月から、私は東京で翻訳家として働きます。日本語がもっとぺらぺらになりたいので、仕事は勉強になるといいなと思って、この仕事を決めました。その後に、私の夢は外交官になることです。外交官になれたら、将来に皆にすごいと言われることをやってみたいですが、今は一歩一歩、謙虚で頑張ります。皆さんも高校で、大学で、勉強してください。手に入るチャンスを利用してください。本当にすごいと人から思われる将来を目指して、一歩一歩、頑張っていってください。そして、そのあなたがたのすごい将来にまた会いたいと思います。
From next month, I’ll be working in Tokyo as a translator. I chose the job because I wanted to become more fluent in Japanese and I figured I could study while I worked. After that, my dream is to become a diplomat. If I can become a diplomat, I would like to try to do things in the future worth of being called sugoi, but in the meantime, I’m trying to do my best with humility, step by step. All of you, please keep studying at high school and college. Take advantage of the chances you are given. Aim at a future in which you could be thought of as sugoi, and do your best, step by step. I hope I can meet you again in that sugoi future we have made.

ありがとうございました。
Thank you very much.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel

2007-06-07T21:56:00.000+09:00

The Japanese national anthem is called "Kimigayo," or "Imperial Reign." Click here to listen to it.

Now, what jumps out at you first has to be the brevity; the song is mercifully short. And there are none of the hystrionics of the US anthem, what with "bursting in air" or "land of the free" being dragged out to a minute each of awful caterwauling. No, this song takes less than a minute. The tune itself is actually rather stirring, and, dare I say it, Japanesey.

The lyrics, on the other hand, are a bit different. Taken from an anonymous poem from the Kokinshu, a poetry anthology from the early 10th century, they run as follows:

Kimi ga yo wa
Chiyo ni
Yachiyo ni
Sazare ishi no
Iwao to narite
Koke no musu made

May your Imperial reign
Continue for a thousand years,
And last for eight thousand generations,
Until pebbles
Turn into boulders
Covered in moss.

So, the poem is a paean to the Emperor. And it's only about the Emperor; there's no mention of Japanese people, the Japanese government, or Japanese culture, which is a problem insofar as you consider those things maintaining an existence outside the Emperor, I suppose. It was chosen as the national anthem in the late 1800's, when Japan was in a desperate rush to catch up to the modernized Western nations. Interestingly, part of the reason for the choice of this poem was its resemblance to the English national anthem, "God Save the Queen"; it was an attempt to gain legitimacy as a nation by mimicking one of the major powers.

Of course, that was more than a 100 years ago, and the paths of the two sovereigns in question have been rather different:

During the war, the King and the future queen, lacking any real power, simply put their efforts into raising the spirits of a country under attack. Today, the Queen is just some rich old woman. If she's a symbol of anything, it's of the former glory of an Empire that no longer exists.

The Emperor - specifically, Hirohito - was the figure behind which the Japanese attempted to conquer much of Asia. His divine status is what gave Japanese soldiers the right to rape the inferior people of Korea and China. Eternal allegiance to him was the rallying cry of men leading suicide charges or flying their planes into ships. His refusal to surrender prolonged the war and allowed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens to die needlessly. Basically, he bears a large burden of responsibility for a war that devasted every part of Japanese society - a responsibility that neither he nor the government ever acknowledged. He remains a potent symbol, both inside and outside Japan, of that past.

Clearly, there is a difference now in singing a song of praise for the Emperor.

But this is their anthem. It's sung at ball games and at the Olympics. It's sung at every school function. In fact, it's not just sung, it's often required to be sung at school functions. Interestingly enough, the national anthem - along with the hinomaru flag - was not officially granted that status until set down in a law in 1999; a response to a case in which a principal, sandwiched between the protests of teachers who refused to sing the anthem at a graduation ceremony and the demands from the Ministry of Education to force them to comply, ultimately committed suicide. Teachers in Tokyo that refuse to stand to sing the song due to its association with the Emperor and Japan's militarism - history teachers, I would hope - have actually lost their jobs on this account. Apparently, since 2003, 401 teachers have been punished for refusing to take part in anthem-related events. Recently, the Tokyo District Court ordered the Tokyo Board of Education to pay damages for any teachers reprimanded for their refusal to sing the anthem, but the Board maintains that, schools being governmental agencies, teachers have a responsibility to teach their students how to be good citizens.

Which raises the question, is loyalty to the Emperor what constitutes a good citizen?

Next time: what Japanese people think - or don't - when singing the anthem.

Irrational Women

2007-05-28T20:52:00.000+09:00

While walking around helping students today in my third year writing class, a boy grabbed my arm and asked me to explain a sentence from a reading sample in his textbook. I stopped, leaned in and took a look at the sentence he was pointing at:

"It is a mistake for him to use cold reasoning to overcome anything which he cannot understand in his wife."

I did a double-take, and went back and read the entire passage. Then I laughed quite hard, and the boy ended up learning a new word: sexism.

Take a look at the essay the kids in this 3rd year writing class - along with all the other 400 students in their grade, not to mention how many other schools who happen to use the same text - are reading. It's reprinted in the book after appearing on an entrance exam for Tohoku University; there's no further information to know to whom to give credit for these pearls of wisdom. To me, it sounds like something they took out of an issue of Good Housekeeping from the 50's, or some chapter on marriage from a very old life-education textbook, but it could very well have been invented out of whole cloth. What's perhaps even more amusing than the students at my school and others studying this passage, is that since it appeared on an entrance exam, past students were actually tested on this; every applicant to Tohoku that year would have had to read and answer questions on this in order to pass the exam. To take that concept a little farther: current students of Tohoku University have all certified their comprehension and assimilation of the ideas contained in this passage by very virtue of being students at the university.

And people in the US complain about biases in SAT questions!

Anyhow, it's good to see that students studying English here are being given entirely new ways to see the world (and women's proper place in it), and being equipped with the language abilities necessary to really succeed in the future (at putting women in that place).

KMK's GF LOL

2007-05-27T01:43:00.000+09:00

A question I often get - as "often" as I get questions about the blog - is whether anyone at my school reads the blog; I guess readers wonder whether I'm worried about anyone getting upset, considering the amount of detail and commentary I provide on students and teachers. Typically, I laugh this off, because even if they found the site, I can't imagine this ever being an issue. I'd be incredibly surprised if anyone at the school - student or teacher - has the English ability or general wherewithal to actually read anything I write. After all, very few native speakers have the stamina to get through a whole bloated post in one sitting.

But, it turns out that at least one student has read the blog. You might remember KMK, a much-doted on student of mine from the English club. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned him several times before.

I had mentioned this fact to him as well, that I was writing a blog on which he had appeared. The thing is though, now that my students are also writing a blog that I also belong to, it only takes one click on my name on the student blog for them to find my site. So, KMK came up to me last club meeting to tell me he had been reading the blog. Specifically one part. With his girlfriend. He was a bit shocked.

He was showing the English club blog to his girlfriend one day, and I guess they clicked right through to my blog. And they started reading this post about the school festival last year. I talk about the time Matt came to visit the school during the festival, and KMK gave the two of us a tour. It's this description in particular of part of the tour that caught their interest:

Here is KMK and his harem. KMK actually has a girlfriend in the second year, but since I don't think she's good enough for him, Matt and I kept needling him about going after this first year girl on the right. As the girls here were in the cooking club, Matt played up that angle, while I convinced KMK that this girl had an elegant, rare "old Japan"- type of beauty. He went red and gesticulated in an even wilder fashion - if that can be believed.

Needless to say, KMK's girlfriend was not happy to hear this story, despite it being almost a year old, and he caught some flak for something I wrote. He didn't seem particularly bothered by it, just kind of exasperated. I was, of course, amused, and not at all repentant. I told him I still held to what I had said and written last year, and I explained the American high school custom I'll call "going down a grade to trade up a grade": boys dating younger, prettier girls of the type that might be unattainable to them in their own grade. I told him it's his senior year, and time to start taking advantage of that while he still can. Maybe he'll listen to me before he heads off to college and has to start at the bottom of the totem pole again.

Good Children = Good Drinkers

2007-05-15T19:06:00.000+09:00

I took this picture the other day at Toys 'R' Us, or, as it's pronounced here, toizarasu. They were selling it at the checkout counter. It's a beer for kids.

I had read about this before, but had kind of taken it as one of those stories - typically, the only type of story ever written by foreign papers about Japan - on some bizarre trend now sweeping the country. I really think the media has special correspondents assigned specifically to find and report on any quirky things popping up here. It goes like this: some fad has reportedly caught on in Tokyo and is speading far and wide across the land- except, no Japanese person I know has ever even heard of the fad in question (two examples I can think of offhand are the "Japanese bathing suits" and "Tokyo oxygen bar" stories). Regardless, we are all thankful for the opportunity to stop and have a cheap laugh at the silly people across the sea. Imagine the kind of insane articles we could write about the US if we applied these kinds of ridiculous journalistic standard to ourselves.

So, when I first read about this - a beer made for and marketed to children - I took it with a grain of salt, but I stand corrected. Because they really are selling a beer made especially for children (or, at least, it's for sale; it didn't seem to be flying off the shelves). In a toy store, no less.

It's called Yoiko no Biiru, or "Good Children's Beer." At the top in red is, presumably, the slogan: "Good Children's Beer: The Beer that Good Children Drink." It is also described (in yellow) as, "A beer-like fermented beverage." Sounds tasty, huh?

Anyhow, the toddler pictured on the label certainly seems to be enjoying his frothy cold one. He's emitting a contented sigh; looking forward to knocking one back at the end of a long day of crawling around and putting things in his mouth.

Parents in this hyper-competitive society are always trying to give their children a head start. Even when it comes to alcoholism, I suppose. A big part of job success here is drinking after work with your superiors, so it's never too early to get a leg up on your (future) co-workers.

Graduation Ceremonies as Cultural Rosetta Stones

2007-05-13T18:03:00.001+09:00

The first Thursday of March was the graduation ceremony for the third year students at my school (The school year here starts in April and ends in March, with finals being held a few days before the ceremony. Strangely, school itself continues for a couple more weeks, though grades are already due, meaning students and teachers keep to coming classes even though we really can't introduce any new material).

Though the various formal ceremonies in the Japanese school system that I am required to attend are invariably tedious, they do offer me opportunities to see the core of the school experience here. High school graduation being the most important ceremony commemorating the most important event of that school experience, the ceremony is a crystallization of the motive and method of that schooling. I'll give you a summary of aspects of the ceremony, then I'll attempt a bit of interpretation for each.

The graduation is held in the gym. The front chairs are arrayed for graduating students; behind the students is a gallery for parents; behind that is one for current second years. The parent gallery is filled - with the exception of perhaps four members, to be generous - exclusively with mothers. To the sides of the stage are two sections: the one on the right of the stage from the audience's perspective is for teachers, with members further divided into camps of senior administrators, third year teachers, and remaining teachers. There is also a microphone set up for announcements behind a small podium, with one teacher who serves as Master of Ceremonies sitting at a folding chair behind it. On the left of the stage are visiting VIP's; PTA Presidents, Superintendents, retired teachers or administrators. Behind all the audience, in the second-floor rafters, is the school band.

In the center of the stage is a podium, behind which are the national and prefectural flags, to the right of which is the school emblem. Slightly off to the right and above the stage is a plaque that gives the order of events for the assembly.

It reads:
1. Opening address
2. Singing of the National Anthem
3. Awarding of Diplomas
4. Address from the principal
5. Address from visiting VIP
6. Farewell address
7. Sending off address
8. Singing of the school song
9. Closing address

The most glaring difference to me was of course the absence of fathers at the ceremony. I remarked on this to another teacher, and she informed me that each student is allotted only one seat for a visitor, explaining that the gym wasn’t large enough to hold more than that. This sounded reasonable, except that the gym apparently was large enough to accommodate the entire class of second-year students. So, apparently it’s more important that the second-year students attend the ceremony than the parents of the students actually graduating.

Along with other teachers who have put off entering until the last possible second, I enter the gym and take a seat near the front in order to easily take pictures. Teachers chat in muffled tones. Everyone is wearing a suit, even the P.E. teachers. (As an aside, a P.E. teacher in a suit is like a 10 year old in a suit: uncomfortable and adorable.)

Muted, indistinct classical music is piped in through the sound system as the third years enter the gym, walking in lines down a pathway of sorts, and sit down in rows, arranged by homeroom class. They are wearing the same school uniforms they wear every day, except with small red flowers - I'd guess carnations, but then again the only flowers I can identify for certain are roses and perhaps sunflowers - in the right front pocket of their jackets. They look bored, and the ceremony hasn't even properly begun.

The principal enters the gym, wearing a special jacket with long tails only used for the entrance and graduation ceremonies. He walks down the pathway to his seat at the aforementioned administrator’s area, sitting to the right of the two vice-principals. After he sits down, the MC stands up, walks to the podium at the side of the stage, and announces that the graduation ceremony will now commence. He then barks out, "kiritsu!"

-Now, this is a common part of all the ceremonies at school, these orders. It was something that jumped out at me the first time I attended a function, but now it seems entirely natural. The audience is told when to stand, when to sit, and when to bow through tersely worded yelps from the MC of kiritsu, rei, and chakuseki: "stand," "bow," and "sit," respectively. It's rather strange taking orders from another person like this at first - rather martial, really - but ultimately necessary to make sure everyone is on the same page as far as ceremony goes. Though it might seem like this would be rather obvious - stand for the national anthem, sit for speeches, clap at the end, etc. - as will become clear, the process here is so involved it would be chaos otherwise-

So,

kiritsu!

and we all stand. "Now, the singing of the national anthem," he announces. The band in the rafters behind us starts in on the mournful dirge of the song, and the teachers and students begin to sing. (I'm going to save my discussion of the anthem itself for another time, but suffice to say, it's both moving and troubling at the same time to experience) At the end of the song - which is mercifully short, as anthems go -

chakuseki!

and we sit.

Then, the MC announces it's time for the awarding of diplomas, and the principal heads up onto the stage, bowing at the audience, then at the flag, taking his position behind the central podium. Now proceeds the most tedious section of the ceremony - the reading of the names of each student. The home room teacher of each class proceeds to the podium at the side of the stage and reads the name of each student in sequence. Nobody walks up to the stage; after his or her name is read, the student stands, yells, "Hai!" bows, and remains standing until all of his or her classmates have had their turn. Then that homeroom sits, and the next homeroom teacher approaches and it starts over again. 40 or so students to a class, 10 classes = lots of "Hai!" and bowing.

I try to amuse myself by thinking about the insane amount of overlap in names that occurs in a country without any sort of immigration. It's like having everyone in a graduating class be named Smith or Jones. There's remarkably little innovation as far as first names go either, because people seem to put all their ingenuity into thinking of different Chinese characters to use to write the first names of their kids rather than thinking of an original name. That topic only works for a bit as a diversion, so I start studying the individual bows of students. You can tell a lot about someone by how they bow: how deep, how long they hold the bow, what they do with their hands - all these things can reveal to an observer things about your personality and upbringing. Or at least, I imagine they reveal such things to me. This kills time.

It also keeps me awake. Many of the other teachers make it through this section by sneaking in a nap. Many of the students do as well, actually. Nestled down in their seats, they jump up as their names are called, managing to get out a muffled "Hai!"

Finally, all the names have been called, so the principal walks off the stage, bowing again, and takes his seat down at the side of the stage. Then, 10 seconds later, he stands right back up, walks back onto the stage, bows again, and takes the exact same position behind the podium. This is the part in the ceremony where I - without fail - laugh aloud and am scolded by whoever I happen to be sitting next to. Because this is the part where the observance of protocol just crosses the line into insanity.

Kiritsu!
Rei!
Chakuseki!

The principal, now back up on the stage and, presumably, rested from his 10 second sojourn, begins to give a speech. This is amusing to me because he's just been transferred to this school in the last year and so is barely known by any of the students. Several, actually, had confessed to me that they don't even know his name. His speech is innocuous enough and passes without incident or interest from the students assembled.

Kiritsu!
Rei!
Chakuseki!

But his speech is outdone in the capacity for arousing disintrest by the VIP speaker brought out next, as the district superintendent comes up on stage to give a rambling 10 minute address. He looks like he's never spoken to a group of students before, and he addresses them in patronizing, simplified terms, like they're graduating primary, not high school. I'm completely mystified by why the guy is even at the ceremony, let alone giving a speech to students. There are actually several other adminstrators present from other junior high and high schools, but they, fortunately, do not also give a speech. Like the principal before him, the superintendent mostly talks about how the students will and should never lose their identification with their school. He sweats a lot, but makes it through, eventually. Most of the students, however, did not make it through the first minute (They're asleep).

Kiritsu!
Rei!
Chakuseki!

The principal stands up once more and again takes his place behind the podium onstage, and the MC announces now it's time for the Farewell Address from a representative of the student body. A girl stands up and walks up on stage to stand facing the principal across the podium. This is what you can see in that picture at the top of the page.

If you look at that picture, you'd probably suspect this was of the girl greeting the principal, or perhaps receiving something on behalf of the class from the principal. But this is in fact a picture taken midway through her speech.

Because, the girl giving the speech about her experience at high school is not giving the speech to her assembled classmates, but directly to the principal at the front of the stage. She talks about the good times and the bad she has had at school, her formative experiences and the times she'll never forget. Near the end, she breaks into tears several times and has to pause to regain her composure enough to go on. Students in the audience, and teachers as well, are similarly shook up by the speech, and the sounds of stifled weeping can be heard all over the gym. Never once during this entire speech does she turn around to face the crowd; the speech is directed solely at the impassive face of the principal. Never once do I see a betrayal of emotion on his face through my zoom lens. The girl goes back to her seat, and

Kiritsu!
Rei!

as we bow at the Principal again, before he makes his way off the stage, and

Chakuseki!

we sit down too.

The sending off is a very quick speech by the

Kiritsu!
Rei!

Vice Principal,

Chakuseki!

and an intro into the singing of the school song.

Kiritsu!

The band starts up on the song, which all the students and teachers know - except for me. I suppose I could learn the lyrics, but it's more fun to just go through it making noises that sound vaguely like the verses, waiting for the end where they just sing, "Hamamatsu Minami Koukou," (the name of the school) at which point I can join in heartily. Sometimes I whistle. The school song is longer than the national anthem, incidentally.

The song done, the Vice Principal stands up and walks over to the side podium to announce the end of the graduation ceremony. With one more...

Kiritsu!
Rei!

...the ceremony is finished. The piped-in music begins anew and teachers stand by the door as the students file out in rows. I start trying to make a mental image of the ceremony to write about later.

So, this was an extremely long, perhaps tedious description of the event. But that's not to say just because the recounting of so many details was tedious to read that the details are of no importance:

First, just walking into the gym, you can see how everything has its place. Everyone knows where they are to be. And, with the giant sign announcing the order of ceremonies, everyone knows exactly what they will do. Obviously, a current running throughout is the intense attention to detail and procedure. This is most ridiculous in the way the principal dances from stage to the table off-stage between portions of the ceremony, of course, but though I laugh while watching, it makes perfect sense here. Things happen according to certain rules in certain ways and at certain times. Everyone knows this, so it all runs like one well-oiled machine. From the outside - to me - it may seem amusing, silly, or even a bit fascist, but the school is not built to produce people like me to live in the US; it's for Japanese kids to learn to navigate Japanese society.

In Japan, knowing your place is vital, as an awareness of relative status is necessary to even properly talk to another person; different verb conjugations and even verbs have to be used to those above or below oneself. There are rules for behavior in most any situation to follow, and social consequences for not following these rules. Once kids graduate school, they enter adult society, and they have to be ready for their new roles in the workplace. That means learning the right way to navigate the social landscape of the group as much as it does any actual job-skills (Interestingly enough, I've heard of Japanese companies making hiring decisions purely based on a candidate's grasp of honorific language, so in some cases this social adeptness might actually be held above actual work-related ability)

The most shocking part of the ceremony for me was watching the girl give the commencement speech facing the principal, rather than her peers and parents. The symbolism was just amazing. In the US, the girl would speak to her classmates. She would share and celebrate their time and accomplishments at school. But here, the girl was speaking to the principal, the school made manifest. By turning away from her classmates, she was showing that this ceremony was not about their lives and futures, but about their obligation to the school.

At the very end of their schooling, the graduate is produced, not as a supposed invididual who has accomplished much and is on the way to even greater things, but - just as the speeches of the principal and superintendent made clear - as someone who owes a debt to the school and though going on to another, larger group, must never forget their place here. The students are there to be reminded of their place in the line of those before and to come. The ceremony is not about the accomplishments of the students, because it's not really about the students at all; it's about the school.

And that's really it. The ceremony is not about the students, because the schooling is not about the individuals. The schooling is not about producing individuals because the goal is to create members of a group that will cohere into one. The ceremony is a celebration of the group, because that's what the society celebrates.

The thing is, watching one of these graduations, though the school and its ceremony seem to exalt in the group, the students themselves seem ambivalent if not apathetic. And this reveals some problems for this generation in Japan. Schools were set up to create factory workers to compete in a post-WWII market that no longer exists. Loyalty to a group - typically a company - in adult life was predicated on a promise of job security that is no longer being made. Kids see this, and the divide between what society promises and what it can deliver them, what the system is there to provide and what they actually want, seems to be growing. This graduation should be a stirring moment for them as a symbol of what's to come.

But most of them couldn't stay awake.

Those damn Brazilians

2007-04-22T19:31:00.000+09:00

In Japan, candidates for political office are subject to all kinds of restrictions on campaigning: apparently forbidden from advertising on television or radio, and prohibited from campaigning of almost any kind up until the last couple weeks of the elections. They're left with two main options: plastering every open surface with posters with the candidates mug and name, and blasting every open frequency with propaganda speeches from huge megaphones mounted on trucks, screeching like terrible birds of prey, descending upon innocents in public spaces, mercilessly slaughtering peace of mind and quiet.

So I go to Starbucks to get a cup of coffee and read a book last week. I like to sit outside on nice days and read, taking breaks to people watch. Often I see people I know - usually students, typically in awe to see me living outside the school grounds - and though it's not terribly exciting, it's a way of getting out of the house and getting some reading done.

But, I'm only there for about 10 minutes when this truck parks down the street and starts blaring its political speech at an intolerable volume. Typically I can ignore background noise when I'm reading, but this not in the background; it's more like someone standing next to you with a bullhorn screaming in your ear.

So I pick up my coffee and book and head down to the other Starbucks. This being a modern city and all, that's only a couple blocks away. I get about 15 pages farther in my book when the speech begins again. I look up and see the same truck. It has now set up shop directly across the street from this Starbucks.

I don't even try to read through it this time; I snarl at the truck a bit, jump to my feet and immediately walk back to the other one, still with my original cup of coffee in hand. I sit down again - back at my original table - and open the book.

I'm still not halfway through my coffee when the truck comes back again, except this time even closer to the first Starbucks than before. Now, I get so angry I actually start listening to what kind of nonsense this guy is yelling into the megaphone. I want to know what is so damn important that they feel it's necessary to hound me all around town.

And then I really get angry.

Because this guy is talking about foreigner crime. Actually, what he's talking about is a case in which a Brazilian from Hamamatsu killed some girl and then ran back to Brazil. Apparently now the government refuses to extradite him. It sounds like a pretty tragic case.

But-

This guy is not talking about this one case alone. He is not leading a crusade on behalf of this girl to bring her killer to justice. He is not even just talking about the problems with the law as it applies to Brazilians. No, he is sitting on the sidewalk talking about foreigner crime. Foreigners, as in all non-Japanese.

He talks about how, though most foreigners are good people, some of them are committing crimes, and then they escape back to their countries to avoid punishment. He exhorts the Japanese people to support a stronger stance on foreigner crime: both to increase penalties and also to educate the foreign population. He informs the Japanese in the area that many foreigners simply don't understand Japanese morals, and it's the job of the Japanese to teach them how to be good citizens.

I am steaming at this point.

In my head, I compose several counter-arguments:

1) Statistics on foreign crime in Japan, though often trotted out in elections to play into public fears of the Other (recently re-elected Tokyo Governor Ishirhara is a prime, prime offender), are rather misleading. Though overal crime rates are somewhat higher for foreign residents, there are mitigating factors. First, to compare "crimes" is misleading, as a majority of the "crimes" committed by foreigners in Japan are actually visa-related, and obviously none of these can be committed by any Japanese person. Second, though crime rates base use the number of legal foreign residents in Japan as the base population, they include crimes committed by any foreign person - even tourists or illegals - for the total amount of crimes committed. Basically, this underestimates the foreign population while overestimating the number of crimes they commit, leading to an artificially inflated number.

2) Why are the actions of one Brazilian used to indict the entire population of non-Japanese in Japan? As an American, invited here by the Japanese government, well-versed in Japanese culture and language, playing a valueable role in the community educating children, why should I be labeled a possible threat? To these very same children, no less. Recently, a young British woman in Japan as an English teacher was murdered by a Japanese man, but I'm quite sure that her parents aren't down on the street corner talking about the grave threat Japanese people pose to us all. An even more pertinent example would be the tragedy at Virgina Tech; only the lunatic fringe of our society use the actions of one disturbed kid to attack all Koreans, all Asians, or all foreigners. Hell, even those people are likely to at least be a little more specific in their racism!

3) For a guy purporting to want to teach Japanese morals, isn't it insanely rude to sit on a street corner and speak in Japanese about the problems with foreigners, addressing just the Japanese citizens as if no one else could understand what you're saying? It's treating all non-Japanese like children who don't need to be part of the conversation that all the grown-ups are having. And if you're going to make wild indictments of these groups, shouldn't you make your accusations directly, rather than in a way you assume they won't understand?

So I think about these things. I stand across from the guy and try to get him to meet my eyes. He does not. I think, if you're going to label me a killer, why don't you fucking look at me directly and say it?

I imagine committing several acts of violent foreigner crime.

But in the end, I walk away, because though all the above points and more would easily flow out with righteous indignation in English, the process of trying to say these things, to think these thoughts in Japanese just tires me, frustrates me. I can't speak out, and I can't stand up for myself. Yet.

I went home and studied Japanese. For next time.

Because I know there will be a next time.

Santa's Visit

2007-02-15T22:23:00.000+09:00

I've been quite lax in my writing lately; not out of nothing to say so far as less time to do so. And, a seeming inability to write on a constant basis. I was home over Christmas and then, after returning to Japan, immediately went off to Cambodia. After coming back from Cambodia I went right back to work - literally, going directly from the airport to school to teach a class. Now I'm trying to interview for jobs in Tokyo so I can move there after my JET contract ends in August. Things have happened, certainly, but these Things get away from me as I put off jotting down stories for another day, which becomes another week, which has become now two months. So, as a stopgap, here is this:

It's speech time again at school. The speeches last semester (last year as well for that matter, though I can't hold this year's students responsible for the ineptitude of their predecessors) were so uniformly awful - in the sense of being awful by virtue of extreme uniformity - that this time kids were required to submit their draft to the teacher before the speech even got to me. The teacher was supposed to reject outright any speeches that were too boring or ordinary, forcing the students to come up with original ideas.

So, that worked, in a way. By and large, the speeches were much less about club activities or the need to study - the mainstays of last semester. And they were more original. One kid talked about how much he loves Rage Against the Machine - even rapping a few of the lines from "Bulls on Parade." (With a solemn expression, he recited, "Weapons not food not homes not shoes / Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal" and then simply announced, "I heard these words and knew they were very true.")

Sometimes their originality left me with some questions about their general mindset. For example, this girl's speech. It starts off with her saying she used to believe in Santa, and one time she saw him. "Oh, that's cute," I thought. I would ask that you click on the image and read how the speech develops from there.

First, this girl is 16. Not only does she still believe in Santa Clause, but she actually does believe that Santa came to her house to take a piss. I talked to her about it when she gave the speech. She insisted.
Second, in what kind of magical Christmas story does Santa take a piss in your house? I'm pretty sure there aren't any carols or claymation specials about Santa sneaking in and leaving that kind of present; even the Grinch stayed clear of that. Even surrounded by bright blue smoke, that's still not a sight to inspire wonder or the spirit of the holidays.
Third, if Santa did come to your house just to take a piss, would it really be something to be so happy about? Something that would fill you with longing and regret that he didn't return to soil your house again with his steaming, yuletide urine?
Fourth, isn't the whole idea of this kind of unsettling? It conjours up thoughts for me of vagrants wandering into her house, or perhaps an alcoholic father stumbling around in the dark.

Other times, the push for originality seemed to result in the students becoming more unhinged than usual. Asking a lot of these kids to write something individual on any topic they like is akin to suddenly releasing animals raised in captivity into the wild veldt; pushed out of the metaphorical cage of their completely structured educational system, shocked by their freedom of expression, freezing stock-still and unable to write at all, or racing off across the fields on some bizarre tangent of communication.

Like this guy. Sandwiched in between the opening and closing lines here is a completely normal speech. That opening line, however, is "I will cause a revolution next year." I read onward to learn of what this kid's plan might be, but to no avail. He just talks about studying and playing basketball. Then the revolution rears its head again. He admits that "causing a revolution is difficult for me" (and I think we've all been there before!) but assures with confidence, "but I will cause a revolution."

When I get speeches like this, I usually pepper them with question marks and send them back to the kid to explain. When it's something I want to hear though, I just leave it, wait for the kid to give the speech, and enjoy the show. They stand up in front of the class and say the most insane things with no comprehension of their meaning. A student declares "I will cause a revolution," but as I break into laughter, he only crinkles his brow slightly before going on, a bit befuddled by my reaction but otherwise unaffected. The rest of his classmates turn back as well to see me laughing, but just shake their heads at me in incomprehension, since they don't understand what the speaker is saying any more than he does.

Nuclear Ambivalence

2006-12-19T16:32:00.000+09:00

Here's an article from the Onion - the satirical newspaper - that prompted me to write this in the first place:

N. Korea Detonates 40 Years Of GDP

Many people have asked me recently about what the mood is like in Japan now that North Korea is, apparently, a nuclear power. After all, it's the Japanese who have the most to fear from N. Korea; with the North Korean missile tests, the Japan has already had two shots fired across its bow. I read in the NY Times online or the BBC News that there's a great fear of nuclear proliferation, of what a maniac like Kim Jong Il might do. The Koreans - even the South - still carry a great deal of resentment, to say the least, against the Japanese over what happened during WWII, and the consistent refusal of the Japanese government to accept responsibility for its wartime actions.

Considering the amount of basic hysteria across much of the US about terrorist attacks - even in places (the entire Midwest?) no terrorist could possibly have heard of, let alone care to target - I thought there would be some level of popular discourse about this situation. I came to work the day after the announcement of the testing of a nuclear weapon. I waited to hear teachers commiserate over their anxiety, or students to ask questions about what would happen, or the principal to make some sort of statement. I waited entirely in vain. The only announcement at the morning meeting was to report on a bicycle accident and remind students to be careful on their way to school. Talk between teachers was as rare as always and as always centered around classes and the monotony of grading papers. Everyone acted like they hadn't heard anything at all, to the extent that I wondered if in fact they hadn't heard anything at all.

Finally, sitting at the computers and reading the newspaper, I brought it up with the Beach Boys Sensei and another teacher. I asked them if they were aware of what was going on, and how they felt. They said of course they knew about it, but responded, "what are we going to do about it?"

And that sort of shrugging off really typified for me the attitude of most everyone here regarding politics. If people are aware of politics at all, they seem aware of it in a totally peripheral way. Politics seems to be to most Japanese, something that happens off in Tokyo. Politics is the business of politicians, and these decisions are to be made by the people off in those governmental buildings. They'll take care of it, so it isn't necessary for people to have opinions either way on issues; they just need to do their jobs.

And know I'm coming from a country where the majority of people don't even vote, and even if they do, it's often based on party lines or without a clear understanding of the issues. Still, I have a hard time imagining Bush getting angry at representatives from his party that don't fully support him and fielding new candidates in an election for their districts that don't even live in the areas. But that's what Koizumi did in the last election; he blacklisted several representatives and sent actresses and businesspeople to run in areas of Japan they might not even have visited before. And they won. People voted for candidates that don't even live in their areas or know anything about them to represent their hometowns and their interests in parliament. That seemed to me to be a pretty clear indictment of how seriously people take the idea of representative government here.

The LDP, roughly equivalent to the Republican party in the US, has been the ruling party here for almost 50 years, with only one brief interruption. We complain about our two party system being inadequate for a real democracy; the system here is a joke. The same giant conglomerates that ran Japan before and during WWII - the equivalents of the huge German companies basically - were never dismantled or run through any sort of process comparable to the de-Nazification in Germany. The current top politicians are either holdovers or descendants of the same people who drove the country right into war before and never recanted afterward. The Emperor has never been held responsible for anything he did, so how can anyone else be, really?

These things shock me, but leave no impression on most people it seems. There was no political discussion going on at Waseda when I was studying there; no protests, no activism, no general awareness of issues at all, really. The complete disassociation with what's going on in their country by people here leaves them dangerously open to being led into another bout with disastrous nationalism. With the same sort of people in power as before WWII, it's just fortunate that the current goals of the government seem merely economic.

Christmas with the heathens

2006-12-02T20:22:00.000+09:00

Next week is final exams so I've been taking it easy on the kids and teaching classes about Christmas. I play Christmas songs (Nat King Cole - The Christmas Song mostly, since that's the only xmas song I can stand to listen to the requisite 40 times or so I will in the course of teaching all the first year students) and the kids try to fill in missing words on lyric sheets; I pass out candy canes and have them write letters to Santa. One day, a teacher asked me to talk a little more about the origin of Christmas - assuming, I guess, like all Japanese do about all Americans, that I am a Christian of deep faith. I had toyed with the idea in the beginning, but thought it might come off as proselytizing, but on further reflecting, realized clearly there no harm in merely talking about religion.

So after listening to Nat King Cole for the umpteenth time, I write the word "Christmas" on the board and ask the kids what they know about the holiday. They volunteer and I list words like toys, Santa, reindeer, Christmas tree, etc. "Okay," I say, "so maybe when you think of Christmas, these things come to mind."

"But, does anyone know why Christmas is a holiday?"

Blank stares.

I think that maybe they just didn't understand the question, so I rephrase it: "Does anyone know what happened on Christmas?"

Blanker stares.

I pause and, stifling a laugh, take a deep breath. Then I turn to where I've written "Christmas" on the board and underline "Christ" several times. I turn back to the class and ask, cautiously this time, "Do you know who this is?" I wince a little for a few seconds as if anticipating a blow, but fortunately one of the kids says the Japanese name for Christ (kirisuto), and I don't have to freak out completely.

"Okay great, Christ, yes. Jesus Christ. (in a fashion taking His name in vain) Jesus Christ, yes. Now, what happened to Jesus Christ on this day?"

A student raises a hand tentatively and says in Japanese, "That's when he died, right?"

I run my fingers through my hair quite hard. "No." I smile. "In fact, the opposite thing happened. And speak in English."

Another says, "Ah, it's his birthday."

"Yeah, more or less. So, let me tell you the story of his birth."

It turns out that they don't really study world religions, at least not until their junior or senior year of high school. I have a hard time comprehending that these sophomore kids at a high-level high school don't know basic facts about the largest religion in the world, since I learned about Shinto in my 7th grade history class. This is kind of insane. So I decide to right this wrong. I am here to bring them the good news, as it were.

I whip out some Christmas picture books and proceed to tell the story of the Nativity. In the course of trying to explain to the kids why it was such a big deal that a baby was born in a manger in some far-off place thousands of years ago, I come to appreciate to an extent how ridiculous missionaries must feel on their first day off in some African village. Trying to explain a religion to someone completely unfamiliar with the stories just reveals how ridiculous they can sound. I see a new expression of bafflement cross the faces of the students for each phrase like "son of God" or "angels" or "three kings" that comes out of my mouth. By the end of the story, I am rather baffled at what's coming out of my mouth as well. You'd have to be a person of unshakeable faith to speak in any way convincingly about these things without feeling a bit silly or embarrassed. I am not that person.

This reaches a sort of crescendo while I'm using the tiny statuettes of the Nativity scene to act out the different character's parts. After a long explanation of the relationship between Mary and Joseph where I've been holding up their two figures, I actually look down at what I'm holding and see that in fact what I'm holding is not Joseph but some random shepherd. Upon closer inspection, I realize that on top of the general discernible differences between the two figures, the shepherd actually has a damn sheep hung around his neck. So, not only have I been telling a rather sacrilegious story about the unconsummated love of Mary and one shepherd from Bethelehem, but I've convinced all the kids that Jesus' father walked around with a sheep strung around his neck at all times. I break and just laugh really hard.

I give up in the end and just have them write their letters to Santa. I tell them about Santa's list; presents for the good children and coal for the bad. This is much easier to talk to the kids about. It doesn't make me embarrassed as an American or feel ridiculous at all. As silly as Santa's story is, at least we all agree none of it is true.

Student life at Hamanan

2006-11-28T17:24:00.000+09:00

Recently I set up a blog for the students in the English club at my school. I wish I could say it's off to a rousing start, but that would a little too generous...anyways, it is certainly off to a start of some kind. Perhaps a bemusing one?

Hamanan English Club blog

The students were asked to write short self-introductions, which prompted stories about car accidents, "soft-ball tennis," BAGELs, and PSP; not ordinary topics during first conversations.

Anyways, I'm going to try to get them to write a little something every week. I'm hoping it will, aside from allowing them a measure of self-expression not allowed, let alone encouraged, in their other classes, let others see the general lives of students here. Whether that will be interesting or depressing remains to be seen. Feel free to check it from time to time.

The Yellow Menace

2006-11-11T20:46:00.000+09:00

A couple weekends ago I had another class at the local community center with the older Japanese. Typically, I give them a few topics to cover in a free conversation in groups while I walk around and monitor them, answering questions or trying to keep the talk flowing. For the second half of the class, we have some sort of structured activity: the introduction of new grammar or vocabulary, a game, etc.

I decided that day we'd have a debate, which we've done a few times before. Though their English levels vary considerably from near-fluent to near-mute, since they're all adults, they generally have something to say which makes a debate of some sort possible for everyone. I broke them up into groups again and gave them a couple topics.

One of the big news stories recently has been the Imperial Succession. In short, the Crown Prince and his wife had been unable to produce a male heir to inherit the throne, putting the succession in doubt. They do, however, have a daughter, so some people argued for a changing of the law of succession to permit the daughter to become Empress. This was the subject of some controversy because, though Empresses are not unknown in Japanese history, the actual male line - they say - has never been broken for some 1500 years. This debate was just settled recently however, when the Crown Prince's younger brother and his wife appeared with a son of their own, ensuring the safety of the succession.

As an American, I am kind of mystified and bemused at the idea of a monarch, and it seemed to me that most of the younger Japanese people I know are pretty apathetic about the whole issue, but I was curious what the older generation might think. After all, most of them lived when an Emperor still had power and apparently the institution still has meaning for them; it's always grandmas out in the crowd waving at the Emperor when he holds forth.

So for one of the topics, I asked them to talk about whether "Women should be allowed to become Emperor." I predicted an interesting talk about whether modern equality should trump traditions. I was very surprised however, as the debate they actually had quickly evolved into one over whether the Imperial system should continue at all - and most everyone said "No."

As it turns out, the Emperor currently receives a yearly stipend of several million dollars from the government. This, despite the fact that his role is entirely ornamental, and he is of course already quite wealthy due to extensive property holdings. Several women in the class were quite vehement in their displeasure of paying through taxes the salary of a man who "doesn't do anything" and yet lives in a huge complex completely isolated from the public. Others went even further, saying that the Imperial system itself is ridiculous and should be dismantled. The only dissenting opinion was the one man there that day, who said that the Emperor should be retained as a symbol of Japan. The women all disagreed though, saying they felt no connection for the Emperor, even as a symbol.

After the Japanese surrender, there was a debate among the American occupation forces about the future of the Imperial system. In the end, MacArthur and the Americans decided to keep the institution, albeit stripping it of its powers. MacArthur also refused calls to try the monarch for any responsibility in the war. He believed that any attempt to remove the Emperor would cause upheavals in Japan. Why? Because he, along with other Japan "experts", thought the people here were fundamentally incapable of thinking for themselves, and they could not have democracy here without the imperial system. They bought into the propaganda of the wartime government of Japan of the people as blindly obedient to the Emperor, and also believed in the myth of all the yellow people in general as ant-like followers.

In the end, it seems this was another example of taking the public front of a government for the feelings of all its citizens. The government talks about the respect and love people had for the Emperor, and I simply assumed that they believed exactly what the government said. I found that I still harbored some of the same patronizing views of people here as Americans did in the past.

If I were an African, I'd smack that kid

2006-10-09T17:50:00.000+09:00

On Friday I was teaching a second-year writing class with another teacher on the subjunctive mood (ex: if I were you, I would...). The writing class is filled with kids who, rather than simply providing simple answers, try their best to come up with something amusing and unexpected each time. To give you an idea of what it's like, both Duckboy and the sagely Life=Happiness Music kid are in the class.

We're calling on students for example sentences using the subjunctive mood. The depressing answer of the day is the completion of the phrase, "If my father had more free time.." with "he could be working harder." Wow, sucks to be your dad, you little authoritarian prick. But generally, we get innocuous answers like "If I had enough money, I would buy a big house." and "If I had enough time, I would want to play soccer." Fair enough, I think.

Then the sage raises his hand and volunteers his sentence:

"If I were an African, I would hunt animals."

I go over to make sure that he actually wrote down what he just said.

Yeah, he did write and say that.

Meanwhile there is little response from the rest of the class, and as I turn around I realize the teacher has just gone ahead and written down his answer on the board. I roll my eyes and take this opportunity to teach the kid a couple of pertinent English words by leaning over to type into his electronic dictionary: "S-T-E-R-E-O-T-Y-P-E." and "I-G-N-O-R-A-N-T." as in, "If I were you, I'd be embarrassed as your stereotype shows how ignorant you are." I write this on the board and make a mental note to ask their social studies teacher to maybe point out next class that not all Africans are currently hunter-gatherers.

Later in class, I realize that they've all just copied down what I wrote on the board as if it was another example sentence from the textbook, missing the point entirely. JET internationalization fails again.

Designated carpool

2006-10-08T22:00:00.000+09:00

Last week we had the sports festival at school. Last year, I was excited to see all the kids out in their teams with their different colored shirts running around. This year, I stayed inside and read so I wouldn't get sunburned. Some things get old quickly.

It's quite a big event though; all of the students at the school have to participate in some capacity, and it goes on for the entire school day. The P.E. teachers have to plan and run the whole thing, so after a long day of work, they do what people do in Japanese workplaces everywhere - go out and get drunk. And I don't mean "a few beers with the boys" drunk, I mean "passing out in your suit on a bench in the train station" drunk.

The next morning, after getting out the shower I notice I got a call from my neighbor, one of the aforementioned teachers. I'm surprised because - though I often call him when it rains to get a ride to school - he has never once phoned me. I call him back.

Me: Good morning!
Teacher: RUKAS~! (He seems to really love yelling my name like this) Good morning.
Me: You called me?
Teacher: Ah...yes. I was going to ask you, can you drive a car?
Me: Huh? Yeah...Why?
Teacher: So, last night, after sports day, I had a drinking party with the other P.E. teachers...
Me: Ah, good work on sports day.
Teacher: Thanks...well, I had a bit too much to drink last night.
Me: Well, are you okay?
Teacher: Yes, but I'm still a little drunk, actually.
Me: (Pause) Umm, okay...
Teacher: So, would you mind driving me to school in my car?
Me: (Pause to laugh really hard)...Sure, no problem.

So, I go down and he's sitting in the passenger seat of his car with the car running, waiting for me. I jump in and we head off to school. He tells me he got home really late the night before after too many beers, and decided it wouldn't be safe for him to drive himself to work. On one level, I think this is responsible and admirable, as drunk driving is alarmingly commonplace - both in frequency and level of acceptance - in Japan. Of course, on another level, he is going to work drunk. And on another, more hilariously terrible level, he is going to teach at a school drunk!

I laugh about this the entire trip, even more as he keeps giving me directions on how to get there; I feign surprise and gratitude when he tells me where to turn to get into the parking lot. Sure, it's ridiculous, but I'm thinking about this too much as an American. There, this kind of thing would be considered alcoholism and could get you fired. Here, they hold drinking parties at least twice a term which all teachers are required to attend - and the hundreds of bottles of Kirin there are all paid for by the school.

In the end, I just laughed and told him to just stand out on the field during class with his sunglasses on and his arms crossed till he sobered up. After all, he's just a P.E. teacher; that's basically all he does every day anyway.

Everything true and real

2006-10-02T21:29:00.000+09:00

The beginning of the school year here means another 400 speeches for me to attempt to correct. When fortune smiles upon me, I just have countless speeches about club activities with simple grammatical and spelling mistakes to make it through. These depress me terribly, because they prove how terribly depressing most of the kids' lives are - even during summer they spend too much time studying and doing club activities and don't see their friends - but at least I can slog through them. Sometimes I am hit by a paper that is basically indecipherable; it looks like it has been translated word for word from Japanese to English, despite the complete lack of structural affinity of the two languages; it contains bizarre sentences without subjects or objects that I cannot conceive of; it is still written partly in Japanese that I have to then translate. These take much longer to get through, because they often seem to have been penned by Gollum, all sentences with off-putting subjects ("It tires," "It hurts us", "It eats well,") possessing that same structure of a maniacal rant struck down on paper.

Then there are the fantastic ones like this (Please click on the picture and read). He begins talking about how he loves music, which I appreciate, and then starts talking about how his favorite kind of music is hip-hop. Any kid who doesn't listen to Japanese Pop is cool to me, but then he ups the ante by dropping the name of Jay-Z. The rest of the essay is just pure gold. This is my favorite type of writing I get from students, because it is simply non-reproducible by a native speaker. Freed from an understanding of diction, style, and often grammar itself, and the burdens those things may impose, the Japanese students seem to be able to do things unintentionally with English that are both hilarious and novel.

There are some great lines: "His rap is smooth just like a flowing river," and the songs "have the samurai spirit." But, my favorite part has to be when he writes, "the words of [his] songs [are] everything true and real."

I believe what he meant is, "Everything Jay-Z says in his songs is true and real." But, instead of that stolid phrase, he says the words themselves are everything true and real. He's not talking about the veracity of Jay-Z's experiences, but claiming that the words of Jay-Z represent, perhaps even create, truth and reality in themselves! What made me laugh even more than this, was that it almost sounded like something Jay-Z himself would say; it's the kind of self-aggrandizing lyric a rapper would wish he'd written.

Long story short, I gave this guy high marks and told him I expected a report on the meaning of the song "Girls, Girls, Girls" next week.

Breaking old promises

2006-09-16T23:17:00.000+09:00

School just started again after the summer break, and I'm getting back into the grind of waking up too early and dragging myself in to dance around for my little English lesson/minstrel show for the students. It being the second year, I'm using the same lessons from last year, so I've got the routine down pat. Like last year, I'm preparing students for a speech contest (more on that later) and grading almost 400 speeches others were required to write for English class.

And so I was in a Starbucks in the city grading these tests when a girl walked up to me and started waving. Lots of students walk or bike by me waving whenever I'm in the city, but, raising my eyes with some suspicion and giving her the quick once-over, I saw that she wasn't wearing a school uniform. This seemed to place her in that dubious category of Japanese that might just wave at me, a complete stranger, just for being tall, white, and red-crested. My interest in Japanese just for their Japanese-ness currently being nil, I decided to ignore her and went back to grading.

But, she as she ran up and yelled, "Mr. Adams!" at me, still waving, I looked closer and saw Mami, the girl I tutored last year for entrance interviews for her university. You know, the one the Vice Principal wanted me to promise not to make fall in love with me. In the end, she passed the interview, was accepted, and went off to Nanzan University in Nagoya to study English. This was the first time I'd talked to her since graduation, so it was really nice to see her. She looked very different outside of school - namely, not in a uniform. I'd say she looked older as well, but that has to be taken relatively, in the sense that most all of the students look like they're 14 anyway so it wouldn't take much to build on that. She and 3 of her friends sat down with me and chatted for a while about their college lives.

Being a bit depressed at teaching the same lame lessons and grading the same boring speeches about club activities, seeing her was exactly what I needed: a reminder of the impact I can have on kid's lives. Not in some vague way about changing their perceptions of foreigners, opening their minds to the wonders of English, or whatever; no, in the definite sense that I got that girl into college. And she's going to remember that, and with something so small I was able to change someone else's life. So the minstrel show will go on, because I've got one more year to get to the rest of those kids.

After talking to her for a while though, it became clear that she's remembering me for other reasons too. Looks like I broke my promise to the Vice Principal after all...

Speaking of hostess clubs

2006-07-18T22:52:00.000+09:00

A couple times a month I teach an English conversation class on Saturday at the local community center to a small group of mostly elderly students. They're all really nice, aside from being much more motivated and easier to teach than the high school kids I deal with generally.

Since I live a bit away, they take turns each time picking me up to bring me to the center. Last class one of the women from the class came to pick me up and as we drove we chatted a bit. It was a little hard going because though she is basically the worst student in the class, she doesn't want me to speak Japanese. Basically, all the students seem to take any time outside of class with me as a free English lesson, so they're always trying to wring every use out of me possible.

We're talking a bit about my plans for the weekend as we pull into the parking lot. Just as I move to take off my seatbelt though, she taps me on the shoulder and a card suddenly materializes into her hand. I look down and find myself holding a business card from "Pleasure Square" for a certain Rena.

"What's this?" I ask
Her: "A card."
Me: "Who's Rena?"
Her: "Ah...my daughter."
Me: "Wait, wait, your daughter is a hostess!?"
Her: "No, she's not. It's a part-time job."
Me: "Yeah, so she's a hostess part-time."
Her: (Sighs)
Me: "Why are you giving this to me?"
Her: "Well...you should go."
Me: "Umm...sorry, but hostess bars are too expensive for me."
Her: "Yes, weekends are expensive but if you go on Monday it is only 3000 yen."
Me: "I don't know..."
Her: "Go. I told her about you. You'd like her."

And then I got out and taught the class. What was so amusing to me was how she was both embarrassed at her daughter's job but simultaneously trying to drum up more business for her. Unfortunately, aside from the fact that I would not pay anyone for a conversation, looking at this woman, to be bitterly honest, I would especially not pay to talk to her daughter.

The "Sublime" of English

2006-06-22T20:50:00.000+09:00

I went to Tokyo for a dreadful re-contracting conference - rife with all the inanity and frustration typical of the bureaucratic JET Program conferences and events - and then we had our school festival shortly afterwards. The school festival is a yearly event in which the all the students participate, both through their homerooms and in their club activities. Each homeroom or club is given a classroom or booth and decides on a theme and some activity. The theme of this year's festival was "The Sublime."

The English club was to translate the program for the festival into English. The program contained little descriptions written by students of what each club or homeroom was doing in their area. This simple translation taks became a chore since even in Japanese none of what the kids had written in the program made sense, and it was further complicated by the fact that most every sentence describing the different activities at the festival used the word "Sublime," rendering the entire thing nonsensical.

Some selections:

24HR "Sublime" Chocolate Bananas: Come taste the "sublime" in bananas!
(The two girls in the picture are advertising their bananas)
Calligraphy club: Has the calligraphy club reached the "sublime" of writing? The answer is...Takashi!
28HR Entrance of a large hall: Tokyo Friend Park! Enter the unknown world inhabited by a mysterious maid
30HR No Goblin!: Throw off your stress and destroy the goblins!
(and my favorite)
39HR Men's Paradise: A world-class paradise for men. We invite you to this world of both fear and laughter

As the program clearly completely fails to convey any idea of what one might find at the booths, the second year students in the English club were also to conduct tours of the festival in English for any foreign visitors. So they would have someone to actually give a tour to on the day, it fell upon me and my well-known contacts in the foreigner community to provide these foreigners who speak English. I brought Matt.

When he arrived, all the girls were busy so we had KMK - I believe I touted his greatness in a previous blog post - give us a solo tour. He took us around and gesticulated wildly at various exhibits.

Here is KMK and his harem. KMK actually has a girlfriend in the second year, but since I don't think she's good enough for him, Matt and I kept needling him about going after this first year girl on the right. As the girls here were in the cooking club, Matt played up that angle, while I convinced KMK that this girl had an elegant, rare "old Japan"- type of beauty. He went red and gesticulated in an even wilder fashion - if that can be believed.

Matt and I also enjoyed going to the biology club's exhibit, where a series of tanks housed various interesting fish and aquatic animals. After listening to the explanation given by the biology club students at each station, we would conduct this dialogue:

Student: This is a very rare fish.
Me: Hmm...that's very interesting. But let me ask this though, can we eat that fish, now?
Student: Oh oh! No no no no!
Matt: But I'm hungry (rubs stomach) and I want to eat the fish. C'mon buddy.
Student: No no no, I-we-ah ah, need the fish!
Me: Ah, okay okay, I totally understand. You can't give us the fish because you need them for the festival, right?
Student: (Visibly relieved) Yes, yes.
Matt: How about this then, we come back in a couple hours, when you close, and then we eat the fish?
Student: Oh oh no! (waving arms frantically as I reach my hand towards the tank)

We ran through this routine at every tank. Then we took turns distracting the students while we took pictures with our hands in the piranha tank. KMK was going into convulsions at this point.

We ended up back at the English club's room, where we had set up English karaoke. My laptop was hooked up to a TV and a stereo, playing music videos from a list of songs. The idea was that the first year kids would look up the lyrics for the songs on the internet and put together a booklet of English lyrics for visitors to our room to use. As it turns out though, none of the students were at all capable of doing anything with a computer, even typing the name of a song into Google, so in the end I had to set up the entire thing myself. The room also shut down for large amounts of the day as they would click on the wrong box and had to chase me down to fix the computer. This seemed to be pretty much par for the course though, with all the teachers involved in their homerooms and clubs doing enormously disproportionate amounts of work for something ostensibly to be run entirely by the students for the students.

Anyhow, our club event proved less than popular that day, so I also did a disproportionate amount of the singing - though I was less frustrated by that outcome - since even the kids in the club most enthusiastic about the karaoke balked about actually singing in front of others once the time came. In between bouts of my crooning though, KMK stepped up and delivered a surprisingly manly rendition of that O-Zone song, "Dragostea Din Tei"...And no one was left unmoved! I tried to counter by singing A-ha "Take on Me" as a duet with this quiet third-year kid (God knows why he knew all the lyrics), but we just couldn't match KMK's visceral power. It didn't help that my partner for the duet looked like a janitor in his outfit.

Most all of the kids were wearing their t-shirts for their respective homerooms, and those not in the shirts were all wearing costumes of a sort. The girls in the tea ceremony club wore yukata or kimono, the girls running the host club (more on that later) wore flashy dress shirts and skirts, others wore flowers in their hair.

While the girls seemed to be dressed up in adorable, graceful or (for school) almost indecent clothes, the boys had taken the occasion to voluntarily serve up their pride to the utmost derision, by me and Matt, at least.

Here is a prime suspect; a 17 year old guy wearing a monkey suit I assume he bought at some store selling little boy's Halloween costumes. Not only was he prancing around in the suit, but he also stopped to pose for this picture with Matt holding onto his tail. I suppose it could be fun for some to see kids taking themselves so lightly, but everyone should have their limits.

Though fortunately I don't have any pictures of this, there were also a disturbingly high number of boys dressed in drag of one kind or another. I suppose their lack of body hair and general possession of the physique of a prepubescent girl makes them particularly fit for this role, but I still found it rather baffling, aside from just unsettling. Boys wearing kimono, boys wearing girl's school uniforms, boys in tennis skirts, and - by far the most nauseating - a boy in a slit China dress. Ugh... (He danced up to me and asked, "Cute? Cute?" "No," I replied most emphatically, "Just disgusting.") Sorry dude, cross-dressing does not equal instant hilarity.

Later, I further fulfilled my bond by bringing a few more friends to get an English tour when Kevin, Joyce, and Yukari showed up. KMK, now joined by his friend, proved himself no more a master of verbal and no less a master of non-verbal communication on his second tour. After a few rounds of karaoke, we stopped by the tea ceremony club to have tea and a snack, and beckoned in by the girls outside, then decided to check out the room that was running a host club.

The fact that a host club had been allowed in the festival kind of confused me, since it seemed wildly inappropriate, even as a joke. Host or hostess clubs in Japan are bars where patrons pay to be waited on and surrounded by male or female hosts, respectively. Usually it's a place salarymen go after work to I guess pay to be fawned on and treated as the center of attention after a day of demeaning and humiliating servitude, though recently bars with young men catering to women are becoming popular as well.There is apparently nothing necessarily untoward about it - nothing is being bought except someone's company and time - but it still seems wildly inappropriate to field a mock one at the school festival. I've never gone to a hostess club because I have never had a conversation I would be willing to pay someone for. Let's just say the school's club didn't change my mind on that score.

The Beer Festival

2006-06-20T21:06:00.000+09:00

Matt came for another visit on the 25th, just leaving last week on the 13th. By the end, I was tired as hell and sick to boot. Now I think I can write a little about it, weekend by weekend.

I had already decided on our plan for that first weekend more than a month prior, when while reading the Daily Yomiuiri newspaper I found an article about the Japan Beer Festival. Over 100 Japanese microbrews? We were there before Matt had even finalized his plane ticket.

So we went to Osaka for the festival and paid 3,000 yen for a 4 hour nomihodai (all you can drink) of more than 100 Japanese craft beers. They tried to handicap us a bit by only providing a 60mL cup, but that proved a futile gesture. Within the first half-hour, we had already sampled all of the beers. By the end of the first hour, we had decided on our favorite brew and taken up permanent residence at their table. By the second hour, Matt had installed himself behind the counter of the brewery booth - despite the continued protests of the woman distributing the samples - and we made a vow to this boisterous Kansai woman that we would drink all of her sample bottles ourselves.

Kansai people - that is, those from the Kansai region of the main island that encompasses Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe - deserve their reputation as a fiery lot though, as you can see in the next picture. As they finally closed the show down and forced us out, we stumbled out with a few souvenir bottles and our skateboards. I think we were able to skate about 10 feet in a looping, parabolic shape before tumbling to the ground. Matt also managed the impressive feat of forgetting he had put this glass bottle in his back pocket, and cut his hand open right good. This would prove to be only the first of many, many falls. Eventually, after we patched him up, we headed off into the city.

We skated around the bright lights of Osaka, dodging frightened old women and chatting up various impressed locals. Later we went out for sushi at one of those restaurants with revolving belts, and, though I only vaguely remember this, I believe got kicked out after we started chucking pieces of tuna against the walls to see if they would stick. I guess it was just that kind of night. Eventually we made it back to a hotel.

The next morning we awoke to find ourselves covered quite evenly with bruises and scrapes. Matt's hand was killing him and I had a nice imprint of a button from my jeans etched into my hip like a head of branded cattle. Pulling it together, we eventually set off to see Himeji, the most impressive castle in Japan. A World Heritage Site, it did not disappoint, to be sure; a massive complex but with a rugged beauty and white exterior that lends it the nickname, the "white heron" castle.

The castle is also known for the maze-like path that leads to the main keep. The path circles around in a spiral with many dead ends, leaving any potential attackers open to constant attack from the surrounding walls. Himeji was never actually attacked however, so this design remains untested. I should say, "had never" been attacked, because Matt and I took it upon ourselves to take up the task it seems lesser men wilted at. Fortunately, this sign's improper use of indefinite articles (climbing "a" wall is prohibited, sure, but how are we to know which wall? It could be any wall, anywhere, right?) left us able to climb without fear of reprisal, as well. I think a young Japanese boy said it best who, after spotting us, cried out "NINJA!" Unfortunately, there were no more samurai sentries left in the castle to come to his aid when I fell upon him like cold, black night, cutting his scream off abruptly with a jab to the windpipe. When in Rome, you know?

We climbed several flights of steep stairs, pushing aside Japanese women, children, and the elderly in our wake as we made our ascent to the top. I fell prey to one of the other hidden defenses of the castle when I cracked my skull repeatedly on the low hanging doorways throughout the building. I definitely would not be the ideal person to storm a castle in which I would have to stoop down the entire time, leaving my neck generously extended for anyone who happened to have a really sharp sword or two in hand. As always seems to happen when I travel in Japan, I was embarrassed to be tired at the end when I saw how many old women past 70 had made the trek seemingly unfazed.

Later that afternoon we dropped in at Kobe - a charming city - and were, as you see here, greeted by many an adoring female admirer. We skated around, soaked up the local color, watched a terrible street band perform, and ate the local specialty, okonomiyaki, which is kind of a pancake with cabbage. We hopped a train back to Hamamatsu that night and laughed at how we had been in three major cities in that one day. In a reoccuring pattern for the trip, I arrived at work the next morning exhausted while Matt went off exploring somewhere else fun. He was, however, always kind enough to call me in between classes to tell me about all the fun places he was visiting. Thanks, buddy.

The School "Excursion"

2006-06-18T21:45:00.000+09:00

For several weeks previous, anticipation had been building for our "school excursion", to which I was invited along. For some reason, this is the English translation of the word ensoku that apparently every Japanese learns in English class. Hearing teachers talk about this excursion business made me rather excited about what we might do. However, it seems that rather than "excursion" - which conjures up images of some voyage into jungle primeval, trek across the frozen tundra of the Far North, or perilous attempt at the summit of some great slag of rock - it turns out it would be much more accurate to render the word as "field trip", with all the banality that term usually conveys.

For banal our field trip was. All students in all homerooms of all three grade levels were loaded off into buses in the morning, each grade bound for a different exciting location, one homeroom per chartered bus. Since I'm teaching first-year students mostly, I opted to go along with the intrepid explorers of 14 HR. Due to rain that morning, a trip to a historic village and hiking was called off in favor of a visit to the Toyota Museum. I thought it might still be fun though, since some of the greatest art to be seen in Japan is owned by various corporations.

A 2-hour bus ride later, I discovered that this was not, as I had assumed, a museum of art owned by the Toyota corporation, but in fact a museum of Toyota cars. As in, a car museum. As in, a museum about the history of the automobile. As in, line after line of cars with placards in front of them. Kind of like going on a field trip to the exotic "Mile of Cars."

Look at the expression on the girl's face in the front in this picture. That's how we all felt. Upon our entrance, we were given about an hour to walk around and enjoy the exhibits. I finished my cursory walk around with some students in about 5 minutes. I gave a personal tour to the kids with commentary: "And here on your right, you will see...another car. And if you walk a little farther, coming up on your left is...this other car. Ah, now we've come to my favorite part of the entire tour - the part where we can all look at this car. Isn't this a particularly fascinating car?" Then I pretended to take an exhaustive series of pictures of the car in question. The tour was over in 5 minutes because I couldn't even amuse myself for that long, and I find myself quite amusing usually. I still can't believe we went to a car museum, but I guess it's hard to find a place to just throw a couple hundred kids in for hours at a time.

After a long lunch, we still had too much time leftover to just go back to school, so we headed to Nagoya to see Nagoya Castle. One teacher, noting my disappointed look leftover from the last stop, tried to buoy my spirits a little by talking up the castle. Unfortunately, I'd been there twice already, and that was already two times too many. Nagoya Castle is a reconstruction, and like many Japanese reconstructions, it's now a concrete edifice lacking any charm, soul, or real historical merit. Not only is the entire castle fake, essentially, but it's not even attempting to be an authentic fake; the rooms have all been replaced with lame exhibits on the castle's history and the center is hollowed out with a modern staircase and elevator. Once you pass within the imposing gates, it's a lot like walking around some public library built in the 50's. Sometimes I really think the Japanese have a gift for ruining their own historical sites.

Still, we managed to have some fun. It was a good chance for me to interact with the students outside of a school setting - although they were still wearing their uniforms. These girls walked around with this other teacher (the young tennis coach) and I most of the day. The tour of the castle didn't take much more time than the museum, so we hung out in the shade and ate ice cream. I chatted with kids in Japanese - it was their day off, after all - took lots of pictures, let them try on my sunglasses; the usual.

In the end, of course, the destination is not so important for the trips here, because it's more about fostering bonds between members of homeroom classes. The school system prepares kids for a place in Japanese society by emulating it on a smaller scale with the bonds formed as a class. Just like the sports festival, it encourages a sense of (and need for) belonging to a social group bigger than oneself. Even by the end of just one day trip, I could see this in the kids in my group and others.

We eventually piled back onto the buses for another couple hour ride back to school. By my estimation, we spent about 5 hours on the bus that day, and only a little over a 2 hours actually walking around.

"Excursion" my ass.

A refreshing new approach to English Literature

2006-05-17T23:23:00.000+09:00

I had several friends at Waseda who were majoring in English literature. On first meeting them, I was very excited to meet some people with common interests, and maybe they would have an entirely different viewpoint on works in the canon. So, I asked:

"You're an English literature major, right?"
"Yes."
"So, who is your favorite author?"
[Confused look]
"Ah...I don't know?"
"Okay...what's your favorite book then?"
[Still confused]
"Ah...I don't know?"
"Well...what's a book you like then?
"Ah...-"
"-Yeah, you don't know, I get it."

This puzzled me at the time, but I wrote it off as just a problem with the intellectual laziness of my particular friends. Recently though, I've come to realize that of the many English teachers at my school - several of whom were English lit majors - none could name any book they particularly enjoyed. As it turns out, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why a person majoring in English literature could be without either a favorite author or book, or really, even a book they liked. You see, English literature majors at Japanese colleges don't really read books.

Let me emphasize that:
English literature majors in Japan don't read books.

If you study English literature here, it seems you are not required to actually read a book written in English. You are not even really required to read a chapter of a book. What you do is go to class and, along with a teacher, analyze a small excerpt, say a page or so, from a book. I mean "analyze" of course, not in the sense of "examine methodically and in detail for the purpose of explanation and interpretation." No no, not in the sense of "literary analysis" I mean "analyze" in the sense of "resolve a sentence into its grammatical elements," or, more succinctly, "parse." This in mind, it could be argued that you are not even required to actually read anything.

So what? Well, the only purpose of studying a language - or speaking a language, for that matter - is for communication, and one studies a foreign language to open new paths and modes of communication unavailable in one's native tongue. This communication is either verbal or written, so we are either talking to one another in another language, or we are reading something written in another language.

I love speaking Japanese. To me, there is a vast difference between what I can say and how I speak in English versus Japanese (not just related to my linguistic insufficiences in Japanese or over-efficiencies in English) It's fascinating, and a hell of a lot of fun to talk to people in Japanese and come to see the differences in the languages and how they both control and sometimes constrain how we communicate.

I love Japanese literature. That was, of course, the whole reason I started learning Japanese in the first place; I wanted to read some of my favorite novels in the original language. At UCLA, I read those novels, modern work and poetry, and even learned Classical Japanese (kind of like Middle English to Modern English) so I could read poems more than a thousand years old. I found that any translation of the work was a pale copy stripped of much of what made it "literature" in the first place, especially between languages so disparate. Haiku in English are a joke:

Ancient pond/Frog jumps in/Sound of water

It's crap, right? Yet this is a famous, great poem in Japanese. Now imagine Shakespeare translated into a language without definite or indefinite articles, or translating Salinger into a language without sarcasm.

As I think I've said many times before though, Japanese schools don't emphasize speaking at all. Everything is geared towards preparation for entrance examinations that test only obscure grammar knowledge, and so teachers just hammer home lessons on syntax and vocabulary. In a way, it's fortunate that they just teach grammar points though, because they usually can't speak English. Even the best teachers rarely speak better English than I do Japanese, and they've got at least 10 years on me.

So most teachers are dismal speakers, of course partly because they are products of the same educational system, but also because they don't try to improve their English. They don't actually try to speak English with others, because they don't seem to see the point. If they were sincerely interested in communicating, they'd be better at it. But then again, to really know the benefit, you'd have to actually speak with others. And these same people who don't enjoy speaking English also don't enjoy reading English.

So what can you possibly get out of a foreign language like English, if you don't want to speak or read it? What pleasure can you get from NOT being able to communicate your feelings or understand those of others? What new worlds or modes of thought can be opened by NOT ever reading anything the way it was written? Well, succinctly, you get NOTHING.

And so, we have a system full of teachers who don't even appreciate the whole point of learning a language teaching a bunch of people who are instinctively prone to not appreciating the point of learning anything; ie: teenagers. How can these sort of teachers ever impart any meaning to the study if they themselves cannot recognize the value? Why should their students, how could their students be expected to care about the subject if none of the teachers do?

Well, they can't. And all signs suggest that they don't.

Despite a kind of national past-time of studying English, nobody I've met looks back on their high school classes fondly. I gave a survey to all 400 first-year students this year and the last, and in response to the question "do you like English class?" more than 60% answer "No." Seeing as the students handed in these surveys to me personally with their names attached, I'd venture to say that some were too timid to be honest, so the actual number of students who don't enjoy English is probably above 80%. The reasons are fairly constant; the grammar doesn't make sense, there are too many words, spelling is too difficult. Certainly, these things are true, but should they be reason alone to hate a language?

But what reasons are there for them to like the language? I can't blame my students for not caring, because I'd hate English too if I were them, and I certainly never would have studied Japanese if someone who doesn't speak, read, or enjoy the language had purported to teach me.

Chocoretto

2006-05-13T20:52:00.000+09:00

Last October I taught a class to all the first year students about Halloween. As part of that class, I handed out some candy to the students who finished the Halloween-themed activity the quickest. I thought this would just be a nice one-time treat for the kids. But since that day, I have been hounded by a small cadre of girls with only one thing on their minds:
Chocolate!!
And, only one English phrase in those minds:
"Give me chocolate!!"

Everytime I pass one of these girls in the hallway, the exchange goes as follows:

Girl: (Waving in my face) "Harrow Mistah Adamusuuu!"
[Students seem to really enjoy drawing out the last syllable of my name]
Me: "Hey. What's up?"
Girl: (Now waving an open palm in my face) "Give me chocoretto!"
Me: (Shaking my head and laughing) "Sorry, I don't carry chocolate around all the time."

She stares for a second at me blankly, tilting her face to the side in a way reminiscent of the cock of the head of a confused labrador. After a few seconds, however, she snaps her fingers and smiles.

Girl: "Ahaaa, yes yes...I understand. Mistah Adamusuuu, give me chocoretto PLEASE!"
Me: (Rolling my eyes)

The path this usually takes is me heading back to my desk with the girl or girls in tow. At this point, I have turned this into a sort of conversation exchange in which I ask them to explain why should receive chocolate. Usually, this invokes an answer like, "Because I need it, Mr. Adams." This is so hilariously - and unintentionally - sexual that I never fail to laugh. If they can speak to me in English for a bit, I'll toss them a Hershey's Kiss. Reminiscent of how one might toss a treat to a labrador. I'm not sure whether this is a form of enabling or training, really.

The spectacle of this steady procession of demanding girls to my desk tends to amuse the surrounding teachers. The sarcastic female teacher thumbs her nose at their "disgusting, grabby little paws," but still smirks. The Beach Boys Sensei, however, just sighs, and pronounces somberly:

"They're like the girls begging American soldiers for chocolate after the war."

This is a joke, though it takes me a few seconds of looking him in the eyes to know for sure, and a few more to know for sure whether I am really allowed to laugh at it.

Situational morality in Japan

2006-05-10T23:00:00.000+09:00

The younger kendo guy's wife is giving her husband and I a ride, along with the English teacher who hates his job and loves to curse. As we pull up to a red light at the intersection of a major highway, the wife points out that in the lane next to us going the other way, a large chunk of heavy plastic - something that might have fallen of a truck - is sitting in the middle of the road. It's not immoveable or particularly dangerous by itself, but certainly enough to cause an accident if jammed in a wheelwell. "Wow, that's really dangerous!" they all agree. As we watch, a car making a turn onto the road nearly runs over it, barely swerving at the last second to avoid it. The three adults in the car are still watching, rapt. That is, just watching. I am sitting on the left side of the car and so (roads being backwards in Japan) on the opposite side from where this is happening. I look over at the the teacher sitting on my right, waiting for him to do something. He in turn looks out the window and exclaims, "Yeah, that is really dangerous, isn't it?" Then he turns his head right back around. Nobody makes a move.

Finally, it is abundantly clear to me that nobody is going to do anything about this, so I check the light, tell them not to drive away, and open my door. I walk around the back of the car, pick up the hunk of whatever the hell it was and chuck it off the road. As I walk back around the car I see the person behind us eyes-wide in a state of shock after witnessing what I just did. Getting back into the car, the three inside start clapping, crying out "Sugoi! Sugoi!" ("Amazing!") I shake my head, because it's nothing I should be applauded for, it's something that a person should do; to me, really something they should be punished for not doing.

This was a particularly glaring example for me of the difference between my Western morality and that of the ordinary Japanese. Our morality is unconditional, a kind of categorical morality. Things are either morally right or they are morally wrong, though we often disagree as to what is which. In the Judeo-Christian ethic, those ideals of right and wrong were traditionally laid down by God, but they could just as easily be understood in a secular, philosophical sense. The point is that widely, our society works on the basis that there are universal things that we take to be right and wrong, and we act accordingly, bound by these rules individually. In this particular case, it would be wrong for me to watch while some innocent person was harmed. We deal in absolutes.

But, the Japanese morality is not absolute, it is situational. Japanese society is based on relationships to others. The very word in Japanese used to mean "human being" in Japanese, 人間 (ningen), is written with two kanji characters that mean "person" and "between" respectively, giving the word the loose meaning of "between people." A person is what lies between others; more directly, a person is defined by their relationships to others. Traditionally, this would be the Confucian relationships between parents and children, adults and rulers etc. Now, it would encompass the family, friends, classmates at school or coworkers. One basically is identified through these groups- but not only passively, actively; students and teachers at school introduce themselves as "Hamamatsu Minami High School's So-and-So," workers at a company might say something that literally translates as "I'm Japan Airlines' Maiko Iba." (ha)

I used to wonder why Japanese schoolchildren wear uniforms; in the US I thought they were either for religious schools or those with disciplinary problems. Neither is really an issue in Japan (well, discipline would be a problem in some schools but certainly not a high level one like where I teach). I could see how they work to crush individuality, but it seemed like they're doing such a great job of that every day in class already that uniforms are quite superfluous in that respect. I was even more confused as to why kids would wear their uniforms even on weekends and vacations when they didn't have class. Understood in the context of the social structure however, it makes perfect sense. Kids wear uniforms to identify themselves as part of a group - students - and, in fact, the uniforms of particular schools are easily distinguishable, making even further stratification possible. Even the suit of the salaryman - or Japanese businessman - can be another group marker. People's lives seem determined by this "inside" and "outside" dynamic.

As belonging to a group is how a person is defined, so their value within that group is defined by their behavior within. Largely, one's life is supposed to revolve around living within these social circles and cultivating relationships, I suppose. People are bound to correct behavior based on their obligations and connections to others. The constant consideration of others that this necessitates accounts for the fabled courtesy and politeness of the Japanese. That's the upside.

The downside, is what happens when another person is not within this inside circle. That is, what happens when you have no connection to another person, and so no real societal obligations to them?

Think of the car itself as a functioning example of this "inside" and "outside" concept. The people inside the car can watch something happening outside with a sort of moral distance because they have no connection or obligation to those not inside the car. They don't know them, they don't work with them, they've never met them. If someone inside their circle were to be in danger, they should act, but outside of that, there is no bond placed upon them in this situation. To me, it doesn't matter that I don't know those who might be affected, the fact is simply that it is wrong to allow others to potentially be hurt due to ones own inaction. That is, my action stems from a morality based on universal imperatives that decide what is right and wrong, while their morality is situational. When taken outside of a situation, it often ceases to operate or decide behavior. This is not to say that some Japanese people wouldn't help, just that no one is expected to help, or would be judged for not helping. The formality that drives the decisions on moral behavior is what makes the fabled politeness of Japanese people to me chilling, as is not really politeness in our sense at all.

There's an expression in Japanese that aptly describes the situation: "The traveler discards all shame." Japanese tourists are regularly much more rude and ill-behaved when traveling in foreign countries than they ever would be in Japan, because leaving the country frees them from their societal obligations towards others. This detachment has been pegged as one characteristic that made some of the Japanese soldiers in WWII so able to committ heinous and dehumanizing acts against the peoples of Korea and China. The Japanese were free from the bounds of their country and its expectations, and the other Asians did not belong to this inner group of Japanese that would accord them fair treatment, but instead basically existed outside in an area in which actions against them were held to no moral standard.

This is not to suggest, of course, that the Japanese are somehow alone in the tendency to marginalize connections to another group in order to easily ignore basic human obligations to one another; this is obviously a constant underlying all aspects of abusive behavior within human civilization, from petty racism to genocide. I am, however, particularly struck by how dangerously open their society leaves them to this sort of moral ambiguity. If they can ignore another Japanese person in such a cavalier way simply because they don't belong to one of the same social circles, imagine the possible attitudes one could have against foreigners, who are basically not even placed in the same circle of humanity as the Japanese themselves.

My three friends in the car are, to me, incredibly kind people. The two teachers work tirelessly to help their students succeed, and if I needed their help, they would no doubt be there. But, it's precisely this fact that makes such an innocuous event so unnerving to me. When these things happen, I feel as though my basic assumptions of human nature have been shattered.

A picture instead of a thousand words

2006-04-27T00:49:00.000+09:00

If you look on the right of the page you should now see a link to my Flickr site. I've posted some shots I've taken that I think are worth looking at, and since I've gotten myself a fancy new camera, expect more photos up here soon. At least, photos soon relative to posting on the blog.

Back to school...

2006-04-19T21:01:00.000+09:00

It's the first full week of class now at Hamamatsu Minami, and I'm already exhausted.

I had finally established a relationship with a lot of students and teachers at the school. Kids knew me and I knew them, and I was settling into a real place at school. But in Japan the school year starts in April, so all the older kids move on and I get to meet a whole new year of incoming students. All the older students had finally gotten used to seeing me to the point where they would no longer cry out when I walked around a corner in front of them, but would actually smile and say hello - or in this case, pose for a picture. Really, most of the kids I taught are unbelievably sweet (like the two in the picture) and I loved my classes with them, so much of this is just missing the old kids. Now I get to go back to square one again with 400 new faces. Faces made up of all gaping eyes and jaws hanging open, slack and dumbstruck. I was beginning to get tired of not being gawked at like some anthropomorphic panda all day, so this comes just in time.

With the new students have come a lot of new teachers as well, since teachers in Japan are rotated from school to school on a fairly regular basis. Although they hide it a bit - only a bit - better than the students, the new teachers are just as bad, really. It's especially annoying as these students and teachers are all new to the school, while I've been working here for more than 8 months. By all rights they should be the ones feeling out of place, not me. Of course, this is an unrealistic expectation, since I'm always going to be an oddity here, but it's still a little trying.

Not that the attention really bothers me; I think it's more that is just kind of bores me now. People here are always trying to talk to me, asking me questions about where I'm from, what I think of Japan, which Japanese food I like the best, etc. And, there was a time when I eagerly responded to these questions and had many of my own because there was a time when I was really interested and excited about meeting anyone I could here. But, one thing I've come to realize is that the time has long past where I was fascinated by the "exotic" Japanese people. No more, "WOW IT'S A REAL LIVE JAPANESE!" They're just people, and just like all other people, there are bad ones, good ones, and a whole hell of a lot of mediocrity in between.

However accustomed I am to them though, they are still interested in me. Interest I understand and appreciate; interest in another person because of their different viewpoints, experiences, or just general good qualities. But most interest in me is not really in me, but in my big, lanky white ass. And this is boring. I'm just not so pumped about talking about how tall I am, how well I use chopsticks, or whether I can eat sushi.

(Side note, this is really one of the most irritating things Japanese people will ask you regularly. Irritating because they ask, not "Do you like sushi?" which is a fair question, but "Can you eat sushi?" This is different as it seemingly implies that it's only the Japanese that are really capable of eating raw fish. First, I might point out that there are like six sushi restaurants in my home town alone, aside from how many there are in most any other metropolitan city anywhere in the world. But this question gets asked for all kinds of Japanese food, not just sushi. Often, it's regarding some sort of disgusting boiled, cold vegetable dish, because Japanese and vegetables seem to be like American Indians and buffalo; they eat every damn part. Take a look at the picture of a course at a dinner in Kyoto. Beautiful yes, but a beautiful arrangement of things that are mostly not fit for human consumption. This is why whenever I'm cooking with Maiko I always have to keep an eye on her because I'm suspicious she's going to try to slip the onion peel or discarded shavings of carrots into the meal.

When I get one of these weird vegetable parts planted in front of me I will balk, to the endless fascination of the others present. "Can you eat it?" they wonder. So, I usually say, sure, I could eat that thing that looks like lawn clippings that accidentally fell into the pot. But then again, I could eat anything. I could just as easily eat plastic, a piece of cardboard, or some wood chips - and usually that would be more palatable. But I'm not going to, buddy. This isn't Fear Factor, and I only eat things that taste good.)

Perhaps I'm being a snob about this, but I think about it more in terms of just cultural acclimation. I wouldn't expect a Japanese person living in the US to be fascinated by me because I'm so white, nor would I expect anything more than a roll of the eyes from a Chinese person if I asked them, "Can you eat hamburgers!?!?"

So I'm putting you on notice now, Japanese. Sorry, Japanese people, but you're going to have to do something now, because your mere existence is just not cutting it anymore. And get some new talking points, because the ones you have now are weak sauce.

For future feedback

2006-04-10T17:45:00.000+09:00

While it's nice to see that all kinds of people like to read the blog - even indignant Islamists intolerant of irony and people who dislike me on general principle - I'd like to keep this blog concerned with what I am actually writing about. So, if you'd like to write comments about something I'm writing on Japan, for example, please do so. If you have anything else to say, feel free to email me at thedukeinjapan@gmail.com, so we can have a dialogue, witty repartee, or exchange of insults in a forum that my grandparents won't have to be privy to.

More of my writing

2006-04-09T23:29:00.000+09:00

An article I translated was published in the Japan Times today. It was a rather large feature in the print edition, and you can also see it online on the front page of the Japan Times website under "Sunday Features":

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/

Or, it is directly linked here:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20060409x1.html

It's about a Japanese woman who lived with the Bedouin, a tribe of nomadic Arabs, in Syria. Though I translated most all of it from the Japanese, I'd like to say a few things up front:

1) The article is a translation, not something I wrote, so I had to be faithful to the original, with reservations
2) I did not translate the captions, and they are a little strange
3) Some extra sentences were added in later by the editor not in the original translation, and they do not mesh well with what I wrote

This aside, it was a fun thing to do, it's exciting to have something published I did - even if I'm not given direct credit on the page - and the start of more freelancing work for me.

English Departmental Trip

2006-03-08T20:51:00.000+09:00

A couple weeks ago I went on the yearly departmental trip with other teachers from the English department at school. 9 of the 13 teachers ended up coming along for a weekend in Kyoto. Unfortunately, neither the Beach Boys Sensei nor the old guy who does kendo were able to make it. I promised them both before I would make up their part in drinking though. Fortunately, both the hilarious sarcastic teacher who helps with English club (the woman in glasses on the right) and the other younger teacher from Kendo (with the camera strapped around his neck and the leather jacket with the fur collar) were coming, so I knew I'd still have at least two people worth talking to.

We were supposed to meet at the train station early Saturday morning to catch a 9 am bullet train, to arrive in Kyoto around 10:15. Since two of the English teachers live in the same apartment building as me, I caught a ride with them to the station. We meet up with the other teachers, sit around waiting for a couple stragglers and then get on our train. It's an hour and 15 minute train ride and they're talking about school about 15 minutes into it, which means they've exhausted all other outlets of conversation. We have reserved seats in one compartment; 10 teachers means we take up an entire two rows of seats, with two sets of three on one side and two on the other. In what would later prove to be a common theme for the trip, the three women sit on the side with the four seats, and the six guys sit on the other side. That is, some automatic sex segregation. In the picture you can see later that day how this played out on the streets, with the women trailing behind and the men rushing off ahead. (Kind of reminded me of the family hikes of my youth)

Arriving at the station, I watch as the teacher ostensibly in charge of this expedition immediately takes us out the wrong exit. I know we're not at the right one, since it exits into a massive shopping complex and we're instead standing in front of a convenience store. Since I'm the youngest person on the trip and the newest teacher in general, I'm trying to let this kind of thing go in the interest of respect. However, after they proceed to spend about 10 minutes as a group trying to decide the best course of action, finally I just tell everyone to follow me since I've been here several times and know exactly where to go. Once I start walking, everyone falls in line and I lead them like duckling through the station and to our hotel. This is another theme of the trip; the teachers dissolving in the face of group decisions into an amorphous, directionless mass until someone - namely, me - prompts direct action. I assumed one of the other teachers would be sort of designated group leader, but since they're all off duty so to speak, pretty much everyone just wants to be led around.

We drop off our bags at the hotel and head off to Kiyomizu Temple, a complex dating back to the late 8th century and one of the main sights of the city. (A little more info here) The other teachers, excited to show the place off to me, are disappointed to hear that this is the 4th time I've been to it; I've actually been there more times than anyone else in our group. Still, it's an impressive building no matter how many times one sees it, and it is a beautiful clear day in Kyoto. There are, as always, a lot of people there as well - both Japanese and foreign - but our group is special to be a big Japanese group with a single foreigner. Later, looking at some of the other teacher's pictures - like this one here - I was puzzled by how many in which I appear in the foreground. At first I wondered if I weren't just so tall I was inadvertently blocking all the shorter teachers shots. In retrospect, the teacher was deliberately putting me into the frame to make the picture that much more exotic. Of course, I certainly am not complaining about this.

Inside the grounds of the temple is a small shrine, Jishu, dedicated to a god of love and matchmaking. As such, it's crammed with young women at all times buying charms of all kinds; to meet people, to stay with people, to have kids, to have healthy kids, to have your kids meet people, to have your kids stay with people, to have you kids have kids...you get the idea. They sell charms of a sort at pretty much every shrine and temple in Japan, usually just at stall inside. At popular places like Jishu or Kiyomizu though, it reaches such a ridiculous level that it seems people are more there to buy souvenirs than actually see the place itself. That is, they become popular as souvenir shops selling goods associated with the place above the place itself.

Also at the Jishu Shrine are two stones at a distance of perhaps 50 feet. Legend has it that if a person can cross between the two stones, walking with his or her eyes closed, his or her's wish in love will come true. Knowing that one of the teachers - the guy who loves to curse - is in his early thirties and unmarried, I started joking that he should do it. As he didn't immediately decline, I started pushing more, getting the other guy teachers to join in with some quality peer-pressure as we chanted "Do it, do it, do it!" He eventually flushed red, wussed out, and ran away down the stairs, with me and the other guys laughing behind him.

We walked through the grounds until we reached the most impressive part of the temple: the stage. Suspended over the valley below through a series of wooden pillars, it offers a panoramic view of the forest behind, gardens below and city beyond in the distance. I reminisced about when my brother visited and basically assaulted two Japanese girls here. (When they asked him to take a picture of them, he insisted instead that we all take one together, leading to one hilariously awkward shot where they clearly don't understand what is going on, and that really captures the deer in the headlights quality of their reaction to Matt) Anyhow, in about the same spot, I snapped this shot of the three female teachers. On the right is the funny teacher, the one in the middle is your stereotypical sweet old Japanese grandma, and the one on the left looks like Yoda and, I discovered on this trip, is really devoid of any discernible personality. Actually, I think Maiko made a much more biting, though uncharacteristically insensitive insult when she saw this picture, exclaiming, "That teacher dresses like a homeless woman!"

After walking out from the temple, we headed down a series of backstreets lined with shops. Whenever Japanese people go anywhere, they have an obligation to buy a souvenir for everyone they know or might conceivably meet in the near future, so we had to buy some Kyoto stuff. Luckily, every city or even small town in Japan has at least one thing it is "famous" for (Incidentally, Hamamatsu is famous for its eel and a candy called "Eel Pies" that doesn't really contain eel) that is sold all over the place. I couldn't believe that we'd been in Kyoto for less than two hours and were already buying souvenirs in preparation for the trip back.

That being said, it was an interesting area with a very traditional "Kyoto" feeling to it, both in the architecture, the small shops and restaurants, and the sort of feeling of walking on narrow winding lanes. Kyoto, despite the evocative nature of the name to us foreigners, is in reality a rather large, modern city, and the large, modern parts of it are pretty boring, if not outright ugly. It's kind of upsetting at first to see, but the Kyoto that we want to see is still extant, just a little harder to find.

After this, we stopped for a break and had some snacks. Some of us, as you can see in the picture, sat down all hunched over with our legs pulled in like little children. We decided to break up for the time being and meet up again later for dinner. I went with the guys, who were going to walk through the city and see some sights on their way to visit Kyoto University, I suppose as a show of support for some of their students taking the entrance exams later that month.

So we ended up on a long and largely uneventful trek through the city in which they got lost several more times and I had to either lead or ask for directions since they didn't want to talk to strangers. When we arrived at Kyoto University, we were so tired from walking that we never got any farther than the tourist information center. Since it had a video tour of the campus, we just chose to watch that instead of actually doing any more moving for a while. I was happy with this because I had visited Kyoto U before last time I was in Kyoto, and found it just as drab the second time as the first. On our way out, three of the teachers kind of bowed at the entrance and made a short prayer for their student's success. I insisted they do it again so I could take a picture, "to show the students later to prove you went." Then I made them hold the pose for about a minute, continuously saying, "Wait wait, one more second!" each time they tried to stop bowing. Notice that they're laughing in the picture, but, importantly, still bowing.

We met up again for dinner at a very nice restaurant along the Kamo River, the ancient eastern boundary of the capital, from which the traditional road east to Tokyo, the Tokaido, began. I was, of course, mostly affecting a signature pensive-style pose for this photograph, but also actually was thinking a bit. The Kamo River is one of those places that figures prominently in so many books, plays, and historical accounts of Japan that I've read, that it is always both exciting and profoundly strange to suddenly be standing next to it. Somehow, when I read in Kabuki plays about the legendary battle between Benkei and Yoshitsune on the bridge over the river, it seemed totally outside my world. It was a world I could not imagine I would ever see, and in that sense, one that never did really exist. This is quite different than reading Dickens or Hemingway stories set in London or Paris; Europe feels quite immediate and close, and even somehow these works are tinged with a feeling of resignation in that my life will almost inevitably take me through those places. Standing on the banks of the Kamo River, or in the temples built by Hideyoshi, or on a forest path through the Japanese Alps next to two waterfalls that figures prominently in the story of Musashi, it seems almost comically unreal that I am here.

Anyway, the restaurant was basically just a single home perched on the river. We sat along a single long table looking out and were served a series of dishes in a distinctly Kyoto style of cuisine called kaiseki and waited on diligently by two little old women. Had a great dinner; drinking and chatting along with the other teachers as we waited for the next dish to be brought out. After a series of immaculately prepared dishes, came my most feared Japanese concoction: the foul chawanmushi.

This "savory egg custard" is like a warm, sour egg pudding, with a disgustingly slippery texture. Since I had told a couple teachers that I hated chawanmushi, they were all really hoping it would be served during dinner, just to spite me. Usually, I wouldn't touch the stuff, but since I was paying more than a hundred dollars for the dinner, I felt obligated to choke every part of it down. People here seem to consider this dish a delicacy, but as you can see from the picture a teacher snapped of me eating, I do not. When it was put in front of me, they could not contain their glee, jibbing me in the ribs, snapping shots of me, and actually taking a video of me eating. Bastards.

After dinner, most of the teachers packed it in for the night, but a few others and I went out for some more drinks. Walking around downtown with just a few of them, looking for a bar, laughing at their bewilderment with all the lights and people out in the city, I suddenly became aware of how different they were from Tokyo people. Nice people all, to be sure, but just as assuredly they're from the sticks. When I walked around the campus of Kyoto University with the teachers, they marvelled at the sheer size of this campus that is smaller than Waseda and maybe a fourth that of UCLA. Almost all of them were born and all of them grew up in this prefecture, and they all came back here to work after college - sometimes even at the same high schools they attended. It's come up a lot here actually, when I start talking to students, teachers, or just friends around here about Japan, I realize that I've been to more places in their country than they have. It's amusing to say, but I'm a more worldly person in the Japanese sense than the other Japanese here!

Be Mine, Mr. Adamy

2006-03-02T21:14:00.000+09:00

According to the Greeting Card Association, a source I know we all can agree to trust, 80% of Valentine's Day gifts worldwide are bought by women. In Japan, that figure rises to 100%, because here it is solely a day for women to give chocolates to men. Not just the men in their lives in the sense of the man they love, but quite literally "the men in their lives." This means friends, teachers, and even co-workers. So, Valentine's Day in Japan is even more of a crazy commercially manipulated holiday than in the US, even more divorced from any tradition or meaning than in the Western world, and yet somehow also even more necessary to participate in. In fact, the giving of chocolate here is so compulsory that there is even a name for that given out of necessity and not affection, 義理 (giri) or "duty" chocolate. The week before the big day therefore, the ghost of the (largely apocryphal) Saint Valentine arrives early to vomit his gaudy wares all over every damn store in the country, from department stores to 7-11's to drink stalls on train platforms.

Usually I try to ignore Valentine's Day and then wait for it on the day to pass engaged in some totally unrelated activity, but this year I was both able to avoid it as a harbinger of loneliness - safe in the knowledge that I have a girlfriend this time for once - as well as enjoy another occasion for attention. Also, I didn't have to do anything myself, which is always nice.

I arrived at school that day to find a box of chocolate on my desk, which I was told was from the female English teachers. This got me really excited, because that means it was giri chocolate. This was amusing to me that they feel they have to give me chocolate, and also oddly pleasing since it means I am enough a part of the social fabric of the school for the other teachers to have a sense of duty towards me. I kept trying to get one of the teachers to admit she had to give me this entirely out of a sense of obligation, as that made it perversely more valueable to me.

The week before in English club I had introduced standard Valentine's vocabulary like "Be My Valentine", "Happy Valentine's Day!", and then watched the episode of the Simpsons where Ralph falls in love with Lisa on Valentine's to introduce "I Choo choose you!" The kids then made Valentines for each other. The next week they exchanged their cards. Surprisingly, I actually got some really nice ones from the girls in the club too, including a ridiculously labor-intensive one from a girl with a crush on me that must have taken an hour to craft, and another from the girl who has so much scorn for me that she couldn't be bothered to write my name correctly, wishing a "Happy Valentine's Day to Adamy." Whatever, she's fat.

The other teacher supervising the club, D'Angelo Sensei also got a great card from the greatest kid Kenji "KMK/King of Kurimura/Kuri-chan" Kurimura. Translated, it reads:

Dear Mrs. D'Angelo,

Good Afternoon! Hmm...I don't really know what to write here...We only meet once a week for club, but please keep up the good work next year too!

P.S. So...how did those candles and candies I gave you the other day work out?

Okay! Anyways, thanks a lot,

With all my love,
Kenji Kurimura

KMK is referencing Christmas time at our Secret Santa party, at which time he gave the teacher scented candles and a bag of aphrodisiac candies, ("A gift for you and your husband," he said with a wink) which at the time made her flush with too much embarrassment to yell at him. The note had basically the same effect. And just like that time, this time too I laughed really hard and told KMK he was a great kid.

After school Maiko came and we had a nice dinner together and then shared a bottle of wine. I got a very nice card and a delicious box of chocolate from her too. Unfortunately, playing into the Japanese style of Valentine's Day means I have to return the favor on "White Day" a new holiday domestically manufactured in Japan and held a month later in March, giving gifts back to all the women from whom I received the same.

Fortunately, as a product of Japan it is subject to the restrictions of the country, which means that as I man I don't really have to do anything for anyone else if I don't feel like it.

Boyfriend of the bride

2006-02-08T21:33:00.000+09:00

A couple weeks ago, I decided to go into Tokyo to see Maiko model, since it might be the last chance for me to catch her in a show. She will start working at JAL in April and is unsure if she'll continue taking modeling jobs. I took the train into Tokyo in the morning and met up with her parents, also there to watch, at the hotel where the show was being held.

I was really looking forward to seeing her in the show, except for a little thing that made me uneasy. It was a bridal show.

As if that weren't enough, it was a bridal show I was to attend along with Maiko's parents.

So I'm sitting there in the ballroom of a hotel next to Maiko's mother and father, waiting for the show to start. The head of her modeling agency comes out to introduce the show, but this becomes a 30 minute presentation by him, because he's a former model and an insanely self-absorbed primadonna. I know he's a former model because he took pains to mention that 20 times during his presentation, prefacing almost any comment he made with "When I was a model..." His presentation, by the way, was on how to be a beautiful bride, which I suppose he is eminently qualified to lecture on, being an unmarried man. The best part was when he demonstrated the "sexy" way for a women to walk, swinging his hips side-to-side. This may or may not be sexy if a woman were to do it, but it is certainly embarrassing, even to witness, for a man.

Finally, his fawning for attention at an end, he brought out the models. They came down the middle of the room, did a turn, walked back halfway and crossed in either direction. The accompanying music was a pounding and confusing mix of disparate styles only connected by their origin outside of Japan and general awfulness. (This following the general trend of Japanese to throw all western music together under one umbrella - literally, if you go to a record store you might just find a giant "Western Music" section - ignoring not just genre differences but huge gaps in time. Only in Japan can you listen to the radio and hear a playlist combine Led Zeppelin, The Arcade Fire, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West into one show. Nobody else seems to notice, which is what makes me suspect they are ignoring it the same way they are pachinko parlors and the guys yelling on the trains)

Anyways, to this painful amalgamation of noise came the models themselves, wearing a series of dresses I would categorize as alternately baffling and excessive. I could hardly conceive someone walking around in these, let alone down the aisle. The first batch were all in different colors: yellow, orange, red, blue and green. Some looked like the product of a bride with unfortunate taste for her bridesmaids. Another, pictured in red, resembles nothing as much as a flamenco dancer.

Later, for the non-Spanish virgin Japanese brides, I suppose, more normal white dresses were featured. During this portion of the show I became intensely aware of not looking at the models in the wrong way. First, I felt rather guilty ogling women openly when my girlfriend and her mother were nearby, even if it was a modeling show and I was supposed to look them up and down. Second, it made me vaguely uncomfortable to be staring at women wearing wedding dresses. I mean, it seemed like there is something essentially wrong with looking at a bride so closely; you don't sit in the church at the bride walking down the aisle and check her out.

Maiko came out in three different dresses, finishing in an ensemble with some sort of veil. Her mother is elbowing me and saying, "Wow, doesn't Maiko make a beautiful bride!" I choke on my water a little, and offer up, "Well, yes...but I think maybe she looks a little too young to be wearing that dress, don't you?"

My underhair

2006-02-07T17:51:00.000+09:00

So, along the lines of the previous post about fascination with my hair. This week in the aforementioned homeroom, all the kids were working on skits in pairs at their desks, which mostly involves them chatting with each other and me periodically yelling at them from my desk to shut up and practice. A girl from the English club, Azusa, and her partner were particularly loud, whispering to each other and breaking out into fits of giggles with their hands over their mouths. Finally, I had to ask Azusa what their problem was. Apparently, her partner, Marina, kept trying to get Azusa to ask me a question for her, since Azusa knows me personally from our club activity. Azusa wouldn't, explaining she was worried if she asked me I would get really angry at her.

I roll my eyes at her. I have had many similar experiences during my first week at the school, in which students would take 10 minutes of frenzied conferencing, agonzing, and prodding until one would work up the courage, flushing deep red, to ask me something as innocuous as, "Do you have a girlfriend?" To get them to go back to work, I just told Marina she could ask me whatever she wanted. I figure I can't be embarassed, angered, or shocked by anything this girl might ask. After repeatedly assurances, Marina came up to the front of the class where I was sitting.

She dances around for a while in anxiety about asking her question, looking back frequently at her friends and wringing her hands. Finally, she takes a deep breath, gathers her strength, leans in and, pointing at my golden arm hair, asks quietly, "Is your underhair gold?" I get really confused at first, and repeat, "My underhair?" She makes her meaning clear by again saying, "Gold?" this time while pointing directly at my crotch.

I laugh at this, because I mean, sure she's being rude - especially to ask this of a teacher - but when I look up into her eyes I see no guile, just doe-eyed curiousity. And, I did foolishly insist she could "ask anything." Of course, I refuse to answer though, because this is hardly the kind of thing I should be discussing in class, aside from the fact that I don't like being treated like a circus animal.

L: "I'm not answering that."
M: "But you said I could ask anything!"
L: "You can ask, yes, but I never said I would answer. (I pat myself on the back mentally for this rejoinder) Why do you want to know anyway?"
M: "Hmm...because I want to learn about different cultures?"
L: "Marina, you know this is not a cultural question.
(Her response actually causes me to choke on a laugh because it's an unexpectedly witty response and I'm trying to be serious. I decide to play a card to end the discussion)
L: "No, I think it's just you being a little eroi (perverted)"

As intended, Marina goes crimson, drops the subject, and runs back to hide at her seat. Azusa and several other students are just in hysterics having been watching the whole time. The Japanese teacher, having overheard only the laughter, comes by and asks me what's going on. I shake my head, tell him it's nothing, and try to move on with the class.

After the bell rings Marina comes up with a worried look and asks me in her little Japanese voice, quaking, "Adams-sensei, do you hate me now?" I tell her no, of course, patting her on the shoulder with the general admonition to try to be a little more aware of boundaries of politeness. She nods and heads off and I try to laugh off the whole thing.

But in my mind she has left me with a suspicion that every student I see harbors the same curiosity in their mind each time I walk into the classroom.

So yeah, go JET program.

Class Pet

2006-02-05T00:53:00.000+09:00

One of the homerooms I teach, 15 homeroom, is pretty much notorious among all the first-year teachers. Any teacher on their way to the classroom is sure to be trudging heavily and shaking their head. When we had a teaching evaluation last month, my teacher lied to the principal and vice-principal about when she was available simply so they wouldn't end up watching her teach that class. Simply saying the name of the homeroom causes teachers to roll their eyes and emit a collective sigh.

The main reason for their communal angst is just a number of noisy girls in the class. They talk loudly in class, wear their skirts too short, and constantly interrupt to ask questions wildly unrelated to anything going on at the time. The attached picture was taken when I caught a few of these girls after school rummaging through a boys desk, reading his papers, and writing a letter to him telling him about all these embarrassing things they found (I say "caught" in the sense of "watched them do it and took a picture while laughing"). One of the girls takes special pleasure in going into the teachers office between classes and basically bullying this 35 year-old math teacher who is clearly uncomfortable dealing with women. I mean, not bad kids by American standards, but they certainly blow carefully organized Japanese classes to hell.

I, however, have no problems with the class. Like I've said before, behavior disruptive in other classes can be easily guided into oral communication activities, people who aren't shy about being loud also aren't shy about speaking out or answering questions, and the kids are in general just a welcome change for me from those that I have to basically grab by the scruff of the neck to get to acknowledge my presence in the room. I also seemed to have tamed the class to a degree - noticed by the teachers - by way of having some girls develop crushes on me.

For example, while correcting skits the other day, I am inviting the students in their groups of 2 or 3 to come up to the desk so I can correct their scripts. As I read over it, I make corrections and offer them suggestions. One girl just stares at me transfixed the entire time with her mouth agape. Finally, I ask her what's wrong. Continuing to gaze into my eyes, she just cooes, "Adams-Sensei, your eyes are soooo blue!"

Then again, there is a fine line sometimes between this adoration and a fascination more of the freak-show variety. Another girl in the class is just endlessly amazed at my arm hair. Japanese people, in general, don't have much body hair - on their limbs, at least. During the very first class I had with this homeroom, I knelt down at her desk to help her with a problem, and as I try to walk her through the answer, I realize that she is not listening at all, just looking down at my arm. After gaping at my arm for a while, and slowly moving her hand closer and closer, she is now in fact petting my arm hair. This takes a second for me to process, until shaking my head clear I ask her, "What do you think you're doing!?" She raises her eyes, which are open wide with wonder, near crying in awe and, continuing to run her fingers over my forearm, whispers,

"Adams-Sensei...your hair...is GOLD!

After clarifying that I am not a dog, I take my arm back. Still, she tries every week to run her hands through my forearm hair, pretending to have questions and calling me over just for that moment to reach out and stroke my apparently golden forearm mane with the excitement of a girl and her beloved pony.

Snapshot of Today

2006-02-01T19:08:00.000+09:00

Snapshots from today:

In class, students are working in pairs preparing a skit; writing, asking for pronounciation and practicing. I'm walking around the room helping them out when I find this girl's bag. The bag is in the colors of the Jamaican flag, with CANNABIS written right under a large picture of a marijuana leaf. I kind of do a double-take, and then laugh and ask if I can take a picture. (She responds by looking down, because she's embarassed. This is why there are so few pictures of students on the blog; it's certainly not from lack of trying, just that putting lots of shots of black hair face down on a desk adds little to a story) She eventually ventures a question of why I'm laughing. I ask her if she knows what "cannabis" is. She doesn't, she confers with several friends, they don't either. I tell her it's the latin word for the plant that produces marijuana. She doesn't know what that is either. Rolling my eyes and changing gears, I ask why she bought the bag in the first place. She says her friend got it for her because it was "so colorful and adorable." The teacher in the class, coming over to see what we're chatting about, hears this part and agrees, "What a cute bag!!!"

Incidentally, students are constantly using multiple exclamation points in their papers, which I always erase down to one or just a period. Recently I've started thinking that maybe the way they talk really does require this sort of emphasis though.

Grading papers from students on the topic of "What country do you want to visit most?" I find in this informal survey of 200 second year students that an alarmingly large amount of Japanese kids age 16 or 17 years old polled, think:
1. Americans are tall simply because they eat so much beef
2. The two main tourist attractions in the US are: the Statue of Liberty and cornfields
3. London, New York, Alaska, Hawaii, and Africa are all countries

Incidentally, the kid who wanted to visit the "country" of Africa was - and this is a direct quotation - "particularly interested in running with cheetahs." (emphasis mine) I understand that students here in Japan - and in the US too, of course - have a limited, if not myopic, worldview, but I would hope this guy would know that if he ever does get close to a cheetah on the African Steppe, the last thing he'd want to do would be to provoke its hunting instincts by galloping past at full speed.

Later, chatting with the Beach Boys Sensei about a poem, another English teacher comes up to use the printer. He studied abroad for a year in college, and loves using profanity. He especially likes saying "fucking," which he pronounces more like "fuh - KING" with a stop in the middle and the second part almost spit out. He also hates working, or perhaps loves talking about how much he hates working. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) he really doesn't know how to use profanity. So this conversation ensues between these two Japanese men in suits with tweed sweaters, one in his late 30's and one in his 50's:

Sensei 2: "Hey, what's fucking?"
Beach Boys Sensei: "Ah...(decides to respond in kind)...I don't...fucking know."
S2: "Fuck! This school is bitch!"
BBS: "Who's the fucking bitch?"
S2: "Bitch! Fucking tired."
BBS: "Are you smoking marijuana?"
S2: "No, I am sober, but this fucking school! Fucking tired. Well, see you later."

Then he walks back to his desk, and the other teacher resumes talking to me without skipping a beat. Nobody else minds either, not understanding any of it - in fact, several look at me strangely for laughing.

Life=Happiness Music?

2006-02-01T18:59:00.000+09:00

I forgot a key story from the day Matt came to school:

As Matt and I walked down the stairs outside of the English room, we came upon a student of mine, who yelps "Oh!" upon seeing us and stands transfixed for a bit with his feet on different steps in between strides before deciding to stay and chat.

This is a profoundly strange kid. I love this kid because he always tries to talk to me outside class, even if what he says makes no sense at all, which is most all of the time. Often I get the feeling he is just speaking to me in disjointed sentences directly stripped from his textbook and their context therein. He also wears a printed hawaiian shirt underneath his school uniform every day for some reason. (As an interesting side note, it's likely that all of the best students in my oral communications class are off-kilter in one way or another; the average Japanese kid is rather unwilling or afraid to participate on an individual level, let alone talk to me outside of class. Only the kids who just don't care are fully comfortable speaking out)

So I ask the kid, "What's up?"
"AH! Ahhh....yes," he replies, fully in agreement with whatever I said in his head, "Good job!"
"What? Good job?" I ask, "I said 'what's up'; I'm asking how you are."
"Yes, yes, yes!" he exclaims in glee, as if to let us know that there is nothing he is more keenly aware of than this exchange, his eyes open wide. He looks quickly from side to side and, leaning in as if to impart to us a great secret, he begins in a whisper:
"Life..."
- I crane forward to catch these seemingly vital words -
"...is happiness music."
Finishing, he nods his head in satisfaction, basking in his own beneficence after laying this deep insight at our feet.
I am less impressed, "Dude, what the hell are you talking about?"
"Oh, oh oh oh!" he replies, and with a triumphant flourish of his hands, exclaims, "Good luck!"

And, such blessed with his benediction on our way to enlightenment, we stand stock still as he brushes past us up the stairs, mission accomplished: another two souls saved.

I am just really amused, since I am used to this sort of regular insanity from students. Matt is rather confused through this whole conversation, and I have to repeat it for him to confirm that it did in fact happen, and that was definitely what the kid said. He made sure to write it down, so this wisdom could be preserved and passed on.

The Def Tech sound Shen and Micro 'round singing on and on and on

2006-01-23T21:26:00.000+09:00

So Matt and I arrive in Tokyo and head off to do our "hatsumode", our first shrine visit of the year. All Japanese people customarily go to a shrine - often just a local one - to offer a prayer in that first week of the year. We decide to hit Meiji Jingu, the largest shrine complex in Tokyo, built to honor and house the spirit of the Meiji Emperor, credited with the modernization of Japan in the late 1800's. There are so many people arriving here that they have had to divert some of the trains onto a separate platform; otherwise people would certainly get knocked off onto the tracks. We get off the train and, approaching the gate, are caught up in a throng of people making their first visit of the year. We shuffle our way to the inner shrine and find ourselves basically the only white people there. Japanese are clearly perplexed at our presence. The giant shrine and forest complex - usually entirely silent except for the distant echoes of trains - feels very much like the inside of a Tokyo subway car during rush hour. It takes about an hour to wade in and out of the river of people. We later learn that some 3 million visited the shrine that day.

Matt and I wander into stores in Tokyo and play with things indiscriminately. We are acting on Matt's in Japan M.O.: "We will do whatever we want and if anyone gets upset, we just say 'we didn't know we couldn't do that.'" Inside Toyland in Harajuku, we take turns wearing a Darth Vader mask with built in voice modulation. I do my favorite line ("All too easy" from when he thinks he's knocked Luke into the carbon freezing chamber) and Matt threatens to choke the life out of Admiral Piet ("You've failed me for the last time, Admiral!"). Matt buys some toys and stridently announces to the girl at the front, "NO these are NOT gifts!"

Matt goes off for a few days on his own after that since I have to go back to work. I will be eternally envious of Matt for the chance he had to be in the presence of this wise old monkey; surveying the land, looking down on what mankind has wrought, a single tear running down his pink simian face. I will not, however, be envious of all the monkey feces Matt had to plod through or dodge on the trek up to this epic sight.

Matt is supposed to come home late one night for dinner after 6. He shows up around 11, loudly singing the Strokes. Which means, he's drunk. Apparently he got off at the bus stop but then decided he would check out this small bar first right down the street. 4 hours and many beers later, he tells me about how he "just had the most fun he's had yet in Japan" drinking with a few local old guys and singing karaoke (In my head I cancel plans to take him anywhere expensive; why waste money trying to go to interesting places if he would rather hang around this tiny town and drink with old men?) However, as he tells his story - he comes in, orders a drink, the guy orders him another, the guy gives him some cigarettes, they sing together, drink a few more - and looks down at his receipt, it becomes clear that when the guys ordered him beers, they did only that, order them. Matt had been buying his - and possibly their - beer all night. So Matt got fleeced by a bunch of old Japanese guys out of $50.

During the week, I'd wake up at 6:30 to get ready for school, leaving at around 7:40. Matt would get up a little later and head out to visit some part of Japan. Hamamatsu is pretty convenient for that, being only a little over an hour away from Tokyo or Kyoto in either direction. After seeing the sights of say Kyoto, most nights Matt would just ride home on the bullet train in lieu of paying for a hotel, since he could ride on any train in the country for free with his rail pass. On those nights, we'd pick up something to cook for dinner at the local market, then stop off at the liquor store next door to pick up some beer. They sell beer at the market, but I've never seen anyone else go into the liquor store before. The guy working there is really friendly, so we decided to become his main patrons. We got to be such frequent customers that he now yells out greetings, runs over and opens the beer fridge for me, and often throws in extra cans as a bonus. After dinner, we'd relax, drink our beers and watch an episode of the Simpsons. Occasionally we would fire bottle rockets off my balcony.

One night that week, Matt and I took the kids from the English club - that is, the kids from the club that I like - out to dinner at a "Viking" restaurant, (So called because of the famed appetite of the vikings? Or their propensity to eat buffet-style? Or because of the generally skewed perception of Japanese people in relation to foreigners? I have gotten all three answers on asking) where Matt and I were able to have the first dinner in a while in which we could eat to satiation. We put on a little show for the kids - feats of eating, if you will - continuously going back for another helping over and over as their eyes grew in that peculiar mixture of admiration and horror that accompanies so much of what I do here.

I was very excited to introduce Matt to Kenji Kurimura, or Kurimura-kun, who is far and away my favorite student, if not my favorite person ever. Kurimura-kun - or "King of Kurimura", as he is sometimes called by me, or "Kuri-chan" as he is called by the girls in the club, or "KMK" as he would soon be knighted by Matt - is a returnee student from Spain. He practices archery and has an unusually dark tan over his unusually feminine features. He accentuates this with his constant hand motions, which resemble nothing so much as a conductor minus the wand. A rather unorthodox conductor, however, who in the course of keeping his own conversations on track resorts to various hand motions that are totally unrelated to what he is talking about as well as impenetrable to anyone else. I had been building the kid up to Matt all week, but he was not disappointed. KMK is the nicest kid in the world, and everyone is forced to bestow love on him with a fierce intensity; Matt too, found he could only oblige.

Most of the dinner was Matt teasing the kids about their girlfriends and boyfriends - these 16 year olds flushing red the whole time - or me doing impressions of the old kendo coach who teaches English at school. Matt warned me about making fun of a teacher, but I explained that I am not making fun at all; though he is half-deaf and just strange as hellI think he's consistently one of the greatest people I've ever met. The point of the dinner was that the kids would get more of an opportunity to speak English, but I think Matt and I dominated the conversation while they mostly giggled like crazy. I don't think Yuka (on the right) really got much out through her giggles at all. Azusa had a bit more spark; as Matt remarked, "She's one of those girls that would just kind of make a guy start dating her by sheer strength of personality." Or maybe I said that? I suppose it's not really important, and we talk so similarly sometimes that it is hard to keep track.

On Friday that week, I invited Matt into school to visit. He was on his way back from Osaka that afternoon, planning to get in around 3. I told him to call me when he got back into Hamamatsu, and to come to school around 4. I get no call from him. Instead, another teacher suddenly rushes into the English teacher's room and spits out between gasps, "Your friend is waiting at the school entrance." I come down to get Matt and find him looking exhausted, unshaven, hungover and disheveled. The office secretaries are understandably uncomfortable, and a P.E. teacher eyes him suspiciously, ready to defend the school from attack. Matt tells me he was out the whole night before clubbing with that Japanese guy he met on the plane and only slept two hours or so in a capsule hotel. "Great," I think, "just the way I wanted to introduce you to the school, red-eyed with a cold sweat. Now, let's go meet the principal."

As a sign of respect to me more than anything else, the principal has asked to meet my friend when he arrives. I tell the vice-principal he's here, and she runs with us down to the principals office, where Matt and I sit across from them. I have to play interpreter for a while as they ask standard questions about whether he likes Japan, where he's from, what university he goes to and what he studies. It's unfortunate, really, as the principal is actually a really sharp guy who studied physics in college; him and Matt would likely have a lot to talk about. Unfortunately he speaks no English and Matt no Japanese, and there is no conceivable way I can translate that sort of conversation.

I decide Matt should be hidden until school lets out so he doesn't disturb any classes. So we go back to the English room and hang out for a while, listening to music. In walks the Beach Boys Sensei by chance. We had been trying all week to find a time to go over to the the guy's house for drinks and dinner but never could get it to work. I suspect that his wife wasn't too enthusiastic about us getting raucously drunk at her house with her elderly husband. Luckily, Matt and him still had a chance to meet at school that day, and we sat around and chatted for a while. Matt and I detail our plan in which Matt leaves me his Japan Rail pass to use even after he is gone, with me simply pretending to be him and getting free train tickets. Sensei listens intently to our plan, closes his eyes in concentration, nods his head as if arriving at some particular understanding, and remarks:
"Ah, so even Adams-Sensei steals."

This quickly became one of our favorite lines.

As the bell rings, I decide to give Matt a walking tour of the school. As if by fate, KMK himself happens to walk by just as we leave the room and we call him over as I insist he accompany us on this tour. He follows behind us sheepishly while we stroll down the hallways. Students who have just gotten used to seeing me on a daily basis are now shocked right back to six months ago to see two tall white guys in their hallways. I keep asking KMK for some commentary but he doesn't have much to say. I'm not sure whether this is good for him, making him look cool for being the kid we like the most and the only chosen to walk around with us, or terrible for him, a public display that further isolates him from his peers. Whatever. KMK will have to deal.

We end up at English club which is characteristically terrible since only half of the kids want to be there. I end it early so Matt can take a little time during his visit to give a demonstration of proper earthquake safety. Rest assured, Asami was later soundly disiciplined for her lackluster committment to such a serious endeavor. I had to convince Matt not to wear that helmet around school for the rest of the day, not because I didn't think it was funny, just that I didn't want the other teachers to think my friend was a lunatic.

After about 5 minutes of watching Matt interact with the students - while wearing the helmet of course - the Japanese teacher in charge of the English club turns to me, shaking her head, and says, "Yes, I can definitely tell that this is your friend." I am still unsure whether that was a compliment or insult.

After club, we walk around to check out what the other kids are doing; visiting the calligraphy club, the Go club, and the music clubs. We eventually find our way to the Shogi (Japanese Chess) club, and again come upon the Beach Boys Sensei. In Japanese chess, rather than standing pieces they use small tiles. All of the chess tiles are the same shape; they are differentiated by Chinese characters written on the top of each piece. Sensei asks me if I know how to play, and I confess to him that I can't read the characters so I don't really know what piece was what. He replies,
S: "Oh that...yeah I can't read them either."
L: "But you know how to play, right?"
S: "Ah, well, I don't know that anyone really knows how to play shogi...(wistfully) It's a mystery...you know."
L: "Haha, then why are you in charge of the club?"
S: "I was assigned...You see, I actually don't care for shogi, myself...(picture this slight, graying man in his late 50's suddenly assuming a low sumo stance) I would rather watch SUMO!"

We again rue not having a chance to drink with him.

The next day is the Saturday of Matt's last weekend here. We were going to head up to Nikko, the site of an amazing mausoleum complex for Tokugawa (the man who founded the dynasty that ruled Japan for almost 300 years) in the mountains north of Tokyo, but it was rainy and cold Saturday and forecast for Sunday as well. We head into Tokyo again, hoping that it might clear up by Sunday so we could make the trip to Nikko in the morning. Getting there, we find it so damn cold we just cancel those plans almost immediately. Maiko and I have dinner as Matt goes off to explore on his own. Later, walking Maiko back to the train station, she hears some maniac singing at the top of his lungs. I see a figure swigging a beer and sort of dancing across the street. I catch the atonal rendering of a Strokes song.

It's Matt, of course. He's been buying beers at convenience stores and sort of strolling around singing, frightening Japanese. I drop Maiko off and we decide on a plan of attack in which we buy a beer at a convenience store, start walking, and drink it before we reach the next convenience store. To put this in perspective, there are convenience stores here practically on every block; Starbucks does not even come close. It actually affords us some time to talk a bit though, which we haven't had as much with me at school and him jaunting around on his own.

The next day is our last. We hit the Japanese Sword Museum in the morning, which is pretty damn awesome, then head to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office Building, a set of twin towers that, aside from housing the government, offers a free panoramic view of Tokyo from 46 floors up. Only when about to enter and have our bags checked does Matt remember that he is carrying not only a leatherman utility knife in his bag, but also A BAG OF FIREWORKS. I wonder if he might toss them somewhere outside, but we are already at this point standing directly under a surveillance camera. I figure it's okay though as long as they are in the bottom of the bag; the officers searching bags are so uncomfortable with the impoliteness of putting their hands through your things that they barely open it. So we enter the government headquarters with weapons and explosives.

We then meet up with Maiko for a delicious gyoza (pot sticker) lunch in Ginza, 8 gyoza and each like 6 inches long. We walk it off touring the Imperial Palace grounds and gardens. It becomes a really beautiful day, despite all forecasts, perfect weather. Matt, tired of walking, decides to just flop down in the middle of the garden there, lying face down in the dry grass. I take a series of pictures of him and the disgust evident on the faces of several salarymen passing by. Eventually we leave, but he insists on not brushing off the grass, and walks around with it all over his stomach and back for the rest of the day. Maiko laughs, but is petrified with embarassment. I cheer her up by throwing her over my shoulder and carrying her around for a while. After we leave, is still carrying his weapons and explosives, this time around the Imperial Palace grounds.

We head back that afternoon and have dinner with Joyce and Kevin - a couple other ALTs - and a few Japanese friends. Matt tries to show them his endless pictures from Tokyo and I think finally realizes how many are superflous, if not simply terrible. One of the Japanese guys does awesome magic accompanied by sparse yet hilarious commentary (Ex: for one card trick: "My arm...is a fax!) We get back after dinner and try to think of a fitting way to spend the last night.

Eventually, we remember the fireworks Matt has been carrying all this time and bust them out. This time, as it almost midnight, instead of firing them from my balcony, we head down the street and start lighting them between rice paddies. We work up our plan for what to happen if we get caught; blame it all on the Brazilians! (If the topic comes up at work I just say, "Jesus, did you hear what those Brazilian kids were doing last night Sensei? Ridiculous! No decency, those folk.") He's got a giant stash of bottle rockets and firecrackers, which we set into the soft earth between rows of rice to shoot off in all directions, interrupted only by our hysterical laughter. After nearly shooting each other several times, we spot a car after us and start jogging away, only to stop and light more off on our wake. In the midst of this I realize how much I will miss having Matt around the next day.

Who's the dog man now?

2006-01-20T19:33:00.000+09:00

I supposed since I posted these photos on another site, I should make them viewable for whoever reads the blog. Some of them are also on the blog, but now they can be viewed with the accompanying commentary, alternating between insightful and "hilarious", penned by me in a state of great boredom and self-absorption. That is, just a normal day.

Thailand Pictures
More of me standing next to shiny things
Student Pictures
More of me standing next to short things

The American tourist who takes too many pictures in Japan

2006-01-08T13:51:00.000+09:00

I arrived back in Japan on the 28th, just in time to pick my friend Matt up at the airport. He is staying until the 16th; almost 3 whole weeks. Look at those great, sarcastic smiles!

I wait several hours for his flight to arrive, sitting in a cart with my own bags watching the gate from the baggage claim. He fails to appear, or somehow sneaks past me, and I eventually get a call from him.

Matt: "Me and Yasu just got off the plane. Where are you?"
Me: "I am waiting right at the gate. Who the hell is Yasu?"
Matt: "This guy I sat next to on the plane and drank under the table. I think his name is Yasuyuki. We're friends now and he invited me to his parent's house in Nara. He's 30 years old!"
Me: "Okay...Well, I hope Yasu has his own place to stay, because he isn't living with me."

Yasu is a 30 year old Japanese guy who just got back from California, where he was living in his car for the last few months. He apparently makes elaborate leather bracelets, and has offered Matt both a bracelet and a place to stay in Nara. I'm not really sure how to deal with this information at the time.

Eventually we meet up. Matt is wired, both with the energy from being in Japan and from a potent caffeine/alcohol binge he's been working on for the last 12 hours. He's also really loud, because he's excited, has been drinking on the plane, and also is just not adjusted to the volume of Japanese conversation. It's a little frightening, this much energy, when I'm exhausted from my night flight from Bangkok with no sleep. We take the train back to Tokyo as he goes from napping straight into regaling me with a story about the hot stewardesses on the plane. In a preview of what is to come, he has taken 10 pictures of and with the women, most of which are blurry and perhaps one of which is necessary, but he insists on keeping all of them. For the rest of the night, he periodically veers up and down from comatose to manic.

We go out to dinner and then, after dropping our bags off at the nearby hotel, to the Asakusa temple which is lit up at night. This is amusing because Matt recognizes it from my pictures from two years ago, even attempts to reproduce my photo with his camera. We stumble back to the hotel afterward to get some sleep.

The next day is Harajuku, Shibuya, Takadanobaba and Waseda, Shinjuku and dinner in Shibuya. We walk around these varied neighborhoods of Tokyo but I wonder if it is at all differentiable to Matt right now, as overwhelming as the city is normally, not to mention when one is as jetlagged and disoriented as Matt is. We're in and out of stations and department stores, experiences that are so routine to me that I am unable to understand why Matt keeps taking pictures or wanting to look at the food at a department store. I am trying to be a bit of a tour guide, but I'm unsure if what I say is sinking in; whether he is deliberately ignoring me or just unable to concentrate. At least he seems to notice when I point out the costume that a popular tv character, "Hard Gay" likes to wear.

We have lunch with my friend Yumi who Matt met last year when she studied abroad at Berkeley. Matt takes a series of pictures that accentuate the ridiculous differences in height, shape and color that characterize Yumi and I side by side. Again, perhaps 5 too many pictures. Matt laughs at my outfit, but I maintain what would seem absurd in Encinitas doesn't go far enough here; my jeans aren't tight or my clothes flashy enough. We meet Maiko and have dinner at a traditional Japanese tonkatsu(pork cutlet) restaurant and then take the bullet train back to Hamamatsu.

The 30th is a day of rest for me, though Matt rides his bike around town like a maniac in the morning. He arrives back wide-eyed and eager to lay at my feet all the details of his exploits, which I endure like a weary mother with a kid she doesn't realy love. He does take a cool picture of the giant concrete jacks at the beach near my apartment that break up the heavy surf though.

We visit the city the next day, I show him the bombed out Soviet prison that passes for my school and we see Hamamatsu castle before returning back home. It's New Years Eve so we drink in earnest - Matt his 3 liter jug of Kirin beer and I a myriad of alcohols - and rush towards the city on our bikes in a whirlwind of drunken anticipation. Awaiting us is a vast expanse of closed bars and restaurants with a smattering of wandering revelers. The bars are closed on New Years Eve! I knew it was a bit of a religious holiday here - what passes for religion in Japan anyway - but I really didn't expect this. We eventually find a place however, and though surrounded only by a group of weird Japanese guys who get drunk too fast and too obnoxiously, we manage to pass the New Year in a sufficiently foreign style, coming home to lay down and sleep in until late the next day.

Matt wakes up the next day and goes swimming in the ocean. Nothing could possess me to do this, because it attains no special quality for being an ocean in Japan to me; it's too damn cold to be swimming regardless of place. He takes too long getting back and I begin to worry, wondering if I should go look for him. I don't worry so much that I actually do leave to look for him though. He later describes the water as so cold that he felt warmer getting out, in the 40 something degree cold and high winds. We spend a quiet day because we are going back to Tokyo the following morning...

Tuk Tuk

2006-01-06T22:33:00.000+09:00

As an addendum or perhaps apology for a previous post full of white-man guilt, instead I present nice pictures that all can enjoy, with commentary you are free to pass over. Here I am at Wat Phra Kaew, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. Thai Buddhist architecture really stood out in literally bright contrast to the Japanese temples I am used to seeing. Usually I try to minimize taking pictures of me standing in front of things with a dumb look on my face, so this was taken by Maiko. I much more like to take pictures of her - she, of course, makes a good model - but occasionally she wants ones of me for some reason as well. Anyways, I figure I should have at least one with me in it so it doesn't look like I just pulled these off some Thai tourism website.

This was the first temple I saw in Thailand, and it blew me away. Cloudy the day before, it cleared up just as we set out that morning, and I honestly had to wear my sunglasses most of the day just to be able to look directly at the buildings. It's difficult to conceive of these being places built by people. Also, I wonder about the religious motive of their construction. Perhaps like European cathedrals they were built to inspire faith by impressing upon citizens the majesty of God, or perhaps not the majesty of the religion but the power of the rulers. Certainly, though amazing, all this ostentation seems rather unbecoming of a Buddhist institution to me.

Apparently many people tour the grounds without ever seeing the Emerald Buddha statue itself, which I can understand entirely. After wandering around a while slack-jawed with and gazing up at the sky like some simpleton, I almost forgot myself that the place contains something else worth seeing. The Emerald Buddha however, was rather anticlimatic, being only 66cm tall and placed high above all worshippers in an inner shrine building. I couldn't even take a picture of it, photography being prohibited inside the temple. Actually, photography was prohibited inside most every temple, as these are actually being used by Thais as places of worship. There are swarms of foreign tourists crowding around, oohing and ahhing at the buildings and shuffling into the inner sanctums without properly removing their shoes or hats, yet one still finds Thais lost in reverence or prayer. I suppose they have to practice a great deal of Buddha-proscribed patience just to study the Buddha in the first place.

However, this was not a feeling or quality absorbed by much of the other tourists. This was taken at the next temple we visited that day, Wat Pho, the home of the Reclining Buddha. A Buddha in a reclining pose represents him at the very moment of Enlightenment. To take a clear picture of this was quite difficult because of the throng of people that kept knocking into me, walking directly in front of me, or just tapping their feet in exasperation behind me. This reached the apex when I was trying to take a picture of Maiko in front of it and a few fat middle-aged Americans, not content to wait 30 seconds, started clearing their throats really loudly behind my back, wanting their turn. The incongruence and irony of this extreme act of rudeness inside a temple and in front of a GIANT STATUE OF THE BUDDHA, symbol of compassion and contentment, really amused me terribly, but rather than pointing this out to them along with the admonishment that one of the many virtues the Buddha praised was patience, I simply cursed at them in Japanese for a while.

Amusing sidebar to this, I discovered Maiko didn't know what clearing one's throat as a sign of impatience meant, since Japanese people never would do that (A Japanese would simply stand directly behind you very quietly for as long as it takes, and so when you finally turned around to discover they had been inconvenienced you would feel shamed). So she had no problem ignoring them and was just standing their fairly oblivious to what was going on, suspecting they all had sore throats, I guess.

After we viewed the statue, we were walking around the grounds of Wat Pho, thinking about getting a massage at the massage school connected to the temple that had a branch on the grounds. We stroll past a group of four Thai girls, when one of them says something garbled to me in what I take as Thai. I glance back over my shoulder, "Eh?" They get real excited that I responded and rush back to us, and, holding out their cameras, ask in labored English if we would take a picture. I am rather suspicious at this point because earlier some guy outside the temple had tried to tell us it was closed for Christmas and we should go with him to another temple, which I knew was a scam, having read about a similar approach as well as being generally aware that there is no reason a Buddhist temple in a country that doesn't celebrate Christmas would be closed on a Christian holiday. No harm done, except of course to my attitude towards people approaching us. After a string of such experiences, I honestly suspect that perhaps these girls are going to distract us while someone comes up from behind to pick my pocket. So, eyeing them warily, I agree to take their picture.

"No, no!" they say, "Not our picture, a picture with you two!" Then I notice that this is just a group of sweet 12 year old girls, and are all carrying English conversation phrasebooks because they wanted to meet people and practice. I relax and shake my head at my distrust of such sincere kids. They pose, excited but embarassed, next to Maiko and I, and we chat for a while. They are extremely excited when they find out she's Japanese, since they also learned a little of that language. Actually, I talk with them in Japanese as well, since I simply cannot understand Thai pronounciation of English. I think they mistake us for stars or some visiting international luminaries, or maybe they just wanted to take a picture with a beautiful Japanese girl and had to accept me as well. Anyway, though I felt rather awful for ever thinking poorly of them, meeting them does raise my spirits again and my kind of hope in the general goodness of people.

The next day we went on a tour to the ancient capital of Thailand, Ayuthaya. From 1350 to 1767, when Thailand was still Siam, Ayuthaya served as the royal capital, a cosmopolitan city of more than a million people. It resisted almost four centuries of attempts at colonization by Western powers, only to be conquered and almost entirely razed to the ground instead by the Burmese atop battle-trained elephants(!). A few years later, the Thai regrouped under a new general and eventually moved the capital down river to what would later become Bangkok. The former capital Ayuthaya was left behind, and so remains today largely in ruins.

Though the fires of the Burmese conquerors and time itself have clearly left their mark on the buildings in the former capital, the most shocking desecration has to be the deliberate way the heads were lopped off nearly every Buddhist statue. It is rare to find one with the head still intact, since it seems they were just systematically decapitated by the invading forces. At first I assumed it must have been for religious reasons; similar to the Taliban destroying icons in Afganistan or the destruction of Greco-Roman statues of the naked human form. I thought the Burmese must simply be Muslims, since I couldn't imagine Buddhists or Hindus or any other of the religions of the region sanctioning pointless destruction such as this.

It turns out, however, they were Buddhist just as the Thai, and had cut off the heads as if the heads of their vanquished enemies. The whole scene was just one of ruin and quiet desolation. Not just in the sense of Shelley's Ozymandias, the sort of ruin that awaits all human pride and endeavor, but it seemed to me to be the ruin of humanity itself. Frankly, looking at all these statues made me more sad perhaps than the idea of all the Thai that were no doubt killed at the same time. To just destroy art and culture so wantonly displays not just a disrespect for human life, not just a hatred for another enemy or group, but a disrespect and hatred for humanity itself. To destroy the essence of the people conquered, that which is captured in their art, is to strike at their very humanity, and reveals a lack thereof in the conqueror.

When I told Maiko how sad it seemed she agreed that it was sad in what it showed us of people, but maintained that if the Burmese had wanted to really erase or mock the power of the statues, they had failed. To her, the statues were not sad, because - though they had been defaced, destroyed, humiliated - in reality, nothing could touch them or what they represented, as each statue was of a Buddha that had already reached Englightenment. For her, they were in this sense somewhat inspiring, having already transcended this place to somewhere they could not even be touched. I was rather impressed by her answer but, of course, pride would not allow me to admit this to her fully at the time. This is actually a rather interesting example of that triumph, a famous spot where a tree has enveloped a ruined statue and now cradles a Buddha head in its roots.

From there we saw the largest statue of the reclining Buddha - larger than the previous one, but at this size, the difference is pretty negligible. I find myself impressed by the size or magnitude or beauty of sculpture such as this, but often lacking any inspiration from faith. It's similar to why I didn't really enjoy the Louvre; I just don't feel anything looking at hundreds of pictures of Jesus and Mary, yeah they have halos behind their heads, they're holy I get it and I don't care. So, it was useful to have Maiko along as somewhat of a spiritual advisor; I can view the art or temples as a believer or, at least, someone more spiritual, through her eyes. She was touched by the happiness and contentment in the expression of the statue. I noticed how big it was. Putting those together, I have decided it was a really big, happy statue.

The trip back from Ayuthaya was a river cruise all the way to Bangkok. After lunch on board we could simply look out the windows at the passing scenery or go up on deck for a better look. The third option was to stay inside and look at a small tv playing old episodes of America's Funniest Home Videos. What blew me away was how many people took the third option. I wouldn't watch that show if I were sitting at home alone, sick, bored and unable to sleep in the middle of the night, yet people sat in a boat cruising down a river in Thailand on a trip they likely spent large sums of money on more interested in watching the antics of Bob Saget then craning their heads slightly to the right or left to see all the crazy shit passing them by. I spent a disproportionate amount of time complaining to Maiko about these people until she told me to stop wasting time criticizing them then and go up on the deck already.

The view of the riverside is a sort of fascinating sped-up timeline of Thailand, from the ruins of the old capital down through the countryside, the banks going from deep jungle to shacks and temples poking out from the brush, to the gradual paring away of the wilderness as the buildings get larger and more modern. Going past us on both sides zip men in thin, long and knife-like boats, couples being sheperded around on private cruises, giant barges being towed downstream, and fishing boats pulling long nets that scape the bottom. I spend most of the time trying to get a "Thailand" picture of one of the long boats in front of a temple, a skyscraper, or the shacks built out into the river on stilts. As you can clearly see, I was successful.

Though the trip went on for another day and there is more to tell, much of it was spent in malls and department stores - not the market stalls and back-alleys one associates with Bangkok - and so I'll just leave it with that last picture that satisfies the concept of Thailand I projected onto the country in the first place.

The ubiquitous Thai/Mexican fruit stand

2005-12-27T11:59:00.000+09:00

I went to Bangkok for five days during Christmas. I was surprised at how Thailand is in many ways similar to Mexico.

It's hot:
The weather was almost exactly like Japan during the summer, but after a few months of cold here, I was unbelievably happy to be sweating in the humidity. T-shirts and sandals.

Cheap, delicious food:
Meals at real restaurants for less than $3, food off the street for less than a dollar.

You can't drink the water:
Only bottled water or beer, all drinks no ice.

People are devout believers:
Thailand is perhaps the most Buddhist country in the world; the average person seems genuinely content despite their situation.

Rampant poverty:
Giant department stores and expensive restaurants that only foreigners and a thin upper caste of Thais seem to be able to frequent

A country almost entirely based on tourism and cheap labor:
Thailand is a third-world country that functionally exists solely for the first-world. Thai schools require either English or Japanese language study - which you pick determines who you're going to serve, I suppose. Whether you're working in a hotel, a restaurant, or a sweatshop sewing wallets, you are serving some foreigner. Contrary to popular belief though, Thais themselves are the most frequent customers of brothels, not foreigners.

Almost everyone you meet is warm-hearted and helpful, except that the few that rip you off:
Kids approach us on the street to give us directions, the guy directing traffic in front of our hotel dances all day, the shop-keeper thanks you with a sort of elegant tranquility, the waitress in the restaurant asks how you are doing because she really does want to know. Then some guy tries to tell us a temple is closed to lead us into some back-alley trap, a taxi driver attempts to take us somewhere entirely different, and I catch another eyeing Maiko's bag. Suddenly I suspect these four little 13 year old girls that approach us to talk are just running some scam to distract me so another person can sneak up and pick my pocket. But then I notice they are all carrying English phrasebooks and just want to meet us and take pictures with us, and I feel terrible.

I really enjoy visiting and yet feel somehow guilty:
I am laying back in a recliner having my feet massaged for one hour by a squat, middle-aged Thai woman while sipping a fresh banana shake. This will all cost me less than $10, so I've been going every day. Rolling my neck, looking down and watching her brown, weathered hands kneading my deathly pale white feet, untouched by a day of hard work, I can't help but feel like I'm living some colonial fantasy. Though this amuses me greatly, I also feel guilty. Perhaps she is content in her work, something safe and easy that provides her with a stable income. Or maybe this is a great symbol of our relationship with poor nations; a white man sits in luxury tossing a sum of money literally at his feet to a servant that is but a pittance to him but her entire livelihood.

Conduct befitting an instructor

2005-12-03T23:14:00.000+09:00

Being only 22 years old, I am at the most 6 years older than the students at school, something that I think makes them more comfortable in approaching me outside of class or opening up to me. The danger, of course, is that just as they can look up to me as almost an older brother, I can forget they're my students and start treating them like younger siblings. There is - I think, at least - a certain obligation that comes from being a teacher in which I have to act slightly different in my role at school than I would outside class, since it is a dual role that includes modeling correct behavior for the kids in the class. This mostly takes the form of pretending I don't still find gay jokes and scatalogical humor amusing. I can't think of a worse role model for not making fun of other people than myself.

For example, a few days ago I was teaching a class about Christmas and each of the students was writing a letter to Santa about what they wanted for Christmas and why. Afterwards, I asked if any of the students wanted to volunteer to tell the class, in return for points. This was Duck Boy's class, which is 21 boys and one girl, a class that is always quite rowdy. Him and his two buddies sit together and are constantly trying to joke around in class by volunteering funny answers to all the questions - which is in itself amusing because their attempts at diversion are really making them by far the most active and best participants out of all my classes. In this class, the first boy announces, "I want Power for Christmas, because I want to rule over Akira (another kid in the class)." This gets a laugh out of me, though I explain to Nietzsche that usually Santa can only grant objects, not metaphysical qualities. The next says, "I want a hot girlfriend. Because I want a hot girlfriend." I laugh again, while explaining that Santa is also not running some sort of dating or mail-order bride service.

The last kid, the Duck Boy, points at a kid to the left of him, let's call him Y., and says, "Hey, Mr. Adams. Yes, yes! I know what Y. wants for Christmas!" I wonder where he's going with this, but since it really does involve an even more advanced use of English to make a joke about someone else, I'm kind of impressed and let him go on. He continues, "He asked Santa for a deep voice!"

This is funny, because it is so true. The Y. kid really does sound pre-pubescent to a ridiculous extent; he squeaks out all his words in a voice that always seems on the verge of breaking but never quite gets there. Sometimes, hearing him ask a question from across class, I really do mistake him for a girl. I feel sorry for the kid, but not so much that I wouldn't laugh at him, which I start doing, very hard. After the few seconds it takes the other kids to process what he said, they start laughing too. The rest of the class laughing is what shocks me back into the realization that I am teaching this class, not in this class, and I really cannot be laughing at this joke. This is hard for me because I love to laugh at other people, especially when accurately characterized. I tell the kid that he's being a jerk. He defends himself, looking up at me, his eyes wide with sincerity, pointing repeatedly at the other boy, "But listen. Listen to him! Yoshimura, talk! He has girl voice. So he wants more manly voice!" I bite my lip hard as the class erupts again.

Changing gears, I point out that while Y. might have a higher voice, he is in fact taller and bigger than the Duck Boy, who is in fact, rather tiny (I use the word "chibi" or shrimp), so overall, they're about equal as men. Yoshimura gets his chance to laugh back, the class joins in, and I figure at this point that this is really the only way to deal with these sort of situations.

After class, both kids come up to me and Duck Boy reiterates that Y. has a woman's voice to me, while Y. calls him a shrimp. Both are being playful about it though, so I figure no harm is done as long as the barbs are evenly spread. The whole serious disciplinarian angle just isn't going to work for me here, so perhaps I will have to be the one to supply wit or comebacks to those kids in need instead.

Profiles of the only students I am sure can talk

2005-11-22T14:33:00.000+09:00

Like I said, there are only around 10 kids at the school that will regularly speak to me. Those ten as well could more aptly be divided into pairs and groups of three students, since students here seem unable to even visit the office or go to the bathroom alone. Not to say that students in the US - especially girls - don't travel in groups for protection, but I'd like to believe I was capable of completing basic tasks in my day without the support of an entourage. Students come up to me or other teachers almost always in groups, even if only one is going to speak to me. The office is filled with about 20 kids during the breaks between class, though maybe as few as 5 actually have reason to be in there. As the representative says his or her piece, his or her friends will mill around to the side, or simply stare at me, beaming.

I felt like writing about some of these kids because one might be left with the impression from previous posts that the students exist mostly to irritate me. On the contrary, usually the 10 kids with one comment easily outweigh any frustration I experience during the day dealing with their classmates. They are geniune, sweet, and often hilarious, even if unintentionally. Talking to kids here is usually the best part of my day, because I don't feel like they are putting up any sort of cynical or apathetic front. (As for example, many American students, like me, did in high school) So here are some student profiles, today just of some of the boys:

One of the strangest is this student who seems to make a point of asking how I am everyday. Just "How are you?". He has a keen sense as to when I am leaving for the day, and often abruptly materializes in front of me around 5 to say, "Hey, How are you!?" Sometimes he comes up from behind me, racing down the hallway after me until he reaches the proper position from which to yelp "How are you?!" The best is when I have my headphones on and I can't see him until he leaps in front of me, halfway bent over out of breath, and I realize he has just come from sprinting across the entire school just to get my attention so he can ask his one question. I've tried to engage him in some extended conversation but he just smiled and nodded his head continuously until I finally just edged around him and went home. I guess he just believes it is his solemn duty simply to find out every day if I'm doing alright. That done, he's fulfilled some self-assigned bond.

Another awesome student is this spry kid with that goofy hair that only Japanese boys have, the kind that inexplicably can stand up in all directions. This kid somehow reminds me of a duck. He has two buddies that are always shadowing him from his homeroom class. He often catches me passing him on the stairway between class and stops me to chat very briefly. Briefly as he usually has only some prepared statement for me that he reveals without warning. He reveals a certain enthusiasm in his conversations with me that I'm not sure he is even aware of, perhaps because he doesn't always seem to understand the denotation or the connotation of the words he uses.

Duck Boy: Hi Adams Sensei, how are you?
Luke: I'm a little tired.
Duck Boy: Oh! (very concerned) I am very sad! [He means "that is very sad"]
Luke: (Solemnly) Yes, yes you are. Anyways, what's up?
Duck Boy: Yes, well...(Nodding his head and looking at me appraisingly)...You are very handsome, I believe.
Luke: (Laughing) Well, thank you.
Duck Boy: I am very surprising! [He means, "I am surprised"]
Luke: Yes, you certainly are.
Duck Boy: Okay... (Nods one last time and continues on to class)

And I have learned to just laugh and shake my head after this sort of interchange, because it's just too hard to figure out what exactly he is getting out of our dialogue, but he at least seems to be happy with it.

Last week I began to get visits from a new group of three third year boys. They were the ones that accosted me in the library some time back, during the summer. Last week, they suddenly approached me at lunch and asked if I was free to talk. I was, and they sat down. I was rather bemused as they took seats at the desks of the surrounding teachers and began to pepper me with a series of entirely random albeit pre-prepared questions:

"What sports do you play?"
"What do you think of Bush?"
"How much do you weigh?"
"Do you listen to Eminem?"
I answer these and a few more, they seem satisfied, and finished with their inquiry, rise from their seats. I turn back to my work at my desk. One of them says, "See you tomorrow then Mr. Adams"

And it turns out he really meant it, because they came the next day. And the next. And the next. On Friday they waited almost a half an hour at my desk for me to return from the store where I was buying my lunch, just to ask:

"Do you have any brothers?"
"Do Americans think all Japanese are samurai?"
"Do you know that Washizu Sensei is a famous soccer player?"
"How tall are you?"

Then, "See you tomorrow Mr. Adams." And it seems that I will.

Tired ape

2005-11-09T22:33:00.000+09:00

Most kids at school don't ever talk to me outside of class. Really, there are probably less than 10 that ever do talk to me on their own. 10 out of 400 of students I teach, or 10 out of 1200 total. There are however a lot of kids who yell "HELLO!" in hideously accented English at me every time they pass me in the hallway, at least 10 a day. But that doesn't count.

One, I don't think it counts because it isn't really a word at all since it sounds an awful lot more like "HARROW!" (rhyming with "borrow") Also, I don't like to count this because it depresses me deeply that after 3-6 years of English education, nigh every student in the school is incapable of pronouncing the absolute first word you should learn in an English class. I mean, that's the first day. You shouldn't be able to get through that day without being able to say "Hello". I just get the feeling the class went more like this:

Teacher: "Hello class"
Students (in unison): "HARROW!"
Teacher: "Hello!"
Students: "HARROW!"
Teacher: "No, no, no...He-llo"
Students: "Harrow?"
Teacher: "(sigh)...Alright, fine, "Harrow", whatever."

Then everyone gave up on pronunciation forever.

Anyways, this isn't just me making fun of kids for not being able to pronounce English words. While every greeting is a bold declaration of the failure of the educational system and a great blow to any confidence I have towards making a difference, I think we all know from years of stereotyping that Japanese people have problems with L's and R's. What really disturbs me about the kids yelling the word at me is the way in which they act saying it. I am not sure exactly what this signifies. The simple explanation is that they are just so pleased at themselves for saying something in English that they are just giggling with a mixture of pride and embarassment for taking the chance. But, I also question whether they are really trying to communicate at all.

Sometimes, I watch a group of girls draw near, and as a single one approaches me to yell "Harro!" and wave frantically in my face, running back to the safety of the group, watching my reaction with supreme fascination and anticipation, I wonder if this greeting is really not more akin to people yelling at a some great ape in the zoo, except this ape curiously can be found loping around the hallways of the school. I am the orangutan that students notice while walking with their friends, the gorilla with almost-human expressions and features. For the amusement of said friends, one intrepid student imitates noises to try to draw the beast out. Of course, they can't mimic the sounds exactly, but perhaps one comes close enough that the simian recognizes in the mockery a echoing of its own language (which is, of course, a mystery to this student and his or her friends), and - this is almost too much for them to bear - it evens attempts to reply in this mysterious primate tongue! Having accomplished their goal and all having had a good laugh, the students move on, leaving the ape where they found him, waiting for a conversation that will not come.

After about 10 of these a day, the ape often feels like pounding his head on the glass a bit. He understands why the gorilla at the San Diego Zoo liked to sit with his back to the glass; so he could ignore the people outside gesturing and yelling widly in an attempt to provoke him into acting like the dumb animal that he surely is.

Shimoda

2005-11-05T23:56:00.000+09:00

Maiko's birthday was a few weeks ago and I decided to treat her to a night at one of the hot springs resort towns all over the Izu Peninsula, both because they're a popular vacation spot and because they are conveniently about halfway between here and Tokyo. After consulting with teachers at the school and actually, a New York Times article, I ended up choosing the town of Shimoda. Maiko and I met at the top of the peninsula and then took the train down the coast together.

Shimoda is a quiet little fishing port town, only famous because it happened to be the place where Commodore Matthew Perry decided to arrive and force Japan to open itself to the oustide world back in 1854. Shimoda was one of two ports then originally opened for use for trade with Americans and afterwards the home of the first US Consul General to Japan, Townsend Harris. Harris was also the first American to live in Japan for any length of time, at a local temple. Now, it's rather hard to believe that this town, out of so many possible others, was chosen by Perry or by fate to be the site of such a momentous historical event. It's not a busy port, nor a large one, and the town itself is quite quaint.

It makes a nice little getaway precisely for the reasons that it does not make a good major trading port,of course. There is no shortage of places in Japan where you can be surrounded by millions of people and be swept up in some surging lifestream; here it was nice to walk along narrow streets in a little neighborhood with enough space and distance from other people to actually harbor the illusion that you were alone. This is a rare luxury in Japan; I've spent hours walking around in Tokyo looking for a place where one might have privacy only to be immediately interrupted by some random person. This was good for both of us, since Maiko is stressed out with her graduation thesis and I'm a little sick of kids yelling "HARO!" at me and laughing hysterically.

We walked through the city, which was small enough to cover in just a day, and ate sushi at a local place. Hardly a restaurant, really, more accurately just a part of some family's house (while we were eating, the kids came running down the stairs on their way out to school and a soccer game) where the mom got us tea and the dad sat behind the counter and cut and rolled fresh sushi for us. There were a couple other locals in the place, and it was a real friendly, casual atmosphere. The fish was excellent, extremely fresh. We also stopped at a German coffee shop that had been built in the early 1900's. We sipped rich German chocolate drinks while a mysterious Japanese man also around since the early 1900's sat in the corner cross-legged, counting coffee beans endlessly as if a sort of rosary.

We visited "Perry Road", one of many things named after the erstwhile Commodore of the Black Ships. I thought it was interesting how an event that was both likely frightening on a personal level - these villagers had never seen anything past fishing and shipping vessels using sails or oars and suddenly a full group of modern gunships appeared in their little harbor - and rather humiliating on a national level - basically being confronted with the irrefutable fact that their country was hopelessly outmatched and antiquated - has been transformed into both a symbol of pride for the village and for the country. Shimoda is sold now within the village as the place where the relationship between Japan and the West began, and by the government as the place where the strong US-Japan alliance was forged. So you have here several monuments, (including this one of Jimmy Carter I posed next to with my best Jimmy Carter slack-jawed hick smile) and a whole bevy of restaurants, souvenirs, posters etc, commemorating what was really not a happy day for Japan. It was the catalyst for the eventual emergence of the country as a modern power, sure, but that was an evenuality born out of shame and vulnerability. I amused myself greatly by talking about my plan to reveal myself to the villagers as a descendent of both Perry, Harris and William Adams (the real inspiration for the character anjin-san from Shogun) taking advantage of their celebrity status in the town as a way of bilking the people out of whatever I could.

Anyways, my pontificating aside, we ended up back at the Tokyu Hotel, where we had a beautiful view of the bay and surrounding coastline. The water was a beatiful blue-green color, enhanced by the rugged coastline, mountainous and lined with Japanese pines. The next day we went down to the shore and saw one of Shimoda's several white sand beaches. I was really surprised at both the beach and how crystal clear the water was. It really appeared tropical, except for the trees running down to the water's edge that are unmistakably Japanese. We had a nice dinner and then went to the hot spring baths. There were two baths with each set aside for a sex for one night and then reversed in the morning so a guest can sample both in a one night stay at the hotel.

The men's bath for that night was an outdoor bath on a deck, all of white cedar. I washed and went out to sit in the main bath for a bit. Usually, you sit for a while, get out for some air, maybe retire to the sauna or to the indoor bath that is slightly cooler. Japanese baths are very, very hot, so the rule is basically that you just try to sit there as long as you can, but that is not usually more than 5 minutes or so. After a bit I had gotten a little hot so I thought I'd stand up and go lean against the railing to see the view of the ocean below. I stood up and stepped out of the bath in one motion and walked to the railing. I felt a rush from standing up too quickly, and I steadied myself by grabbing the railing.

Then, I passed out.

I woke up probably only a few seconds later to the frantic yelling of several elderly Japanese men. This did not help me orient myself. Only after a few more seconds did I realize that I was hanging partly over the railing - naked - being supported and pulled back by a couple of Japanese grandpas - also naked. I realized - to an extent - what was going on and sat down. My head was swimming for a minute or so. As my wits returned to me I felt the double shame of acting like a jackass and of being a foreigner who acted like a jackass in Japan, this second shame always acting to enhance the first because of the special attention I receive and a certain responsibility placed on my every action here which is always endued with the immutable distinction as me being a foreigner acting. It is entirely possible that to many people, I will be the first and last foreigner they will ever have any direct contact with, which means that I am essentially all foreigners to them. So I don't have the benefit of just being a moron who doesn't know that you shouldn't stand up fast after sitting for a long while or make the blood rush to your head quickly when you've been in a hot bath, I am an emblem of how all foreigners are too stupid to take baths properly.

This whole thing however, occuring in my mind, might have been occuring there alone, as the three old guys all remarked, "You drank too much tonight right? Watch out for that and go take a cold shower to wake yourself up." So perhaps my imagined humiliation was easily subsumed and therefore forgiven under the perfectly acceptable Japanese tendency to do unbelievably juvenile and ridiculous things while intoxicated. All I was really sure I was left with was a set of strange railing bruises on my inner thighs and a silent prayer of gratitude that the railing was not a few inches lower.

After doing several math problems in my head, composing some philosophic arguments, and speaking and translating between Japanese and English, I decided there wasn't any permanent brain damage and called it a night.

Other than that, it was a very relaxing and romantic weekend. Maiko and I had a great time together. Unfortunately for you, if you're interested in that kind of thing, I only write about things here that are funny, annoying, or unjust.

Luke and the Ewok

2005-10-27T21:32:00.000+09:00

A couple weeks ago one of the third year English teachers came up to me and asked if I would be willing to tutor one of his students. The girl wants to get a part time job working at the airport, but the job requires an English interview and she's only studied English at middle and high school in Japan, which is to say that while she is adept at English the science of taking English written exams she doesn't know English the language. You know, the one that some use as a form of communication between human beings. (Interesting sidenote, one of my teachers argues that English education in Japan is just a way for colleges to judge by a grammar test the basic diligence of an applicant, it being only indicative of the amount of time a student spent studying the subject in high school. So English isn't a subject so much as it is an aptitude test)

So I agreed to have a tutoring session with this girl and quickly realized that if she wanted to have any chance of getting this job - the interview is at the end of November - we were going to have to meet several times a week for both interview coaching and just basic conversation practice. We meet for 40 minutes or so after school, which means, as my day is officially from 8:10-4, that I am staying overtime several days a week. This leads to some of the teachers - those who lament having to stay later even though they aren't getting paid more - to make fun of me for turning into another overworked Japanese teacher, and for the rest of the teachers - those who lament having to stay later but enjoy the suffering or have nothing better to do regardless - to profess their admiration for my strong Japanese-esque work ethic. I would allay both of the camps with the admission that I take at least an hour nap every day hidden in the English teacher's room in a nice big chair, but my current position allows me to kind of chuckle silently at both their misunderstandings.

And to take nice long naps.

But, since they are very much concerned about protocol here, I am really only supposed to be here for 8 hours, and any additional time has to be compensated with time off. This being the case, I regretfully requested to come in late in the mornings in which I had after school lessons with the girl. This request was put forward in the standard way; I tell the teacher assigned to look after me, she talks to the vice-principal, the vice-principal confers with the principal and a decision is reached, this decision then passes down the same channel back to me. (The office hierarchy is quite immutable, and as a result, I have never actually talked to the vice-principal) The next morning my babysitter teacher came over to tell me the results. My request had been granted, all I had to do was inform the teacher (who would then tell the VP) the days on which I would tutor and the days on which I wanted to come in late.

I thanked the teacher, but she wasn't finished. She pursed her lips, looked around for a while, drummed her fingers on her desk, and seemed generally uncomfortable.

Luke: "Well, was there something else?"
Teacher: "Yes...I really hate that I have to tell you this. It's so stupid and embarrassing..." (Looks down)
L: (A bit concerned) "Okay...Is it about me being late on Monday this week?"
T: "No, it's about something else...the vice principal told me to tell you this..."(shuffles papers on desk) "...but I really don't want to, because it's so embarrassing."
L: (Relieved, now leaning in with a preemptory trademark smirk) "Oh yeah? C'mon, what is it?"
T: "Okay...it's about the girl you are tutoring after school." (Trails off)
L: "Yes?"
T: "The vice principal told me to tell you..."
L: (Eyebrows raised and head tilted forward)
T: (flushing slightly and leaning back)"...not to make the girl fall in love with you." (Now completely flushing)
L: (Triumphant, laughing, stamping feet while sitting and clapping my hands against my knees in disbelief) "No way! That's so awesome! Were those her exact words!?"
T: "Yes, that's what she said."
L: "Oh my god, that's so great!
T: (Rolling her eyes) "Yes, but can you please not give me a hard time about this? The whole situation is embarrassing for me."
L: "Sure sure, I totally understand. But can I clear something up now?"
T: (Guarded look) "Yes..."
L: (Feigns serious look of concern) "What if, despite my best efforts to the contrary, she falls in love with me anyway? Am I still liable for that?"
T: (Head hanging) "Please Adams-sensei..."
L: (Huge grin) "Okay okay, so I'm not allowed to make this girl fall in love with me, but what about other girls at the school? Are they all fair game then?"
T: (Still hanging head but trying not to laugh) "Oh just shut up already."
L: "Where do you think this is coming from, really? Does she think I'm just some sort of out-of-control lothario?"
T: "I just don't think she knows anything about foreigners."
L: "But why would she worry about the student falling for me? Wait, wait! Do you think maybe the vice principal herself is in love with me?
T: "Hmm....possibly."
L: "Too bad she looks like an Ewok."
T: "What's that?"
L: "Yeah, it's probably better that you don't get that one."

Tailgating with kami-sama

2005-10-07T00:12:00.000+09:00

Though it happened only a few days after the sports festival, it has taken me nigh 2 weeks to work up the energy to write about this. Not for lack of enthusiasm about the topic, but more for lack of energy. Immediately after the festival I was rather incapacitated for the next few days due to the pairing of an enormous amount of concentrated drinking with surprisingly strenuous physical activity that the event entailed. After I recovered from that however, I had to prepare midterm examinations for my classes, which meant writing a test and recording all the parts. On top of this, I've been tutoring students after school, so I've found myself staying until around 6 every day lately. (the other teachers get a big kick out of me becoming "Japanese" in this way) So, I've actually been rather busy at school, and after biking home find myself rather exhausted.

Anyways, on the night of the welcoming party that I wrote about previously, one of the teachers - a really hilarious guy that sits next to me at school, (the older teacher in his 60's who does kendo) - invited me to participate in a yearly festival of his local shrine. I readily accepted, because though I've been to several festivals, he was actually inviting me to be part of one, which would be quite a different experience, I imagined. According to the other teachers, he's never asked any of the other previous ALTs at the school (there have been about 5 before me), and actually, according to some other teachers, he never really likes to talk to anyone, be them ALT, Japanese or otherwise. For some reason, I made a good impression on him. (Probably the drinking)

So I took the train out to Iwata City, about 15 minutes away from Hamamatsu, and met the teacher at the station for a day of "real Japanese culture". He lent me his brother's happi coat, gave me a big woven straw hat, and we were dropped off at the shrine by his wife. My basic information about what we would be doing is dragging the 神輿 (mikoshi) or large portable shrine around town along with other community members, from about 9 am until maybe 9 at night. The teacher also had mentioned there might be drinking involved.

When we arrived at the shrine there were about 30 or so people milling about; old men standing together, joking around and speaking gruffly, younger men leaning against the walls smoking cigarettes, women chatting and yelling at the children chasing each other around the area. I was introduced to the guys, eliciting cries of what is surely my most common description here, でっかい！(dekkai) - "HUGE!" (which sounds kind of insulting in English, but I have been assured is meant only in an impressed, complimentary fashion here) With those pleasantries finished with, one of the younger guys helped me get suited up in my happi coat, tying the belt up for me. I was then handed a beer immediately, and, though it was 9am and I hadn't really eaten anything yet, I thought, what the hell. I chugged it down, the teacher and I walked up to give a short prayer to the god at the shrine, (this was amusing in that the praying involves clasping your palms together and clapping, so I had to put my beer down right in front of the platform) and we all headed out back to where the mikoshi was set up.

The mikoshi was about 3 stories tall. They are held between two poles and carried on the shoulders of the participants, or, as in this case, placed on a wheeled base and pulled with heavy ropes. Inside, ringed around the actual object ostensibly containing the kami, there are some kids playing the drums accompanied by a couple adults playing Japanese flutes. In the front, a masked and costumed person conducts a fan dance of sorts, insomuch as wild gesticulating with all four limbs while sitting down can be rightly considered a dance. The outside is lined with paper lanterns and decorate with elaborate wooden carvings. A railing running down both sides is manned with guys pushing, while a rope arcs out for about thirty feet from one side in front then back to the other, with people pulling (or, in most cases, merely carrying) the rope, distributing the work of a couple pack horses among 20 or 30 humans.

Despite the picture, which makes it look like some sort of child labor or Sisyphean endeavor, the whole procession is quite lively and fun. The music is going continuously and often the group breaks into some different chants that are, while not really understandable to me, gutteral and ambiguous enough that I can merely yell out unintelligible syllables along with the rest of the group. The people involved are all in good spirits; different members of the troupe coming up to chat with me the whole day. In fact, all I had to do was move further up or down the line to hang out with the different sections, since it was basically oldest at the back and youngest at the front. I talked with gruff old guys, the younger men and their girlfriends in the middle and the little kids at the front. This little girl and I walked for a half hour or so together while she showed me the different magic tricks she had gotten earlier as prizes. I feigned amazement and worry that she had really lost her finger, made her promise not to scare me with the trick again, and lifted her up into the air by lifting up the rope.

Basically, we dragged the big shrine through the whole neighborhood, soliciting donations from locals. When someone who wanted to make a donation heard us coming by, they would walk outside and wave us down. At that point, the guy in charge of collecting donations would run over and stand next to the person in question, holding up a paper lantern. As we drew up to him or her, they would hand over whatever - either money, sake, or food - and their donation would be announced. The crowd would yell thank you, the music would restart, and we'd be back on the road. Sometimes instead of a donation, a house would have laid out tables with snacks and beer, and we'd sit down together for a break.

Otherwise, from the shrine, roughly located in the center of town, we fanned out to the south, returned and took a break, hit the east, then came back, and continuing in this way covered the whole area. This meant we had to navigate a lot of narrow streets and sometimes avoid overhanging telephone wires that would get snagged on the top of the mikoshi. Fortunately for us, we had a man behind the wheel - more accurately, crank - who did a stellar job of steering, despite the fact that he spent most of the trip making calls to his girlfriend on his cell phone. I got a little worried when he started steering while talking and drinking a beer, two things that would be a bad idea driving a car, let alone several tons of antique wood and a GOD, but he, and the rest of the crew, were unfazed.

At the breaks we had meals and enjoyed performances of traditional dance and music. Another great event held at lunch was a sort of Halloween-esque candy free-for-all. Basically, hundreds of bags of candies, treats, and toys were loaded up into the mikoshi. Several people climb up into and on top of the portable shrine (including me) while children gather around with their bags. Then it's just a free for all for about 2 minutes as we throw out everything inside in every direction. The kids were waving widly at me to try to get me to toss something their way, but every time I tried to give it to one kid or throw it into someone's bag, I ended up inadvertantly hitting another in the face with a little cake. Then that fat kid who earlier ruined one of my pictures pushed his way to the front and lifted his pudgy arms up with his bag, demanding I feed his obsession. Trying to throw one into his bag, I instead plant one right in his face. Finding this hysterical, my new game was to throw 5 candies or cakes in rapid succession at this fat kid who, overwhelmed with his greed and hunger, grasped feebly at them all only to catch none, instead being pelted all over his bulbous form while his friends collected the candy (literally) on the rebound that should rightfully have been his. I am pretty sure I was laughing maniacally while doing this, but luckily nobody really knows what I'm thinking as a foreigner or how I am expected to behave, so they really have no basis for judgement or comparison.

Did I mention the enormous amount of alcohol? First, every time we returned to the shrine for a break we were drinking beers or sake. Drinking also occured every time we stopped along the way at someone's house. In addition to this, the portable shrine had cases of beers stashed all along the railings as well as a giant cask of sake strapped to the side for us to take from freely. When I wasn't getting myself something to drink, someone was forcing something on me or filling up my glass without my notice, making it nearly impossible for me to gauge in any way how much drinking was really going on.

But, my guide being the older teacher from my school, I spent a majority of the day hanging out with the old guys, so I couldn't slouch off when it came to the drink. These guys loved to joke around and have a good time; they weren't uptight salarymen from Tokyo but normal working-class guys. Really, I was a bit nervous at first, not knowing anyone but the teacher and suddenly barging into a local festival, but these guys made me feel totally welcome. It wasn't just the normal conversations about where I'm from or how I like Japan, they actually just treated me like one of them, which, I realize, is the sort of community I have sometimes felt the acute lack of here (well, probably anywhere).

In the end, the shrine or religion aside - noting that in most cases the people involved don't fully know the historical or religious significance of the traditions here for Shinto or Buddhist festivals - this seems mostly to me to be a form of community building. The old Shinto religion was really the belief in different animistic gods which were centered in ones own particular village. There was no unifying belief system or nation-wide dogma. The gods were the property of each village or town, and, therefore, served as a way of branding the villagers as part of the same group. What I saw in this festival was the continuation of that idea, in which the god enshrined in this mikoshi is not as important as the fact that the townspeople pull the shrine together, the rope being a very obvious symbol of this interconnectivity. All the people who might otherwise not meet each other come out, don their same outfits and are unified under their god and town. The little kids walk side by side with the village elders. By pulling the mikoshi, donating, or just by coming to watch, everyone confirms their place as part of this group. And, for all my intense individuality and isolation from others, it was nice to be allowed to pull my way in too, if just for that day.

State-sponsored binge drinking

2005-10-06T21:58:00.000+09:00

On the Friday night after the sports festival was a party held in my honor by the other teachers in the English department. These sort of parties - usually not for any specific purpose - are a fairly common occurence throughout the academic year, I suppose as a way to build friendly relations among teachers. This is encouraged to the point that part of my pay is automatically deducted every month to go towards these parties; about $30 a month. In my reckoning, this means that they are basically taxing me to buy me alcohol later. Another way to look at it is that it mandates that a certain amount of my paycheck is put aside for alcoholic beverages. Anyhow, this amuses me.

We meet up at a local western-type bar where we've got a whole section covered. There are the 12 teachers and 3 college students who have been undergoing teacher-training at the high school for the last couple weeks. One teacher stands up and gives a brief thank you for coming and let's welcome the new teacher bit, then the nomihodai begins. A 飲み放題 (nomihodai) is an all-you-can drink deal where you pay a set rate, usually around $20, for 2 hours of unrestricted drinking. This makes sense in Japan from a business perspective, since most people are unable to really have more than a couple drinks anyways. Being an American though, I have always felt it is my obligation to try to really make the place lose money on the deal. In this particular case, I feel a certain bond placed on me as both a foreigner and as the new guy to really drink more than in any way necessary.

So, I order drink a couple beers along with the other teachers and then up the ante by ordering an entire pitcher for myself. Then I am invited by one of the teachers to drink sake, so I polish off a bottle with him. At this point, going back to the menu, I notice they also serve scotch, and I start getting a little obnoxious, as I am want to do when I am a bit tipsy. I order a scotch and water and then nonchalantly ask the Beach Boys Sensei if he'd like to join me in a glass. He feigns reluctance, so I make the decision for him and order two. This becomes two more and two more. By the end of the night he goes home hanging on the shoulders of me and another teacher, while they make fun of each other like two frat guys. I retire, dignity intact, though in a sense not so much since I essentially goaded a guy into drinking too much. Anyways, it's just harmless drinking, but it's interesting that they can still get away with this kind of thing while fully adults, if not nearing retirement age.

The main interesting thing was seeing how the teachers behave outside of class. Other than the aforementioned lack of restraint, I managed to get into political discussions with a few teachers that I would never have expected could have occured in school. I also saw that some teachers, alcohol or not, are just as boring and lame as I imagined, whether in English or in Japanese. The best part of the night, however, was when one of the teachers cornered me at a table set aside - seemingly the designated representative from the group - and said, "So...I hear you have a girlfriend." Once I confirmed it and offered him a picture of Maiko, he snatched it and an over to the rest of the teachers, saying "Look look look!!! It's a picture of Adams Sensei's girlfriend!" Two of the teachers that are usually so exhausted during the day that their vocabulary consists entirely of sighs leapt to their feet and cried out "OOOOOOOO Let me see let me see!" The pictures were passed around for the inspection of the entire department, and my reward was a serious of winks and smiles for the rest of the week. Still, every time I mention going to Tokyo to see Maiko, I get a comment like "Ohhhh, tell Maiko-chan 'hi' for me! (heeheehee)" The hilarious thing about this is that most of the teachers reacted, to a degree that is almost uncanny, exactly like their students did when I told the students about my girlfriend. People at the school really love gossip, it seems.

The Sports Festival

2005-10-05T23:20:00.000+09:00

So last Thursday was the yearly 体育大会 (taiiku taikai) "Sports Festival". Wow. I knew the students had been preparing for it since the beginning of the semester, but I never expected it to be quite this big of a deal. Basically the entire school is split into ten teams identified with ten different colors, with every student participating. Each team is made up of students from a particular home room - three to a team - meaning they are all from different grades. Though each of the ten teams has the same basic color, each of the three teams making up the ten have their own designs for the t-shirts of each homeroom; 30 different t-shirt designs. All this adds up to is a huge mix of kids from different homerooms and social groups thrown together in the spirit of team work and a developing of a sense of community within the school between students who might not otherwise meet. That and a lot of girls wearing colorful, cute t-shirts. (Guess which part I enjoyed the most?)

The event began, as most every one seems to here in school, with a long drawn out speech from the principal that none involved - including the principal himself - paid any particular attention to. Finishing his address, he stood on the elevated platform as the students aligned themselves in orderly rows based on colors and began a marching procession with flags aloft. This performance culminated with the flag-bearers from each color converging on the principal and raising their flags in a sort of triumphal salute to his august countenance, as he smiled down at them, bowing to their obsequious display.

Then the competition began with a series of 1000 meter relays. I was invited to participate but respectfully declined, unsure if I could in fact still complete a full lap running. It's one thing for me to enter an event I can dominate - thereby winning the respect of my students and peers in the faculty - but I had no intention of being publicly emasculated by a bunch of kids. Instead I watched the action in the ample shade of the three tents erected on the sidelines for the teachers and parents to sit and watch from. Apparently the teachers used to compete as well, but now they just sit back and watch for the entirety of the 6 hours. So I made the most of a tough situation, sitting back in my chair and being brought tea by a few girls in charge of keeping the teachers and parents adequately refreshed with hot and iced tea during their strenous sitting.

After the relays was a fun-run of sorts, with students competing based on their clubs. Each club ran at one time, with the members all dressed up in their uniforms or holding their equipment. So the soccer club wears their uniforms, the basketball their jerseys, but the science club wears white lab coats and carries levels, the music club runs with acoustic guitars, and the tennis club wears ski masks and runs around hitting tennis balls at each other.

Before the event, I asked several people why the hell there was a giant pile of 10 foot long logs next to the tents, but couldn't get a satisfactory explanation. For some reason, nobody else seemed to have noticed. It turns out, they were for the next - my favorite - event, what I'll call the log war. So these logs are placed in the center of the field, lined up parallel to one another, side to side stretching across the width. The colored teams send 20 representatives at a time, and these are lined up to face each other across the field with the logs in the middle. Basically, like a battlefield.

The ref shoots the starting gun and the kids race for the logs, the point being to take as many logs back for your team as possible in a certain amount of time. However, with a limited amount of logs, maybe 20, after each team takes their first log, they have to struggle to try to bring the others back, sometimes five on five, sometimes 1 on 7, just trying to slow them down. This was the most exciting event for me, especially the beginning. With the two large groups bracing themselves and staring across the field at each other, the tension was always palpable. With the sound of the gun came the thundering of kids racing into the center at full speed, where they basically crashed into a great, seething mass of total chaos. Again, basically like a battle. There were even kids suffering from mock-shell-shock, who came up to the teacher beforehand: "Sensei, I just don't think I can take it anymore! I'm not made for this!", only to be shot down by this general's rejoinder, "You have no choice, get in there and make your team proud!" I couldn't help wishing I were able to participate, but it was probably better I didn't have the chance. I know I would have gotten carried away, started throwing some Japanese kids around, and before you know it we'd have a real battlefield after all.

The next event was the tug of war, with some thirty students on each side pulling for their lives and the rest of each team on the side cheering wildly, jumping up and down and yelling through bullhorns. Even the other teams came over to urge one side or the other on. Sitting in the tent, I jokingly asked a couple teachers how many Japanese kids they thought I could defeat in a tug of war, with my bet on "at least two boys and one girl, maybe two girls." They however, without the cultural prism of sarcasm to separate sincerity from humor, took this up as a serious point of discussion, and the idea was bandied about at length. I'm going to get myself into real trouble with the teachers here sometime with sarcasm.

The most interesting part of the event though, and this was a thing brought home to me again and again in every event, was the way in which all these kids really pulled for each other. I mean, they took these games seriously and they wanted to win each one, but they wanted to win for their team, not for themselves. When they watched other teams, they cheered on their peers as much as they did their own. Several teachers that day asked me whether they had this sort of thing in the US, and I had to admit that this is the kind of thing I only remember having in elementary school. One, I can't really see disaffected American kids participating in something so wholeheartedly. Two, I can't see them giving a shit about the idea of these groups. Well, maybe replace "disaffected American kids" with "me" - I couldn't imagine me in high school participating. This is exactly the kind of thing I would have scoffed at; "What's the point of all this community building?" I would smirk. "This is gay, and so is anyone who wants to do this crap."

But maybe that's the reason I never felt part of anything at school. Sure, there was debate, and the occasional sports team, but did I ever feel really connected to all the kids at school? Did I at UCLA? Does anyone, really? Maybe at the football or basketball games you yell at Torrey Pines or USC or whatever, but I don't feel like it carries past there in any significant way. Anyways, this is one of those situations in which the community first - individual second way of thinking in Japan really shines through, and it makes me kind of wish I harbored any like sentiment for any group larger than myself, my family, or my immediate friends.

After a while, I hit upon an even more enjoyable exercise than actually watching the events when I decided to document all the different t-shirt designs.

This involved me going around asking girls if I could take pictures of the backs of their shirts. Often the shirts had not just the original design, but each girl had drawn more herself or had her friends sign the back.

Another fun thing to point out is that I asked them to look back when I took the shots so I could get their faces, but some of the girls were too embarassed and just stayed turned around. The fun thing is that despite not looking at the camera, they still made the peace sign in front of them.

This picture I Iove because this girl on the right was acting so embarrassed and feigning reluctance to have her picture taken, making a big fuss right up until before I snapped the shot, when she suddenly pulled this demure, come hither look.

However, after I took a few pictures, I didn't have to even ask, since girls started coming up to me on their own. The girls with the matching headbands too were just too cute.

After a few more pictures, I didn't even have to leave the tent, since girls started coming all the way up to my chair and asking me to take pictures of them. The girl on the far left in this picture asked if I would take a picture of her, and when I told her I had already taken one of her color, seemed on the verge of tears. So I relented and took one of her and her friends.

So to counteract the image of me as some sort of stalker here, all these pictures were taken with the consent, if not the insistence, of those involved.These two, actually, came up behind me at the tent and stood there for 5 minutes until I noticed them and asked them what they wanted. Struggling for the English words, finally they just handed me the camera.

I took a picture of them, but they kept waiting around. Finally, I just asked them in Japanese what was up, and, relieved, they asked for a picture with me too. The girl with the dandelions in her hair then followed me around for the rest of the day and now goes into hysterics of waving every time she seem me in the halls. Fun job, this.

I'm a genuine excellency!!

2005-09-28T19:26:00.000+09:00

Wait a minutes, comming soon

Major themes:
Alienation from other people, alienation from reality, Attempt at communication with nature to reach true meaning in life, loss of self, fear of black male sexuality, sexual insecurity

Part 1: The calm sea

Summary:
The narrator visits the sea, but though he finds the sea calm, the "billow" is rough. The weather and his spirits are also fine, yet the "billow" is not. Again, it is rough. Still, the narrator explains, he likes the billow. He wonders how the reader feels about the subject, apologizing for not knowing without asking. However, he admits it's a given that the reader will like the sea, or at least likely. The narrator lists the reasons he likes the sea.

Vocabulary:
"billow" - a Japanese-English word that can refer to any one or none of the following: "billow" "billowing" below" "blow" "buy low" "by row"

Analysis:
The writer presents the reader with a common image of the calm sea only to abruptly set the reader foundering with the introduction of the "billow". The term remains ambiguous throughout, defined only in terms of what it is not (ie: not calm, not fine, not the sea, not the weather, not his spirit). The reader is further thrown off-guard by their sudden inclusion into a dialogue with the narrator himself as he asks conversational questions in a rhetorical fashion, presuming to know already the mind of the reader. However, the narrator reveals himself as, despite his rhetorical swagger, not entirely sure of even what he himself thinks; he "believe[s]" he likes the sea. His very thoughts seek outside confirmation. From this one could presume that the questions he asks of the reader are really just offshoots of this modern individual grasping for definite meaning in a world stripped of God and His Word.

Part 2: The dialogue with the sea

Summary:
The narrator begins to stare at the sea itself when suddenly he hears the voice of the sea calling out to him. It asks him "Why don't you do your best?" He is somewhat confused by the experience, but the sea consoles him, telling him "Don't be afraid."

Analysis:
The "mysterious things" of the sea foreshadowed previously are revealed in this section. One cannot read this passage without being reminded of Camus' The Stranger, when a man walking along a beach with the hot sun burning down on him suddenly commits a senseless murder. However, in this Stranger-esque experience, this sea does not urge the narrator to kill, but just to "do your best." The previous passages alienation from self is found here along with a need to find answers outside oneself in nature - even to the extent of an imaginary dialogue with the sea - rather than to confront the enormous responsibility of defining one's own life. There is a suggestion that this might even lead to a sort of madness; one is left unclear on whether the narrator realizes this as an imaginary or actual situation.

Part 3: The Negro and the many slender body of suntanned woman

Summary:
The narrator, on the same beach with the calm sea (presumably with the "billow" as well) spots a large (African-American) male. The man stares at nearby women suntanning. The narrator watches the man pick up a straw hat caught in the wind and return it to the owner. Picking up a shell, the narrator catches the man as he "shined up" to the lady. The narrator, and others watching, are shocked at the nerve of this "Negro".

Vocabulary:
"a big part of body"- a man with a large, muscular frame
"Negro" - relating to or characteristic of or being a member of the traditional racial division of mankind having brown to black pigmentation and tightly curled hair, from the Spanish word for "black".

Analysis:
The narrator suddenly shifts from himself to a description of an apparently licentious "Negro" at the beach. This shift can only be intentional, to shift both the focus and the blame for his problem onto someone else. This "impudent" African-American makes a convenient scapegoat - as he has so many other times in history. The narrator, if he is to be believed, is a passive observer of the ravaging of women on the beach by this "Negro", which leaves him shocked, exclaiming "MY LORD" along with the other onlookers. However, as often the case, this overt sexualization and fear of the black man really is a sign of both the sexual frustration and repression of the narrator himself. Why else does this anger or shock him so if it is not that this black man is willing to both openly seek and indulge passions the narrator cannot even admit to wanting, let alone satisfy? Rather than dealing with his dark desires, he simply projects them onto this other man, seeking to fool himself and draw the reader as well into propping up his fragile psyche. The final statement of "I'm a genuine excellency" just strikes the reader as a desperate cry from the narrator out into this emptiness of personal denial and existential meaningless as if to overpower and fill it up with bravado; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Hanging with Ants

2005-09-15T21:16:00.000+09:00

I am in the midst of grading the summer homework of all my students, which amounts to me reading over paragraphs about what all 400 of them did this last summer. One thing that stands out is most of them live awful lives. At least half of the papers are something like:

"This summer I had practice for the (insert name of club or team) every day. Practice was very long and very hard. And at the end of the day I was very tired. I did not have time to see my friends. But we went on a training camp and that was fun. I want to train hard to get better. But I hope I can see my friends next vacation."

At first I felt a terrible sympathy for these kids, but after reading 200 of the same ones I am about tapped on empathy. Right about then though, when you just feel like you've had enough, is when you get one of the money essays. They are either:
1. Unintentionally funny due to grammar mistakes, often misuse of pronouns like "it".
2. Unintentionally funny because they are crazy and you are incapable of extracting what the hell the writer actually wanted to say.

So here is a great example of #1, an innocuous tale of training camp that gets rather racy. My mind had started to dull after grading for an hour or so when suddenly my listless eyes ran over the second paragraph. Then I just started chuckling as I imagined the scene, not just of someone loving taking cold showers with her friends but the look on her face if she realized what she was actually writing. Even worse, these are part of a show-and-tell assignment, so if I left it uncorrected, this girl would stand up in front of the whole class and declare her love for cold showers with teammates.

These, however, result mostly in just juvenile snickering. The next essay category is so baffling it is just fantastic. This is where I get to read stories like this one a kid wrote about catching a catfish at the river and then bringing it home to raise as a pet. Great lines there, like "The catfish, as you know, has a hearty appetite." He fed it whole goldfish and crayfish, and plans to bring it in for show and tell.

This one though, both amuses me and frightens me. I love how this essay begins with a normal description of day - getting up, talking about the weather, eating a meal - and then all of a sudden, he just says casually, "After, I hang out with ants." Oh, yeah, hanging out with ants, sure. So I get this picture of the kid finishing his lunch and tramping outside to stand hovering over an ant pile for hours at a time. Then, it takes a turn again and I imagine him sitting over the ants like some future serial killer, enthralled with his chance to finally exercise control over a world that has left him out, coldly dealing out death, all the while cackling wildly. And, the kicker, is the closing sentence. He can't wait for next summer because, to this kid, summer=hanging with ants.

I get at least one of these for each class of 20 kids. Now I've just got to make a list of students to watch out for.

Cock of the walk

2005-09-07T15:23:00.000+09:00

Last Thursday was the first day of the Fall term, so they held an opening ceremony to welcome me to the school. Most other JET teachers have a similar event on their arrival, in which they are expected to stand in front of all the students and give a short self-introduction, in English usually. Anticipating this, I wasn`t too worried about the event. However, mine was a little different because of my (reputed) Japanese ability. The vice-principal approached me a week or so earlier and told me he was really looking forward to my speech in Japanese. I, a bit confused as to the idea of giving an actual "speech" asked him how long they expected me to speak. He explained that, considering my level of langauge study, they were planning on at least 5 minutes. He shrugged his shoulders and said casually, "surely a graduate of UCLA who studied at Waseda would have no problem giving a speech like that."

Basically, the vice-principal called me out.

So I wrote a real speech over the next week, occasionally consulting with my personal tutor (Maiko). I finished it the day before the ceremony and handed in a copy to the vice-principal.

Thursday morning was also a fire and earthquake drill, so I was to give my speech at after the students had evacuated out onto the athletic grounds. Fun thing about the emergency drills here, every student and teacher has a white helmet to wear. I have a helmet too, but since I have a freakishly large head even for a white person, the helmet is too small to protect me entirely. So I have to decide, when the time comes, whether I want to protect the front or back of my skull(I actually consulted with the biology teacher about which lobe of the brain would be more vital; whether I would choose basic functions over higher thought). Even more awesome than the helmets are the great blue jumpsuits that the principal and vice-principal put on in emergencies. They look either like a garbageman or a spaceman, depending on which you find more amusing. The idea of there being an earthquake and the principal running off to throw on his jumpsuit is just fantastic. Maybe he stands in front of the jumpsuit, housed in a glass case, wondering whether the situation really warrants it - is this really a "jumpsuit worthy" emergency? Anyways, like we don't know who the principal is already. Japanese people don`t look that similar.

The students and teachers tramp out to the athletic field - more accurately the big, open dirt space that passes for a field here - and line up in neat, orderly rows. The students are all wearing their uniforms, accompanied by their white helmets. A teacher stands in front on an elevated platform and barks orders at them through a loudspeaker. There is a definite fascist air to the proceeding. I amuse myself by imagining having a friend here who doesn't understand Japanese and wildly mistranslating the speech about earthquake safety into some deranged rant about the need to raze the corrupt bureaucracy to the ground and seize power in a wave of bloodshed, the only way to restore the honor of this ancient nation which has lost its way, in the name of the true Japan and its eternal symbol the holy Emperor! Actually, let me attach a great picture taken shortly after the ceremony from the preparations for the big sports festival. This needs even less fake explication to invite images of fascism/communism.

Anyways, I stand in the sun with the other teachers until I see the old kendo teacher standing by himself over in the shade. I have already been outside in the 90 something degree sun and awful humidity for 15 minutes, which is 15 minutes more than my pale sickly skin can stand, so I go join the old guy in the shade. Emboldened by my rash, individualistic decision, several other teachers who were planning on suffering silenly join us under the trees nearby. We watch the continued ranting of the man on the platform while cooling off, both pitying and amused at the students who remain roasting in the hot sun. I wonder what effect this will have on their excitement about listening to my speech. I show my speech to the Beach Boys teacher, he finds it very amusing, but in a nice little stab right before I go on stage, warns me that Japanese students probably won't laugh when assembled as a group, even if they do find it funny. I imagine 1200 students staring at me when a joke falls flat, and his comment cuts me like the experts who bleed the bulls before they are sent out to meet the matador.

The rant ends, the principal takes the stage and I am introduced. The eyes of all 1200 students turn to me as I stride up to the podium. I look up at the students, take a deep breath and start my speech in Japanese:

おはようございます。("Good morning")

A rush of murmurs breaks over the students like a wave as they realize I am going to give the speech in Japanese. It occurs to me that none of them knew beforehand that I could speak Japanese.

"Nice to meet you. My name is Lucas Adams, I'm from San Diego, California, in the United States. I'm 22 years old and I just graduated from UCLA. Having majored in Japanese at UCLA and studied it at Waseda last year from January until September, that I am still this poor at speaking the language is really quite embarassing, isn't it? Really, I'm quite sorry."

The students, over their initial shock, laugh at this obviously false modesty, giving that I have just said all this in perfect Japanese. I, over my initial apprehension, fall back into my usual comfortability with public speaking, and feel totally in control again. I start by talking about the difficulties in speaking a second language, joking that I am glad I was born in the US just so I never had to learn English in school. I tell a fun story - one oft repeated on any occasion I can find, really - about mixing up the words "okoru", to become angry, and "ogoru", to treat to a meal when out on a group date last year with several Japanese. The punch line is, of course, me accidentally offering to pay for everything and ending up out of some $150.

"Perhaps you all have been told before, 'One learns from their mistakes'. Well, I learned quite well from that one. $150 is a an expensive vocabulary lesson, ne?"

The students eat this up.

I then shift the speech to something a bit less funny, but being given a chance to actually address all the students and teachers at once, I felt it was too good to pass up. Also, it being the beginning of my time at the school, I wanted to make plain my beliefs about education. So, if I strangely had to translating my own writing from Japanese back to English, it went something like this:

"Of course, in today's Japan English study is important for both entering a good university and future success in the work force. However, when studying, there is something you should not forget. English is not a subject just like math or science. If you study physics or math, you will come to understand the laws that govern the world around you, and cause and effect in the world will become clear to you. However, studying English is not studying the world. English is purely a tool of communication. If you don't use it, it will rust. But, if you use it correctly, it can open up a new world previously closed to you. I feel this has happened to me with Japanese. You can make friends, you can travel, you can have new experiences. But it can also lead you into new awakenings within your own mind. Languages do not overlap exactly. English is more analytical and direct. Japanese is more subtle and intuitive. Learning more languages opens up more modes of communication of our emotions. Language is something that lives outside of the classroom, but if you treat it purely as an academic subject it will lose its meaning and die. If you treat it as a living thing, it will improve your life. Thank you."

I bow to the students, walk off the platform and bow to the principal, who smiles broadly. Rejoining the teachers in the shade, they are somewhat shocked. I realize again, that most of them didn't know I could speak any Japanese either. The Beach Boys teacher gives me a pat on the back. I walk off feeling like a politician fresh off a stump speech with my shirt and tie; another teacher compares me to a dictator riling up the crowd. I feel as if it was successful above all my expectations, though, to be fair, my main wish was just not to totally die on stage in front of 1200 students. For the rest of the day, teachers come up to me separately to tell me they enjoyed my speech greatly and agree with what I said about the nature of language.

The students, on the other hand, seemed to only absorb certain parts of the speech. My library buddies from the previous story (I made $150 today), pictured here, run up to me afterwards to giggle about dating girls. Students come up to me all that week to laugh about the stories. One girl in class looks up at me, dreamy-eyed, hands on her cheeks, leaning her elbows on the desk, sighs and swoons, "I wish you would take me out, Mr. Adams."

Ah well...I should have learned in debate to play to my audience.

This water not be good to drink

2005-08-29T21:06:00.000+09:00

The level of annoying background noise in Japan is somewhat unbelievable, especially for a nation that is known for its politeness and civility. I'll break it down for you by outlining what you might have yelled at you or blared at you in an average day in Tokyo:

You wake up to the sounds of some ridiculously loud traditional song being broadcast over the local loudspeaker for reasons unknown OR to some sort of earthquake / fire siren, which happens so often that people just basically pretend like it's not happening because they know it's just a drill. Walking to the train station, you pass a Pachinko parlor (Pachinko is roughly equivalent to slots, for all intensive purposes in the awful noise, smoke, and generally dehumanizing effect it has on participants), which is not only decorated with outlandishly garish, giant posters and banners of giant-breasted cartoon women and hugely muscular manga action heroes, but emits an wave of cacophonous bells and rattles every time the automatic doors slide open, which - since people are going in and out all day - happens continuously.

Arriving at the train station, you have the general rush of people and the ticket machines, but, knowing that the Japanese passengers on a train are almost invariably totally silent and the train ride itself smooth, one might be tempted to relax a little; it seems you might be safe for a moment. But the noise isn't coming from the passengers, it's from the near-constant announcements over the PA system. Just on the platform, you'll hear the grating, high-pitch, recorded voice of a Japanese woman informing you when the train is arriving, that it will arrive soon, that it is arriving now (at this point you can see the train), that it is right in front of you (so you know that the train you are looking at is, in fact, a train, that you are not in some sort of non-Cartesian world of illusion), that the doors are about to open, that the doors will soon close, that the doors are now closing (oh, and there's a delightful song accompanying the process). And she will remind you to be careful to stand behind the giant yellow lines, because it turns out that you don't want to be over those, because then you'd fall off the platform and be standing on the tracks, which is, seemingly, a bad place to wait for the train.

Once you are in the train with the doors close and you have been told that the doors are closed, the train conductor begins his dialogue with you about every goddamn stop. Which wouldn't be so bad except that he has to add three sentences of meaningless polite gratitude for your gracious choice in honorably riding the train today, which - be assured - he, as well as the train service, Japan as a country and really, all of its people, feel tremendously blessed to receive. Then he'll list the names of all the connecting lines available at the next stop, tell you all about which door will open when you stop (just in case you are unable to figure that out or need a running start to the door) and affix another blessing on you and your child for having continued riding the train since he started speaking a minute earlier. This usually starts about 10 seconds after getting on the train and ends about 10 seconds before you get off, meaning that the message basically extends from each stop, so you hear it as many times as you are passing stations on your ride. (For me last year, think 10 stations a ride, twice a day, for 9 months)

When you get off the train and out of the train station, you might be in the mood for something to eat. You exit the station but trying to cross the street suddenly are forced to literally cover your ears because someone has pulled up in a van and is yelling directly into your face about your desperate need to oppose the crazy militants who would threaten the perfect peaceful society of Japan that is a beacon of hope to all nations by re-militarizing OR to get those pussies out of power that are dishonoring Japan and its rich history by standing in the way of it re-militarizing.

Entering a restaurant, there are several waiters conveniently situated around the place who immediately begin yelling いらっしゃいませ！(irasshaimase! - "welcome!") at you repeatedly from all directions until you are guided to a table, where you can enjoy hearing them yell that at each new patron as well. Finishing your meal, you are rewarded with everyone in the restaurant now yelling "thank you!" at the same time as you scuttle out the door.

If you choose to go shopping, the shop people will first yell "WELCOME!" at you and "PLEASE HONORABLY LOOK AROUND AND TAKE YOUR HONORABLE TIME ABOUT IT!" everytime they see you, and, strangely enough, every time they see each other as well. I suspect that the job training for stores in Japan requires a sort of Pavlovian training in which the employee is trained to respond to any and all stimuli with a knee-jerk "WELCOME!" (ex: New customer? "WELCOME!"; Another employee? "WELCOME!"; Stray dog? "WELCOME!"; Errant bag floating into shop on gust of air? "WELCOME!")

Deciding to just go home (after going through the train ordeal again) you might stop at the local supermarket for something to cook for dinner. Somebody is going to yell "WELCOME!" at you while walking in the door, make no mistake. And somebody is going to yell it at you while you walk the aisles. But the most insiduous thing about Japanese supermarkets (computer stores and electronics chains are the same way) is the store jingle. Some of them are full songs, but the worst are those that are only 5 seconds, as they repeat endlessly and burrow into your mind until you find yourself walking down the street singing "Bi-ku bi-ku bi-ku Bic Camera!" Case in point, I just sang that aloud unintentionally after typing it. I can also still remember the song from my local supermarket chain, Seims, from a year ago ("Everyday~ Seims, for your body and your mind...")

There are two alternatives to this: One, like me, you simply wear your headphones anywhere you go, insulating yourself completely against the outside world. Two, like most Japanese people, you are conditioned by this level of noise to develop the ability to basically block out all of the outside world. The problem seems to be, however, that this only pushes the people involved - whether it be advertisers or people demanding you hear their gratitude for your patronage - to new heights of shrill annoyance to compete for your attention. But, like my supervisor said when we were in the electronics shop for an hour listening to the jingle for the 1000th time, it's not that people aren't bothered by it, it's just that nobody ever complains.

Kandou shita

2005-08-27T00:57:00.000+09:00

A girl took me totally by surprise today and almost broke my heart.

I was sitting at my desk ramping up to go home for the day, it being shortly after 3pm. Which meant I had succesfully passed 6 hours at the office, quite an accomplishment considering I have no work and only three other teachers were in today (Side note: it often seems like all the teachers get some bulletin I miss about when to come to school, so it's like just me and two other people there in the morning and I always imagine they have some sort of early warning system I don't get, like everyone else knows the school is going to be hit by a tsunami that day or something. Side note to that note: If the Tokai earthquake hits, the school will be hit by 10 meter tall tsunami waves). So I just had to kill time for another half hour or so, then I could start slow preparations to leave. Then I could brace myself for immediate exit at 4 pm sharp, muscles tense for another 5 minutes, watching the slow revolutions of the clock.

BUT, instead I was interrupted from my vigil by an English teacher, who presented to me one female student who was apparently working on a speech for the English speech contest to be held next month, and instructed to correct it for her. Interestingly enough, though it came right before the end of my day and would make me stay late, I was somehow so touched by the idea of having actual work to do that I took it and started through it.

The girl had just returned back from a summer studying abroad in Australia, and her speech began with a conversation between her and her host father, who asked, "Don't you feel homesick for Japan?" At first, the story seemed clear, it's going to be all about her experience in Australia; she found out we're all just people, the same though appearing different, she ate vegimite and saw koalas, blah blah blah Australia. I just start correcting the grammar and explaining the problems to her.

Then I get to the end of the paragraph about her host father. Suddenly the speech shifts from "my host father was a really great guy because even though he worked hard he also did chores and talked to me" to "when I came home and compared him to my father I realized that we don't really have any sort of relationship." It was clear this was a very different kind of speech.

At this point I skip ahead and quickly read the rest of the speech, which is a single, handwritten page on notepaper. This girl explains that her father, who works for Honda, was sent abroad to Ohio when she was only 9 years old. She quickly became used to not having a father around, and didn't really feel any connection to him any more. Even when he returned, they rarely spoke, and though her mother would tell her how her father worried about her, "they had no relationship."

Upon talking to her mom about this recently, her mom remembered a letter the father had written home to the girl and her sister 9 years ago while in Ohio. In the letter, he explained that he was working hard to set up a new factory, and though he was tired, he knew he would become more successful through this work. When the girl read this letter from her father, she felt that he was "maybe a good person, perhaps the word that describes what [she] felt was 'respect.'" She respected her father for working hard to improve himself, and recognized her own work to go to Australia or to study as similar in intention as a form of self-improvement.

The end was what killed me though. Even though she felt more gratitude towards her father for allowing her to go to study abroad, she has never been able to tell him. She confessed she doesn't know what would happen with their relationship in the future. She only hoped that someday she could too become a person worthy of her father's respect, and they could sit across from each other and talk as adults. She had never been able to talk to her father about how she felt. But she invited him to the speech contest, and is hoping that by giving this speech she might somehow break through to him.

She told me this, and I was in kind of in shock. I tried to get back to correcting her paper for her. I walked her through each sentence, but the whole time I was basically trying not to get too emotional, even not to cry. We finally made it to the end of the speech. She asked me what I thought of it, and I told her, 感動した。(I was deeply moved)

She says she just wants them to respect each other, but I thought, why should that be all she can have? Is that really the most she should be able to expect from her relationship with her father, the admiration existing among peers?

I'm not trying to say this is a problem solely of Japan - clearly it is a problem that occurs in every culture and every time - but it is something reinforced or exacerbated here by murderous work hours that make it nearly impossible for even the most devoted father to spend enough time with his children and a culture that discourages any sort of open communication of emotion by men to others. It's a harrowing situation to live in, and likely part of the reason Japan has as many suicides as the entire United States despite having less than half the population; the suicide rate is more than double that of the US or most EU countries.

The point is that this lack of paternal involvement is something I have read about, even told people who asked me about the work environment in Japan. I even speculated about the effect it would have on the lives of my host family; the two young kids were only 4 and 8 but still didn't seem to see enough of their father. But hearing a 17 year old basically confess to me that everything I had heard was true...to personalize this loneliness for me and stand in front of me at once both meekly and bravely...it was hard to be so glib about the topic. To speak summarily on a topic or treat it academically always involves a sense of distance, but there was no distance from this girl. She was there, and she was so goddamn honest and open about how she felt that I had no way of not dealing with it.

I told her that this is common in the US as well, that it happens everywhere. She was not the only one who felt distance from her parents. Hers was not the only parent who could not tell their child how they felt. That I too once felt distance from my father, but we found a way to communicate with each other and now can actually tell each other how we feel. That there could be something better for her, that it doesn't have to just be too successful workers sitting across a coffee table from each other. That he's not your colleague, he's your father, and I'm sure he wants you to be his daughter as well, not his peer.

I was there until nearly 6, and today I felt like I actually might have earned my money for once.

Politics at the bus stop

2005-08-23T11:06:00.000+09:00

When placed in a foreign land, at first the cultural and political landscape appears rather impermeable. One must follow the mindset of the people to understand their chosen avenue of expression, but this can be daunting without a guide. Navigating the world of Japanese society is a path fraught with difficulties, so I will explicate this particular instance of protest speech for the uninitiated.

This young man makes a rather cogent argument in t-shirt form, suggesting that it is the "public" that hates minorities, for "human" are relieved to "exist in majority." It is this characteristic of humanity writ large that makes them "such weak life." The sheer size of "PUBLIC" serves as a cry out against the immolating forces of conformity, and the desperation expressed in the final statement, "human is such weak life", should be viewed as embodied in the bold type itself. Taken as a whole, the shirt serves to both shock and inform, and performs admirably in both respects.

One only wonders, however, if this young man has anything to offer to this discussion besides criticism, and whether his cynicism might actually alienate others and contribute to the problem rather than allieviate it.

I made $150 today

2005-08-22T15:20:00.000+09:00

Today began late, with me arriving at school at around 9:30.

9:30-10:30
The teacher who invited me over to his house for dinner comes over to thank me for the two Beach Boys cds I burned for him, Pet Sounds and Smile. We have an hour-long conversation about our favorite Beach Boys songs (he loves "Sloop John B" and I love "God Only Knows") and discuss the possible causes for Brian Wilson`s breakdown (I explain the rivalry between Brian Wilson and the Beatles and he expounds upon his theory of the "tangled" quality of the Smile songs hinting at the confused nature of Brian Wilson`s mind).

10:30-12:00
The young female PE teacher who sits next to me notices me listening to music on my laptop and comes to look at my music. She gets really excited suddenly and runs out to her car to get two cds she has recently bought, returning with the new Gwen Stefani cd and the new Babyface album. She then plays me her favorite Babyface song and I dutifully transcribe and attempt to translate the lyrics for her on her request. This takes an hour, Babyface lyrics proving more obtuse than you would expect when you have to explain expressions like "the grass is always greener" or "sometimes you don't know what you have until it is gone". The cliches and awful wordplay seem to attain a certain profundity in translation.

12:00-13:00
Lunch. I walk to the 7-11 near the school to buy a drink and eat some spaghetti a teacher cooked for me the other day. I watch an episode of Late Night with Conan O`Brien on my laptop. Laughing aloud, I am prompted by the teacher across from me to repeat this funny joke: "A recent survey conducted in Mexico found that 40% of adults in Mexicans would move to the US, given the opportunity. Researchers explained that the numbers would have been higher, but the other 60% is already living here." Said teacher likewise found our immigration problem most amusing.

13:00-14:00
A Chemistry professor approaches me tentatively and introduces himself in better English than any of the English teachers. Apparently he has listened to English broadcasts on the radio for nigh on 10 years and is entirely self-taught. He shows me a book of English sonnets he is reading and we talk about our favorite British Romantic poets (He likes Browning and I like Shelley). I show him one of my favorite poems, "To My Coy Mistress" by Marvell.

14:00-14:30
I wander the halls for a while listening to music on my ipod, stopping some students dead in their tracks who apparently have not heard about the existence of a new ALT. Dropping by the library to check out a book of Japanese poetry, I am suddenly accosted by three first year boys. Blocking my exit, they interrogate me in Japanese about the finer points of American culture, like whether people really have parties at their house like in "American Pie" (and to a lesser extent, "American Pie 2"). I assure them that not only do people have these parties, but it is so common as to be rather passe. They are suitably impressed.

14:30-16:00
I come back to the teacher`s room to use the internet and write my blog.

I will be paid $150 for today.

Then she gets chikan-ed...

2005-08-18T14:10:00.000+09:00

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I was "invited" to a 2-day English Seminar for a local high school, Konan (湖南=lake-west, not Conan the Barbarian / Destroyer / Governor, or of Late Night with _), invited being in quotations since this is what my supervisor said. Really, it is part of my contract, so this was one of those Japanese mandatory "invitations"; delivering an order but couching it in polite language.

The seminar was held at a hotel in the city and consisted of two days of English conversation classes, workshops and activities, the slogan of the camp being "Japanese is not allowed!" 10 ALTs and 40 something first year high school students - mainly girls, since they dominate the English department - from the Konan English program attended the voluntary seminar. I taught 10 50 minute classes with 5 students to a class, and then spent a few additional classes working with one group to develop a skit for the competition held at the end.

At first, adhering to the "no Japanese" policy, I spoke only English to all of the students. They, in return, rewarded me with blank stares and monosyllabic replies. The awkwardness of the situation was enhanced by the fact that each class was held in a large meeting room at this business hotel with a small table placed exactly at the center that served to make us feel more isolated from each other and the silences that much more devastating. I felt like my life was bleeding out of me right there in front of them, their silence swamping my enthusiasm and energy.

So afterwards, I decided to start speaking a little Japanese with the kids, and that made all the difference. Once they knew I could speak, they would come up to me outside of class to chat or ask me to explain certain words to them, rather then spending the class leafing through a dictionary. Kids also probably became more comfortable speaking to me in their poor English once they heard my own bastardized version of their language. Really, they started talking to me a little too much, especially after I had lunch with the students and happened to find myself sitting next to the popular clique with the two loudest, most outgoing girls. Afterwards, they followed me around for most of the seminar, giggling and taking pictures of me with their cell phones.

The best part of the seminar though, was writing the skit. My group was assigned the scenario: "Someone is being annoying on the train. Tell them to stop" So we brainstormed what would happen like that on a train, and for the students, the obvious response was chikan, or the perverts that grope women on trains. This is a bit of an epidemic in Japan, with trains being so crowded that men at night sometimes take advantage of the cramped trains to try to grope women. (http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/International/story?id=803965&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312) It's amusing that the girls were making a skit about grabbing each other on a train, but it is doubly amusing to me that it is so commonplace in the culture and basically taken as a matter of course that it is something that can be joked about.

My group was four girls, Yurie, Yumi, Kumiko, and Kyoko, and a boy, Yuuki. Yurie (left) was an extremely shy girl, rather tall, who barely spoke at all, and never in English, and spent most of the time in class covering her face with her handkerchief. Yumi (right) was this tiny little nerdy girl with glasses and hair that came down over her face. Kumiko (middle) had lived abroad, was a bit more confident speaking than the others and the only one who could really speak English. Kyoko was one of the previously mentioned chatty popular girls (the one not wearing my sunglasses), really loud and hilarious, very cute. Yuuki was really a shy little boy basically, but tried to hide it by acting cool and nonchalant about everything. Like most Japanese boys, he bored the hell out of me with his lack of personality.

Try to keep a picture of these kids in mind when reading this, and keep in mind they are all wearing their school uniforms too, which makes this even more amusing. So the skit that they eventually produced ran as follows:

Yurie - Chikan victim
Yumi -Chikan #1
Kyoko - Chikan #2
Kumiko - Chikan #3

[Yurie walks into the train car and grabs the overhead handle]

Yurie: I am so glad I caught the last train

[Yumi is a few yards to the side of Yurie in the train and eyes her]

Yumi: Oooo! That girl is so pretty, and alone!

[Yumi shuffles to the side to get a little closer. Yurie notices and moves away. Yumi scuttles closer; Yurie inches away again.
They chase each other around the train until Yurie, trying to escape Yumi, unwittingly backs right into the waiting Kyoko, who then grabs her ass instead]

Kyoko: Ohhh yeah! And nobody is going to stop me!

[Kumiko walks on the train and arms raised, yells]

Kumiko: I will stop you! Me and my two guns here (poses, flexing biceps and then kisses each fist alternately) are going to take care of some business.

Kyoko: Bring it on then, punk!

[They circle each other, Kyoko looks ready to hit her but instead suddenly whips around and runs off]

Kumiko: I saved you. [Puts her arm around Yurie (who is actually maybe 5 inches taller than her, which is hilarious)] How about a drink?

Yurie: As IF! I didn't need your help anyway, you pervert!

[She walks off the train and Kumiko chases after her]

[Yumi is still standing in the train the whole time and after a few seconds sighs]

Yumi: ...I am so alone.

End scene.

The skits were all supposed to have a moral or message at the end. I guess our's was "Everyone on the train is probably a pervert"? But God, I laughed so hard and was so proud of these kids for their guts. I couldn't believe that Kumiko actually stood in front of all her classmates and flexed and kissed her fists, and Yumi's downtrodden look and slumped shoulders when she delivered her final line just killed me.

Unfortunately, though our skit was by far the most amusing, we were having such a good time thinking of lines for the skit that we didn't finish writing it until 5 minutes before we had to perform, and so nobody had their lines properly memorized. So we didn't win this contest based on delivery and grammar, but we made everyone else competing look boring and lame, which in the end, is all that really matters.

Del Mar is indeed a real place

2005-08-16T00:13:00.000+09:00

Sunday night I was invited over for dinner at the house of one of the teachers I will be team-teaching with. He picked me up at my apartment and drove me back to his place, about 40 minutes away, where we ate with his wife, daughter, his father and mother, his brother-in-law, sister, and their daughter. As he warned me as we walked up into the alcove of his house, "You're going to have to speak all in Japanese tonight, because nobody else speaks English." Indeed, he was quite right. But of course it's not just the difficulty of speaking Japanese; entering into a family dinner is always tricky businesss - navigating a web of already joined exclusive relationships - but this is just exacerbated by the over-arching Japanese cultural system that puts one further on the outskirts. Walking into the dining room, despite the teacher having told his family a foreigner would be coming over for dinner, it was still hard to miss the barely-concealed shock on all of their faces upon greeted with me in all my glory. I suppose describing a foreigner to a Japanese person is kind of like trying to describe the face of God; words fail to do justice to its power and magnificence when one finally does see it, the experience reducing a person to a sort of gasping fetal state. Or perhaps a more apt analogy that more accurately captures the fear inherent in this experience while also commenting on my general relatively outlandish appearance here would be coming face to face with a grizzly after only looking at photos of grizzlies in National Geographic, standing quivering at the foot of the giant beast as it rears up on its hind legs to its full height, towering so far above as to block the very sun itself!

Anyways...

So dinner was a rather good mixture of sushi, barbecue, and fried fresh fish, but a rather stolid affair at first as everyone acclimated themselves to my sudden appearance in their home. But as usual, a bit of alcohol was all we needed to loosen my tongue and concurrently the atmosphere. The teacher grabbed a few beers for me and his brother-in-law, then he grabbed a couple more when we finished those. He told me he used to be a strong drinker when he was younger, but not anymore. Then he went and grabbed an old bottle of scotch and pretty soon the three of us were drinking scotch on the rocks. Yeah, sure, when you were younger.

After the scotch, he ran out to the back of the house, suddenly reappearing with a guitar and a songbook. Of Beach Boys songs. Which he then started playing at the table for all of us, to the delight of his family and to my great amusement. The Beach Boys, as part of the increasing trendiness of surf culture in particular, as well as the continuous fascination with American rock in general, are huge in Japan. The teacher said his favorite Beach Boys song was "Surfin' USA", and then asked me to sing along to the song with him as he played it. So we sat around the table singing the song. He was impressed that I knew the lyrics, since the song came out so far before I was born. So I explained, "Well, you can't really grow up in California, as the Beach Boys were from there, without hearing all the Beach Boys songs a thousand times." First, he said, shocked, "Wait, the Beach Boys are from California?!" I said yes, and then afterwards I pointed out that both Del Mar and La Jolla, mentioned in the song, were in fact in San Diego, quite near my house. To which he replied, incredulously, "Those are real places?!" Apparently he thought the Beach Boys had just made up all the names they were singing...

Not to make a point after every post, but that's a good illustrative lesson on the level of absorption of even American popular culture in Japan. If the Beach Boys can't make inroads here, what the hell am I going to be able to do?

The Reddish-Black Ship

2005-08-09T17:14:00.000+09:00

Dialogue today with hilarious Japanese colleague:

Luke: I don't have anything to do during the day...
Sensei: You should go visit other teachers
L: Are you sure? It seems like people are kind of busy and besides, I disrupt every class or activity I get near.
S: I told you, nobody is actually busy here, they are all just stupid Japanese who have to pretend. Anyways, the teachers really want to talk to you but they are too scared and nervous and they don't know how to start.
L: Oh yeah? What should I do then?
S: You just have to walk over and force your way in like you are Perry and the Black Ships!
L: (Laughs) So I should maybe come in and demand they open their class to me? Then come back the next day to make them sign a formal agreement?
S: そうそうそう! (yeah yeah yeah!) But instead of warships and guns you will use your height and blue eyes.

Info on the Black Ships:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Ships)

An education in the way of the sword

2005-08-09T15:04:00.000+09:00

This is the office I work in, the teacher's lounge at the high school. Japanese offices are not separated into separate rooms or even into cubicles, just one large room with all the desks next to each other. All of the teachers have desks in this room, along with the two vice-principals, with only the principal having his own office. I suppose it's to promote unity in the workforce, or to make sure that the vice-principals can observe everyone working. The end result is that everyone has to be busy all the time, but since nobody really has anything to do, basically everyone has to pretend that they are busy all the time. I however, having finished my assignments for the whole month already, have taken instead to watching movies or listening to music on my laptop; since Japanese people don't really know anything about computers, nobody knows what I'm doing on it. Otherwise, I wander around the campus listening to mp3s on my cell phone.

Even though it's summer vacation, the students still come to school almost every day to take part in club activities. Each student joins at least one club - out of sports, martial arts, English, chess, calligraphy, etc - and this club is basically their main social group throughout high school. Teachers volunteer their time to be in charge of these various clubs. Having time to wander around, I also started visiting various club meetings. Yesterday I went to watch the kendo club practice, on the invitation of one of the teachers I'm working with, who happens to be in charge of this club.

Kendo 剣道 (literally, way of the sword) is the modern martial art of Japanese fencing based on traditional Japanese sword fighting, but formalized into a competitive sport with specific equipment and rules. Each participant wears a kind of protective cloak with armor along with a helmet, and they fight with bamboo practice sword called a shinai. Points are awarded in competition only for strikes to certain areas of the body, and each strike is accompanied by a loud kiai, or shout, kind of like a battle cry. So kendo practice is a bunch of kids in these elaborate outfits running and smacking each other while shrieking loudly.

Enter this teacher, who pulls out students during the two-hour practice for individual sparring. Usually this guy is really well-mannered, almost timid, in his 30's. He walked me over to the gym wearing his robe and I had to stifle a laugh because I just couldn't picture him participating in, let alone teaching, an activity involving violent confrontation. However, once he put on his mask, everything changed. He pulled out this kid and after they bowed at eachother, proceeded to BEAT THE SHIT out of him for about 20 minutes. He would rush at the kid with this samurai war cry - weakly returned by his opponent - and then just whack the hell out of him; on the facemask, on the wrist, on the shoulder, and once, ducking under the swing to hit the guy full on in the stomach. The best part though, was when they would get too close to swing at each other and would start grappling, swords pressed against eachother near the hilt and masks close together. The teacher would get in the kids face and just start yelling his kiai at the kid over and over, while the kid - who I imagine is by this point weeping underneath the mask - would reply weakly with a squeal that sounded more like a stuck pig. He got so in the kid's head, it was just awesome to watch.

The Hated Otaku

2005-08-07T20:49:00.000+09:00

This is the hated オタク, "otaku": a person who is obsessed or devoted to a particular hobby or activity, especially on an individual basis. These hobbies include anime (Japanese cartoons), manga (Japanese comics), video games, computers, and collecting of all sorts. And so, here he is, 35 years old, in a toy store, buying model kits for giant robots from the "Gundam" cartoon series.

From the fact that almost all video games come from Japan, and the huge worldwide success of anime movies like "Princess Mononoke" or "Spirited Away" and Pokemon, you might suspect a lot of people would be into playing video games like they are in the US, or watch these anime shows occasionally; it would seem that there might be more of a tolerance for nerdy activities in the culture of Japan. But there is no tolerance. In fact, most people I know greet these types with a particularly virulent disgust. If you mention otaku to a Japanese girl, the response you will almost invariably get is きもい！"kimoi", which is something like "gross!" Girls would never date a guy interested in any of these things, and self-respecting guys are not into them at all. So out of all the guys I knew at Waseda, not a single one of them played video games, or at least, would admit to it.

I take special pleasure in seeing all the lame Americans who came here purely because they like anime made for little kids discover this fact upon their arrival in Japan, and how by revealing their interests they immediately sabotage their chances of ever making any friends or getting any girls. Seeing a Japanese girl crush an anime guy by saying, "No, but my baby brother watches that show..." is pretty priceless.

Hanabi Taikai

2005-08-07T01:36:00.000+09:00

Tonight I met up with my old history teacher/debate coach from high school, Kerry Koda, and went to see a fireworks show. Koda actually was assigned to the same town as I am, but as she just finished her year teaching in the JET program, it was her last night in town. Kind of a shame, would have been fun to hang out with her as a fellow teacher.

Fireworks, or hanabi, are a big deal in Japan during the summer time. Girls put on their 浴衣 yukata - light, colorful cotton robes that were originally worn after bathing - their sandals, and carry these ridiculous tiny bags on long string handles that somehow serve to make them look even cuter. Guys sometimes also wear yukata, or sometimes a sort of loose cotton coat along with shorts and sandals. Of course, as usual in Japan, usually it seems like only the girls are dressed up, and the guys just wear whatever. Anyways, people go out with their friends and families to the big fireworks displays - 花火大会 hanabi taikai - held all over the country. Here is a picture of two girls yesterday on their way to hanabi wearing yukata. They are both taking pictures of a guy in a monkey suit, and I am taking a picture of them, since they might as well be wearing a monkey suit to me.

I was so so about the idea at first, because fireworks don't really do it for me so much, but I figured at the very least there would be a ton of cute girls all dressed up. The display was held in Fukaroi, a town 20 minutes by train from central Hamamatsu. And the place was packed, at least five thousand people there, with the roads blocked all the way there and back. We walked down the path to the main field, lined with the red lanterns on the left side and people who had simply sat down and staked a place along the road to watch. Arriving at the main field, perhaps another three thousand people covered the grass clearing, making it essentially a sea of black heads and flowered-print bath robes. Circling the clearing were all the stands you find at every Japanese festival: yakiniku (grilled meat kabobs), okonomiyaki (sort of a pancake with vegetables and meat inside), kara-age (fried chicken), and of course, lots of beer. We grabbed some food and, wading our way through the crowd (with me leading, since Japanese part before me like Moses at the sea) and found a spot to watch up on a hill behind the clearing. Despite my initial misgivings, it turns out these Japanese take their fireworks pretty seriously; this was a pretty damn impressive display, especially considering it was held in a pretty small town outside the city. They had been going off the entire time we had been in the area, and it went on for another half hour, culminating in a giant Mt. Fuji made out of fireworks going off low to the ground. This was, strangely, accompanied by the song played at school graduations. Well, strange if I weren't in Japan, I suppose.

Hiroshima 60th anniversary

2005-08-05T21:46:00.000+09:00

Tomorrow, August 6th, will be the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Some 80,000 people died instantly, and more than 200,000 died in total as a result. It was a terrible event, and hopefully one that will never happen again.

I just finished watching a two-hour news special on Japanese television about the event. Beginning with the war, it detailed the Manhattan Project, the fight within the US over whether the bomb should be used, and the fight between the Japanese military and civilian government over Japan's surrender. Afterwards, it gave an in-depth explanation of the effects of the bomb, the suffering of the people who died that day or survived only to suffer cancer or other diseases. Finally, it followed one of the bombers on the Enola Gay as he visited Hiroshima for the first time since he dropped the bomb as he visited the peace museum that now sits on a building that survived the blast. The climax was a conversation between this man and a married couple who survived the attack. They asked him to apologize for the bombing, and he steadfastly refused to, having lost too many of his own friends at Pearl Harbor and in the war itself. The ending was a call for peace, splicing current and more recent war footage with shots of the aftermath at Hiroshima.

But being in Japan, I am struck by how the focus in this country on the anniversary is in entirely the wrong place. The problem is, I see absolutely no reflection in Japan about why it came to this. Sure, there were military and political analysis of the situation leading up to the bombing, but where is the questioning of what lead to the war? The coverage is always about how bad the bomb was, and how much people suffered. But the fact that the bomb was awful, and that people suffered, that's clear already. Emphasizing this is just to shock people and warn them of the brutality of nuclear war in particular and war in general. It teaches us nothing about how to proceed as a nation or people. Japan has this knee-jerk reaction to the war and the bombing of "No War, just peace" which isn't a coherent or tenable ideal at all. Worse, this constant attention to the bombing and the suffering of the Japanese people has given them a sort of a victimization complex. Each time I saw the pictures of the people who died at Hiroshima, it was so awful it brought tears to my eyes, but by the end of the program, I thought, "Yeah, but where are the pictures of the American prisoners that the Japanese experimented on? Where are the thousands of Chinese women that were raped and bayoneted to death?"

There is, of course, a strain of thought in Japan that refuses to take responsibility for what the Japanese did during the war, if not just denying it outright. There has been a constant fight throughout the post-war period to make the Japanese textbooks accurately depict history, including Japanese atrocities. The problem was that the sort of purging process that took place in Germany with de-Nazification never took place in Japan; token people were tried and punished, while those truly responsible (say, anyone in the Imperial family) were never held responsible. This was done with the complicity of the Americans, who were more worried about a strong ally to resist the Chinese and Russians than they were about changing Japanese society fundamentally. And so the same group of giant companies that essentially ran Japan before the war continues to run it today, the same people in charge of politics and the economy. Obviously they have no interest in anything that could challenge their power in the country, and this effort to evade or rewrite history is reflected in the educational curriculum and the behavior of the government writ large. They say they've apologized for what they did, but apologies repeating how they have "feelings of deep remorse and heartfelt apology" mean bullshit, and even less when you are aware of the Japanese concepts of "tatamae" - the face people put on for the outside world - and "honne" - one's true thoughts - the two of which are basically assumed to always be at ends with each other. So, Koizumi, the prime minister, makes this sort of apology and then goes and visits the Yasukuni Shrine housing the souls of Japanese war dead including 14 Class A war criminals. A true apology requires real remorse, and real remorse is not just an attempt to evade responsibility and put the past behind them.

My point is that for all its semblance of ultra-modernity, Japan today resembles very much Japan after WWI. That is, the same sort of dangerous nationalist country, insular and incapable of thinking of people outside of Japan as the same as Japanese. It is my opinion that this is a result of the power base of the country not really changing at all. 60 years after WWII, the Japanese I meet here should be a lot more open-minded, but a McDonalds and a 7-11 at every train station has not made this country truly open, and kids who listen to Blink 182 and carry Louis Vitton purses do not really feel connected to the foreigners who's style and clothing they latch onto. The country has moved through its past without every dealing with it, and nobody really seems to give a shit.

The politicians are already building up China as the next big threat, and this coupled with the image of a victimized Japan that now has suffered long enough...Maybe after this next war with China people will realize they have to confront the lack of recognition of the humanity of the Other that lies at the inability of nations and their people to coexist peacefully.

First week in Hamamatsu

2005-08-04T22:41:00.000+09:00

So here I am again in Japan, though this time in a place far removed from Tokyo. Though ostensibly in the city of Hamamatsu - population some 800,000 people, rather diverse for a Japanese city as it has a sizeable population of Brazilian and Peruvian workers to man the many local factories - I actually am now living in Enshuhama, which is what the Japanese affectionately (or, in Tokyo, disdainfully) refer to as the inaka, or "countryside." So, rice fields, old women in straw hats. Of course, this still takes place in areas criss-crossed with major roads and lined with vending machines, and I am still only less than a half-hour by bike from the city.

As for the job, I'm working at Hamamatsu Minami Koukou (Hamamatsu South High School), which is one of the better public schools in the area. Though, it is a little misleading at this point to say "working" as school is on break until the first of September, so work consists of me going to the school and sitting at my desk listening to music on my laptop and gossiping with other teachers. My only assignment for this month was to prepare a schedule of classes, which I finished this afternoon. Lesson plans being essentially the same as last year, I don't have much else to occupy my time. Eventually I'll be team-teaching with 7 different teachers, 10 classes a week, basically trying to give these Japanese to the only real speaking practice they'll get in school and perhaps the only real chance to interact with a real honest to God Gaijin on an individual basis. So this program already seems rather futile before I even start. You know a country has problems with diversity and internationalization when they have to enact a draft for foreigners.

Sidenote: A teacher today came down and sat with me while I was having tea. He tried to explain the front page story in the Japanese newspaper (which is, amusingly enough, about the attempt to privatize the Japanese postal system, can you imagine a country where that's front page news?) - rather unsuccessfully, since I could only recognize the words "mail" "company" and "prime minister Koizumi". Afterwards, he told me I looked like the actor from one of his favorite movies, "The Sting." He struggled to remember the name, and for some reason I remembered it was Robert Redford. He got really excited, but almost personally offended when I told him I'd never heard that before. He refused to believe I wasn't told that daily by other Americans.

Anyways, I'll write more later on the exciting topics of Japanese school bureaucracy and my awesome Japanese colleague here who told me today that the vaunted japanese busyness is really just a tool that allows the people in power to limit individual thought and dissent in the populace.