Japanthropology!

and finally...

2011-04-11T00:15:00.015+09:00

years after living in japan, finally my first QR code

that's it for japanthropology! - but the blog goes on...

you can read more at davethomson.net and then there's some new ingrish filed away here.

thanks for reading.

dave thomson - formerly "dave-ish."

the engrish files #4

2007-10-31T02:32:00.001+09:00

a note at the akihabara capsule hotel i stayed at in august

japanese tv

2007-09-06T19:05:00.002+09:00

i was lucky enough to catch an episode of this show when i was round katie and akira's place, way back when. check it out:-

striking out

2007-08-27T06:21:00.001+09:00

a lucky strike captured from our hiroshima hotel window

an eleven and a half hour flight saw me return to british shores, waiting sleepily for a delayed connection at heathrow airport. i'd left the majority of my friends behind in miyagi one week earlier, setting off on one last tour of japan, hoping to leave in style. leaving wasn't easy for a whole host of reasons - that i'm not going to go into - but thankfully i didn't have to go it alone for the majority of my trip, having hashmatt as my travel companion. first stop: kyoto for the daimonji festivities.

getting a tip from some fellow travellers staying in our traditional, quaint hostel - so quaint that it lacked even air-conditioning - we got the bus to a small hill in the centre of kyoto where we were able to view four of the five gigantic kanji they annually burn into the mountains to mark the end of the festival of the dead. there was a lot of excitement, pushing and shoving once the flames were lit at each of the distant sites, people battling to either get a decent look at - and in many cases photo of (imagine long-exposure night mode in a world without tripods, trying to remain steady amongst a relatively small but thronging crowd, and you get an idea of how difficult this task was) - the far off flames. all in all a pretty low key but memorable event.

himeji castle

the next day we headed over to himeji, location of japan's best preserved and, as everyone says, most impressive castle. wandering the castle grounds, walking barefoot through the west bailey, climbing its wooden staircases to the top of the main building; being there was certainly an experience that topped visiting osaka castle (1). actually, afterwards we headed to osaka, there going on a busy night time river cruise guided by this comedian who hit us with a barrage of japanese pun riddles. later we wound up wide-eyed in the streets of dotonbori (2), somewhat of a neon paradise, with novelty building façades a dime a dozen and endless eating and entertainment opportunities - in my opinion, if you're in the area, a must see (last time we missed out thanks to bad timing and last train paranoia).

all at sea off miyajima

one shinkansen later and we were in hiroshima; getting off i couldn't help thinking i'd arrived in one of the most famous places in modern history. having decided to stay there for two days, first on our agenda was to head to the site of one of japan's official top-three scenic vistas: the shrine entrance gate standing in the sea before the little island of miyajima (3). taking the ferry toward the gate i was struck by the beauty of the island itself and the deep blueness of the sea. once on the island amongst the various tourists seeking the perfect photo of the gate, however, it's own picturesqueness very quickly became apparent. after dining at an overpriced yet relatively oishii restaurant we realised it was possible to get on the beach and get an unobscured shot of the shrine gate. once down there wading into the sea to get an even better pic trigged a desire in me to actually walk to the thing; the at just the right level to get away with it in my shorts. followed by some inquistive but fundamentally less daring japanese people i actually made it. henceforth, with the tide at ever-more appealing levels, other travellers would make their way to the gate - but we made it there before them and got the best photos!

the peace park cenotaph; a-bomb dome in the backdrop

day two took us to the hiroshima peace park and museum. visible through the arching cenotaph shown above is the skeletal remains of a building now known as the "a-bomb dome," which was right next to the hypocentre of the atomic explosion all those years ago. i was surprised when i found out the history of the area immediately after the blast; it seemed that only a few months later work to resurrect the flattened city had begun - i had expected the area to be lethally radioactive for some years. not only that but some people in the city had randomly survived unscathed thanks to being in random buildings that somehow protected them. the museum itself held back on being too gore-orientated and, somehow - despite its stated purpose of working toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons - my idea of the longterm consequences of nuclear war was vastly reduced, despite individual tragedies. perhaps by skewing my conceptions of the massacre by focusing too wide (on countries) and too narrow (on the individual stories) without criticism or anger, in a way perhaps mindful of international relations, my trip to the peace park museum had the opposite effect to what i'd expected. that day ended with the two hour thunderstorm fortuitously captured at the top of the page.

fuji at 6am on a summer morning

setting off alone the next day i eventually made it to the fuji area by monday evening. tuesday saw me getting up at 4.30am on a mission to get a decent view of the mountain, aware that in the sweltering summer it is often too hazy to clearly make out. getting completely lost meant that i didn't reach my intended viewpoint until around six. after following my urge to scale the 1180m mountain i found myself on i headed down to the shrine at the bottom of fuji, which marked the beginning of the hiking route back in the day when you couldn't just get the bus halfway up there (4). after that i went on an udon quest - the area is famous for its thick and chewy noodles - on a tip from the tourist information office and using a specialist map, eschewing the lonely planet's lazy recommendation. when i finally reached my destination there was a 25 minute queue! thankfully i was rewarded for my endeavours with the best udon i've ever had - and cold too, thanks to my request - which i ate with some electricians on a business trip from tokyo. notably, the people in the fuji area are some of the most friendly i came across in japan.

at the shrine at the foot of mount fuji

my last day i spent with hashmatt in tokyo, visiting the edo-tokyo museum and having two great meals, the first of which being chanko nabe - a sort of soup comprising of anything and everything, with the kitchen sink thrown in for good measure. because the place cited in the rough guide was sadly shut, and because we were in tokyo's sumo district - chanko nabe is the cornerstone of the sumo "diet" - we asked a nearby sumo wrestler for a recommendation; his suggestion wasn't at all disappointing. the second meal was a good note to end my time in japan on: tepanyaki at a restaurant specialising, unusually for japan, in cooking vegetables (5). to round things off i stayed in a capsule hotel overnight in akihabara. if you're thinking about doing so too one day, i recommend you don't - unless you enjoy being surrounded by snoring middle-aged men whose capsules' alarm clocks wake you up and not them, leaving you with an apparent eternity of beeping to deal with around 6.30am in the morning to cap off a wonderful night of no sleep whatsoever. though we may imagine capsule hotels have glass doors, this place only had pull-down screens: the chocolate fire-guard of noise insulation. it was something i felt i had to do but, trust me, you don't!

(1) much smaller and less authentic, both in that the necessary restoration work was much more extensive and in that it is so thoroughly artificial on the inside that it even includes an elevator.
(2) osaka's main night life district, famous throughout japan.
(3) another is miyagi's own matsushima; this one is a lot better.
(4) those who climb mount fuji - apparently the most climbed mountain in the world - usually begin their ascent from the so-called "5th station," midway up.
(5) tepanyaki is that style of japanese cooking conducted on a large hot steel surface.

the vagabond

2007-08-07T23:40:00.000+09:00

wood, sweat and beers: katie, akira and i after carrying that omikoshi

so right now i'm sitting on the veranda of matt's apartment, balancing my laptop on a bit of wood between below-the-belt clotheslines and a concrete wall, stealing some poor, unsuspecting wireless internet on a tuesday night. matt himself is away in america - hell, all my usual crew have buggered off somewhere or other, be it tokyo, the states or on a hastily-arranged trip to thailand. as of today my own apartment is bereft of gas, water and electricity, emptied out apart from the heaviest and bulkiest of its contents; my job has come to an end, my bank account closed, phoneline and internet cut-off. and, just to top things off, even the seat on my bike isn't my own - mine was nicked so i've temporarily borrowed that of my absentee host.

i have around one week left in ishinomaki before i leave for to tour of southern japan; i'm not looking forward to leaving. and yet, as of tomorrow, when i hand over the keys to my own apartment, i am officially homeless and jobless in this country. though i've started saying my goodbyes already, the hardest ones are yet to come. my leaving drinking parties are behind me, my speeches said - it's saying farewell to my closest friends that i worry about now.

but you have to have some fun in your last days, right? i have had a little luck in that department, owing a debt to my limited japanese contacts and recent summer festivals. thanks to a lady who calls herself 'maria' i was able to board one of the ships circling onagawa harbour during its summer celebrations, later being pushed into doing a little "lion dancing" before confused crowds - who just couldn't understand why there was a clueless foreigner bumbling around in the requisite costume - and a short spell on the taiko drums (when nobody was looking). i spent the day thereafter with a couple of ALTs i seldom see and a shipshape bunch of drunken japanese blokes - not such a bad combination all in all. then there was the fireworks at night, the last of which bursting the heavens and bringing an immediately-soaking downpour.

a few days later there was the two-day ishinomaki fireworks festival, the first night of which summoning up the best display of hanabi (literally "flower fire" - take note mario fans) i've ever seen and lasting nearly two hours. having been invited by my mate akira, the second day i was able to carry omikoshi (1) through the ishinomaki streets at the close of the celebrations - i.e. when just about everybody out to see their kids perform in school brass bands etc had went home - along with the man himself, his fiancée, katie, and twenty or so others. despite requiring a lot of strength - and lot of "heart," which the guys said is something i had because i am, well, a guy - it was hugely fun in a personally-challenging and yet team-orientated way to help carry the thing, and nice to be actually actively involved in proceedings (i've seen a fair few omikoshi in my time but never from beneath one) in the appropriate outfit on a sweltering, sweat-soaked afternoon (2). not an experience i'm going to forget any time soon.

(1) a portable shrine carried on the shoulders that japan, as seen plentifully in asakusa but most spectacularly in shiogama.

show of hands

2007-07-06T09:54:00.000+09:00

after having last week off to traipse round tokyo with chris one of the teachers forgot that i would be team teaching with them and left for a first year class without me. when i arrived i received a cheer from the class - the students were actually happy to see me.

i've been trying to teach them grammar this week using a weather lesson i made as the subject matter. despite grammar being not only deadly boring but also ridiculously hard to teach when it came to asking the students to answer questions they were raising their hands and competing to be chosen to answer like primary school kids. it's happened a couple of times so far this week now and it never fails to surprise me, this enthuasiam.

i like teaching this current first year - they're my students. when i came here the kids were pretty apathetic; i used to blame myself and my tendency to try and teach english instead of just playing games all day. the teachers used to reassure me that they prefered my way of doing things to that of my predecessor but classes were difficult to motivate so i was sure i was doing something wrong. these new first years, however, which has been mine from the offset, still seem to have a certain spark about them that was already lost in the previous generation by the time i'd arrived last august. when i asked one of the new teachers about it he said that he'd heard that my predeccesor was a "little strange, not so hard-working" and that in turn had had a negative impact on the kids.

all of a sudden i feel like i can have a positive impact; that some ALTs can have a positive impact. i now understand that sometimes the ALTs who have life easy are the ones who had good predecessors that prepped the kids correctly. it's not yet august - tellingly, after the summer holidays - and i might be deluded, but a little job satisfaction once in a while never hurt anyone, right?

the adventuring

2007-07-01T16:36:00.002+09:00

the oft-forgotten forth member of the so-called "three little pigs" didn't really make things difficult for the wolf

i met chris at a train station in ueno, the northern district of tokyo where we'd be staying the next few nights. it was tuesday afternoon, around 5PM. after we'd got ourselves checked in to our lodgings it was time to head to the overrated akihabara in search of a plug adaptor for chris' laptop. it took an hour of getting sent around the houses before we could accomplish our mission. after that a brief trek outside to check out the overhyped neon of the little "electric town" was enough. next stop shibuya and shinjuku.

shibuya and shinjuku are where you go to when you want to experience what you expected from the aforementioned akihabara: both districts featuring vast neon-lit streets bustling with people, the latter having more than its fair share of electronic shops and arcades if you know where to look. shibuya is famed for its crosswalk so that was a must see. after eating in some random restaurant, giving up on the lonely planet's somewhat idiosyncratic and difficult to locate suggestions, we jumped on the subway to shinjuku, home of the busiest (subway?) station in the world. heading to its skyscraper district we then checked out the view from the metropolitan government offices - which i personally prefer to that from tokyo tower in terms of impact - and quickly nipped in to the keiyo plaza (the hotel i stayed in when i first arrived in japan all those months ago). wandering around shinjuku gave us the chance to head into the insanity that is a pachinco parlour; it was a lot of fun for me to watch chris' reaction to the staggering noise of hundreds of metal balls descending through machines as we weaved a trail through the cigarette-produced smoke therein.

wednesday saw sunshine, persuading us to reorder the detailed schedule i'd hammered together and head off to kamakura in the morning - if you're in the tokyo area, heading to see the big buddha statue is one of the most rewarding sight-seeing options. last time i was there we had only enough time to visit that star attraction, eschewing the confusing variety nearby temples. this time it was different. of the four we saw our favourite was one famed for its hyderangers, plentiful and vibrant in their blue hue; chris and i were lucky to stumble into its grounds as they were in full bloom.

after bidding our escape from the heat, a one hour train ride saw us at the terminal for reaching the small island of odaiba (1). the views from the train as its skirts its way toward rainbow bridge and onto the island are impressive, though the island itself leaves a lot to be desired during the day, with various unkempt and undeveloped plots apparent if you walk from one side to the other. there chris and i decided to duck into the odaiba onsen, which is a little pricy but well worth it. you have to don a yukkata before entering this area themed on an old school japanese village, which was in essence an excuse for various money-grabbing enterprises, including restaurants and a massage parlour (2). the onsen itself was amazing though, with a supernova sauna, a jacuzzi-style bath, indoor and outdoor pools - everything you could want, and volcanically heated too. eventually bumbling back out into the odaiba streets, we were met with the vista below, featuring rainbow bridge, a scaled-down statue of liberty replica and, in the distance, tokyo tower.

thursday was destined to be a scorcher, and that was evident even as we left our ryokan at 7AM on our way to the chaotic tsukiji fish market. despite missing the auction, and thereby various mighty sea creatures, but we did eventually manage to find out way into the public market section - just - through the hectic array of vehicles milling around outside. therein some fellas were slitting the throats of living eels, others sawing up tuna fish into more managable chunks; somehow it still felt worthwhile being there just for the hustle and bustle. after sushi for breakfast it was time for us to desparately hurry over to the imperial palace for a tour of its grounds. the palace itself is somewhat underwhelming, too modern and architecturally understated to be striking on the outside - and that's all were were allowed to see. so instead we were advised, thanks to the free english audio guide, that the best place in the grounds to take a picture was in fact by the much older nearby guardhouse. so we did.

after the palace we made a brief sojourn around the national museum in ueno before getting hopelessly lost for an hour on our way back to where we were staying. one well-deserved break later it was time to meet up with little sara and her friend from back home, julie, who had coincidently got to tokyo that day. not knowing exactly where to spend the evening we headed off to shinjuku where we found this little bar where the waitress couldn't understand our japanese and the kanji-packed menu left us eating onigiri and soy beans for dinner. cutting our losses on the seating charge, we decided our best option was to wander round the streets armed with a can of beer each; it was then that we finally came across the nightlife district of shinjuku, away from where the business men stray after their long days at work (i.e. where chris and i wound up on tuesday night). it was fun just walking the streets there, aside from the burly guys trying to push certain venues on us.

on friday we got up a little late but still managed to get to nikko, a two hour train journey away, by midday - it felt like something of a coup. nikko is another special place, home of various temples and a particularly famous mausoleum, and it's nice to spend time there even on a misty, damp day thanks to the effects on the hills and greenery. after exploring the area for a few hours we jumped on to a train and began the trek to my "hometown," ishinomaki, where i was able to introduce chris to my mates and have him visit our usual haunts; from friday evening to sunday morning, when chris left for narita airport, there's nothing exciting to report per se - well, apart from us trying milk ramen!

it was fun having chris meet my mates here, and just having him around. karaoke, for example, is certainly a different prospect when you have someone on hand who knows the stupid songs from the 90s that you grew up with. the downside is that when he left it really hit home that i'm going to be leaving too fairly soon. still, happy memories in the adventuring.

(1) the name apparently means "fort."
(2) yukkata: japanese cotton robe.

the engrish files #3

2007-07-01T16:31:00.000+09:00

a shop window in kamakura

one for all

2007-07-01T14:53:00.001+09:00

the days of four or five blog posts per month are sadly long gone; these days i seem to average one each month, though that's not always because i'm lacking in my adventuring. time to scribble some stuff down, huh?

i have no idea when it was now, but we made a weekend retreat to a place called cat island, which is, strangely enough, famed for its felines: dogs were banned there long ago; cats roam free. the human population, meanwhile, is small - like the island itself - and consists of aged japanese; the invasion of several tens of foreigners one saturday surely must have been a shock to their system. we stayed in two cottages with cartoony cat paint jobs designed by some semi-notorious manga artist. turns out that my infamous kocho-sensei actually grew up on this island - and attended the manga kitty houses when they served the function of an elementary school back in the day. for us school was out and the beers were in.

on a different weekend our friend kocho-sensei took me to a place called kamimachi (lit. "river town") where the local high school canoeing heats were held. that day i had to work on a saturday - in exchange for the following tuesday being a holiday - so i jumped at the chance to escape into the mountains. previously kocho-sensei had taken me around the schools on the ishinomaki area sports day, and on the whole the sports facilities are impressive; the stretch of river they converted into a canoe course was no exception. (i was more impressed, however, when it turned out that kocho-sensei was the president of the miyagi high school canoeing federation, the tohoku regional president and the all-japan vice president.) anyway, for me all in all it amounted to a day getting paid to lounge around in the sun, which can't be bad.

another weekend i went with annie to find this mysterious ice cream shop of myth and legend, the location of which handed down from one generation of ALTs to another via cryptically-titled scrolls with names like "things to do in ishinomaki." luckily, annie had misplaced her copy - possibly the last surviving one in existence in her apartment - so we were on our own. after asking a convenience store clerk we were on our way to an aladin's cave of ice cream delight (1). as we gazed upon its brilliance our minds were filled with delusions of pearl ice cream, shark ramen ice cream, even whale flavoured ice cream. eschewing such extravagence i plumped for vanilla. no, not really. i had the curry one - a little spicy, kind of tasty; very cool.

but who needs whale ice cream when you can just eat the real thing? i hear your jaws hit the floor as you consider the implications of what "real ice cream" might be, but you are misguided - i am in fact talking about eating whale. so we headed down to the peninsula attached to ishinomaki on yet another of these weekends, albeit not with that particular purpose in mind; mr kocho-sensei had previously recommended the place to me as his favourite in the entire miyagi prefecture, so it was with his blessing that six of us packed into a five person car and just drove down there. near the tip the peninsula has some killer views, making it good value for a n afternoon day trip, and a fun adventure park which sarah, annie and i conquered. but there is also a whale museum in the area, replete with a medium-sized whaling vessel. we didn't actually drop into said tourist trap; the gift shop alone was sufficient, proudly displaying as it did a whale foteus and two dried whale penises - both of which taller than me. with these exhibits somehow having no impact on our hunger we tired the whale jerky lying around there to dry in the sun, then stopped off at a restaurant where hashmatt ordered whale sashimi (2); kindly he offered some to the rest of us, and i can exclusively reveal that the taste is nothing special. (talking to kocho-sensei it emerged that whale used to be cheap, and thus an economical source of protein for local families, and that is why it was popular. he said i should be like an advocate for whaling when i get back to england.)

and then what happened? a friend from back home came to visit, a certain mr turnpenny stopping by via hong kong. he just called me to say he got to narita airport ok and will be jetting off shortly. stay tuned for the adventures of turnpenny and thomson.

(1) i'm over-hyping this beyond belief. there was like a fridge.
(2) sashimi: sliced fish, like sushi without the rice.

capital gains

2007-06-01T11:12:00.000+09:00

since we came here i'd always wanted to go see sumo wrestling; surely it is one of the unique experiences japan has to offer. sumo tournaments last two weeks; we decided to go down for the middle weekend of the may competition in toyko, coinciding with one of capital's trio of biggest festivals: the asakusa sanja matsuri.

we got an early shinkansen on saturday morning, deciding to make use of a weekend rail pass, and checked into our hostel before heading to the arena for around 1pm (1). with the majority of the seats empty the atmosphere was somewhat lacking; it's only the tourists who make the effort of arriving before 3pm when the major league bouts begin, hence an unusually high ratio of foreigners to japanese in the audience when we arrived. as a spectacle, too, the bouts earlier in the day are lacking, though it is worth to show up earlier so that you've got a point of comparison for when the true fun begins. so round about 3pm the wrestlers representing the east come out, all bedecked in their ceremonial sumo regalia, stand in a circle around the ring, engage in a little ceremony and depart, followed by those from the west, who follow suit. the colours are bright, the fabric exquistite; the audience is seated, there's a buzz in the air; the lights are turned down: the stage is set.

the arena is a cross between an indoor stadium and a theatre, tiered so that the run-of-the-mill seating is on the second level, with the spectators below sitting on japanese mats in areas demarked to accomodate blocks of four people. everyone faces the middle, where there is an square earthern stage marginally bigger than the outlined circular sumo ring, raised a couple of feet or so above ground level. a black-clad line judge sits facing the ring on each of the quadrilateral's side, amongst the foremost spectators, with the technicolour referee - dressed in purple, yellow or some other powerfully bright colour - standing in the ring itself. the wrestlers come out in fours, one quadruplets from the east emerging with one from the west, plonking themselves down to face each other across the sumo ring. one wrestler from each side then enters the ring, both introduced to the crowd by the chirpy introduction of the fight announcer. the sumo wrestlers then take their time pacing around, hoisting their legs in the famous way at the corners of the mound, throwing salt by way of purification across of the ring, washing their mouths out with sake and composing themselves mentally (2). a minute or two later they square up. and then go at each other.

sumo fights are fun in the same way that sushi is fun: each lasting for brief but enjoyable moment and impressive as variations on a theme. you get fast-moving bouts where the wrestlers just push/slap at each other, with one inevitably maneuvering the other out the ring; you get tense times when the wrestlers are locked together, each trying to unbalance the other; you get moments of comedy when a wrestler falls out the ring and onto squishes someone sitting in the front row; in short, you get everything you could ever hope for. the most memorable battle featured one sumo wrestler side-stepping the other from the off as his competitor charged by and then pushing the suprised and off-balance fellow into the ground for an ultra-fast victory that was both cheered and booed. toward the end we actually took to betting on who would win: the stake being, funnily enough, 105 yen plates of sushi. as always, the day ended with a traditional form-shifting performance by the yokozuna.

the highlight of sunday was the asakusa festival, famous for its portable shrines a la the shiogama matsuri from a few months back. while none of these shrines, or omikoshi were anywhere near as large or ornate as those in shiogama, what was lacked in quality was made up for in quantity - there seemed to be a never-ending number of the things moving around the district, each carried by a small army consisting mainly of men dressed in mainly white outfits, whose job it is to make sure the shrine keeps bobbing erratically and chant (3); supposedly there are around one hundred shrines. the real spectacle, however, was seeing the tattoos of japanese gangsters, aka yakuza. ordinarily tattoos, the mark of the yakuza, must be covered; the sanja matsuri is one of the rare times they can reveal - and others can revel in - their body art. it was possible to see detailed and impressive tattoos covering the backs and legs of men donning little more than an old-fashioned nappy-like garment, thankfully in a safe enviroment but in the knowledge that they were dangerous characters.

before heading home we had enough time to go the controversial yasakuni shrine, famous under the previous japanese prime minister thanks to his own visits and the diplomatic fallout they caused in china and south korea (4). the atomosphere was sombre; we didn't stay long.

(1) the bouts actually begin in the morning and continue all day, with the junior ranks kicking off proceedings and the masters bringing things to a close.
(2) the ritualistic elements are skipped in the second rank competition.
(3) their purpose is to purify the neighbourhood.
(4) the shrine is controversial since it commiserates japan's war dead, including those chinese and koreans press-ganged into service whilst japan controlled their territory.

half-century

2007-05-11T13:56:00.000+09:00

i wasn't going to accept a run of any less than fifty posts for this japanthropology malarky; finally, as my innings is nearing a close, i have reached the milestone. and you thought i'd forgot about this thing. time for the customary catch-up highlights package.

so golden week - famous for it's abundance of national holidays (i.e. three in one week) - finally came along and, thanks to the use of two days annual leave, gave me a half-term holiday just a few weeks into the new school year. the weather finally became warm too, meaning that we ventured to the beach, though this doesn't mean that the sea was any warmer than an ice cube slipping down your spine, or that we henceforth kept ourselves dry. we spent another day playing basketball and frisbee in a local park, one checking out the onsen in onagawa, what's really worth talking about is our four day trip to the tokyo area.

the things we did down in toyko, for the most part, are altogether too predictable for japanese people to be interested in whilst at the same time lacking the clout to make those unfamliar sit up and take note. we went to asakusa, which is famous for its HUGE red paper lantern; we went to kamakura, famous for its outdoor sitting buddha statue - yes, yet another sitting buddha statue! this one, however, is my fav so far due to the fact that it was aged, authentic and approachable - and where we managed to locate a pretty nifty turkish restaurant; we went to the china town in yokohama (one of the biggest in the world), home of a myriad of reasonably-priced quality chinese restaurants and various tourist-orientated shops; and we went to tokyo tower - the japanese capital's questionably attractive eiffel equivalent. we also managed to go to akihabara (tokyo's famed "electric town"), which is a place i've wanted to check out since i was a kid. unfortunately when we first went there - at 10PM on a sunday - all the lights were off. heading back there a few days later, after a relatively expensive failed mission to get a idyllic vista of fuji on an unfortunately rainy day, we did experience its distinctive neon glow, however - which for the record is shut down at 8PM. now, having been there, it seems to me that the name "electric town" presumably comes more from the fact that it is THE place in japan for discounted electronics than its illuminations.

tokyo is some place: huge, time consuming and costly. however, while this makes it totally unlike the sapporos, sendais and kyotos of this world - your typical mid-range japanese cities - it lacks the class of london, paris or hong kong. perhaps what it lacks in character it makes up for in quirkiness. on our last night we ended up at this place called "lock down" - walking into which being akin to short haunted house ride (with the odd rattling corpse and what have you catching you off-guard in the darkness) - where we were greeted by a waitress wearing this blue plastic dress and waiters dressed as prisoners. the best thing about the place was the drinks, which all were themed in the style of concotions you might find in the lab of frakenstein or some such crazed scientist. served in beakers and connical flasks, and coming with mixers contained in test tubes and fluid injectors, were various eccentric cocktails with names like "jekyll and hide" that were as easynjoyable to drink as they were fun. sadly we had to escape before we missed the last train back to our hotel, thereby missing out on further hijinks. i forget the name of the district that the bar was in, but i do remember the streets outside teeming with people sheltering from the rain, anonymous beneath endless umbrellas, walking a criss-cross crosswalk between brightly lit streets as we ran between them - it was like a picture perfect movie scene.

there is one last thing to mention. the night before annie's birthday (fifth of the fifth) our mate akira, who's father is a fisherman, took us to ishinomaki international harbour on the way back from a kareoke session. he made us get out of the car and watch while he grabbed a poled fishing net from the trunk, put it in the sea and slooshed it through the water. magically the net lit up, illuminated by the phosphorescent plankton therein. amazed, we experimented with the net, splashing it into the surface water. the effects were unreal, the blue-green sparkle unforgettable - as a memory, it was unbeatable. thanks akira!

pieces of april (3)

2007-04-19T09:55:00.001+09:00

at my main school twenty teachers left and twenty-three arrived, meaning that there would be more new teachers than sekisyo veterans. underpinning this wholesale change was the unshakable belief of kocho-sensei - a PE teacher in a previous life - that sporty types are more confident, upbeat and, through their coaching of sports teams, good for boosting both morale and the school profile; apparently the new recruits were chosen first and foremost on their sporting records from their own high school days.

working with the new teachers has been an interesting experience thus far - especially because, all of a sudden, i am the experienced one. the guy who i teach third year oral communication classes with, for example, has proved willing so far to accept my input into how the class is taught instead of just depending on my teaching materials, even venturing as far as to put things together himself for use in class (1). the other new guy i work with - only 25 years old - is so new to the job that he is deferential to me rather than the other way round. he's a good guy though: he's already invited me to a hanami party on sunday and is a lot more chatty than the other english teachers i know; he's also a big fan of soccer.

the transition between the placid six week period without classes and the start of the new school year was abrupt. up until the past couple of days it's been a constant battle to keep up to date with lesson planning and marking, though thankfully it was easy enough to slip back into the routine of teaching per se; in the first week the new first graders were dazed and confused by the fact that they were all of a sudden in senior high school, surrounded by unfamiliar faces and subject to unknown rules, and in this docile state they were easy to teach. week two for the first years has seen them much more settled - the noisy and cheeky kids, resembling their predecessor first years, have already begun to emerge - even though they now have to cope after school with what my old supervisor called "a kind of hell:" cheering practice.

on tuesday afternoon my new supervisor recommended to me that i go to the gym, where all the first grade kids had gathered, and go and see what all the fuss was about. when i entered i saw that the kids were spaced out throughout the hall, standing individually and reciting the school mantra at the top of their lungs. amongst them, reminding me of fascist camp guards, walked some of the kids i taught last year - the kids from the worst class in the school - who had been handpicked by kocho-sensei in the role of prefect, pacing around full of power and with menacing gaits. along with their school uniform they had red armbands, white gloves and stern facial expressions; thinking that they were like a cross between nazis and the bully characters from roald dahl's tales of childhood i was glad, as a teacher, that they had no authority over me. the first graders looked pretty intimidated by their presence, especially worried that they might be sent to the stage, where everyone could see them, for somehow failing their brief: not standing straight enough, not shouting loudly enough, etc. throughout this torture there was a large drum beating, its sound filling the gym, mingling with the sounds of the students' periodic collective screams of "hai" in miltaristic symphony.

today they're off the hook, and so am i: the last class of the day has been cancelled - which i was due to teach alone - and so has cheering pratice. this we owe to the benevolence of the principal, who declared that we would all go and see the sendai vegalta soccer team train the the nearby ishinomaki city football ground. taking two of the possible meanings of the phrase: it's nice to get a break once in a while.

(1) seriously, this never happens.

pieces of april (2)

2007-04-18T20:41:00.000+09:00

there's a lot of small details in everyday life that i tend not to write about for some reason: the way that the postmen scoot around town throughout the business day on motorbikes, riding the yards between houses and leaving the engine running whilst they run to the next postbox; the way that japanese people almost invariably reverse into car parking spaces; that the convenience store chain spar is called hot spar over here. there seems to be a never ending amount of - perhaps trivial - things i just don't talk about but never would have known before coming to japan.

it seems all too obvious to me now, but it turns out that the japanese nation is obsessed with cherry blossoms. the season kicked off much further south a few weeks ago, ushered in by forecasts in the news about the percentage said flowers will be blooming in subsequent days, and finally has reached ishinomaki. the common way to celebrate the coming of the "cherry blossom front," as it's known in the vernacular, is to grab a sheet of tarpaulin and some alcohol and sit under the cherry trees enjoying the scenery; there is even a verb, "hanami," that means "flower watching" to describe this national pastime. apparently it's best to go when they're fully in bloom during the day, again at night, and finally to see the "storm" of fallen petals blowing around on a gusty day. actually, the hanami season is short, with the cherry blossoms fragile with regards to wind and rain - both of which are in abundance in spring here.

last weekend sarah, andrea and i headed down to ogawara to check out one of the supposedly top one hundred places in all of japan for hanami. the place is in fact famous for having over one thousand cherry blossom trees lining a river and, despite imperfect weather, it made a good day out south of sendai. then today my japanese teacher cancelled our class so that we could go to a local hanami site. you may think that i've lost my mind, or my sense of masculinity, by engaging in such activities but it's just the done thing here. you also get to experience the seasonal food that goes along with hanami, which words english ordinarily fail to describe but is often tasty; today marked a departure on this front, however: transparent noodles that not only looked like they were made out of dried PVA glue but also smelled and tasted just like it. i knew something was wrong when my japanese teacher, who ordered them for me - it's basically impossible to pay your own way if you've been invited out by a senior - started liberally apply the bemusing combination of sugar and soy sauce to whatever had just been put in front of me. my advice: avoid. start spreading the glues.

pieces of april (1)

2007-04-18T11:54:00.000+09:00

when i'm haring along from the train station to school on onagawa mornings i love it when the students try to keep up with my pacy walk, jogging along and venturing to talk with me in japanese as they do so. it's happened a couple of times before, and it happened again this morning with one of the now-second-year male students (1).

onagawa kids, on the whole, take me a lot more seriously than their sekisyo counterparts - usually calling me "sensei" (the respectful way to refer to a teacher) in class, usually more communicative outside of school hours. i even remember one of the guys asking me for tips on how to get a girl; according to my mate akira, whose sister attends onagawa high school, i'm quite popular with the ladies here. not that any of this helps them remember anything about me - my name, age or what country i come from. i've actually lost count of the number of times this one girl has asked me these questions, bashing me in the shoulder when it turns out i'm still not kevin, 24, from america. you think i'd have learned by now, right?

(1) that's right, the first years grew up - i'll talk about that some other time.

memoirs of a gaijin

2007-04-01T00:54:00.000+09:00

my travel buddies and i in kyoto having tracked down some geisha-wannabes

it's typical: you go on a short vacation only to find when you return that one of the school buildings has been taken down and half of the teachers are leaving, including four of the six english teachers and the kyoto-sensei. just another manic monday, right?

but i'm over-dramatising events: the disappearing building was in fact a temporary pre-fabricated job anyway - deigned to stand only for as long as it took to refurbish sekisyo - and that teachers are leaving is due to the academic year having just ended here, triggering the transfers of various teachers between various schools and the odd retirement (1). everyone was amazed at just how many teachers are leaving, however, with nineteen jumping ship instead of the usual total of between five and eight - including some real characters who the staffroom won't be the same without. with regards to the english teachers, i'm glad that the two who are staying are my current supervisor and my new supervisor (ironically the woman who first helped me get set up here), though "unluckily" - as my supervisor puts it at least - all of the new english teachers are male (2).

for my vacation i headed down to kyoto, osaka and nara, which are all in the kansai area of japan (round about the middle longitudinally) and can be reached by bullet train in around four hours from sendai (3). we stayed in kyoto at traditional japanese lodgings known as ryokan, which are good for travellers working to a budget: ours cost a mere 3500 yen per person per night (4).

in modern times kyoto is famous as the location where breakthroughs on global climate change just don't happen. historically the prefecture is renowned for its geisha and, especially from a tourism point of view, it still is

this is kiyomizudera (or, in english, 'purifying water temple'), one of the places to see in kyoto. founded in 780 it is located in gion, a well-known geisha hot spot. whilst there we spotted a couple of geisha parading around an appretice who looked smug as a bug in kimono

some of the random things we got up to in kyoto included finding quite possibly the tastiest scones i've ever had, eating at subway sandwiches for the first time in the east, using a little spanish in a mexican restaurant and drinking in both an english pub and an irish pub. regrettably we also ended up going to a place called gion corner, where we saw the most superficial overview of traditional japanese culture put together into a bit-part stage show for a steep 2,800 yen. easily the most touristy thing we've put ourselves through here, the show really made us value the genuine experiences we've had elsewhere - which some might say are priceless, but they've probably just seen too many mastercard advertisements.

todai-ji temple in nara is one of the most impressive sights i've ever seen in my life. once in this huge wooden structure's grounds it's easy to become immersed in a vision of historical japan

housed in the wooden building above is the largest gilt-bronze statue in the world, the daibutsu, which is 15m in height. much much older than the effort i saw in hong kong, this calm-looking buddha has quite literally lost it's head on several occasions

it was on the second day of our trip that we headed to nara prefecture; whilst there we went through nara koen - a park famous for being plentiful in (very docile) deer - on the way to todai-ji. our third day would be spent in osaka where, alongside seeing the umeda sky building and the castle, we patronised an aquarium that featured incredibly cute sleeping sea otters, dolphins, a manta ray and a whale shark, before returning to kyoto for the remainder of our trip. aside from a little drama, and a little earthquake, a good time was had by all.

the umeda sky building in osaka - the second most populated prefecture in japan - which is easily the most distinctive and interesting feature of the downtown skyline

osaka castle, which is much smaller than, say, edinburgh castle but still well worth checking out. inside is a museum featuring various relics of old japan, though my mates and i were instead captivated by a five-year-old japanese girl who somehow had better english than most of our students and parted from us with the words "see you later, alligator"

mozu in kyoto, home of an astounding 14,000 of these shrine gateways. good for a walk, even on a rainy day

kinkakuji (the 'golden pavilion'), another of kyoto's best-known tourist attractions

(1) those wishing to move have to put a transfer request in, whether or not it is granted, and any subsequent movement, are all at the whim of the principal.
(2) somehow the total of new female teachers is only two out of twenty or so.
(3) the real name for the bullet train is the shinkansen. although these trains can travel at up to 190 mph the difference between travelling by rail in england is sadly not-so-pronounced, though certain carriages do have interiors more reminiscent of planes. entirely unlike english trains, however, shinkansen are invariably on time and seem to make no discernable noise: i was walking along the platform when i saw my first one; it stealthy slid up beside me with the grace of a gigantic metallic sea serpent, catching me by surprise.
(4) the room that my four mates and i shared was barely big enough to accomodate the five futons therein and featured a jam-packed bathroom where it was barely possible to turn around - never mind swing a cat or any other domesticated animal that may be to hand. actually, we were in our room getting ready to check out on sunday morning when we felt last weekend's infamous earthquake, though thankfully we only experienced a mild tremor lasting for a minute or two.

welcome to the machine

2007-03-14T09:29:00.000+09:00

having heard about junior high school graduations, in retrospect the graduation ceremony at sekisyo was sort of disappointing: nobody cried. this might have had something to do with the fact that third grade consisted of exclusively male students, but i can't help feel like corners were cut. perhaps crucially, instead of each and every student mounting the stage and receiving a certificate of completion, the students merely had to stand and shout "hai!" - sometimes in stupid, laughter-inducing voices - before their chosen representative was sent up to collect one certificate on behalf of their class - a time-saving measure freshly implemented by the teachers here.

yesterday saw the counterpoint to graduation: the entrance examination results being posted. junior high school (JHS) students spend their final year at that level preparing for senior high school (SHS) entrance exams and the stakes are high: they can only apply to one place (1). a certain number of students are then recommended by JHS staff to the SHS's in question, meaning that they can attend an interviews and may secure places without examination (at sekisyo 80 places up for grabs at this stage). next the remaining applicants face tests in five areas with their average result becoming their final score. how difficult it is to get into a school is based on the level of competition - there isn't a predetermined benchmark score that'll get you in; at the top school in ishinomaki, sekikou, about 1.6 students apply for each available position, whereas at sekisyo it's a still-impressive 1.3 students per place - there are 200 minus the 80 reserved places - and at onagawa it's a lowly 0.5.

on results day students must travel to their chosen SHS in time for 3PM, where the boards showing the successful applicant's student numbers are hung above the student entrance and unveiled; prior to this moment you could cut the atmosphere with a knife (2). then all of a sudden there comes this swelling noise of jubilation, a cross between a scream and a roar, eminating from the amassed former JHS kids. one student jumped up, punched the air and slammed his satchel into the floor; others were merely hugging (3). but then there were the mothers crying, calling their less-than-confident kids on their mobiles to tell them they didn't make the grade - those guys have a tough time ahead of them.

for those that didn't make it it's not necessarily over: they can apply to schools like onagawa that didn't fill all their places. by doing so they are, in a way, admitting inferiority in a system built on prestige where second choices aren't really good choices. failing that they can sign up for expensive private school tuition in a big city like sendai, or call it quits and go and get a job. actually, education is only compulsory until the end of JHS in japan, and henceforth students have to pay 110,000 yen per year even to attend a public school, be it high level like sekikou or uncompetitive like onagawa, with compulsory uniform costing another 50,000 yen (4).

once upon a time sekisyo and sekikou stood literally side by side. now sekikou, a decade younger than its 95-year-old rival, is recognised as the best school in the area. the kids there will learn academic subjects, with the majority going on to university. here at sekisyo, however, the kids will learn employable skills like book-keeping instead, and the level is improving - especially since girls are now admitted (the number of girls who made it this year is around 95, up 15 from the current first grade). at the end of the day i can completely understand why emotions ran high yesterday. it's just a shame that, like one of my collegues says, those kids will soon forget how excited they were to get in. i wonder how long their enthusiasm will last.

(1) interestingly, i've heard that students work harder preparing for university entrance examinations than they ever will at university - in japan its actually getting into a presitigous place that takes priority.
(2) and i would have missed it had kocho-sensei not came to get me from the otherwise empty staff room.
(3) meanwhile, at annie's sekikou, kids were hoisting each other into the air and, contrastingly, at koubunkan - the formerly all-girls school where andrea works - celebrations were somewhat muted (emotional response seems to be in direct proportion to competition rate).
(4) i asked kocho-sensei about this and it turns out that the tuition money goes to the miyagi board of education, not the school budget - there isn't a point where an unpopular school cannot afford to stay open.

get bento

2007-03-12T13:18:00.000+09:00

today was an standing order bento lunchbox day: nothing special. although a 480 yen bigger bento is available, the choice bento at sekisyo costs 420 yen; sometimes it's so tasty that i want to track down whoever made it and hug them - which is a pretty unusual feeling for me to have; it really is that good. wednesday last week, though, special bento were compulsory - thankfully they were afforded out of the teachers' fund, which everyone subscribes to. to be honest i didn't enjoy it at all: it was bigger but fattier and i just ended up feeling bloated. so when it came to thursday and friday and i had the option of ordering what my supervisor calls a "more luxurious" bento i declined, choosing to keep with the 420 yen one rather than risk between 1000 and 2000 yen on another misfire. my supervisor, locked into the japanese system, was calling my lunchbox brand the "number one" by the end of friday lunchtime - and me the "king of bento". appropriately, my bento maker is called arigato or, in english, "thank you".

with my supervisor able to return to the arigato lunchbox today, he was once again praising its virtues. as it turns out, though, tomorrow is another special bento day. why, you ask? well, it's the job of one of the teachers to invoke the speciality lunchbox - and that's what's happened. but who decides? my supervisor! intregued, i wanted to find out more. in his words, the japanese are all about "cherishing harmony" and are, at the same time, very much locked into their respective groups or, in this case, grades. it's his duty, essentially, to gage the opinions of his co-workers and, if necessary, order a "more luxurious" bento tomorrow in line with what he thinks most people will want. henceforth there are no options: all teachers in his (third) grade will have the selected lunchbox tomorrow. at this point i briefly outlined what might happen instead in england and, impressed at the "logical" nature of my thoughts, he said he was unsurprised that foreigners, having a "broader perspective" than their japanese counterparts, could come up with such a system - a system that benefitting the individuals in question. so at the end of the day he's jealous of my freedom - but he would never dream of breaking from the japanese way of doing things. anyway, since i don't have a grade he says that my decision is "not so serious" - even if the office staff are trying to co-opt me into their collective.

apparently there's a bit of joking on with the lunchboxes, making me realise why some teachers are willing to pay up to 2000 yen for theirs. in instances where other teachers in range have paid less for somewhat more compact bento, they can expect to take a bit of flak from the third grade teachers, who might, for example, poke fun at the relative size of a colleague's shrimp. on days when the third grade teachers are feeling a little less extravagent, however, they tend to remain silent and avoid drawing attention to themselves or their supposedly inferior lunches. it seems to me like a sort of conflation of the idea of "face" in asian culture with good ol' fashioned banter. although, according to my supervisor it's only "half-serious", who'd have thought lunchbox politics could be so complicated?

tradition impossible

2007-03-12T09:02:00.000+09:00

the portable shrine at shiogama hote matsuri

monday morning, 9AM, and against all odds it's snowing. this is the most snow i've seen in this part of japan in, according to one of the teachers here, a year "雪一番" - or "number one for snow". somehow i managed to survive cycling to work despite the treacherous conditions, making it in on time: to do absolutely nothing. for the past two weeks or so i've had no classes, with this state of affairs is set to continue until april 8th. however: being on time (for an 8.25 start) is especially important these days in light of me getting to work two fridays ago at 9AM, hungover like hell, after being out drinking with various teachers (1). on the plus side i've managed to jettison my jaunts to onagawa for the meantime, so at least i don't have to get up quite so early and i don't have a train to miss.

this post is a bit of a catch-up on the "cultural" events that i've become acquainted with over the past few weeks. the first is actually non-japanese in nature: chinese new year, which fell on sunday february 18th. held in yamoto, site of birthdays and holidays galore, we celebrated mainly through food under the guidance of annie - what better way to celebrate the year of the pig (2)? heading first to the local supermarket we managed to find suitable of enough ingredients to make a hot pot soup and chinese dumplings. back at andrea's apartment, as is becoming the norm, i was drafted in to help with preparing the vegetables - cooking was good fun that day - before akira appeared just in time to skilfully prepare the fish. happily, i also managed to knead the dough to make dumplings with; when it came to making the dumplings themselves this was very much a multiplayer activity - though we ended up frying them all thanks to time constraints despite our intial hopes of wonton action. we rounded off that day with making a chinese new year poster card, a fun collaborative activity to round off a fun day.

in japan the third of march is hina matsuri, the dolls festival to commemorate girls's day. in terms of the associated customs i really can't say anything more on the subject than sara, who deals with the matter in depth in a recent post (3). kocho-sensei here managed to win some free local newspaper publicity for the school by bringing in the exceedingly expensive seven-tiered doll display he bought for his daughter when she was born - and apparently was still paying for two years later - since this is the first year that the school includes girls and she is now married and in her 30s (my PE teacher mate has a similarly grandiose display for his daughter, minori). on the day itself some of us headed down to the international centre in sendai in an attempt to somehow participate in the festival, though disappointingly in the end the event there was a japanese-only private party. that day we did manage to go and see traditional japanese flower arranging exhibition though - which i guess is girly enough; it was actually interesting since japanese flower arranging is so completely different to western forms.

finally, the weekend just gone saw an unusual festival in a place called shiogama - about forty minutes south of ishinomaki by train - called the hote matsuri. here's how the japan national tourist organisation describes the event:

The Hote Matsuri is a festival held every year at Shiogama-jinja, a shrine in the city of Shiogama, Miyagi Prefecture. The shrine is at the summit of the mountain Ichimori-yama, located almost in the center of Shiogama. The approach to the shrine is straight with a steep incline and 202 stone steps. The highlight of the festival occurs when a large portable shrine is carried down the stone steps. This o-mikoshi carries shrine maidens dressed in beautiful attire, and parades through the city with a flag hoisted like a sail. Tradition has it that the festival began around 1680. Back then fire was a common hazard, and the festival's original purpose was to pray for protection from fire. Since then, prayers for the prosperity of the city and wellbeing of families have been added, and the festival thrives to this day.

and they're not kidding about the highlight. the shrine is a hugely heavy thing and, combined with 202 particularly worn steep stone steps, the act of carrying it from top to bottom is a dangerous, strenous feat. part of the crowds lining the staircase, i saw from less than a metre away the strained expressions of the bearers at the front (something like ten men bear the load on their shoulders to the fore, with perhaps another fifteen behind doing their best to hold up - and hold back - their end of the deal) as they made their difficult journey down the stairs, swaying to the left and the right en masse as they descended, with many in the audience heart-in-mouth. meanwhile, some were attempting to throw 100 yen coins into the shrine as it passed them, often as not pelting those carrying the thing instead. personally i can't remember seeing such a trial upclose and personal; it was quite something - especially since the decayed state of the stairs had proved itself felt only moments earlier when the old man at the head of the procession had fell and rolled down five or six of them (thankfully he seemed unharmed). instead of following the procession and thereby seeing the parade, i joined up with my mates and went to explore the temple at the top of the staircase. whilst there we were lucky enough to see a short musical play about an ogre trying to overthrow this king who, in the end, is able to feed the ogre's head to his trusty pet dragons - especially entertaining.

traditional japanese dress and instruments in the portable shrine procession

the shrine carriers having just began their descent

(1) the preceeding thursday had been graduation. we'd started off that night at this place very popular for office parties (or えんかい - enkai), 石もり (ishimori), with a sort of semi-formal dinner party. afterwards, with kyoto-sensei and kocho-sensei both disappearing, i ended up hanging out with the PE teachers, one of whom is the famous dinner invitation guy. at this next place, featuring fairly nasty wine and kareoke, the onagawa teachers randomly showed up too. i ended up hammered for three reasons: 1) the japanese system of pouring drinks for each other from interchangable and infinite bottles makes it impossible to know how much you've drank; 2) the japanese custom of pouring no drinks for yourself and only for others as a gesture of friendship; 3) the japanese belief in the white guy as an enzyme-powered god of alcohol and my tendency to forget i'm not as i become increasingly out of it. i remember i ended up ballroom dancing to kareoke with both of the waitresses - which i was embarrassed about until i found out my predecessor's predecessor, who was also english, ended up doing the same on a regular basis. since i didn't have my watch with me i have no idea what time i got home, though it might have been after midnight. waking up by chance at 7.45AM i had the potential to get to work on time but was so tired and intoxicated there i didn't have a chance in hell. having been in work for a couple of hours, kyoto-sensei told me i was in trouble with the principal, who as apparently "very angry" - though when i went to his office i didn't get told off; he just said that the japanese honourable way of doing things was to get hammered and stay up all night but make sure you get to work on time, no matter your condition, and warned me against making the same mistake again. that day i was so hungover i ended up taking the afternoon off.
(2) for the record, 2007 is the year of the boar - or wild pig - in japan, and representations of the animals in question are very different in the two countries.
(3) thanks to my japanese teacher i've tried those hailstone things and they're pretty tasty, their sugary texture reminding me of merengue - though i think they are more crunchy.

links awakening

2007-03-07T11:31:00.000+09:00

sometimes when i'm at work i forget that i'm not just stigmatised because i'm a foreigner, i'm also a temporary worker with a fixed expiration date - which means i'm screwed both ways. check out this article from time magazine.

and, on the lighter side, here's something on the strangely titled white day and valentine's culture in japan.

made in hong kong, chapter four

2007-03-05T09:26:00.000+09:00

there was always supposed to be a fourth, final chapter to made in hong kong. two months after getting back, here it is.

* * * * *

if you want that "nice suit," a "nice watch" or a foot massage then kowloon is the place to be. always prepared, we were relying heavily on a copy of the hong kong Lonely Planet when we went there - only it was about ten years out of date. for our first destination, having seen the film chungking express back at uni, i petitioned matt that we check out the chunking mansions - which LP lovingly refers as a hell-hole. chungking mansions is in fact a place notorious for its dodgy stores and even dodgier accomodation, though somehow it still felt disappointingly dark, dingy and dense compared to how it seemed on film. aged or not, our LP was (sometimes) on the money.

after grabbing something awful to eat at an awful restaurant - where our lonely "non-smoking" table was literally surrounded by smokers, the service was abysmal and the tea lived up to hong kong's infamously poor standards - we decided to check out kowloon's park. according to our LP, kowloon park is (or more accurately was) a monstrosity. thankfully we ignored its outdated advice and found ourselves an interesting park with an entertaining exotic avary in its centre. whilst there we also spotted some old men playing a game that, from a distance, looked like a crazy version of draughts. it turned out that it was chinese chess - xiangqi - which is played on using the lines, not the squares, of a 8 x 8 grid; searching for a set of our own was something that would henceforth become a subquest of our hong kong adventure. i remember this old guy laughing as he kept taking his opponents pieces with his cannon, surrounded by other old guys gripped by the chess battle in hand.

it's worth noting that in kowloon are also various markets, including the famous bird market - home to hundreds of birds in insuffienciently-sized cages. there are a few trees in proximity; seeing free birds flying between them and alongside their caged brethren only served to intensify my misgivings about the cirumstances of captivity. actually, on the whole the markets in kowloon are disappointing - we found better on hong kong island at repulse bay, home to its own disappointment in the shape of an over-hyped, unremarkable beach. (it was there that we finally found an inexpensive portable chinese chess set.)

* * * * *

it must be said that matt and i, bearers of the archiac LP, are neither the most experienced nor efficient of travellers; it wasn't until one of our spontaneous friendly guide women suggested that we get ourselves a free, up-to-date tourist map that we even procured our cumbersome fold-out one. anyway, we'd planned to stay in hong kong an extra couple of days to catch new year. however, we failed entirely to locate exactly where we should spend it - only realising this huge oversight on december 31st. we were in trouble.

we'd talked several times about finding a good place to go drinking, even doing some scouting a couple of nights before new year. we discovered that soho was underwhelming and that the nearby superior drinking area - all of the western bars were packed into a cul-de-sac, showing re-runs of football games and selling british beer - was patronised by middle-aged clientele. despite having a good time drinking that night we decided new year would be best spent amongst our own generation, although we were clueless as to how we could make this a reality.

now it was december 31st and, what was worse, it was evening. we'd heard time square was a good place to be but we didn't know where that was (we found out the next day that it was moments from our hotel, seeing photos of proceedings in the newspaper). the best we could come up with was to go to the habour area, where we figured we could catch the fireworks at midnight amongst people and amazing neon-lit scenery. having learned it was legal to drink on the streets, we found ourselves a 7-11 and each armed ourselves with a bottle of alcohol. but when we got to the harbour it was empty and, soon enough, so were our beer bottles. somehow it had reached 10.30PM. there were no shops in sight, and we had a mission on our hands.

by the time we found a 7-11 it was around 11.30PM. on our travels we'd passed a crowd watching a (presumably) local band playing by on the waterfront - we were planning to get back over there in time for the midnight festivities. when i was waiting in line to pay for my beer this girl in line behind me said "hi" so i turned round; she asked me were we were spending new year. when i told her she said that we'd already missed the fireworks (they'd been on at 8PM!) and she'd be at this place called "red" near the IFC building. totally forgetting that there were actually two IFC buildings but pleased with this recon, i headed outside to tell matt that our plans had changed. once we realised that we didn't actually know where we were going, with about fifteen minutes left to midnight, all seemed lost. we were wondering why we'd left the girl (and her boyfriend) behind.

everyone we asked for directions couldn't help us. but then, when were in this mall, this guy saw that we had beer and asked where we'd got it from; evidently he was as screwed as we were: the closest 7-11 wasn't close enough. matt asked if he knew where "red" was. he did! not only that, despite living in hong kong he'd had no idea of where to spend new year either and, seizing this opportunity, he said he'd take us there. when we told him we were sorry to have missed the fireworks he said that he hadn't even known there would be any. feeling altogether less idiotic, things were starting to look up.

not only did we find the place - a rooftop overlooking the harbour on one side and the city on the other, with the smaller of the two IFC buildings towering over us - but we got there in time. and we were surrounded by people our age. we'd rode our luck for all it was worth and we'd pulled it off. it was a good feeling: made in hong kong.

quick march

2007-03-01T11:40:00.001+09:00

graduation for third year senior high school students fell this year on march the first, and i've just got back from preceedings. ceremony is an strange beast in japan. there's a lot of people walking off the stage, bowing to flags and returning to their seat before being announced as the next speaker, going back up the stage, getting some more bowing in and speaking into the microphone once more. notably, the speaker always faces whoever he's addressing, leading to instances, for example, where the student leader has his back to the entire assembly bar the principal. meanwhile, for the audience there's a lot of bowing in various directions at various times; sometimes you have to get up from your seat, bow, sit down, stand back up a moment later, bow again, and sit down again (it keeps you literally on your toes). the nice thing about today's proceedings was that, for a change, they'd pre-heated the hall, allowed us to keep our shoes on (cold sports hall floors aren't too welcoming) and given us seats. graduations are special occassions: you can tell because the hall is bedecked in red and white stripes if nothing else.

schools here have their own songs, official mottos and logos; sekisyo recently became one of the few to also fly a flag - one of the many publicity stunts kocho-sensei pulls to get this place in the local newspapers. according to kocho-sensei the general passion of the students has declined since back when he was merely a teacher here. he was telling me about how the pupils used to get into fights with their counterparts at rival school sekikou (one of annie's two schools) at the annual sports meet/derby, and dive into the river when their team won in the boat race - regardless of whether or not they could swim, inevitably leading to the emergence of the local rescue boat. the students are nowhere near as masculine or brave these days; when you let them loose on the internet, for instance, the best they can do is browse 300 quid wallets and fashionable jeans. but they're still guys at the end of the day: in my language classes they're always trying to find rude words - though the best they usually find is a misconstrued term like "welling up" - and shout them in my direction.

i realised today that i recognise quite a few of the departing third years, mainly thanks to kocho-sensei's cleaning time initiative (an idea stolen from the office head teacher), whereby the students assigned to tidy his office are lined up and made to converse with me on a daily basis. then there's the guys who i taught three times a week (all twelve of them); there was some good guys and real characters in that class - i wish them well. a lot of ALTs are wondering right now how their wishy-washy second years are going to somehow evolve into third years in just over a month. i think, however, that the trick is that the new first years will just look so young as to make everyone else that bit more mature by default. to be honest, i don't know what to expect from the next generation of students here - the school will certainly have a different vibe with girls in two of its three grades - but i'm looking forward to starting from scratch.

snowbiz

2007-02-19T12:30:00.000+09:00

fall guy: akira diving backward into the snow

if you're wondering where winter was hiding this year then the answer is northern japan, where the days are nippy and the ground is slippy. such is the setting for the sapporo snow festival, annual magnet to the odd busload of ALTs.

48 of us met up in sendai on a thursday night, many arriving straight from all-you-can-drink parties to discover there was no toilet onboard our coach. we left sendai at about 1.30AM. everyone was suprised when we got to the ferryport just four hours later, two hours ahead of schedule; many of my fatigued companions resorted to sleeping on that most uncomfortable of beds, the concrete floor, upon arrival since we were soon unceremoniously dispatched from the bus. waiting for us were the ever-lovable microwave vending machines (side-stepping them most people seemed content with ice cream for breakfast). eventually it was time to board the silver queen, where our living standards were upgraded to include carpeted floors and small cuboid leather pillows. a quick reccé of the area yielded the discovery that the "restaurant" onboard was staffed exclusively by more microwave vending machinery. it was time to get some sleep.

after an eight hour ferry ride and another bus journey we arrived at our hostel; clean, cheap and comfortable it was a good find as far as i could c. those of us who wanted to had enough time to grab a shower before heading out into the snowy streets of friday evening in the city of sapporo. our destination was the sapporo beer factory, host to a 90 minute all-you-can-drink-and-eat party featuring mutton, which you cook yourself on grills built into the tables. there were three beers available, each brewed onsite by the famous sapporo beer company (one of the top three brewers in japan): the usual light-coloured whizz pop variety, its darker smoother brother and a "half and half" combination of the two. after the fun and games there most people headed over to an infamous foreigner-friendly club called "booty" for dancing and drinking (to date my only clubbing experience in japan).

for some reason stitch's popularity is perhaps only second to that of winnie the pooh when it comes to disney in japan

having been inexplicably sensible in my alcoholism on friday night, saturday morning woke me without a hangover. that day we did three notable things: ate some of the sapporo's trademark ramen for lunch, saw panoramic views of sapporo from the JR tower in the evening, and saw the snow sculptures that make the festival - turns out the army make the sculptures - both by day and by night. some of the sculptures, slightly melted thanks to winter lacking its usual force, were undoubtably impressive, perhaps between fifteen and twenty metres high and detailed in design. highlights included a japanese temple, palacial building and an ice mansion, all of which looked better when artificially illuminated against the pitch-black night sky. the day ended with a snowball fight and us making a snowman.

on sunday i joined akira's brigade and headed to a famous town called otaru. quite a lot of the day seemed to be spent driving, though on travel excursions like this one that's not necessarily a bad thing and it beat the endless walking of the day before. the town itself was pretty quaint, sort of reminiscent of towns in the lake district in england, and we visited a couple of craft shops there, including this one with an igloo outside. oh, and there was this lane in the town reserved for "snow gleaming" where people were making these snow/ice buckets to put candles in at night and random piles of snowballs. once we left we headed via gondola cable car to close to the top of this mountain, taking a caterpillar-tracked snowmobile to the summit for more kick-ass views of hokkaido. i wound up the day with some tasty chinese food at the english-friendly restaurant steamed in sapporo.

the mighty snow temple

i had a really good time in sapporo. i remember the taxis revving up on the icy roads, desperately trying to get some purchase, while other cars skidded to a gradual halt behind them; i remember going for ice cream on saturday, despite it being the iciest day i'd faced this year; i remember eric singing songs from aladin in the communal baths - i've never had a friend like him; i remember it snowing in otaru, with over a foot of snow already on the ground and akira falling in. there's no business like snow business.

yesterday's news

2007-02-14T09:53:00.000+09:00

if there's something that really annoys me it's when figures use their authoritive status to pull the wool over the eyes of unsuspecting audiences - the case in point being the first article i linked to yesterday, concerned with "terminating" the use of ALTs in japan. once upon a time i was forced to study a "critical thinking" course at college, which back then i considered to be the biggest waste of time in the world; crucially it made me remember to question why you believe what you are told: is it because of who's telling you and not what's being said? our friend, the "professor of English as a foreign language at Toyama University of International Studies," is guilty of using his status as an authoritative academic to sidestep due academic process, writing something up in a newspaper that would be shot to pieces within seconds if posted in an academic journal.

where's the research, the balanced arguments, the referencing? what's this guy's agenda? why did this truncated and rehashed version of an article he wrote last summer appear just the other day in the press? i wonder. he's far too willing to rely on "anecdotal" evidence and a very limited range of examples to provide a foundation for his grandiose generalisations, while at the same time complaining that there have been no "comprehensive studies with valid empirical evidence" to prove the value of ALTs - where's his equivalent evidence that they're so entirely useless? personally i would never argue that the current ALT system is particularly efficient or necessarily effective on the whole, but to pretend that there are no successes, or to imply that no ALTs have qualifications, is just smoke and mirrors. obviously ALTs were introduced in the first place for a reason; why not suggest improvements rather than calling for their termination - perhaps downscaling ALT numbers in conjunction with an actual ALT training programme, requiring preliminary teaching qualifications even, and better ALT supervision (including progress reviews) throughout their time working in japan? and i'm confused as to why he thinks Assistant Language Teachers always supplant the role of the main teacher in class - the ALT is just as often the one sidelined - or why actual co-operative mutally beneficial team teaching is never the result. i have good relationships with many of the teachers i work with and i genuienly think things can work rather well on occassion.

and it's not exactly obligitory for ALTs to play games every lesson and thereby turn english study into some sort of joke. most senior high school ALTs base their activities on the trying to make the dead english in the textbook come to life, or even fight against the old-fashioned/misfiring english therein. i myself, with no restrictions on what i teach, try and come up with useful material too - and i'm getting better as my experience grows. ALTs actually are pretty useful too in allowing the students to interact with english speakers (one of my students at onagawa was complaining the other day that he could understand only JTE english so why did he have to put up with me - but this is real life kid), see english being used as a living language in conversations between ALT and JTE (that i could understand japanese words thanks to english explanations seems like a magic trick to students): there certainly are benefits. on the whole the actual english ability/experience of JTEs (and textbook writers) is insufficient in itself; why not use ALTs at least as a crutch until the japanese education system can go forward unassisted?

finally, our professor totally ignores the internationalising function of the JET programme too. he makes reference to the "ministry" (concerned with education) - failing to acknowledge that JET ALTs may be paid as teachers but are employed too with a view to propagating cultural and racial enlightenment by three different ministries! and, as a gaijin in japan, i think internationalising is pretty important. the second link from yesterday - about a school hiring blondes with blue or green eyes as their ALTs - tells you alot about the mindset of some japanese. my supervisor, despite his interest in english, in fact never wants to go to an english speaking country and never has been - that tells you something too. then there's that racist magazine that was onsale throughout japan until recently (you can draw your own conclusions on that). at the end of the day i still get stared at an awful lot in my daily life for just being white, and the students often call ALTs by their predecessors names: it's important for them to learn, in this globalised world, that we're not quite so scary and that we're not all the same. don't forget the word gaijin means "outsider."

in his piece our professor even plays the populist card of pointing out what a great waste of taxpayers' money ALTs are. it's a shame someone is willing to stoop so low to try and destroy completely what remains potentially useful in the name of a narrow-minded idea of progress. i wanted to write a response, as much for my own sake as anyone else's - though it's somewhat ironic that i can use my spare time at work to do so! viva la JET programme!

blonde internationalisation

2007-02-13T16:19:00.000+09:00

today i've stumbled over a couple of contrasting articles that seem worth linking. the first is a bit of an assault on the humble ALT, ignoring totally any internationalising aspects of the JET programme; the second is about blondes...

senbetsu

2007-02-08T16:18:00.001+09:00

i'm off to this snow festival in sapporo, on the northernmost island of japan, this weekend, leaving tonight. and next weekend's plan of going to this other festival in the west of japan seems to be on ice since a (rare) japanese friend of mine is getting married. by mentioning these things to kyoto-sensei here at sekisyo i learned a couple of interesting cultural pointers.

first: the holiday form of senbetsu. according to kyoto-sensei's electronic dictionary senbetsu means ‘a parting (farewell) gift,’ though it may be invoked at less decisive moments such as when someone is departing for a trip. in this instance the way it works is that you give somebody a white money envelope containing a certain sum, with a view to getting a souvenir back from the trip to the value of 33% of that amount. about ten minutes after explaining the concept to me - and i wasn't certain why he was - kyoto-sensei came up to me and gave me a money envelope containing 3,000 yen. so now, in sapporo, i have a mission.

secondly: the events form of senbetsu. on special occassions, such as when one is moving, getting married or having a funeral, then senbetsu takes on that function of a farewell gift. apparently at a wedding it's the norm to give about 30,000 yen to the couple nowadays, with this amount being about three times what it was back in the day. guests get presents in exchange for attending. from what i can gather the value of the gift is fixed in most instances at a percentage value of the money given, which is interesting and probably has something to do with the eastern obsession in ‘face’ (i.e. the meaning being the same as in the expression ‘save face’). according to kyoto-sensei, since i'm not invited to the family-only wedding ceremony itself, my contribution should be something like 1,500 yen with perhaps the gift in exhange being valued at 500 yen.

getting involved in this sort of calculated situation without knowing your role seems to be a dangerous business; you could seem to be snubbing someone just by paying a reasonable yet officially insufficient senbetsu if you don't completely understand the rules of engagement. it's at times like these that i feel totally out of my depth, like the lead character in the book i'm reading at the moment - "the idiot" by dostoyevsky - who is incapable of dealing with the alien world of high society. i wonder if this story will have a happy ending.

hirakatakanji

2007-02-07T09:40:00.000+09:00

you know you're in trouble when, in early february, you start a class with a dispute over what year it is. the JTE i was working with was clueless, the students were arguing it was 2008 - it was an interesting situation to be in. the real reason for the confusion was that the japanese way of counting years is entirely different to ours, based on the year of the current emperor's reign, with 2007 being year 19. the japanese calendar is somewhat bastardised, actually, originally based on that of the chinese but later tailored to fit our gregorian system - thus they they currently use the chinese zodiac in conjunction with our year start and end dates. in a sense, then, it's like the japanese language in that it borrows heavily from a system developed by the chinese, has proved willing to use it in such a way that it no longer makes sense to its parent, and has proved incapable of resisting western influence.

the japanese language is composed of three character subsets: hiragana, kanji and katakana. apparently, hiragana was derived from the outdated sōsho style of chinese calligraphy, with the resulting characters unique to japan. kanji, on the other hand, is a more wholesale borrowing from presently used chinese writing system - though according to the resident expert the japanese usage is discordant in its combinations of strokes, sounds and symbolism. then there's katakana: the medium for importing foreign loan words into japanese and is paradoxically the perennial enemy of the ALT in the classroom and the best friend of the gaijin on the street. it works like this: you get a foreign word, mess with the syllabary so that its component sounds match those available in hiragana and then write it up in katakana. so, for example, soccer is pronounced "saa-ka," tuna is pronounced "tsu-na" (even though they already have the word "maguro" for tuna anyway) and restaurant becomes "restoran" - and they do the same thing with western names, hence i'm "mistaa debito" to the kids.

as you can imagine, learning katakana sometimes makes life that bit easier - although it can be quite the conundrum to figure out. the problem is that in the classroom students are occasionally taught (especially at lower levels) how to pronounce english words using katakana, thereby guaranteeing they new generations will say "remon" instead of "lemon" and throw random vowels at the end of every word that doesn't end with an "n" ("n" is the only sound in japanese that isn't followed by a vowel within the syllable). but that's not the only controversial point: foreigners wonder why their words are borrowed in a way that retains their separateness from real japanese via the katakana character set. i have to say, though, having been to hong kong i'm thankful for it: it's like having a cheat code for understanding menus and things - and in japan i'm willing to take all the understanding i can get.

the battle of midway

2007-02-01T15:59:00.000+09:00

i've filled in my form. it's on the desk infront of me, signed and dated.

i can't deny it: i'm kinda sad about my decision. but it's best to quit while i'm ahead.

i'm not recontracting.

this weekend marks the midway point of my JET experience. six months to go and counting.

made in hong kong, chapter three

2007-01-25T19:21:00.000+09:00

welcome to the jungle

hong kong is disjointed by nature; as you emerge from the underground MTR stations you never quite know what you'll see, which certainly keeps things interesting. the skyscrapers in the above picture belong to the area of hong kong island called "central" - i.e. the affluent central business district. it's the place where hong kong displays its economic might: it's ultra-modern, completely clean and super-sleek. and it's home to endless malls. actually, the first floor of seemingly all the major buildings is devoted to shopping, with these buildings conspiring with pedestrian overpasses to join the many - often cavernous - stylish shopping malls central has to offer; you could shop for days on end without ever gracing the streets. oh, and you can find some pretty nifty restaurants around here without any hassle: just pop into a nearby mall (if somehow you're not already in one) and the choices are endless. on the whole food is something hong kong does very well - be it chinese, indian, thai, vietnamese or whatever - and pretty inexpensively. be warned, though: outside of the usual western franchises the experience known as "a decent cup of coffee" has not, at time of writing, been invented.

a few stops away on the MTR you can emerge into wan chai, where our hotel was. this place has completely different vibe; it's full of the sort of signs hong kong is famous for - the colourful type that jut out into the street, competing like trees for sunlight. actually, on the MTR you can get to all sorts of interesting places, from kowloon on the mainland (where infinite numbers of street peddlers with try and tempt you with ambiguous offers of a "nice suit. you want a nice suit, sir?") to temples in the new territories. depending on where you are you may then have the option of using trams - including the world's longest "funicular" tram up to victoria peak - buses, ferries or a cable car to continue on your journey. you could always walk, but why walk when there's also taxis and the taxis are dirt cheap?

so in hong kong it's easy to live like a king, dining and being carted around all day long without even the smallest dent in your pocketbook. anyway, you can check out all the pics i took in hong kong at this location, or have a gander at some of the more photogenic places we were whisked away to below.

matt and i at a buddist monastry. it's somehow peaceful despite being nextdoor to a motorway; because it's hong kong there's also some towerblocks and a mall nearby

a few stops away on the MTR and you end up at this temple. many ALTs say "once you've seen one temple you've seen them all", but i'd never seen anything like this

this brass buddha is the biggest of its kind in the world. it's really impressive - well, up until you find out it's younger than you are. after that the experience gets old very fast

matt and i hopped in a taxi to go and see this huge suspension bridge and, when we got there, we were bowled over by this (entirely different) bridge instead!

now and a yen

2007-01-24T09:26:00.000+09:00

reading the bbc website today made me want to cry: the pound is at a 14 year high against the the yen. not so long ago the uk government put interest rates up; what is it trying to do to me? i'm hoping my student loan is unaffected, otherwise my earning power is going down in direct proportion to my debt being increased. one of the problems is that japanese interest rates are impossibly low - is the country afraid of foreign investment after the asia crisis or something (1)?

news just in: i'm 99.9% sure i'm not going to recontract. over the past couple of days i was able to speak with a lot of JETs at this ALT conference in sendai and, it turns out, about half of them are of the same mind. moreover, i heard that the turnover rate for JETs in miyagi prefecture is one of the highest in japan. at the end of the day i just can't commit to spending another 18 months of my life here - i'm certain another six should be enough for me to leave on a high.

i've been having a pretty good time recently. scrolling through the highlights in reverse chronology, being in sendai on monday and tuesday yielded much in the way of great eating - chinese, indian and italian - and it was nice to see a few familiar faces, including other exiled brits (1). saturday brought a miniture kareoke extravaganza, featuring six or seven people and limited to two hours in length. since i always try to mix up my selections i tried my hand at songs as diverse as "stuck in the middle with you", "born to be wild", "deer dance" (by system of a down) and "holy thunderforce" by rhapsody (2). andrea and sarah pleaded/forced me into 'singing' "i would walk 500 miles" too, and i guess a video of that might appear on their website; i decided to go for a (entirely inconsistent) faux scots accent and basically ignore the vocal melody. top 40 here i come!

way back last monday i went around that teacher's house again (his name is shoetsu-sensei). this time i taught his kids english for 40 minutes or so; it was such a change to my actual job! they were so enthuasiastic, interested and engaged - nothing like the vast majority of my students (even at my better school english is, apparently, their lowest priority). the best part was when their mum came to tell them dinner was ready and they were like "just five more minutes!". after teaching the family and i ate together and the food, as always, was fantastic. things could be this way once a fortnight from here on in; it's a nice arrangement.

i got a phone call yesterday from toshiba's repair people and it looks like my laptop may be returned to my base school sometime later today - where, of course, i am not. there's always tomorrow...

coming soon: hong kong photos!

(1) if you're reading this for the first time then you missed an almost half-decent pun featuring capitalist pigs and a foolhardy economical approach to the truth. see comments.
(2) btw, instead of saying "niche" americans say "nitch" for some reason, and blame us for colluding with the french!
(3) the lyrics are really fun to this last one, kicking off with "face me evil bastards"...

made in hong kong, chapter two

2007-01-18T15:39:00.000+09:00

if i hadn't lived in japan for five months i'd have seen hong kong through different eyes. as it was i guess i experienced everything in a flipped round, back-to-front and upside down kinda fashion. at the airport it was seeing familiar kanji on signs that made me feel relaxed, not the english - i'd fallen for that in tokyo in august, misreading what amounted to kissing english goodbye for its reaffirming handshake. worryingly, i soon found i'd lived long enough in gaijin-deficient northern japan to feel uncomfortable around groups of non-asians, especially white people, that i didn't know already. and in 7-11s it was run-of-the-mill british foodstuffs that caught my eye instead of the snack oddities unavailable back home.

initially matt and i made things difficult for ourselves. forgetting that we could actually communicate with people in quite literally our own terms, we missed opportunities to ask people for help until we'd wandered off and had enough time to double take. but it only really took a day for us to get used to the new state of affairs, aided by such things as long-forgotten american tv channels and newspapers written in our mother tongue. it was like becoming reaquainted with an old friend, and that old friend was yourself. i have to admit that, after just one week of this easy listening, straight talkin' english existence, my interest in learning japanese took a real battering.

english is forever the comedian. coupled with hong kong's invariably pushy service staff, it led to some funny situations. one of my favourites involved a head waiter at this chinese restaurant. since we'd previously made several unintelligent orders at various eateries, matt asked this guy to recommend us something from the menu. he did. but then we asked for a rice bowl each to go with our food. the last thing we expected for him to say was: "later. maybe," and walk off. would we get rice or not? was there some sort of test to pass first? it was a cliffhanger moment.

eating at that restaurant turned out to be quite an experience. everytime we dared to even touch the teapot on the table interchangable waitresses would immediately steal it away to the other side of the room, returning it in ever-more diluted forms. as for the rice, to our surprise it did come; unfortunately, that wasn't the only surprise: when matt lifted vegetables from the serving dish to his own plate this really long hair went with them, bridging the two. the instant the waitresses saw what had happened everything on his side of the table was scurried away without warning. the head waiter then appeared, promising a replacement, though we no longer felt hungry.

when it's time to pay i decide to complain, saying the hair put us off our food; we're unhappy about paying full fayre. a waitress disappears to fetch the head waiter. from the kitchens he marches confidently toward us. he has something in his left hand. "what seems to be the problem?" he says, "you had your replacement." and he looks at us, confidently adding, "by the way, in my hand is a crab. it's live." so we left it at that.

in hong kong you can't even stop at a menu outside a cafe without someone emerging to try and sucker you into going in. this one time we were standing on the sidewalk and this guy steps out, telling us the food was really good, heading off down the street. once we sat down inside it transpired he was actually the main waiter there. being all japanised, i asked him whether noodle slurping was good or bad manners in hong kong. he sat beside us and started talking about "foreign devils" like ourselves and noodle slurping - for some reason he was the only person we met who was confused by, or remotely interested in, the pairing of a texan with an english northerner in hong kong - in a fast talking and sort of jokey tone, saying a little about hong kong's schitzophrenic nature, touching on some some things to do and places to see. turns out we've just made our first friend; as we leave he hands us a sheet of paper with his name, steven, and mobile phone number just incase anything goes wrong. we say we'll see him again like we mean it and wave him goodbye. somehow we never actually do.

people in hong kong are so completely different to in japan that it's almost just grounds for culture shock. in japan, for example, shop attendants are universally ultra-friendly, to the extent that when you first get here it seems a little too artificial and irksome. once you've lived there long enough, though, you realise it's not exactly fake: it's automatic and maybe, in a conditioned sort of way, even genuine. in hong kong i experienced the opposite: i was confronted by people who would just snatch cash out of my hand, not even acknowledging me over the course of a whole transaction, talking all the while to their college somewhere else in the store. then in japan there's no tipping at restaurants - it's seen as disrespectful in that it implies the employer isn't looking after his people - but the staff are just as helpful as you'd want them to be. meanwhile, in hong kong, you could get obnoxious waitresses playing for tips, refusing to leave a man or his teapot alone, or the sort of waiter who just shoves your food onto your table without even slowing down on his way past. i guess it all depends whether you're dealing with an optimist or a pessimist in the world of tips; interestingly, white guys apparently are famous for tipping the least and japanese people the most. now, what did i say before about tipping in japan?

outside of stores and restaurants, on average the hong kong native is way more social interaction-ist than the social isolationist japanese. for most japanese other people, and foreigners in particular, seem to have a douglas adams-esque "somebody else's problem field" cloaking them from view. in hong kong, however, people would notice us looking confused or lost, walk up to us and actually try to help, particularly if they saw us wrestling with our gigantic, folding free tourist map - less discrete than a huge flashing neon arrow above our heads with "clueless" written all over it.

this one evening we're battling with the map in kowloon when this woman - maybe in her mid to late 20s - comes up to us and asks where we're looking for. turns out we're looking for this market - do you know where it is? to cut a long story short she ends up acting as our tour guide for the next 45 minutes or so, bargaining on our behalf with several of the salespeople in cantonese. this was the second night in a row we'd been led round hong kong by a friendly lady; the previous evening we'd been led round the central area of hong kong by anna from singapore, albeit in a really roundabout fashion. all we'd done was ask her a question about bus fares. i was starting to wonder what made us so special.

made in hong kong, chapter one

2007-01-17T09:57:00.000+09:00

there was me, matt and keiko waiting at ishinomaki train station for the coach to toyko. it was late. sure, so far only a few minutes late but matt and myself, well, we were stressing. i'd both been wired that way since i woke up. super keiko ran across the road to see if the coach was hiding round the corner. it wasn't. and so another minute passes.

it was after 9pm on december 25th 2006: the least christmassy christmas in history. keiko finds it really funny that matt, her boyfriend, is so anxious. i'm feeling exactly the same but, gladly, don't show up on her radar. for some reason we have no map of where we should be waiting - this is the right place, right?

just then the coach arrives, a whole six minutes later than we'd expected. matt and i are the only ones to get on. we have this eight hour journey ahead of us and there's no toilet onboard. thankfully, the driver says we'll stop at the odd service station. we wave goodbye to keiko and away we go. final destination: hong kong.

* * * * *

i could feel the warmth in the air the moment i got off the plane at hong kong international airport, despite being penned up in one of those raised tunnel-bridge exits. somehow everything had gone smoothly up till now. yet our mission was far from accomplished - all we had managed so far was to trap ourselves in a country where there were no supervisors, relatives nor friends to save us; for the first time in a long time we were on our own. there was still a lot that could go wrong.

it didn't take us too long to get our passports stamped, retrieve our luggage and start plotting our escape route from the airport. we would get the "airport express" train to hong kong island, costing a surprisingly-expensive HK$100 each (1).

the airport express, like the airport itself, was very new, clean and efficient, and matt and i quickly found ourselves at hong kong station. we needed to change train systems to the MTR (2), which is the local equivalent of the london underground. this time the fare would be HK$4 - much more in line with what i'd expected. but matt needed change. nearby was a 7-11 so we decided to check it out. matt got his change, while i salivated over a number of snacks available in the uk but not in japan. tempted, i took my wallet out of my pocket ... only to resist. right now i wasn't hungry and i had enough coins in my pocket to get by. it could wait. we went and got our tickets and went through the turnstiles towards the train.

suddenly: disaster! i can't find my wallet anywhere. be calm. most of your money's in your moneybelt. your passport's in your bag. but all my cards are in my wallet! all my yen! and, my god, the key to my suitcase!! this can't be happening ...

so i start pulling everything out of my pockets and out my backpack, leaving debris strewn over the station floor. i ask matt if he can guard the wreckage and run off back towards a turnstile. it won't accept my ticket back through so i jump over. i check beside the MTR ticket machine. i quickly look in at the 7-11. i find a help desk - with a long que. whilst waiting in line i spy matt looking confused, eating something or other, and realise just how big a mess i've left him stranded with. since this que is going nowhere fast so i try and get a hold of myself, go buy another HK$4 ticket and head back to tidy everything away.

once done i head back over to the help desk, this time without having to leave the ticketed area. just as i get there i see a guy wearing a 7-11 uniform walking over to the desk. something's in his hand - can it be? yes! it's my wallet. apparently, without involving my brain in proceedings, i blurt out "watashi no wallet desu!" and point at it like a man possessed. the woman at the desk looks confused: what language is this crazy white guy speaking anyway?

i have just enough sense to get my passport out of my backpack and show it to her to prove the wallet's mine. appologetically i say "i'm sorry, i've only been in japan for one hour", not realising the mistake until matt pointed it out later. luckily the woman doesn't seem to be listening to any of my gibberish. she hands me my passport and wallet and i can't believe how lucky i've been. nothing's missing.

i walk away, part of me in shock: that "hour" in japan must have really messed with my head! feeling fraught, exhausted but ultimately relieved, matt and i head towards the appropriate MTR line. next stop: wan chai.

* * * * *

we had to pay the hotel bill up front. the alternative was to only pay a deposit, which confusingly was considerably more than the total cost of the room. matt paid on his visa, i paid using cash. i felt like i was taking a big hit, wiping out more than half of the funds i'd exchanged in tokyo. since the majority of my capital is in my (provincial) japanese bank account, inaccessible internationally, i started to worry about how long i could hold out in a place where my money was disappearing so fast.

we had a double room booked, and it was perfectly adequate - clean, tidy and just about the right size for two people. mission complete. time to get some kip.

(1) there's HK$15 to the pound, HK$7 to the US dollar - or thereabouts.
(2) Mass Transit Railway.

rattlepated

2007-01-10T15:19:00.000+09:00

so i looked up "scatty" on an online dictionary and it threw up that title. there's your word of the day, week and year sorted out right there.

and for some reason there's a hoard of students somewhere nearby howling. maybe they're rattlepated too.

they've stopped.

as i glide my fingers over the keys of this not-my laptop, the words "it's been a while" drift through my mind like a lonely wandering cloud. as for the "my" laptop - tried and found guilty of being inoperable - it has been exiled to an unknown location in japan for repair; presumably right now its at some sort of corretional facility. all that went wrong was that the "l" key became stuck. not actually stuck, you understand, but the "my" laptop just became obsessed with the idea and just wouldn't give it up. i have to admit, in all my experience with computer's i'd never been through such "L".

luckily for me it decided to malfunction just before i went to hong kong, so i had just enough time to throw it at some poor unsuspecting gent, wearing something that looked like a delivery person's uniform, before getting on the plane (if think you luck could somehow be involved). it's been gone three weeks as of today.

on the way to the airport, via eight hour bus journey, we stopped at a service station style place very briefly. inside was the mother of all coin-operated monsters: the microwave dinner vending machine! choose whatever, it'll drop it into this microwave and away you go - i recommend you don't come back. in japan, land of the never-surprising vending machine (i've been on boats and up mountains that've had them), i'd never seen anything like it.

loosely on the subject of food sales, at supermarkets here they don't have conveyor belts. the check-out operator lifts things from one basket into another - they don't really use trolleys you see, except little ones to ferry the baskets around - scanning in the items in the process. but this technology gap doesn't mean they're worse. for me christmas time brought about the innovation of the double-staffed check-out, utilising two tills - the first adding the totals and the second dealing with transactions; a system repleat with the RAM to store a few customer's shopping totals. there's something about seeing all the check-outs in a supermarket double staffed on overtime overdrive that brings a tear to the eye: straight-forward, efficient, amazing.

aside from dreaming of ever more wonderful check-out configurations, my thoughts these days are consumed with something i'd really wanna know: should i stay or should i go? the question of recontracting must be solved before february 2nd. my school wants to know earlier, actually, since the issue of whether or not it'll be the base school for an ALT next year seems to hinge on whether i want to stay - or at least that's the way they're making it seem. it's a toughie, no doubt about that.

one last thing: my thanks to those who post comments on this thing. they make the difference between me feeling like i'm talking to myself or feeling like i have something like sanity.

happy new year!

santa flaws

2006-12-22T11:58:00.000+09:00

well that was weird. i was just flexing my fingers, getting ready to hammer in a blog entry about something completely different, when one of the teachers here at sekisyo came up to me and asked me for a favour. would i write a letter for him? sure. turns out there was a catch: the letter would be from santa. well, they say identity fraud's in vogue, right?

here's the deal: this guy - one of the friendliest teachers, the one who asks me over for dinner with his family sometimes - has ordered his kids a nintendo wii for christmas. the problem is that it's not in stock. so will i write a letter from santa explaining that there's going to be a delay? so begins a tricky little task, at once heart-wrenching and brain-taxing. it wouldn't have been so bad if i didn't know the kids in question.

anyway, the japanese english teacher who translated it to him for me said it was a "heart-warming story" and that i deserved a standing ovation. i then had to dust off my cursive writing skills and scribe the thing out on a (questionably festive) yellow sort of card. i just kept thinking about the kids' disappointment on christmas day.

for me, there's no chance santa will be paying me a visit on the twenty-fifth. instead i've got an appointment with plumber. at 10:00am. what can i say? merry christmas!

sendai outings: SOS

2006-12-20T15:06:00.000+09:00

so yeah, my last post was on haircuts. says it all really. winter's here and, for the meanwhile, excitement's on ice. for at least a month now it's been a real battle to get up in the morning and confront my all-too chilled-out bachelor pad. and then there's the darkness, creeping up on my throughout the day and ready to strike the instant i leave work. it's winter, japan, but just as you know it.

people keep asking me what the weather's like here. well, in general it's nowhere near as gloomy as i remember the english version. actually, back when i was learning beginner's japanese at university my teacher, a pretty native japanese in her mid-twenties, said that the british winter was so depressingly grey all the time. in terms of temperature, though, it's been pretty similar here to the good 'ol northeast. and the weather itself? it's snowed a little a couple of times, though never in a significant manner; there was sleet once; rain still appears on occassion; it's usually not so bad. and it's only been icy once - not that it stopped me falling off my bike to celebrate the occassion (1).

the past couple of weekend's i've headed down to sendai, capital of miyagi prefecture. since there's only two million people in miyagi, with sendai housing about half that number, making it - on average - the place to be. two fridays ago i went down there to attend a hastily (dis)organised goukon (2). with a three-to-one guy-to-girl ratio it didn't go quite as planned - but it was put on informally and spontaneously by a mate and it was still a pretty fun, cheap night out. still, the last train was at 10:50pm: that's not cool.

but anyway, last saturday i headed to sendai again, the reason this time being an "international party" and whatever may follow. again what looked good on paper didn't work out in practice: although the snack food dotted around the room was certainly party-grade, the surroundings made the whole thing seem more "office party" than anything else. but it wasn't even a party. imagine maybe sixty japanese and nine foreigners - the foreigners allocated on a one-to-six ratio to random groups of japanese - being forced to do the kind of activities i'd make my students do to practice their english (if i could actually make them). it felt all too much like being at work and not getting paid, while at the same time being a student and forced to speak or be silent on command. making matters worse, the cutest japanese girl there couldn't speak any english!

whatever may follow, somewhat surprising, turned out to be that my mobile phone battery would die. my options died with it. faced with either milling around by myself for an hour before getting that same bloody train as the week before i opted to join matt, keiko and her japanese friends for an uninspringly titled "stew party". after about ten minutes in the car we arrived at one of their apartments. from the offset let's just say this wasn't a party either - it was sitting on the floor, periodically eating japanese stew and rice. turned out i had a good time though; it was a good experience just hanging out with japanese people about my age and being out-numbered for a change. irrevelantly, but interestingly, the japanese dub of the last samurai was on in the background. plus since keiko gave matt and me a ride back to ishinomaki i got to circumvent the last train, arriving home round about 2.45am.

what's next? well, this weekend will complete the sendai trilogy with a basketball match. i'll try and take some photos or something...

(1) readers of matt's blog may note that he fell over that day too. as it happened we both hit the tarmac on opposite sides of the train station with only a three minute lag time. thankfully, though, my clothes remained intact.
(2) this is like a group blind date, the purpose being to try and meet persons of the opposite sex outside of your usual social circle. the unwritten rule, apparently, is that there's an equal number - maybe three or four - of guys and girls.

a right 3 and 8

2006-12-13T10:53:00.000+09:00

since i've came to japan i've had four haircuts. and i've only been here for like four and a half months. once upon a time i went for two years without a single one. sometimes i wonder what went wrong.

my first japanese haircut was a scary experience. i mean, nobody wants to go at the best of times, fearful of how long it might take to recover; a haircut is often an exercise in damage limitation. ususally, to play the part of the customer well, you just need to communicate what you want to the barber, sit still, and pray. but i couldn't speak japanese. making matters worse, i've never been religious.

for everything to go wrong seemed inevitable. that day i had a little stubble; getting a shave with your haircut is a pretty standard thing here, so i thought why not? this daredevil attitude led to my imprisonment in the chair for about an hour. at one point the barber started putting foam around my eyebrows, which freaked me out. at the time i had this hot towel over my mouth so all i could do was try to shout a muffled "no!" in japanese. my pleas went unheard. before i knew it it was too late.

i soon realised, though, that the haircut wasn't as bad as it could have been. sure, hair right in the middle of my fringe was longer than the rest - i could deal with that. sure, my face felt kinda sore from the shave - but at least it was a close shave, right? and my eyebrows looked pretty sharp. not so bad, i thought. not so bad.

i was in denial.

trying to draw some sort of moral from the story, maybe the problem was that i wasn't a religious man. but think of monks. no, the real moral was "find another barbershop, heathen fool". good ol' kocho-sensei recommended me this place - cheap at quite literally half the price - and that's where i've been the past few times. there's a pun to do with the name of the place and the japanese words for "3" and "8" that means that, on days of the month featuring those numbers as the second digit, but excluding weekends and holidays, there's a random 300 yen discount. it's something i don't understand completely. but, more importantly, they understand me enough - thank god. sometimes i don't even need to pray.

culture shock

2006-12-06T10:32:00.000+09:00

before coming to japan i received something called a "general handbook," which was supposed to be my bible with regards to surviving in japan. needless to say, since i actually got here it's been pretty useless. still, it is of note in that it contained the first graph showing what's widely called "culture shock" that i'd seen. back then it was something of a revelation.

by now i've seen that graph more times than i care to remember. at any given opportunity, in lieu of actual advice on how to actually deal with the problems associated with it, that graph is wheeled out. so now it's etched in my mind. basically it's pretty simple, a cycle of peaks and troughs never ending. to be honest, though, it's actually pretty accurate in itself. the term "culture shock," however, is a little over the top. the other day i heard it described as "cultural fatigue" - i think that's more appropriate.

but sometimes the way things work here drives me crazy. there's vending machines everywhere, for example, but bins are hard to find - and if you do find one it'll probably be the wrong sort; i've seen people carrying empty PET bottles around with them for hours. then people keep telling me about how japanese people live in harmony with the planet, failing to notice altogether the incredible amount of disposable wooden chopsticks thrown out every single day - coming as standard with bento and ready-to-eat salads - and their immense air-conditioning/heating demands (depending on the time of the year). summer or winter it's common for people to leave their cars running whilst they head into the local convenience store, motorists presumably hoping to keep their vehicles at just the right temperature. oh, and insulation in houses DOES NOT EXIST HERE. which brings us onto japanese (in)efficiency.

japanese efficiency is something i don't understand. it seems quite often to mean bureaucracy. like, it's customary here for everyone to have a say, despite the cultural predisposition to avoid breaking harmony by actually having individual opinions. this translates into simple memo's on avoiding drink-driving having to be signed off by six people before i can take one look at it and throw it straight in the bin. and paperwork takes a long time to get through the system. and every time i go on a "business trip" i have to hand in a special form, this somehow extending to every one of my contracted visits to onagawa; this kinda thing means there's a lot of paperwork.

being efficient seems to mean looking like you're efficient. as long as you get to work on time, look busy, and don't leave as soon as you officially can, then you're a hardworker. QED. who cares if you have nothing to do today? sincere people will come over and seriously ask you why you work so hard, looking worried about you. but when the school holidays come along things slacken a little. you can actually leave school premises at lunchtime, for example, and have an hour instead of the usual 35 minutes to yourself. yet you're still expected to go in every day, no matter how impossibly little work you have to do. so you see teachers asleep at their desks and you're thinking: what's so efficient about this? some teachers get to school early, work late, work weekends, work holidays, but never get any packback for it - everyone's given only 20 days per year to have off, feast or famine, and as salaried workers no overtime pay exists. on the other hand, one of my friends is a part-time teacher and subsequently only gets paid per the lesson; because this is japan she comes in all day anyway.

there's a lot here i don't understand - or don't agree with - at the end of the day. the rate of suicide amongst japanese school students is increasing, for instance, especially in relation to bullying. but then the principal of a school commits suicide because of an oversight in a - wait for it - bullying incident. i say to my supervisor that he's setting a bad example and, even though my supervisor is genuienely concerned about suicide amongst students, he just says that, basically, suicide is the traditional japanese thing to do when you screw up big style. to me, his attitude was mind-boggling. and then this other teacher didn't want to play hangman with his class because, according to him, it reminds japanese people of death. the japanese, he says, are not like people from britain - we british killed our king; we're comfortable with death; we're like the french! then, a few lessons later, he wants me to play hangman. no comment!

great teacher mr. david

2006-12-04T15:25:00.000+09:00

the kids here get examined four times a year, which is pretty hardcore. but whenever they're at panic stations, stressing about their impending doom, i get to kick back and relax. no classes, no nothing. in theory this gives me time to draw up some lesson plans, learn on some japanese, get some rest. and sometimes these things do happen, i'm proud to say. sometimes.

being the educational free spirit i am i declared that henceforth we'd be studying christmas, quite aware that inside my cranium is all sorts of junk that i've accumulated over the years - of course, accumulating junk seems to be what christmas is all about; i in fact seem to know more about christmas than about anything else. looking back, it probably has something to do with learning about it year in, year out, at primary school every time november raised its white flag of surrender - perhaps in an attempt to stop the bleakness of winter invading my young conciousness. so i'm an expert. and so are you. probably. i don't really know who you are. but leave a comment, make yourself at home. go on. i'll be your friend (1).

before i knew what was happening i had two lessons worth of material staring me in the face. and then all of a sudden, several days later, i was teaching it. "good morning everyone" i clichéd. "good morning umehara-sensei and mr david" came the half-hearted reply (2). class took a little while to start; some girls were interested in how i'd ended up with this huge scab on my right arm near the elbow, another girl told me i had to get rid of my (ten day) beard ... but then things got under way (3). soon i was trying to make them say "merry christmas" in german! and then, whilst they were off-guard, i followed that up with making them say the word "bauble" repeatedly, with some students actually laughing and smiling. it's amazing how you can forget how funny some english words really are. then, to absorb the last ten or so minutes of the lesson, i had them storyboard this basic version of the nativity story that i'd taught them. i can't believe mary rode a donkey! but anyway, one student in particular excelled at this task, adding a shock twist to the tried-and-tested nativity play of yore:

that's definitely jesus, btw. when i showed this to umehara-sensei he just said "already?" and walked off laughing

(1) limited time offer. no purchase necessary: remember, friendship is a priceless commodity. cash value of offer: 0.000001p.
(2) if you didn't know my official name's david. but that's mr. david to you, apparently.
(3) the weekend before last matt, keiko, annie and myself had went exploring a nearby hill/small mountain and discovered an adventure park. the hightlight was astro-turf sledging - i.e. getting in a sled and careering down a pretty lengthy bank of astro-turf. wearing no sleeves i totalled my sled near the bottom of the bank, the resulting friction burning off some skin. the wound looks a lot worse than it felt.

the engrish files #2

2006-12-03T00:37:00.000+09:00

this is a bib that i found at a 100 yen store in yamoto. it seems to be written in stereotypical italian-american. and right now it's pinned to my apartment wall.

this so totally reminds me of "it's a me, mario"

the engrish files #1

2006-11-28T12:29:00.000+09:00

this is easily one of the best uses of engrish i've found so far in japan. it's a little plain paper schedule book. hashmatt spotted it in a department store in ishinomaki.

looks like the (big) cat's out of the bag ...

U-S-Anthropology

2006-11-24T09:45:00.000+09:00

far left: americans don't think that's swearing...

november 23rd marks thanksgiving in america, a national holiday celebrating the first settlers sitting down to eat with the natives they would ultimately usurp. once upon a time the japanese decided that this date would make a fitting holiday too, subsequently calling it "labor/thankgiving day" and thereby half-heartedly blurring two separate US events into one ambigious amalgam. since the culmulative effect of all this was that i had thursday off, personally i think they made the right decision; my only complaint is that while the US has a four-day weekend i instead find myself at work today.

it's kind of fun to be able to skip those traditional days from back home that have became increasingly tedious over the years. there was something about letting guy fawkes slip by without those legally-available projectiles called fireworks threatening to finally be a hit this year (i.e. thanks to teenage hitmen); there was something about halloween without little masked strangers knocking on your door in demand of a kid's ransom; there's something about being able to sidestep the overdose of commerciality that a vengeful santa brings every year, angry that no-one took him seriously after he signed up for those coca-cola adverts - even though he was bullied into it by rudolph, who needed the money to fuel his drug addiction. it's even more fun to be able to join in cultural days here, be them japanese or - as in this case - american in nature. so yesterday i decided to do the thanksgiving thing.

today thanksgiving still seems to be about eating with family and friends, though in this case friends you hopefully won't one day extinguish. the local JETs separated into two parties on this one, the first heading up to ogatsu and megan's place (1) and the second, smaller sect went south to andrea's place in yamoto. andrea distributed the preparatory tasks by way of damage limitation, assigning the cooking of the $80 imported turkey to the girls (herself, annie and sarah) alongside other complicated creations such as the stuffing, cakes, "deviled eggs" and oatmeal chocolate crunchies (think chocolate rice krispie cakes with a different core ingredient), whilst the guys were left with the salad, mashed pototoes and the salsa; i baggsied the salsa option (2). my chosen cuisine was a little more expensive and difficult to put together than i would have liked. the ingredients, once i was able to find them, came to about $10: 2 x onions, 2 x tomatoes, 1 x tin of chopped tomatoes, 2 x avocado, 1 x lemon, 4 x mild green chilies, and some seasoning (3). after that came the actual engineering of the salsa, which without the aid of a food processor involved a lot of chopping, and peeling, and time. finally came the eating of the salsa; the results were pleasing, eaten with tasty corn chips made from blue corn.

everything went pretty smoothly all in all, mainly thanks to the hard work of andrea and sarah, who were so tired and somehow full before the food was served that they hardly ate much with the rest of us (3). and the food was good! and this apparently is what thanksgiving is all about. sure, some people were eating with chopsticks. sure, we weren't all americans (keiko was also around; she and i added a little culture to proceedings, apparently). but we were all thankful and ate a plentiful feast of new world origin.

the general feeling of festiveness, to the uninitiated, was something like that of christmas day. people were cooking whilst others chilled out or played games or merely waited for the food, andrea's apartment was really really hot (thanks to 1200W of pure oil radiator supernova) and spirits were high. and there was turkey, of course - but not just real-life edible turkey, oh no! we made hand turkeys: a traditional (children's) thanksgiving activity. it's kinda fun actually. you just draw round your hand and play around with it so it looks something like a turkey, then just colour it in. there you have it: a hand turkey! everyone made it, and every one was different - it was like a metaphor for the american dream or something. it was only when everyone was finished in this enterprise that we gobble gobble-d up the food.

hand turkeys!

(1) i'd bet my bottom dollar little sara will blog whatever goings on occured in ogatsu sometime soon.
(2) thinking i would be merely buying a ready-made salsa an angry annie would call me up in what almost amounted to a defence of masculine culinary ability, declaring that if i "copped out" i almost certainly would be giving thanks for my life on november 23rd for as long as i was allowed to keep it.
(3) if you like your fruit and vegetables expensive you'd like japan. want to find an apple that costs a pound? three carrots for two dollars? four hundred yen for nine small strawberries? come see me sometime.
(4) smoothly all in all, except for problems with ovens. real ovens don't exist in japan really, so the weapon of choice was the microwaves with oven-simulating mode. the turkey had to be cooked in various sections, and since only annie and hashmatt have such wonderful devices, and because of the variety of things that needed to be cooked, a backlog soon emerged and things were ready a little later than was ideal.

dancing in the streets

2006-11-22T21:44:00.000+09:00

glo-sticks at the ready

when you're dependent on a bicycle and living in a "city" like ishinomaki you pretty quickly learn the various back alleys that'll get you around that little bit faster; over time the way from my apartment to the train station on mondays and wednesdays has evolved into the sort of route it's impossible to describe to anyone. anyway, tonight i was cycling back at around 7:30 pm (i visit my japanese tutor's house after work every wednesday) past ishinomaki grand hotel - where that infamous sekisyo alumni party was held - and before i knew it i was riding into a sort of mini-festival. a temple that had always been closed before had now opened its doors, the street was lined on one side with japanese paper lanterns and stalls selling food, and coming towards me was a little musical procession. men wearing navy blue robes were spinning poles trimmed around the top with lengthy strips of what might have been paper, reminiscent perhaps of a certain flower or a hula skirt, as they danced, followed by other folk playing instruments including traditional drums and panpipes. in front of these people were a few more guys holding up whatever that big canopy thing in the picture above might be and a couple of traffic police wielding their distinctive illuminated pink batons. there was a crowd of sorts watching the performance (though they seemed more stimulated when they noticed a gaijin had invaded their little scene than by the entertainment).

armed with only my mobile phone capturing what was going on wasn't easy: two megapixels or not it was a pretty poorly lit night time. after watching the little parade for a while - taking increasingly blurred stills no matter how still i tried to be - i went towards the temple. more food stalls outside, a queue of people waiting to ring its bell, a religious ceremony of sorts going on inside. i have no idea what was so special about tonight, but there was a good atmosphere about the place that made just being there kinda fun.

you can just about make out those spinney poles

temple of gloom

in other news i'm going to hong kong for christmas/new year. gonna spend about a week there; finally got the plane tickets and hotel booked on sunday. it'll be a shame to miss spending that time with people back home but while i'm on this side of the world i want to do as much adventuring as i can. plus a lot of people speak english there. i can't wait.

twenty-two years cold

2006-11-13T09:16:00.000+09:00

tag-team time crisis

ok, i admit it. i'm cold. monday morning, twenty past nine, and i'm cold. somehow i've wound up at my base school with the prospect of no lessons and a pretty chilly staff room. i heard that budgetary reasons make it unlikely anything resembling a heating will make itself felt for a good few weeks yet; the temperature right now is about ten degrees. thankfully something called a Parcel From Home has just appeared, bearing tidings such as two jumpers and a pair of gloves, possibly thanks to UN humanitarian assistance but at the same time definitely from my parents.　どうも　ありがとう！(1)

oh, by the way, i got older. two elevens (i.e. november 11th) finally made twenty-two. for the first time in a long time my birthday fell on a saturday, and for the first time in a while here it was a rainy day. sleeping in a little was followed by lazying around of the highest order. eventually, though, in the afternoon - despite the unwanted attentions of the flirtatious rain - it was time to step outside, ride my bike to the train station and jump on the train to hypertwin central (yamoto). about half an hour after getting there annie arrived with a homemade cake made from what only can be described as happy, tasty greatness - even when served at room temperature such a thing can only make you feel warm inside - and i got to blow out four tea candles to the tune of "happy birthday to you".

so things started off well. but from what happened next i still bear the scars: a trip to the arcade (2). for the first time ever i played some dance dance revolution - which is a difficult, tiring sort of fun - a little mario kart coin-op, some time crisis 4 and - clearly not for the first time - air hockey. it was only 100 yen, or roughly 50p, for a shot at any of these things, meaning the entertainment was continous and plentiful. squashing into various (i.e. two) cars we then headed off to a cosy little restaurant of an indeterminate style where i had "taco rice" - essentially the contents of what might be in a taco, sans taco, served on a bed of rice. good stuff. and, because someone let it slip it was my birthday, i got brought some really good banana cake to the tune of "happy birthday to you".

things were still going well. next destination: kareoke! at the sum of our powers this kareoke would feature akira akira (3), andrea, annie, brian, hashmatt, katie, keiko and friend, matt, sara and sarah; only five of us would survive the four hour distance. with alcohol on a bring-you-own basis the price per person for this much singing was merely 700 yen and (losing) your voice. the best bit was dispensing with the microphones for an eight-way, semi-drunken rendition of "bohemian rhapsody" - an obvious choice but a guaranteed hit - which i hadn't heard in any form since, well, last time i was at kareoke over a month ago. also of note, a sort of soft toy war erupted at one point (4), instigated by keiko-san (5) , akira-san covered the first theme from fullmetal alchemist (japanese lyrics) and i made a misguided attempt to accompany him, and brian and me tried, with a surprising amount of success, to duet "idioteque" sometime after midnight. one thing i didn't sing was the tune of "happy birthday to you" but i would hear it once again - the third and final time that day (6).

conciously missing the last train home meant crashing at katie's and being woken by kittens. katie and akira have two, a white one with blue eyes (i.e. the "gaijin" kitty) and an all-black one (7). since they slept through the entirety of the eleventh of november seemingly all night they played, fought and ran around the apartment. one time i was awoken by the white kitten running over my head on its way to the other side of the room, for the hundreth time, for no apparent reason. still, playing with them in the morning was loads of fun: they're impossibly cute. the rest of the day i tried to sort out my own apartment, and finally managed to acquire a guitar: a secondhand, budget yamaha acoustic with a little bit of superficial wear and tear. for like 12,000 yen it seemed like a good buy. disappointingly, however, as yet i've not been able to get it in tune - mainly due to lack of appropriate equipment (i.e. no tuner) and the coldness of my apartment i think. so whether it was a good buy or not is a work in progress.

i just got back from a chat with kocho-sensei, who complimented my tie. i asked him to guess how much it cost - he started off seriously with an estimate of 10,000 yen. turns out it cost 300 yen, but don't tell anyone. much to my surprise it turns out it's 100% silk (i couldn't read the japanese characters). anyway, good buy!

(1) for those unable to read japanese text for obvious reasons: 'domoo arigatoo', meaning approximately 'thanks very much'.
(2) the taiko (traditional japanese drumming) game is so addictive i ended up with a friction burn on my right hand from using the thick wooden drum sticks. nearly all the tunes you can play along to are nearly all modern j-pop/j-rock beasts; drumming along to the mario brothers theme, therefore, was the highlight.
(3) i.e. like "shakira shakira", "hips don't lie"; always the crowd pleaser.
(4) soft toys have become our mascots. owl-chan was the pioneer, staring at numerous events since halloween, where she featured as part of my costume. brian has since unveiled "jim" - aka penguin-chan - and for my birthday i was given a toy walrus who for now will remain nameless.
(5) on friday night a little funny lost in translation moment happened with miss keiko. we were talking about what we were going to do on saturday and someone mentioned me wearing my "birthday suit". i tried to explain the concept to keiko, saying it meant wearing the clothes we were born in and thereby nothing at all. her earnest reply was "oh, i want to see!", much to the bewilderment of her boyfriend matt and perhaps everyone in the known universe.
(6) the warner record label owns the copyright to this song, subsequently makes about $2 million per year in royalties.
(7) "gaijin" = "foreigner".

cabin fervour

2006-11-09T10:23:00.000+09:00

fun intended

for some reason i've been getting into british bands recently. like when i was in england japanese bands seemed really interesting and everything, but now i'm actually in japan i hardly listen to them any more. instead i've been unearthing things i used to listen to, digging away at the internet to find unlikely things including oasis. actually, the song 'half the world away' managed to permeate my life for about a week; the lyrics just seemed so apt. don't worry, i got over it.

this time last week i was guest starring in the school marathon, which for guys is usually 22 km but for me - with my role basically to keep kocho-sensei company - i only had to do the girl's distance of 17 km. 17 km is still about ten miles like; walking with kocho-sensei meant that it took about three-and-a-half hours, and i was fairly knackered by the end of it. i ended up finishing in 26th place out of about 80, which isn't so bad considering i was walking alongside someone in their late 50s. what was impressive was that there was this guy who was about eighty who actually ran in the man's race; he got a trophy for his participation - deservedly. the students who finished in the top five of each race also - deservedly - got trophies. and then, so did i! for walking the girls race and finishing 26th! thankfully i missed the awards ceremony - that would have been way too embarrassing - but i still had to stand before the teachers and give a little acceptance speech in japanese. what i said was quick and to the point(less). in english i'd have to put the whole thing down to kocho-sensei's mysterious powers. i mean, usually teacher's can't even join in the race! still, it was fun: a wonderfully sunny day with a pretty scenic view and a nice lengthy walk sure beats working any day of the week, especially when you're getting paid for it =)

somewhat predictably, after thursday came friday; somewhat randomly, it was a national holiday (although that's nothing compared to the upcoming one on thursday november 23rd). and so began a tale of two days, three cars and ten gaijin. like always plans came together at the last minute, sitting at the tastiest meat restaurant around (each table has two basins of coals, replete with grill, and you cook your chosen meats of evil whenever you feel like it) the night before, organising via mobile phones a hastily arranged fieldtrip. we decided to go to naruko - a place famous for hotsprings and autumnal awes - and stay overnight in a cabin. some of the views we saw were amazing, and on the saturday i went to an onsen for the first time (1). despite getting stuck in traffic frequently - everyone knows this particular weekend was the time to go to naruko - the time i spent in the car (the kanan ALT mobile) was pretty cool with really great soundtrack. and there was a damn good dam on the saturday. instead of more details, here's some photos:-

naruko's most famous vista in its autumn decadence

live fish put on sticks to cook over coals

i'm the blue dot somewhere near the middle...

atop the dam (i love this photo!)

boiled eggs just like momma used to make - in the stream

(1) onsen = naturally heated public bath where your only, at best, a small flannel away from total nakedness. usually single sex in format.

marry an idiot ...

2006-10-28T18:44:00.000+09:00

sarah (on the phone) - "what do you mean you don't like my country? you were going to marry an idiot to become a US citizen!"

me (not on the phone) - "hey, that should be your country's slogan: marry an idiot, be an american!"

right now i'm sitting in US territory - andrea's apartment - writing on a US apple powerbook. last night, though, was that halloween party. i got to meet peoples from such exotic places as scotland, wales and even england. i could just about understand their baffling accents, misguided dialects and idiosyncratic cultural references. of course, no such beast as the english northerner was lurking in the shadows, but it was still cool. we (andrea, annie, sarah and me) got to the place pretty late - about 10 p.m. or suchlike; some people were really wasted by this point (actually, having not been around drunk people for a while, and not being drunk myself, some of them were a little scary). with a background of amazing starry skies, the party was in some cabins in a fairly remote town somewhere to the west of ishinomaki. just about everyone was dressed up too, with some of the costumes being not only impressive but homemade - hats off to akira for his effort, which in fact won the prize for best costume of the night. i was dressed as harry potter, by popular demand (i was outvoted!). still, an easy costume that required no effort from me whatsoever - i borrowed everything from andrea, annie and sarah variously - and i actually got a little kudos from wearing it, not embarrassment like i'd expected.

having been once again careful on the drinking front i awoke this morning with no discernible hangover. escaping from the wreckage of the night before by about 10 a.m. on a beautifully sunday day, a quick exploratory drive led us to the foot of a mountain promising a temple at its summit. despite thirst, hunger and tiredness the only proper course of action seemed to be to conquer it - though andrea and annie neglected their duties as soon as we were far enough up for someone to have irritatingly installed a sign saying "starto" - and for some reason a boundless energy emerged within me and i was running up hundreds of soil and wood stairs before anyone could stop me, sarah eventually in tow. according to the regularly spaced and increasingly likeable signposts, by the time we had got to the top we were at 726 metres or so. the temple was a disappointing little shack but, from that height, the view was amazing. it was really cool to be above the clouds and look out across white blanket skies. still wearing yesterday's clothes it was a strange pursuit yet definitely well worth it.

events slowly led to me being in yamato, a nearby sub-town of ishinomaki, which is where andrea's apartment lies. hashmatt has now appeared, saving me from being the only guy (after car journeys full of love songs and disney songs, and being told off for various incidental and inconsequential things, it was really good to have him around). there's rumours of pizza and an indian movie - so i might not get home till after midnight tonight. i'm so happy it's sunday tomorrow!

level up

2006-10-27T11:11:00.000+09:00

an altogether different sort of turkey

it's friday morning, 11 a.m. ishinomaki standard time. i just got back from teaching my first ever class alone. thankfully it was my favourite class - the one with the most ability and the fewest students - and it went really well. definitely a big confidence booster. because my experience points have rising recently (thanks to an increasingly busy teaching timetable) this came at the right time, too. level up! (1)

i guess the best fun i've had this week came on wednesday. instead of my usual onagawa jaunt i was able to go bowling with the sixty third-grade students; i ended up, however, bowling only against my secondary (i.e. onagawa-based) supervisor, umehara-sensei, and this other teacher i who's friendly but with english barely better than my japanese. umehara-sensei started off strong, bowling a strike and a couple of spares with this 12lb ball. abandoning the 10lb ball of the fortnight before, i started off with an 11lb hello kitty ball - to moderate success.

but i was feeling quite competitive. i felt like proving myself in some way to people who probably see me as a (literally) speechless fool. soon i adopted a 12lb ball too, and that's when things started to go well. the scores would remain tight throughout the first game; i was really happy to not only win against two real male adults (real male adults make tough foes) but also get my highest score ever: 130. expecting my arm to tire in the second game, i thought my fun was over. but for some reason my luck continued.

last time i went bowling a friend taught me a few things:-
- just throw it straight
- keep aiming between the first and the third pin
- her bowling average used to be 160-170

it was the last thing that surprised me. having previously only reached the heady heights of 120 or so (on a good day) i didn't think 160-170 was remotely possible. i put it down to her being the daughter of a professional bowling coach and thus being a class above mere mortals like me. but then a miracle happened: a turkey! my first ever. so in the second game i somehow i ended up 167, finishing with the highest total score out of both students and teachers. level up!

looking back, this week has been even more isolated than the one before. it's had a totally different vibe about it, though, and i've actually not minded my separateness anywhere near as much. i guess i owe this to the anime i've been procuring - flcl, elfen lied and fruits basket - and how entertaining they are, but probably even more to phone calls back home. in essence, however, not much worth reporting has happened during my own time. at least, that is, since last saturday.

saturday began with yet another of these cultural festival things. it was at annie's school in the small town where i've recently taken up weekly japanese lessons, kanomata. things started off normal enough, with everyone surprised they were not only awake on a saturday morning but on time for the train too. but then, well ... i blame balloons. when matt, this japanese girl called keiko and me got little bored, we started playing with one, with a student or two joining in occasionally. it was a quite a little balloon, though, and soon we'd left it behind. but then we found a bigger balloon. and a bigger one. and then one that was absolutely huge! at each point we became even more childlike, running around laughing and throwing the balloons around. me, aged 21; matt, aged 23; keiko, age 29. like children. we only really realised how embarrassing we must have been to annie once we'd left, thinking about the various unimpressed expressions on the faces of the confused japanese people at the school. but i mean, that final balloon; man! it was like between sixty and seventy centimetres in length and proportioned exactly like a good ballon should be. level up? uh...

then the evening happened. my kocho-sensei somehow rigged it that i would have to go to the sekisyo's annual alumni meeting at Ishinomaki Grand Hotel. free entry instead of the 25 quid entry fee, free wallet/key chain combo to every guest, free buffet. maybe over 500 people were there. at one point i had to very briefly introduce myself to them, on stage with a microphone. scary! the teacher sitting to my left won one of the raffle prices - maybe worth 15 quid - which isn't bad; later i would ask this same teacher if he wanted a drink of water (he was driving), only to return with a glass of something that looked exactly like water (including ice) but turned out to be shochu (2) - i remember vividly his expression once he'd had a sip! since we keep getting told that there's a 0% alcohol tolerance limit for drinking and driving i felt pretty bad (3). i was so relieved when he told me that, in reality, you can have maybe a beer or a glass of shochu or something and still pass a breathalyser test. relief!

when the party was over kocho-sensei took me downstairs, to where the dignitaries of the event (former principals, alumni association heads, current important staff), would continue to drink and eat. people were asking for my business card, which in fact doesn't exist, so they kept handing me napkins to write my name down for them. thankfully i've recently learned katakana - the character set for writing down foreign words - so i could oblige. i have no idea why i was there. this one guy started asking if i had a japanese girlfriend and, hearing my answer was in the negative, told me it should be my priority, with learning japanese a distant second. actually, he said i should stay in japan for three years - so that the girls at the school (this year is the first with girls) have time to graduate so that i can date them. eventually i happily escaped from these people with kocho-sensei - since they were his seniors even he had to be polite and bow all the time to them - but we would humerously keep bumping into them around the town as we made our way to subsequent bars. next stop was a suishi restaurant for the ten teachers who used to be students at the school, with me the special guest; by this time i was totally stuffed, but the food was really good and they kept on pushing more in my direction. in the end, just kocho-sensei and me, wound up at his favourite bar.

kocho-sensei's favourite bar is a quite small place run by two women, one of whom grew up on a small island near to the small island kocho-sensei is from; he says they have a strong bond because of this and says she's like a mother to him. the other is maybe in her forties. anyway, kocho-sensei is pretty skilled at flattering them. he told me to give the latter my wallet/key chain gift from the alumni party and put a five yen coin in for good luck; it was a fairly cheap wallet but she was really happy; kocho-sensei promised me another sometime in the near future - as the principal he "can do anything". at this place out drinks ended up being free. in fact, i was getting poured beer i didn't even ask for. we also ended up with some fruit, chocolate and various other edible booty. all in all an interesting experience and pretty fun night - for free. and i managed finally to control my drinking despite the all-you-can-overdose nature of most of the places i was at. level up!

tonight i have a halloween party to go to with JETs from all over the prefecture. it'll be good to see my friends again but at least i've proved to myself i can manage on my own. level up =)

(1) a role play game term describing when a character's strengths have been raised to the next level.
(2) a clear, still alcoholic drink which to me tastes like a strong version of sake but to others like paint thinner.
(3) passengers in the car, and even people you were out drinking with, can be arrested for a drink driving offence. responsible drinking here is everyone's responsibility.

cold turkey

2006-10-20T09:44:00.000+09:00

one of the cool statues of kinkasan, in hypertwin surround

over the past few days my perspective on being in japan has changed. i always seem to oscillate between wanting to stay for two years and wanting to go home, feeling pretty sure at any given moment about which one is the right decision. at the moment i'm on the downward side of that see-saw. it's not that the dream becomes a nightmare, it's just that the dream periodically reveals itself as just that - a dream. and so i wake up to cold realities (1).

i just got back from a lesson with what passes as being my favourite class, 3OC1 (grade three, Oral Communication 1). they're the best students i teach in terms of ability, and the smallest class too - only twelve students instead of, for instance, the forty students of each first grade class (2). when saying "good morning" to the students today one responded with "morning shot" - the name of a popular canned coffee in japan; henceforth, with the help of the blackboard and the friendly JTE (3), i revelled in explaining what is a pretty intelligent pun to the class (4). work over the past days for the most part has been a slog though; tuesday, wednesday and thursday were all really busy and exhausting one way or another. as my kocho-sensei would say, "thank god it's friday".

this week has been tough for other reasons too. an action-packed weekend comprising of adventuring on friday, saturday and sunday gave way to isolated weekdays reminiscent of my first weeks here. as i guess you can tell from reading this, most of the fun i have here i have with my friends - without contact with other native english speakers life can feel pretty lonely. at such times i'm extremely jealous of annie and matt, who live not only next door to each other but three minutes from the train station; their apartment is the first port of call for any of whom stray into our fair city. thus after the highs of spending the whole weekend with my friends came the cold turkey of solitude. living in a country where any communication with 99.9% of the population is extremely difficult and limited, if not impossible, what the japanese call the "alone life" wears thin very quickly. still, i'm determined to fixing things so that my alone time is not just a lonely time; i guess i've let things slip for too long.

and, of course, with my mates there's fun and games to be had. so what's been going on? on friday i had a business trip to sendai, which in effect was an excuse to see people i hadn't seen for weeks for a pretty relaxed teaching seminar. following that we wandered around the city for a bit, had some really good food at a restaurant catering in an okinawan style (5), met a couple of fun new people and got the train home.

if friday was good fun, saturday was killer. starting off with the (disappointing) sekisyo school festival - the highlights being introducing to annie and matt to kocho-sensei (he was in a jokey mood) and playing table tennis in the dark with the appropriate glowing equipment - matt and me then went walking/hiking up this mountain within ishinomaki, which was really cool (i might end up going there regularly, actually, for walks). after that we went for a meal with some friends before hitting the bowling alley; maybe there were nine of us by that point. putting my first ball in the gutter and having not bowled for seven years or so, somehow i got a few spares and strikes and had a good time (my first game score was a fairly respectable 114), probably because i was bowling with a hello kitty ball! then i wound up hanging out at annie's apartment with this guy from sendai called harrison, and finally reached home at half past midnight. an unbelievably tiring but great day, all in all. and, for a change, relatively inexpensive.

hashmatt and his deer friends

sunday, however, wasn't cheap. we went to the island of kinkasan from onagawa harbour, where we saw some pretty neat sculptures and temples, deer and even some monkeys! hashmatt was almost beaten up by the deer actually, which was really funny. having been chased around by like six or seven deer earlier, bag of deer feed in hand, he found some of their less patient bretheren waiting for him at the habour; at one point i saw a deer lunge at him, standing on its hind legs and aiming kicks at hashmatt's stomach with both front hooves - thank got it didn't connect with him. after all, hashmatt is someone i hold deer.

(1) i must admit, the title of this post a little over the top, but it's still better than using "the heartbreaking fragility of the moment" - the title of a former housemate's band's first EP - so let's breathe a collective sigh of relief, eh?
(2) actually yesterday i taught three classes of 40 students and 3OC1 - making a total of 132 students of thereabouts. subsequently, literally nearly everyone, both students and teachers, were pointing out how tired i looked. but in japan that's sort of a compliment sometimes, supposing that you've earned your fatigue through hard work.
(3) Japanese Teacher of English.
(4) of course it's a play on "warning shot", the best bit being the use of the word "shot" - connoting a shot of coffee (like a shot of whiskey) and also a "shot in the arm" (maybe an injection of adrenaline) at the same time.
(5) i.e. recipes from okinawa, the southernmost prefecture in japan, kinda like taiwanese dishes, or so i am told.

strange things

2006-10-11T22:27:00.000+09:00

strange things are happening to me
strange things
strange things are happening to me
ain't no doubt about it

i've been struggling to know where to start with this entry. the lyrics to 'strange things' from toy story just won't get out of my head, though, so i'll take the hint. i blame the hypertwins and their endless supply of disney-based driving music.

strange things, part one: the inconsequential consequences of monday on tuesday.

1) i borrowed this plastic baseball to use in a game in class. having taken the baseball to school i was notified that afternoon classes would be cancelled. for a baseball match! in fact, a match featuring a rubber baseball - which isn't at all usual.

2) after driving annie "bentobox" sheng crazy by going on and on about gyoza (1) all day at the merest mention of food, my random bento (2) the next day contained gyoza - for the only time ever. which was fun.

strange things, part two: the curse of the number four.

i'm always being told that the number four is unlucky, with its chinese kanji synomous with death. yesterday evening in class i realised that in japanese the word for four, yon, is avoided as often as possible. in fact the number four is missed from apartment numbers altogether, meaning for example that my apartment, 205, is surrounded by room 206 and room 203. 204 is nowhere. so anyway, i was happy at my discovery and pointed it out, several times to several people. maybe that cursed today.

1) for the first time i was comfortably on time for the 7.44 train. yes, there's two fours right there. a few minutes into the journey - seriously maybe about four minutes - the train stopped where road and railtrack overlap. the train lights go off. nobody knows what's happening. over the next hour the train remains still. ambulance, fire engine, police and reporters sporadically arrive at the scene. eventually i can see some men carrying a stretcher with a yellow cloth drapped over it and what seems to be a small body underneath. totally covered. not moving. dead.

about ten minutes into the ordeal, with me still not knowing what's going on (all announcements on the trains are in japanese) this 29-year-old woman came over and asked if i knew "malia". i said yeah - maria's this middle-aged lady who pulled over this one time when i was walking along the road for a chat, a friendly lady with decent english who periodically appears (her real name is something different, but this is the name she told me to use). so i go and sit with this woman for the rest of the journey, trying to patch together conversation. for a while we thought that a kid had been hit by the train. thankfully it looks like we were wrong. but maybe the one good thing that came out of all this is that it looks like i have a new friend.

i've heard that trains were disrupted in the ishinomaki area and that classes were cancelled for some students. my school had exams today though and they went ahead - despite some of my students being on that train. i didn't envy them. the feeling in your stomach when death is in the air isn't pleasant, nevermind when combined with exam stress.

2) i got to school about an hour and ten minutes late. in japan being on time is crucial, but i'd called ahead and everyone knew the score. it's probably a school record - something like three minutes late was probably the benchmark for the past fifty years. but of course i'm glad to have finally reached the place and left the train behind.

after i've been sitting down for a minute or two, with the time maybe around 9.4o a.m., there was this squeal of brakes and this crash outside: a car crash. (btw, the number nine is associated with suffering.) this was shaping up to be some day! when i went out later to buy lunch i saw one of the vehicles. a car had smashed straight into its flank, leaving a bonet-width dent a good few inches deep. broken shards of tail-light were lying on the ground. this time i don't think anyone was hurt though.

epilogue

the only other real point of interest from today was that i was part of an exam. recently i've been loving the fact that i don't have anything i need to cram into my brain like my life depended on it. i didn't suspect that instead of being tested i would be the test, though, or at least the listening section. strange things are happening to me, ain't no doubt about it.#

(1) gyoza are chinese in origin. they're sort of fried dumplings, maybe containing pork. kinda small but very tasty.
(2) a bento is a japanese style lunchbox. they vary in width and breadth but are usually about an inch and a half tall, made of black plastic with a transparent lid, and contain various luncheon goodies. they're all over the place here. pretty neat, though not the cheapest midday food.

earthquake and typhoon

2006-10-06T21:01:00.000+09:00

go go gaijin rangers!

most japanese are amazed when i tell them england has no earthquakes, no hurricanes (aka typhoons) and no volcanoes. they just can't understand - can't understand how we, as a nation, survive without hot spring resorts (i.e. onsen). saftey in japan often isn't a priority - witness the innumerable cyclists with umbrellas on even in the most slippy, wet and windy conditions - only one hand on a brake - riding the narrowest path alongside the busiest road. at night.

i think it was sunday night when i experienced my first quake - well, it was 1.30 a.m. on monday morning - whilst lying on my futon. it lasted for maybe between ten and fifteen seconds. apparently in some place or other it was around 5 on the richter scale; in ishinomaki it was only something like a 3. it was the duration that was surprising - it lasted long enough to feel like it might never end. it was kind of cool though, in a way. and i lived to blog the tale.

currently i'm experiencing the first negative effects of a typhoon. today it's been ridiculously rainy and unbelievably windy (i actually made it across a decent size bridge without pedalling, propelled by the wind alone, which somehow made me really happy). typhoons are basically their own little weather systems. the last one, which struck the opposite coast, brought sunshine and warmth to ishinomaki. this one brought the trains to a halt tonight. loads of the teachers found it sort of amusing that i had to bike to work on such a day; yoshie-sensei, who annie-sensei and me share between our base schools like the good children we plainly aren't, actually offered me a lift home though. i had to decline: my bicycle is something i'll inevitably need tomorrow to pedal through more liquid transparent sheets hanging from the sky - i couldn't afford to leave it behind. (my bike's at the heart of my existence here. to be honest i don't feel right in ishinomaki without it close by, or if i'm outside of ishinomaki without it waiting at the train station for me to return.)

i haven't blogged for over a week. i've been busy, especially at the weekend. last saturday was the annual cultural festival at my visit school, which was fun if unspectacular. on the monday, which i had off in exchange for going to school on the saturday, i went to sendai. on the day inbetween, aka sunday, i went to the beach.

the hypertwins have very recently got themselves a car, which they're going to share - presumably through some complicated arrangement comprehensible only in terms of string theory - and it's just big enough to cope with six gaijin. (i guess maybe i should introduce my possé? wearing white is hypertwin andrea, then hashmatt, matt, me, annie, and wearing black is the other hypertwin, sarah.) so, like anyone would do freshly in receipt of wheels, we went to the beach, stashing annie in the boot/trunk. this beach was in hashmatt's territory, far from ishinomaki's processing plants. and the sea was just warm enough to wade into. lacking in the swimming trunks department i dispensed with my american "pants" and went round instead in my british "pants" - which was obviously kinda pants. but we had fun in the indistinct sun, even giddily venturing to reveal our true (gaijin ranger) identities to the locals.

but then something happened. an inexplicable session of sexist banter saw the guys cast out of the camp, supposedly sent to go hunting. but when we were just far away enough the girls decided to pack up everything - including our mobile phones, wallets, shoes and trousers (lol) - and run off to the car. soon we saw the danger and went tearing after them across the pebble-stricken beach, only just reaching a point where we could cut off their exit route from the car park. or so we thought. after a few minutes spent wondering what their next move was going to be we started walking to where the car was. or, more accurately, wasn't. what was there instead was a secret escape road.

between us our famous hunter-gather skills lead to the discovery of a single shoe and a mobile phone with no signal. war had been declared. we quickly put together a battle plan - we'd obliviously carry on like we didn't need the girls and even enjoy ourselves while we were at it. stage one: shoe toss. the game of shoe toss, perhaps because it was conducted for no more than three minutes under the right scientific conditions, was actually pretty fun - mainly because we knew the girls we watching (hashmatt had spotted their car from afar). they drove off again after we pretended not to hear their shouts. stage two: building a sandcastle. almost as soon as our heap of sand remotely began to resemble a heap of sandcastle the girls returned, unpacked everything and came to join us once more. against all odds we'd won! however, gloating was reserved until sometime after we'd snatched our trousers from the jaws/trunk of defeat. or more accurately, now =)

retrospective: scrapbook

2006-09-27T21:38:00.001+09:00

they say a picture speaks a thousand words. if that's true you're going to be reading this entry for hours.

sports day at sekisyo

presumably the students designed their own team shirts

a shot of the famous matsushima, officially one of the top three sights in japan

a temple at matsushima. it only opens every thirty years

blue impulse fly in formation at the annual yamoto air show

performing the finishing move: love heart struck through with arrow

at the jozenji street jazz festival - the world's biggest music festival, apparently. (just so you know, that's an artificial waterfall along the backdrop)

one of the students at onagawa made this, borrowing from some american pop art. the slogan, though, was his own

art in hanamaki, near the station. the propellors move in the wind

the last of our sunshine days

2006-09-27T09:17:00.000+09:00

so ok, it didn't rain last wednesday. i admit it. but all of the water that didn't fall that day was stockpiled, readied and hurled with great force towards the ground today instead. thus after our sunshine days comes the rain, back with a revengeance. it's almost too easy to turn 'wednesday' into "wetnessday." what you might not realise is that the japanese kanji symbol for 'wednesday' is the same as their kanji meaning 'water' (1); it's clearly fated to rain this day .

sleeping in on monday meant missing my 7 a.m. train, getting the 7.45 one instead and still making it to school on time - putting my profits at one hour of sleep and my losses at zero. today my decision to miss the early train was a conscious one but, thanks to today's monsoon conditions, my ONE MINUTE margin for error in getting between my destination station and　 my school was compromised (to be honest i almost missed the train altogether). so i was late, right? no! every two months they spend time in the morning checking the students' hair colour and uniforms, and by some amazing coincidence that day was today. in theory i arrived dripping wet and needing to stash my waterproofs somewhere with negative amounts of time to do so; in reality i was somehow fifteen minutes early for the morning meeting with copious amounts of time to do whatever. i was still wet though.

chronicling the weekend is going to take up an indeterminate amount of space and time, sort of like a black hole. friday night began with at this european style restaurant in town, where the food tasted great. then we moved on to karaoke - as ususal this was all-you-can-drink in nature and a lot of fun once i was in the mood. i actually ended up failing to make it home that night; i crashed at annie's with hashmatt instead of crashing my bicycle into a wall on the way home (2). thanks alcohol!

waking up at 8 a.m. the next morning, the sun shining through closed eyelids and making sleep less than probable, was to the detriment of saturday. having said that, minimalist sleep did not deter me going to bed after 2 a.m. the next night. the order of the day was playing - playing basketball, playing frisbee, playing on the ... uh ... jungle gym. actually the latter was maybe the most fun; not only was there this multi-coloured slide that consisted of small rollers but also there was a sort of three-dimensional climbing web - tricky but tremendous. the day wrapped up with watching the film brick - a seriously classy end to the day.

the photo that comes with this entry was taken on the sunday. i thought we were going to yamagata prefecture to go apple picking; we went to IWATE prefecture instead to pick GRAPES, though nobody knew that apples were out of season until we got there. two hours on the train there, two hours back that evening. yet there was something wholesome in the traveling that means i don't regret it. our destination was the town of hanamaki, which i guess translates as "flower city." (my japanese hometown, ishinomaki, loosely translates as "rolling stone city" by the way.) grape-picking doesn't take too long in terms of actually picking grapes - it's eating that takes the time. it was an expensive day for what we achieved, and you can go grape-picking in much closer locales, but i enjoyed the day. and the sun never stopped shining. maybe for this year it was the last of our sunshine days; i'm glad i spend it the way i did.

(1) cit: thomson, david, knowhere to hide in the land of the rising pun (unpublished).
(2) check out the sugoi gajin blog for a more detailed account of the night.

my last day at television university

2006-09-25T15:01:00.000+09:00

just another manic monday. believe it or not but i've actually been working pretty hard today; i've survived three classes worth of self-introduction lessons and, for the first time ever, even marked the students' worksheets:-

Near to Washington is a England called Sunderland ... By the way I am Karen years old. My Sheffield is to play the guitar. The photo below ... was taken on my last day at television University.

this is the work of student aged around 18, supposedly having listened to what i said and filled in the blanks before i'd even said it. this is a bit of a freak occurance though; most kids prefer not to rely on such feeble powers of clairvoyance.

then there was the Q&A. basically i let (1) the kids ask me questions about whatever; they usually resort to using one of the twelve or so example questions i've prepared. this one guy, who's a total anglophile and wears this certain air of smugness like it's going out of fashion, went for something completely different. it was sort of my own fault for saying "ask any question" but it still caught me entirely offguard. in the past i've been asked important philosophical questions like "do you have a big knife?" and "are you spiderman?" but this was new: "what is your weak point?". i mean, wtf!? resisting the urge to say "i just don't look good in a size 10 dress anymore" (2) only meant staring, open-mouthed, into the distance until i could think of something suitably dull.

since i've told the kids about my favourite rock bands three times today, some x japan lyrics spring to mind: "weekend, i still love you; weekend, but i cannot carry on" - which may be a tenuous link, but considering how much i've enjoyed my weekend and how worn-out i've ended up it does seem pretty apt. to be continued...

(1) transl: force
(2) this is a uk dress size. i don't know how to convert this figure into american dress sizes, light years or the dewey decimal system. and i'm not so sure if i want to convert my figure into a shape appropriate for a size 10 dress.

ticking over

2006-09-22T09:43:00.000+09:00

today's the first day i failed to have breakfast - a meal crucial to my very existence. i'm really missing weetabix these days, but i'm happy at least that i found something i like to call "secret bread" in lieu of knowing its actual name, and it sets me up for the day - when i have time to eat that is. ('bread' and 'fibre' in japan are almost always mutually exclusive concepts. but then my supervisor brought me some bread his wife had discovered; supposedly it contained the fibrey goodness of both rice and wheat. lo and behold my prayers had been answered. but the lord was feeling particularly stingy that day; supervisor-sensei had no idea where i could get my hands on more. maybe two weeks later, at a shop i hadn't even seen since my very first night in the city, the secret bread reappeared. now it's the de facto cornerstone of my diet.)

my supervisor's a hero. having heard of my predicament he gave me a sandwich, and since then my condition's changed from critical to stable. (maybe my definition of 'hero' is a little lacking for you, but maybe you have heroes who wouldn't even give you the time of day, never mind their sandwich?) actually his wife's away at the moment and he's been reduced to eating a convenience store (or "7/11") diet for a couple of days. hence the convient sandwich. but anyway, he's a good guy. later he's going to help me set up my gas bill at the bank so that i don't have to wait for someone to collect the money from me at my apartment - a practice which is sort of common in japan. interestingly, you pay other bills at the 7/11. also in cash.

it must be said, supervisor-sensei has some controversial things to say. personally i don't want to say too much, but when drunk he said to me that he sees himself as a 1940s japanese nationalist but believes inter-racial interaction and understanding can help avoid future wars. somehow this translated in class the other day into to him trying to get me to do a nazi salute to help students answer his question "during word war ii who was the dictator of germany?". but apparently that's not offensive in japan. another question was, revealingly, "how do you say sekai heiwa in english?" (i.e. 'world peace'). at the end of the day i like him - he's always up for a laugh, he's kind, he gave me a sandwich ... he's a good guy, like i said.

right now my time's just ticking over. today's the first day of the exam period, which supervisor-sensei says is the most relaxing period for teachers (and of course the most stressful for students). so no classes to teach today, putting my grand total at four classes taught this week. for those busier ALTs who feel aggrieved by this, i'm sorry. but next week it'll be three.

before escaping from the rapidly-gathering crowds baying for my blood, i have two little notes:-
(1) everyone can now post comments
(2) sara covers some of the events of the past weekend way better than me in her blog. look for her entry for september 20th; i was with her and our various allies from when she and meg(hann) got to ishinomaki on the friday evening till when she got back to kohoku on sunday.

something fishy

2006-09-20T11:55:00.000+09:00

a photo of a photo of the sashimi master

at about 11.00 kyoto-sensei (the vice principal) summoned me from my desk to follow him down to the home economics rooms. inside there was a handful of teachers, a class full of students and some sort of sashimi master(chef). (sashimi is like raw sliced fish - sort of sushi without the rice.) i think the events that followed are worth chronicling.

watching a professional slice fish is a really interesting experience. he made his first incision on the bottom of the fish, maybe three inches from the tail, and sliced towards the head. then he pealed off the head, pulling the skin back over and along the top of the fish to remove it. next he took the blade and horizontally sliced through the fish parallel to its bones before turning the fish over and doing the same again. after trimming off any excess skin or fat (there wasn't much to be honest) with some deft bladework his finishing move was to move down the length of the fish, slicing diagonally at regular intervals. sashimi!

the students all got a go; as the resident foreigner the sashimi master gave me a little help when it was time for my attempt. it's not as easy as it looks, but i did end up with something decent. i'm guessing the fish was caught by onagawa-based fishermen. it was kept in ice boxes and was really fresh.

just after i'd finished slicing this woman appeared with a microphone. she was like "japanese is ok, yes?" or, more precisely, "Nihon-go wa daijoubu desu ka?". after failing for a minute or two to string a coherent sentence together - or really understand what the hell was going on - i ran for my supervisor to act as translator. trust me, it's pretty scary being confronted with a microphone when you can't say anything more complicated than "it was fun" or "sashimi is tasty." turned out the mystery lady was from a local radio station. 76.1 FM in the ishinomaki area. tune in about 16:30 on friday for a chance to hear my confusion.

as a postscript, while i was writing this i got whisked away. for the first time ever at this school i got called down to the office to eat lunch with the kocho-sensei (principal). kyoto-sensei briefly appeared to off-load an absolute ton of his noodles onto my already full plate, the whiley fox. this was a problem for me. indeed, right now i feel like i'm going to explode. take note: in japan it's considered extremely rude not to finish whatever's put infront of you. inevitably it's going to cause problems what to do with the remaining food too, which is embarrassing. in the middle of my o'doom noodle the sashimi plate from the home economics class reappeared, this time for the consumption of. and yeah, it was great! the moral of the story is: come to japan, have good food, buy a bigger belt.

the revenge of the daijoubi

2006-09-20T08:52:00.000+09:00

one unusually busy friday and one bank holiday monday (1) later my blog patterning has been disrupted. i'm sitting at my other school in the sleepy town of onagawa, which borders the pacific ocean. at the flick of a switch summer has vanished for another year. now is the autumn of my blog's contents.

i keep myself busy these days. too busy. friday night i went out with loads of ALTs to a korean cook-your-own-meat style barbeque place - which rocked - followed by drinking at a seedy bar called fishbone. meg and sara stayed over, which made it i think three consecutive fridays when i've had guests, before we headed to ogatsu on the saturday. katie and her japanese boyfriend akira (2) came along for the ride. the plan was to go camping but thanks to what was yet another rainy day we just chilled at meg's house instead. we ate loads and the food was great, including some fresh fish akira's dad had hauled that day. so sunday i woke up in ogatsu, headed back to "the ish" to get some essential maintenance done on my life, then went over to yamoto for another good ol' indian film and indian food combo, courtesy of the hypertwins (andrea and sarah). (i enjoyed the film from last time - bunti aur babli - a lot more, it has to be said; mainly i think this was due to crisp filming, vivid colouring and jaw-dropping dance breaks - yes, i did just say that!) on monday solitude turned to socialising by evening. finally, tuesday: really busy day at the office (3) followed by the coaching of the sekisyo speech entrance contestant, japanese class and うどん（udon noodles）with andrea before ウノ (uno, heh) with annie and matt. boy, did that game never end!

right now of course i'm knackered. the infamously unpredicable sleepless night reared its ugly head just at the moment when only six hours sleep was mathematically possible at best. bed at midnight and getting up before six a.m. somehow just isn't as safisfying as it sounds. the saving grace is that it's wednesday, the day god decided should be donated to me feeling tired, getting wet on the way home and doing essentially nothing else. even though the sun is out right now i'm not exactly filled with confidence. there's a hurricane floating around somewhere to the north apparently, making the weather still more unpredictable in these parts. actually the weather of the past two days has been pretty good. friday was pretty warm too. but here's the catch: it rained saturday, sunday and monday. looks like sod's law is universal (4).

(1) not really a "bank holiday" as such, but what else do you call a free monday off? apparently respect for the aged day, but i didn't see anyone taking that seriously.
(2) this guy has legendary status. you may remember my story about getting stuck in a random train station after getting the train from sendai? it's mainly thanks to bumping into him when i was leaving a restaurant that i actually got to sendai train station in the first place. it was really weird. i'd met him in ishinomaki at an ALT gathering and then, just when i was faced with getting hopelessly lost at night in sendai for a second time he was just there. heading nearby to where i needed to go. bizzare, ne?
(3) turns out the american version of the office is way better than the uk version. don't get me wrong, i like my british uncomfortable-comedy (uncomedy?) as much as the next guy (i'm alan partridge, peepshow) but i've never been able to find the office funny. i guess the difference is like the difference between your own dad being embarrassing and a close friend's dad being embarrassing, with the uk office being the former. the uk version maybe hits closer to home but it's too much - you can't take it. the us version, on the other hand, is something you can sort of enjoy despite whatever empathy you may feel for your mate. maybe this analogy is something you can understand? oh, btw - sorry dad!
(4) transl: murphy's law.

no americans were harmed in the making of this blog

2006-09-13T08:49:00.000+09:00

monday was of course september 11. never before have i been in the company of americans on that date. and never before have i been in japan on that date. it's an interesting experience.

americans seem to be a nationalistic-patriotic beast. perhaps this isn't a revelation to anyone, especially them. andrea says maybe i should be prouder of british history and being british. but that just doesn't fit. i remember when i studied history and came across the definition of a 'nation' as an "imagined community;" when you're living on an island though you don't need to believe you are something, like british, you just are. there aren't any canadians or mexicans sitting on the other side of a border making me think "well what makes me different to them?". we keep our otherness in house.

most of the britons i know (britons!? brits..?) aren't particularly nationalistic. where i stand in politics and philosophy seems to guarantee that i'm not going to be changing soon, even if i'm surrounded by "the other" on a constant basis. i found myself even able to try peanut butter and jelly - aka strawberry jam - without feeling like too much of a sell-out. (really, who am i kidding? they'll never let me back through passport control...)

you're probably wondering where i'm going with this. but you know already: september 11. i was at andrea's with hashmatt, who we bumped into at yamoto train station, making it a classic gaijin gathering of three ALTs. andrea is from kansas, hashmatt from the "DC area" - you know, the other washington. of course, we ended up straying into political conversational territory on occassion. but we actually were having a laugh most of the time. oh, watch out for 99% chocolate! that stuff is deadly. you bite into it and for the first few seconds you're ok. but you're not ok, you're just deluded. suddendly you feel this bitter thick tar in your mouth. your jaw locks. your mouth stops working. all you can do is start laughing - if you're with the right sort of people - with your mouth stuck open, perhaps until tears stream down your face. but it's still there. 99% bitter tar. all i had was a piece about the third of the size of an ordinary square of dairy milk. had i had any more i doubt i would be here to write this today.

so. having a laugh, with americans, on september 11. the provocation mainly came from japanese tv. all day long there was no mention at all of the date; it just didn't seem to register. we're in japan though so maybe that's not a big surprise. but the tv? there were "docu-dramas" about the people trapped in the twin towers trying to escape. this person "mr blah" - shows real life photograph - was dancing with an over-size pot-plant when all of a sudden he was trapped. then it would cut to the actor playing mr blah, speaking in japanese obviously (i mean, this is true-to-life stuff), trapped with his beloved plant. next it would cut to a random japanese person who happened to be standing somewhere or other in new york at the time and interview them for about five minutes or so. then it would show - for maybe for the 20th time but from a whole new angle - footage of one of the planes actually hitting one of the towers. worse still: they had a special advert for their "docu-drama" where the camera just looks out over a sunset-illuminated new york, slowly pans round, and you just see a pretty realistic-looking plane. careering into the office window. right infront of you. the glass smashes. there's smoke everywhere. but then it's on to more adverts. there was more, but let's just say i think retaining a shread of sanity required humour. all you could do was laugh really.

endurance training

2006-09-11T09:18:00.000+09:00

i've heard from back home (from someone who will remain nameless for their own safety) that my puns might be being missed. well, in case your worried, i have been honing my skills wherever and whenever the opportunity arises. actually, this is probably going to lead to a souring of relations between britain and america in the near future, so gordon brown take note. anyway, this blog's going to contain at least the RDA of puns, so fear not. oh, and by the way it was phil watson =)

so. a weekend has come and gone. the title of the blog was inspired by my recent train experiences. first on saturday night got stranded alone at some unheard of station in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night - thankfully only for forty minutes but only through luck. today i was up at my usual monday/wednesday time (5.30-ish) to get to the station in time for a 7.00 train that never came. another tired forty-five minutes wasted. before i came to japan they told me the train system was fantastic and that trains are almost never late. i guess the fact that they can leave you stranded without warning or just not come at all was in the small print. in japanese.

so. a weekend had come and gone? let's start with friday night, which i spent waiting for a ALT mate to get to my apartment so i could get some sleep. he was having his welcome party with the staff at his school. i waited til about 11 pm, which was his scheduled ETA ... finished a murakami short story i started (thanks katt!) ... fell asleep about 12 pm. mobile phone rings an hour later. ALT - aka brian to those who know him - is lost somewhere or other in the city, maybe near my apartment. groggily i stumble out wearing only a hastily-grabbed shirt, my boxers and sandals into the streets of japan to search for him. took a while. it's probably not what i'd be doing at 1 am on a friday night back in the uk! anyway, mission accomplished and more sleep occurs.

so. friday had come and gone. saturday: sendai jazz festival. sendai is the capital of my prefecture, btw. i invited yoshie, this 26-year-old home economics teacher from my school, along, which was fun. i went to kaiten sushi for the first time - a restaurant styled featuring sushi and conveyor-belt antics. i also saw some jazz, although incidental meetings with ALTs was order of the day. some i knew quite well, some i knew a little and some i was just meeting. but ALTs are usually friendly "out of the box" if you know what i mean - no set up required. and we stand out in japan. a gathering of more than two non-asianic people is pretty much guaranteed to involve at least one ALT. maybe even two foreigners together is suspect. must be said that i had a fun day like.

so. saturday had come and gone. sunday: alone time in my city. ishinomaki has everything you need to get by except any form of excitement. there are areas where you can buy your daily necessities, there are places you can go for a walk or ride a bike; yes, we even have a cinema. but it's not really the sort of place that holiday brochures are going to devote themselves to. and then there's that smell. lurking. but then, when you least expect it: fish! this place has some sort of fish processing plant, probably central to the local economy. when i went exploring on sunday i saw it with my own eyes, and upclose obviously the olfactory assault is brutal. but then i found a pier, and on the pier you're safe. there's fishermen, ironically, but no fish smell. the sea was cold and grey that day; nicely reminscent of the north sea. i've always found the vastness of the sea comforting and the sound of the slow wash of the waves relaxing. later i found this great spot to view it from. unfortunately it was a grey, kinda foggy day though. i'll have to go back. it's definitely going in my tourist guide.

today i taught two first year classes at my other school. 40 unruly kids per class. but then, as a bonus, i helped teach a third year class of 10 students. a lot more fun. i mean they're not quite churning out sonets - their english isn't exactly amazing - but there were some good kids who were up for a laugh. now the school day is nearly over. so what next? i'm planning on getting rained on for a bit. and for reasons undefined, i have no coat and no umbrella but my tie has dolphins on it and i feel this could be important. i just don't know why yet. adios!

sekisyo and tell

2006-09-08T12:23:00.000+09:00

i'm sitting in the teachers' room at the moment; nobody's really here. in japan the kids stay in the same classroom for all their lessons and it's the teachers who move around. so we have this teachers' room where all our desks are. i have my own laptop so it's pretty cool.

anyway, i'm at my main school: ishinomaki commercial high school (aka sekisyo). the students here are 15-18 from what i can gather. today by chance i've had only one class to teach instead of the scheduled three, which can't be bad. it went well - today marks my fifth day of teaching in the history of the world and i think i'm learning pretty fast. i had to knock together this lesson plan really quickly for last night - mostly people don't tell me what's going on til the last minute - and for my first real lesson plan it worked really well. good confidence builder. it seems they're going to let me teach pretty much whatever i want here. other than that my chair's really comfortable here for longterm desk-sitting and everyone's friendly enough to leave me to my own devices - hence blogging.

what can i say about sekisyo? quite a lot i guess. my kocho-sensei (principal) here is really friendly and speaks really good english. i'm really lucky. he's always inviting me in for a chat and wanting to eat lunch with me (sometimes these things eat up my time ridiculously and i have to stay late at school, but it is japan so who doesn't?) and he teaches me a little about this and that. it's actually been really handy to eat with someone who actually can tell me what goes where and what is edible. in fact, with kocho-sensei away on a business trip, yesterday i managed to apply a coat of what turned out to be instant-soup paste to my breaded chicken before anyone could stop me.

then there's the vice-principal (kyoto-sensei). today he's also acting principal i guess. whatever, he's totally overworked at all times - once i caught him in the office at 7:30 on a friday night; i've also seen him here at the weekend and that was during school holidays! i sort of got wrong off him yesterday. well, he gives me some "advice" sometimes. like not to walk while drinking because it's rude for japanse people to do so. or not to let my kids fall asleep in lessons. in fact that's what i got wrong for yesterday. basically it was my third day teaching ever and it turned out that the top brass in the whole prefecture - the top three at the miyagi board of education - together with kocho-sensei, kyoto-sensei and the head of teachers - the top three in the school - showed up to watch my lesson for a few minutes. at this point i hadn't asked anyone what to do about the sleepy kids yet (i'd read it was common for students to be comatose in japan), so there was one or two out for the count. to have such almighty people arrive in your class just isn't a feel-good experience, nevermind when you're as green as i am. of course, by the time i was getting told off yesterday i was on day four and it wasn't happening anymore. to be honest though kyoto-sensei's a nice guy too. later that day he corned me to converse in english, starting off by telling me how angry he was! thankfully it wasn't at me. but anyway, this meant i ended up going home way later than any ALT has gone before. (well, not really. i left at six; people i know stay til like eight nearly every day.)

the staff are back so maybe more next time!

retrospective: tokyo

2006-09-06T21:34:00.000+09:00

since i've started writing this one month into my JET experience i've got some catching up to do. i'm going to post the odd retrospective entry into this blog from here on in.

ok, tokyo. i'd always wanted to go to tokyo, and to be honest i'm keen to get back there sometime in the near future. sadly i was only there a couple of days and most of my time was taken up by speeches and seminars. granted, the first day we had off - but ten hours or so of jet lag and zero sleep don't make exploration 100% attractive. i did have to go hunting for food that day though, ending up choosing whatever the red meal ticket was at a ramen bar that a helpful policeman led me and my JET allies to.

over the next couple of days there were times when i managed to escape - usually in the evening - and the humidity just hits you like a brick wall; thank god august in miyagi prefecture was nowhere near as severe. the first night proper involved going up this 45 floor tower-block to catch an amazing view of the tokyo's neon skyline at night, followed by a prefectural drinking party and then all-you-can-drink kareoke. great night! the second night i went to this thing held for british JETs, but that was nothing to write home about in itself. however, the journey there was extremely interesting. with the hotel bell-boy supposedly having told our taxi driver where we were supposed to go, after five minutes the taxi driver - who could speak zero english - asked us where our destination was. luckily we had no map, no address, no japanese and no clue about anything at all. eventually we managed to find the hotel phone number and he called them up to find out what the hell was going on. scary experience. as a healthier alternative our return journey took place on the tokyo subway system.

raining on my parade

2006-09-06T18:49:00.001+09:00

tonight is bitter-sweet, for with the rain comes free wireless internet but also a good old-fashioned soaking. having attempted to wait out the rain at annie's aparment (she's the one from new jersey; she lives right next-door to texan matt) i departed only to get drenched anyway. riding a bike an night through the badly lit streets of ishinomaki, with my glasses desparately in need of some sort of miniture windscreen-wiping device and me taking on water like a sinking ship, isn't the best. but, like i said, rain also brings the gift of internet. to celebrate i'm writing in my water-logged clothes, hoping the magic won't disappear too suddenly.

so what's been going on with me? depression kind of caught up with me last night. but really it was more tiredness i think. for like five consecutive days 99% of my spare time, on top of any work i might have been doing during the day, had been taken up by gruelling socialising. well, not necessarily "grueling," but you get the picture. so it was the first night i had to myself, and all i could think about was how tired i was and how wrong everything was and how much hassle everything was. probably for the best i had no internet last night then, eh? today is a different story. i'm wet, i've had a tiring day, i still have to cook, iron, etc but there is the promise of sleep - i.e. i don't have to get up at 5:30 tomorrow morning. i have enough energy to be satisfied with today - just about - and the potential energy to hope.

it begins

2006-09-04T15:24:00.000+09:00

somehow, as of yesterday, i've now been in japan for one month. i really don't know what's happened. i'm sure i actually know less japanese than when i got on the plane, but i'm getting by. i guess i'm starting to feel sort of settled.

i started teaching on friday. i taught one class from each grade, trying to use exactly the same material.. let's say it was an interesting experience. discipline is really lax for some reason, so when you're trying to teach 40 kids some of them are literally asleep at their desk, talking amongst themselves, and so on - even though there's a bone fide teacher in the room, and also me. today i taught the same grade three times with the same teacher and same lesson plan at my other school and that went sort of well: the teacher actually taught and i actually assisted - rather than me just teaching everything with zero experience or know-how - unusual!

i still don't have the internet in my apartment, and i still haven't got round to even starting proceedings. but i'm going to be at school everyday from here on in for the next while, so maybe this blog thing will finally get moving. i've been slowly acculmulating some photos too, so you never know, i might break out the multimedia.

after a whole month of japan it's hard to know where to start. right - firstly, everything's expensive here. a red apple costs a quid in some places, for example, and a tiny box of cereal costs maybe two quid or something! even technology isn't cheap where i'm living - i'm not exactly at the hub of 21st century globalisation in my hometown ishinomaki, it must be said - but basically things seem to be the same as in the uk but cost more. next.. not so many people speak english. which makes life difficult. ah, and my inability to read or speak makes life a lot less predictable. i'm worse than illiterate here most of the time. i'm reminded of ghost in the shell standalone complex - specifically the logo of someone called "the laughing man" which is framed by the words "i thought what i'd so is pretend i was one of those deaf-mutes." sometimes i feel like pretending i wasn't in fact a deaf mute; it seems amazing that there might be somewhere in this world where i actually understand what's going on. shopping for even the most basic food takes hours of pondering and shaking and running and asking.. all to find you've probably bought the wrong thing anyway. or worse still, you still have no idea if it's right or not so that (a) you keep it just in case, using up precious apartment space AND (b) you have to attempt to find the very same thing tomorrow for hours on end!

despite whatever issues i'm going to post here, it must be said i'm enjoying my time here. it's a vacation from reality in some respects. don't get me wrong, it doesn't seem like a dream. but at the same time it's hard to ever believe i'm really here, or that there's any connection between my existence in japan and my actual life.

i've started hanging out with americans. one's from new jersey, one's from texas, two are from kansas.. and there's more. it's cool because my paper-thin preconceptions are being transformed a-la oragami into more life-like models. btw, americans totally outnumber anyone and everything on the jet programme. after initiating first contact i soon discovered that use of the word "pop" in reference to soft drinks and love of peanut butter exists amongst their people. like our gaijin ("foreigner") cards say, we're all aliens here.