Week 4 & 5: Thanks a lot, Japan

The convenience of a bike has also become something I take for granted everyday when I stay up late the night before and have to ride into work in five minutes rather than twenty. But biking here is far more dangerous than anywhere else I have every ridden a bike, more so than on Madison's crowded campus, around commercial areas of Minneapolis, and surrounded by hundreds of other bikers on the MS150. Cars come around corners without looking, oncoming bikers wait for you to move, and alleys are blind to the street. Suffice to say I have nearly been killed or run over someone enough times that I wonder constantly why no one wears a helmet, not even the people who ride two to a bike.

So of course I have to go on my bike to do everything, even pay the bills. Here is another point of contention that I have with Japan: their strict enforcement of personal security and their occasional absentmindedness. The first occurs every time you sign a document, for a bank withdrawal, for example. In some remote database they keep a copy of your first signature you gave them which forever serves as a template for how all of your signatures should look. If they should decide the two do not match, they send it back. Even in cases where you yourself cannot see the difference between the two, it can still get rejected. On the other hand, should you choose to pay for everything with direct withdrawal, sometimes the guy in charge of paying from your accounts forgets to process your regular bill and next thing you know you’re without power and wondering what you ever did to deserve it.

In the event that you should lose power, feel free to drop an F-bomb or two in the comfort of public space. Seriously, I am starting to worry about my language around the people who will casually say fucking to describe just about anything. My personal favorite story about someone here using fuck was at work when Joanne burned her hand getting boiling water for her tea and screamed Motherfucker. You just assume no one is listening to you cause, chances are, no one is because they can’t understand you anyway. Imagine if I am here for a few years, how would it be if I come home, went to Buca’s, and talked about how fucking good their fucking garlic potatoes are.

Before I actually started teaching, however, there was a messy little process called: The Oral Placement Interviews (OPIs). This is immediately following the written placement tests where all the VFMs had to get into suits and walk around a lecture hall while a tape played conversations. I was rather happy when Paul, a part time teacher in another area read who hales from Ireland, read a short section on James Joyce, but the rest was like watching a learning special on PBS. The written tests give them two grades: one for their listening comprehension and another for their reading. This is what decides what level of freshmen English (FE) they get into. There are occasions where the students either have a bad day of testing, get really lucky in guessing, or the test just plain sucks and they end up in a class that is completely out of their league. There are also students who miss the placement test and are placed at random into any class in the hopes that they will be caught by the interviews.

The interviews themselves take place in the same room as the class itself. I am teaching two sections of FE, Economics and International Relations, both are listed on the same level but I would soon find that there is a world of difference between their skills. A student sits across from me with a camera fixed on his or her position in case I do have to send them off I have record and can justify my decision. Each interview lasts for about five minutes and consists of questions that are very simple but get harder as the students’ level of English shows promise. For my interviews I had to do both sections of FE on the same day, so that’s 42 students that had to be interviewed in five minutes, graded, and moved if necessary by the end of that evening. I have to admit here that after a couple of hours I was beginning to wonder if I would get in trouble for asking over their head questions like, Have you ever been convicted of a felony? What makes you qualified for semen donation? Does Canada suck, or what? and, for the student in the lavender shirt with the white sport coat, You watch a lot of Miami Vice in your free time? Thankfully, I didn’t get too glib.

The Miami Vice look is just one part of a whole fashion trend that seems forever trapped in the 80’s. Much of the style here seems borrowed from the glam rock, punk, and angsty teen look of 20 years ago with some modern technology like cell phones and a sexual edge that would turn the farthest right-wing Christian a cold shade of green. Between classes in the restrooms guys, yes, guys, will spend several minutes making that cowlick they call a hairstyle look perfect and that random patch of blond behind their ears isn’t buried under a drooping spike. The girls on the other hand are comfortable showing as much leg as possible that the occasional ass cheek hanging out is a fortunate accident. There is a girl in my sophomore English class who has to carry a towel around to put on her lap when she sits so her crotch doesn’t show. Not to worry, since almost none of the boys are babe hounds who spend the majority of class trying to pick up their neighbor. You’ll actually have a hard time getting boys and girls to voluntarily get into a group together. How’s that for weird?

A couple of IR students stood out immediately as my favorite for a few reasons. The first was a guy who looks exactly like Alton Brown’s illegitimate Japanese son. This is not just some weird comparison, but the guy wears the same style button-down short sleeve shirts, glasses, and hair as the man on TV. I remember there was an episode of Good Eats where Alton went to Japan to talk about the salt trade, so it might be possible he was here 18 years ago. The second is a girl who cannot weigh more than 90 pounds even though she is almost as tall as I am. When I asked her what her favorite movie was she exclaimed, Saw, it was way better than Saw 2. Wow, and because she is going to Washington for AUAP, what did she think of America? I hate Bush, she said, but I love American food. My next question would have been, will you marry me? But then Mik’s mantra jumped to mind.

For FE I am teaching both classes out of the same book, from the same lesson plan, and using a lot of the same materials. The book has 12 units that are taught over the course of the year, six per semester. The problem is that most of the IR students are so far ahead that each unit four pages of content cannot be stretched out to occupy them for two weeks, let alone a single class, so I have to improvise a lot of my materials. Already I have found that the IR students can handle about twice as much work from the combination of knowledge and drive they possess.

And to everyone I told I was teaching economics and international relations, I'm sorry. I was mistaken. AU offers majors in four categories, economics, international relations, law and business. While my schedule said Econ 11, it actually meant that all of the students in the class were economics majors in a freshman English class. And here I was thinking I would have to teach basic math skills and add a dollar sign. Economics students have to learn English as part of the school’s mission to spread internationalism and because it is becoming a Universal language, but there is a good chance they will never use it. IR students learn it for the same reasons but also because they want a job that deals with foreigners and are soon traveling to America, so they have a practical reason to learn and to care about studying.

A shift occurs midweek for the schedule when the Econ students go to another room and get taught by another professor with a different book. They are still learning English, but in another class. For the econ kids I have found that it is best to ignore the day and pick up right where I left off. For the IR students on the same plan, there is an extra day per week, or Fifth Day, that I have to fill in with an alternate activity. After a slew of suggestions, good ones including one that is being published later this year in a textbook, I decided to steal (yeah, I’m not even going to deny it) pronunciation drills involving L and R sounds alternated with survival English scenarios like going through customs and ordering food in a restaurant. The first pronunciation drill went really well considering all I had them do was sit in a circle and say words like lung and rung for 45 minutes, but even after one day I could hear a different in their speaking.

In addition to the English, I also have a couple of communication (comm.) courses, creative writing and general communications, where I have free reign to teach whatever I want. The writing course looks to be a lot of fun since the students want to be there, even though it is hard to talk about poetry and fiction well in another language, let alone as freshmen. I was a little offended when only 13 people showed up on the first day, one left as soon as I wrote writing on the board, three more left when I said the class met twice a week instead of once, and then only eight have come consistently ever since. They are from different levels of English, but they seem to understand pretty well when we read together. The reading part of the class doesn’t lose them as much as the analysis, but they are getting better. Now I just need to get them to write more.

All of this has got me thinking about a girl I met a little over a year ago that I thought was less intelligent (ok, stupid) for how she talked, but never considered the fact that her job as a nanny made her that way. There are a lot of things you have to adjust in order to work with someone who communications skills are far lower then yours. One skill you have to learn fairly early is how to recognize a look of incomprehension. The students feel somewhat obligated to appear understanding, even if they have no idea what you just said. I can (and have, I assume) go through an entire lesson and not get anything across. Eventually you learn to give up polysyllabic words, jocular expressions, and speaking at a normal clip like your talking to a young child. I now am filled with a great deal of guilt for having been so impatient with her and can only hope that in the future someone will find the patience to speak to me without judgment.

The other comm. class is to get other IR students ready for going overseas. I had about 90 students show up and was advised to only allow 30 in, and this number would pare down to about 25 as the semester goes on. With such a large group from various levels meeting only once a week I feel as though I cannot get anything across. This may become a basic conversation class with a lot of movies and music to fill the gaps. As the days grow nicer I develop the desire to send them out to speak English with whomever they come in contact with just to see what happens. This is the foreigner experience, you might as well get used to it now. But all of the students, despite repeated warnings from my superiors, are very nice. The worst they can do is look bored, and for some that seems to be a more a genetic condition than a state of mind.

The last class I teach is Sophomore English for IR students. Most of these kids have just come back from a semester in America and are ready to learn some more and refine their skills. The class takes on issues of global importance like war, political unrest, famine, and a lot of other stuff they never mention on Sesame Street. The entire class was developed by the curriculum development committee (CDC), so I literally feel like a mouthpiece reading almost verbatim from the instructions, handing out assignments that were written, printed, and collated for me, and giving tests that even I don’t know how to take. Whenever a student asks me a pretty basic question about the class I just stare at them and say, that’s a good question, before consulting the manual. This was just for the first day, in the future I will have to do nearly everything myself, but it was strange to feel like a machine for a day.

The night I first got here Russell asked me if I was pretty good with computers. A bit of a random question since I just met the guy, but later I found out that the head of the computer committee (CAI) had gotten a look at my resume, saw that I was experienced, and passed on the info to his VP, Russell. The CDC and CAI are a couple of about 10 committees that work within the CELE department handling various duties from ordering supplies for the office to publishing the in-house journal. Each VFM has to sign up for at least one. Thankfully Karen and Juniper had little interest in computers (well, Karen did consider it for a moment). It’s early yet, so all I have done is coordinate the sign-up for the language and computer labs for the semester, and all that took was putting a calendar together with the correct days selected and emailing everyone about it.

Overall I feel really confident about the whole thing, but there is a nagging fear that makes me hesitate before I go home for the day after teaching. Having come from a whole life of being a student first and an employee second, I feel constantly worried that I am supposed to be overwhelmed with work and putting in countless hours to prepare lesson plans when I am not. On the weekends people with come in for an entire day to sit at their desk and work, while I feel like I have the next few days ready in a couple of hours. Am I doing something wrong? I hope not. But I’m new at this, so getting into a groove is maybe what I am doing now. We’ll see.

Week 3: Please tell me you speak English

(I asked Karen to look angry, she's really a very nice person)












When I shop for groceries I feel as though I am shopping for pornography. The people never really look me in the eye, say a simple hello when you enter, and ring up your purchases with a mechanic swoop of the arm and a flat reading of the price as if they are saying, I don’t judge you for buying this bread, these eggs. People on the street walk with a quiet purpose toward some respectable goal—work, school— in a uniform that is totally black with a white undershirt. All the women look like flight attendants; the men are either salary men or waiters. When you go by them on the street they bow their head and often say excuse me, or I’m sorry depending on the translation. I feel an obligation to be polite while I am out because of this, say excuse me and nod apologetically when I get in someone’s way. I hope that this will continue for as long as I am here, but I get the feeling that one day this cold detachment will make me a little rude and I will push past people without even meeting eyes. I have been told that people at work often get the impression that this is the most polite city in the world, only to do a complete 180 within a year’s time.

2000 Yen for five minutes

This week I was determined to get a cell phone (keitai). It started when I broke down and finally bought a wireless internet card for my laptop in a store that would put any electronics store in America to shame. This was an eight story building with everything you could possibly run on electricity from washers and dryers to DVDs. Russell was kind enough to take me out there since he was going to look at digital cameras anyway and meet up with a friend of his in the neighborhood later. Lucky me, especially considering I had no idea where to go, what the place was called, or what I was looking for. I guess I was a little overconfident in being able to just walk out of the train station and find the place as we wandered in and out of every exit to the building before hopping through the bus lot and crossing the street. Electronics shopping is a very dangerous hobby.

The store is a beacon of light when we finally got to it. There are white fluorescent bulbs all along two sides of the building, shifting in waves to direct people's attention to the entrance. To look directly at it may have caused retinal damage. Inside took advantage of every inch of space to sell computers, both desktop and notebook, as well as accessories. In another area are digital cameras and further on is the Mac wing. In the back are the stairs with a ten foot high list of everything you can buy there divided by floor, none of which I can read except for the bathroom symbols. I started on the first floor and made my way up to the seventh poking my head on each level along the way, all the while listening to Japanified versions of popular songs like Tainted Love and The Price is Right theme song.

I think I might have wandered around for about an hour before I started actually looking for wireless internet. Since my search was so aimless, I had to work my way down from the top floor casing each area to make sure they weren’t hidden away in an obscure location. Hey, the Japanese may think it perfectly reasonable to have internet cards next to the toasters. I ran into Russell and we went down to the subbasement where all the computer accessories are stored. In one corner was the printer ink section which was designed to look like the refrigerator section of the grocery store. This section held the most comprehensive collection of ink cartridges I have ever seen; there must have been thousands of tiny boxes in neat little uniform lines. I grabbed a wi-fi card and headed for the stairs.

This was a mistake. In large stores here items are tagged and security towers are set up on every floor. When I headed for the stairs the tower and a tiny black box attached to the wi-fi card started beeping. I threw my hands into the air and waited for a clerk to apologize to. When one came he removed the chirping box and left. Not so tight security after all. I paid for the card on that floor and asked the clerk where the keitais were in my simple Japanese. I had to repeat it a few times because it was so broken. Finally he said, On the first floor, in English.

In Japan the personal computer has never become popular, and the technology that Americans most often use their computers for has been installed on their phones. Things like email, messaging, internet access, dictionaries, and now even GPS are now becoming more common. In America the slim design is becoming more popular with phones like the Razor being offered free with a new service. Phones here are not only fatter (most of them are the flip design) but have a small loop attached so people can hang accessories off their phones like tiny figurines. I have seen people with ten or more different little toys dangling from their ear taking up about three times as much space as the phone itself. Depending on which company you go through (NTT, AU, or Vodophone), a newer model could cost you as much as $350 while an older model is only a penny.

I learned all of this from a nice girl who spoke about 100 words of English and politely told me that I needed my passport in order to sign up. She gave me a catalog and her business card for a commissioned sale later. I politely took it, knowing that it was too much of a hassle to take the train out for a half hour just to get a phone when there are places within a block of my apartment. Later that week I was so determined to get a phone that I biked out to Kichijoji with every piece of ID I had and a handful of cash.

Not until I had actually gone looking for a phone did I realized just how many phone stores there are. It’s not only safe to say that there is a shop on every block, there may be as many as two or three on a block, and some of them are right across the street from another store. The best part is that many of these store are predominantly two companies (AU and NTT), and often they are both working out of the same place. Each company representative is easily identified by their bright orange (AU) or blue (NTT) windbreaker. At one point I might have thought that at least one person out of ten would know some English, and it would be fairly easy to stumble across that one person working in a service job. Not so. I visited seven different stores and talked to at least 12 people before I found anyone who could out a sentence together.

To give you an idea of how frustrating this is, let me say this. After the fifth store turned me down, usually a polite young girl who exclaimed, No English, while flattening her palms and making an X in front of her, I got a little frustrated. When I got turned down at the sixth store, I made a feeble attempt to ask where a store would be that would have an English speaker. This consisted of sentences like: Where do I buy a phone? Speak English? Where do you speak English? Where is an English speaking phone? Suffice to say none of these worked. At that point I walked outside to the bustling streets of Kichijoji and nearly yelled out to the passing shoppers, 1000 yen. 1000 yen for anyone who will help me buy a phone. Thinking this may not be the best way to gain assistance, I switched to thinking, 2000 yen for five minutes. All you have to do is tell the clerk what phone I want, 2000 yen. Then I decided the whole idea was stupid.

On the verge of giving up, I walked into the last store on the way to the bike lot and said, please tell me you speak English. A little, the woman said. Thankfully, she spoke a lot more than all the people I had dealt with previously put together, and was able to explain to me what the plans were, how much a phone costs, and what the best phone to get is. She also explained that I needed my Alien card to get the phone and the forms would not be sufficient identification. Great, ninety minutes of searching wasted. But I promised her that I would come back to this store and buy a phone from her since she was the only person capable of helping me. She promised to practice her English and thanked me. Now I feel too guilty to go anywhere else.

If you are curious, a phone will cost me nothing. If I sign up for two years of service, the monthly rate is about $30, but the number of minutes I have per month is 50. Anything over that is about 16 cents per minute. An international call will cost $1.65 per minute. A text message costs a fraction of a yen for every 64 words. At that rate maybe in a year I will pay one dollar for all the texting I’ll do.

Daie-no Hiroba (The get-to-know-you retreat)

Can you imagine what your college experience would be like if your entire freshman class was divided up into each major and sent to a hot spring for a few days? I can’t. Even after I went room to room meeting various international relations students I still had no idea what it would have felt like to go and bond and bathe naked in water that must have been around 190 Fahrenheit. I guess the prospect of having everyone in my future classes knowing what my pasty white ass looks like is not a thought I want cropping up on me when I am doing group activities.

A hot spring is a popular location here in Japan. Due to the fact that there are several natural springs all over, the knock-offs have quite a good business, too. All you have to do to take advantage of a natural spring is to find a steaming pool of clear water and build a hotel on top of it. You have to be careful, however, as some of these springs are hot enough to boil eggs in, and some tourists come equipped to do just that. The retreat I went on was to a fake spring, think of it as a small heated swimming pool complete with a hot tub and sauna in the same area. The Japanese sure aren’t pansies when it comes to heat, and all of these places are just below the boiling point.

The trip started with all the VFMs meeting in the office to coordinate and head to our respective buses. To get everyone there the school rented about 50, but each one held only 30 people at most with a couple of upperclassmen there to make sure the three hour ride was filled with songs and trivia games. These were nice buses too, not like the one you took in high school, these had padded seats and speaker systems, overhead bins, pockets, cup holders, and there was even a stewardess that served our box lunches called bento which consisted of rice and fried meat that tasted like it had been sitting in the front of a bus for four hours.

The hotel looked like any other hotel I have ever been in except for the few touches of Japanese everywhere like hanging cloths and kanji signs. The schedule for the day was pretty tight, so we had about 15 minutes to get our stuff dropped off in our rooms and make our way to another room where 20 students had gathered to get to know us. I brought along some pictures from the internet as well as a photo of my brother (the one of him in the catacombs of Paris holding a skull, but don’t worry, I lied and said he was in a cave holding a rock). To get around I was guided by this really cute upperclassman girl who spoke really good English. The whole time I was reminded of the phrase that Mikio (the assistant director) says just about every other day to all the guys, You can’t date a student. Note his use of “a” as in “don't date a student” and not, “your student.”

I talked for five minutes about where I was from and what I studied in school, then opened the floor up for questions. I had no experience with any student up to this point. No idea what their language level was, how they would treat me as a foreign teacher, let alone one that wasn’t even ten years older than then they are. They started out with easy ones, how old are you, do you like sports, how long have you been in Japan. That last one is the one I would like to say got the biggest reaction, and it did get a big one, but the best was when they started asking, do you have a girlfriend, what’s your type, and, do you like me (from a spunky looking girl in the back). Not to worry, I was very diplomatic in all of my responses, I just met you but you all seem very nice. When I called on one student to ask a question (I had to call on them to say anything), he just said, you have a high nose, which, he later told me, is a compliment.

After the introductions we crashed in the room for a few minutes. Here is where I found out that of the six VFMs in the building, the four guys had to share a room and the two women each got their own. This would not have been so bad had it not been for the fact that all of the rooms were the same size and could have held about six comfortably and eight very cramped. The guys in my room were all nice, though, David, the south African with a heart of gold, Stuart, the Canadian who often takes it upon himself to lead, and Ron (the captain, if you get that reference) a Japanese man from Hawaii who, again, is nothing but nice. With three nice people you can tell how hard it was to decide who was going to take the two beds and who would sleep on the floor. After a few rounds of everyone saying, I don’t care, I was the first to volunteer for a bed.

Dinner at the hotel was the first, I guess, real Japanese meal I had since coming here. We sat on mats, had little tables, and an old woman in a kimono served us tea and lit our lamps to heat the soup. I know Juniper and Karen had to request special dinners so they wouldn’t get meat (though Karen does eat fish), but I was determined to brave the waters and see what they had in mind for us. There was a bowl of miso soup, salad with mayonnaise, Suffice to say, everything was fishy. Even the stuff without fish, the soup, the salad, and even the tea tasted like fish. I managed to eat the salad and the soup, then gave everything else away to the fellow males who divvied everything fishy up over my table.

When dinner was over the six VFMs and 20 other teachers met in the meeting hall to introduce ourselves to the International Relations (IR) freshman class. The room, filled with a couple thousand students grew to be ten degrees hotter which, in combination with the heating system, made the room its own special kind of hell. After twenty minutes of talking the ventilation system started pouring exhaust into the room until it smelled like a bus was parked right behind us. I understood nothing that was said save for our introduction in English, then bowed upon hearing my name.

That night I met up with some of the other VFMs and drank until we could no longer remember what any of the students we talked to looked like. This was nice in that I was able to get to know some of the other teachers a little better in an environment that felt casual. Some of them were still wearing robes from the hot spring. We stayed up until about one playing a game called Dealbreaker where we ask each other what would be something that would make you lose interest in dating someone (smoking, momma’s boy, prison record, etc.). Despite the nature of the game, it never got to be mean or prying, which was a nice thing to discover about everyone.

I got back to the hotel room second, an hour later David and Stu came stumbling in drunk. Not sure if I was in bed yet, they talked for a moment, then turned on the lights to see if I was there. Thanks, guys. From that point on we each took turns keeping each other up by snoring as loud as we could. I woke promptly at four incapable of sleeping due to hangover, noise, and the light pouring through the slight curtains at the window. Thinking there would be no one at the spring, I decided to take a chance and lounge about in the hot water. This was a bad idea. With the drinking and the dry air of the room I was massively dehydrated going in. After only ten minutes of soaking, my head started spinning. I stumbled out of the locker room and drank myself to the point of drowning at the fountain. For the next couple of hours I felt like I could vomit at any moment, but at least I didn’t pass out. Ron caught me sitting outside and said, you’re Japanese now. I assume my expression didn’t give away how awful I felt.

Breakfast was again with a lot of fish, as well as a sweet omelet block and sausages that were coated in solid fat. We had to meet the students once more for a question and answer session about the Asia University America Program (AUAP). We all sat at these tables that circled the same meeting hall as the night before, including the same heat and exhaust smell. This time, however, we were seated by the windows and I quickly got some fresh air moving into the room. Sadly, I must have come across as the monster of the group as no one wanted to talk to me about AUAP. Karen gave me some pointers for how to sit next time so I’m more approachable.

From there it was a long train ride back on little sleep and even less food. For the whole thing I was given about $125, enough to make me go out and buy something stupid when it struck me later. A rep from the KKB office gave me an envelope full of cash while an upperclassman offered me a lunch. I accepted one and turned down the other, you can probably guess which is which. The second the train pulled into the station I was out the doors and heading for the coffee shop outside for a chicken bagel sandwich and a cup of coffee. It must have taken them at least twice as long to make everything than it did for me to eat it. I sat there for a few minutes trying to remember how good the sandwich tasted when I knew I would never really be Japanese.

Week Two: So what's...like?

A couple of notes before I go too far into this week's update (which is actually last week's update and should have been posted two weeks ago, or something):

1. Please do not email me and tell me that I should call you right now. I only have access to the internet at work, for limited periods of time, and usually I leave the headset at home. Mostly, I am not sitting at my desk with my headset on clicking Refresh on my hotmail inbox to see if someone is going to email me to tell me that I can call them now. Assume that, if you send me any email, I will not read it for at least six to eight hours and when I do I will not be able to call you at that moment. If you would like to tell me a good time to call you, that's fine. I'm not upset or anything, but I don't want to give the impression that I am thinking, "Screw this guy, I just tried to call." I did buy some Skype credit, so I can call you on your phone now at 2.5 cents per minute.

2. Since I am new at all of this I am apt to interpret, mishear, and just make shit up for every new discovery. I will try to correct myself as time goes on, but for now understand that my knowledge is severely limited and I rely heavily on input from people who have only been here for a few years and admit that they still struggle to understand.

Living Things

David, an older South African (white) who is so nice I sometimes feel bad for being rotten, told me that the spring is four days of hot and five days of cold. I forget what it means, but I know the weather during the afternoon is warm enough for T-shirts and pants, by late afternoon the temperature has dropped precipitously and you have to have a jacket. I have been stuck out with a group of people on a couple of such occasions and am now amassing quite a collection of borrowed jackets and sweaters, all hanging by my door to be returned. You can never rely on a day to be consistent, as even the warm clear mornings can quickly give way to cold wind and rain.

On a particularly nice day I finally got to go to the city hall office of licensing to sign up for an Alien ID card, which is like a state ID card. You pretty much need it to do anything, rent movies, buy a cell phone, or get a bank account. The whole process was more or less the same as going to the DMV; a lot of sitting and waiting around for about 30 seconds of actual forms and talking with a worker. Apparently there is a lot of bureaucracy here. It takes a little over two weeks from when we signed up for it to be ready for us to pick up (that’s right, they don’t just mail it). Why we had to wait almost a week and a half to sign up for one has never been satisfactorily explained to me.

We filled out all the forms for the bank once we had the card taken care of and opened an account with 100 yen (less than a dollar) and now we have to wait for all that paperwork to go through. The thing about money is that this is a cash society in every sense. There are no credit card machines anywhere, and no checking whatsoever. Petty crime is almost unheard of, so carrying around the equivalent of $500 is normal. One nice thing is that there are machines for withdrawing cash almost everywhere and oftentimes next to them is a machine that balances your account book for you. Imagine if that existed in America, you just opened your checkbook to a blank page in the record section and it printed out all of your transactions and gave you the balance. Nice.

At the end of a long day I was called into a meeting with three other VFMs to talk about getting internet service. In order for us to understand everything that needed to happen, the phone company sent a representative to explain the internet, land phone lines, and cable TV. How she was able to do all of these things is still a mystery to me, and to her, I think. She brought with her the usual grab bag of pamphlets and papers that had all the deals, packages, and plans that could combine the various luxuries into affordable deals, but none of it was in English, thus requiring a couple of workers from the KKB (the office of international relations) to sit in and translate.

A couple of things I have to point out here. The first is this misconception that I (and others, I assume) have about the widespread use of English. English was recently embraced by the Japanese government when they realized that it was becoming the common language for international business relations. As much as they wanted to fight it, they realized that it would be the same as shutting down the ports and letting the rest of the world surpass them. Very few people here speak any English at all (as you will see when I recount what it was like to try (and ultimately fail) to buy a cell phone next week), and those that do can barely hold of conversation, let alone get complex information across like setting up internet in the home.

The second thing is that I have called to set up high speed internet with three different companies, called tech support a few different times, dealt with installation people in person, and worked over-the-phone tech support for DSL and the only thing that I could contribute to the conversation was, "Yes, DSL and cable internet are faster than dial-up." I spent the entire meeting smiling at a very nice looking woman race through several sales pitches designed at getting us to buy the most expensive plan, only to have each summed up in a couple of sentences by the translator. Even then I was pretty much reliant on Russell, who managed to show up about half-way into this hour long discussion, and what his current plan was. "I want whatever you have," is what I said to him, and he politely pointed it out in the booklet for me.

For all of those who are interested in when I can call them at any time, day or night, and just chat for hours on end, here is the deal. To get a land line phone would cost $200 to install and about $40/month to have (no kidding), but overseas calls would not cost that much, and you can receive calls for about as much as you would pay for long distance inside the US. I was supposed to get a sheet on this when I arrived but only received it this week when Stuart overheard Juniper complaining (rightfully so). A Keitai (pronounced kay-tie, a cell phone) cannot be purchased until I have my Alien ID card, which is supposed to be available on the 12th of this month. The problem with keitai is that international calls will cost about 10 to 20 cents more per minute. I signed up for internet, but who knows if that actually went into effect since I need the Alien ID to get a bank account to get the internet. With any luck I will have a keitai on the 15^th or so and the internet on the 23^rd.

Food

For lunch I just had a sandwich that was made up of a dumpling of mashed potato and mayo, breaded and deep fried, served on top of a hotdog type bun with shredded cabbage and more mayo. It was delicious. If you think that's a lot of carbs, I have seen the same thing in grocery stores with spaghetti and tomato sauce. Everywhere you can buy some kind of food item to go you can get sandwiches. They come in a variety of styles, yet the only thing that I can find that resembles an average American sandwich is ham, cheese, and lettuce. Everything else is an experiment from the fried mashed potato, to fried pork, egg and curry sauce, cream cheese and fruit, and potato or egg salad. All of them are served on white bread with no crusts or a sub roll and cost about one or two dollars each depending on where you go. I prefer the cafeteria on the first floor of my work building, Building 8.

When people ask me what I eat here I pause and try to remember. I guess I never put much thought into it before. A friend of Mik's, the head of the department, was in town the other day and came out with the crew to the Hub one night. He's a white guy who now lives in New York whose family moved to Japan when he was younger and he went to an international high school with Mik. He told me about twenty years ago finding anything American to eat was impossible. You ate what everyone else ate and you liked it. Since then with globalization, fast food, mass production, etc, getting a burger, and I mean a serious American burger, has become easy. You just walk on down to the TGI Fridays and order one.

When I say American burger I have to clear something up, beef here is not quite the same as it is in the states. For one thing, it's not all beef. A grocery store meat section will have a small area dedicated to non-seafood where you can by a ground pork/beef patty that has the ratio printed right on the label (6:4 for example). Ordering in most restaurants will yield the same result, a beef patty that tastes a little off. If you don't mind the mixture, then you can get by just fine. For those of you who hunger for pure red meat goodness, you have to search around a bit more.

Pure beef, as in steaks, is also tricky to come across, and when you find it you'll notice a lot of fat marbled in. I cannot say for sure why this is, but I assume it has something to do with high fat meat being cheaper, as it is in the states. I know of Kobe beef where the cows are fed beer and massaged daily to deliver the fattest, juiciest, most tender, most expensive hunk of cow you ever had. I have never actually seen a well stocked beef section, nor have I wandered into a restaurant even by accident and seen Kobe on the menu. Some day I'll break down and order one just to say that I did, but that activity exists on the list with eating deadly puffer fish. The likelihood of either happening is slim.

But aside from strange beef and sandwiches, I have not eaten any true Japanese food yet, not any like you might imagine. There is a restaurant with a traditional layout near the school run by a woman who can only be described as a Japanese Fran Drescher. The only word I could understand was "chicken," and she said it a lot. I was there with a group of people who all ordered lunch, but I left as soon as the food arrived. Since this was only lunch and each meal cast about $8-9, I wasn't hungry enough to get a full meal right then. It was also the kind of place that I would have to come back to with my camera just so you could appreciate just how different it was.

What I have eaten here was a mix of Americanized foods and foreign foods that are not Japanese. I ate Thai noodles at a Japanese version of Denny's that also has things like club sandwiches (again with the sandwiches) and pancakes. There is a Subway on Skip Dori where I managed to get a turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato only after having the girl behind the counter go through all of my topping options six times. Every time I asked for lettuce she would get confused and list them off again. At home I eat rice with whatever I can put of top including vegetables, soy sauce, some other sauce I have yet to identify, and curry sauce that you can buy already prepared. In Kichijoji, the best place for food thus far, there are crepe stands that make the entire block smell delicious, an Italian restaurant with good pizza and pasta (but you get larger servings when a particular chef is working), and the best Indian food I have ever had (but this is part of a chain you can find anywhere). Another good chain is Dotour, a coffee place that has this chicken salad bagel sandwich that I could live off of if the need arises. There is a shop on the way to school that is going to get a lot of my business this year.

Shopping in general is a challenge as everything is in another language and made by companies that I have never heard of and sold in stores that are just plain ostentatious. For general home stuff I go to Don Quixote, which is like a Target Greatland (for those of you who know what that is) crammed into about 1/8th the space. I know I mentioned this before, but you really have to imagine trying to shop with dodging everyone and not knocking over any number of eight or nine displays in a three square foot area. The rice machine I bought there had about eight boxes stacked in an area of one square foot. An old woman was kind enough to hold all of the signs hanging down from the top box while I pulled a machine out from under the display model. She then asked me a few questions, made an eating gesture, and laughed. For all I know she could have been asking if I eat human waste, but I nodded nonetheless. I also found a generic jar of mayonnaise there, which is strange because I was told that people here really like it and yet I cannot find it in anywhere else.

For the official tour of Kichijoji I learned a bit more about the shopping capital of the city. Thankfully the elder VFMs thought it wise to put together a map of the area and decorate it with key locations that we would find interesting. One of my favorites was the foreign food store, which is really just more stuff you can buy elsewhere and a few new things. What was nice is that they had Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, a total comfort food for the future, even if it costs about $2.50 a box. If I wanted extra cheese I can buy a small block for $5 and make do.

The best thing about Kichijoji right now is that is just far enough away to bike to if I ever just want to do some shopping. Denny, Another VFM in her third year (who reminds me a lot of Connie from Eastern) gave me her old bike so I can get around. It is a bit old, has only one speed, and rusted out in parts, but rides really well and will last until I start making money and can shell out for something better. After a twenty minute ride I just park it in a bike lot and pay about 100-200 yen for several hours of parking. There is a machine that you feed money into and locks each bike into place, though don’t expect it to keep the bike safe as all anyone has to do to get it is pay the 100 yen and the latch opens.

Getting Around

Outside of getting used to having a bike, I laid low this week and just got used to being at home for a while. Since I was going out every night, I think I have gotten pretty used to being in a strange place most of the time, not understanding signs and conversations I happen to over is no longer a Kafkaesque nightmare but a minor nuisance. What couple times I did go out I learned that just because you have been to a place and wandered around for three hours doesn’t mean you can assume you have a grasp of the area. Within a few minutes of getting off the Shibuya train I was completely lost, realizing that there are multiple exits from the station each leading to a separate wing of the neighborhood. Finding anything that was familiar took about 45 minutes, and by then I had lost track of what I had gone out there for.

The same happened in Shinjuku where, after months of sporadic emails, I have finally been able to put a face to the name Joy. Joy is the friend of a friend of mine who gave me some advice about Japan when I was first starting to gather information. She showed me around Shinjuku again, giving me more insight into the area and what some of the hotspots are. When I arrived home I was struck with an incredible sense of loneliness that everyone warned me about. Joy was excited to know someone, anyone else that she could talk to and hang out with. People have said they made friends here who are not in the office, Japanese and foreigners, but the way that Joy almost seemed to need me made me scared to think that I might be spending a lot of time alone in the future.

On a more positive note, this week was the start of the Sakura (cherry blossom) bloom and all of the trees are covered in small, pink flowers. I have already put up a few pictures, but people here take it a lot more seriously than we might the autumn leaves changing. Many women will go out in Kimonos, parks will be filled with people who have set up a place the day (or longer) before to have a good spot for picnicking, and everyone has a camera. Public drinking is acceptable here, but eating and walking are strangely looked down upon. Since most of the time I have been in Japan has been accompanied by sakura blossoms, it’s hard to appreciate it as much as everyone else. The city has hung pink lanterns on telephone lines, pink paper flowers decorate store entrances, and there are even special graphics for signs leading into gambling parlors and strip clubs.

I also got the low down on the law and what my rights are here as a foreigner. Not to sound insensitive, but being white here is about the same as being a minority in a white area of some American cities. People tend to assume you are going to cause trouble and if a white person commits a crime in a neighborhood they’ll arrest any white guy they find and drag him to the station. This happened to Michael, a third year from Minnesota, who told me he was surrounded by about four cops so short in stature and build he could have easily beaten all their asses without effort, but that would have been really bad. Everyone here has been questioned at least once, asked for their Alien ID, and a few have been sent to a station. All bikes here are registered, so they can stop you at random and check your registration. If a cop asks to see your ID, you do have the right to ask him for his, but they have the right to arrest you and hold you for 21 days for no reason, so it’s best to just be polite and cooperate whenever a situation arises.

Next week: Cell phones, spas, and really bad Japanese food eaten