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.