Assuming people still check this thing, I figured...

The length of this page is getting a little long and I started another page (http://gai-jin2.blogspot.com/) to cover the continuing adventures of our hero, Mr. Dis. Check it out, there is already something there. Thank you, readers.

Week 7: Golden Week

Playing Doctor

For me, the week started on Monday. Not there was anything boring about Sunday (as you will see), but events from last Friday led me to Monday, and so on. Last week I was confounded by a cold that seemed to get better then worse everyday. On Friday I was out with some of the crew when I got a terrible sinus headache like someone was pressing their thumb into my cheek just below my right eye as hard as they could all day long. Suffice to say I was in a sour mood. We ate dinner at Tucci Bennuch, where I tried to focus on eating so hard that I ignored the entire conversation going on across the table. Something about whether or not the food in the salad bar was vegetarian or not, which seemed like it was a lot more trouble finging out than it was worth. At home I took a handful of pills (11, to be exact), failed to sleep for several hours, and made plans to see the doctor on Monday. I actually tapped into my supply of leftover meds from when I had my wisdom teeth removed thinking that either the pain would go away or I would be so high it would no longer matter.

I really can’t complain about going to the doctor other than to say that I had to wait a lot longer than I felt was necessary and it was all my fault. Based on my conditions, my medical background (my father works in a hospital), and the fact that I have had this affliction before, I already knew and wrote on the visitation form that I had a sinus infection hoping this would speed everything along a bit. Considering it was a walk-in clinic, I assumed that I could come in, get some pills, and go home. However, since this was Golden Week everyone who had so much as the sniffles thought today would be a good day for a visit, and there was only one doctor seeing the people filling every chair and couch in the waiting room. The time stretched on until I realized I had been waiting for almost three hours. Had I gotten there at 9 when the clinic opened I might have waited about 15 minutes.

When the door opened and my name was called, I practically ran inside. The doctor was a bit of an eccentric, evident in his statically charged hair and clothing. He asked me, in Japanese, if I preferred to speak English, Japanese, or French. English, please, I said. He poked me in the face, looked at my throat and said I had sinusitis. I need to stay warm, not eat spicy food, and take antibiotics for the next week, he told me. The total time spent in the doctor’s office, and I mean his actual place of healing, three minutes. After that I met up with a few others in the park and played Frisbee for a while. My cheek didn’t stop hurting for another couple of days.

Harajuku

On Sunday Joanne took me to Harajuku. I had been there before for the Hanabi (cherry blossom festival) work party, but that was entirely in the park and she wanted to show me around the whole area and have dinner at the one good Mexican restaurant that anyone knew about. But the most memorable thing is the first thing you see coming out of the station, and that the is bridge crowded with one third Japanese who decided not to go out of town for the week, on third tourists, and the rest people in their make-up and costume that put American goth and punk kids to shame. You can see all kinds, girls in skirts with zombie faces, Victorian era black ballroom outfits, and the guy who looks like he was standing next to the north tower when it collapsed. I have no idea if that last guy is trying to make some political statement or reference to 9-11, but he is white and present every time I have gone there.

With all of the tourists about I start to feel less and less impressed with the whole idea of “being in Japan.” When I first got the job everyone and their cousins had already done sometime like that last year. So it was partially less thrilling than it could have been, but now that I can go to the store, ride the train, eat in a restaurant and see at least one other white person, usually speaking English, I feel less unique, and realize that this is just another big city in the world. This may also because I am from the big city and having people generally ignore me and crowd me across streets when the light turns green makes me feel as though I have never left. But what really makes dealing with the honkies a hassle is the fact that they don’t even acknowledge you. Here I am giving them a nod as if to say, “Hello, I’m a stranger here, too,” and they are quick to look away lest I ask them for money.

The closer we got to the temple the more foreigners we saw, but the more obvious the reason, too. Everything about the temple was packaged and clean for visitors. Even the monks that walked in full dress behind the roped boarders looked far too clean and proper than real monks should. There were gift shops all over the place selling the same small stitched envelopes with coins inside for luck and incense to burn in memory of lost loved ones. The walls had a fresh coat of paint so everything seemed newer than when it was actually built. But please ignore my criticisms and believe me when I say that it was impressive to see the ornate carvings that went around the entire wall, larger than a couple of football fields and sporting gates that you could get an army through in a matter of minutes. The whole place is encompassed in a forest so thick that it muffles out the sounds and blocks the lights of the nearby city. You actually forget that you are in Tokyo, but maybe I’m just used to traveling outside of town to see a monument this big.

This time in the park I got to see the Rockabilly Club, though people around here call them the dancing Elvises. I might have something to do with the fact that no one here is from an area where a rockabilly may be found, nor would they have come across one through work or school, but they are out there. You can find them with slick hair and an all-leather outfit sporting a perpetual “fuck you” expression on their face. They listen to various kinds of butt rock, a style which I am at a loss to describe as anything other than bad. But they can basically be exemplified by the guy who wasted no time walking over to the bushes along the walking path and peeing into them as soon as we entered. I asked Joanne what she thought about it and she said it happens so often that she no longer cares. So I have more of this to look forward to.

We played cards for a couple hours and watched families toss around Frisbees and kick soccer balls. At key intersections of the trails venders had set up shop and sold drinks and snacks like baked balls of dough wrapped around calamari, skillet fried noodles, and grilled salted bites of chicken on a stick. We got some chicken and watched the Elvises. I should mention here that it is extremely rude to eat and walk around at the same time. Even with the rush attitude that most people have, you should stop to eat. Similarly, it is illegal to walk and smoke at the same time, but this is because such crowded streets result in people getting burned all the time by careless smokers. Getting back to the food, it is, contrary to American venders, really good.

All of these snacks made us hungry for dinner, but on the way to the restaurant I constantly thought about an episode of Iron Chef where the challenger was a Mexican food enthusiast. The show talked about him and how he went to Mexico and started a restaurant here in Tokyo to teach people what real Mexican food is, but I have no idea where to find it. Getting to this restaurant was a bit of a journey, we walked through several blocks of people so tightly packed that it was inadvisable to stop at any of the numerous shops lining the road since there would be no room for you carry additional mass. While most of the shops where clothing, some of them specialized in the kinds of outfits you would wear if you wanted to hang out on a bridge and have your picture taken. I suggested Joanne get some pre-torn fishnet stockings, but she had nothing they would go with.

When we got to the restaurant we were seated right away. The hostess told us that they were completely booked up for a party that was supposed to start in an hour and a half, but for now the place was completely empty. The whole restaurant was underground, and if you were expecting to drive past it and see it, you would easily miss the tiny structure erected over the stairway leading under the street. And if you think the underground location makes the place small, well, it was larger than most restaurants I have been to in the states with two levels and a fireplace in the main dining area. I ordered enchiladas and Joanne got chicken mole as well as an order of chips and guacamole. We drank sangria and got our food in under ten minutes. I swear I have never had to wait for food in Japan like I have in the states. The food was good, about what you would expect for an attempt at making cuisine from across the ocean without importing authentic chefs, and really expensive. My dish alone was 2000¥, and the whole meal was around 7500¥. Yikes. It’s a good place to go if you're seriously Jonesing for Mexican, but not more often than that.

This was the most western day I have had since I got here.

Tachikawa

Karen suggested we break free of sitting around hoping for the weather to improve and head to Tachikawa, the huge shopping district. Try to imagine what the Mall of America would be like if it encompassed an entire district. Buildings here are large, commercial, and crowded such that there are several different ways of walking between them. You can either be on the street or up in the air on walkways that curve and bend back on themselves like cities pictured on the covers of sci-fi novels from the fifties except without the aliens that have the bodies of well-endowed supermodels and the heads of squids. While I would like to say that I hated this part of the city, what with there being a picture on my computer of me scowling in front of the Mall of America and the neighboring Ikea, I found this to be the coolest place I have yet visited.

Not to discount the various temples and historic grounds that I have been to, but there was something dreamlike about the way the entire area was designed to fit not just a bunch of stores, like everywhere else, but a bunch of America-sized stores with multiple levels of shopping heaven. As you know the Japanese are not real big of wide aisles and open lobbies, so every store is so crammed with merchandise that you could spend an afternoon in one store and miss a good portion of what they’re offering. Karen and I walked into one shopping center and found a food court that stretched an entire block filled with pastries, sandwiches, and coffee shops. I swear, wherever you are in this city you are never far from a keitai shop, salon, or Starbucks.

Depending on where you go in Tokyo, the style of building is going to change dramatically. Shinjuku, for example, enjoys less severe shaking than most of the city during an earthquake and can therefore afford to build skyscrapers that can be seen from miles away. In parts more prone to damage, buildings are smaller and are built to sway their narrow bodies in order to survive the shakes. If I had to guess, Tachikawa would also enjoy such a benefit as Shinjuku since a severe quake would send most of the buildings, walkways, and raised train tracks down into the ground. Giant boxes have little swaying power and tend to crumble faster under pressure. As the Nambu Line raced away overhead, well over six stories in the air, I wondered what would happen if a quake hit right then.

When the rain got worse we took cover in the outdoor lobby of a movie theater. Since we really had no concrete plan, we played with the idea of seeing a movie, only to find that it was near impossible to figure out which movies were in English with subtitles and which were dubbed. We finally asked some woman what she knew and after a few minutes of charades, decided that, while we were interested in seeing a movie, we weren’t 1800¥ interested. On average, though, it takes about six months for a popular movie to make the trip through the translation machine and come out on this side of the ocean. The cost is near what it would cost in the states to just buy the DVD, but, new DVDs cost anywhere from $30-$40, so there’s no point in just buying it to see if it’s any good. At the theater, I had my heart set on seeing V for Vendetta since it had come out the day I left for Japan, but though that renting it for around 400¥ was good enough.

We walked around one of the raised walkways toward a large building advertising a clothing store (I think) and a bookstore. The rain was little more than a drizzle, but enough to soak us through had it not been for the plastic awnings decorated with small LEDs that cycled through all six colors of the visible light spectrum to create an LSD feel of a floating rainbow path that looked down on a street where traffic never seemed to move. On my left I noticed a single walkway branch off to a large building with a Dunkin Donuts embedded in the corner right where the path met. I was starting to think this place looked less like some futuristic utopia and more like Heaven.

The bookstore had a pretty good English section with a number of dictionaries, magazines and books. Most of the books you can get here are pretty good, actually, but a lot of them are bestsellers. Thankfully, people in America make a bestseller of a few genuinely good books, so I have some options when I shop, even if they cost twice as much for the paperbacks (about the same for hardcovers). Magazines are the same way, mostly made up of popular news publications, fashion, and porn (there were the same numbers of each). Karen and I looked for a while and split buying a couple of travel guides for Tokyo so that between her, Russell, Joanne, and I we had a total of four to look at or borrow.

We spent the rest of the afternoon into early evening reading our new books and studying some Japanese. I have to admit that seeing Karen go through her new dictionary made me feel rather bad that I had devoted so little time to trying to learn Japanese. While we were sitting in Starbucks at the far end of the giant food court, I looked at some of her notes and tried to learn a little with her. After a few minutes I got up to ask for water. I had to ask Karen what the word for water was before going to the counter. Asking for something is easy, just the thing and "please," but I got completely lost when the clerk asked me if I wanted ice in my cup. I knew that’s what she asked me when she switched to a near perfect English to ask me again. If I actually drank more coffee, I could get by at just about any Starbucks as people who work there tend to speak the language.

Ueno

I laid low for a few days and healed. By Wednesday I was feeling the need to get out again and go where I had never gone before. I ran into Karen and we decided that Ueno was a cool place to check out based on our brand new travel guides. So, to be honest, I had no idea where we were going, but Karen said to bring my book and that it would take about 45 minutes to get to this place that had a big park and some other stuff. Considering I had done little, ok, no planning on what I should see during this week.

The Ueno park was right off the train, just like the on in Harajuku. I could see the crown of people moving along the wide paths in the thick trees. I began to wonder just how many people actually went out of town during this week since so many managed to find their way here to make my visit just a little bit slower. The first place we went to was the local science museum, one of many in the area. Standing not far from a built to scale blue whale mounted alongside the building, we talked about the possibility of going inside and having a look around. This day was beautiful, and there was no reason to pay to go inside for a few hours and look at sculpture when there was so much outside to look at. Through a fence by the street was a giant gate that had been moved here as part of the exhibit. Despite only being a small part of the entire castle, it was a formidable piece, and gave me a good idea how big the whole thing must have been. Another time, perhaps.

Down the path was a carnival set up for the local children, including food stands, local performers that were made up of anyone with a talent and a hat to catch money in, and rides that could be quickly assembled and removed when the season changed. When we got out of the crowd there were a lot of classic buildings, temples, sculptures, and grave sites with signs that explained their historical significance English and Japanese. How thoughtful. Karen and I paid a few dollars to walk through a classic temple that has seen little refurbishing, so its age and original beauty showed despite its cracked paint and rusted fixtures. Inside were two very large carved wooden dragon masks that you could sled a few people down a hill in, and a dark metal gong like disk with an original map of Japan and its prefectures on it. No pictures were not allowed inside, sorry, folks.

Outside was a memorial to the bombing of Hiroshima. When the son of the owners came to find the house gone, there was a small bit of wood still burning in the rubble. He took the flame, built a larger fire, and kept it going as a sign of his anger at the United States. Eventually he realized the problem with carrying a vendetta around and the fire came to symbolize the desire for peace rather than a need to revenge. They keep the fire going to this day as a reminder of the destruction war can do. I have heard a lot of amazing things about the actual cities where the bombs were dropped and the dedications that have been made there. It’s something that people still carry around with them in a lot of ways, still evident in some of their art, movies, and even comic books both in good and bad ways. Other teachers tell of people who come and yell at them for being white and, therefore, American. I haven’t seen this yet, but everyone assures me I will.

Being completely at the will of Karen led me to a large cemetery. Later I found out it was the largest in the country, and you have to understand that, due to low land area and a high population, the graves are packed in so close the coffins practically rub against one another. In the center there was a playground for children to occupy themselves with while the adults spent some time in mourning. What a clever idea, I thought. This is something they should really have in America, but I suppose people will dismiss it as being too morbid, attracting children who live closer to the cemetery playground than the park one. I have to say in my defense that it was Karen’s idea to take picture of me on the swing, though I will admit that I was thinking it. We also joked that next year, during Hanami, we should have the work picnic here in the park.

Somewhere in all of our wandering we got lost a few times. For those of you who intend on visiting I will tell you that you can get around just fine without a map as long as you take note of the surroundings and notice when the stores end and the apartments begin. It will be a pretty sudden change from bright red and yellow signs, LEDs, men with megaphones, and people handing out packets of tissues with the company logo on them to empty streets and drab, gray buildings with blank steel doors with the narrow shatterproof window. But if you do play it safe you are likely to miss the temples and old structures that were literally just left standing and developed around. In Shinjuku, for example, you will be walking down a block of giant commercial buildings and suddenly there is a break in the wall of concrete and glass with a row of trees and an old stone path leading to a temple.

When we were searching through the labyrinthine streets of Ueno that would turn the city planners of St. Paul green, I noticed the cables that ran through the city about one story above the street. They connect every building, every pole, and double back on themselves for fail safes and backups. The cables here are prevalent to the point of being pervasive. Once you notice them they seem like a net ready to fall down and catch a dinosaur. They’re thick and black; little is made to hide them from contrasting with every surface and the sky. And this is exactly how the Japanese live and function, I thought. Once the newest thing comes out they are quick to implement it and make sure that everyone has it. You can hardly buy a CRT TV anywhere as every store carries the HD thin models, phones become cheap and disappear within months of coming on the market, and even cars are cheaper to buy new than to hang on to the old one. When the cabled came out there was no place else to put them, and everyone had to have one. It’s a shame in a way, but something you can become accustomed to very quickly.

The pinnacle of the trip was a small park and temple ground we stumbled into completely by chance. The area was surrounded by a steep slope decorated with lilacs bushes and a winding path through them lined with people. Inside the great archway to the grounds were statues decorated in traditional clothing of some kind. I’m afraid I never saw the plaque for this one, but they appeared to be higher class garments with ornate stitching and color patterns of flowers and exotic birds. Off to the side was an open area where a local group was setting up drums for a show. We must have gotten there early since few people had gathered and we got really good spots to watch. Within fifteen minutes there wasn’t anywhere to stand.

The show was made up of classic drum lines performed by kids aged from four to 18, I assume. At one point the leader jumped in and played a few round with them, out of costume, but with incredible skill. I don’t know much about this form of music, but over the course of the show they demonstrated songs with different drum arrangements, by hitting the body and the skin on the drum to make different sounds, and by the leader, who appeared to be the oldest, shouting commands to the others to keep them in sync or signal a changeover. The best part was when they arranges three drums in a line and had six people running around the peripheral two beating on two drums at a time and turning in circles. I’m surprised they did so well. The exhaustion was evident between songs. With enough people there were a few that could sit out for a while and rest, breathe heavily and sweat into their elaborate costume, tapping a partner out when they needed a break. I surely would have passed out in a few minutes. When the show was over, I was about ready to.

Yokohama

Yokohama was the first coordinated effort by all of the crew (Russell, Karen, Juniper and I) to go out and see a place. Russell had been here before, but was willing to guide us through the cool sections and give us tips on what to see. The best part about Yokohama, he said, is Chinatown. I have been to Chinatown in the SanFran, so this was going to be a treat. This is also the farthest that I have ever traveled from home, taking a one hour train ride and switching a few times to get there. people used to joke with me and say that anywhere in Japan in ten minutes away from anywhere else by train. I am starting to realize that this is not the case, and even a short trip could take a while from frequent stops and only going at top speed for a few minutes at a time. There are a few trains that are “Rapid,” trains that skip over the less popular stops on the way across town, but you have to get a popular place to catch one.

I should also mention that this is the first time that I have seen the ocean here as well. But because of this prime piece of real estate the area is a haven for tourists and locals who want a relaxing day on the border of town. I have seen pictures of Japan with white sandy beaches and grass huts to sip margaritas under like Mexico, but this area had a port design to it more like, well, San Francisco. There is a large amusement park with the second largest Ferris wheel in the world behind the largest in Osaka. Just looking at it made me feel a little dizzy. We walked up to the entrance, each level of the stairway was marked off with a sign that told how long you had left to wait. There couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes worth of people in line, but we decided that we would come back on the way out.

Across the road from the park is a string of hotels lining the coast. Each appear as mountains of glass that branch out to maximize the surface area, every room with its own window and view that stretches for miles. This is especially true of the Landmark Tower, the largest in Japan (and the 33^rd largest in the world). For a measly 1000 yen you can travel to the top and hang out in the sky garden and look across to the other side of the country. Curiously, we decided that it would be better to come back to this on the way out. I was really excited to look out and take some pictures for the old blog here, but conceded that going to the first attraction right out of the station was the thing that everyone did, and hitting it on the way out was better.

One of the big attractions here is the silk museum. A small museum dedicated to the production, use, and history of silk featuring some beautiful tapestries and kimonos dating back several centuries. My favorite section was a series of photographs detailing fashion trends in this country over the decades, including the period immediately following World War II when American fashion became very popular. Near the end the production stage was explained describing the lifecycle of the worm, which brought back a lot of what I learned in my into level entomology class. Probably the most interesting section was where they showed common clothing items next to plastic cases containing the number of cocoons it takes to make each one, a kimono takes over four thousand, for example.

Further down the road we came to Chinatown, the busiest place I have ever seen. The streets were so packed that it was near impossible to walk without running into somebody every step of the way. Each block had a recreation of a temple with ornate decoration and coloring, but was so new that it seemed almost fake amid the bustling city and rain-gray buildings. In a shop Russell bought a stamp with the Chinese character for his name on it that the man carved right there in front of us. He wanted a thousand for it but Russ talked him down to 500.

Russ actually came to Japan after teaching for a while in China. He knows a bit of the language and has several tidbits of information on what the real China is like, such as buying a bun with a piece of pork in the center costs about 300 here, but a quarter could buy you a dozen on the streets of Hong Kong. It was damn tasty, though. In a Chinese restaurant He had a really good time talking to the waiter about our various food problems, no meat or wheat for Juniper, no fish for him or I (he’s allergic, I just don’t like it), and no beef or pork for Karen. When the guy left Russ know that he was pissed at us, but brought us the food in good time anyway. Despite the fact that I wasn’t all that hungry, I must have eaten more than my share when the two girls confessed to being stuffed. Thinking about going to China now? Russ asked me. Yes, I said. Man, Chinese food is delicious.

With all of us tired from walking and full from dinner, we got back on the train a stop down from where we arrived and headed toward home. About three minutes before the exit to the Ferris wheel and tower, Russ asked if I was the only one who still wanted to go up. I could go either way, really, I said. Then everyone chimed in with the same. There is nothing worse than a group of people and no decision maker among them. Ultimately, none of us were married to going up either. Sad, maybe we should have gone up front.

Costco

When I think of Costco I think of America. Don’t get the wrong idea here, I’m not talking about flag waving and all that other crap that people mean when they throw the word “America” around like it was candy at a parade, I mean loud, commercial, big, heavy, and convenient. Well, maybe not entirely convenient. Like every other trip I took this week there was an hour on the train and a bit of walking thrown in for good measure. Russ took Juniper and I along on this crazy shopping venture that occurred in an obscure little area on the outskirts of Tokyo, but had all the earmarks of a good, American suburban shopping sprawl.

For starters there was nothing out there. I mean a lot of open fields and dirt just scattered about with no apparent plan to turn into something foreboding and cheap any time in the near future. There were a few apartment buildings around with plenty of breathing room, as well as a convenience store and a few small shops along the road. We followed the road past the shops, past a store that was several acres and two floors of superstore painted green, and across from the pet store that could supply every animal in the country, wild and domesticated, to a building that was the old, familiar warehouse box, Costco. Cars lined the block to get into the multilevel garage at the side while men reflective vests ushered them through. The people at the door checked Russell’s ID and welcomed us in English. By now I was already starting to forget that this was Japan.

The inside is America Costco; I need not describe more to you than that. There are all of the same sections, meat, bakery, computers, appliances, lawn furniture, etc. Except for a few additions in the fish area and some gaps like the lunchmeat area, Japanese people apparently don’t eat lunchmeat, it was the same. We hit every aisle and area in no particular order, filled two carts with food and other items, and hauled it up to the front. I have been saying ever since I found out that this place was here that I was ready to drop a couple hundred dollars there, but when I say things like that I’m kidding. When I saw the register ring up the total (64,000 yen, or about $600), I nearly hit the floor. This was divided up among four of us, Karen included, to be sorted out later. Shipping would take about a week and cost another 2000 yen, but it was worth it. We grabbed a few items from the cart, I got a bag of cheese to make pizza that I didn’t trust to the delivery guy, and we had dinner in the cafeteria.

I remember eating a slice of pizza when Russell pointed out that there was grease running down my arm, and sure enough there was a clear orange line running from my thumb to my elbow, branching off a couple of times to get around a few small hairs. Along the edge of the table line a man with a bullhorn proclaimed that a member could get 1000 yen if they signed up now with a new member. I felt greasy and tired, there were children running around screaming and overweight people scarfing down two or three pieces at a time. In the check-out area people pushed into one another without ever saying “excuse me.” Something about this place had changed them. Being a part of it already, I had no idea what it could be.

Week 6: Where are all the white women at?

Taking the train.














This is the electronics store I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. I get a headache just looking at it.















Don't be sad, Tommy Lee Jones, you can buy Boss coffee at any corner vending machine.

Nouveaux Riches

That’s what Karen calls us now. Something about our paychecks being larger than anything any of us have ever seen before (well, at least me and Juniper). This week we got paid on Monday, a direct deposit into our new bank accounts which, until now, only held about a dollar just to get the account started. There were the usual provisions that had to be taken out, retirement, key charge for the arms (which was supposed to cover our rooms getting cleaned, but actually paid for nothing), and taxes (which was not supposed to happen at all but since I never got the letter from the IRS they are taking it out anyway). I never thought gross incompetence on the international scale could cost me so much money. On the other hand, I was reimbursed a small portion of what I paid for visiting the doctor (about a fourth of what I actually paid, four times more than what I should have) and my travel money to cover the cost of flying over here. The travel money was the only thing that was actually commensurate to what I shelled out, including the hotel stay in Chicago when I missed the connecting flight.

I would like to say that it was the lump sum thing that made me do all the spending. Had the checks come in small doses I would have been more inclined to put it away and not think anything more of it. But think of a month’s salary being dropped into your account in an afternoon, which nearly doubles the amount of money you had saved up working for six months before that. Now, wouldn’t you be just a little inclined to spend it with reckless abandon knowing that you are only a few weeks away from another said deposit? After living like a student, albeit, a spoiled one with generous parents (hey, at least I’m honest), actually having money to spend changed my entire outlook on life.

Everyone asked me what I was going to buy. Dunno, I said, like the ideas hadn’t been coming to me every time I walked into a store. One of the first things I did was go to the grocery store and buy up a lot of what would be standard at home but are luxuries here. Things like peanut butter (a knock-off), chicken breasts, and real butter. You wouldn’t think it, but butter is hard to get here. It usually comes in blocks that are slightly smaller than two stick in America or individually wrapped packets like you get with your rolls in Italian Restaurants. The rest of the refrigerator section is stocked with various kinds of margarine, which, if you didn’t know, is made from vegetable oil made solid with trans-fatty acids that are really bad for you. I should also mention that a quart-sized container of milk costs about the same as a gallon in America and is the consistency of half and half. After drinking skim for the past few years it reminds me of heavy cream. Cheese is also pricey, but you can get a large block of cheddar for a few dollars more than in the states. Cheese is also limited in variety, mostly cheddar and gouda, as well as shredded mozzarella for pizza and a few fancy cheeses like camembert. No wonder there are so many old people here hunched over from osteoporosis.

Now, what am I supposed to do with all this cool foodstuff? I can cook up all sorts of good eats with my brand new toaster/microwave/convection oven. Yes, it does all three things in the same size as a larger microwave oven. I couldn’t help myself as I seem to have developed an unhealthy need to bake over the past few years and here is a machine that I can not only make cakes or pies in, but reheat the leftovers the next day. To this day (about two weeks later) I have yet to actually bake anything in it as baking supplies such as flour are really hard to get. I saw some bags of flour in a foreign market (way cool) that were a few pounds in size and cost about six dollars. I see so many wheat things all over the place like sandwiches, cakes, and noodles, yet I cannot find flour to save my life. Until the day I can get a big bag of flour, I will be content reheating my rice and toasting bread. I have to mention, bread here comes in smallish loaves that are cut into either six or eight really large slices. Even the thinner, eight-slice bag is large enough that you only need on piece for a sandwich.

My oven also taught me a valuable lesson in making large purchases: most people in Japan have everything shipped to them. Since this was my first large purchase I figured I could just carry it home (less than a mile, maybe). After I paid for it, the guy in the store asked me (in Japanese) if I wanted it carried down to my car. I realized this only after he made the steering wheel motion with his hands, whereupon I said, no thanks, I’ll carry it. He then gave me a look that I easily interpreted as, really? Are you nuts? Apparently because, even though the oven could not have weighed too much more than ten pounds, the box it came in doubled its size and the handles where just round holes cut into side. I had to stop several times on the way home to adjust my grip, lean the box on various parts of my body since having it against my upper thigh cut off the circulation to my legs, and wipe away the profuse sweat from my face due to the effort and the hottest sunshine this country has had since I arrived. And to think, it was literally storming not an hour ago.

My next big purchase was a couple days later. Karen and I went out to Jmart, a really big store that looks like a Home Depot on the first level and a Target on the second. You can quite literally buy your entire home in this place and not need to shop anywhere else, though you may get sick of packaged foods after a while. My mission was to get some plastic drawers, a desk of some kind, and a bookshelf. Karen was on the look out for some kitchen supplies and a new kitchen cabinet. Remember how I said the place was never cleaned? Well even after several cleanings the cabinet she did have was still encrusted with mold and looked like it had been picked up off a curb in the rain. She didn’t trust food to be in it, let alone wanted to look at the thing taking up space next to the fridge.

Karen was also in the market for a tatami mat. A tatami is a pad for the floor and a mat is a thin cover that goes on top. Living rooms and bedrooms of a residence have recesses that the pads fit into. They are about two centimeters thick and, like the mats, are made of woven grass so they will be soft for sleeping or walking on and smell nice when the weather gets warm. One interesting thing about them is that there is only one size of pad, and a few common room sizes they fit into. That way, you can make a large mat for a room in only a few sizes to fit a room perfectly. In another cheap-ass move on the part of the landlord was to purchase the cheapest pads he could find and not replace them even after the recommended date. As such, they are stained, discolored, and stared to fray leaving bits of grass on everything and requiring constant vacuuming. I have been told that the lord sometimes comes to work functions to meet everyone, but I seriously hope I never meet him as I may be unable to stop myself from punching him in front of everyone. If you ever visit, you would understand.

We looked around Jmart for a while to see what all we needed. In one corner we came across the pet section where, like an American pet store, several puppies and kittens where on display in windowed cages. The pet area was pretty extensive, consisting of food, toys, beds, and, in addition to the aforementioned animals, fish, lizards, rabbits, chickens, and beetles (big, ugly ones like the kind you have only seen in museums). People can actually bring their pets into the store provided they are on a leash or in the cart. Karen and I got all gushy around the cute animals, then were shocked that the average price for one of them was around two to four thousand dollars. I’ll admit that they looked good, pure bred, healthy, and young, but that much money for a cat? We left shaking our heads and feeling sorry for the one dog that cost $800 because he was the cheap one.

After spending a couple of hours looking at things, we get more or less what we came for. I never got the desk, but I did find a nice bookshelf and some drawers and Karen got her mat and cabinet. In order to get all of this stuff home we walked over to the customer service desk and asked for someone who spoke English. Since I was feeling savvy having discovered a dictionary on my phone, I showed them words like “delivery” in the hopes that they would hand me the form. Not so simple, they called over an older man who spoke a little English to guide us through the whole process. After talking with the other employees he turned to us and said, rather distraught, We can deliver your goods to you tomorrow, but I’m afraid it is going to cost you five dollars (OK, he didn’t say dollars, but I translated it). We pretended to be a concerned by this. Think about two large boxes, a tatami mat, and two large plastic drawers being delivered overnight to your home for five dollars. I guess that’s acceptable, Karen said. This is where I felt really stupid for having carried that oven home.

On another night out spending money, Russell and I managed to convince Juniper to get a cell phone. Since I had a good experience buying mine, I had suggested to Karen and Juniper to go to the same place since I knew for sure that they would have an English speaker working. Of course she was there, and spelled out the plans, the monthly rate, and the cost of each phone, which had gone down in the couple of weeks since I had gotten one. After the whole process was over the woman gave her the phone and said, actually, the phone is free when you sign up. Not that I was bitter, but I paid about $90 for my phone, and at the time I bought it the phone Juniper received cost about $120. The night before this Russell had purchased a new digital camera and after saying he was going to buy it, the clerk handed him a series of things like a bottle top mount so you could use a coke bottle like a tripod when you want a steady shot but are just out with your friends and not in full on art mode.

This led Russell to the hypothesis (I’m giving him the credit here) that, in Japan, people are rewarded for purchases rather than enticed to buy. The longer you have a cell phone the cheaper it gets every year, even though you can only sign up for one year at a time. When he explained this I thought about all the free crap that everyone seems to offer with large purchases, like a free printer with my laptop, but never is there a surprise for someone who goes in expecting the one thing. Personally, I would think that this would be a much better method since it encourages loyalty rather than an easy out for another offer. If cell phone rates went down the longer you stayed a customer people might be less inclined to cancel their service and sign up with another company every year. But that’s just me.

In All the Wrong Places

Despite the fact that since the day I first expressed interest in going to Japan I was bombarded with reassurances that I would be hottest thing to every cute Asian girl I came in contact with, I have yet to really hit it off with anyone (unless you want to count the hostess at the J-Girl party, but I would rather not). This week, however, a coworker, and a Canadian, no less but we'll just call her Joanne, and I expressed mutual interest in dating one another. Ultimately we decided that it was a bad idea since we work together, live together, and are together socially all the time. Not to mention the fact that everyone pretty much works and lives together and any such activity would fall under the close scrutiny of nearly everyone we see regularly and awkwardness would be the prevalent feeling. Sad since I probably get along with her better than anyone else here, but good because this means things can stay cordial. Funny, Joanne let me in on Russell's astute observation made in a pithy text message to her when I arrived saying, you’re going to like the new guy, which made me laugh. The problem now is most know we like each other but no one knows me well enough to just ask me and no one wants to be rude and ask her about it. I assume some are fine not knowing while others prefer to fabricate some elaborite scenario in their heads based on their observations, but that's how these things work.

On the other hand Russell and Juniper are now dating which sort of makes them the litmus test for interoffice relationships. All of this is giving me a weird sense of déjà vu since last year started with me interested in someone who agreed that a relationship was a bad idea while Juniper was quickly picked up by a co-worker who had a reputation for being a womanizer. Russell has acknowledged his reputation, though with confusion since he is not the womanizing type. I have no reason to believe that he is, understanding how gossip can just be a lot of shit people say to make themselves feel important. However I can say with some confidence that he is a far better person than the previous guy I know Juniper dated whom, for several other reasons, I would like to work on with a 7-iron.

I realize that I am gossipping here and I apologize, but I sort of feel it important to note this now to see how the various relationships are going to play out over the next couple of months (let alone, the next year).

Speaking of Ruth, my dear has recently decided that she would like to come and visit me. She hammered out a date and purchased a ticket with the plan on getting here at the end of June to spend ten days hanging out with me and her friend Joy, who is planning on leaving in July. Of course being the selfish prick that I am, I immediately began formulating a list of things I would like her to bring me from America. This was under the assumption that she was leaving from Minneapolis, my beloved home, and could put together a bag of my things from my parents and just carry it through the airport for me. Not so fast, before you could say, mule, Ruth changed her mind about her Minneapolis move and is now going to stay in Washington for a while to get a grip on what she wants to do for the next year before applying to a doctorate program. She assures me that she would like to end up in the Twin Cities for that, at least, since it is such a cool city and the University has a good program. End shameless plug.

What was that?

Constant exposure to students and people is constant exposure to germs and bacteria. I caught a monster of a cold from someone--if I knew who I could throw down, but, alas, I cannot--that is going around and hitting everyone. My advice to you if you should ever come here or ride a train anywhere is to never touch your face for any reason until you have washed your hands. You will see a lot of people, especially this time of year when pollens are in the air, wearing facial masks. This is, of course, to protect them from allergens, but it’s also a courtesy thing. For many people, if they catch a cold or are unwell, they will put the mask on to protect others from infection. Isn’t that nice of them? In America you’re lucky if the asshole next to you on the bus doesn’t just farmer blow all over you. Blowing your nose in public is also strictly forbidden, so sniffle until you can get to a bathroom, no one will mind.

One night I was up late, stuffy, tired, and generally feeling ill before going to bed. After only a few hours of restless sleep I was awakened by the rattle of glass panes in the bookshelf and the floor moving. I had only woken up in time to catch the tail end of it, not entirely sure for a moment what had happened until my senses had returned. I spent about three minutes staring at the faint outlines of my desk in the dark wondering if I was close enough for it to come down on top of me when I just fell asleep. Eschewing any pride I may have, if I had been completely awake at the time this occurred I am certain I would have been crying and moaning like a pansy. Joanne wanted to call me and ask me if I was ok, which sounded really sweet until I noticed she was laughing at me for putting on a scared face.

Earthquakes are pretty common, or so I’m told. Stu warned me that I should expect one every week, but they are usually so mild that you may not even notice. There was one on another day that felt like little more than a large semi driving by outside. Having grown up near an airport, I hadn’t even noticed it until someone pointed it out. These have been the only two instances that I have noticed in my time here. On my first day Russell showed me his emergency kit complete with a flashlight, food, and bottled water because if a major one hit we could lose water and power for a few days. I was frightened, reminded of many days sitting in the basement waiting for the tornado warning to pass. But a tornado can't get you in the basement the same way a quake can get you anywhere in the building.

The local elementary school is an emergency center where we can go if a big one hits, but make sure you open a door when it starts cause the foundation can shift and next thing you know you trapped inside. There was a large one in 1995 that killed 1,590 people, followed by the Tokyo subway gas attack not long after. The last really big earthquake was in 1923 where about 143,000 people died. There has been a lot of speculation about when the next big one will hit, but scientific predictions are only slightly accurate. But then, they say the end of the world is coming in a lot of ways. AU provides us with a helmet at each desk while a map on the wall guides us to meeting points. In the office everything is so crowded that nothing could fall over since it would just run into something else. I know I am not supposed to run outside if a quake hits, but I would rather be at work if a real big one occurs.

I really need to learn to end on a more positive note.

Shave and a haircut, forty bucks

The old locks were starting to get a little mullet-y in the back and something had to be done about it. When I first asked about getting a haircut people told me that I should either bring someone along who can explain things like length or find a picture of the cut I wanted. Assuming that no one in any shop was going to know what I was saying, it was easy for me to understand. I asked them in return who their preferred stylist was and got a variety of answer ranging from shaving his own head every morning to traveling across town to an Australian stylist and paying $80 for the pleasure of polite conversation with a basic cut. There is a shop not far from here where the stylist there speaks some English, but, again, the cost is around $40. I’m from the school of thought that a simple haircut should cost no more than $15. I admit that this is on the cheap-ass side, but I refused to pay more than $20 even if the stylist was a native English speaker. But when Joanne told me that somebody (being intentionally vague) got their hair done for around $200, suddenly I felt I was on another planet, never mind another country.

Hair salons are about as ubiquitous as cell phone shops. Seriously, half this city’s labor force must be made up of stylists and cell phone dealers. On Skip Dori there must be at least eight salons, plus three more around the corner and a couple more across the street. If ever I need variety in who I wanted to cut my hair, I need not travel far. When I first saw kids working their hair in the bathroom at school I really not put the two things together, but a lot of importance in put on people’s hair, more so than clothing. And every place has their prices listed in the front or on the window, and all of them are asking at least 4500Y ($40) for the pleasure of a cut. Mik told me there was a place on the Skip that would do it for 1800Y, but I was unable to find it in regular travels to the train station. There is one place that advertises 1000Y ($10) haircuts in ten minutes, but you get what you pay for, and it’s located under the station next to a coffee shop that specializes in “to go.”

If you think the cost is not worth it you are thinking of what you get for an American cut. A Japanese cut consists of shampoo (twice), shave, scalp massage, cut, and shampoo again. The whole process can take up to an hour and a half if you get the full treatment, but if you say cut only, they will just cut it and send you on your way. When I was reading through the orientation book on the plane, I remembered the part where it said, haircuts can take a long time, so don’t go get one between obligations or you may be late. If you are still willing to pay $40 for a haircut and all that other stuff, I expect you to look fabulous when it’s over.

One night after 30 minutes of trying to find a picture of George Clooney ala From Dusk Till Dawn, I finally broke down and went looking for a shop no matter what the cost. Again I looked for the cheap place and did not find it, went by a place that had two prices advertised, 4500Y and 2250Y, but could not figure out how to get the cheaper one. My phone dictionary had no idea what the word next to the cheap price meant, and I could only assume that it was member’s only. In the middle of the Skip I walked up a flight of stairs and asked what it would cost for a cut. 4500Y, she said, but there was a discount for some reason, and it would really be 3300Y ($30) tonight. This was all in Japanese, of course, even the part where I told her how long I wanted it and she said, one hour. Do you have pictures, I asked. She took me over to a shelf covered in books, each with all sorts of pictures of various styles taken from four angles. I jumped to the short section and found what I was looking for.

Since the picture featured a guy with highlights, I had to make it clear that all I wanted was a cut. After that I told her that I like it combed forward when it was done while running my hand through my hair to demonstrate. Forward, she asked. Like the picture, I said, pointing again. OK, she said. After my two shampoos she led me over to the stylist and told her, forward. The stylist said, forward? I became worried. All told the process did take about an hour. The stylists had a method for only cutting a tiny bit off the end of my hair repeatedly until it was the desired length. The process might have something to do with Japanese hair being black and, usually, thicker, but either way I was covered in what looked like cocoa powder when she finished. She then took me back to the sink for a second wash and got out all the little specks from my scalp that surely would have itched like Hell that evening and I was done.

A strange phenomenon occurs when you meet people looking like one thing. They establish this idea of you and how you look and it sticks with them. Everyone noticed immediately at work the next day, it was a sharp contrast, but they all said that they almost didn’t recognize me. Even Juniper, whom I have known for over a year now, thought I was a random stranger who wandered into the office. I don’t really see the difference now between this and my $15 cuts in the states, but I guess it was worth the extra cash for the shampoos and the looks I got the next day. Next time, however, I really am going to find the 1800Y place and go there.

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.