Kogai Ni

Being outdoors, dudes!  It's a thing, as I've recently learned.  You won't recall me talking about my first camping trip here, because I so deftly skimmed over it.  That was about a month ago, I guess; we went to go see this badass taiko drum concert on Sado, an island just off the coast beyond Niigata City, with a bunch of the other Niigata JETs.  We brought our gear with us to the island; after the concert, we set up camp on the beach, made a bonfire, checked out the stunning night sky--I saw more shooting stars that I ever had in one night--and generally mucked around like the college students most of us are deep down.  (Okay, maybe it's just me.  What?  I've been out of school for less than a semester now.)  Being sort of out in the countryside as it is, I'm not too starved for contact with nature, but it's still nice to really bust outta Dodge.  You know, get away from the sounds of people, breath in some really fresh air, and get your ass woken up at six by the sunrise.  I would like to emphasize that that latter item really did happen.  I was confused because it looked like broad daylight outside, and also because I had netted myself  something like three hours of sleep.  It took my tent mates a few solid minutes to fully persuade me that it was, in fact, death o'clock in the morning.  After that, I stumbled into the surf--this proved to be a good way to wake up, one I wish I could replicate at home.  (Maybe if I hauled in some sand, flooded my bathroom…wait, this sounds suspiciously familiar.)

So there's a lot that I'm skipping over from that trip--notably, how I ran into one of my coworkers while hefting a one-liter bottle of beer, plus hanging out with this one guy who's been teaching English for fourteen years! --but I must push on, lest I wind up writing about mid-October on my winter vacation.   This camping trip marked our official, prefecture-wide welcome party, the culminating event after a bunch of smaller-scale welcome shindigs we'd attended both in Gosen and elsewhere.  The venue, the ground zero of our jubilee, was a campground a couple of hours south of us.  After a quite scenic drive, we arrived some three bajillion hours before the festivities were to commence.  As the only three people there, Carly, Amanda, and myself began setting up camp.  Permit me one moment to describe the place.  The first of two general parts was the actual grounds itself, a small, open area of neatly manicured grass.  Connected by a short bridge over a small creek were the cabins and other stuff (office, bathrooms, etc.) arranged around a paved communal area.  This bland description doesn't do much justice to the place, but suffice it to say that it was a pretty sweet deal, quite conducive to a large social gathering, and better kept than I would expect a campsite that's further in the countryside to be.

We began constructing our sweet tent, borrowed from our friend and de facto host mother, Rumi.  This was the same tent we had used on Sado; then,  we were forced to delay setup until midnight after a solid night of, well, concert, and so did not efficiently nor one hundred percent effectively put our tent up.  (Also, sand.)  This time around, however, we had the leisure to properly erect a veritable fortress, the envy of our fellow campers.  Carly was pleased, Amanda doubly so--as I understand it, the average Minnesotan spends thirty weeks out of the year camping.  Our frequent companion from the town next to us, Kristyn, was amazed beyond words when she arrived later--which is to say not literally "beyond words."  Kristyn fills an important niche in my social constellation, that of an avid purveyor of dry humor, which is, shall we say, not as common as rice in Japan.  She's an excellent foil to my style of outrageous hyperbole and embellishment; so when I began to expound on the great toil we had endured, she adroitly cut me off with a terse sentiment along the lines of, "Uh huh, sure."  Borderline sardonic, maybe, but it hurts good.  Also we talk about beer in a scholarly fashion, a hobby I miss much from the halcyon days of my college career.  You know, like six months ago.

We went to scope out a nearby park and shrine before the rest of the nerds began to arrive.  On this expedition, we accrued, Katamari-like, an entourage of small children who happened to be playing while we visited.  They were very interested in America, although we had to disabuse one of them of the notion that America and Japan are geographically contiguous and also the same country.  Another persistently inquired into the logistics of currency exchange.  "Do they hold the money for you until you come back?"  Now that would be a sweet deal, you guys.  In short, they were quite adorable.  When we left, they followed us back to camp, which was something of a cause for concern on my part.  I was rather unclear on the protocol regarding unaccompanied minors following strangers around; I know that the American legal code classifies that as a "party foul" worth ten years in the pen.  (In all seriousness though, it's interesting how much autonomy they give little kids here.  I haven't any facts or figures to persuade you, but outside of school these small fries roam quite freely.)  As the rest of Foreigner Squadron Alpha began to drift in, we played tag (or as it's called here, oni gokko, "play [at being a] devil") with the kids.  I only visit my elementary schools for half-days each, therefore I haven't had the opportunity to participate in after-lunch tag with students.   So I was mega blown away at the energy these kids had; they were firing on all cylinders all the time.  Eventually one of their mothers came by to pick them up, much to the relief of my exhausted body.  Now, it was time to get down to the serious business of socializing.

The grill was fired up as we foreigners accumulated, and we congregated in the common area by the cabins.  At this point there's not much more I can say other than we had a right old time; grilled noms and beverages aplenty, someone's iPod blasting from somewhere, nerds jamming out on guitar, frequent trips to pee in the woods (in spite of the fully functional toilets), a dance party, s'mores cooked over an open fire.  What began as a duel of good old fashioned Wizard's Staff between two friends turned into a campsite full of wizards, culminating in an actual wizard battle (which I did not realize was stipulated in the rules).  It was just a good time, you know?  Like, pick a good party you hit up at school.  (Maybe one year at Don't Mess with Texas, or an O-Week crawl.)  The crazy thing is how immersed I find myself in our big get-togethers.  Part of it, of course, is that during the week I don't see people or go out, on account of how spread out we are and this crazy new schedule I'm trying out wherein I actually manage more than six hours of sleep.  But just being around my JET friends, hanging out en masse, I experience two things:  First, I nearly forget that I'm Japan.  This is a little ridiculous--especially because there are usually some Japanese friends-of-friends whom I end up chatting with-- but regardless, that's the sensation comes over me.  Second, I sort of quietly marvel at how normal it all is.  Coming to Niigata, I had a hunch that it would be an active bunch, so I guess I should've anticipated that there would be some proper partying going on.  But, as with so many things here, it's what's similar and familiar that stands out more than the big differences.  I think that's because, even having had some experience with Japan, I've mentally (perhaps unconsciously) positioned myself more on a footing to anticipate and process the differences, which of course are abundant.  But that apparatus has no function to account for the similarities I find in my lifestyle.  I don't want it to sound like I'm paralyzed by massive cognitive dissonance every waking second, because I'm not.   Rather, it's a vibe that's there in the back of my head.   When I zone out sometimes, it hums a little louder, to the tune of, "Whoa, I'm in Japan.  So much is different, but sometimes I can't even tell because I just feel…normal."  That's something I experience in small ways, like hanging out in our happy little threesome at the end of the day, and in bigger ways, like this rad camping trip.

Oh, and I nearly forgot to tell you about the first burger I had since I've been here.  Man.  Okay.  Gotta back it up a little bit.  We went to the mall a little ways out to pick up gear for camping, right?  I'd already been to this mall before.  We weren't sure what we felt like for dinner, so we wound up at some place in the food court that sorta had everything.  Among other items on the menu were, you know, burgers.  I thought about it.  I went for it.  And man, it was good.  I mean, the burger itself was tasty--not like a Perigord, but better than a fast food thing--but rarely have I had a single item of food affect me so profoundly.  I just felt good, like my whole body had just been massaged.  I hadn't even realized how badly I'd wanted a burger until I put my mouth on it; at those specific coordinates in space and time, that was exactly what I needed.  Amanda put it well when she noted that eating a meal like that is a completely different kind of full from the usual Japanese fare we have.  And I could feel that in my stomach, so forgotten yet so familiar, like going home over the summer and seeing your high school friends again.  Since I was on such a roll, we went to Baskin Robbins afterwards.  Did I mention it was pay day that day?  We were in a mood of excessiveness that night.  The cherry on top was discovering Paulaner hefe-wiessbier at the big grocery store downstairs, which I grabbed for emergency use.  I left the mall in a pretty okay mood.

Okay, now fast forward! We're at the weekend after I went camping.  I woke up on Saturday morning at 2:30 in the morning.  That's right kids, this was the day we went fishing with our boss.  Our first move was to go to the convenience store, where our boss bought us beer.  Japanese has a specific word for this phenomenon--asazake, or "morning alcohol."  Then we hopped over to the city, picking up hooks and bait on the way, went out to the water, and, well, fished.  (P.s., my boss had brought the rods and other such gear.)  I don't have a whole lot of fishing experience under my belt, so I wasn't completely sure what was going to happen, or whether I would grievously harm myself in what would be a hilarious accident if it happened to someone else.  Here's how it went down.  We set up shop on a pier, not right on the sea because of the sea walls (where the hardcore nerds were fishing from) but jutting out into a calm body of water.  Like I said, I know jack about fishing, so this will be a laughable description, but instead of just one hook at the end of the line, we used a string of small hooks?  No clue what it's actually called.  Anyway.  The strategy was simple enough:  Bait, then plunk the rod down and wait for a tug.  The fish were, to my surprise, quite plentiful, and quite dumb too.  Every time I dropped my line, these little guys would be eagerly tugging at the line mere seconds later, as if begging me to deliver them from their boring existences as fish.  (Wow.  That got dark, yo.)  But we had quite a haul, maybe a few pounds or so of fish.  After napping all afternoon, we enjoyed our catch for dinner at our boss's house.  They turned out delicious; his mother (who lives next door) had fried them up, and we munched on them.  That was just a super pleasant evening; the boss is a secretly hilarious guy.  (Incidentally, one of the best feelings in the world is getting a joke in another language, like this morning when I asked him what to do if I see a bear [bear sightings being common in the fall] and he told me to just play dead.)  We learned that we're the first JETs they've ever invited to their home, which was a little surprising but very satisfying.

Man.  That's just the end of September.  I'll hit pause for now.  I'm probably missing a lot here too, especially since I've mostly been talking about the weekends without bringing up the Interesting Things that go on during the week.  I'll throw you one such bone:  Occasionally, my kids will ask me when I'm returning to America.  One such time was when I was eating lunch with my sixth-graders; I told the kid that I had just shown up, dude, and I wasn't planning on leaving just yet.  The kid next to me chimed in that I couldn't go back.

"Why not?"  I asked.

"You don't have a home there."

"What about my family's house?"

He thought hard about this.  "They died," he decided.  Pure gold.

When I was leaving school this past Friday, as I was leaving I told another student that I was going on a trip over the weekend.  His response?  "Oh, to America?"  Yep.  See you on Monday, kid.

 

One more:  We were doing timezones one day, and, pointing at Australia, I asked them what country I had indicated.  Now, I was already well-acquainted with my students' command of geography, so I wasn't surprised when they responded, "Germany!  America!  Africa!"  It was just their fearless, almost reckless bravado, the heroic enthusiasm with which they spitballed (and so magnificently failed) that caused me to seize up with laughter; I literally had to stop teaching, and wasn't sure if I would make it through the rest of the lesson.

 

 

These and other hilarious things are pretty much par for the course at the elementary school.  Honestly, my middle school days are more laid back because I teach fewer periods a day.  Teaching itself is still going pretty well.  I'm more or less on a regular schedule now, but I'm still working on getting completely used to it, particularly trying to balance being active and taking charge in the classroom versus keeping to a supporting role--my title, of course, is assistant language teacher, so you could say I'm trying to figure out when to be more "assistant" and when to be more "teacher", all the while trying to account for cultural differences.  But that'll come in time; I mean, it seems like forever ago now, but I've only been teaching for right under two months now.  Even so, it's not as weird as it used to be when people call me "sensei."

Quick review:  There were absolutely no dick jokes or bad words in this post.  At least one very specific reference.  Alas and alack, I failed by my own criteria.  Although I am digging this meta-writing.  Maybe in some future post I'll do a roundup of all such meta tidbits and see how well I'm doing on those, and so on until infinity, or until you snap, fly over, and shoot me in the kneecap.  Bring jerky when you do!

NEXT TIME:  A long weekend of shenanigans with Japanese pals old and new, and my stunning debut on the court at the biannual basketball tournament.  I should just quit my job, 'cause maybe then I would catch up on my blog.

Natsu no Owari

It's the end of the summer, my nerds!  You know what that means--that means the shit is starting to get real.  As I so tantalizingly alluded to in my previous post, it's been a hell of a few weeks.  The menu's running long today, so I hope you brought your appetite.  Since the last installment of this esteemed publications, the first thing I did was enjoy a 72-hour gauntlet of festivals over a long weekend in mid-September.  I'm only slightly exaggerating; our schedule was punctuated with sporadic breaks for eating and sleeping, but otherwise it was pretty much full throttle.  Let's back it up to the Friday when it all kicked off.  We had practice for the first event we'd attend, the fall festival in our town, Gosen.  The actual shindig went as follows:  Each part of town has a small float that they pull along on ropes, making stops to pay their respects to old dudes hanging out at specific landmarks along the way to the terminus of the procession, a larger shrine in the town's center.  Oh yeah, and in front of the floats are people playing flutes and small taiko drums on wheels.  So Friday night was "practice," which for me meant following the people who were actually doing stuff on our route and…not much else.  Everyone thought Carly and I were married, which was hilarious; basically if a guy and a girl are out together, they'll assume the two are an item, and that's doubly so for foreigners.  Throw in the fact that everyone gets married about two seconds after they graduate university and boom, they start to see foreigner couples errywhere.

So anyway, we walked for about an hour.  The reward for our strenuous activity was nothing other than Japanese grandpa drinking time.  (Hang on, I need to back up and say that I got to hit on the drums a bit, which was good fun.  I have a secret, unrealized love for percussion instruments, and as far as those go, taiko drums are pretty swell.)  So we had some Japanese grandpa drinking time at the house where we had originally gathered for the evening.   We sat at low tables stacked high with all manner of Japanese noms--shrimp tempura, pickled veg, kara age (basically fried chicken) and potato salad (which to my persistent amazement is much loved here).  Dominating the skyline were towering bottles of fine Japanese beer.  This, of course, was the main attraction.  At this point I should belatedly clarify that the overwhelming majority of the party ranged in age from old to older; we owed the festivities to these elderly patriarchs who had so diligently retained memory of the old ways.  So we celebrated the successful transmission of a centuries-old tradition the usual way--good food, good beer, and (inevitably) good sake.

The following evening was the fall festival for realsies.  Where our practice night had been dim and quiet, the festival proper was alive with the beating of the taiko, the streets illuminated by the floats rolling by; they weren't huge, but they seemed ponderously massive relative to the narrow streets teeming with human bodies and booths selling food and toys.  My role in all this was the very traditional, very respected position of "dude who directs traffic around our parade."  Really.  Right before we left, one of the men in our group handed me a rod much like a short, flashing lightsaber for the purpose of directing any cars near us to kindly not mow down any of our party members.  Amanda got one too, and we immediately commenced our duel.  I don't know why they saw it fit to charge us with the safety of a few dozen people, many of them young children.  Nonetheless, we proceeded on the route, quite casualty-free; we took in the sights of the festival and watch other floats go by.  At some point, I was handed a can of Asahi--and that's when I learned that the float, being pulled along mostly by small children, had a full cargo of beer.  I was stunned by the ingenuity of it all; I was basically on a traditional Japanese crawl.  Upon reaching the shrine and watching the short ceremony there--more music and dudes in the regalia of Edo-period Japan--I abruptly shifted functions.  I was handed one of the two paper lanterns mounted on bamboo poles and placed in the vanguard of our party.  This was a little more badass than my previous occupation, so I happily complied.  After wending our way through small back streets and eventually on to the main road--literally on the road, I should add--we eventually made it back to the start, where we commenced round two of Japanese grandpa drinking time.  As it is with any group I socialize with for the first time, they told me how great I was at Japanese/using chopsticks, and I talked about my interest in Japan and life in Gosen.  You can imagine that covering the same ground over and over again can get old, but the fact that my community is genuinely eager to get to know me and include me more than compensates for that.  It's pretty great.

Sunday we hit the city for, yes, some more sweet festival action--these ones being in a more modern vein, rather than the traditional shindig I had attended the previous two nights.  First, we scoped out the dance festival.  It seems like just about anyone could form a team and enter, but that's not to say that they didn't totally kick ass.  Random streets were blocked off and open spaces commandeered to accommodate participants and spectators; it really felt like the whole city was in celebration.  We moseyed from place to place watching the dances, and somewhere along the way we caught a random solo concert, maybe a dozen viewers strong.  This dude was just jamming out on acoustic guitar, so we thought we'd take a break and chill out.  My butt had barely made contact with the seat before he started calling us out in front of the audience.  "You guys aren't Japanese, huh?"  No, no we were not.  "Cool!"  We caught a few more songs, then went to talk to him when he took a break.  He was still pretty excited that some foreign nerds had shown up at his show (he actually mentioned it on his blog), and we snagged a couple of signed CDs from him.  There was a lot of reciprocal days being made right then, you guys.  Hey, if you like solo acoustic guitar without vocals, you should totally check him out right here:  http://fujita-shingo.jugem.jp/  (Fuck yes.  I was waiting for the day I could make a shameless plug on my blog.  Now this blog is major league, my nerds.)

Later in the afternoon, we dropped in on what was definitely the main attraction for the day:  the random-ass food festival.  Purveyors of all things edible came from around the prefecture to show off their goods.  After getting our bearings, I made a beeline for a coffee stand.  My rapid advance in that direction, however, was almost completely negated by the velocity at which I was blown away when I heard the coffee dudes speak.  You guys, the stand was run by a trio of Japanese who spoke what is undoubtedly the best English I have ever heard any Japanese speak; unaccented, quick and flowing.  Whereas I normally time most of my time speaking patiently in slowly-enunciated English with my teachers at school, these strange barista-cum-teacher-cum-persons of mystery spoke such fantastic English that I felt myself shifting into the same speech patterns normally reserved for use with my pals--a reaction I'd never had evoked in me speaking English with a Japanese person.  It was insane!  We learned that these guys taught English at a private school in the city; I felt like I should go and learn a thing or two about English.  Dazed, I walked off to explore the rest of the festival.

Lots of free samples!  One of the best was cubes of gelatinous mochi powdered in crushed soy, a favorite treat of mine.  At some point, I spied someone selling brownies; I literally stopped, breathed out hard, and gazed a gaze both tender and sad.  I stood still for so long I was separated from the rest of the crew.  I didn't buy any, just like I didn't purchase anything from one stand selling what they professed to be a Mexican dish; it just wouldn't be the same.  I did, however, score a sweet chicken katsu burger, which was absolutely top; everyone else had a bite of mine and went out to get their too.  It was that good, dudes.  There was also a wall of the venue dedicated entirely to sake.  To anticipate your question, yes, they too had free samples, but I threw off the haters by not imbibing.  (Who knew maturity would set on so quickly?  I feel like I need to do a Keystone out of a plastic bag to stave off impending adulthood.)  Instead, I received instruction in the basics of sake.  Here are my findings based on a conversation I had with one of the vendors:  There appear to be two main types of sake, ginjo and junmai.  A key difference between the two types is that junmai tastes more like rice, while ginjo has a fruiter flavor.  I'm sure a cursory Google search will turn up more useful information than that, but I do want to say this:  If you've ever tried sake and totally hated it, I encourage you to try it at least a couple of more times, because the different varieties and makers really do put out a diverse range of the beverage.  If the bottle's already open, then I'm probably not in a good place to judge, but I do know from the experiences I've had (as a part of my continued effort to educate myself on and integrate into Japanese culture) that, well, sometimes I get sake I hate and never want drink again, and sometimes I get something so good I don't know how anyone could dislike the stuff.  In short, go check it out sometime.

Next up was Monday.  You guys, Monday is when shit got really real.  The first night of the second iteration of the fall festival, we were assigned to help carry an omikoshi, or portable shrine, in the festival procession.  I say "miniature," but the whole thing weighed around six or seven hundred pounds!  Our team was headed by the city's superintendent, so consequently we were responsible for one of the flashiest and biggest omikoshi in the whole festival.  Before the heavy lifting began, we arrived at the superintendent's place for a quick snack, got up in traditional festival gear, and rolled out to the launch site.  I'm not going to lie, I may have been a little blasé when my friends and coworkers warned me that the omikoshi would be mega heavy; after all, these were the same people who had told us that it was too hot to watch kids on their sports day at school (which everyone else did) or that it was insane we ate rice twice in a day (which everyone else does.)  But as soon as we got into position, crouched under the poles, and hoisted it aloft for the first time, I immediately thought to myself:  "Shit."

The omikoshi was conveyed by hoisting the wooden beams sticking out of it onto our shoulders.  The main logistical issue for me was the fact that I stood a good head or so taller than most of my teammates.  I had two options:  Either sacrifice my shoulder for the greater good, or stoop down and walk like a fool.  I cycled between fire and frying pan, but damned if it wasn't a workout either way.  Gruntingly sustaining our burden aloft, we set out along the parade route to a real shrine just past the festival grounds.  Like Saturday's festival, that meant navigating through crowded streets festooned with colorful awnings, covering shops selling chicken skewers, light-up plastic katanas (I bought five), and Hello Kitty memorabilia, among many other things.  When we reached the shrine grounds, I noticed a problem:  The shrine wasn't there.  Well, it was, but it was concealed among trees…and was also situated about fifty steps of stairs above us.  Yeah.  As our team marched towards the stairway, my thought process went something like this:

"Okay, we're moving towards those stairs."

"Why aren't we turning away from those stairs?"

"Are we going up those stairs?"

"We're going up those stairs."

"Double shit."

I felt much like I imagine a doomed traveler would feel right before plunging off of Victoria Falls in a raft, only instead we were going up.  Still, exhausted as I was, I couldn't help but smile at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.  We called on a second wind to blast the omikoshi up the stairs and landed it in front of the shrine, and gratefully began our break.  Beers were passed around--it wasn't clear to me that that was the best choice of beverage given the activity, but I wasn't about to refuse the kindness of our teammates.  We socialized for a bit, and I saw a lot of students who were also in the festival.  Eventually we got back to the ceremony part:  An officiator in traditional Shinto garb first inspected our omikoshi, then opened its tiny front door to "put the gods" inside of it.  Immediately following that was our omikoshi battle.  I hate to disappoint, but it involved neither ramming others' shrines at high speeds, nor fisticuffs with opposing teams.  Rather, we picked up our omikoshi again and basically rattled and shook the hell out of it, along with plenty of yelling for good measure.  My sore shoulders begged for mercy, but were soon relieved as I was taken in by the surrounding din, huge structures of wood moving too fast, ornaments jingling and flashing in the lights, battle cries coming from every corner.  In short, it was pretty badass.  We returned the omikoshi to where we started, a sort of large garage that was packed with beer--I hadn't seen so much beer since stocking up supplies for Beer Bike.  We celebrated a day's hard work basically the same way we had the whole weekend; a few of the teams sat together on tarps laid out on the driveway, and we were treated to more light noms and beverages.  Worn down to the bone and with the workweek resuming in less than twelve hours, we excused ourselves after a little while--not without politely turning down invitations to participate Tuesday and Wednesday night.  I still don't get Japanese humor.

We did go back Tuesday night to mill around instead of participating.  One stand was selling what they called "doner kebab,"  but was really more like shawarma.  As I previously suggested, I don't exactly jump at every chance to eat non-Japanese cuisine (for now), but I was overcome with curiosity.  Frankly, I wasn't disappointed; I couldn't help but think back to Amman, where I'd had the best sharwarma of my life, but it was damned tasty nonetheless.  I also scored a sweet banana and chocolate crepe, which, for my fan club, is one of my favorite flavor combinations.

So anyway...OH MY GOD I just realized I have so much more to write about dammmnnnnnn.  Okay.  I'm gonna let all this sift through your brain while I go start the next installment.  Now I know how Tolkien felt.

NEXT TIME:  The best camping trip of all time.  The best burger of all time.  Plus fishing and drinking beers with my boss at five in the morning.

P.S.:  I realize I talked a lot about food in this particular post.  However, I'm not going to apologize because apparently, eating takes up a lot of my time.  Write what you know, nerds.

Atarashi Kyoushi

All about that new teacher!  That's me, in case you missed it.  Today I wanna talk about getting my feet wet in the wonderful world of teaching things and stuff.  That's right, kids; in addition to drinking beer, ridin' dirty in my Hot Wheels-sized K-car, and inadvertently scaring Japanese grandmas, I do have a day job as a full-fledged Japanese civil servant.  (You read that right.  Yeah boyyeee.)  As I previously suggested, I didn't even visit my schools for the first time until a couple of weeks ago.  I was mostly just sitting around at the city's Board of Education office for eight hours a day; the novelty of getting paid to do almost nothing was soon overcome by a soul-numbing boredom that pervaded my very bones--they turned cold and weighty, like frozen lead.  But!  As August drew to a close, so my schedule (my shed-dule) began to fill up.  I was due to hang out at my schools just before the new semester started, chat with my teachers, get a feel for the premises, and generally get used to the idea of being a teacher.

Here's the quick rundown.  I teach at five schools all told.  My gig is mainly middle school (or junior high school, as they call it here), which runs from our 7th to 9th grade.  They really hit the sweet spot on this one, since you have the first years who are at the tippy top of the rollercoaster before they plunge into the crazy hormonal ride of puberty, then the third years who are about fifty feet taller (I measured) and sound like fog horns when they speak.  I also do a little elementary school each week, and once a month I'll transform, in Autobot-like fashion, into a human jungle gym at a kindergarten.  So, putting aside the kindergarten, I visit two middle schools twice a week and two elementary schools once a week (half a day at each on the same day).

Obviously, at this point I can only give you my first impressions about the whole experience in general; I'm still very much in the process of getting used to my "normal" schedule--the quotations are to be taken somewhat ironically, since the schedule of classes I teach at each school varies at least slightly each day.  As the plot unfolds, I hope that schools will be specified and teachers will be introduced.  I can already tell some of my coworkers are quite the characters, and once everyone else warms up I'm sure to learn all sorts of interesting things.  For instance:  Our section head at the BoE was (and is) every inch the classic Japanese businessman.  We felt like we had him pegged at the start; a few weeks later, after company parties and a dinner at his house, we've learned he likes singing, playing guitar, surfing, and spear fishing, among other activities.  The wonderful thing about people not warming up as quickly as they do back home is that they will zag when you think they're gonna zig.

Anyway.  The visits were pretty low-key, especially once I figured out that all my schools wanted about the same thing from the start:  Make a lesson plan talking about yourself for the first day, and give a small speech at the welcoming ceremony.  Figuring out whether I would eat the school lunch was apparently a high priority; it was literally the first order of business at a couple of the schools I sat down at.  I later found out that my predecessor did not subscribe to the school's meals, hence the alacrity with which my teachers addressed the issue.  They were also impressed with my Japanese ability, which was nice, but here I had also been set up by my pred--he spoke no Japanese, it seems.  You can imagine that I was feeling pretty good getting off on the right foot, though I was a little worried when one of my teachers told me I wouldn't have any problems because I was "fluent" in Japanese.  Har.

As for the teachers themselves, they were mostly quiet but excited to have me (a real live foreigner!) on board.  The elementary school teachers speak less English as a consequence of the lower level they teach, but the junior high school instructors are pretty good.  I try to speak only in English with the latter group, and they keep up well.  They might be confounded by the contents of this publication, though.  (Then again, I'm probably confusing a lot of native English speakers too.)  I had the opportunity to attend an English teachers' workshop before classes started; I hung out with some of my teachers and we taught a demonstration lesson together, which was a refreshingly useful way to pass the workday.

 

So, the first day I actually went to school was the last Wednesday in August.  This was one of my middle schools.  I showed up, introduced myself to the office, and did…nothing.  Neither of my middle schools wanted me to start teaching right off the bat, so I spent that day spinning around at high speeds in my chair.  That is, until it was time for me to give my first welcome speech.  Dudes, they straight up threw me in the broadcasting room and slapped a camera in front of me while everyone watched from their classroom.  Even though I had prepared ahead of time, the nervousness was not diminished for sitting in a completely quiet room alone.  But I talked to some teachers afterwards, and they said that the kids all thought I was super smart.  Double har.  Classes ended on a half day, so I scoped out some of the clubs and chatted up the kids a little bit.  I felt kind of like Belle at the beginning of Beauty and the Beast as I walked around; as soon as I left each group of kids, they would start talking about me:  "Who's that?"  "His Japanese is so good!" "He's the new English teacher!"  The kids were super pumped, and I fancied it a good sign of things to come.

But if the middle school was excited on my first time there, the elementary schools made them look positively sluggish.  At the first school I visited, these little kids were bouncing off the walls so damn hard I thought the poor building would collapse, its structural integrity compromised by so many child-sized holes.  I may have misunderstood, but I think all of them were asking me to be their best friend from that day until the end of time.  It's not going to always be play time with the younger kids, but probably most of the time.  I talked a little and showed them pictures, they asked me questions, we had a few games, and I played some music I'd burned--I feel kind of like a troll for playing "Call Me Maybe," but at least I didn't Rick Roll them.  In the afternoon, I went to my other elementary school.  I met the school's principal, and was very heartened by the following conversation I had with one of my teachers while we waited in her office:

"Hey Chris."

"Yeah?"

"You like alcohol?"

"Yeah."

"You like whiskey?"

"Yep."

"You like sake?"

"Uh huh."

"You like beer?"

"Oh yeah."

My intuition tells me that he'll be a fun guy at the next office party.  At this school, I was persistently mobbed by kids before I even parked my car.  Seriously, any time I was outside of the classroom or the teachers' office, I was rolling like thirty kids deep.

Since then, it's been pretty much the same schedule:  Teach somewhere between three and five classes a day, usually teaching lessons about myself, and chill out in the teachers' office during my off periods (and nourish my starving body on internet access, which I am still without at home).  Probably my favorite part of it all thus far has been question time after my introduction.  Aside from the basics, I've been asked multiple times if I like girls, if I have a girlfriend, if I'm married, and what my favorite Pokemon is.

After the initial rush of novelty wore off, the middle school classes have ranged in energy; some are pretty engaged and focused overall, some are dominated by one or two kids, and some I have to take a kid's pulse before I ask a question to make sure they're not dead.  This serves to illustrate an important point:  The schooling over here isn't as different as you might think--these kids aren't all mega studying machines whose lives revolve around getting into a good high school.  There are still the kids too cool for school, the popular girls, and the outrageous nerds as well.  No matter how totally unique to the system I am, these kids still just wanna dick around with their pals at the end of the day.  And I can respect that!  I may have actually put effort into my studies like the good little nerd I was back in the day, but that doesn't mean I wasn't forward to playing Smash Bros. and drinking Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel with my friends.  In short, these kids are, well, kids.  I've been around the block (by which I mean the planet), and that's one thing that doesn't seem to change too much no matter how far I walk from my front door.

The other instructors—that is, those I don’t teach English with—are also warming up, slowly but surely.  There is not an overabundance of younger teachers, but the few that are around are the vanguard of the teachers’ office; I try to talk to as many of my coworkers as I can, but the younger teachers are the ones that have gone out of their way to engage me.  That is, beyond complimenting me on my Japanese and ability to use chopsticks.  One such teacher, Ikeno-sensei, told me about his visit to Hawaii; and I had a brief but pleasant geek out with another, Iwami-sensei.  These are the kinds of dudes I hope to see more of as time goes on.  Being over here, I’ve discovered how unique the American ability to make friends almost instantly is.  But that’s cool, I’m not going anywhere for a while.

Real quick before I have to go, here are a few ways I've been killing my free time:  We jacked around at a nearby river for an afternoon and (totally unintentionally) got free food from a nearby barbecuing shindig in return for playing with their kids all day; I got my ass handed to me by the girls' table tennis club at one of my schools, in what was the first of my weekly hangings-out with the club; and I briefly participated in a rice harvest with some of my fifth-graders.  You guys, I think I might be legally considered an Asian by the time I get back.  …If I ever come back, muahahahahaha!  Just kidding, I'm gonna need to eat a burrito eventually.

 

NEXT TIME:  I have a long weekend starting like now that is apparently going to involve me pulling and carrying some heavy shit in the big fall festival from Saturday to Monday, so that will probably make an appearance.  I also hope to make a cursory report on how the teaching itself is going once I really start to hit my stride.  Beyond that, I already know that I'm pretty much booked solid for the month of October; I won't spoil the story for you now, but stay tuned.

 

Hisashiburi!

Long time no see, nerds!  Yes, much to your relief (or chagrin, depending on who's reading this), I haven't been stabbed by a samurai sword, eaten by spiders, or flipped my car in a catastrophic but adorable accident (on virtue of the bite-size cars here).  I should mention that these are all real dangers, but thus far I have prevailed, survived long enough to resume--in an extremely belated fashion--the publication of this esteemed blog.  (Wait, before I get too far out here, I should probably mention that I haven't actually run the risk of being impaled on a katana.  I think.)  Although the content of each post will probably be somewhat different from the last batch of two years ago--i.e. the adventures of a gainfully employed, grown-ass man compared to some kid jacking around in a foreign metropolis for a few months--I aim to maintain the distinct quality that was characteristic of that first chapter.  You know, that rich style that made you roll your eyes so hard they nearly departed from your skull in a brisk fashion, as if they were booking it from the theater after the first five minutes of The Last Airbender.  This shouldn't be difficult, though; as I intend to convey to you, dear reader, my excitement at being in Japan has hardly diminished for having already been here once before.  Once again, I'd like to thank you for stopping by; the thought of you (yes, you) curled up by your laptop late at night when you need to get up in the morning to go to class or work/buy kolaches before they close/water your neighbor's plants serves as a more stimulating muse than I've ever had.  So, I'd like to invite you to wade onward and enjoy this account of my experiences in and observations about Japan, along with the occasional dick joke, cuss word, and esoteric reference swirled in for good measure.

So.  I've already been in Japan since the end of July, which means I've already experienced a lot of things and a lot of stuff.  For the sake of both brevity and clarity, I'll unfortunately be unable to give as much attention to each individual item as I should like to, but that's what I get for being lazy as shit.  Let's rewind to five weeks ago.  (Click.  …That's the sound of me rewinding.  The tape.  Five weeks back.  Okay.)  So I left outta Houston, where I fuelled up on good beer and tex-mex for the long haul, had my first trans-Pacific flight, and landed in Tokyo to get oriented and shit.  Orientation was, in a word, pretty fuckin' rad.  I think JET hires up to age 35, but my incoming class was overwhelmingly recent college graduates.  Predictably, when you stick a bunch of kids who have at least one shared major interest and are already mega pumped to be in Japan (many for the very first time) in one of the busiest parts of Tokyo, the resulting critical mass of sheer excitement would produce enough energy to power a small eastern European country for a year.  And that's exactly what it was like for me, returning to Japan and meeting tons of really cool people.  Surely that's what they had in mind when they put "euphoria" in the dictionary.  I probably could've taken a bullet and shaken it off with a smile on my face.  I roomed with two of the guys who I had flown in with, Lance and Jose; we spent much time after each day's workshops bossing around town like the foreigners we were and eating ramen that was waaayyyy too spicy.  And once we finally met up with the other kids who were placed in the same prefecture--well, that is when the shit got real.

At this point I want to introduce to the plot two key members of the cast, Carly and Amanda.  Well before I showed up, we had already known that we were all going to be living in the same apartment building together and doing a lot of overlapping professionally; so I knew that a mission-critical objective was to deceive them into thinking that I'm not a complete jackass for as long as possible.  I think at this point I've already abandoned the charade.  When our prefecture gathered, Carly was the first one I met.  Recognizing her from the Facebooks,  I politely informed her that I was the dude she was going to be living with.  She responded by giving me a look that said, "Great!  The fuck are you?"  See, I had cleverly disguised myself by getting a close shave and haircut right before I left, hence her confusion.  That was quickly resolved, and then Amanda came in.  Literally the first thing she said was, "You guys, we're going to become best friends!"  This was a fortuitous event; I was so elated I was going to say that myself.   We went out a couple of times as a prefecture too, including the obligatory inaugural karaoke visit.  (Incidentally, I don't think I've ever been to karaoke without "Bad Romance" coming up.)  I should mention that going out in urban Japan is insane; take the sum total of all the bright lights and the sound of any major city's downtown, compact it down, then liberally squeeze the resulting product into cramped blocks and tiny streets.  You would imagine that the zoning board was aiming to inflict as much sensory overload as possible.  In short, the profusion of neon signs, the loud yells of hawkers standing in the road, and the pervasively wafting scent of noodle shops and conveyor-belt sushi restaurants combined to make a not-so-gentle reminder that I had, in fact, wound up in Japan once again.

 

We also learned some useful stuff during the workshops, but that's boring.  What wasn't boring, however, was the day we left for our town, Gosen.  I'll have a bit to say about the town later, but for now, just keep in mind that Gosen is a small, mostly rural town in Niigata prefecture, about three hours to the northwest of Tokyo by bullet train.  We showed up around lunchtime at the Niigata City train station (Niigata City being about a half hour from Gosen) and were greeted by three members of the Gosen Board of Education:  Kumakura-san, the section head; Nakahara-san, who coordinates with the school we teach at; and Yoshida-san, our supervisor whose main duty, in a nutshell, is to make sure we three don't die.  Also present was Yamagiwa-san, who was brought on to interpret.  However, we soon made it clear that we were equipped with some Japanese ability, much to the relief of everyone present; Yamagiwa-san joked that she would be fired.  I wasn't feeling super confident in my Japanese at that point, but I was really gratified that they had such a positive reaction.  I guess it was like, one, I was glad to be accepted, and two, it was great to see that my years of study were beginning to pay off in a really concrete way.  I would later find out that all but one of our predecessors spoke no Japanese at all, which is part of the reason why they chose kids who had some command of the language.  We had a bite at a sushi place--a heavenly welcome back to Japan--and were taken to the Board of Education office.  At this point we received our first practical test of Japanese--the self-introduction.  That day marked the first of approximately several million times that we've all been compelled to state such information about ourselves as our name, age, home country, and other trivia.  The bad news is, I've become immensely bored with myself as a person; however, blowing away coworkers with my (limited) ability to use Japanese is truly the best fun.  That, my friends, will never get old.  Later that night, we attended an important office function:  the enkai, or party.  Yes, a critical component of Japanese office culture is periodical enkai, where office workers meet at an izakaya (or Japanese pub) to eat, socialize, blow off steam, and drink enough beer to float an aircraft carrier.  In spite of our exhaustion and somewhat bewildered by our drop feet-first into life here, it was great to hang out and have a more personal connection with our coworkers from day one.  After walking home (the pub being close by), we returned to our new apartments and I gratefully crashed, tired, full of delicious Japanese food, and at least a little tipsy.  If not for the jetlag, that trifecta of circumstances would've put me in the best sleep of my life.  Would that we could all go to bed every night like that, huh?

 

From the next day on, we were on the clock at the BoE.  Fortunately for us that meant running around and doing all the necessary shit:  Getting our phones, a health examination--wherein they attached clamps and diodes to me and I legit thought they were going to shock the fuck out of me--and filling out all sorts of fun paperwork that I understood about 90% of the time.  (Maybe 70%.)  This exciting business was broken up in a few different ways.  On what was literally our second day of work, we met the mayor and had our first (yes, one of a couple) interview with the newspaper.  One day, Kumakura-san took us inside and out of Gosen; we got to scope out the gorgeous countryside that encompasses our small town, and we even checked out a temple way up in the woods.  Beyond that, the weekends have been super duper packed thus far.  I've danced in traditional festivals, been out camping on the beach at a taiko concert, shot off gnarly Japanese fireworks at my coworker's barbecue, partied in the city and elsewhere with fellow JETs old and new, relaxed in hot springs, made at least one new Japanese bff…the shit goes on and on and on.

But alas!  Alas, dear reader, I've come upon a major conundrum.  Were I to try and describe all these zany happenings at length, this single post would grow large enough to exert a powerful gravitational field, accrue matter, turn into a white dwarf, and finally (once its mass had surpassed 1.4 solar masses) collapse into a black hole.  Now, I've been called a dick before, but far be it from me to jeopardize the fate of the planet.  In the future, I plan to reference this past month where appropriate, but for now I'll draw this latest installment to a close.  But that was a pretty exciting list up there, right?  What a fucking tease.

 

NEXT TIME:  Gonna be talking about last week and this week, wherein I actually start teaching and shit!