November

I know it's been a while, and I'm sure that all (seven) of my avid readers are just quivering with anticipation for some gripping stories and penetrating insights into Japanese life, but that's just not gonna happen today. For the last two months or so I've just been working too much. And really, I didn't get as much out of it as I would have hoped.

I mean, I did get slightly more money. But after taking into account my increased travel, cleaning, and food costs, the extra pay for the first month worked out to be about enough for a trip to the movies. Point of fact, I didn't get anything that had I expected out of the last couple months. For example, I never expected to learn how many times you can wear the same shirt before it really starts to get offensive because you don't have any time to do laundry or go to the cleaners.

And I did learn a few things about teaching. For example, teenagers tend to be self-concious to the point becoming ridiculous no matter what country they're in. And encouraging them to quit being "pitiful, crying little worms" is kinda like telling all those jerks on the Saikyo train to stop pressing up against my butt during rush hour: the one person you catch stammers and acts contrite while everyone else who you aren't making direct eye contact with keeps doing the same damn thing.

Did I mention that to work at the Junior high schools in the morning and the conversation schools at night I have to take the Saikyo trains? The Saikyo trains run from central Saitama (where there tend to be more houses with families) to western Tokyo (where there tend to be more businesses, offices, shops and restaurants). They are somewhat infamous for being really really crowded during rush hour, and for having a fairly high incidence of "Chikan" activity. (That'd be guys taking the opportunity to grope unwilling people in public). I know there's a difference in acceptable personal space needs from country to country, but I never imagined that less than 2mm was acceptable between strangers anywhere. At least, anywhere that didn't involve tucking money into someone else's underwear.

But I digress. The point is, my only real expectation was not met at all. For some daft reason, I expected to feel satisfied in some way after working hard. Like, maybe I'd be financially satisfied (nope), or more content with my work progress (nuh-uh) or social situation (0 for 3 there, hotshot) or something. In fact, the only halfway satifying thing I learned last month almost cost me my night job.

Maybe it has to do with the place I work. I mean, maybe it's because I'm working for companies owned by foreigners who came here seven years too late wanting to get rich off the bubble economy, and they're still under the impression that if they can wring every last drop of productivity from each of their assets then they'll be able to afford all those 1988 Japanese luxuries like $5000 per diem expense accounts, sushi dinners served by naked women and of course, Universal Studios and 35% of the real estate in metropolitan Los Angeles.

Or maybe it's because I'm still not clear on some of those subtle societal differences. Like why an assistant teacher at a junior high shouldn't get mad just because he's treated (socially and contractually) in the same way as an overhead projector leased to the school. Or why an office lady feels no qualms at all about telling you that the before her trip to Canada she was really worried about being so constipated that "for four days, [she] can't poop," but was relieved to recieve an enema from her doctor and the news that "Canada's medical system is good enough" that if she had another problem while on vacation she'd be able to get an enema in Vancouver too. Or maybe its...

Ah, the hell with it. Here's a few links to some weird-ass Japanese stuff. Imagine the society that produces it and try to understand that I feel wonder, confusion, frustration and affection for 'em.

October Revolution

This has been an odd month. As you may (or may not) know, I've started working at a junior high school. So five days a week I try to help 13-15 year olds work on their English. And, because Japanese companies don't pay you until the first monthly payday AFTER you've completed a month of work, I've continued to work at the shitty conversation school I was at before.
But there can be no important change without discomfort, yeah? And this has been a fairly important time for changing. I've changed my primary place of employment, my sleeping habits, my spending habits, my eating habits, the amount of time I spend on the train... It's been a pretty odd month.

And the most important change has been the least drastic one. Perhaps because of my relative isolation, the change in my feeling about that isolation has be been the strongest. Honestly, some days I can feel psychosis radiating off of me in waves. Unstoppable cascades of thought that would be impolite at best and immoral, indecent, blasphemous, treasonous and in plain bad taste at worst. It honestly surprises me that the one-on-one adult students can't sense this current of filth and madness that's running just beneath the banter about current movies and their plans for their next vacation.

Of course, in all fairness, they probably have other things on their minds than the mental state of the English conversation source they've rented for the hour. I mean, they have lives too, right?

But they're not the one's writing this blog, I am. So let's get the focus back where it belongs: on me.

I had a birthday recently. And maybe it's a sign of maturity (or impending adulthood...) that this year was remarkable for not being anything other than a pain in the ass. It wasn't my first year to buy smokes, porn, booze, guns, to rent cars or to be living in another country. It wasn't like I was expecting a great present, a big party, or some great feeling of maturity and wisdom.

Really, what this change felt like was an entirely arbitrary marking of time, with no deeper meaning. I'm older, but no wiser, richer,. stronger or healthier. Nothing's changed except one number I have to remember. Last year I might have said I'm one year closer to being dead, but I get the feeling that it's not gonna be old age that does me in, and it won't be something I can count towards.

But the point of this was supposed to be revolution, yes? Change. Removal of the old standards. The wholesale slaughter of the innnocents claimed as representatives of the old order in the name of progress. Let the streets of my mind flow with the blood of the counter-revolutionaries! This will change our mind for the better! Viva!

It took me ten years, but I finally think I got it...

This last month has been a bit of a pain in the butt. Not just because I lost my wallet. Which was inconvenient, but not nearly as bad as trying to get a new ATM card. And not just because the girl I thought was interested in me was just trying to score some free English lessons for her friend.

Maybe the worst part was dealing with the company that leases my services to the Saitama prefecture board of education. As it turns out, despite the efforts, attitudes and responses of everyone at the school I've been at, it turns out that I'm not actually a part of the school community.

Since I was encouraged take part in student life, I'd been staying after to help some of the students get read for their English recitation at the school festival that was held this Saturday. For those of you who didn't attend a Japanese Jr. High, every semester or so they'll have a "bunkasai," which roughly translates as a "cultural festival." The students (and a few of the more... confident teachers) will perform or present some kind of fine-art-type effort. There's a lot of organized choral-type singing, speeches and recitations, a few dance routines and pop song-quartets, and some obligatory mugging from whatever team has the most popular students.

Oh yeah, and no air conditioning in a packed gymnasium from 8 am to 4 pm.

Needless to say, this whole affair is a lot of work. The students and teachers really bust their butts for this thing. And since it runs all day on Saturday, the school takes a day off the following Monday.

Now I was looking forward to getting that Monday off, since I needed to go to the bank, the post office and the police station. All fine institutions that only offer the services I needed most between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM. But when I finally was able to get in touch with the helpful young Australian at my company to ask about whether or not I should send my pay sheet in on Monday or Tuesday, she informed me that I was due to meet the principal at a new school on Monday, and couldn't figure out why I hadn't answered any of the messages she'd left on my cell phone.

Explaining both my desire to be at the cultural festival to see these kids show off the stuff they (and I) had been working on for the last month, and my predicament and subsequent need for some time off on a weekday, she very carefully considered the facts, and said she'd talk to her boss, and then call me back after 5:00. Which would be after the school switchboard was shut down, and before I had retrieved that all-important cell phone.

It took some doing to get her to see the failure of that plan to be successful, especially given the language barrier.

"Wait, you said she's from Australia, right? Aren't you both native English speakers?"

That's an excellent observation. But I've never been any good at communicating with a dumbass.

After some effort, she finally got an official party line from her boss (the half-Japanese Irishman) which stated that

although ALTs are encouraged to participate in school life, they are, by contractual definition, not members of the community of an individual school. Therefore, any attendance or participation in any extra-curricular school activity is at their own initiative, and will not be eligible for compensation, in terms of cash or time off.

I knew those cheapjack skinflints weren't gonna cover my transportation, but after being told reminded that I was essentially equivalent to any other piece of equipment that had been leased to the school, I was in a less than genki mood.

Come on. Am I really supposed to believe that they expect all the ALTs to try and do their jobs well without going to the damn festivals?

And then I finally realized what I've been struggling to understand for all these years: I've had so many jobs that I hated, and I never understood why I've had this inability to be a happy worker bee. What was the reason? What was the common thread?

It's not that I hate work.

I hate working for other people.



This may be the beginning of wisdom.

[expletive] TOKYO-MITSUBISHI BANK IN THE [expletive] WITH A BIG RUBBER [expletive]!

I hadda cancel my bank card on account of losing my wallet a couple weeks ago. The fuckers at the bank very kindly cancelled my card immediately, then told me I couldn't get a new card without a new Gaijin card, which took 2 weeks, and that I hadda go to a bank during regular banking hours: 8:40AM to 2:00PM, not including any holidays.

Of course, the helpful dumbass I talked to on the phone assured me that I could get money as long as I got to the bank by 5:00

Did I mention I work from 8:00AM to 4:00PM? And that the nearest branch is 41 minutes away?

Or that everything except the card-only ATMs was sealed shut at 2:00?

I reiterate:

[expletive] TOKYO-MITSUBISHI BANK IN THE [expletive] WITH A BIG RUBBER [expletive], THEN BREAK IT OFF AND BEAT THEM WITH WHAT'S LEFT.

The Sorry State of Public Education

-OR-

They'll let anyone teach ANYthing, won't they?

I'm just an assistant teacher. As a foreigner trying to work with a limited second-language capacity, my abilities are, obviously suspect. For example, I've been presumed incapable of pulling weeds and wiping windows.

But I am capable, appearantly, of assisting with remedial 6th grade algebra in Japanese.

Not too shabby for a guy who flunked Algebra once and Japanese twice.

I been busier than a [insert cutesy-poo metaphor here]

Yeah, so I got a new job a couple of weeks ago. (For those of you just joining us, ever since I moved from Fukui in February, I've been juggling a couple of part-time jobs to cover my beer, rent and ramen expenses. I tend to get new jobs fairly regularly...) I'm now an assistant English teacher at a Junior High School.

On the one hand, the job is a lot of fun. The pay's not great, and the commute is a 90-minute pain in the ass that involves changing trains twice and walking for 15 minutes at each end. But the students are generally a lot of fun. For some reason, learning a 2nd language here is viewed as kind of fun. (Why the hell wasn't my experience like that. After 5 years of unwilling Spanish, all I can really recall is how to ask where the bathroom is and a couple of insults.) Hell, even the lunches aren't bad. And they're cheap, too.

There's something oddly thrilling about hearing a class of students correctly use something they've learned from you. Maybe it's a little thing, but hearing someone say "I'm OK, how you been?" instead of "ai-mu fai-nu an-do-yu?" is satisfying. And I gotta be honest, it's kind of a kick to have people be interested in me, rather than scared or condescending, just because I'm different from them. And kids are pretty good for that.

Of course, since I am working for a Japanese company that is leasing my services to the board of education, I'm not actually going to get paid until almost two months after my first day. It's kind of nice after you leave a job, cause you get that month's pay to travel or pay your taxes or try to live while you look for another job. But at first it kind of sucks. Which is why I had to continue working at the conversation school at night.

I'm tired. but I'm working. And I'm skilled, but I'm underpaid.
So, uh, I guess all I need is a misunderstanding about the meaning of "irony" and I can be an Alanis Morisette song.

(Japan does bad things to your sense of what pop culture is wretched and what's acceptable...)

This WILL be used as evidence against me, I'm just not sure when

Go ahead, quote bits from this post out of context. It'll sound damning, but I gotta tell you: There's a lot of really great perks to working in a junior high school. Let's forego the obvious monetary rewards. (Which really aren't all that rewarding. Especially once you add up transportation costs, cleaning expenses, the manditory insurance fees and the inital lo-ball-salary amount which is probablt why my company was selected by the Saitama board of education to supply foreign assistant-teachers...) And it's not like this is a really easy, convenient job to get to. I have to get up at 5:40 AM and take three different trains over 90 minutes to get there. (I could move closer to the school, assuming I had 5 months rent on hand...)

But there's something undeniably gratifying about seeing a group of 12-year olds light up simultanously because they figured out they could be understood in another language. Or seeing a silly game you made actually help a class understand how to use some new words. Or having the ability to help someone sort out the difference between "visit" and "stay."

...Or walking by and having a group of 15 year old girls say "a-ra-ra, atarashii sensei was kakoii wa yo!"

Seriously. I'm gonna behave. They trust me, so I gotta make good. And besides, I'm not a creepy degenerate.

Not in that way, anyhow.

Wait a sec, didn't his country INVENT the damn language?

I didn't have a student for one class tonight, so I got to listen to a British dumbass fumble his way through a countable/uncountable lesson.
Countable and uncountable are the two classes of nouns that are defined by whether or not they take a quantifier.

For example: I'll have a BOWL OF soup (soup is uncountable).
There are FIVE apples on the desk (apples are countable).

Generally, uncountables are liquids (beer), made up of many small pieces (salad, rice), or are words of foreign origin (curry). Which is why you can count pigs and cows (old English words), but not pork or beef (originally French words.) This is really tough to teach people whose native language doesen't even have a plural form for most nouns.

And as far as this guy's lesson went, I don't know which was worse: his crap explanations, his piss poor examples (he asked a Japanese person to name some foods, then tried to explain why sushi, soba and sukiyaki are all uncontable, then tried to gloss over the "I'll have a salad and 3 beers" dilemma, And finally he misprounced "Cabernet Sauvignon" and MIS-corrected the student who was closer with his katakana-pronunciation.

Keee-rist. They'll let anyone be a teacher.

Why I Hate My Japanese Textbook:

An exerpt from Japanese For Busy People:

"gojikan gurai"
Do not confuse with "goji gurai" which expresses an approximate specific time."

It took me 15 minutes to figure out they meant the difference between
"about 5 hours long" and "about 5 o'clock."

C'mon, "an approximate specific time?" How the hell can a language textbook company have not one editor on staff who could catch that? Bunch of stupid bastards.

I mean "aitsu-ra, bakamono-tachi."

What Have We Learned?

Try to imagine a series of TV programs for learning how to do stuff. Do you remember that old show with Bob Ross on PBS? The one where he taught you how to paint happy little trees? Imagine a show with some sincere, knowledgeable, slightly creepy guy telling you how to avoid the most common mistakes of whatever hobby you're trying to pick up.

Now imagine one for business English. And one for advanced business English. And one for British Football English. And one for conversational English. And one for German, Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean and Mandarin Chinese.

Now imagine one for cooking. And making apartment furnishings from stuff you got at the 99 cent store. And one for caring for your pet hedgehog. And one for making miniature aquarium diaramas. And one for making paper airplanes. And one for golf. And one for swimming.

And one for walking in high heels.

Hey, look at that. We've just covered most of the offerings on NHK-E, the educational channel offered by Nippon Hoosoo Kyoukai (Japan Broadcasting Corporation). The Japanese government pays to produce TV programs that teach people how to waltz. Or say "Where's the toilet?" to a guy from Hamburg. Or how to walk in mules and look sexy without making that fpap-fpap-fpap sound.

What... you want some kind of comment that explains the significance of this? It's clearly a representation of some sort that shows what the government thinks the average person with enough free time wants to know, but how the hell can you sum up everything that implies? I'm putting together a jigsaw puzzle with no picture, no border, and no end.