School Snippets

A number of people have been asking me how the whole teaching/school thing is going, and I realized I’ve mentioned very little about it on here. Mostly, that’s because I have only been visiting the schools for four days, and that doesn’t seem like enough experience to base any sweeping statements on. That being said, in those four days I have managed to happen upon some salient moments, so I can pass those on.

So, in chronological order…

Elementary / Shoogako

You haven’t properly lived until you’ve experienced the unmitigated wonder of a round little first grader in chef’s hat and apron serving lunch to you and his classmates—one concentrated ladleful at a time.

High School / Koko

One of the girls in my third-year class looks familiar, and, to make matters worse, she keeps looking at me and laughing behind her hand. Eventually, question and answer period roles around, and—through my JTE’s translation—she asks me if I remembered her from the Kombini in town—the ONLY Kombini in town.

And the only thing going through my mind is “oh crap. Did I buy beer from one of my students?”

Middle School / Chyugako (blogger ate the formatting, and I'm too lazy to try to fix it, so I apologize)

Junior High School kids
Playing badminton
with the ferocity of Tennis Pros.

Me, I thought it was a good idea to play with them.

And

Just like when I agreed to join an Ultimate Frisbee team,

back before I’d ever properly played the game

and I still wondered why Overly Athletic Ally was so into it,

when, already tired from running the length of the field,

direction of play switched on me,

and I had to run all the way back.

Just like then,

I realize I have severely underestimated

the potential intensity of this game—

nay

—this Sport

And all I have to look forward to today
is having my ass handed to me

by a fourteen-year-old

girl.

Modern Myths: Maguro

I just got back from Sapporo orientation (which was awesome, and I think Sapporo may just be in the running to become Japanese Toronto), and I'm freaking out about preparing for my first day with the students tomorrow. Thus, to fill the void and lighten it up after that whole uniform thing, here are some daylight photos of my town, and below you'll find something a little wackier. It's what happens when the little seeds of ideas are allowed to grow rank and gross in nature within the confines of my mind.

RISE, tuna. RISE!

While learning about Japanese cuisine from Sonomi and her mother Didi, we got on the topic of how the growing global fascination with Japanese sushi is causing world stocks of bluefin tuna (maguro) to dwindle dangerously. Sonomi mentioned that, despite being aware of the declining population, major Japanese corporations in the fishery business have tried remarkably little to reenergize the population. Quite the opposite, actually, as she claimed that these companies are aiming to capitalize on this increasing scarcity.

She tells of Japanese fish corporations that have researched and developed space-aged cryogenic technology for the sole purpose of amassing huge reserves of bluefin tuna. Like oil tycoons, they seem to be hoarding these stock piles in vast, subterranean, subzero vaults for the days when the price-per-kilo of tuna swings and skyrockets as wildly as the price of oil is currently doing on world markets.

I picture massive, underground caverns, carved out to house machinery and storage vaults. With all the frost across the surfaces and dry-ice-fog gliding along the ground, they look like nothing so much as Mr. Freeze’s lair from Adam-West-era Batman. Walking the narrow aisles between storeys-tall vaults is the CEO-cum-Fish-Baron of TRANSWORLD SAKANAKORP Ltd.

Around him, state of the art robots are abuzz, preparing, storing, and monitoring his icy hoard. At the top of the cavernous hall, he sits down at a luxurious table that overlooks all the serenely-humming freezers, and his RoboButlers bring him martini glasses brimming with tuna roe and plates piled high with bluefin sashimi. He adjusts his monocle and runs his hand over a patchy, swarthy beard before falling to the feast, pouring the slippery roe down his throat with his left hand while cramming the sashimi into his mouth with his right. Mouth full, looking out over his creation, he cackles in triumph.

And then one of the half-chewed pieces of fish catches, and he chokes. He claws at his throat with frantic hands, eyes bulging as he gesticulates to the RoboButlers. The RoboButlers, for their part, do nothing but stare on with cold, blue, LED eyes. Eventually, face purple and eyes bloodshot, he collapses, and the last of his life flows from him.

But the RoboButlers keep butling, with silicone minds and cold fusion hearts, and the secret subterranean vaults remain secret and remain subterranean through an age of the world. The tuna stocks dwindle, as predicted, and the oil stocks dwindle along side them, and, before long, the remains of the race of man make plans to leave their depleted planet. They amass a fleet of ships, glittering and advanced, but a bug in a defense protocol interprets the first launches as a nuclear first strike. Following its hardcoded subroutines, the protocol empties the salvoes of three continents, triggering automated retaliatory strikes from the salvoes of two more.

The resulting nuclear firestorm triggers the volcanoes of the nation once known as Japan, and the heat and seismic activity crack open the long-buried and forgotten bluefin tuna vaults. And, bathed in the combination of blistering heat and inescapable radiation, the tuna were resurrected and they were changed. As they stumbled out of those vaults to claim their world—walking on webbed, scaled feet, with bulging eyes blinking at the tang-orange sky—none that had known these creatures in their original form would have recognized the upright, reanimated monstrosities that they now were:

Zombie Tuna inheriting the Earth!

Illustration contributed by Sonomi Tanaka.

The Uniform

This little bit of contemplation is for Sarfaraz because he gets up to far more social commentary in his blog than I do, and I should really try to keep up!

So last month I had to go buy a tracksuit.

And I feel dirtier for it.

I have often sworn that I will never wear trackpants. I can’t quite explain it, but I find there is something unseemly about them. Perhaps I’ve just had my eyes scoured by too many sketchy men taking advantage of baggy trousers.

Regardless, apparently I need to get over it as tracksuits are a requirement in Japan.

Michael, the outgoing JET in Furubira/my predecessor and guru for all things Furubira-related had been getting me prepared for what it was going to be like for me over in Japan. One of the things we went over most recently was the dress code for my various workplaces. Since Furubira’s such a small town, I’m the only foreigner game in town and I’ll be working at the elementary, junior high, and high schools. And, unlike in North America where a teacher is pretty much good in business casual attire no matter what school they work in, in Japan the school very much dictates the wardrobe.

At the high school, Michael explained, everyone dresses very formally, and men are required to wear dress pants, a dress shirt, and a tie. As annoying as that may be, I had been previously informed that the Japanese view high schools as formal environments and that I should be so lucky as to get away with anything short of a full-on suit and tie.

At the elementary school, he described the environment as more informal and mentioned that I would be spending a lot of my day playing with the kids, so it was acceptable to wear a tracksuit. Tracksuit or not, that made sense.

With the junior high school/middle school being the step between elementary and high school, and being the place where Japanese students started wearing school uniforms for the first time, I expected it to be kind of a business-casual setting. And I was right, as Michael told me that the ideal wardrobe for the junior high school was dress pants and a button-up shirt with a collar.

“Or,” he said “you can just wear a tracksuit.”

I laughed, and explained that, from my perspective, a tracksuit was pretty much as far as one could get from business casual attire. I mean, hell, even on casual Fridays at my old employer, I would have gotten a fair few side-long glances, if not an out-and-out thinly-disguised, all-call email had I elected to show up in a tracksuit. Michael conceded that it did seem a little strange, but I accepted the advice, and I dutifully went out and bought my first track suit (shudder).

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Japanese society is focused on ceremony, formality, and handling pretty much every interaction in a manner that was officially sanctioned. Whether I’m going into a tiny grocery store or a big-box kombini, every single clerk greets me in the exact same fashion, and when I leave they all say the exact same thing to me. Every time the door to the store opens, they robotically spout the exact same thing, even when they are in the middle of an interaction with another customer. In a society that is this formal, how could something as informal as a tracksuit be on the same level as business casual attire?

Then I got it.

Like the suit and tie of the Japanese salaryman, and the polyester polo-shirt-and-visor numbers of Japanese fast food workers, the tracksuit was just another uniform. It didn’t matter that you were wearing a tracksuit, it mattered that everyone was wearing tracksuits. It mattered that you weren’t wearing something else.

The Japanese enjoy the uniform.

But should that “uniform” be a noun or an adjective? Is it the matching clothes or the elimination of differences—better expressed as uniformity—that the Japanese appreciate?

Indeed, uniformity would serve The Collective Mind/Cohesive Social Unit that seems to pressure and dominate Japanese society. The uniform erases the individual, as well as all of the inconsistencies and unpredictabilities that go along with it. Just as the uniform of cotton and polyester makes one comfortable knowing who is the one serving and who is the one being served, so, too, can uniformity provide us with a degree of tempting comfort. With Uniformity, there is no question as to who is leading and who is following. In the Uniformity of the collective, one is comforted by numbers and insulated from responsibility.

So, you can say what you like about how all the people in western society are drones, and how even individualism has been commodified and mass-marketed, but the fact remains that I can freely go swimming in a public place in Canada without worrying about bearing my tattoos. However, here in Japan, tattoos have been assigned to the uniform of the Yakuza, regardless of how archaic an association that may be. And, being part of this less-than-desirable uniform, there are certain places in Japan that people with tattoos are not allowed to go. One example would be the hotel we stayed at in Tokyo (the swanky Keio Plaza), where I was told that if I wanted to use the free, roof-top pool, I would have to rent a wetshirt for the equivalent of about $12 Canadian to cover my tattoos.

Another, better example is the Japanese Onsen or hotsprings/communal baths. The onsen, I’ve been told, is one of the single greatest Things Japanese to experience over here. I haven’t been yet, and I intend to go, but that plan is accompanied by a certain amount of trepidation on my part because of my tattoos. I mean, I’m luckier than most because my tattoos are usually concealed, and I could likely get into the onsen without the proprietors knowing, but I’ve been informed that they will have no problem coming and hauling me out of the communal hottub at any moment and telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I should leave.

This is because, in Japan, even when you’re bare-ass naked you are still wearing a uniform—or rather your body is being evaluated against the ideal of The Uniform. To say nothing of the overly-hyped western physiological differences that would go against the uniform, the ideal of the uniform is clear skin (to use a wince-inducing cliché: a blank canvas) and, should you have had the audacity—the individualistic GALL to accessorize your skin, to create the birthmarks that you wanted but were never born with, then, my friend, you are an aberration and an abomination.

The Japanese would claim the yakuza link for this pejorative stance. The yakuza are the only people in Japanese society who have tattoos, and the yakuza are not allowed in onsen. But, as a former JET explained in his rather rude, last-ditch tattoo defense, “Yakuza janai! Gaijin desho?!” I’m clearly not a member of the Japanese mafia. I’m clearly a foreigner. The little pictures I have on my back pale in comparison to the full-shirt irezumi of the yakuza, and trying to equate the two—trying to confuse whitey ‘ol me with Japanese-only, nine-fingered mobsters—is a thin smokescreen over what is actually going on: I am being denied because I do not adhere to the Uniform.

Four Points (aka: Here there be madness brewing...)

Thanks to far too much encouragement from Mark and Lindsay, who are also sequestered on Japan's north island of Hokkaido, I've come up with a dastardly plan.

The Japanese Government has seen fit to provide us with three back-to-back holidays in September (21, 22, 23), and my supervisor mentioned that he pretty much assumed I would be taking the 24th and 25th (WOO! Birthday!) off. So, kids, if you do the math, that adds up to NINE DAYS STRAIGHT off from work.

Not being one to waste such an opportunity in a foreign land, and with only a month's notice to plan something epic (read: not enough notice to plan a junket down to Honshu/Kyushu/Shikoku), I devised the FOUR POINTS Hokkaido tour!

What does that mean, you ask? Well, simply put, we're going to jump in a car and circumnavigate the massive northern island of Hokkaido in the mother of all roadtrips. This had been a loose dream of mine for a month or so, but Mark was the one who mentioned that it would likely be possible in nine days. If I can make it work, here's what it looks like on a map.

View Larger Map

Or, because that sucks, here's a picture:

And, according to google, that would equate to just under 2,000km and 48 hours of driving.

Now I just need to sit back and keep my fingers crossed that Mark and Lindsay's supervisors will greenlight them taking the 24th and 25th off. Sonomi's in for it, too, though she knows she can't get the full nine days off. Worst case scenario (if they only get the five days off), we'll still do something mad like drive from Hakodate at the south tip of Hokkaido to Wakkanai at the north tip along the coast of the Sea of Japan.

Wish us luck!

What our apartment does when we're not around...

The screen fairy visited me again today while I was at work.

When I came home for lunch today, after being dutifully sent on my way from work by the Furubira noontime air raid siren, I thought I was hallucinating when I opened the window over my laptop and found a screen in it. I was pretty sure there hadn’t been a screen there before, but with all the multitude of sliding panels that make up Japanese windows, I couldn’t be certain that I hadn’t simply missed the screen in all my sliding about.

However, when I came home from work at the end of the day and found two sliding screens in the massive windows of my sun room, I knew for absolute certain that something was afoot.

WITNESS!

Fortunate for my paranoia, as I was standing before these new screens, looking part perplexed and part creeped out, a kindly face smiled up at me from the street below and gave a patented Japanese wavebow. I thanked him from above in my pidgen Nihongo, then rushed down to introduce myself and thank him properly with some omiyage from The Great White North.

His name was Kurokawa-san, and he was the somewhat gaunt, somewhat sunripened figure who I’d often seen labouring away in the workshop below my apartment. I’ll be sure to impart his life story to you once we’ve both had beer enough to improve my Japanese or his English.

The fact that he popped in some screens for me, without me having to ask him, is just another one of the reasons I’m so happy with my apartment. Though I pay far more for it than most of the other JETs who were sent to the Cold White North of Japan (meaning, I pay 50,000 Yen [500 Canadian beaver pelts] and most of them pay nothing, plus get a car, a bike, and anything else their heart desires), I can’t exactly complain about my accommodations. So, without further ado, here they are:

My bedroom, complete with Tatami mats

I seriously think I may need to marry these mats so I can take them with me when I leave.

My western bed. For all my talk of being hardcore and sleeping on the floor, I was VERY happy to see it when I showed up here my first night.

I can't explain how fun it is to be sleeping in this room. All Zen. All the time.

There's a tiny window at the end of my hall. I can't explain it, but it feels right.

The toilet's got its own room and its own slippers. It is also the only room in the house that you step down from the level of the hall to use.

For all my veneration of my tatami bedroom, I've relegated this smaller tatami room to the role of closet/storage.

Shower room! You could have a dance party in here...but I'm not sure if that would be good naked or bad naked.

Meet HAL 11,000: My Japanese Robot Light. He anticipates my every need by turning on as I approach and off as I depart. He even tries to show up other lights by brightening when they're on.

The hallway in my place is actually lower than the floors of all the other rooms, so you have to step up to enter the rooms...except for the toilet. You step down to use the toilet.

Kitchen + Bathroom Vanity - Oven = Meh, but it will do.

Entranceway. Notice the awesome slidiness and the lack of a real lock. I've had friends leave windows and doors unlocked for days at a time without having anything walk from their apartment.

My living room and sunroom.

Of Time Travel on the Shakkotan Peninsula

This was inspired by Amanda when, upon asking her how the painting of her new house had gone, she reminded me it had been less than a week since last I’d seen her, and the painters were still very much hard at work.

My god; you're right. It’s only been a week.

It's a strange thing, but with all the change in my life over the last week, it kind of feels like I've lived lifetimes in the interim. The idea that exactly a week ago I was finishing up my farewell dinner with my family and heading back to my mom's place to do the very last of my packing seems so incongruous as to be fictional.

That I could have spent 17 hours on a plane (only 13 of them actually in flight); that I could have lost 12 hours somewhere between Saturday and Sunday--somewhere between Toronto and Tokyo in a never-ending day; that I could have spent three nights in Tokyo and met all the people that I did, that I could have flown to Sapporo, met my new supervisor, and come all the way out here to Furubira to get settled in my monster apartment and work two days at the Board of Education...

That all this could have transpired over the span of a week is a feat of science fiction. Time travel or quantum singularities or boogeymen or something along those lines.

If a week could feel so very long, if it could be filled with so much change and growth and difference, what will I be like at the end of next week? What huge and remarkable things will I have accomplished? How will I have grown and changed? Weeks like this make me wonder if I couldn't be completely fluent in Japanese by this time next Saturday--if, perhaps, I will have met and become friends with everyone in this town. I mean, sure, such feats are impossible for one person to accomplish in the span of a week, but, with the way I've watched time balloon and ebb and fluctuate over the last week, I can almost convince myself that those were attainable goals.

Though, funnily enough, thinking about how one week could stretch out to become like a month gives me my first real pangs of homesickness. I wonder how I could possibly live in this place, detached from you and all of those like you who I love and need in Canada, for another 51 weeks?

HA!

Then again, when you put a number like that on it—51 weeks—it all of a sudden becomes fleeting and totally surmountable. When you do that, all of a sudden it's a countdown, and it brings out the very converse feeling: that I'm running out of time and a year will be up before I know it; that there is so very much I wish to accomplish in that year, and how could 51 weeks possibly be enough time to do so!?

Regardless of whether my time here is too short or too long, I’m here, and every so often stuff like this happens to remind me I’m in the right place at the right time:

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The Tortures of JETlag

knock

knock

BAMM!

Mark is sitting bolt upright on his bed in his suit. The scene behind him is an office-light-pixelated canvas of Tokyo night. My brain, still coming out of its REM fugue, thinks it strange that when I layed down (which feels like not five minutes ago) the sun was getting prettily low behind the buildings out our hotel window, but now it’s full on night. As Mark, who seems to be a little more with it than I, goes to the door, my foggy mind comes around enough to realize what I meant to be a short nap turned into a longer sleep, and I’m grasping frantically for anything with the time on it so I can run down my mental schedule of just how much I’ve missed.

Damn you, JET lag. I guess you do exist after all.

Fortunately it’s only 7:30 pm, and that’s not so bad. Fortunately Lindsay noticed the conspicuous absence of her co-ice-cold-north-JETs and saw fit to come check how deep a coma we’d lapsed into. Fortunately 7:30 is still early for the H-K JET do later this evening.

So, long story short, I made it to Japan…more or less in one piece.

But my usual resilience when it comes to vanquishing jet lag seems to have met its match with the whole thirteen-hour-flight thing. Or maybe the problem was the four hours before the flight when we had to sit, inactive on the tarmac as oxygen systems were rebooted, electrical systems were cycled, and pilots were switched. Or maybe I was overstimulated from having Japanese immigration screw up and grant me a three month visa instead of the intended three year visa.

Regardless of the explanation, I got painfully little sleep after arriving in Tokyo last night at about 10 pm local time, and that lack of sleep repeatedly bit me in the ass today as I tried to keep my eyes open through all of the very important JET orientation sessions.

However, I’ve now got some unintended sleep, so I figure I’ll head out with the other Hokkaido JETs and attempt to booze myself into a comfortable slumber tonight.

Wish me luck.