Sam in Japan

A Conclusion Of Sorts

2008-08-29T08:52:00.003+09:00

And so my time in Japan has come to an end.
I've enjoyed it. I've met some wonderful people, and my job allowed me to teach an assorted mix of characters. I've enjoyed the stories they have told me, whether they are hilariously funny or grimly morbid.
I have learnt much about Japanese culture. I now know that you can eat your rice whilst holding your bowl in the air. I know that you can make loud slurping sounds when you eat noodles. I know that you need to wipe your hands on a wet towel before every meal and to bow at every given moment. I know that Love Hotels can be a curious oddity and that everything is slightly different in Japan, even with the most mundane things like sleeping. Capsule Hotel anyone?
And I have finally come to the conclusion that whatever I do in Japan, I'm doing it wrong. But I know that I have received an unlimited amount of hospitality during my stay here. The big farewell bear hug from Isamu, and wet kiss from Shigeho is testament to this. But there is one thing I still don't understand: How to use bloody chop-sticks.

Final Lesson

2008-08-28T14:21:00.009+09:00

I had suspicions that Seneiji Elementary school were going to do something special for my final lesson because when I was about to leave the school after finishing my lesson last week, one of the Japanese teachers, Masayoshi, asked what my favourite Beatles song was.
I ruminated for a bit whilst trying to pick a cheerful tune because I assumed my students were going to sing a tune by the Fab Four.
I picked Day Tripper, then immediately rejected this because it was an overt drug song. I then picked Help! on account of its upbeat tune. But I aborted this choice due to its downbeat lyrics. I eventually picked Hello Goodbye - possibly the simplest song ever written.
Masayoshi wrote this down and said, "You will get a surprise next week."
It didn't take a bloody genius what he was arranging.
When my final lesson arrived, I walked into the classroom to be met by all the staff and students of the school. This was a surprise and I privately berated myself for believing Masayoshi was naive in my abilities of perception. To see all of Seneiji huddled into a room was a humbling experience and made me wished I had wiped off the toothpaste stain smeared on my t-shirt that morning.
I walked to the front of the room whilst the kids stood in rows in front of me. They all bowed and wished me a good morning. Masayoshi then made his way through the crowd whilst holding an acoustic guitar and a roll of paper. He patted my shoulder and said the students had something they wanted to sing to me. He then unfurled the paper and stuck it to the black-board. It was a lyric sheet to the song Let It Be.

This puzzled me for a moment because I picked Hello Goodbye specifically for its upbeat tune and simple lyrics. Let It Be is a nice song but it's a party-killer. I wanted something that you could tap your foot along to and get people rocking. This song, however, was about loss and tragedy.
The morose opening bars were played on the piano by Masayoshi and he signalled for the students to begin singing.
"When I find myself in times of trouble mother Mary comes to me...."
Put a gun to my head, I thought.
By the time the song was over, the kids looked depressed, the teachers looked depressed, and I looked depressed.
The song finished to a scattered applause from the teachers and me. It took a moment for Masayoshi to recover his spirit after his depressing playing on the piano, but he eventually staggered towards me and announced that the students had more surprises for me.
"Karma Police by Radiohead?" I quipped, quietly.
Masayoshi snapped his finger like a conjurer, and a line of kids formed in front of me.
One of the girls then stood one pace in front and began to thank me in English for my lessons over the past year. I thanked her and bowed. She then took out a medal made from wood which said "Goodbye Sam". I lowered myself so she could loop it over my head. Once this was completed, I inspected my medal and said, "I win gold medal for teaching at the Olympics!" I judged that the silence that accompanied this statement was because no one understood English, and not because it was a crap joke.

.

Farewell Cards

2008-08-28T14:11:00.008+09:00

As it is my last week at Terakoya, I thought it would be fitting to get my younger students to make farewell cards. I was expecting lovely, heartfelt messages combined with artful and thoughtful pictures. But kids are unpredictable creatures and the cards I received were more on the offensive side.
I wanted the kids to write "Goodbye Sam" complete with a caricature of myself on the front. Inside, I wanted them to write a message in Japanese and on the opposite page they could draw whatever they wanted.
I wandered around the room looking at their drawings of me. The results were shocking. I either looked like the Joker, my grandma, or a drag queen. All these drawings left me self-conscious about having a hair cut and my lips reduced in size at the nearest opportunity.
I wanted to rip up their work in bitter anger. There was one kid who drew me sitting on the toilet taking a crap but obviously missing my target because I had a pile of shit on my head. I asked this little-Picasso why he drew me like this. He merely replied I had a poo-head. That was a valid enough reason so I left him to continue his work.
In a different class which consisted of two girls, I had a different problem to face. The problem was that they became caustic art-critics. I drew a Japanese flag on the back of my own farewell card to myself and they both poured scorn on it. I asked what was wrong and they said the circle in the centre was the wrong shade of red. I let this unwarranted attack on my work pass, but they continued to harass me about my drawings that failed to live up to their high expectations. My drawing of a piece of sushi was too flat; my smiley sun was too round; and my drawing of a laughing mouse looked liked a grumpy elephant. I had no platform to mount a counter-attack because their drawings were brilliant. They even made me resemble someone of my own sex.

Needless Gifts

2008-08-22T22:22:00.006+09:00

Ayano and Nana are two little girls who have a passion for giving me presents. The problem is these presents are of no value to me whatsoever. As with most presents, it's the thought that counts. But I doubt whether any thought went into their minds when they give me their gifts. Their idea of a present seems to consist of grabbing the nearest object closest to them, then shoving it into my hands.
When they enter the Terakoya staff room just before their afternoon lesson, they will wave energetically at me and dart to various corners of the room, scouting for potential gifts. More often then not, they will run over to me with their hands loaded with detritus and other useless objects, unload it onto my desk, then scuttle off to another room. Past presents have included, a blunt pencil, a teddy bear with its head missing, and shredded paper they plucked from the bin. Every lesson they leave a mound of crap on my desk which I am left to clear. At first, I thought this was a quaint little character trait and would pretend that their gifts were of use to me. With the blunt pencil I curled up my top lip and balanced it on top pretending I had a dapper moustache. With the teddy bear, I pretended it was food and pretended to bite the head off with a satisfying mmmmm sound. And the shredded paper...well, I just threw it back in the bin. But after six months, I realised this could go on no longer. I think this thought occurred when they left my banana peels I had thrown away, on my desk.
"Ayano and Nana, no more presents!" I pleaded with them.
They looked sad.
"I'm sorry, but these are not presents," I said.
They told me they would give me a different kind of present next week. I had a bad feeling they were going to scrape off the bird shit from the window and give it to me.
The following week came and, true to their word, Ayano and Nana walked into the staff room and handed me an envelope.
"What's this, money? Now that's what I call a present," I mused out loud.
I opened it and discovered a few pieces of paper inside with scribbles and shapes.
"What a .....lovely...thought. What is it?" I stuttered, still trying to figure out the cryptic doodles.
"It's a game," they said in unison.
"Yeah? Looks more like someone's vomited on the paper," I said, knowing they couldn’t understand.
"Find Nana and Ayano!" they said.
On closer inspection, I realised that amongst the jungle of scribbles were little smiley faces resembling themselves. But any sense of fun with this game was forbidden because Ayano and Nana took it upon themselves to circle the faces in red, making the game defunct. But I humoured them and stroked my chin as I pretended to search intently for the smiley faces. After my faux-pain staking hunt, I thanked them for a more original present.
Buoyed by my new found positivity for their gifts, they yelled, "Next week more presents!" and left the room with a skip in their step.
I couldn't help noticing that Ayano and Nana were studying the bird shit on the window as they said this.

Birthday Surprise

2008-08-22T10:57:00.004+09:00

My students gave me a nice birthday welcome when I walked into my evening class. I had told them a week before the date of my birthday when we were doing a "When is your birthday?" introductory exercise. The students must have remembered.
As I entered, my five students stood up and shouted happy birthday at me. I was humbled by their gesture and thanked them.
Minneko, the part-time magician, shuffled to the corner of the room and started to slice pieces of cake for everyone. I was about to tuck into my tasty looking cake but Minneko ordered me to wait.

Minneko snapped her fingers and the class started to sing the Happy Birthday tune, whilst I was still dangling a piece of cake on my fork in front of my semi-opened mouth.
They finished the song and I clapped with brio. I then opened my mouth to eat the cake. I stopped when I heard Minneko shout, “Hip Hip Horay!”
These birthday protocols were all very nice but, to be honest, I just wanted to eat my bloody cake without interruptions.
".....and one for luck hip-hip hooray!" they concluded.
"Great. Lovely. Marvellous," I said, and moved the fork towards my mouth.
"Sam!" Kiomi said
"What now?!" I said irritably, the fork just millimetres from my mouth.
"What is your birthday wish?" she said with a smile
"To eat this cake," I replied, and shoved the cake into my mouth.
When we all finished our tea and cake, Minneko wanted to perform some magic and wandered over to a suitcase with brightly coloured spots on it. She cracked the case open and took out a bundle of cash and unfurled a sheet of paper with numbers 1-6 written on it. She handed me the cash.
"If your magic trick is giving me money, then it's the best thing I've ever seen," I said.
She said I might be allowed to keep the money if fate allowed it.
I didn't like the sound of that. It conjured up images of me schlepping through a perilous obstacle course involving swimming through shark infested waters, walking on hot coals and being chased by a Mayan tribe through a jungle - whilst Minneko waited at the finish line, holding the money in a fan-shape and cackling with glee.
It was more prosaic than that. She asked me to place the money on particular numbers written on a sheet. The money in my possession amounted to about £80. I put the bills on random numbers hoping it was the correct combination, according to fate.
Minneko then took out a small piece of paper with a chart written on it. She asked me, according to the chart, to replace certain bills with others, and give back particular bills to her. Eventually I was left with nothing but a 10,000 yen bill (£40). She said it was mine to keep.
I was rich! I let out a wicked laugh and pocketed the money. Before I could day-dream about what to spend it on, Minneko said, "Wait!"
I looked at her with suspicion. "What?" I said
"Fate says the money should be returned to the magician," she said, reading off her chart.
"Screw fate, this is mine!" I wanted to say. All I could do, however, was meekly laugh, and curse my bad luck and hand her back the money.
Minneko repeated this trick with the others in the class, and each trick ended in the same way as mine. No-one won anything. I questioned Minneko's judgement for magic. It's meant to spark the imagination with visual astonishments. It's not meant to leave a birthday boy bitter and blue.

Leaving Party

2008-08-19T08:54:00.009+09:00

When you leave a teaching job in Japan, your students will organize a leaving party for you. There are a mandatory rules to follow at these events, the important ones being eat like a pig and drink like a fish. I was happy to comply with these demands. My most raucous leaving party was hosted by my all-male business class who worked on the 'weapons making' facility. One member of this class, Masahi, offered to pick me up outside my apartment and drive me to a local restaurant where the party was taking place on Saturday night.
On that evening, I was in Masahi's giant Land Rover as we drove to the restaurant. He told me that some of the other members of the party had arrived early at the restaurant and were in the process of aggressively depleting the proprietor of his alcohol stock.
"They are, how you say, wibbly wobbly," Masashi said.
"Yeah, that's what we say alright," I said, to humour him.
To divert the conversation away from the reprehensible gang that was sure to meet us, I drew Masashi's attention to the ungodly amount of lanterns adorning all the houses we passed. I asked why people hung these lights outside their houses.
Masashi informed me that it was to celebrate an annual festival called Obon.
I couldn't quite hear him when he said this because we hit a bump in the road making the car bump up and down loudly.
"Obama?" I asked
"What?!" he shouted over honking horns directed at him as he continued to riskily drive over man-holes adorning the road.
"Did you say it's called Obama?"
"Yes, I said Obon. It's Obon day," he continued, above the squawking chicken coup he nearly ploughed into on an adjacent farm.
"Obama day?” I said, still failing to hear him. “I didn't know Barak Obama had a festival named after him in Japan."
"No, not Obama Day! Obon!"
"Oh."
He then told me this festival celebrated the life of a family member who had died in the last year and to commemorate the deceased a family relation will hang up a lantern outside their house.
As we sped through the rural landscape of Iida whilst the sun was setting, I counted an innumerable amount of lanterns swinging outside the houses of the town.
I playfully nudged Masashi with my elbow. "Looks as though the life expectancy in Iida is pretty bad, eh?" I said and gave a small chuckle.
He stared ahead with an expressionless face.
To break the awkward silence I asked what he did at the weekend.
"I went to my grandmother's funeral," he said.
Shit.
We eventually arrived at a small Yakiniku restaurant. I didn't need to ask Masashi if this was the restaurant we were going to because I could already hear rowdy noises from inside. Masashi and I entered the private room reserved for our party and were met with joyous cries of, "Yaaaaaaaaaaa!!!"

I was immediately offered a seat by the now ridiculously pissed members of the party.
As soon as I sat down, a huge beer jug was placed in front of me. Everyone raised their jugs and clinked each others with exaggerated swooshing motions and booming “Kampais!”
I was slugging on my jug in order to catch up with my students, but before I could make any headway, a gigantic plate of raw meat was placed in front of me.
"Eat! Drink! Eat!" a red-faced Yukinori pleaded with me.
"Make up your mind, buddy," I said.
I pointed out I wasn't in the habit of chewing on raw meat on account of wanting to live.
Yukinori looked with an askance face and picked up my plate of raw meat and threw it on a small cauldron embedded in the centre of the table. As soon as the meat hit the base of this indented groove in the table, flames shot up as if our table was directly above hell.
"What the...?!" I shouted, as I leapt back from the flames.
"Yakiniku restaurant! We cook the meat ourselves. Yummy Yummy," Yukinori said.
My students served me generous helpings of all the meat that was on offer throughout the evening. My jaw never stopped chewing or drinking making the night a feat of endurance.
After chugging down five jumbo jugs of beer and chowing on an unethical amount of meat, my stomach was beginning to make squelching sounds. I loosened my belt and made a clamorous burp.
The eldest member of the group, Tomio, leaned towards me. "Sam!! What do you think of Japanese girls?" he shouted into my ear.
"Very beautiful," I said, trying to face away from his stinking breath.
Everyone was happy with this statement and they all went "Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!"
Tomio leaned forward again. "Sam! What do you think of English girls?"
"Very beautiful."
"Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!"
The internal functions of my stomach began to disintegrate and I needed to abort immediately.
"Er, excuse me everyone. I have to go to the toilet."
"Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!"
I emerged from the toilet to find the group in a horny mood. They were comparing girls from different countries. I sat down and heard the toothless Kazahito suddenly explain the advantages and disadvantages of Thai girls to me.
"You see," he frothed, "many girls in Thailand are beautiful. But many have diseases. So I have to choose beauty or disease. It's a tough choice."
I assumed he had already made the choice judging by his foul face.
When everyone had finished their drinks we departed. My student's paid for my meal so I thanked everyone during an impromptu burping attack. They were all blitzed out of their brains so they couldn't hear me anyway.

The group loitered outside the restaurant as we waited for Hiroshi to finish his business in the toilet. He emerged with his shirt poking through his zipper. "Let's go to Karaoke!" he slured.
"Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" was the unanimous verdict to this suggestion.
The karaoke room we went to stuffy and musty but that didn't stop the high-spirits.
I was touched by the decision that every member of the group should sing in English with the aim of making me feel more at home. I thanked them for their generosity, but I was so drunk at this point that my English singing probably sounded Japanese.
It was unfortunate that the Yuua decided to kick things off with a Radiohead song.
Looking around the room whilst Yuua sang the verse: "I'm a creep/ I’m a weirdo/ What the hell am I doing here.." was like staring at a number of colourful balloons being deflated. Everyone was slumped in their chairs and staring at the floor.
Masashi snatched the microphone from the naval-gazing Yuua and decided to inject some life into the evening with the song Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
The guy was a pro. He knew every beat and warble that accompanies the song. All the other guys began to sing along with the chorus as if this was the best song they had ever heard.
At the end of this song, Masahi handed me the microphone and it was my turn to rock the joint. I needed an easy tune that could involve everyone. Ideally, a call-and-response song which had a killer beat.
I made my choice and punched the information into the karaoke remote control.
The instantly recognizable opening bars crashed through the speakers and had everyone clapping along and singing: "Who you gonna call, GHOSTBUSTERS!!"

Tongue Twisters

2008-08-12T10:36:00.003+09:00

Tongue Twisters hold a duel purpose. It helps with student's English pronunciation and it provides amusement for me watching students flounder. I use tongue twisters in my lessons mainly for the latter purpose but pretend otherwise.
I first understood the value of using tongue twisters with my Tuesday evening class which consists of two bright High School girls called Yoko and Yunna.
Whenever I teach them, the exercises I set are always finished with relative ease and it gives me the impression they are coasting through my lessons. With this in mind, I needed an exercise that would challenge them. Tongue twisters are great because even if you can't do them, it’s funny for others to watch you fail.
I began with the familiar: She sells sea shells by the sea shore.
Translated by Yoko as: "Sells she sea sea shore she sells.....what?!"
I urged her to relax after the 20th time of her trying to crack this sentence without success. Yunna didn't help matters by laughing hysterically at Yoko's attempts. I turned the tables on Yunna.
"Yunna, please say this sentence," I said, as I wrote the new tongue twister.
Freshly fried fresh fish.
Yunna studied the sentence with care as if it were an important code-breaker.
"Frebbly fwied fred fish," she said.
"Nice try," I consoled.
Yoko was howling with joy.
"Yoko! Say this," I said.
A big black bug bit a big black Bear, made the big black bear bleed blood.
She breathed in a huge amount of oxygen and exhaled with fear, as if I had just asked her to bungee jump from the top of Mount Fuji.
"Big bear bug blood bit blood bear bug bled blood," she said.
"Nope! Yuna, try this."
Friendly frank flips fine flapjacks
"Fwendly fwank fwips fwine fwapjacks."
"Ha ha ha ha. No, no, no. You're all wrong," I laughed with unnecessary gloating malice.
"OK. You do it then," Yoko challenged.
"Me?" I said.
"Yeah!" Yoko and Yunna both said, threateningly.
"Sure," I said, whilst my face twitched with nerves.
They looked at my Tongue Twisters sheet and picked out a horrendously difficult one.
Fred fed Ted bread, and Ted fed Fred bread.
I cleared my throat, assumed a dramatic pose as if I was about to begin a 100 meter sprint, and begun.
"Fred fed bread Ted and Ted Fred bread fed ....class dismissed!"

Little Ninjas

2008-08-11T23:49:00.003+09:00

War is bad. It is especially bad when conducted by kids. When kids spar against each other with wicked intent, the results can be nasty. I have the dubious honour of presiding over a kid’s class that consists of two students who are hell-bent on the others destruction.
Their names are Yuuki and Amane. I haven't the luxury of a back-story that led to their respective loathing but all I know is that if I wasn't there to supervise them, they would fight to the death.
This afternoon class requires more effort from me than normal lessons. Mainly because I have to plot and pace my lessons in order to avoid a bloodbath.
One tactic I use is a seating plan where I make Yuuki and Amane sit as far away from each other as possible. This has the potential to work, but on continuous occasions Yuuki or Amane will stare with ferocious intensity at each other then leap up on the table to start wrestling. After sweeping from the table the clumps of hair Yuuki and Amane tore from each others head, I will get the kids to spread out in the room and make sure the two little psychos are a healthy distance from each other.
Believing that everything is settled, I might get the kids to play a quick game of Simon Says.
It's quick, easy and fun. But with Yuuki and Amane's participation the game becomes violent, stressful and destructive.
The three other members of the class are great, and will laugh and clap with joy as we play the game. Amane and Yuuki have other plans as to the direction this game will take.
"Simon Says......" I boomed, whilst I thought about the body movement. As I did so a loud cry erupted from both corners of the room. I look down from my thinking pose, and saw Yuuki and Amane charging at each other with flying kicks. I tried to break up their fight but they kicked my hand away and resumed beating the shit out of each other. I took matters into my own hands and stood as an obstruction between them. They didn't notice and continued to kick and punch me.
The other nice kids were looking on with mouths agape in horror.
I pushed Yuuki and Amane apart with my two hands, and held them in this position until they calmed down.
I asked why they disliked each other with a passion.
Yuuki said Amane was an Unko.
"What's that?" I said.
He pointed to his bottom and made farting sounds.
"Right. I see. And Amane, why don't you like Yuuki?"
He held is winkle and starting mock urinating onto Yuuki.
"Stop that!" I said and reprimanded them for being vulgar. I warned them not to fight again otherwise I would tell their parents about their poor behaviour. That seemed to mute them.
It was going well until I ended the lesson with a game of Pictionary. The kids could draw anything they liked and the others had to guess what the English word was.
When it was Yuuki's turn, he strode up to the whiteboard and drew a lumpy object with flies buzzing around it.
"OK kids, what's that," I said, still not sure what Yuuki had just drawn.
"Poo-poo!" the kids yelled.
"No," Yuuki said with a grin, "It's Amane!"
And in a flash, Amane leapt from his chair onto the table, lunged towards Yuuki and started thumping him.

Selling My Stuff

2008-08-06T14:57:00.004+09:00

With only weeks to go until my contract expires, I have decided to sell many of my items.
I have been brutal with what needs to go because I want a light suitcase to carry when I leave Japan. I snapped open a black plastic bag and went about depleting my room of things I hoped to get money from. Among these items were CDs, clothes, and my sofa.
I went to a nearby second hand music and film, whilst carrying a bag containing over 100 CDs. I said hello to the staff and dumped all my items on the counter and said, "I sell, you buy?"
In order to make eye contact with me, they had to stand on tip-toes above the piles of CDs before telling me they would need to check the quality of the CDs before deciding which ones to buy.
I said OK, and wandered around the store whilst they gave my items a severe investigation.
Two hours later, they said they wanted to buy all of it. The store assistant gave me an invoice as to how much they would pay for my stuff: 20,000 yen. This wasn't much but I signed the invoice regardless and pocketed my cash.
The next item I wanted to sell were some of my clothes. Most of the clothes were clunky winter wear which would be heavy inside my travel bag.
I went to a second hand clothes store and dumped my clothes on the counter. The staff told me to wait an hour whilst they checked the quality of the clothes.
One hour later I walked back inside the store with a doughnut that cost me 120 yen. The shop worker called me over to give their assessment. It wasn't as glowing as the music store. It was, instead, a denouncement. The woman behind the counter shook her head and said that most of the clothes were unsuitable for selling. At first I thought she was damning my fashion taste but it turned out that the shop didn’t buy winter clothes in the height of summer. Which makes sense, but I tried to find a loophole round this by offering to cut my jeans in half to create shorts, and chop-up my jumpers to make a woolly vest. The shop worker wasn't having any of it and shook her head. She offered some consolation because she pointed to a big pile of my clothes they wanted to buy.
I asked her how much they would offer. She punched some buttons on her calculator and then flipped it round so I could see the ridiculous price: 100 yen.
"You’re telling me this bloody doughnut is more expensive than a pile of my clothes?!" I asked animatedly.
She didn't understand, and shrugged her shoulders. I had no other choice but to accept this unethical offer and walk out the store 100 yen richer. To cover the fact that I had just wasted one hour of my life, I tried to repeat the soothing mantra of: Every little helps. Unfortunately a pragmatic devil mantra finished off the sentence with but 100 yen gets you fucking nowhere.
The next thing to sell was my two seater sofa. I bought it for 5,000 yen and thought I could recoup half of that price. I had the arduous task of picking up this heavy load and walking from the 4th floor of my apartment to the car park below. Carrying it down the stairs was an absolute nightmare, and I was panting and salivating like an uncouth fiend. Half way through this excruciating ordeal, I lost my grip on the sofa, and it rattled down the winding steps like a bob-sleigh on a slalom. I was relieved no had been walking up in the opposite direction because they would have been flattened.
As I reached the bottom I saw the yellow sofa upturned in a muddy puddle. I spent at least half an hour cleaning the mud-caked sofa until it was suitable for selling. Once this was achieved, I needed to cram the sofa into my little car. It was like fitting an elephant inside a pencil case.
In the end I managed to squeeze it in by putting down the back seats and sliding the sofa in from the opened boot, whilst pushing the front seats up to the windscreen. As I buckled up, I noticed my nose was touching the windscreen and my legs were bent in some strange shape. It looked like I was a 20-foot giant trying to ride a toy tricycle. In this ridiculous position, I drove to the local second hand furniture store.
Thankfully the friendly staff carried this yellow leviathan into the store whilst I tried to reorganize my body to its proper shape. Behind the counter three staff members were quietly conferring about the value of the sofa. Five minutes later they came back with an invoice that read 500 yen.
I stared at them with murderous intent.
500 yen is under £5. I couldn't put a value on my morning tribulations but I would guess, for sheer effort, I should get at least half the price I paid for the sofa.
But the shop workers weren't budging on their offer.
I snatched the 500 yen coin out of one of the workers hand and walked out the store whilst declaring war on all the sofas in the world, before blowing the money on a bag of doughnuts.

Fact Or Fiction

2008-08-02T23:12:00.005+09:00

Only rarely will I plan a lesson whilst my students are walking into the room. I will do this when the original lesson I planned had the potential to be a disaster.
For instance, I had planned to do a class debate on ageism with my Tuesday lunchtime class. This would be fine if my class were elderly, but the class was a mixture of young adults and middle aged people. They might have been insulted at my proposed lesson talking about retirement and discrimination in the workplace. I realised I needed to abort my ageism lesson when I asked Tomoko, who is in her late twenties, what she did at the weekend.
"I went to Okinawa for holiday. I went diving, then I went for a jog along the sea-front and then I went clubbing in the evening," she said.
After a full weekend of energetic adventure, she might loose the will to live if she learnt about the ailments that effect people in old age. What a horrible 'welcome back' that would be for her. When I asked the others what they did for the weekend I wasn't listening to their answers. Not because I didn't find their stories interesting, but I was frantically trying to figure out how to fill this one and a half hour lesson after deciding to scrap my planned lesson. I asked the final person, Syuuti, what he did at the weekend, all the while hopelessly searching for inspiration. As I pondered, I managed to catch the tail-end of his weekend adventure which was, "-and then I found a monkey in my car."
My brain was alerted to this strange comment.
"How on earth did a monkey end up in your car?" I spluttered.
"Well, as I was saying, I had been driving through the mountains of Nagano with my wife and we stopped at a mountain edge to see the view. When we turned around we saw a monkey in the front seat driving the steering wheel."
"I don't believe it," I said
"It's true. Don't worry, the engine was switched off so the monkey couldn't drive the car off the mountain."
"If that's a true story, it's very funny," said Mitzuko.
Tomoko and Eiko asked if he took any photos of the driving monkey.
"No, I was too busy trying to kick it out the car," he said.
"I'm not sure I believe you,” said Mitzuko.
I had an idea.
"Today class, we are going to play a game called Fact or Fiction," I said.
My students all leaned forward with facial expressions that read: "Do tell"
I explained the rules: Each person has to write two or three short paragraphs based on a factual or fictional story about themselves or someone they know. The class then has to guess if it was fact or fiction, and hilarity ensues.
The class warmed to this idea and immediately began writing their stories.
The results were interesting.
Eiko had written three mundane stories that people do everyday:
I drank water yesterday
I walked yesterday
I will drink water tomorrow
Her grasp of English is limited but I encouraged her to include a fictional story in her list.
"But these are fictional," she revealed.
"Oh, well see if you can include a factual story which is interesting."
"OK," she said with a grin.
As I walked away I saw her writing: "I drank water today."
Next to Eiko sat Mitzuko and I was surprised to see her story written with such intricate plotting. From what I could fathom, her story was based on her friend Juna, who was a wonderful singer in her youth who was signed to a record label when she was 18 years old. She was the talk of the town until a new boss took over the record company. He exploited the work force by forcing them to work ridiculously long hours in the studio. Juna, although tired by the label's demands, carried on singing to fulfil her dream of one day being a success in America. But the demands of the boss were too severe. He wanted Juna to produce one album a month. Juna could no longer work at this rate and eventually lost her voice. Not to be defeated she carried a law suit against the record label boss and won the case and received a huge sum of money from the courts. With the money she took over the record label and recruited the next generation of wonderful singers, who were all a success in America. And everyone lived happily ever after.
I looked at Mitzuko with a knowing smile and said, "This is fictional, right?"
"No," she said.
"NO?! This bullshit actually happened,” I said, getting carried away.
She sternly stared at me until a mischievous smile swept across her face and she gave me a playful wink, she also asked me what bullshit meant, which I ignored.
"It doesn't matter if it's true or not, I'm buying the film rights," I said as I walked over to Tomoko.
Tomoko's story was a re-telling of her weekend trip to Okinawa, making it obvious it was a factual story. I told her the class would easily guess it's a factual story so I suggested that she write about a mermaid she saw whilst snorkelling. I reassured her this would be a funnier story, despite her confused expression. After persuading her to do as I recommended, I walked towards Syuuiti's desk. His unwholesome story was: Sam has many girlfriends and has gotten them all pregnant. He is not married to them but he is being pressured into it by his cousin, who is a vet. You can get STD if you have unprotected sex.
"Syuuiti, what is this? This isn't a story. This is just crazy uncorrelated thoughts," I said.
"It's English, is it not?" he challenged.
"Yeah, but it's offensive English. I don't want you to read this to the rest of the class,"
"Why not? It's fictional and funny, apart from the STD bit"
"I'm not going to explain to the class what STD means!"
"OK, OK, I will change my funny stories," he said with anguish.
"Good," I said, and walked away.
When everyone had finished their stories, I asked Syuuiti to kick off proceedings.
Syuuiti rose from his seat, dramatically cleared his throat, and read, "Sam has many girlfriends......"

Japanese Cooking

2008-08-01T12:44:00.004+09:00

I usually savour the delights of Japanese food in restaurants but at home I am criminally unadventurous with what I cook. My diet usually consists of rice, fish and, if I am feeling impulsive, a carrot. I tend to make this meal because when I come home after teaching I'm usually tired and I just want something quick and easy to make. And if it wasn't for the fact that my microwave looks like it’s barely survived a nuclear-holocaust, I would probably live off microwave meals.
After 11 months of this mundane home cooking I could almost hear my taste buds yelling, "Oi, chump! We're bloody bored of fish. Give us something else to chew on, or we'll attack you."
Not wishing to find out what would happen if my taste buds attacked me, I decided on hunting down a Japanese cookbook. There is a book shop near my apartment and I scoured the cooking section of the store. The selection was not a great. There was a sushi cookbook with a mad looking chef on the front cover vilontly wielding a blade above a piece of sushi. Far from appearing like a cookbook, it resembled a cookbook for mass murderers.
Another book showed a jolly rotund woman laughing as she held up two plates of appetizing dishes. This was promising until I noticed a bit of food inside her open mouth. Holding back a retch, I skimmed through the final book which just had the title and pictures of particular dishes, and nothing else. There were no instructions as to how to make it.
Defeated, I left the store and went to the supermarket to buy more fish. As I was eating later that night, I noticed my tongue had a coarse feel to it as if it was turning into sandpaper. This unprecedented feeling led me to believe my taste buds were indeed attacking me. They were true to their word!
This had to stop and something needed to be done. I needed to change the food content in my flat. And help, as so often, came from one of my students.
I was asking Mihoko, my Thursday morning student, about what she did at the weekend. She told me that her daughter was visiting from Tokyo so she had decided to cook a big meal. I asked what this meal was and she told me it was Suki-yaki. I didn't know what Suki-yaki was and asked her to enlighten me. She struggled with the vocabulary of preparing food, so what followed was a lesson based on cooking food. I taught her the vocabulary of things such as cut, slice, chop, boil and simmer, and she would tell me how to cook various Japanese dishes, whilst I took notes. I was fearful that this lesson was being used for my benefit, but Mihoko seemed to be enjoying it because she clearly loved cooking and she gave me the recipes for such exotic sounding meals I later tried to make myself. Dishes like Oyako Donburi - a Japanese 'fast-food' dish with meat eggs and Negi (Japanese onion) mixed with sugar, sake and soy sauce and placed on top of rice. Results in the kitchen when I attempted to make it: scolded pan, minor explosion and my ceiling covered in egg residue.
She told me how to make Cha-han - a Chinese dish where you fry thin slices of ham and onion in a pan, then scramble some eggs separately and put this in with the ham and onions. Then you put in some rice to stir in with the mix. Results in the kitchen: Onion tears falling into the pan, heavy spatula landing with a 'clunk' on my foot, and a ferocious spitting of the frying pan when heated causing me to duck for cover behind my sofa.
Finally, she gave the recipe for Okonamiyake - chop half a cabbage, beat two eggs and put them all into a pan. Then put some flour into the pan (three quarters of a mug) and stir this all together without the heat on. Then in a separate frying pan you fry pork, octopus and shrimp until it is cooked. Then put the flour, egg and cabbage mix into the frying pan to cook on either side, drenching it with soy-sauce. Results in the kitchen: Wondering if I imagined seeing an octopus tentacle move when I was about to chop it into small pieces, the shrimp jumping like pogo enthusiasts when heated, and using too much pork causing my flat to smell like and abattoir.
Maybe I could repay Mihoko the favour by telling her the ingredients of some staple British foods like Steak and Kidney Pie, Black Pudding and greasy full English Breakfasts.
OK, maybe not.

Airplanes, Beetles and Jungle Jim

2008-07-26T23:45:00.012+09:00

If ever a week is clouded with monotony, I can always rely on Seneiji Elementary school to blow those clouds away. And last Wednesday was no exception.
I arrived at the school at the normal time in the morning. I then usually enter the staff room, greet the other teachers and enjoy drinking green tea until my lesson starts five minutes later.
This week my routine was altered when I realised the staff room door was locked. I walked through the empty school and called out "Kernichiwa."
No one responded.
The school was deserted.
I sat on a small bench near the opened entrance, staring at the surrounding mountains, ruminating why there was no-one in the building. It could have been a school holiday, but why were the doors opened?
It could have been a fire-drill, but I couldn’t hear an alarm.
Maybe alien abductions?
“Ah to hell with it,” I said aloud, and headed to the car to go home.
"Hello Sam," called a quiet voice behind me.
I spun around and saw one of the Japanese teachers waving at me. I waved back and asked where everyone was.
"We are all outside. Will you come and join us?"
I agreed and assumed everyone was outside due to the stifling temperature inside the school.
I strolled out into the playground and saw all my students crouched down in a line and picking at all the weeds sprouting through the cracks on the floor. The bandanna wearing teachers were standing in what looked like designated positions surveying the work of the kids. It looked like a happy version of a chain-gang.
I waved to the kids who bellowed my name upon seeing me. I asked why they were weeding when we were about to do an English lesson in a few minutes.
"Aaahahahah," came a warbling laugh to my side. I turned to see the Headmaster of the school, who was wearing a Donald Duck baseball cap.
“We are here because a plane is going to fly over us,” he said, and pointed to the sky. I followed the direction of his point. “The children are making the playground look presentable,” he said pointing at the children. He then pointed at me. “You will help.” And he jabbed his pointy finger at my chest.
I absorbed all this information, but one vital piece of information was missing. Why?
“Ah! An inquisitive mind,” he said, and poked his finger to the top of my head. “The plane is taking a photo to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the school.”
When said this, he felt it fitting to point to my ear, which in no way held any connection to what he had just said.
He told me that we all had to stand in a particular position in the playground so that we would all form a human Kanji symbol which would become clear from a photo taken by the plane. He told me the Kanji word would be: Seneiji Elementary School.
“So no political messages sticking it to the man like, ‘Reduce Oil Prices!’ or ‘We Don't Need No Education’” I joked.
The Headmaster pulled an expression that looked like someone was giving him colonic irrigation. “No,” he said and pointed to my nose before wandering off.
Another teacher nearby gave me a red bandanna to wear and showed me to my designated spot for the Kanji symbol. Once in my position, I did as the kids did and started to clear the weeds from little my area until the Headmaster screeched that the plane was expected imminently. The kids snapped to attention and stood in a solemn stance with their hands akimbo and legs spread apart. It was like they were preparing for an imminent battle. No-one in the playground uttered a word. You could hear the wind whistling around the surrounding mountains. It was faintly eerie. Eventually, we would hear the low rumble of an engine sound far off. The plane slowly soared towards us, getting bigger and bigger by the second.
"Get ready!" screamed the Headmaster, and he would continue saying this more volubly every five seconds as the plane grew more visible and louder.

When the plane was moments away from hovering above us the Headmaster screeched "Prepare children!" with such belligerent force that when he finally said "GO!" I expected the kids to whip out bazookas and fire on the small plane. But they just waved with big smiles on their faces. The plane circled a number of times, flashing with a bight light as it took numerous pictures, before it flew off towards the glaring sun.
The kids were delirious with excitement after the plane had flown away and started to mimic a plane and glided about the playground. I couldn't help thinking that if my lesson didn't have an airplane theme to it then they wouldn’t give a toss what I taught.
Back in the classroom I had to forcibly shout for the kids to be quiet amongst the din of countless kids going "brrrrrrrrooommmm" around the room with their arms stretched out like wings.
I asked them to do a Pictionary game based on animals and transport. At the mention of the word "animals" a dozen students scampered over to various glass containers at the side of the room and dug their hands in them. They then slowly lifted their hand up with the other hand clasped tightly on top. It didn't take a genius to surmise they had some sort of critter in their grasp. The kids lined up in front of me and each student opened their hands to reveal their animal of choice. The first child had a very nice butterfly in her hand, as did the second and third kid. Then the animals started to get more ugly and malevolent as I went down the line. One little girl had an obese toad weighing heavily on her hands. It croaked a loud wheeze and wobbled a bit. The last few kids had a proclivity for big, bloody beetles, which was more evil looking than a grumpy toad. Once revealed in all their horrific glory, these ugly beetles had antlers to size of fingers. I hate beetles and the terror in my eyes spurred the students holding the behemoths to move closer to me whilst ghoulishly dangling the beetles in my face. I went a bit bonkers with fear at this point because I just legged it out of the room, which was a big mistake because the beetle holders ran after me. Before I realised what was going on, I found myself darting through the vast school whilst being chased by a bunch of giggling kids holding giant beetles. We were stopped in our tracks by the Headmaster, still wearing his ridiculous Donald Duck cap, who blocked off our route and asked what was going on.
"They're chasing me with beetles, sir," I said pathetically, trying to catch my breath.
The headmaster gave the kids a stern look, and pointed to the beetle, then at the children then back to the beetle.

“No more beetle chasing!” he said with scorn, and swung his cap back to front and grabbed two of the students by the ear and dragged them back to the classroom.
The shenanigans earlier with the plane photo-shoot chewed up much of my lesson, so thankfully this anarchic lesson was a short one. This enabled me to end the lesson earlier than usual. As I was preparing to say goodbye to the students, a Japanese teacher walked into the room and asked me to play a game with the children before lunch
“What game?” I asked.
"Jungle Jim," the teacher said.
"What's that?" I queried.
"Ahh, you will find out,” he said and sprinted away.
The kids then huddled around me, clasped onto my hands, and led me away to the playground outside.
Once assembled by a climbing frame, one kid acted as the Jungle Jim spokesman and tried to tell me the rules of the game. Through an intricate array of mimes and facial expressions I was able to deduce that the rules involved one person being Jungle Jim and they were required to chase the others who hanged on the climbing frames. As soon as Jungle Jim tagged one person, that person would be the new Jim and they would have to go hunting for the others.
"OK, got it. Who's going to be Jim?" I asked.
"YOU!" the kids yelled back.
Once mounted on top of the climbing frame I kicked started the game by thumping my chest repeatedly and hollering like a lunatic Tarzan. I don't think the kids ever saw or knew about Tarzan because they looked at me with expressions that read: "What the hell is he doing?"
I then began my perilous hunt. It was quite easy because a portly kid next to me couldn't scramble away fast enough. I thought I might give him the benefit of the doubt and let him off the hook. But then I thought Jungle Jim is meant to be a callous warrior of the jungle and moments of compassion would be wasted on him. It was survival of the fittest in the jungle, surely. So I just stuck out my arm and tapped him on top of the head. He wailed in disappointed and violently thrashed his arms at me, trying to tag me back. I was nearly knocked off the goddam climbing frame by his wild movement.
He lunged for me in what looked like an act of revenge for me tagging him in the first place. I ducked out the way and made my escape down the climbing frame. The rest of the kids were hovering near the bottom, out of reach of the new Jungle Jim at the top, but not for long because he was slowly descending. I joined the kids who gave me a dignified nod of the head. We all looked up and saw the new Jungle Jim coming down towards us but what was unnerving was that he focused his feral glare on me.
The kids were clever because they saw that this Jungle Jim only wanted to attack me, so they all moved far away from me. I felt like I had the sodding plague. Inevitably, the chubby kid pinned me in the corner and tagged me. Yet he was so bloody slow trying to get away again that I tagged him back. He frothed with anger and repeated his lunging movements as I scrambled away. And this tiresome set-piece was repeated throughout the game.

Magic

2008-07-18T10:51:00.005+09:00

My student, Minneko, works as a postal worker, but she has a special hobby on the side, which is magic. This passion of hers became apparent during a recent lesson of mine. As always, Minneko came bustling into my Monday evening beginners’ class with a huge grin on her face. Her eyes, which are normally magnified by her bi-focal glasses, flashed with even more excitement than usual. I humoured her with a chuckle and a, "Now, what are you so excited about," remark, which on hindsight may have seemed condescending seeing as though she is about thirty years older than me. She struggled through a sentence which consisted of, "I magic, show you, exciting, exciting," and popped a DVD into my hands.
For a brief moment I thought she was going to turn the DVD into a rabbit with a wave of her hands. But she made some gestures that indicated she wanted me to watch the DVD.
"OK, Minneko," I continued with my condescending tone, "but only for a few minutes because other students will arrive shortly."
We went next door to the staff room and I popped the DVD into the computer.
A black screen opened with a legend that flew onto the screen announcing: "Magic Show in Nagano!!!!!!!!!!!" And in case you were wondering, the legend did have that many exclamation marks giving one the impression that they were being screeched at by an unseen announcer. The legend flew off screen with a needless twirly-whirly effect and the opening shot of the show began. It was of an empty smoky stage with an audience of elderly people perched in front. An almighty trumpet began to tootle off-screen giving a jarring effect which made me disorientated. I was at least watching this on screen. I would hate to imagine the effect this violent sound had on the frail brittle people in the front row. Their slumped postures may have indicated the fatal effect.
A few moments later the audience gave a scattered applause to an ancient chap who staggered on stage. He was completely unsure of himself. He clearly didn't know if this was his cue to come on stage or wait in the wings. He would look back to an unseen person at the side of the stage and give a cartoon shrug. For his sake I hoped this was part of the act because he was clearly a mess otherwise.
"Who is this stupid old man?" I said incredulously.
"My father," Minneko said, frowning at me.
I raised my eyebrows so high in surprise that they nearly flew off my head. “Ah, oh, er,” I responded strangely.
Meanwhile Minneko's father was giving a bad odour to Minneko's family name as he arranged his props with shaky hands, dropping a chair, his wand and even a top-hat which allowed a hidden rabbit to scoot free.
If he was partial to a bit of Tommy Cooper, this introduction would have been brilliant.
Minneko assured me he was being serious which made the performance even worse.
Minneko's father was now hobbling around the stage trying to catch the excitable rabbit whilst clutching his stooped back in pain.
The audience, meanwhile, were not sure whether to laugh or clamber up on stage and pump him with oxygen.
After a wasteful five minutes he assembled the props which had run-away and began the show.
Minneko's father attached a cape, (two-sizes too small) to himself and put on a top-hat (two-sizes too big), allowing only his nose to poke out under the rim. He then fluttered his hands in the air for some sort of effect that didn't in anyway contribute to anything, which pretty much summed up his whole act. He would make odd movements with his body to some cheesy synthesizer music whilst smoked billowed around the stage. That's all well and good, I thought, but I wanted to see some actual magic not some prat pontificating on stage. Minneko's father was lucky the front row snuffed it from the trumpet sounds, otherwise they would have stormed the stage asking for their money back.
Eventually he performed a below-par card trick which was so forgettable that I wished he would continue with his body contortions which were memorable because it was so bad.
"When are we going to see some actual magic?" I asked Minneko, whilst struggling to hide my irritation.
"Look at me!" she shrieked.
I followed her orders and stared at her like an idiot.
"No, not at me. Look at me on the screen!"
I looked at the screen and there was Minneko walking onto the stage with a garish, skimpy leotard, which nearly caused me to shriek with revolt.
Minneko was clapping in ecstasy beside me. Not wishing her to feel alone in her moment of joy, I also clapped.
On screen, Minneko's father instructed her to retrieve a box from the side of the stage with more unnecessary body theatrics. Minneko came back with the box and lay down inside it. Her father then went behind the curtain and came back wielding two samurai swords in his hands.
I was glad Minneko was standing next to me otherwise I would have been certain her father's limited and clumsy magical abilities would have resulted in impaling her with horrific results. Minneko was inside the box with only her smiling face popping out of the top.
Her father started to juggle the swords, dropping one in the process, which was careless considering he was only holding two of them. The sword he dropped clattered to the floor and spun towards the front row, causing many to leap backwards into the second row.
I wasn't surprised by this gaffe because his eyes were still concealed under his extra-large top hat.
After stooping down to collect his sword he started to thrust it into different holes on the box. On screen, Minneko looked shocked and in a great deal of pain with each thrust her father did, leading me to believe he had actual inflicted a mortal wound on her. After six more thrusts, Minneko looked white.
"Were you ok?" I asked Minneko.
"He was out of practice," she replied ambiguously.
Her father finished the act by unfolding each side of the box with some difficulty revealing that Minneko was alive but still wounded because she hobbled off stage whilst clutching the side of her hip.
Her father victoriously took off his top hat and bowed to the crowd. It sounded like only two people were clapping in the audience. The curtain then suddenly dropped onto the head of Minneko's father causing him to collapse to the floor, leaving only his feet jutting out from under the curtain. His feet were then pulled back behind the curtain by some unseen hand and he vanished from sight, which was one trick I approved off.

"Music, We Have A Problem."

2008-07-11T23:18:00.006+09:00

I assumed incorporating music for two of my lessons would make them more entertaining. I was wrong. Oh so wrong
My two Friday evening lessons are one-to-one affairs. The first is with a sullen 12 year old girl called Yuko. The other is with a happy-go-lucky 17 year old Maths wizard called Manabu.
I wanted to play them a song, whilst they read the printed lyrics sheet in front of them. But I had deliberately left out certain words and would ask them to fill-in-the-gaps as they heard the particular word sung.
I scanned my CD collection and figured the gnarly, aggressive sounds of Tom Waits was inappropriate, as was the thrashing volatile punk of The Damned. And unless they wanted to learn African instead of English, then the tribal shouts of Fela Kuti would be lost on them.
For Yuko, I needed simple, happy songs and nothing to scare the living crap out of her. So I put aside songs by the Sex Pistols, Wu-tang Clan and NWA. I decided to use The Beatles' Hello Goodbye to help practice opposites, and Sam Cookes' Wonderful World to practice the names of school subjects.
Recently I have been teaching her from a boring textbook, so her eyes widened when I came into the room with my laptop which stored all my music. I told her we were going to have a special lesson and got her to close the dusty, rotting textbook.
I set up the laptop and then theatrically clapped my hands together excitedly. "Do you like MUSIC?!" I said like a circus master addressing an expectant crowd.
"No," was her terse reply.
This wasn't in the script. I expected her to nod energetically and clap her hands whilst yipping, "Yay!"
This was not forthcoming and she remained looking miserable throughout Wonderful World.
She filled out the words without any trouble, but she was clearly not enjoying the lesson. She would constantly sigh and blow through her cheeks. The awkwardness of this moment was accentuated during the middle eight of Hello Goodbye when she wasn't required to do anything whilst the orchestra blared and the guitars twanged for what seemed like a lifetime. I tried to introduce some humour into the proceedings by pretending to conduct the orchestra in the song by waving my hands back and forth in the air. I thought this would be funny. Yuko thought otherwise and let out an audible yawn.
I had hoped Manabu would react differently to my proposed lesson because I always saw him wandering around the school with a huge bass guitar slung over his shoulder. I figured a musician would like music. He did, just not my music.
When I told him about teaching him English with music, he seemed pleased and asked what music I would be playing. I told him I had chosen the songs Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon because he was interested in London; Johnny B Goode by Chuck Berry because he liked fast guitar sounds and You Can't Always Get What You Want by The Rolling Stones because I like it.
I began Werewolves and he wrote down the correct answers but stopped me mid way. "What's a werewolf?" he asked.
I assumed he knew what one was, and even if he didn't, Warren Zevon shed some light on the matter by consistently howling AaaaaaWoooooo throughout the song.
I told him it was a fictional wolf beast and did an impression of one. He looked at me as if I were sick in the head so I drew a picture of one on the board. He seemed to understand, but insisted on taking the song at face value.
"Why would there be a werewolf in London if they are not real?" he asked.
"I dunno, it's just a song," I said.
He also couldn’t understand the lyric: I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
"How can a werewolf look at a menu while walking. They walk on four legs, right?." He asked, scratching his head.
Manabu had just crushed the life out of this song by failing to use his imagination.
I resumed the song but Manabu didn't have a thirst for this lesson anymore. His analytical brain was disappointed with the fantastical content of the song.
As with Yuko I garnered the worst reactions during the uncomfortable middle eight section.
As the guitar solos squealed, I pretended to air-guitar much to Manabu's non-amusement. I gave up and stared intently at the screen as if I was figuring out a complex mathematical equation.
Johnny B Goode didn't fare to well either because Chuck Berry just sang too damn fast. This was my fault. I should have put myself in a non-native English speaker's shoes and realized Chuck Berry's staccato rap during his bouncy chord work would have been impossible to decipher. This proved to be the case when Manabu handed me back his lyric sheet with question marks filled in where the missing words should have been.
The Stones had never failed me in the past, and I pinned my hope on their song ending the lesson on a marginally more positive note, rather than the wreck of a lesson it was turning out to be. But the truth is Mick Jagger has one of the most distinct vocals in rock music. In other words, you can never understand what the bloody hell he is saying.
The lesson was officially labelled woeful when Manabu filled in his sheet at the end of the song and asked, "What does this sentence mean when he sings, with a glass of wine in her hyyyyyy-aaaaaand? What does hyyyyyy-aaaand mean?"

How Old Is Eiko?

2008-07-11T23:08:00.003+09:00

If I had to guess, I would say Eiko was 90 years old. I was, however, proved woefully inaccurate.
Eiko is one of my students in my weekday lunchtime class. She makes up for her lack of English with a face cracking smile. Every afternoon she will shyly shuffle into the room and will painstakingly gather her limited vocabulary to comment on the weather, and will remain mostly silent for the remainder of the lesson. As much as I try to get her to join in, her self-conscious lack of understanding of the language keeps her mute.
I make it my business to let every student participate in my lessons, so as an introductory warm-up I ask each student to comment on their weekend activities. The other more able students in the class can do this with relative ease. Eiko, however, stares at me as if I have asked her to describe Einstein's theory of relativity. I understand why she might be reticent, so I carefully craft my questions which only requires a 'yes' or 'no' answer.
But one day, she astounded me by constructing a detailed answer to my question.
"I met my mother-in-law and we went shopping and played tennis," she chirpily said.
The initial rapture I felt that she was beginning to speak English gave way to troubled curiosity at the viability of her statement.
"Your mother-in-law?" I asked Eiko, whilst covertly counting the numerous wrinkles on her weather beaten face.
"Yes," confirmed Eiko.
Without seeming rude, I aborted scrutinizing her features and composed myself for more investigating. I had a gut-instinct that I was about to discover the oldest living mother-in-law in existence and I wanted to make sure Eiko had got her facts right before I notified the relevant science magazines.
"Are you sure you mean your mother-in-law? Don't you mean your daughter, or cousin?"
"No, no, my mother-in-law. We buy gift for my daughter's birthday. Next week is daughter's birthday."
I searched my brain for the Polite Questions Department and happened across this belter.
"And how old is your daughter?" I asked.
"She is 70."
I looked at Eiko in disbelief, then at the class, who were busy trying to not to laugh.
My brain passed me another question from the Polite Question Department.
"So how old is your mother-in-law?"
"50"
I mentally drew Eiko's baffling family tree and came to the conclusion that her daughter was older than her. I broke out in a sweat as I tried to figure out this complex puzzle until I realized my palpitations and ruminating silence cast an unsettling atmosphere in the room. But there was another aspect of her story which puzzled me.
"Tennis as well? Can you play?" I asked, thinking that she would surely snap in two if she tried to pile-drive an ace-serve.
"Yes. I'm good player. But I lost," she said, and made a sad face.
I was about to say I wasn't surprised seeing as your more nimbler mother-in-law is 20 years younger than you, but I refrained.
There was one piece of the puzzle missing that would have explained everything, but the Polite Question Department must have deemed the question, "So, how old are you Eiko?" beyond the pale.
This little mystery will surely remain unsolved.

Sword Play

2008-06-27T18:38:00.010+09:00

A week passed since I waved goodbye to Shoko, and I was still feeling sore. Each morning I woke up feeling depressed and in no mood to teach.
I had received a call from Shoko telling me she arrived safely and had started her stewardess training. I wished her well and tried to sound upbeat, but as soon as I hung up the phone after our conversation, I felt remorseful that I wasn't there with her. I needed something to vent my feelings of frustration. Luckily, Seneiji School invited Martin and myself to play Chanbara. I asked the headmaster in the staffroom what this was and he said it was a sword fight.
"Ahhhhh Yeeeeeeeeeah!!" I said expressing my delight in the vein of a character in a Blaxploitation film.

If any activity could be used to help me express my pent up anger then this activity was surely it. The sword was going to express my true feelings. It was unfortunate that the students were going to be on the end of my tumultuous feelings.
When Martin and I were in the gym, the students handed us our swords. They were constructed from paper that was wrapped around a cardboard cylinder. Martin and I grumbled to each other that we would have preferred heavy, metal swords to fight our enemies, even if they were a bunch of smiling benevolent students. But we made do, and swung our swords in mock-ninja style. The kids stood back and laughed at our uncoordinated movements. The sports teacher drew a halt to our ninja show when he showed us how the art of Chanbara was done, and he plucked a short chap from the group of students. He then swung the sword at this little fella with all his strength. Luckily the student was tiny because he could crouch to the level of the teacher’s kneecaps and avoid the swinging sword that nearly decapitated him.
"You might want to go a little easy on the boy," I said to the teacher who was in the middle of a jump and slice manoeuvre which resulted in the sword crashing down on the poor guy's head. The teacher stopped his butchering of the boy, and confidently strutted towards Martin and I with his chest puffed out."You understand game now?" he asked.
"Yeah, kill each other," I said.
I don't think he understood because he said "Yes, yes, yes," and walked off chuckling. Maybe he did understand, and the game really did require us to kill our opponent. But with paper swords, that seemed unlikely. Although, I looked at the small chap that was besieged by the violently possessed teacher, and he didn’t look too good. He was still clutching the top of his head which the teacher so humbly thwacked with force and was clearly in a great deal of pain. I was sure if he was subjected to any more sword bashing to the top of his head, his brain would have exploded.
The teams were assigned - three against three. I was in the team with Bad Brain Boy who was still groaning in pain. I took issue with the teacher for putting me in a team with an inoperative fighter who was now lying on his back with his hands submerged over his whole head. The teacher reproached me for my wicked competitive streak and asked for more compassion on my part. The cheek! He was the one who eradicated the poor chap. The first battle was between Martin, who was on the other team, and a lanky acne riddled boy on my team. Martin was wildly doing swiping motions with his sword which didn't find his opponent, who was busy dancing around him with light footed speed, clearly enjoying the fact he was fighting an amateur. Too be honest, acne boy was a bit of a poser. He was darting in and out of Martin's artless jabbing with his hands on his hips and a smirk on his face. Who did this kid think he was, Zorro?
He eventually put Martin out of his fighting misery when he did some intricate jousting with Martin's heavy handed style, and managed to find an opening and struck at Martin's heart. I felt this was a rather sinister manoeuvre, but it was legal because if you hit a part of the body, you win the game. Acne boy came sashaying back to me and Brain Boy (whose face was now turning a bright purple colour) and did an unnecessary bow.
"Gloating git," I thought, even though he was on my team.
It was my turn now, and I was fighting a girl. She was a smiley, excitable person, which gave me the false impression she would be an inferior fighter to me. Surely good fighters should be surly, aggressive looking brutes. This was far from the truth because she was the best of the bunch. I realised this when it was too late. When we stood opposite each other and bowed, I was mentally picturing how to celebrate my inevitable victory. I was still thinking this when we took our fighting positions, when suddenly, she flew at me with incomprehensible speed.

"What the fu-" I managed to say, before her sword clattered against my jittering sword that protected my face from being exposed to her unexpected attack. I jumped back to create space between me and Xenia: Warrior Princess, but she came at me again, even faster than before. A samurai might not have done what I was about to do, but then again, they probably never fought such a quick fighter as I was doing now. What I did was drop my sword and ran away. It might not have been a dignified sight, but it was the only safe option open to me because I was sure she would have inflicted some damage if I fought her. I didn't care if our swords were made of paper, she would have found a way to hurt me. I was running around the outskirts of the gym as she chased me. I must have broken numerous rules because the teacher said a few words and another kid entered the arena to assist Xenia.
"At least give me Brain Boy!" I called out to the teacher, in despair. I looked over to the kid. He was now a bright green colour and was lying on the floor with one eye wide open and the other one closed. "Forget about it," I said, and continued my escape. It was no use, the duo pinned me in a corner and swiped at my legs, signalling the end of the game.
"OK, great. Game over, now stop hitting me," I said.

At the end of the tournament, my team lost. The two teams then lined up opposite each other to bow and end the game. Zorro was pouting and sulking because we lost, Brain Boy (who was now turning orange and blue) needed to be propped up against Zorro in order to stand, and I was sneezing on account of the dusty gym.
I may not have vented my frustration at having lost Shoko, but I did learn the value of life.

Matsumoto Birdman

2008-06-26T16:13:00.004+09:00

Matsumoto is a small city near Iida. There's not much to it except a castle and a goat. But if you look carefully you can discover a plethora of delights. I recently travelled there to see its sole attraction which was called Crow Castle.
I figured it had this name because of its black and white colour, but on further inspection it was because of the frightful amount of squawking crows swooping about the structure. The castle is an impressive sight. It is surrounded by a small mote filled with giant multi-coloured fish. It also boasts a beautiful garden nearby. But it was the assorted oddities around the grounds that attracted me.

Walking towards the entrance of the castle I spotted a cackling pork-pie hatted old man waving his hands in the air whilst young couples ran away from him, screaming. Naturally, I wondered why they were terrified of this lunatic. As I came closer I saw that rested on top of his hat and arms were crows flapping their wings with gusto. And the old man was talking to them in what I believed to be Japanese, but it could have been bird-speak for all I knew. He was feeding his winged pals bird-food whilst stroking their beaks. I hovered near him, curious to observe at close-inspection how he dealt with the tourists that walked past him. Needless to say he was in a wickedly impish mood because the next young couple that sauntered past him were subjected to him lunging at them whilst his feathered friends aggressively squawked and croaked. I couldn't fathom why he was doing this. Surely not for monetary purposes because who in their right mind would pay to be scared shitless by some bastard in a hat.

After his fresh bird attack, he adopted a new terror tactic. He pretended to be a statue and stood still. And, as expected, a small group of tourists approached. As soon as they stopped to inspect whether he was a real human or a model, he lunged towards them yelling, "BAAAAA!"
The group he terrorized were of an elderly disposition, and the oldest of the group gasped as he clutched his heart.
When I decided to walk past him, I knew what to expect, so when I observed him mounting an attack on me, I took the initiative and suddenly lunged towards him going, "BAAAA!”
He looked startled and clutched his heart, which made the birds fly away, obviously disturbed by this break in protocol.
Pleased with my victory over this unseemly character I explored the castle grounds with relish.

It was a pleasant affair with benign groups of tourists posing for pictures in front of the grand castle and the delicately crafted trees populating the gardens. I was enjoying this scene on a bench whilst I ate a chocolate ice-cream when, from the corner of my eye, I spotted an aberration to this picture-postcard area. This oddity was some bloke in a mushroom costume. He was hopping to and fro amongst the shrubberies and being a general pest. He was similar to the birdman outside in so much that I couldn't see what he was contributing to society. He would bounce over to a kid, ruffle their hair, chortle a jolly "ho ho ho," and would bound off again. I applauded the crew-cutted brute of a kid that took it upon himself to violently stamp on Mushroom-man's foot, which made him omit a thunderous yowl that disturbed the peace of the grounds.

The day was getting more entertaining by the minute. With this in mind, I entered the castle with high hopes that I would see something even more outrageous like a pair of gorillas wearing samurai garb and duelling with each other.
This never materialized, but a more realistic human comedy emerged.
The castle had five floors, and on each one it displayed an array of historical artefacts from Japan's illustrious medieval history. There were majestic Samurai armoury, ghoulish weaponry and simple tools and utensils for history buffs to salivate over. This was all fine, but what interested me was the death inducing steps that led visitors to each floor. They were all murderously steep and I was curious to see how people from all walks of life mounted these steps. The younger people managed to do so without much difficulty, but still complained about the danger apparent in walking up to the different levels. However, the elderly were a lost cause. They had to be towed up by at least 13 members of their respective families. What made this route more perilous was that people were either walking up to the different levels, or walking back down to the exits. It was like the worst human traffic jam you could imagine. And when the more portly members of society either ascended or descended the steps, the slow flow of humans ground to an abrupt halt as they hanged off the edge of the railings allowing for these big-boned waddlers a chance to pass on through.
I tried my luck at climbing to the different levels of the castle and constantly clattered into the people coming the other way.
The Samurais of old may have been accomplished warriors but they were fucking terrible architects when it came to stairs.

Onsen

2008-06-26T16:02:00.001+09:00

A Japanese onsen has never appealed to me mainly because you have to be naked in a small pool with other men. It's a traditional Japanese past-time, but as far as I'm concerned they can keep it to themselves. I was, however, goaded into going to one by my students in my lunchtime class. Their English is very good so they could get to the route of my apparent problem with onsens.
"Are you afraid of the water being dirty?" said Mitsuko with concern.
"No, it's just something I don't normally do," I replied.
"Don't you like cleansing yourself?" said Noriko.
"Of course I do!" I said.
"Are you ashamed of your body?" asked Syuuiti.
"Hang on! Is this an English or Psychology lesson?" I said.
The truth was that I was a little uncomfortable with the whole idea of getting butt-naked in front of other blokes. Another aspect of an onsen is you just sit in the warm pool and do nothing. You're meant to relax, but I can't relax in a pool of dirty water with other pruning men. I'd rather read a book on the couch.
Syuuiti was the most aghast person in the room with regards to my lack of onsen experience. He was troubled by the fact that I had been in Japan for more than 10 months and hadn't had a traditional onsen.
"You've seen a lot of Japan, and done so many Japanese things, but not an onsen. Why, Sam, why?!"
My difficulty in coming up with a good excuse spurred me to say, "OK. I'll bloody do it!"
So I did the following weekend.
I walked to a nearby onsen and bought my locker key. I went to the changing room and saw a line of Japanese men aged between 100-200 years old stripping off and walking towards the adjacent onsen whilst their ball-sacks dragged across the floor.
I tentatively took my clothes off, making sure no-one was near me and went next door to the onsen.
The pool was filled with the ancient fossils I saw getting naked moments earlier. They were nattering to each other in Japanese. It was just my luck that I picked a day when the pool was filled with old friends and I was the social miscreant to break up the party.
I smiled and nodded to them when they all shot a glance at me. I instinctively cupped my naughty bits as I nodded. They nodded back and resumed their jolly anecdotes.
I spotted an isolated corner in the onsen and ran towards that before it was occupied. The only other space was between two obese men coughing like loons.
My sudden dash to the corner attracted concerned attention from the decrepit gang. I stopped in my tracks to give them another nod with the hope of confirming I was a cordial fellow without a mental problem. They nodded back and resumed chatting.
I quickly jumped into the pool hoping to conceal my flapping dick. Unfortunately, I caused an almighty splash which made the warm water slam into the face of the coughing bloaters nearby. I made amends by nodding to the others. They didn't nod back this time. Instead, they looked at me as if I was a rabid monkey let loose in this den of calm and relaxation. My face went bright red and I stared straight ahead at the wall. I didn't dare move another muscle in case I happened destroy the calm of the onsen.
I only lasted five minutes in the place before I got bored, so I made contented sigh and leapt out of the pool, causing a degree of relief amongst the elderly bathers who had been clearly nervous by my erratic presence.
When I met my class the following week, Syuuiti said, "Did you enjoy your onsen?"
"Hated it," I said.
At least I was honest.

The Rejection Of Ohmi

2008-06-21T23:16:00.003+09:00

I always like to have a united class. I find it an uncomfortable experience when different factions form, causing a split in the group dynamic. It is even more uncomfortable when the whole group shy away from one person. But when that sole person is Ohmi, it is understandable. He is a big character in my seniors class, and he often overshadows the other students. This is mainly because his English is perfect compared to the others. When one of the seniors struggles with their English, Ohmi will get restless and irritable. He will fidget and shift in his seat, desperate to speak at length about his opinions on world affairs. Normally, his in-depth discussions about the American stock-exchange and the benefits of proportional representation is lost on the other students. I try to allow each student to have their say on anything they choose to talk about, but with Ohmi's belligerent presence, this is a problem. It is only now that the other students are beginning to revolt against Ohmi. This became apparent during one of Ohmi's rants about the state of Japanese youth today. His dissection of the surly Japanese teenager was peppered with negative words and criticisms. He talked at length about chairing a meeting the following weekend. The meeting was organized to discuss how to solve the crisis with Japanese teenagers, and how they should respect their elders more. I asked who else was going to attend the meeting.
"Two people, including me," he said proudly.
I couldn't help thinking that their meeting would be in vein. The chances of teenagers in Japan changing their behaviour on account of a meeting consisting of an octogenarian and his friend would be very slim, but he seemed confident that the meeting would reap results.
I asked if anyone in the class would be attending the meeting.
Kimiyo said she was “busy”, Akiko said she "had to do something", Masaho said, "I'm not doing anything on that day, so I'm not going to Ohmi's meeting," and Tersuo simply said, "No."
I asked why he wasn't going. His answer may relate to his tiny grasp of English because he randomly said, "Hair."
"You're getting a haircut?" I said, questioning his statement because he's bald.
"No, just hair," he said.
I know when someone is getting the cold-shoulder, so I left it at that.

Small Room Of Pain

2008-06-21T23:05:00.003+09:00

I've always disliked teachers who exact physical retribution on their students. I think it's cruel, unprofessional and down right detestable. Unfortunately, one of my students was subjected to physical pain in one of my lessons. This student is a pale 10 year old called Yushin. I teach him, along with his twin sister Mao, every afternoon. Their English is non-existent, so I have adopted a basic approach to teaching. The lessons are normally a sedentary affair where I use various visual aids to assist their learning. For the benefit of Yushin, Mao and myself (for I was becoming bored of constantly sitting in one place for an hour) I decided to change the structure of the lesson by introducing a game which promised running about in a reckless manner. I named the game Find it!
This involved me placing various animal picture cards around the room then bellowing to Yushin and Mao to find a particular animal card. They would then joyously search for the picture card. The first person to find it would get a point. Unfortunately, I had misjudged the room size for this game. You see, the room I teach these kids in is no bigger than a hamster cage. Finding interesting places to put the cards became a chore because there were no places to hide them. There was the desk, the white-board and the door. That was it. To obviate this problem, I asked Yushin and Mao to close their eyes and count to 50. This had the duel purposes of practising numbers and allowing me much needed time to plot where the hell to put the cards. The tiny interior of the room, however, restricted any cunning card concealment. The only option open to me was placing the cards in dangerously precarious positions. I placed cards next to a mouldy bin, inside a pair of vacant slippers, under the low-lying table and on top of a cactus plant. I felt bad, but I had a masochistic curiosity to see how this game would unfurl. I asked Yushin and Mao to open their eyes.
Mao had been uncomfortable about this whole arrangement from the start judging by her unsettled face. She had been quick to realize that a game of Find-it! inside this tiny room was a suicide mission. Yushin, on the other hand, was beside himself with delirious anticipation. He was like a wild beast on a leash waiting to be set free. I duly obliged. "Find the.....elephant!" I said, and he was off like a rocket! Mao, in contrast, half-heartedly roamed around the small confines of the room, not wishing to commit herself to bodily harm. Meanwhile, Yushin was oblivious to his surroundings. The only thing that concerned his curious mind was to find the elephant, and to hell with anything that stood in his way, even if that thing was the prickly cactus plant.
"AAAAAHHHHHhhahahahahahah!" he screamed, as he impaled his hand on the plant when he lunged at the elephant card. I couldn't decide whether he was in pain or having fun. Perhaps he thought pain was fun.
Much to Mao's rightful chagrin, I continued this game.
"Find the...rabbit!"
Whooosh! Off went Yushin on his expedition of pain. He clattered into the door, the white-board, ducked under the table and banged his head on the under-side as he got up, all for the purpose of finding a ripped card with a smiling rabbit on it. Mao spotted the rabbit in a slipper and slowly shuffled towards it as Yushin was climbing the walls like Spiderman.
Mao picked up the card, lazily waved it at me, and sighed as she sat back down.
Yushin was slamming into the bookcase at this point, with his head inside his bag.
"Yushin, Mao has found the card," I said.
He was still searching for the rabbit card inside his bag, whilst standing up.
"Yushin! Mao has found the card. It's not in your bag," I reiterated.
He yanked the bag off his head and looked to Mao who was slumped in her seat and showed the rabbit card to him. He looked crestfallen. He had all those wounds and had nothing to show for it, even if the prize was a ripped picture of a rabbit.

Sayonara

2008-06-19T00:35:00.005+09:00

Shoko was departing for Hong Kong at the end of the month. As much as I made encouraging sounds about what a wonderful opportunity it was for her, I couldn't help but wanting to howl at the moon in anguish. Imagining my time in Japan without Shoko gave me an empty feeling. It was with a heavy heart that I planned to meet Shoko for the last time before she set off for her new life. Osaka was decided to be our meeting place, and throughout my coach journey to this city, my head hung low and my face was grim and sullen.
I tried my best to be in a happy mood when I met Shoko outside Hankyu Station, but she sensed something was wrong, and asked what the matter was.
“I don't want you to go,” I said directly.
“Sam, please don't say things like that otherwise I'll start crying,” she said, already sniffling.
“If you go I will start crying,” I replied, beginning to cry.
“Don't say things like that,” Shoko said, crying.
“Don't cry,” I said, also crying.
So there we were, outside the entrance of a busy train terminal weeping into each others arms. The violin busker opposite started playing a sentimental tune to make the scene tragically complete.
This was not the beginning I had in mind for our final meet-up. I wanted to have a fun time, to conclude all the other wonderful times I had shared with Shoko. I didn't want a weeping face-off.
After drying our eyes, we agreed that we should remain upbeat about the future and enjoy each others company before we parted. The first thing we did to dispel the gloomy atmosphere was go to a Turkish restaurant and smoke a sheehan.
Our table was on the top floor of the restaurant, and we were situated amongst a dozen hippies who were in the middle of a spoken poetry session. Everyone was sitting on the floor, surrounded by multi-coloured pillows. The smell of marijuana was in the air.
Opposite Shoko and I were two girls, one with blue hair the other with orange, and both done up in bunches. Their garish appearance was in stark contrast to their lifeless faces as they sat staring vacantly at us throughout our stay in the place. I waved in their faces to distract them, but they didn't bat an eyelid, even when their joints had burnt down to an ember.
The Sheehan had a soothing effect and I was contentedly puffing away.
In between puffs, Shoko asked if I wanted to go back to her parents’ house with her and help her pack for Hong Kong.
I said that would be fine.
“Can you come with me and see me off at Narita Airport?” she asked.
Before I committed myself, I had to make a few calculations because I had an evening lesson back at Terakoya on the same day as her flight. I contemplated calling in sick, but realized Martin couldn't cover my lesson because he was on leave in Okinawa, and the Asanos were away on holiday in Kyshu. It was effectively just me running the school. There was no way out of this. I had to be at Terakoya the next day.
I asked Shoko when her flight was scheduled to depart. She said at one o' clock.
I calculated that after saying goodbye to Shoko at the airport, I would make it in time for my lesson, with thirty minutes to spare, if the trains and coaches ran on time. I agreed to go with her to Narita and received a fountain of kisses from Shoko in response.
Shoko drew back from me and stared at me with a lovely smile and a glowing face.
To hell with my lesson! If making Shoko happy meant missing a lesson, then so be it. After all, it was a lesson with a group of bratty kids who never listened to me anyway.
The rest of the evening was spent in a karaoke booth. It seemed fitting that we would start and finish our time in Japan together in a karaoke booth. It was also telling that my singing had not improved, which caused someone in the next booth, to enter our one and politely asked if I could perhaps “sing better” because I was causing a disturbance.
Despite this interruption, we had a fun time and I concluded the evening by singing 'The End'. I had wanted the Beatles tune, but accidentally picked the depressing Doors song, which left a foul atmosphere in the air after I had finished murdering the already death inducing song.
Shoko and I went back to her house in Kobe and I helped her pack for her trip to Hong Kong the next day. Her mother and father also helped. Whilst Shoko and her mum talked in Japanese, her father and me continued to name Stones' songs we didn't name the last time. At midnight, with everything packed, everyone went to bed. As Shoko lay sleeping beside me, I was still wide-awake, fearful that I might miss my lesson tomorrow and lose my job.
Next morning came, and the sun was shining ferociously through the curtains. Shoko and I both woke up to her alarm, and got ready to go to Narita. Shoko said a teary farewell to her mother and father, and as we got into the taxi that would take us to Kobe station, Shoko's dad shouted at me from the house, “Let’s Spend the Night Together!” which I felt was inappropriate considering the situation.
From Kobe Station, we caught a Shinkansen train that took us to Tokyo Station, and from there we took a JR train to Narita airport. I don't know how Shoko would have managed to carry her suitcase by herself because it weighed a tonne and I was struggling to carry it as we changed trains throughout our journey.
We arrived at Narita airport in good time, leaving us time to eat an eel lunch called.
We didn't say much over lunch, and when we did it was only to comment on the nice weather and wishing each other good luck for the future. By the time Shoko was ready to check-in, the first signs of blubbering were apparent from each of us. After we hugged goodbye, the floods began and we broke out into loud sobs.
“Call me!” Shoko called out to me as she went through passport control.
“I will, don’t worry about THAT!” I shouted back, increasing the volume of each word as Shoko slowly faded away. An old lady next to me thumped me on the arm with her handbag and told me to be quiet.
With the combination of being attacked and Shoko leaving, I started to cry and staggered towards the exit. All I wanted to do was curl up on the ground in a foetal position and close my eyes. But I understood my job was on the line, so I made my way to the coach station in Shinjuku.
The Iida coach came on time, and once seated I felt I was composing myself, even though I felt I had a Shoko shaped hole in my heart. My composure was destroyed when I received a text from Shoko, which read: “Miss you Sam. I had a wonderful time with you x”
My face went through a series of expressions when I read this. At first I smiled, then I looked remorseful, then my lip trembled, then I sobbed in loud splutters that made the man next to me look worried.
I slumped my head against the window and watched the Tokyo skyline drift away as the coach pulled out of Shinjuku and made its way to Iida.
The coach arrived twenty minutes early at Iida Station, allowing me time to walk slowly to Terakoya and wallow in my misery.
I entered the empty classroom on time and sat down. I buried my head in my hands and waited for my students. Five minutes later I heard the patter of feet charging towards the door, before a dozen ten year olds burst into the room and shouted, “Sam is a toilet!”
This was not what I needed.

Earthquake!

2008-06-19T00:07:00.004+09:00

When I was awoken to the sound of my apartment rumbling, my first reaction was to scream, "TERRORISTS!" and it suddenly dawned on me that the political reasoning behind attacking an unheard of Japanese town, sleepily situated between towering mountains would be a tad foolish. As my room continued to rattle, I surmised that I was experiencing my first earthquake. The only profound statements that passed through my lips as I experienced an earthquake for the first time was, "Cor blimey, it's very shaky."
The earthquake was the main topic of discussion amongst my students that day.
I commented that I was initially scared when I saw my pots and pans jump up and down with a life of their own.
Masaho, my Tuesday evening student, said, "You were scared?! WAA-hahahahah!"
"Well, Masaho, I have never experienced an earthquake. I'm not used to it," I said.
"But I am. And this earthquake was a kiddie’s earthquake. I have been through more terrible earthquakes than that."
What then emerged was a testosterone fuelled game whereby all the male students in the class tried to out-earthquake each other with the most violent, destructive tales of personal agony and woe. An extract of the class conversation went like this:
Yuki: "I was driving on the roads, when an earthquake happened, and it threw my car into the air."
Masayoshi: "I wasn't driving a car at the time. I was walking, and the earthquake threw me in the air."
Yuki: "It flipped my car upside down."
Masayoshi: "It flipped me upside down. Twice."
Whether or not these tales were true, it didn’t matter, it was entertaining. But I had to cut a brutal end to proceedings when Yoko stood up and portentously said, "Earthquakes are not here to amuse us. They can tear families apart," and she sat down with her head in her hands.
That effectively killed all earthquake related stories in the classroom.
Yoko, of course, was quite right to remonstrate with the goading students. Earthquakes are indeed a serious matter and it is essential to know what to do in the event of one.
When I was in the staffroom sipping English tea after teaching my kindergarten class, I saw one of the teachers rise out of his chair, walk over to a microphone and started to scrunch up pieces of paper as he transmitted this sound around the school. Before I asked one of the teachers if they had any spare straight-jackets in the staff room, the Headmistress chuckled as she saw my confused face and filled me in on the details. The man with the scrunched up papers was trying to make accurate earthquake sounds because the school were practising an earthquake drill. I didn't have the heart to say that it sounded more like a man scrunching up paper, but the sound had the desired effect because the whole school streamed out of the exits, including the teachers in the staff-room. In the case of an earthquake, it appeared that the kids were expected to wear big yellow pillows over their heads. They looked liked little pixies as they marched out onto the playground with their thick pointy hats. The sheer weight of this gargantuan hat caused many children to fold over backwards onto the floor. I questioned the logic of placing this cumbersome apparel on the top of their head in the event of an emergency. Surely one would have the inclination to be as spry as a rabbit and dive for cover and not to be prevented to move by a bloody big elf hat submerging your face.

Juggling

2008-06-04T00:24:00.008+09:00

After having a lovely time with Shoko, I felt distraught it had to end. And when the day came to see her off at the bus station, it was all I could do to choke back the tears. I heard a clock ticking down to her imminent departure to Hong Kong, and time was running out. As her bus drove off towards Kobe, I needed a distraction otherwise I would allow myself to wallow in self-pity whilst wearing nothing but underpants back at my flat. I called up Martin and asked what he was up to.
“I’m off to practise some juggling with a circus troupe,” he said. “Wanna come?”
I thought for a moment. Circuses have never appealed to me. Clowns terrify me, the animals are treated poorly and the show tunes are so terrible that I was always prepared to wrench off my ears when I was a kid. But it was either go along with Martin or blub in my underpants all day.
“Let’s juggle!” I said.

Martin told me during the drive to Gifu that there was going to be a circus festival soon, and he had volunteered to help. I wasn’t sure how I could be of service to the troupe. I could do a fine pirate-jig on the spot, but that was it.
When we entered the rural town of Gifu we were surprised to find it deserted. The only activity I saw in the place was of the local farmers scratching their asses as they assessed their crops.
The rehearsals for the festival took place on the campus of a dental university. This was a shame because I was hoping the event would take place at a Clown College. I got over my disappointment and entered the gym that hosted the jugglers.
There were about 10 of them in the room, and they were delighting each other with their juggling skills.

Martin was quick to ingratiate himself with the group as he picked up a set of juggling balls and practised his juggling technique. I, however, was lacking in juggling skills, so I contented myself with lumbering around the gym annoying the others. I had my bulky Nikon camera slung around my neck, so some of the jugglers made some dramatic poses as I crept up and took snaps of them. I was treated with a baffling degree of respect. I reasoned that some of them believed that I was a professional photographer for some juggling magazine - no doubt called Tossers.
The illusion that I was of some relevance was soon shattered when a toothy, overweight chap, who looked like a warthog, came waddling towards me demanding I delete the picture I took of him balancing a pole on his colossal nose. He was bellowing at me in Japanese so David, a middle-aged American teacher, who organized the event, translated his outburst.
Apparently Mr. Warthog never allows his image to be used in public and didn't want his picture appearing in a magazine. I could understand why with a face like his but I reassured him that I didn't belong to a magazine, I was merely an amateur. He suddenly looked at me with snooty scorn and turned his already upturned nose up at me and walked away with a grunt. I intend to comply with his demands, but if I find out that Warthog Monthly is holding a photography competition, then I will ignore his demands and publish his image.
The others soon understood I was an amateur and treated me as such. Each attempt to take a snap of a juggler always concluded with them breaking their juggling concentration, dropping their balls and shooting me a loathing look.
Instead of incurring the jugglers' wrath further, I decided to join in.
I looked over at the pile of circus apparatus in the corner of the room and dejectedly walked over to find suitable things to play with. I tried to juggle three balls at once, but ended up throwing one of the balls into the eye-socket of David's Japanese wife. I tried juggling with two balls, but ended up throwing one of the balls into David's crotch. I then tried juggling with one ball. After hitting someone in the mouth with this ball, I decided juggling wasn't for me and picked up a multi-coloured flag. I had seen two people waving this around moments earlier and it looked mildly interesting. But when I tried to fling the flag around me, it was a disaster because I accidentally ensconced myself inside the flag, creating a colourful cocoon which nearly suffocated me.
I went back to basics and picked up a small plastic hoop, and started to twirl it around my arm. Some people looked at me with horror.
"You gotta start somewhere," I said.
After one hour of this twirling I was bored, so Martin and I went to a nearby Chinese restaurant promising David we would return in one hour. He A-OKed us and we left the campus.
The food at the restaurant was strange and didn't taste like Chinese cuisine. It tasted like something scrapped off at the bottom of a slop-bucket. But it was the first piece of food I had eaten all day, so taste took secondary importance. I just wanted some solids in my stomach.
This solid soon melted into a slushy mess and I immediately had to abort to the toilet. I remained there for the next twenty minutes trying to extract the gunk I ate from my bowels. Even when we were back on campus, I had to make my excuses to the juggling gang and spend most of the afternoon hugging the toilet seat as I expunged the vile Chinese cuisine by all means necessary.
I'm sure the jugglers missed me.

Welcome to Iida

2008-05-31T10:16:00.007+09:00

Shoko was going to stay at my apartment for a week after I invited her to see Iida. This may have been a huge mistake seeing as though my flat consisted of a bunk-bed, an armchair and, well, that was it. My surroundings were simple and basic in Iida, but that needed to change when I was going to invite a bombshell to stay over. I wanted to show Shoko a good time but Iida, as much as it was picturesque, offered very little in terms of entertainment.
I couldn't change the contents of Iida, but I could change the contents of my flat, so the day before Shoko arrived, I went to a furniture shop in town and bought some much needed items. I bought a new two-seater sofa. I bought a new blanket for my bed because my previous one was so old it had gone grey.
I also bought a table where we could eat dinner off. Previously I ate my dinner on my lap as I sat in my decayed arm-chair. It was a sorry state of affairs. I was therefore glad Shoko was coming because it forced me to change my lazy bachelor lifestyle.
Cleaning my room enabled me to see how degraded my life had become. There were rotten apples behind the fridge, there were dead mosquitoes I killed during the previous summer but failed to remove from my walls, and there was a strange black crust that circled the plug hole in my shower.
Shoko's imminent arrival was going to be a breath of fresh-air, literally.
Cleaning and organizing my room took one week, and on the day of her arrival, it looked brand new.
Shoko arrived at Iida's bus terminal on a coach at midnight, and the first words she said to me after surveying her surroundings, were, “Is this it?”
Things got off to a good start when she entered my apartment and found my table laid out with chocolates and lit candles. She was impressed by my romantic gesture, so much so that she abandoned eating the chocolates and went straight to the intercourse.
The next morning, I drove her around the town and showed her the various landmarks of the city.
It was a quick tour. My tour showed her the post office, the library and the opticians. If I really wanted to impress Shoko with the area, I needed to show her the area outside of Iida which had breathtaking scenery.
I drove Shoko along mountain roads which enabled her to see the beauty of the area, with its rich vegetation and soaring natural landscapes. Her big smile as we drove along the sunlit roads was reassurance that she was enjoying herself.
Her mood changed when a flash-flood erupted from the sky causing the car to skid on the edge of the mountain road.
“You get a better view of the ravine from this angle,” I said as the car cruised along the edge of the road from a high altitude.
Shoko informed me that she would rather stay alive than see a fucking ravine. I agreed with her and drove to a nearby Indian restaurant called Krishna's.
Upon arrival in the car park of the restaurant, we saw the proprietor beside the entrance looking up at the sky with his hands spread out in a crucified pose. We exited the car and waved a cheery greeting to this curious man. He was dressed in an Indian sari which was soaked and exposed his fleshy nipples. This horrific sight ruined my appetite, but there was worse to come.
The proprietor was a tall, bespectacled fellow with a body odour problem. Upon seeing us, he excitedly ushered us into the restaurant. It was soon revealed why he was so happy to see us.
We were his first customers of the day, even though it was the late afternoon.
Shoko and I took a window seat and watched the rain thrash down. After a while we surveyed the interior and noticed that he was the only person working in the restaurant. We concluded that with this many customers you only needed one person to manage the place.
As Shoko and I surveyed the menu, our bespectacled waiter was busy clattering pots and pans around in the kitchen. We tried to block the sound out and talked about what we should order when suddenly a dirty wet cat came hurtling towards us, hissing like a serpent. Shoko, who is allergic to cats, leapt out of her chair and screamed. I tried to shoo the cat away by waving my fork at it. The proprietor came darting towards us and reproached my behaviour, stating that it was a harmless cat. Shoko and I were too nice to state that it may well have been harmless, but it was still a filthy wet cat in a bloody restaurant, so we merely looked annoyed and ordered. As we ordered, the chef picked up the cat and started to stroke its wet fur. When he went to the kitchen to make our food I noticed that he was talking to himself. He was repeating "Samosa, samosa" whilst preparing the food. I'm not sure if this was his own personal mantra, or he was off his rocker. What was most distressing, though, was that he had failed to wash his hands after stroking the dirty cat that was now busy licking its penis next to us.
A few minutes later he came back with our orders and I was aghast to find cat hairs in my curry. Shoko and I refused to eat the food for fear of getting a disease, and prepared to get up to leave. The waiter came back with a sad expression on his face. I couldn't take him seriously because in his hand was a pink cat toy.
"Aren't you going to eat your food?" he enquired.
"I would rather eat a rectal ulcer," I said, and we left the restaurant.
By now, Shoko and I were very hungry after not eating in Krishna's. We got into the car and I slammed my foot on the accelerator and we sped off in search of food. After hurtling up a mountain road, I spotted a small café perched on the edge of a clearing. I assumed it was a café because the sign outside showed a happy chap slurping on a cup of coffee.
Inside, the place was rustic with decaying walls and musty smells. There was one other customer using a laptop computer which seemed incongruous in a place like this. I assumed the most modern thing this place had ever seen was toaster.
The owners were an old couple with bent backs and impressive beards - the wife having the longer one.
Shoko and I took our seats and ordered coffee from the old lady.
"No coffee," she said.
"This is a café?" I asked.
"Hai," she proudly said.
"But you don't serve coffee even though the sign outside shows a man drinking coffee?"
"Hai."
"What do you sell then?"
"Juice" she said victoriously.
Shoko and I ordered orange juice and were distraught to find brown flotsam and jetsam floating inside the glass. We both refused to drink any more. Before we got the hell out of this pit of a place, I went to the toilet. Initially I thought it was a squatter model, but on further inspection it was just a hole in the ground. When I emptied my bottom I could hear the echoing thud of my excrement, and I was sure I heard something yelp down below. Maybe it was the chef at Krishna collecting the raw ingredients for his dubious curries.
Needless to say, we didn't stay long in this café and were on the road again. I was on the verge of turning back into town with the belief that there would be more restaurants to choose from. But before I did, I noticed that a large number of cars were parked up ahead. I guessed that they were there for a special reason so I drove towards them. As I pulled up, I estimated there were over 100 cars parked along the side street. I followed the stream of cars until we found an entrance guarded by a sullen looking man with kimono. I parked the car, and as we approached this man, he held out an open palm and ordered us to stop.
“Ticket!” he announced.
“For what?” I asked.
“Kabuki,” he said, and made a sweeping motion with his hand towards the open entrance, as if what lay behind him was a mystical land.
I asked Shoko what this guy was waffling on about. She informed me that Kabuki was traditional Japanese theatre dating back to the early 17th century. It consisted of dance and drama, with the actors wearing heavy make-up and lavish costumes. And performances are usually staged outdoors, often surrounded by nature. It is known throughout Japan for its visual beauty and affecting performances.
“That's lovely, but will food be available?” I asked.
Shoko asked this question to the man in Japanese.
“Hai,” said the man.
“Let's go and see some Kaboko then,” I said, clapping my hands together.
“It's Kabuki,” Shoko corrected.
“Whatever,” I replied, as I bought two tickets.
Shoko and I walked down a small pathway lined with market stalls selling Kabuki merchandise, kimonos and lucky charms. I only had eyes for one stall, though, and that was the bento box stall. I ran over to this stall and bought four boxes filled with various types of Japanese food. Shoko and I found a bench nearby and gorged ourselves for the next ten minutes.
The food restored our energy, allowing us to see the Kabuki in a satisfied state of mind. Any other state of mind would not have been compatible with what we saw. Kabuki is, I might say, an acquired taste. From my perspective, it was a two-hour show where very little happened apart from a couple of actors pirouetting around the stage dressed in multi-coloured robes and wearing outlandish make-up. When the actors spoke to each other, I asked Shoko for a translation but she had no idea what they were saying either because they were using an outdated Japanese dialect.
The option left to us was sit and stare at the epic show, pretending to understand what was unfolding, or leave. We chose the latter.
I asked Shoko what she thought of her first day in Iida on the way home.
“Stranger than Tokyo,” she said.
If something is stranger than Tokyo, then you know it is bonkers.

What's Wrong With Kotoro

2008-05-29T15:48:00.003+09:00

Kotoro is an eight year old chap built like a sumo wrestler. I teach him once a week and I am always fearful that he could cripple me if I raise my voice in reproach towards him. I wouldn't be so worried if he was a sweet kid, but he is violent, loud, and unstable. In fact, he is pure evil. He always enters the classroom hollering with sweat dripping off his chubby face and chocolate smeared across his mouth whilst he clatters into the walls. Initially, I believed he was shouting in Japanese, but on closer inspection it's nothing more than gibberish.
"Wa wa ba ba!" is his favoured tune.
I tell him to shut his goddamn mouth in the most polite way, and he will immediately come marching towards me in a fit of anger, stand in front of me and gnash his teeth like a pit-bull.
I have to treat Kotoro carefully because anything can set him off. This is the reason why I never place any teaching objects on the table because he will only vandalise them. For instance, I will put a pack of alphabet cards on the table - he'll fling them like boomerangs; I will put colouring pencils on the table - he'll snap them in half and stick them up his ass; I will put a dice on the table for a board game - and he'll eat it. It's a no win situation.
There are about 10 other kids in the class, but my main focus is keeping Kotoro happy and studious.
I have toyed with the idea of allowing him to devour a KFC king sized bucket whilst I teach, but realized he would never pay attention to me.
It has been a long nine months teaching this kid. The low-points have included him marching around the classroom with his dick hanging out whilst singing the Japanese national anthem. On another occasion he squatted over a bin and did a shit in it before sitting on the faces of other students.
Quite unexpectedly, though, I found his Achilles heal.
I had given the kids a jigsaw puzzle to do. I was amazed to observe that Kotoro was quiet and polite to the other kids as he carefully tried to complete the puzzle. When the kids finished the puzzle, he alone packed away the pieces delicately as if this act was the most important thing he had ever done in his life. The kids were getting restless because I was staring dumbfoundedly at Kotoro for five minutes as he packed away the puzzle.
When he handed me the puzzle box with a bow, I thanked him with a stunned gasp, thinking that I must bring more puzzles to the lessons so I can restrict his fondness for causing carnage.
When he delivered a final bow he ran over to the boy next to him and sat on his face.

The Curse Of Pink

2008-05-20T22:35:00.011+09:00

Shoko and I were going to see her friend, Ayaka, in Nagoya the day after staying over at her parent's apartment. The trip to Nagoya from Kobe is about four hours, so we arrived late at night because we ate a big lunch with her parents. We might have never made it to Nagoya because I found it hard to get up out of my chair due to the large amounts of ramen and tempura I consumed at Shoko’s house.
During the drive Shoko arranged to meet Ayaka and her boyfriend, Ryosuke, outside Nagoya Station. I protested about this meeting spot, predicting that it would be swarming with other cars, aggressively eager to fill any empty space available. My prediction proved correct when we approached the goliath structure of Nagoya Station.
As expected, the dropping-off point outside the station was suffocated with cars and taxis swerving in and out of each other as they searched for spaces with eagle eyes and thrashing expletives. I entered this fiery cauldron with light dabs on the gas pedal. Within 0.54 seconds I received the first ear-splitting horn-honk. I turned towards the direction of the honk and saw a furious bald headed cabbie shaking his fist and cursing like a wild carnivore. Why he was livid with my driving, I couldn't say, but I adopted the general spirit of proceedings and stuck my middle finger up at him before driving on ahead.
A few seconds later a car came crashing out from around a corner causing me to do an emergency stop. This driver had long scraggly hair and a cigarette drooping from his mouth. He may have looked different from the bald headed cabbie, but he used the exact same movements and started to furiously shake his fist at me, nearly chocking on his cigarette as he did so. Again, I couldn't understand the anger directed towards me. He was the one who pulled out of the corner too quickly, not me. With this in mind, I stuck my middle finger up at him and drove off.
Where I ended up was the worst possible place in existence. It was a small car park crammed with cars. It was unfortunate that as I entered this parking space, I inadvertently blocked off the exit for the other cars. As a result I received a tidal wave of car honks and angrily contorted faces. The exhaust of all the cars created a hazy shimmering mist around the cars and their drivers, which made for a hot and uncomfortable atmosphere. It was like Dante's Inferno.
I looked to the left side of me and saw a juddering driver with a ghastly frothing face screaming swear words at me, and to the right of me was a little old lady working her angry jaw in unfathomable shapes and sizes. Punctuating this scene was a small procession of fez-wearing Turkish tourists walking through the car-park which made this horrendous experience even more unsettling and surreal. I tried to reverse out of the car park but was blocked off by another honking taxi. I closed my eyes and dreamt of swimming in a placid ocean with a group of smiling dolphins. Shoko shook me out of my comforting reverie and told me to get out of this area so that we might escape with our lives. I agreed and jauntily reversed out the exit. I spied a tiny space at the drop-off point behind a garish pink car in my rear-view mirror and duly parked behind it. Fearful that I may have been blocking the road, I parked dangerously close behind the car. Just as I turned off the engine in victorious relief, a petite girl in her early twenties launched out of her car and inspected her bumper. She then accusingly pointed a finger at me. I didn't know what she was so angry about and was about to raise my middle finger in protest, when she yelled out: "Crash! You crash!"
I had an innocent rabbit-caught-in-a-headlight expression. She walked over to my window and started to shout in Japanese. I made some calm-down gestures with my hand as I got out my car. She led me to her bumper and pointed to a spot. I assumed a manly crouch as I inspected the spot, hoping I would give off the impression I knew more about cars than she did. I studied the spot she pointed at with strained eyes but could find no reason why she would be angry with me. I looked at her and said "Where?"
She pointed to the spot and forcefully thrust my face to the offending area. What she was upset about was a minuscule scratch that was no bigger than an ant’s leg.
I looked at her with astonishment and asked what she wanted me to do about it.
"You pay!" she said.
I wanted to tell her that by damaging a pink car I was doing her favour because no pink cars should be allowed on the road.
I shook my head, pointed to the tiny-scratch and said, "You have got be kidding."
She took this adversarial battle to the next level when she called her boyfriend who was talking on his phone nearby. Moments later this lanky six-footed creature came lolloping towards us. He put his arm around his girlfriend and asked what the problem was. She pointed to the spot and he had the same vacant expression I had when he inspected the spot. "Where?" he said.
His girlfriend stomped her high heeled foot in annoyance and said she wanted me to reimburse my heinous act otherwise she would call the police. For such a harmless scratch, I suspected the police would enact punishment by tickling me.
It was at this point that Ayaka and Ryosuke joined us. They parked their car behind mine with annoying ease. They were an impossibly good looking couple and were somewhat surprised to meet me for the first time in this circumstance. In a perfect world, we would have all met, shook hands, exchanged pleasantries about the weather and wandered off to the nearest bar and to get trashed. But they wandered over to find a physically and mentally exhausted bloke, with his hair messed up and greasy by all the exhaust fumes, and waving his arms about as he remonstrated with a girl standing next to a bright pink car. Naturally they seemed perturbed by this unruly sight. I still found time to shake their hands with them whilst the girl with the pink car continued to scream at me.
Shoko whispered in my ear that Japanese people can't stand the slightest mark on their cars and will move mountains to get it fixed accordingly. To prevent an encounter with the police I paid the ridiculously expensive bill for a new paint job.
When the girl and her daddy long-legged boyfriend sped off in their pink car, satisfied at having depleted my wallet, I was properly introduced to Ayaka and Ryosuke.
I started coherently with a chipper, "Konichiwa."
It then rapidly fell apart.
They knew very little English and, as mentioned, my Japanese knowledge stretches to pointing at things and pulling faces. The onus was on me because I was a guest in their country. The onus had apparently scuttled away when I could think of nothing more to add to this exchange.
Ayaka, Ryosuke and Shoko started to discuss where we should go to drink in Japanese, whilst I stood at the side and pretended to understand all that was being said. I would nod at appropriate intervals and go "Hai, hai" when I felt the moment needed my input. This led Ayaka to believe I understood Japanese, so she asked me a question in Japanese. I guessed she was asking me where we should go for the evening so I made drinking motions with my hand and, for comic effect, pretended to act drunk. Shoko pulled me to one side and said Ayaka wanted to know how long I had been living in Japan. Ayaka, naturally, was spooked by my behaviour.
I recovered and said, "Er ...9 months."
"Wa Kari Masen (I don't understand)" she said.
I started to wave nine digits in her face and said "months, months"
She understood, but she still had a perturbed expression on her face.
Shoko spoke to them in Japanese and made short motions to her hands towards me. Ayaka and Ryosuke laughed. I think Shoko reassured them that I was quite normal but a bit of an idiot.
To escape the crowded area of Nagoya Station we all went to a nearby yakitori restaurant. Like a baby, I asked the others to order for me because I couldn't read the Kanji on the menu. Ryosuke chuckled and assured me he ordered the best dish for me. He did so in Japanese so I initially didn't understand what he told me so I responded by laughing hysterically and slapping my knee thinking he told a humorous joke. Shoko translated what he said and told me it wasn't really that funny. I apologized to Ryousuke for my social gaffe and made some hungry "mmmmmmm" sounds which on hindsight may have sounded quite sinister.
Whilst we waited, Shoko, Ayaka and Ryosuke started to converse in Japanese, no doubt concluding that I was a lost cause. As they joyously chatted away, I practised holding my chop-sticks in a beastly fashion. I couldn't get my hands to morph into the right shape. Each attempt resulted in the chop sticks falling out of my hands and clattering on the floor, disturbing the conversation around the table. I whispered an apology and motioned for them to continue. I turned in my chair and faced the wall as I discreetly continued my chop-stick etiquette. I was like the school dunce.
I gave up this practice when an attempt to wrap a finger around one of the sticks resulted in it flipping out of my hand and falling with a plop into Ryosuke's beer.
As we finished dinner, the talk centred on how to continue the evening. It was decided that we should go to a club which had a dancing competition that night. "Body-popping" was the term used for the dancing. I had no idea what this meant, but Shoko informed me it was a particular style of street dancing used in hip hop. I was still none the wiser but she highlighted that I wouldn't have to converse with Ryosuke and Ayaka a great deal and I could crash into people and wreck havoc without seeming out of place so I was delighted.
The club was small and a lot of bodies were indeed popping to the hip hop beats. I tried to entertain Shoko, Ryosuke and Ayaka by pointing one finger in the air and doing a crude Saturday Night Fever disco move which seemed inappropriate in this charged hip-hop atmosphere.
We ordered drinks and sat at a table on an elevated platform allowing us to view the competition taking place. Ayaka and Shoko went off to the toilet, leaving me and Ryosuke alone. There was an awkward silence as we watched the dancers. I tried to kick-start a conversation by pointing towards the mayhem on the dance floor and said "Su-goy! (great)" he smiled back and repeated what I just said, and returned to staring at the dance floor. I tried to further our conversation by tapping him on the shoulder and saying "Su-goy" again. He nodded and smiled and returned to staring at the dance floor. Trying to come up with any more Japanese phrases was so mentally exhausting that I nearly collapsed. Thankfully, Shoko and Ayaka returned and I could talk with Shoko in English.
As the hours ticked by, I became progressively drunk and uninhibited, so much so that I started to do impromptu body popping myself. My rubbish attempts to contort my body to the beats had them in hysterics. I was in their good books. I now knew what made them laugh, but I couldn't exactly continue this dancing all the time. Walking down the street or eating in a restaurant whilst doing some body popping would be beyond the pale and deeply disturbing so I basked in the momentary good relations we were igniting.
When the poppers had finished the competition, we all went our separate ways, with Shoko and I arranging to meet Ayaka and Rysoke the following day for dinner.
We all left in good spirits, but the following day things got off to a remarkably bad start.
As Shoko and I waited for Ayaka and Ryosuke by the ferris wheel in Sakae, Ayaka came running towards us weeping, followed by a grimacing Ryosuke. Shoko and Ayaka exchanged a few words before Shoko informed me that they had just had a row and she was going to comfort Ayaka for a while. So off they went and Ryosuke waited beside me. There was a prolonged silence.
I don't even know how to deal with these lover's tifts with my friends back in England let alone in Japan, so I was in uncharted territory. What the hell was I meant to say to the guy? Small talk was impossible because I didn't know the Japanese for "Did you check the latest Sumo scores?" As a result, I tapped him on the shoulder, pointed to the ferris wheel and said, "Sugoy". Unlike the last few occasions I used this opening gambit, he didn't even crack a smile. I continued regardless of his sullen expression.
"I like it," I brightly ventured.
Nothing. Not even a smirk. I shifted the topics from ferris wheels to careers and asked what he did for a living. He pulled a constipated face as he tried to find the right English word.
"Temple," he finally said.
"You're a......temple? How did you become a temple?" I said with concern.
"No, no. I'm a student. I study temples." he said.
I was still confused. I never knew temples were on the curriculum in any country but I made sincere nods with my head pretending to know what he was talking about. He asked what I did, and I told him I was a teacher. He asked what age range I taught. I mimed that I taught all ages. For the kids, I crouched down and made baby sounds and for the old folks I adopted a hunch back and pretended to walk about with a cane. He was laughing aloud. Unfortunately for him, he was guffawing when Ayaka returned with a sad, mascara smeared face and the sight of her boyfriend in a jovial state of mind left her distraught so she ran off crying again.
After twenty trying minutes they had reconciled and began holding hands again.
We decided to eat at a nearby Ugandan restaurant and as we were seated you could tell Ayaka and Ryosuke were in high spirits again. They laughed at my attempts to converse with them in Japanese, which I didn’t know whether to take as a show of warmth or a sign of cruel goading. Seeing as we weren't getting anywhere with the conversation, Ayaka, who is a talented graphic designer, started to sculpture a set of ducks from the napkins on the table. When her squad of ducklings were complete we all amused ourselves by playing with the model animals and making quacking sounds for the rest of the evening. I may be incompetent at Japanese but at least I am skilled when it comes to incoherent quacking.

With everyone in a good mood after a delicious dinner we all made our way to a Pricura shop. This is a popular pastime in Japan where young people take pictures with each other against cartoonish backgrounds. Upon entering the shop, I was struck by the amount of pink adorning the interior. There was pink wallpaper, pink photo booths and pink clothed shop-workers. To complement the sugary pink colour scheme was the bubblegum J-pop blasting out of the loudspeakers. All this dizzying pink nearly caused me to vomit - pink puke probably.

Shoko, Ayaka, Ryosuke and I huddled inside one of the photo booths and smiled our best smiles. I consistently managed to miss-time the photo shoot as I always bleated, "When does the machine take the photo?" only to see the camera flash as I turned towards the group with a confused expression on my face.
The pink colours and sugary-sweet pop music was making me hyper-ventilate and was dangerously close to castigating me. I was in desperate need to feel a man again. I was relieved therefore to discover an arcade area near the pricura machines. The sight of arcade games consisting of gunning down zombies, driving fast cars and playing in football tournaments filled me with ecstasy and testosterone that was dearly lacking before.

Kobe Meeting

2008-05-08T22:59:00.003+09:00

Since we met the last time, Shoko and I were phoning each other all the time when we went back to our respective home towns. During our last conversation, we agreed to meet each other in her home town of Kobe.
This relaxed city is a thriving and bustling metropolis which has seemingly recovered majestically from the ruins of the devastating earthquake of 1995. It had all the qualities of a colourful and vibrant city but without the in-your-face culture of Tokyo or Osaka. It is a perfect place to stroll around whilst admiring the bargain shops and the wild array of restaurants.
Indeed, it's the restaurants and cafés which are the most visible attraction in Kobe. As soon as I exited Sanomiya Station and met Shoko, we were spoilt for choice as to where we should eat lunch. Thai, Russian, French, Jamaican and Mexican were just a few of the restaurants on offer to us.
We decided to eat at an Indian curry house because we both held the firm belief that Indian food is the best in the world. As we looked at the menu, I was hoping for a big helping of spicy ass-blasting curry, and we got it in spades. The first course consisted of spicy Nan bread. But this wasn't any old Nan bread. This was a mutant sized Nan which had the power to destroy man-kind. Our waiter's back was stooped by the weight as he carried it to our table on giant plates. It would have been better to cart it in a wagon.
He found it difficult to find space as he deposited the Nan plates on the table, so I opened the window nearest to me and allowed part of the Nan to flap about in the wind in order to accommodate it on the table.
During our meal, Shoko and I began to laugh when we reminisced about the Love Hotel in Osaka and my dubious pick of Tom Waits for 'mood' music. We agreed that it was a great night. This made her imminent departure to Hong Kong next month even more demoralising.
After eating one-sixteenth of the Godzilla-sized Nan, we were nearly full, so decided to order our main courses. I picked a spicy Vindaloo, partly because Japanese restaurants have a policy of immediately refilling your water once you finish. Without this reassurance, a red-hot vindaloo might have had the ability to destroy the foundations of my body and soul.
I was lucky that my glass was always refilled because the vindaloo this restaurant cooked up was so damn hot, that I was convinced it was made in Hell. The first mouthful I tasted nearly blew me off my chair. I had to hang on to the table for dear life as I ate my lunch. Shoko offered some of her milder curry, which I gladly accepted because I wanted to actually taste food and not to be aggressively attacked by it.
After finishing our meal, we went for a walk around Kobe and basked in the glow of the afternoon sunshine as it lit up the cosmopolitan city. Two hours later, we were both feeling peckish, so went to a nearby French café for a late afternoon supper. It was ferociously windy at this time of the day, so we were quite apprehensive about sitting outside due to the tables inside being occupied. The food looked so good that we decided to risk the uncomfortable gale-force winds ripping through the city. The food we ordered were crepes filled with strawberries, bananas, cream and chocolate. As expected, it was delicious. But, as expected, the wind was determined to ruin our eating experience. I lost count how many times I had to forcefully stab my fork into my food to stop it being whipped off my plate by the wind. Shoko found it difficult to eat because her long hair submerged her face as she sat in the direction of the wind. Naturally, we didn't have time to savour the food because it would have surely flew off into the Kobe streets if we hadn't shoved it down our gullets in a flash.
It was in these inhospitable weather conditions that Shoko decided to reveal some surprising news.
“Would you like the see my parents tonight?” she asked through her wind-swept hair.
“Er,” I said brilliantly.
“You don't have to. I just thought it would be nice for them to see who I've been hanging out with for the past few weeks.”
This comment was weighted with meaning. I suspected Shoko was a family girl judging by the amount of times she said she loved her parents. She was also living with them. Rejecting meeting her parents might mean rejecting Shoko, and I didn't want that. I wanted to meet her parents, but one issue plagued my mind.
“Do they speak English?” I asked.
“No,” Shoko replied.
“Ah.”
This new found information could have proved potentially hazardous. A meeting between non-English speaking parents and a non-Japanese speaking fool was no basis for enlightened discussions.
I voiced my fears to Shoko.
“Don't worry! Just smile and nod. They'll be happy with that,” Shoko said.
“Your parents are easy to please,” I said.
“Trust me, they're easy-going.”
I was reassured by this. If all I was to do was smile and nod to keep them happy, I was determined to make my smile the best they had ever seen. I practised my smile at the table using Shoko's make-up mirror.
“Don't be ridiculous,” Shoko said, snatching her mirror from my hands.
Shoko decided we should meet her parents at their apartment in the evening, leaving us a few hours to explore the city. Before we got up to leave the French restaurant she phoned her mother and explained the plan. After hanging-up, Shoko said that her parents were “very very very excited” about meeting me. With this much anticipation attached to me, I was sure I was going to drastically disappoint. Especially since all I was armed with was a smile and a nod.
After the crepes we went for another walk around the city, this time visiting Kobe's port, which explained the international feel of the city. The different cultures that sailed to this port must have had a lasting influence on the city's aesthetic and mentality. Indeed, there was so much international influence and very little Japanese. This became obvious when we searched for a Japanese restaurant when we became ravenously hungry. But the search for a restaurant proved fruitless. The options we had were Vietnamese, Nepalese, Indonesian, German, Spanish, Korean and Jamaican restaurants. I wanted to try a meal I had never eaten before, and I had never eaten Indonesian or Jamaican food. Shoko told me that Indonesian food was quite spicy, and I had already experienced spicy food earlier that day and I didn't want to meet Shoko's parents with my ass locked and loaded and ready to explode. With this in mind we picked the Jamaican restaurant.
Our shared meal of jerk chicken, rice, peas and shrimp was fantastic. We had no complaints about the food but the restaurant layout proved a problem. Shoko and I were seated next to a big screen TV screen showing footage of Burning Spear in concert, which was great because I love his reggae. The problem was that we were also seated next to the loud speakers, and trying to make conversation with Shoko whilst Winston Rodney passionately sang about the politics of Marcus Garvey wasn't the atmosphere I had hoped for.
During our meal Shoko sensed I was feeling nervous about meeting her parents, so she suggested we go for some karaoke to unwind before hand. I thought this was a good idea so we went to a karaoke bar nearby and belted out a number of tunes in a small booth which overlooked Kobe's cityscape at night. As much as I was enjoying duetting with Shoko, I made the fatal error of drinking three glasses of whiskey on the rocks. This had a ghastly effect on my brain which left me a stumbling mess. Upon observing my intoxicated behaviour, Shoko said she would not present me to her parents in my current state. With this in mind, she led me to the girls’ toilet and dunked my head into a sink of cold water to sober me up. Underneath the water I still managed to hear the shrill screams of women walking into the toilet and seeing what appeared to be a woman trying to drown a man in the sink. This brief drowning had an immediate effect on me because the shock of the ice cold water on my face made the alcohol lurking in my brain run away for dear life.
Shoko looked me up and down before concluding that I was fit for presentation. We then headed to her parents house.
Our taxi pulled up outside a house in an area that had been flattened by the earthquake in 1995. Shoko told me that her parent's house was one of the only ones left intact after the disaster. I nodded to this fact, but I couldn't really give a measured and mature answer because I was terrified about the meeting about to take place. I knew all eyes would be on me, with her parents judging whether I was suitable for their daughter.
Shoko rang the door bell, and whilst we waited she quickly rearranged my hair.
The door opened and revealed a small smiling woman.
“Oka-san!” Shoko said, hugging her mum.
“Kernichiwa Shoko,” her mother said in a soft voice.
Shoko broke away from her mum and positioned me in front of her.
“Mum, this is Sam,” she said.
I bowed and presented her with a box of chocolates I had bought earlier in the day.
“Arigato,” she said, bowing. I bowed in kind.
There was silence.
Shoko nudged me, indicating she wanted me to speak.
“Kernichiwa,” I said.
“Kernichiwa,” Shoko's mum said, and gave a delicate laugh whilst covering her mouth.
The extended silence that followed this exchange cemented the fact that I was one lazy bastard when it came to learning Japanese.
“Good!” I said whilst pointing to the interior of her compact and cosy house. “Good house.”
Shoko's mum covered her mouth and laughed again. Shoko and I went inside when her mum ushered us in. The house was simply designed with Japanese paintings adorning the walls. The smell of Nabe came from the nearby kitchen causing my stomach to rumble.
We entered the living room to find Shoko's dad sitting on a sofa watching a J-league football game on TV. He stood up to reveal his towering stature and shook my hand.
He must have been over six feet tall, and looking down on me he said, “Hello Mr. Sam.”
“Hello....Shoko's dad,” I said.
He offered me a seat, whilst Shoko and her mum attended to the Nabe in the kitchen.
I sat down next to him and we laughed. There was nothing funny to laugh about, but we realised we couldn't speak the others language so we needed to fill this language void to avoid any awkwardness. We continued to laugh about nothing for a few minutes, before we settled down and stared at the TV in silence, thinking of other ways to communicate.
I had an idea.
“Football,” I said, pointing to the TV.
“Hai!” he said.
“Do you like it?” I said.
He looked confused.
I made a happy face and pointed to the TV. I then made a sad face and pointed to the TV, miming my question.
He looked even more confused.
We resumed laughing at nothing for the next couple of minutes. We felt safe with this arrangement.
The adverts came on the TV with the Stones' Start Me Up playing over a beer commercial.
“Ah! Rolling Stones,” Shoko's dad said with a big smile.
“Rolling Stones!” I said with an even bigger smile.
Shoko's dad looked incredulous. “Uh? Rolling Stones?” he asked, with amazement.
“Hai, I like Rolling Stones,” I said.
He laughed and shook my hand, clearly delighted he had met a fellow fan.
The next ten minutes consisted of the two of us saying the title of Stones’ tracks, and occasionally singing them. It turned out Shoko's dad was a fanatical fan because he started to sing the relatively obscure Stones' song Tell Me at the top of his lungs.
This new found topic of discussion beat laughing at nothing, that's for sure.
As Shoko's dad was mimicking the harmonica solo in Midnight Rambler, Shoko and her mother walked into the living room and laid out pots of steaming Nabe on the low-rise table.
Before we ate, the family put their hands together and said “itadakimasu.” The Japanese word for giving thanks.
I tried seconds later. “Eat-a-dead-eye-mask” was my interpretation of the word.
Over dinner, Shoko acted as my translator and through her I realised how lovely her family were. They were warm and affectionate towards their daughter and hospitable and friendly towards me.
Shoko's mum whispered something into her daughter's ear.
“My mum says she likes your floppy long hair. It makes you look like a cute rock star,” Shoko revealed.
“Er, thankyou very much,” I said.
I reasoned I should compliment her back.
“Well, I can see where your daughter gets her good looks from,” I said.
Her mum laughed with her hand over her mouth after hearing Shoko's translation.
Shoko's dad lunged at me with a knife in his hand, screaming something in Japanese.
“Holy fucking shit!” I screamed, jumping out of my chair.
Shoko translated her father's comment.
“Stop flirting with my wife!” he had said.
“I was just being friendly,” I said with a weak voice wrecked by fear.
Shoko's dad suddenly broke into hysterical laughing.
I should have realised he was joking, and that he wasn't serious about gutting me at the dinner table.
I settled back into my chair and ate in silence as Shoko and her parents conversed with each other.
I was hoping that after dinner Shoko and I would make our way to a nearby hotel, and repeat our Love Hotel shenanigans. But as Shoko and I were clearing the table, she told me that her parents would like me to spend the night.
I encouraged Shoko to try and find a plausible excuse to turn down this offer. She refused, and said it would be a nice gesture if I stayed the night. I knew it would be a nice gesture, but I was far more interested in gesturing privately with Shoko.
The steely look in Shoko’s eyes made it clear that there was no choice but to stay.
Shoko's room was next door to her parents room, which meant that the only thing separating us was a flimsy fusuma door. As a result, I could clearly hear Shoko's parents movements next door. Any hanky-panky with Shoko was out of the question. But I've always been a risk taker, and to prove this, I kissed Shoko only to be startled by a loud bang on the fusuma followed by Shoko's dad speaking in Japanese.
“Behave yourself, boy,” was Shoko's translation of what her father had just said.

Mount Fuji

2008-05-03T19:30:00.009+09:00

You'd have thought Mount Fuji would be easy to find due to its huge size, but it was harder than first anticipated. There were five of us travelling to this Japanese landmark, and we had planned the route the night before, safe in the knowledge that we would arrive at the foot of Mount Fuji in the morning. This was the best time to see it before the afternoon clouds submerged the view. We were therefore somewhat surprised to be driving along the highways two hours after our estimated time of arrival. The road signs gave no indication that Mount Fuji was in the vicinity, so we were clueless as to our surroundings. The other teachers in the car were getting restless as we guessed the whereabouts of the great mountain. We continued to drive along the roads surrounded by green hills and valleys. But there was no sign of Fuji.
"Perhaps it's nipped off to get some coffee," I helpfully suggested.

Just before we all started to get irritable, Fuji suddenly flashed into our sights as we turned the corner of a road. Each of us in the car made a cooing “ooooooooh” sound emphasizing the impact the grand view had on us. Fuji stood aloft over the landscape without a cloud encroaching on its space. This created a scramble inside the car as we attempted to take photographs from the car. The nearer we approached, the closer the clouds swirled around the mountain. Instead of being a hindrance to the view, the clouds made for a more mysterious and magical sight, which created even more of a scramble inside the car for a photo.
We drove to Fujiyoshida, one of the five lakes that surround Fuji, and walked to a lift that would whisk us to the top of a lookout area. As we waited in the queue for the lift we noticed a series of pictures depicting a rabbit and a gopher fighting as they climbed Mount Fuji. We fathomed that these must be some strange Fuji mascot to entertain the kids that visit the area. Although I'm not sure it was sending out the right message because the pictures depicted extreme violence, with the homicidal rabbit always beating the rather dim gopher. These strange pictures were quickly forgotten as we all crushed into the tiny lift and ascended a slope. The view of Fujiyoshida was spectacular, and the clear blue skies suggested we were lucky to pick this day to go Mount Fuji spotting. Although the blue skies were an illusion because when we got the top and wandered around the lookout platform, the clouds had covered the roof of Fuji. We lingered about at this look-out place for a while, hoping that the clouds would depart, but they never did. Without the grand view of Fuji to look at, we resorted to deciphering the meaning of a strange model in the centre of the lookout point that depicted the homicidal rabbit mounting the dim gopher from behind in what looked like a sexual tryst. Bored of the heavy clouds blocking our view and of the amorous rabbit and gopher, we made our way back down the slope and to our car. After a few minutes of debate, we decided on seeing Lake Kawaguchi because we had read in our rough guides that this was one of the most sumptuous beauty spots in the area. Our rough guides weren't wrong because it was an amazing lake surrounded by verdant mountains and populated with fishermen. As we strolled along the outskirts of the lake, my Nikon camera was rumbling excitedly in my bag, desperate to be let loose in the area. I agreed to its plea and spent much of the afternoon hopping along the rocks surrounding the lake and taking snaps.

As the sun was setting behind the mountains, we decided that there was still time to do one more thing before we hit the road home. Reuben, Russ, Anthony, Martin and myself browsed over a tourist map and simultaneously pointed to the same spot which read: Seiko Bat Cave.
A normal bat cave is incredibly exciting in itself, but the fact that it was a Seiko (pronounced 'psycho') bat cave made it sound even better. But the reason behind the name is less than thrilling. It's called Seiko because it is in the town of Seiko. I was hoping it was because the bats were crazy.

Ten minutes later we arrived at the ticket entrance to the caves and were instructed to wear hard-helmets because the caves were low and spiked with stalactites. After securing on our hats we entered the cave and spent a good half an hour exploring the area but we encountered no Seiko bats. We eventually gave up and confronted the ticket officer outside about the absence of the bats.
"Ha ha ha. The bats come in November. This is the wrong season. No bats now. Ha ha ha," he said.
We didn't see the funny side after spending an hour trekking in a stinky cavern covered in bat shit, when he could have informed us beforehand about our pointless trek.
On our way back home, we noticed a line of parked cars at the side of the road. In order to inspect why this was so, we slowed the car down and saw a serene lake with Mount Fuji looming behind it in the background. This little cove wasn't in any of our guide books which made it even more rewarding for us to discover. The sun was setting by this point and the clouds had dispersed. Needless to say, the view in front of us was incredible. I insisted on a photo of me in comedic mode, whereby the photo would look like I was holding Fuji. I also insisted of me in smiley mode, whereby I stood to the side of Fuji and grinned like an idiot. And I wanted a photo of me in thinking mode, whereby I squatted down and looked ruminatively towards Fuji.
It was telling that the best photo I took was the one without me in it.

Burping

2008-05-03T15:24:00.002+09:00

The best teaching plans happen when you least expect it. Halfway through my Monday evening lesson, I was struggling to teach two seven year old boys adjectives. It was like trying to fill a sieve with water. These two kids, Shigeno and Yoshgey, were more content on making farting noises.
I used everything at my disposal to ram home the essentials of adjectives. I used flashcards of a 'big' whale and a 'small' mouse. I drew on the white board a picture of a young girl and an old woman. I even acted out the sound of a 'noisy' person by screeching at a high pitch. But I received no sign of understanding from the farting kids. I didn’t know what to do.
I scanned the room for any tools that could further my adjective teaching.
As I pondered to the sound of farting noises coming from the boys, I spotted that they were both drinking fizzy drinks.
"Can you burp?" I said to them.
They didn't understand the word 'burp' so I demonstrated to them with an almighty burp. I told them that what I just did was a 'big' burp.
They understood and laughed. "Big burp, big burp!" Shigeno bleated.
I asked them to do the same. They eagerly did so, repeatedly.
I deliberately goaded them for the sake of teaching them a new word and said, "You’re doing small burps."
They took offence of my judgement and reassured me they were doing manly big burps. I said this was questionable and asked them to deliver me a really big burp. I pointed to their drink bottles and said they could emit a thunderous burp if they drank from it. The two of them drank from their bottles as if they had been in the Gobi desert for a year, and proceeded to deliver epic guttural burps, which I'm sure could be heard from Tokyo. They both had a set pattern where they drank and burped, drank and burped. The stink of the burps wafted around the room and the ferocity of the burping alerted some of the students in the next room to peek through the window. What they saw was me waving my hands like a conductor, instructing the kids to make 'bigger' burps and 'smaller' burps whilst they duly obliged.
After ten minutes of consistent burping action from the boys, I took over proceedings and started to burp myself. I told them to say whether they thought my burps were big or small. Needless to say they nailed these adjectives and labelled each of my burps with the correct adjectives allowing me to feel confident that they had fully understood these important words.
Near the end of the lesson I told them to do a big big big big burp. Shigeno and Yoshgey took a deep breath and drained their fizzy drinks. Obediently they let loose a bloody big burp which caused each of their eyes to pop wide open. Something went wrong with Shigeno, though. He aborted burping mid way through, tensed his muscles, clasped his hands over his ass and ran to the toilet. Maybe I was a bit thorough with my burp-teaching, but at least he now knows the words "big" "small" and, possibly, "smelly poo."

Ninjing In A Ninja Park

2008-05-03T15:08:00.007+09:00

I was travelling to a Ninja Park in Nagano with five other teachers, and we were all excited about what lay in store for us. We had planned it weeks in advance after one of my teenage students recommended it. The photos promoting the park on a website showed people of all ages being trained martial-arts by authentic ninjas.
Reuben summed it up succinctly as we were nearing our destination: "I'm looking forward to fucking about with Ninja shit."
The park was situated in the mountainous region of Togakushi, and the four hour drive afforded us epic views of rocky plains. As we ascended the narrow roads the air became fresh and sharply smacked you in the face if you popped your head out of the car window. I must admit, as we came closer to the park, I had images of me battling ninjas in full ninja garb and being taught the ways of the ninja by an old sensei with a flowing white beard and that this lesson would take place by moonlight. I would then return to my teaching way of life with new-found ninja skills allowing me to no longer take any shit from my students.
I was not the only one with ninja dreams. Martin, who was driving one of the two cars in our convoy, delved into a bag as we stopped at some traffic lights, and took out a black hood.
"What's that," I asked.
"A ninja hood I bought in Kyoto," he said, and put it over his head.
Far from giving off the impression of a cunning ninja, he resembled an old Arabic woman. And his nose was poking out of the gap reserved for the darting, alert eyes of a ninja. I made this observation and he agreed the nose should be concealed in case it got caught in a trip wire.
"There, I'm practically invisible," he said beneath the hood.
I was amused to see the reactions of people driving past our car in the opposite direction. I'm sure they had never seen a ninja driving a car before. But I surmised that Martin didn't give off a ninja impression because the looks of the families driving past in the opposite lane was one of terror. Maybe they thought he was some crazy-nut with a bag over his head.
We parked outside the park premises, and Martin - still wearing his ridiculous hood - instructed me to be quiet because he wanted to scare Russ, Reuben and Anthony in the other car.

"How you gonna sca...," and before I could finish the sentence, he had darted off into the jungle in a commando position and hid behind a tree, laying in wait for them to walk past. Again, he didn't quite accomplish a ninja appearance. For a start he was wearing a blue t-shirt and jeans. A real ninja would calculate that blue clothes would alert his enemies to his whereabouts in a green jungle. Indeed, a couple of girls walked past his 'hiding' place and immediately spotted him. They screamed in terror when they saw his dark lumbering presence and ran away.
"Martin, you look more like a rapist than a ninja!" I called out.
"Eh?" he shouted back, cupping his ear.
"You're not hiding properly. Everyone can see you lurking about in the jungle!" I shouted.
"I'm not just in the jungle, I am the jungle!!!" he boomed.

I left him to act out his sordid ninja fantasy. Ultimately his grand-plan of stealthy terror was a disaster because Russ, Reuben and Anthony were still in their car browsing over a map, leaving Martin to sulk and get bored beside a tree. After five-minutes he took matters into his own hands. He leapt out of the jungle and tip-toed towards their car in a crouch position.
As he squatted beneath the window of Anthony's car, he took a moment to balance himself before shooting up from his crouch position and shouting, "Boo!"
None of them even flinched. Instead, they looked at him with perplexed curiosity.
Anthony wound down his window.
"Why have you got a stupid bag on your head," Reuben said.
"Boo!" Martin needlessly said again.
"The parks just round the corner, let's go," Russ said.
Martin’s grand plan had been destroyed.
I couldn’t see his expression as his face was covered, but I imagine it would have been a hang-dog one weighed heavily with anti-climatic vibes. He slowly took off his hood and gingerly put it in his bag as the rest of us walked on ahead leaving him defeated and embittered behind us.
The rest of the group soon felt as Martin did because the park was not the one we had in mind.

I expected a ninja to greet us with a flying kick and a somersault. But the impression I got from this park was that it was exclusively for children. One feature that backed up my thought was the sign that read: "Children's Ninja Park" and the small cuddly logos of cartoon ninjas smiling and waving. When we entered the park, the apparatus on display were swings, slides and rope-ways. There was little ninja relevance to this place. The park pretended that the place was a realistic assault course used by ninjas to train by placing picture signs around the park of stern looking ninjas swinging on swings, sliding down slides and balancing on rope ways. I wasn't fooled and promptly told the others that we had just driven four hours to visit a kid’s playground.
“Can I beat up your student who recommended this park to you,” Russ asked me.
After a moments thought, I said sure.
This is bullshit," Reuben concluded.
We all agreed that we should make the most of the day and decided to make use of the apparatus inside the park.
It was understandable that the little kids playing on the slides and swings suddenly evaporated from view once they saw a bunch of blokes charging towards the park in an intimidating way. This was good for us because it meant we had the whole park to run riot in.

Eager Iita

2008-05-03T14:49:00.001+09:00

Iita is one of the 30 kids I teach every week at a kindergarten school, and his zest and energy for everything and anything is surely unparalleled in the history of the human race.
Myself and Martin will enter the room and say hello to the kids. The kids – who usually sit in a big circle - will say hello back, but there is always one voice that is louder than the rest and it belongs to Iita. No matter what activities we set, this portly little chap with a pudding bowl hair-cut, will carry out the task more notably and zealously than his fellow classmates. When I go round the circle I will ask each student how they are. They will either say "happy" "sleepy" "cold" "hot" or "hungry". Iita has a different interpretation to the question. Not content with just one of these answers, he will say all of them in a shrill excitable voice that will perturb the other students.
"How can you be hot and cold?" I ask.
"I'm Superman!" he will reply, not answering my question.
Normally Martin and I will split the class down the centre of the circle. I teach one half, Martin the other.
Iita was on my side.
Martin informed his side to follow him to one side of the room, whereupon Iita lurched out of his chair before anyone else, and ran up to Martin and jumped up and down on the spot giggling.
"No, Iita," Martin said. "You are in Sam's half."
Iita saw Martin's hand pointing to me, understood what was asked of him, and ran towards me flapping his tongue like a lap-dog.
The rest of the class were still seated, watching with baffled curiosity Iita's uncoordinated movements.
I informed the class to sit down in a circle in front of me. Iita, being the teacher’s pet, made sure he sat next to me and shoved away any unfortunate kid who threatened to invade his space. Although I wished he hadn't because he gave off a decidedly odious funk of mud, sweat and piss.
Recently I taught the class the name of certain sports and used flashcards to do this.
With each card I showed, Iita was unrelenting in his enthusiasm. I showed a picture of a basketball game and he screeched an answer in an impossibly awful ear-popping sound. The answers he provided were mostly wrong. But wrong in a big way. For instance, he thought the picture of a basketball game was an octopus and that a picture of a golf game was a helicopter. It wasn't only me who was concerned for Iita's mental well-being but his fellow students as well because they looked at him with genuine worry when he yelled out his answers.
When he got bored of the picture-cards, he stood up and ran around the circle, head butting the other kids.
There's no doubt about it, the guys a menace. But a special menace nonetheless, who may possess telepathic abilities. I say this because I played a game whereby I would line up a series of animal picture cards. I would then get the kids to close their eyes as I took one of the pictures away. Once the card is hidden behind my back, I will get them to open their eyes again and guess what card is missing. But even before the kid's have time to assess what card is missing, Iita has already guessed the answer correctly. At first I thought he was peeking through his hands that covered his eyes, and made sure I observed his behaviour as I hid a card. But his hands were pressed tightly against his eyes.
I hid the card and said, "What card is missi-"
"MONKEEEEEEEY!!!!" he said, with his hands over his eyes.
"Yes, Iita, right again," I replied, looking at the quizzical faces of the other kids who were intimidated by Iita's wizardry powers.

Be Prepared

2008-04-24T22:49:00.003+09:00

Over the months I have acclimatized myself with the individual characteristics of my students, so I am prepared as to how they might behave in the classroom. For instance, I know that my elderly student, Ohmi, will talk relentlessly about his morning rituals and stop abruptly in order for me to fill the void. This makes for straining conversation. An extract of the dialogue between us may go:
Me: "Ohmi, what did you get up to at the weekend?"
Ohmi: "I woke up at 5am, and worked on my farm."
Me: "Wow, that's earl-"
Ohmi: "AND!! (cutting me off) I planted many seeds. I woke up my grandchildren to help me."
Me; "I bet they were happy about tha-"
Ohmi: "AND! I deposited natural manure on my farm. I don't like to use chemical fertilizer!"
Silence.
There’s not much you can say in response to someone’s desired choice of manure, so I merely uttered an “Ah.”
Ohmi won't contribute any more on the subject, making it clear he wants me to ask someone else about their weekend.
Sometimes my students are a little forthcoming about offering their thoughts on a subject.
The middle aged Syuuiti is a map obsessive and will duly unfurl a map of Japan at any given opportunity.
"What did you do at the weekend Syuuiti?" I would ask.
"I went to Kiso," he would say.
"Where's that?" I queried.
And before I had finished the sentence he was already rummaging inside his bag before proudly spreading out a map of central Japan on the table, knocking other students stationary off the table in the process. He would then put on his reading glasses, take out a sharp pencil from his breast pocket, and would give a detailed outline about how long it takes to get there and the wind speed on the motorway. I would have been content if he had just went, "Dunno, mate," to my question.
I have learnt not to encourage him to display his maps because at the merest hint of a question associated with the location of a place, he will be sure to aid you with one of his giant maps. He always seems to have a dozen or so in his bag. I recently mentioned that I wanted to travel to Mumbai for a holiday and in a flash he had whipped out a map of India from his bag, and began highlighting the best areas to visit.
Whilst some students are forthcoming, others are very tentative. Minneko, my Monday evening student, is incredibly timid and you have to coax answers out of her. When she does finally speak, it will only be for a few seconds.
"What did you do at the weekend?" I ask
"Shopped," she says.
"What did you buy?"
"Things"
"What things?"
"Things," she repeated.
"I see."

For every student, you have to be prepared for anything. And it's not just the adult classes. The kids are a different breed of character, and I found they could get nasty if you don't share their artistic vision when moulding plasticine shaped animals.
As part of an activity before lunch at an elementary school I teach at, I was instructed to join the kids in making little clay animals. I tried my best even though my end product was dreadful. I attempted to make a smiling turtle, but the fact that I was given a piece of plasticine the size of a snail's pecker wasn't the best way to construct mind-blowing shapes. I showed my end product to the kids who were busy making wonderful shapes, and they were not impressed. Instead, they were openly hostile towards me. One little girl next to me and a boy opposite me, grabbed my animal, inspected it, accusingly pointed a finger at me whilst bellowing a Japanese curse word, before throwing it in the bin.
There’s no pleasing some people.

A Bit of Jazz A Bit of Love

2008-04-23T22:49:00.003+09:00

Shoko sent me a text that read “I miss you.”
If ever there was a more clear invitation to meet again this was it. I was unclear as to how she felt towards me. I, on the other hand, liked her immensely. She was sexy, funny, and warm-hearted and, given the chance, I would attach myself to her like a leech. This may be a disgusting image, but it was how I felt.
I wanted to take her to a nice restaurant with a laid back atmosphere, leaving us the opportunity to talk and enjoy each others company. I did a quick google-search on the internet for possible ideas. After much scrolling through the clutter, I found an interesting restaurant in Osaka called the Royal Horse. It was a restaurant which served good food and hosted live jazz. I like jazz and I like food, so I was sure nothing could go wrong.
I didn't want my reservation to be lost in translation which might cause me and Shoko to end up eating our food from a wheelbarrow in a toilet so I asked Shigeho to book me a table in advance.
“Two?!” Shigeho cooed.
“Yes, two,” I said.
“Is this romance?”
“No, no, it's just me and a friend,” I said, trying to squash her excitement.
“A girlfriend?”
“She is a girl and she is a friend, so yes,” I said.
“I will, how you say, play maker-match,” she said as she phoned up the restaurant to book a table. When she hung up, she had a thoughtful expression before saying, “Would you like me to book a double bed for you and your girlfriend at a hotel?”
I declined Shigeho's embarrassing offer and phoned Shoko to let her know the time and day to meet in Osaka.
When we met outside Osaka train station in the evening, Shoko jumped onto me, wrapped her legs around my waist and swathed me with kisses.
“Nice to see you too,” I said after a rest bite from the kisses.
She held my hand as we walked through the dense Osaka streets. There was an awkward silence between us. Shoko clearly had something on her mind. I was silent because I was hopelessly lost and was trying desperately to find the road that led to the restaurant using the rubbish map I had printed from the internet.
“I've been thinking about you recently,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” I said distractedly as I scanned the street names around us.
“I think I really like you,” she said.
“That's nice,” I said, looking at my map.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Are we near the Sonezaki area?”
“Sam!”
“Sorry.”
“I'm telling you I like you a lot,” she said, clasping my hand in hers.
I put my map away, and stared deep into her eyes.
“I like you too. I like your smile, your eyes, your....HORSE!”
“What?!”
“The Horse. The Royal Horse, over there!”
Shoko followed the direction of my pointed finger and saw a dark lit restaurant with pictures of jazz musicians adorning the window.
I grabbed Shoko's hand and together we walked to the reception area of the Royal Horse.
I understood that what Shoko had to say to me was important, but I couldn’t really respond soberly because I was so hungry that I could have eaten a horse - royal or not.
I was surprised, however, to find nothing related to the name of the restaurant. If you’re going to call yourself The Royal Horse then at least plonk something in the room relating to this. Heck, just shove a saxophone playing horse dressed up in a zoot suit to keep asshole customers like me happy. But the fact the restaurant had a void in all things horse-related troubled me greatly. I mentioned this to Shoko who couldn't care less. Yet I wouldn't let this drop.
"Why is this place called the Royal Horse?" I asked a pony-tailed waiter as he took our drink orders.
"I don't know, sir," he bashfully replied.
"Sure you do," I said through a mouthful of peanuts. "You work here don't you?"
"I'm sure the manager will know the reason," he said.
"Well I'll be sure to take it up with him," I sternly said.
"Very good, sir," he said as he walked off, no doubt uttering "prick" under his breath as he did so.
Our table was a few feet away from a low-level stage which had a grand-piano, fiddle and guitar resting on top of it. I guessed the live music was going to be of the gypsy- knee-jerking variety.
I poured Shoko and myself a glass of wine and asked how we could still see each other if she was going to work as an air-stewardess in Hong Kong.
“I know,” she said with a sigh. “But I want to do the job because I want to live abroad and travel for a year.”
“Where can I fit in?” I said.
“I can come to visit you.”
“I will be in England by the time you get the job.”
“I can see you there. My airline flies to London four times a day. I'm sure I can see you often.”
I toyed with my napkin thinking about this.
“What if you are not scheduled to fly to London, I won't be able to travel to Hong Kong.”
“Yes you can,” Shoko said.
“I'm not made of money, love.”
“If I am an employer I can nominate one person for a 90% discount. I want to nominate you.”
I dropped my napkin.
“90%! I can fly every weekend for that price!” I yelped.
“You can also fly to different destinations around the world at the same price,” Shoko said smiling.
“I can go to places like New York? Paris? Mumbai?” I asked, getting carried away.
Shoko nodded.
Before I pumped my fist in the air, I realised that I was in danger of blowing this wonderful opportunity and sought to retain this discounted privilege.
“Shoko, I won't go anywhere if you're not there with me,” I said with passionate eyes.
Shoko smiled and kissed me.
Sign, sealed and delivered. I could now travel the globe for a bargain price and continue seeing the most gorgeous girl I had ever set eyes on. Life, for now, was wonderful. I ordered another bottle of wine and toasted the night with Shoko.
On my fourth glass, three cheerful looking fellows walked onto the stage to raucous clapping. On guitar was guy named Haroki - a chiselled jawed chap with unkempt hair; on the violin was Jumpey - a cheeky looking guy wearing a backwards cap; and on piano was Amani - a portly pony-tailed maestro who flexed his fingers above the piano keys like a magician about to conjure a trick.
As they warmed up with jaunty jazz rhythms, our pony-tailed waiter asked for our food order.
Resisting the urge to order horse, I opted for pasta.
"Still no sign of the horse," I laughed as he noted down our orders.
"No. Clearly not," he said, keeping his eyes fixed on his note-pad.
"Don’t worry, I'll find it," I chuckled drunkenly.
"Very good, sir," he said with a fake laugh, and walked off.
The band signalled to the lighting man that they were ready to begin. On this cue, the lights dimmed in the already dark room, making it impossible to see what was on our table. I noticed that up on stage a technician was assembling recording equipment indicating that this gig was being recorded. The band said hello to the crowd before launching into a blistering rendition of Django Reinhardt’s Minor Swing and the place was tapping along to the twitchy guitar licks. When the tune finished, the fiddle player took centre stage and delivered a wonderfully mournful solo performance. Unfortunately, this heartbreaking performance occurred at the moment when I was scraping my fork on my plate whilst trying to lift up my pasta.
This eating technique caused quite a disturbance to the beautiful performance taking place a few feet away. As the piano player and guitarist quietly chimed in with a few gentle sounds to accompany the fiddler's soaring solo, a horrible SCRRREEEECHING sound was emitted from my plate as I scooped up the pasta. Understanding that this gig was being recorded, I imagined the sleeve notes would read Haroki on guitar, Amani on piano, Jumpey on violin and Sam Holtmon on the fork.
After one hour the band walked off stage for the intermission. Our pony tailed waiter came back to take our drink orders. I had had quite enough by that point of the evening, but gladly ordered a whiskey on the rocks. As the waiter was noting down our order, I saw a busy man, who also had a pony-tail, talking to some of the customers. I asked our waiter if this was the manager. He gave me a sullen stare and said it was. I stared back.
"You're still thinking about the horse, aren’t you?" he asked.
"Yup," I said as I excused myself from the table and staggered in the direction of the manager.
I greeted him with a lopsided smile and applauded him on the fine entertainment and great food. He thanked me and asked if it was the first time I had been here. I said it was but I would love to come again. He said I would be welcomed any time.
I should have left it there, but horses were galloping around brain.
"Jushht a quick queshhhtion," I slurred. "Why are you called the Royal Horse?"
Before I could let him answer, I belligerently continued.
"It would have been far better to call this place something relevant like The Royal Jazz or....," and I looked at his hairstyle, "or, the Royal Ponytail."
His mouth didn’t move but his eyes said, "Go fuck yourself."
Shoko dragged me out of the restaurant before the manager slapped me with his pony tail.
It was now late, and shops were closing for the night. The only places available were for dancing or drinking, and seeing as I was in no state for both we avoided going to these places.
My mind may have been a murky alcoholic pit at this point, but I still deduced Shoko and I were mildly intimate with each other. I felt it not unreasonable to suggest going to a hotel to progress our intimacy.
Shoko felt this suggestion too mild.
“Let's go to a Love Hotel,” she said with a purr.
I had heard about this Japanese quirk. A hotel distinctively catered for couples to go and screw the night away. For me, an ordinary hotel performs this function so I wondered why Love Hotels would be any different. With this, and the promise of sex, in mind, I snapped up this offer in a millisecond.
Shoko, who knew Osaka well, found a street lined with Love Hotels. Each hotel was relatively small with opulent exteriors. There were vines weaving across the walls of one hotel, twinkling lights adorned another, and another hotel had a gushing water fountain illuminated with blue flood lights. Each hotel had a sign offering rates for a Rest (quickie) or a Stay (indulge).
We picked the first hotel we came across. It was a medieval looking hotel, complete with an iron gated entrance and giant candles resting on the windows. We walked over a small mote on a pathway, which led to the reception. We were the only ones there at this point and were met by a smiling old lady, who looked more like a librarian rather than the gate keeper of sex rooms.
Shoko and I said hello to her and asked for a room. She pointed to a wall which pictured various rooms and asked us to pick the one we wanted by pressing a button next to the room we desired.
There was a 'wild' room with leopard skin silk sheets, stuffed animals hanging along the wall, and painted images of warriors fighting with dangerous animals on the wall. There was a 'Gothic' room with a black velvet bed, spider patterned sofas and candles illuminating red walls. Shoko and I decided to pick the 'Tudor' room because it seemed opulent without appearing too flashy or gimmicky. There was a wide doubled bed, lanterns dotted around the room, and paintings of Tudor couples involved in amorous trysts. I was happy with this arrangement except for a disturbing portrait of Henry the Eighth hanging on the wall above the bed. Having sex whilst the eyes of an obese, bloodthirsty king are upon me was likely to puncture any libido I had. Despite this peculiar feature we chose this room. The old lady nodded and told us to wait whilst she retrieved our door key in the staff room next door to the reception.
Little did we realise that the old lady would take 10 minutes before returning with the unfortunate news that she could not find the key for the 'Tudor' room. She told us this information within ear shot of the half-dozen couples queuing behind us, who had emerged whilst we had been waiting for the receptionist.
With the news that our favoured room was no longer available, we had to pick a room quickly. We didn’t want to hold up the queue even longer. Shoko pointed to the 'wild' room.
“We'll take that one,” she said.
I noticed a girl behind me cocking her eyebrow with a so-your-that-type-of-girl expression.
“I'm afraid that's unavailable,” the receptionist said.
“We'll take that one then,” I said and pointed to the Gothic room.
A man further back in the queue made a werewolf sound.
“Unavailable,” said the receptionist.
I was going bright red.
“What is available?” asked Shoko.
The receptionist pointed to a picture of a colourful room.
“What the hell is that?” I asked
“The Space Room,” the receptionist said dramatically, waving her hands about.
Shoko and I looked at each other with resignation whilst the other lovers laughed behind us. One guy in the queue whistled the Close Encounters theme.
“Fine, we'll take that one,” I said, looking with confusion at the picture of the strange room.
“You guys beaming up to get there, ja?” a German man said behind us.
“Fuck off, Klaus,” I said, and took Shoko by the hand to our Space Room.
Once inside, it appeared even worse than in the picture. There was a picture of the solar system on the ceiling, with stars flashing on and off amongst the planets. There were silver, metallic looking sheets, with silver plated bed posts. The walls were adorned with Amazonian women riding huskies through space. The hotel staff thoughtfully left a dildo machine next to the bed and a packet of condoms on our cushions where a mint would normally be in a hotel. There was also a DVD collection underneath the TV. The most bizarre aspect of this room was seeing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone nestled amongst the porn movies.
Shoko and I surveyed our surroundings in detail, and burst out laughing simultaneously.
“Have you got any mood music?” Shoko asked, as she went to the bathroom.
I did have a CD I bought that day but I wouldn't have called it 'mood' music. It was an experimental Tom Waits album. I put it on regardless because to have no music would subject me and Shoko to the sound of the couple next door screwing like screaming banshees, or to the progress of Harry Potter during his first year at Hogwarts.

Guitar Lessons

2008-04-16T22:52:00.004+09:00

I can hardly speak a word of Japanese and my guitar teacher can hardly speak a word of English but, somehow, this hasn't been an issue in my lessons.
I have been under the tutelage of Yasuno for over six months now. He is an exquisite Jazz-guitarist who owns a music store near Terakoya.
For the first four months, Yasuno would teach me the basics of jazz guitar after I mentioned I was a big fan of Django Reinhardt. At the mention of the famous gypsy guitarist, he glowed with delight and sprinted to the corner of the room to collect a bundle of jazz guitar books. I found it interesting to learn from this, but after a while it was clear I didn't have the heart for Jazz guitar. I wanted to raaaawk! With this in mind, I recently took my iPod to the lesson and politely closed the jazz-book Yasuno had opened up in front of me. I made some hand gestures to signal that I wanted him to listen to one of my favourite songs. Yasuno understood and put in the earphones. I pressed play and Honky Tonk Women came blaring out. Yasuno was tapping his foot along to the jaunty Keith Richard chords and seemed to be having a good time. I found it hard to contain my delight when he started to interpret the song with his own vocals. Not being an English speaker, he did remarkably well. In fact his own spin on the chorus: Wonky Plonk Boo-men could even be better than the original and throughout the song he would make up his own lyrics and sounds. When he finished hearing the song and put the iPod to one side, I almost felt a little sad that Yasuno's incoherent yodelling had finished. But he had such a fine ear for guitar sounds that he knew immediately what notes I should play for the intro to the song.
We never exchange words whilst he teaches me. He just waves certain fingers in my face and gestures at what string and fret I should play with particular fingers. Of course we will chuckle to each other after successfully completing a guitar tune, but dialogue is limited to exaggerated sounds and mumbles.
But I was impressed with his ability to learn how to play a tune just by listening to the song. As a result, I will play one tune for each lesson I go to, and he will usually teach me how to play it at the end of the hour. The best part of the lesson, though, is his colourful interpretation of a song being played to him. I have recently been interested in playing blues guitar and wanted to learn the guitar style used by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Yasuno certainly teaches me the style, but maybe not the correct lyrics. Whilst listening to a Muddy Waters classic on my iPod, he turned the tune: I Got My Mojo Workin' into I Got My Do-jo Workin' and Howlin Wolf's Smoke Stack Lightning into Pope Smack Fighting.
Regrettably he had trouble understanding John Lee Hooker's relatively straightforward song: Boom Boom.
I told him I wanted to play the song.
"Ok, let's play Boom Boom Boom Boom," he said as he got ready to listen to the song.
I may have been pedantic, but I said it was just two booms.
"The song's called Two Boom's?" he questioned.
"No, no. Just Boom Boom," I said.
"Ok. I play Just Boom Boom," he happily said.
"The song is called Boom Boom."
"Boom Boom Boom?" he asked
Just play the damn tune for the love of god, I thought.

Cherry Blossoms In Kyoto

2008-04-16T00:29:00.008+09:00

For a while now, I have been thinking about where and when I should meet up with Shoko. After our marathon karaoke session in Osaka, our next meet-up needed to be even better. It was true that I wanted to impress her, so I ruminated as to what we could do. I figured something fun and romantic. I paced my room as I encouraged my brain to get enlightened. A few things came to mind. I could take her snowboarding in Nagano, but realised that demonstrating my hideous snowboarding technique would not impress her. I contemplated taking her to the arcades in Shinjuku and play on the arcade taiko drums all day, but realised no enjoyment could have been gained by this. I even thought about taking her on a camping trip to the island of Shikoku, but gave up the idea when I realised it would take 20 hours by car to get there. I needed a sign, a flash of inspiration that would elevate me from my thinking funk and it came in the shape of a cherry blossom that floated onto my balcony via a soft breeze. Of course! I could show her the view of Iida from my balcony. The cherry blossom decided to make its presence known even further by drifting through my opened patio door, into my room and dropping onto my head. I immediately scrapped my idea of showing Shoko my balcony, and decided to ask her to come and see the Kyoto cherry blossoms with me. When I spoke to her on the phone she told me she had recently graduated from a Kyoto Buddhist University, and could therefore show me the best spots to see the blossoms. The time, date and location were agreed and I felt happy.

I was feeling calm on the way to Kyoto because the city is well known for its scenic beauty and peaceful, Zen-like atmosphere. It wasn't a good sign, therefore, that I wanted to break some skulls as soon as I was thrust into the annoying crush of commuters inside Kyoto's cavernous station. It was even worse that I wanted to subject my violence to a group of Buddhist monks. It came as quite a surprise that I wanted to exact physical harm to a bunch of non-violent baldies, but when they insist on blocking my route, I lose all sense of self-respect. I encountered this peaceful gang of half a dozen on the escalators and was annoyed when half of them decided to block the side of the escalators reserved for people in a hurry who want to charge up the stairs. I looked annoyed but remained calm. At the end of the escalators the Buddhists went beyond the pale and stood in a circle yakking to each other, creating an obstacle for other people. I was blocked by their circle and waited until they buggered off. They didn't and remained talking quietly amongst themselves. I coughed loudly and irritably. They didn't hear me. I was about to say, "Oi! Slap heads. Move it!" ensuring a lifetime of disastrous Karma. They only became aware of my presence when one of the Buddhists gesticulated wildly with a clenched fist, which in turn punched me in the stomach, winding me.
“Gomen!” he shrieked in horror.
“It's alright,” I said, whilst bent over like an old witch.
Once they saw my broken form, they quickly dispersed and allowed me a clear route to the walk through. My fury levels were now notched up even higher.
I concluded my feelings of rage were going to be misplaced in a tranquil city like this and would leave a bad impression with Shoko, so I took a deep breath and thought of happy images like playing football in the sunshine, drinking a nice cool lager and dreaming of using chopsticks correctly. I fixed a simpleton grin on my face and serenely walked through the station, whilst being knocked back and forth by hurried travellers. Whilst my soul was feeling calm, my appearance was a disordered mess. My clothes had been yanked and pulled from the crush of people in the station, my hair had been ruffled, my bones were bruised and I was still crouched over after being punched in the stomach. When Shoko met me outside, her quick gasp upon meeting me signalled the fact that I must have looked like Quasimodo. In contrast, she looked fantastic, as if walking off the cat-walk. When we walked off to a nearby coffee shop to decide what to do for the day, she strutted whilst I hobbled.
As we slurped at our coffee we quickly decided on seeing Kinkakuji - The Golden Temple - a popular tourist destination due to its golden structure and the shimmering water that surrounds it. Before we got up to go, Shoko asked if I needed a walking stick for support. I assumed she was joking, but when she said this, she looked serious. This was not going well at all. I had hoped to impress her with my winning formula of good humour, looks and humility. But what she really got was a clapped-out old bastard who couldn't even stand up straight. I forced myself to straighten my back and made a sigh you normally would hear from your granddad when he lifts himself out of an armchair. I saw panic in Shoko's eyes, and I didn't blame her. “Why am I hanging around with this broken fossil?” her eyes read.
I decided to come clean.
“I was hit by a Buddhist.”
She stared at me.
“He hit me real bad,” I reiterated in a whiny voice.
“I see,” she said.
She waited in silence as she saw me struggle to straighten myself out.
“Wow, he must have been a bloody big Buddah,” she said, and laughed with power.
I was relieved she saw the funny side and wasn't embarrassed by my wretched figure. Maybe she was, but she covered it up well as she assisted me getting on the bus. As we sat down an old fella opposite saw me gingerly sit down whilst holding my back in pain. He gave me a knowing wink followed by a I-know-how-you-feel expression. The old man suddenly winced and clutched his own back, and his wife rubbed it. Almost immediately I felt a sharp pain shoot through my back and I too winced and clutched my back. Shoko helped by massaging the spot. As she was doing this I stared at the old man with an expression that read: But-I'm-young!!
He stared back, his face read: Well-at-least-we're-getting-a-massage.
I stopped our telepathic bickering when I realised he was right.
Our bus eventually arrived outside the Kinkakuji Temple, which was swarming with tourists taking pictures of the cherry blossoms that surrounded the temple grounds. Shoko and I walked over to a blossom tree and made some appreciative comments about the pretty flowers.
“I love,” Shoko said, pirorretting around the tree.
“Love what?” I asked.
“I just love,” she said with a smile and skipped off towards the Golden Temple.
Her infectious attitude momentarily rubbed off on me and I attempted to skip off after her, before realising I could walk only with an outrageous limp, thus destroying any hopes of happiness at that moment.

The Golden Temple was situated in the middle of a lake and glistened in the afternoon sun. The peaceful setting was disturbed by the incongruous appearance of a man playing B.B King songs with an electric guitar as he squatted on a rock at the viewing area. I was intrigued to see if security were going to drag him away, so I watched him for a while until Shoko dragged me away to look around the grounds. As we left the area, I turned to find two burly security men dragging the guitarist off whilst he was playing The Thrill is Gone.
Shoko and I walked towards a group of people who were throwing money into a tiny pond. Shoko threw some money in and did a quick prayer. When she opened her eyes she told me she prayed that she would have a good year. She then told me to throw some money in and pray for something.
I looked inside my wallet for a worthless one yen coin, but all I could find were 500 yen coins, which is quite a lot of money.
“Erm...I think I will pass,” I told Shoko.
“Oh, come on, everyone puts in something. It's tradition!” she said.
“All I have is 500 yen coins,” I pleaded.
“You can't put a price on a prayer,” she said.
“I can.”
She gave me a fierce glare.
I sighed and took out a 500 yen coin before grudgingly tossing it into the pond.
I turned to Shoko. “Who am I praying to again?” I asked.
“Whoever you like.”
So I prayed for the fish in the pond to throw my money back. Predictably, this never happened.
After becoming 500 yen poorer, we decided on seeing Daigo-ji temple because it had a huge pagoda and the obligatory cherry blossom trees. Once there we made a few remarks about the beauty of the cherry blossoms, the temple and the pagoda. Finding ourselves stuck of things to do apart from that, we decided on visiting a cafe. Before we left the temple grounds, Shoko found a prayer area outside a small temple. People would light incense and pull a rope which would ring an old bell before praying. Shoko took me by the hand and dragged me to the praying area.
“I've run out of prayers, Shoko!” I remonstrated.
“Do what I do,” she said, and she rang the bell and prayed. I did too.
“What did you pray for,” she asked.
“To stop praying,” I said.
She playfully punched me in the stomach, which actually bloody hurt considering the thumping I took from the Buddah earlier. I felt we had done enough templing that afternoon and suggested we sit down for some coffee. There was a convenient little cafe on the temple grounds but this cafe was strange because it appeared not to exist. We found a sign with an arrow pointing in the direction of a cafe which we followed. We walked for some time but found no cafe. We were about to turn back when Shoko spotted a small curtain hung against two trees in a small forest. Curious as to what lurked behind this red-curtain we walked towards it and drew it back which revealed a small house with table and chairs occupied by people sipping green tea and eating Japanese sweets, enjoying the sunshine.
Shoko and I agreed this must be the cafe and sat and waited for a waiter to come and take our order. After a few minutes we began to question the service of this archaic cafe-bungalow hybrid. "Sumimasen!" Shoko said, looking for a waiter.
On this prompt, a smiling old waiter appeared from behind a nearby bush, which was no bigger than a beachball. As Shoko was giving her order I made quick darting glances to the bush the waiter had just materialized from. I was intrigued as to what was behind it. Shoko tapped me on the leg and said it was my turn to order. My investigative eyes remained fixed on the bush. "Whatever you're having," I said in a distracted manner.
The waiter bowed and scuttled back behind the bush where steam suddenly emitted behind it. Either there was the smallest kitchen behind this tiny bush or he was relieving himself of a particularly potent shit. I gathered it was the former explanation because he emerged after a few minutes carrying two hot green teas.

After this sojourn in the woods, we decided to visit the city centre before seeing Koizumi-Derra because this temple was the only one lit up at night. The city centre was heaving with tourists, which made walking along the pavements impossible. The suffocating atmosphere forced Shoko and I to hole-up in a coffee shop for the next few hours. The gates to Koizumi-Derra temple closed at 9.30pm and we finished our coffees at 9pm, so it was a mad rush to get there. The bus dropped us off at the bottom of a steep road which led up to the temple. A quick look at our watches told us we had only five minutes to get to the temple before the door slammed shut on our faces. We both took a deep breath and legged it up the road which was aligned with market stalls selling merchandise. If I had time to inspect this scene, I would probably conclude that it was all very atmospheric and lovely. But the situation only allowed us time to fly up the road like a couple of rockets. We arrived at the gate just as it was closing. Shoko sweet-talked the security man who allowed us in. It was worth the killer-run because to see this lighted temple at night was remarkable. The cherry blossom trees illuminated the grounds with a golden, ephemeral colour. Kiyomizu also afforded visitors ample look-out points which provided a view of Kyoto at night.
As Shoko and I looked out over the beautiful Kyoto sky-line in thoughtful silence, she asked what I was thinking.
"Where we're going to eat dinner," I said.
We went to an Italian restaurant in the city centre. Over our lasagne we talked about how great it was seeing each other and how much fun we were having.
I asked what she was doing later, hoping she would say, “I want to continue having fun with you!”
I was therefore upset to hear she was busy. I asked what she was doing.
“My job,” she said.
“What do you do?”
“I'm a hostess,” she said.
“Oh, splendid,” I said, in an unintentionally posh accent.
“I work in Osaka. You can come with me if you like.”
I had just recovered from the surprise of hearing Shoko was a hostess. I was further shocked to hear she wanted me to entertain her customers as well.
“As much as I'm flattered by the offer, I really don't think I would make a good -”
“I don't mean you work with me silly!” she laughed, and playful punched me in the stomach again, causing me to bring up a bit of lasagne. “I'd like you to come to Osaka with me. When I finish my work, we can go somewhere by ourselves.”
I said I would love to go with her, but as soon as I did, a dark thought entered my mind.
“What exactly do you do with your customers?” I said, worried about how Shoko would react to this dangerous question.
“I know what you're thinking, and no, I don't do what you think I do.”
“Well, what is it that you do do?”
“I don't do do anything!”
Our first serious conversation was in danger of becoming ridiculous.
“My company calls me, tells me what bar to go to. I then go to the bar and meet the people that asked for a hostess. I then sit and talk to them and then I leave.”
I nodded sagely.
“You've obviously never been with a hostess before,” she said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Yep.”
We took a Hankyu train from Kyoto to Osaka, and arrived 40 minutes later. Shoko was running late for her appointment with a bunch of businessmen in a bar near the station. She said to meet her outside the bar in two hours time. She smiled and leant in to kiss me on the cheek.
“Break a leg,” I said, which wasn't the best thing to say considering she had never heard this expression before.
“You want me to break my leg?! What’s wrong with you?!”
“Erm....just have fun,” I said to redeem myself.
She waved and ran to the bar. I drifted towards the bar so I could get a look at her customers. Through the glass window I could see Shoko shaking hands with a circle of chubby businessmen who were slurping on beers. I hated them immediately. They took my girl away from me!
One of the businessmen looked up and noticed me scowling. I stuck my middle finger up at him before fleeing into the Osaka night.
I walked the streets for the next two hours, getting paranoid as to what Shoko was doing with the fat businessmen. No doubt the person I scowled at had relayed to the others that he had seen the apparition of a bespectacled scruffy fellow swearing at him from the window. Shoko would probably know that misfit was me which meant I was going to have some explaining to do.
“Did you swear at one of my customers?” she said, when I met her two hours later.
“No!” I said, pretending to be hurt by this accusation. I was telling the truth because I swore at him twice. Once from the window, and again when I waiting for Shoko to leave the bar and saw the guy leave early. I gave him the finger when he walked past me at the entrance.
“It's just that one of the customers saw someone matching your description swearing at him,” she said.
“He must be imagining things.”
Shoko wasn't convinced by this answer but didn't investigate further. But I was still investigating her job.
“What did you talk about?”
“Politics, the economy and their work,” Shoko said.
I was delighted to hear they didn't request her to get naked.
“I guess you have to be well informed,” I said.
“Of course. If I can't have a conversation with them, I won't get paid.”
Shoko then told me she planned to quit her job because she had just been accepted to work for a major airline company in Hong Kong as a cabin crew member. The hostess job had punishing hours and she found herself always returning to her parents’ home in Kobe in the early hours of the morning everyday. Plus the nightly intake of alcohol was causing her to feel sick.
All this sudden rush of information was causing me to feel sick. I tried to arrange the information with the most important at the top of the list.
“When are you going to Hong Kong?!”
“In June.”
“Bloody hell, I only just met you!” I said out loud.
“I only found out that I got the job yesterday.”
I was utterly deflated, and my face complemented my feeling.
“Come on Sam, let's not let this news ruin the evening,” Shoko said. “Let's go to a club.”
This news depressed me even further. Shoko watching me dance would make her depressed as well. But I had no say in the matter because she dragged me into a nearby nightclub where we proceeded to get blindingly drunk. We both danced close together and before we knew it, we were kissing and we didn't stop for the rest of the evening.
We left the club when it closed, still kissing. As we walked through the Shinsaibashi district, Shoko broke off and said, “We should just be friends.”
“Of course we should. Friends that like to kiss,” I said and launched in for another kiss.
She gently pushed me away.
“But I'm leaving the country in two months, we have no future.”
“Live in the present baby,” I countered and tried to kiss her again.
“I just can't Sam,” she said, rejecting my lustful moves. “I made a mistake in the club.”
“Well, I'm sorry,” I said like a petulant teenager.
“You know what I mean. If I get involved with a guy, I have to see a long-term possibility with him.”
“Well I got a long-term possibility growing in my trousers,” I said whilst hugging her, thinking I was the wittiest person in the world, when in fact I was just an intoxicated fool.
“Sam, stop it,” Shoko said with severity.
“Sorry.”
The trains by now had all stopped, leaving us to spend the night in Osaka. I had initially planned to spend it in a hotel, but I didn't think Shoko would be happy with that scenario considering our conversation. I asked where she wanted to go for the night.
“Let's go to an Internet Cafe,” she said.
I told her that Internet Cafes were no place to spend a night, but she reassured me that it was different in Japan.
We went inside a big building which had seven floors. On each floor were varied amenities. A bank, a bar, and a restaurant to name a few. At the very top was an internet cafe. The interior had dark lighting with sporadic bursts of bright lighting. It was quite disorientating. Another aspect of the large place was that it was silent. It was as if Shoko and I were the only ones there. At the reception area, a moody adolescent with punky multi-coloured hair gave us an overnight stay ticket with our booth number on it. We then made our way though the cafe, which was lined with black booths, each containing a computer and a beanbag. When we found our booth, we took our shoes off outside, and closed the door behind us. It was dark, cramped and very cosy.
We checked our emails, watched a DVD whilst drinking endless cups of tea, and went to sleep.
I had enjoyed my day, despite the rebuff by Shoko. But my time with her became even better when I woke up in the middle of the night to find that Shoko had her arms around my shoulders whilst she was fast asleep. I tried to keep this position, even though I eventually lost the feeling in my body after straining my muscles. At least this allowed me ample of time to plan what to do with Shoko the next time I saw her.

Young Punks

2008-04-14T13:38:00.001+09:00

My new Friday afternoon class consists of three excitable 10 year boys who could cause me a mental breakdown.
I greeted the little chaps and their mothers at the school and asked them to follow me to a nearby classroom. The mums asked if they could watch the lesson, and I said sure. They informed me that their sons were very nervous because it was their first English lesson in a new school. I said I understood and I would try to make the lesson fun and interesting. It looked like I had my work cut out because the trio appeared reticent and were hiding behind their mothers nervously.
I sat at the head of a small table and got the boys to sit down. The mums were sitting in the far corner of the room.
To kick things off I asked for their names. They provided it with hushed mumbles which proved too indecipherable to note down accurately. To combat this situation, I resorted to calling these kids either "Oi!"or "You, there."
I eventually found out their names were - Hirotaka, Naoya and Sho.
With the names out the way, I started the lesson.
I held up some animal flashcards and asked what the pictures displayed. They quietly responded with whispers. I tried to draw the boys out of their shell by making animal sounds and getting the kids to guess what I was mimicking. There were a few laughs from the kids as I mimed an elephant. I even received claps from the mothers who seemed to be having more fun than their sons. Satisfied with the direction of the lesson, the mums left the classroom with a flourish of waves and went downstairs to the coffee room. As the door clicked shut, a drastic change occurred. Hirotaka flashed a fiendish glance to Sho, who was sitting opposite him. Sho quickly nodded. On this signal, Hirotaka promptly walloped Naoya on the side of the head with the back of his hand. What was equally baffling was that Naoya laughed his ass off in response to this act of violence. The three of them then leapt onto the table as I was about to show them a picture of a badger and started to beat the shit out of each other.
My students had suddenly transformed into a pack of wild werewolves.
I broke up the scuffle and firmly told them to sit back in their chairs. Unhappy with my order, each kid blew a raspberry in my face, covering me with their frothing saliva. I threatened to call their mothers back into the room if they carried on behaving like the Sex Pistols. This seemed to have the desired effect and they all sat down, which was good. But they decided to sit down on top of each other on one chair, which wasn't so good. You can't exactly teach a lesson when two of your students are submerged beneath the ass of another student.
I was about to open the door and pathetically shout, "Mums!" when the young punks ran to their chairs and insisted they had calmed down and were ready to learn English. I waited a few moments in silence to judge whether or not they were bluffing with this assurance. I was wary about reading their facial expressions because earlier I thought they were a bunch of benign kids, not a gang of bloody lunatics - which they proved to be.
As silence reigned in the room, I felt confident to begin the lesson.
I showed Sho a picture of a frog and asked if he knew the name of the animal.
"Michael Jackson," he bleated, causing an uproar of howling laughter from the other two students.
I played along with Sho's quip.
"OK, supposing this animal's name is Michael Jackson. What animal is it?"
"A Michael Jackson animal," he said, struggling to contain himself.
Hirotaka was in hysterics and banged his small fists on the table. Naoya was equally pleased with Sho's wit and high-fived him.
The mums at this point decided to enter the lesson again and they looked with maternal pride as their sons were sitting silently with serene grins on their faces. The little brats had morphed into peaceful little chaps again. It was as if the carnage in the classroom had never happened. They were now the epitome of politeness. When I began the lesson again, each animal card was answered correctly without a single Michael Jackson remark. The mums nodded their approval and shuffled out again. As one of the mum's was closing the door she asked if the lesson was going well. I took this opportunity to speak the truth.
"Well, no. Each of your sons are insa-" and before I could finish, she waved a farewell to me and closed the door. As I stared at the closed door, I heard an almighty ruckus behind me. I turned to find the boys involved in a wild jousting fight, using upturned chairs as their weapons of choice. I packed my animal cards away and buried my head in my hands.

Top Secret

2008-04-10T12:26:00.002+09:00

Teaching English on the premises of a weapons making facility is a new experience for me. Initially, I thought that the company I teach at in the mountains on Tuesday evenings was just a dull industrial park and whenever I enquired as to what jobs my students do, I usually received frosty responses of, "Nothing that interesting."
I have tried to gleam more information about what goes on at the company by snooping around the building 10 minutes before my lesson. But it is mostly vacuous and bland inside, revealing nothing of interest. All the doors that line the long corridors are closed and as you pass each one there is often a low murmuring of voices. Being naturally nosey, I sometimes shove my eyeball over a key-hole hoping to see what on earth is happening behind these secret doors.
I have been teaching there for one month now, and the company has been shrouded in mystery.
That is until now.
As usual I signed my name in the security man's register at the entrance and drove through the industrial complex which housed many large gas cylinders, low-rise huts and office-blocks covered in tarpaulin. I parked my car outside the building where I teach and walked in. Once I assembled all my teaching materials on my desk I waited for my students to arrive. I was in the process of scratching my arm-pits when I heard a soft mumble from next door. I stopped scratching in order to hear this sound more clearly. It was a woman's voice and she was speaking English. I pressed my ear to the wall and discovered this voice belonged to an American. It was hard to understand what was being said but I heard her say things like "goals" and "objectives in the up-coming quarter."
It sounded like a boring business meeting until the American woman's speech was cut short by a gravelly voiced American man. His contribution made this meeting a lot more interesting.
"I don't give a shit how it’s done. Just do it," he barked.
My eyes suddenly turned to the size of saucers and my mind was polluted with images of me tape-recording this meeting and sending it onto the Russians. I felt that my interpretation of this meeting being riddled with political secrecy was premature. For all I knew they could have been discussing the fastest way to transport a crate of pig-shit to a compost heap in Hong Kong.
One of my students – Tomio - entered the room finding me pressed up to the wall cupping my ear. He sat down without a word, leading me to believe he expected this type of behaviour from me. I reassured him that I was quite sane and that I was merely interested in the meeting taking place next door.
"Ah. That meeting," he said with knowing wink.
I said it must be quite important if there were Americans present.
"Yes. Very important. Top secret meeting," he giddily revealed.
I asked why it was top secret.
"I cannot tell you because it is top-secret," he bluntly said.
"Oh, go on," I said.
"OK then," and he began to tell me about this top secret meeting.
Tomio’s swift acceptance to inform me about the meeting after my gentle prodding made me seriously consider a job in a police interrogation unit. It was probably less to do with me, though, and more to do with Tomio being a compulsive gossip.
It turns out that the company manufactures weapons and supplies them to the American army. Items such as laser guided missiles, radars for battle-ships and rocket launchers.
I was wildly excited by this disclosure. I'm a bloke, of course I would be.
No longer would I be teaching English inside a boring industrial complex, I would now be teaching English inside a mysterious layer that created an arsenal of destructive high-tech gadgetry - and I was teaching the guys that made them! I suddenly had a notion that I held some influence over these doomsday scientists. They learnt the English that I taught. Perhaps I could get them to write a small thesis on the benefits of world peace, leading them to reject their jobs of war and take up building bungalows instead of missiles. I was ejected from my reverie when Tomio smacked his fist on the table and sternly informed me that our discussion was to be kept secret. Our seal of confidentiality was broken, however, when another of my students, Kazuhito, walked in and Tomio said, "I've just been telling Sam about the top-secret meeting next door."
Kazuhito stopped abruptly as he was about to sit in his chair. He gave Tomio a look of maximum hate.
"Yes. He was just telling me that you supply weapons to the Americans," I said.
Kazuhito nodded in recognition to my statement but wished to disclose nothing more. He only gave Tomio another glance of loathing. To help matters further, I jokingly confided to the pair that I was a British spy and that Tomio's information was very helpful for MI6. They didn't find it funny.

Picnic

2008-04-03T22:17:00.005+09:00

Arranging a picnic with my senior class was a disaster. The five octogenarians I teach on Thursday mornings are a lovely bunch, but their ears have seen better days. This makes my job slightly more difficult, especially when I have to arrange a picnic with them because to shout at people for one hour is not my idea of fun.
We all agreed to meet the following day at a nearby park. We exchanged telephone numbers in case one of us had to drop out. I said my number to the class and they slowly wrote it down with shaky hands. I got them to read it back to me. Instead of waiting to recite their number one by one, they all blurted out the number at once, causing an incoherent mess. I then gave my email address: samaholtmon@hotmail.com
What they wrote down was bizarre. Akaki wrote down: sham@popmail.com. Kimiyo wrote: samhalt@hoffmail.cop and Tersuo, who doesn't have a good grasp of English, wrote "cat." We met up the following day and the park we decided to go to was tiny and was surrounded by cherry blossom trees that were on the verge of blooming.

As we started to unfurl the floor mats, the quietly spoken, owl-like Masaho informed the group that he was going to the toilet. The others failed to notice his comment. Feeling bad that no one paid attention to him, I acknowledged him with a grin and a nod.
A few moments later Ohmi thundered, "Where's Masaho?!" which promoted the other three to look worried as they searched the area. I calmly informed them that he had nipped off to the toilet. The three seniors didn't hear me and were going berserk with worry at the thought that Masaho might have been abducted. They needn't have panicked because it was the safest park I had ever been to. The only danger one could have faced was getting run over by the little boy riding a tricycle nearby. But observing Ohmi, Tersuo, Akaki and Kimyo wheezing about the place, looking through shrubberies, trees and bins, you'd have thought something of a foul nature befell Masaho, who was at that moment contentedly pissing in a pot nearby.
Whilst the three huddled together to discuss how to solve this disaster, Masaho breezily shimmered out the toilet cubicle with a wave. The other seniors thought they had just witnessed a magic trick judging by their awed expressions at the sudden materialization of the errant Masaho.
After Masaho cleared up their pointless panic in Japanese we began to eat.
Akaki had packed all the food in her bag and distributed pastries filled with thick cream, multi-coloured tea cakes and hard boiled sweets, complemented with an endless supply of green tea. For most of this leisurely picnic the four others conversed in Japanese which excluded me and left me to stuff my face and admire the cherry blossoms. Whenever they chose to include me in their conversation, it was always at the worst time. For instance, when they asked me my plans for the weekend, my mouth was filled with creamy goo, and all I could say was: "MMMmmphmhmhmph fwwwoo fwooo."
When I did decide to involve myself in their conversation, it was always with bad effect. During a brief lull in their conversation, I picked this moment to make an observation - partly to appear interesting, but more to remind them that I was still there.
"What do the cherry blossoms symbolize in Japan?" I asked
The seniors’ faces contorted to a furrowed brow weighed heavily with concentration. I surmised that I picked a party-ruining question which had little room for humour. They answered my question with sincerity with words like "renewal" "growth" and "beauty". As soon as they felt their answer was satisfactory, they continued their own private conversation in Japanese, leaving me to stare at trees and suck on sweets like a baby.
We left the park after eating the food and drove to a nearby Japanese restaurant. I believed this restaurant was easy to find because it was only a five minute drive down a straight road. But Masaho, who was becoming quite a hazard, managed to get lost from our convoy of cars. To lose your way was remarkable given the fact he had lived in Iida for the past 80-odd years and should know the area like the back of his hand. But lose himself he did, causing the rest of us to loiter in the car park of the restaurant as we waited for him. Finally he emerged in a flurry of chaos as his car screeched into the car park after cutting up the oncoming traffic. This clearly did not concern Masaho because he briskly exited his car with a spring in his step, a smile on his face and without a care in the world.

Sumo

2008-03-26T00:14:00.013+09:00

I was travelling to Osaka with Martin and Reuben to see a Sumo wrestling tournament, but I was also going because I remembered what that crazy old man said the last time I was in Osaka. He told me I would find happiness the next time I travelled to the city. This journey filled me with anticipation, and if happiness failed to materialized, I would sue the old bastard for everything he had – which was bugger all.
Reuben’s mum, Gladys, was also coming along with us. She was in Japan for two weeks, and Reuben was showing her around the sights.
During the trip to Osaka on the bus she kept on making lewd comments like, “Ooh, spending a weekend with three handsome men. I’m the luckiest woman in the world.
She would laugh. Reuben would go red.
When we arrived in Osaka we checked ourselves into a capsule hotel before heading off to the sports arena which hosted the sumo tournament.

The place was heaving, mainly because the sumo wrestlers were plodding around causing the floorboards to creak beneath their collective weight. I always imagined sports men and women prefer the secreted quarters of a locker room where they can meditate and have a moment of peace, but the wrestlers were quite content to potter about half naked in their sumo nappies. Some were shooting the breeze with the pundits, others were going to the toilet, and a few were doing some curious warm-up exercises. I saw a couple of wrestlers bend their knees into an attack position before charging towards a solid wall and slamming their podgy forms into it. The ground shook every time they performed this kamikaze act.
Twenty minutes before the first fight, I decided to take a potentially glorious close-up photo of the fighters entering the stage. To do this I had to sneak into the fighters section and evade a spotty steward with a brutal side-parting. I hummed the James Bond theme as I crouched in a dark corner of the passageway leading up to the wrestler's changing rooms. Meanwhile, the spotty steward in the distance protected the place from the public with precise steps back and forth. He wore an unnervingly focused expression on his face. I thought all hopes of infiltration were doomed when suddenly another steward came running up to him. This new steward showed him a piece of paper and the spotty steward laughed and they both walked off. I spied an opening and walked crab-like towards the sumo dressing room. The door suddenly opened and out came a stream of coaches, business suits, camera-men and behind them were two sumo wrestlers. I mutated out of my crab-pose, hopefully morphing into a respectable gent about town with a reason for being there and not some pesky prat with a camera. The sumo brigade weren’t fooled, and a towering wrestler who suddenly appeared behind me grabbed my shoulder and moved me to the side like a rhino pushing an ant out the way.

The procession evaporated from sight and my glorious photo was never taken.
I met Reuben, Martin and Gladys at the merchandise section. I was pleased they were all stocking up on bottles of sake, and I bought some too.
We took our seats with high expectations. We wanted sweat, blood and violence. I wasn’t sure what Gladys wanted, though.
“What team are we supporting?” she asked.
“There’s no team, mum. Just individual fighters,” Reuben would clarify.
“Well, what individual are we supporting?”
“I don’t know. I forgot the names of the fighters.”
“You were always a forgetful child,” Gladys said, whilst arranging Reuben’s hair into a neat style. “I remember when you would forget to use the toilet when you were six and did it in your-“
“Mum!”
“Yes, dear?”
“Stop it.”
“Where’s that draft coming from?” Gladys continued. “It’s very drafty. Wouldn’t you say it’s drafty, boys?”
“No!” we all replied at the same time.
There was a cheer that went around the arena when the first two fighters waddled towards the fighting ring. They then began a strange warm-up routine. They would walk around the ring, eyeing their opponent sternly. They would then go to the corner of the ring and dunk their hands into a pot containing salt before throwing it up in the air. I had no idea why they did this. Perhaps they fight better when fantasizing about putting salt on a pile of fatty chips at the end of the fight. The fighters then crouch in front of each other before the referee – who was dressed like a funky wizard - orders them to fight. A loud smacking sound vibrates around the arena as these two gargantuan warriors bash into each other with their respective body fat. The fight normally lasts about 30 seconds, which results in a high turn-over of fighting action. It's understandable it finishes in a flash because the technique used by the sumo wrestlers consists of grabbing their opponent on the belly, throat or nipple before choking or tweaking with malicious force.
The eventual winner of this three hour sumo-fest was a humorous character who insisted on wowing the crowd by pirouetting around his stick-like trophy much to the annoyance of the humorless Council of Evil.

As the tweaked victim is inspecting whether they are one nubbin short, his opponent has already shoved him out the arena with a crushing bear-hug. It is usually obvious who the winner is. The loser is the broken soul with the contorted body outside the ring, weeping like a baby. Gladys, meanwhile, was having the time of her life. She was in and out of her seat like a hopping frog.
“Go, on hit him!”, “Jab him in the groin!”, “Give him an upper-cut!”, and “Get up you pansy!” were just some of the forceful comments that launched out of her mouth.
The eventual winner of this three hour sumo-fest was a humorous character who insisted on wowing the crowd by pirouetting around his sword-like trophy. Gladys felt he had won unfairly and was content to boo him during his lap of honour around the stadium.
All in all it was a good evening which provided good entertainment. But if this was meant to be the happiness the old man had predicted then I would start contacting my lawyer. Happiness, for me, does not involve seeing obese men in nappies beating each other up. However, the night was still young with plenty of time to find happiness.
“My mum wants us do some karaoke,” Reuben said dejectedly.
Happiness was clearly going to have to wait.
The karaoke took place in the Dontonburi district, and it was a horrific experience.
Gladys was necking back double whiskeys, and was determined to do a duet with either Martin or myself. After murdering the already dreadful song of Lady in Red with Martin, she turned her attentions towards me. As she tried to focus her glare, I was trying to hide under the table.
“Sam, a little birdy told me you like the Rolling Stones,” she laughed.
I was under the table and remained silent.
Gladys suddenly poked her head under the table and terrified me with her quick reveal.
“Let’s sing the Rolling Stones, shall we?”
“No” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“No,” I said, determined.
She dragged me up from under the table with surprising strength, and hit the play button on Brown Sugar.
Singing a duet with a much older woman about a slave-boy having a night of pleasure at a brothel was not one of my finer moments. And after recovering from this horror duet, Martin and myself insisted on cutting short our evening with Gladys. Reuben respected our decision, and said he would check his mother into the capsule hotel before joining us later.
After receiving a hug and a kiss from Gladys, Martin and I were going to a nearby bar to meet up with one of his friends. She was called Ayumi and we met her at the entrance of the bar near the Glico running man advertisement. Ayumi greeted us with a kiss on the cheek and led us to where her friends were. Her three friends were seated at the back of the room, and were all beautiful. Not only were they gorgeous, they were also extremely hospitable and offered their seats to us. We declined their request with a Hugh Grant stutter and introduced ourselves. The prettiest girl of the group stood up and opened my jacket, to reveal my Japanese football t-shirt.
“I love a man in football t-shirts,” she cried with delight. I could already hear the man with the coin-beard say, “See, I told you would find happiness you pessimistic prat!” From then on, this girl was the focus of my attention for the rest of the evening. Her name was Shoko and she was an extremely fun girl to talk to. She had flawless English, and would quote Shakespeare, John Keats and Snoop Dog lyrics to me. Her brain was always fizzing with ideas that it was difficult for me to keep a hold of the conversation. Soon enough, I had forgotten that there were other people in our group. Shoko’s attractive appeal of beauty and lunacy had made me block out other interferences. When Shoko was talking about why she loved Macbeth, she stopped mid-way through to yell to the others at the table, “Let’s go to a club!” She downed her cocktail and dragged me off by the hand, as I continued to stutter like a fop as I commented on the sudden change of direction our conversation had taken. Inside the club, the girls in our group started to dance in a sexy way, whilst Martin and I just stood with awkward poses and glared at them. Shoko dragged me to where she was dancing and asked why I wasn’t joining in. I couldn’t tell her the truth and say I had two left feet, so I bullshitted my way out of this quagmire. “I’m too good a dancer. I only dance when the moments right,” I said. She looked at me with an expression that outlined she saw through my lies, and put my theory to the test by grabbing me by the shoulders and started to dance. “If this isn’t a right moment, I don’t know what is!” she yelled above the Hip Hop music. She was right. I therefore had to give the impression I could dance. I started off well by deftly moving my feet. I then made a fatal mistake by doing a waltz/moonwalk hybrid, which disturbed Shoko so much that she took four steps backwards and looked at me with concern.
I took my leave and sat at a table to drink just incase I was thrown out of the club for crimes against dancing. At this point Reuben joined our party and sat down at my table. He had the look of a defeated man.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“My mum,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I’ve got 10 more days with her!”
“She’s your bloody mum. Be nice.”
“You want to swap with me?”
“No,” I said swiftly, and ordered him a drink. He looked like he could have done with one.
After a while, Shoko returned to where I was sitting. The other guys had decided to explore the club. Shoko said she loved the music they played at this club and loved to sing along. Immediately I suggested that we both go to a Karaoke bar to indulge our shared love of singing. I was lying. I just wanted to be alone with her. Besides, I could barely have a conversation with her above the loud music and I wanted to blot out the memories of the karaoke session I had with Gladys.
Shoko agreed to go and got her coat. I was about to notify the other guys when I saw Martin kissing two girls at the same time and Reuben throwing up into his shoe. I decided not to interfere with their activities.
Shoko and I went to a nearby Karaoke place and rented our little booth for one hour, and I insisted that Shoko sing first.
She began to sing a Carol King tune, and had a lovely voice, which made it all the more distressing that I had a dreadful voice. It was my turn, and I deliberately picked a Sex Pistols track because everyone knows Johnny Rotten can’t sing. I snarled my way through EMI and was relieved to see Shoko clapping with vigour at the end of my performance. “I love crazy English singing,” she said. The game was up, though, when she insisted we both do a duet of Put a Little Love in Your Heart. Shoko recreated a lovely jazzy version for the Annie Lennox part, whereas I ripped to shreds Al Green’s part. “I thought you said you were a good singer,” Shoko said, with mock annoyance at the end. “I am. I was just doing a punk version.” “Hmmm, I like your crazy English singing,” she laughed. If she thought I represented English singing then she must have had a low opinion of the British music scene. When the hour was up, we extended it for another hour and we continued to extend our time until we were there for six hours. By this time both our voices were hoarse, allowing Shoko to limit herself to Janis Joplin songs and Tom Waits for me. We had time for one more song before we were kicked out. I went for the jugular and picked Marvin Gaye’s Lets Get it On. I crooned through it and flashed Shoko my most charming smile, which in hindsight must have looked like a drunken leer. Shoko laughed and stroked my arm as I was singing. It was all I could to stand up on the drinks table and shout, “That coin-bearded old hippie with the smelling salts was right. I have found happiness!” I quickly realised that if I did say this, I would scare off Shoko and lose the happiness. With alcohol induced confidence, I leant in for a kiss at the end of the song. “What are you doing?” Shoko said. To explain to the recipient for the second time during my time in Japan that I was trying to kiss them made me believe that it was culturally wrong to kiss in this country. “Errrr,” I floundered, believing for certain that Shoko’s arm stroking was a solid invite for a kiss. I sat back in my seat with a forlorn expression, cursing the coin-beard man. He lied to me! “Sam, don’t worry. I like you. I want to see you again,” Shoko said. The coin-beard man was back in my good books, and I quickly exchanged numbers with Shoko. As I walked Shoko to Umeda Station at sunrise before she got a train back to her home town of Kobe, I told her that I had had a wonderful night. Shoko smiled, kissed me on the cheek, and waved goodbye to me. Before she went into the station, she turned to me and said, “Will you call me?”
“I Promise!!” I shouted like an overenthusiastic schoolboy. “Bye Sam,” she said, and went inside the station. “Bye Shoko,” I said, waving to the empty space she had previously occupied.

Animal Psychology

2008-03-20T15:01:00.003+09:00

I have been teaching an interesting activity recently. It is entitled 'Animal Psychology' and it is based on students naming their three favourite animals and giving reasons why they are in their top three. This activity is meant to increase their adjective vocabulary. For example, a student might pick a cat because it is affectionate, cute and agile or choose a dog because it is loyal, friendly and funny. These choices reveal the personality traits of the student, according to the teaching book I am using. Their favourite animal indicates the type of person they want to be. The second animal is meant to indicate how the student appears to other people. And the third animal is meant to reveal their true personality. Each time I teach this exercise, it throws up interesting, and somewhat bizarre, interpretations of my student's personalities.
In my Tuesday evening class, Kazahito's favourite animal is a cow. I asked why. He told me a cow was delicious, fat and had lots of milk. I then had to tell him that this meant he wanted to be delicious, fat and have lots of milk.
Sometimes this task backfires. Let's take the case of Akaki - a Monday evening student of mine. She picked a fox as her third favourite animal and her reasons for picking a fox was because it was cunning, sly, and dangerous. I had to tell her that, according to the book, her true personality was cunning, sly and dangerous. Understandably she looked slightly hurt by this revelation. I tried to soothe her by stating that I thought the book was rubbish and asked her to reveal her second favourite animal which was a Leopard. I asked her why this was. She said she liked their spots, sharp teeth and nocturnal nature. I then had to reveal that, according to the stupid book, other people saw her as spotty, possessing dangerously sharp teeth and someone that likes to lurk about after dark.
She looked inconsolable.
I moved things swiftly along with haste and asked her to reveal her favourite animal which would reveal her true personality, hoping for the love of god that it was a nice fluffy little animal you could pet. The choice she finally settled on was a hippo. Regardless of her choice, I insisted her favourite animal was a bunny rabbit which was beautiful, funny, and friendly. She looked please.

Farewells

2008-03-20T14:46:00.008+09:00

With many of my students graduating, they are all saying goodbye to me. My favourite farewell was by the graduating students at Seneiji Elementary School. I liked it because it was bonkers.
At the end of the lesson, the kids formed orderly sets of rows in front me creating the feeling that I was a criminal about to be shot by a firing squad. They all began to sing a Japanese song whilst attempting to do a coordinated dance routine. To be quite frank, they were a mess. Half the class were singing a different tune to the other half and one dozy kid at the back wasn't singing or moving he was just staring up at the ceiling whilst picking his nose. When they finished their chirpy, but disastrous singing, I felt like a judge on a talent show and wanted to confess that they had no future in show business. But they tried and it was a nice gesture so I clapped vigorously at the end. There was an awkward silence after I finished clapping leading me to believe that I was meant to do something more. I wasn't quite sure what that was so I started clapped again, more vigorously this time. The Japanese teaching assistant at the side of the room told me to stop clapping and quietly conferred with the kids about something. He then reported back to me that they wanted to sing an English song but the only one they knew was inappropriate. What was he trying to say? That the kids knew a gangsta rap song? Intrigued by what this song was, I said the kids should sing it. The teaching assistant looked pleased and took out his guitar. Maybe it wasn't rap but an acoustic version of a Stooges song.

He strummed the opening chords and the kids started to sing Jingle Bells. The class singing a Christmas song in the middle of March didn't trouble me and I clapped along. Some of the class started singing the end verse in English, others were singing the beginning in Japanese and the dozy kid at the back was still staring at the ceiling picking his nose.
Thankfully the song soon ended and I wished the class good luck for the future and walked next door to teach my next class who were also graduating.
Their farewell surprise consisted of making a circle around my chair and singing head-shoulders knees and toes. It had been so long since I participated in this children's song that I forgot the order of the body parts. When it came to the ..." and eyes and ears and mouth and nose...," I got flustered and pointed at my ears instead of my eyes, my mouth instead of my ears and my knee-caps instead of my mouth. I couldn't keep up when they picked up the pace, so I started clapping along like an insane penguin, distracting their rhythm all the while.
With this activity finished, the kids arranged the chairs in a circle. One girl, who appeared to be the elected spokesperson of the class, formally asked me if I would like to play musical chairs with them. I cordially accepted her invitation and replied that yes, playing musical chairs would be most agreeable.

With the formalities out the way, the classroom door opened and in walked the guitar playing assistant teacher from the previous class. Did this guy get paid to teach or play guitar?
He took his seat and strummed the opening chords which sounded the same as his Jingle Bells intro. And sure enough, the kids started to sing Jingle Bells as they ran around the circle of chairs. I joined in the Christmas-related festivities and sang along.
I had forgotten how genuinely nerve-racking musical chairs was and momentarily forgot that I was about ten years older than my students because when the guitar strumming stopped I dived to the nearest chair as if my life depended on it. To make matters worse, I indulged in a bit of skulduggery as I pushed a little lad out of the way when he was about to occupy the chair nearest to me.
One by one the kids lost out to my dirty tactics, leaving just me and a girl called Mika, who possessed the same pathological competitive streak as me, to battle it out. The Jingle Bells tune was strummed out and we commenced our run around the solitary chair. We glared at each other menacingly and changed the pace of our run with the hope of rattling our opponent.
Mika was a worthy foe and it was hard to break that steely glare of hers.
The guitar stopped when I was positioned in front of the empty chair. Victory was mine as I positioned myself to sit down. But Mika snuck beneath me with the agility of a cheater and claimed victory. I had not noticed her quick movements beneath me and continued to sit down, little realizing I was about to sit on her small frame. The guitar teacher dropped his instrument and lunged forward, knocking me out the way before I crushed the little girl's head.

Small Town

2008-03-20T14:37:00.003+09:00

Iida’s smallness was demonstrated to me on one strange day.
It began when I went for an early morning run. My route took me along a river which is surrounded by little rustic houses. The route then emerged onto a pavement next to the main road. As I ran back towards my apartment on this strange day, I heard the repetitive honking of a car horn. I looked to see who was committing this barbarous act at this early hour. It was Makiko - a student I was going to teach that afternoon. She gave me a cheery wave which I returned before she sped off. I resumed running and a few minutes later I heard another honk of a horn. I expected it to be Makiko again insisting on more waving, but it was another student of mine, Mitzuko. She was in the same class as Makiko. I couldn't believe the coincidence and looked astonished. She waved and so did I. She then curiously honked her horn again and sped off.
I was sweating by now and my cotton t-shirt felt uncomfortable so I decided to run to a nearby clothes shop and purchase a sports t-shirt. Inside the shop was Haroshi - another of my students I was going to teach that afternoon - browsing the golf section. He waved and so did I. And instead of speeding off like the others he walked towards me and we exchanged pleasantries about the fine morning.
I ran back to my apartment wearing my new blue Japan football shirt. I made breakfast and noticed my food stocks were running low so I went to the supermarket down the road.
As I was shopping, a small girl came hurtling towards me clapping her hands and yelling a greeting to me. I thought it was just some crazy kid and chuckled whilst pulling a funny face. The mother came over to me and said hello. I didn't have a clue who she was but I said hello as well. She asked how I was. I said I was fine and asked how she was. She laughed and said she was very well because the weather was sunny. I agreed and a prolonged silence occurred. The girl then started to jump up and down saying my name.
"Wow," I said to the mother. "She knows my name!"
"Yes, of course,” the mum said. "You teach her."
I stared at the girl trying to remember which class she was in but couldn’t come up with an answer. It must have been one of the big ones where all the kids scream, run around and blur into one anarchic mess.
"Ah ha ha. Yes I know," I said whilst waving goodbye to the girl and mum.
I walked back to my apartment to unpack my shopping. Once finished, I decided to go the library to check out the English books on offer. As I was thumbing through Ulysses I heard a woman's voice say, "I love James Joyce."
Startled, I looked to the source of the voice. It was Yoko, a student I was going to teach that afternoon, along with Mitzuko, Makikio and Haroshi.
We then started to talk about the Irish writer. After concluding that Dubliners was his best work I waved goodbye to her.
I walked back to my apartment and heard a honk of a horn. It was goddamn Mitzuko again, waving like a loon. I waved back and she emitted another needless honk before speeding off.
I felt like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone.
I was convinced that was the final coincidence of the day and drove to my afternoon lesson.
Makiko, Mitzuko and Yoko were already seated at their desks when I walked into the classroom and we laughed about spotting each other in the street earlier.
Just as I was about to begin the lesson, Syuuti, the other student of the class, came bursting into the classroom.
"Do you own a blue Japanese football jersey?" he asked
"Er, yeah," I said.
"I saw you running along the street!!" he said with joy.

Graduation

2008-03-20T14:29:00.004+09:00

Graduation ceremonies are on the school schedules across Japan. As a teacher at these various schools, I am expected to be present at these formal occasions. It was only a few years ago that I attended this type of ceremony as a student, now I am sitting in the teachers section looking all serious and official. This was the case during the graduation ceremony at the computer college I teach at on Friday mornings.
I was told beforehand to arrive in a shirt and tie and look presentable. I did my best to appease the powers that be, but I'm sure I didn’t make a favourable impression with my rumpled shirt which hadn't been ironed since the early 90s and my unruly, wild hair sticking out at ridiculous angles on account of oversleeping that morning. I was shepherded into a large room by a teacher and as I entered I knew I had to drastically improve my dishevelled rag-tag look because the seated senseis were all immaculately attired with not a crease in-sight. The students, who sat in rows in the centre of the room, were all dressed in black and made an effort to craze-up their hair-styles into various odd shapes. Everyone made an effort, whereas I looked like I had just wrestled a sumo wrestler and got battered.
I quickly darted to the teacher's section and took a seat in the corner. I wanted to be out of sight whilst I tucked in my shirt and adjusted the belt on my trousers.
As I was fixing my shaggy hair into a respectable side-parting, the piercing tootling of a flute began to play through the loudspeakers in the room, signalling the beginning of the ceremony. Everyone stood up as the stern headmaster came sauntering through the door. I stood up and noticed the flies of my trousers were gaping open with my blue shirt hanging out of it. I wrenched it shut with a yank, startling the old bespectacled teacher next to me. I bowed to him, hoping that would explain everything. He gave me the once over with a baffled expression and resumed acknowledging the head-teachers presence who was now greeting the teachers and students. The Headteacher then gave a long speech punctuated by finger pointing and bowing. I was glad I couldn't understand what was being said because everyone in the room looked utterly bored. The ceremony kicked off when the certificates were distributed to the students. They each had to walk stiffly towards the headmaster's pulpit whilst Vivaldi's Four Seasons was playing through the speakers around the room. They then bowed to each section of the room and accepted the certificate with a rigid nod of the head to the headmaster. This formality lasted about one minute. But there were 30 students graduating so it felt like an eternity. I wanted one renegade student to break this monotony by bounding to the front of the hall doing cart wheels and back-flips. This, of course, never happened and we had to be subjected to this sleep-inducing ceremony.
When each student received their certificates, I was willing the headmaster to say, "Now that this shits over, let's paaaaaaarty!!" and a 70s funk band would appear from behind the curtain and begin jamming. Instead, more damn speeches were spoken. What was worse, other teachers were getting up to make long speeches. This was made even more unbearable by the central heating, turned up to such a level that it made the room feel like a furnace. I was also desperate for the toilet and constantly squirmed in my seat during these excruciating speeches.
It was all I could do to get up and howl with joy when these speeches finished one hour later, and when they did I observed the Headteacher giving a few concluding remarks. He finished with a bow and smiled to the crowd. This surely was the end, so I got ready to leave. I was half-way out of my chair when an ancient looking man with a bent back came hobbling towards the front.
This was too much to bear and I sat back down with an irritable sigh. What possible pearls of wisdom could this decaying fossil spout? I was contemplating doing everyone a favour and knocking out the wobbly old geezer with a flying kick.
10 minutes later he finished his croaky speech which finished the proceedings and I bolted to the toilet to piss torrentially.

Shotgun Lessons

2008-03-13T22:18:00.001+09:00

Props are essential when teaching kids. It's a rare occasion when I walk into a kid's class empty handed. I’m either carrying a bunch of flash-cards, a dice or maybe a small board game. Recently, I added a new addition to these assorted goods - a shotgun - a toy shotgun to be more accurate. It's a small pump-action gun that shoots out a little suction padded dart which sticks to any flat surface that gets in its way.
I figured that the kids I teach would love this toy. With one class, I entered the room holding a carrier bag containing the gun. The kids, aged between eight or ten, then appeared intrigued as they tried to guess what was inside. I then looked smug as I withheld the information they desperately craved. I sat back in my chair, with my hands clasped over the bag acting as a lock against any little handed intruder.
I then asked a few introductory questions and they answered whilst their eyes were fixed on the plastic bag. I eventually revealed the gun inside the bag. At first they were terrified, but when I reassured them that it was a toy model, they relaxed and desperately tried to snatch it from my grasp. I refused to let their little mitts handle the toy gun until I explained the English language game that involved the use of the gun. It was foolish of the kids to think I'd bring the toy gun only for them to run around shooting the shit out of each other. There was a logical purpose for this toy.
The game involved me drawing a large dart-board on the white-board. I would then ask each student a question, and if they answered correctly they were allowed to shoot at the target. The kid with the most points at the end of the game wins.
It's amazing what a toy gun can do to the most docile of kids. The benign and laid-back children were tuned into excitable, frothing gremlins as soon as they had the gun in their hands.
I always gave the student who was in possession of the gun a stern warning not to shoot their classmates and preach general safety before providing them with the rubber dart. They nodded with innocent doe eyes, and like a belligerent chameleon, would begin shooting their fellow students in the ass as soon as they had the gun. I lost count the number of times I ran around the classroom whilst a kid was waving about the shotgun and shooting off rounds wildly, whilst making "hyuk hyuk" laughing sounds like an in-bred hick. I think I may have exposed many of them to violence with the use of this gun because when I tried to retrieve it off a particularly crazy, saliva-flecked kid, he grabbed onto the barrel of the shotgun with both hands and didn’t let go. It became apparent which kids had morphed into war-warmongering, gun-toting nutters and which kids kept their sanity because the latter tried to help me out by trying to retrieve the gun from a bawling gun-slinger whilst the violent kids will band together to protect him from anyone trying to end their abhorrent, reckless gun-firing fun.
The picture was one of bedlam and wouldn't have seemed out of place in a Sam Peckinpah movie.
The madness was ended by me grappling with the gun-holding kid and aiming the tip of the barrel at his groin area before firing at will. Momentarily shocked by my brazen act, the kid let go allowing me to grab the gun and put an end to the proceedings.
In future I think I'm going to give them boring worksheets to do.

Football Match In Nagoya

2008-03-11T22:49:00.013+09:00

I was excited about seeing some live football after a drought of footie action since arriving in Japan. Football, or soccer as it is known in Japan, is not the most popular sport. Baseball and basketball hold the top position in the heart of the Japanese.
What was most disturbing was that there were no live football games in the bars of Iida. The only way of seeing a game is by going to Reuben’s house who has the luxury of Sky TV. But nothing can beat going to a live football match: The walk towards the imposing stadium, the smell of the terrible meat-based food, and the roar of the crowd. The anticipation, therefore, of seeing a live J-League football match was tantalizing. I had booked tickets to see a game along with two other football fans, Martin and Reuben.

The match was the opening game of the season between the home team Grampus Eight against Kyoto Purple Sanga. It was taking place in Nagoya at the Toyota Stadium - a cavernous, futuristic stadium that gives one the impression that it has just landed on earth from another planet. The visual treat of the stadium is further enhanced by the strange skeletal bridge that travels from the main expressway to the entrance of the stadium.
The drive to the stadium was two hours from Iida and when we saw the space-ship stadium silhouetted against the bright blue sky we made admiring grunts of approval. We had arrived over an hour before the 2pm kick-off, which was lucky because finding a parking space was a nightmare. Each car-park in the near vicinity had police patrolling the area, forbidding anyone parking in the spaces unless they were residents. After scouting for a space, we found one in a multi-storey car park outside a Jusco shopping centre about a 20 minute walk from the stadium. The only problem was that there was a policeman outside the car park, processing the comings and goings of shoppers. If he found out we were only here to see the game and not to shop, he would have told us to park elsewhere. Consequently, we walked past this unsmiling guard whilst giddily talking about the brand of toothpaste each of us were about to buy in the supermarket. The plan worked, not because of the shameless content, but because he probably couldn't understand English.

We arrived at the stadium forty minutes before kick-off, allowing time to soak up the pre-match atmosphere. Whilst Martin and Reuben were buying the ridiculously expensive Grampus Eight football shirts, I flicked through the official match-day program and discovered a few facts. Today marked the début of Grampus Eight's Norwegian signing Frode Johnson - a towering lumbering giant, with a lantern jaw and a huge scar across his face. I also feared for any of the Japanese Grampus Eight players who might transfer to the English league. I say this because the players had such fancy, girlish, peroxide hair that any meat-headed, slack-jawed cockney who happened to cross his path would immediately snap off their delicate little legs in a two footed tackle.
Once Martin and Reuben proudly pulled on their new Grampus Eight jerseys, we ambled to the food section and bought dodgy looking sausages that smelt and tasted of death. It was also imperative to stock up on beer which made Martin feel slightly peeved because he had to drive back. Reuben and I didn't help his alienation by taunting him as he ordered a fizzy-pop drink.
With our mouldy meat product in one hand and warm beverage in the other, we found our seats in the impressive stadium.

The pre-match banter was entertaining with the opposing teams goading one another. The outnumbered purple attired Kyoto fans were the most vociferous and had a relentless stock of chants. We listened attentively to see if anything witty was being said in Japanese. It dawned on us after a few minutes that the Kyoto fans were merely yelling: "La La La La." Such was the easiness of the chant that we joined in, until we realized we were sitting in the Grampus Eight section of the crowd. Perhaps singing la la la in the face of Grampus supporters was the ultimate sin. However, there was no need to worry about sparking off angry la-la related riots because Japanese football fans are incredibly passive. The fans cheered and clapped when they were supposed to. The clapping consisted of a quick burst of five seconds, before everyone unanimously stopped. And under no circumstances was booing aloud. Reuben tried to do it when a Purple Sanga player disagreed with the referee, and the fans seated near us stared with fury at Reuben and insisted he should be quiet. Even the football was devoid of any atmosphere. The passing was neat and tidy and the shots were clean and direct. It was a drab affair. We alleviated the situation by bringing some good old-fashioned English hooliganism to the proceedings. We figured no-one would understand our distinctly English swearing so we started to shout, "Geeeeeet up ya wanker!" to a Kyoto peacock of a player who flamboyantly fell down after being tackled and "You're shit and you know you are" to a woeful Kyoto striker's shot on goal. The final score was 1-1. But we were too bored to notice.
As we walked back to the car with Martin and Reuben still wearing their Grampus Eight shirts, we saw the same policeman still outside the Jusco supermarket. He surely must have seen Martin and Reuben wearing their football shirts. We had a quick think, and as we passed him smelling of sweat, beer and sausage-fat, we started to talk about the wonderful toothpaste bargains inside the super-market. He smiled and nodded as we walked past. He must have been a fan of that particular brand.

Rock And Roll In Osaka

2008-03-07T10:30:00.008+09:00

In light of my disaster with Kumiko, I wanted to indulge in a wild weekend. I wanted an unhinged person to accompany me who would encourage irrational behaviour and a lack of decency. I decided to go to Osaka and the person I asked to accompany me was Russ. Having an unhinged person to with you on a drunken weekend is fine, but having someone like this whilst on a bus in the middle of a traffic jam is horrendous. The bus journey from Iida to Osaka was meant to be four hours, but due to an accident on the expressway, it lasted eight hours. Russ was hollering at the driver to change lanes, or to intimidate cars ahead to move out the way. He would then spit out expletives as to the cause of the traffic jam.
To occupy ourselves during this arduous journey within the unbearable heat of the bus, we devised an incredibly juvenile but entertaining game entitled: Wank.
The rules consisted of replacing a word in a famous film title with the word Wank. The possibilities were endless, which was just the thing we needed to dampen the volcanic anger that was brewing in each of us towards the crawling cars ahead.
My personal favourites from this tasteless game were: Ace Ventura Wank Detective; Wank on a Hot Tin Roof; Wank Hard 2: Wank Harder and Wank Russia with Love. We had exhausted the game when we finally arrived in Osaka, and I felt as if we were on the verge of insanity. One more game of Wank and I was certain I would have been led off to an insane asylum. We alighted from the bus, and breathed in the air for the first time in eight hours.
The time was now 11.30pm and we were starving. It took three minutes of speed-walking through the fluorescent lighted streets of Shinsaibashi to find a small sushi restaurant tucked away on a side street. As we sat down in front of a long table, with the customers on one side and the sushi chefs on the other, I was handed a menu by a quivering wreck of a waiter. He looked as if he had just experienced a guided tour of hell. I observed the other chefs across the table from us, all of whom had the same ghostly expression. The explanation for this was due to the continuous orders from the customers. Sushi restaurants are essentially fast-food restaurants, and customers expect fast-service. If you order one piece of sushi, a good sushi chef will prepare it in 20 seconds. But with a multitude of orders flying at the chefs in different directions, I imagine it must be bloody hard to keep track of who ordered what. No wonder they looked as though their souls had evaporated from their bodies. As much as I felt a modicum of pity for them, this didn’t stop me from adding to their woes and ordering a belt-breaking bundle of sushi. From sea-bream to crab, you name it, I ordered it, and when my order came, I slurped it up and gobbled it down in an exaggerated style like a ravenous cartoon character.
Russ and I left the restaurant and made our way to a nearby Hip-Hop club called Pure. It was 3,500 yen to enter and then free drinks all night. It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. We paid the entrance fee and went inside.
The place was uncomfortably crowded, and the music was painfully loud. But these gripes were soon forgotten when we found the bar and started to deplete the club's stock of alcohol. Russ and I knocked back half a dozen tequilas in quick succession and followed them up with beer and vodka. I could already hear my brain yell, “Abandon ship!” It was good to its word because the remainder of the evening passed in a fuzzy haze of lights, girls and thumping music. I berated myself for drinking too quickly and as a result I stumbled around the dance floor like a one legged goose.
I attempted to speak to a Japanese girl standing nearby looking bored. I straightened up, slicked back my hair, and focused my eyes. I stood in front of her but before I could say “Konichiwa,” I ran to the toilet to vomit. I came back and saw her still standing there. I slicked my hair back again, chewed on a mint and wandered over to her, still feeling queasy. “Konnichiwa,” I said. “Konnichiwa,” she said. This fascinating conversation was stopped short on account of me charging towards the toilet to vomit again. I came back for my third encounter. She was still standing there. “Konnichiwa,” I said, one eye wide open, the other half closed. “Fuck off,” she said, and took her leave. I sat on a step next to the toilet and watched everyone having a good time, whilst I was in a pit of despair. I was drunk, tired, and depressed about such a shocking start to my supposed weekend of fun.
I was scanning the club for Russ in order to drag him out and find another club for a fresh start. I spotted him in a passionate embrace with a girl. I figured that in my incapacitated state I couldn’t hold a conversation and would have appeared a drooling idiot to people. I decided to leave the club and sleep on a pavement outside. This was lower than a nadir. This was a nadir tunnelling further than it’s ever gone before, searching for a world record in tunnelling. I came for fun, what I got was a shit stained pavement.
I wasn’t sure how long I slept, but I was woken by a man who was holding some smelling salts under my nose. I rubbed my eyes and the man came into focus. He was old, had a tangled beard which had coins dangling from it, and wore a baseball cap turned back to front. He was also wearing a ripped waistcoat and some long-johns with a t-shirt that read Stop Staring at my Tits.
I was confused.
“Yeah?” I said with a groaky voice. “Wake up, boy,” he said, in English. “What’s the problem?” “You’re the one with the problem. You’re sleeping in garbage,” he said, and pointed at the fast-food hamburger boxes I was using as a blanket. “You’re in need of some luck,” he continued, and grabbed my hand. “What the-” I said, startled. He studied my palm for a few seconds and made some satisfactory grunts. He let go of my and said, “The next time you come back to Osaka, you will find happiness.” “What kind of happiness?” “Come back and you will find out,” he said, and held out his palm. “Listen, I’m not going to read your palm,” I stated firmly. “No. I want money,” he said. I gave him a hamburger box. “That’s for not telling me what the happiness will involve,” I said and walked off. Dawn was breaking, so I figured the club would close very soon. I wondered if it was worth waiting for Russ to appear. If he was still exploring the tonsils of the girl he picked up in the club, I would have been superfluous to requirements. I was about to check myself into a nearby capsule hotel when Russ emerged from the exit, without the girl from earlier. “What happened?” I asked. “I told her the rules of Wank: The Game and she left!” he said, incredulously. We decided not to get some sleep at a capsule hotel because we weren't tired. Besides, our bus journey back to Iida was scheduled at 3.30pm and we wanted to see as much of Osaka as we could. The chances of finding something mentally stimulating at this early hour were slim but we were still mildly drunk so continued to aimlessly walk the littered streets whilst playing Wank. We were stopped in our path outside another club by two lads, one wearing a baseball cap and the other wearing a big puffer jacket. They were asking us to pay a visit to their club called Beer Guzzlers the following night. I told them we were leaving Osaka that afternoon.
They seemed like sprightly characters so Russ and I continued the conversation.
"Where are you guys from?" I slurred.
"I'm originally from Ghana," said baseball hat.
"And I'm from New York," said puffer-jacket.
"That's cool. What are your names?" I said.
"I'm Roy," said Ghana baseball hat.
"And I'm Rock. Rock Adams," said New York puffer jacket.
I waited a moment to see whether Rock was joking about his name. He fixed his glare on me, not flinching. With a mixture of drunken fearlessness and stupidity I proceeded to goad him about his ridiculous name. “Come on! You’re not called Rock,” I heckled.
"Hey man, you don't believe me? Check this out," and he swiped a Beer Guzzler's card out of his wallet. Emblazoned above the title Executive Manager was the name Rock Adams.
"That doesn't mean anything!" I protested. "I could get cards with the name Napoleon Bonaparte printed on the front, doesn't mean it's my real name." I then started to laugh as if this was the funniest thing in the world.
What was I doing? This guy was built like a brick shit-house, and if I've learnt anything in my life it’s never to get into a fight with a fella named Rock.
Luckily, Rock took my little jibe well and started to laugh in a booming style.
Roy asked where Russ and I were heading. We shrugged and pointed northwards. He beamed and said we should walk together because he was going home and the train station was in the same direction. We said goodbye to Rock, who nearly broke my hand with his handshake, and walked with Roy to the train station.
On our way to the station, Roy gave us an in depth analysis of his sexual exploits from around the world, whilst Russ and I would nod without interest.
Just as Roy was about to descend the stairs to the train station Russ stopped him and gave him some business advice.
"You should call yourself Roll," he said.
Roy looked confused.
"Then you can call yourselves Rock and Roll. It'd be a great business move," Russ said.
Roy laughed and carried on laughing as he walked down the steps until we heard his chortle echoing from below the subway.
The hour was still horrendously early, so we grabbed some coffee and eggs from a cafe. During breakfast, we decided, for want of anything better to do, to head towards the nearby aquarium and beat the queues before the opening time of 9am.
It was a highlight in my rough guide to Osaka, which meant it must be good. That's what I thought, anyway. The rough guide doesn't, however, give a warning to avoid this place whilst suffering from a grim hang-over.
We beat the queues as expected, but I didn't appreciate the aquatic delights on display as we shambled through the place like zombies. Instead of focusing my attention on the majestic and graceful movements of the sea-creatures I was more concerned about stopping myself puking in the otter tank.
With each new tank displaying a wonder of the deep, all I could think about was when this little tour finished such was my dire state. I let out a sigh of relief when I saw the exit door. I gave an eager wave to a gang of portly penguins and lunged out into the open air.
Russ and I decided to head back into the centre of town and linger until our bus came. We were definitely not in eager tourist mode. We were barely in functioning human mode.

New Classes

2008-03-01T14:18:00.002+09:00

Martin got drunk one evening and forgot to turn up to his lessons the following day, causing uproar amongst the students he taught. The Asanos, quite rightly, were furious and decided to dock his wages for a month and cancel his contract and a handful of his classes. As a result there was a vacant position for extra classes and extra pay, a vacancy I filled. This means I now have to go through the routine of introducing myself to a new bunch of students. I usually have a few pieces of information about myself which will make my students go “oooh!”. The most interesting information is my mixed heritage. I will tell my class that I have a father who was born in Oslo, hence my Norwegian surname. And my mother was born in Cairo which prompts startled nattering amongst my students. Normally, students will respond to my bloodline with positive comments, so I was unprepared for the query posed to me by one of my new Tuesday evening students.
"Does that make you a half-breed?" he sunnily said.
I blinked in slow motion like an anaemic tortoise.
"I'm not a damn mutant!" I wanted to say. Instead, I gently reproached him for using such crass language and carried on introducing myself.
I talked about my education with the evening class, just to reassure my class that I wasn’t a street person that wandered into the building. I also talked about my favourite football team and my hobbies. But my little introduction felt a little flat. As much as I worked tirelessly to ingratiate myself with the students, they all had faces resembling smacked asses. There was no hint of interest. They just sat and listened. That was it. I finished my one-sided commentary and waited a moment in case any of my dormant students wanted to spring to life and ask a question. On the contrary, they seemed content to stare through me. I even hoped the bloke who earlier called me a half-breed would say another equally offensive comment just to fill the silent void.
Another aspect of teaching a new class is the observation that I look like Harry Potter. I have been compared to this fictitious boy-wizard since my arrival in Japan. I don't take it as a compliment.
I think the only similarity Harry Potter and myself has is that we both wear black rimmed glasses. That's where the similarity ends.
I can't shoot magic out of my fingers, I can't fly off on a broomstick and I haven't got a damn scar on my forehead. Yet on a weekly basis I am reminded of my Harry Potterish look.
One of my new lessons consisted of 20 moody adolescents who rarely show signs of life. I label them the 'flat line class'.

I bounded into the classroom and brightly said hello. I received a few grumps and huffs. I commented on the fine sunny morning. I received a yawn and a cough. Restraining the urge to kick the yawning spotty brat in the teeth, I wrote my name on the board in English. I also wrote it in Katakana in a hopeless attempt to win over this surly bunch. I asked them if my Japanese writing was correct. The yawning bloke in the front row said it wasn't because it read Sam Holtmon. I looked quizzically at him and confirmed this was actually my name. His face contorted as he tried to suppress a laugh. He finally composed himself and said: "You should write Harry Potter!" and proceeded to laugh like a witch.
I self-consciously adjusted my glasses and feigned a proud pose as the class laughed. If only I was Harry Potter, I could have fried this wise-guy with my magic powers.

Winning The Photography Competition

2008-02-27T16:17:00.009+09:00

Before coming to Japan I was never really interested in photography, but after seeing the beautiful surroundings Iida had to offer, I felt it essential to capture these images on film. Subsequently, I have explored the whole of Iida, looking for scenic shots that would dazzle family and friends back in England. When I found out that Iida’s City Council was running a photography competition, I immediately sent them a couple of my best photos.

One photo was taken during a fireworks display. The image was of a bunch of maniacs leaping about like goons whilst being engulfed by flames.
The other photo was taken during the tea ceremony I went to, which took place next to a gigantic tree. I photographed a girl staring up at the tree in wonder.
I was delighted to hear from Shigeho over the phone that they had both won a prize in the competition.
"Wow!" I said. "Where'd they come?"
"The fireworks one won," she said excitedly.
"Won won? It won....twice?" I tentatively asked.
"No," she said irritably. "The fireworks photo won the top prize. And the tree photo came 7th."
“Wa-hey!” I said, needlessly.

I was up bright and early the day the awards were taking place. I drank a strong cup of coffee to wake me up and went through rigorous morning exercises in preparation for the awards. I brushed my teeth three times and practised giving an award winning smile. I also practised my hand-shaking technique in front of the mirror and even went through a brief but thoughtful acceptance speech in English. I aborted this plan when I realized that most of the Japanese audience wouldn't have a clue what I was yakking on about.
As I opened the door to leave, the phone rang. It was Shigeho.
"Just to remind you," she said. "Please wear smart clothes."
She hung up.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I surmised that my ripped jeans and Never Mind the Bollocks t-shirt weren't appropriate for an awards ceremony, so I exchanged the t-shirt for a shirt and the ripped jeans for smart trousers.

I arrived at the city council on time and met the Asanos outside the building. They led me into a medium sized room which was filled with rows of chairs occupied by about 25 people talking amongst themselves. It may not have been the Oscars, but I felt on top of the world. I breezed in, hoping my striding walk signified to the seated people that they were witnessing a winner in their presence. This illusion was eradicated when I buckled clumsily over a covert chair that snuck out from beneath the drinks table. I gave a feeble wave to the people who witnessed this stumble with a stifled laugh.
I took my seat at the back of the room and waited for the proceedings to start. I was nudged in the back by Shigeho who told me to take a seat at the front. I walked to the front and floundered as I didn't know my designated chair. An elderly man with a shock of white hair looked at me furiously and forcefully jerked his head to the chair next to him. I took the hint and sat next to him.
Proceedings kicked off when a small, rotund woman, who was the chief-judge, gave a short speech and pointed to the various competition photos laid out around the room. When finished, she picked up a large certificate and read out information from it. The people in the room started to clap. So I did, too. The woman was looking at me, so I looked at her with a smile on my face and continued to clap like a trained seal. I turned to the white haired old man next to me, who forcefully jerked his head towards the woman. I smiled at him and continued to clap before realizing I was the only one in the room doing so. The woman at the front took matters in her own hands and walked over to me and dragged me by the hands, like a petulant child, to the front of the room. It dawned on me that I had missed my cue to accept the certificate by almost two minutes. I held my hands up in apology and bashfully smiled to the small audience. The judge then gave me the certificate and started speaking to me in Japanese. I didn't have a clue what she was saying but that didn't stop me from appearing to understand every word she said. When she looked happy, I looked happy. When she looked inquisitive, I looked inquisitive. When she laughed, I laughed. It was a simple but effective formula. Finally, the moment I had been waiting for arrived: The grand-prize.
I envisioned lots of money and maybe even a speed boat thrown in. I was, therefore, mildly disappointed to discover that the prize was a framed drawing of an aged old tree. Instead of throwing the painting on the floor like a spoilt brat, I looked dizzy with excitement as I exaggeratedly studied the painting in front of the audience. I held the picture up for the audience to see and they all nodded their approval. I took one final look at the drawing before bowing in thanks. I walked back to my chair with a sinking sigh. The elderly man next to me tapped me on the shoulder as I vacantly stared at the painting, and gave another forceful jerk of the head towards the front of the room. I followed his jerk and observed that the woman was beckoning me to return to the front. I jumped out of my seat and dashed to where she was standing. I wondered if there were more prizes to come.
She said a few more sentences and delved into a bag lying on a table next to her. She took out a wooden pen. She bowed as she gave it to me. The audience clapped and I felt it fitting to hold the pen aloft like Excalibur as they did so. I checked the feel of the pen by writing my name on a scrap of paper nearby. It didn't work.
When the clapping stopped, I lingered for a moment, hoping the judge would delve into her bag of goodies and whip out a bundle of cash. Instead, she stared at me with a grin. I fidgeted on the spot, and came to realize that this was going to be it in terms of prizes: A dodgy painting and a defunct pen. I knew I had to sit back down when I looked at the elderly man, who jerked his head towards my vacant seat.
I bowed to the judge and sat back down with a huff. I turned to the elderly man, who was jerking his head to no-one in particular, and said, "You wanna buy this pen?"

The Snow Monkeys Of Nagano

2008-02-25T14:04:00.015+09:00

Monkeys were the main attraction of the weekend. To be more precise, Snow Monkeys. These peculiar looking simians roam the mountainous Nagano region of central Japan, and are treated with reverence in Japan. They are a source of inspiration for Buddhist myths and are thought to be the inspiration behind the expression “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

Martin, Reuben and Russ and myself drove in a snow storm to get to Yamanouchi, Nagano - about a three hour drive from Iida. This area had a place called Jigokudani Park which was populated with a community of snow monkeys, who had their own heated onsen to relax in. Despite planning the trip for weeks, we still had trouble finding the park once we arrived in the freezing town of Yamanouchi. When we asked for directions from passers-by we couldn’t gleam any useful information. One person gave woeful instructions along the lines of: "OK, go straight, then take a straight and make a straight at the straight."
Remarkably, we found the entrance to the park off a small side road. Our excitement was dented when we read a sign by the entrance which notified visitors that the actual park was a one mile trek on foot through a forest. By this point in the early afternoon, the snow was relentless, which made for icy temperatures. No one in our group could convey our disappointment because it was too cold to speak. All we could do was chatter our teeth to one another and look depressed. We still had time to take a photo outside the park entrance. Russ, Reuben and I did a see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil pose, thinking we were so clever in doing so. As started to trek towards the park, another group of lads did the exact same pose as ours. This dented our pride, and with slumped shoulders we staggered through the snow along a narrow path surrounded by a malevolent forest, which made for a spooky experience. We never knew when we would see a monkey. They could have been lurking anywhere. This was not a reassuring idea because I had seen photos of them before the trip and they looked like they could pack a hell of a punch to pestering tourists. With this in mind, we tried hard not to disturb our surroundings in case they were sleeping but this was made impossible because the forest echoed back everything we said. We first realised this when Reuben became irritable about walking and screamed, “This place is colder than a witch’s tit!”

The echo of the word “tit...tit...tit,” had us all diving for cover in case we were confronted by an army of angry monkeys ready to spill blood. Realising the coast was clear we valiantly trekked on, keeping focused on not falling down the large crevasses on either side of the trail. This was made more complicated by Russ, who is a serial snow ball thrower. Just when you breathe a sigh of relief after surviving a particularly dangerous pathway littered with rocks, ice and huge drops on either side, you'll get a big lump of snow thrown in your face by Russ, who would then laugh wildly before scampering off to reload. It was unnerving to see him dart ahead with a fresh snowball in his hand and hide behind a tree or rock. Even though he was unseen, we could hear his foreboding laugh echo around the forest. It was straight out of Deliverance. Half way through our trek to the monkey park, Reuben, Martin and I decided to quash Russ' merry little game by surrounding him and pummelling his shocked face with a fierce snowball attack. Not one snowball was thrown by him after that.
After the uncomfortably cold walk, we entered a wide clearing which looked like a mini-valley. The small hills were cloaked in snow, and the bridge that connected the two hills was iced with stalactites. On top of one of the hills was a small tavern with a welcoming light twinkling at the entrance. Business must be pretty bad because the four of us were the only ones inhabiting this Gothic clearing. The wind was howling in this open space and strange sounds were being emitted from above a set of steps that snaked to the top of the hill opposite us. It wasn't a human sound. More like a wild beast. A colourful thought swept through my mind as I surveyed the surroundings. Perhaps this small valley was the monkey park and the monkeys were actually running the tavern and admitting the tourists with ticket stubs. This would explain the patent lack of human tourist guides and helpers.

The bedraggled, toothless old bartender inside the tavern was the first human being we had seen in an hour, yet he was more delighted to see us. When he saw us come into his inn, he jumped in the air with joy and made a strange yipping sound. The sort of sound a Chihuahua might make if you stamped on its tail. He then sprinted to the counter to take our orders. Judging from his reaction you'd have thought we were the first customers he'd seen in 30 years.
I ordered warm sake which was a comforting beverage considering the below zero temperatures outside. We sat on a tatami mat next to a heater and drank like drains. It was a unanimous decision to numb our senses with alcohol before we were exposed to the freezing cold again. Not only were we successful in numbing our physical senses, but we also numbed our mental ones because we found ourselves doing monkey impressions by jumping around on the tatami mat, and disturbing the other drinkers in the process. After slurping the last of the sake we said goodbye to the oddball landlord and staggered out into the fresh chill. We ambled up the twisty stairs on the hill opposite the tavern and in our pissed state we all felt it fitting to hum the Indiana Jones theme as we charged up the dangerous and archaic looking steps.

Finally, at the top, we found what we were looking for: The Snow Monkeys. There were at least 50 monkeys patrolling the wide clearing. At the centre was a small pool of steaming water. On closer inspection, the water was warm and inside the little pool were monkeys soaking up the atmosphere and having a good old time. It was their own personalised onsen I had read about. On account of the freezing weather, monkey families clung to each other to keep warm. It was a wonderful experience to see little baby monkeys snuggling up to their parents with dreamy eyes whilst the mum and dad would look authoritative as they protected their little kid. This truly breathtaking moment was ruined by me crassly remarking, "This is like David Attenborough shit!"

Stupid and glib comments aside, the scene was remarkable and I managed to get many close-up photos of these monkeys. Most were obliging, apart from one grumpy git. This particular monkey was appealing to me because his gnarly face was weather beaten and old. He looked like he could tell a fine monkey tale round a camp-fire. I slowly crouched down before him and attempted to make reassuring and friendly monkey sounds. Hearing my monkey grunts, Old Git Snow Monkey looked up from the ground and made eye contact with me. He was obviously unimpressed by what he saw because he looked straight back down to the ground again with a grunt. I crept closer to him and started to focus on his face with my expensive camera. The picture was going to be perfect. The snow was gently settling on his forlorn and wrinkled face creating a potential magical shot. Just as I was arrogantly saying, "National Geographic, here I come." Old Git Snow Monkey bared his teeth and made guttural growling sounds that were definitely not mentioned in the tourist brochure. I let that sound pass, thinking he would calm down and quit being such a big baby. I resumed focusing the lens on his face. Suddenly, one of his friends came ambling over and nuzzled him in the back, creating the potential for an even greater photo.

Just as I was about to take my snap, Old Git Snow Monkey and his furry pal both growled simultaneously and bared their teeth. I gathered they wanted me to piss off so I crept backwards whilst profusely apologizing for being such an annoyance and resumed photographing less skittish monkeys. Perhaps Old Git Snow Monkey has seen one too many tourists in his lifetime, and my suffocating presence was the last straw.
We spent about an hour at the monkey park but I could have stayed all day. The weather, however, was unforgiving and our group were only five minutes away from turning into ice. The monkeys, too, felt the cold because they were bunching together in mass huddles to keep warm. At the moment we felt our fingers would drop off at any second, we waved goodbye to the monkeys. As I passed Old Git Snow Monkey, I threw him my business card in case he changed his mind and actually likes the idea of having his head-shot taken.

Troubled Trio

2008-02-21T09:24:00.004+09:00

I have come to realize that my Tuesday lunchtime class is clinically insane. As the weeks go by, their craziness intensifies. When I first began teaching them at the office block a few miles away from Terakoya, they were quite reserved and would not show their true characters. Now that they are used to me, they are quite willing to expose themselves as the gaggle of loonies they truly are.
The trio of kooky characters are Syuuti - an unkempt and gangly car mechanic; Makiko - a young newlywed office worker; and Mitzuko - an elderly kindergarten teacher. Together, they are an unstoppable team of mayhem and lunacy.
I can deduce that their insanity is coming to the boil because their weekend activities have become quite irrational and bizarre.
Take Syuuti for example. Six months ago he was quite guarded as to what he got up to at the weekend, but now he is quite happy to divulge everything he does and, quite frankly, I preferred it when he didn't say a word. Recently, he chirpily told Makiko and Mitzuko how he spent a lovely weekend in Kyushu. Makiko and Mitzuko asked what he did.
"I went to a strip club with my friends and then watched porn in my hotel room. Ah-hahaha!"
From sheer surprise, I spat out some water I was drinking from a bottle.
"What Syuuti meant was...." I floundered, trying to redeem this awkward situation in front of a stunned Makiko and Mitzuko. "What Syuuti meant was..was....what did you mean Syuuti?"
He stared at me with sincerity. "I meant just what I said. That I watched strippers and porn," he said with a hint of pride.
I looked at Syuuti, and not having a clue as to how to expand this conversation without the possibility of him revealing more unwholesome facts, I asked Makiko and Mitzuko what they did at the weekend, hoping it would contain nice topics to talk about in an English lesson - like bunny rabbits or flower arranging. This is not the first time Syuuti has divulged information that should have been kept to himself. For example, a few weeks ago, it had been snowing heavily in Iida so after driving through the snow to my lesson, I remarked to my students that I had never experienced such heavy snowfall. This remark then evolved into the weather conditions of England and Japan. After ten minutes of this idle chatter, I asked my students if they liked the snow. Makiko and Mitzuko both shuddered and said they hated it because they had to constantly clear it from their drive-way every morning. I noticed Syuuti was hearing their woes with a thoughtful silence. I asked Syuuti his opinion.
"I like the snow," he said.
" Why?" I asked.
"I'll tell you why," he said, with a pointed finger. "I like it because snow means that there will be more crashes on the road which means my business will profit. Ahahaha!" he laughed with his customary cackle.
"How's business at the moment then?" I said.
"Booming!" he declared.
Syuuti isn't the lone wacko in the class. The other two are equally eccentric, but in a harmless way. At least they don't pray for death and destruction on the roads.
Makiko, who is in her late twenties, is a good laugh and will always make us chuckle with her impulsive attitude towards life. I think alcohol is the reason behind this because she drinks gallons of the stuff, and will gladly admit this fact to the class. Without fail, her weekend highlights include drinking two crates of beer with her husband and playing computer games whilst pissed, and not just at the weekend. She says she drinks beer everyday. I half-joked recently whether she drank before the lesson and she responded with an ambiguous laugh, and nothing else, so I'm not sure if she is intoxicated in my lessons or not. I wouldn't put it past her judging by her unpredictable character. I have to be prepared for any Makiko-related randomness in my lessons. A few weeks ago we were working through an exercise that looked at unusual English expressions like 'white lies' 'back-seat driver' and 'hand stands'. I asked the class if they knew what this expression meant. They looked puzzled, so I half-heartedly told them. I described the process of doing a handstand. I even drew a picture of a stick-man doing one. Makiko's face suddenly brightened. "I love hand standing!" she said, as she jumped up from her seat.
Slightly perplexed by her eager reaction, I asked why she likes them and why she was standing up.
"I did them everyday when I was a child. I still like doing them," she said with joy, and started to do a demonstration. She took a few steps away from the table, firmly placed her hands on the floor and flipped the lower half of her body over her head. She then started to do a handstand shuffle across the room. She was very agile and started to do the splits in mid-air. Syuuti, Mitzuko and I all clapped with delight. Spurred on by our seal of approval, Makiko started doing a 360 degree turn on her hands. It was great entertainment, but I was aware that the boss of the company was working next door, and I pictured him getting annoyed by the rowdy behaviour that was going on next to him. If he walked in at this precise moment he would see a scene whereby no English was being exchange whilst Syuuti, Mitzuko and myself were clapping and encouraging the upturned Makiko to do "More! More! More!"
I begrudgingly brought a halt to proceedings. The trio looked sad. I did too. It meant I would have to teach stupid English instead of marvelling at Makiko's handstand tricks. Makiko, however, wasn't finished.
"I can do cart wheels as well," she said with an infectious grin. The other two looked happy about this. Knowing that the lesson had already descended into anarchy, I put my feet on the desk, leant back in my chair with my hands behind my head. "Go ahead," I said, with resignation. And off she went cart-wheeling around the room to the sounds of a rhythmic beat being clapped by Syuuti, Mitzuko and myself.
The final student, Mitzuko, is the oldest out of the trio, being in her mid-sixties, which might attribute to the ever-present flu she carries with her. Every week I ask how she is, and every week she will answer, "I have a snuffle."
I correct her and tell her the word to use is "a sniffle" even though I'm not sure this twee word is suitable in the modern age. But her "snuffling" anecdotes remain the same each week. It consists of Mitzuko waking up with a fever, going to the doctor for a check-up and going home to rest. It’s amazing she finds time to study English amidst her busy schedule of sickness.
As well as an aptitude for absorbing illnesses, she has a remarkable talent for being brutally honest. If she is not happy about something she will say so, which is a very un-Japanese characteristic. At the end of my lesson last week which consisted of adjectives used to describe movies, I asked the class if it was a useful lesson. Syuuti and Makikio said it was, but Mitzuko shook her head. I asked her what was wrong with it.
"Boring," she said, with an incongruous smile.
"Boring? In what way," I inquired.
"I don't know. Just boring," she said, still smiling.
I smiled back and went "Well..er...I'll try to make it more interesting next time. Perhaps the lesson needs to be more fun. Would you like more language games?"
"No," she laughed with a cluck, and abruptly waved goodbye to me.
At the end of my most recent lesson, I was determined to win back her favour, so I peppered the lesson with games and more student based activities. I sweated through that lesson trying to make her happy and at the end I asked her, whilst panting out of breath and gripping a chair for support, what she thought of it.
"Yes. Better. Well done," she said with a clipped tone.
Boy, is she a tough cookie to please.
I am very fond of this trio, but for their benefit and my own, I may have to strap straight-jackets on each of them in order to have a more normal and peaceful English lesson.

Suitable Textbook

2008-02-19T09:32:00.003+09:00

I had to travel to Nagoya in order to buy new text books for my kid’s classes. This trip was essential because some of my lessons have, once again, become quite sterile. I tried in vein to find some books in the only book shop Iida has. I only succeeded in coming across a small English section consisting mostly of Tom Clancy spy novels or Harry Potter books. I couldn't use these as teaching materials unless I decided to teach the kids how to become espionage spies or wizards.
The nearest place to find a good selection of teaching material was in Nagoya, a two hour bus ride away.
When I arrived in the bustling city on an early Saturday afternoon, the temperature was pleasant compared to the frosty mountainous surroundings of Iida. I slung my coat over my shoulder and hailed a taxi outside Nagoya Station which took me to the biggest book store in Nagoya. I found the English section and proceeded to find English text books that would help inject some much needed fun into my lessons. Up until now, I have been woefully unimaginative when planning my lessons and have stuck to printing out dull worksheets. The lessons have been distressingly repetitive, both for the kids and me. A prime case that signified the low morale in my classes was when one kid took a boring worksheet I handed out and blew his nose with it. His fellow classmates applauded him with vigour.
The gauntlet had been set by this incisive young chap. Action was needed, and it was down to me to make the change.
As I was looking through the endless selection of textbooks in the book store, I was looking for a cover that might have a screaming title like: Super-Fun-Happy-Book: The Best Ways to Teach a Bunch of Brats!
All I got, however, were rather placid and maudlin covers. The majority of the books were either boring, incomprehensible or dated. The amount of textbook I browsed through that contained images of shoulder padded housewives with big hair and chubby blokes with pasty faces, a mullet and a dirty little moustache, was ungodly.
I needed help, so I went over to the counter. Luckily the shop keeper could speak fluent English, so no miming was necessary.
"Hello, I was wondering if you could recommend any teaching text books for kids," I asked.
"Certainly" the shop keeper replied, and walked over to the book section and grabbed the horrific 80s book I had discredited earlier.
"This is a particularly fun book," she said and opened the book to a particular section and pointed at a picture displaying the pasty faced mullet haired bloater who was grinning directly at the reader with a speech bubble from his mouth that read, "Guess what job I do?"
I was sure that any child reading this wouldn't give a flying fart how this unhealthy looking creep earned his living. I politely declined the shop keeper’s recommendation, and asked her for something more recent, preferably made in this century.
She brushed her finger across a number of other books as she scanned the shelf. "What kind of things are you looking for," she asked. "Grammar exercises? Vocabulary exercises? Role-playing exercises?"
"Something that will keep them quiet for an hour," I said.
"I have just the thing," she confidently said.
The book she gave me had a shockingly abrasive colour scheme on the front cover that nearly blinded me. It looked as if a rainbow had vomited on the cover. It was that psychedelically awful. Amidst the colour chaos was the drawing of a giddy cartoon banana dancing with a grumpy looking apple, whilst a too-cool-for-school strawberry was break dancing in front of them. My eyes had to violently strain to comprehend the title that was submerged beneath the blanket of fizzy colours. It was Learn English the Fun Way.
Judging by the front-cover, the title should have been: Learn to Dance like a Fruit the Fun Way.
I flicked through the pages and was unimpressed. The activities were boring and difficult, and the cartoon fruit characters were bossy with their prompts. One irate looking plumb at the bottom corner of the page would bark at the reader to, "TURN THE PAGE, NOW!"
I wasn't going to subject my students to these unseemly characters.
I thanked the shopkeeper for her help and said I would continue browsing.
Eventually I settled on buying a book entitled: Vocabulary Kids Need to Know.
It had some fun worksheets and games, but what was most important was that it didn't have a sweaty mullet haired yob or an aggressive cartoon fruit in sight.

"Say Cheese"

2008-02-18T09:42:00.002+09:00

One of my lessons was infiltrated by a photographer. Shigeho informed me that the school needed images to put on pamphlets, posters and websites to promote the school. The Asanos wanted pictures of an eager class being taught by a competent and dynamic teacher. Why they wanted me, I had no idea. The pressure was on. The day when the photographer appeared in my class I doubled my efforts to make my lesson that afternoon the best I had ever done. Before I began my lesson, I had pangs of doubt. What if the photographer took a bad picture and snapped the class whilst one student was yawning, another staring at their nails and me scratching my balls? It would promote Terakoya as a school for delinquents.
I informed my students in my afternoon class to expect the photographer and insisted on them being on their best behaviour. Even though they were adults, I had to make sure they would toe the line.
As I began the lesson, a small balding man lightly knocked on the open door and I told him to come in. He entered the room with a tiny disposable camera clutched tightly close to his chest. He personally bowed to each student sitting at the table, which wasted about five minutes worth of teaching time. When he finished, he stood at the head of the table with an impossibly straight back with his hands pressed against the side of his legs, as if he was about to blast off into space. He then began talking to me in Japanese for a few minutes. I pretended to understand, and nodded intermittently throughout his little speech. He finished with a question. I had no idea what this question was, but I cordially nodded my head and said, "Yes."
He looked happy with my response and darted to the corner of the room. I asked my students for a translation as to what he said. They told me that he asked if it was OK if he could take pictures in the class.
"Yes. It's OK to take pictures," I said to the man, who was staring glumly at his small camera.
He took his eyes off the camera and stared at me. He just blinked a few times.
In hindsight it was a bit of a fractured response. Suddenly responding to a question he gave minutes earlier may have appeared odd.
I began the lesson and the photographer started to shuffle about the room looking for good angles. To be perfectly frank, he began to piss me off as the hour progressed. Not only did he annoy me, he annoyed the students.
He would come creeping up to me as I taught the past perfect. His creeping movements were unsettling in itself, but he kept on creeping until he was inches away from my face. I had to stop mid-sentence and stare furiously at him. “Hasn't your camera got a zoom?” I asked. "Teach! Teach!" he yelled, gesticulating wildly with his hands.
I suppressed an urge to yank his ears to the ground and carried on as best I could. Things didn't get better. Disposable-camera-man disturbed the students as he swooped up behind each of them. At first, it looked like he was taking a birds-eye view of the work they were doing. But on closer inspection, it appeared as if he was more interested in taking pictures of the top of their heads. Once completing his bizarre shot, he would scuttle off rapidly to the next student. The man was an eerie lunatic.
With each photo he took, he would arrange himself into an unnecessary action man pose. He would squat, crouch and dive to his desired locations.
This was only a small private school, not some bloody war-zone!
Clearly dissatisfied with the pictures he had taken, he asked me for a "Number 1 shot."
"Yeah, to your head," I darkly muttered.
He crouched in front of me, aiming his disposable camera in my direction. I shuffled awkwardly on my feet and stared at him.
"Teach! Teach!" he shouted again.
I hesitated for a bit because his crouching presence was off-putting, and plucked up the courage to continue teaching.
"Smile! Smile!" he barked.
I then unnaturally smiled as I taught grammar, which is clearly not a happy topic.
"Smiler! Smiler!" he demanded (which I assumed meant to smile more.)
I fixed a face splitting grin on my face as I taught mundane grammar to my students.
I heard the little click of his camera and immediately wiped the smile off my face in favour of a murderous expression in his direction.
The photographer pocketed his camera, stood erect with his hands clasped to the side of his legs, bowed, and without a word, jumped backwards out of the room. What an odd little man.
The whole room let out a sigh of relief. Although I have a bad feeling we will be seeing another photographer very soon because this one might be sacked on account of the pictures he took. I can't imagine the Asanos would want to use any of them. Especially the last one of a bunch of stony faced students being taught English by a lunatic with an idiot grin on his flushed face.

Exhibition

2008-02-15T16:53:00.003+09:00

Ohmi, the talkative fellow I teach in my senior class, is a budding artist and has displayed his works to the class on numerous occasions, and the other day he had his works on display at a nearby exhibition. He asked the class to accompany him to the exhibition and see his work. Most of us gladly accepted and packed ourselves into his Mercedes.
The exhibition room which housed his paintings was small and brightly lit. The paintings on either side of the walls wonderfully displayed the rich and diverse beauty of Japan's scenery and culture with portraits of temples, shrines, cherry blossoms and people singing karaoke.
At the far end of the room were Ohmi's paintings. The lighting above his work highlighted his works more than the others, indicating that his drawings were the main attraction.
He informed me that this was because he taught an art class once a week and the paintings on display were his students. Ohmi led our small gang to the far end of the room and pointed at one of his paintings. It was of Mount Fuji covered in mist. The class and I made the appropriate "oooooooh" sounds. I wanted to praise Ohmi’s work in a knowing and respectful manner.
"I notice," I said, stroking my chin, "that you have drawn Mount Fuji in an ambiguous season."
Ohmi looked confused. So did the class. Hell, even I didn't know what I was babbling on about.
"I have?" Ohmi asked.
"Yes. I mean, what season has it been drawn in?" I continued to waffle. "It could be winter, judging by the thick set of snow surrounding the mountain. Or it could be summer, judging by the blazing sun illuminating the majestic mountain."
Ohmi looked once more at the drawing. Then at me, then back at his portrait again. He blew sharply out of his cheeks. "I don't know what season it is. I copied it from a post card. Now, if you will all look over here...." and he went over there to talk about his other painting, which was of Kyoto in the spring. Throughout that season Kyoto is famous for its pink cherry blossoms that bloom all over the city. Ohmi managed to perfectly capture the colour and atmosphere of Kyoto during this season and I conveyed my approval by saying, "U-huh u-huh. Yes. Yes," repeatedly during his little description of the drawing.
After gushing at Ohmi's fine paintings we all sat down at a nearby table and were served green tea by an old lady, who I guess was the owner of the little building. She gave us biscuits and chocolates and whenever we finished our helpings with a contented burp, she would run back towards us with second helpings. She continued this set pattern until I sternly told her on the ninth helping to cease her eager hospitality lest she wanted to mop up chocolate stained puke from the table. I said this as diplomatically as I could.
As we ate and drank, Ohmi, who is an accomplished English speaker, delighted in telling the history of Japanese art to the class, who were not accomplished English speakers. They valiantly sat through his eager discourse even though they understood not a word. When Ohmi finished his monologue with the conclusion that Indian rock paints are the most refined painting utensils, the class were contentedly snoozing round the table, not giving damn about Indian rock paints.

There's Always One....

2008-02-10T20:14:00.001+09:00

Having taught English for six months, I am in a firm position to accurately assess the various character traits of my students and, naturally, there are stand-out personalities that need highlighting.
Take, for example, Tadahiro - a portly judo-instructor. I teach him on Saturday mornings and he is staggeringly oblivious to his surroundings. The lesson starts at 9am and he arrives, without fail, at 8.30am. He will enter the school, give me an enthusiastic wave and go and make coffee. After making his coffee, he will enter the staff room without knocking and have an idle wander around. I acknowledge his presence with a nod of the head and continue with what I am doing, which is usually surfing the internet or planning a lesson. Meanwhile, Tadahiro will pick up loose sheets of paper on my desk, study it intensely, get bored, drop it back on the desk, and continue his stroll around the room. I gather he is quite a nosey character because everything that he comes across, he will inspect, and I mean everything. A few weeks back I saw him rustling through the bin. I couldn't let this unwholesome act pass, so I took out my ear-phones and asked if everything was OK. He took his head out the bin, chuckled, gave me a thumbs up, and shot his head back inside the bin, where moments earlier I had deposited my banana and orange peels.
Tadahiro does not have a good grasp of English, but surely he could have judged by my appalled expression that what he was doing was wrong. Yet he happily rustled through the junk without a care in the world. His carefree approach to his hygiene is matched by his carefree studying style. When his two other classmates enter the study-room at 9am he will give them a childish grin and an enthusiastic wave. And the two men will despondently respond with a muffled greeting. They know, and I know, that Tadahiro is a disruptive student. Try as Tadahiro might, he just cannot keep focused during the one hour lesson. As I teach I will make eye contact with each student and they will stare back, except for Tadahiro, who is busy glaring out of the window with his mouth open. I will take this opportunity to spring a question on him just to check he's been following the lesson and it is quite clear he never does. He will chuckle in response to my question and resume fixing his eyes on the happenings going on outside. The two other blokes in the room, who are at a higher English level, will shake their heads in exasperation. When I get my three students to do a reading exercise, Tadahiro's participation is compulsory, so I stand in front of the window, blocking his view, and ask him to begin reading whatever is on the sheet of paper in front of him. He will giddily nod his head and begin reading. Sounds, undoubtedly, come out of his mouth, but whether these sounds are English is debatable. For instance, a word like "jump" will morph into "jip" according to Tadahiro. This is fine, of course. Learning a new language can be extremely difficult and it is quite natural for mistakes to be made. I slowly gave Tadahiro the correct pronunciation of the word "jump". He nodded, let the information sink in, and confidently said "Jip".
"No, no. It's j-u-m-p," I would say.
"Jip"
"Jump."
"Jip"
By now, the other two students joined in this farce and shouted: "Jump! It's JUMP!!"
"Jip," Tadahiro would merrily repeat.
There was a momentary silence in the room as the other two students and I calculated that all hope was lost. Tadahiro was silent because he returned to glaring out the window with his mouth open.
I have a proclivity for backing the under-dog, and Tadahiro is undoubtedly that, and I like to think that one day he will be an accomplished English speaker, although I think it more likely that Tom Hanks will start a Hip Hop career before this ever happens.
Another interesting student I teach is Haroshi. Every sentence he utters carries a heavy load of innuendo, and with this evening class consisting of a majority of middle-aged women, these jokes are not met with gushing approval. One prime example where his sense of humour got completely out of hand was an exercise called "If...."
This is where each student had to complete numerous sentences that began with "If..."
For example: If I was invisible I would... If I won a million dollars I would.... If I was born 10,000 years ago I would.......
This is a fun exercise because students normally provide funny answers. Haroshi, at first, was on fine form. I asked him what he would do if he was invisible.
"Go to an all-girls spa!" he cried with joy.
I laughed and so did the class. Haroshi ticked this sentence off on his sheet with a winning smile. I went round the class to get their equally funny answers.
It was time for the next sentence.
"Haroshi. If you won a million dollars what would you do?" I asked.
"I would buy an all-girls spa," he boomed.
I laughed and noticed that the rest of the classes weren’t crazy about this answer and fidgeted with their pens in silence. I quickly carried on proceedings whilst he victoriously ticked off this sentence on his sheet.
The next sentence was: If I was born 10,000 years ago I would.....
I nervously glanced towards Haroshi for his sentence.
"If I was born 10,000 years ago I would be the first person to build an all-girls spa!" he quacked with joy. His jokes were getting predictable and the others in the class felt the same way because no one laughed.
I looked at the next sentence: If I met Gandhi I would...
Haroshi surely couldn't make a sex gag from this, I thought.
I was wrong.
"If I met Gandhi I would ask him to join me and my girlfriends in the spa!" You could have heard a pin drop.

Big Class

2008-02-04T09:59:00.002+09:00

Teaching at Terakoya normally consists of teaching a handful of adults or kids in a small room. It is a relaxed scenario whereby free discussions are actively encouraged. I think this creates a much more rewarding learning environment for the students. It has also enabled me to gain confidence when teaching English as a foreign language, and because I am my own boss at the school, I can try out new teaching ideas and techniques on a trial and error basis. If an idea doesn't work for one lesson, I'll scrap it for the next lesson and start a-new. This relaxed teaching style took an abrupt U-turn when I taught a morning class at a college near to Terakoya. Normally, I teach nine students who are 19 years old. They are all quite surly and unresponsive and will reluctantly carry out the exercises I set for them. Nine students in this behavioural mould are plenty. I was therefore discouraged to find out that Martin, who teaches the larger and older class next door, was suffering from a fever so was unable to teach. As a result, I was to incorporate his class into mine. It was the largest class I have taught since coming to Japan. There were about 35 students in total and they all had funky clothes and spiky hair-styles that would have hurt a porcupine. Martin warned me that some of his students like to talk whilst he teaches, and true enough, when I talked to the students about what we were going to study, people from different sides of the room were joking and jostling with each other. I had to act tough to silence this rebellious crew of student outlaws. I theatrically cleared my throat and tapped the white-board. The chatter continued. I raised the stakes and did an even more theatrical cough, which prompted one worried looking girl at the front to ask if I was OK and needed some water. I said I was fine and decided not to do anymore coughing lest I was to get a Heimlich manoeuvre.
"Everybody be quiet!" I yelled.
And they did.
I became a bit smug with myself after that and let this small power-trip go to my head. If I could silence a class of 30 trendy students, I could achieve anything. Consequently, I started to strut around the room like peacock as I taught English like a tyrant. When one student began to fidget and talk to their neighbour, I would click my fingers, point at them and hollered at them to turn a particular verb into its past tense. And I would make it a particularly difficult verb.
I felt annoyingly self-satisfied because I enforced a degree of orderly conduct in the lesson, making it both a smooth experience for myself and the students. I gave them all a worksheet which was about conversations used when socializing. I paired each student off to practice conversational English. "Begin!" I unnecessarily bellowed, and watched as they set about doing the task for the rest of the hour.
This was a breeze, I thought. So I sat down at my desk at the head of the classroom, put my feet up, and read the current thriller book I was reading. I could get used to this style of teaching.

10 Little Monkeys

2008-02-02T19:20:00.001+09:00

I never like singing at the best of times. I was therefore mortified to hear I was expected to sing a song with my kindergarten class. I entered the staff room of Jiko Kindergarten school and did my customary greetings complete with comical bowing. I was about to go and teach but a Japanese teacher came bustling over to me and handed me a piece of paper with the title 10 Little Monkeys written in block capitals at the top. Underneath the title were lyrics. The teacher beamed at me without explaining why she gave me this piece of paper. To escape this curious encounter, I laughed, did a monkey mime, handed the piece of paper back to the teacher and attempted to leave the staff room once more. The teacher grabbed my arm with surprising strength, fixing me routinely to the spot. She was still grinning.
I politely enquired what she wanted, feeling terrified. She said she wanted me to sing this song to the class I taught that afternoon. They needed to practice this song because they were to sing it for an upcoming graduation festival. I thought this was a joke because a) I didn't have a clue how the song sounded and b) I had a hazardous singing voice which had the potential to scar innocent kids for life. She was having none of it, though, and subsequently dragged me to the classroom.
My students were seated in a semi-circle, randomly clucking with joy for no apparent reason. The scary teacher took me to one side and said, "10 Little Monkeys. Are you ready?"
"Well, no," I confessed.
"No?!" she wheezed, her eyes bulging.
"I don't know the tune," I bashfully laughed, attempting to sound upset by my ignorance.
"Don't worry," the teacher laughed merrily, and handed me the lyrics sheet. She then wandered off to an expensive ivory carved piano in the corner of the room.
I looked at the lyrics. It went something like this: "1 little, 2 little 3 little monkeys, 4 little, 5 little, 6 little monkeys, 7 little, 8 little, 9 little monkeys, 10 little monkeys in the tree." You are then meant to repeat this 10 more times. It was enough to make your head explode.
Her advice of "don't worry" was unfounded. Of course I was going to worry. I was surrounded by wide-eyed kids who were about to be subjected to the worst ever performance of 10 Little Monkeys. I looked around for the exit door. Damn! Some chubby kid was seated in front of the door, blocking any potential escape to freedom. I made a quick assessment whether or not you could lose your job for pile-driving a six year old out the way. The odds weren't good, I concluded.

The jaunty opening chords of the song began. I looked to the teacher for a signal as to when I should begin. She didn't bother. I was left to my own devices which is never a good thing in any circumstance. It was a lonely place to be standing in front of 30 kids, staring at you with expectation. I did some conducting motions with my hands as the piano intro was jangling away, which garnered some laughs from the kids. I enthusiastically continued this joke. Anything that would delay the horror that was soon to happen.
I was pretty sure I was meant to be singing by this point because the piano intro had been going on for over two minutes. I jabbed a finger towards the kids, hoping they might start the song, and I would join in later. They failed to appease my hopes, so I began by reading the lyrics as if it were a shopping list. The fat kid by the exit started to cry. The kid’s then realised the fatality of my singing voice and began to chirp their way through the song so as to deaden my sound. I pretended to be joyously singing along with them, but I was just silently mouthing the lyrics because I was concentrating on how the kids were singing the tune.
It's never a good sign when you have to take English prompts from a bunch of Japanese six year olds.
The song ended. The class clapped and so did I. They couldn't have been clapping me. I did bugger all apart from waving my conducting hand around and doing a baffling jig on the spot.
The teacher then pointed at me and asked the children to listen to how I pronounce the words to the song. The jaunty intro began again. It was meant to sound happy and uplifting, but for me, it sounded like the death march, such was the fear these opening bars resonated with me.
I began the song again, singing at the wrong moment, forcing the teacher to divert the tune to suit my backward needs. I sang out of tune, out of place and out of the English language. The lyrics were so easy, but I was focusing entirely on getting the tune right. As a result, I confused up my counting. I would go: "...4 little, 6 little, no, 'ang on, 5 little, 7 little monk...oh, no! 6 little monkeys."
I was a yodelling mess.
The kids looked mortified, I went red, and the teaching assistant looked at me with formidable fury.

Learning Can Be Tough

2008-01-31T15:27:00.003+09:00

Studying a new language on a hangover is never a wise idea. I had planned to visit a Japanese language school on Wednesday lunchtime. Unfortunately, gallons of beer and whiskey the previous night nearly prevented this academic event to occur.
I was up until the wee small hours the previous night with a few other English teachers. Most of the evening took place inside a small, uncomfortable Karaoke bar. After ransacking the bar of its alcoholic contents and murdering Elvis Costello's back-catalogue with my drunken drawl, I decided to call it a night. I was determined to go to the language school the next day - hangover or not. Naturally, I woke up and meekly murmured, "Like hell I'm going," and promptly fell back to sleep. I awoke soon after due to a coughing fit which eradicated any chance of further sleep. I had a scolding shower, a refreshing shave, a strong cup of coffee and immediately felt better. This, however, was a cruel illusion, as I soon found out. I met up with Reuben, who was the only other teacher awake and not suffering from any day-long drunken slumber like some of the other teachers. We drove in my car to the school and said hello to the staff there. We also said hello to the four other grinning students occupying separate desks, who were all from China. Reuben and I sat at our own designated table and were met by a plump Japanese man who would be teaching us separately from the rest of the class. He spoke English fluently and he seemed more articulate than Reuben and I.
The teacher began with rudimentary exercises for the two of us. For example, he would ask us to read a Japanese sentence from a text-box on a scrap of paper. When he signalled for us to begin, we would merely stare lifelessly at him. I saw his mouth move but couldn't hear him speak. When he repeated his instruction to read the text box, I offered Reuben the chance to go first. He declined and said I should go. I said I wasn't feeling too good, so he should begin. He proclaimed he was feeling far worse than me, so I should go first, goddamit. The Japanese teacher watched this charade unfurl before his panic-stricken eyes, and acted as the referee. He said he would begin reading and that one of us should take over half way through. We thought this was an adequate request and let him begin. Halfway through his flawless recital of the text, he looked up from the paper and motioned for me to continue. I let out an audible sigh and began the reading, making so many mistakes that I'm sure the teacher thought I was speaking Zimbabwean rather than Japanese. Whenever the teacher corrected me, I would get flustered, lose my place, make an "eeeeeer" sound, and start reading in the wrong place. I finished and looked up from the paper to see the teacher slumped back in his chair with horror in his eyes. I looked over at Reuben who was staring into the middle distance with half-closed eyes.
The teacher had a sharp intake of breath, and begrudgingly proceeded with the next exercise. He knew it was a lost cause with the two of us, but bravely battled on. He attempted to teach us some Japanese grammar, but to no avail. He would tell us how to change a verb from present to past tense, and Reuben and I would forget instantly. We would weakly croak for him to repeat what he had just said. When he had done so, Reuben and I would turn to stare blankly at each other, and then stare vacantly back at the teacher who would repeat the rule once more...then again..and again, and again. When the lesson finished, he closed his exercise book with relief. "So, were you guys drinking last night, eh?" he said with a knowing wink.
“Was it that obvious?” I asked.
“It’s as obvious as your lack of skill in Japanese.”
When the other Chinese students finished their lesson we all sat around a table. This was a chance for everyone to get to know each other whilst eating lunch. All I wanted to do, though, was run to the bathroom and wretch in the toilet.
The meal was prepared by a hobbling old woman with a face populated by hairy warts. As we sat at the table in awkward silence, the old lady waddled around the table distributing the contents of the steaming pot she was carrying onto a plate. I'm no food expert, but I deduced the stuff that was dumped on my plate was slop. I prodded it with my fork to check if it was alive and noticed lumpy purple tentacles submerged in a puss-coloured liquid. I turned to Reuben to see his reaction. He was staring at the shit on his plate with fear and queasiness. My assessment of the meal was not improved when our Japanese teacher held his greasy fork in front of my face, with a dangling tentacle on the end of it. He asked what I thought it was. "I have no idea," I said dejectedly. "This is cow's tongue," he said, and with a hearty chuckle, popped the cow organ into his mouth.
I felt bloody sick. I tried in vein to eat the stuff on the plate but failed. I left three quarters of the stuff behind. When the old lady came clomping back to collect the plates, she looked at mine, aghast, and asked why on earth I hadn't eaten it! I didn't have the heart to tell her it was because my bile would have tasted infinitely better.
When we all finished the horror-lunch unscathed, it was time for the introductions. Each person had to stand up and explain a little about ourselves. The Chinese students were garrulous and delightful to listen to. But when it came to my introduction, the positive atmosphere generated by the Chinese was quickly vanquished. I stood up and gave a half-hearted opening gambit. I stated my name and address in a slow murmur, as if interrogated by the police. I was swaying back and forth as I was saying this. I attempted to explain the reasoning behind my disorderly appearance and slovenly behaviour. I weakly chuckled that I stayed up late last night singing karaoke. I thought this would create some empathy from the studious Chinese students who were of similar age to me. No one reacted, though. I coughed and thought about how to alleviate myself from this disaster zone. I did so by saying not another word, waved pathetically and sat down again to the sound of muffled fidgeting from the other students.
Perhaps it would have been better to stay in bed that day.