Don't Panic

Mein Schloss!

2006-05-18T20:22:00.000+09:00

Went for a drive the other day and on a whim decided to visit some historical sights. As it was a whim, I didn't have my digital camera so these low-res cellphone shots will have to do:

And in other news, the following excerpt from my company bulletin board:

The spring Police Safety Driving campaign is on! Speed traps, safety belt checks, and cell-phone checks are up around town, so please be aware and forewarned. Penalties are: no safety-belt: a written warning, no fee. Speeding: fees depend on amount over the limit, talking on your cell phone: 6,000 yen. (in order to legally use a cell-phone in your car, your car must be stopped with the engine off)

So theoretically the police DO care how people drive around here... they just have no effect. Speeding, running red lights, and cellphone talking are all par-for-the-course in this town. I don't know about the seatbelts though...
Some idiot today nearly hit me head-on because he decided to suddenly lurch out of his turn lane and go straight... while I was making my "protected" right turn. Foolio.

Something in the air...

2006-05-14T17:00:00.000+09:00

We had Spring festival last week so the streets were even more crowded than usual. The festival itself was somewhat boring this year, but it's always interesting to see the huge floats taking up one side of the only wide street in town.

SaKuRa

2006-04-04T12:40:00.000+09:00

Even in Tokyo there are plenty of blossoming cherry trees...

My hovercraft is full of eels...

2006-03-28T12:37:00.000+09:00

German-style beer hall, filled with Japanese people (plus me), with some guy playing 'Tequila!' on the saxaphone. Yeah, it was one of those nights...

Faces have been blurred to protect the innocent.

Noise noise noise

2006-03-20T13:32:00.000+09:00

Sometimes I get asked by my ex-laguage school in S.F. to help give prospective teachers advice about Japan.

So you want to teach English in Japan? Here's some advice:

1) Pretend you're a celebrity.
That way when people stare/glare at you in shock you can pretend it's because you're famous and they're just trying to remember where they know you from rather than being xenophobic.

2) Learn Japanese.
People probably still won't actually speak to you in Japanese, because everyone wants to practice English (not just being xenophobic), but at least you'll know when they're talking about you.

3) Bring a dictionary with you at all times.
Even if you don't need to look up a word do so. It reminds people that you're new to all this and they should go easy on you and also gives you some time to think and try to figure out just what the hell is going on.

4) Learn how to draw.
A picture says a thousand words which is nice because saying a thousand words is tiresome and your students won't know 998 of them anyway.

5) If you're over 5 feet tall bring clothes.
Lots of clothes. And shoes.

6) Practice driving a huge manual-transmission Mack truck the wrong way down a narrow one-way alley blindfolded with one arm tied behind your back.
Then you'll do okay driving here for the first time.

7) For goodness sake, get some teaching credentials.
All of the fast-food English teachers around here make it difficult to actually teach students because the students become used to half-assed alleged teaching and confuse talking about the weekend in broken English for language studying.

8) Beware of the Dark Side.

Ume and take

2006-03-14T12:35:00.000+09:00

'Tis the season to hike around...

Last weekend marked the end of the blossoming plum trees so I went out to see them before it started raining again.

Later I visited Futamata castle for a picnic lunch.

Okay, so only the stone steps are left but these stone steps have a lot of history behind them.

Among other things, this was the castle of Tokugawa Nobuyasu. He was accused of plotting against the then ruler Nobunaga Oda and so his father, Tokugawa Ieyasu (the future Shogun), had to order him to commit suicide, which eventually he did. Famous story, old stone steps.

Proposer Of Your Life

2006-03-07T13:17:00.000+09:00

I won't even comment on this sign but it does remind me of two stories from class:

1)
I have a late-middle aged ladies conversational community class once a week and the ladies like to try to embarrass me sometimes. Here's one incident:

K-san: I know a joke.

Me: Okay.

K-san: There is a reality show contest where one very rich man must choose a wife. Three women enter the contest. The man gives each woman $1000 and will choose the winner from what each woman does with the money. One woman spends the money buying an expensive gift for the man. The second woman spends the money to make herself look beautiful. The third woman invests the money and doubles it. Who does he pick?

Me: I don't know, the one who invested it?

K-san: The one with the biggest tits.

(Everyone laughs except C-san)

Me: Okay...

C-san: What are 'tits'?

Me: Er, you know... a woman's.. er... chest area.

C-san: Oh!

N-san: Neh... men like big tits.

Everyone except me: (Nodding in agreement) Neh...

Me: Okay... er....

M-san: But some men say the shape is more important than the size.

N-san: So desu neh...

K-san: But most men like big tits.

C-san: What kind of tits do you like Sensei?

Me: Okay, we are not having this conversation.

K-san: Sensei, do you like big tits?

Me: This conversation... is over. Now... past participle...

2)
I also have a young ladies community class once a week on a different day. Two of the ladies are addicted to watching Sex and the City on DVD and always want to start the class by talking about it.
So, we just spent about twenty minutes talking about the uncensored last season when:

M-san: I don't like orgies.

Me: What!?

M-san: I don't like orgies, they're too loud.

Me: Huh?

M-san: On my last vacation there were too many orgies and they were loud.

Me: Um, I don't think you're using quite the right word...

M-san: Orgies... people from Australia.

Me: Oh, Aussies! You mean Aussies?

M-san: I don't like orgy beef either...

(オージー･ビーフ)

Dogs and Cats

2006-03-02T15:00:00.000+09:00

There is a saying here in Japan: Nothing changes so completely or so quickly as a woman's feelings and the weather in Spring.

It started to warm up a bit this weekend so I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and go for a walk in the park. I love this place as it's one of the few places that I don't have to duck, crunch, or kneel.
The next day, however, was one of the worst rain storms in a while, typical of this time of year. Really Spring and Fall are the best times; Winter is too cold, Summer too hot and humid. It's just that you never know what the weather will be like from one moment to the next. Driving last night was through flooded streets; today it is sunny again.

This week's freebies: BMW Z4 3.0i and M1

No Sex Please.

2006-02-24T12:10:00.000+09:00

Most Japanese people in this area live with their parents until marriage. Even after marriage it is common for the couple to then live with the husband's parents. This makes certain private exercises difficult to partake in and so 'love' hotels are quite common. These hotels are usually rented in two-hour 'break' periods and many of them offer a wide array of themed-rooms and accessories. Sorta like a theme park for boinking. They look much more interesting at night but my digital camera doesn't work so well from the car at night, as you can tell from the first pic. Most don't admit overnight guests until after midnight to maximize rental time so if you are traveling around Japan and looking for a hotel something that looks like this might not be your best bet. Then again, maybe it would be...

The thing that I find interesting is the signs for these places. If you look closely, you can see that the sign has a happy anime-style rabbit couple giving happy "O" faces and waving cheerfully. Freeow.

Darkness warshed over the Dude...

2006-02-21T13:40:00.000+09:00

...darker than a black steer's tuckus on a moonless prairie night.

Last night I had to drive a fellow teacher home from one of the companies that we both teach at. I had no idea where he lived so he tried to give me directions but we are from different 'direction story' circles so there was a lot of:
"Okay, you know the three-finger tree?"
"No. Is it by the hairy-doughnut place?"
"The one with the nasty-squid?"
"Er, I don't think so..."

So finally he just ended up trying to give me play-by-play directions. Thing is, at night in the rain it is very hard to get where you want to go if you don't know the area well. There are no streetlights in many areas so it is pitch black at night, the rain makes the street markings impossible to see, and the streets are narrow with blinding oncoming headlights. The steamed-up windows didn't help any either. Even the other teacher got confused. At one point I was going down the wrong side of the street because what I thought was a two lane one-way was actually a one lane two-way. The reason I thought this was because there were no street markings and the car in front of me was also driving on the wrong side. We found this out when a car came at us from the other direction. I guess the oncoming car could have been going the wrong way down a two lane one-way...
Anyway, I managed to drop him off and then got totally lost and ended up crossing the river and realized I was headed into the next county. Mmmm, good times.

The upshot is that we now have a new shared navigation point: The One Or Two Lane One Or Two Way Street Of Darkness (with a heavy-metal shun-dun-dun sound after).

Where'd who go?

2006-02-16T09:08:00.000+09:00

344: By far my favorite road to drive. The posted speed limit is 50KMH but everyone goes at least a mandatory 10-20 over. Most people, with the exception of large trucks, take this road at 80-100 so it really makes up for lost time caused by downtown traffic. Unless there's a large truck, in which case you're screwed.
Speed limits here are more sort of guidelines than rules. Sure you will get a ticket if a cop sees you speeding, but there are never any cops and everybody speeds so you kinda have to go crazy-fast in order to keep up with the normal flow of traffic. The problem is that everyone also runs red lights, which is harrowing because everyone waiting at the intersection tries to get the jump on the green light. I've seen more accidents in my time here than my whole previous life in S.F. Zoom.

Tonight's coffee freebie: BMW 320i

I'MFINETHANKYOU.ANDYOU?

2006-02-13T20:05:00.000+09:00

Half-an-hour into class and things are really rockin' ...

Aside from the driving things have been pretty mellow of late. I can always tell when there is some big deadline looming at the companies that I teach at because the students are either late or don't show up for class at all. And so I wait, and wait...

...and play gameboy. Yea!

Most of the employees I teach work crazy overtime. In the States I used to complain about 10-12 hour days but these guys average 15-18 hours a day. Wild.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Every so often I have to give a prospective-student interview to new students. I don't know why since they are already in the class but I do what I'm told. Here's an excerpt:

Me: What do you like about this company?

Student: I don't like to working at this company.

Me: Oh? Why not?

Student: They are making me for to study English. I hate to studying English.

Me: Well, you sure inspire me to teach well!

Student: What?

How you say 'pasta' in Engrish?

2006-02-09T08:51:00.000+09:00

My apologies to those who have seen this before, it still scares me profoundly:
Man, I miss Mexican food. My kingdom for a burrito!

The only decent 'ethnic' food (okay, non-Asian) that I've been able to find in this city is Italian. There's an Italian place not too far away that I go to fairly often; the food is... decent, but the atmosphere is all off. The walls are colored in pastel, the chairs are pink, there's neon light glaring down, and obnoxious J-pop blaring out.

Sometimes living here is like how I imagine living in Disney Land would be: Everything is expensive, cute, brightly colored, loud, crowded, too small, and there's obnoxious happy music everywhere.

Mmmmm.... burrito.....

Shogun

2006-02-06T09:48:00.000+09:00

Perhaps the thing that I like best about living here is that even though Japan is one of the high-tech centers of the world, there is still a sense of tradition and far-reaching history. Driving on a busy highway I can look out of the window and see the remains of an old castle towering in the distance.

Even the ravine (pictured below), while not much to look at, has a story behind it. Over 400 years ago Tokukawa Ieyasu once camouflaged the mouth of the ravine and tricked his enemy's army into falling down to the water below, thus turning a desperate battle into victory.

It's this kind of thing that, through the daily stress of living in a strange environment, reminds me that there is still a nice "neat" factor to appreciate.

Strike me down with all of your hatred...

2006-02-03T10:21:00.000+09:00

...and your journey towards the Dark Side will be complete.

I was driving home the other night and I turned onto a one-way street. Much to my surprise I found myself staring into the headlights of a car coming at me from the wrong way. Fortunately, seeing as how this was a very narrow one-lane one-way street, there was just enough time and room to avoid hitting each other head-on and also not destroy any of the houses lining the street. He had to backup into a driveway for me to pass. Now, in the States I would have rolled down my window and given him a good what-for. But this is Japan, we don't do that. All I could do was glare at him as I passed and all he was expected to do was bow slightly as I passed him. People are polite in that there is little road-rage, but there is an over abundance of road-stupidity around here. Seriously... pedestrians, drivers, bicyclists have no sense of proper situational awareness. Later at the next (blind) intersection a bicycle darted straight across my path against his light. If I hadn't been going extra slow from that last incident I would've hit him.

ばか！

For the most part I love living in Japan but there are some things that make it difficult for foreigners here. Primarily, there's the xenophobia and being stared at all the time. But the one thing that gets me the most is that if you have tattoos, as I have, you can not do many things here. You can't go to gyms, swimming pools, spas, hotsprings, even some restaurants. So... if you are thinking of moving to Japan and have a tattoo you will probably have to hide it.

List of 'acceptable person' at the local gym:

Turn left at the thing, right at the other thing.

2006-02-02T08:50:00.000+09:00

Where the streets have no name...

Japanese don't navigate by street names, it's all by area and object. It's cool in an old-school town kind of way but confusing in a city with the size and complexity of most modern cities in Japan. You hear a lot of "turn when you reach the Lawson", but there will be at least five Lawsons in the area, they all look the same, and everything is in kanji anyway. So we end up making weird descriptions for our own groups of peeps such as: The Gilliam Statues (pictured above), The Stupid Crazy Blind intersection of Doom Near the Lake, and That Place Where You Almost Hit the Crazy Motorscooter in November.

Since I drive so much all day distance is no longer measured by time or, well, distance. Each day's driving is measured by CDs listened to, including repeats. So Monday is only a one-and-one-repeat day, where Tuesday is a five-and-a-couple-of-repeats day. Thank goodness for Tom Waits and his many albums.

Speaking of (or rather, typing of) Lawson, here's last night's coffee freebie:

Now I'm off to take the Two Strip-Club street to the speaker store and on towards the Dirt Lake and to class.

You mean coitus?

2006-02-01T09:11:00.000+09:00

Secretary: John-san...?

Me: Johnson?

Secretary: Can you please turn in your reports before Friday?

Me: I was talking about my rug...

Secretary: What?

Me: Nothing.

(My name is not John by the way, the poor secretary was trying to talk to another teacher before I derailed her by channeling The Dude. Not to suggest that John is a dick or anything...)

That... was the driver.

2006-01-31T12:40:00.000+09:00

When not actually teaching, I pretty much spend all day driving from one company to another. As a result I have become a big fan of the Calorie Mate and coffee combination. I tried eating bento in the car once but it didn't work out so well.You're not allowed to park your car on the street here (for obvious reasons) and so parking space is at a premium. Since there is so little available land they often have these mechanical car-lifts instead of parking lots. You drive your car onto the lift and then the mechanical arm lifts your car into the air (I've seen up to four levels) so that someone else can park underneath. Not a big deal, but I think it's kinda cool. I'm not sure how it works out if your car is on top and you want to leave while someone else's is parked underneath but I'm sure it all works out somehow...

At least the recycling rules are easy to follow.

生ごみ！

Got the bagel, but not the cheese...

2006-01-29T18:04:00.000+09:00

Today I found a "genuine" New York deli downtown. They even had bagels (well, one kind anyway) but not, in typical Japanese fashion of "genuine" American things, any cream cheese, lox, or capers. But at least they did have genuine American Louisiana Mama, whatever that means.

After lunch I went and saw Kabuki. I won't go into the details of Kabuki here but suffice-it-to-say Kabuki is a traditional Japanese entertainment where even the women's parts are played by men. At first it was kinda like a strange Japanese Monty Python sketch but after my brain adjusted it was really, really good; lots more action than in the Noh I've seen. And they had a nice plant corral for you to park your plants in while you watch the play. Happy!

Let's Enjoy Safety Driving!

2006-01-28T12:57:00.000+09:00

The nice thing about driving in this area of Japan is that there are no sidewalks and usually the streets are only two narrow lanes. This makes it real fun when you have to dodge pedestrians, motorscooters, and bicycles... while also dodging the oncoming traffic that's in turn dodging pedestrians, motorscooters, and bicycles on its side of the street. At least there's the magical traffic robot to look over us.

Actually, it's pretty creepy to see this thing in motion while driving.

I especially love it when people park their cars and take up one whole side of the road.

The lens warps the perspective a bit but there's no way my car can fit through the gap here. I tried gently approaching but the dude totally ignored me, or didn't notice somehow. I eventually had to backup through the intersection again to allow cross-traffic to pass. I could've honked, but being honked at by a gaijin probably would've given him a heart attack and then I would have been really late.

My brain hurts...

2006-01-27T09:31:00.000+09:00

This is my eyeline view of many of the doorways around here.

外人: What's the kanji for 'tabemono' （food)?

日本人:　It's 食べ物. The 'ta' part, 食, is the same as in 'taberu' (to eat); easy neh?

外人: So if I see 食, it reads 'ta' and means something to do with food?

日本人: Well, it probably will have some meaning do to with food but it doesn't always read 'ta'. It commonly reads as 'shoku'.

外人: Okay, so 'ta' or 'shoku'... food, to eat, or meal...?

日本人: Yeah, but sometimes it can read as 'uka' or 'uke'...

外人: Oh...

日本人: ...or 'oshi' or just 'ke'...

外人: Er...

日本人: ...or 'shi'...

外人: Eh...

日本人: ...or sometimes 'jiki'...

外人: Uh...

日本人: Glad to help!

外人: I'm hungry.

I saw her in the hallway!

2006-01-26T19:44:00.000+09:00

One of the companies that I teach at is just like the morgue Ewan McGregor worked at in the film Nightwatch. The gentle sound of wind howling down the hall accompanied by the creaking doors and banging windows really makes this a cozy place to work.

Good luck with those old-school Japanese toilets ladies.

This is also the scene of the half-naked Chinese women incidents. For those who don't know, the story goes something like this: I was relieving myself one night at one of the male standing stalls when I heard the enclosed stall's door behind me slowly creak open. I turned to see this nice-looking topless Asian woman peering at me from the stall. We blinked at each other then she screamed, covered herself, and ran out the door.

After I finished (and washed my hands... hygiene is king) I went out into the hall but she was nowhere to be seen. Maybe I'd imagined it.

The next week I was in class ahead of my students. The door to my classroom opened and a different Asian woman wearing only pajama bottoms and a towel peered inside. She smiled. I smiled. She said something in what sounded like Chinese. I asked her if she spoke English or Japanese. She smiled. I smiled. She left. I looked out into the hall but she was gone.

The next week after class the students and I left the classroom to find that we were locked in the building. We tried to fiddle with the lock but it was a key-only affair and nobody had a key. Suddenly we were surrounded by several (now I will say Chinese based on the sound of the language) women in various stages of dress, undress, and towels. They only spoke Chinese, we only English and Japanese but the students and I managed to negotiate our way out of the building. The ladies were very friendly.

The next week when I arrived at the building I found I was locked out. I politely knocked on the door and was confronted by several variously-clad Chinese women on the other side of the glass door. I have no idea what they were saying but the smiles, body language, and general tone made me hungry for some reason. They let me in and I proceeded to class.

In class that night one of my students said that he had found out that these women were cheap labor that lived and worked there in the building. They were basically unskilled labor imported from China and learning on-the-job. The fact that the students themselves hadn't previously known about it was kinda interesting. I haven't seen the ladies since.

So the moral is: When putting your markers in the cup it's Tails up. Tips down.

Bi-atch!

Share and Enjoy!

2006-01-25T20:47:00.000+09:00

When you buy bottled drinks in this country you often get some kinda free little toy along with your refreshing beverage. Tiny cars, motorcycles, laser guided rocket systems... the usual stuff. Generally I try to avoid them (except Star Wars stuff, I'm a big geek from way back) because they just end up creating Kipple, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

Today I got a little toy Polyptychoceras of the family Diplomoceratidae.

You know you want one.

The Story So Far...

2006-01-25T20:02:00.000+09:00

I'm an American. I live in Japan. I teach English. Freeow.

More to follow as it becomes available...