Vending Machine Nation

2007-07-05T23:35:00.000-07:00

Cleaning the Cab; Mumbai

Delhi: A Work In Progress

2007-01-17T23:21:00.000-08:00

India attacked my senses like a midget wrestler to my groin. And I have to say that I enjoyed it. It is a country of constant sensory overload. Colours so rich and vivid – the people, dressed like moving rainbows, dashing in front of my eyes. Pungent smells, both wonderful and putrid, floating down the crowded streets, ripping through my nose and rattling my bones. And piercing sounds that never stopped - not for an instant. Not even for one moment of silence. Here was India. And it was un-like anything that I had ever seen. I was captivated.

We started our trip in Delhi, where the nights were cold, and so were the people. Generally, the most animated response that we would get from someone when asking for directions, would be a look of disdain and the all-encompassing “Indian Head-Tilt” – a slight jerking of the noggin from side to side; speed, and the number of tilts depending on the enthusiasm level of the head-jerker. Smile - usually not included. Coming from Japan, a land where they have near perfected politeness, we were in for a shock. Luckily, an un-expected lay-over in Beijing, en route, gave us some practice in dealing with a rude culture.

Visiting India proved to be an incredible experience, albeit layered with personal ups and downs. I would spend nearly 50 percent of my three week vacation feeling ill. I was vomiting within 48 hours of landing on Delhi’s chaotic landscape, and spent half of my time in the capital city, keeled over in the back of our hired taxi, too sick to explore the many cultural and historic sights. Whether it was the toxic water, the dirty food prepared by cooks with un-washed hands, or the horrible air quality, by the time Delhi was finished with me, I was several pounds lighter, and was drained of energy.

Holding in my liquid sickness as we barreled down the hodgepodge roads of Delhi, the images were overwhelming. The streets are jumbling messes of human life – cars, rickshaws, cyclists, pedestrians, old, beaten-up tractors- all criss-crossing; weaving back and forth as they travel perilously through the city– one near death experience after the next. The paint dividing the traffic lanes has either long faded or is simply ignored. Drivers constantly swerve in front of one another; passing on blind corners, speeding to overtake a colorful bus or an old man mounted on a camel or an elephant, pulling a cart overloaded with straw, metal or television sets. Mopeds zigzag through the thick traffic, often transporting a whole family; a husband and wife, and three or even four children squished onto the tiny motorized bike, all without helmets, all completely relaxed, as if they had done it a million times. The city is alive like no other that I’ve seen. It is a city where the most brazen driver reins supreme; where courage is king. The constant honking still echoes in my mind.

Delhi, like most of India that we saw, is not pleasant on the eyes. The roads are bleak and falling to pieces. Massive heaps of bricks and mud lay like rubble from a bomb in front of the tiny store-fronts, flowing out onto the roads, causing drivers to swerve around the scattered piles of debris. Un-finished bridges, leading to nowhere, sit like ugly, forgotten monuments, spikes of jagged rebar shooting out of them toward the sky. Dust hangs in the air like a blanket over the town. The most stunning parts of Delhi have had their beauty all but stolen by the surrounding ugliness, leaving former symbols of magnificence lost amongst the scars of a worn-out city.

The city’s people are in no better shape than its structures. Like India as a whole, Delhi has an extreme gap between the rich and poor. But there is something in this city that people of all incomes must share, and that is its horrible living conditions. India is not a country where your money can buy you total ease and comfort. The rich travel the same horrendous roads as the poor. They use the same filthy public facilities. They eat from the same un-hygienic street vendors. As I took in the objectionable sites that a city in the grip of poverty has to offer, I noticed this fundamental difference from the other developing nations that I’ve visited. Regardless of how rich a person is – regardless of how much money lines your pockets – you wouldn’t be able to buy a clean and quiet lifestyle in India. Madness surrounds you at all times. On the roadsides, groups of elderly homeless people lie lifelessly under blankets, or sit around flaming piles of burning garbage, trying to stay warm in the cool, winter air. At stop-lights, young children, mud etched into their skin and dressed in rags, walk barefoot between the waiting vehicles, stopping at the windows of passengers and lifting their dirt-covered hands to their mouths to motion that they are starving. Others try to sell cheap goods to passing drivers; anything that will make them a Rupee or two – a calculator, a Santa Claus mask, a piece of colored fabric. For the most part, all I could do was stare straight ahead, as if they weren’t even there.

Scattered across the city, old faded metal signs, with the words ‘Work In Progress’ painted across them, stand in areas where the rubble is at its thickest – beside giant, dug-out pits in the earth, near abandoned construction sites, and in areas where gutted buildings stand, crumbling away, as they have probably stood in the same state for years. I couldn’t help but laugh quietly to myself. The ‘progress’ was nowhere to be seen. With its garbage-lined alleys, Baghdad-style infrastructure, and a ruthless poverty that has engulfed the city, tearing at the heart of any human with a pulse, Delhi, it would seem, was more so a ‘Work Falling Apart’. The city is a massive bee-hive. And I think the queen might be dead.

Photos by Navin Bahl

J-Pop: Some Languages Sound Nice Being Sung… Japanese Isn’t One of Them

2006-08-07T17:32:00.000-07:00

Japan produces good pop music like McDonald’s provides great health food options. Such a creature just doesn’t exist. J-Pop – or, Japanese Pop to the tragically un-hip – is, in my opinion, disharmonious, ear-piercing sonic-plastic – most songs without any redeemable qualities at all. Amass it together and you have the worst popular music catalogue of any country that I have visited – likely the worst in the world. I’ve never been to Serbia, but even Belgrade’s own DJ Salty Squirrel Nuts and his Euro-trash club anthems put J-Pop to shame. The saddest part: Japanese people don’t have a clue just how horrible their nation’s pop music is.

Stray dogs are in fact pickier about their choice of sexual partners than the Japanese public is about their music; they have horrible taste. There seem to be only a few requirements for success as an artist in the Japanese pop industry. They are as follows:

1. The beats/music must be as un-natural sounding as possible and smothered in thick layers of gorgonzola.

2. A song’s chorus must contain a few choice words sung in un-intelligible English. This is to give the band undeserved ‘street-cred’ and legitimacy. The singer must perform these mispronounced phrases in a shrill voice and with a complete lack of understanding of the meaning. During a television performance, these English words must be subtitled in order to provide a clue as to what the fool is singing (and, yes, the little bouncing ball helps the audience mumble along).

3. Male pop-stars must oddly resemble girls; female pop-stars must be strikingly beautiful.

4. Groups are better than individuals (as is always the case in Japan), and said groups must perform embarrassingly pathetic dances that seem to have been choreographed by dropouts from the Mickey Mouse Club. Yes, the boy band trend, which died on the table in North America years ago, is alive and well in Japan.

5. The names of groups must be written in the English alphabet (even though they have no chance of cracking the Western market) and must be extremely queer; a few choice examples: ‘Bump of Chicken’, ‘SMAP’, ‘Orange Range’, ‘Porno Graffiti’, and ‘Puffy AmiYumi.’

Just as Canada - with its lax security policy and care-free acceptance of all - is a haven for terrorists, Japan, a country with no musical morals, is a sanctuary for less than stellar musicians from other countries. These ‘musical refugees’, who are unable to overcome the stringent, listener-driven quality control standards on the radio waves of their home countries, needn’t look hard for musical exile, knowing that the ears of Japanese music listeners are open to just about anything. The only additional requirement for these pond-jumping, often half-Japanese hacks, is that they must include a few Japanese words in their songs - a small artistic sacrifice to make in order to plunge toward sure stardom in Japan. And one can’t exactly sacrifice their artistic integrity if they didn’t have any to begin with.

One such musical refugee is Shen, a white rapper fleeing from the hostile, high-standards of the Hawaiian music scene. He, along with his Japanese buddy Micro, makes up Def Tech, one of the ‘hottest’ groups in Japan at the moment. With millions in album sales, cheesy videos in constant rotation on television, and posters plastered on the walls of the hippest stores in the hippest sections of Tokyo, one would assume that Shen has the talent to back-up such a phenomenal and rapid rise to stardom. Wrong. He’s terrible; just utterly devoid of the type of talent that should be a prerequisite for stardom. I have friends from high school who are far better rappers! He is surely the worst famous rapper in the world; a male Britney Spears, yet missing two important ingredients: sex appeal and a team of professional songwriters and image consultants planning his every move. This is a man who couldn’t win a ‘battle of the bands’ contest in a back-country town like Smackover, Arkansas, and has yet gone on to become a sensation in Japan – a country where, and excuse me for making a bold generalization, the general public cannot seem to differentiate between crap and talent when it comes to music.

Shen’s lyrics flow from his mouth like marbles rolling down the stone path to a Buddhist temple. But there is nothing Zen-like about the messages that he is driving home. His words are the lyrical equivalent of smiling puppies sitting under a rainbow, but without the warm, fuzzy feeling that that image might provide. Listening to American MCs rap about how great they are and how many diamonds and ‘biatches’ they have is actually refreshing after listening to Shen’s guttural mutterings about catching waves. He should consider himself the luckiest bastard in the world. I’m ashamed to admit that even Britney Spears is more deserving of her fame. At least she’s got star quality.

Not only does their own music suck (99% of the time), Japanese people also happen to have an unhealthy appreciation for the crappiest specimens of Western song. They have a special fondness for foreign artists whose CDs, in North America, you can only find in the overflowing discount bins of the Walmart electronics’ department. One friend of mine, a Japanese teacher of English whom I worked with last semester, is a perfect example of this misguided taste in music. He is a 30 year old guy – cool in every respect, with great English skills and a healthy appreciation for beer, women and foreign culture. However, he listens to the most dreadful American artists; boy bands well past their prime and pop princesses that are ruining music’s good name. His favourite artists include the Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync and Britney Spears, and he would often bring the albums of these artists to class, forcing his poor taste on the children of the future. Nowhere in Canada would you find a mentally fit, 30 year old male with similar taste in music. That idea is just not fathomable. Twelve year old girls in Canada don’t even listen to the Backstreet Boys anymore. They’ve moved on to crap that is much more contemporary, like the Black Eyed Peas (also very popular in Japan).

Needless to say, this particular 30 year old English teacher still lives at home with his parents. But I swear, he’s a cool guy. In his defense, listening to ‘N Sync is a far better option than listening to the crappy boy bands of Japan. At least ‘N Sync had funkiness and talent, something that most J-Pop artists wouldn’t know if they were run down in a car driven by Mr. James Brown, himself. I mean, Justin Timberlake… come on. As easy as it is to dislike him, the boy’s got soul. Sing on, bruva.

In a country at the pinnacle of technological development, Japan is always 10 steps behind the latest North American music trends. They are a people easily deceived by the cookie-cutter sounds of programmed pop; a nation with a twisted obsession with out-of-style American pop-artists and obscure acts from the 70’s, such as The Carpenters, a group that is hugely popular in Japan, yet today virtually unknown amongst 20-somethings in North America. Ask any Japanese teenager if they know the poppy-folk sounds of The Carpenters and a smile will in all likelihood stretch across their face. The same goes for The Bee Gees and ABBA. The singing of the aforementioned groups’ songs is virtually a prerequisite in junior high school English classes. The lyrics are printed in the bloody textbooks!

Of course, there are exceptions to the norm; some Japanese people do have great taste in music. But, on the most part, they listen to music that, in North America, is more out of style than the abacus. Similarly, there are musicians here who are producing great material, but who was the last Japanese artist to crossover to the Western market? Or, has there ever been one?

And the radio waves of Japan are crying…

More J-Pop Facts! (taken from Wikipedia, as well the depths of my own tainted mind):

-J-pop’s impact on popular Japanese culture is immense. In anime and television shows, particularly dramas, opening and closing songs are changed up to four times per year. As most programs have both opening and closing songs it is possible for one show to use 8 tracks in a single season.

-Japan is the land of ‘one-hit wonders.’ The face of J-pop is constantly changing, with many artists only releasing one album and several singles before fading back into anonymity. It is very difficult to stay prominent for longer than this, and artists who sustain their popularity for a decade are considered outstanding.

-Recently, as video games have been taking over the world, J-Pop has been spreading like poison to other parts of the globe. Lethargic couch potatoes with no substantial hobbies and no hope for the future will import the Japanese versions of the games that they want in order to obtain them up to a year in advance of their Western releases, thus exposing the J-Pop soundtrack to wider audiences. Those ‘gamers’ are more dangerous than you think… Never trust them.

-The only song sung entirely in Japanese to reach #1 on the Billboard charts was “U o Muite Arukou” (‘Let’s Walk While Looking Up’) by Kyu Sakamoto. It topped the charts back in 1963. The song, and its beautiful melody, has been sampled and covered hundreds of times, most famously by those forgettable one-hit wonders, 4 P.M.

Check out Def Tech's ridiculous website here.

I Have A Dream!

2006-07-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

... rather, I had a dream. It was last week. I woke in the middle of the night with the images of my vision fresh in my mind. Like most vivid dreams, for a short time, I wasn’t able to separate reality from the disturbing figments of my imagination. And, like all dreams, the seed was planted in real life.

Earlier in the day, one of the school boys came into the staff room with a scared look in his eyes and a tissue held to his mouth. He shuffled slowly to the nurse’s desk and was quickly surrounded by several comforting staff members who began to examine his face, tilting his chin this way and that, and talking in smooth tones. The boy stood, expressionless, muttering short answers and rolling his eyes toward the ceiling; clearly awkward from the outpouring of attention from middle-aged Japanese females.

The boy’s dilemma was not typical of a school-boy. He wasn’t sexually provoked by the football team or flushed down the toilet by the cheerleaders. He didn’t lose his lunch money either, and he hadn’t wet his pants. Rather, his problem was one that I had never seen before. His teeth were quite literally rotting out of his mouth. That morning, he had lost another one, and he had come to the staff room to find the nurse.

This particular boy has some of the worst teeth in a school of diseased chompers. He, along with a sad group of three or four others, have by far the worst teeth that I have ever seen on living human beings. This boy’s teeth are nothing more than jagged, blackened shards; rotten remains of once healthy fangs. After years of increasing rot, they are finally falling out of his mouth.

That night, after seeing the sad 13 year old kid in fear as his teeth crumbled away, I dreamt that my own teeth were rotting out of my mouth. I saw a detailed image of an insect scurrying into a hole that separated my bottom gums from my putrid incisors. And I thought it was real. I woke up in a mild state of fear, pressing my fingers against my teeth in a private act of worried vanity, reassuring myself that they were still intact.

That morning, I imagined how traumatic it must be for this boy who will likely live the rest of his life with few or no teeth. The ones that he does manage to hold onto will be black, diseased pieces of brittle bone. Dental work just doesn’t seem to be an option on the table for the kids in the countryside of Ibaraki.

After teaching at an elementary school the other day and meeting 6 year old kids with dark, rotten baby teeth, I wondered how a child’s teeth can become so diseased at such a young age. Knowing that these black baby teeth will soon be replaced by new, healthy ones, I thought to myself, while staring in bewilderment at the cute little Japanese kids with bad fangs, ‘now at least you have another chance.’ But the 13 year old junior high school boy with the mangled teeth isn’t so lucky. He’s used up both of his chances.

That morning, when I awoke after my dream, I found myself expressing gratitude that I wasn’t born into the Japanese lifestyle. Worried about my teeth of all things, I felt lucky that I wasn’t born in Japan, the second richest country in the world, and on paper, not a bad place to be born. It’s on days such as these, in the heart of the developed world, when you see a kid’s teeth rotting out of his mouth and subsequently have dreams about it, that you think you may need a vacation from Japan.

School Ceremonies Part 2: For Those Special Occasions....

2006-06-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

A weekly school ceremony is the Japanese school system’s way of torturing foreign English teachers. But these frequent gatherings pale in comparison to ‘special occasion ceremonies’ – lengthy, tedium-inducing jamborees from hell where the staff pull out all the stops. These momentous occasions in the yearly agenda of any Japanese school, thankfully, happen with less regularity. But what they lack in frequency, they make up in sheer insanity.

The two biggest ceremonies of the year in a Japanese junior high school are the ‘graduation ceremony’ in which the 3^rd year students are bid farewell, and the ‘welcoming ceremony’ in which the incoming 1^st year students are inducted into their new school. Each of these over-the-top ceremonies, which commemorate what in most countries is a rather minor blip on one’s personal history, make my weekly Monday morning gatherings seem like a walk in the park. Not a glamorous park - perhaps one riddled with strung-out addicts and disposed needles - but a park, nonetheless.

These ceremonies creep up on the calendar like a pair of drunken elephants, arriving within weeks of each other in the spring, after a great deal of organization, fanfare and a general ‘the world will end if this isn’t done properly’ mentality. Weeks of preparation are undertaken by the staff and students. Choreography is rehearsed. Strategies are planned. Protracted speeches are penned. Tissues are prepared in anticipation of the crying masses. Suits, skirts, and traditional Japanese costumes are pressed into creaseless sheets of softened fabric. And, a video of the previous year’s tiresome ceremonies is studied by the teachers in the staff-room as they discuss ways to improve the flow of events, which, to me, pass as comfortably as golf ball-sized kidney stones.

Several days in advance of a ‘special occasion ceremony’, the gymnasium is transformed from its typical, dimly-lit character, into what resembles a traveling medieval road-show - minus the horses, armor, and un-bathed maidens. Green plastic sheets are strewn across the scarred floor and lined with rows upon rows of rusted folding chairs. A lengthy red-carpet is taken from storage, shaken of dust, and stretched down the centre of the room. Ruffled, multicoloured flags and wax-paper designs are placed along the sides of the expanded red carpet like throngs of paparazzi; tripods and cameras are carefully assembled in areas with good sight lines. Lastly, a garden variety of flowers is arranged along the stage and podium, and the walls are draped in bright banners to cover the imprints of poorly guided basketballs of past. Preparations are so intense in fact, that on the eve of the latest ‘special occasion ceremony’, several teachers from my school spent the night sleeping in the nurse’s room. This enabled them to get up at the crack of dawn and work on the final touches required, proving that Japanese teachers are more dedicated to their school than Robert Downey Jr. is to getting back on the smack.

On the morning of the ceremony, pandemonium ensues. The baseball diamond quickly transforms into a makeshift parking lot as the gym is flooded by the students’ family members, dressed in their finest garments and carrying digital cameras and pride-filled hearts. The staff members stand rigidly in rows at the gymnasium entrance - adorning their finest suits, complete with flower lapels and shining cuff-links- greeting spectators as they arrive, and ushering them to their seats. Just prior to the ceremony’s commencement, everyone in attendance rises to their feet as a throng of local dignitaries is marched in; former principals, distinguished members of the community, bureaucrats from the board of education - a group of nearly twenty geriatrics in total, all grinning the same expression of fake enthusiasm and walking with cautious, frail steps.

Then, heaven help me, come the speeches; an endless barrage of repetitive well-wishing and congratulatory sermons. First the principal addresses the hordes with one of his longest numbers of the year. The panel of worthy guests is then introduced, each standing, one by one, to say ‘congratulations’ or ‘welcome’ or whatever the occasion requires. Several of the VIPs then take turns making lengthy inspirational orations to the group of students (whom they have probably never met before in their life). And, in the case of the ‘graduation ceremony’, a pre-selected student presents a lengthy speech to the principal. Last April, this speech was given by a boy who sobbed uncontrollably throughout the entire delivery, providing for quite the spectacle; a demonstration of family-like attachment between student and staff that I could never imagine witnessing in a Canadian school, let alone most Western families.

The whole ‘special occasion ceremony’ process can take upwards of three hours. Speeches are interspersed with several long renditions of the school anthem and, at the graduation ceremony, impressive choir numbers performed by the students, who moan wildly, crying while singing songs of affection and farewell. The audience rarely, if ever, claps, and not a single spectator or participant, staff and students included, has a dry eye.

Why such great lengths are gone to for junior high school ceremonies is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is because Japanese students work so much harder than their Western counterparts and thus take middle school much more seriously. Thinking back to my own days as a junior high school student, we had no induction ceremony in grade 7. Rather, we were given a confusing class schedule and a locker combination, and left on our own to find our way about the school halls, receiving intermittent beatings and froshing from older students – our own welcoming ceremony of sorts. I can’t recall having a graduation ceremony in junior high school either, but instead had a shoddy boat cruise down Winnipeg’s (in)famous Red River, eating horrible buffet-style food, and ending the night in a nauseous state - but not from the swaying of the boat.

Junior high schools in Canada simply don’t demand the same type of dedication from their students as they do here in my adopted home. In my school days, we weren’t required to clean the entire school twice a day as the students do in Japan, but instead had a team of paid adult custodial engineers who dealt with daily abuses from ungrateful little punks. And things haven’t changed. Western students don’t have hours of homework and mandatory after-school programs. Nor do they spend 10 hour days at school. Rather, they loiter in front of public buildings, discover the joys of fermented agricultural products, and develop a keen interest in after-school botanical experimentation. Or, so I’ve heard. And thus, there is a certain emotional attachment absent in most Western schools; the student-institution relationship lacks somewhat in sentimental value.

I didn't cry when the students a year ahead of me graduated from junior high, but was rather happy, seeing as I would now be amongst the ‘clusters of superiority’. Nor did I cry when I said farewell to the teachers in my junior high school for the last time, knowing that I wasn't graduating to a high school in Mongolia, but was rather moving to one just down the road. But, this past April, as I witnessed more than one hundred 1^st and 2^nd year Japanese junior high school students wail hysterically as the 3^rd year scholars, also crying, marched out of the gym in army formation for the last time, an image was permanently penned on the mushy inards of my mind. It is an image that I hope will stay with me forever. The kids cried like their parents were being shipped to serve in the Iraq war. And I have to say, it was quite touching. I think I almost cried myself… well, almost.

School Ceremonies Part 1: Play That School Anthem One More Time!

2006-05-30T19:23:00.000-07:00

For me, attending school ceremonies in Japan is like watching a mind-numbing foreign film with no subtitles. Nothing interesting is happening, the monotonous actors seem so distant and lifeless, and I can’t understand a damn thing. And, unfortunately, the Japanese love nothing more than pointless gatherings to practice their ‘group think’; this is a performance that I have to watch at least once a week. Every time, it is déjà vu all over again.

My school has a 25 minute long assembly every Monday morning. During these tiresome morning congregations, when all of the students are gathered in the gymnasium for ‘debriefing’, one could easily jump to the conclusion that Japanese schools have for years been successfully cloning children. Like a field of oversized, Single-Stuffed Oreo cookies, the students stand attentively in inflexible lines; the blanched, creamy complexion of their faces sandwiched by their straight, carbon-black hair and their equally dark school uniforms. Today, this is a sight that I am well accustomed to. However, during my first experience at a morning assembly last September, I had to take note of the large ‘rising sun’ flag hanging ominously over the stage to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently landed myself in the midst of a North Korean military rally. Kim Jong Il and his platform shoes were nowhere to be seen. And the clone-like students, thankfully, were not wielding rifles.

Regardless of whether or not there is something important to be discussed, these Monday morning ceremonies happen with unfaltering regularity. And therein lies the problem; there rarely seems to be anything of importance happening. At the assembly’s onset, the students are called to attention by one of the principal’s henchmen. Silence falls over the group. They wait and watch patiently as the headmaster makes his way to the stage, shuffling dazedly like Quasimodo with a bad hangover. At the top of the stairs leading to the stage, the principal pauses briefly and bows in the direction of the slightly crooked hanging Japanese flag. He saunters slowly to the podium and then bows to the masses, receiving an enthusiastic ‘good morning’ and teeth-to-the-floor bowing from the students and staff. Talking like he has wads of cotton balls shoved into the pockets of his mouth, he proceeds to ramble on in his gravely voice, sputtering out a variety of formal greetings and pleasantries for which the Japanese - who can’t pour a cup of tea for a friend without rhythmically bowing their heads and muttering a succession of needless humble sayings – are known for.

To make matters worse, these weekly assemblies are highly formal. Despite the fact that everyone in attendance at these gatherings is a member of the ‘school family’, everything is performed as if someone of great importance is watching. In fact, the assemblies are executed as if they are practice sessions for the day that Japanese President Koizumi himself will walk in through the rusting doors of the school’s gymnasium. One example of this pointless formality stands out in mind; often, the principal will give his opening greeting, but have nothing else to immediately add. He will walk off the stage, pausing to bow once again at the flag as he stumbles down the stairs. Before he even has time to catch his breath as he leans against the gymnasium wall, his sidekick will introduce him again, yet for a different task, such as presenting awards to several outstanding students. The principal will saunter slowly back up the stairs, bow at the flag, approach the microphone, and again bow to the students and staff. “Wo! Didn’t this just happen?” I ask myself sarcastically. Couldn’t he have just stayed up there and finished everything that had to be done at once rather than leaving and coming back? Some days, this will happen three or four times – he returns to the stage alone, leaves, comes back with the vice-principal in tow, leaves again, the vice-principal comes alone… Each time with a formal introduction, bowing to the flag, and a warm greeting from the populace as if he had just entered the building. Formality taking precedence over efficiency; the Japanese way of handling business.

During assemblies when there is very little of importance to mention, adjournment does not come early. Rather, time is filled. Usually, the remaining minutes in the allotted ‘meeting time’ are worn-down by the brass band- a group of pint-sized twelve year olds no bigger than their old, faded wind instruments- who torment us with endless renditions of the school’s anthem. Yes, the school, like a tiny, autonomous socialist nation, has its own anthem praising its glorious history and successes; a simple melody sung in Japanese and repeated over and over again for what seems like a short eternity. Any given performance of the school anthem is reminiscent of a scene from a comedy film that I cannot quite place my finger on; just as the band seems to be winding down on the last pass through the song and the instruments are holding what you are praying is the last note to be played, the percussionist cracks the dull drum-snare with her splintered stick and the band kicks off once again from the top; the staff and students singing boisterously along en masse. “La la da da doo da doo doo da.” Every time that you hope it is nearing the end, they loop it back to the beginning for another delivery. Even bad foreign films without subtitles need a soundtrack, I guess.

With all of this practice, one would think that the brass band would be a top-notch ensemble. But unfortunately, no, they cannot play one pass through the school anthem without several discordant squeals from the members’ instruments. ‘The Squeakers’, as I call them, are great kids, but in a system where the 3^rd Year students don’t take part in the ‘club activities’ (they ‘retire’ to focus on their studies), and with every new school year, half the band is replaced by 1^st Year students who have never played their instrument before, you have a recipe for cacophony. After all, a band is only as good as its weakest member; and a trumpet being slobbered into by someone with only a few months experience handling their horn, will never sound good. Even Miles Davis and John Coltrane started out as ‘squeakers.’ Brass band musicians who cannot yet play an instrument but are anxious for success should pawn their rusting saxophones and start a punk band. Then maybe they can sell a million. Hey, it happened to Green Day - once, and forever... 'squeakers'.

The Most Expensive Fruit You've Ever Seen

2006-05-28T22:09:00.000-07:00

Sorry to beat this 'expensive fruit' thing to death, but some things are just too shocking not to report. I have found the world's most costly fruit, sitting elegantly (or, at least as elegantly as fruit can sit) in a posh department store in the basement level of Tokyo Station.

Included here are cellphone pictures of a $120 US dollar box of cherries, a pair of mangoes for $95, a small bunch of grapes for $100, and a cantaloupe (notice the fancy ribbon attached) for $100.

Un-f#$king-believable!

Pachinko: Ruining Lives For Several Decades And Counting

2006-05-07T21:12:00.000-07:00

If Satan has a summer home, away from the fiery confines of earth’s dark entrails, it is surely in a pachinko parlor somewhere in Japan; a home away from home for any practicing sadomasochist with a thirst for gambling induced pain. But even Beelzebub himself might get a little freaked out from time to time by these warrens of modern gaming and the automatons that they attract.

Pachinko, Japan’s upsetting contribution to the oh so respectable world of gambling, is pinball’s loathsome cousin; that extended family member that knees you in the balls, kicks you when you’re down, steals your money, and then convinces you to keep coming back for more. The machines, which combine the innocent, childlike-joy of pinball with the addictive, blood-thirsty trickery of slot machines, are scattered across Japan, congregated in pachinko parlors; boxy, colourful buildings, dazzling in their neon brilliance and shocking in contrast when planted amongst the most rural of rice paddies like misplaced, deceiving beacons of hope; attracting desperate Japanese gambling addicts like flies to a rotting opossum carcass on a hot strip of Florida asphalt.

Pachinko parlor parking lots, even in the most rural of settings, will often be full at 11 a.m. on any given day of the week; an achromatic sea of cars, backed into the narrow parking spaces and surrounded by the welcoming colours of tacky neon signposts, festive, feathered banners, and raffish posters of bikini-clad manga cartoon girls. But these tawdry, circus-like attractions - like a drug dealer offering to throw in free Ju-Jubes to entice a crack addict who is looking to score - are unnecessary in order to draw-in compulsive gamblers with an itch to lose some money.

When stepping through the electronic sliding doors of a pachinko parlor, you are instantly bitch-slapped across the face by the deafening hum of the machines; the ping-pang beeping of the flashing consoles and the incessant rattling made by thousands of small, pre-purchased steel balls. Players drop these tiny spheres into the money-stealing apparatuses in hoping that they will pass through a range of pins, and fall, not straight through to the bottom as is the norm, but into certain gates that in turn pay out more balls for you to squander away. The gamblers do so with repetitive, mind-numbing persistence, and often have plastic crates, piled full of the small steel balls, stacked at their feet. They play until they are left broke and destitute, and willing to sell their first born child for a chance to redeem themselves. The decibel level within these havens for the dim-witted of society is greater than that of the loudest nightclubs, preventing players from being able to converse with one another, and hence causing them to continue gambling away their children’s dental-funds uninterrupted.

As you clutch at your bleeding ears to try to block out the clattering rumpus, you can’t help but notice that you are nearly suffocating from the dense clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. The smoke is so thick in fact, that you can eat it with a spoon – and I have on several occasions. Like most Japanese establishments, pachinko parlors seem to be un-ventilated; a thick haze of death looming over the heads of the expressionless gamblers like a rain-filled cloud sitting lazily over a depressing village, about to dump its weight on the unhappy people below. Every hour spent in a pachinko parlor is another year of your life taken away. Some of the gamblers staring passively at their machines are in fact dead, just going through some sort of post-mortem arm twitching, allowing them to continue inserting the steel balls. Creatures of habit, they are.

Despite the fact that pachinko parlors are spread across Japan like fleas on a rabid dingo, gambling in this country is actually illegal; cash cannot be paid out. Thus, players take the steel balls that they are left with after hours of monotonous gambling, and they exchange them for a cheap prize, ranging from shoddy pencils to plastic watches or handbags, depending on the number of balls that one has amassed (if they are left with any at all). They then take that stingy prize outside to an adjacent cash booth and exchange it for cold hard cash-money. Ahhh… a gambling loophole. This ‘pseudo-cash’ gambling is also illegal in Japan, but obviously ignored by authorities.

One possible reason why the police don’t enforce the gambling laws may lie in the fact that pachinko parlors are largely controlled by organized crime; both by the Japanese and Korean mafia. Yes, organized crime and gambling; forever hand in hand like Michael Jackson and vulnerable children.

Regardless of who is running the pachinko parlors, their endeavors have been successful. Watching the pathetic people squander away their time, health and money while sitting inside the smoky gaming rooms is more painful than having a botched vasectomy; their burning cigarettes hanging from their half-open mouths while ash falls onto their crotches; staring at the flashing lights, their eyes un-blinking. It reminds me a bit of Christmas dinner with my family.

One of my cherished past-times during these past few months has been to go to the local pachinko parlor to watch the enraptured gamblers – sometimes for hours on end. I’ll park myself at my favourite machine, buy several hundred dollars’ worth of steel balls (I’m there anyway so I might as well play, right?), and try to strike up conversation with the preoccupied people at the neighbouring consoles – trying to pick their brains; wondering what makes them tick. They rarely say more than a few words to me, responding in un-enthusiastic grunts and smoky exhales of emotional pain. I usually end up talking to my blinking machine instead, shoving steel balls into the greedy bitch until she’s devoured the remaining money from my previous paycheck or until I’ve fallen asleep, my face pressed up against the beeping console, woken by a security guard blowing smoke in my face at closing time.

As I stumble outside into the early morning light, broke and hungry, I tell myself ‘never again’ - but that segment of society is just so intriguing to me – I can’t help but return for another look – just a little bit more sociological research. Now I’m battling a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome, the ping-panging machines are constantly echoing in my tired mind, and I’ve never felt so unhealthy since taking up smoking. Mom, send more money please.

Further Pachinko Facts Taken From ‘Japan Zone’:

-it employs a third of a million people in Japan, three times more than the steel industry

-it commands 40 percent of Japan's leisure industry, including restaurants and bars

-and, 30 million regular enthusiasts coughed up almost 30 trillion yen in 1999 (a higher turnover than the car industry)

Akihabara: Geeks, Porn, and Flashing Lights - Japan's Dark Underbelly Exposed

2006-04-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also brought me into a bizarre Japanese porn shop, leading me to the most disturbing thing that I have yet seen in Japan.

A person without curiosity is akin to a rabbit without a sex drive; your reason for existence is lost. Most of us humans are curious by nature – a biological trait that enables us to pass down useful discoveries to our offspring; fire hurts your skin, 2-ply is better than 1, your sister, regardless of how much make-up she puts on and how much you’ve had to drink, is off limits to you.

It is with these thoughts in mind- thoughts of the sister that I never had- that I entered a Japanese porn shop a few weeks ago with two American friends. We were in Akihabara, Tokyo, one of the world’s most extensive electronic shopping districts and, next to polygamist Mormon colonies in Utah (where the self-serving men are quite curious about their nieces), Kim Jong Il’s bedroom during ‘hanky-panky time’, and Turkmenistan, it is the strangest place on the planet; scattered with comic-book craving, coke-bottle-lens-spectacle-sporting outsiders of the Japanese mainstream; geeky, fashion-handicapped tech-addicts; diehard adult collectors of the world’s most useless products intended for children (pimpled, gangly Toys R’ Us customers on speed); erotic cartoon shops; and, attractive girls in French maid outfits handing out promotional tissues (for your runny nose, you degenerate!).

At night, Akihabara Electric Town can be seen from the moon- or at least from an airplane that is flying fairly high on a clear evening, directly above the glowing ball of light and commotion. It is a town years ahead of its time- a glimpse of what the world will be like when science fiction writers finally take over office; a whirling mass of depravity, wires, circuits, and cartoon sex packed into a small space- and with enough flickering neon illumination to send a Kalahari Bushman into a complex partial epileptic seizure. For residents of Tokyo, and ever-increasingly, for myself, Akihabara is just part of a warped reality.

We entered the narrow stairway of one of the dozens of porn shops in the district, passing uncomfortably close to suit-clad salary-men on their way out; their packaged purchases gripped tightly in their eager hands. Akihabara porn shops, it would seem, are generally four or five stories tall, each floor of the shop being a tiny, confined room, packed to the tits (pun intended) with porn of all types; risqué videos and pictures of women in unflattering positions, drawings and cartoons for those socially-impotent fellows who have trouble relating to real humans, unsettling yet highly creative props for all purposes - anything that your dirty little mind can concoct. At the entrance to each room, a middle-aged Japanese man stands in a catatonic stupor at the cash register; lost in thought, perhaps entranced by the mountains of porn in constant reach – imagining what kind of sick bastards are nodding hello to him as they creep, soft-footed, into the den of impropriety, their wallets not the only of their possessions bulging with something to be spent.

We moved from one floor to the next, quickly browsing the store’s wares, laughing at the oddity of it all. In the low-ceilinged stair-case, which scales up the dark, porn-warehouse’s aging shell, the walls were plastered with welcoming images of naked Japanese women, as if to warn any un-suspecting grandmother looking for a noodle restaurant that her and her little dog Toto are definitely not in Kansas anymore. And some of the stuff that we saw once we had made it to the top floor of the smut-shack is surely illegal in Dorothy’s home state of tornados, sunflowers and anti-sodomy legislation. Even the Wizard of Oz, that unabashed sexual deviant, quite fond of surrounding himself with attractive witches and height-impaired, squeaky voiced elves, would disapprove.

It was not the cartoon depictions of ‘wolf and girl’ bestiality that were shocking. It wasn’t the racks of school girl uniforms and nurse’s outfits either. Nor were we taken aback by the neatly bundled packages of used underwear – a picture of the former proprietor glued to the front of each, with a personalized message scrawled in hand-writing and a price tag for the equivalent of $100 stapled to the sealed bag. These were comical, largely because they were to be expected in this country of closed-door perversity.

No, the shock came soon after when we stumbled upon the kiddy-porn, the most disturbing thing that I have yet witnessed in Japan. A little known fact about this country – one that you will not read in their official tourist brochure – is that pedophilia is rampant- and tolerated to a much larger degree than anywhere else that I know of. Here we were, on the fifth floor of a typical Tokyo edifice, in the heart of the modernized world, staring face to face with the censored eyes of Thai children showering in their loose-fitting bathing suits. My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it. On the back of the sealed magazine, an ‘Engrish’ slogan of disastrous proportions was printed; something to the effect of “in times sunshine, enjoy beauty the bathing children.”

Alas, there was more. Without having to even search for the filth (you’d think that they’d at least be inclined to keep it behind the counter), we found postcard-sized glossies of elementary school girls at a track-meet; taken discreetly by some pervert with a telephoto lens, showing children removing their track-pants, jumping hurdles, and bent over in race starting positions. And, we found more sealed magazines showing young South-East Asian girls, as young as perhaps 9 years old, dressed skimpily and standing in sexually evocative poses. No nudity was shown on the covers, but small, censored thumbnails gave clues as to what lay beneath the well-fingered, laminated magazine jackets.

The most haunting discovery within the walls of the raunch-shop were packaged pairs of children’s underwear; sized for an 8 year old girl and complete with poke-a-dots, hearts and pretty colours – designs intended to remind the wack-job purchaser of the product that they are indeed the underpants of pre-pubescent kids, and not of a legal-age woman (for what would be the thrill in that?).

This perverse discovery shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. Recently, I read an article outlining one Japanese ‘erotic manga’ magazine’s current promotion. The magazine, which seems to have a cult-like following amongst Japanese pedophiles, has offered to send a free pair of “panties of delight”- underpants made for a 130-cm tall girl (the height of a pre-school child) - to any new subscriber. Such promotions are not un-common for Japanese magazine and video game companies, which often give away free school-issued swimsuits and uniforms in addition to children’s underwear. The most alarming fact however, is the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response that this particular magazine has received from creepy Japanese men across the nation. The publishers have been unable to keep up with the demand for the free children’s ‘panties of delight’ (and I don't think that the new subscribers are school-girls looking for a free pair of usable underwear). Wow! And you thought you had issues!?

Coming from Canada, a country with some of the strictest child pornography legislation in the world, I can’t help but be disgusted by the Japanese attitude toward the exploitation of children. In Canada, anyone in possession of the magazines that we saw in Akihabara would be arrested. The photographer, the publisher, the store owner, the creepy men who pay for it – all would be committing a criminal offence. Here in Japan however, this filth is allowed to be bought and sold; despite the government having outlawed pornography involving children in 2000, this law is clearly not enforced.

While it may not be illegal in Canada for a magazine to give away free children’s underwear, the police would certainly nail the pervert publishers for some other infraction – anything to get the point across; child pornography is not tolerated. I can only hope that Japan will follow suit. Perhaps as long as it is poor girls from impoverished nations such as Thailand and Cambodia, and not the children of Japan, that are being victimized, the Japanese government will continue to turn a blind eye to the issue.

Being a curious guy, I'm wondering how on earth this practice can be considered to be acceptable.

Click here to read more about the erotic manga magazine offering free pre-schooler underwear.

Japan Is In Need Of A Land-Bridge To Reality

2006-04-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

There is gold inside this $25 watermelon.

Living in an island nation for any extended period of time can have disastrous effects on your sense of reality. The Cubans were convinced that communism would work; Madagascarites think that lemurs make wonderful house-pets; and, Greenlanders think that 80% of all territories are covered in uninhabitable ice. While the Japanese may have elements of communism in their national philosophy, they are rather ambivalent toward lemurs. And, there is very little square footage of ‘perma-ice’.

However, the powerful paws of seclusion have indeed managed to stroke this land of rising sun with the brush of unreality. A long history of isolation has had numerous effects on this country’s sense of normalcy. And there is one result of this extended shelter from the rest of the world’s consumerist nations that stands head and shoulders above the others. It is a shocking consequence of isolation; the frightful result of being surrounded by a vast ocean that, for centuries, has swallowed the ripples created by distant lands, long before they reached the guarded shores of Japan. I speak not of abuse, violence, incest, or ‘anime’, but something far more disturbing. I am referring to fruit; specifically, the average Japanese person’s inability to make a rational judgment as to how much one should pay for a piece of it.

Sure, a long period of Japanese autonomy from the world’s suffocating grip managed to create a conducive atmosphere for the birth of some of the world’s most recognizable culture. But men in colourful robes, fighting with long-wooden sticks (think Donatello from the Ninja Turtles), and women with wooden sandals and white-painted faces, pale in comparison to the most shocking result of seclusion. It is the exorbitant prices paid for fruit that most strongly convinces this watermelon slurping, lychee devouring lover of the ripened ovaries of flowering plants that Japan has to stop taking the crazy pills in the morning.

Only in Japan would someone pay the equivalent of $25 American dollars for a blanched, misshapen watermelon the size of Gary Coleman’s noggin. Melons, found in Japanese supermarkets, come adorned with golden ribbons and are often sitting snuggly in a fabric-cushioned wooden crate; a clever marketing ploy used by your friendly neighborhood produce manager in an attempt to ensure you that not one of your $25 dollars will be wasted. But don’t be fooled. You can dress the girl up real pretty-like, but you can’t make her taste any sweeter. I’ve fathered finer watermelons as a kid after spitting the bothersome black seeds of the fruit off of my back deck at home during the short-lived Winnipeg summers.

While traveling in Turkey, my friend Mark and I were paying 50 cents a kilogram for some of the juiciest, freshest little bastards to come off a vine South-West of Istanbul. The insides were a deeper crimson than blood and even the rind was flavorful. Sadly, the gold-ribbon was not included, despite our persistent bargaining with the grizzled Turkish melon-farmer who, with an Ottoman Empire-era scale at his side, spent days leaning lazily on his rusted truck, which was burdened by the weight of a small mountain of large, egg-shaped green fruit. He offered us his only daughter, but wouldn’t budge on the gold-laced ribbon.

We were on a 2 kg-a-day watermelon diet for much of our time spent in Turkey, frittering away afternoons, languishing in our temperature-controlled room, away from the scorching heat of the Eurasian sun. We would slice the massive melons open with a Swiss Army knife and burrow into the fruit with a spoon, gorging on the succulent, sugary sauce and fleshy innards. Eventually, when our spoons could no longer scrape the watery flesh from the light-green rind, and our bellies were beginning to ache from expansion, we would lift the remaining shell of the fruit over our open mouths and drain the last of the sweet sap down our throats.

It may sound like a glamorous life, but it was in fact far from it. Surely, it could have been, if we had had scantily-clad Cleopatra look-a-likes wafting us with fig leaf fans and feeding us cold grapes and sliced cubes of watermelon-meat. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case (not even the farmer’s daughter was in attendance). Rather, try to imagine two unkempt young men, lying slothfully in a dark hotel room, sweat pooling in every crevice of our half-naked bodies; our heads hanging limply over the natural bowl-shape of a sliced open watermelon, and our brown, sun-tanned hands rhythmically, yet without gusto, moving our spoons back and forth from our lips to the flavourful fruit. Oh, and did I mention that after eating kebabs from Turkish street-vendors, who, it would seem are allergic to soap, and hence don’t use it, we were too sick to eat anything but watermelon. Yes, but the fruit never tasted so good. Nectar of the gods, I tell you. I’d take a healthy piece of fruit over candy any day of the week. Even Tuesday.

You would never find a Japanese person overindulging in this manner on a $25 watermelon. Here, the melons must be savored. In Japan, a person will spend a small fortune on a bundle of less-than-fresh, imported fruit. In a single grocery store excursion, a shopper will often drop the yearly wage of a Bangladesh shoe factory slave-girl on just enough fruit for a couple of days’ worth of one’s recommended vitamin intake. And it’s not just the watermelons that are worth their weight in gold (or at least a bottom-rung mineral such as quartz). I’ve seen $25 cantaloupes, $5 oranges, bundles of grapes for $20, and strawberries for a buck a piece.

Message to Japan: the rest of the developed world does not spend this kind of cash on small doses of fruit. This is more reminiscent of our daily budget for designer drugs, addictions to prescription medication, or cute outfits for our rat-sized dogs. You know, life's bare necessities. Fruit, like most food, is such a luxury item in this day and age.

Having said this, there are always great deals to be found in the fruit discount bins of Japan. Mhmmmm…. discount fruit. Always a gamble; often delicious. Now that’s a glamorous life.

'Engrish' As A Second Language

2006-03-22T21:27:00.001-08:00

In most cases, the use of English writing here in the Japanese countryside is as effective as a newscaster with a debilitating speech impediment. Clarity is definitely lacking. If I had a nickel for every time that the Japanese misused the English written language, and I put all of those nickels in a bag, I’d have a fairly substantial bag of nickels; at least enough to buy an English dictionary for every shop owner in my town who took the initiative to defecate their building with splatterings of ‘Engrish’.

Now, please forgive me for seeming like an ignorant foreigner. I do not want to emit the impression that I expect Japanese people to be competent in English, for, as you probably gathered from my last letter, I am definitely lacking in ability when it comes to theirs. I would never expect someone to conform to my standards. However, the reason that I criticize their bastardization of written English is that they do it often, and with a care-free disregard for using the language correctly.

In the Ibaraki countryside where I live, the strangest things are written in English, despite the obvious absence of English speakers. In my town, for whatever reason, many of the signs, which stand at the entrance of grungy storefronts and hang on the faded, wood-paneled sides of dilapidated restaurants, are printed in English. In some cases, giant letters of the English alphabet have been crafted out of rough steel and spiked into the outer walls of businesses; the grammar and spelling almost invariably wrong.

Why these business owners would feel the need to advertise their product in English to a town full of Japanese speaking farmers may seem peculiar. Perhaps the easiest explanation is that they have done it all for my benefit. Even before I arrived, were they already thinking of me? The barber shops, which stand on nearly every street corner in my town, desperately want me to know their going rates for a perm and cut. The fishmonger, who can be found on any day of the week in his dimly lit shop, standing in a pool of blood, water and fish guts, and wearing a crimson-stained rubber apron, doesn’t want my lack of Kanji recognition to prevent me from buying fresh eel heads or Dogtooth tuna-fish bellies. And the Iseki tractor salesman, hoping that I will choose to invest my ‘not-so-hard-earned’ money in a rototiller, has laid out his own cash in an expensive, misspelled English sign which advertises his farming wares. I haven’t yet sprung for the rototiller, but I’ve got a brand new plastic mulch layer hooked onto the back of my Nissan. What can I say, that salesman is a smooth talker. Now I just need something to mulch.

No, as much as I would like to believe that the friendly shop-owners of this drowsy little town are bending over backwards to accommodate me, they aren’t advertising in English for my benefit. Not to come off as self-absorbed, but if they’re not doing it for me, then for whom are they doing it? Seeing as I am the only native English speaker in the town, and one of perhaps a total of 10 people who has an English vocabulary over 100 words, why bother writing in English at all? And incorrect English at that.

The answer has little to do with language comprehension and more to do with marketing. Spraying nonsensical English words on your business or product, as hard as this is to imagine for a native English speaker, actually impresses Japanese people with little or no English capability. The English language, not only in Japan, but in most non-English speaking countries, is eye-catching and authoritative. It serves as somewhat of a status symbol. Japanese business owners assume that if they throw some random English lettering on the side of their store, a passerby will stop and say to himself, “Looky here! This guy’s got it going on. I’ll buy my porn comics from him!” Strangely enough, the shop-owner’s assumptions are probably correct.

Consequently, ‘Engrish’ is used everywhere in Japan; not only in small farming towns, but in booming cities. Not only on country storefronts, but on towering Tokyo structures. Every piece of tacky memorabilia and article of gaudy, fluorescent clothing fathomable is stained with the unintelligible mutterings that are ‘Engrish.’ Shirts adorned with slogans such as “Let’s Happy Enjoy!” or “Cutie! Please Call It A Lovely Person!” Pencil cases marked with catchy ‘Engrish’ phrases such as “A Heart is Giving You From Me”. And, ‘Hello Kitty’ products (a multi-million dollar corporation, mind you) with the following inspirational words: “I only wish to provide you feel tired and depressed with some strength and aspiration when you in life.” Those last words taken directly from the mouth of Kitty.

The previous examples aren’t of small ‘mom and pop’ stores in the middle of nowhere, but of successful businesses based in Japan’s biggest cities; businesses that are catering to millions of people. Surely their annual budgets could accommodate a ‘$25 dollar an hour’ native English speaker to proof-read some of the crappy goods that they spew like warm vomit onto the store-shelves of Japan. But, they’re fully aware that the grammar and spelling found on the t-shirts and school supplies being sported by the masses doesn’t matter in the least. The use of ‘Engrish’ is meant to be eye-catching, not logical. It is not meant to provide enlightenment, only to draw in easily-mesmerized consumers who drool at the sight of the A, B, C’s.

Personally, if I was a Japanese business owner looking to invest $2000 in a flashy neon sign with exotic looking English lettering, I would first get someone to proof-read it- and not just the local sake-slurping rice cultivator, but someone with at least a basic sense of the language. Out here in Ibaraki however, anything goes. It doesn’t matter if there are spelling mistakes- few people can understand it anyway. And the examples are endless. One shop, in a town near my own, has the word ‘boutique’ spelled on two different places on the outer wall- two expensive looking signs, one spelled correctly, the other, not; the shop-owner, I assume, figured that if he used two different spellings, the chances of one of them being correct would be greater. My schools, despite having the presence of several English teachers, manage to misuse the English language with amazing consistency- adding the slogan ‘Jump to shining future’ to the culture festival, and printing sport festival t-shirts with ‘1th Annual” written on the sleeves. Even in Shinjuku, the main business district of Tokyo, where high-rollers spend money faster than Madonna gravitates toward new ways to attract attention to herself (one can never go too far to stay relevant), I recently saw a sign for a restaurant offering ‘drinks and fooding.’ Now, they are either promoting their tasty cuisine or offering to let you drink sake in a lounge submerged in several feet of water. With the abundance of delicious food at every turn in Tokyo, I might opt for the flood. Just to mix things up a bit.

There are some companies in the Japanese business world that have managed to perfect their use of the English language; primarily, all of those who sell to a Western market. Car companies, technology giants, appliance manufacturers- these are companies that can’t afford the luxury of butchering our mother tongue. If the Honda car company had a slogan that read “make fun happy times Honda now!” and ran that ad in every English speaking country on the globe, what would that say about their attention to detail in the machine shop? English speakers would equate their vehicles with coloured steel trash bins on wheels. Fortunately, these companies had the clever foresight to hire a few English speakers to take care of their English marketing division, ultimately allowing them to escape any possible instances of advertising their cars as ‘super super speedy fast’.

It may seem peculiar, but in Japan, companies such as Toyota, Sony, Fuji, and Subaru write their names in the English alphabet rather than in one of their own numerous writing systems. This would be the equivalent of ‘Black and Decker’ writing their name in Arabic and trying to sell it to Americans. It just doesn’t seem to make sense. But here in Japan, English is marketable, and any company with aspirations of success will stamp those eye-pleasing A, B, C’s on their product. After all, a wise man once told me that every problem is a marketing problem. Every problem, that is, except for a urinary tract infection. You can’t really put a positive spin on that, now can you doctor?

Until Japanese tech-men perfect the electronic dictionaries, which manage to spit out translations more awkward than a six-foot-three female gymnast, one can expect to continue to see ‘Engrish’ fastened to the back-bone of Japanese life for many years to come. If nothing else, at least it provides some much needed comic relief. Happy happy super enjoy!

A heart is giving you from me,
Eric

Japanese Writing is the Craziest Bastard in the Language Nuthouse

2006-03-12T17:57:00.000-08:00

In the literate world, the Japanese writing system is the no-good, ugly-duckling step-son. Nobody really likes it, it makes more problems than it solves, and the rest of the family keeps wondering why it’s got to make everything so damn complicated. But don’t expect this unwanted little sibling to get kicked out of the house anytime soon. All signs suggest that we’re stuck with it. As badly as Japan needs to make an appearance on the new hit reality TV show “Please Do An Ultimate Makeover On My Country’s Written Language! It’s A Nightmare!” it’s just too late to kick to the curb this plague on the family’s otherwise decent image.

The Japanese written language is the poster-child for this country’s secret obsession with ineffectiveness. Despite what you’ve heard about dedicated working-stiffs churning out Toyotas faster than Fidel Castro spits out propaganda, this country loves to make things as complicated and time-consuming as possible. And the Japanese written language takes the cake when it comes to inefficiency- narrowly beating out the maze-like roadways, which snake through the rice-fields of my town like winding tunnels made by chemically imbalanced gophers under a former Chernobyl power plant.

How could the Japanese written language be any worse than English- that wretched tongue that has been confusing immigrants and conquered peoples for centuries? Well, there’s no disputing that the English written language is one of the stupidest inventions after the automatic turkey carver, but the Japanese written word has it beat in terms of difficulty to learn, complexity, and general ridiculousness. Allowith me to explain.

The Japanese written language is made up of not one, but four separate writing systems, each more difficult than the next. These include:

1. ‘Kanji’- the most complicated of the four- this strikingly beautiful yet insanely complex syllabary was borrowed from the Chinese and includes thousands upon thousands of intricate and difficult to replicate characters

2. ‘Hiragana’- a syllabary that can be used to write any word in the Japanese language; it was initially intended for words which can’t be written in Kanji, words for which the author doesn’t know the Kanji, or when the reader isn’t expected to know the Kanji

3. ‘Katakana’- a system used not only to write foreign loan words such as ‘kohii’ (coffee) and ‘doa’ (door) which pervade the Japanese vocabulary like gaps in an Appalachian mountain-man’s mouth, but, if so desired, can also be used to write any word in Japanese

4. ‘Romaji’ - the English alphabet used to spell out Japanese words- strictly for the benefit of foreigners

Each of these systems, on its own, is quite good. However, the problem lies in the fact that all four systems are often combined in sentences to create one dastardly abomination of the written word. Moreover, most words can be written in any one of the four syllabaries, causing this outsider to suggest that- and call me crazy if you wish- keeping all four writing systems is as unnecessary as nipples on a Pygmy White-toothed shrew – the tiny creature’s miniscule teats are so hard to get a handle on, and the milk, so bitter and tasteless.

Rather than choosing one syllabary at some point over the past hundred years ago and deciding to stick with it exclusively, the Japanese, in their endless quest to complicate matters, said “what the hell- let’s just keep ‘em all! How bad could it be?” Well, let me tell you – it’s bad. My own personal conspiracy theory is that the Japanese deliberately kept each system in order to further thwart an outsider’s penetration of their culture- but that’s just me being crazy. Or is it? Today, in order to become truly literate in Japanese, one must be able to read and write all four alphabets.

Now, learning the majority of the writing systems is not difficult at all for English speakers. Romaji is the first to be conquered. Being that it uses the English alphabet, it comes more naturally to an Anglophone than urine to a homeless man’s pants (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner- it’s just a sad fact of homelessness). Hiragana and Katakana come next. Any primate with a heartbeat, 60 flashcards and a pot of coffee can learn these cute little characters in less than a day. By this point, your eyes may be bleeding, your mind may be spinning, and you may be seeing furry little leprechauns dancing across the walls of your room - but rejoice! You’ve learned three-quarters of the syallabaries! Just don’t get too excited though, Rain Man. Forget not Kanji, a system of writing that even the average Japanese person can’t master.

Yes, you read that correctly. Japanese people can not even read the entirety of their own Kanji syllabary! Not even close, in fact. Of an estimated 11,000 or more characters, the average, well-educated Japanese person can only read roughly 3 or 4 thousand. And naturally, reading characters is easier than replicating them- the average Japanese person would not be able to write more than a quarter of the Kanji from memory.

Technological programs in devices such as e-dictionaries and cell phones are further accelerating the average Japanese person’s loss of Kanji writing ability. One simply has to type what they want to say in Hiragana, and the clever Japanese gadgets change it to Kanji – thus eliminating the need to write the most difficult of the syllabaries. With the growing use of cell phones and computers, more and more people don’t know how to write anything but the basic Kanji (and by that, I mean the first few thousand characters or so – a damn impressive feat in itself, if you ask me).

Does this qualify the average Japanese person as being illiterate? Am I living in a society that has made their own written language so difficult that it has actually rendered them incapable of reading and writing great chunks of it? This is like something out of a comedy caper film in which our comic heroes create a bank-heist plan so complicated that they themselves can’t figure it out. This is what great comedy is made of! The funniest result of their over-zealous Kanji syllabary, is that today, on posters, in movie subtitles, and on news program headlines, the Kanji is often subtitled in Hiragana so that the average Joe and Jane can understand what is being written. Even the subtitles have subtitles! Little Hiragana symbols are scrawled over the Kanji characters to clarify the difficult Kanji. If this isn’t a clue that Kanji is redundant, I don’t what is. Yes, history has proven once again that there are definitely flaws in being overly ambitious. Perhaps the Japanese should create a fifth syllabary that acts as a code to decipher the difficult Kanji? Or a sixth syllabary to decipher the fifth syllabary’s codes? Or would this just make things a tad confusing?

Surely you see how the Japanese written language can be a frustrating and tiring ordeal for a native English speaker. At times, it’s more stressful than being a gay Wyoming cowboy in 1963 – or, so I’ve heard. Because I can’t read one of the four syllabaries, it is most often the case that I can’t understand the full meaning of the sentence that I am trying to interpret. Nearly all road signs, school bulletins and police arrest-warrants issued in my name contain at least a few Kanji characters sticking their attractive little heads out at me. I can usually read upwards of three-quarters of the writing on any such notice, but, having three-quarters of the ingredients to make a cake isn’t going to fill your stomach after a night of hard drinking (unless you’re into eating raw eggs and flour). There are times when my knowledge of the first three syllabaries comes in handy, but most days I feel like an elected leader of any of the North American nations – unable to read or write.

Of course there is the option of studying the abundant Kanji characters. This, however, is literally a life-long undertaking. Several of my English teaching friends have studied Japanese since high school or have lived in Japan for years through various exchange programs. Some have studied the language for several hours daily for the past half a dozen years. The best Japanese speaking foreigners that I know have mastered, at most, a few thousand Kanji- giving them the ability to read or write most words in the common vernacular. But none of them could be considered to be fluent in the language.

Several of my ‘less Japanese-inclined’ friends have, in a noble effort, begun studying the first few hundred Kanji- such as the days of the week, and the characters for words such as ‘entrance’, ‘exit’, and ‘person.’ Knowing these very basic Kanji may help you out from time to time, but it is roughly the equivalent of learning the English alphabet up to the letter ‘C’ and then trying to follow along on ‘Sesame Street’ - you may be able to get the general drift, but you probably won’t catch onto the fact that Bert and Ernie are more than just flat-mates. Personally, if I can’t find the exit of a building without being able to read the Kanji for that word, I’m probably not the most brilliant colour in the rainbow, or else I’m somewhere where I shouldn’t be- trapped in Osama’s bunker, perchance? I haven’t consciously studied any Kanji, but I have picked up a few along the way just through constant exposure – most notably, after stumbling into the woman’s washroom on my third day in Japan, I made an effort to remember the symbols for ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ Now every time that I walk into the woman’s washroom, I am fully aware that I’m doing it.

Despite the flaws of the Japanese written language, one cannot deny the fact that their spoken language is fantastic, easily putting English to shame. It is everything that English is not - clear, consistent, uniform. If I see a word written in Hiragana, I immediately know how to pronounce it. There is no Japanese equivalent to strangely-pronounced English words- the pronunciation of which you must know from memory- such as ‘phlegm’, ‘Wednesday’, ‘enough’… the list of ‘exceptions to the general rule’ in English goes on and on.

Now, if only I could get the Japanese to make their written language a bit more practical. But this isn’t going to happen anytime soon. If I could read and write as well as every salary-man passing through Shinjuku Station every day, I would arguably have more advantages than any one of them. And who would that benefit? Certainly not the Japanese identity. Conspiracy, or just a natural protection of the nation’s best interests ? I guess we’ll never know.

Additional Notes about Kanji:

-Students have studied the first 1000 Kanji upon elementary school graduation, and a total of 2000 characters by the time they are finished High School. And you thought the multiplication tables were grueling?!

-The estimated number of Kanji is disputed. In China, where there are a far greater number of characters (but probably not three other writing systems to supplement their primary alphabet!), recent dictionaries contain more than 80,000 symbols! I wonder what the symbol for ‘insanity’ is in China? Perhaps a sketch of a man with a rope around his neck and a thick dictionary in his hands.

Kanji ‘facts’ taken from ‘Wikipedia’ and from the Japanese teachers in my schools.

Japanese Students Have No Innocence... But You've Got To Love Them Anyway ("Strictly In A Platonic Way", Your Honour)

2006-03-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

Japanese students, like a shipment of Guatemalan melons spread attractively across the produce stand in 'Try n’ Save', range from first-rate quality to dangerously rotten. Fortunately, there are no rotten melons in either of my two schools. The quality of school lunches, at times, may be questionable, but my students are of premium stock.

Now, this isn’t to say that all of my students are angels – because they aren’t. Nor are they young Pasteurian scholars, well on their way to solving the mysteries of the world’s incurable diseases. They are simply a bunch of relatively well-behaved and polite country kids. Some of the melons may be a tad over-ripe and perchance too flavourful, while others were perhaps not quite ready to be plucked from the stem. The odd piece of fruit may have a bruise or soft-spot where it has rubbed on the tree, but none have troubles that, with a touch of caution, can’t be worked around.

In my schools, there are no reprobates, loud-mouths, crazies, or criminals. Moreover, there aren’t any delinquents, deviants or troublesome tormenters. There are, however, many Japanese boys slowly being shaped to fit the classic mould of perverted Japanese male - and these can be just as dangerous as the aforementioned scourge of society.

Sexual perversion, like a spring daffodil, blooms early in Japanese boys. The kids point and grab at my crotch, making immature sexual gestures while practicing their limited English skills. “Wat dis?” they say with impish smiles spread across their youthful faces. “Leally big?! Do you play sex?” These endeavors of cross-cultural curiosity are performed in the presence of the Japanese teachers, who laugh, smile, or turn a blind eye while I am sexually assaulted by flocks of prepubescent boys. At times, I literally have to cover my ass. And the occasional hand, I am ashamed to admit, has slipped past the defense.

Not only are Japanese school-boys overly curious about what lies beneath my frock, they also show an unusual interest in each other. The unwritten rule of ‘no public displays of affection,’ that I mentioned in a previous letter, doesn’t seem to apply to Ibaraki junior high school boys. Within the guarded walls of the school’s compound, anything goes. They sit on each other’s laps, hang off of each other’s shoulders, tap each other’s bums with their notebooks while ambling down the halls- I’ve even witnessed the occasional back rub and hair caressing. If junior high school boys behaved this way in Canada, I’m afraid to say that they would be beaten mercilessly.

While the boys show an unusual fondness for each other, the relationship between the boys and girls is, by this point in their lives, well on its way to being in a state of frosty, mutual disregard. The junior high school kids in my schools, on the most part, have begun to grow out of their rambunctious, pre-socialized ways of childhood, and have become shy and introverted little workaholics- hostages to the homework, servants to the study, drudges to their duties. It would seem that there is little time for, or interest in, the opposite sex. This habit of ‘all work and no play’ is perhaps the case for girls even more so than for boys.

Japanese junior high school-girls are a perplexing lot. By this stage in their life, they are roughly one-third of their way through their troublesome and debilitating addiction to all things Disney. They’ve progressed through the early phases – introduction, childhood fascination, and creative fantasies- and have moved on to the second major stage – fervent consumerism!

Japanese junior high school girls buy the exact same school supplies as kindergarten school-girls do in Canada- and they buy it ‘en masse’. Pencil cases adorned with the familiar faces of ageless cartoon characters (both Japanese and American), writing pads sprinkled with sparkling hearts, and notebooks made by my favourite TV program of 1986 – ‘Sesame Street’; all can be found on the wobbly, wooden school-desks occupied by the girls. Nowhere else in the world does ‘Big Bird’ have such a strong, cult-like following amongst 12 to 15 year old girls as in Anytown, Ibaraki, Japan (even some of the boys have Sesame Street school supplies!). Once again, I’m afraid to say that Canadian junior high school girls with Mickey Mouse backpacks and Sailor Moon shoes would be beaten mercilessly. And could we really blame the perpetrators? I mean, really - Big Bird at age 15?

Strangely enough, the second most popular type of school supply manufacturer, following the various cartoon conglomerates, is a different empire altogether, and one that I falsely thought would have been more popular amongst the boys than the girls. I’m speaking of Playboy. Often, the same girl that has a Minnie Mouse pencil case sitting on her desk will be writing with a pencil made by the company responsible for bringing porn to the masses- a contrast in degrees of innocence that is completely lost on the doe-eyed students. This is similar to the nun that I met that was wearing a Metallica t-shirt under her black and white habit. But those nun get-ups can be deceiving disguises- never judge a book by its cover. That nun was bad news…

The students come to school every morning, dressed smartly in their dark, heavy uniforms. The girls are required to wear long skirts for the entire year- even in the dead of winter when the temperature in the halls of the school hovers around 7 degrees Celsius- no warmer than the daytime temperature outside. I dress in long underwear and several undershirts and I still find myself shivering when outside of the heated teacher’s room. Poor girls- I couldn’t imagine having to wear a skirt during the February freeze. I stopped wearing mine back in October.

The girls may be tough when it comes to withstanding frigid temperatures in the classroom, but everything seems to fly out of the window when they are on the losing team at either the sport or culture festival. The students take these annual festivals extremely seriously. The winning team is lavished with patronizing praise by the teachers. They are presented with a golden, spit- polished trophy of historical importance and several long-winded speeches- likely toasting their noble efforts and comparing them to great winners of the past. The losing team, on the other hand, and the girls in particular, break down into fits of uncontrollable sobbing; ashamed and embarrassed to have lost such a ‘meaningful test of their dedication to the school’. I run and hide the kitchen knives, fearing an unpleasant incidence of mass hara-kiri. Shame is a dangerous emotion in Japan.

No, it cannot be argued that the Japanese aren’t a dedicated people. Kids back home, taking part in a Canadian school’s sport or culture festival, would be far too intoxicated to care whether they won or lost. It would seem that Canadian students are just dedicated to different things. Everyone has to have a passion in life.

After spending everyday in a school where the boys have tickle fights with each other and the girls buy Playboy, nothing surprises me anymore. And, as Justin Timberlake said most eloquently, “I’m loving it!” For those who haven’t heard, I’ve signed on for another year of Japanese cultural immersion. If nothing else, at least this gives me enough time to visit Disneyland a few dozen times.

Japanese People: The Average Jane

2006-02-22T17:54:00.000-08:00

After having visited 30 countries and many more cultures during my life, Japan has managed to snuggle itself cozily into an unshared section of the ruffled bed that is my cultural familiarity. This unparalleled island nation stands on its own in one sense of my varied cultural encounters. Although Japanese culture is dripping in rich colour, its storied history reads like a flight of the imagination, and it has customs which are unique throughout the globe, I can name a dozen other countries that meet the same criteria. In my mind, these are not the things which distinguish Japan from the world’s many other realms. What separates this country, and what will perhaps leave the strongest impression on me, lingering on in my memory many years from now when my dreams of becoming a Uzbekistani cattle herder finally bring to fruition, is the fact that only in Japan have I found many aspects of a country’s culture to be outright comical.

Now, finding a culture to be humourous is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s better than being boring, right? And, the truth of the matter is that the Japanese culture is far from being boring. It is one of the most interesting and curiosity evoking cultures that I could imagine. However, there are so many customs and behaviours in Japan that, when witnessed, can’t help but make one laugh. Most days, Japan is stranger than fiction; the peculiarities of the people more bizarre than the bargain-hunters you would find at a Walmart clearance sale in Topeka, Kansas.

Japanese women pull their share of the weight when it comes to contributing to this often outlandish culture. Like a fine wine that has spent a few too many years in the secluded cellar, Japanese women, in this historically isolated and mono-cultural society, have developed idiosyncrasies- depending on the meticulousness of your palate, one might even say that they are a little ‘off’. Like a wine produced in the barren hills of Mongolia, the average Japanese woman’s ability to ‘mature’ is questionable. Judged by Western standards, many of them would be considered to be juvenile.

Perhaps the most unusual characteristic of the average Ibaraki woman is their strange obsession with all things Disney. The vehicles of Japanese women are often decorated as traveling shrines dedicated to Pooh Bear; stuffed likenesses of the honey-sucking loafer and his various care-free amigos spread about the van; cushy, colourful seat-covers bearing his adorable jowl, waiting to keep your arse warm and comfortable, and miniature effigies of the characters from ‘Pooh Corner’ dangling lifelessly from the rear-view mirror.

By far the funniest dedication to the portly sugar-addict named after my fair city was on a small van-type atrocity of a vehicle that I saw one fine afternoon while driving. Giant, coloured portraits of Winnie and his ageless Disney friends had been air-brushed onto the sides of the vehicle, each exquisitely painted in a perfect rendering, and spanning the van’s entire breadth. The time and money that must have been invested in the depiction on this van, which no self-respecting 12 year old girl in Canada would be caught dead within 30 feet of, would have made even the fun-loving and cash-hungry Mr. Walter E. Disney himself proud. The van was the Japanese woman’s equivalent to a Latino gangster’s low-rider- the ones with the topless women holding silver Berettas painted across the hood. All of the Disney characters were topless- none were holding side-arms.

Japanese women don’t stop at decorating their vehicles with the lovable characters meant to bring joy to young children and the mentally under-developed. Like devout Islamic worshippers performing the Hajj- their highly ritualized and spiritual pilgrimage to Mecca- women in Japan make an annual pilgrimage of their own. It is not a journey to a sacred religious site of great historical importance, but rather to a more modern ‘mecca’ of sorts; an oasis upon the urban desert, a sanctuary for the young at heart, and one of several of Mickey Mouse’s palatial homes (what a pimp!). I speak of Tokyo Disney. Whereas a 30 year old North American woman would likely only go to Tokyo Disney if she were curious to experience a taste of modern Japan or traveling with young ankle-biters, Japanese women make frequent trips, and can never seem to get enough of the land where time stands still, or whatever it is that happens (or doesn’t happen) within those magical walls. I have yet to visit the Eastern stronghold of the famous cartoon empire. Perhaps the magic really is addictive. Mickey has not yet sunk his piercing claws into my curiosity but my rabies inoculation is wearing thin.

Cuddly cartoon characters aren’t the only addiction that Japanese women have. Among other vices, such as sucking back cigarettes in quicker succession than a strung-out death row inmate, living with their parents until marriage, and decorating their cell phones with oodles of dangling kitsch, they have an insatiable need for Louis Vuitton accessories. Having an LV handbag or wallet in Japan is a status symbol; something that young girls and women strive for, and will often forsake other necessities in order to acquire.

There is in fact a very real and disturbing culture of hushed prostitution among a percentage of Japanese high school girls, who will sell themselves for hundreds and hundreds of dollars to older Japanese men- not because they are starving, homeless, or even poor for that matter, but because materialism’s pleasurable grip has taken hold of them, and they will do more than just salt French fries at Mos Burger in order to buy fashionable designer goods.

A coworker of a friend of mine was recently transferred to a different school after being caught soliciting sex from one of his students. The story never made the news and the teacher wasn’t prosecuted. Like many scandalous and potentially embarrassing situations in Japan, it was swept under the rug and never spoken of again. At times, avoiding possible embarrassment or shame prevails over seeking justice.

Now, if only the young women could feel at least slightly embarrassed to be driving decorated shrines to the Disney characters…. Ohh, where is the justice!?

Japanese People: The Average Joe

2006-02-17T17:51:00.000-08:00

The average Japanese adult of modern times would not bode well when compared with the great samurai and geisha of the past. They don’t exactly 'fit the mould', so to speak. There is no room in our romantic image of this country’s noble and exquisitely dressed people of past centuries for an overworked salary man in a rented suit, reading comic books in his parent’s basement- where he still lives at age 34. Nor is their room in our stereotypical image of Japan’s proud culture for a Louis Vuiton handbag-totting woman wearing a Winnie the Pooh sweater and furry boots that seem to be fashioned out of shotgun blasted squirrel pelts. Unfortunately, this is where the cruel laws of evolution and adaptation have brought the Japanese men and women of today. Yes, despite the fact that change in Japan occurs at about the same rate as loss of faith in a Riyadh mosque, things have transformed enough around here during the past few centuries for this funny looking gaijin to go “hmmmm?”

To set the record straight, Japanese men no longer carry swords. Years back, they accepted the fact that the pen is mightier than the sword, and have since taken a great liking to comic books. Ahhh… pacifism can be so cruel at times! Japan is the only country that I have visited where comic books are an accepted form of literature for married, perfectly mature (by Japanese standards) adults. In the convenience stores, which permeate the rice fields of Ibaraki like open sores on a Muscovite woman of the night, the men line up at the magazine stands in droves; a thirst for knowledge in their tired eyes and curious anticipation racking their brain, wondering what will happen in the latest issue of “Curious High School Girls Will Do Anything!” Employees read comics at work, students read them at school, and teachers read them late into the evening while burning the midnight oil at work. There are comic books for all ages, personalities, and interests; young, old, innocent, virtuous, and, well, the not so innocent and virtuous.

Judging by their choice of comic book, it is safe to say that most Japanese men are perverted. I hate to be one to generalize, but it is true. Japanese men are perverted. Well, we men in general are perverted, but in the swimming pool of perverts that is life, the Japanese men seem to float to the top. Put a beer in front of a Japanese guy and the topic of conversation immediately changes to the size of the nearest foreigner’s ‘unit’. Put a second beer in front of a Japanese guy, and he’ll start to point at it. Put a third beer in front of a Japanese guy and, well, that’s when one has to break out his limited karate skills. They have a serious inferiority complex to say the least. This is why, during December’s teacher’s trip, I was reluctant to get within 100 yards of a public bath with anyone employed in my school division. Fortunately I made it out alive.

Going to the local bar however, can be just as perilous as the public bath, despite the fact that, rather than being naked, a few thin layers of cotton and denim separate me from the probing hands of the drunk and all-too-interested Japanese alpha-male. I could not begin to count the number of times that a drunken man has hugged me, touched my nose or hair, or put his hand on my leg, much closer to my hip than my knee- if you know what I mean. Having experienced being the only foreigner in a ‘middle-of-nowhere’ Japanese bar catering to sake-slurping, bi-curious farmers, I can now truly empathize with a woman who, at one point or another in her life, has been the only female at a drunken frat party where the stereo is blaring Metalica, the TV is showing wrestling, and the air is thick with the testosterone of sexually frustrated men who haven’t been getting any. I feel your pain, girl!

The strangest thing about the aforementioned habits of the typical Ibaraki beer guzzler is that these sexual advances and invasions of personal space are so contrary to the overall culture. As I’ve mentioned before, Japan is a country of contradictions. While pornographic comics and anime are rampant, showing affection is kept behind closed doors (if it happens at all?). Japanese culture, like an old grumpy miser staring, sour-faced, out of his window at the beauty of life, frowns on all public displays of affection. A friend of mine was recently ejected from a Japanese person’s house and told quite bluntly to “never come back” after he made the mistake of putting his arm around his wife in front of the hosts. His own wife! This may be an extreme example of one crazy man’s refusal to have affection shown under his roof, however, to this day, six months into my Japanese experience, I have not once seen a Japanese couple kissing in public (outside of the more liberal metropolis of Tokyo, anyway - but even there, PDA is a rare sight). I rarely, if ever, see a couple holding hands. They don’t even shake hands. They rarely pat each other on the back. They never hug. Outside of major cities, they don’t even dance together!

In the dance clubs in my prefecture (which are few and far between), the males and females stand apart from each other on the dance-floor and ‘worship the DJ’- in other words, ignoring the opposite sex, dancing in their own private groups facing the music maker, and trying, with all of their might, to fight all natural urges. In related news, concerned by the aging population and shrinking birth-rate, the Japanese Prime Minister has recently made a plea for couples to have children. It all starts in the dance clubs Koizumi! It all starts in the dance clubs!

The behaviour of young Ibarakinites in the dance clubs is quite typical of their non-aggressive courting strategies. As far as I can tell, Japanese men DO NOT approach Japanese women who are strangers. How do they meet each other, you ask? Well, in many cases, they don’t. Because Japanese society revolves around the ‘group’ as much as the life of a dung beetle revolves around finding a new, fresh place to call home, fraternizing with people outside of one’s group is rare. As group members introduce friends or relatives from other groups to which they belong (ie- bringing your work friends to your pick-up volleyball game), the group expands, and the chances of meeting a possible love interest increases. For those poor unfortunate bastards who don’t belong to enough groups, well, these are the people who live with their parents well into their 30’s.

Living at home until the gray hairs on your head outnumber the black ones is not at all uncommon in Japan. Japanese men, you see, are unable to care for themselves. Without a woman in their life, either a mother, a grandmother, or a wife, they are as helpless as a drunk with no arms; unable to acquire the things most essential to them in life. Hence, Japanese men live at home until they get married. If marriage doesn’t happen, well, I guess they take cooking classes. For those men who marry but lose their wives before their own death, sympathy flows like a river of pain. A widower in Japan is said to be one of the saddest people imaginable; sadder even then a clown with no one to entertain.

If a Japanese man is fortunate enough to find a compatible wife, don’t automatically assume that he’ll live the rest of his life in appreciation. Many Japanese men treat their wives like a ‘live-in’ cooking and cleaning service- only they don’t have to pay them. Furthermore, cheating on your wife is nothing to be frowned upon; a practice that is as common today as it was when Japanese men would spend every available hour and dollar on their favourite local Geisha.

My friends and I met one such interesting character- a womanizing and neglectful husband of the highest degree. His name is Isaka-san, a middle-aged man with a smooth, round face and glasses far too hip for his graying complexion. He, who not only has an interest in women who aren’t his wife, but also in foreigners, happened to be frequenting the same ‘middle of nowhere’ Japanese bar where we found ourselves one evening. Isaka-san was in this small town bar, not with his spouse, but with his girlfriend, making absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that he is having an affair. His wife, who was probably at home picking the lint out of the tatami mats, is likely aware of his indiscretion, being that word travels fast in a small town (especially when you meet your lover at the only bar for miles!). However, she would have little say in the matter. After meeting people like Isaka-san, one gets the impression that being in a Japanese marriage can, in many instances, be a lot like being a gay man in the U.S. military; in other words, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’.

Isaka-san, whose sexual preference we of course questioned after he behaved like most drunken Japanese males, spent the rest of the evening buying us food and drinks and bragging about his many exploits with lady friends. His girlfriend, who was half his age, was more excited than a dog in heat to be sitting beside her ‘man.’ At one point, and this is no word of a lie, she pulled out his bottle of Viagra from her purse and proudly showed us the blue pills which turn Isaka-san into a regular Don Juan. Ohhh… isn’t love adorable! Kids these days….

And this, in addition to the fact that men in the countryside will urinate wherever and whenever nature calls, has been a nutshell description of the typical Ibaraki man.

To give you an idea of just how fascinated the Japanese are with comics, I have attached a few pictures taken from a series of history text books found in one of my school’s classrooms. To make history more digestible for students, the history curriculum involves this series of comic-book texts, displaying, in drawings and small dialogue bubbles, the history of Japan. And, of course, I wouldn’t attach just any boring old picture- but drawings of the important, mythical creators of Japan - having cartoon sex! Ain’t learnin’ fun these days!!

The Lengths That One Man Will Go To For A Beer...

2006-02-15T22:38:00.000-08:00

Japan is a wasteful society. It can not be characterized as one that reduces, reuses and recycles. Plastic abounds. Everything is shrink-wrapped, double-wrapped, individually sealed; once-bagged, twice-bagged, smothered in a plastic peal. As far as I know, there is no recycling program in my prefecture. Everything that can be burned, is. Everything that can’t, goes to that magical, mystery garbage pile in the sky (well, on second thought, it’s probably dragged out onto the ocean by a rusty, aging tug-boat, a few kilometers from shore, to be dumped; only later to wash up on the rocky beaches not far from my town). Not quite as romantic of a thought, now is it?

Hence, I do my best to save the universe- one purchase at a time. Whenever I buy something that I can easily carry without requiring a bag, I tell the cashier, who reaches for the plastic sack faster than an American customs official reaches for the rubber gloves, to “chill."

One Friday evening, not long ago, I was heading over to my friend’s apartment. On the way, I pulled into 7-Eleven to buy a couple of beers. As the clerk began to bag my drinks, I stopped her. “Iranai,” I said, telling her that I didn’t need a bag.

As I walked out of the convenience store, the two cold beers in my hand, I fumbled in my jacket pocket for my car keys. It would seem that this was too much for my tired and frail mind. Already concentrating on walking, carrying the two drinks, and humming a tune quietly to myself, the whole concept of successfully taking my keys out of my pocket proved to be too much to handle. In an unusual moment of gracelessness- an uncharacteristically clumsy moment in my life- one of the beers flew from my over-worked hands, floated fluidly through the air, and landed, hard, on the cold, un-forgiving pavement of the 7-Eleven parking lot. Before I even had time to trace the soaring snifter with my eyes, it bounced off of the concrete and rolled beneath the body of an idling car.

Like a prized pig hunting for valuable truffles, I circled the car in search of my two dollar treasure. It was nowhere to be seen. I bent down low to the ground and scanned beneath the smog-emitting gas guzzler, all the while trying to be inconspicuous so as to not alarm the woman sitting in the driver’s seat, yakking on her cell-phone like it was the end of the world. I quickly spied the battered beer can, hiding on the inside of the front driver’s side tire- but not before the woman in the car eyed the strange foreigner inspecting her vehicle from the perspective of a lop-eared Cocker Spaniel.

So as to not elicit fear in the chattering Japanese woman, I returned to a standing position, straightened my collar, and retreated to my car, which was parked adjacent to hers. Trying to hash out a plan, I weighed my options. I could either drive away, leaving my beer to the unknown darkness of the quiet Japanese country town, or I could wait for the woman to leave, fetch my assaulted Asahi, and head to a warmer place. Thinking that she had just arrived, or that she was about to leave, and couldn’t possibly talk on the phone for long, I chose to wait. I under-estimated the gabbing grit of the Japanese house-wife.

I waited in my car for four minutes. She clearly wasn’t going anywhere. After noticing me scoping out her vehicle from the closest thing to being on all fours, and then making eye contact with me several times as I sat in my car and glanced at her every 30 seconds, the woman, I am sure, began to wonder what I was up to. She gave me fleeting glimpses from her car seat; eye-balling me cautiously, constantly keeping me in her peripherals. She continued to yak on her cell phone, making sure that I remained at a safe distance.

After waiting for those four, long minutes, I was fed-up. I just wanted my beer. Frustrated, I stepped out of my car. As soon, as I did so, I saw her look up at me, a befuddled panic painted on her shadowed face, and I heard the power-locks of her car doors ‘click’. She locked her doors! She was in fear; thinking that I was going to hijack her vehicle or steal her Louis Vuitton handbag. I walked around the front of her car and made my way to her window. She followed me intently with her eyes, transfixed by my unfamiliar and threatening presence. As she stared at me like a brush-tailed rabbit-rat watching an approaching spitting cobra, she spoke nervously on her phone, likely giving post-mortem instructions to whomever it was she was speaking with.

I stood at her door, looming over her; nothing more than a quarter inch of laminated safety glass separating her from what she perceived to be an untimely calamity. I smiled. She shook her head defiantly, her eyes wide and her eyebrows furrowed; an unusual combination of fear and annoyance. She spoke more rapidly on her phone. She turned away from me, trying her best to disregard the 6 foot 2 inch foreigner blocking out the light of the street lamp, eclipsing the driver’s side of the car. Every few seconds, she glanced up at me with her wide, perturbed eyes, each time hoping that I would concede defeat and walk away. I remained, motioning for her to roll down her window. She refused, waving her hand uncouthly, motioning for me to leave her alone. I pointed frantically at her tire, hoping that, if I made her think that there was something wrong with her car, it would elicit a self-concerned response, and thus persuade her to speak with me. She didn’t fall for it. She shook her head insolently and pointed inside the store- as if to suggest that I had the attention span of an inebriated Robin Williams with no one to entertain, and my interest could be deflected elsewhere. Not once did she break in conversation.

I stood awkwardly outside of her window for more than four minutes, alternating between animated gestures for her to roll down the glass and violent gesticulations in the direction of her tire. She continued to ignore me as best as a frightened and agitated woman could manage. With a discourteous brush of her hand, she waved me away occasionally as if I were a destitute, squeegee clutching punk rocker looking to make enough cash for a coffee and a cigarette. I motioned with my hands that I wanted to speak with her. Passing 7-Eleven shoppers stared in puzzled wonderment as I stood, somewhat frustrated and disheartened, making unusual gestures beside the idling car of this middle aged, verbose Japanese lady. I considered just going ahead and reaching under her car for my concealed beer, but I didn’t put it past her to try to run me over in self-defense. I wanted the beer, but not that badly.

Finally, after realizing that I wasn’t giving up so easily and would likely stay until the wee hours of the morning, she pulled the phone away from where it was glued to her ear and rolled the window down a sliver; only enough for me to hear her say rudely in Japanese, “what?!”
“My beer is under your car” I replied, agitated. She smiled and let out a delicate laugh, directed more at me than at the peculiar situation at hand (most Japanese would have apologized profusely, both for ignoring me for so long and for what they would have falsely seen as themselves being in the way of me getting my sweaty paws on the cold brew). She waved her hand like Queen Elizabeth beckoning her man-servant to fetch another bucket of gin and tonic, motioning for me to retrieve my drink. I moved to the front of her car, reached under and grabbed the bruised can. I held it up in the light for her to see, trying my hardest not to glare at her, or better yet, spread my lanky body out on the hood of her car and crack open the can for a well-deserved nip. She smiled somewhat sarcastically again, and, having finally rid herself of the troublesome foreigner, stuck the phone once more to her ear, and went back to doing what she does best; ignoring me while discussing what I’m sure were deep and reflective topics such as frilly lingerie, mittens for cold dogs, and the small balls of lint that gather in the folds of one’s kimono.

I walked back to my car and sped away, annoyed, not by the fact that she was slightly scared of me, which I can empathize with, but by the fact that she was one of the very few Japanese people that I have met so far who was actually quite rude to me.

When I arrived at my buddy Seth’s house, I told him the story and we laughed about it for a while, adding it to our mental list of peculiar behaviours exhibited by the Japanese. He recounted to me a story about his mother, who had been on the opposite side of a similar experience in Connecticut where Seth grew up. She was using an ATM, not far from the ‘bad side’ of town. As she finished withdrawing money, a black man, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, appeared at the glass door of the locked banking booth; standing, in what appeared to be a menacing position and waiting for Seth’s mom to open the door. She apparently stood inside for several minutes, refusing to leave the safety of the locked ATM booth, in fear of robbery, or worse. They both waited until finally, the man, who was likely as annoyed as I was while waiting for the gabbing house-wife to roll down her window, said to Seth’s mother, “lady, I just wanna use the ATM.” She relented, walked outside and past the hooded man as he walked in to legitimately retrieve some of his own, hard earned money. Both survived to tell the embarrassing story.

So, while my personal mission to reduce, reuse and recycle might get me in the occasional quandary, I will persist, in hoping that my efforts will save a baby porpoise from ‘asphyxiation by polyethylene’ or at least to give the appropriately labeled ‘bag people’ a well-merited rest from cleaning up the beaches. But most importantly, I will remember to never again interrupt a Japanese housewife in the midst of her ‘parking lot philosophizing.’

Cars, Trucks, and the Morons Who Drive Them: Part 3- Buckling Up

2006-02-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in my last letter, Japanese people have strange obsessions. Well, who doesn’t, right? But one thing that Japanese adults do not seem to be concerned with is the safety of their children while driving. Often, when edging along in traffic, stuck somewhere between a high school girl on a moped and a farmer driving in a tiny truck made out of recycled tin cans, I will pass a Japanese family, riding in their minivan, going to or from wherever it is that they spend their time. The parents will be sitting in the front seat, staring ahead with expressionless faces, grandpa will be in the back, trying to sneak a peek at the girl on the moped, and grandma will be readying her backhand, about to swat grandpa. All are oblivious to the fact that the children, sometimes as young as two years old and no bigger than swollen wharf rats, are unbuckled, crawling around the van like monkeys on speed. They are hanging over the seats, dangling from the head-rests, perched on grandma’s hunchback, and pressing their cute little faces against the windows, trying to intimidate strange looking Canadians. I cringe every time I see this. And I see it all of the time.

I can think of nothing more irresponsible than this when it comes to caring for your children. This is a country with highly dangerous, narrow roads (my prefecture being one of the worst), which accommodate much more traffic than they can handle. The drivers are often terrible. There are accidents all of the time. There are no sidewalks, resulting in the cyclists, riding on rickety old hunks of welded steel, cruising down the constricted streets, taking up one third of the lane and requiring drivers to avoid them like the plague. Cars will stop and park on blind corners, perilously blocking the road as if to taunt the drivers behind them, “so, do you feel lucky, punk?” Drivers here in Ibaraki, Japan exhibit less common sense than the parents who were dropping their kids off at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. “Have a good time with Michael, sweetie. Play safe.”

Needless to say, whenever I see unbuckled kids bounding about their parent’s van like it is happy hour at Tokyo Disney, I get a little bit queasy. These parents should just tie steaks around their kids’ necks and let them play beside the lion cage at the Ueno Zoo. If the foolish, catatonic parent driving the minivan so much as tapped the rear end of the tin-can truck in front of him, the kids would slam into the back of the seats like birds into clear glass. Worse yet, the kids will go sailing through the windshield like fuzzy-haired projectiles and land amongst the bags of rice weighing down the back of the now crumpled, shoe-box of a vehicle in front of them. I hate the thought of it. So I cringe- and the mystery meat that I had for school lunch comes dangerously close to making a re-appearance.

While many Japanese parents that I’ve seen driving are not so conscious of the lack of safety of their unbuckled children, the Japanese in general have an outrageous paranoia about crime and their safety from its venomous grip. At times, they seem to have a perception that they are living in a war-zone, claiming that this is ‘such a dangerous place to live.’ Of course, this is absolutely preposterous. Japan is by far the safest country that I have ever visited. Even the drunk guys are more interested in grabbing your crotch than starting a fight. I can leave my Ipod lying on the seat of my car, with the windows down and the doors unlocked, and no one will touch it. Japanese people don’t steal. Because there is such a dominating group mentality, people are more afraid of letting down their fellow group members than of any other possible penalty. Shame is the biggest deterrent. Of course, being ethnocentric and, dare I say, often racist, Japanese people direct most of their blame toward foreigners when it comes to accounting for crime. Unfortunately, their accusations are based in truth. Most of the crime IS committed by foreigners; mostly those from other Asian countries.

Regardless of who is committing the miniscule amount of crime that actually does occur here, the people have no sense of how relatively safe Japan is. “Canada is so safe!” they often exclaim. “You are so lucky!” What I don’t tell them is that if they were to take a stroll through certain sections of Winnipeg, they would likely arrive back home with a new hole in their body and half of the blood that they left with. On the other hand, I could walk down any street in my prefecture, with a bag of gold tied around my waist and a diamond pendant around my neck saying ‘Rob Me’ in glittering letters, and I wouldn’t feel the least bit insecure.

Lately, in my area, I have been told that there has been a rash of crime. I’m not sure what constitutes a crime spree in Japan, but I’m guessing that someone’s potato patch was raided or their cat disappeared (I hate to say it, but I think I saw Fluffy lying in the middle of the road the other day- and she wasn’t doing too well). Being ever-vigilant and highly organized, the teachers at one of my schools have begun to assemble the kids into massive packs at the end of the school day. The kids, who all ride their bicycles to school, are then escorted by a teacher, who will drive ahead, leading them down the road, into the sunset and safely home. At the end of everyday, there is a mass exodus of students from the school; all dressed exactly alike, wearing their blue school uniforms and white bicycle helmets, their flashing bicycle lights permeating the increasing darkness, warding off dangerous outsiders. As they ride, tightly packed together down the road, the students are much more likely to get hurt from crashing into one another than they are from any possible child abductors. But why try to argue with their logic? The pack mentality is alive and well in Japan.

We humans are such contradictory characters; not just the Japanese, but people in general. Living here however, the contradictions that are inherent in the Japanese culture stand out like Jehovah’s Witnesses at a 50 Cent concert. They have an immense phobia of non-existent crime, ever-fearing for their safety, yet, many families allow their kids to pile into the van- the traveling jungle gym on four wheels- and barrel down the dangerous roads, unbuckled. They are completely ignorant of the fact that moving vehicles kill far more people than guns in civilized countries such as this. “Stay away from that dangerous looking Canadian kids! Now everyone pile into the fun-bus! It’s party time!” This is like a meth addict with a fear of flying (but, enough about me), or the father of my host family, who spoke about the dangers of poisonous, chemical-laced Chinese vegetables while sucking back one cigarette after the next. Yes, sometimes we homo-sapiens are just not the rational thinkers that we so arrogantly claim to be. “We’re better than the chimpanzees! Booya!”

As an adult, choosing not to wear your seat belt is your own ill-planned decision. Just don’t subject your kids to such stupidity. The Japanese may make safe and reliable cars, but if you don’t make your kids wear their seat belts, what does it matter? The next time I hear a Japanese person obsessing about crime, or parking, or comic books, or even the size of foreign genitals, I will stop them, look at them inquisitively, and say, “yes, but are your kids buckled up?” Now, obsess about that.

Cars, Trucks, and the Morons Who Drive Them: Part 2- Parking Obsessions

2006-01-23T21:16:00.000-08:00

The Japanese have an obsession. Well, they have numerous obsessions. Among other things, they have an unusual fascination with perverted comic books, the size of a foreign male’s genitals, conforming with the group, speaking about the excellence of their own cuisine, and making boring, long-winded speeches. But, these are all normal obsessions, are they not? Who doesn’t like sitting with their fellow ‘group’ members over a fine Japanese meal while speaking about the incredibly large private parts of the foreigners depicted in the comic books being passed around the table? It’s a typical Saturday night for me, anyway.

One of the more unusual and nonsensical fixations however, involves something much more mundane; something quite ordinary – something you may not even think about twice. I’m talking about parking. To be more specific, I’m talking about the manner with which the Japanese park their cars. The Japanese are obsessed with parking their cars backwards into the spaces. They say it is easier, but for the life of me, I can’t understand why. When I try to reason with my Japanese friends, arguing that it is actually more difficult, they shake their heads in defiance. “No, it is easier.”

When driving through a busy, nearly full parking lot- a parking lot without the luxury of having an over-zealous parking patrolman- the moron driving in front of me will often cruise past one of the only open spaces. “Haha… fool…” I mutter under my breath, thinking that the person in front of me just passed up on a golden opportunity. But wait! Don’t get your hopes up so quickly, funny looking ‘gaijin’ with no concept of the Japanese parking customs. I soon realize that I WILL NOT be parking in this space.

The driver in front of me suddenly slams on their brakes once pulling past the open spot. The white reverse lights flash on. They then start to back up, ass first into the parking spot. This requires me to back up as well in order to allow them room to squeeze in (much to my annoyance, I might add). They carefully back into the space, slower than a granny trying to land her butt in the seat of a crowded Winnipeg public bus on a frigid January morning; maneuvering this way and that, making sure not to damage the other vehicles that they are narrowly squeezing between. Finally, after an easily avoidable amount of difficulty, and many seconds of my short existence wasted watching them struggle to squeeze into the narrow space, they are snuggled into their parking spot and I am left to search for another. Ohh! It's soooo much easier!

It is simpler, in my opinion, to pull in front first. That way, when backing up, you are backing into an open lane rather than trying to back into a narrow space between two other cars. But, such foreign logic and ‘double-speak’ does not help to convince the Japanese of the evil in their ways. “It is easier,” they say stubbornly, claiming that when you are backed in, it is much faster to leave (funny enough, they leave their slippers in the entrance-way of a house in the same fashion – facing out for a quick get-away, as if, on the odd chance, they might actually do something immoral and need to flee the group- not bloody likely!). “You are already facing forward" they tell me. "You just have to pull away.” What they mean to say is, “everyone else is doing it!”

That is part of the 'problem' with the Japanese mindset; lack of individuality and free-thinking. In most countries, some more so than others, parking lots are beautiful, chaotic mosaics of coloured cars, parked facing forward, backward, sideways, and everything in between. Here in Ibaraki, Japan, on the other hand, it is just the opposite. There is far too much order and balance. In most parking lots, nearly every car will be parked ass-in, and one rarely sees any flashy coloured vehicles. Maybe it is just my mind playing tricks on me, but they all seem to be neutral-coloured or earth-toned, and of standard shape and size; like something out of ‘bizzarro world.’ At least it’s never hard to find my car in a parking lot. I just look for the only one that is parked differently from the others.

In Japanese, the word for ‘different’ –‘chigau’- is the same as the word for ‘wrong’. This speaks volumes about the Japanese perception of things atypical. All too often, ‘different’ is seen as being ‘wrong.’ Japan is an incredibly ethnocentric society and the people quite adamantly boast that no foreigner could ever truly understand the Japanese way of life. One is not considered to be ‘Japanese’ unless their ancestors have lived here for as long as history has been recorded. Your great-grandparents could have emigrated from China 150 years ago- you may have never been outside of Japan in your life, you speak no other language other than Japanese, and you know no other way of life- but to the Japanese, you are still a ‘foreigner’, because, somewhere in your lineage, your ancestors came from the outside world.

There is no equivalent in Japan to being a ‘Jamaican-Canadian’ or ‘Dutch-Canadian.’ There are ‘Japanese’ and there are ‘foreigners.’ That’s it. Japanese people often ask me, “what do Canadians eat?’ I try to explain that Canada is made up of people from all over the world, and therefore we don’t have a common diet. “Yes,” they say, “but what do Canadians eat?” I’m not sure that this concept of diversity is one that they can truly understand or relate to.

If you reach deep down into the depths of Japanese culture, beyond the technological gadgets, cheesy pop music, and ever-popular anime and comics, you realize that things in Japan haven’t changed much in recent history. Customs and cultural practices are essentially the same as they have always been; uniquely Japanese and virtually free of foreign influence. To many Japanese, ‘different’ IS ‘wrong.’ Things have worked a certain way for as long as anyone can remember; the Japanese way. Why change now?

I feel, however, that a little bit of chaos is much needed here in Japan. Whether it is in the parking lots, the school system, or in general, day to day life, it would be nice to see the occasional kink in the chain. And, to an extent, that is why we foreign English teachers are hired through the JET Program. Many of us have no teaching experience and we are clearly not here to ‘enlighten the masses’. Teaching was barely touched upon in the hiring process for this job, and I was not given any teaching training upon my arrival in Japan. We are here rather, because someone high up in the Japanese school system- someone with a free thinking, ‘outside the box’ mindset- realized nearly 20 years ago that it is important for the Japanese youth to open their minds and acknowledge that there is a whole other world out there, beyond the rocky, sea-cliffs and beaches of Japan.

I am not here primarily as an English educator, but as a living, breathing example of diversity. I am here to stir things up a bit – and I take every opportunity to do so- at school, in restaurants, while driving, everywhere I go. I purposely do things in a non-Japanese way. Not to the extent of being rude, but just to be different. And they are very open to it in most instances, because I am a foreigner, and it is expected that I will be different, perhaps wrong. They laugh, joke around, and enjoy the circus attraction. But, never would a Japanese person do some of the things that I so easily get away with. The social guidelines and mores are very well defined.

A few years from now, the students that I have taught will likely have forgotten the useless textbook English phrases that they are forced to regurgitate and repeat, over and over again until memorized. They will never use the majority of the English that they have studied unless they go abroad (which Japanese people seldom do- they don’t have time for holidays). They will never have to approach a foreigner in the Tokyo subway station and ask in English what time the next train to Shibuya leaves. They will never have to ask in English for directions to the nearest restaurant (and I would feel sorry for them if they had to!). To know English in Japan may be an advantage, but it will never be a necessity- especially for the country-bumpkins that I’m teaching. However, if my students learn one thing from me- if there is one thing that I can teach them that they will remember forever- I hope that it is that ‘different’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘wrong.’ Well, that, and I’ll try to teach them a thing or two about parking.

Cars, Trucks, and the Morons Who Drive Them: Part 1- The Provider of Un-Necessary Directions

2006-01-15T21:12:00.000-08:00

For whatever reason, in Japan, you can rarely get good directions when you need them. For instance, if you ask for directions to the nearest restaurant in any given area, a long-term inhabitant of that very neighborhood will likely hum and hah, scratch their head, and wonder out loud… “Soo daa….. resutoran, ne?” Just around the corner, barely out of eyesight, a large, flashing neon sign stands high above an equally eye-catching restaurant. The neon sign burns brightly; intense glowing arrows pointing at the building. “Restaurant…. Restaurant…,” it flashes every few seconds, burning its image into the minds of all conscious passers-by. And yet, the person whom you are asking for directions, the same person who lives, works and breathes on these very streets, just stands in confused wonderment, dumbstruck by such a puzzling and yet seemingly simple question. “Resutoran…. a so des ka… hhmm… I swear I’ve seen one around here somewhere…”

I’m not sure if they don’t want to tell me, or if they just don’t pay attention to details. Regardless, getting from point A to point B on these maze-like, narrow roads can sometimes be an exhausting and time consuming task. In addition, the Japanese never seem to be concerned with finding the quickest or most direct route to any given place. Roads criss-cross my prefecture in seemingly random patterns and it often seems that all paths eventually lead to where you want to go. However, it is choosing the right combination of roads that separates your journey from being an almost effortless venture, and being a day long exploit through the entrails of hell.

This is something that my Japanese friends seem to be unconcerned with. They don’t embark down dusty side roads in search of a faster route. They don’t zip through a convenience store parking lot to evade a never-ending red traffic light. They just follow the road signs and are glad to be staring at the ass end of a pocket-sized farmer’s truck for hours on end, slowly putting towards their destination. As a result, they have a horrible habit of always over-estimating the amount of time that it takes to get to any particular place. In sum, think twice before asking a Japanese person for directions. Only when you are really lost.

There are times, however, when you are given directions that you don’t even need. At construction sites and in parking lots, you will find a Japanese person, dressed in a neatly pressed blue uniform and reflective vest, yielding an orange, glowing baton and wearing a hard helmet on their head; a gleaming, gold crest fashioned in its center. From a distance, they resemble a police officer, their black boots painstakingly polished and shining, and a variety of tools and gadgets strapped tightly to their thick white belt. They wave their baton frantically through the air in a constant, stilted motion, endlessly blowing the sparkling, silver whistle that sits perched between their lips. A walkie-talkie radio sits strapped to their forearm for easy access, and they are often seen communicating with their similarly dressed, ‘direction giving’ cohorts, who are standing just a few meters away. Their white-gloved hands are held high in the air, motioning this way and that, pointing and signaling, and making un-purposely humourous gestures while ‘directing’ traffic. These are the ‘providers of unnecessary directions’. They can be found in all corners of my prefecture, and likely all over Japan, providing useless information to drivers.

In some instances, I will admit, their presence is warranted. They are required to maintain the smooth flow of traffic on roads under construction. Yet, it is when they are spread about shopping center parking lots, more numerous than virgins at a Star Trek convention, that really makes me chuckle. Picture me rolling into the nearly empty parking lot of my favourite shopping center, driving in my dark green, compact Nissan; my music blaring to offset the penetrating racket of my squeaking fan-belt. Out of nowhere, jumps a ‘provider of unnecessary directions.’ He’s got more energy than a Jack Russell Terrier and it’s been a slow morning at the supermarket. He saw me coming for miles, watching, waiting; clenching his glowing baton in his tight fist, moistening his dry lips for perfect whistle-blowing conditions, and radioing his traffic directing friends to let them know to stay back…. he will field this one.

“Ahh!” I slam on the brakes. Rather than smoothing the flow of traffic, these guys are endangering my life! He begins waving his gloved hands in the air as he walks backwards while facing me, signaling violently for me to follow, looking side to side, and constantly checking for possible obstacles and obstructions. “Gee, should I drive straight ahead like he’s motioning for me to do, considering that it’s the ONLY WAY TO GO?!”

Without an option, and assuming that this guy has the inside goods on all of the secret parking spots in the virtually vacant lot, I follow. He gesticulates constantly as I stare in bewilderment. He then motions for me to turn by rapidly waving to the right; using his whole body, shifting his weight from side to side, his shoulders rolling gracefully beneath his tight, ironed uniform, and his knees bending and straightening effortlessly as he rhythmically bounces to the drums of over-enthusiasm beating within his own mind. I do as I am told. He runs alongside my car until we approach the parking space, where, since he first saw me barreling down the road towards the shopping center, he has envisioned my small Nissan March parked within the yellow lines. Like a sheep, chased into proper position by the efficient sheep dog, I park right where he wants me. Success! Another one down for the ultra-hyper direction provider! But there is no time to waste. Another car could approach at any time. With a bounce in his step, he quickly paces back to the parking lot entrance, watching, and waiting for the next lost soul.

While most countries would simply have a few strategically placed signs to direct traffic, Japan has employed an army of ‘unnecessary direction providers.’ Sometimes they just serve as human pylons, signaling for cars to drive around the giant bulldozer blocking the road (thanks for the help, buddy!), and at other times, as described above, they will all but drag you to where they want you to go.

But, like all Japanese employees in the public sector, they always give off the appearance of being ‘genki’, a great Japanese term which means ‘happy’ or ‘full of life.’ Nearly all Japanese people are incredibly polite, going out of their way to greet you when you enter a store, or nod hello on the street. Whether they are constantly high on the excitement of the daily-grind, or are just simply exuding this false image of happiness, is up for debate. Regardless, the rebellious, semi-non-conforming Japanese will give you the same overly-formal greetings and ‘thank-you’s’ as the rest of society; they just do it with a little bit less gusto.

Thanks to the ‘unnecessary direction providers’, since arriving in Japan, I have had no sleepless nights, worrying about where I will park at the mall the next day. Nor have I worried about driving straight into that giant bulldozer that is often blocking one of the lanes as I drive, groggily and cataleptic, to work in the morning. I’ll feel so lost when I come back to Canada!

The Ultimate Enkai

2006-01-02T20:41:00.000-08:00

The morning was cold; one of the coldest so far this year. The frigid wind was biting at my face as I stood, waiting for our chartered bus to pick me up in front of the Town Hall. I wanted to be asleep in bed. It was a Saturday morning, this past weekend, and I was awake at 8 A.M., standing in the cold; setting out on a trip that I wasn’t sure I wanted to take.

I was heading out on an ‘enkai.’-the Japanese term for ‘teacher’s party.’ An enkai is a chance for the teachers to get completely wasted together, as a team. The alcohol breaks down the social constraints that stand like a wall between them, and they bond, without the constant pressures of work hanging over their heads. This particular enkai that I was heading out on however was not your typical evening party of booze and fine food. This was to be the ultimate enkai; an entire weekend of debauchery. Sounds like a good time, doesn’t it? Well it was. But, the only hitch for this particular enkai – the enkai of all enkais- was the same prohibitive factor that permeates much of Japanese life- the cost.

Japanese people, it would seem, are immune to spending money. If the group leader- in this case, the kocho sensei- says “spend!’, the rest of the group members, with respectful smiles on their faces and their outreached palms lined with cash, say “how much?” I, on the other hand, have a slight allergy to spending money frivolously. I don’t like to pay more than what I deem something to be worth. Call it what you will, but I don’t like to get ‘ripped off.’

Typical enakais cost between $40 and $70. That’s for a two hour party- all you can drink and eat - some of the best Japanese alcohol and cuisine that you could imagine. This particular enkai that we were setting out on- the ultimate enkai- was far more than just a two hour party. It was a two day trip! The plan was to charter a bus, drive to Gunma-ken, several prefectures away, stay at a famous, traditional Japanese hotel, bathe in one of the most famous onsens (communal bath) in Japan, eat mouth-watering food, and have unlimited alcohol for the entire time. If you think it sounds expensive, you’re right. I nearly choked on my green tea when I was told the cost.

“It will be yon man en” (the equivalent of $400), one of my fellow teachers told me a few weeks prior to the trip. “Will you join us?” I coughed violently, the green tea trying to sneak its way down my windpipe. Breathe, and then drink- never at the same time. It’s an important lesson.

“Hhhmmm… it sounds nice…,” I managed to exhale, interspersed with short coughing fits. I tried to smile, my eyes watering as I choked to death at my desk. “I’ll think about it.” The response within my own mind however, was not so polite. “$400 dollars! Are you #$%&@ crazy! For one night! I could feed a small Sudanese village for a month with that much $%^@# money!”

“Please, join us,” he said again, and left me to struggle for breath.

For the next few weeks, I continued to dodge the issue. “Join us... join us,” my coworkers would say occasionally, trying to persuade me with friendly smiles and flashy brochures. It worked. Unfortunately, I have an inability to say ‘no’ to people. I hate to disappoint. I know, it’s a horrible personal fault, but sometimes, I just can’t help it. I didn’t want to become even more of an outsider than I already am. I didn’t want to be known as ‘the strange looking foreigner who doesn’t come to our parties.’ A few days before we were to leave, I reluctantly agreed to tag along.

Once the bus arrived on Saturday morning, a few minutes late, I was just happy to get out of the cold. I was tired and so were the other teachers. The mood was somber. I curled up on a seat and stuck my headphones in my ears. As I fell asleep, I thought about what else I could buy with $400. I could travel in Eastern Europe or South East Asia for a month, I could fly half way home to Canada and land somewhere in the ocean, I could buy a Fender Rhodes keyboard, a guitar, a beautiful camera lens… I could save somebody’s life…. But here I was, heading out on an overnight trip with a bunch of teachers, most of whom are twice my age. For a guy who would be happy with a hamburger for dinner and a dorm bed in a decrepit hostel for the night, I couldn’t imagine that spending $400 on fancy food and a famous hotel could be worth it. With so much poverty in the world, I couldn’t justify spending that much money on something so superfluous. I felt guilty. I felt unnecessarily fortunate. I don’t need a vacation! Most days, my job feels like a vacation!

At 10 A.M., I woke up as the bus pulled into a rest stop. The sun was shining. The country was thawing out from the previous night’s freeze and things on the bus were beginning to warm up. At the back of our ‘party mobile’, the kocho sensei, surrounded by the male teachers, broke out a huge bottle of sake. “This is the best sake in Japan,” he boasted as he opened the lid and began to pour it into plastic cups. “Very expensive!”

“I would #$%^# hope so,” I thought to myself bitterly.

“Join us, Eric!” he said as he sniffed the strong liquor sitting at the bottom of the plastic cup. He swirled it around, staring into the small funnel that he was creating, anticipation glowing in his eyes. Somewhere in Japan, the founder of this particular sake brand – the best in Japan – was rolling in his grave, knowing that his pride and joy, his baby, was being drunk from plastic cups in the back of a short-bus.

“Join us!” they yelled, either unaware or plain indifferent to the faux-pas they were committing with their particular choice of drinking vessel.

“It’s morning, isn’t it?” I said jokingly in Japanese. They burst out laughing and smiled slyly at me. As I said, I can’t say ‘no’. Sake from a plastic cup had never tasted so good!

Like everything that the Japanese do, our super-enkai was highly organized. Every hour of the weekend was accounted for; every move, planned. There was no free-time, no down-time, and no ‘alone-time.’ Just ‘group-time.’ We left as a group, spent our weekend bonding as a group, and returned, our stomachs full, and our bodies tired, as an even stronger group. Of course, being the ‘gaijin’ with limited Japanese skills, I was completely oblivious as to what the plans were. All I knew is that we were going to a famous onsen in Gunma-ken and that I would be paying a lot of money. As the weekend unfolded, like a beautiful piece of origami, I was encountered with one surprise after the next. On the way to and from Gunma-ken, we stopped at a famous temple, had a delicious lunch in a ritzy hotel, went to a renowned glass blowing workshop and museum, and, my personal favourite, we went to a museum dedicated to John Lennon.

Now, I know that I mentioned before that I really dislike museums, and that is the truth. But, I never qualified that statement. What I should have added is that there are only two types of museums which I would find interesting; the first being a photography museum, the walls of which would be lined with beautiful, inspiring photographs, and the second would be a museum dedicated to John Lennon. Well, the latter is where I found myself at one point during the weekend, and it was awe-inspiring. Believe it or not, I got to touch the actual piano with which John Lennon wrote the song ‘Imagine.’ Now imagine that….

On Saturday at 4 P.M., we pulled into Minakami, home of one of Japan’s famous onsens, and the town where we would be staying for the night. Minakami is a small ski-village with the charm of Banff and the exotic feel of a European getaway. It is nestled high in the scenic mountains, which were gorgeously coloured with snow-covered Evergreens; snow-white and tree-green for as far as the eye could see. This was the first time that I had seen snow in Japan. It was beautiful. It reminded me of Winnipeg.

The sun was beginning to fade as we arrived. The narrow, winding mountain roads of the town were lined with small wooden houses. In the doorways of the shops and restaurants, skis stood, dripping wet, the snow slowly melting off of them. A small creek flowed through the town- the water rushing past the snow covered rocks which looked like marshmallow stepping stones across the stream. Coloured snow-plows driven by old, grizzly Japanese men slowly putted about, clearing snow and blocking traffic. Cars with roof-racks, driven by young snowboarders, sped throughout the town, heading home after a long day spent on the mountain. Minakami had everything that a proper skiing village should have. And I wanted to explore! I had my tripod and my camera and sake was flowing through my bloodstream, keeping me warm. What I didn’t have was free time. ‘Eric’s time to explore and take pictures’ was not penciled in on the detailed schedule. The group was waiting.

That evening, before dinner, we went to the onsen. A Japanese onsen is a unique experience. They are gender exclusive; the men and women each having their own separate bath. I’ve heard that the women have tickle fights and splash each other with warm water, but I have not seen for myself. The men, on the other hand, strip naked, wash themselves in a sit-down shower, and then soak in a boiling hot tub. Together. Naked! I wasn’t excited about the idea of getting naked with my fellow male teachers. Let’s just say that Japanese males have an unusual interest in the size of foreign male’s….hmmm… how should I put this delicately… units (but, this will be ‘touched’ upon in an upcoming letter). I figured, ‘when in Rome’ and joined the group. It was a cleansing experience- pun intended- and very relaxing; the hot water fighting away the cold air as we sat in the outdoor, wooden tub, surrounded by snow covered trees, listening to the sound of the flowing creek. And, my coworkers were nothing but perfect gentlemen.

That night, dinner was a feast- Japanese style. It was a 12 course meal; the waitress bringing something new to eat every few minutes. The food was exquisite, but no more satisfying than the Kraft Dinner I had eaten a few nights earlier. We sat around the low wooden table, dressed in our traditional Japanese robes. We drank draft beer, expensive wine, and sake, and ate until we could eat no more. By the end of the second hour, even the alcohol couldn’t combat the discomfort I was experiencing from sitting on the floor for so long. Japanese women can kneel down at the table, with their legs below their bums for more than two hours, without losing functioning in their lower extremities. I can last about 3 minutes before encountering severe discomfort. By the end of the third course, I was sprawled out like a beached whale, my long legs sticking out on the other side of the table, nearly tripping the waitress whenever she passed. I’m sure that the teachers across from me could see up my robe, but I didn’t care. They were drunk anyway.

The wonderful thing about an out of town, super enkai, is that the fun doesn’t end at 8 P.M. when dinner is over. We had an after-party! We all stumbled up to the male teacher’s communal bedroom, a large tatami mat space ideal for a Japanese after-party. One would think that for $400, you would get your own room for the night. But, in true Japanese fashion, we shared a room, and didn’t have Western style beds to sleep in, but thin futon mattresses. All of the teachers crowded into the male’s room, spread themselves out amongst the futons, and drank, pulling cold, snow covered beers from the outdoor balcony as needed.

For the rest of the night, we drank, ate snacks, and watched out the window as a blizzard pounded the quiet town with a heavy snowfall. Well past midnight, when the female teachers had retreated back to their own room, I soaked in the small, private hot-tub on the balcony of our room. Here I was, sitting naked in a hot tub in the cold December air; high up in the mountains, looking at the stars and watching as the snow fell like a million jewels from the sky. And I was drunk.

The next morning, we woke to a town covered with a thick blanket of snow. More than a foot of white powder had fallen during the night, covering cars, resting in thick lumps on the rooftops, and weighing heavily on the Evergreen branches, pushing them towards the ground. The blizzard had also shut down many of the highways, forcing us to take the slow roads home rather than the expressway. Before leaving Minakami, we visited the onsen once more and had a huge Japanese breakfast, with miso soup, rice, and fish; food eerily similar to dinner the previous night. We then slowly made our way home, eventually crawling down and out of the mountains, and back into civilization. More beer was consumed, and, as we neared Tokyo, the snow that covered the ground got thinner and thinner, until finally, there was no snow to be seen at all.

It wasn’t until 7 P.M. that evening that I arrived back home; the bus dropping me off right where I had gotten on the previous day’s morning. I arrived home 3 pounds heavier than when I had left; my stomach full, my mind sore and tired, and my skin as clean as the snow that had fallen from the sky during the night. I also arrived home with a stronger sense of companionship with my fellow teachers. They bid me farewell with broad smiles on their faces, saying that unique Japanese term- “thanks for working so hard!” I was one step closer to being not just an honorary member of the teacher’s group, but a ‘full patch member’. Whether or not I will ever get that badge is still a mystery to me.

So, after it is all said and done, did I have a fun and interesting trip? Yes. Was it worth the money? No. Would I rather give that money to someone who actually needs it and could improve their life with it. Yes. Will I go on the next ridiculously expensive, super enkai trip that my co-workers invite me on? Well…. “I’ll think about it…..”

I spent $400 on a trip to Gunma-ken and all I got were fuzzy memories and this damn blog post!

Office Relations Part 3

2005-12-29T20:37:00.000-08:00

Japanese teachers will not hesitate to tell you how busy they are. They do not complain, because complaining is a sign of weakness, but instead drop subtle hints and reminders of their ever busy schedules. However, it is my impression that they are only ‘artificially’ busy. In their never-ending zest for satisfying their expectations of one another, they have managed to confuse spending long hours in the office with actually working hard. Teachers in Japan are expected to stay at school until 8 p.m. or later, even though, from what I understand, they could leave at anytime after 4 p.m. But, it is their duty to fulfill what is expected of them in their role as a teacher. In other words, they are expected to stick around school until late at night, because that is what they have always done in the past. And, precedent in Japan is a virtually insurmountable obstacle. If a teacher were to leave at 5 p.m. every night, the others would probably talk behind his or her back.

The result of this cultural emphasis on ‘staying in line’ is that the school staff room, at 7:30 p.m., is still filled with teachers, many of whom have been there since 6:30 in the morning. I get the impression that they just sit at their desks and try to look busy; surfing the net for baseball stats, staring endlessly at old lesson plans, downloading the latest ghastly pop-music that this country so efficiently pumps out, and, reinforcing each other’s perceptions of just how busy they are. “Yes, we are very busy. We are teachers. We stay at school until 8 pm, sometimes later. Very busy…yes yes.. very busy indeed.”

But, why does the art teacher have to stay at work until the moon has lifted itself high above our little town? Is he actually planning and revising lesson ideas? “OK… ummm… first…. ahh… show them how to hold the paintbrush….then, uhhh… tell them to paint the still life display… watch them for the next hour, making occasional encouraging remarks… Oh! There just aren’t enough hours in the day to plan this madness!” (NB: the art teacher example was chosen randomly from a wide selection of teachers, and in no way is a stab at art teachers the world over).

In my two schools, there seems to be a daily competition to see who can stay the latest; like a group of stubborn children competing to see who can stand on their head for the longest period of time, no real benefit comes of it, but the winner gains the respect and admiration of the others (or, at least they think they do). Of course, I never stick around the office long enough to find out who wins.

I do feel bad, however, when I leave earlier than the others (am I slowly being socialized into the Japanese culture?!). I’m required to show up at 8 am, and I have to stay until 4 p.m. At 4 p.m., I choose to stick around, visit with the kids and play piano for an hour or two. At around 6 p.m., when I’m getting ready to head home to my cold and forlorn apartment, a surge of guilt passes through my body. Should I stay and pretend to work hard like the others? What will they think of me for leaving early, this outsider with few responsibilities, yet all of the benefits of being a ‘real’ teacher? The guilt wells up inside of me for a brief moment, but it’s never enough to keep me from walking through the staff room door. After all, I am an outsider, and I don’t have to play by their rules.

When leaving before their colleagues, a Japanese worker announces a phrase which translates roughly as an apology for not staying as long as the others. In reply, the other workers shout out a phrase in Japanese which means, “you’ve worked so hard today, thank you!” Another common saying translates as, “you must be tired- you’ve worked so hard!’ This is really just patronizing B.S! It is a very thoughtful gesture to compliment someone in this way, but when it is said day after day, it quickly loses its meaning. For example, I attended a ‘business trip’ not long ago to a school in one of the neighbouring cities. At the school, we sat and watched a teaching demonstration for an hour, and this was followed by a meeting to analyze, point by point, everything that had been observed. Myself, and the other foreign English teachers in attendance however, got to sit in a separate room of our own, where we drank tea and joked about what we thought the Japanese teachers were talking about. Surely their meeting was rife with endless speeches and abundant overanalyzing. Upon our arrival back at our own school, after a comfortable and relaxing ride in the passenger seat of my kyoto sensei’s car, I was bid farewell with that unique Japanese phrase which means ‘thank you for working so hard today.’ “Oh yes,” I thought to myself jokingly, “I am a teacher. I work very hard. I work very hard indeed!” In reality, I have the easiest and most overpaid job that any lazy man could ask for.

In the Japanese office worker’s struggle to prove their dedication to the ‘team,’ their family loses out. Their long days at work are a detriment to their husbands, wives, and children, who often see very little of each other. But, a Japanese office worker’s colleagues are in fact, their ‘second family.’ They spend the majority of their lives together at work, and, in addition, have drinking parties and staff trips after hours in order to increase camaraderie and group cohesion. I’ve been told quite frankly by my kyoto sensei that the teachers “must” spend this time together in order to ensure that they work well as a team. My fellow teachers however, could literally spend three hours less at school each day and still get the same amount of work done. Ahh… inefficiency- so imperceptible to the inefficient.

For such a ground-breaking and advanced nation, there is an incredible amount of inefficiency in Japan. The government, the road system, licensing, the school system; all are subject to vast amounts of paperwork, fact-checking, confirmation, and re-confirmation. Yes, the venomous hands of futility reach far into all aspects of Japanese decision making. Precedence and beauracracy prevent anything from happening in a timely fashion, and ensure that several hours of each person’s day will be time wasted and better spent with family.

Like the teachers, the students have a painfully long day, and spend little time at home. They have a tight schedule during the day, with a ten minute break between each of their six classes. In addition, they have club activity practice twice a day, every day except for Sunday. Every school offers a selection of extra-curricular activities, known as ‘club activities’. Each student is required to select a sport or hobby and practice for several hours each day. The result is that they arrive at school at 7 a.m., and the earliest they will arrive home at night is 5:30 pm. The teachers are expected to teach these different activities, even if they have no prior knowledge of the sport, or any particular skill. In some cases, it is like the blind leading the blind. This ‘club activity’ system is a great idea (and can likely be credited for Japan’s production of great athletes), but they’ve got to cut these kids some slack! Many Japanese people are like Michael Jackson- they never had a childhood.

From what I gather, my students out here in the countryside of Ibaraki have absolutely no social life. They don’t see their friends after school or hang out at the mall. Like their Western counterparts, they don’t sit outside of the 7-11, smoking cigarettes and ‘fishing’ for beer, or set fire to parked cars in acts of civil disobedience. They go home in the evening after school, eat, study, practice an instrument, or watch TV. Many also attend cram school in the evenings, where they study for a few additional hours every night in order to prepare for High School entrance exams (yes, you read that right- getting into your chosen High School is very competitive, and most kids are VERY studious).

In my first month here, I worked with a young girl who was practicing for an ‘interactive forum’ competition, wherein a group of students from schools around the prefecture will sit in a circle and make small-talk, scoring points for their proper demonstration of the English language. To practice, the girl, Mayu, a cute kid with a nice smile and relatively great English, would talk with me within the parameters of a few, pre-determined topics. At one point, we were talking about her friends. She told me about her best friend, who lived in the next town. Mayu hadn’t seen her best friend in 3 months! And this girl lives 15 minutes away! Here we were, in the middle of August, the poor girl’s summer vacation, and she was coming to school once a day for a few hours to study a foreign language. Instead, she could have been hanging out with her best friend, terrorizing the town’s boys and sweltering in the humid Japanese air. What a life! The students have daily homework and studying during their short vacations and then kick off the new school year with a week of testing. They can never escape the pressures and duties that rest so heavily on their shoulders. My friend Seth, a VERY liberal American who teaches nearby to where I live, says that he would rather be a Republican than a Japanese. And that’s saying a lot!

Office Relations Part 2

2005-12-15T20:35:00.000-08:00

Lunch time in a Japanese school is a unique experience, quite unlike that of a Canadian school. Like a proper team, the entirety of the school’s staff and students eat the same meal. Each class eats lunch along with their home-room teacher; the kids taking turns each day to serve the food to their fellow classmates. The staff members who don’t teach a home-room class, eat together, meaning that I have lunch along with the ‘kocho-sensei’ and his band of merry-men. The women staff members who don’t teach a home-room class, eat in a separate room... just like I would imagine they do in Saudi Arabia!

Lunch ladies in Japanese schools have two main jobs; serving the food and drinks, and cleaning the bathrooms. So much for division of labour and specialization! This is not exactly the combination that you would hope for. This is somewhat like being both a town’s health inspector and waste management officer; good results should not be expected! However, the lunch ladies that I have met are very good at their jobs, and never let down the team. An important spoke in the wheel they are, and I do not envy their job in the least.

One of the lunch lady’s central tasks is the all-important distribution of green tea. If there is a fuel that enables the office workers of Japan to work their 12 to 14 hour shifts, day in and day out without complaint, that fuel is green tea. Drinking green tea in Japan is expected. I have not met a Japanese adult who does not drink it. In the morning, upon my arrival at school, there is always a piping hot cup of green tea on my desk, placed there by the lunch lady, who scurries around, tray in hand, filling and refilling mugs and distributing them to the thirsty teachers. At lunch, my mug is once again waiting for me on the table, filled with the hot, bitter, green liquid. I have never been offered green tea. I am simply given green tea. I drink it everyday. But, I can’t even say that I like it.

The lunch lady at one of my schools dresses up like a surgeon before preparing and serving our lunch. She has an all-white outfit, complete with a flowing apron, a face mask that covers all but her eyes, and, not only a hair net, but a ‘babushka’ type kerchief that keeps her hair from falling into our food. Meals are typically quite good, but not always the healthiest. There is often some type of fried mystery meat staring up at me from my plastic plate, daring me to stab my chopsticks into its battered, crispy coating. At other times, the menu includes small fried fish, heads, tails, and everything in between, dripping in sauce; their glass-like, fishy eyes, like the famous eyes of Mona Lisa, watching you from any position in the room, as if to beg for last minute, lunch-time mercy. Mmmm... tasty fish eyes! No, it’s not all sushi and tempura here in Japan!

To wash down the ever-exciting school lunch, staff and students each enjoy their own small carton of milk. There is something bizarrely humorous about watching ‘the coach’ (kocho-sensei), a grown man and the recipient of my town’s utmost respect, sucking on the straw of a small milk box, slurping its contents down to the last creamy drop. ‘Ahhh...If only you could see yourself now…’

The table manners of the Japanese people are unusual considering their high regard for polite and non-offensive interaction. On days when soup or Ramen (Chinese style noodles) are served for our school lunch, the building’s walls reverberate with the objectionable sound of 300 Japanese people simultaneously slurping from their plastic dishes. My posse of student-less staff members, gathered in our cramped lunch room (where I’m convinced the sign on the door reads, in Kanji: ‘No Girls Allowed’), hold their bowls to their mouths and cunningly use their chopsticks to shovel the food into their awaiting bellies. Dishes do not have to remain on the table while eating, but can be lifted to one’s lips for a quicker devouring of the meal. Grunts, slurps, grumbles, and groans can be heard, interspersed with off-colour, ‘mouth-full of food’ conversation; the one dialect of Japanese that is consistent in all corners of these scattered islands. “Mmmhhr mmrr mystery meat mmrrhha tasty mmrrhh, no?!” Elbows, however, may NOT rest on the table edge, because, well, that would just be plain rude. So far, I have withheld the urge to adopt this custom of slurping and scarfing, fearing that upon my return to Canada I will be shunned to the cellar, or, worse yet, the children’s table, for my meals.

When lunch is finished, the ‘kocho-sensei’ doesn’t clean up his own dishes like the rest of us. No, such peasant labour is far below his elevated status. He leaves his dishes and garbage on the table, allowing the other teachers to scramble after him, cleaning up the remains of his meal. What kind of grown man can’t clean up his own mess? He also never answers the phone. It will be sitting beside him, ringing incessantly, but he won’t lift a finger, reminding me of the father of my host-family, who would beckon his wife to do everything but sprinkle the salt on his own food.

Lunch time in a Japanese school is always followed with a good ol’ communal brushing of the teeth. Both staff and students stand along the trough-like sinks and brush their fangs; a practice that is well-intentioned yet, for many, ‘too little, too late’. Unfortunately, despite Japan being the second richest country in the world, it has failed its people in terms of proper dental care. Some of my students, and I am not exaggerating when I write this, have lost most, or all, of their teeth. I have students with huge gaps in their mouths where there should be pearly whites. Others have jagged, blackened, rotting remnants of teeth, sure to fall out in the coming years. These are 13 and 14 year old kids for Christ’s sake! And they will probably never get them fixed!

After spending a fair bit of time in Tokyo, I can say that this seems to be more of a problem in the countryside. It can be largely attributed to a lack of fluoride in the drinking water, but may also boil down to a cultural de-emphasis on spending money on such things as dental care. Braces are an extreme rarity amongst my students, despite the fact that over 80% of them, if living in Canada, would have metallic smiles. Perhaps many of these farming families simply can’t afford the high costs of dentists and orthodontists. Regardless, it is always sad to see a 13 year old kid who is afraid to look you in the eye.

Take care of those chompers!

Office Relations Part 1

2005-12-02T20:33:00.000-08:00

If you are from outer-space (or Canada), and you have no idea what Japan is all about, visiting a Japanese workplace might give you the general drift, even though only a small fragment of this outlandish country’s culture may be on display at any given time in a working office. The office workers aren’t wearing kimonos or having sword fights. The women aren’t dressed as geishas, hiding their faces behind colourful fans, and the men aren’t pounding back sake and belting out ‘hits of the 80’s’, somehow still popular in Japan. But, the occasional employee will be wearing one of those unique Japanese face masks, which in itself speaks volumes about these considerate and unwavering people (or is it ‘overly loyal’ and ‘afraid of failing to meet the team’s expectations’?).

Regardless, whether you are deep in the dark bowels of your favourite car company’s office buildings, or in the design rooms of the world’s leading technology companies, where clone-like ‘salarymen’ labour away, inventing revolutionary gadgets, yet are still unable to control the temperature in the room, the Japanese workplace will give you a somewhat accurate first impression of this unparalleled country’s people.

Being that the school staff room is the only Japanese office where I have spent a considerable amount of time, it is this which I will describe to you. The Japanese school staffroom is a small, microcosm of the society in general, complete with an established and unbreakable order of hierarchy, excessively formalized greetings and interactions, and an unwarranted amount of dry, long-winded speeches, much of which I don’t understand, leaving my imagination to fill in the blanks…. “we must fight hard today, team! We must not let our guard down! We will persevere, using strength and spirit to make it through another trying day of labour, teaching our students the knowledge that our forbearers passed down to us, because…. the future of Japan depends on it!”

This is how every morning starts for me at school. On special occasions, the speeches are even longer and somehow more capable of inducing REM sleep; the microphone being passed from one person to the next, each probably re-iterating what the last said until the top of the hierarchy gets his (yes, ‘his’, not ‘her’) chance to address the lowly masses (“uhh… ya, like the last few guys said, we must.. uhh.. use our courage and will-power to make this the best damned children’s play since the Meiji period! The future of Japan depends on it!”). In all honesty, I have not attended a single party, social, or school function in Japan which was not preceded and concluded by a succession of speeches, endless bowing, and an assortment of un-necessary formalities. They can’t even get drunk without first having a little group-think session. “Ahem… I just want to make sure that we’re all on the same page here team…we’re going to get really drunk now, aren’t we? Are there any dissenters within our ‘circle of trust’? ”

In addition to the unwarranted abundance of workplace ceremonies, the Japanese school system is quite unlike that of my home country. For instance, it is not the students who move from one class to the other, but rather, the teachers. The result is that the teachers don’t have a cushy desk in their own classroom, but instead share one large office. While Canadian schools have comfortable teacher’s lounges where the staff sit on plush couches and relax, away from the clutter of their workspaces, Japanese teachers have no such place to kick back and take a break. They have only a crowded communal work-room; the walls lined with rusted cabinets containing files which date back to pre-World War II; inspirational phrases, written on tattered and sun-bleached poster-boards, loom threateningly above their heads, serving as a constant reminder of their duty to the team; and, like a complex war-plan, schedules of all kinds are written out in grid-like patterns on the numerous blackboards, outlining, minute by minute, what seems to be the next year of our school life together.

At the front of the staff room, the top members of the staff hierarchy sit in a row, overlooking the teacher’s desks like honourable military generals looking down upon their loyal foot soldiers. From here, the daily morning ‘debriefing’ is given. In the middle of this succession of middle-aged Japanese men (rarely does a woman advance far enough in her career to sit with the ‘big dogs’, but it does happen), sits the ‘kocho-sensei’, a position roughly equivalent to ‘principal’ in North America. However, the ‘kocho-sensei’ has a hell of a lot more power and respect than his North American counterpart.

In Japan, a teacher is a very highly regarded role in society, much more so than in North America. The ‘kocho-sensei’, moreover, gets roughly twice the respect that a regular teacher does, leaving you to imagine how these guys are treated in Japanese society. They are addressed always as ‘kocho-sensei’ and are never referred to by name. “Yes, kocho-sensei… ok, kocho-sensei...,” I can hear the teachers groveling throughout the day, likely agreeing to shine his shoes or light his cigarettes. I however, being an ‘outsider’, don’t have to play by the Japanese rules. After bonding with my kocho sensei at a teacher’s party, where he drunkenly laid his head on my shoulder after a little too much sake, I now just call him ‘the coach’, and we give each other high-fives, ‘bear-growls’ and ass slaps in the hallways. Ok, maybe not the ‘bear-growls’….

Sitting next to the ‘kocho-sensei’ at the front of the teacher’s room are his right hand men; the ‘kyoto-sensei’, or vice-principal, also referred to, not by name, but by status, and an assortment of other ‘executives’, caught in a hierarchical limbo, somewhere between ‘teacher’ and ‘upper management.’ Adjacent to the teacher’s room is the ‘kocho-sensei’s private office. This is a spacious and comfortable dwelling, complete with a curtained-window in the door, which serves to add a certain mystique to the goings-on of this abode; an office so symbolic of success in the Japanese working society; a room with a desk where all teachers (except me) strive to sit. My theory is that the ‘coach’ spends his long days hidden within the office’s anonymity, playing naked tic-tac-toe with the secretary and re-working past, inspirational speeches. Ahhh… what a life when you’re at the top!

Race Cars, Robots, and Coloured Baloons

2005-11-28T20:23:00.000-08:00

This past weekend, I accepted an invitation to get together with my host family. I wasn’t really sure what the weekend’s plans entailed, but I figured, “what the hell, how bad can it be?” I woke up early Saturday morning (many hours earlier than one should get up on a Saturday), and drove to their house. As soon as I had arrived, their son and I had once again set out the door; jumping into his Volkswagen Jetta, and departing down the crowded, narrow roads that criss-cross this country in such confusing patterns.

We slowly made our way out of the sprawling city of Mito and into the serene countryside, where small traditional Japanese houses stand amongst the fields and orchards; vegetables hanging in the sun to dry, and washing pinned on the clotheslines, blowing in the wind. We followed the gentle, winding roads towards the edge of Ibaraki Prefecture and into neighbouring Tochigi, passing alongside the beautiful golden hills as we drove. The trees, which covered the small mountains like a wonderfully painted quilt, were coloured red, green, yellow, orange, and everything in between. They were caught in the early morning’s light, creating an eye-pleasing brilliance; the rolling hills resembling thick drops of swirling, colourful paint on a painter’s palette. It was a beautiful morning.

We were heading to ‘Twin Ring Motegi’, the second biggest and most famous racing circuit in Japan. The race track is only a small part of this enormous park, which is home to amusement rides, go-carts, children’s play areas, and several interactive displays. Every year, ‘Twin Ring Motegi’ is the site of various festivals and attractions, including Formula 1 racing (I could have had my picture taken alongside the cardboard cutout of world famous race-car driver, and fellow Canadian, Jacques Villeneuve, but I passed on the opportunity- and now I’m kicking myself!).

On the day that I attended ‘Twin Ring Motegi’, the attraction did not involve grossly overpaid men driving fast cars in a big circle. As exciting as that sounds, I was not fortunate enough to witness it (although I did watch some turbo-charged Honda Civics race around the course, the drivers of which were trying to prove themselves so that they too can one day become grossly overpaid men driving fast cars in a big circle). Michael Schumacher was NOT scheduled to make an appearance on this day, and I was NOT penciled in to race him in my small Nissan March, and then laugh about it with him afterwards over beers. None of this, unfortunately, was in the cards for me on this warm and gorgeous November day.

The attraction on this day was the Honda Hot Air Balloon World Grand Prix, a globe-trotting competition involving some of the world’s best balloonists. The competitors travel the world, making stops in different countries to compete with each other on a variety of tasks. One of the stops was ‘Twin Ring Motegi’, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, and I, by a mix of fate, language based confusion as to what the weekend’s plans were, and general indifference, was lucky enough to be in attendance.

“How in the hell do balloonists compete?” you ask. So did I. There are a number of different skill testing competitions involving the hot air balloonists dropping balls onto targets from above, racing towards pre-determined markers, and using large swords to slash each other’s beautifully coloured balloons in an attempt to send their opponents crashing to the hard, unforgiving earth (ok, I made that last one up, but it would sure make things a bit more exciting!).

Balloonists, contrary to the common misperception, are NOT the most exciting people in the world. Yes, you have been lied to. Balloonists are WWOBs. That is, they are White, Wealthy, Old, and Boring. The ‘ballooning fanatics’, who follow the balloon pilot around the world in his conquest for fame and fortune, drive cautiously around the competition grounds, riding in their Honda minivans, the windows of which are plastered with “I Love Ballooning” stickers. They stand in small circles and speak excitedly in British accents (whether fake or real) about the wind and heat currents and other such things that are of interest to balloonists, but are sadly taken for granted by people like myself. They wear ‘flack’ jackets, aviator sunglasses, and funny little caps on their heads, as if it were actually they who are flying a mile above ground in the peaceful sky, looking down on the tiny houses and people of the world, rather than just driving around in pursuit of a dream. And yes, there are ‘balloonist groupies.’ And boy, let me tell you, they are wild and crazy!

We arrived at ‘Twin Ring Motegi’ at 9 am that morning. This, it turns out, was far too early; even earlier than the ‘balloonist fanatics’, who were probably still languishing away in their hotel rooms, recovering from a long night of hard drinking and wild women (or maybe it was just a really competitive game of Scrabble and a little too much Green Tea flavoured ice cream). Regardless, the only people at the competition grounds at this time were a bunch of young families, who were shelling out $10 a pop to sit in a hot hair balloon that was suspended 20 feet off of the ground. It didn’t seem like much of a thrill to me. But, I must admit, there is a little bit of ‘balloonist fanatic’ inside of me. I would love to float through the clouds in the comfortable basket of a coloured balloon, a warm blanket around me and some aviator glasses and a funny cap on my head. But, I’d rather do this over the plains of the Serengeti or over the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta. Not 20 feet over the cold asphalt of a Japanese parking lot in late November.

The Motegi racing circuit is sponsored and operated by Honda. The grounds are plastered with the colossal company’s advertising, the latest slogan being “Do you have a Honda?” (In other words, “If you don’t own a Honda, buy one now you fool, or you will die, having led a lonesome and unfulfilled life"). And, what would a famous racing circuit in Japan be if it didn’t have a museum honoring the sponsoring company? In the true sense of propaganda and ‘in your face’ commercialization, the Honda company has a museum dedicated to its greatness, reminding visitors just how bleak the world would be if it were not for Honda. The building is filled with perfectly restored models of every engine bearing machine that the historic company has ever manufactured. Unfortunately, I have no interest whatsoever in the combustible engine or any machine that contains one. Furthermore, I find museums to be incredibly boring and I can’t stay in one for more than 30 minutes without becoming bored stiff. So, you would think that I would be quite jaded by a museum dedicated to the all-powerful Honda engine, right? Well I was. Not since visiting the ‘Steinbach Museum of Scissors and Other Cutting Tools’ have I been so bored.

After a mad dash through the museum, we made our way through the festival grounds, where brightly dressed Japanese dancers ate hot dogs and sipped on Coca-Cola. In addition to the Hot Air Balloon Grand Prix, a Japanese festival was taking place at Motegi on the same day. We watched the performers as they danced in unison and waved giant flags above their heads. Little kids, their faces covered in make-up, and dressed in sparkling outfits, ran around the festival site, between the vendor’s stalls; laughing and enjoying life. We crossed the festival site and warily weaved through crowds of children, each vying for a chance to smash into their friends and family members while riding on high powered, Honda bumper cars. We then entered a building that is home to the world famous robot, and pride of the Honda Corporation, 'Asimo'.

Asimo is a short, human-like collection of nuts and bolts. He stands only 4 feet tall, and yet is a powerful symbol of Honda’s ability to take over the world, if and when desired. The small, steel robot boy can talk, dance, walk up and down stairs, and wave his hands carelessly in the air; all of which do a convincing job of making you think that he really knows what’s going on.

We found a spot amongst the crowd who had gathered to watch the marvels of modern technology. A bus load of French tourists gasped, muttering “Mon dieu!” under their collective breath, when Asimo shook his booty to the music. A group of tiny Japanese school children laughed with glee when the robot walked down the stairs without crumpling into a ball of twisted metal, and then said one of his quirky, pre-programmed phrases. I, however, being exhausted from my early start at the morning, began to drift into a light sleep during the climax of the show; my mind wandering into a creative, sleepy frenzy. I began to imagine what life is like for Asimo when he’s not standing rigidly under the hot lights of the stage. I pictured him backstage before the show, sitting before his round light bulb encircled mirror, staring into his beady robot eyes, and wondering if life is still worth living. A Japanese woman gingerly applies ‘Robot Oil’ to his solid casing as the young android downs the remains of his Jack Daniel’s Whisky. A cigarette dangles dangerously at the edge of his robot lips; hot burning pieces of tobacco falling onto his metal torso, leaving black marks; reminders of his troubled existence. “Why did you create me?!” he yells, his head tilted towards the roof and his jagged and clumbsy arms reaching towards the heavens. The show producer, a young woman barely out of college, wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard, comes to the door of his dressing room and knocks quietly, knowing full well the furious robot rage that can erupt from the small boy-like machine at any time. “Asimo! Please, they are waiting! The show must go on!” Asimo throws the empty whisky bottle in her direction, shattering it just above her head; tiny pieces of glass flying in all directions. “Leave me alone!” he yells in his monotonous, robotic voice. He stares back into the mirror, and a small oily tear wells up in his glass, lens-like eyes. “The show must go on….” he says quietly to himself. “The show must always go on…” And then I woke up and the show was over.

After the robot demonstration, we made our way to the site of the day’s balloon skill competition. At this point, I still had no idea of what to expect from the so called ‘Grand Prix’ of ballooning. We stood beside an open field, lining up with the countless others; ballooning fanatics, photographers, local Japanese people – an eclectic mix. We waited patiently and I wondered what I had gotten myself into. “When is this day going to end?” I thought to myself as the sun sat motionlessly over the horizon, as if it would never go to sleep for the evening. Just as all hope was about to be lost, a beautiful balloon appeared in the sky, over the trees and houses, floating gently in our direction. And then another. And another. Within a matter of minutes, the late afternoon’s blue sky was filled with spectacular hot air balloons, creating a rainbow of vivid colours. A total of 40 balloons floated at various altitudes in all directions above our heads, creating an awesome spectacle. They took turns zooming down towards the field, at which point the pilot would launch a weighted ribbon from his basket in an attempt to land it within a certain area and score points. It was impressive. If a war breaks out, requiring us to use hot air balloons to drop rocks onto the heads of our enemies, I now know where to find the pilots.

As we watched, I heard the adorable, high pitched voice of a Japanese child. She was saying different words in English, as if to get my attention. “Hello!” she shrieked in a shrill voice, followed by “Balloon!” and “Red!” I turned to see who was making all of the fuss. Amongst the crowd, I spotted a cute, Japanese girl in her mother’s arms. She would yell some basic word in English and then giggle uncontrollably and hide her face against her mother. After a few minutes of this, I walked over to say hello. She was a five year old girl who had already, at such a young age, begun studying English one evening a week. She was dressed in a pink and red outfit, and had several ‘ballooning themed’ pins on her jacket. I spoke with her and her mother, practicing my Japanese and teaching them new words in English. Together, we watched the balloons as they sped towards the field. The young girl would shout out the colour of each in English, and I would follow suit, doing the same in Japanese.

Japanese children are perhaps the cutest creatures that have ever graced the face of the planet; cuter even than new-born, fluffy kittens and little puppies who are just learning to walk. Not yet properly socialized to the sometimes bizarre Japanese cultural customs, the children will shout, attack, point their fingers in your direction, and stick their tongues out at you – things that I sometimes wish the adults would do a little more often.

The highlight of the weekend arrived with a bang later that evening. After the sun had gone down and the tall flood lights lit up the wide open festival grounds, crowds of spectators gathered in the stands overlooking the race track. One by one, white vans arrived on the track below and began unloading the hot air balloons. Within half an hour, once the crowds were thick and the air was cool, all 40 of the teams had set up their airships. For the whole length of the race track, the 40 balloons stood, side by side; some hunched over like old Japanese ladies, not yet full of hot air, others standing tall and wide, their gas burners blazing, creating flashes of luminous colour. Once all of the balloons were standing erect, the flood lights were shut off and the area was covered in a thick darkness. Then, after a short countdown, the burner of each of the 40 balloons was turned on at once and a massive fireworks display lit up the night sky. It was spectacular! I, along with hundreds of other Japanese photographers, had my tripod set up in the stands. I shot nearly a roll of film of the beautiful fireworks exploding above the massive, coloured balloons. Every few seconds, the pilots would turn on their balloon’s burners, creating a strobe light effect as the 40 balloons, standing gracefully in a long procession, took turns flashing rapidly between darkness and brilliant coloured light. It was one of the most beautiful things that I have ever seen.

And who said that balloonists don’t know how to have fun?!

The Big One?

2005-11-15T20:21:00.000-08:00

Last night, around 8:30 pm, I was my apartment when a massive earthquake suddenly struck. The whole building began to shake beneath me. At first, it felt like any of the previous large earthquakes that I have experienced here. It then began to rapidly increase in intensity. Normally, I just sit wherever I am when the quake strikes, and wait for it to pass; a look of shocked excitement on my face. This time however, after quickly realizing that this was a huge earthquake, I jumped to my feet and ran to the doorway of my bathroom, the most solid doorway in my apartment. I waited there, watching and listening as everything in my apartment shook; the dishes rattling on the rack, my bookshelves swaying and rocking, nearly falling over, and my kitchen appliances coming alive, vibrating rhythmically with the shaking earth, as if they wanted to dance across the floor. I honestly believed that my two-story building was going to collapse!

After experiencing six or seven earthquakes out here so far, for the first time, I must admit, that I was scared. My emotions crossed that fine line between fascinated excitement and fear. Any potentially dangerous activity can be enjoyed up until a certain point, at which time it becomes scary. Sure, running with the bulls in Spain would be fun – until you see one of the massive beasts closing in on you, its eyes zeroed in on your ass, and its horns lowered, ready to gouge through your body. At that point, you become scared. Of course sky-diving would be an awesome thrill. But, when you realize that your parachute isn’t opening, and the cars on the highways below you are quickly become larger and larger as you plummet towards the earth, you’ve crossed that line between excitement and fear. The earthquake last night was the in the same vein. The previous earthquakes were exciting and interesting; something that I had never experienced before. The one last night was dangerously scary.

The worst part was that I was in my boxer shorts and a t-shirt when it hit, almost all of my clothes being in the wash. No socks on, no sweater; ‘what if I have to quickly run outside, out into the cold, rainy evening?’ Thankfully, after close to 40 seconds of extreme shaking, the earthquake began to dissipate, and I was left standing, half naked like a fool, under the frame of my bathroom door. Realizing that I was safe, my nervousness quickly changed back to excitement.

Today, I found out that the earthquake’s epicenter was North of where I live, just off the coast. At the epicenter, the earthquake measured as a 6.3 on the Richter Scale, making it about a 5 in my town.

I don’t have a big fear of earthquakes. They always provide for a thrilling few minutes in my day. However, I just don’t want to be sitting in my rickety, cockroach riddled apartment, dressed in my boxer shorts, and worrying about the roof caving in when the big one hits.

Japanese Face Masks... And Not Just The Doctors Are Wearing Them

2005-10-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

Unique, colourful, rigid, powerful, impenetrable, ancient...

These are only a few of the words that could be used to describe Japanese culture. From the distinctive melodies of Okinawan music to the beautiful tattoos of the Yakuza gangsters, Japanese culture is alive and vibrant, likely celebrated as much today as it was during the country’s years of isolation from the world. It was during these years of seclusion that the many glorious cultural traditions of Japan flourished and developed, eventually shaping into today’s familiar forms.

Language, art, theatre, samurai, folk tales… Japanese culture, along with the people of this tiny island nation, has found its way from the mountainous confines of this previously detached society, to all corners of the Western world; reaching its fingers deep into the fabric of the new world, and laying its roots along with the transplanted cultures of numerous other countries. Japanese culture and influence, both the ways of the past, and the technology of the present, is all around you. Whether you like it or not….

There is one specific aspect of Japanese culture however that has intrigued me immensely since arriving here 3 months ago. It is not the Japanese obsession with karaoke that has perplexed me, nor has it been the delectable cuisine. Similarly, it has not been the beautiful calligraphy, nor the varied assortment of deadly martial arts. No, it has been the Japanese masks that have piqued my interest the most while living in this foreign land.

Now, you may be wondering why I am interested in Japanese masks. Allow me to clarify. First of all, I am not so much interested in these masks as much as I am confused by them. However, the type of mask that baffles me may not be the same type of mask that you are picturing in your mind as you read this. No, it is not the colourful, wooden Kabuki theatre masks or the beautifully painted and carved Noh theatre masks that interest me. They are all well and good. But, it is a different type of mask that I am confused by ….the Japanese face mask.

You may know it as a ‘physician’s mask’, as that is what it was likely originally designed for. Doctors use it, I believe, to keep their germs from transferring to their often ‘immune-vulnerable’ patients. Other professionals have since adopted the mask as well; not to keep the bad things in, but to keep other bad things out. Carpenters and other trades-people, for example, often use the masks to keep tiny, foreign particles of wood and metal from entering their bodies. Likewise, industrial painters have adopted a similar mask to keep the harsh, toxic fumes of vast amounts of paint from intoxicating them and causing potentially un-enjoyable hallucinations (you always have to wonder about the painters who choose not to wear a mask… never trust those beatniks!).

Here in Japan, it is not only those aforementioned professionals who wear these thin, white masks, but also the average Japanese person with as much as a common cold. You see, the Japanese culture is based on a group mentality. The interests of the ‘group’ are always placed before those of the individual. Japanese society has successfully adapted the Japanese people to be so concerned for the health and safety of their co-workers and family, that whenever a Japanese person develops the slightest tickle in their throat, they don the face mask to prevent rapid spread of disease and the potential for reduction in group productivity.

I’m guessing that when the whole theory of germ transfer was being formulated, and doctors in Japan first started to wear the face mask, some clever Japanese patient looked at the mask and thought “well, wouldn’t that be just peachy! Next time I’m sick, I’ll just put on the face mask, and then Yuki won’t get sick as well, and sword production won’t drop below 50 %!”

Well, because of Yuki and his face-mask wearing friend, Japanese people can today be seen in all reaches of society, wearing the mask while performing their daily duties for the group. All too often, a teacher will show up at school with a mask strapped tightly to their face (a la Michael Jackson), making for awkward conversation (and I thought the language barrier was a big enough obstacle…). Kids show up to school wearing the mask. Bus drivers, police officers, homeless people… they’ve all worn the mask at one time or another.

The funniest mask sighting of all however, is the lone person driving in their car, to or from work no doubt, the mask covering all but their eyes and forehead as they putt slowly down the narrow roads. Now, when driving alone, even if deathly ill, could you not just remove the mask until you once again come into contact with a ‘group member’? Couldn’t you just enjoy a few minutes of solitary, mask-free comfort, away from the constant pressures of the group and the endless fear of infection? When alone, just take that mask off… some fresh air would do you some good, you infectious fool!

I would think that when sick, simply covering your mouth when coughing or sneezing would be sufficient to reduce the spread of germs. But, the Japanese people see it differently I guess, and the more power to them for it! When your society places more emphasis on taking care of those around you than it does on physical appearance, it can’t be that bad of a place.

But, don’t get me wrong. Japan isn’t some utopia where everyone cares for their neighbor and physical appearances don’t matter. Sure, the people are very friendly to me, but I have a suspicion that most of them are only willing to offer brief moments of friendliness, and would never truly allow me to be part of their ‘group’. The Japanese perception of foreigners (‘gaijins’ – which basically means ‘outsider’), is a topic for a whole other email. It is, in actuality, a very ethnocentric and xenophobic society. One might even say ‘racist’.

In many respects, Japan is a land of contradictions. They wear the face mask when sick, yet, in 75% of the public washrooms that I’ve been in, there is no soap and no paper towels! You’d think that if you wanted to reduce the spread of disease, the use of soap would be your first barrier of defense. Even countries like Morocco and America are catching on to that little tidbit of information! What good is a face mask if your hands are covered in e-coli bacteria?

But, having said that, the Japanese people rarely, if ever, touch each other. They bow rather than shake hands, and display little to no physical contact. But, there are still the door handles! They’re using the same door handles, aren’t they?!

Furthermore, this can’t truly be a society that is not concerned with physical appearances. This is probably the most materialistic society on earth! It is worse than Hollywood! Japanese people will skimp on food in order to buy their Louis Vutton handbag and their designer clothes! Appearances are everything for young Japanese people! Ask a Shibuya girl what she spends on makeup in one year, and then question whether this is a society un-concerned with physical appearances! They’re just not ashamed to wear a face mask occasionally, that’s all…

One of these days, I think I will spend 24 hours donning a face mask, just to see the reactions that I get. Maybe then I can be part of ‘the group’!

Hey, at least I haven’t been sick yet…. Thanks team!

How To Kill A Cockroach and Other Life Lessons

2005-10-18T19:59:00.000-07:00

Ahhh… humidity! Mother Nature’s double-edged sword. It can be both your friend and foe at the same time. It keeps your skin soft and complexion young. Yet, it can also make the hottest days seem impossibly hotter; so hot and muggy that you’d be willing to join forces with Osama Bin Laden, just to have access to the cool confines of his caves. Thankfully, those hot summer days of Japan have come and gone. The days are now warm, and the early mornings and late nights, cool.

During the hot and humid days of summer, homes in Japan can easily become mold sanctuaries. No food can be left out of the fridge for any extended period of time without it being taken over by colonies of bacteria. Regular cleaning is a must to stay one step ahead of the invisible life forces with whom you unwillingly share your living quarters.

Humid, moldy apartments also happen to be an ideal nesting ground for cockroaches. When I took over my apartment from the last English teacher, I unfortunately inherited a family of these tiny beasts. On occasion, when coming home late at night, I see the filth-loving creatures scurrying across my kitchen floor, back to their nests, hidden deep in the bowels of my apartment. Startled by my arrival home, and threatened by the bright, revealing lights of my apartment, they escape to the protection of the small crevices that we humans don’t even know exist. If you see one cockroach, it probably has 10 friends whom aren’t as slow and stupid, and whom you will never see. Fast and agile, they are, making them nearly impossible to catch.

But, stomping on a cockroach that you witness dashing across your floor is not the proper approach to terminating the infestation anyway. You see, by squashing one of the dirty little bastards, you release its eggs in your apartment, and soon after, you will likely be the legal guardian of its 10 children. There are several proper methods to fighting the war on cockroach terror:

1. ‘Roach Motels: These small traps bait the curious, eternally hungry critters inside where they get stuck on the glue-like floor of the trap. Here, they slowly, but surely starve to death. They can survive more than 2 weeks without food, so be patient. Sure enough, once the cockroach dies, or soon before, its eggs hatch (providing that it is female), and the mother’s carcass is surrounded by numerous little baby cockroaches stuck to the floor of the trap. I shed a tear, and then throw the trap in the trash. If only I could find traps that match the colour of my curtains!

2. Poison: This method tricks the ‘roaches into eating poison disguised as food. Judging by the fact that I occasionally find a dead cockroach lying on my floor, the poison seems to be very effective. But, like using poison to get rid of any pests, you have to question whether you want their bodies decomposing in your home, hidden somewhere where you will never find them.

3. Spray: The best method, but least convenient. The cockroach spray works wonders, but, in order to use it, you have to catch the vermin out in the open. Even then, this stuff is lethal, and I don’t really enjoy spraying it around my tiny apartment.

I’m fully aware of the stigma attached to people who live with cockroaches. These nearly indestructible insects seem to be the standard by which filth is judged, beaten only by rats and wild raccoons in terms of creatures that you don’t want living in the same room where you sleep. Describing a place as having cockroaches tends to sum up the general state of cleanliness. But, before you judge me, consider the humidity, nature’s double-edged sword that breeds all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures that you don’t find in Canada. I am a clean person! I run a clean ship! But, sadly, I have cockroaches. I have put a huge dent in their population, but the war is not won. I blame the humidity! Oh, and the filthy people that lived here before me.

It’s not only small, ghetto style apartments like my own that have cockroach problems. This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to do a homestay in a neighbouring town. I had signed up to stay with a host family in order to learn a bit more about day to day Japanese life. The family that I stayed with were very cool! I had a great time! I got to spend a night in their large, beautiful, hybrid (half Western style, half Japanese style) home. Sure enough, on the bathroom floor sat a little poison dish, waiting to be eaten by an unsuspecting cockroach.

My host family consisted of an 85 year old grandma, a middle-aged couple, and their 28 year old son. The grandma, like most old Japanese women, was not much more than 4 feet tall. When they age, Japanese women begin to hunch over like you wouldn’t believe; more so than any other race that I’ve seen (maybe from all of the bowing??). She spoke to me, a mile a minute, in Japanese, virtually none of which I would understand. She knew that I speak very little Japanese, but would just keep on talking, perhaps oblivious to the fact that I was smiling and nodding not to show comprehension, but just to be polite.

The son was a nice guy. In Japan, it is not unusual for children to live at home well into their 30’s. Many young people in Japan are not marrying these days, resulting in lots of single, young adults living at home with their parents and grandparents. I’m not sure if it is a cause or an effect of living at home until your mid-30’s, but most Japanese my age seem to be very immature. I’ve met many 30 year olds whose cars are covered in pictures of their favourite Disney characters, and who’s cell phones have Winnie The Pooh’s face on the display. Maybe it’s just my false sense of maturity, but is this not strange?

The middle-aged couple were very kind to me, feeding me loads of delicious, home cooked Japanese food and keeping my wine glass full during dinner. They, as well as the son, spoke decent English, allowing us to communicate easily, and also enabling them to teach me lots of Japanese.

Dinner on Saturday night was great! We had a huge Japanese feast, cooking the food on a grill right at the table. “We don’t buy Chinese vegetables in Japan” stated the husband during the meal, a cigarette burning between his fingers. “They are covered in chemicals. You never know what kind of diseases they will give you.” He promptly ground the butt of the cigarette into the ashtray and lit up another, holding it in one hand and his chopsticks in the other. Ironic, no?

It was interesting to note the division of labour in the Japanese home. Rather, the lack of division of labour. The women in Japan do nearly all of the chores. The husband of my host family would sit at the dinner table, and, in the most polite way, would order his wife to fetch one thing, or bring another. Regardless of who was closer to his desired object, he would ask for something to be fetched, and the wife would do so with a smile on her face. After eating dinner on Saturday night, I began to help her clean up the dishes, and she said shockingly, “Japanese men never help with this!”

“Watashi wa Nihon-jin ja arimasen,” I replied, saying that I wasn’t Japanese. “I wish I married a foreigner” she whispered under her breath.

Despite being a typical Japanese man with traditional views of domestic life, the father is a cool guy and an expert potter. Sunday, we spent the whole day in his pottery workshop. The whole family gathered there around the table, wearing smocks and bandanas, moulding clay with their hands. Even grandma hammered away on a chunk of wet clay, making what would eventually become a bowl. The father taught me how to make a coffee cup using the Kasama method (a famous pottery town in my prefecture). On the wall, his work was displayed in rows. His art is really amazing! I look forward to going again and finishing my coffee cup.

That night, I said goodbye to the family, and the son drove me home. There was a matsuri festival in my town during the weekend, so I spent Sunday night walking up and down the streets with some friends, taking in the awesome sights of the festival; traditional, giant wooden carts being pushed and pulled by sake drinking men and women in kimonos, glowing lanterns lining the narrow roads, Japanese people dancing drunkenly in the streets, and every where I turned, a group of my students waving at me and yelling “Eriku!” My sleepy town became alive for a brief moment in time.

Tokyo: Goths, Sumo and the Weirdos they Attract

2005-09-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday, my brother Ian and I took an early bus to Tokyo. We bought an ‘all you can ride’ metro ticket for $7, and spent the day exploring the city. We were there on the day of the national elections (or, ‘erections’ as the Japanese would say), but didn’t notice any unusual tension in the air.

We saw a lot of Tokyo on Sunday, riding the train from one interesting center to the next. We visited the trendy shops of Shibuya, took photos of the gathering gothic girls in Harajuku, and got caught in a rainstorm in Shinjuku. We walked for hours, taking photos of the ever-busy city that is Tokyo. We set up our tripods and took pictures of the massive intersections, where, even on a Sunday, there is a never ending flow of traffic (those on foot, those on bikes, and those in cars).

Every Sunday, dozens of gothic girls gather in Harajuku to have their pictures taken by camera wielding foreigners. The goths range in appearance from some of the freakiest, mask-wearing girls with Marilyn Manson style makeup, to cute teenagers dressed in colourful nurse’s outfits and holding colour coordinated umbrellas (don’t ask me…). As Ian and I walked around, taking in this unique Tokyo sight, we noticed a large man, shabbily dressed and wearing a purple bandana on his head. What caught my attention was the beautiful Rolleiflex camera that he had permanently attached to his eyeball. He would rapidly shoot pictures as one of his many youthful assistants loaded his second camera. When he ran out of film in the camera he was holding, one of his assistants would throw the strap of his second camera around his neck, remove the first camera (as if this guy didn’t have hands of his own), and would quickly repeat the process, ensuring that the photographer always had film to expose.

This intrigued me. Why did this guy have an entourage that rivaled 50 Cent’s in numbers? Who was this strange man that I would have thought to be homeless if it weren’t for the $5000 worth of camera gear clutched between his large, sweaty fingers? I asked one of his posse members who the photographer was. “Bruce Weber” she replied.

“Is he famous?,” I asked.

“Yes,” she said snobbily, as if she didn’t have time to talk to a lowly peasant such as myself. “We’re having a gallery opening. You should come.”

'Not if you’re going to be there', I thought, and walked away.

The name Bruce Weber sounded familiar to me, but it didn’t sink in at first. Later, Ian looked up his name. It turns out that he is one of the most famous fashion photographers of all time. He has taken pictures of Madonna, Johnny Depp, Kate Moss and every other celebrity who has had more than 15 minutes of fame. His forte however, seems to be nude males and dogs. This has been a running joke for Ian and I ever since. I wish that I could say that Bruce Weber asked me what kind of film I was shooting that day, or how I thought he should compose his next picture. Hell, I even wish I could say that he asked Ian and I to pose topless, holding Cocker Spaniels in our bare arms, but he didn’t. Oh well. And somehow life goes on….

At 4 pm we made our way to the sumo arena in Ryoogoku, passing huge kimono clad men on the way; their long greasy hair slicked back, their traditional Japanese wooden slippers clip clopping on the cement sidewalks, and the smell of baby powder lingering in the air as they passed. A prestigious sumo tournament is being held in Tokyo for the next two weeks, and Ian and I had tickets to watch the action on the first day. We made our way to a couple of seats that we had reserved for ourselves earlier that morning.

Sitting a few seats over from us was a guy of roughly our age, dressed in a messy t-shirt and camouflage pants. His hair was frizzy and unkempt, and he had a thick, bushy beard. Before long, he was talking our ears off; his thick Scottish accent, which I usually find calming, became annoying very quickly. The guy had been in Japan for a week, but talked to me as if he were an expert on all things Japanese, and I had just arrived yesterday. “You’ll like this place,” he said in his thick drawl. “There’s a lot of stuff to do here.” Thanks buddy…

He talked to us for most of the remaining bouts, giving us his impressions of Tokyo. He threw out several memorable lines such as: “It’s the only city where you can buy life size blow up Batman dolls, Star Wars characters, and child pornography in the same store.” His favourite things in Tokyo were Pachinko halls (Japanese gambling), Tokyo Disney, and the fast food restaurants. I told him how disgusted I was by Pachinko halls, describing them as hell on earth, full of loud, annoying machines, clouds of cigarette smoke, and compulsive gamblers. He then told us that he was addicted to gambling. Awkward…. I told him that he should pick up smoking as well. To make a long story short, this isn’t a guy that I would like to be stuck in a room with, let alone a massive, Japanese style Sumo arena. I think he spent the majority of his time in Tokyo riding the Tea-Cups at Tokyo Disney and scarfing down Japanese hamburgers. 'Twas a very cultural experience, lad!

Also sitting near us in the stands was a strange Japanese lady who was holding two dolls, both the size of real babies. She was cuddling them, holding them gently in her arms, and rocking them back and forth. The dolls had their own carriage, and she treated them delicately. This lady was wacko! You didn’t even have to talk to her to be sure! She was all alone (go figure!), taking in the sumo event with her two little baby dolls. And one of the dolls was a white child! Very unusual! She’s probably one of those people who still believes Michael Jackson just likes to hang around with children.

The sumo wrestling was a very cool Japanese experience. The bouts were on average extremely short, some of them lasting less than one second. The loser is the first person to leave the ring or touch any part of their body other than the bottom of their foot against the canvas. In some matches, one of the contestants was knocked out almost instantaneously. Those weren’t the exciting matches. Several of the bouts, however, were quite thrilling; watching as the two wrestlers slammed head first into one another and then used all of their power to resist being thrown from the ring. In some cases they fell hard, the sound of the thud reaching the upper deck, where we were sitting uncomfortably close to a Scottish gambling addict and a delusional mother of two plastic dolls.

The last fight, between the best sumo wrestler in Japan and his challenger, was the most thrilling that we saw. The fight lasted nearly a minute, which is extremely long for a sumo bout. The underdog began to threaten the undefeated fighter’s chances of winning; pushing him close against the edge of the canvas and throwing all of his weight against him. The undefeated fighter was clearly experienced. He narrowly escaped defeat for most of the bout, standing on the tips of his toes as he withheld the force of a giant man trying to push him off the canvas. It was thrilling! The underdog came so close to winning so many times, but the more experienced fighter managed to somehow stay on the canvas. Finally, the previously undefeated fighter was thrown from the ring. He fell hard down the 2 foot drop and onto the ground. The crowd went ballistic! Everyone in the lower sections of the arena, in an expression of shock at the outcome, threw the cushions that they had been sitting on. The canvas quickly became covered in red seat cushions; some of which hit the winner of the bout as he sat cross legged on his side of the canvas, the look of pride beaming across his face.

For the next few minutes, the arena was abuzz with shocked, shouting spectators. It was like a scene out of the movie Rocky, only a very Japanese version. Watching as hundreds of flat, red cushions floated through the air and landed on and around the canvas was dream-like. Time must have been advancing in slow motion for the winner who had the respect of every single person in the arena. The crowd was amazed that the winner of the previous six tournaments had just lost a bout. The underdog performed a ceremonial dance while the spectators began to file out of the venue. It was a great experience! The next day at school, all of the teachers were talking about it around the green tea cooler. It was a 'green tea cooler' conversation...

When not in Tokyo, we’ve been hanging out in my area. Among other things, we've visited a world-class Aquarium on the ocean where we took in a dolphin show and saw an amazing array of large fish being held captive in tanks far too small for their bodies; and, we had lunch in a small ramen shop where Japan’s slowest, oldest waitress served us and then stared as we slurped our noodles in the empty restaurant. While I spend my days at work, Ian dresses up in his favourite maid’s uniform and cleans my apartment.