On the Bike Again

Saturday I slept wayyy in, given that my opportunities to do so are rare, and then I took a bike ride to Nobetsu. At least I think that’s how far I got, I’m not really sure. It was a new way I’d never taken, and not overly scenic. My goal had been to find a park I’d heard about, but I just ended up riding along the ocean. It’s probably the same way at home, but I can’t help but feel like there’s so much wasted ocean space. There are so many factories, condemned buildings, and crap lots lining the ocean, there’s very little room for scenic views, restaurants, homes, and parks. It’s kind of depressing.

Still, I went past some interesting business signs that I’ll have to return and take pictures of. 1) A really cute cat logo that looks like batman if he were a mother cat carrying her baby, 2) an Engrish car dealership called “Person’s Car,” and an Engrish grocery store called, “Nose. Fast kitchen.”

I passed some giant stone gate and got all excited like maybe it was a park or some historic remnant they built the town around – but as it turns out it was the overclocked entrance to a pachinko parlor. Eventually I just pulled off onto a beach behind an old building somewhere; it was a nice ride but I wanted some pictures – Silver Week was almost over!! I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be along the ocean in these places, there’s so damn many factories, it’s difficult to know what’s private property and what’s not. I figured this place was safe though, since it was mostly parking lot. It was kind of pretty, but everything was too far away to get decent angles. There were surfers in the water, and more of them appeared once the tide started coming in with huge pulsing waves.

When I saw two bikers take off down past where I’d come in and further down the coast, I decided I too could do it without getting into any trouble. Then I had a moment of panic, as I turned back to the parking lot and my bike (with my purse in the basket!) was nowhere to be seen. I racked my mind for a minute on the possibilities, refusing to believe that it had been stolen – “Maybe someone moved it…” “Maybe that wasn’t *really* where I’d parked it…” and my mind kept insisting there was another reason I couldn’t see it, even though I couldn’t think of any. Please god don’t let it have been stolen!!

As it turned out, the wind knocked it off its kickstand and into some bushes. Thank god.

I passed big water barriers, condemned rusted ladders, and various other actualizations of garbage and abandonment, following the trail to the dead end where the 10 foot drop I’d been lording over merged into a ramp of sand. It was a cool place to be and in light of all the discarded junk, it wasn’t so dirty or dank. Learning my lesson from Friday evening, I stripped off my socks and heels, passed maybe a little too close to a junkyard for Japanese standards, and went down to the beach. There was a metal pipe sticking out of the sand, god knows what it was for, and just as I got it in my head that I wanted to actually stick my toes in the ocean, since I’ve been here two months and haven’t done it, I noticed the beach was literally hopping with bugs. Having no idea what they were and since they had some good parasitic spring to them, I decided to make my time scarce and not to go in the water. It was starting to cool off and my beautiful fall day turned into a chilly autumn night with a long bike ride home, so I snapped some quick shots and headed back to the pier.

I thought I’d take the opportunity to get “industrial” in my photography, but before I really had the chance, my camera battery died and I’d forgotten to charge my spare, so my photo quest was over. The sun began to set, and I guess that meant the abalone silk that materialized where the ocean had been was just a personal sunset for me that day.

I’m not sure how far I biked since I stopped so frequently for pictures, but I think it was somewhere around an hour and half round trip. Close and far, long and short, it always feels different when you’re not on a time schedule. On my way home I thought I deserved some beverage (Hungarian-inspired Japanese yogurt mango/peach juice? Lol) and some apples. When I got home, I had my first real independent experience with garlic. I like garlic, but I’m very sensitive to it. I’m not sure if I did it right, but my kitchen still smells like it but my breath doesn’t, so I’m going to assume that yes, I did. I also had my first experience with “powdered cheese,” which I guess is supposed to be grated parmesan, but I’m not convinced. Still, it was good. I made eggplant pasta with bean sprouts and it was very much delicious :)

I went to bed at 11, which is about 2 hours earlier than normal, but still it wasn’t early enough because I had to be up at 5 AM to meet Mochi and his friends at 7-11. Damn.

Never Miss the Boat

Getting up at 5 was a beast, but I really didn’t want to be late so I sucked it up. I’ve been late for these people often enough. I put on some clothes that I thought would be warm enough for a Muro autumn morning (wrong!), and raced my bike off to the 7-11 to be picked up. It was only about a 5 minute walk from my house, but I guess that shows how much those extra minutes mattered to me. As it turned out, I waited for about 10 minutes before a solitary woman in a car showed up, flagging me down. I figured since this was Japan and nobody else knew my plans at 6 AM, she was probably not an assassin or abductor. I asked her her name and made a big show about meeting her for the first time and didn’t really understand what she was trying to express to me until I realized it was Megu, the woman who’s birthday I’d helped celebrate at the end of August >,< I was so embarrassed! Still, I didn’t feel like it was too much my fault, since the last time I’d seen her she had been really tired and quiet, wearing glasses, and being otherwise mousey in every way, whereas today she was very beautiful and relatively chatty.

As it turned out, The Actress had been running late, so it threw us all out of whack (I was supposed to be picked up last but instead was picked up first, and late at that), so then we picked up Mochi, and then we went back for The Actress. So much for me feeling bad about ever being late - at least when I was late I wasn’t an inconvenience, I was mostly late on account of work, and I arrived within 10 minutes of the time I was supposed to be there. She was rockin’ closer to a half an hour and she definitely wasn’t coming home from work at 6 AM. Not to say my lateness is ok, but comparatively…y’know.

Turns out Mochi lives in the next neighborhood from mine, one I’d discovered on my bike ride the day before. Together the four of us drove to a Lawson’s and picked up the 2nd in command from the jazz cruise, a dweeby dude who is really nice but whose name I don’t think I ever learned. We went to the shrine in old downtown so that we could get our samurai garb on >:D Walking in, it was the coolest shit I’ve ever seen and I really think the family in charge lives there, which sets of fantasies of shrine life in my mind. So much beauty and style in one building! A tatami and shouji dream!

Admittedly there was some awkwardness for me in the dressing process, since I was always only about 3/4 of the way informed on account of the language gap. This was most awkward when the old man at the shrine kept implying that I needed to change some of my clothes to put on the samurai outfit, and I wasn’t sure if he meant now, later, here, in another room, and what parts. As it turns out, I did had understood everything he was saying, the only problem was that I was hesitant because I hadn’t known that he was the one dressing us (kind of important, perspective-wise!). Also, as I remarked in earlier entries, in Japan it’s okay for high school kids to strip down to their skivvies in front of each other, including the opposite sex, but the same is also true for adults. Nobody expected me to strip down in front of the dudes, being all foreign and everything, but it did throw me off a little.

In the end, I worked out a sweater/leggings combination out of the clothes I’d been wearing and I’m old enough and comfortable enough with myself that most of my awkwardness didn’t come from being indecently exposed, but from worries about whether or not I’d make a faux pas by doing it surrounded by the wrong people, since I didn’t know the culture.

Anyway, everything was fine, just culturally amusing, and in the end I got to wear the Taisho (captain) uniform while my three friends wore more brightly colored, less authentic looking ones. Mochi and me had a little too much leg showing on the bottom on account of our heights, The Actress had a little too much on the floor, but Megu’s was just right. We also got to carry real katanas (though not sharpened) and that was pretty effin’ sweet. I guess it’s fairly common for shrines to have stocks of period costumes in their closets. Cool.

So the four of us, completely dressed as samurai, piled into a car and drove across the big famous bridge in my city that I hadn’t been on yet. The port was gorgeous, seeing as it’s all wonderful ocean lined with soft blue mountains along the entire horizon across the bay. We also stopped at a 7-11 and bought some breakfast, which I thought was a hilarious thing to do dressed head to toe like samurai, but oddly enough no one in the store, working or otherwise, seemed surprised in the slightest. Perhaps the ridiculous stereotype Westerners have isn’t so far off, maybe samurai and geisha really do stroll around modern Japan every day.

We couldn’t have asked for better weather, though it was a little cold to be dressed as a warrior, even with all the extra layers of folded and tied shirts and such. When the foreigners started coming off the boat, many of them didn’t inherently notice, “Hey, that woman isn’t Japanese,” though if I’d talk to them they’d stop, look thoughtful for a moment, and say, “I didn’t think you looked Japanese.” So here we were, my friends trying to use as much English as possible and me trying to use as little as possible, all to keep up appearances and make the guests comfortable. I took a lot a lot a lot of pictures with tourists, but very few for myself.

Almost everyone I knew in Japan was out in the city working at some point, foreigner residents included, though I didn’t get to talk to any of them because we were all so busy. I think overall the passengers were very impressed by the energy of the city, as they should be because everyone tried damn hard, was damn friendly, and it was all volunteer! The City by the Sea can really snap into action. And let’s be honest, here they were training ordinary folk to use the right English to accommodate the passengers and setting up all sorts of special parties and cheap rates, when if this were to happen in the States nobody would even consider learning more than a greeting in another language or taking the guests beyond tourist spots. It’s kind of amazing.

Mochi and I separated from the girls and went to a quiet, more-industrial, part of town. It was kind of sad because there weren’t many people around and the Japanese hosts were a little disheartened. I stuck around making conversation, helping people haggle on both sides of the language spectrum and coercing the passengers to try the food. I had some great conversation with the obasans and ojisans in the food tent and they showered me with yummy yummy foods while I was there and even sent me home with a cob of roasted corn and two onigiri. My favorite though, was the mushroom miso soup, which was awesome beyond awesome. I made some good conversation with the ship passengers too, offering as much insight to Japanese culture as I could and smoothing the gap between everyone. I’m glad I was there because most of the passengers didn’t know the parking lot of antique and food tents existed, let alone had the guts to ask for something they wanted. When Mochi came back to pick me up, I bought a wall scroll from the antique dude and a cute little hanky from the obasans. It was a good day :) Though unfortunately I sensed a bit of a cold coming on, and you know damn well that while you might be mistaken about any other thing in your life, you never have a false positive when you feel a cold coming.

Mochi and I puttered around a little in a busier district, hob-knobbing with our other friends, and then we headed back to the shrine to dawn our regular clothes. My only regret was not buying my own set of tabi socks and kimono while they had them in Western sizes set out for the passengers. I always hesitate when it comes to shopping!

At the shrine I got to look around the rooms a little and we had to go to the kitchen and rinse our mouths with alcohol because we were in such a special place. I was glad to get out of my tabi socks, since I’d been wearing a 27 and am really at 27.5. That half a centimeter really makes a difference, believe it or not. Also, I think the geta I wore them with only went about halfway across my heel. Many expressions of thanks and good work were exchanged and we headed down to the port again to see the passengers off. Of course all the people I’d met no longer recognized me, but I did get to hear some stories about how some people thought I was from the boat, and I made some jokes about getting my Japanese friends on the boat by pretending to be a passenger. Note to self: take a cruise, that shit is bananas! 6 ports in different countries, spend all day getting fawned upon on land, and the travel time in between playing games and eating at a buffet? Sounds like a recipe for fun (and disaster).

We waved goodbye with glowsticks and yosakoi dancers from ages 5-15, and us hard workers downed some tako-yaki and some mascot-shaped waffles filled with bean paste (my favorite!). Fifteen hours after we’d started in the morning, we were dismissed, frozen to the bone and ready for dinner at 10 PM. My crew and I went for heaping bowls of the most beautiful ramen I’d ever seen at a Beatles-themed place in the district I’d been working that afternoon. I think I made friends with the cook, though I’m sure he’ll remember me more easily than I’ll remember him.

The Actress, Mochi, and I walked home together since our respective chou’s are so close. I really enjoyed the time I spent with my Japanese friends today, considering I’m getting comfortable enough with Japanese to take risks and after our English lessons they all felt comfortable enough too that we can all start to express ourselves in ways we couldn’t before. Then I came home and died on account of my lack of sleep and presence of cold (though I wasn’t the only one who died, my computer did too). Gotta get that fixed…

Now the difficult thing will be deciding whether to go to a meeting in two weeks to get to know some JET friends better, or to stay here in the City by the Sea and hang out with my Japanese friends. I’ll miss out either way and I’ll have great fun either way, so I guess I’ll just have to make a decision and not look back.

Mice and Men - and the High Schoolers Who Fall Somewhere in Between

In traditional Japanese style, I got to work today and food had appeared on my desk without explanation. And in traditional Japanese style, I ate it without question lol Usually it's snacks and sweets, omiyage from trips the other teachers took. Todays looked like a rice cake but it said cream on it, so I figured it was something sweetish filled with cream. Then it also said "fermented in beer," so I was skeptical but it was all right lol

Today I taught a new lesson for the first years. We use an atrocious book full of slang, and not the useful colloquial type, but the type you really can’t understand and won’t learn from unless you’re a native speaker. I kept a lot of the activities because they were good, but I edited them to suit my needs. The lesson was about art and how to give soft and strong criticisms (adding adverbs and such to soften, etc). I borrowed a bunch of art books from the art teacher and they had to listen to identify which pieces I was talking about and whether I liked them, then they categorized words and phrases isn’t soft and strong and positive and negative, and we practiced some dialogs.

In the final activity, I asked them to rank 8 pieces, then get into groups of four. I told them they were art thieves and they had 3 minutes before the alarm in the museum goes off during which to work out which 4 pieces to steal as a team. At the end of three minutes, I blew my whistle and yelled, “Guess what!? You all got caught by the police!” While they were working, I handed police badges (something I found in my desk! Lol) to certain students. At this point I told them they’d found the badges and were able to slip away undercover as police officers with one piece of art, the art the group thought was the best. At that point they came up to me, told me their piece and why they chose it, and I handed them a card with a picture of the piece on one side and a fortunate on the other. The backs had the amount of money they got for their pieces on the black market – anywhere from $1 Million to $0, along with an explanation like, “Oh no, $0, the police got you anyway!” “this artist isn’t famous yet,” “you accidentally took art from the kid’s corner, this was done by an 8 year old,” “You tripped and broke it before you can sell it,” and my personal favorite, “Great! Now you can afford to get a lawyer for your friends!”

The students do get me down sometimes though. They’re so depressing. When they don’t know, or even if they do know and don’t feel like talking, they just look down and pretend they can’t hear you. Maybe it’s rude in Japanese culture too, I wouldn’t know, but as someone from the States I think that’s horribly rude. At least smile submissively and shrug, or say, “I don’t know.” Say “I don’t know” in Japanese! Shake your head! Anything! Not to mention, sometimes I just want to look at them and be like, “Just say something, this is the easiest question in the world. There’s no way you don’t know it.” We’re talking, “how old are you,” here, guys. You don’t need to be able to speak English to answer that question. I’m sure most of you reading this can answer in at least one language, if not more, whether you’ve taken 3 years of classes in that language or not. And clearly, the prevalence of English is a different ball game altogether because most people in the world know at least a few words in English just from exposure. These kids could count in English for as long as they could count in Japanese. And this is coming from the sympathetic Japanese language learner who studied teaching and linguistics. Can you imagine how the other ALTs feel?

I think today’s lesson went pretty well though and the teachers are glad to see that I’m a real teacher. I’m not sure what they expected of me. Really, most ALTs are totally unqualified to be real teachers, so they’re a little justified no matter what they expected. Maybe the best way to describe it is that it felt like they expected me to be a professional teacher but didn’t actually anticipate that I could do it? Hard to pin down. Anyway, the strictest of the teachers seem to like my work, so it *should* be all downhill from here.

Additionally, I ended up pumping out pretty decent lessons for my last two adult conversation groups, the international club, and English Day at the other big high school in town. I’m kind of proud of myself that it came to me so quickly. Especially the international club lesson. After my run-in with the delinquent who hurt my feelings during our last meeting, I was kind of unmotivated. In fact, when the club president came up to me yesterday for his perfunctory, “what will we do in club tomorrow?” my attitude was kind of like, “Why are you asking me? You decided on a boring topic already. I have no idea what you want from me.” But then I sat down with it, generated some good discussion questions and pulled up some conversation games like a “would you rather” based on the theme and a game where you pass around two pens until the music stops and the person holding the red pen asks a question to the person holding the blue pen. In the process, I also stumbled across a bunch of really cool drinking games I’ll try to work into class (and probably also into my parties! Lol)