More Ups, More Downs

Continuing on the theme of a previous post, I thought I’d list some of the ups and downs from a last weekend.

Saturday
There was a “Mexican Taco” party at someone’s apartment. Tacos are hard to get in Japan (unless you know the right places) so I was glad someone hosted this event.

Nevertheless, I’m surprised we got away with it. Big Western style “house parties” are not very popular in Japan, and I didn’t think we’d make it through the night without the neighbors complaining or the police coming.

Back in Oita Prefecture Mike used to host a lot of big parties at his place and we would never (and I mean never) make it through the night without the police coming. And then the next morning Mike’s Board of Education would always take him around to all the neighbors to make sure he apologized. But, bless his soul, this never stopped Mike from throwing another party a couple months later.

(I once read an article that said claimed of the “cultural conflict” on the JET program is actually generational conflict, resulting from all these of JETs fresh out of University being placed in the aging countryside).

But I digress. Back to the party at hand. I had spent all Saturday afternoon doing nothing but laying around my apartment. I felt a little guilty about it, and was eager to confirm no one else had been doing anything exciting. To my relief, most of the people I talked to had days that were just as boring as mine.

Most of the people at the party I knew, but I met a few for the first time. One girl refused to believe I was from America because she didn’t think I had an American accent.

This doesn’t happen often, but it happens occasionally. Back in Oita there was a Korean girl who was convinced I had a British accent. I tried arguing with her, then figured: “Well, what does she know? She’s Korean.” But then some other people joined in to confirm that I didn’t sound like an American said. Even my British friend Greg was slightly on the fence. “I can understand why you say that,” he said to the Korean girl. “But no, in the end I don’t think he sounds British.” I began to wonder if all the time I spent hanging out with Brits had altered my speech patterns.

Now a fellow American was refusing to believe I was from America. “Where are you from really?” she said. “That’s not an American accent.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I answered. “This is how we talk in Michigan.”

I spent a good deal of the party standing, but once a spot on the couch opened up I grabbed it. My friend Mary was sitting on the couch, and a Japanese girl Miho was sitting on the floor.

Nobody in Gifu knows I have a girlfriend. I’ve kept it a secret in order to enjoy more social flexibility. And Shoko has been keeping me a secret from her co-workers back in Oita, so I figured it was fair game.

In a way it’s kind of lying, but Japanese people are often very guarded about their personal lives, and a Japanese person wouldn’t think twice about denying a girlfriends existence. So, when in Rome…

It does make things a bit more complicated though. For instance Jorge had been trying to set me up with Miho for quite some time now, and I was currently in the process of “trying not to be rude by ignoring her, but at the same time not give her the wrong idea by paying too much attention either.” (We’ve all been in those situations I’m sure.) Miho on the other hand, perhaps aided by the alcohol, was a little bit more friendly than usual, and at times almost seemed on the point of climbing into my lap while I was talking to her. I tried to concentrate my attention on Mary instead.

Mary was showing me all the pictures she had stored on her cell-phone (did I mention all the cool things Japanese cell-phones can do?) I thought it would be funny to show her the picture of my nipple that I had taken with my own phone. (This was back on a visit to Oita when I had taken this picture as a prank to send to Holmes. I never got around to deleting it though).

Mary recoiled in disgust. “That’s the grossest thing I ever saw,” she said. “It’s so hairy. And what makes it even worse is that you’re cupping it with your hand. That’s just disgusting.” I thought this reaction was pretty funny, so I e-mailed Mary. She was less than pleased when it popped up on her phone screen.

She showed Miho. “Look at this. Isn’t this disgusting?”

Miho recoiled from it as well. Miho then looked back at me, and there seemed to be a visible change in the way she was regarding me. “This is probably for the best,” I thought. “It will make things a little less complicated if she looses her affection for me.” And yet, I liked it a lot better when she was looking at me with affection. I was somehow addicted to the attention. I found myself trying to explain away the nipple picture as just a silly joke.

After I had looked through all the pictures on Mary’s cell phone, she asked to see mine. “Okay, fair’s fair,” she said. “You saw all the pictures on my phone. I get to look at yours.”

I was just about to hand the phone over when I remembered all the pictures of Shoko and me. “I can’t let you see these pictures,” I said.

“Why not?” Mary demanded.

“Um, because the nipple picture is just the beginning,” I lied. “There are a lot worse pictures on my phone.”

“What? No! I didn’t think you were like that.”

“I’m like that.”

“You can’t be like that. You were supposed to be the one friend I had who was semi-normal.”

I shrugged. “Everyone has their quirks.”

“Well let me see them then.”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t feel comfortable sharing those pictures of myself.”

“Well, I’ll just look at your phone the next time you leave it lying around.”

“Suit yourself. You’d only be scaring yourself for life.” There were no more requests to see my phone pictures.

About 1:30 AM my cell phone started ringing. “Who in the world could be calling me at this hour?” I wondered aloud as I pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was Greg calling from England. I stepped out on the balcony to talk to him.

“Hope I’m not calling at a bad time,” he said.

“No, I’m just at a party,” I said. “I needed a breath of fresh air anyway.”

“Who’s at the party?”

“It’s all Gifu people. You wouldn’t know any of them.”

It was good to hear from Greg. I hadn’t talked to him since he back to visit Japan this summer. And since I had said good-bye to him at the Nagoya station, I never heard how the Oita half of his adventures went.

“I was really hoping this trip back to Japan would bring closure to everything, and allow me to get on with my life,” he said. “But that didn’t really happen.”

“That never happens,” I said. “You never really get closure to anything in life.”

“Have you decided what you’re going to do when you go back?” Greg asked.

“No still thinking about it.”

“Well, you’ve got time yet. But you want to have something going. The worse thing you can do is go home and just sit around.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone tells me.”

Greg talked more about his difficulties re-adjusting to life in Britain, which made me worried about how I would adjust when I came back to America. “I find I have a hard time relating to my old friends,” Greg said. “But when I meet someone I knew in Japan, I can talk to them for hours. Which is sad really, because my old friends are really my better friends. I feel like Japan has changed me in ways I didn’t want it to. And I really miss all those adventures we had in Japan. Just the way everything was an adventure.”

“Yeah, I’m really going to miss that to,” I said. “I’m sick of my job though. I feel like I’m through with teaching English, but I like the adventure of Japan. I’m both looking forward to going back home and dreading it.”

“While, Japan will still be there if things don’t work out back home,” Greg said. I agreed.

Around 2:30 I decided to call it a night and head home. But it turns out the night was far from over. Before I went home, I still had to play taxi for several people.

In the countryside of Oita almost everyone, out of necessity, owned a car. In Gifu most people are content to take the trains. But when the last train has left, I’m one of the only foreigners around with a car, and so I usually end up playing taxi.

I don’t mind it too much as long as I’m not driving ridiculous distances. I figure I can socialize at a party, or I can socialize with people while I’m driving them home, and it’s all the same in the end. I try and avoid anything that’s in the complete opposite direction of where I lived, but when the trains have stopped running and a friend is in a pinch, what can I say? Sorry, just stay here for the night and I’ll see you tomorrow?

Sunday
Sunday was Yuka’s Halloween party. Yuka is a Japanese friend who tutors children in English part time. She was having a Halloween themed party for her students.

She had asked me to help her out long ago, and I said yes as I always do to things which seem far enough off in the future that I don’t have to think about them. As the actually party approached though, I began to think that I didn’t want to spend my Sunday afternoon doing this.

I talked to Mary about it the night before. “Oh, are you going to that party?” Mary said. “I told Yuka I wouldn’t do it. I might have been a bit rude, but I was very firm that Sunday is my day off, and I don’t teach English on my day off.”

“I wish I would have said that,” I moaned. “Hopefully this won’t take up more than two hours. In fact, why don’t you phone me at the two-hour mark so I have an excuse to suddenly leave. Tell me our friend Adam has fallen down the well or something, and I need to come at once.”

And so, the following day, I went to the party. Yuka lives in my town, so most of her students I actually knew from school, which made the party seem even more like work. Some of the kids were really hyper as well. They weren’t bad kids necessarily, they were just kids, and I didn’t want to deal with it on a Sunday.

We split into different groups, and walked around the neighborhood “trick-or-treating” at different houses which Yuka had arranged beforehand. I had a particularly rough time keeping my group together.

I had six students of which there was a noticeable gap in ages. Three of the students were pre-school aged; three of them were 3rd graders. The older kids were eager to get to all the houses and kept running ahead. The younger kids kept straggling behind. Yuka kept reminding me to keep my group together, and I in turn was always yelling at my kids to either speed up or slow down.

Nothing gets me angrier than telling a kid to do something, and then have them either completely ignore me, or go back to doing the same thing 5 minutes later. I had one student in particular, Kateshi, who was constantly running ahead in violation of our “no-running” rule. “Kateshi slow down! Kateshi slow down! Damn it Kateshi will you slow the fuck down?!” I guess I’m just not cut out to work with kids.

As a side note, I’ve touched on this issue before in my blog, but there is no discipline system in Japanese schools. Back in America, my Kindergarten and 1st grade teachers used to make us put our head down on our tables or sit in the corner if we misbehaved. My 3rd and 4th grade teachers used to make us stay in during recess and write lines. In Middle school we were issued demerits, and we had to come into school early for a “zero-hour” if we acquired three of them. And in high school, the teacher would just send us out of the class if we misbehaved.

In Japan there’s nothing. No time outs, no heads down, no detention or line writing or demerits, and it is illegal to send a child out of the room. The only means a teacher has of enforcing class control is by verbally trying to either shame the class into discipline, or positively encouraging them.

Because of the strong emphasis on group unity in Japan, this works better here than it would work back home. And when it works good, it is a wonder to behold, but when it goes bad (and it often does) the teacher is left floundering. At the elementary school in particular it often goes bad. Also for the foreign teacher, who doesn’t understand the inner workings of Japanese culture and has no authority, it is impossible to enforce class discipline. (For more confirmation on this, see Justin's entry here).

This Halloween party was an extra-curricular activity, but the same rules seemed to apply. I yelled at the kids, and when they didn’t listen, I just yelled more, and eventually I wanted to strangle all of them, but there was absolutely no consequence for them not listening to me.

Besides trying to get the older kids to slow down, I was trying to get the younger kids to speed up. One of them whined to me, “Yes, I’m trying to go faster, but you see I don’t think my shoe fits quite right and it’s really slowing me down.” I could see he was trying his best to keep up, and to a certain extent, he reminded me of myself as a kid, someone who was trying to do his best but kept screwing up.

But at this point I was too cranky to be sympathetic. “Look, you need to go faster,” I said, and gently pushed him forward despite his complaints about his shoe.

The party ended at the two-hour mark just like Yuka said it would. There was a lot of cleaning up to be done afterwards, but I had the feeling I really needed to get out of there. “Um, I’m really sorry, but I made plans to meet someone in a half hour, so I should probably leave now,” I lied.

“Oh, really?” Yuka said. “But I was going to take all the volunteers out to Yakiniku (Korean Style Barbeque) later”.

Actually that did sound pretty good. But I had already said I had plans and it was too late to go back on it now. “I’m sorry I have plans,” I said. “Some other time.”

I ended up just going into Gifu city and reading my book. It was a slow Sunday afternoon, and I didn’t run into anyone I knew, so I ended up just eating a lonely dinner by myself, and then going back to my apartment. That’s what I get for lying I guess.

Monday
Monday is usually bowling night. It used to be organized by Monika, but since she has left the task has largely fallen to me. I know have to call everyone up, confirm times and where we are going to eat, and then arrange transportation for everyone who doesn’t have a car.

I like the bowling, but coordinating it can be a big headache. I tend to do a really good job of organizing it one week, and then rest on my laurels and forget to organize it the next week.

This week I forgot to coordinate it. Mary called me to ask about bowling. “I’m sorry I forgot to organize it,” I said. “It’s probably a little late to rally all the troops now, but if you wanted to just catch dinner or something I’d be up for that.”

Mary and I went to Gifu. She sent me a text message asking where I was. I told her to look for me by Gifu station. “I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes,” I said.

This only served to confuse Mary, and when she finally met up with me her first words were: “when did you start smoking?”

“No that was a joke,” I explained. “That’s from ‘The Great Gatsby’. Didn’t you ever read ‘The Great Gatsby’?”

“Yes, but it was a long time ago,” she said defensively. “Alright, if you’re such an expert on ‘The Great Gatsby’, then where does it take place?”

“Um, New York?”

“Yes, but where in New York? Long Island, my hometown. So there!”

We went to a fast food place to get dinner. “Tell me, do you think I sound like an American?” I asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“Someone at the party the other night said I didn’t sound like an American. She refused to believe I was from America?”

“What? Who was it?”

“I don’t remember. I just met her that night for the first time.”

“Well, whoever it is they’re an idiot. You have the most stereotypical midwestern accent I’ve ever heard. In fact the other day I was listening to a CD where the narrator was from the Midwest, and he sounded exactly like you.”

With this question solved, we moved on to talk about life in Japan. I suppose we were both feeling a little depressed, because we largely focused on how much we hated Japan. “It’s interesting,” I said. “Back in Oita, most people were pretty happy with Japan. In Gifu all the people I talk to can’t wait to get out of here. Even the people who’ve only been here one year or two years can’t wait to leave.”

“That’s because Gifu’s such a shit hole,” Mary commented. “Even the Japanese people who aren’t native to the area hate it here. It’s just such a depressing area to be. Sometimes I wonder what all our friends would be like if we had known them outside of Japan, because I’m sure everyone would act a lot different.”

“Yeah, for instance Alan is probably always in a cheerful mood and is a real party animal.” Alan was a friend of ours who had been in Gifu last year, spent most of that time complaining about how depressed he was and how he hated Japan, and then left after only one year. And there seems to be a lot of those types of people in Gifu.

“No, Alan was genuinely just a depressing person to begin with,” Mary said. “I still keep in touch with him, and now he’s depressed about being back home.”

“But it does seem like all of the people I know who have gone back home to do through a period of reverse-culture shock when they get back,” I said. “Maybe that’s just normal.”

Mary talked about how she was nervous about returning home, and not sure she would fit in anymore. “In Japan everyone’s so polite,” she said. “When I went back to America on holiday, I couldn’t handle people being pushy with me.”

I commented that maybe all of our friends seemed a bit odd because Japan attracts odd people to begin with. “The normal people all get serious jobs after graduating from University,” I said. “All the people who don’t fit into the normal world end up going overseas. That’s why all the people we know in Japan have so many quirks.”

We finished dinner, but it was still too early to call it a night. “Are you up for some video games?” I asked. We started walking towards the video game arcade.

On the way there I ran into my German arch-nemesis walking the other way.

I’ve discovered something interesting about him. When I ran into him, I used to just give him a bit of a sarcastic smile and a nod, but then after a while he just started doing the same thing back to me. But I discovered if I actually said something like “Hello Thomas” to him, then he just avoided eye contact and slunk away.

I think it is because in all the times we’ve run into each other, he never learned my name. I had given it to him, but he must have been too upset to be listening closely. So if I called him by his name, I suddenly had him at a disadvantage and he couldn’t return the greeting, so he would just look the other way.

Ideally I wanted to keep talking to casually to Mary up until the last minute, and then shout out my greeting to Tom as if it was no big deal. But his presence unnerved me enough, and I was unable to talk casually, and so temporarily broke off conversation with Mary as we approached Tom. “Hello Thomas,” I called out in my best confident voice. He mumbled something softly and just looked away.

As soon as we passed, Mary asked, “Was that your German enemy?”

I would have actually preferred Mary didn’t make a big deal out of it until Tom was well out of earshot, but I guess she wasn’t as concerned about it as I was. I answered quietly in the affirmative. “Wow, I could totally tell. Isn’t it amazing how you can tell these things? He just looked German. I can’t put my finger on it, but he just looked German. The way he was really tall, and the way he had a sloping forehead, and pasty white skin, and was going slightly bald; all the other Germans I know have looked like that. And your shoulders really tensed up when you saw him, so I knew there was something between you two.”

We played video games for about an hour, until I declared I wasn’t wasting another single coin on that damn machine, and then we headed back to the station. We still had some time before Mary’s train left, so we headed to “Mr. Donuts” for some late night donuts and coffee.

We were still complaining about Japan. “It’s not so much that I hate my job now,” Mary said. “I think I would just hate any job. It’s my parents’ fault. They didn’t mean to, but they spoiled me and my siblings. We had everything we ever wanted when we were kids growing up, so we never learned how to work hard for anything. And now suddenly we’re like ‘we have to work? We don’t know how to work. Can’t we just stay home and play computer games and have everything given to us like it used to be?’”

“You know, I think that describes me exactly as well,” I said.

“Really? Did you grow up upper-middle class as well?”

“Yes.”

“Well there you go then.”

“In fact,” I continued, “I hate to admit it, but there’s been nothing in my life so far that has made me grow up. I just spent four years goofing around in college, and I liked to study so that didn’t even really count as a hardship. And now I’ve spent four years in Japan just goofing off. There’s been no responsibility in my life.”

“That’s how it is with everyone,” Mary said. “No one really grows up until they have kids.”

“Not in the old days,” I said. “It used to be when you turned 18 you went out to work on the farm.”

“Whatever. Maybe in Michigan.”

Ten minutes later she ended up catching her train, and I drove back home.

Link of the Day
Regular readers of this blog may remember my frequent references to "Dogs and Demons" by Alexander Kerr. It's a book about everything wrong with Japan, very popular with us bitter foreigners living here.

I'm not sure how many times I've linked to it, but for instance here (when talking about the Last Samuri), and here (talking about World War II) and here (talking about all the wires in the air).

Anyway, the Japanese times published an interview with Alexander Kerr to ask what his assesment of Japan is four years after he published the book.