tokyo

Oh, my, i really can't believe it's been nine months now since i went to tokyo. i probably can't remember many details now... oh well, if i could remember everything the entry would never end. some representative pictures, then:

First day: poked around Ginza for a couple of hours by myself, then met an old Kansai Gaidai friend, Shohei, with whom I went to Odaiba.

Ginza is a famously expensive shopping designer-boutique-packed shopping district. Smack in the middle of it, though, was this:

If you can't see that clearly enough, it says "Snoopy in Ginza 2008." Beneath that, it says in Japanese, "This year's 'Snoopy in Ginza' features the reception of the Rich and Gorgeous Snoopy" (with the words "rich" and "gorgeous" transliterated from English).

Odaiba, an artificial island, is supposed to be full of great architecture, but my Kansai Gaidai friend was a slightly lame host who had no idea what to do or see, and took me shopping to boring places instead. I did see this one building, the most famous one there, the Fuji TV headquarters:

We sat a bit on the beach by the Rainbow Bridge as the sun was going down. awfully hard to get a non-blurry picture using the night lighting on my camera:

Second day: Akihabara, with Richard, also an old Kansai Gaidai friend. Later we also hit up a bit of shopping, including an awesome bookstore that's better than anything in Kansai, at Tokyo Station.

Akihabara is the great mecca for all geeks: anime/manga/videogame/electronics lovers, and other kinds of weird people. It's quite a brightly colored place:

It's also a mecca for costume play--people are just walking around the streets dressed as though they walked out of an anime--and there are weird fantasy places such as maid cafes. It seems to all be pretty innocent in degree--I don't get the idea that the fantasy places in Akihabara ever get close to actual prostitution, which seems to be reserved for other parts of the city. Richard and I ate lunch at a maid cafe, and while it sure was an odd place (full of computers free for all customers to use; videogame prowess was a job qualification for the maid-costumed waitresses; one lucky customer won something and got to play a videogame with a maid while everyone watched and cheered), it was really straightforward in feel. There was nothing sleazy about it; there was even a family with children there.

I don't have a picture of the maid cafe we went to, but you can see maids handing out fliers in front of the station:

I think it was on this evening that I had dinner in Shinjuku. Too bad I didn't take a picture; I'm quite a sucker for bright lights, and this place is the most magical blinding-bright-as-day every-color-of-the-rainbow candyland of neon lights anywhere in the country. It's an awfully touristy spot, kind of like Times Square, but I just can't help it...i like them bright lights, i go for 'em like a bug.

Third day: Roppongi Hills...well, I forget the name of the area, that's the name of the immense and awesome building that is what everyone goes to see in that area. It has these strange wingy things...

...that make a constant cold wind around the building, awesome because it was sweltering summer.

The building is full of exotic restaurants. I ate at some sort of Hawaiian fusion sort of place that was not a total success to me--it was more that I could see the taste image the plate I ate must have been aiming for, than that I thought it actually achieved that aim. Oh well. I will be going to Tokyo again this summer, for JET orientation, and this time I hope to eat a full French dinner. (I found a place on this trip, but it cost like $100. You have to be mentally prepared for that and have someone else who's willing to go...I've already met some of the other future CIRs online, and one of them and I have discussed maybe going for that French dinner.)

Fourth day: Ueno, with Richard again. We enjoyed a walk through the huge park, including this massive lake that is invisible because of the giant lily pads that stick up feet above the surface of the water:

In the park were a few art museums. Our planning was badly random that day and we only hit one, a calligraphy museum, before closing, and only had time to scurry through the free displays at that. But I love calligraphy and feasted myself on enough of it in the little time we had that I was quite satisfied.

a few shots of some of my favorite pieces:

One of older-style characters, when they were closer to actual pictographs:

A couple of samples of an interesting squarey style which was entirely new to me and which I thought was really cool-looking:

A shot of three pieces with a sampling of styles. The one on the right is really radical, and I feel like it reminds me of some particular piece of modern painting I've seen before, though I can't at all think exactly what:

A piece with only four giant characters, that I sat looking at for a long time:

Fifth day: I went to Meiji Shrine, which I thought was supposed to be something really fantastic and was a bit disappointed to find out it was like any shrine I had ever been to, only awfully big. Oh well. (I later found out that the really great shrine to see in Tokyo is the one in Asakusa. I didn't get to hit that on this trip, but I did when I transitted through Tokyo to the north on a more recent trip.) Meiji Shrine was in the Harajuku area, a place that is supposed to be a world mecca for crazy youth street fashion. Some of the pictures of Harajuku fashion I found on the internet when preparing for this trip were truly fabulous, and I was deeply disappointed that even though I went on a Sunday (supposed to be the best time to go), there was really nothing there. A few people in slightly weird clothes trying to be looked at, but almost nothing at all. I was very sad because it was one of the things I was looking forward to most on the trip. Tokyo was, in fact, surprisingly empty in people, period, that week--I was scared from the stories I had heard of trains so crowded that the collective body heat is sweltering; and was somewhat looking forward to seeing the special employees I had heard of whose sole responsibility is to push as many people onto rush-hour trains as would fit (a job to be had only in Tokyo!). There was not a bit of this sort of thing, and later I learned that that was because the week I went, a big holiday week in Japan, is a time when people return to their ancestral homes to visit family graves. So no one was in Tokyo because they had scattered out to their family origins in the countryside.

Because it was so hot that day and Meiji Shrine park and Harajuku (where I did manage to at least do some fun shopping for strange scarfy things at market stalls) were outside things, I was very relieved to head to the last destination I had planned, a huge Edo-period-themed onsen, where I stayed for five or six hours, in utter heaven. Though this trip in total was not a complete success in every way--I planned too many places to try to go, but at the same time should probably have found out more details for each--the putting the onsen on the last day was such a divinely perfect wrap-up to such a busy trek that it's something I've made a mental note of for trip planning ever since. I used the idea again on my recent week-long pilgrimage around northern Kanto and Tohoku, and it was great again.

so, there you go. the tokyo trip. Next is Kanazawa...will try to get to it quickly.

The long-promised suppon!

The suppon in Gion, a somewhat surreal experience, was with that train conductor who was the same age as me, and from whom I unfortunately never heard again after this dinner. This saddened me greatly because I thought we had a good time. On the other hand, it does make the adventure even more surreal to remember. I don't even have a picture of the guy, didn't think about taking one because it didn't occur to me that he would disappear into thin air the way he did. Anyway.

When we walked in, we were the only customers in the shop. We ordered a suppon full course for two. (Oh, a suppon is a kind of aquatic turtle, in case you forgot that from so many months and entries ago.) The master, a kind of relaxed, jolly-faced dude who made us feel good the whole evening, asked us if we wanted a boy or a girl. We chose a boy. He took it from the tank, held it up behind the counter, and asked if we wanted to see it killed and if we wanted to drink the blood. I voted for getting the whole experience and said yes on both counts. I braced myself because I thought it would upset me to see the creature slit in its shell, but when the instant occurred, any reaction in me was just shut off, and my feeling flashbacked to that of seeing fish cleaned when I was little, which I grew up with so I thought of it as totally normal.

Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the suppon before it was killed. While it was moving around in the master's  hands, my companion and the master were talking about suppons being smart in some way.

Anyway, when you kill a suppon you have to do it in a single big round cut under the shell, and then immediately pour out the blood so that it won't congeal. Then, you can drink the blood, mixed with some other fluid--it mixes best with shochuu, one traditional kind of Japanese liquor (usually made from wheat or sweet potato), the master said; beer is next best; rice wine is next, and non-alcoholic fruit juice is least preferable. I don't like shochuu, but upon the master's recommendation I drank it with the blood, and actually the blood was so thick that I couldn't taste the shochuu at all. Not that the blood doesn't have any strong or strange flavor; it tastes like your own blood, I suppose, if you've ever tasted that; it was just thick.

I forgot about my camera altogether until we had just about finished drinking the blood, so here's the nearly-empty cup (it was a small cup, the picture7s just close-up):

The master cut off the head of the turtle and placed it in front of us for us to look at while enjoying the next couple of courses. Though the eyes were dead, the toothy beak was still clapping open and shut rhythmically. This was kind of creepy.

Working with very masterly speed and deftness (although the whole time he kept a deliberate and avuncularly smiling attitude), the master, after consulting us on what parts we wanted to eat raw, produced a sashimi plate including the penis, balls, heart, I think the liver, and probably a few other organs, plus what looks in the picture like some more ordinary muscle meat, though I can't quite remember everything that was on the plate.

This must be the freshest sashimi I've ever had--just 5 to 10 minutes after the killing, fished out of the body and slapped onto the plate with the chef's bare hands in front of our eyes, and still covered with blood.

Eating the raw, bloody penis and balls of the creature while its face was blindly clattering open and shut in front of us was the oddest part of this meal.

The penis was rather tough, though the balls were soft and delicious (the balls of anything are soft and delicious, I have since discovered). The heart is also tough, and an odd texture. The liver is also soft and delicious.

Oh, here is the best shot I could get of the master's jolly face:

The next course was fried. The fried portions included the neck, I think, and other larger and more outer portions than those served as sashimi. I seem to have lost my picture of the fried course, but I suppose everybody knows what fried stuff looks like. The neck, and later the head, were VERY difficult to eat, full of a million little bones, but my companion and the master said I handled them surprisingly well.

Next was nabe. "Nabe" just means, "pot," and nabe is meat and vegetables put with broth in a pot. You don't eat the broth, but it provides a good flavor to whatever you put in it.

The master put the head in the nabe pot, so you can see it peeking out there from among the white and green onions and tofu.

Suppon is a famous source of collagen--the skin is very thick and gelatiny and quite clearly full of collagen. Actually, it's kind of collagen overload, and most of the collageny parts went into the nabe, and the next course, zousui. To make zousui at the end of a course like this, you just take the remaining broth of the nabe, the flavor of which has richened from having the meat parts soak in it, and add egg and rice, and perhaps a little bit more substantial material. One of the bowls of zousui is in the foreground here:

Nabe and zousui are nice warm cozy things to eat that make you feel very relaxed, especially in winter.

All the collagen makes suppon a little unlikely to be anyone's number one favorite food, but our master was quite expert, I think, and made everything as delicious as possible. This was probably the most remarkable eating experience I have ever had.

Near the end of our meal, two very drunk middle-aged ladies wandered in and also ordered a suppon full course. The master was pleased to do two in one night. The old ladies were really surprised to see a foreigner in a place like this tiny, upper-level restaurant, and were not shy in exclaiming about it. (The master was really cool about not commenting on my being a foreigner or treating me differently or expecting me to be unable to handle sashimi or anything that less cool and more patronizing Japanese people often do; but he was able to speak so that I could understand him easily.) They ran their mouths busily at us the whole time we were in the restaurant together, and when we left they invited us to come see them at their respective workplaces. This was when we discovered that one of them was a priest's wife at a Buddhist temple, and the other was a snack hostess. (In Japan a "snack" means an expensive bar where there are women whose specific job is to talk to the customers and act like their friend and/or date. Real all-out hostess clubs, one step up from snack bars, are a more clearcut fake dating business, a very odd phenomenon of Japanese society, directed toward businessmen who have no time for real girlfriends.) So they were a very funny twosome to go wandering around Gion getting drunk together.

When the guy and I said goodnight, he took the snack lady's card and I took the priest's wife's card, so I guess I could still go see her. I should do that sometime; it would be funny.

Update on friends and students 8

There are no reasonably priced tickets to London left, so I am going to Tokyo and wandering north. awesome...

I have to fingerprint myself for the JET program. I asked the police station and they refused to do it, so I have to do it myself and hope I do it right.

Oh yeah, last weekend: A couple of friends of Ryo's, Dai-chan and a kind of odd quiet dude named Akira, came from Tokyo, so Ryo was going to be showing them around for the weekend. I had only Sunday off, but it was still a crazy weekend with them. As soon as I got off work on Saturday night, I headed to Ryo's apartment, and then we all went out for what turned out to be some very expensive yakiniku in Sannomiya, and then went back to Ryo's apartment and all crowded in and slept there. The next day, the dudes wanted to go to an onsen, so Ryo said let's go to Akou. So after a brief stop in Kakogawa to eat lunch (Ryo wanted the boys to try katsumeshi, Kakogawa's specialty, which I've mentioned in a much earlier entry) and go to the clothes shop of some old friend of theirs, we headed out to Akou, a very countryside town in northern Hyogo, partially on a cape. Akou was quite lovely (this was my third trip--you will get pictures from a previous trip in a soon-to-appear entry), though the well-known hot-spring inn we went to this time actually didn't have as high-quality water as the less-known place we went to both the previous times. BUT, we had kind of a scary experience...

There is this thing called kousa, yellow sand that blows over the sea from China. It gets carried by the pollen in pollen season, messing with people's heads and making their allergies worse. (A whole lot of people in Japan have pollen allergies because there are huge numbers of artificial forests consisting entirely of Japanese cedar, a common allergen. Apparently, at the time these forests were planted they were supposed to be cut down and used for timber later, but then the labor was too expensive or something? and these huge cedar forests are just sitting there, all over the country, making people allergic.) Apparently in the last few decades the sand has been carrying evil chemicals from Chinese factory smoke, and has started causing cancer and crap.

(I just found that it's also called Asian dust, and you can wikipedia it under that name.)

So, when we went to Akou, we were strolling around on the cape before going to the onsen, and we wandered down through this large shrine gate to a rocky spot with a lovely view of the sea. Only to all start pointing at a bank of low yellow clouds hanging above the entire left half of the oceanline--the kousa. We were all scared out of our wits. Ryo cheerfully reminded us that we could get cancer from it.

Anyhow, the bath was okay, some lively old ladies started talking to me and such. I felt very relaxed and sleepy in the car going back home. The guys, or mostly Dai-chan, wanted to go to some music event in Himeji, which was on the way. It was apparently some hip-hop/reggae thing, which I wasn't too excited about, but Ryo asked me if I would be interested if it were old stuff, like the classic stuff modern hip-hop comes from. I said OK. Apparently Ryo only said this to get me to give the thing a chance, and had no idea what kind of music there would really be, which pisses me off a bit.

So we got to Himeji, and I was extremely hungry because I had had no breakfast and only a little lunch, but Dai-chan wanted to go to this event so we said we'd go for an hour or two and then eat. But then they didn't know where the place was. They called people, got wrong directions, spent about an hour looking for the place. In the meantime, I inquired about the price, which no one knew. Ryo pointed out that if it were freaking expensive we probably wouldn't go, but we continued to look for it, finally found it, observed that all the people going in were really young-looking, and Dai-chan still wanted to go. Then it took forever to find a parking place. Then after they parked, I thought we'd go in. Then they wanted to smoke for a bit first. Then they smoked for like an hour. By this time (it had been about two hours since we had arrived in Himeji), I was about to die of hunger and explode with annoyance at how the whole process was dragging and nobody cared that I was starving. Oh, and in the meantime they had called to find out about the price, found out that indeed the cover was 25 dollars, but Dai-chan said that once in a while something like that is OK, so everyone else just kind of agreed. (No one else seemed particularly interested.)

By this time it was about 9. I had been wanting to eat for a long time. We headed to the building where the event was, and then it turned out we were going to have to wait in line for a while. When we got into the event, Dai-chan wanted to stay till about 12, and then eat. Then I did explode. I had been making loud notes for a while of the fact that I was starving, and this was it. I announced that I wasn't going, and would go get food and call them after a while.

They said OK, so I wandered forlornly off to a convenience store, and ate some cold things damply outside the front thereof. (It was also raining, and I had no umbrella, and my hair was still wet from the onsen.) After half an hour I wandered back, only to meet some of them outside. It turned out they weren't quite so heartless after all--they had actually thought about going to get food with me, but they hadn't realized I would disappear so quickly. Ryo had been looking for me the whole time, checking every restaurant in the immediate area.

We headed inside, and at this point things got better, because one of the people I ran into outside was, actually he was the dude who owned the clothes shop in Kakogawa, and he was a friend of the guy running this event or some such. So, when I went inside with him, I ended up not having to pay, which was great. He, and everyone else, was still surprised however that I was let through so easily, and they said my face just looked like some VIP.

Well, the event was SERIOUSLY LAME. The live music was some kind of teenagey band. All the people hanging around were mostly very young and very fakey-cool reggae lovers who no doubt thought they were very hardcore. (When Japanese people consider themselves hardcore reggae lovers, they are often quite annoying. Any foreigner in Japan knows what I am talking about.) No one had checked into whether this event was at all worth going to, and it wasn't. At least I had gotten in free, and I stood around kind of laughing at the absurdity of the situation for a couple of hours until we went to dinner.

Yoshimi showed up for dinner, and the six of us (me, Ryo, Yoshimi, Dai-chan, Akira, and Tecchan was there too) went to a restaurant that is a favorite of mine, Ryo's and Yoshimi's. We've been there several times before. However, I don't think we can go there again. When we walked out to the car (which was about 2:00, because the restaurant staff were very oddly slow that night, something we've never witnessed before, slow to the point that Ryo began to kind of scold them in a fatherly manner), apparently somebody brushed his body against the car next to us, which car belonged to three young guys, customers at the same restaurant, who thought they were really cool. They came out and started hissing at us for touching their car, and then all the guys got into a fight. The young guys were probably about my age, and kind of prissy-looking, and were stupid to provoke a fight with Ryo and his friends, who were older and bigger, and there were five of them. The whole thing was stupid, but Dai-chan apparently said more insulting things than necessary and made it worse. Ryo was constantly trying to make peace, while Yoshimi, being a half-yakuza, got into yakuza mode I guess and became extremely scary--the police ended up being called to break up the fight, and Yoshimi was very rude to the police. I was kind of worried about his behavior, but apparently it's okay to be insult the police here as long as you don't attack them or anything.

Actually, though, as scary as Yoshimi looked from a distance (the guys told me to stay in the car), apparently he amused everyone by introducing himself and giving all kinds of unnecessary information about his life before beginning to fight. He had been talking about unnecessary things all night during dinner...Dai-chan had had hiccups, and Yoshimio had spent a long time very seriously trying to convince Dai-chan that if you curled your arm around a certain way and drank water from a cup in the crook of your arm thusly curled, the hiccups would stop. Even though Dai-chan tried this and it didn't work, Yoshimi continued to insist that it was infallible, and that Dai-chan just hadn't been doing it correctly. Then, Ryo was showing off his new cell phone, and Yoshimi made a huge serious deal over how Ryo's phone was really not top quality because it didn't make a satisfying enough click when opened and closed. Yoshimi opened and closed both his and Ryo's phones many, many times to make sure we were all clear on the difference.

Anyhow, Yoshimi, who is really just a big baby, got very friendly with the police as soon as he stopped arguing with them, and when the five of us were ready to go home, Yoshimi said he wanted to stay and talk to the police a bit more. As we were going away, I could hear myself being introduced to the police, "Oh, and there's Bonnie, the American, and she's not involved with any of this..."

On the way home it was discovered, to much cheering, that Dai-chan's hiccups had stopped in the course of the fight.

so it was a crazy day...first perfectly relaxing and lovely, then exasperating and lame, then scary. but it was okay, and fun.

Next, I promise, the pictures begin. I've really finished ALL the friends and students updates, so, starting next entry, we will go back to last summer and begin the picture stories, first suppon, then the various trips.

Update on friends and students 7

I'm just a little bit damp because not only have I had to decide to quit this job before exactly having a new one, but now it's really sunk in that I can't have my job back (although I could have recontracted if I had wanted to) because today I learned that they've ALREADY hired someone to take my place (it took them only a week!). It's almost certain that I'll have a CIR job soon...but I can't be 100% certain of course...plus if no one drops out immediately and it takes a little bit longer for them to upgrade me, I won't receive equal placement consideration but will just get whatever position someone drops out of, so I could have to move really far away. Argh. I most likely don't have anything to worry about, but I'd rather know for sure.

Ayuko is a bit sad because the new person is a guy. She wanted to work with a girl. The guy before me wouldn't talk to Ayuko very much, and she's afraid any guy will not be able to talk to her as easily as I do.

Ayuko and I had a talk with the owners today about our method here, where I told them about the various things I've tried to do here (mostly in the kids' classes, with spelling, phonetic reading, and conversation that is not dependent on picture flash cards), hoping to get them established as things the next teacher will be keeping up. This persuasion went pretty easily--Ayuko thought it was because they didn't care, but I thought they did because they asked me questions, wanted to know exactly what I was doing how, but seemed satisfied with my answers. That was nice.

Only, when Ayuko started talking about how much our student number has grown this year, Tomoko just expressed surprise and wondered what it could be due to--our advertising, the fact that Nova (the former largest chain English conversation school in Japan) went out of business 4 or 5 months ago...it never occurred to her, apparently, that part of it is me...I work very hard to give trial students a good impression, which I don't think the teacher before me did. There were trial students on one of the days he trained me, and he didn't do too much to make them enthusiastic about the place. Oh well. It would have been nice if Tomoko had acknowledged my effort...hmm, oh well.

So, the additional friend-related topics I promised a couple of posts ago.

The cruel betrayal of Taiki: I told about Taiki before, the dude from Kansai Gaidai who learns languages fast and who was fluent in English when I first met him two years ago, but when I met up with him again last summer, his English had half-disappeared and he had learned Chinese. I introduced him to Ryo and the three of us went out together to a club Taiki said he had always wanted to go to when he was a student but had never had the chance. So we went, went till the morning, had a good time, said goodbye and planned to meet again after Ryo came back from Nepal.

So the next time we met, we went back to my Indian friend's restaurant and had a very long dinner there, but...

Taiki seemed to have decided that I was no longer of any use, but Ryo was. Ryo comes across very confident and knowledgable when he is talking about his business, so people tend to assume that his company is a large one. Actually, he works alone and could not give anyone a job, but Taiki didn't know this, and had decided that it would be prudent to start sucking up to him, and that one way to do that would be to make fun of and exclude me. I'm not sure why he thought this made sense since I am Ryo's best friend, but...he talked to Ryo entirely about business for two or three hours, too fast for me to completely follow, never looking at me or making it possible for me to participate. Actually I could follow some and thought it interesting, but it turned out that Ryo was worried the whole time about the fact that I wasn't being included, and plus he didn't want to talk about business on a Saturday night when he thought he was just going out for curry, but he had no chance to change the topic because Taiki talked so fast the whole time.

Taiki dropped a few nasty little cuts at me into the conversation. One was when he referenced going to the club with us last time--he said going out all night is for people who have nothing to do, and that no one except me had fun. (He seemed to have forgotten that we went to the club because HE wanted to go and I offered to take him.) Then, I mentioned at one point that Ryo and I had a business idea we were thinking of doing together (I'll explain more about that in a second), and without even allowing me to explain what it was, Taiki cut in and said it wouldn't be good for Ryo to do business with me. I'm not sure whether he thinks I'm not worthy of respect because I'm a) a girl, b) currently only an ESL teacher, c) both, or d) what. I DO have qualifications I can't use in my current job, which Taiki doesn't know anything about, because I don't start bragging about my accomplishments when they are unrelated to the conversation, which Taiki kind of does sometimes. At any rate, he seemed to be trying to create a closeness with Ryo by shutting me out, which was a really odd as well as unkind thing to do.

Then after we went home (and the minute we said goodbye, Ryo and I started discussing our shock over Taiki's behavior), Taiki sent Ryo two emails thanking him for the evening, and of course didn't contact me at all. Ryo didn't email him back, so neither of us has ever heard from him again.

It was really a shock...I suppose I always thought he was strange before, kind of emotionless, and he didn't seem to be able to tell me anything about his ex-girlfriend of more than a year except that she was very attractive, and that she was rather controlling but that was okay because she was very attractive. He appeared very shallow, but I thought that was due to my not knowing him well enough. But now I guess I don't need to know him better...he seems possibly seriously misogynistic, and lacking in normal human warmth.

Well. Next topic--oh yeah, the guy who is not actually Guatemalan: I was with Ryo at Soul Blood, Ryo's longtime regular bar I mentioned before, where Shouji, Keisuke, and Ramos used to work, though they all quit recently. There was this black girl smacking a dude, and I was smacking Ryo, and I think the two guys started talking because they were sympathizing about the way gaijin girls smack guys so much, and then we all started talking, and the girl and I sympathized in our rapture over Keisuke's dimples and our forelornness at his quitting, and also it turned out the girl was a JET, and I told her about my application, and she went to no pains to be encouraging--said that all the CIRs she'd ever met were totally fluent in Japanese, with the plain implication that I was nowhere close and hadn't the ghost of a chance. (I should be able pretty soon to tell her that I got the job after all, ha ha...) But anyway, we had fun talking together. The dude at first said that he was Guatemalan, so I told him to prove it by speaking Spanish, and actually he spoke Spanish so well that I couldn't say for sure it wasn't native. (though he forgot the whole being Guatemalan thing after a few minutes when he told us his name, Katsu. I just had to effusively compliment him on what a Guatemala-esque name it was.) Anyway, it turned out he had just gotten home from doing the Japanese equivalent of Peace Corps, so he'd been in Guatemala for two years and was kind of in re-entry shock.

Well, Ryo got mad (Ryo gets too mad sometimes at random people for random reasons) because as soon as we all went home, the dude emailed me but didn't email Ryo, even though we had all been talking and exchanged contact info. Anyway, I invited the guy, who seemed desperate for some company, to come to Kakogawa and have dinner with me, which he did and it was very nice. I wasn't interested in getting romantic with him at the moment, and he seemed to pick that up and be mature about it and not to think I was therefore automatically no use hereafter, a praiseworthy attitude somewhat atypical of Japanese guys, and which I attribute to his recent foreign experience. His communication style also wasn't very Japanese, which was a good thing for me because I really hate the whole indirect thing sometimes. Anyway, he was cool, quite smack in the middle of re-entry shock, and I hope I get to see him again.

Next topic--Ryo's driver friend and others: Ryo's friends often seem to me to be low achievers compared to him, but there's something very real about them. They seem to be cool because they have such a real attitude, and sometimes they seem to actually be very smart, but just not worried about using it all the time, and certainly not worried about appearing smart. I have wondered whether Ryo's high opinion of his friends could just be his kindly imagination, but irrefutably cool facts about these on the surface very lazy people keep showing up.

There is Hossan (the "-san" is a suffix and the "Hos-" has to be a shortening of his real name, which I'm not sure what it is), whom Ryo thinks is an amazing person, even though he does absolutely nothing and just lives off his CEO girlfriend. The girlfriend is apparently a very talented person being headhunted on all sides. I've never met the girlfriend, though I see her shoes all over Ryo's house, because Hossan and his girlfriend pay part of Ryo's rent in return to being able to use Ryo's house a few days a month when the girlfriend visits Kobe (she is in Tokyo most of the time).

Hossan is also apparently a very talented person who has had many amazing job offers, and also many offers to join yakuza families, none of which offers he has been interested in, so he is just doing nothing until he finds something that interests him. Apparently he has magic abilities at connecting with people and can become friends with anyone he wants to, so he has a wide and glittering circle of accomplished and somewhat-famous acquaintances.

At one point I wondered whether he could be lying about all this, since there seems to be little solid proof of it, but I have to admit he doesn't seem like a fake (for one thing, I didn't hear any of his fantastic stories from him--he doesn't talk about them--I just hear them from Ryo), and I am probably just jealous of his good luck.

But no, that's not all--I feel like he pushes Ryo around a little bit. He apparently told Ryo that he is talking to these famous people and may be getting into some business plans with them that could be really good and turn into something big--but that Ryo can't participate in this because his ability is insufficient. Hm. I guess good friends are honest with each other, but I also kind of feel like Ryo is proving his business talent pretty well with what he's doing now, whereas Hossan is doing nothing, has just talked a bit to some people apparently, but feels like he's better for some reason.

I also feel like Hossan is bossy with the subleasing arrangement--I mean, he pays enough so that it's certainly fair, but even though it's Ryo's apartment, Ryo doesn't get any say in which days he has to be out of his apartment. I mean, Hossan really does pay enough (of his girlfriend's money, I presume) that even that is actually probably FAIR...it's just...I feel like they treat him like a servant. I get this feeling from various of Ryo's friends, so maybe his personality just invites it...come to think of it I can't say I don't sometimes do the same thing; his personality really does invite it...yeah, I totally make him run errands for me and stuff...Okay, I'm done.

Ryo's other friends...there is Shakura, whom I've met once, and who is a musician barely hanging onto his rent in Osaka...and Tecchan and Daichan (again, the "-chan" is a suffix; this is an affectionate suffix generally used for a little girls, but kind of for that very reason, tough guys use it among themselves in tight-bonded groups), who are construction workers. Tecchan, perhaps, lacks any special talent but has kind of a cute face--his cheeks sort of divide into upper and lower parts when he smiles. He has a cute but immature girlfriend. Daichan, who lives in Tokyo and whom I met for the first time this weekend, doesn't exactly betray this by his hulky outward appearance but apparently lived in Australia for a year, going to language school, and I was pretty impressed by his casual conversational ability.

Yoshimi-san as well seems to have hidden talents. Until recently, one would have thought he was just a good-for-nothing half-yakuza, but after getting in a bit of trouble in the past year for gambling, he suddenly decided to do something more legal, and starting selling used cars for a living, and seems to be doing great at it. He is always driving a different car every time we see him, which is fun.

Ryo's friends all call him Bokuri. Apparently the name was originally Kuribo, which means "chestnut boy," and I think was the name of some character. At some point the "bo" got moved around to the front, which everyone thought was better.

* * *

I have a week off less than two weeks from now, and still haven't decided whether to go to London and see Andrew, or go to Tokyo and then wander north from there by local train, exploring onsens and scenic spots.

* * *

Oh, next time I need to tell a bit more about last weekend, which was kind of wild. I have to go now because Ryo just came over.

Update on friends and students 6

Well, I find that last time I mentioned Yuka, the advanced Friday afternoon student, I called her "an enthusiastic and motivated student whom one can't not enjoy," or something about like that. Hm. I'm not sure what I was thinking at the time--I guess it's just that when I first arrived, I enjoyed the students who could really hold a conversation well...but being able to talk doesn't equal being enthusiastic and motivated enough to actually COME once they've gotten used to the new teacher. Yuka's rudeness is quite a joke between me and Ayuko. She frequently doesn't come, often without calling to cancel, when she does come is always late, and has come as late as 32 minutes into the 50-minute lesson before. To top this off, after the first few months she began to make it clear to me that she specifically doesn't want to be given anything hard. One week I was using quotes, and I would have the student draw a quote, explain its meaning in straight language (deciphering any metaphors, etc. involved), then discuss examples and whether he/she agreed or disagreed with the quote. Well, I would cut out the quotes, put them upside down, and have the student draw one, which usually eliminates being picky about which quote you get--but Yuka would actually tell me to pick out the easiest one for her! This is quite odd behavior for an adult student, especially an advanced one.

Yuka only has to pay half-price for her lessons, because she is the friend of Tomoko, the owner. I guess her discounted fee means that she values her class time less, and being Tomoko's friend makes her feel that she can run all over us if she wants to. Well, that's unkind. She's very good-natured in a certain way. If she only came to parties, at which she shows up with surprised home-baked cakes and is the life of the place, she would be great. Plus, she brings me presents sometimes. So I shouldn't be too nasty to her.

Tomoko actually occasionally comes for lessons as well, at the same time as Yuka, and Tomoko shows up once a month or less. But that's more understandable because of the number of things she actually has to do.

Yuka, for that matter, comes in with long strings of sometimes excellent excuses for being late. But still, she is ALWAYS late.

We have some new 5-year-old girls on Friday, who are cute, but only one of them is bright and attentive and gets my total approval. One of them sometimes isn't very cooperative under the (from varying outside evidence clearly false) guise of being too shy, and another one doesn't seem to be smart enough to figure out how to do basic things like copy numbers and imitate my mouth movements for pronunciation purposes. So the class is just a little annoying. Also, sometimes it's annoying when little girls are previous friends of their classmates and for that reason help each other too much--although it's certainly worse if they're enemies...

We have a LOT of new students recently actually, mostly kids. It will be nice, when I leave here in the middle of June, to be able to state on my resume that in a year I raised the student number here from 50-something to what will probably be 80-something when I go.

Oh, speaking of which, I am indeed leaving here, which is kind of a quiet piece of news at the moment because I can't yet announce that I for certain have a wonderful job waiting for me. I probably do. I'm the top alternate on the Chicago consulate's CIR list--at least it IS actually the position I applied for--and they expect to upgrade most of the people on the list, so that I will pretty much certainly be upgraded, and likely quite soon. But I really do hate the waiting part of anything, so I will be very happy when the phone call actually comes. In the meantime, I have had to make a sufficiently early decision about Atomic, which has already posted an advertisement for my job.

I was suffering quite a bit when I didn't know whether I would be continuing here or not, because there were reasons to stay and reasons to go. But now I feel pretty good about leaving. I've done plenty of good things here, but I've kind of run out of both topics for the adults, and fresh yet productive ideas for the kids. So this way I'll be doing good things but leaving without burning out (apparently those two of the three previous teachers who stayed for a second year both burned out, and I don't want to do that). I'm kind of feeling like almost all of the students would benefit at this point from a totally fresh person, and as for Ayuko, while she was overjoyed for the first half-year at least to have someone who would talk to her, since the teacher before me wouldn't, she might possibly be getting sick of me running my mouth about now. So this year has been great, but this place is a small, small world that ideally should turnover quickly for the benefit of all involved.

Well, whatever that little sermon was...back to the Friday students. I almost lost Yuki, who got frustrated because I challenged his class a lot--not too much for his too very smart classmates, but apparently too much for him...which I don't think was because he wasn't smart, but because he lacked confidence. He told his mom that he didn't understand anything, which was quite untrue, but he seemed to believe it. I guess he thought the other students were understanding with ease every little grammatical detail of everything I said, which they weren't; it was OK for some things to pass over his head at the time and hopefully be absorbed gradually later, with only the response-essential details being fully understood. But he was discouraged and said he wanted to quit. He decided to give it one more chance and did totally change his attitude around, and now is very serious at his lesson on Fridays, which has coincidentally become private. I feel bad that I still don't think he is really having much fun--the highest-level kids' class is just serious enough that it's not really that much fun unless you really enjoy the language--and, well, it's become a private, which really isn't fun without enjoying the language--and I don't think he necessarily cares about English that much. I think he came before because he enjoyed his classmates, and he's coming now becauses he doesn't want to be a quitter--his younger brother comes here too and is rocking away (oh, his younger brother is Ryoto, whom I've mentioned a couple of times on here). I'm glad I didn't lose him, but I wish he could have fun and be challenged at the same time.

My last class on Friday (the last class I taught, as it's Friday night now), is one I really enjoy. Oh, I mentioned this already kind of--the smart girl who used to be in our highest-level elementary school class but has just started junior high school yet is continuing to come here, which we are overjoyed about. (Typically kids starting junior high school quit here in favor of going to cram school and beginning the crazy study career that will culminate in college entrance exams.) Anyway, Ayana (kind of a funny name for her--I think it sounds gentle and benign, but she is extremely sportsy, rough and tomboyish) is a brilliant kid with a naturally analytical brain who is an utter joy to teach. She's had two lessons in her new class so far, and so far is going really fast. If she doesn't get frustrated with the current pace, she is going to learn a LOT.

Saturday: Joey, a hilarious little kid with an old man face, DID get frustrated and has probably quit since we haven't seen him over a month, but in his case that was totally because of him, not us. (That would be us, not me, because Justin frequently teaches on Saturdays and Mondays.) He's an extremely perfectionistic kid who, though he was doing wonderfully in his class, cooked up the idea that he was a failure because he couldn't understand every detail of anything that comes out of the teacher's mouth. Which is SERIOUSLY not expected. Officially, we are not supposed to use any Japanese in the kids' classes. I do at times, for necessary instructions or grammatical explanations, but it's best avoided as much as possible, and there are plenty of situations where we say things in English that we know the kids can't possibly fully understand the details of--for example, during the initial few greeting-ish moments, I'll say something like, "Oh, what do you have on your shirt?" Because I point to their shirt and start listing the things on it, they figure out what's going on, but they can't possibly understand what that sentence actually precisely means. However, just for immersion purposes--for hearing native pronunciation, if nothing else--to say that sentence is better than to leave space where I would have said it. All kids really pretty much understand this situation, so when one freaking little perfectionist freaks out about it, it's quite surprising and can't really hardly be helped. We tried to talk to Joey and tell him how well he was doing for his age, but he had his own expectations in his head and thus wouldn't really listen to us. I don't think he'll come anymore.

I can't remember if I ever mentioned the Okamura kids, a brother and sister who started coming together last fall or something. They are great, awesome, attentive kids that I really love. They used to be so shy and serious that it was kind of hilarious, and Koki--oh, it seems (looking back over posts) that I have never mentioned Koki! I LOVE Koki! He kind of has me in awe because of his people-sensitivity: he understands and provides (unconsciously, I am assuming) whatever dynamic is needed to make everyone in a class feel comfortable. He is very smart, and when I first came there was no one else in his class and he was a rocking-away private, but when the Okamura kids showed up, and were really serious and ready to learn, but were a bit shy about the fact that they knew absolutely NOTHING...Koki instantly turned into this ridiculous little hyena who appeared to know no more than they did AND made everyone laugh constantly with his absurd antics...goofing off and purposely losing in competitive games (not in a patronizing way, but more in an "I was busy being upside down and didn't hear the question" kind of way), but always of course able to provide the answer to a question when I actually turn directly to him. What a wonderful kid. Actually, I got so used to his goofing off that eventually I FORGOT what a archetypal model student he could be...then a couple of times he had makeup lessons on other days with other classmates, and I was reminded. One of his makeup lessons was in Yuma's class (the laughing-fit kid), and Koki metamorphosed into a straight-faced little (he is quite little for his age) desk behavior expert--I'm convinced he became especially serious to help me out, because he understood that Yuma's ADD attitude and screaming high-pitched voice were almost out of my control, so he was adding weight to the sitting-quiet-and-still side of the balance.

What a wonderful, wonderful kid. He won't ever have any big problems in life if he keeps up the way he's going now.

Oh, but now the Okamura older sister has moved up a class, which is good because both of them are awesome but they were so darn serious when they had class together...

Then there are the Matsumotos, whom I really don't enjoy teaching. I think I may have mentioned them once before and probably said something good about them way back when, because like I said I enjoy students who can really talk. These are the three siblings who lived in Thailand for five years and thus are fluent in English. BUT they apparently don't feel they should have to come here since they are fluent, so as soon as they were used to me their attitude became terrible. Especially the middle boy, Kai, was sometimes unbelievably rude. Class became nearly unfeasible--he would just ignore me--so a talk happened with the parents, which produced good results. Kai's behavior has become quite passable, and the other two were always okay. But they don't especially enjoy coming here, so I don't really enjoy it either.

I guess it's just that it seems to me that even if they would rather be doing something else, since they KNOW they have to come here for 50 minutes every Saturday, and they don't even have to be very active if they don't want, just respond to me, they might as well take as positive an attitude toward the situation as possible--any other Japanese kid would. You know, I have my complaints about the Japanese school system--I think it's too rote-based, stifles creativity and presses kids into a mold--but for whatever reason it sure does seem to produce little people with universally positive attitudes with regard to realizations like "I've been put in this class from 4:00 to 4:50 and can't be anywhere else so I might as well be right here doing what they're doing here." The Matsumotos' general negative attitude is a clear result of the different atmosphere they have spent many years in, and among mainstream-lifestyle Japanese children is actually nonexistent, from everything I have seen so far.

You know what, I guess in discussing the good and bad points of the Japanese school system, I just pretty much summed up the benefits and malefits (the most useful original word by Bonnie) of a collectivist society. Interesting.

Oh, I have a funny picture from a Matsumoto class though. This is from when Kai was still being rude. He would draw stuff like this on the board instead of responding to me:

The three characters under the chicken, サソリ、the right side of the リ of which is drawn to look like a scorpion's tail, says "sasori," meaning scorpion. Then, to the right of the scorpion with a big question mark for a body, you see Questions 1-7, written in Japanese. They say, respectively,

Question 1. Please draw the body of a scorpion. (Downward arrow pointing to the box on the left) Let's draw it here! (Downward arrow pointing to the box on the right) And here, too

Question 2. Nothing in particular.

Question 3. Nothing!--

Question 4. Nothing, but-- (untranslatable sense of exasperation)

Question 5. Even though there's NOTHING--

Question 6. I'm sick of this--

Questions 7. I'm done with this--

At the bottom, in the red box, is 自由に書いてください, "Please draw as you please."

Then up above, in red, blue, and black, you see a huge おわり, "The End."

* * * 

Nothing else of a whole lot of note on Saturday. There is an adorable new young woman student named Miho, who came with me and Ryo last weekend on our complete failure of an excursion to Yoshino, the most famous place in the nation for cherry blossoms. I was overflowing with excitement about the outing--it's a place I've wanted to go for years--and it never occurred to me that Sunday, the only day I had off for two weeks, would be too early, since it was peak everywhere else and Yoshino's peak was supposed to be Monday or Tuesday. But, after an expensive 3-hour train ride, we arrived to find no cherry blossoms whatsoever--just deep rolling hillsides covered with thousands of flowerless trees that were to be gorgeous on Tuesday. Oh well. Despite a failure so complete we just kind of had to be a good sport about it, the outing was great fun. Yoshino is such a deeply beautiful, soul-refreshing place, even without cherry blossoms, that the day was actually just fine by me. Even the long train ride through rural Nara was a joy--tiny hidden valleys with just a few houses in them, terraced rice fields up mountainsides, plenty of beautiful cherry blossoms lining rivers we crossed (I guess that was my hanami for this year, haha)...I could just imagine the sweet countryside smell from behind the train windows.

Hm, I wonder if my health has been bad this year because of air that wasn't fresh...I've always lived in the countryside or at BSC, which is a pretty garden-coated campus. I wonder if that could actually be an issue?

Anyhow, so Yoshino gets my official forgiveness for not having its cherry blossoms out when I was there, just because I'm so glad I discovered the place, period. I'll want to go back in all seasons. And we all went to Himeji afterwards to eat dinner with Yoshimi...turned out Ryo pursued this plan up because when he saw Miho he realized she would be Yoshimi's type. He was very right about this, and after we dropped Miho off he burst into a flood of nervous speculations about whether he should ask her out, and how, and what she would say, and whatever. My opinion was asked, so I said I thought it would be best, if he was all nervous about how it would go, for us to hang out all four one more time, and maybe he could pick up that way whether there were any possibilities. So I will try for that to happen.

Yoshimi actually offered to take us all back to Yoshino the following Sunday by car, to give the famous cherry blossoms another try, but only if Miho would come, and unfortunately she can't. So I guess we give on Yoshino for this year. But there's been a lot of rain this week so the cherry blossoms are sured to be pretty saddened by this time anyway.