Alone in Ogura

...and so it ends.

2006-08-07T02:21:00.000+09:00

Well, been back in England now for almost a week, and it's high time to finally put this blog to bed. Since both Ogura and my time spent there already seem so far away, it makes sense to wind up this corner of teh interweb and start afresh. Thus, I hereby announce that a blog aiming to detail my no doubt considerably more humdrum existence in the land of my birth is now open for business in the form of Pickled Flex. More info after the jump.

Moving on from pretentious self-promotion, then, how have things been? Well, after all the excitement of the Kokawa Matsuri, there was little left for me to do besides throw my things into the bags I was taking home and hope that getting to the airport the following morning wouldn't be too difficult. Thanks to the selflessly generous offer of ex-colleague Yamamoto Sensei to drive me all the way to Kansai from Naga Town I needn't have worried. He was at the local train station considerably brighter and earlier than I was and got me to Kansai in record time, almost three hours before departure.

Further satisfaction was had when I glided through check-in without needing to pay so much as a penny of excess baggage, despite my 23kg+ packing opportunism. From there I was reminded why Kansai is so meh compared to other international airports (my main gripes being the lack of foreign media at its news stands and difficult-to-locate smoking areas) until before I knew it, I was back aboard a plane in leaving Japan for the final time, at least for the forseeable future.

Mixed emotions really - I find flying internationally to be such a dazing, spacey experience that I wasn't really able to focus on what it meant to be going home for good. That said though, I certainly felt a bit of a twinge when I had to hand over my gaijin card at immigration. I wanted to keep it as memento, as you do, but it can't be helped.

So, 15 hours of flying and a one hour stopover in Amsterdam later and I was back once again in the family nest, seeing little that was all that different, and happy that all of my boxes had arrived ahead of me.

Over the past week I've been taking it pretty easy to say the least - pottering around the house, wandering around town, seeing mates, going to the pub - and so far it feels much the same as the two-week visit home I made last year. I expect it to be at least a month or so until it properly dawns on me that this is what life is going to consist of from now on - no more living solo in a cosy flat, no undemanding job, no late-night chu-hi dispensing combinis, no Gemma, Sean, Sarah, Mercedes, Jared, Noel, Rich, etc. etc...

But that's all yet to come. Otherwise, my initial observations indicate that first and foremost, news of England's all-consuming heatwave appears to have been greatly exaggerated. I've had to unearth my beloved flea-bitten leather jacket whenever I've ventured out the house and have spent time shivering in my local's beer garden. It's damn cold. People here assure me that I missed it all, but that there'll be some kind of second wind within the next fortnight. Bloody hope so, it'll make adjusting to the climate of Northern Europe a damn sight easier if it's hot.

Also, following a conversation with the similarly recently-returned Mark, we both observed how casual everyone is when you're out and about in town. No one expects to walk into Debenhams or M & S to a chorus of shrill 'irrashaimase!'s, but the random conversations I had with sales staff when ordering a cheque book from the bank and buying a new keitai (it sounds so much cooler than the word 'mobile') were like nothing I could ever expect from Japan, even if I had ever mastered the language fluently.

There's a certain ease and informality here that's utterly at odds with the Japanese way - an obvious thing to say, but you do start to miss the 'customer is God' philosophy a little when you leave a cafe, as I did, eliciting no response at all from the staff and wondering if it's because you said or did something wrong.

Oh yeah, and not to forget the mild case of information overload that comes from actually being able to understand signs and comprehend overheard conversations. The latter is especially distracting after two years of automatically filtering out incomprehensible Wakayama-ben chattering in school staff rooms and on the JR Wakayama line. My attention filters need a considerable amount of work, I feel...

Overall, it's still early days yet. I don't doubt some of CLAIR's dark warnings about reverse culture-shock will come true, but I just have to take things as they come. What matters now is formulating some kind of plan regarding what I'm going to actually do with the rest of my life. The past two years have been great and no mistake, but they're gone and it's time to look ahead. So, signing off here for the very last time, sayonara to you all...

Going Loco in Kokawa

2006-07-30T17:14:00.000+09:00

Bringing things full circle, pretty much a year to the day I first started this ‘ere journal, I’m writing once again about the goings on at Kokawa Town’s annual summer festival. Yesterday evening the great and the good were out in full force to mingle, eat, drink, be merry and to watch the pushing and pulling of the traditional carnival floats known as danjiri.

Huge, bedecked with lanterns and often containing large numbers of children with a taiko drummer or two thrown in for good measure, these oversized wooden death traps are raced along the town’s narrow streets without much warning – several men will suddenly run towards you blowing whistles and gesticulating wildly, which is your cue to get the hell out the way and watch as the danjiri lumbers past, accompanied by shouts of what sounds like san-ri-yo – no relation to the manufacturers of Hello Kitty merchandise, I’m sure…

The Kinokawa/Wakayama Shi massive was out in full force of course, with numbers swelled even larger than usual with the addition of Gemma’s brother Robert, Hannah’s boyfriend Jan and two high school buddies of Jared’s. Not only were we numerous, we were nearly all dressed for the occasion, with yukattas for the girls and jimbes for the guys. Alas, I have no pictures at all of our sartorial hi-jinks, but Mercedes is likely to post plenty over on her blog some time in the next few days.

As one might imagine on a night involving a large group of people attending a crowded festival and drinking rather a lot in the process, it wasn’t long before the group fragmented and the night became increasingly random and chaotic.

Having taken a stroll up to Kokawa Temple (with all the assembled people there loudly praying and the myriad food and trinket stalls, it was by far the rowdiest temple I’d ever seen) myself, Noel and Sean took a leisurely stroll back along the main street where all the action was, stopping every now and then to say hello to students we recognised from our classes and marvel at the lithe young girls whose job it was to hang off the danjiris and give a hand pushing them. We then had the good fortune to run into a colleague of Sean’s, who invited us back to the shop owned by his family, where we were treated to lashings of sushi and draught lager and partook in animated conversation spanning arcane Japanese popular culture and obscure kanji characters.

Following this, we managed to reconvene with some of our lot from earlier, looking slightly the worse for wear. Thoroughly smashed by this point, several of us struck up conversation with some of the aforementioned lithe young girls loitering beside an idle danjiri, who’d taken the unusual step of accessorising their traditional uniforms with Jamaican scarves and face paint because they ‘liked reggae music very much’. Much stilted banter later, I was extremely excited by their suggestion that some of us drunken gaijin assist them with the pulling of their mighty danjiri. After a couple of beers beside the temple, the call came for Robert to join them, and not wanting to be left out (and drunk enough to care who knew) I ended up foisting myself into the crowd.

To the cries of san-ri-yo Rob and myself did a fairly cack-handed job of helping a dozen or so people push the thing down the street at steadily increasing speed until we slowly ground to a halt a hundred and fifty meters or so later. There then followed a lengthy san-ri-yo call-and-response session between the danjiri’s female passengers and their largely male mules, during which Robert and I were finally rumbled. A short, bespectacled and extremely agitated man pointed at us, demanding that we leave, ostensibly because we both had incorrect footwear (sandals and flip-flops, as opposed to the Japanese wooden sandals which are all but impossible to run in) but the racial subtext was impossible to ignore. (though of course, he could have just been pissed off that two drunk, British idiots were lowering the tone). As I remarked to Robert on our way back to the temple to rejoin the others, what we’d just experience had been the very best and very worst that Japanese hospitality had to offer.

Feeling somewhat ill after the danjiri dash, it was clear the night was finally starting to catch up with me. Accompanying the others to the 24 hour supermarket to pick up some late night munchies was about all I was good for by that point, and abandoning my original plan to walk back to Sarah’s, I instead opted to crash on the floor at Hannah’s.

So, here I am, feeling slightly tender but otherwise good and finding it a little difficult to believe that the sun is finally setting on my two-year-long Japanese adventure. This is the last time I shall be posting from the land of the foreign sun, my final postscript will be from England’s green (well, rather barren and parched if news about the weather is to be believed) and pleasant shores. Due to me having passed out by the time the others briefly returned to Hannah’s later that night, I’m slightly upset to have missed saying goodbye to Gemma, Sean and Noel for the final time, so I’ll do it here – take it easy guys, thanks for some pretty damn good times and stay in touch.

All that’s left for me now is perhaps one final okonomiyaki in a nice little restaurant here in Naga, and then a long flight home tomorrow morning. Here’s to hoping my excess baggage costs don’t bankrupt me and that I make it back in one piece.

Nihon…sayonara…

The horror…the horror…

2006-07-26T15:31:00.000+09:00

It should be noted that as of now I am no longer in Ogura, nor alone for that matter. Since leaving my flat for the final time yesterday, I am temporarily based in Naga town, staying at the home of generously hospitable fellow ALT Sarah, ahead of my return to England’s green and pleasant lands next Monday.

This temporary homestay is mainly intended to give me a chance to properly appreciate the fact that I’m leaving after two years, and allow me to see friends and do things out here for the last time without constantly thinking about the stress involved in sorting out my place, arranging final bills and all the other horrifically complicated and tedious things anyone has to do before they permanently move away from somewhere. All that’s done now and finally, I can afford to relax a little.

What stress it was though…with four generations of JET behind me and no one new coming to take over, it was up to me to dispose of everything in my small two bedroom flat and Wakayama High to pick up anything I couldn’t get rid of myself. A combination of lack of forward planning, two years of laziness and Japan’s restrictive waste disposal laws meant that yesterday caused me levels of stress and frustration the likes of which I never want to experience ever again. Don’t be fooled by the diminutive size of my former dwelling, it boasts an interior of TARDIS-esque proportions containing dizzying quantities of crap that filled bin liner after bin liner in the absence of anyone else wanting it. Anything usable went into cardboard boxes that I soon ran out of, everything small went into bags and several cupboards had to remain full. I fully anticipate an irate phonecall from Wakayama High’s head of administration any day now.

And all that was just the stuff I was leaving behind – there was still the issue of everything else that was coming back with me. Having packed a suitcase, a backpack, a small rucksack, a guitar case and laptop shoulder bag with all my worldly possessions it quickly became apparent just how optimistic it was to think that I could get it all on a plane. I was to find out just how optimistic when nihonjin buddy Daisuke came over in the morning, ostensibly just to pick up the oven I was giving away for his mother, bringing with him at my request a set of weighing scales. The horrible truth soon became clear – the combined weight of my baggage came to 46 kilos, exceeding my 20 kilos allowance by more than double.

(Brief note – if anyone can explain to me why it is that residents of Canada and the US are given 32 kilos baggage allowance on international flights while the rest of us mere mortals have to make do with 20, I’d love to know).

Bitterness aside, I was left with a rather large problem to say the least – if I wanted to avoid crippling excess baggage costs at the airport, a radical solution was called for. I decided to try and send my suitcase home through the post. An insane idea, admittedly, but I didn’t have much of an alternative.

So, to my profuse thanks, Daisuke agreed to come with me to the local post office and act as interpreter. Driving there on his father’s open-top pick up truck with me hanging on for dear life in the back we entered and endured an interminable ten minutes or so while we waited to be seen, another fifteen for the young guy behind the counter to say whether it was possible to do what I had in mind (it required two phonecalls and a lengthy perusal of his Post Office employees user manual – to be honest I’m not certain whether he actually worked there, such was his level of ignorance and nervousness) and another thirty for me to do the weighing and filling in of the relevant forms once we were given the go-ahead. Standard shipping costs applied, which meant fifty quid on surface delivery, expected time of arrival at destination roughly 4-6 weeks. Furthermore, I was unable to lock the case, nor insure the contents – something that could only be done at a larger branch in the next town over. Hopefully I won’t have clapped eyes on that case for last time – time will tell…

Daisuke and I then went for a pleasant lunch at the local Chinese (the owner of which had been the happy recipient of my oversized Sony television) before he had to dash off to work at a private tuition school. That left me to clean, pack and tidy for about six hours solid until the arrival of Gemma around 8pm, after which time I was all but spent.

So, here I am in Sarah’s scrupulously tidy and well cared for abode which has flowers on the balcony outside and everything. All mine had was an overflowing bucket for the water pumped out by my temperamental A/C unit. Later today I should be dropping in on the family of Morimoto Sensei for dinner, perhaps kicking back by the river tomorrow afternoon and with any luck hooking up once more if possible with a couple more erstwhile colleagues by the end of the week. Let the home straight begin…

For a limited time only - an audio blog!

2006-07-20T22:43:00.000+09:00

Sorry to get all techno gee-whizzy on you folks, but have had a rather eventful evening tonight, and instead of writing it all down in my own inimitably convoluted way, I've poured out my thoughts into a diddy little dictophone thing. Why? The answer is contained within the somewhat lengthy (about 7 minutes long - sorry) mp3 file that you can download here courtesy of the fine people at YouSendIt.com. Hurry though, this offer is only available for a seven day period as of now...

“Thank You So Far”

2006-07-15T11:56:00.000+09:00

As my time in Japan draws to an end at frightening speed, I’m naturally finding myself doing many things I’ve become used to over the past couple of years for the very last time. No longer will I drop in on the kids at Kii Cosmos special needs school, nor teach classes at Kinokawa High ever again.

There are also the classes themselves of course, though in the case of Wakayama High, I’ve only known the 16-18 year olds I teach for several of months, seeing as the academic year out here runs from April to the following March. In spite of this, the students from two of my classes have been very kind in handing me collections of small thank you notes (though the mean-spirited, cynical side of me suspects that this has more to do with my teaching colleagues needing some activity to fill up their end-of-semester lessons on the days I’m not around).

Either way, receiving these testimonials is a very lovely thing, though I can’t help thinking that the phrasing and choice of words in some of them speaks volumes about the general standard of my teaching. I don’t know, take a look below and see what you think…

Cheese, Curry and Pot Noodle – Together at last!

2006-07-14T14:18:00.000+09:00

Dear God, there’s so much wrong with this picture I don’t even know where to begin. My first sighting of one of these monstrosities was early last Sunday morning, when Sean picked one up from a convenience store on our way back from a rowdy gaijin all-nighter by way of ‘breakfast’. I was intrigued that such an unholy creation could actually exist, so when I saw one in my local Lawson when out getting lunch earlier today, I knew I had to try one.

And I can report that it tastes pretty much as vile as you might expect – what ‘cheese’ there is contained within exists in powdered form, mixed in with curry granules, turning into a revolting chemical slurry once water is added. The disturbing thing is that I ate the bloody thing about two hours ago and can still taste it slightly. Am considering washing my mouth out with bleach once I’m back at the apartment and swallowing some while I’m at it. It’s not as if my insides can suffer any more damage than they have already...

Harmony, tranquility…and two lumbering brutes playing frightening rock music…

2006-07-12T21:16:00.000+09:00

The koto is a fine instrument – an oriental harp, originally brought over from China around the 8^th century, it resembles a zither and makes a lovely, soothing noise when played well. Hearing five or six of them being played simultaneously is even better. The skill, poise and talent clearly required to get it sounding good engenders deep respect for its players (at least from me). It’s also bloody big, played in a similar way to a pedal steel but about three times the size, made of a hoofing great slab of wood – and the deep, resonant bass koto weighs in at an even larger size than that.

Conversely, the standard acoustic guitar is an instrument much beloved throughout history by huge numbers of people for the way its portability, ease of use and relative cheapness has made the act of making music accessible to the masses, from world-weary blues players to disenfranchised protest singers to bourgeois middle-class white boys with angst issues…hey, it can even be played with a modicum of success by violently hungover ex-pats who have been drafted in to entertain the great and the good at a culture centre in a small Japanese town on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon.

Yes, yours truly and partner in busking-related crime Sean Casey found ourselves at the weekend playing to a roomful of completely bemused spectators who’d come to see some hardcore koto action, only to find themselves, halfway through the concert, staring in horror at these two herberts who’d popped up between koto renditions screaming “f*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me…MOTHERF*CKER!” at them.

In our defence, we kind of fell into it. Sean hadn’t been able to say no when someone he knew approached him to do something in the name of ‘local international cultural exchange’ and the idea of bringing our reckless musicianship, well-honed from boozy evenings playing to the mean streets in front of JR Wakayama Station, to a well-to-do cultural event seemed perversely entertaining. Okay, so our choices might have been a little better, but they were the only ones we were any good playing.

So it was that we treated the citizens of Kokawa town and several giggling foreign English teachers (cheers again Gemma, Mercedes, Rich, Noel) to ‘Bright Lights and Music’ (one of mine, about a guy who accidentally kills himself) ‘Paranoid Android’ (well, it seemed like a good idea at the time…sort of…), ‘You Know How I Do’ (by Sean-approved American rockers Taking Back Sunday, with added harmonies probably the best one we did) and, um, ‘Killing In The Name Of’ by agit-metallers Rage Against The Machine. Okay, the last one was just us being mischievous.

Each number was surprisingly greeted by polite applause rather than violent lynching, and people didn’t seem to mind too much about the swearing…though the reaction of the startled 8-year-old girl sitting near the front when Sean hit the aforementioned “MOTHERF*CKER!” at the climax of ‘Killing…’ did make me feel a little bit bad afterwards.

Still, having gone for the shambolic comedy angle, knowing full well how bad we both looked when compared to the elegant ladies and their koto-playing loveliness, we just about survived and were treated very well indeed by the café next door, happily supplying two full lunches to us and our assembled friends for gratis, bless them.

Hannah, it should be noted, acquitted herself brilliantly, playing as part of a koto ensemble and on flute as part of a duet. Having seen the mind-bending sheets of paper consisting of kanji, hieroglyphics and difficult to follow tables that make up Japanese koto notation, my admiration for what she managed to achieve is all the higher.

See above for some video of how it should be done, and a picture of how it really, really shouldn’t…

You know it’s hot in Japan when…

2006-07-05T21:58:00.000+09:00

1) The walls of your apartment seem to be sweating almost as much as you are.

2) Opening your front door causes a backdraft.

3) Airborne insects begin to get woozy, losing all sense of direction to the extent that a 10 minute bike ride is liable to leave your face plastered with bug-based roadkill.

4) The sounds of the nocturnal randy frog chorus emanating from the rice paddies becomes deafening, usually around 3.30AM.

5) The temperature differential between air-conditioned department stores and the impossibly humid streets outside can potentially cause an afternoon’s shopping to result in a severe bout of pneumonia.

6) Everybody seems to feel the need to utter the words Atsui desu ne? (trans. “Hot, isn’t it?”) approximately every 5 seconds, despite the overwhelming obviousness of this statement making its very use, be it frequently or otherwise, completely redundant.

7) The carrying of small towels to regularly mop sweat from one’s brow, face, arms, neck, etc. becomes essential.

8) Showering becomes utterly pointless, the effort needed to towel oneself off afterwards itself generating more sweat than you had on you to start with.

9) Stepping off a train feels as though you’re walking into a blast furnace.

10) You find yourself doing 3 times the normal amount of laundry per week to combat the drastic increase in sweat stains and persistent odors suffered by your clothes, the only compensation being that after hanging your garments on the washing line they’ll usually be bone-dry within minutes.

11) Newspapers held in your sweaty hands begin to dissolve before your very eyes.

12) It feels like it's time to go home...

Bento Rockin' Beats

2006-07-04T22:21:00.000+09:00

So, last weekend found me journeying a fair way up north to Toyama to catch up with good mate and fellow JETpat Mark and to witness the party celebrating the conclusion of the Bento Boys project he's spent the last half year cooking up with British ALT Rob. For the uninitiated, the Bento Boys is these two lads' attempt to channel the JET experience into a spoof hip hop act, crammed with in-jokes, wit, beats, samples and a great deal of gratuitous swearing.

So, having got up at 5AM, I made my way to Osaka, boarded a JR Highway Bus and tried doing my level best to get some sleep within the awkard confines of my seat. Considerably cheaper and more comfortable than the train it may be, but I personally find this route between A and B to be somewhat disorientating - it's a cliche that all Japanese cities look the same, but it's a fact that all Japanese service stations look IDENTICAL. Nodding off after pulling away from one, heavy waves of deja vu assault the groggy traveller upon pulling into the next one two hours later with the same buildings, the same shops and many of the same cars and buses visible in the parking lot.

Still, I got there in the end and hung around for a bit while the Bento Boys busied themselves with the preparations for the night's events. This was to be the playback of the album they'd recorded, pressed themselves and were going to be selling to the party's attendees with all the proceeds going to cha-ri-dee. In any event, after no small amount of wiring, hoiking speakers around, sweet-talking the venue's owner and a quick curry/lager combo to fortify their constitutions it was on with the show.

The playback went nicely, thundering through the small bar's speakers like no tomorrow while I chatted a while with one or two JETs I'd met before and a great many I hadn't, until the time came for the main event. As it was, despite the cramped confines and improvised amplification, Mark accquitted himself admirably, Bono-tastic shades and all, as can be seen above. For a representative sound sample of what went down, I direct the curious to their MySpace site, which unlike most of the things you can expect to find on there, really is worth your time - especially if you're currently, or have ever been, a participant on the JET Programme. All hail.

(Was that okay Mark? When can I get my 20 quid PR fee?)

Following the festivities, the assembled throng rapidly made their way to a nearby sports bar in order to catch the England game, the second time during this World Cup where I appear to have found myself in a communal match-viewing crowd completely by accident.

Okay, a quick word or two regarding my attitude towards football. I find it impossible to care about this game that touches the lives of so many in any meaningful sense whatsoever. When I find myself taking notice of anything to do with it, it's usually accompanied by the distinct sense of unease I feel when witnessing how otherwise perfectly normal, rational people become possessed of a wierd primal fury when watching 'their' team of eleven men kick an inflatable bag of wind around a large field against another team of eleven men with equally deranged 'fans'.

Given how unutterably tedious I find watching this futile display of athleticism, sponsorship and nationalist fervour spread out over the course of 90+ minutes, I hastily sought refuge at the bar, as far away from the big screen as possible where, happily for me, I got to enjoy several highly engrossing conversations with several other football (sorry, saaaa-ker) refuseniks. At the very moment that all that penalty business against Portugal was going on I was engaged in a highly illuminating tete a tete with a chap called Geoff about the current state of play within British politics. We only realised that England had lost when the entire bar suddenly went so eerily quiet that you could hear a pin drop. We then resumed our debate regarding the socialist credentials or otherwise of Gordon Brown several seconds later and were probably the only ones in the room talking for at least the next five minutes.

Being out here has denied me one small pleasure though - the sight of seeing legions of emotionally retarded men in Essex tearfully taking cross of St. George flags off of their cars and houses, their world shattered into a thousand fragments of bitterness and resentment over what Mooney, Wooney, whatever the hell his name is, did and how it's good that Deckham or Heckham or whoever he is has finally left. Schadenfreude isn't good, kids, but sometimes it can be fabulous...

My Bosses Are Unicorns

2006-06-30T17:12:00.000+09:00

Loathe though I am to speak ill of my benevolent employers, I'm somewhat at the end at the tether and feel the need for a rant. The thing is, I figured out today that I work for unicorns. How so? Well, it would appear that my prefecture's Board Of Education, kind of my uber bosses if you will, consists of mythical beings that may or may not exist. Allow to me explain.

People I work with have assured me that this 'Board Of Education' is real, that it exists at the other end of "fax machines" and "telephones". The kicker, though, is that I've never seen them with my own eyes. Every now and then they even ask me via my colleagues to do things for them, such as sending them forms telling them the date I wish to leave Japan so that they can pay for my trip home. What's wierd is that I then won't hear anything for weeks, making it rather hard to plan ahead and make enquiries regarding transport links and baggage allowances.

Even stranger is the fact I've never spoken to them directly - despite the fact they supposedly speak English (making them very clever unicorns indeed), my colleagues always insist on acting as intermediaries, informing me of what they've said during "phone calls", similar to the way in which a five year old girl will insist that fairies live at the bottom of her garden, but that they only become visible if you accompany her there and turn your back on the spot where they appear. The only logical conclusion, therefore, is that I work for mythical beings.

However, I made a breakthrough of sorts today when I managed to actually obtain the "telephone number" of (name withheld) Sensei and was able to call him directly. Imagine my disappointment then, when the leprachaun that answered told me that he was "away for the afternoon" and "wouldn't be back until next week". Perhaps he's off patrolling a labyrinth somewhere in Greece...

Die, critters, die!

2006-06-18T18:47:00.000+09:00

In addition to lots of heat, opportunities to do stuff outside and a great deal of sweating, summer out here also brings with it the onset of bugs, which was made all too clear to me earlier this week. Yes, once again it would appear that I have a cockroach infestation somewhere in the apartment, but the good news is that I managed to spot one of the little buggers and neutralize it with the aid of some handy spray. Bloody big it was too, though as is always the way with these things, the above picture hardly does it justice.

I remember trying all sorts of things last year (cardboard traps filled with bait and adhesive glue which didn’t work, chasing them under cupboards while attempting to hit them with shoes), but this stuff really seems to do the job. Only slight downside is that rather than producing instantaneous death, a steady blast will cause the offending ‘roach to frantically run around in circles, flip over onto its back and wave its legs pathetically in the air before expiring slowly and painfully five minutes later, which can’t be good for one’s karma. Anyway, one down, probably another dozen to go. Am posting a pic of said spray for the benefit of any other JETs who may be reading – Arichol I think it’s called. I suggest tactically positioning several cans of the stuff around the home so that you’re ready to let rip when the beastly parasites show themselves.

A slightly more positive bug experience was had on Monday evening however, with Gemma kindly driving Sean, Sarah and I into the mountains so as to witness the fireflies found in Tomobuchi village. Upon leaving the car, a very pleasant hour so’s wandering was had down the paths running parallel to a number of rice fields, directly above which loomed the heavily wooded mountain slopes. Cheesy though it may sound, the sight of thousands of pulsing green fireflies lighting up the trees and dancing above the paddies to the accompanying sound of crickets, cicadas and frogs was pretty amazing.

It wasn’t quite as busy as I’d imagined either, though there were numerous families there, most of whom had had the foresight to bring torches along with them to navigate the extremely dark pathways. Indeed, so lacking was light generally that any attempts at trying to capture anything on camera were utterly pointless – though the fact that I saw it at all is more than enough for me.

Funny isn’t it, we’re happy to wax lyrical about insects which look pretty, stay outside and illuminate forests for our delight and entertainment, yet ruthlessly exterminate those which are brown, ugly and scuttle around our homes. The combination of natural selection and human prejudice can be so cruel…

Kyushu Part 3 – Gardens, shopping malls and REALLY bad clubs

2006-05-22T23:25:00.000+09:00

For our final day in Nagasaki we made a point of visiting the Glover Garden, a kind of garden-cum-museum in honour of one William Glover, a major figure in contemporary Japanese history and Scotsman that I'd never heard of. Turns out he opened the first lager brewery in Japan (now Kirin) and imported the first steam locomotive, while his son revolutionized the fishing industry by making use of modern trawlers and catching techniques for the first time. Not bad going, considering beer, trains and fish are still major cornerstones of Japanese industry.

Before seeking out lunch in Nagasaki's Chinatown after this, however, we both made the rather unpleasant discovery that the limited bank ATM system in Japan is in fact so limited that it's impossible to take out any money in Japan AT ALL while Golden Week is in progress – while not a complete disaster, seeing as we'd both brought quite a lot of cash along, it did mean us having to be a little restrained with our spending once we got to Fukuoka the following day.

Which is a shame really, because if there's one thing you can do an awful lot of in Fukuoka it's shop. My abiding memory of the place was of a sprawling urban jungle, populated with large numbers of impossibly attractive young couples, making their way from one ludicrously oversized shopping centre to the next. That probably makes it sound a bit worse than it actually was though, it is a nice place, the central bit we were in being much like the commercial districts of Osaka, only cleaner and much less confusing.

As luck would have it, we also happened to hit Fukuoka in the midst of a large annual festival, during which huge numbers hit the streets to watch processions, mini taiko concerts, eat at temporary riverside noodle bars and partake in all the other activities one usually associates with a matsuri. The big carnival procession was a somewhat bewildering highlight, featuring as it did massed ranks of marchers dragging floats, waving flags, dancing and generally larking about, though the jarring juxtapositions of traditional Japanese music, brass bands and pre teens high-kicking to blaring rave music while kitted out in somewhat risque clothing was a bit much for the senses.

The malls on offer in Fukuoka really are stupid though, putting anything I've seen in UK to shame. Thurrock Lakeside is a minnow compared to the cavernous, labyrinthine chaos of Canal City, or the insane IMS tower with its enormous open-plan car showroom on the seventh floor. It would seem that this is where Japanese commercial architects come to let their imaginations run riot, designing these bloated monuments to capitalism. And can you easily find a record store in any of them? Can you hell...

With Nagasaki's nightlife having turned out to be considerably quieter than either of us had expected, we were hoping to be able to make up for that in Fukuoka – after all, it's a bustling, modern, young, rich city and allegedly home to the most attractive young ladies in Japan, the famous hakata bijin – what was there not (for me) to like? As it turned out, after a nomihodai (all you can drink) session completed in just under an hour and a considerable amount of time spent wandering around lost while asking various young passers-by about any good places to go, we somehow managed to end up in one those multi-storey buildings so beloved of Japanese entertainment districts with different bars and clubs on different floors. The first one we tried was a lifeless hip hop club, with a hidden DJ spinning the very latest in lazy, boring, unimaginative gangster stuff to a handful of extremely unimpressed punters. Seeking our chances elsewhere, we tried a reggae club one floor down where a DJ (visible at least) was spinning the very latest in lazy, boring, unimaginative dancehall/reggeton stuffto a handful of extremely unimpressed punters. Having paid a fiver to get into both, we were at least able to wander freely between them with the 'back of the hand stamp' system they were operating.

The reggae place got even worse once the DJ actually stopped playing proper records and instead fired up a series of crap instrumental breaks over which a group of suit-wearing salarymen started toasting in a singularly inept way. It was funny for about five minutes, before this impromptu karaoke session became unwatchably bad. Still, you can't win 'em all, eh? We both did manage to get well and truly battered however, which was at least something.

Possibly the bit of Fukuoka I enjoyed the most, however, was unexpectedly the museum of contemporary Asian art we went to the following day – there was loads of good stuff here, from Vietnamese takes on the style of Rembrandt, to none-more-postmodern satirical collages from India and video art from Pakistan. I never think to go to art museums that often, but maybe I should.

So, with that done there was nothing left but to get the nightbus home – an experience I found very odd just prior to lights out when we made the final stop for the rest of the journey. All motorway rest stations throughout the world feel as though they exist in some kind of weird limbo, but it's even more the case in Japan, where you're surrounded on all sides by elevated freeways and the indistinct glittering lights of a thousand factories and power plants pressing in on you.

Kyushu then, it's, y'know...nice. We were only there for a week and only went to perhaps the top three tourist destinations, so most likely saw just a fraction of what the place had to offer. On the whole, Kyushu definitely feels far more 'Japanese' than either Hokkaido or Okinawa, but then that's to be expected I suppose. Either way, my aim of setting foot on all five of Japan's major landmass areas draws one stage closer, only Shikoku to do now and I'll have me a set...

Anyone wishing to see more Kyushu pix can do so here.

Kyushu Part 2 – Mud, Bombs and Mountains

2006-05-22T23:02:00.000+09:00

Onsen Hoyoland, now that was fun, if a little stinky. Right after we'd investigated the hells, we both decided something a little more worthwhile was perhaps in order, thus it was that we made our way further up and into the hills for a naked frolic in Beppu's geothermal mud. Upon getting off the bus we were greeted by a large hotel building that one could supposedly stay at if one wished, but given the almost comical state of disrepair and neglect on display in the entrance lobby (peeling paint, 70s furnishings, gloomy lighting), one probably wouldn't want to.

Anyhow, the hotel wasn't what we'd come to see, but rather the complex awaiting us at the end of lengthy stroll down a wooden walkway, ending in the entrance to the male/female changing rooms. On the other side of these was a number of outdoor and indoor onsens linked by pathways and bridges, all of filled with almost completely white sulphurous water. Once in, surrounding the rocks at the bottom was a kind of gluey, gelatinous mud that sucked at your feet, the aim being to rub it liberally over yourself before washing it all off. Once again, very good for the skin apparently, but left me and my clothes stinking of eggs for days.

Pretty much satisfied with what Beppu had had to offer, it was off on a bus again to Nagasaki. Famous, of course, for being the second city in history to have been hit by an atomic bomb at the end of WWII, it's still well known for being a major shipping port, as well as one of Japan's most cosmopolitan cities.

The A-Bomb memorials and museum were much as you'd expect, similar to Hiroshima but on a slightly smaller scale, though the museum really is good – particularly the very even-handed history exhibits that detailed the background behind Japan's Pacific War. As I felt when I saw Hiroshima, again it's remarkable to see Nagasaki as it is now, a bustling, important, major city when only 60 years ago so much of it was reduced to dust.

The following day saw me and Gemma tackling the mountains of Unzen in order to get a good look at a still active volcano. After a somewhat misty start (resulting in a completely blind cablecar journey halfway up), it soon brightened up just in time for us to reach the summit after a pretty intense (for me at least) 1hr+ climb. The views were grand though, just like floating in the clouds. Coming down we went on foot all the way – not incredibly arduous but not easy, and the experience did leave with howling calves and painful sunburn for most of the next few days.

A quick word about dinner – once back at the hotel, I ended up spending five minutes chatting in foyer with a Mr Kawabata, a trucker from Fukuoka, who seemed so grateful for our chat that he promptly invited me and Gemma to for dinner with him at 'the best Japanese restaurant' in Nagasaki – a dubious claim, to be sure, perhaps he just found it to be the most tolerant. In any event, it was busy, cramped, and freezing cold, owing to the operators being a little too enthusiastic with their air conditioning. Kawabata promptly ordered plates of incredibly random stuff, most of which Gemma and I had never seen before, and some of which we hopefully never will again. Among the sundry delights were some unspeakably inedible green snails that I refused to go anywhere near, and a platter of whale meat that included tongue, bacon, blubber and whatever the whale equivalent of 'breast' might be. The whale was the tastiest thing on offer and before anyone says anything, well, you have to at least try it once, don't you? Especially if someone else insists on paying, as was inevitably the case here, despite our protests. All we had to do in return was patiently listen to Kawabata's barrage of incomprehensible Japanese and smile politely. We made our excuses for the night the moment we got outside.

Kyushu Part 1 – Fire and Water

2006-05-22T22:53:00.000+09:00

So, to Kyushu then. With Japan’s run of consecutive public holidays in the first week of May (otherwise known as Golden Week) needing to be filled, myself and fellow JET Gemma set about planning a week’s jaunt that would take us in a triangle around the northern half of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost major landmass.

First stop was Beppu, famous for its hot springs and reputation as a slightly trashy yet fun resort town – a kind of Nippon Blackpool if you will. While there we had ourselves the pleasure of a sand bath, whereby one dons a red gown, lies down in a pit of hot, black sand and is buried up to the neck in the stuff by the bathhouse’s attendants. You’re meant to lie there for about 15 minutes, while the sand slowly starts scalding the parts of your skin not covered by the gown and sweat slowly starts getting in your eyes. The volume of sand on top of you is mercifully low enough to make it possible to simply stand up once you’re done, and very good for skin it is too, I’m sure. The only problem I could see was the fact that I left the place smelling of earth, and in the knowledge that I now had black sand trapped in somewhat, well, hard to reach places shall we say…

As part of our onsen odyssey, we also took the time to visit a remote natural spring in the hills overlooking the town, maintained and kept tidy by local residents on a voluntary basis. Little more than a naturally heated pool with a small shack beside it to act as a somewhat limited “changing room”, this was surely about as natural as onsens get – just you, the hot sulphurous water and the elements. And three naked fat guys in their late fifties.

Yes, just because it’s the last word in al fresco soaking doesn’t mean that the standard onsen etiquette of bathing with nothing besides a small hand towel to cover one’s modesty is in any way deviated from. Gemma manfully went the full monty, despite the presence of no women whatsoever, what few there were loitering instead further back along the path. I’m sure neither of us violated any major unwritten protocol, and the men there (who scarpered soon after we entered the water) didn’t seem to mind at all. Funny, that…

We also found time to take in what’s arguably Beppu’s largest tourist attraction, the ‘hells’, large pools of naturally heated spring water, hot enough to produce steam. Legend has it (or the guidebook, at any rate), back in the day Christian missionaries would be thrown into these things, hence the origin of the name. These days the hells swarm with a multitude of tourists and school parties all queuing to see…some colored water.

The blue hell we saw was certainly quite pretty and was surrounded by pleasant gardens, with a random greenhouse thrown in for good measure. The mud hell contained hot bubbling mud that brought to my mind melodramatic scenes set in the arch-villain’s lair from Flash Gordon and James Bond films, which was quite diverting. The red hell, however, really did just come across as a warm bath into which someone had dumped a load of food coloring and beside which had constructed the mother of all souvenir shops. I think you know you're not on to a good thing when said shop seems to take up more square meters than the attraction itself. Hey ho, you win some, you lose some.

KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR

2006-05-22T22:52:00.000+09:00

…was the rather frightening message flashed at me by my laptop about a month ago, shortly before it experienced the technological equivalent of a stroke. Thus followed days of increasingly random error messages (CRITICAL_ERROR, CANNOT_MOUNT_BOOT VOLUME, ABANDON_ALL_HOPE_AS_OF_NOW – alright, maybe not the last one), erratic behavior and frantic attempts by me to back up as much of my precious data as possible, and all this right before I was due to spend a week traveling around Kyushu.

In the event, I succeeded in having a very pleasant Golden Week during which I managed not to think about computers at all (details of which can be found elsewhere) and after returning, finally managed to coax the long-suffering bucket of bolts back to life again with the aid of a borrowed screwdriver and a replacement hard disk.

The original problem? Overheating, caused by failing to keep the coffee table it normally sits on adequately clean of dust, cigarette and incense ash, biscuit crumbs and other mess. Fans on laptops are often located on the underside of the machine, so if you’re an incorrigible slob like me, this gunge builds up over time (say, a year and a half), gets sucked underneath the computer, blocks up the fan’s grille, causes a dangerous buildup of excess heat and fries your hard drive. Consider yourselves warned, kids…

This Is What An Enkai Looks Like...

2006-04-19T22:35:00.000+09:00

Hanami + Enkais = The Official Start Of Spring

2006-04-19T21:43:00.000+09:00

Another lengthy gap between posts for two reasons - a general lack of me doing anything vaguely interesting over the school holidays besides keeping irregular hours at work and taking over the school's music facilities to add guitars to my demo recordings, and the fact that immediately after I actually did some stuff, I somehow never found the time to write any of it down. So, what stuff did I do?

First off, hanami - a noble tradition here in Japan whereby the entire population becomes inordinately excited at the appearance of blossom on cherry trees. The media breathlessly covers this national obsession as warm fronts sweep across the country, the ephemeral nature of it all adding something special to the occasion - they're around for maybe two weeks in any given area, tops, before they disappear.

The really good thing about all this though is the hanami tradition associated with it - essentially very boozey picnics, hanamis simply involve getting together with friends, family or work colleagues and lolling under some nearby cherry trees while consuming a large amount of food (traditionally fish) and alcohol (traditionally sake), singing songs, dancing and generally getting battered.

If the book I read is to be believed, this apparently all stems from an ancient tradition dating back countless centuries, in which people would give thanks to the gods of the day for the appearance of said blossoms by leaving offerings of sake and fish beneath the trees. Coming back the next days to find the goodies exactly where they'd left them (oddly enough) the general feeling was "Well, it'd be a shame to see this lot go to waste, eh lads?" (I'm paraphrasing here), and promptly devoured the lot, since which time they've been doing it annually ever since.

And who am I to argue? Me and around half a dozen other JETs got together a couple of weeks back to have a hanami of our own in the grounds of Wakayama City's castle, with lashings of lager, wine, sake, fish-based snacks and entertainment in the form of two guitars, a ropey old keyboard, a frisbee and an American football - needless to say, overcast though it was, a very good time was had by all...once again, cheers to Mercedes for the guitar pic...

The other item of interest was the works bash held at a swanky hotel that I attended the following day with the teachers at Wakayama High. In addition to the academic year running from October to March, the other oddity of the Japanese school system is the fact that major changes are made to the teaching staff and various other aspects of the school organisation. Anywhere between 5-10 members of staff are transferred, people often switch desks in the staffroom, move to different offices or are moved sideways into different departments. The do that I went to (or enkai as they're called) was in honour of those staffmembers leaving, of whom two I was very sorry to see leave. Nakano Sensei was a young English teacher I taught a couple of weekly classes with, while Yamamoto sensei was science teacher a little older than me, who I spent loads of time chatting to in the staff room, as well exchanging lots of movies, games and cigarettes with.

The event itself consisted of a pleasant and no doubt hugely expensive meal which was a curious mix of Japanese and European cuisine (sushi with chopsticks I can handle - using them to rip apart a large pork cutlet is something else entirely), interspersed with speeches, occasional bursts of karaoke and some very peculiar staff bonding rituals at the end.

Yamamoto and I foolishly hit the free whiskey-serving bar a little harder than perhaps we ought to have done once the food was over, and hijacked the karaoke machine just as everything was winding down and the hotel staff began trying to get us all to leave - his chosen weapon was YMCA, mine was a spirited and tone-deaf rendition of 'Jealous Guy'.

As you can see from one of the pictures, the last hurrah came in the form of everyone forming a circle and repeating something that sounded like 'yarrgh!' while a PE teacher stood in the middle pumping his fist into the air. After that, everyone sang the school song that I still don't know the words to, and finished off by forming a human chain a little like the 'Oranges and Lemons' party game every Brit does at a birthday party when they're about 5, through which scuttled the teachers that were leaving. Most odd, but arguably far better than just getting mindlessly pissed and attempting to make a painfully embarassing move on the colleague from accounts you've had your eye on all year...

Breaking The Silence, Spring Is Sprung(ish) And The School Corridors Echo No More

2006-03-16T14:22:00.000+09:00

Well now, the first post in a very looooooooong time indeed. Why the gap? Well, the simple lack of anything really interesting to write about – the actual definition of ‘interesting’ here, being entirely relative of course.

Truth be told, all that my life has really revolved around lately has been sorting out various exam bits and pieces in time for the end of the Japanese school year and plugging away at my increasingly ill-suited and badly completed Japanese correspondence course.

That notwithstanding, other events of note have included the ‘city hi-jinks’ that I was looking forward to during my affliction failing to materialize, having to make do instead with a very messy alcoholic evening in a small bar in Iwade with Gemma and Sarah which, while lacking the sense of lawlessly chaotic unpredictability of the average Osaka all-nighter, was jolly good fun nonetheless..

The third years at Wakayama High also graduated, amid a ceremony characterized by a bizarre cross between militaristic formality and saccharine sentimentality. Example- during the two hour rehearsal for the main shindig held the day before, all students are assembled together in a hall roughly the size of an aircraft hanger but even less insulated. They are then ordered to practice standing, bowing and sitting in perfect unison before the third years take to the stage to collect their certificates to the strains of Lennon’s Imagine. And this was only the practice, the whole event was actually held twice. Most curious thing about it all as far as I was concerned was the amount of 17-year-old graduating boys blubbing as they filed out of the hall at the end. I expected tears from plenty of the girls after witnessing last year’s ceremony, but these reconstituted new-man emotional types really caught me by surprise. More power to ‘em I say, it was rather sweet in its own way. Now with that over and several weeks of end-of-term exams pretty much done, school is winding down for a few weeks, causing Wakayama High’s draughty concrete corridors to fall eerily silent.

Anything else? Well, pretty much every JET in the Naga-Gun area (I refuse to recognize Kinokawa Shi as a geographic and administrative entity) turned up to see an enormous Taiko concert given by the group Sean goes along to every week which included some of the biggest drums I’ve ever seen in my life and some of the densest rhythms ever to pound my ears. Sadly my efforts at making a bootleg recording on my trusty iRiver which I could then share with the world (after obtaining permission from the performers of course) completely failed after my inaccurately-set recording levels made the end result sound as though the venue’s walls were caving in. Never mind, eh? Photographic evidence is courtesy of Mercedes.

Other than that, I witnessed once again the sheer unbridled joy demonstrated by the average Japanese club DJ who either leaps around behind the DJ booth to J-Punk like a six year old on a sugar rush or else gets, like, totally into it maaan by adopting a Christ-like pose and dramatically throwing his head back to Progressive House while out with Jared and Sean at Wakayama’s Club Gate last weekend.

Oh, and it’s been getting warmer too. Iwai Sensei, my special needs school supervisor, emailed me a couple of pics of the plum blossom starting to grow in southern Wakayama that you can see up there. The Japanese go absolutely nuts over their Spring blossom and given how I’ve finally experienced a properly hardcore winter, I can’t say I blame them really. Unfortunately, most of the trees around here have yet to burst into vibrant life. Indeed, the last couple of days have seen intermittent bouts of snow of all things, and in mid-March!

However, by the time school starts again in early April and the corridors once again ring to the students’ cries of “Kusai!”, “Kawaii,” and “Bye bye!” the Sakura will be well on its way, the weather conditions will be about as good as it gets in Japan for a Brit like me and I’ll be enjoying a few of sake-fuelled hanabe with friends and colleagues. Here’s to hoping, anyway…

Under The Influenza...

2006-02-20T17:33:00.000+09:00

Well, yay for me...25 today and I'm stuck at home having been diagnosed with Type A influenza following a visit to the doctor's last Friday, what larks. Well, it lets me have a quiet time of things I suppose, and it's just as well I'd earmarked next weekend for fun and hijinks in the city rather than this. So here's to me then, a quarter of a century in and...oh, God, enough already. All this talk of my own mortality when my current fits of coughing make it difficult to type properly is just unbearably depressing...mumble, mutter, grnrg, mutter mumble...

Ice, Ice, Baby...

2006-02-19T19:16:00.002+09:00

To Sunday then, and the coldest I think I've ever felt before. After almost two hours of recovery in the sancturary of Sapporo's Excelsior Cafe, and with bleary eyes and tired expressions all round, we embarked on a journey to Sato Land, the festival's other major site one hour away from Sapporo by bus.

After all of us slept the whole way there, getting off was something of an eye opener - vast expanses of snow-white plains for miles around and by God was it cold. What we'd failed to appreciate was that cold though Sapporo was, at least the city had plenty of tall buildings to act as wind breakers. The place were now at had nothing as far as the eye can see, enabling the bitter winds to do their very worst...

Sato Land wasn't short of things to see or do by any means - enormous ice slides, snow labyrinths and a ride in a dinghy attached to a snowmobile promised much frosty fun, but with three hour queues for the slides and the thought of the cold winds whipping across my face putting me off the idea of the snowmobile, I contented myself with simply sampling the huge range of hot cuisine on offer from various stalls and trailers. Jared, Sean and Hannah weren't to be put off though and enjoyed icy drive around the track, the fools.

After a doner kebab, some corn on the cob, a cup of hot whiskey and as much time sheltering inside the site's main building that we all thought we could get away with, we had a quick wander around the snow labyrinth before admitting defeat and heading back ahead of the end of the closing ceremony.

With all of us in a near state of deep freeze, an emergency onsen-based thaw-out session was called for before heading down the road for a meal at a charming locale by the name of 'Nuts Cafe' and yet another extremely ill-advised nomihodai. The sensible ones (Mercedes, Jared, Hannah) made their excuses and left at a realatively reasonable time, seeing as we were due to be getting a bus to the airport the following day before 6am. The rather more foolish ones (me) thought they'd see how far they could push the fun before the voice of reason made itself heard and suggested that maybe another tequila wasn't such a good idea after all. The lost causes (Gemma, Sean) on the other hand, declared war on the forces of reason and the human body's capacity for alcohol absorption and stayed til nearly four, making friends with the bar staff, flirting with the bar staff, solemnly promising to one day marry the bar staff and ultimately yakking up outside, leaving a particularly colourful ice sculpture of their own.

All of which tomfoolery ended up making for perhaps the most chaotic boarding of a flight I can ever remember having. Sean had gone AWOL that morning from the capsule, and it was only with the kind assistance of the hotel staff that I was able to track him down to the lounge area on the top floor. With his basic motor functions seemingly shot to pieces and his eyes apparently only registering something else very far away when I tried talking to him, I ended up shoving his flight ticket in his hand and barrelling back downstairs to rejoin the others and seize our bus.

Three of us even managed to get through airport security together. Gemma got separated following a paged announcement for her over the airport's PA. Turned out it was courtesy of Sean who'd made it to the airport with moments to spare, only sans his ticket and mobile phone. Much negotioation later, Sean finally made it onto the plane and came to the back where we were seated to announce proudly that he was a 'star' before being led to the new seat he'd to reserve near the front.

So, that was Snowporo. A lot of snow, a lot of fun and one hell of a lot of drinking. Remember kids, one is never enough...

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow...

2006-02-16T17:55:00.000+09:00

To the next day then, and what I can dimly recall another lengthy walk around Odori, this time by day, which much stopping off at various cafes and restaurants to get out of the cold. Make no mistake, Sapporo in winter is a bitterly cold place, putting my rantings over the past few months about winter in Kansai into some perspective. The average was -5 degrees while we were there, or thereabouts, resulting in a level of personal discomfort alleviated only by judicious use of 'heat packs' (plastic pouches designed to be stuck to the back, torso or feet that emit small amounts of heat when pressure is applied) or popping into a well-hidden Japanese restaurant below ground for a huge round of soba noodles, rice and bento.

After the cold finally got the better of us all, we all retired to Safro for a luxurious session in its well-equipped spa facilities. Or at least I and fellow lads Sean and Jared did. Owing to lack of space at the hotel, the girls we were with said they'd find something to do while we were off pampering ourselves, only to end up sitting in the hotel's lobby for nigh on an hour and a half. Did we feel guilty? Well, the thought did cross our minds, yes...

After this, off we went to another nomihodai, this time a huge affair organised by Sapporo's JET population, only we never knew the start time before we arrived and were given the wrong information by the venue. After securing a seperate table ourselves, we then proceeded to consume an unholy quantity of Kirin Beer, whiskey cocktails, barbecued lamb and sushi. 100 minutes later, we were last to leave the aerodrome-esque indoor Kirin Beer Garden in the company of a group of Japanese pharmacists. Consciously taking pains to avoid the spontaneous snowball fight that took place as soon as we left, I scampered off to a convenience store, only to come a cropper in the middle of the road when my legs shot out from underneath me and leaving me painfully winded, which I managed to feel even through my beer armour. It still twinges even now.

Once again, the booze blinds descend over memories of the rest of the evening, suffice it to say that another bar and a club by the name of 'Booty' were involved at some point. To say that most of us got up the next morning somewhat the worse for wear would not be putting too fine a point on it...

Walking In A Winter Wonderland...

2006-02-16T17:28:00.000+09:00

Last weeend saw myself and five others making our way to Sapporo, main city of northernmost Japanese island Hokkaido, for several days of marvelling at huge snow sculptures by day and taking advantage of Japan's dangerously relaxed drinking culture by night at the 2006 Yuki Matsuri or 'snow festival'.

We all arrived easily enough early Friday evening and wasted no time in making our way to Sapporo's premier spa/capsule hotel complex, Safro Spa, located slap bang in the middle of the city's notorious red light district, Susukino. The dubious delights of 'soap houses' and 'massage parlours' were passed over however, in favour of a tour of Odori Park by night.

Odori (literally, 'big street') is where this year's star snow sculpture attractions were located, centred around all manner of crazy themes. The really big ones were largely likenesses of obscure public buildings from around the world, (with bands playing on huge stages in front of them, which was a nice touch) or else were celebrations of Japanese sports stars such as golfer Ai Miyazato (pictured) or other pop culture icons, such as the recent release of 'The Chronicles Of Narnia' (also pictured in trippy technocolour).

These mammoth triumphs of of sub-zero engineering were very impressive to be sure, but the thing that got me slightly was the size of the advertising hoardings placed next to the larger sculptures. Obviously, it takes a lot of money to organise an event like this and sponsorship is a necessary evil, but I couldn't help thinking that the bloody great boards advertising the benefactors for many of the sculptures could have been placed a little more tactfully for the sake of the crowds wanting to get a decent look at them.

After this, it all gets rather hazy as we embarked on the first of our evening drinking sessions, including a nomihodai (all you can drink) offer. Most of us went in on one of these every night we were there, which goes some way to explaining later events...

A Day At The Races

2006-02-06T18:26:00.000+09:00

After my last post of righteous fury and invective, on to something a little lighter. Last Saturday saw Sean, Jared and myself braving the bitter cold for a visit to Wakayama-Shi’s cycling track – not because we’re all huge fans of cycling, but to have a bit of a flutter. Yes, the huge legal grey area that is Japan’s gambling laws has resulted in a wide variety of off-beat betting opportunities, among them fights between beetles and hog racing. Cycling seems almost sensible by comparison.

With the assistance of Sean and his formidable command of all things kanji-related, it didn’t take us too long to figure out the intricacies of the betting system, which oddly only seemed to allow for spread betting. Interesting to note was also the fact that gambling addicts seem to be the same wherever you go – almost without exception, shabby-looking men in their late fifties puffing on cigarettes as though their lives depended on it, eyes dead to everything aside from the latest results on one of the many television monitors located throughout the track. Entertaining though it was, we all ended up leaving with less cash in our pockets than when we went in, though we’re already making plans for Spring when the elements are going to be slightly more forgiving of the track’s very open-plan design. Yeah, the Gods will be smiling on me then, I can just feel it…

The Return Of Mister Misanthropy

2006-02-06T18:20:00.000+09:00

Well, not much in the way of entries recently for the simple reason that nothing very much of note has actually happened, besides me getting struck down with yet another couple of beastly colds leaving me bedridden. Following a blind dosage of some inordinately strong ‘cold pills’ I randomly picked up at a pharmacy, I’m now feeling considerably better and waiting to see whether they adversely react to the malaria pills I’m still taking.

So, by way of therapy, to fill up space and to satiate the borderline obsessive/compulsive need to make lists that I now have following my Sri Lanka write-up, I hereby present:

Callum's extremely petty list of top 5 annoyances in Japan

1) Taxi drivers

Alright, so it’s not the best the job in the world, it must be unbearably tedious a lot of the time and a frequently thankless task given that no one ever tips in Japan but even so, the taxi service here is far worse than it has any right to be. The language barrier is probably the main culprit, though I can’t get too uppity about that as, duh, it’s not an English-speaking country. What really bothers me is a) the costs involved in the average journey and b) the fact that 50% of the time the drivers don’t know where they’re going. Compared to their Sri Lankan brethren who know their neighbourhoods like the back of their hand and will usually charge you less than the price of a Japanese chocolate bar to get you to your destination, it’s a very poor show indeed.

To illustrate one example, last week found me having to get a bus to one of my schools as my usual teacher-driven lift was unavailable. Thanks to the baffling complexity of Wakayama Shi’s public bus facilities (which narrowly missed inclusion in the top 5), I ended up on one that dumped me miles from where I wanted to be. Flagging down a taxi, I painstakingly ensured that the driver understood my desired destination, settled back and was rather alarmed five minutes later when he pulled up beside a convenience store to ask random passers-by for directions for what seemed like ages. This I could have just about coped with were it not for the fact that the penny-pinching swine left the bloody meter running. A swift call to my school supervisor was called for, who just so happened to be in Tokyo at that time, to get the name of some landmark near the school the driver would know.

Upon getting the information, leaving the cab was impossible due to the automatically locked rear doors, so in the end I, slightly frustrated by this point, had to wheel down the window and bark out ‘Oi, moosh, get back ‘ere now!’ which mercifully brought him running. After finally getting to school 14 quid worse off, I was not impressed.

2) The hopelessly inadequate housing design that makes winter and summer into months-long endurance tests.

I’ve written about this at enormous length elsewhere, so don’t really need go into detail here. In August you lose half your body weight in sweat. In January you contract colds while you sleep. Not good.

3) ”Samui desu ne?”

Heard at this time of year with insanity-inducing regularity, the literal translation is “Cold, isn’t it?” Now, being British and all, I have absolutely no problem at all with people constantly pointing out the obvious in an effort to make conversation which often happens here – the difference between where I’m from and where I am now though, is that there’s never any attempt to inject this phrase with a bit of variety, be it through understatement, exaggeration or any form of irony at all. Indeed, frequent has been the occasion where I have responded by saying “Hai, sukoshi ne?” – yes, it is a bit, isn’t it? The response is always “No, it’s really, really cold! Do you not think so?” My immediate thought, never voiced, is never mind…

Truth be told, when I first arrived the apparent lack of irony and sarcasm in everyday conversation and discourse was incredibly refreshing. Coming from a country where self-conscious irony within the media is pretty much approaching critical mass, making many conversations I remember having at the time far more cynical than was strictly healthy, it was great to behold the directness and borderline naivety of my students and colleagues. Perhaps now my homing instincts are finally kicking in, as I’m beginning to miss cutting asides and witty sarcasm terribly…

4) Small amounts of yen

Really petty this one, but I do find it incredibly annoying. Given the extremely approximate exchange rate of 200 yen to the pound, I have found myself driven to distraction by the quantity of 1 yen coins (0.5 of your British pence) I’ve somehow managed to acquire without wanting to. Tied in with this is the way in which cashiers tend to return large amounts of change from notes of high denominations – the note is placed in the palm of the customer’s hand first, followed by a steady trickle of change placed gently on top, making any attempts to place the shrapnel in one’s wallet all but impossible. At this time of year, when numbed fingers are struggling enough as it is, those pesky one yen coins attach themselves to the skin from where no amount of juggling can dislodge them. It drives me nuts.

Many’s the time when my precarious amount of change has gone spilling over the counter and onto the floor. Humiliating yes, but a useful way of getting shot of some of Satan’s own one yen coins. Until, that is, I’m half way across the car park when I suddenly get accosted by an anxious cashier looking to give me back the four one yen coins I’d dropped earlier. That’s two pence. This has actually happened.

The reason I really hate them is that none of Japan’s ubiquitous vending machines ever accepts them – you’re just stuck with them. So far as I can tell, the banks aren’t much good either when it comes to getting shot of the things, though as yet I haven’t been able to face counting up hundreds of the things and trying. Bank ATMs will happily dispense them though, should you wish. Why?

5) Motorists

As a non-motorist myself, (and a cyclist too, for additional self-righteousness), I’m not a huge fan of cars at the best of time. This antipathy reaches new heights, however, when I’m forced to contend with Ogura’s ridiculously narrow, pavement-less roads on a daily basis. Be it walking or cycling, nothing gets me madder faster than being unable to make my way past two oversized cars locked in a dance of “After you,” “No, after you.”

Furthermore, people often talk about how idiotic it is to see enormous People Carriers cruising down a High Street in Islington with virtually no room for maneuvour on either side. It’s doubly so when the road in question is little more than a treacherous causeway snaking its way between two rice paddies, lined on either side with three-foot deep drainage ditches. You do not know rage until you’ve experienced the blank-faced businessman in the super-sized Hyundai behind you trying to edge past, nearly knocking your bike off the road (because he’s clearly in such a hurry and his need is so much greater than yours), then watching, dismayed, as having overtaken you he then dawdles along without a care in the world, taking up what little space there is, doubling your journey time and making you late for the morning staff meeting. Hanging’s too good for ‘em.

The Writing's On The Wall...

2006-01-22T19:44:00.000+09:00

Well, it's official - last Friday I signed the relevent piece of paper that means my time in Japan will now come to an end as of late July this year. Mixed feelings really - excitement at being able to see longtime friends and family again, relief at being able to live somewhere where I can communicate properly with strangers but also sadness at leaving all this behind, as well as trepidation at the amount of preparing I'll have to do prior to my departure.

Let this therefore be my first mention of something I'm likely to scribble about repeatedly over the next few months, namely the fact that EVERYTHING in my small, yet cluttered apartment has to be either shipped home or got rid of before I leave. Due to local government cutbacks, I will be the last in a long line of JETs to live at my current address and work at my current school, so no handing over the reins and passing on of all the useless junk I and several others have accumulated over the years for me. Instead, all I've got to look forward to is no doubt a great deal of stress, frustration and wrestling with Japanese waste disposal laws.

Still, hard though all that's doubtless going to be, at the same time I'm now looking forward to really making the most of what little time I have left out here - though obviously balancing that out with my imperative need to save enough money to keep myself afloat while contemplating my next career move in the UK, of course...

To slightly brighter news, examples of my musical 'talents' are now up for all to see and dismiss at Rupert Murdoch's latest cashcow MySpace - go to www.myspace.com/78ratio hear the home demos recorded a couple of years ago by Mark, Sophie and myself while we all shared a house together in Brighton, getting drunk in the evenings and proceeding to do silly things with a few guitars and a computer.

Pt. 4/4: Three Wheelers, Linguistic prowess and all the Spice that’s Fit to Eat – Top 5 reasons why Sri Lanka is Great, Generally

2006-01-18T22:04:00.000+09:00

..because I’d hate to finish on a downer.

1. The food

Facile, yes, but when you like curry as much as I do, and you’ve been in Japan for as long as I have, maybe you too will eat probably more than you really need to, even going so far as to order it in pretty shabby restaurants where it might not, ahem, digest as well as it might. The rice is something to behold too, at least for me for whom the chunky, sticky Japanese variety has become the norm, as opposed to the drier, lighter, more fragrant kind that complements those meats, vegetables and sauces so well, oh yeah…If I could do it all again, I’d probably also get through far more spicy samosas than I did, for it truly is the snack of kings…

2. The general standard of English

Used to seeing mangled forms of English on a daily basis while in Japan (“We can help with super OK happy get time” and so on…), it truly was a revelation to see signs and billboards written in simple, flawless English and to have conversations about politics, history, culture and people with any number of taxi drivers, waiters and hotel owners. It really is remarkable, and seriously highlights how far short Japan falls, for all the pressures to learn English exerted by its schools and various ministries.

Admittedly, there are more than a few major reasons for this discrepancy, not least Sri Lanka’s economic dependence on tourism and the fact that the Japanese never had to contend with the British marching into their country, pointing guns at them and demanding that they learn the lingo or else, but still. In what you could call a ‘developing country’ with something like a 93% literacy rate and two native languages, the quantity and quality of spoken English (not to mention German too) is pretty remarkable to say the least.

3. Tuk-tuks

Three-wheeled scooter/carriage hybrids also found in Thailand and India, tuk-tuk taxis are great. This holiday was my first chance at riding in one, followed by many more opportunites over the next couple of weeks, with every journey an unpredictable white-knuckle thrill ride. The fun begins before you even get in, with the complexities of the fare negotiation (“300 rupees,” “Come on, I went to the same place yesterday and paid 75. 100 rupees, final offer,” etc.), followed by the excitement and occasional moments of terror as the driver weaves you precariously through the dangerously unpredictable chaos of Sri Lanka’s lawless roads.

Clapped-out busses belch smoke in your face, two-lane traffic ceases to mean anything and souped-up rival tuk-tuks try and outdo each other in terms of reckless maneuvers. It’s quite a trip. Also of note are the considerably rarer, but extraordinary ‘cigarette ice cream van’ variety, selling all manner of dubiously acquired foreign tobacco brands, sweets, lighters and other bits and pieces, easily identified by bizarre horns and sirens, flashing lights and crazy modifications that make them look like something from a Terry Gilliam movie.

4. The people

When one makes claims of ‘the people’ of any country, they are always, of course, making the mistake of lumping everyone together when we all know that populations, by their very nature, exhibit a wide variety of differing behaviors and personalities. Of course, what such people actually mean is ‘I had no particularly bad experiences from anyone I met’, and aside from our shifty law-enforcement officer and a couple of surly waiters, this is what I found to be the case in the former Ceylon. Random men may well have accosted us and attempted to steer us towards certain shops and lead us on wild goose chases in Colombo’s markets, insistent touts may well have been quite forward in trying to get us taxis and accommodation when we required neither, but overall the smiles we got from strangers and the interactions we had with the various people we came into contact with were great.

When you consider how much damage the 2004 tsunami caused, how much controversy there is regarding unspent foreign aid and drastically reduced numbers of tourists, that by far the majority of people I met were friendly, courteous, polite and in no way outwardly bitterly resentful at us or the myriad problems that so many in the country have had to face (even before you factor in the whole simmering Tamil separatist conflict), it’s pretty humbling.

5. In their own ramshackle way, the trains

Wires in the ceiling where fans used to be attached, broken window shutters permanently yanked at 45 degree angles, ominous pools of liquid collected outside the on-board toilet, stations with no telephone and a manager with no idea as to when the next train will arrive, doors that are left open in transit and the law of the jungle when it comes to securing a precious seat are just some of the delights that await the user of Sri Lanka’s railways – JR it ain’t. It is an experience though, something I definitely can’t say about the Wakayama to Osaka service, with the less savoury aspects made up for by the on-board busking entertainment, food sellers, spectacular scenery to be seen outside and outlandishly cheap fares. At least as far as this condescending bourgeois middle-class traveler is concerned.

So if you’re reading this, go there – business isn’t exactly booming, the tourist industry needs reliably steady income as much as it needs ‘mislaid’ charity contributions, there’s loads to see and do, it’s cheap once you’re there and it’s another destination to chalk up on this marvelously diverse world we live in.

Pt. 3/4: Prohibition, Rozzers on the Take, Sartorial Carnage and Airborne Irritants - The Worst 5 Moments Of The Trip

2006-01-18T21:55:00.000+09:00

…because even the best holidays have lowlights.

1. Kandy’s draconian drinking laws

We’re still not sure if this was just confined to Kandy itself or whether it was the case nationwide, but our chosen location to see in the New Year turned out to be a tad more disappointing than we’d originally hoped. Mainly because as of midnight, New Year’s Eve, every bar in the city without exception stopped serving alcohol for a period of 24 hours. Whether this was because of the Islamic community, the fact that the president himself happened to be in town, or due to an uncompromising attempt to ensure civil order on one of the most potentially rowdy nights of the year, none of us know. Suffice to say, we were able to have a few drinks in an expat bar before the booze shutters came crashing down, nothing else seemed to be happening in town, and upon arriving back at our hotel at ten to one, found ourselves locked out. We finally got let in, but were then told that the champagne Mark had brought and that we requested be put in their fridge to chill was unrecoverable that evening. Cue an early night and the unusual sensation of waking up on New Year’s Day feeling refreshed and not ill in the slightest.

2. Great rooms but terrible service one night, terrible rooms but great service the next.

At the Sunani Hotel, Kandy and ‘The really weird place in the middle of nowhere our driver took us to the night before New Year’s that I don’t know the name of’ respectively.

3. Looking Sri Lankan police corruption directly in the face and having it smirk back at you

Following a pleasant meal in Colombo with Mark’s parents, there were the three of us speeding back to our hotel in a tuk-tuk when we get pulled over by a cop. He says something to the driver in Sinhalese, then looks at us sitting in back seat and demands we all get out. He then proceeds to ask us for our passports – only Mark had his on him, Sophie and I having left ours back at the hotel. You know, so that we wouldn’t lose them or anything. This chap, quite a young guy, slaps Mark on the shoulder, says he’s “okay”, looks at Sophie and I, smiles and lets some air out through his teeth in a “well now, what are we going to do with you then?” kind of way. When all three of us explain that the passports are back at the hotel and that he’s more than welcome to swing past there and inspect them himself if he wants, he just looks at us, smirks maddeningly and then looks into the middle distance as though he’s waiting for something.

Sophie starts to get rather impatient with the guy’s attitude, as well she might, starts to protest and is then angrily rebuffed by the copper, who spells it out – “This is NOT your country, you need PASSPORT!” – what happened after that I can’t quite remember. I think the tuk-tuk driver may have said something, or maybe the copper’s colleague did, I don’t know, but somehow he dismissed us all with an angry shake of the head and a scornful expression. Not keen to hang about, we sped off.

In conversation with guide Sam a few days later, he was of the opinion that all the cop wanted was to fleece a couple of tourists and get a bribe from us, which we’d all suspected anyway, though with Sam’s family connections in the police, we got confirmation from someone who knew what he was talking about. Talk about the wrong arm of the law…

4. Having my beloved leather jacket partially munched by beastie(s) of unknown origin

With Japan being as cold as it was and Sri Lanka as hot as it was, upon our initial arrival both Mark and myself were reluctant to drag our bulky winter wear around with us for the next fortnight. After asking at the desk of our the-flight-landed-in-the-middle-of-the-night-so-we-really-need-somewhere-
to-stay-and-we’re-not-fussed-where hotel, the morning we checked out, they very kindly agreed to keep our jackets there until we came back again en route to our return flight at the end of the holiday. Great, until it was time to pick them up, whereupon the collar of my much loved second-hand leather jacket was revealed to have been eaten away by species unknown. I made a point of drawing the owner’s attention to it, but beyond expressing disappointment there was nothing I could do. They were ultimately going out of their way to do me a favour, no money had changed hands and I’d put it there at my own risk. That’ll teach me to be a lazy freeloader…

5. The bites, dear God the bites…

I’m of the opinion that Sri Lanka’s population of mosquitoes are the highly trained, elite stealth bomber precision-strike ace pilots of the mozzie world – the bastards seem to know exactly what location on the foot is likely to cause the most discomfort, they seem well-versed in the technique of carpet-bombing both forearms simultaneously, causing the victim much simian-esque scratching humiliation the following day, and even pioneering offensives such as biting a victim on the ear. Make no mistake, Sri Lankan mozzies are true professionals, even malarial in certain regions (meaning they really pack a payload). Mozzie nets and tactically positioned incense coils can slow them down, but ultimately there is no escape, the only consolation being that their bites rarely irritate for more than a day or two, unlike their sadistic Japanese counterparts…

Pt. 2/4: Dub Reggae, Homosexual Elephants, Posh Nosh and Levitating Teeth - The Top 5 Things We Did

2006-01-18T21:43:00.000+09:00

1. Riding an elephant bareback for half an hour before joining in with its bath time

Okay, so this is about as touristy an activity you could ever hope for, but I don’t care – I rode an actual elephant, dammit (albeit a rather elderly female one that kept randomly wandering off into roadside bushes in search of a snack) and found out what pressurized water shot out of an elephant’s trunk and hitting you in the face actually feels like. My thighs may have ached for days afterwards, thanks to the dress of the elephant keepers I may now have posed in one of the least PC pictures I could possibly imagine (see above) and a change of clothes may have been required before our driver let us all back in the car afterwards but it was cool…

2. Bentota Beach and the Wunderbar Hotel

For several days prior to Sophie’s arrival, Mark and myself had an extremely relaxing time hanging around the beach front at Bentota. Of the numerous hotels there, we appeared to have found the best in the form of Hotel Wunderbar, one of many Germanic-sounding ones thus named so as to attract Sri Lanka’s many Teutonic tourists. Indeed, there plenty of German guests there at the same time as us, giving me ample opportunity to road-test my shaky German, but what made this place and the time we spent there so great was the extremely large and cheap room Mark and I shared, the brilliant wide verandah running the length of the floor outside, the laidback restaurant with Bob Marley posters everywhere and Dub Reggae frequently on the sound system and the excellent beach, less than six minutes walk away with enough sun loungers to keep even the Germans happy and enough mangrove shade to prevent my skin from catching fire.

Throw in regular bongo parties on the beach, a none-more-laid back vibe and close proximity to town and you’ve got yourself a winner. We tried to stay there again for our last few days, but the owners inexplicably jacked the price up to ludicrous levels just around the time our rupee supplies were running low – still, no one’s perfect.

3. An early morning jeep safari

Worth getting up at the crack of dawn after a very busy day for, this involved us clambering into a battered old jeep for a ride around some very picturesque jungle plains where we got to see lots of elephants (including a gay male couple, according to our driver/guide Sam – not sure if he was telling the truth but they did both look rather camp to me) and a large number of birds. Latter included visual evidence that peacocks can actually fly, and very impressively too. With the jeep’s canvas roof rolled back, and all of us standing and leaning out at various points, the wind rushing past our heads while the jeep’s four wheel drive battled potholes and ditches, it was certainly a bracing start to the day.

4. Witnessing the tea-making techniques and extraordinary scenery of Nuwara Elija

Nuwara Elija is located in central Sri Lanka, way above sea level, it’s where most of the country’s tea produce comes from (19% of all the tea produced globally, fact fans) and the place where ghosts of the country’s colonial linger on more clearly than elsewhere. Lots of posh hotels, restaurants, country clubs and even a golf course or two here – we satisfied ourselves with a medium-level hotel, a slap up feed of top nosh at a boss posh eatery by the name of ‘St Andrews’ and a tour around one of the region’s many tea factories. Much cooler climate-wise than elsewhere too, owing to the elevation – almost like being in the Scottish highlands during summer, oddly enough.

5. Kandy and the Tooth Temple

It is said that those fond of confectionary or ‘candy’ are in possession of a sweet tooth – well, Kandy the city is in possession of arguably the sweetest tooth of all, namely an upper canine (possibly) taken from the cremated ashes of the Buddha himself. All of which agonizing punnery is a roundabout way of saying that Kandy’s Tooth Temple is quite a special place, even more so when the temple’s monks throw open the doors to its inner sanctum and allow the general public to gawp at the receptacle containing the legendary artifact, if not the tooth itself. Said container is pretty bling to say the least, though a bit difficult to see properly what with its decorative jewels reflecting all of the low-level light and the monks hurrying you and the massed crowds past the small hatch you have to view it through.

Apparently, the last time anyone opened the container it was to take a hammer to the tooth and destroy it for all time, whereupon the tooth rose into the air, hovered for a bit and glowed like the sun. Cue would-be vandal hastily converting to Buddhism and spreading the word. I’m going to make sure that I’ve got my Black & Decker on me next time I go, because that has got to be worth the entrance fee…

Pt. 1/4: ‘What I Did On My Holidays’ by Callum Fauser, age 24 and 11 months

2006-01-18T20:42:00.000+09:00

Got back to the frozen wastes of Wakayama little over a week ago now, so ought to post some sort of Sri Lanka-centric entry really. Well, what was one of the most painstakingly pre-organised, logistically complicated holidays I can ever remember going on, happily also ended up being one of the memorable and enjoyable. By way of an extremely brief précis, I journeyed with good chum Mr. Mark Seymour from Kansai Airport, Osaka via Singapore (with a grueling 6 and a half hour transfer time) and from there to Colombo, Sri Lanka, whereupon we wasted little time in heading south to the west coast beaches of Bentota to meet with Mark’s parents.

An extremely chilled few days was had by all, after which the four of us journeyed back up north, met with Mark’s girlfriend, erstwhile housemate and uni chum Sophie, before bidding farewell to Mark’s folks, journeying east to Kandy city, north a bit more to see some sights and animals, back down again to the city in time for new year, further south and into the mountains to see tea being made and the high life being lived at Nuwara Eljia, before journeying westwards and downwards back to the beach for our last few days before the departure of Sophie and eventually Mark and myself, a somewhat lengthy 12 hours later.

There’s the outline – now, rather than go through it all in painstaking detail, giving a blow by blow account, behold my cheap, Nick Hornby-inspired list-tastic approach to expanding on what we did and saw over the two and a bit weeks that we were out there. Starting with…

I'm Leeeeeaving, Ooooooooon a Jet Plaaaaane....

2005-12-22T14:20:00.000+09:00

So finally, after weeks of shivering, sneezing, coughing and wheezing, tomorrow I fly to the sunny environs of Sri Lanka, there to hopefully see and discover lots of marvelous things, in between sunning myself on the beach, kicking back and taking a break from it all. I may well be swapping my cold symptoms for a ferocious sunburn, but at this stage frankly I don’t care.

My only concern with the trip on the whole is the response I’ve had from various people when I’ve told them where I’m going, often something along the lines of “Oh, to do aid work?” Which instantly makes me feel just a tad selfish and guilty, as I mumble my reply of “Well, no, just to kind of…you know…have a holiday really…” The places we’re going to visit, as far as I’m aware, largely escaped the worst of the damage inflicted last year, but with all the moving around we’re going to be doing (seven different locations over two and a bit weeks at the last count), it’s probably inevitable that we’re going to come across a visible reminder of what happened, never mind witnessing the general mood of the population in the run up to the first anniversary of the tsunami disaster.

Either way, we shall see for ourselves I’m sure, take it as it comes, enjoy ourselves and do our best to make the most of what Sri Lanka has to offer. Happy holidays everyone, until January…

Bernard Cribbins, It's Cold - and God Knows I'm Suffering

2005-12-14T14:38:00.000+09:00

I am not happy.

I am the very opposite of happy - as I attempt to write, my eyes are streaming and my nose is doing likewise. Today I am at my special needs school where, as my services were not required in any class all morning, I have been slowly contracting a cold in the teacher's large staff room.

It is not heated. It is not insulated. It is freezing. It is the only staff room at any of my schools which is not heated, and I have been confined here for hours. This makes me angry. This also makes me sneeze, sniff and cough a great deal. My pack of Japanese tissues, designed to instantly dissolve upon contact with any kind of moisture, do not help very much either.

The bathroom next door has no hot tap and no towel to dry one's hands after washing them. It is, however, home to the only source of warmth at my disposal, namely the heated toilet seat, to which I have retreated several times in sheer desperation at feeling my buttocks go numb.

I taught one class in the afternoon - more song based stuff for the high schoolers where I was required to play guitar but was barely able to because of my sneezing. I may have passed my cold on to the students.

There is now just over an hour to go. I am really feeling quite ill. The staff around me are wearing ski jackets and woolly hats. This is not good. This is absurd. They say to me Samui desu, ne? - cold, isn't it? "No shit, Sherlock." say I. I'm not sure they understand.

I think I'm slowly losing the will to live. One hour, four minutes to go and counting...

Do You Know Who Jesus Is?

2005-12-08T22:37:00.000+09:00

Had one of those interesting cultural realisations at school today. As part of an afternoon High School correspondence class, I'd prepared a short Christmas quiz consisting of various multiple choice questions, the idea being to then use these as a springboard for class discussion and a chance for me to educate my Japanese charges in the strangely foreign customs of the traditional Christian Christmas. Due the peculiar nature of my correspondence shifts at Kinokawa High School, where student class sizes are never known before the day itself, there was only one student in attendance - no matter, at least she wasn't going to be able to nod off and completely ignore me.

As it was, she seemed pretty engaged throughout, and seemed particularly interested in the photos I showed her of my parents celebrating their Christmas in the UK last year. The interesting part for me came during the quiz where, in answer the question "In which country was Jesus born?" with the options of 'America', 'England' and 'Israel', it took this girl in her late teens two attempts to get the correct answer. Hmm.

Now, we all know that the Roman Empire and the Crusades never quite made it this far, that as a consequence Christianity is not exactly big in Japan, and that the finer points of the Nativity Story are thus not drilled into young minds during their pre-school years as they are where I'm from. Even so, seeing such a clear demonstration of this rather took me aback - having attended a Catholic School myself, I was almost shocked at the student's complete lack of knowledge as to who Jesus was at all, leaving me to try and explain his significance to her in meaningful terms in the space of a few minutes. However, as an atheist I was also delighted at her complete ignorance of 'the Son of our Lord'.

Just think - a society where the insidious idea of Original Sin never took hold, where the Immaculate Conception is but a foreign theological curiosity, where the Protestant Work Ethic never got off the ground and where no zealous septugenarians are given the autocratic right to dictate the sex lives and practices of their followers. Alright, so I'm just venting my ani-religious spleen here and yes, it's not as if Japan is a utopia without any inherent forms of repression and hypocrisy to rival those above, but really - to witness Christmas in a country where all that is celebrated at this time of year by the population at large is rampant consumerism and the none-more-secular image of Santa Claus is to see cultural realativism at its finest. Which is why the large and well-organised networks of Jehova's Witnesses, Mormons and other Christian missionary intiatives out here annoy me so much, but I'll save that rant for another time.

You want an example of how commercially vacuous Christmas in Japan really is? KFC (yes, those purveyors of "finger lickin' good" bits of reprocessed meat that could conceivably be described as chicken following rigorous analysis in a petri dish) have shrewdly managed to position themselves here as the 'go to' place for all your Christmas dinner needs if you and your Japanese family fancy making like those crazy Americans and having a chicken feast on December 25th. As a result, branches nationwide are often booked up with parties well ahead of mid December. Madness. A life-sized replica of Colonel Sanders dressed in Santa's traditional finery will even greet you as you enter, though as I haven't been able to snap the one in Wakayama-Shi yet. Instead, enjoy this one dressed as a Samurai courtesy of someone else's blog.

Either way, I'll be enjoying the delights of Sri Lanka this festive season so it doesn't make any difference to me. Now, what were you saying about that guy again? Fed a crowd of thousands with several fish and a couple of loaves of bread you say? Turned water into wine and came back from the dead? Get outta here...

Shop Til You...Break Down In The Street, Helplessly Bawling Your Eyes Out at the Utter Futility Of It All.

2005-12-05T23:15:00.000+09:00

With the exception of purchases related to books, records, musical instruments and computer equipment, I am terrible at shopping. There's something about the intimidating size of department stores, the frankly terrifying approaches of members of staff and the sheer volume of people with bulging carrier bags who seem to know exactly what they're doing that just reduces me to a gibbering wreck.

Despite this dreadful affliction, Saturday found me braving the packed streets of Osaka's Umeda district in a desperate attempt to make some kind of headway on my Christmas Shopping. Having wasted far too much time browsing reading matter in Hankyu Station's 'Books Kinokunya' store, and even more time coveting the sundry delights on offer in Osaka's premier guitar shop chain, I finally managed to get my act together (sort of) and bought some trinkets for the folks back home. I'd like to say what they were, but of course the intended recipients may well be reading this, so I'd best not say. Suffice it to say, I at least made a start.

My main accomplishment was, however, a purchase made on behalf of yours truly in the form of a ludicrously complicated backpack, complete with all manner of mysterious straps and buckles the purposes of which I can never hope to fathom, ahead of my Christmas Sri Lanka expedition. The kind gent who served me spoke marvellous English and was extremely adept at parting me from more of my money than I'd intended. Whatever, at least I'm now prepared, and all being well my purchase should at least serve me reasonably well on any adventures I may have in the years to come.

Despite its formidable size, baffling layout and impossible-to-navigate system of interconnected department stores, shopping arcades, train stations and passageways, Umeda does at least offer some form of respite in the shape of its highly diverting street entertainment. Several elevated pedestrian crossings play host to the cream of Osaka's busking talent, which I'm always keen to observe being as I'm occasionally in the business of playing songs in public spaces myself. To wit, the band I made a point of watching offered a set of mainly forgettable J-Pop by numbers, albeit featuring an heroically be-shaded bassist who appeared to be partying as though it were 1982. Max Headroom would have been proud, I'm sure...

Public Speaking, Positive Nose Contact and Manga Idiot Boy

2005-12-05T22:41:00.000+09:00

Sorry, no pictures. Just lots of words.

Well now, I've had me quite an eventful week, which makes a change. First big thing of note was the Wakayama JET midterm conference on Monday and Tuesday in Wakayama City's 'Big Ai' building (it's honestly called that - you think that's daft, the stadium directly opposite goes by the name of 'Big Whale'. Because, duh, it looks like a whale). This is the annual shindig at which every JET in Wakayama Prefecture assembles as one over two days to attend lectures, partipate in workshops, share ideas and methods in relation to teaching, make new friends, rediscover old ones and get mind-numbingly pissed in the evening. This year was a little different for me and many other second and third years however, as I was actually giving a presentation entitled 'Using Audio-Visual Technologies in the Classroom'. Snappy title, yes?

To my annoyance, I wasn't actually scheduled until the last workshop on the second day, meaning I had to behave myself on Monday night with just a few drinks and a pleasant meal at a pizzeria, rather than get recklessly smashed, stay out all hours and wake up the following morning in a love hotel. I won't mention any names...Anyway, the Monday's lectures and workshops were pleasant enough, frustrating though it was to be shepherded to individually pre-designated talks, rather than being allowed the freedom to go to the ones we actually wanted to see, as was the case last year. Hence the reason I missed the reportedly excellent ones delivered by Noel and Sean on classroom discipline and Kansai regional dialect respectively. The former I could have really done with seeing, considering what happened later in the week, but I’ll get to that in a bit…

For now, Tuesday seemed to drag somewhat, which is unsurprising considering how appallingly nervous I was. Granted, I’ve spent most of the past year and a bit standing in front of roomfuls of (young) people who expect me to somehow educate them but crucially, the people in question are non-English speakers. I was going to be doing this thing in front of a roomful of Japanese English teachers and fellow JETs. They were professionals and they would be able to smell blood. Having painstakingly set up everything on my battered laptop beforehand so as to wow the crowd with my whiz-bang AV prowess and 60 laboriously prepared bulky handouts, when the time came I was ready to begin.

I was shit.

My mouth went dry the second I stood up and having forgotten to acquire a bottle of water during the break for lunch, it stayed that way. My delivery was rambling, incoherent and shambolic, delivered at a snail’s pace because of comments made by the moderator earlier on about how the Japanese teachers had had some difficulty with the speech speed of some of the other JETs presentations. Unfortunately, I went too far the other way and spoke patronisingly as if to a class of pre-schoolers while using completely inappropriate words such as ‘impeccable’, ‘geek credentials’ and delivering some God-awful ad-libbed jokes that fell flatter than a hedgehog clamped in a vice thrown from an 18^th storey window.

Thankfully, the computer decided to behave itself, aside from launching the swirly, psychedelic screensaver I’d installed while still plugged in to the projector, momentarily distracting the audience completely and painfully drawing attention to my general ineptitude. Everything else worked fine – my recording of the Wakayama High students performing the voicemail activity, the painfully embarrassing movie I made with my after school English Club imploring the year’s new intake to sign up and the ambitious PowerPoint presentation of my family, which featured several video clips. The latter seemed to go down especially well, with my father’s brief filmed rendition of the opening bars of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor even getting a mention from the generous, unfailingly efficient Canadian JET and conference organiser Genevieve during her closing ceremony speech after the whole sorry ordeal was over. By all accounts, my laptop gave a far better presentation than I did, though some people were good enough to say some very nice words to me after the event, which I thank them for. I then proceeded to get slightly drunk in the Irohanihoheto (nightmare to order a cab from, or did I make that joke already)? bar next to JR Wakayama station and headed, to my enormous relief, homewards.

To Wednesday then, and a day at my designated special needs school, Kii Cosmos. In a dramatic break with tradition, I’m actually going to indulge in a spot of ‘own trumpet blowing’ by mentioning the kid whose name I can’t remember (which alone probably invalidates all of what follows and helps put my Mother Theresa rating at around 0.02) that I helped during a morning cooking class. Now, the kid in question (who shall henceforth be referred to as Ryu because I have to call him something and it’s the only Japanese name I can ever remember, thanks Streetfighter 2), like many at Kii Cosmos, suffers from a severe mental disability that leaves him unable to form sentences and perform basic motor functions. I have no idea as to what his condition is, as very little English is spoken by Kii Cosmos staff.

Classes at Kii Cosmos are usually composed of three to five students, twelve at the most, but in this instance only one, owing to others being absent or undergoing essential physiotherapy. The task was to make a ‘sweet potato cake’ composed of mashed sweet potato, sugar and milk, the combination of which is then placed into an oven and cooked. My job was to sit next to Ryu, talk to him and give him words of encouragement as best I could while the teacher mixed the ingredients into a plastic bag, making it easier for Ryu to have a go at mixing them himself. Oh yeah, and his mum also happened to be in school that day and was at that precise moment observing our ‘class’.

This, I have to say, terrified me because I’m not qualified in any way, whatsoever, to teach special needs education. I’ve generally taken my stints at Kii Cosmos as they come, adapting to whatever’s asked of me as best I can, which generally consists of nothing more taxing than playing the odd game, teaching some very basic English and generally being there for the students’ amusement and entertainment. Still, I had to just get on with things really and so it was that Ryu and myself ground up the mixture in the bag, with me placing his fingers in the right place to get him started and making some extremely tenuous ‘squeeze as hard as you can’-type gestures at him. That done, the teacher snipped a small hole into the bag, through which was squeezed the mixture, before being placed in little foil cake cups.

While this was going on, I busied myself cleaning Ryu’s clothes and hands of cake mix and drool with some wet wipes as his mum looked on. My words of encouragement consisted mainly of ‘ooh, “ere we go, yeah, mash that up, good stuff, there you go look, that’s going to be good once it’s out the oven" and somesuch. Alright, so he wouldn’t have understood a word. The adults in the room didn’t understand a word, but for a kid who seems unable to speak any Japanese, never mind English, it seemed the only right thing for me to do. He probably got the general gist one way or the other. At one point he actually turned to face me directly and put his finger momentarily on my nose before turning back to the middle distance as the teacher and myself attempted to keep him enthused.

The lesson over, it was half an hour before I returned to the same room for lunch, because one of the girls in the homeroom class held in the same place (it’s kind of like the form room/registration setup in British secondary schools) insists on talking to me over lunch if she ever gets the chance. While there, I got to have a few words with the teacher from before, who told me that Ryu’s mother was highly impressed with the way I’d been so careful, gentle and patient with him, and that the fact that Ryu had tried to touch my nose was very telling. According to her, he only does that with people he trusts, and that overall, she hoped I’d be a teacher at Kii Cosmos for the foreseeable future because I was very good at what I did. Blimey, now that’s what I call winging it.

Seriously though, it was really nice to hear that – all I need to do now is find out what Ryu’s name actually is and I might be able to start living up to his mother’s seemingly high estimation of me…

From the sublime to the ridculous then, the following day I was at my regular Thursday high school for disadvantaged kids who never completed their mandatory Junior High School education for a variety of reasons – usually because of instability within their family, they have some form of behavioral disorder or some other disability or circumstance that prevented them from completing it. It goes without saying that some of the kids that go there can be tough going at the best of times, though in my time here so far I’ve found that though it hasn’t been easy, I’ve been able to make a decent fist of teaching English to classes there that possess little ability and even less interest in the subject.

So, a day much like the many I’ve had there began with a class of first years, who rather confusingly are all somewhere between 15 and 19, containing around 14 students. The subject was, I seem to recall, the use of the word ‘to’ in questions such as ‘What do you want to be when you’re older?’

Armed with photocopied handouts of an activity for the students to do, I handed them out to everyone but got a rather negative reaction from the cluster of tables at the back of the classroom around which were seated four 16-17 year old-lads, who are generally quite cheeky and reluctant to learn but who’d never given me too many problems in the past. As soon as I handed the sheet to one of them, he didn’t look at it at all, but simply slid it straight into the space under the desk where the textbooks and worksheets for his other classes were kept and carried on fiddling with his mobile.

A brief bit of background here – like many others, before I arrived I naively assumed that teaching Japanese kids would be about the best introduction to the world of teaching, my mind filled as it was with the western stereotype of studious kids who are forced to work obscenely hard and adhere to class hours far longer than those of their western counterparts. They might be shy, I supposed, but at least they’d be hard workers and obedient. Well, this is certainly the case at some of Japan’s more prestigious centers of learning, but not at the places I, and many other JETs have been assigned to.

Firstly, the Japanese system of teaching assumes that so long as any one student is not being so disruptive as to bring the entire class to standstill, they will not be chastised by the teacher for sleeping in class, reading unrelated material (usually manga comic books), fiddling with mobiles or any other kind of distraction. The received wisdom out here seems to be, if a student wants to waste his or her time in class then that’s up to them. That there’s no point stopping the whole class in order to discipline a student who otherwise wouldn’t be bothering the others. This runs directly counter to my own experiences of the classroom during my schooldays and, I would venture, to most classroom systems throughout the world.

Therefore, I’ve had to develop an extremely high patience threshold when it comes to teaching Japanese kids. Loud talking can occasionally be a real annoyance, but I can usually count on the ever present Japanese teacher of English to help me put a stop to that. I’ve nevertheless had to get increasingly used to addressing one half of a class while the other indulges all manner of irrelevant activity, sometimes even going so far as to do homework for other subjects while I’m trying to teach them. My general way of coping thus far has been to simply stand near any offending students while talking, or else throw questions at them if they’re not paying attention. They all know that they ought to be concentrating, and if they’re confronted with it, usually they’ll stop and do what I’ve set them.

In this particular instance with the lad and the mobile though, I couldn’t help but take slight offence at his apparent outright refusal to even acknowledge my existence. Basically, I objected to the fact that this kid was seriously taking the piss. One of his friends also happened to fiddling with his mobile while another seemed engrossed in his tales of manga.

So I reached under his desk, withdrew the sheet again, and in my patented hybrid mix of Japanese and English, injected with enough subtle menace to make myself sound serious without having to resort to shouting, I carefully told him that there was only 15 minutes or so of the class left, that he could play with his mobile as much as he wanted afterwards, but that for now we were going to be studying English. With the traditional chastising teacher’s sign off of do I make myself clear?, I was done. Then what happened? The little bastard sarcastically said ‘yes sir’ and made a Nazi salute. If my blood hadn’t been boiling before, it sure as hell was now.

Fighting the urge to yell at the kid, to try and explain that half my family was German, that I’ve had to endure idiots who think that doing Nazi salutes in my direction is really funny since I was a child, and that he should either behave or get the f**k out of my classroom, I just glared at him, went back to the front and calmly carried on what I was doing for the benefit of the other 10 or so students in the room who were looking attentively at me and the work in front of them, pens in hand.

So, once class was done and my colleague and I were making our way back to the staff room, she was quite effusive in her apologies – that “The students do not like English” and that some of them are “very difficult” or have “very low ability”. Well, I’ve known all of that since I first started working there, and just briefly explained to her that what I objected to was a small number of students who clearly didn’t care at all, ruining it for the rest of the students who did. Mobile-addict, Manga idiot boy and the other kid had been talking together loudly enough, even before the Nazi business, to put me off and make teaching the rest of the class that little bit harder.

I had two further classes that day with a different teacher, who happened to be the head of the school’s English department. Before going to class, he mentioned to me something that the teacher I’d had the class with earlier had said. Apparently, she was of the opinion that it was perhaps best for me not to teach that class with her again as my approach was making some students reluctant to come to class at all. Well, this was certainly news to me – I can only guess that that either meant there were less students there that day than were supposed to be, or else that she was afraid that the kids I’d told off wouldn’t come to class again. Oh yeah, and that I hadn’t done anything wrong. That really threw me.

Firstly, obviously I had done something wrong, or else she wouldn’t have requested I don’t teach with her again. Secondly, was she proposing that because the kids took offence at me telling them off for doing something they shouldn’t have been, and may consequently be reluctant to come the following week, the rest of the class would have to make do without a native speaker in class, so the miscreants would be able to sit there and disrupt the class with impunity? Something didn’t quite add up.

As it was, my other classes that morning went perfectly well, even the second containing a particularly volatile 19-year-old appropriately called Aso. As has always been the case in the past, the students were initially slow to settle down and reluctant to get started, but after some prompting from me and the teacher, did eventually make a stab at the pre-prepared task.

I had a brief chat with the female teacher later that afternoon before she left school – I told her what I’d heard from the Department Head and explained that I would actually like to continue teaching with her, for the benefit of the majority of students who wanted to learn. I left it by saying that ultimately, it was up to her whether I went to that class or not, and suggested she think over what I’d said and tell me what action she wanted to take when I came to the school again the following week. She seemed happy with that, apologized again and reiterated the “students are difficult” line again. Well, yes, they are, but I don’t believe in writing them off as hopeless cases. Does she?

Sorry, rant over. It’s just the first time anything like this has actually happened to me since arriving in Japan and frankly, it smarts a tad.

The Cold Draws In...

2005-12-02T21:04:00.000+09:00

...well, it's been here for a while now, really. Yep, the days of sweating buckets without moving a muscle seem to be but a distant memory as those of us in Japan break out the blankets, crank up the heaters and try to get used to the vision of our breath condensing in midair indoors when we get out of bed in the morning.

It's not as if winter here is even that cold, at least not in the Kansai region - certainly not when I compare it to what's been going on in the UK lately. The problem is, with the buildings. With little more than paper protecting one from the elements, you're almost no better off outside than in. Much as I appreciate that I'm less likely to be killed by substantial pieces of masonry falling on my head during an earthquake as a result of this, what I don't appreciate at all is the hellish 7am dash to the bathroom across my bitterly cold kitchen.

My only sources of heat are my three trusty portable electric heaters. Thing is, they take a while to get going and for safety reasons, cannot be left on all night. What happens then? I get a cold. While sleeping. So far, this has led to me having to take an afternoon off work (after snuffling my way through the marking of the students' oral English exams, trooper that I am) and spending one of the most depressing weekends I can remember, bedridden and reading the latest H*rry P*tter (I needed something relatively undemanding to read through my facial gauze of mucus). If you read this Sarah, I'm not being snooty - cheers for lending it to me, I appreciate it. Honest.

Anyway, what I did find interesting about securing the first sick leave I've taken since arriving in Japan, was how the other teachers seemed so concerned about how I ought to see a doctor. For a common cold? No, it can be ably treated with plenty of imported Lemsip (cheers mum) and a great deal of sleep, preferably not in temperatures approximating those of a household fridge. I swear, I was this close to answering their advice with "Well, unless he or she is going to come round my flat to install central heating and cavity wall insulation, I can't really see how that would help me." Grrr....

The only region of Japan that even thinks of including double-glazing on most of its houses is sub-zero Hokkaido island, way up north, which is fair enough. They get a whole ton of snow every year, so to expect its citizens to live in residences such as mine would be almost tantamount to human rights abuse. The people I feel really sorry for are those with larger apartments that are harder to heat (the only time of year I'm not otherwise bitterly jealous of them) and those poor sods who live at the very northern tip of Honshu island. No government-sanctioned housing insulation for them, just ice forming in their bathrooms, which I’ve genuinely heard happen to some JETs up there. Believe me, you have my utmost sympathies…

Right, enough bitching about the weather. I never stop whinging about the summer, never stop complaining about winter, mutter grumble, mrmrmrmhrr...

The Daily Grind, Catering Success, Stunt Bikes, Busking and the Long Arm of the Law...

2005-11-24T19:42:00.000+09:00

Ooh cripes a lordy, I really am getting tardy at keeping this thing up to speed. I was aiming to get it to at least two entries a week, more if I actually do anything interesting but I seem to have become mind-numbingly busy lately. A number of extremely tedious tasks have been occupying my time at work - in no particular order, marking some students' attempts at writing a Wakayama tourist guide, writing and recording a listening exam on a tape recorder which insists on randomly chewing up cassettes, teaching myself Japanese from the free CLAIR correspondance course and assembling a presentation on using Audiovisual technology in the classroom to be given at a JET conference taking place next Tuesday, among all the usual teaching duties. Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

So, things of note then; well, throwing all temporal order to the wind for the simple reason that I can't remember what I did and when, I atttended the last of my cooking classes where I whipped up a couple of extremely tasty okonomiyakis which you can see up there. Made from flour, eggs, yam potato, cabbage and pork, these little beauties are just the things to warm one's cockles over the winter months. I had actually attempted one before at home using the enormous custom-built hot plate left behind by my predecessor without knowing what I was doing, which rather predictably ended in disaster. Still, I know where I'm going wrong now so who knows, I might even entertain guests at a dinner party at some point. Maybe.

Also, Kinokawa High School (my place of work every Thursday) played host to its own bunkaasai recently. Somewhat more low-key than the all singing, all dancing Wakayama High offering I blogged at length about elsewhere, the floor show consisted mainly of one extremely impressive chap showing off what he could do with a stunt bike, some boxes and a stage, while several lads subsequently demonstrated what damage could be done with a microphone, a pre-recorded backing track, a passion for karaoke and a dearth of talent. Still, I got to partake in a tea ceremony and sip me some wonderfully bitter green macha so all was not lost.

I also recently had the pleasure of serenading the blissfully ignorent citizens of Wakayama Shi with a spot of aural ultraviolence in the form of a busking performance featuring Sean (pictured above with city resident and fellow JET Mike) and my good self. 'The Man Who Sold The World' went down quite well, with my mini slide solo attracting a couple of appreciative stares from two ageing pensioners, but our acoustic rendition of Rage Against The Machine's 'Killing In The Name Of' seemed engender little more than looks of brazen hostility from more than a few passers by, can't think why...

*I have just this very second experienced a genuine earthquake tremor*. Christ, haven't felt one of those since last year...calming cigarette now in hand, heartrate slowly returning to normal, I think I'm good to continue. It doesn't matter how small they are, for those first few seconds when you realise what's happening, you've know idea how bad it's going to be. This one was just a slight judder, thankfully, but bloody hell...

Well, I wasn't going to add much more to this bit really, besides mentioning the rather messy night had by me and a few fellow ex pats in Iwade Town last Saturday where one too many GNTs at this nice cozy bar led to me dozing off in a karaoke booth, then getting stopped by the police as I was walking home. They asked me where I was going, to which I was able to respond 'Watashi no Apaato, tabun juu fun koko kara'. - 'My apartment, maybe ten minutes from here'. They then asked me something which to my drunk, Japanese-ignorent ears sounded like 'dokgjn ngkdlg jnssoi djg odfgn?' to which I could only respond 'Watashi no nihongo wa amari yokuarimasen' - clueless idiot Japanese for 'My Japanese is not particularly good.' Thankfully they just gave up and drove off. Fair play though, there is something awfully suspicious about a foreigner wandering around a built up residential area at three in the morning...

Mind you, it could have been worse - Gemma fell off her bike while cycling back to hers, while Sean woke up at sunrise in a roadside ditch. I reckon I got off pretty lightly, all things considered.

And that earthquake earlier? According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, and if I can read the kanji correctly, it was a force 2. Nice...

2005-11-12T23:51:00.000+09:00

Remember kids, safety first. Especially out here when an earthquake can strike without any warning and decimate an entire city within minutes. In response to questions I’ve fielded from various teachers about whether or not there are any earthquakes in the UK, my answer’s always been no, of course, and followed up with a little anecdote. Back when I were a wee nipper in pre-school, I remember a page in this large picture book with a map illustrating the locations of all major earthquake activity throughout the world, as indicated with a small red dot. The green landmass of Japan, I recall, was completely concealed beneath a sea of red. Thank goodness we don’t have any earthquakes in Britain, I thought to myself. They look really scary. That place Japan has loads. Why would anyone want to live there? As they say, with age comes wisdom.

Because of this ever-present threat to lives of Japan’s citizens, all public and private institutions regularly hold disaster training exercises as a matter of course. Last Wednesday it was the turn of Kii Cosmos yogo gakko or ‘special needs’ school. I had been present at the one held at Wakayama High a few weeks earlier, so had a rough idea of what to expect, though the Cosmos one seemed a bit more engaging.

Having caught one or two utterances of the word jishin (‘earthquake’) during the morning meeting, I was quite chuffed at knowing a drill was to take place before my non-English speaking supervisor at the school, Kurayama Sensei explained it to me in more basic terms. Thus, at 10 O’Clock I was already on my way to the assembly point outside, when I was somewhat surprised to hear a cacophonous rumble, building to tremendous roar blaze out of the school’s high-quality PA system. This struck me as quite a good idea, adding realism to the role-play aspect of the exercise, but at the same time potentially troublesome for the kids in a school such as Kii Cosmos. When some of the more severely mentally disabled students barely know what day it is or what someone is saying to them at any given moment, I thought it entirely possible that some may get hysterical. Well, more so than usual, anyway.

As it was, the timed evacuation of the building clocked in at a total of six minutes, rather than the recommended five, as the visiting fire chief took pains to explain to everyone above the usual clamour of some of the younger students howling and trying to climb over each other. What struck me as rather amusing, but really shouldn’t have, was the fact that all the students emerged with small cushions or pillows wrapped around their heads, presumably to protect them from falling masonry. A sensible precaution, obviously, but it did mean that the massed ranks gathered on the school’s baseball pitch rather resembled a multi-colored Ku Klux Klan rally having just raided a branch of World of Bedding.

After the fire chief had done his bit, we all then got to go on the ‘Insta-Quake’ machine. There’s some other name for it I’m sure, but what it basically consists of is a small room on the back of a lorry which can be made to sway and violently vibrate from one side to the other in emulation of an earthquake. Don’t believe me? That’s it up there. Of course, yours truly gave it a try and I can report that going on past experience, its emulation of a lower-level tremor is uncannily accurate. As the intensity increases, it becomes like some demonic fair ground ride, quite good fun in this context but rather frightening when you imagine how accurate to real life it probably is. I was in it with another teacher and about six students, at one point having to put my arm around the girl with down’s syndrome sitting beside me to stop her from banging painfully into the wall. This was then followed by a short skit acted out by the teachers in the school’s gymnasium, basic ‘What should and shouldn’t you do in an earthquake’ type stuff. All in all, diverting, but also highly thought-provoking.

Oh yeah, and that afternoon myself and another teacher gave a heartfelt rendition of Peter, Paul and Mary’s peacenik anthem classic ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’, followed by explanation of the words ‘flower,’ ‘young girl’, ‘husband’, ‘soldier’, and ‘graveyard’ complete with my own lurid chalk illustrations and arrows so as to explain the cyclical nature of the song. And to think that The Sun labels the teachers in Britain all loony lefties, they’re just not looking in the right place, are they?

On matters culinary...

2005-11-12T23:45:00.000+09:00

Yeah! Get a load of that! A plateful of sushi made by my own hand. Alright, so it might not have been the best sushi ever, but it was tasty enough. After skiving off my Sunday morning cookery class in favour of Osaka the previous weekend, I made up for it last week by getting stuck into crafting some dainty makizushi. Surprisingly difficult to make the actual rolls though, especially the small ones, though matters improved when I came to realize that making sushi is much like making a large spliff, only using rice and fish instead of tobacco and Mary Jane. I ended up with stacks of the stuff after the three-hour lesson, far too much for me, so palmed some off my neighbor Makiko and got a huge pear and a persimmon for my efforts. So runneth the Japanese food economy it would seem…

On matters drunken...

2005-11-12T23:36:00.000+09:00

In a desperate attempt to maintain chronological order and not miss anything out, a brief summary of an all night bender, typical of the ones us good-for-nothing JETs have from time to time, in Osaka around two weeks ago.

Well, said weekend had apparently been earmarked by someone or other as officially being Halloween. As a British citizen, Halloween means little to me besides greeting card shops making a fortune, having a few more sweets than usual as a kid, pseudo scary stuff on telly and trying to avoid answering the door to opportunistic teenage delinquents for whom the words ‘Trick Or Treat’ have virtually the same meaning as ‘officially sanctioned extortion’. For those hailing from the Land of the Free (and obviously by extension Japan, never one to shy away from the more bombastic commercial aspects of notable American holidays) it’s a time for great revelry and mischief making, preferably while wearing an extraordinarily elaborate costume.

This goes some way to explaining why it was that at 9.30pm on a Saturday myself, Sean, and fellow Brit Noel found ourselves wedged into a carriage on Osaka’s central Loop Line barely able to breathe while being squashed up against a 35 year old Junior High School student, Morticia Addams and Jason Voorhees. This was because of a so-called ‘Annual Event’ organized, I believe, over the internet (in an instance of what the media used to call ‘flashmobbing’ until about five minutes ago) whereby hundreds of foreigners in and around Osaka flock to JR Osaka station, board the loop line in possession of enormous amounts of alcohol and then proceed to have themselves a party on the train. At every one of the four or so stops between there and Tennoji in the southern central part of the city, everyone disembarks, moves one carriage down, gets on again and off they go. Why? Christ knows.

All I do know that my companions and I were able to withstand the general chaos for one stop before having to get off and catch a different train. None of us were anywhere near drunk enough to appreciate the whole thing properly, and when it emerged that there were ordinary, frightened-looking Japanese civilians going about their business on the train and got caught up in the melee completely by surprise, well, I just felt a bit bad really. Apart from anything else, a baying crowd of hundreds of drunk, noisy and disorderly foreigners in the otherwise civilized climbs of Japan is just slightly unsettling. It’s fine when there’s 10-15 of us, but you don’t want massed mobs, oh no…

Following this, we three hooked up with a slightly larger group in ‘young person’s going out place’ Shinsaibashi where we promptly fragmented, some going off to spend horrific amounts of money to get into places happily contravening every health and safety law going with the multitude of people they contained inside like battery hens, while others, myself included, took in the entertaining bar/club ‘Playpen’ (no entry charge) and upon talking to two Japanese girls dressed as sheriffs and one dressed as a French maid, following their advice, went to an insane bacchanalian techno night being held at a place by the name of ‘Underlounge.’ With very few foreigners present, a huge amount of Japanese trendy types sporting all manner of dress from impossibly cutesy costumes to what could be described as borderline fetish wear and some particularly brutal techno pounding away over the top of it all, the night ended on a high note.

Back to a capsule hotel (with incomprehensible emergency signs, see above) after that for three hours sleep, and a prolonged walk around Den Den Town the following day, where I was very good and didn’t spend stupid amounts of money on some piece of useless technology like I usually do. Ah Osaka, every time a good time…

On matters cultural...

2005-11-06T19:24:00.000+09:00

Ooh, crikey - managed to let the old journal lapse into neglect once again these past few weeks. It's mainly because I'm spending most of my considerable downtime at school between lessons beavering away at this free Japanese languge course we get to do courtesy of the JET corporation. Spending my evenings indulging in my ever-swelling PS2 games collection isn't really helping either. Nor is spending time at Aikido, at Nohan onsen, attending social gatherings, yada yada yada...

Anyway, want to make a note of this, so let's get on with it. Two weeks ago(ish), October 21st or thereabouts saw Wakayama High School host its annual three day Bunkaasai or 'Culture Festival'. Yeah, you can stick your Sports Day where the sun don't shine, this is the real deal...

An idea that ought to adopted by the UK's Secondary Schools forthwith, the Bunkaasai is a sort of three-way cross between an arts showcase, a talent contest and a school fete. The first event to get underway is the poster contest. Every form class designs its own poster advertising the Bunkaasai itself which takes place over three days in October. Drawing heavily on the high-contrast, bright, brash style of anime, the standard of these is incredibly high, as one might expect from teenagers in the country that came up with the artform.

Next up are the displays/diaramas produced by some classes and one or two clubs, usually illustrating a cultural tradition, either from within Japan or abroad. With these projects usually underway weeks in advance, the days of the Bunkaasai itself are centred around an elaborate talent contest that takes up the morning and afternoon, and on the Saturday, the temporary 'food village', erected in the school's car park (aside from a sandy baseball pitch, Japanese schools tend to have no open playing-field type areas to speak of whatsoever). Here, the students of various forms prepare and serve a variety of Asian foods with the assistance of their form teachers and sell them to the remaining staff and students, as well as parents, siblings and other visitors to the school. Employing a ticket system whereby one purchases coupons of various denominations (roughly 50p up to 5 pounds), the school gets to cover its costs and also make a bit of money on the side.

The really good part? Over the course of the Bunkaasai, EVERY student has to do something, whether it be to help with a display, do something for the talent show or cook. My contribution was getting the after school club to put together a display illustrating that great British tradition, Bonfire Night. We even made a Guy and everything, though my distinctly amateur painting efforts on his papier mache head left him looking like a rather unsettling combination of my dad and the Aphex Twin. Alas, Japanese health and safety laws forbade us from burning said effigy and letting off fireworks in the process. After the initial reaction of my colleague Toyoda Sensei to what Bonfire Night is actually about ("Okay, so basically there's this terrorist who attempted to blow up the UK's seat of governement about four hundred years ago, and we make dolls representing this person that we then ritually cast into a blazing inferno...no, really..."), perhaps that was just as well. Judge my efforts for yourself...

The food fair really was great, during which I had the pleasure of sampling the Korean dish shizhimi for the first time (reminded me greatly of particularly spicy falafel) as well as moku roku which I was assured comes from the Japanese community based in Hawaii. It essentially consists of rice, sauce, egg and pork served in a plastic cup. Most odd. With many of the students in attendance in pretty high sprits to say the least (as can be seen up there), much fun was had by all, even before taking in the karaoke contest being held simulataneously in the school gardens.

A quick word about the talent show - similar to last year, I found this to be pretty much in line with what I remember from watching my own school's talent shows all those years ago. The glammier female members of the student fraternity took the opportunity to wear not very much while performing a variety of somewhat risque dance routines, while the lads tended to treat the whole thing as a laugh, mugging and gurning for the benefit of their mates in the audience. Wearing drag seemed to prove surprisingly popular among the boys, however, with many a schoolgirl's sailor uniform used to accommodate the unsuitably bulky frames of various members of the school's Baseball and Judo team. Those crazy guys.

As if all that weren't enough, as the day was winding down the school hall played host to a frighteningly professional school band from Osaka (winners of a prestigious inter-schools competition held in the Kansai region, apparently). With ten members and a huge amount of extremely expensive-looking equipment onstage, they performed renditions of a number of J-Pop tunes I completely failed to recognise but Wakayama's student body joyously reacted to, as well as a blistering rendition of that unbearable pop standard, 'Wannabe' by the Spice Girls. The latter was improved immeasurably, however, by an unfortunate linguistic error that resulted in the vocalist stridently delievering the immortal line, 'But if you really bugger me, than I'll say goodbye'. Top class.

All in all, an event by turns informative, gloriously absurd and highly memorable. Just a bit of a shame that I probably won't be around to catch all the madness again next year...

Bathing Naked In Beer

2005-10-15T16:48:00.000+09:00

Oh yes, last Wednesday - in what is likely to be the most decadent evening I'll have for a fair old while, almost worthy of Caligula himself - I got to live out the fantasy of many a bloke, and you know what? It felt good...

Thanks to a phone call from Sean, he and I headed out to everyone's favourite bathhouse/brewery 'Nohan' where they were holding a beer promotion. Funny, I'd imagine that if you were trying to sell a drink you'd get the potential customers to taste it rather than soak in it - hey, I'm not complaining though.

Japanese onsen etiquette dictates that you enter completely bereft of clothing with nothing more than a loincloth-shaped towel to protect your modesty, and shower thoroughly before getting into the water. The actual bath area of this place, the men's bit anyway, is split between an indoor and a sheltered outdoor area - two baths inside, a super hot one and two individual barrel-type baths with cold water outside. It was one of these cold ones which had its water supply connected to a stack of those large metal draught cannisters, through which was pumped gallons of diluted dark ale at something like a 30-40% mix....

After soaking even longer than usual in the super hot one to the point where I could almost bear it no longer, it was time - what can I say? Cooling down in the cloudy, amber depths of a barrel-shaped bath is a slightly icky, if not entirely unpleasant experience. What tends to happen in these cold ones is that your body cools rapidly, causing large amounts of blood to suddenly rush to your head, making one feel somewhat woozy. Add the fumes of God knows how many litres of booze to the mix, and the sensation is made just that touch more intense. Protocol clearly demanding I scoosh myself with water from the showers before getting back in the hot stuff, much fun was no doubt had by the other patrons while watching me attempt to walk in a straight line, my loincloth half-cocked (so to speak) and almost headbutt the shower head.

Of course, what with rules being rules and my digital camera not being waterproof I have no photographic evidence to prove any of this. On the other hand, perhaps it's best that I spare you such wanton imagery. I hear they may be having another one of these again soon, wonder if they'll use the pilsner next time...

High Speeds, Hedonism and Hiccups in Hiroshima Part Two

2005-10-15T00:12:00.000+09:00

Leaving earlyish so as to catch ourselves one of Hiroshima’s charming trams (why so many towns and cities in the UK ever got rid of theirs I’ll never know – honestly, cars become popular, the trams just get in the way so they’re taken out, and now we get congestion charges because there’s so many cars clogging up the streets, don’t make no sense, but I’m diverging wildly here) out to Miyajimaguchi (jima means ‘island’ in Japanese, fact fans), it was a gloriously sunny day. After the brief 20 minute ferry ride on board an old-fashioned vessel that bore some resemblance to a Mississippi Steamboat, we found ourselves outside Miyajima harbor surrounded by sundry tourists and, somewhat curiously, a large number of fawns and adolescent deer randomly wandering around. Turns out that these were one of the island’s more kawaii attractions, as they’re found everywhere, delighting visitors and very sweet they seem too, at least until one starts to notice the amount of deer crap trodden into the ground and sees packs of them rifling through litter bins at night in search of food.

First off, we headed straight for the ------- shrine (I can’t remember the name, I know, my memory’s frightful) and took the requisite photos of its water-erected gate. From here, we were interested in checking out some of the delights to be found at the top of the island. I’d hesitate to call it a mountain, but a cable car was there to take visitors to the peak of Miyajima’s high ground. From what we could see, the main point of interest was what appeared to be a monkey sanctuary.

When we emerged from the cable car station, indeed, there were quite a few. Whether it was a ‘sanctuary’ as such was slightly harder to tell. More specifically, they appeared to be red-faced baboons rather than actual monkeys, for the most part either lounging around picking flies off each other, or else dramatically scaling the walls of the nearby café/gift shop. Whatever, it was nice to be able to see them from close up.

Wandering around a little, we got to a look out point and took time to take in the pretty spectacular views of Miyajima, its surrounding islands and the concrete sprawl of Hiroshima City, glittering away in the distance. Repairing to the café for a couple of beers and the usual unidentifiable complimentary Japanese bar snacks, we rested for a bit and then embarked on a walk that was to take us the rest of the afternoon.

Our viewing appetites whetted by what we’d already seen from the cliff tops earlier, we made for the observation platform located at the very highest point on the island. On our way there, we encountered a fellow Englishman, John, there on holiday with a few friends. He was there on his own, having done a whistle stop tour of Miyajima with his companions the day before and wanting to come back and do it again, but properly this time. With Mark and I explaining the various intricacies of the JET Programme to him on the way, we made it to a couple of shrines, past a large clump of boulders and finally to the observation structure itself, complete with several small deer in attendance. How they’d made it so far up and managed to stay there, I don’t know. After we’d marveled at the even more spectacular views and dried off from the sweat we’d all accumulated after the exertion of getting there, Mark and myself attempted an extremely tenuous, not to mention highly inaccurate homage to the cover of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds like the good music geeks that we are. You can judge the results for yourself above.

After this, the brave decision was taken to hike back down again, rather than get the cable car. Alright, so it was downhill all the way, but when the path mostly consists of uneven steps and haphazard rocks, it puts slightly more strain on the old calves than a simple sloping gradient would. Nevertheless, we got back to town just as the sun was setting, passing through a picturesque shrine on the way.

Famished and desperately thirsty by this point, another Hiroshimayaki was called for, prompting John to claim it as by far the tastiest Japanese dish he’d had up to that point. Done with food, it was back to the ferry for a parting of the ways with John and a night of hopefully wild, reckless, drunken abandon for Mark and myself.

Once back in town, Opium seemed closed for a private party, so what’s to do? Hit Hiroshima’s prime generic faux Irish Bar ‘Molly Malone’s’, that’s what. Thus commenced much sippage of Guinness to the accompaniment of the Pogues, U2, the Undertones, The Divine Comedy and all your usual Irish favourites. Sometimes it’s nice to swallow your pride and embrace the comforts of the theme pub, after all.

After a being there for a quite a while, our thoughts turned to trying to find a club. With Japan’s club culture, such as it is, apparently consisting solely of awful meat market places designed to attract bovine foreigners, and really good places playing great music to fantastic crowds that are impossible to find, we weren’t expecting much. Consulting a map of Hiroshima’s night spots kindly lent to me by fellow Wakayama JET Gemma we set off in search of a place going by the enigmatic name of ‘Cover’, found it, but on the verge of entering heard the strains of ‘Stuck in The Middle With You’ by Stealer’s Wheel drifting up the stairs of a basement bar over the road. Well, clearly we’d found our place.

Upon entering and parting with the reasonable fee of 1,500 yen (including complimentary drink, yay!) we found ourselves in a very small, extremely dimly lit and quite busy bar, complete with compact dancefloor, stage playing host to a hyperactive DJ and a fair few extremely amped punters. After Mister Blonde’s ear-slicing waltz had ended, Mr DJ fired up some…Charleston. Yes, 30s style big band stuff with jazz drums and cornets. The crowd went appreciatively wild. Shortly after this came ‘Pretty Fly For A White Guy’ (not great, admittedly, but the jarring juxtaposition amused me greatly) followed by some bizarre eighties hair-metal theme to a Japanese kids’ cartoon. Great stuff – I for one am highly appreciative of any DJ that chucks a whole load of random stuff together and habitually wrong-foots the crowd.

Things kept getting better, with another guy taking over to play a mini set of ska, another delving into eighties British pop and fifties easy listening, and so on and so forth. Not only were the DJs delightfully loopy throughout, visibly getting off on what they were doing, unlike the po-faced bores that are endemic in the UK, the crowd were frenzied, all facing forward and ecstatically snapping away with phones and cameras. Even better, we were the only foreigners in there, besides one guy who wondered in, body-popped for half an hour and promptly wandered out again. Irritating, quasi-racist, holier-than-thou inverted snobbery though this may be, once you’ve been on as many nights out in this country as we have, you’ll appreciate that large numbers of ex-pats assembled together in one club is rarely a good thing.

All grand, apart from one thing – the mysterious Hiroshima Hiccupping Hex. I’d come down with a pretty bad bout of the hiccups the previous night for some reason or other and didn’t think too much of it, at least until I started having a thoroughly miserable time in this otherwise fantastic place. Now, having to leave a club because excessive drinking has left your brain unable to carry out basic motor functions is a valid excuse. Having to leave a club because a combination of lots of beer and giggling (usually over some hilarious recollection from mine and Mark’s university days or reference to a Chris Morris sketch) throughout the evening has led to an onset of hiccups so bad that you can barely breathe properly, never mind form coherent sentences is just a bit…well, rubbish really.

Yet that’s pretty much what happened. We had an innings of maybe two hours or so, which I didn’t think was that bad, before I personally had to leave. Passing the DJs huddled round the exit on our way out, we paused to show them our verbal appreciation in a typically cack-handed way, before we headed off, with me being propelled up the road by the power of my own diaphragm.

One final note on clubs out here – whether the place be hideous gaijin trap or none-more-hip place to be seen, you won’t find any bouncers anywhere. I can’t even begin to explain how liberating the total absence of those bomber-jacketed, knuckle-scraping Neanderthals whose greatest pleasures in life revolve around intimidating paying customers and hitting people and getting paid for it, actually is. All you get is door staff whose job is to charge for entry, most of whom look as though they’d be rubbish in a fight. Of course, should a group of punters get leathered, start getting lairy, and it all kick off, there might be a problem.

Who knows though, perhaps all Japanese bar staff are trained in karate? In fact, what I want to know is why it is that the home of so many martial arts disciplines is, on the whole, a non-violent society that doesn’t see the need for ‘security’ in places where the young go to get drunk and dance. Could it possibly be that the air of menace and barely-suppressed aggression that greets you in any provincial club in the UK before you’re even through the door is, in some senses, a self-fulfilling prophecy? You assume that everyone coming in is going to get smashed and act like a complete tool, therefore most of the people that come in get smashed and act like a complete tool. I don’t know, but I won’t be going out anywhere as much as I’ve done here once I’m back in the UK, that’s for sure…

After a convulsive sleep and a rather woozy process of coming to, the following morning left us with plenty of time to kill before catching our shinky back to Osaka at 5 in the afternoon. After watching Mark’s hopes of getting a roast at Molly Malone’s savagely dashed (Sunday’s only – well, duh) we had lunch and spent lots of time mooching around a branch of Time Records, drooling over the cheap and highly desirable music-making kit at a guitar shop and supping beers outside a posh brasserie before hitting the station.

So, that was Hiroshima – my expectations of the place were well and truly exceeded. To witness the dense, vibrant city that has emerged only 60 years after it was all but annihilated is quite an inspiration.

High Speeds, Hedonism and Hiccups in Hiroshima Part One

2005-10-14T18:20:00.000+09:00

And so it was, in yet another voyage to a must-see part of Japan last weekend, that I found myself cramped into the busy adjoining section of a Shinkansen or ‘bullet train’. I’d managed to get on at Shin-Osaka and happily met Mark on the train itself – given how busy it was, it was just as well. Somehow, the packed ‘standing room only’ nature of things wasn’t quite what I’d expected from Japan’s premier rail service. And, more to the point, not what I’d expected from a 50 quid fare either.

Still, rocketing along at God knows what kind of speed, we were in Hiroshima in little over an hour, somewhat the worse for wear (poor old Mark had been standing all the way since the express he’d got from Toyama-ken) but at least with time on our side, it being 2pm. With my ears gradually returning to normal after all the popping they’d been doing throughout the journey (people frequently compare the Shinkansen to going by plane for a reason) we hopped in a cab and made our way to Minshuku Ikedaya, our digs for the next two nights.

Pretty basic as Japanese-style (which basically means there’s tatami mats in the room and you sleep on a futon) places go, we were nonetheless pretty much in the center of town. Thus, once we’d rested up a tad and got our room TV fill of CNN, MTV, the Disney Channel and Jude Law getting bludgeoned round the head in a showing of The Talented Mister Ripley, we were ready to head.

A fifteen minute walk got us to Hiroshima’s main landmark, the famous A-Bomb dome. For those that don’t know, this is the only structure still left standing in the center of town since the bomb fell in August 1945. Now fenced off and regularly maintained to keep it preserved exactly as it was in the immediate aftermath, the skeletal remains look ghostly when set against the usual Japanese cityscape of high rises and neon.

Attached to this is the large, green expanse of the impeccably looked-after ‘Peace Park’, based around a central boulevard that takes in a flame that will be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon is decommissioned (excellent sentiment, but with the current people in charge, I’m not holding my breath) and leads to the wonderfully brutal, modernist building that houses the memorial museum.

With a charge of \50 (25p) to get in, making a profit is not exactly the aim of this place. Instead it does what every good museum ought to do, leave you more informed and knowledgeable than you were before.

Broad in scope, the ground floor explains the Hiroshima’s role as virtually a city-sized war factory in the late 30’s and early 40’s and goes on to briefly explore Japan’s intervention in China. The museum, not to mention large sectors of the government, have come under fire in recent years for playing down, or at the very least not doing enough to atone for, the sins it committed back then in the name of empire expansion. Here at least we get a mention of the siege of Nan-King and the massacre of Chinese civilians carried out by the Japanese military. The reasoning and thinking behind the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour does go brazenly unexplained, however. Fair enough, it’s not the aim of the museum to give a complete narrative of Japan’s history throughout WWII, but given Peal Harbor’s crucial importance in setting in motion the events that would ultimately lead to Hiroshima’s near total destruction, you’d think they might fill you in a bit more as to why they did it.

Where the museum surpasses itself, however, is in the display cabinets containing declassified memos and communiqués from within the Allied Forces in the run-up to the attack, demonstrating one of the hardest, coldest processes of bureaucracy you’re likely to see outside of the arrangements for the Holocaust. Shown alongside deeply strange photographs of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin sitting together and looking all chummy, it’s quite an education.

Upstairs is where the gallery of the grotesque begins – battered watches with their hands frozen at 8.15, torn and tattered school uniforms, life-sized dioramas of stricken children fleeing burning buildings with their limbs melting, stark black and white photographs of traumatized burns victims, large blocks of granite with the silhouettes of people burnt into them…it’s all pretty harrowing.

After moving through here in near total silence along with everyone else, one then emerges into the Why Nuclear Weapons Are A Really Bad Idea area. Wall friezes explain the (very) basic principles of nuclear fission and fusion and their respective employment in Atomic, Hydrogen and Neutron Bombs, a large 3D model of the Earth illustrates the location and arsenal sizes of the nuclear powers (though as Mark pointed out, oddly failing to include Israel) and various bits of text and illustrations that outline the facts behind nuclear testing. The only major omission as far as I could see was the absence of any comment regarding the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, who didn’t get so much as a look in. Something of an oversight, I thought.

With the announcement that the museum would shortly be closing, we drifted out into an eerily deserted Peace Park at dusk. We’d been on our feet for hours and really needed to unwind for a bit, so we headed townwards to take in Hiroshima’s unique and extremely tasty take on that Kansai culinary staple okonomiyaki (lots of bean sprouts, noodles, egg and pork sandwiched between a pancake/falafal hybrid) before hitting a rather trendy bar by the name of Opium for a couple of so-so lagers. After some bawdy and highly experimental booth-based karaoke (with just the two of us there, we thought we’d attempt some rather more outré selections than usual – I now consider ‘Informer’ by Snow to be almost avant garde in its lyrical complexity) and the obligatory half-pissed Picture Club (another time), with a provisional plan of taking in the attractions of Miyajima the following day, we called it a night.

Telephonic Hi-jinks

2005-10-07T09:27:00.000+09:00

Of course, it's not all socialising and gallivanting around exotic locales out here - oh no. We're expected to do the odd bit of teaching too. So, in the interest of adding a little variation to the likes of "...and then we went for a few drinks and got really drunk in [insert name of Japanese city here], great, yeah," I thought I'd share some of my teaching experience with you.

Given that my 'job', such as it is, essentially revolves around devising classroom activities while sticking broadly to a series of lesson topics outlined by the textbook, I'm allowed a pretty free reign is terms of instructing the students what to do. For instance, my senior high students (age range 14-18ish) have this week been practicing telephone conversations. Personally, I think this is one of my niftier ideas and may serve to inspire others...possibly.

Anyway, in all classes, I'm teamed with a fellow Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) and we teach the class together. Their role can be limited to providing interpretations of my instructions when required, or be employed more constructively by allowing me to carry out two activities at the same time. To wit...

I prepare a sheet on which an example telephone conversation is printed on one side and a dialogue with bits missing for students to fill in on the other. So far, so unimaginative. I then hand out a second sheet on which is printed a blanked-out dialogue explaining how to make a voicemail answering message and how to leave one. I then play a pre-prepared tape to the class of me speaking: "Hello, you're through to Callum. I'm not in at the moment, but if you leave a message I'll get back to you". Recorded into a computer beforehand, I filter it to sound crackly and add a long 'beeep' at the end for added pizazz.

Then, leaving the students to practice the conversation dialogue while being supervised by the JTE, I set the tape recorder up in the corridor outside, call out the students two at a time and record them performing the dialogue outlined on the voicemail sheet. When all the students are done (or as many as possible within the lesson's 50 minute time limit), I set up the tape recorder in the classroom, and in the lesson's last five minutes, play back all the messages to the hopelessly embarrassed assembled students.

The great thing about this approach is that with students as shy and reticent as mine, it enables them to sort of speak to the rest of the class in absentia - without the pressure of 20 pairs of eyes on them while they're doing it. They can afford to concentrate a bit more on their pronunciation while speaking, and critically examine it themselves when they hear it back, assuming they're not giggling too much at the time.

For my next trick, the idea is to get the students to use the conversation dialogue sheets they spent the above lesson practicing, in a more instinctive way. Thus, assuming all the JTEs okay it, my plan for next lesson's warm-up activity is to get the JTEs to bring their keitai (mobiles) to the lesson. With my ketai number programmed into theirs, I will proceed to pass my keitai around the classroom. With my back to the class, I then use the teacher's keitai to call mine - whichever student happens to be holding it, has to answer and use it as a prop (I'll have hung up by this point) while we perform the dialogue that they (ought to) have practiced. We'll have to wait and see how successful this is...

So, a rather sober posting, but a necessary change of pace. Still, all being well I'm off to Hiroshima tomorrow with good buddy Mark (erstwhile housemate, university chum and now fellow JET in Toyama ken) where things of much interest will doubtless occur. Looks like I might also be taking my first trip on the shinkansen (bullet train) which is veh exciting...

Four Go Mad In Okinawa - Part Three

2005-10-03T21:54:00.000+09:00

After another horrifically hot and somewhat arduous trek to the harbour, we caught the ferry, enjoyed the fun and bumpy ride and located our Greek-themed hostel in Naha without too many problems.

After hitting the frighteningly dense urban jungle of the city’s central district for lunch (shamefully consisting of a Maccy D’s on main thoroughfare Kokusai Dori - I know, I know, but it’s about the only reliable non-Japanese convenient food staple we have out here, a duck wrap with hoisin sauce or a hot panini would have been lovely, but it was never going to happen) Mark and Melissa, who I should probably point out at this stage are actually a couple, hence the time they spent together, opted to go gift shopping, while Sean and I checked out a music store so I could buy a talon-shaped pick for my hand-made samishan back in Wakayama. For our troubles, the owner gave us each a postage-stamp sized piece of genuine snakeskin on our way out (no doubt cut from one of those long-suffering habi) to keep in our wallets so that "much money may flow though them" (fine by me), following which, we headed to Shuri-jo, Naha’s castle, pictured above.

Very big, very red and surprisingly non-Japanese in general appearance we both had a good poke around the place, before catching a big red gate thing nearby, which must be quite important, as it features on the rare 2,000 yen note. Yes, alright, when it comes to my learning of Japanese history I am truly shocking in my dogged ignorance.

That night saw the belated proper celebration of Sean’s 24^th year at a nomihodai (one upfront fee gets you all can eat from a buffet and all you can drink from the bar for four hours – not half bad for 10-15 quid I reckon) beer hall, which was worth it for the booze but not so much for the distinctly lacking food. Such is normally the way with these places, but since I’d had a McDonald’s earlier that day, it’s not as though I can get on my culinary high horse here.

Following this was yet more karaoke, booth style this time, and in a porno-tastic setting that resembled an early eighties city boy bachelor pad – lots of matte black, red borders and revolving chairs that glided spectacularly well at high speeds across the floor. Much fun indeed was had raising chair-related havoc in the corridor outside, bashing into random doors and saying hi to the bemused occupants before careening away again.

After our time was up (broken to us by a phonecall to our ‘room’ – I’m never the one who answers for both my sake and the staff’s), we headed hostel-wards to the rooftop bar where Sean and myself were determined to claim the complimentary awamoris we’d been promised when we checked in. Bad idea. Mark and Melissa didn’t last long before retiring, which was an extremely sensible course of action, as shortly after they’d gone, we were joined by sizeable group of soccer players from Yokohama. That's them you can see up there. Yeeeaah….

The extremely accommodating barmaid was good enough to let me loose on her iPod and provide a jittery soundtrack to the ensuing conversational chaos (“American.” “American? Ah, veh good! You?” “English.” “Aha, yeah! English! England! Beckham! Veh nice!” you know, that sort of thing) while me and Sean concentrated on chugging back the boozy goodness, which I soon came to regret in the small hours of that morning when, coming to in a stifling room in which the coin-operated aircon had clicked off some time ago, I found myself desperately ill and managed to haul myself to the downstairs bathroom just in time to spew. Only my second ever drink-related vomit in Japan, that. Not very nice though.

And so, to our departure. With the emergency excavation of my guts the previous night having have had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the nausea aspect of my usual hangover routine, I suffered a great deal all the way to the airport. Even once there, due to a check-in system of Kafka-esque complexity that required us all to queue no less than three times, I was really not in the best of moods.

The low point came during ‘breakfast’ at a branch of A & W which, according to Sean and Melissa, is a root beer company of all things, which some time ago branched into the fast food industry. They needn’t have bothered. What I assumed was the safe option of a ham and cheese toasted sandwich (pleasant memories of breakfasts at Amsterdam coffee shops spurring me on) turned out in fact to be a flaccid, mayonnaise-drenched processed monstrosity which I would hardly have been able to stomach at the best of times, never mind in my present condition.

Storming out of the restaurant in search of something slightly more recognisable as food I was grateful to come across a bakery serving croissants and black coffee. Like some magical elixir, the restorative power of these two dependable breakfast companions banished my morning-after demons to such an extent that I could even enjoy a cigarette in the smoking lounge. (‘Callum Fauser’s Guide To A Better, Healthier You’ is available now in shops, priced $When Hell Freezes Over).

After that and the most thoughtless gift shopping for work colleagues I have ever performed, it was back aboard the (sadly non Pokemon-themed) plane, homeward-bound.

Okinawa truly was lovely, but remember what we’ve learned kids – awamori is a dangerous mistress, big spiders are abominations of nature, no matter what anyone says, snorkelling rocks and American-style fast food always deserves to be treated with the utmost suspicion, if not contempt.

Four Go Mad In Okinawa - Part Two

2005-10-03T20:37:00.000+09:00

The next morning began with a vigorous stroll up to the first observation platform overlooking Zamami’s south-western bay designed for the purpose of whale-spotting. No whales at this time of year, mind. Intending to make the most of the blazing sunshine we were lucky enough to have been blessed with (even though I could feel it frying my pasty Caucasian skin from one minute to the next), we then opted for an afternoon by the beach.

This was an extremely good move. With snorkel kits and flippers hired from one of the several beachfront vendors, all four of us took to the gloriously clear waters for a close up look at some fish. There was some pretty amazing stuff to see down there, once my smoker’s lungs became acclimatised to the idea of breathing underwater and stopped hyperventilating of their own volition. Once they did, I was free to enjoy a cornucopia of aquatic attractions, even that pulsating stuff attached to coral that appears to be breathing, and in its own way probably is. The only slight downside was the frequency with which one would find oneself colliding underwater with someone else, both of you too busy gawping at that bloody big trout thing with the shimmering skin to see where you were going.

Sean and myself then went for a bit of a wander to case out some of the deserted beaches just out of sight of the main area. After potentially risking life and limb scaling the huge deposits of black rock and minerals that separated one beach from another, we found ourselves at one virtually resembling a lunar landscape, albeit a very sunny one.

After we returned, I got my first go on a banana boat with Mark and Melissa (great until you fall off, which only happened three times, to my surprise), soak my sun-ravaged skin in some cooling shade and tuck into a supremely dodgy ‘curry rice’. A hike back to town found us doing the rounds of three izakayas for some refreshing Orions, bracing awamoris and conscious avoidance of an Okinawan vegetable speciality going by the name of Goya. For all I know, it might be the main reason behind Okinawa’s extremely high life-expectancy rate but that doesn’t stop it being rather unpleasant. Thin, green, knobbly and bitter as hell, readers of Roald Dahl’s ‘The BFG’ are encouraged to call to mind the ‘snozzcumber’. Goya can be served in a number of ways, as part of a wide variety of dishes, all of them inedible.

Anyway, our final port of call was my bathroom refuge from the previous night, where Mark and Sean regaled our group and the business outing that were the only other patrons there with a particularly raucous karaoke workout. The latter lost points, however, for violently singing ‘I Will Survive’.

So, to Friday (if you’re still with me by this point, I truly salute you), and a very active day, all told. It began with us all kayaking out to one of the smaller islands off Zamami where we initially carried out an investigation of the deserted beaches for any signs of life, finding only a large number of hermit crabs clustered in a cave and a boat party from the mainland gathered beneath parasols.

From here, we paddled around a bit to a small cove, allowing access to a lighthouse we’d spotted on our walks at night. A 10-minute hike found us outside an imposing locked blast door, seemingly designed to withstand nuclear attack, attached to a tiny structure with a light at the top of it. The ones in Cornwall (like what Portland Bill had) are much better, if you ask me. Anyway, after lunch in the limited shade of this thing it was back to the boats and back to the mainland for a bit of a rest.

With Mark and Melissa looking to get in some more quality snorkelling time (I’d have gladly gone too, were it not for my dangerously pink shoulders and shins), Sean and myself kicked back at the campsite. Following a shower in the site’s toilet block, I had the dubious pleasure of encountering my first Japanese Hunting Spider on my way out – these are supposedly harmless and utterly terrified of humans (great hunter, eh?) but that didn’t stop this bastard from being absolutely F%)@&ING HUGE and scaring the life out of me. It was clinging to the wall above the sink, brown and about twice the size of a human hand, before it suddenly zipped away, up and into one of the toilet cubicles that had been mysteriously sealed with gaffer tape. Maybe that’s where its nest was. I shudder to think. Unfortunately, my camera wasn’t on me, therefore I can’t share this nightmarish vision with you all. You can relax then, and get a good night’s sleep tonight. Me? It haunts my dreams, whuhuhha…

Anyway, driven mad by the campsite’s population of flies (See? Where are the damn spiders when you actually need them?), Sean and I opted to move to the ‘whaling platform’, to chill for a while, before taking a bit of a walk to the northern side for a good view of the sunset. After a bit of a read and a snooze at the first place, we commenced hiking for a good hour or so at least, before finding the place we were after, high above the town and just off the island’s perimeter road. Briefly saying hello to a travelling party from Osaka and their two dogs who rudely didn’t offer us a lift back (the party, not the dogs, though I suspect they might have been in charge), we found our spot, got snap-happy (up there’s the best of my rather patchy lot) and trudged back as night began to fall.

With dinner at a restaurant (yaki soba for me, definitely no bloody Goya) and a couple of beers on the beach by the campsite, we were ready to turn in, ahead of our move to Naha the following day.

Four Go Mad In Okinawa - Part One

2005-10-03T20:10:00.000+09:00

Cor, get a load of those pictures, nice aren’t they? Aside from the one of me flashing my keks of course. Yes, last week (September 21^st if memory serves) myself, Americans Sean and Melissa and Australian Mark took a flight way down south to the sub-tropical Japanese archipelago of Okinawa for a sun-drenched five days, taking advantage of one of Japan’s many bank holiday weekends and the cheap flights Sean was able to get with Japan’s excellent ‘domestic flight birthday discount offer’.

Having been before last year, it was very good of Sean to go again to pretty much see the same stuff as he did last time, inviting the rest of us along for the ride. The first three nights were spent on the beautiful and extremely sparsely populated island of Zamami, an hour away by catamaran ferry from the region’s main island. Once there, we endured a pretty painful half hour or so trek in the sweltering heat with our backpacks to the campsite we’d booked, set up our tents and then marvelled at the beach we were staying next to, just the other side of a small mangrove. That’s it, right up there. Gorgeous is the word I’d use, with the bluest water I’ve certainly ever seen before, clear enough to make out the distinctive shape of the large tracts of coral just beneath its surface.

After an initial hour or two getting settled and tucking into our supplies of food, we ventured ‘town’wards (more a hamlet, really) where as luck would have it, the local population were celebrating an annual festival in which they all gave offerings to the God of the sea by stockpiling large amount of sake and local brew awamori (more on which later) in a small shrine, leaving it there for a while, and then cracking it all open, to the accompaniment of dancing and general drunken festivities. For our part, we paid 1,000 yen apiece to be allowed inside, and were then presented with a dinner of a whole deep fried fish accompanied by clementines, while also being allowed to tuck into their lager supply, largely consisting of Okinawan tipple of choice, Orion – a very pleasant quaff indeed.

Alas, with none of us having thought to bring our cameras along, no pictorial record of this event exists, at least in our possession. What we saw consisted of the great and the good of the entire island (there was maybe a hundred or so people gathered in the same small space as us) entertained throughout the evening by a hardy-looking fellow in his sixties singing and playing the samishan (traditional three-stringed instrument that resembles an elongated banjo) and his mate accompanying him on Taiko drums. May the God of multiculturalism strike me dead for saying for this, but his repertoire was a bit, well, limited. Pleasant enough, but the ‘songs’ he did sort of ran into each other from what I could tell. The crowd were definitely digging it though, the many children present especially. There was much unstable dancing from locals, who of course managed to drag us gaijin in from time to time. The dance that we were encouraged to follow reminded me rather amusingly of the ‘waving one’s hands above the head emergency signal’ from recent puppet flick Team America: World Police…

Now that I’ve poured arrogant scorn upon centuries old Okinawan music tradition, on to my biggest regret of the trip – in a desperate attempt to locate the toilets at this place, I ended up accidentally wandering off, missing one of the coolest things our party got to do. Stumbling blindly into an izakaya after roundly failing to locate any kind of pissoir, I thought it terribly rude to just use their facilities and promptly leave, so opted for a scotch on the rocks first, as you do. After a baffling five minute wait for said drink (I was one of very few people there), I got talking to a particularly attractive girl visiting from Chie prefecture, staying with one of the bar staff. What was said, I can’t even begin to remember, but it ended with me promising to return with my companions in tow. Conscious that said friends may well be wondering where I was by this point, I made my way back to the party shrine where it turned out I’d missed the passing of the habi awamori trophy chalice.

As briefly mentioned before, awamori is an insanely strong alcoholic concoction similar to the Japanese shochu drunk on the mainland, intended to be diluted before drinking. Some varieties of awamori are interestingly served alongside a poisonous snake known as the habi, usually by placing them in the bottle, in a similar fashion to the worm found in traditional tequila, only slightly more extreme. In this instance, the winner of what I think was some kind of boating and/or fishing award placed a habi (dead, I would imagine) in his large bowl-shaped trophy, filled it up with awamori and proceeded to pass it around the crowd. While I wasn’t there. Which really bothered me, as I’d wanted to try this habi juice myself since first hearing about it, and knew I’d be far too stingy to buy a whole bottle of the stuff myself. Either way, according to the others it was good fun but didn’t taste too great. Now there’s a surprise.

With Mark and Melissa opting for an early night, Sean and myself briefly chanced the izakaya where my latest acquaintance appeared to be busy helping out the others running the place, leaving me to repeatedly try and subsequently fail to catch her eye. Hey ho.

Bartender, Mine’s a Beckham

2005-10-03T20:07:00.000+09:00

Yes, that rather noxious-looking drink you see up there is in fact a cocktail ordered in a Wakayama Shi izakaya (read: pub) going by the name of a ‘Beckham’. Why, Christ knows. In case you’re interested, it includes apple liqueur, vodka, calpis (pronounced ‘cow piss’, some kind of sweet milk thing they have over here) and another juice of some kind, possibly lemon.

Looking like a violent collision between a Snowball and some waste material from a DNA laboratory, it’s sweet enough to risk causing permanent damage to one’s taste buds. Think I’ll stick to the GNT’s, thanks…

Introducing My Mate Dave

2005-10-03T19:55:00.000+09:00

Yep, that’s him there, wearing the cap beside a couple of his mates. He met fellow JET Gemma at Shirahama beach one day following his recent return from studying English in Canada, who in turn was surprised to hear that he lived in Ogura.

Soon enough, en route to a get together organized by Gemma in her stomping ground of Momoyama Town, myself and Daisuke got acquainted for the first time. The ‘Dave’ part is because the English equivalent to his given Japanese name is, according to his Canadian teacher, David. Thus, I’ve taken to calling him ‘Dave’ but only when I’m pissed. He’s an alright chap, into his swimming, surfing (I think), R ‘n’ B and ensuring that he always sports sharp threads. Bit of a townie, all told, but in the nicest possible way. Hardcore smoker too, which I always appreciate in a person for the way it assuages my own feelings of guilt regarding my habit.

So far, I’ve gone for an exceptionally fine Korean meal with him and two of his friends (and have come to the conclusion that Korean cuisine, origin of the mighty Yaki Niku, is my new dai suki no tabemono du jour) and a rather peculiar afternoon Karaoke session. Peculiar, because in my experience daylight and the shedding of dignity that usually accompanies this activity would not seem to mix at all well. What with him having just started work at popular ‘young things’ hangout ‘Bird Bar’ in Wakayama Shi, he might be somewhat preoccupied in the weeks to come but, hey. All told, it’s very good to have gotten to know an Oguran native below the age of 65 and still in possession of all his teeth.

New Blood and Hurricanes

2005-10-03T19:42:00.000+09:00

So, upon my return to Japan, it wasn’t long before the autumn/winter school semester cranked its way into life and I found myself standing in a series of classrooms beside a stack of expensive audio visual equipment, delivering a PowerPoint presentation on ‘Talking About My Family’. Yep, my return to teaching happily coincided with the ‘Family’ unit of the textbook giving me a good chance to show various photos and videos of my parents and grandparents to my resolutely nonplussed students. I must have done it about seven or eight times in all, but it was worth it to see their expressions while watching the footage of my cat frolicking in the hallway. “Kawaii ne!” quoth they, which roughly translates as “Cute, huh?”

The weekend of that initial first week back consisted of, as I dimly recall, a WAJET (Wakayama’s chapter of AJET, which in turn is a kind of JET equivalent of a student’s union which organizes social events, councilling services, help, advice and stop me if I’m boring you) bash at Shirahama Beach way down in the south of Wakayama Prefecture. Much fun was had by all, splashing about in waves and dealing with the horrible gungy mess that sticks to your legs when sand and sunblock inevitably meet.

I may have laboured the point before (and I thoughtfully left it out of the ruminations on my home country elsewhere) but the drinking culture here in Japan really is fabulous. All of us who went (20 at the very least, possibly more) were able to stock up on cans of beer and chu-hi (nuclear-strength alcopop that would instantly cause an urban apocalypse if ever introduced to Britain’s Saturday night high streets) from a convenience store located just off the beach and happily quaff them while sitting mere feet away from families with young children who were doing much the same thing themselves (the parents, mind, not the kids – it’s not that liberated). No fights, no shouting, no drowning, no abuse, no trouble – incredible. They have a secret to having civilized fun with booze out here, and I’d love to know what it is.

Anyway, after a long, lazy afternoon, our assembled mass of foreigners piled into a fleet of cars bound for Assistant Language Teacher Hailing Originally From New York Peter Katz’ house where a largeish scale barbecue party was planned.　The party proceeded in a thoroughly pleasant manner with much drinking and consuming of chargrilled food, marred only slightly by my managing to get hopelessly lost for an hour and a half in the unfamiliar surrounding neighbourhood in an attempt to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Still, the day’s combined festivities gave me a chance to get to know a number of the new JET recruits starting this year, and thoroughly good eggs they were too, as far as I could see. The extent to which drink may have affected my social skills remains unknown, but I certainly remember feeling very at ease and chatty, in a marked contrast to last year when a mixture of confusion and disorientation over my first month or so caused me to be a great deal more cautious, reserved and uptight. I can safely say that I no longer occupy that same peculiar headspace, for which I’m thankful.

Aaaaanyway, it was good to meet some of the new blood billeted at my end (sort of) of the prefecture then and on the days that followed; Brits Sarah and Hannah, Americans Zack and Mercedes and Irishmen David and Donal. May there be more good times to come.

Finally in this little subsection, a word about hurricanes – I don’t really need to chime in with my two cents worth on Katrina, its subsequent fallout and the fate of New Orleans, but I will say that we out here endured a storm of the exact same size and only marginally less magnitude earlier this month. The news had cast warnings that it would strike at night, so what did I do? Join Mercedes, Sarah and Hannah in the early evening for a trip to the combined onsen (Japanese hot baths, like what the Romans had back in the day) and brewery complex Nohan No Sato half an hour away from me by train. A foolish course of action, not only because my soak was a somewhat solitary one (men and women’s areas being obviously segregated) but because while reclining in the bath located outside with a roof open to the elements, one could see the sky starting to boil. Quite a cool sight, but like I said, not a very sensible thing to do.

After emerging freshly scrubbed and having imbibed flagons of the exceptionally good European-style pilsner brewed on site, we caught the train back to our respective towns, with me just making it up the steps outside my apartment building before the storm's full fury was unleashed, while being buffeted by rather strong winds. Once inside, across came my steel window and door shutters, on went the Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ (which has become something of a tradition, don’t ask me why, I just find it quite soothing during times of meteorological carnage) and the pounding commenced.

Having drifted off somewhere around the outro of ‘Have a Cigar’, I awoke the next morning to howling winds, the sight of an almighty gash left in the rice field outside my apartment and an email from Iwai Sensei (Kii Cosmos special needs school supervisor and aikido partner in crime) requesting my presence at school, assuming the trains were running. With no students of any age attending any school in the entire prefecture due to Wakayama being on ‘alert’ status, my usually claustrophobic train ride in was an absolute breeze, happily.

With the winds pretty much gone upon my arrival and the beginnings of a beautiful sunny day slowly emerging, the Powers That Be were nevertheless taking no chances and kept all our kids at home for the whole day. Thus it was that I busily occupied myself with some half-hearted kanji study, voracious reading of Dan Brown’s Deception Point and a bout of self-flagellation after getting so much enjoyment from that literary equivalent of a Big Mac. A visit to a restaurant with Iwaii for an unagi (that’s Japanese style eel – don’t knock it til you’ve tried it, it tastes fab) lunch relieved the tedium slightly, but truth be told, the day was rather dull.

The point of all this detailed description? No one died, at least not here anyway. I think maybe ten or so people got washed away by swollen rivers and surging seas down in Kyushu, but that was about it, as far as I know. The Japanese at all levels, from the highest official to the smallest child know that their country gets a regular battering at this time of year and have sensibly chosen to take all relevant precautions, namely providing adequate annual public funding for really important stuff such as warning systems, emergency response teams, infrastructure design, drainage implementation and a number of other things I know nothing about, seeing as I’m no expert. The thing is, does all of the US suffer from regular hurricanes? No. Does one particular region there get hit hard every year? Yes, the Gulf coast. There are lessons to be learnt from the way the Japanese appear to have made a pretty good fist of learning to live with the harsher things that nature can throw at its people, and it would seem to me that other countries around the world might want to start paying attention.

Oh, To Be In England

2005-10-03T19:18:00.000+09:00

Right then, first off England and my visit to thereof. (Note my adoption of the irritating Japanese habit of failing to recognize the national entity variously known as Britain, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, British Isles, etc.) After a satisfactory flight via Phuket and Bangkok courtesy of Thai Aiways (no back-of-seat monitors for the inflight movies in economy class, boo!) I touched down in Heathrow, got hopelessly confused while attempting to find a coach bound for the prearranged pick up point of Stansted Airport and noticed with a shock how BLOODY COLD it was. Within minutes, my leather jacket was out of the suitcase and around my trembling shoulders, as I marvelled at the assorted Brits milling about in shorts and T-shirts in the British summertime like it was normal or something. Wierdos.

So, aside from the fact that I can navigate far easier in an airport where the signs are all in Japanese and that the abrupt change of climate wasn’t doing much for my body, from this point on I was able to enjoy an extremely pleasant stay at ‘home,’ in reliably bland Colchester (see, up there’s a photo of the High Street – fascinating to the teachers out here but, alas, not to the students it would seem). The grandparents were down from Scotland too, which was nice, having not seen either of them for at least three years or so. My folks’ house, cradle of my adolescence (pictured above), was much the same as it ever was and Vashti the cat (see accompanying illustration) was just as slothful and dismissive as she’s always been, all of which was quite encouraging.

One or two observations on England and the English. Number one, lots of large people – I’m trying to be nice here, when I suppose what I really mean is plain ‘fat.’ This is not to say that there aren’t any porkers in Japan, there are a fair few, but FAR less than I saw on my frequent wanderings around town. Bearing in mind that I’ve only got Colchester and Wimbledon to use as benchmarks, it may not be the case everywhere, but I somehow suspect it might be. Why? Diet? Probably. Lack of exercise? Possibly. I don’t know, all I do know is that I saw a hell of a lot of bellies and that surprised me. Then again, perhaps I’ve just become so used to the sight of beanstalk physiques here in the Far East that anything else seems to be the extreme opposite.

Second, what is it with the number of teenagers pushing prams? I realize this comment is probably pushing me rather uncomfortably towards ideological ground shared by the likes of Norman Tebbit, but really, I saw LOADS. Alright, so maybe all or most of the young mothers I saw weren’t teenagers at all but actually in their twenties, or else were much older siblings, maybe even childminders. Aunts or cousins perhaps. Again, I’m probably making wide-ranging value judgements with nothing to back them up, but what I will say is that in my frequent trips out here to get groceries, visit major cities and travel to other schools, I have yet to see any mother appear visibly younger than twenty five. And the Japanese look young for their age. Honest! That last line’s not racism I can assure you, my Japanese work colleagues and friends have told me so themselves, so could it be the mothers I see are maybe even 35? Maybe I should start asking.

So, besides noticing broad trends of what I took to be a rise in incidents of obesity and teenage pregnancy, what else did I see? Well, not much to tell you the truth. It was still highly aggravating being forced to vacate the cosy confines of a pub at a little after 11pm (not as of November this year though, eh?), and someone really needs to sort out the litter problem on Britain’s streets. Oh yeah, and more Brits should cycle, because bikes are great, but I’m getting preachy now, so I’ll stop this and round off the rest of my time there.

Over the following week and a half, I managed to catch up with buddies Luke, Al, Jarrad and Tom, witness the latter’s drumming involvement with up and coming band Kev and the Mazins at a rehearsal (sure to be setting things off in chamber-folk alt-rock kind of way very soon, I’m sure), journey to London for a meeting with erstwhile housemate and now frighteningly capable public sector co-ordinator Sophie, and meet up with eternal beacon of loveliness Alex. All of which no doubt makes for scintillating reading for all those with no personal knowledge of the above. Except for the fact that the aforementioned are pretty much the only ones who’d ever bother to read these ramblings…duh, duh, duh…

...yes, sorry, where was I? Well, I saw them, and did a number of other pretty banal things involving shopping, curries and time indulging in certain practices that I’m not at liberty to expand upon in a public forum such as this. Basically, what I’m getting at is that going home was really good, and something I’m very glad to have done, as I suspect it will serve to cushion the blow for when I leave JET, most likely in July next year, and get myself a proper job. One final thing though, Marks and Sparks’ sushi is some way short of being authentic. The actual fish is fine, but the rice used to fill the ‘maki zushi’ rolls is terrible. I’d happily grit the path with it in winter, but would have slight reservations in terms of actually eating the stuff again…

The Big Blog Bonanza Starts Here…

2005-10-03T18:44:00.000+09:00

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Well now, done a fine job of keeping this little document going, eh? I seem to recall seeing some article in The Grauniad a while back about the huge amount of blogs begun in a blaze of enthusiasm and good intentions, only to end up as neglected and unwanted, lonely tumbleweeds of redundant rhetoric tossed aimlessly around by the cold winds of the .blogspot.com domain. And it so nearly happened here too…

Well, during my extremely brief visit to England in August, considering the amount I had to pack in (catching up with family and friends, gorging myself on familiar foods and drink, devouring as many English language books and magazines as possible, that kind of thing), this written account was never going to be high on my list of priorities until after I got back, but then that was well over a month ago now. With an internet connection at my apartment, there really is no excuse. No more! As of now, I intend to attack this sporadic journal-writing lark with renewed vigour by writing loads, posting it all as separate entries for ease of reading, and making sure to include a load of spurious waffle that one has to wade through before even getting near any details of what I’ve actually been doing lately. Shall we crack on?

Gizmos and Carnival Floats

2005-08-03T13:40:00.000+09:00

Ah, isn't it lovely? That there spooky glowing black box at the top is the 40GB iRiver mp3 player I purchased last Saturday with money that, to be honest, I probably don't really have. Still, having a device that contains pretty much all the records you own and allows you to play video files while travelling on a train means I don't mind surviving off rice for a week if it comes to that.

Deeply tedious subject for a post, I know, so on to my activities that evening - first off was drinks party (enkai as they call them out here - I think) with the aikido mob, which was pretty enjoyable, aside from one peculiar moment where I had to ritually fill head honcho Shirakami Sensei's lager glass in a display of deference. Peculiar, as this is pretty much what everyone does at a drinks do in Japan anyay - you never fill your own (usually small) glass from the (usually large) bottle but wait for someone else to offer. The difference when I did it for the Shirster was that he was holding his glass unsteadily above the table while I stood at a higher level pooring it from above - with flashbacks of my days as a waiter spilling drinks over people on my mind, I did it soon as poss. and retreated to my spot. Apart from that moment of slight awkwardness, my appalling Japanese just about managed to hold up under the circumstances and a happy time was had by all - including the strange "Go, team!" moment outside when it was over, with everyone stood round in a circle, raising one fist and shouting "hunh!" or something several times. Well, if it makes them happy...

After that, I ventured to Kokawa town to join Sean and Noel at the annual Kokawa festival being held that day. Arriving after 10, late enough to miss the newly arrived local ALTs and just in time to witness most of the fetival winding down, I took in the sight of these large carnival floats blazing away in the night (there's one up there, near the top), some with young children rather precariously hanging out the top of them.

With most of the stalls having shut and little else really happening by this point besides lots of milling about and drinking by the remains of the crowds that had been there earlier, we were offered fine lager and sushi by one of Sean's school colleagues at his family home - effortlessly charismatic and linguistically proficient as Sean and Noel both are, I was happy to sit back and let them do most of the talking.

Leaving there, we drifted in the direction of the station, having missed the last train and wondered what to do. As everyone was going home, the size of the town and the appearance of its streets at this time of night suddenly reminded me somewhat wistfully of going to a couple of Bonfire festivals in Lewes, Sussex during my student days. After going to the supermarket, for lack of anything to do and to stock up on booze and crispy munch, It was still early, and with just about every izakaya (pub) seemingly closed, a taxi seemed to be in order. However, doing this when the local company is also closed, and when the only number you have is for a company with whom you cannot make any meaningful communication with whatsoever in Japanese (not helped by Noel going AWOL and Sean passing out on the pavement) the only obvious thing to do is get as pissed as you can and kip in the station, as I did.

Alternatively, you can kip in a carnival float parked directly outside the station as Sean and Noel (when he re-appeared) did. I was all about to, but at the point of climbing in and joining them, a scary crowd of zealous float pushers and taiko drummers appeared on the opposite side of the road. Not wishing to attract attention, I thought I'd leave them to it. 3 highly uncomfortable and slightly smelly hours hours later, I caught the first train alone after attempting to rouse a very stubborn slumbering Suffolkean and comatose Tennessean. Can't say I didn't try.

So, back to the 'working week' and it's as uneventful as ever, besides attempting to sort out everything I need to before heading to the UK this Saturday and finally managing to persuade the PE department to let me use the school pool. Hurrah! And on that inconsequential note, here endeth the ramble.

Inept Aikido, final farewells, booze and religion

2005-07-29T18:14:00.000+09:00

With little of real note taking place during my so called 'working hours' over the past few days, besides almost drowning in my own sweat during the 10 minute bike ride there from my apartment, only to find myself sitting my desk, studying kanji characters until I get bored and spend the next hour or so engrossed in reading 'Memoirs of a Geisha', I shall relate the events of Wednesday evening.

First off was my weekly (after my impending visit to the UK, twice weekly, honest) lesson in Aikido at this little dojo on the outskirts of Wakayama Shi - or rather my embarrassing attempts to fall down gracefully while utterly failing to grasp the basic principles of body movement necessary to make any meaningful progress in learning a complex and demanding physical sport, at this little dojo on the outskirts of Wakayama Shi.

My trainer/interpreter on these occasions is one Iwai Sensei, my supervisor at one of the special needs schools I visit during termtime - unfailingly patient with me, he's the one who encouraged me to give it a go and stick at it - and having on this particular occasion also helped me place an order for a rather expensive uniform, I now at least have an additional financial incentive to stick it out. 'Stick' being the operative word, 'cause after the hour long session (including a potentially tendon-mangling warm up portion at the start involving extraordinary acts of physical contortionism performed by the dojo's head honcho, Shirakami Sensei, which us poor saps are expected to emulate without ending up in a wheelchair) the degree to which my clothes stick to me is really quite remarkable.

Sorry to be labouring the point somewhat, but believe me, I for one did not appreciate the amount of sweat fluid it's possible for the human body to unleash during prolonged physical activity carried out in a small, non air-conditioned building on a Wednesday evening during the height of the Japanese summertime. On to something less icky methinks...

Yes, anyway, after this I ventured into nearby Iwade Town to join seven or eight others in bidding a fond farewell to ALT Rachel Warrilow (pictured above) who flew out yesterday. The send off came in the form of much drinking and typically chaotic after hours karaoke. Rachel, if you're reading this (and I'll have emailed you the link, so there's no excuse), we're really gonna miss you and those inimitable phrases of yours. Hope your return journey was bien, and that the flight crew weren't too dry as a nun's. Here's to you and your impending adventures around the world.

And finally, to make up for my recent tardiness in updating this thing (and because hey, it's not like I've waffled on long enough or anything) the first in a regular feature...

Peculiar Sights and Experiences in Japan #1: The boozy man of the cloth
If you and a friend are riding back on a train following a pleasant visit to a Japanese onsen (that's 'hot public baths') and are accosted by visibly pissed gap-toothed man in his 60s whose first words to both of you are "You - handsome boys. Are you mormons?" should you:

a) attempt to ignore him and hope that he goes away?
b) make a big show of moving further down the carriage in a gesture of defiance?
c) smile politely and find yourself inexorably drawn into conversation with said gentleman?

It's clear that I've been here too long when I plumped for c. Turns out this particular septuganarian skebe san was a lapsed, quasi-alcoholic Christian preacher, who'd spent a good deal of time in the American mid-west, hence his good English and initial theological enquiry of us. This did not, however, prevent him from enthusiastically eulogising the almost mystical properties of Japanese sake ("My friend - he very bad. But he make me drink a lot. Which is good. Sake good. Sake good, yes? You like Japanese sake?") and coming out with highly inappropiate lewd comments regarding the unfortunate 13-year-old schoolgirl sitting opposite. "She is very attractive, yes? Yes? Japanese women, very good looking, heh heh!" quoth he, while the schoolgirl shot us nervous glances.

Following the smug departure of my friend Sean 15 minutes before my stop, leaving me with him, I attempted to divert his attention from her by getting him to talk about his concept of religion. Though he did not appear to have renounced his faith, he was by some measure no longer actively involved in the church in a professional capacity. I shudder to think why, frankly, and tried to diplomatically explain my position as a hardcore atheist. He didn't appear to mind, and mercifully didn't try to convert me, but as I left soon after (thankfully some way before his stop) it did get me thinking a bit on Japan's attitude to alcohol and religion. Far from being mutually exclusive, from my observations (which are sketchy at best) sake appears to have a considerable role to play in the shinto/buddhist religion which is dominant round these parts - not for them a ritualised sip of communion wine and a good deal of hand-wringing over how bad booze is for the soul, but often rather a round or two of drinks while sitting in a shinto shrine, at least according to one of my teachers at school.

One can only wonder how on Earth this man (who I'm sure would have been a perfectly nice guy had he been far more sober or I far more inebriated) must have got on in puritanical Utah. I shall return to this whole Japan = Fantastic Drinking Country theme extensively over the coming months, no doubt, but as blog entries go, this one's already far too long. We do have lives to lead, after all...

And so it begins...

2005-07-26T04:48:00.000+09:00

Yes indeed, exactly one year ago to the day I first arrived upon the shores of Japan as an Assistant Language Teacher, I've finally got round to setting up a blog. Hopefully updated regularly, it will detail most of my doings in this fine country, contain some random thoughts and lots of bad prose, and hopefully provide a useful way for friends and accquaintances to catch up with what I'm doing, should any of them be interested.

And on this maiden post, I can inform one and all that I'm currently in the school's IT lab with nothing better to do during these early days of the students' summer break, while a week-long build up of rain slashes down relentlessly outside, causing me to ponder precisely how soaked I'm likely to be after the bike ride home to my apartment, having failed to bring waterproofs, umbrella, or indeed weather protection of any kind with me today.

Plans for later - a trip to neighbouring Iwade town to get a 9-month old camera film which predates my digital photography days developed, omiyage (that's 'gifts' to you) shopping for the folks back home, and checking my money situation ahead of yet another monumentally foolish consumer electronics purchase, in this case an iRiver, later this week. Cor, fascinating stuff, eh? Bet you're glad you followed that link now...