Four Hundred Days Til Re-entry

This blog has outlived it's usefulness

2007-05-18T00:17:00.000+09:00

This blog is now officially closed.

Please check me out at my new place and enjoy my newer stuff there.

The Mongolian visa part #1

2007-04-06T11:05:00.000+09:00

Let's just skip back in time a few days..... (hum so the screen goes wobbly)

This is what I wanted to be saying yesterday but never got round to it as I was interrupted. The lead-up was thus. Bits in brackets are what I thought:

Me: Hello?
Woman at the Mongol embassy: Yes, hello?
Me: Hi, yes. I want a tourist visa to visit Mongolia but I'm not sure what I need and what I have to do.
WATME: Well, how will you be entering the country?
Me: By train, from China.
WATME: You'll need your passport, a passport photo, 4,400yen and a form which we will give you when you get here.
Me: (Whoa there! I thought I could do it by post.) I have to come in person?
WATME: Yes.
Me: And I can't do it by post? (It will cost about 200pounds and take about three days for each trip to Tokyo to accomplish this.)
WATME: You could have a proxy do it.
Me: I don't know anyone in Tokyo. Is there no other way?
WATME: No, sorry.
Me: So I have to go all the way to Tokyo to sort it out?
WATME: Yes.
Me: Can I get the (damn) visa in Beijing? Can they do it in three days like you can?
WATME: I don't know.
Me, resignedly: And there is no other way to do it in Japan?
WATME: No.
Me: (Please God! Please!) And there is no other place in Japan that I can put my hands on a visa? Nowhere I can get to in under half a day?
WATME: Hang on. Where do you live?
Me: (No way am I telling her Shiga. Muddy the waters even further... Let's go for) Kyoto.
WATME: Just a second. OK, here is the number for our honorary consulate in Osaka.

So it came out in the end, once I had prized he information from her clutches, that I could get a visa from an office in Osaka. A mere two stops on the subway from where I was going anyway to pick up my passport and Chinese visa.

So the moral of the story, or an amoral in this case, is to keep hammering away no matter what. Normally I hate people who do that, but who knows? Perhaps that is a part of the local culture?

Me: I want to go.
Her: No way!
Me: Oh, go-on!
Her: I don't think you really want to. Not really.
Me: No, I do! A lot!
Her, fingers held apart: About this much?
Me: No, more! I haven't got big enough hands to show you.
Her: Well, OK then....

To think I nearly spent tons of money sorting it out. So if anyone ever needs it, there is a consulate of Mongolia in Osaka.

China visa Gettoh

2007-04-05T17:36:00.000+09:00

That is what they say on Japanese TV when they receive something on a TV show or in a quiz or something. I got my visa for China today, and handed my passport straight on to the "Honorary" Mongolian Consulate. I assume that meant that I actually handed it over to a private company. Oh well, over with the helm and trust in God. If it doesn't come back then I am screwed!

Meeting myself coming the other way

2007-04-04T12:06:00.000+09:00

No word from me for such a long time can only mean one thing - busy as hell.

The good news is that I have broken it's back. In order of importance:
I have finished working.
I have moved house.
I have started the ball rolling towards getting home.
I have finished the first draft of my book.

Finishing Work
I have finished what must, surely be the loneliest three years of my life. Learning to separate the issues has been one of the great challenges of my time here but I have never really got to the bottom of why things have been so hard. Work was definitely at the root of it. Three years in the Japanese education system have not treated me kindly.

It might seem strange that some one could be lonely whilst working with and around seven-hundred people or so. Again, separate the issues: Working with the kids was very rewarding and I enjoyed it. Largely, that was what got me through the day, week or month - whichever I was looking to clear. Working with the teachers was a problem for me.

I don't really know what the issue was. I worked hard, I made it easy for them to take part in my lessons and kept my temper under control. I learned Japanese. I brought bits of foreign food to school for them to try. I kept my ethnocentricity at home (for those of you who don't know the word, it means that one looks at the world from the point of view of ones own cultural or ethnic group) and tried to do it their way. Which got me no-where, really. As a group, the teachers were off-hand and barely polite at best. I don't know if I screwed something up somewhere or what, but I feel like I never really had the chance to become a part of the schools, which is what I wanted.

On the last day I had to be there for a ceremony, first with the teachers, then with the kids. The teacher's bit was a quick speech from each teacher that was leaving. Most of them went along the lines of "thanks for everything. Hopefully see you again." Mine was more along the lines of "I'm not sure what it was but it's been emotional" with that last bit ripped-off from a film. I wanted to tell them how I really felt (upset, used, angry) but I managed to be English to the last, dignified in defeat.

The thing with the kids was much nicer. There were twelve of us leaving and we had to walk through the middle of the kids in the main hall. I got lots of cheers and waves from the kids. I was struck yet again by the massive schism between what I got from the kids and what I got from the teachers. Make no mistake - I was there for the kids and that side of my job went really well. We each heard a speech from one of the kids, a representative from the teacher's class. I didn't have my own class but taught everyone in the school, so they could have chosen anyone. I was pleasantly surprised that it was Ren. We'd had problems the year before but had managed to smooth things out and re-establish a relationship. I felt that he was one of my bigger successes over the last year.

I listened to what he had to say. It was a shame it was only one hour a week. My lessons were fun and easy to understand. He was sorry I was leaving. He'd particularly enjoyed making paella and chili-con-carne with.

I made my reply to the whole school. I was going back to the UK and was probably not going to work with junior school children again. The best part of my time in Japan had been spent with them and that even for those who would never travel abroad I would take a little bit of them with me. I told them that they needed to take their chances and make sure that they did something extra special at least once in their lives.

I was quite pleased with my speech because it was all in Japanese and it made a lot of the teachers stop and think, too. I also managed to keep a rein on my temper, too. I got a few genes from my mum that gave me a penchant for the dramatic and they were pushing me to go out with a bang.

Anyway, that night there was the soubetsukai. This is Japanese for farewell party, sort of. This again didn't go awfully well for me. I know how it is supposed to be done, Japanese-style, and they didn't do it for me. Oh well, I thought, head down and be pleasant until I can go home. At them end of the night I waited until I could decently leave and left. I'd been sat with no-one talking to me for a while and thought I might as well do the same elsewhere.

"Right them, bye!"

A few people were like, "what, are you going?"

"Yep, see you never."

All of a sudden it dawned on them that I was going and not coming back. Now about five or ten people wanted to talk to me. I left anyway, with what grace I could muster after copious amounts of alkyhole. Onward and upward from here, I thought.

The reason I am writing all this for the world to see isn't for the sake of recrimination or anything like that. I was over it before I even finished the job or even started the last month. It is my wish and fervent prayer that they learn from it and treat the next English teacher much more kindly. Before I left I had a word with a couple of people to try and get that going.

So, work-wise, the last three years have been pretty taxing, emotionally. I'm though it and out the other side, stronger for the experience and happy within myself that it has been good and useful, if not exactly enjoyable, experience. All in all, it has left me with a stronger desire to help and look after people.

Moving House
Moving house at the same time as finishing my job was painful, but not nearly so bad as it could have been if I hadn't had a week off right before I moved. I have worked out that this was the fifteenth time I had moved house, with the subsequent move back to the UK being the sixteenth. Even with that much practice I am still no good at it and hate the damn process. I have a few friends at home that have moved once from home to their own newly-bought houses and I can't help but be jealous of them.

We had the usual issues of what to keep, what to sell, what to give away and what to chob in the garbage. I don't think that I have lost any important documents this time. In one of my moves from house to house at University I lost contact with my driver's license and also my birth certificate at some point. It is still early days and the Japanese dearly love a paper-trail. You virtually have to get things signed and stamped to go to the toilet. Only three weeks of that left now.

I have made myself a firm vow to stop buying so much stuff. I've decided that I am going to live in one of those ultra-modern houses with lots of right-angles and empty spaces. You know the ones I mean, often painted black and white and displayed in magazines. I've decided this not because I like the design but because I think you could probably move house in a mini.

Right at the end it emerged that we had been conned yet again. When we moved in the guy from the agency lied to us and said we could get another parking space close by. In fact this whole line of conversation had been spurious. When we went to the office of the company they told us that we couldn't rent a space from them, in no uncertain terms. We also had the guy tell us that we couldn't move in until the fifth and then tell us on the fifth that we could have moved in on the first and that rent was due from that date.

Well, we also paid a deposit of about seven-hundred and fifty pounds, from which we were told that damage would be subtracted. Well, that was a lie, too. Two thirds of that were a present for the landlord and only the remainder of the final third could come back to us. Time to re-adjust my finances.

Going Home
This is going on and on, so I will try and keep it brief. On April 23rd I will begin going home, kind of like this:

April 23 - Arrive in China and spend five days in and around Beijing.
April 28 - Stage #1 of the Trans-Siberia train journey to Mongolia.
April 29 - Arrive in Mongolia and spend four days on the Mongolian steps living with horse farmers and doing stuff like archery and so on.
May 3rd - Depart on Stage #2 of the TST to Russia.
May 5th - Arrive Irkutsk and spend three days around Lake Baikal.
May 8th - Leave Irkutsk for the final leg of the TST to Moscow
May 11th - Arrive for one day in Moscow.
May 12th - Moscow tourism followed by late departure for Latvia by train.
May 13th - Spend day in Riga, then fly to Liverpool.

Then after that I will head down to London for a job interview for a teaching position over the summer.

May 21st - Fly to Krakow in Poland to do a CELTA certificate. This will take a month.
June 21st - Finally arrive back in the UK for the foreseeable future.

This whole thing is going to take money and visas in equal proportion, though I think it is all in hand. My only worry is the payment that I sent using the post office. Particularly the train ticket and package, for which I had to send the best part of a thousand pounds by international transfer without myself, the travel company or the post office knowing exactly what combination of codes and details were needed to get the damn thing through. I'll consider this year's share of luck used if it goes through first time.

This process is what I am in the middle of now - I am heading into Osaka tomorrow to retrieve my passport with Chinese visa and sending it straight off to Tokyo for the Mongolian Embassy to put their stamp on. Then I will be waiting on payment being received in Hong Kong for the train ticket purchased in Beijing for the ticket to Russia. I need a letter of invitation, you see. Once I have that I can get my Russian visa from the consulate in Osaka and I am set. Sorry, I forgot to mention my new passport which I received last weekend after I found out I needed six months left on the damn thing to get the visas in the first place. It couldn't be easier.

The Book
First off I should say that the book may never actually be read by anyone but myself. I'm still not convinced that the concept is good enough and the style is in any way entertaining. The whole project was a test to see if I could actually write a novel. I'm happy to say that I have done it. At least to the first draft.

There is an inch and a half of A4 sat up stairs in our room. It is one thing to have it saved on disk and another entirely to have it in your hands. If I am lucky I might even start reading through it tonight. I need to get it checked and re-written before I leave the country because their is absolutely no way I am going to carry hard copy and computer the full length of Asia and Europe.

The Big Picture
So if you all have been wondering why I haven't been emailing / writing online, well, now you know. I either didn't have time because I was busy or didn't feel like it much because I was down about work. Hopefully, I am back with a bit of time on my hands.

So I have what, nineteen days left in the country? And this is about where I am up to. Looking back over what I have written here I am aware that it all seems pretty negative. In fact I am pretty happy and positive about things in general. I think I have enough time to get everything done and plough straight back into life in the UK.

I think I am going to make it!

2007-03-02T20:32:00.000+09:00

It is all going to end good. Cue the fat lady! Then ball and chalk her as well.

I'm gong to finish my four hundred days, though I was in doubt for some considerable time. Let me tell you why:

I'm going through an extended period of lasts at the moment. I had my last upper school classes at one school the other day. I've bought my last tub of kerosene for the heater. We're having our last house party before moving tomorrow. Incidentally, it is my birthday, too. Hopefully not my last one, though.

I've had my last meetings, taught the fifth years for the final time seen off the second years at a different school. Today was my last lesson with the fourth years at my bigger school. I woke up with a sore throat this morning, a headache (I had the last beer last night) and felt pretty poorly. I've got two sick days left. You do the maths. In he end I decided that I would go in and teach the kids because it was their last lesson.

In to school, print off some vocab sheets, blank game boards, sort out some dice. Next I head up to my classroom with a box full of stuff. I am the one who always has tons of stuff to carry so it is logical that I get the classroom furthest from the door on the top floor. Change the date and weather cards (Last time I'll see the February card), cut the vocab sheets into pieces to give to the students. We are making English boardgames today. Suddenly I remember: I have to tell the classes they need their glue and scissors.

Long story short: I go down to tell them and they are getting changed ready for PE. I check the timetable. It says they are coming. I ask the teacher, she says they have changed the days. Thanks for sharing that with me guys. A day with no classes and I am not feeling very well. I could have stayed at home.

I battled it out and saw the day out writing my book and doing little bits of stuff. I don't really have any work right now. I leave feeling pretty rotten, and angry to boot because I have had my time and efforts wasted. I went to the supermarket to get supplies for the party tomorrow. It was here that the clouds parted.

I just bumbled into the DVD rental place in the grip of one of my hopelessly optimistic spasms. I didn't expect to see anything I actually wanted to see. Weelllll, we were off to a good start when the romantic comedy section simply wasn't there any more. A quick glance, a double take, a treble eye-rubbing take. Tsutaya (the shop name) has got the whole of The League of Gentlemen on DVD! And a bunch of other TV shows from England.

There is just enough new material in there, if you include the mental chewing gum of those endless Sci-Fi series that are on sky all the time, to fill my every spare waking hour until I leave. And when I say "spare" I mean that is the way I am going at the moment. Let the party begin.

The cultural festivities this week have been based around....

2007-01-17T21:07:00.000+09:00

.... The Hot Supporter

When I first heard tell of the Hot Supporter I immediately thought of some kind of revolutionary underwear, possibly for women with droopy breasts or even men with droopy testicles. I couldn't imagine why the school would be getting one. So then I reasoned that it might be part of some kind of push to get more kids to go and watch live football or something like that. The Football Association is sending supporters to espouse the wonders of watching football of a Saturday (In my opinion, the wonder is that anyone at all pays to see Japanese football). A hot supporter. At this point my mind took a leap sideways by about fifteen years to my childhood glimpses of page 3 girls in the Sun. Often a hot chick lifting a football shirt to show the barely literate her mammary glands.

It wasn't a football supporter either. In fact it was a guy sent by the local government to help the foreign kids deal with their problems at school. These problems often include no Japanese language ability whatsoever in the entire family. I have my suspicions that some of this is linked to their not being arsed with the Japanese education which is largely worthless outside Japan. This is only a suspicion based on hunches and little details so the jury must not let it influence their decision. In my opinion, though, a lot of these people are taking the piss. I cite one example of a boy who was off school three times in the same year for his own birthday. Putting him on the scale of one for human and two for ruling monarch, he could possibly be a demi-god but if so his parents have wisely decided to keep this fact to themselves. Just for the record, it is not the done thing to give your kids time off for their birthday(s).

My school has a moderate number of South American students, mostly from Brazil and Peru. Some of them speak Japanese better than me, while some of them arrive at school on their first day seemingly without the ability to say "konichiwa"or "arigato". Whilst I am aghast at this there is just a small amount, visible only by microscope with a big lens on a clear day, of respect for the sheer balls of this approach. Surely they knew they were going to be living in Japan? Is it possible to accidentally move house 14,000 kilometers and a good eighteen hours by plane on a whim. Or by accident? And make your way through the vile, dinosaur infested swamp that is Japanese immigration bureaucracy? "Oh, I'll just leave this inch thick wad of documents containing my entire family history on this desk here, shall I? Just while I tie my shoe lace again. Pablo, Pablo! Goddamnit, I've gone and lost the family documents again..."

As I said, we can assume that they knew they were coming. So now we will switch things round. This is you now. You are moving to an alien country with your family. Do you point them in the direction of the Japanese textbook or not? Just for the essentials: Good morning, a large beer please, where's the toilet, thank you.

So the local government decided to deal with this (muhahahahaha) not by telling the parents to get their shit together but by employing extra people to do all the work for them. Thus the idea of the Hot Supporter was born. Though where the name came from is anyones guess. So they set up a system where a guy comes in every week on Wednesday morning to interpret difficult stuff for the kids (stuff like science and history, maths looks the same in any language) and translate documents for the parents of these kids. This was supplementary to the woman that the school organised by themselves. Like I said in my last post, you need redundancy in schools to stop kids falling through the cracks. All well and good.

Fast forward through 'til about three quarters of the way through the year. The hot supporter is not here. We've gone from being hotly supported to being cold and dangly. Why? WHY?! Well, the guys at the local government got their sums wrong. The contract was for x days. Reality had a contract that said (x + quite a large number more) days. For once reality came out on top. So as a last minute stop-gap measure (the Japanese love these just a bit less than uniforms and pointless meetings), we got the Japanese Sean Connery.

Not Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice, where he is badly disguised as a Japanese person in a process that would later become known as valmorphanization. This guy is Sean Connery reborn before his death in Japanese form. How do I know? He turned up at work to fill in for the hot supporter until March. He's quite a jolly chap, with four languages at least and a brief and passing acquaintance with reality. Hilarious in his own way, which is highly taxing to busy school teachers.

He arrived at school this morning and, having been introduced to the head master the previous week and started the day in his office, let himself into the head master's office to continue the tradition. Having then handed his coat and hat to the deputy head he then proceeds to go round and introduce himself to all the people working in the staff room. The whole thing reminded me of a George Bernard Shaw play that I read last week called "Augustus does his bit". Well worth a read, by the way, and free for download from Project Gutenberg. There was something oh so very tragicomic about the whole thing. The ego, the three piece suit, the cologne, the faint falling of the face when he discerned that his desk was the one under the pile of posters and damaged books, it was all there. I asked him if he used to be in the police, but he said no. He used to work for an airline. It all fits.

In the end I, who am not known for it, took pity on the poor fool and took his mind of the earthly realities of the Elementary School. I buffed his celebrity a bit and chit-chatted about various things with him. I had the time free today because my classes were mostly off skiing (no invited again, damnit!). I distinctly remember him saying at one point that he "would try the school lunch to see if it agreed with him". Eventually the deputy head told him he was in danger of missing his train, which in Japanese conversational terms is like that big hook-thing they use at auditions. "Next"

After he had gone the deputy head thanked me for keeping him occupied. I asked her what she thought of him and she said he seemed alright. This wasn't the answer I was hoping for, so I said that he was very easy to talk to. She said it was fine so long as she didn't have work to do, so asked her if she wanted to discuss it. She looked like she was going to throw her rose hip tea at me until she realised I was joking.

The one day per year that makes it all worthwhile

2007-01-10T17:38:00.000+09:00

I bitch and moan about Japan and it's education system, though the primary education system is very good, basically. Some days I feel like letting rip with an Uzi, but sometimes the good bits balance things out.

Today we had the second annual "Hinan Kunren". As many of you will know, social decline and the rule of the idiot-box over vast sections of the population have led to a lowering of the moral tone, to steal some words. People cannot tell helping old ladies with their shopping from parking in the disabled zone, right from wrong if you follow me. And now... our schools are no longer safe!

There was an incident, or even a series of incidents starting about five years back, in which a man basically entered a school and started damaging the students. The schools, local authorities and PTAs have brought in all manner measures to try and protect the safety of the kids. Each child has a rape alarm thing on his bag. Each teacher and PTA member has a sticker on their car or push-bike saying that they are on patrol. A series of elderly volunteers has been appointed and given day-glo coats and armbands (the Japanese love uniforms more than sushi, by the way), along with instructions to watch over the kids. Sorry, I meant The Kids.

Last year the Board of Education (BOE), in their wisdom, decided that we needed to have a drill to deal with "strange people coming into the school" to do unspecified "things" to or with the kids. Now we have three drills a year; A fire drill, an earthquake drill, a mentalist drill. The kids learn to walk calmly outside, get quietly under the table and quietly lock the doors and windows of the classroom. If this all seems a bit reactionary to you, then, well, it does to me too. Remeber, The Kids.

School started yesterday and the senior teacher gave me my timetable for this term. No lessons tomorrow because we're having a mentalist drill. No lessons was fine by me but it did strike me as a little bit odd. Perhaps the fruitcakes in Japan notify the schools in advance or something?

Up until about lunchtime I designed endless piles of worksheets and handouts. Over lunch they showed a video saying what you should do if someone strange enters the classroom (apart from the teachers and students). Then they gave specific instructions as to what was going to happen. A police man disguised as a mentalist was going to come into the school and do something unspecified to 6 - 3 (yes, they did actually say which class was going to be targeted). The student nearest the door and the one from the next class over were nominated to come and tell us in the staff room what was going on while the nearest teachers tried to contain the problem.

Most schools now have a special capture device, a kind of long metal stick with a semi-circular bit in the end to capture the baddie in. One of the other teachers dibbed this, so my weapon of choice was an aluminium stepladder. We agreed that he would go high and I would go low. Then we sat at our desks pretending to work with the adrenaline going round. The copper slipped out of a door and the uniformed one walked out with a clipboard. Then we laughed when he came back and asked if the nutter-copper was allowed in in his outside shoes. The Japanese police crack me up, they really do. Then the waiting game began.

The headmaster came out with a bokken, a wooden practice sword that I used to use when I did Aikido, and a kind of manic grin on his face. He used the remaining three minutes to pose with it on his hip like a katana and edge closer to the door so that he could be first on the scene. I don't know what he thought he was going to do with it because a wooden sword is fairly useless unless you want to seriously fuck someone up. I kept quiet though.

Anyway, the kids turned-up shouting and the headmaster bolted like shit off a shovel. I ran for my ladder and then ran along with the guy with the capture device. Down the corridor, left past the changing rooms towards 6-3 and there he was in the corridor surrounded by about three teachers. We charged in (litterally), me with my step-ladder and the other guy with his pitch-fork thing. "If you don't practice properly you won't be able to do it properly on the day" is a bit of a motto of mine, so I put a fair bit of weight behind it and we pinned him to the wall.

The guy, who had a fake knife in his hand, said, "OK, I'm captured." This was a bit of a poser because it was either a moderately un-cunning trick, or the copper saying he had had enough. He started to move, which settled it for me. I gave him a real hard jab with the ladder on his shins. "I'm captured," he said again.

The guy next to me said, "knife, knife."

I shouted, "DROP IT!" in Japanese and "Drop the fucking blade!" in English for a laugh. After he dropped the knife I settled the ladder in a stronger position.

"The ladder really hurts," said the copper.

"You're still breathing," I said with a shrug. Then a bunch of reinforcements came, mostly carrying brooms apart from my mate the nurse who had a ten inch hollow plastic hundred yen baseball bat. The copper with the clipboard, who I hadn't noticed up to this point off to the left, called things to a halt. Then a geriatric with an armband told us we had done it wrong and should have pulled out his legs with umbrellas. Hilarious. Especially when he tried to demonstrate the technique and failed.

I took my ladder back and joined the kids in the main hall. We endured thirty minutes of acronyms and advice from the geriatric, who it turns out was an ex-cop. That would be where the comedy aspect came from. At one point, I shit you not one bit, he taught the 1st years how to scream for help. "So that's how you do it," I said to the nearest teacher.

All that remained was the obligatory meeting. Japanese people like pointless meetings almost as much as uniforms. What was supposed to be a half hour postmortem became a soapbox for the geriatric ex-copper, who was newly retired and seemingly still hungry for power and attention. Luckily, I didn't have to attend. Word came through the grapevine that I had been very effective and the guy still remembered me from the year before when I smashed the knife out of his hand with a steel flagpole. Nice to be appreciated and all that.

So in all it was great fun. I got to hit the local filth with a ladder, which is the kind of opportunity that doesn't come along everyday. The exercise itself was a bit of a waste of time. Everyone knew exactly what was going to happen and when but in the case of some kind of real attack the school would be largely unprepared. My recommendation to anyone working at a school is to have ladders placed strategically around the school. With a ladder you can keep the assailant away from your body whilst smashing or crushing tender parts of your mentalist. As long as they don't have some kind of projectile weapon, like a gun...

Happy new year, world

2007-01-06T17:27:00.000+09:00

A week away from the net and see how it all piles up...

December 27th - I spent most of the day driving south to make sure that I would be on time to meet M but I took a look at "folk village" (tourist trap) near my hotel:

December 28th - more driving, this time right the way to Sendai airport where I met M off the plane. I did stop off at Matsushima, though. It is one of the top three for something or other in japan.

December 28th to 30th - We went to Zao onsen where we enjoyed some good snow and smelly onsens. Seriously, the water had some kind of sulphur-compound in it that made it smell like rotten eggs.

December 31st - Off to Sendai in the morning. It emerged that that hotel we were staying at did have a car-park as it said but it wasn't included in the price. For a price selling itself on price this was a swindle. Not happy. Anyhow, we welcomed in the new year with Mexican food and Cuba Libres. Here is M modeling the latest in designer drink-wear.

January 1st 2007 - We went to a place called "Whale land" which I had assumed would be a whale watching spot. It turned out to be a museum about whales. First thing I saw on left as I came through the door was... canned whale meat. The whole building was a museum dedicated to the history of whale fishing. Not quite what I had been hoping for...

January 2nd - Another mammoth day of driving all the way to Kusatsu Onsen, where we stayed the night. About 400km this day. On the way we stopped-off in Nikko, a place famous for daringly criminal monkeys and old temples and shrines.

January 3rd - we carried on to Nozawa onsen, where we were planning to go boarding. Alas, the sun had other ideas and scuppered our plans by melting all the snow. At this point we decided to cut our losses and head home. At around 9pm on the 4th we arrived back at our flat, tired but satisfied.

So this is boxing - The northern most part of Honshu, Japan

2006-12-26T17:29:00.000+09:00

Boxing day was another early start and quick exit. I had tons of ground to cover if I wanted to see some stuff as well as get to my next hotel on time. That is the thing about Japan; it looks pretty small on paper but up close it can be massive.

Still being a bit achey from the day before (boarding down Hakkoda), I decided I wanted to get out and see some places, get some photos and relax in some hot water somewhere. Here are a couple of photos of my day.

All the farmers round here seem to use boats... By the way, that's Hokkaido in the background. The visibility was not so good this day.

I had a wander out onto this little island on my way round the coast. Very pretty it was, too. My dad would have liked it here.

This is the most northern part of the main island of Japan. There are representations of Tuna everywhere so I guessed that the village was based around fishing them. Note the man shaking his fist at the fish as he disapeared below the waves.

Merry Xmas 2006 in Aomori, Japan

2006-12-25T09:05:00.000+09:00

This is hopefully my last Christmas away from home / family for some time to come. It has been some five years since I last did it but this time was my first completely on my own.

I was up at dawn and off into the hills after stuffing my face at the eat-all-you-can buffet breakfast at my hotel. First stop was Moya Hills, a skiing / boarding place. Boring as hell - only half of the lifts open and the life groomed out of the runs that were there.

The second stop was Mount Hakkoda which was the best place I have been in Japan. Pricey, but well worth it for the 5 or 7km long runs through the lollipop trees. The scenery was stunning and the clouds parted at all the right times for me to get the shots I wanted. The boarding was challenging and interesting. You couldn't get one of those damned grooming machines down the runs. Finally, I lost my sunglasses on the way down (I was being a bit too ambitious with my jumps) and actually had tem handed back to me with a Merry Christmas to boot. Now I know I love Alpine boarding.

I never did manage to find the onsen I wanted to go to. I did manage to find a good yakiniku shop. No turkey on the menu though, I am afraid. Here are some more photos:

Moya Hills - though I love boarding I hate what the resorts do to the views.

The top of Hakkoda - see what I mean about the trees?

Partyway down the hill on the forest course. The trees were not so heavily coated here.

Driving to Aomori, Japan

2006-12-24T08:11:00.000+09:00

Just photos for today! Enjoy!

This was parked outside an Onsen I went to.

It was valleys and forests all the way to the outskirts of Aomori City. Great!

This is what most of the roads were like. I never fully lost control of the car so it was exhilarating rather than scary.

Off to Lake Tazawa for boarding and sightseeing

2006-12-23T17:02:00.000+09:00

I was up at 5am to get my guzzler off the boat. As soon as I was off the ramp i was off and into the countryside at the part where Akita meets Iwate, in the middle of Touhoku.

The first thing that struck me was the ominous lack of snow anywhere in sight. As I got clear of the city and out into the badlands things started to look up and I started seeing patches of white between the trees in my headlights. It must have been a good hour and a half before I stopped for food and fluid. I spotted that the convenience store had wireless internet for free so I took five minutes to check everything out and email the missus. The map seemed clear enough so I ploughed on, keeping my eyes open for those joke signs the japanese put up up to three junctions before the one they refer to.

I got there at about 8am and headed straight for the ski-slopes. First stop was tazawako-kogen. Strike one: though they were recruiting for staff outside I tried to get on the slope. "Nope," I was told, "try the mountain dear." Now in English this looks like she forgot a comma in being friendly, but in Japanese it can only mean a kind of animal related to Rudolph, of red nose fame. I left none the wiser than you.

Luckily, I had planned for this and my backup was to head up through the mountains to a place called Hachimantai, a national park surrounded by ski fields. Straight up 341, turn left after 30km or so. Or not. Now I know how Gandalf felt on Kharadras. My mountain didn't need the help of Saruman to see me off, just a guy in a uniform to lock the gates. Strike two.

After a long, hard look at the map I noticed a ski-place called Kamoshika Gellende. That means Mountain Dear Skiing Place to you and me. Arrive at ten, check the price, decide to give it a while because the first day of opening is half price. I buy a 1,800yen 5 hour ticket. Gear on, boots tight, goggles on and off I went.

I had a great time. I'm no great shakes but I was probably the best boarder there. All the newbies were snowploughing the life out of the middle of the track. I saw a few guys go off through the trees on the left so I took the right and stayed there all day. Six inches of powder and a fresh track each time. All I needed from that day. I got my Ollies, jumps and 180s going by the end and had a thoroughly satisfying two hours of it, after which my knees teamed-up with my thigh muscles to call things to a close. On the way out i managed to flog my ticket to a guy for half price so I was well-chuffed.

After that I wandered round taking photos, hooning about in my car and searching for my vaguely located Youth Hostel. The people there were really friendly. For those who have never stayed in a Japanese youth hostel, let me assure you the message was lost somewhere along the way to Japan. A huge room to myself, parafin heater and a hot bath. Also, I am afraid to tell you die-hard hostelers, there was a beer machine inside.

The only slight blemish was the curfew at 9pm. This was enforced by hiding the guests shoes. Not that i wanted to go anywhere, but I left my towel in the car and was forced to use a Tshirt instead. Luckily no-one caught me.

So what does Akita look like then? Here you go:

This is Lake Tazawa. It is almost round. Note the lack of snow on the hills!

This the beautiful waterfall I stumbled across after boarding. It was right outside the Onsen that I went to.

I thought this rock looked kind of like a monster with hair on it's arms and head. Note that it is now snowing. It snowed for about four or five hours, and eventually overnight, too!

More from me tomorrow about what I did today!

Ferry strange indeed - Japanese ferries

2006-12-22T16:27:00.000+09:00

Last Thursday was my last day of term, complete with end-of-year-party (bounenkai in Japanese). By the time I got home I was buggered, but still had to pack and stuff my boarding gear in the car.

Up at 5am to make sure I got away on time and didn't miss my boat. Out of the door stuffing sarnies and coffee into my face I managed to get away by 6am. All the way up route eight to Tsuruga in Fukui prefecture. I arrived well ahead of schedule and registered. I was a bit worried as there was a boat but no other customers that I could see. Anyhow, all appeared to be in order and on I got.

I booked the boat a few months in advance, quite reasonably assuming that there would be tons of people heading north for the snow. Onto the boat and park my car behind the other guy. The other guy. Up on inside and order two meals in advance.

It was like being on that boat in Goldeneye the Nintendo game. Everyone is dead, because you have shot them. You've got the whole ship to yourself. There were a total of eight passengers. The only person with a standard class ticket was myself. Which was ironic because I got a huge room to myself while the guys who paid more got these tiny little bunkbed rooms for their cash. Sweet.

Once i was on the boat the seconds dragged and dragged. Luckily I had copious amounts of books and beer. I was able to occupy myself until about 9pm when I finally had a bath and went to bed. All told, not very exciting but hey! it takes 20 hours to get to Akita and I needed the r and r time.

More tomorow!

There was a bit of a brightener under the radar this morning

2006-12-14T15:45:00.000+09:00

I got an email from Icons - a portrait of England today. First-off, it was a wonder it got through the spam filter. Furthermore it was an even bigger wonder that I read it with a title like that. Anyway, read it I did and, despite the unpromising start, a very encouraging read it was too.

It seems that this picture I took at Chatsworth House "nicely depicts England" and has been selected for use with some project or other. Did I mind if they used it? Obviously not as long as they put my name and web page adress on there somewhere.

The reason that this was so encouraging for me is that I was actually begining to wonder if it was worth the bother of uploading the damn things because hardly anyone looks at them. It just goes to show that there is no such thing as a lost cause. Interestingly, this is not what I consider one of my best shots, so there.

By the way my flickr page is here.

Even lower under the radar - Japanese hot springs

2006-12-11T11:19:00.000+09:00

I reached a new low this weekend, with a double whammy of immense proportions.

The first would normally have dominated a post like this. During the course of a weekend I embarked upon a course of action which ultimately lead to my paycheque being micturated up the house heat-retainer in under 48 hours. Bit of a head-fuck, that was. It was kind of like one of those Barklay Card adverts without the "priceless" thing at the end.

We had a party on Saturday night that took about ten hours of cooking, which started on Friday night. Beef bourguinon is one of my favourite foods but does unfortunately take about eight hours to cook if you do it right. Anyway, all told it was about 15,000 yen in preparations and food, I think. Well worth it, though. Thanks to everyone who came and squeezed into our tiny flat.

Saturday morning saw me in Nagoya for a Senior ALT meeting. The company paid for this of course. Unfortunately, the return route took me past the Mac Shop where I acidentally bought a new MacBook. Including the three year warranty this soared up to 180,000 yen, though I got a discount for being a teacher.

Sunday saw me buying snow tyres for the gas-guzzler. Even though I got them second hand, and at a good price too, these limped-along to 36,000 yen including fitting, balancing and sacrifice of chicken.

So, in my new-found spirit of poverty, I decided to go to the sento. What's a sento, UTR? I'm glad you asked. Here it is:

One of the best and most highly redeeming aspects of Japan are the hot springs. These are called "Onsen" in Japanese and are supposed to be naturally occuring. I say supposed to be because Japanese business people being what they are, these are often faked and dressed-up like an Onsen with a big kerosene boiler hidden in the trees at the back. An onsen can start at a steaming outdoor mudhole and range through small, garden-sized indoor pool all the way up to huge spa complexes. The best ones have indoor and outdoor sections, saunas, steam rooms, cold plunge-pools, bubble baths, Jacuzzis, special chair baths that blast your shoulders with water, and so-on.

Here are a few examples:

You remember I said that there were a few fake ones about? These basically fall into two categories: The one type are the cowboy outfits who would be closed down in the UK but aren't here because of the lack of trading standards.

The other are called Sento and are a godsend on a cold day after a day / weekend of pounding over the jumps, along the rails and down the hills on my snowplank. These are generally really clean and have more of the things I want: Whirlpools, steam rooms and plunge pools.

In both you go in naked but with a small towel. The towel should not be dunked in the water, however. They are 98% separated into mens and womens sections.

Now we are up to speed, back to last weekend. Sunday afternoon and I am about 230,000 yen down and a macbook, set of tyres and party experiences up. Before going to get some snowboard bits I decide to call into the sento. Clothes off, shower, rinse down with the special water before getting in (more manners) and one foot in the pool.

"nick-sensei! nick-sensei! Look everyone! It's nick sensei!"

Now, I do not mind being naked in front of other men. I do not actively seek it out but neither do i let it stand in the way of sousing my aching bag of bones on a Sunday. The line in the sand is drawn at people from school. Especially the kids. What a fucking nightmare.

I very quickly became aware that the school baseball club were in the building. despite my fears the kids were actually pretty civilised. Once we had had broken through the initial time/place/what do I do now? stage, the kids followed me round asking me questions. One of the kids took me to one side for a little confidence:

Kid: Nick sensei
Me: What?
Kid: Do you mind if I tell you something?
Me, with the fear of God inside me, quaking: Er, OK.
Kid: You know that doctor's surgery skit we did?
Me: Yeeeessss?
Kid: It was really hard.
Me: Oh thank fuck for that! Yes, I know. It was a taster for next year so you know what to expect.

So I got through it all OK in the end. I might have to start going further afield for my hot water adventures after this.

There comes a time...

2006-12-06T17:31:00.000+09:00

... in ones life where one has to take a look at itself and make changes. Out with the old and in with new and the shaking of the hokey-kokey.

It started with the links down the side over there ==>

And continued on with the bar across the top.

Where will it all end?

Please bear with us until the work is over.

Life in Japan - what's a busy week?

2006-12-03T10:47:00.000+09:00

All quiet from me for a while. Excluding "nothing posts" not much for three weeks or so, really. The fact of the matter is, in truth, that I have a had a busy week for a few weeks. All kinds of unusual and good things have been happening. At the same time I have been busy as hell at school. Most of you out there in the real world won't have a clue what I do at school, so here is a run-down of what I did last week.

Monday - In early (for me) at 8.30. The other teachers do longer hours than me but they get more pay, bonusses and job security. Fire up my computer, make a coffee, start preparing for my lessons. About half of my job is preparation, and of that half is logistics. Meaningful activities for forty kids at once that are engaging and simple.

2nd period - class 3-1 rehearsing their English play. They are doing an Eastern European book called "the glove". We divide the class into two. I take the performers and introduce them to the actions as well as the lines, the class teacher takes the naration group and drills them on their lines.

Break - Another coffee. A coffee an hour gives the teacher power.

3rd period - class 3-2 rehearsing their English play. They are doing the Eric Carle book "Hello Red Fox". There is no narration group for this story so when I wrote the script I put in two recurring role plays based on correcting someone's mistake and giving and recieving a birthday present. In this class we divided the kids into their two groups, practiced separately, then brought the two groups together and had a go at moving the kids round the stage.

4th period - class 3-3 rehearsing their play, another Eric Carle book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". This class are ahead of the other two so we piled straight into the full rehearsal. At the end we discussed the props that the students would need to make.

Lunch - Usually I would eat with one of the classes but recently no-one has been asking me so I ate in the staff room with some of the other non-class teachers. After that I designed some prints for a class the following week and did some printing.

Cleaning time - The kids have fifteen minutes each day to clean a certain area of the school, on a rota. I always clean with the 4th years in my own classroom to make sure that they actually do some cleaning. Other teachers rarely enforce much cleaning so my room is the cleanest in the school by some considerable way.

5th period - 4-2 practiced their play. The fourth years are dramatising some old Japanese fairy-tales for a show that will be held on FRIDAY MORNING next week. Things are getting a little bit frantic here because meetings were not done when they should have been and so no-one knows what is going on. In theory I am coordinating this but each of the four teachers involved is imagining something different for the end product. Also, each teacher has different ideas of what is expected of the kids and how the acting should interact with the narration.

Anyway, this class is doing Momotarou. the highlight of this lesson was the actor chosen to be the Black demon. She is in fact, Ddrdrdrdrdrdrumroll, the shyest person in the class. As we approach the penultimate scene where the hero goes to fight the baddie, who is standing demurely with folded hands. Poor casting - not my fault. My unspoken thought - you were in the meeting but not actually listening to the words or the meaning.

6th period - World club. I taught the kids how to make Apple Crumble, using my patented super-fast method. A roaring success but after rushing through the preparation the kids took forever and a day to actually eat the stuff.

From about 4.15 to 4.40 I met up with the 2nd year teachers to discuss the lesson we would have the following day. In theory. In fact I plan all the lessons and tell the teachers what we are going to to do. In this case I explained that we were going to talk about what vegetable we liked the most, we were going to do a kind of bingo activity for the first activity to practice just the vocab., then an interview activity to practice some grammar. I went on to elaborate that the kids would soon be going up into the third year and that from there on in they would have English every week and would have more varied lessons with slightly more complex structures and more difficult application activities. This would be a taster.

From this time until five I did a little bit of paperwork and killed time. At five o'clock one of the 4th year teachers caught my eye and I wearily surrendered to the half hour meeting about the Board Of Education's "good idea".

I should explain that one of the guys on the BOE is enamoured of making people work harder than they need to and making people does stuff without offering any leadership at all. Suffice to say that he thought it would be a good idea to have the Junior High School ALT (foreign teacher) and the Elementary School ALT (me) swap positions for a day or two. Just explaining the point of this would take me days.

The upshot is that Lisa from the JHS was coming over for a meeting to discuss the lessons she was going to teach with the 3rd and 4th year teachers. Why does this have anything to do with me? Well, the school wants her to do something that will fit in with my curriculum (that I wrote and am immensely proud of, by the way) which no-one knows about because they never do the meetings 'til the last minute. I only knew she was coming because I had noticed something written on the weekly schedule and went to them.

I finally made it through the door after more or less planning a lesson for them. I disagree with this kind of thing because A) I don't see this as my responsibility and B) everyone has their own style of teaching and what works for me probably wouldn't work for her.

Tuesday - I didn't need to be in so early so I gotup a little later and arrived at school at 8.45. I need to be there for 9 o'clock.

I printed-off a hundred interview sheets and made some small cards with the vegetable vocabulary on them for use in the bingo-type game. then I went to set up the classroom with the correct flashcards, date and weather cards etc. Then I had a coffee.

2nd period - Usually about five minutes before class I am waiting outside the room for the kids to arrive. The main point ofthis is to be in control from the first child arriving and to stop the kids entering until everyone is there and lined-up in a state comensurate with entering the room and doing some work. I have stood there with the kids for fifteen minutes before now.

The lesson this time was as close to an average lesson as you will see. The kids sit down, we greet each other, sometimes two or three times if I am not happy with way it was done. We go throughthe weather and date. Next I introduce the vocabulary in some entertaining way. We listen and repeat a bit.

The first game is really simple. Each child recieves a card with a vegetable on it. Everyone stands up. When the child hears the vegetable on their card they sit down. First team seated gets point and we start again. This is just a listening exercise and of limited worth in teaching language. The main point is to lead the students into main body ofthe lesson, get energy levels up and perhaps get few of the kids to notice that they haven't remembered all the vocab yet.

Next we go through the target structure. "Which vegetable do you like best?" "I like potatos." Aftera bit of demonstration (using a toy penguin as my conversational partner. More sense out of him than some of the teachers [tongue in cheek here]) i ask a few of the more switched-on kids the question and theatrically write their names down on the interview sheet. The kids get the idea.

Another quick practice and then I give out the sheets and unleash the kids. My role at this point is to check pronunciation, structure, behaviour. In a given class 10% will be doing the questioning in Japanese or just mumbling something that sounds like the target. After a few people have filled their forms I call things to a halt and sum things up. I tell the kids the point of the lesson, point out the good and bad points of the class that day, cover the structure one more time and then send them back to their classroom.

3rd and 4th periods - same as above with variable behaviour from the kids.

Lunchtime - lunch in the staffroom, time on the computer, more coffee.

Cleaning - Same as...

5th period - 4-3 came to practice their play again. Of the three fourth year classes they are by far the worst behaved, by far the best at English and will easily eclipse the others when we come to present the plays. They have a bit of a reputation, this class, but I think I have found a formula that works. They are doing and old Japanese tale by the name of Urashima Tarou.

From three until four I checked my state of preparation for the following day, did a bit more design and made some materials. From four until about 4.45 I had a meeting with one of the 3rd year teachers about this exchange with the Junior High School. Along the lines of "What are we going to do?" She said that the school wanted us to continue with my curriculum. I said that I wasn't convinced the kids could do it anyway, and added to this my doubts that the JHS teacher could get the kids to the required level to complete the series in the final lesson. In the end we decided to let the JHS teacher do what she wanted and that I would do something about Christmas. Until about 5 o'clock we had a general gripe about the state of the education system in Japan as it affected teachers: Deplorable and getting worse.

Wednesday - In at 8.30 to make sure I am ready for my 6th year classes, who are fairly high maintainence. With coffee.

2nd period - 6-3 are there to study prepositions (in, on, under, etc.), the sentence "There is a noun (preposition) the other noun andthe names of school people (nurse, head master, English teacher, etc.). They are doing another one of my pet theories, task-based English projects. They are eventually going to be making posters intoroducing their school which may or may not be used as part of a limited exchange with a school from another country.

Basically, we review the preps. using "It's on the table" type sentences. We practice the names of various pieces of furniture. Then we practice making the new structure using my home-made psoter and magnetic pirates. Then we do a quiz where the students have to find various kinds of monsters in another homemade poster made from photographs. Fastest to answer gets a point for their team. Then we quickly go over the new vocabulary for ten minutes and I reinforce why we are doing thisand how those who are still not able to remember all the vocab and grammar will have a chance for more practice later.

3rd period - 6-2 come for their lessonj as above.

4th period - 5-2, who are in the middle of learning English to use at the doctor's. We have already done My leg hurts, I'm sick, don't go to school, take these tablets, how are you、etc. This lesson is about explaining what happened. When I wrote the lesson plan for this I hadto bear in mind that past tenses are above their level, and this class are particularly hard to teach because of their low attention spans and their high levels of attitude (as in the kind that Gangsta Rappas have). In the end I decided upon a board game that didn't exist. I made up a game called The Game of Death. Each player is a cat with nine lives. They move round the board and if they stop on an accident square they have to cross off a life and say what happened. If they can't say it they have to ask me or the class teacher how to say it and loose another life. Last cat standing is the winner.

5th period is 6th years again.

Between 3 and 5 I was trying to translate a song from Japanese to English for use in one of the 4th year plays. In my considered opinion this is the sort of thing criminals should have to do in prison. I was interupted in the middle by the 4th year teachers wanting to talk about the logistics of the plays. We had decided to project pictures onto a screen to provide the backdrop. I had staed that this would need to be done from behind so as not to blind the kids on stage. This had been a sore point for some weeks. Their position: It wasn't necessary. It wasn't possible. My position: It was. It was.

As it turned out, we had to actually set the projector up, and stand on the stage to be blinded before we came to the conclusion that it was necessary to do it from behind. Having put up a paper screen and put the projector behind it we established that it was emminently feasible to project from behind. This kind of situation comes up about five times a week, though it usually takes less time to prove me right.

I spent the last ten minutes packing my gear up to take to the other school that I teach at.

Thursday - At the smaller school I am always really busy due to the number of different classes and the need to make materials on the day I use them. Not without recourse to coffee. On this particular day this included making a poster of the role-play the 4th years were going to do. What I wouldn't give for technology that actually works. One ofthe ink tanks needed changing, a fact that only became apparent after the damn thing had spent ten minutes warming up. After I changed the tank the damn thing took ten minutes to warm up again. then ten minutes to print and A1 poster that was mostly white...

2nd period - A module based around a role play. In this final lesson of five we start by demostrating the role play. I'm the doctor and the class teacher is the patient. next we divide the class in two and line them up opposite each other. One side is the doctor with me, the other the patient with her. After a while we swap. Then we redo the first part with randomly selected students being the patient and having plasters stuck on them, etc.

3rd and 4th periods are the same lessons twice with the 5th and 6th years. Half of the class are sent to take photos of the school while the others learn some vocabulary and practice grammar with me in the classroom. Halfway through we swap. The point of all this, besides all the grammar and vocabulary, is to get the kids to take a bit of responsibility for the English they need, come and ask me and take some ownership of their lessons. I would like to flatter myself that this was fully achieved in both of these lessons. Even the attitudy kids in both classes got involved and played their part.

Lunchtime - immediately after lunch (with the first years who were hell bent on being able to copy my signiture) I had a meeting where the 5th year teacher and myself hammered out some of the details of next lesson to come the following week.

No cleaning at this school as my classroom is closed from lunchtime.

5th period - A review lesson with the special needs class. The following week we will begin filming a video introducing the school. Possibly for use in some kind of exchange. This class always takes tons of preparation because they generally do different activities to all the other groups. They also need lots more activities because there are only two of them.

After that a series of running meetings (in the sense of running skirmishes) run me up to five o'clock. Pack up, go home.

Friday - As usual for a Friday, I hurtle through the school gates at about 8.55. On thisday, I have very little to prepare. I take it easy checking out a few professional sites and my company site. Internet browsing enhanced by cafeinated drink.

2nd through 5th periods - Another 5th year class and three fourth year classes doing their plays. I lost control of one of my 4th year classes, not as is sometimes the case to the kids, but to the classroom teacher. She had a different idea of how to combine the acting with the narative. I didn't like it because the majority of the class spent most of the lesson watching her bollocking the individual narators for not speaking up, then not cutting their sentences in the right place. Then she would swap to bollocking the acting section for getting the timing wrong or not miming well enough. In short, the kids weren't ready for what we tried and the teacher destroyed everyone's confidence by breaking stuff up wierdly and interupting everyone all the time.

The funniest part was when the hero had to take some gold out of a bowl and exit stage left. She bent down and mimed picking up an armful of gold. The teacher went nuts and said, "leave that bowl there!" The kid sheepishly said that she had taken the gold from the bowl but left the bowl in the middle of the stage. Child points. Hilarious! I had to look out ofthe window so the teacher couldn't see me smiling.

3.00 - 4.30 - I was trying to get the big scanner working in the computer room. If only the technology actually worked when I needed it my job would be about 20% easier. Didn't get it to work but did manage to find some cheap tickets back to the UK when my four hundred days are up.

In the last half hour of the week I had a bit of a chat about some emergency activities for the 4th year show if things finshed early. Then home for a beer.

Busy as hell so.....

2006-11-28T20:06:00.000+09:00

Heres something I got in the mail the other day:

The Tshirt Guy 6 - A hiatus explained

2006-11-14T12:37:00.000+09:00

Those of you who follow this blog may have been wondering whta happened to the Tshirt Guy. I must say that I have found his lack of output lately quite puzzling.

However, it has come to my attention that he has in fact been moonlighting in the hat industry. I spotted this on the desk of another teacher the other day and all became clear.

Japan has a large number of NPOs and volunteer organisations. It is fairly routine for these to give out free pieces of protective or weather-proof clothing should such be necessary for the tasks encomapssed in the workings of the organisation. These often manifest themselves as dayglo jackets with NPO names on the back of them. This one NPO devoted to public sanitation has decided to try and atract young helpers by comissioning a hat from the Tshirt Guy. Here it is:

Note the warning and the icon. Pure genius!

This was a bit of a perk yesterday

2006-11-14T09:04:00.000+09:00

First snow of the year! The first snow in the country was actually a few days earlier in Hokkaido. However, I got up on Monday morning to this:

Now this might not look like much to you because the photo was innexpertly taken (from my moving car, as it happens) but if you take a closer look:

You can see snow on top of the mountains on the other side of the lake!

Over half-way to re-entry now (190, I think), but more importantly it is just a few weeks until the boarding season starts. And I still have all my, ahem, sick days left!

Life in Japan - ever wondered why the sun is red on the Japanese flag?

2006-11-10T19:06:00.000+09:00

That's why - sometimes it really is red. Another minute earlier on the scene and I would have nailed this shot without the clouds obscuring the sun.

The backend of no-where

2006-11-05T12:26:00.000+09:00

Not much time to write anything recently, but here are some photos for you to peruse at your leisure. There are rather a lot of them.

This is my FLickr photo page here.

You can also see them as a slideshow here.

Enjoy!

I laughed so hard....

2006-10-29T20:59:00.000+09:00

...that I nearly lost an eye. Being shown a calculator doesn't usually do this to me. Rewind to the start of the situation:

My flash memory device goes for a burton in the most annoying way. It leaves the clipart, the recipes for bread, the stuff off the net, the stuff off my hard drive and destroys the lesson plans and the scripts for the plays I had just written for my third year classes. This was not why I laughed. This was why I was in the electronics shop in the first place. Being a Saturday it was why I had my darling girlfriend with me.

While I bought a clip drive (USB storage device, for those of you who can use computers but not much) she was looking coyly at the digital cameras. By the time I had been told that the item I wanted wasn't available, been glaringly rude to, re-chosen the item I wanted despite the ministrations of the cashier (Who, in God's name, chooses computer hardware by colour?), waited for the item to arrive from the shelf two feet away and paid, She was mid-barter with the salesman.

As I know, and you all should, salesmen are the scum of the earth, not even fit to lick the enzymes off a cold-germ. I should know, I've done it. I wandered over to protect my missus and butter the tightrope for the sales-gimp. "Don't buy it," I said. "It was cheaper in Kitamura."

"How much was it," she asked loudly in Japanese.

"27,400 yen," says I. After a suitable pause I continued, "with a really fast SD card and that real leather case you liked." Big wink.

Anyhow, the guy dissapears, comes back and at us with this complicated scheme for buying using a point card, bamboozling the computer with a magnet and standing on the leg of the month. Right leg, for your information. Alas, but the case on offer was pink, decorated with a cartoon character and with one of those mini karabiners that only a mentalist would consider using in polite society. Totally unsuitable - neither of us are mentalists.

Rethink time led to correction of mistake time and I thought we might as well get a bigger, faster card, swap it with my big but slightly slower card and Bob's your Auntie's live-in-lover. Everyone is happy. Apart from the sales-dude who has to come back and say that it will cost a bit more than he initially said. Cue air-sucked-through-teeth sales manouvre. The verdict - 27,573 yen.

The missus, bless her, says, "Can't you do it any cheaper?"

The sales dude just stopped short of staggering backwards, theatrically. "I am afraid that is litterally as low as we can go." His words, not mine.

Mariko stunned me by saying, "not even the three yen?"

We are talking about less than one and a half pennies in English money, about two cents in US money, but even this balls-out probing had no effect on the guy. "I can go no lower."

I faced my girlfriend, put my hand on her shoulder and said, "I will pay the extra 173 yen." Less than a pound to you and me. "And I will buy you a case so that it doesn't get damaged." The sales guy straightened just a tad. "From Kitamura."

In the end she said yes, the guy dissapeared off to get the camera itself and took us over to the paying area. A paying area with stools, I noted. Not everyday you see people sitting down to pay for a camera. There you have it.

He says: Do you have a point card? (Point cards are like malignant tumours. They are troublesome and multiply like that Chinese woman who gives birth every one point five seconds. Turn your back for a few minutes and all of a sudden you have got a wallet full of them.)
She says: Yes. (passes it across)
He says: There is a better point card than this. (ai ai, thinks I)
She says: Oh?
He says: This point card. (He points to a card)
I say: That's a credit card.
He says: Yes, but if you sign up for it today, you get extra points and I can knock some more off the price.
She says: What do you think?
I say: Well, it is up to you, it's your name. We could try and use mine (this in English) and have a bit of a chuckle when the machine tries to look me up and then explodes when it sees my credit rating.
She says: I'm not sure...
I say: (Back in Japanese) Well, if it was me I would say no. You remember a very similar situation in which the guy in the shop told me it would be fine for me to quit using yahoo BB, sign-up again, take the free 10,000 yen gift voucher without any interuption to the service? That guy was also on some kind of comission deal, too. "Without any interuption" included being utterly reamed-out, as I recall.

At this point one of the other clerks who was listening sniggered, which sealed the matter in my mind.

He says: Give it a whirl?
I say: No, I have been conned in this manner once before.
He says: I'm not conning you. You can sign-up, take the price cut and then cancel the card when it comes. Like you said, I get a comission. Do it for my sake!

This is when I started laughing: Hahaha! Haha! Ha! Haha! You said you couldn't go any lower! How funny are you? No lower...

He said: Well look, this offer ends on Tuesday...

We'd had sheep factor, making-the-customer-look-stupid-for-not-recognising-a-saving, the self-sacrificing-do-it-for-me routine. Now we were onto Fear-Of-Loss. Like I said, I've been on the other end of the seasaw before.

She says: Well, I already have two credit cards...
He says: Hey, I have five!
I say, inwardly: And yet here you are, sucking Satans's cock for pennies. You cannot seriously think I could respect any decision you have made? Not while you are debasing yourself so piteously?
She starts to crumble and says: I don't really want to...
I say: Hang on, how much are we talking about here?

The guy grasps his calculator again (this is a part of Japanese culture I have never understood. Why do the guys in the shops need to tap the price out on a calculator? I initially thought it was just because I was foreign and they thought it was beyond my language capabilities. I was a tiny bit insulted. Then I realised that they did it to Japanese people too. Then I was really insulted because I twigged that it meant that they thought I might not be able to deal with the figures.) and taps away.
He says: The price is 27,573 yen. If you sign up for the new card it is 27,350 yen.

It was stifling my laughter at this that I nearly lost me my eyeball. A few grunts and squeals of glee escaped but he didn't notice because he was looking at my darling lover.

He says, harking back to Mariko's effort with the three yen: If you do it this way then you get a nice figure that rounds off to a multiple of ten.
I say: Mwaaaaahhhahahahahaaaaaaa! Haha!

I swear I nearly shat myself laughing at this. I actually fell off my stool and mariko started laughing too.

I say: Haaaaaaaa ha ha ha! NO Lower! You said it! You said it!

I almost told him we'd sign up if he licked the sole of my shoe, but in the end we contented ourselves with turning-down one last sighing check that we didn't in fact want to sign up for a credit card. We left, me with a new 20MB/second SD card for my DSLR and Mariko with a new smart camera.

So, it is under two hundred days 'til re-entry and one of the things I miss most is still British comedy, though if I want a bit of a laugh I can just have a wonder round to look at the real world. Infinitely more entertaining.

Anyhow, here she is modelling the latest in consumer electronics:

Beckham reunited after years

2006-10-26T19:51:00.000+09:00

I stopped in at this Chinese restaurant over the weekend. The England team had obviously been here over the course of the Japan / Korea world cup four and a half years ago. Great minds think alike - what are they saying with this monkey / photo arangement?

The Tshirt Guy branches out - loquat, cumquat, paraquat

2006-10-24T15:07:00.000+09:00

The Tshirt guy is moving in on the Wine guy's territory:

The print at the bottom says:

This is a loquat pie made from plenty of choice loquat, yellow and with sweet smell. The crispy pie is much suitable for a tea time in the early afternoon. We are looking forward to so happy tea time when we can enjoy loquat pie

Once again he has hit the nail right on the head. Very sweety indeed!

This piece of clipart I found...

2006-10-23T14:27:00.000+09:00

... confirms all I ever heard about childbirth. It is painless and even fun when you get the local monk to help out! As with everything in life!

Sunday Photobogging 6 - Love toilets?

2006-10-16T21:10:00.000+09:00

I　know I do. I love hotels, too. And I love Love Hotels even more.

When I get round to having a house, the sink in the bathroom wil be like this.

The toilet did not meet this massive standard but did include some artificial grapes and a bit of holly to add to the marvelous experience of sitting on the toilet the wrong way round.

For those of you who have never been to a love hotel, the better ones can look like this inside:

The question: What was I doing in a love hotel on a Sunday afternoon without my girlfriend but with two other girls?

The answer; will be forthcoming eventually.

Danger Zone 6 - Danger vanquished!

2006-10-09T19:48:00.000+09:00

Several breakthroughs were made during the course of the long weekend, which was another long one in the other sense, too.

The first piece of danger occured in the most usual way ever. I was hungry and busy whilst in Japan. Luckily I was in the middle of making food for the party. We got a new breadmaking machine which luckily broke, forcing me to make some muffins. Do you know the parable about some court artist who was asked to demonstrate his sketching prowess to his king and sponsor? He did so by drawing a perfect circle by hand.

He's got nothing on what I've got - homemade oven-bottom muffins that perfectly match the sze of my fried egg. None of my cooking highs ever scaled this height.

The evening rolled around and so did we eventually! It was another of our country-themed parties. We crowned our glories with "England". One the menu were cottage pie, fish and chips, beef-in-guiness pasties, apple crumble and real English cheese that Mio had recieved from Rob about a month back (?!). Also on offer was Guiness (closest I could find to English beer) and Gin and Tonic (Bombay Saphire, export strength at just under seven pounds a bottle!).

On the guest-list were people from the Philipines, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan and one from England. Not bad for a postage-stamp sized apartment.

The next day Mariko, Mio and I took a trip to stay on the other side of the lake. Being as our tent is not really big enough for three we decided to rent a cabin.

OK - spot the odd one out: Door, roof, windows, floor, walls, air-conditioning, mats on the floor. Yep - the garden shed had air con. Not that we needed it in the balmy evenings of 15 degrees.

We had a massive BBQ (someone forgot to put the small one of ours in the car - whoops!) and spent the rest of the night burning pine cones for the smell. The next morning we were up at 5.30. For those of you who know me, I must just reinforce that this was 5.30 IN THE FUCKING MORNING! Up until this point i hadn't really believed in the possibility of being awake this early without there being a still in there somewhere. It was most disconcerting. Luckily the sunrise more than made-up for any slight discomfort.

After which we had another (light) barbie for brecky. This was when all hell broke loose. For the first time ever, ever, the espresso machine thing failed. Not only did it fail, but it failed in a sort of cartoon bad-guy fashion. Somehow it managed to melt without reaching a high enough temperature to boil the water inside. I was left with only one option. This is the second danger situation. I had to have coffee out of a vending machine.

The problem: It ws cold.

The solution:

Five minutes in the embers and my insipid,cold, over-sugared, under-caffeined coffee was bearable again. They will be selling heated ones soon.

In Japan there is a special order for seating...

2006-10-07T15:01:00.000+09:00

..on the trains.

A commitee met to decide who deserved the seats most and came up with the following order:

In fourth place was a woman with a child, just narrowly beating a man with a dog.

In third place came the really fat person who is too big to support their own frame on their ravanged knees.

In second place came the wildcard entry of a man with his leg stuck in a giant test-tube. This kind of thing goes on all the time in Japan, you know.

The runnanway winner was the old man with a stick and a hideous growth on his back. Who could begrudge him a priority seat?

I know what you did last week

2006-10-02T17:18:00.000+09:00

I know you didn't watch any of Screams 1 through 4.

Y went to the gym four times, the swimming pool twice, the sento once.

You uploaded a bucket-load of photos to your Flickr acount. You put them here. They include details of your pyromanic adventure on the lakes of Lake Biwa.

You watched a TV show in which a man ate the freshly-fried scrotal-sac of a cow, much to your distress. Much to the distress of the cow, no doubt.

You were much amused by this page here.

Every criticism I have ever levelled is expunged with this piece of art

2006-10-01T11:31:00.000+09:00

Look at this

No words can express. This guy was off to a biker rally on the day.

TORIBIA - sayonara

2006-09-28T15:10:00.000+09:00

The last episode of Trivia was on TV last night, and a sad occasion it was too. Fifteen minutes of genuinely funny / interesting material stretched over two hours. However, right in the middle of it was a section about my favourite Japanese food - Yaki niku.

Here is the trivia: In Japan it is illegal to eat the spinal chord, brain and gums of a cow. However, it is not illegal to eat cows nipples. (Roll Footage of chubby bloke eating cow nipples fried before his very eyes. Comment - It's rubbery and delicious)

We are then told the next trivia: Though it is illegal to eat the gums, spinal chord and brains of the cow it is not illegal to eat:

Answers on a postcard in the comments section please. Infinite satisfaction to the first one hundred correct answers. What is the man eating in the picture?

Sunday Photobogging 5 - the impact of wa on toilets

2006-09-25T13:19:00.000+09:00

Long gone are the days where I would happily squat down outside for a bit of a pontificate, newspaper read or stab at the tetris chapion title. Ah the breeze wafting around my thighs, birds and butterflies stopping for a howdedo. Since the injunction was passed I have missed my little peaceful squat in the park.

For those of you who like to pass waste in the wild, this is the place for you. One the one side the neo-asian decor and bamboo sink area provide a delicate counterpoise to the full length window onto the private garden area.

Sportsday

2006-09-22T15:33:00.000+09:00

Alas, last Saturday I had to work. I had to go to the school Undokai, which is kind of like a sportsday but not as well. It was especially gutting as there was a separate paying opoortunity to work in Nagoya for money.

Anyhow - in Japan they have dancing and stuff as well as running races. I assume it is aimed at trying to bring some of the more athletically challenged member of the school into the limelight. Luckily I was not called on to display my sad state of fitness. My new lifestyle starts here.

The weather dude cast his pall over the day with his threats of rain, which he was willing top act upon but not enough to ruin the day. I have recently come to suspect that my old mate Dr. DogChop over at Ph Level may have been mistaken in his comments about the weather dude. I begin to suspect that yahoo weather have been subcontracting to a network of oldwives, housewives and grannies for their predictions.

Back at the Ranch the teachers were getting to exercise their imaginations a bit with the games and activities for the day. Two weeks of solid preparation went into the day, and I could tell. Below are two examples; Big ball rolling whole school race and Three pointed relay with cardboard caterpillar track event.

The blue team won this by some considerable distance.

This one shold be in the Drunken Olympics. The kids only had to do it in straight lines, but I would make drunken adult men try to go round corners to double the viewing pleasure.

In the evening there was the standard party with traditionally expensive Japanese food which mostly gets left because everyone is busy talking and getting drunk. This is the point at which I definitely got beastly drunk and possibly did something embarassing. I have no memory of doing anything taboo, though that is not always such a good indicator. Anyhow, I managed to snap-off a shot of the first remove so that you know what expensive Japanese food looks like. Here it is

Also, I've dropped another in the lies section.

Yesterday, Nick sensei did his new flash with play...

2006-09-21T13:15:00.000+09:00

Yesterday in pictures:

C from up the road came to my school to teach the kids about her native South Africa. It was great - thanks C! I took this using my super duper new flash-gun that does everything for me. Great!

There was a lot of nice light on my way home so I stopped to make a record of the occasion. This is two minutes drive from my house...

This is the other side of the mountain to the town where I work.

Nearly trod on this guy before seeing him. I suspect he was already dead as his legs ended at the knees and he wasn't moving.

Here you see sunset over rice, stubble and burning material to reintroduce some nutrients to the soil. The rice is over half in now and the temperature is dropping to merciful 22s and 23s when it isn't sunny.

Finally, I squuezed another one out in the lies section - check it out if you have five minutes spare!

Update time

2006-09-19T09:34:00.000+09:00

No time for anything so good as a real post so you will have to do with some other stuff I have been up to recently:

I've written a short role play in honour of my mother on the fiction bit.

I wrote a short euphamism on the Tony Clifton Experience, which seems to be dying, alas.

I have also put a few photos online after signing-up for Flickr. You can have a look at them here. This is work in progress. Hopefully I will get some photos of my area online for my Auntie Linda who is coming to visit! I think it must be about fifteen years since we last met (she lives in Australia now) so I am very excited about that.

Also, my cousin and her boyfriend are coming at some point, too. That means two lots of people to enjoy my last six weeks or so in Japan with.

Finally, I got a flash-gun for my digital SLR so I should have some fun learning how to use that in the next few weeks. Hopefully that should feed back into some new kinds of photos soon.

Why do you have such a downer on living in Japan, UTR?

2006-09-14T09:14:00.000+09:00

OK, OK - I know I go on about being a bit tired of it all and really I do generally quite like it here. A few people were a bit interested in my philosophical asides on Japanese culture, so I thought I would go for another. Pehaps think of this as a cautionary note for future visitors to these green and brown shores.

The facts:

We were on our way to buy M a new Nintendo DS lite prior to heading off seaking thrills, spills and automobills in the mythic land of Mie. We were on a smallish suburban road perhaps two minutes from the town centre.
The road we were on meets a rail-line for the Omi-tetsudo (the most expensive railway in the country). There was a guy in his big boxy van in front. He slows down almost to a stop, looks both ways and then off he goes. All of a sudden a copper appeared out from behind a tree and hares off after him blowing on his whistle. The guy was rumbled.

The supposition:

We are off into the realms of possibilities now, but I very strongly suspect that this guy has been collared for not stopping at the crossing. Though he stopped, looked both ways and then went, he has probably been copped on a technicality. I suspect that either his wheels were still rotating minutely or that he didn't stop for some proscribed ammount of time. So he obeyed the law in intent and did nothing too seriously wrong, but he got done on the letter of the law.

This kind of thing is not unusual. This is part of Japanese life training, a basic part of their social education. Where there is a protocol it gets stuck to. The japanese are great masters of methodology and process. This is what fuelled the economic miracle of the 80's and the subsequent failure to predict that the bubble would burst. So the cops here have a manual and that is good enough for them.

I don't really ever have problems with the police, save one time when my friend Rob and I accidentally wandered into a hostess bar and got hit by a huge bill that we weren't willing to pay without making our displeasure felt. "Right then," I said, "call them!"

The same thinking is also there in the banks, the post office, the town hall, the schools, the trains, the whole works. The Japanese have grown up with these little bits of bureaucratic nonesense and so that is their benchmark. This drives me nuts because it wastes my time (I have the patience of a hung-over Rotweiler) and it means I get sidetracked into these crusades "to change things for the better".

The Japanese mentality extends into everyday life. Particularly into conversation, which is somethign I enjoy extremely. To put it simply, the Japanese talk in exasketch - basic objects connected by lines. Wheras, in comparison, westerners talk in picassos and sculptures. This means that despite a strong command of the language I still struggle to express more elaborate ideas because the Japanese do not use them very often. Japanese culture, and in particular spoken language, is really simple. I make no judgement about which is best I am just telling it the way I see it here.

So, as a language teacher you can imagine that this causes some problems at work. As opposed to somewhere like France or Spain, just teaching the units that make the sentences and pointing out the differences with the native language is not enough. The concientious teacher has to teach the student how to construct a conversation or paragraph in English. General Macarthur, the American put in charge of Japan after the second world war, was famously quoted as describing the Japanese as "a nation of twelve year olds". While I think this sentiment is trash, I think I can see how he might have come to this conclusion having talked to several Japanese people by this stage.

So if you want to know why I am so badly itching to leave Japan (as distinguished from getting back to my family and the UK) it is becuase of the evil menace of bureaucracy, it's fingers in every pie, and the lack of a good chat now and again.

Of course this all boils down to my view of bureaucracy and what a good chat is.

Neo-classical art with boats

2006-09-13T15:34:00.000+09:00

Some of you out there may remember my interest in Modern Art With Boats back in May. I thought it was a passing fad but aparently it goes on all the time. Look!

Mie produces the goods again!

This time there is a definite ivy covered motif comon to certain kinds of neo-clasical folly seen in the grounds of English country houses.

These busses are hiding sheepishly, no doubt embarrassed to have accidentally come to the wrong party. You will notice the car in picture #1 is not so worried. Note that the keikuruma (light car) had folded up like a blanket in whatever crash it had been through. Extremely safe as long as you don't drive them.

Danger zone #5 - no danger

2006-09-12T11:57:00.000+09:00

The weekend saw us travelling to Mie as part of the extended birthday celebrations for M. Mie is to the south of where I live with the mountains inbetween. If you look at a map of Japan, look for the big lake and then go South. There should be a little bulgy-type peninsula thing. That is the Ise (E Say) peninsula.

As well as the aquarium, of which I may post pics if God and my workload spare me, we also wanted to experience the local delicacy, ise ebi. Big prawns to me and you. Here they are!

This one was Mariko's and, starting top left and continuing clockwise, consisted of seaweed soup, kombu (a diferent kind of seaweed, I think), pickles (Japanese ones, made with salt not vinegar), a bit of orange, a muscle and a cockle (cooked), Tuna sashimi with nori (dried seaweed) on rice and deepfried prawn, octopus and oyster.

This was mine, mostly similar, though mine had no sashimi and the deepfried gear was limited to two eight inch long prawns, sliced down the middle before bread-crumbing, in the middle at the top.

I spend a bunch of time complaining about Japanese food but this was great and really cheap into the bargain. The whole meal cost about fifteen pounds and would easily have cost twice as much in the UK. Highly recommended.

On a warning note, the brand of Ise-ebi doesn't really mean much any more. The guy who ran our hotel was telling us that the supply of locally caught prawns is nowhere near the level of demand so the local businessmen cater to visitor expectations. Which is the polite way of saying that most of the prawns come from way out in the Pacific and are sold in Ise.

This didn't bother us too much because we usually eat cheaply anyway and the prawns don't taste any different. He also added in passing that it was the same for the Matsusaka beef, up the road. Now M's mum bought a couple of kilos of this for about a hundred quid a year back. Was it real or bogus. Two facts which will serve as food for thought, if you will.

There is no mandatory monitoring of trading standards in Japan. There is no Health and Safety exec. Chilling.

A sign of the times - or what I saw this weekend #1

2006-09-11T11:46:00.000+09:00

Travellers beware!

What they don't want you to know! Gangs of pelican youths are roaming the streets locking the heads of passers-by in their vicelike jaws of fishy death!

Crikey! Look at this beauty! 40% pokemon, 40% rabbit (as in sex and the city), 80% fear. This thing is a sex manchine! It's three pronged penis of death reaches all the right areas. How does it manage to use such mighty tackle? Poke'm in!

Time remaining...

2006-09-11T09:41:00.000+09:00

Two hundred days or so! One hundred and sixty or so left to work, then about twenty of messing about and sorting out my stuff. Moving house also to be done in this stage. Primarily to Mariko's Mum's house, terminating at Dad's back in the UK.

This should be followed by about six weeks in Thailand, doing a CELTA certaificate and beefing-up my PADI scuba qualifications. I don't think i will get up to dive master in the time, though I will certainly get some of the more groovy bits and pieces done, like wreck diving and so on. I might also get a course in thai cooking done. Then it will back to Japan for a brief stop and then back to the UK. Alas, it is starting to look as though Mariko and myself will be going separately, though I hope to talk her out of that idea.

Another countdown is also underway. Woe is me: My household PC is very sick. It seems to have the computer equivalent of ebola as well as the immune deficiency. The bigger issue is the random cut-outs that it throws out with increasing regularity. Somewhere in there is a hardware issue. Precisely which piece is a mystery, as until it cuts out everything seems fine. I suspect the graphics card, as the cooling fan fell off a few months back. Buying a new graphics card might only lead to the computer not working slightly more expensively.

To tell it like it is, I am buggered if I am going to put any more money into that computer. So in sixty to ninety days, I am buying a mac. To be more precise, I am after a new MacBook. Presumably on sale at MacDonalds? "Shake, fries and a Macbook, please. No Gherkin on the macbook, please."

Dear North of England

2006-09-08T10:46:00.000+09:00

Dear North of England,

I hope you are keeping well and starting to overcome your medical issues. I hope the dehydration is on the mend. Central Japan sends it's love.

I am writing to say thanks for the other month, when I came back to visit and brought my girlfriend over with her sister to see what it was all about. They both had a great time and said they would come back again. If you could pass on my particular thatnks to all the various pubs and drinking establishments we visited, that would be nice. The value of your pubs was not lost on them.

I would like to say a special round of thanks to all the yobs, teenagers, bigots, racists, sexists, fuckwits, con-artists and police. It would not have been the same without their contribution. They stayed out of sight admirably. Only one slipped through the net, a "can I borrow 7p?" artist in the centre of Manchester, and he was dispatched without bloodshed or heated words.

A special series of thanks to the busses, trains, taxis and aeroplanes, all of which turned up, and what's more, on time. I would like to thank the planets for aligning to make this happen for the week, uninterupted. If, as I suspect, this never happens again, it will have been enough.

Yours sincerely,

Under The Radar

Now, i just have to make sure I've got this right...

2006-09-05T09:27:00.000+09:00

Yes, Lonely Planet did claim that it was the dullest place on the planet. One Word: Doha.

Two words: Didn't sleep.

Six words: Didn't want to miss my plane.

The lonely planet, which I only read grudgingly and call The Book, has this to say about the cultural / actual desert in which I stopped-over:

"Around the Gulf, Doha has earned the unenviable reputation of being the dullest
place on earth. You will be hard-pressed to find anyone who'll claim the place
is exciting."

I really wanted to give the place a chance. It is not really geared-up for someone to just drop-in and have a bit of a look around. That is all I wanted. I wanted to sleep on the plane from Manchester, spend the day in Doha being multicultural and then catch my ongoing flight to Osaka feeling vaguely like Lawrence of Arabia. Here are the main points.

Disembark, enter terminal building (so named for the feeling it engenders), look for a sign and follow everyone through the baggage check thingy. See a guy come out shouting that people who wanted to go into the city shouldn't go through with everyone else.
The next stage was a bit odd. I got a free breakfast and was told to come back in half an hour, when I would be allowed out. Breakfast was a slab of meta-fried-egg, non-rectangular non-triangular toast and a cup of ribena. I went back down to the reception wher I was told there was nothing to be done and to wait with a big bunch of other people over there. "What over there," I asked. Yes, over there. "What, in the corner?" That's right, I was told to go and stand in the corner. To my sleep deprived mind (it was 6am and I hadn't managed to sleep on the plane) this presented some existential issues. Maybe he was the teacher and I the border guard? I mulled it over, went back and spoke to a third person who correctly spotted that I didn't have anything better to do than waste his time for the next fourteen hours. We reached an arrangement, by which I was quietly slipped back under the rope, as it were.
Getting a visa. Like the bloke in Massive Attack sez, gettin' a Visa Card Nowadays isn't hard. Though if you don't happen to have one, getting the other kind of visa is bloody hard. I had to open a bank account to get a Qatari bank card to pay the 12 pounds to get the visa. The woman stamped something in my passport and then litterally scribbled over the top of it.

Up to this point I was getting tired and irritable. Luckily things started turning for the better. The taxi-driver took pounds. He let me name my own exchange rate and kept the twenty pound note as a souvenir. This was not the last time this happened. I asked to go to the city centre. He took me to, not the city centre, but actually a shopping centre in the midde of nowhere called City Centre. Thanks, goodbyes, camera out. The transition from air-conned taxi to rarified desert at 42 degrees caused even the plastic parts of my camera to mist-up. Stood around and sweated for ten minutes while my camera warmed-up.

I killed time until Starbucks opened (The Cafe, Behemoth. I don't go here unless I can't help it). Killed time in starbucks by attracting attention using my Lancashire County Cricket sun hat. I killed time wandering around looking at shops until the internet cafe opened. I grimaced at other foreigners also wandering round trying not to fall asleep. I checked the net for details of the city. Enough to get me to the stuff that I wanted to see. Arabian art, the weapons museum, the national museum, the cultural museum.

"I want to go to the ethnographic museum."

"Wha?"

"A museum about people."

"National museum?"

"No. I want to learn about people in Qatar."

"I only know the national museum."

I inwardy sigh and off we go, me planning the ask the guy at the museum about the other museums and wondering whether this guy had stolen the taxi. We fire round the roads and roundabouts. We arrive at about 12 o'clock. "It looks awfully closed." I rap on the glass of the information window. The guy in there tells me the place doesn't open til 4pm. Because of the heat. No he doesn't know any other museums. Back to the shopping center.

Next began a six hour battle against sleep. I wandered. I sat and read. I sat. I had a burger king just for the hell of it. I wandered round. My sleep-addled brain made the best of a bad job.

At about 3 o'clock I stumbled into a shop shop selling Egyptian stuff, run by an Engyptian guy. Honest to god he looked like the Scorpion King. I bought something for Marikos birthday, which I cannot say any more about because she might read this. While we were haggling I somehow managed to end-up fixing the guys computer. Coffee was had, sadly not the arabian coffee I was hoping for but Gold Blend or something of that ilk. We had a bit of a chat. He showed me a pickie of his girlfriend at their engagement party. He told me that he wasn't going to marry her. He showed me a picture of himself a few years back, this time with hair. He looked like the Doughnut king there.

We watched a couple of videos of his favourite belly-dancers from back home. I found it strange that I should get on so well with a complete stranger, chatting bizarrely like there was no tomorow, though in fact there had been no yesterday.

More bizarrity at the airport. Some fifteen-year-old travelling alone latched onto me and struck up a conversation. I think he said he was from Kenya. He mentioned having been to Dubai and being off to India to see his grandmother. I had another one of those cultural line-crossing incidents where the questions started innocuous and worked upwards, like a shoddy chiropodist. Where do you live? What do you do? Do you have a girlfriend? Oh you live together? Do you sleep in the same room? How do you warm your girlfriend?

Honest to god I am not making this up. I am kind of used to this sort of situation now. "Do you always walk up to people and ask them questions like this," I asked, not harshly. He became embarassed and asked me some questions about my job, Marikos job, etc. As I went into some detail about what M does, the guy across from me closed his book with a snap and said, "Your conversation is much more interesting than my book. What does she do again?"

Thus began random conversation #3 which lasted me up until boarding my flight to Osaka.

So what, I can hear you wondering, was the point of this story? Well, the point is this: When I write, and especially when I write fiction (when I can be bothered) I get the feeling that what I am writing is not coming from me but some thign that I found and used. These three, the kid, the shopkeeper and the journo (the third guy) will probably crop up somewhere down the line. The journo will save a life, the shopkeep will probably become rich and the kid is going to die in a most dismal manner at the start of a screenplay or novel.

What is it like in Japan, right now?

2006-08-31T22:25:00.000+09:00

Before launching into the business of filling in the gaps from the last five weeks, a quick look at the landscape nowadays:

The rice is ready to come in.

Bring on the old blokes! This one has a stripey umbrella on his combine harvester.

I wonder if he brought it with him on his bike?

All in all it is much like an advert for that buddy American beer Shitweizer but on a Japanese Beverly-Hill-Billy scale. Quite funny to see the rice all over the road as I came past.

It's all over bar the fat lady....

2006-08-30T20:13:00.000+09:00

I'm sorry to say that I am finally back inside the websphere after a month or so of globe, bog and pig-trotting.

More to follow in detail, but for now suffice to say that my fathers house is outside the range of Broadband, busses, cheap taxi-rides, pizzas, civilisation and luckily Japanese food. The place has dial-up internet, and worse still is only on a rate where you can use the net in the morning, i.e before I am up.

General impressions of the UK after a further two years of absense. All the rumours about British weather are true. Trust me it was like Narnia for a month.

British food is demonstrably not bad. Eye-witness accounts from three out of three people interviewed.

My family could be transfered into Coronation Street without any need to jazz-up the plot with wierd happenings. We have it all.

Photos of food and Tshirts to come!

Ever wonder weird stuff?

2006-07-12T09:11:00.000+09:00

Ever loose sleep over those things that niggle? Well, here's the solution; become a TV producer!

I mentioned these guys before. They basically just wander round and make little experiments about whatever crosses their minds. How many dogs out of a hundred would protect their owner from a bear? What is the biggest fish a cat can carry off in its mouth? Today was a train inspired offering.

Just how much can one of those handles on the train hold? Was mum right? Will it break if I swing on it?

Mum was only right if she was an elephant. It took thirty six ten kilo manequins to rend the plastic strap. All the other components, bar, ring, were still fine.

The photos of the fatal moment didn't come out - taking photos of the TV never works - but you can trust me that it was nicely done. For my money, the event itself was worth doing just for the part when the plastic snapped and the manequins were smashed to pieces on the tarmac below, as seen from several angles.

Also in the same show, they had a non-experiemental trivia. Aparently once a year the executives of KFC (Japan) go down to the local shrine and pray for the souls of the chickens. They had this rather touching montage with grey-suited geezers bowing and the priest waving a stick with some paper on the end. At each section they would pan out to show one of those grinning Colonel Sanders from outside one of the shops. Absolutely hilarious.

The show is called Trivia, or more precisely "TohRiBeeAhh". If you ever come to japan and have an evening at home on a Monday, give it a whirl. I don7t normally recommend japanese TV but this one is good. Very tongue in cheek.

No it's not the Mondays

2006-07-10T10:02:00.000+09:00

One of those things that gets me down, and on this Monday morning I am incredibly down, is forcing my way through a foreign culture with my eyes closed.

There has been a never-ending debate about the Japanese race - Are they arrogant or are they insecure? I have read four or five books on the subject and not really come out any the wiser. From my own personal experiences I still cannot decide. Let me give you an example:

I am in the staff room at school and a woman walks in talking to the kids. She tells them I am going off to various places. She asks if it is hot in the UK. I say, not as hot as here and not as cursedly humid either. She says, "How about typhoons?" I say no. She asks about hurricanes and the rainy season, I say no. She asks about volcanos, I say no. Finally, she comes out with, "well, we have four seasons in Japan."

I don't know why this is such a source of pride for the Japanese but it comes up time and time again. "We have four seasons too, and what's more Spring and Autumn last more than two weeks. I could oversleep and miss Autumn here," is what I don't say, because I am supposed to be an ambassador for my culture and being rude is not supposed to be a part of the job description. I kind of mumble that we had them too, in a slightly embarrassed manner. So the woman has backed herself into a corner.

"Maybe England is better, then," she says. I am thinking, not so. And it wasn't what I said. You are asking the wrong kind of questions.

"We don't have skiing or snowboarding in the UK," I kind of half-lied. The stuff in Scotland is notoriously the worst in the world so it doesn't count.

Anhow, she seized on this and manage to draw some national pride from the situation. I was glad that I managed to get out of the situation without embarrassing her too much in front of the kids. Eventually, one gets used to things like this living in Japan. Either that or one goes home.

What has this got to do with my non-Monday Monday-morning-sulks? I had one of those weekends where the stuff just kept coming. I'll explain how it happens:

I occupy a rather strange kind of position or post at school. I do not work for the government or the local government. I work for a company contracting in a public school. That is a state-run school for those of you Brits reading. This basically means that though I do teach I am not a teacher in the eyes of the law and have to have another teacher present for insurance purposes and to help run the class. I could say more here but I won't. The other thing it means is that I am not a public servant and I get separate pay and conditions to the other teachers at school. This cuts a number of different ways. I get more time off, they get bonuses (boni?) twice a year. I get to go home at five most days, they get more time at school but they cannot be fired. If I was going to live here for ever I would be more bothered about this but I really have to choose my battles.

The upshot is that there is an imbalance. To whatever extent, and it varies from person to person, I am being seen as less of a teacher than everyone else. Add to this the arrogance / insecurity issue above. This usually manifests itself in innexpressive people who either can't or don't want to talk to me. The first bunch are the hardest to deal with because they often say something for the sake of it, which leads to various results. The foreigner-haters can be easily ignored and I know enough Japanese to put them down without too much hassle.

The penultimate ingredient for this pot is the local manner gap, as I like to put it. I assume this is universal, and you would see it in the UK and the US and anywhere else. The gap exists between what is right, what is easy and what acceptible. The the second and third are taking over because the Japanese do not usually speak out against individuals who don't follow the rules. Acceptable has recently become "whatever no-one checks me over" and as a reult the benchmark is getting lower. Many people have heard that the Japanese are extremely courteous. This is still true, though anyone who has ever spoken to an airline check-in clerk knows that whilst still using polite words and phrases a person can be exquisitely rude. In the UK manners change with education, area, job, etc. In Japan they don't.

So, it is Friday and the three things I mentioned came togther in a big meta-meiwaku (meiwaku is japanese for annoyance). The final ingredient in this coctail is, of course, me. If you wanted to be charitable you might say that I call a spade a spade, or I wear my heart on my sleeve. Generally, I get angry quickly and then get over it quickly. This is great for the kids, who I am here to teach and appreciate the consistency. They know that if I get angry with them it will be over fairly quickly and then we can be friends again. With the teacehrs, who I am not here to teach and who should know better, it is a different matter. I am here as a foreigner, and not as a teacher in their eyes. Ocassionally they try and push the envelope and I have to say something. If I don't it will happen again, and not just to me but to the next person, and so on.

Back to Friday - the whole incident, and it was small, revolved around a CD player that someone had borrowed and not brought back. I got angry, I soprted myself out, it was over. At least it was for me, though half of the staff-room are not speaking to me anymore. There are two ways of looking at it. My way basically revolves around the question, "do I really have to teach adults to ask to borrow stuff andbring it back?" Their way: "Who is this idiot that is getting worked-up about a CD player?"

So there it was, I went home feeling like a bit of a dick and having a hard look at the way I deal with people. There were a whole bunch of other isues roled into this and I don't think anyone involved, including myself, came out of it looking good. New leaf time for Nick. Again.

And so it rolled round to Saturday and I had arranged to go to out with the missus and some of their friends. M was driving so I was drinking. Incidentally, this was the last time 'til I get back to the UK, hopefully. We got there, went through the formalities, introductions, initial embarrasment and searching for common ground. At that time there were Aiko, who I had met before, and her husband and two friends who I hadn't. Beer flowed, conversation likewise. I enjoyed talking to Koichi, Aikos husband. In Japanese there is a phrase, "ki ga au" which basically means that spirits meet. A more meaningful translation might be, "we got on well."

Another bunch of people arrived, sat down and said hello to everyone. Down they sat and koichi asked them to introduce themselves, for my benefit. "I am Sadam Husein. This is Kim Jong Il. He is, er, Hideyoshi." Hideyoshi is a famous Japanese historical figure. He is just fucking about, fine whatever. Another of them asked Mariko if I could speak Japanese. Note, that he did not ask me. This is usual for Japan. Personally I would always speak to the actual person first. Innocent until proven guilty, sort of. I jumped in and told them I did. Then I went back to talking to Koichi about football. He eventually asked me, "Can you play?"

I said, "no, I've never been any good at football."

So he asked me what sports I did and I listed them off, ending with the fact that I used to play rugby at school. "I like Wales," shouts this guy from the other end of the room. "Great," says I. "They are very strong," he smirks.

"Oh, I see," I think to myself. "He is taking the piss because we lost our last game to them, some six months back. "Oh, well. Whatever," I thought. "They were really strong last year." After that I turned back to talk to the guy I was originally talking to.

A few minutes later, "WALES" is roared across the room at me.

"Mate, who is holding the world cup at the moment?" That shut him up for a while.

Next things the drinks arrive. On route to me my drink gets drunk out of by one of these guys. I just look at him as he looks at me whilst doing it. I think, "Fuck it. Don't worry about it." Next marikos drink comes down and the guy raises it. Something must have made itself plain on my face coz the guy doesn't drink and says something about my eyes. Someone else says, "don't you do that in England?" No, we don't do that in England.

I stop about a centimeter short of punching the guy. Litterally, my fist is hovering in front of his face. Everyone around said they really thought i was going to punch him. "This is what would happen if you did that to a complete stranger in the UK." I explained that it was rude. The one guy asked I would punch someone just for driking my girlfriends drink. I said no, that would be just for my beer though I don't really go in for that kind of thing. Gradually they explained that this was only something that friends do. This was their way of trying to help me into the group.

Things move on and I go off to the toilet. I come back and sit down. The guy next to me says, "Do you really love your girlfriend?"

My spluttered response to this was, "What? What is the meaning of this?"

The guy looked at me and apologised. The night progressed much in this vein. The second time I went to the toilet I heard my name four or five times while I was in there. "Nikku, sonna warukunai," came floating through. That means "He isn't that bad." As the night progressed I gradually got the impression that I was being tested. There were more of these "let's compare cultures and decide which is best" conversations that I hate, with barely veiled implications that England was not all it was cracked-up to be and it was my place to answer for it.

At about eleven I decided I had had enough and told M that I wanted to go as soon as she liked. She finished her drink. We discussed how much we owed from the total. We paid and left. As we were leaving I said goodbye and got my shoes. At this point these three guys who had been criticising myself and my country were all trying to shake hands and suchlike. I honestly thought they had been talking to me in the rudest and least sensitive way possible.

"No way," I said, "I'm not interested."

The guy that had been shouting about Wales and scowling at me all night was looking at me with a hurt "let's be friends look" and proffering his hand. "Do you understand how terribly rude you have been to me tonight? No? Well, have a think about it." We left, with me steaming about the whole affair.

The next day I was talking it over with Mariko. She was telling me that these guys just didn't know how to behave and that she had had a bad impression of them too. Later on she got a phone call from Aiko, who had invited us. She said that the guys had been genuinely shocked and that they had only been trying to be friendly. I said I was sorry for wrecking the evening. It seems that after we left they had a bit of an inquisition. Who said what? Did I do something wrong? It wasn't that much fun after I had left.

Mariko changed her tune after this phone call. These guys don't really know how to communicate. They were unneasy because I was a foreigner. They didn't know what to say to me. It wasn't their fault.

In all honesty, I asked if I was wrong. She said I should have told them if I wasn't happy. I told her I had. She said I should have told her so she could help out. I told her I had. She said, "Right, so you did." She said I should learn some new japanese phrases to deal with these kinds of people. I told her that would just deal with the symptom, not the disease.

In the end I agreed that I wouldn't get angry next time. It seems as though I will just have to keep dealing with this kind of thing til I go home. In about 240 days. If I don't get really angry then nobody takes any notice then if I get angry everyone judges me on it. If I just leave it then I feel like I have betrayed myself and let down all these other people who will come here after me. Hey, if you want to decide for me, go ahead.

Still nothing on the horizon - apart from Turd You Can

2006-07-05T16:05:00.000+09:00

Still feeling horribly negative so I would like to point you all in the direction of Yahoo news, in particular the quote below. Think "Spudulike."

"Competitive eating is a popular sport in America, particularly at holidays, with contests for everything from chicken wings to "turducken," turkey stuffed with duck stuffed with chicken."

This was actually on the tail end of a world-record-hotdog-eating contest story, for those of you who can't be bothered to read it. For those of you who don't know, a hotdog is defined a "greasy cartridge filled with abertoire sweepings." As said by someone funny.

Anyone up for some Turducken? Anyone got any ideas for something grizzly made from stuffing things inside each other? Let me know!

Just a quick one from me

2006-07-01T17:05:00.000+09:00

I'm getting ready for a party! And a football match!

Quote of the day; "I don't look for beacons of hope in football teams - that would be foolish." From todays Independent.

Sunday Photoblogging - Sunday on Tuesday Night

2006-06-20T19:25:00.000+09:00

You can usually measure how busy I am by how long, if ever, it takes me to post some drivel about what I did on Sunday. In fact what I did on Sunday caused the delays in this case. You see, I had to go to Osaka for Paul McCartneys birthday party.

Just so that you know, the man himself didn't know anything about it. This was more of a (let's make money out of) Paul McCartney's birthday party. And it ws on the pricey side for an amateur do. 2000 yen in on the door, though it ws BYO. Let me say that again, it was BYO. Bring you own beer. To a gigg.

Got there and these guys were playing. They have many virtues, though, alas, pronouncing English is not one of them.

These guys came in their Japan shirts as japan were playing on this day in Germany. One of the guys came in a blue Seibu Lions (baseball team) shirt. maybe the non-wearing of this one japan shirt cost them the win that might have seen them within a chance of progressing past the group stage of the comp. This one guy... Football knows.

One of the band members was off for some reason. Possibly seeing men with dogs. Anyhow, they had to enlist a bit of help for the last song, shirted in yellow and tortoishell below.

Did I mention you could bring your own drinks? Being as this started two hours away from home on a Sunday at 12.45, guess what I had for breakfast! This is Asahi, liked by many, and Mariko. I prefer Kirin.
The next two bands performed the last rights on not just songs by the beatles, but also a large number of other groups that had contained Paul McCartney. The guys below could sing but not play their instruments beyond GCSE level.
These guys could play but not sing: They took it in turns to sing. Possibly this was to spread the blame a bit. Diminished responsibility? The woman with the violin base (only one group had the balls not to appear with the signiture axe) sang with a warbling, trilling style more common to the Enka (sort of Japanese folk music) and yodelling than to British rock. ten out of ten for the matching waistcoats, though. When I first saw these guys sitting at the front I though t they had escaped from some kind of rail privatisation scheme.
Finally, my darling love managed to snap off a good one of me, though some of the credit must go to Mariko as she pushed the button. The camera did most of the work, though.

Saturday in Pictures - part 3

2006-06-14T20:04:00.000+09:00

This one comes courtesy of The Great Andini himself. Enjoy.

Saturday in words - Pictures couldn't describe it

2006-06-14T16:03:00.000+09:00

The reason we were there at all was because, sadly, the Great Andini is off back to down under with (how many prespositions, eh?) his missus and this was the last time we would see each other in Japan. Sad days, but happy for him.

This is one of the big things about being an ex-pat about 12,000 kilometers away from home: You can become great friends and fill big holes in each others life, for a time. The lifestyle has useby dates by the ton. There is the need to escape (which I am getting very close to), where you just want to go home. This can vary from two days up to twenty years. I know of one guy who got off the plane, had a look around and decided he couldn't bear it and went home on the next flight. I reckon, the further away from your own culture the shorter an individual can manage.

There is the "life holiday" aspect to it all, where even though you are not there, your life at home sails on as innevitable as a hard-struck ball for a window. I have four brothers and sisters who basically don't know me apart from an occasional phone call. At least I haven't asked them how school is yet. I do sometimes tell them how big they are getting, just to check if they are listening.

Some people outstay their welcome or run out of potential employers. Especially,the guys have a habit of going out and making beasts of themselves with their students (not the kids, the adults at the language schools) and have to leave. Or turn up for work drunk and late more than is thought normal here. You get the picture, many of the people who come here to teach are hardly professional in any sense of the word. "On holiday with English teaching" sums up about half the language teachers in Japan.

Whatever the reason, you have to get used to saying goodbye to good friends, bye to friends and not a great deal to the guys above. For the brits, it is far from the end of the road. Whilst I am back over the summer I will hopefully see four or five of the good friends I have made over here during my sojourn. For those from Ausatralia, like Anidini, it is more likely to be once or twice more before I die. In a way this last four years has been a bit of a taster for getting old. Of all the people who left my life, only one actually died, though.

So what's the big deal? You only saw the guy three or four times in the last year, online efforts aside. Well, true, once the honeymoon period was over and I had set sail for my new job there was a whole bunch of geography inbetween. The difference lies in the possibility of catching a train to see the guy and the impossibility of catching a plane and still being able to afford University in a years time. There was a comforting presence over there which is very soon going to have gone.

And now when I email and say, "this guy at work fucked-up my class by being an ignorant twat," I will not hear that he gets that sometimes, but that he got that sometimes. We are no longer in the same boat. Head down and forwards. Two hundred and eighty days to go.

Saturday in pictures - words couldn't describe it part 1

2006-06-12T14:24:00.000+09:00

Two hours on the train to see the great Andini in Nagoya. As the big bloke said in that film, "This 'll get messy."

At the local Gaijin bar, The Elephant's Nest, Sakae. Gaijin means "outsider" or in this case, foreigner. This is where we went to watch England beat paraguay, through the bodies and a haze of alcoholist fever. England won, though the cash register came a close second.
Who nailed a bike to this wall I am leaning against heavily? Sometimes I just don't understand this life.
I got a clue watching these guys. They were doing a kind of exhibitionist karaoke. Not bad dancing, though I am only assuming that they are in time to the music.
Drunken drinking in the park, where the bottle of bubbly was actually bigger than the streetlight. This photo was taken with the shutter open for four seconds, handheld whilst drunk. How good am I?

The Tshirt Guy 4 - gotta have a system

2006-06-09T07:46:00.000+09:00

or at least, that's what Harry Hill used to say. Jill Dando, Marlon Brando and all that...

the TShirt guy has a "system of the" which uses advanced grammar, spelling and subliminal messages that will definitely have fido hiding behind the sofa. For those of you who can't read / can't be bothered to click on the link, the text at the bottom says, "It is improper if a point from here isn't done by itself somehow. Though it is a little dirty, there is a warehouse in the place where it got out of town." Once again the Tshirt Guy has nailed the issue.

You know - for kids

2006-06-07T09:43:00.000+09:00

So the kids at schools here have to learn how to make rice and grow vegetables. This is so - may god have mercy upon my soul - they can stay in touch with their roots.

This is the school field. The signs are from the PTA saying something.

Zoom out and what's this? It is a dingy red and mauve box. There is a tattered curtain flapping in the wind.

Hang on! It says, "nurse, race queen, Body Con." on it. Careers centre?

Let's look inside - It is a vending centre that sells girls pants, condoms, costumes, dildos and porno mags and DVDs.

Presumably the company responsible for this did their, ahem, homework before putting this here. Demographics and all that. Presumably the PTA are aware of it too.

More of my mundane life

2006-06-05T19:55:00.000+09:00

Not that mundane today though. For the second time in two weeks I was invited outside to have a look at the problem, pictured below at about 1.30 in the afternoon.

The outdoor pool had been taking a few beauty tips from the paddy fields over the fence. For those of you who haven't seen one, a rice field is a rectangular pool of mud that comes up to ankle. Home of mosquitoes, elderly farmers and incautious drivers. Usually the drivers are in there in the winter when the roads are icy. Often there are no pavements so if you venture off the road then you are going home via the police station, the auto-repair shop, the bank and the farmer's house to apologise with money.

Anywhat - the schools deal with this problem by giving the kids mops and sponges and suchlike. The teachers wander round the sides spraying water round giving the kids conflicting orders. Great fun! Especially with me around to butter the stairs.

This school has a new pool and sports hall recently, so the place is generally in good nick. Certainly better than the other school I work at. The other school has good everything else. The school pictured here has good pools and sports hall, bad everything else. The other school litterally had six inches of thick mud that had to be scraped out and carried to the edge of the school where it was dumped.

Hey presto - I absolutely fucking amazed at how clean they got this baby in the space of about an hour and a half. There is no water in here - that reflection is coming off the bottom of the pool.

Use the force mike

2006-06-03T19:39:00.000+09:00

What's this? Machines destroying machines? How absurd!

No but really - have a look at this. You seen Starwars three?

Ten reasons why Belle and Sebastian were worth about eighty quid

2006-06-03T10:59:00.000+09:00

As you will have seen, I went to see Belle and Sebastian the other day. It was fairly pricey at 6,500 円 which is about thirty five quid. I also bought a ticket for Candice for her birthday so I could kid myself into thinking that I was too nice for my own good. This is why I paid:

Belle and Sebastian write good music with strong lyrics and have never, to my knowledge, written a bubblegum song that doesnt mean anything.
The venue was pretty good and we got to stand really close to the band.
They played a bunch of my favourite songs off one of their older albums.
They played for two hours without stopping or sending on a crappy support band.
They use real instruments. I saw a trumpet, a cello, a violin, a pianica (I hate these but it is a valid instrument) a xylophone, a little battery operated organ and all the usual guitars and basses. These guys do not mess about with synthesizers when they can use the real article.
The lead singer came out into the crowd to give a prize to a girl for the best dancing. By a staggering coincidence she was also really pretty. I am not one of these people who gets off on touching celebs but we did brush shoulders.
When they came out to do the encore they asked what we wanted to hear (though they didnt play any of the songs I was shouting for).
The crowd for this kind of concert are always really friendly. It is something to do with the genre. People who like intelligent music don't tend to like fighting for the sake of it. And anyway, this is Japan and the hooligans tend to stick to riding round on motorbikes without mufflers (not the clothing, the bit of the bike that makes the engine a bit quieter).
The next time a good band will come to Japan, particularly soewhere close to me, is probably autumn.
I needed to get back into this kind of thing. next stop UK in festival season!

Thursday 1st of June - Belle and Sebastian at Hatch in Namba

2006-06-02T19:50:00.000+09:00

Seventy minutes on the train - how dull. What are we going to do about it Candice?

I know - let's preload on booze and talk shit!

For those of you who are worried about getting your can / bottle in the wrong hole, you needn't. Closer inspection shows that they lead to the same bag. A whole night of lost sleep prevented.

Mio met us in Osaka and nicely booked thje tickets for us. Thanks Mio!

The security guy on the door opened my bag to look for a camera, saw my camera and said, "No camera." You're in charge mate. I managed not to get caught taking any, too. Most of them came out badly though. Not enough light.

This was in the cafe outside - beer and chocolate!

Creative writng coughs back to life

2006-06-02T13:00:00.000+09:00

I can't be bothered with any cutting social commentry today, so I am going to direct you all to the fiction section over the road.

What the concert last night didn't suck out of me, the 5th years leeched out 4th period, so that is it for today. Unless I get ten minutes to throw up some photos of Belle and Sebastian later.

Modern art with boats

2006-05-31T09:47:00.000+09:00

I think this boat would look cool with three control turrets.

Looks like James Bond came through here sometime past.

In all seriousness, I was driving around the other day when I stumbed across a pile of boats. They were mostly fishing boats, though there were one or two dinghies and an Oxford / Cambridge stylie eightman rowboat there too. Stacks of boats are a part of the solution for boat owners, but for the government these are a big issue.

The Japanese use a hell of a lot of stuff. If you go to buy a bottle of water, you will recieve a plastic bag. If you buy a digital camera, you buy one every few years. If you buy toys they come from the hundred yen shop (50p shop) and get broken and thrown away within weeks. A new law has been passed making it illegal to trade in electronics over five years old. The country is consumerismed-up in a big way and the garbage man can't keep up.

I have this garish calendar at home that tells me which day I can put certain kinds of garbage out. Stuff for burning like old food and bits of wood go out twice a week. Glass goes out once every two months, metal alternates with it. Cans get collected by the local school. Anything else is a pain in the proverbial to dispose of.

On a micro scale the boats are the same as anything. If I want to throw my batteries away, I have to take them to the town hall. If I want to throw my futon away (and I desperately do - it is more sweaton that futon), I have to take it to the town hall and pay about five pounds. If I want to chob my fridge in the dustbin I have to pay twenty quid for the pleasure. How much for a boat?

I can't imagine a twnety foot fibreglass boat is going to be cheap to throw away. As you can see, some enterprising farmer has found a way to make a quick buck out of the situation. How long until we start seeing fields full of fridges? Fridges that still work? I think some one needs to have another look at the way the garbage gets dealt with.

Gold dust mixed with diamonds

2006-05-30T08:49:00.000+09:00

A few years back I looked around my room despairingly and decided that something needed to be done. Usually this equates to something needing buy buying and so it was in this case. The problem: About 1000 CDs, DVDs, and SVCDs. The solution: A set of matching CD cases from the 100 yen shop.

Those of you out there who have done this kind of thing will appreciate why this is a poor idea. Say you want a particular CD - which one of the twenty identical cases to look in first? The inneviatble point where you realise that you have been putting them back onto the "to be looked at pile" meaning you have to go through them all again. You get the message, right?

So in preparation for the upcoming Belle and Sebastian concert this week I was growing increasingly frantic about the whereabouts of my favourite album of theirs, Tigermilk. I had been through all the "one last tries" and looking behind the toilet that accompany this kind of search. I had had the seats out of the car, put my more suspect CD-borrowing friends to the torture and still come up with nothing.

Then I came across a seemingly empty CD wallet. I opened it up and nestled inside were the following CDs:

Tigermilk by Belle and Sebastian
The Great Eastern by the Delgados
Wonderland by the Charalatans
Global A-gogo by Joe Strummer

along with the thought-previously-lost entire CD collection on CDMP3 on about 7 discs.

Since then I have been listening to the four CDs listed above and floating around in a kind of fierce joy. These are amongst the best CDs I own and my God how I have been missing them.

All apologies - Dangerzone yasumi

2006-05-29T21:57:00.000+09:00

I have broken my resolution to bring you this news.

The missus is always complaining about these. "Your nuts smell like fish," she says.

"That's nothing!" I shout, "Your Tshirts are pants." She leaves hopelessly confused about her vocabulary.

Danger Zone 4 - hang on....

2006-05-29T21:11:00.000+09:00

This is the lunch from a few days ago: Rice, milk, miso-soup and deep-fried gyouzas. They are a kind of Chinese dumpling sort of thing, usually boiled or steamed. They are quite nice in fact, though they are about as healthy as leaded petrol when deep-fried. But wait, what's that?

... that kind of fishy-cabbagy smell? What has the Randam Salada Selectaa come up with today?

Baby Fish and Cabbage! Boiled to a uniform shade of yellow saltiness. This is yet another salty treat that will make your dog fear.

No Danger Zone 1 - A colossus is born

2006-05-28T21:25:00.000+09:00

If you like Soy, and you like Joy, you're bound to love SoyJoy. Who would have thought rhyming and confectionary could produce such a wondrous lovechild.

This is what it looks like in all of it's birthday suited glory, and half-eaten to boot. A chocolatey soy-y bar of beer acompaniment. Just what the doctor ordered.

EDIT

I do actually like this one

Long time no meither

2006-05-24T20:41:00.000+09:00

As I said, long time no meither.

I got about halfway through last week and decided that I was having "one of those weeks" again. You know what I am talking about. Those weeks when even the lepers won't come near you and all the tramps think you smell like piss.

For an English teacher in Japan, this means everyone showing up ten minutes late and not really settling down at all. The form teachers forgot I was supposed to be coming to eat with the class, and laughed about it when i turned-up and everyone was eating. I'm not really allowed to punch people at work so I had to content myself with stuffing horse penisses through her sunroof and sending her a cows heart full of nails in the post.

Anyway, I thought I was having "one of those weeks" but I was totally mistaken. In fact I have come to understand I was having "One of those fortnights". I sincerely hope I am not having one of those months.

The bright ray of sunshine, and let me just stress the singular nature of this one beam of energy from that distant nuclear ball, was my 2 year aniversary with Mariko yesterday. It is now only some 320 days to re-entry. This is largely down to the fact that is is also roughly 320 days til she becomes my common-law-wife and gets a cushy visa to come to the UK.

I will leave you with a bit of random news that was on telly while I was running to no-where in the gym: It seems that some japanese people saw a taxi at the station. You are wondering how this made it onto the TV? The people who saw the taxi were in fact inside the station. On the platform. It emerged that the taxi driver in questioning actually "mistook the road" at a level crossing and ended-up driving up the tracks.

Three hundred meters up sleepers? Presumably it is him that had been driving through the park and in and out of rivers. 320 days.

UPDATE

I was wrong - he didn't do it by accident. HE DID IT ON PURPOSE BECAUSE THE TRAFFIC WAS BAD. The man had a passenger in there too. For those of you who can read Japanese read this. 320 days, I tell you.

The Tshirt Guy 3

2006-05-16T15:00:00.000+09:00

This is a later piece of the work of the man. By this stage in his life the Tshirt Guy had cast off all contact with his roots, society and dictionary / lexicon pocket calculator.

In terms of colour, there is a rather fashionable brown background with a mixture of orange, yellow and white lettering.

Tackling some of the smaller issues first, let's take a look at the title. Though the majority of the language is not-English, there is a little section of not-German too. What does this little umlaut mean? What is he trying to tell us?

The subscript is one of his more instructional constructions. Initially, the change of colour halfway through a sentence draws a frown across ones face. Why? WHY? Then we realise that it is a sentence pattern. The reckless wondermerchant has decided to show us the folly of using sentence patterns, by purposefully screwing one up. Experts beleive that this is a comment on his Japanese blood.

As for the meaning: There are two schools of thought here. One believes that the Tshirt Guy is a secret naturist. The other places him firmly in the 1990s watching Shallow Grave.

This is an almost verbatim rendition of the introduction to my training presentation on theme and task based learning:

2006-05-15T08:59:00.000+09:00

"Good morning everyone. I am glad to see you all here today. I hadn't expected to see so many here. Most gratifying.

Before I move onto the main part of my presentation, I would like ot take a couple of minutes to tell you what I think makes a good teacher. The first fifty percent is in the preparation. If you are not ready then your lesson is in the hands of the gods. As such I spent almost four hours on my handout, a further three on my speech and powerpoint presentation. The planning was almost perfect.

The second half of a good teacher is in working in the moment. On those days when things are not going your way, can you carry the lesson, the day or even the week by thinking on your feet? As I say, tmy planning was almost perfect, up to the point where I left the office without my memory stick."

So there I was, without my powerpoint presentation. To be fair I didn't absolutely need it. I luckily had most of the data on my laptop. That icy-cold bucket of terror that thoroughly drenched my body as I was setting-up the projector drained-off and a bit of quick thinking saved the day.

The guy that had been running the seminar had said we might be able "to give you something for doing it" beforehand. I thought that this sounded a little along the lines of a book-token or a warm handshake. Personally, I had been thinking that the experience was more valuable than anything because I want ot get into University next year and anything that makes me look beter is most welcome. I had thought that 5,000 - 10,000 yen was about all I could expect.

At the end, I got the warm handshake and was given an envelope. The guy said, "here is a token, no two tokens, of our appreciation." I was thinking to my self, "They have never decided to give me 2,000 yen for it?" In the end I just threw it in my bag and forgot about it til this morning. 20,000 yen! It could not have come at a better time.

The upshot: I am feeling benevolent today.

Yahoo news pushes the envelope all the way round the galaxy

2006-05-12T15:59:00.000+09:00

I couldn't really avoid commenting on this after I read it. I know, I know, yahoo news is actually worse than the Mirror or the Daily Express.

Anyhow, it seems uber-cunt Nasseem Hamed has been out in his tank again. Aparently he has been enjoying his favourite hobby "destroying the little people" in his native Sheffield. His 38 year-old victim aparently, "broke all the bones in his body", which is quite an achievement.

Don't believe it? read about it all here.

"prince among men" Nasseem Hamed off to the shops in his Merc.

"Oh fuck! What the hell was all that noise?"

A close-up of 38-year-old Anthony Burgin, after Prince Nasser had broken every bone in his body, including all those really small ones in his ears.

Danger Zone 3 - Mortal Danger

2006-05-11T10:00:00.000+09:00

You know, my time in Japan is rapidly drawing to a close - some 370 days or so at this point - but I think i understand the place less than I did one year ago.

Japan has a way of thinking that is almost the opposite, or an inversion, of British thought. This is true of Western culture in General, I think. English grammar puts the important bit at the start of the sentence. Japanese puts it at the end. You average Brit has a clearly defined self-image, an awareness of themself. In most Japanese people thisis less developed and group dynamics play a much bigger role in thought. I could go on, but I will try and come to the point.

In the UK, defining someting takes time. I call this the "what" stage. Literally, what is it? If a japanese person were blindfolded and dropped into the middle of, say, Yorkshire, they would spend their time wondering round sking "What is this?" and generally getting a feel for things. As they are Japanese they understand the group dynamic and their place in it (outsider, at the bottom) and move onto the "How" stage. If they have been paying attention during the "what" stage this one is very simple. The smart ones will then move onto "why". Why is it like this? Why does it have to be like this? In Britain, I think this is largely practical or ethical, in most cases.

My time in Japan, stretching over four years now, has had a lots of "what" and "how", as I have been learning how to speak Japanese, how to do various martial arts, how to fit into the public school system, etc. As I learn more of "what" and "how" more and more "why" situations have been cropping-up. I grow more dissatisfied as these build-up.

Anyway, The same system can be applied to food here, with the same result.

What is it? It is raw octipus mixed with wasabi.

How do you eat it? Cautiously and with extreme distaste and chopsticks.

Why do you eat it? I don't, at least not twice.

Let me re-phrase that; why does one eat it? Presumably because one has always eaten it and one has come to like it. Use makes master, and all that.

Ok, then. Why did one start eating it in the first place? Pass - I have asked myself the same question about many foodstuffs without any satisfactory answer becoming aparent.

I must add in passing that this is one of those fifty-fifty ones. Either you like it or you don't and the population is split. The Mortal Danger warning is this: Do not eat this if you are planning a lot of drinking for the evening.

The Tshirt Guy 2 - An awakening

2006-05-09T22:34:00.000+09:00

On a hot summer day I was ambling along the streets of Harajuku in Tokyo when I decided I was in need of some clothes. The resulting binge was to colour my life as it lead me almost to the door of the Tshirt Guy. After a frenzied fifteen minutes I was with jeans, two shirts, a bag and an accidental copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Clothes Shopping for me is one of those tantric exercises where the event if preseded by months of thought and claminess. The event itself is carried out without human emotion and as quickly as possible. I know what I want. Either they have it, or they don't.

I was shirted, bagged, jeaned and booked, but still sadly unTshirted. At this point I was unnaware of the mystical significance of the Tshirt. Even then, I had vague feelings about their role in the wardrobe.

After stumbling through a few record shops (I love vinyl, but alas my turntables are in another country) I dived into a small shop to escape the heat. The weedy looking clerk took a look at me as I walked in. I didn't see him, though. My eyes were fixed on the masterpiece above. In dark blue and of tight fit, it had thbe word "Curling" completely contained within a curling stone. Beneath this, it said "Let it slip" and almost too small to see "in the direction of the tee" A stunning summary of the very soul of curling. What fierce joy in the world of mop, kettle and fronzen bowling green. What hours of research, demography and youth-culture had been spent to create this, I wondered.

The clerk broke into my reverie, saying, "It was the Tshirt Guy."

"The what?" I said.

"One score and four years before..." he began. Thus was the lay of the Tshirt Guy revealed to me. When he had finished we both sweated in silence. I digested his words, the small room, the isolation, the rapute that only carefully proportioned Tshirt / wordy combinations could supply. I swore my life to his on that day.

"I'll take it."

"I thought you would. You have seen."

That night I was so emotional I accidentally paid ￥3,500 to get into a Jazz-bar.

Sunday Photobogging 4 - The beery dumpstation

2006-05-07T10:00:00.000+09:00

Sunday Blogging on Sunday! What is the world coming to? A trip to the brewery up the road in Nagahama. There is a website here, but they utterly forgot the bogs! They are cerainly more worthy of mention than the beer, which is all gassy largery stuff, even the stout, if you can form an image of such an abomination.

How about this then? The bogging connoisseur can do the dirty deed whilst having his attention diverted by the topiary and heavenly lights of varying colours. All thoughts of wee leave me!

And how cool is this guy? I toilet with the gentry! There is a kind of pattern, though. This is a "Roman" brewery, built twenty tyears back, so why not victorian deco in the dunnies?

Edit

If you look at the photos on the page above, you might be able to get a Danger Zone out of this, too. There is a picture of a bunch of food on there - Check out the steak. Can you see all the fat?

The Tshirt Guy 1 - A quiet beginning

2006-05-06T22:30:00.000+09:00

This was my first run-in with the Tshirt guy. At that point I wasn't aware he existed and this was my first adventure among the craziness and revelry of Tshirts.

This was an early effort, I later found out. Written when he was a mere twenty years old, it is a burgundy piece which says "Quick" in big white letters, with "Maximum Speed" written in small yellow letters. The Tshirt shows none of his usual prosaic subject matters, such as nature or dogs.

This was an innocent time in the life of the Tshirt Guy, before his avante garde essays into spelling, grammar and punctuation. Later, his bold statements and commentries would, emblazoned onto Tshirts, rock the very foundations of the art world. This was not his first work but it was his first that I owned and so it occupies a special place in my heart. Other than that, it is of little value, which is just as well as I singed two holes in it lighting a barbeque some years ago.

Nevertheless, this is still a Tshirt Guy Tshirt and it possesses that je ne sais quoi brilliance that characterises his work. Many have stopped to stare in wonder at this shirt.

Happy News For The Wine Guy

2006-05-02T12:44:00.000+09:00

The doctor took a file from the nurse as she said, "They are waiting in your office. They seem quite distraught."

The doctor frowned, then pushed the door open. "Good afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. er, Wineguy?" He checked the file again and looked hopefully at the couple sat before him.

"That's right," said the man. Something of the puzzlement on the medic's face must have promted him. "It is part of my hereditary position. You know the descriptions on the backs of bottles of wine?" The doctor nodded. "It is my job to write those in a small room somewhere. It has been in my family for longer than we can trace."

"How interesting! Does that mean that you have to taste all those wines, too?"

"Yes, of course." The Wine Guy flashed a fatherly, cardiganish smile.

The doctor paused for a second, "Say, I had a bottle of French wine the other day. It said it had a 'creamy mouth-feel.'"

The Wine Guy steepled his fingers and said, "Not one of my better days, I am afraid. And the stress has been getting the better of me. I am worried about my son."

The doctor looked at his file, "Wine Guy Junior?"

The Wine Guy shook his head, "no, we are both most happy with his progress, aren't we dear?"

His wife nodded. "It is James, our youngest son. I am afraid that, well, have a look." She handed over a piece of paper for the doctor to have a look at. "This is his diary."

Tonight was sunny. I loving to out in the sun. Tomorow also will sun. I should die happiness in the sun.

Tomorow Dave would call. He liked snoopy but not Charlie. Snoopy is everyones' favourite dog. He play in the baseball.

The doctor had a look at it and then reached behind him for a book. "Ah, yes. I have heard of just one case like this. Mrs. Wine Guy, you are in fact Japanese, are you not?"

She looked down demurely, "Yes I am."

"Yes, it all matches! Let me be the first to congratulate you. You may or may not know of the sad and untimely demise of the Tshirt Guy?"

Mrs. Wine Guy nodded and Mr. Wine Guy said, "Yes, ours is a small brethren and we mourn his loss extremely. He had an unhappy time of it, as you may know. His son turned-out to be someone else's."

The doctor beam triumphantly. "Well, I rather believe that your blood has combined with that of your wife to produce the new Tshirt Guy!"

"Oh! Thank the Lord! I was so worried." The doctor saw the worry drain from her face. Her husband was no less pleased. "I am so proud! I can't thank you enough, doctor."

Thus the saga of the Tshirt Guy was begun.

Conversations with oneself are always rewarding

2006-05-01T13:35:00.000+09:00

My combined hangover / cold thing metamorphosed into a weeklong headache.

So What?

True enough, that isn't enough to keep me quiet, usually. I did take a little time to have a look at my computer, specifically the OS.

Was there something wrong with the OS?

No, as it turns out. There was the trifling matter of all the bugs and virusses, but the only real thing wrong with it was it's inherant piratey feel. This is the first ever time I have bought Windows. I did find out why it had been so dreadfully poorly of late.

Why was that then?

The wind moving part of the processor fan had parted company with the main body. The motor was there, the fan was rattling round the bottom of the case.

So, effectively the processor was being cooled by a vibrator?

Yes indeed. The cooling fan on the graphics card had also gone off on its own.

So that was Sunday. How else have you been whiling away these medium-long Spring nights?

Well Friday night and Saturday Morning were spent getting drunk at and recovering from Cs party. She made a really nice beef stew and an olivey / broccoli-y concoction which sounds bad but was actually quite delicious.

OK, but your last entry was last Saturday. What do you think this is?

Yes, I really must apologise for that. I was busily burning my retinae out with Ebooks. Oh, and we watched the Life of Leornardo Da Vinci in five parts.

Was it good?

To be honest, it was piss-poor. There was a historian, a seventies historian, with a beard and a grey suit who would come on at various points and fill in some of the gaps and interact with the minor characters. His main role was stressing that, "We don't really know, we are just guessing that it was like this."

So you are saying that it was a piece of fiction based around reality, in the documentary style?

Yes, how perceptive of me to think that. The exercise left me unclear about the life of the man without actually allowing me to like him. It took the worst parts of either format.

I suppose I can let you off, though unless we see some progress soon our couple of readers might dissapear. Haven't you got a few pieces about Tshirts in the pipeline?

Yes I have. I might fire one up tomorow.

See that you do.

A lifestyle change could be on the cards

2006-04-22T10:55:00.000+09:00

I woke up feeling - not so bad. I then progressed through feeling slightly dehydrated, had the squits and then my cold-linked-sinus-pain mated with my alcohol intake to beget a pain beyond even stubbed-toe or papercut.

This is being written inbetween bouts of shaking in bed and pacing round the house, head in hands.

My one consolation, small though it is, can be summed up in the words of an old friend from school; "bad though it may be, at least it hasnn't progressed to the yellow palsy." How right he was, and is. How i hope he will never be right again.

If anyone needs a nominated driver, give me a shout.

Let no man say japan has a paucity of toilets

2006-04-21T00:00:00.000+09:00

I had a pleasant little number in this little number a few weeks back. Overall, this one rated quite highly, an eight out of ten for appearance.

As you can see, the basin is a hand-made earthernware afaire with nice asymetrical glaze / lack thereof. It was set into a green marble top with a tastefully understated faucet. It was almost a shame to use it, so I didn't contenting myself with a quick wipe on the back of the trousers.
The urinals were a delightful combination of modern and classical themes, standing alone and away from the wall. Closer inspection showed that all but a few of the most powerful had managed to miss without hitting the wall, so I think we can conclude that the technique was a success.

Cautionary note

As you can see from the photo, this toilet has a high "loiter" or "loom" quotient. This combined with the usual shyness associated with the act might dissuade some of our less confident micturators.

A quick glimpse into the cucbilcle was not wasted. A sharp eye will see that the cistern has not only been covered in clingfilm but also taped in place. At first, this was clear to me - the clingfilm was there to stop powders being snorted off it, and the tape to stop enraged drug-fiends from smashing it to pieces out of revenge.Judging by the standard of the establishment I was forced to discard this theory, however appealing it might be. It must have some deeper, more arcane purpose. Answers on a postcard, please.
The last item of note was this charming ceramic piece - I couldn't be fucked translating this in the insipient gloom, so I don't know what it was. However, I would like to believe that it was a recommended code of conduct to guide the user through the joys and woes of using this toilet. I imagine techniques for getting the majority of the liquid into the urinal featured here, with some more about techniques for getting stools to water level without spoiling hte cleanliness of the bowl.

Danger Zone 2 - An ancient foe awakens

2006-04-17T23:10:00.000+09:00

Luckily, it is always a few days before we meet after the beginning term giving me some time to ready myself and take on some of the mental toughness needed to deal with this awkward bugger.

Kyuu shoku is Japanese for school lunch - best summed-up by by a slight slight verbal mangling to Q shock.

I ma not a huge fan of japanese food anyway and as I am sure you can imagine, this is just the benchmark from which the school lunch can be considered worse.

Starting top left and working round clockwise we have; a small pack of milk (ok), a bowl of rice (same calories as a pint of diesel), miso soup (containing, but not lilited to, tofu, carrot, onion, bits, pieces of stuff, random slices of meat and a shitload of salt), lumps of fish with the skin left on (two pieces, as I am on good terms with the dinner lady) and the piece de resistance, emphasis on resistence. This piece of resistence was made from cabbage, carrot, broccoli and spinach. Boiled in a fucking huge cauldron and in a filthy dungeon by somebody utterly devoid of taste-buds, olfactory prowess or even the sensation of touch in their mouth. Let me tell you, that while cabbage, carrots and whatever else they managed to dredge out of the fields maintains some structural integrity after some hours in the pot, spinach does not. So you are left with something not unlike slime-coated vegetables bolied yellow but without salt. Veggies garnished with ectoplasm - Just like Mum used to make!

Personally, I wouldn't even feed it to the Spice Girls, but I have to provide a positive example for the kids, so I force it down and stifle my ghasps and roars.

Now here is a most surprising piece of journalism

2006-04-15T11:46:00.000+09:00

And no, it is not one of mine.

Before turning over the link, I must say that it is very rare that I laugh out loud at an actual God-damned newspaper, specifically, with a newspaper. Included are some wonderful bits of taboo slang and verbiage that made me wonder how this ever got onto the editors desk, never mind off it.

Here you go - enjoy.

"Tonight Cat, I am going to be Jesus Christ being Liam Gallagher singing Wonderwall."

Fan-fucking-tastic

"Nayam, Meene and Linda, two Hindus and a non-practising Christian, admit they don't know much about the Passion. "I'm guessing it's Jesus who dies," Linda says."

Likewise, brilliant! We need opinions, any will do!

It's flower-looking time

2006-04-15T09:31:00.000+09:00

That's the most literal translation of "hanami" - though it's significance is really in Cherry Blossoms.

Most people think of something like this when they think of Japan and Cherry Blossoms:

This is the sadder side of tree viewing. This one was supposed to bring balance to the garden. It was like a sibling sapling to another tree. Early in it's career it slaughtered a bunch of seedlings and was so wrecked by a fight with it's mate that it is only held together by a bamboo exoskeleton and hatred. You can see it talking to the owner of the white car, telling it not to be too proud of "this mechanical monstrosity" it has created.

Finally, for your appreciation is Mariko next to a piece of herbiage. Enjoy!

Welcome to the world of the damned

2006-04-14T11:02:00.000+09:00

Where the network doesn't speak to ones laptop and refuses to post photos.

Hours of hair-pulling, nail-biting, scratching, coyly trying things one last time after abandoning them have still not yeilded positive results. Most disapointing as I have tons to say - another toilet to the stars, flowers, fearful repast - all languishing on my lappy.

It seems the lappy has outlived it's usefulness, now doomed to forever from network to network being cast out like a lepper.

[keen observer says] Why not do it at home after work?

I am glad you asked that, keen observer, because I have such a good answer to that. I have been going out a lot and / or watching all three extended versions of the Lord of the Rings. Certainly, the lord of the rings has left little time for anything else - I rented them for a week only - taking about ten hours of the last three days.

On the subject ofthe Lord of the Rings, the extended versions make much more sense than the ones shown in the cinemas. The first time I saw part two I began to wonder if Jackson had been round to Bruce Willis' house to borrow the plot sledge-hammer. They've met once, now they're in love!

Bah - a real post in the offing, now.

Sunday Photoblogging 3 - Sunday on Tuesday

2006-04-11T10:54:00.000+09:00

This Sunday Photoblog is becoming increasingly badly named but whatever...

I went to another one of these school get-togethers the other night and was regaled with the usual horrors on a plate. No big surprises, and no fish heads this year. Instead of the food, though, I thought I might make a case for technology. See below:

Now, this might look like a common or garden CD / DVD player but it is actually the control unit for the item shown below:

Being an old hand in Japan now, I am used to the average Western-style toilet with added luxuries of heated seats and a power-shower to blast the dags out of ones anal-beard. I am unmoved by such paltry innovations. In this case, I was takenb almost instantly, as the toilet not only automatically opened the lid but also lit the bowl with blue fluorescent light. It didn't stop there - the control unit pictured above also had a tasteful blue backlighting.

Not that I use any of these features, by the way. I just like the idea in principle. No way am I going to use the washer on a toilet that drunk people use.

The absolute opposite of this is your common or garden garden or hole in the gound. My mother had the misfortune to loose her dignity over one of these while she was over here last time. Next up is the Japanese toilet, which I have used a grand total of once, in just over four years. For your consideration:

I can see this leading to a cropper, can't you? Anyhow, that is the end of the toilet-non-humour.

All banking is theft

2006-04-07T09:36:00.000+09:00

I overheard this at the bank, the other day:

Bank Clerk: Good Morning! How may I help you?
Customer: I'd like to ask about this charge, here.
BC: Ah yes, I see. It seems that you dropped below your credit limit for a while there.
C: It was only three hours. I don't understand how that cost me thriry pounds.
BC: There is the cost of sending a letter...
C: Please. See this mark here? This means that it was printed and sent automatically. So, five pence for an envelope, two for the paper, rather less than one for ink and general wear and tear. Oh yes, I forgot thirty pence fof a stamp. Where is the other twenty-nie and a half pounds going?
BC: I think it is supposed to be a deterant.
C: I see. Presumably this moral code works both ways does it? I will quietly wait for my thirty pounds from the time you accidentally billed me too much?
BC: There are people waiting behind you and I am sure a manager...
C: Am I going to be fined for this, too? Or is this one of those situations like in the film Double Jeopardy? Am I already covered for this? Can I expect to see a line on my next statement saying, "thirty pounds for temerity"?

But seriously, banks do seem to have this kind of twisted view of the world, completely divorcesd from any kind of morality. I once had a friend who was a self-proffessed anarchist (everyone else professed him a hooligan). I never really agreed too much with most of the stuff he did, but I was in complete agreement when he went around writing, "all banking is theft" on all the cash machines in the city.

It seems that at last someone agrees with him. It seems that the costs above were, as suspected, a way of boosting profits. I actually worked at one of the banks mentioned in the passage and I know that they always perform a very tiring balancing act of making record profits whilst dodging a windfall tax. Sickening, eh? Even more so when you realise that some of the people in the country can't pay their debts.

Banks - If you are worried about people not paying their credit card bills on time, maybe you shouldn't be quite so free when you are giving them out. I will elaborate - How can a student possibly be expected to take responsibility for a credit card or overdaft with no fixed income?

Danger Zone - 1 Posh Danger

2006-04-06T13:21:00.000+09:00

Every year in March, aproximately one sixth of the teachers are moved on to a new school. I am not sure why, though it is a central policy. In any case, there is a leaving do where you can get drunk and eat japanese food for pretty high cost. these things are always a bit of a trial to me, not because of the company but because of the food. Those of you who think that japanese food starts and stops with sushi can think again. Some of it is excellent, though some of it makes me physically sick.

To give you an idea of how it works I have stuck a picture at the top with a guide below.

Bottom middle - This looks like a slice of grilled fish. It is just that, an innocent piece of salmon. Very little danger here.

Bottom right - This looks like some kind of vegetable. It is! but beware, this could have been almost anything. Potential danger in this kind of dish.

Bottom left - This looks like some kind of excretion in a pot. I would not be surprised to find this in a pyramid next to a dead king. This one has high potential danger but was in fact a mixture of miso paste (from beans) and some kind of slightly bitter herbiage. Not bad.

Upper middle - Danger! Danger! You need to be careful of this kind of thing because it might be raw. In fact it was a pair of raw cephalopod carcasses filled with mustardy stuff. Personally, I would never eat this again as I was near tears and virtually vomiting where I stood the first time I had this. Moderate danger here.

Upper right - There was a little shape and contextual danger here. Japanese chefs have been known to make stuff that looks like this out of fish. However, this was quite nice.

Upper left - Run for the hills! This one of those "aquired tastes" like tripe and martini. We are old friends, we are. Only a few months back my friend Rob was horribly sick after eating some of this. Raw squid in sauce. Do not mix with beer unless you have a stomach of iron and a will of diamond.

The overall score for this number was four out of six: I could eat four of them. But it looks nice, eh? Previous episodes have contained, but not been limited to;

Raw chicken
Raw horse
Cooked fish heads
Fermented fish

This is just the stuff that I knew about. Half of the time stuff comes in lumps and you either leave it or put your faith in God or alcohol, whichever you trust the most. Hopefully this should be a recurring theme.

Sunday photoblogging - 2 Sunday on Wedensday

2006-04-05T11:13:00.000+09:00

Mixtures of business and Mariko having the camera delayed this one a bit. We headed into Osaka to meet friends. I wasn't clear about where we were going until I actually got there but it is a definite recommendation for those of you who might one day make it to Japan.

It was a kind of mock-up of what Japan was like a hundred years ago. Known locally as the Showa Period it was after the Meiji Restoration, when Japan started talking to the world. Things were troubled even then, with new Western Issues battling with old Eastern Issues, and Japan is odd even by Asian standards. Luckily the place and the history book had only a nodding a aquaintance with each other, like people who live in vaguely the same area.

The attraction occupied the fifth up to seventh floors of a building that also contained an amusement arcade. Floor five was more or less entirely food. For a quick stop you could eat more or less anything Japanese. Alas, the prices were not circa 1900 but nearer circa 2030, though the food was good. We had okonomiyaki, a fairly safe bet for anyone travelling who is not into the more grizzly Japanese fayre. Raw sea-urchin and the like.

The sixth floor was more of the same, with a few of the more lamentable types of tourist traps thrown in. The crown jewel was the ghost-doll show. Rob and Mio went in for it and Mio came out looking a bit the worse for wear. It was 500 yen (£2.50) and took rather less than two minutes to complete. The scary thing was that A) they expect you to pay so much for so little and B) People actually pay it.

On the third floor was the showForgive the quality of the photos, it was pitch-black in there:

It was almost Vaudeville meets Last Samurai meets pantomime. Not that I have anything against any of these. Unfortunately, the person who wrote the show must have done so in some kind of fevered frenzy. The centre piece of the show was a chant, which went, "oboosan wa he wo koita." This translates as "the priest farted." As if these vast flights of comedy weren't enough there was a series of gestures that went with it. The story, from what I could gather, was about a woman who feld to Las Vegas after being taunted by her husband. I think he said she smelt, or had put on weight or something. Mercifully, most of the details were hidden in songs and I was distracted by Makikos assurances that it had been exactly the same the last time she had been. Aparently, it all ended well and the two of them flew back to Japan on a trapeze wire with half of the audience trying to look up their skirts.

The true highlight of the show was when the red-haired wench, and I can scrcely think of a better word, came over to have a chat after the show. Either she liked what she saw and wanted to know more or she wanted to practice her English on me. Ho-hum, nothing does it for me like green spotty tights and a bright red wig.

Anyhow, we decided to stick around for beers and finished-up at a nomihoudai (lit. drink as much as you can). The shop is called shirokiya (lit. white tree shop) and is a fine place to eat / drink on the cheap. The other nice thing about it is the guy who built the empire, killing off the opposition and plastering is face all over the place in the process. I had a headmaster like that at Grammar school. My old headmaster, however, was not a closet scouser like this guy. Here he is below - aparently a lifelike characature. The hand behind his back is probably clutching a stolen car radio or something.

You do it. No, you do it!

2006-04-04T09:52:00.000+09:00

I was on the way up to meet Evan and hand over some comapny-car keys yester day when I realised I was early and stopped to take some photos of the river. As it was, I couldn't help but overhear this couple shouting.

Him: I'll do it tomorow.
Her: You what? YOU WHAT?
Him: I said, "I'll do it tomorow."
Her: Right that's it - I'm going to live at my mum's.
Him: Wha?
Her: Two years, two years I have been asking you to move it.
Him: What's the big rush?
Her: It's an eyesore.
Him: Well going to your mums won't help, she only lives across the road.
Her: It's not just that, it's your attitude. It stinks.
Him: I see, it's me that goes around causing all the arguments is it?

I never did find out if she went to her mums, though I suspect that what they were arguing about was this.

I am on the guys side. Don't fuck with mother nature! Don't fuck with anything that is ripping a car to pieces! I quite possibly owe my continued existence to that rule.

The other side of the coin is the ridiculous figure one has to pay to get rid of anything here. My mate was just offered the golden opportunity to pay 5,000 yen (about £25) to get rid of a small fridge. Surely this kind of thing is going to keep happening?

One thousand days before i have to go back

2006-03-30T10:36:00.000+09:00

I haven't been doing much fiction recently. Not since my last project died. However, I have started up a new fiction page at under the radar.

Most of what I do comes from my everyday life, and what a wealth of inspiration I got yesterday. I got a postcard in the post (funnily enough) a few weeks back saying that I had to go back and renew my Japanese drivers license. Though in fact it was more of an upgrade. I moved up from green to blue. This may sound good but it makes little or no real difference, other than serving as a stepping stone up to a gold license and giving employment to a higher number of officious little men.

In I went, in line for the window, payed, accidentally signed up for a charity and was shown into a room with some road-safety videos showing. I can't remember the first one (Nice going guys. Good work - big impact there!) though the second one is still very clear in my mind. This is how it started; a guy drives up in a sports car, parks and walks off. I am with you so far, Mr. Road safety video maker.

Then I started wondering if I was in the wrong room, I started wondering if I had wondered into the cycling proficiency test because someone thought it was a great idea to inform adults about road safety with talking cars. No joke - I was sat there in stunned silence while the sports car told her Grandad, a Rolls I think, that today was scary becuase her owner drove fast. While they spoke, the cars flashed their lights. We are talking ultra low budget kids TV. I got moved on to the next room before I got to hear what the truck had to offer on the matter. I was tempted to start furiously scribbling down notes like, "fuck! you're supposed to put the lights on when it's dark?!" and "Don't forget to look for pedestrians as well as cars."

The next room was a bit of a shock because it said "at the end of your two hours there will be a test." "No-one told me about a test," I thought. If I had known there was going to be a test I would have brought someone to translate for me, as my written japanese is terrible. A glance around the room revealed the following points:

Road safety posters - there is a very special world in which the guys who make these things live. In that world (shown here) it is OK for old people to drive badly if they put a sticker on the car saying they are bad at driving. That is the orange and yellow one off to the right. In this world, lazy people who email whilst driving are suddely shown the error of their ways by poster 2, in the middle. Finally, in this very special world, people have to be told that two people on one bike is not safe.

The supreme air of absurdity in the building means that the desks have to be screwed down. Otherwise they would float away on a cushion of frivolity. Either that or it was to stop the remedial class from beating the teacher to death with them.

The teacher came in and did a sketchy bow, glared randomly round the room and then introduced himself. One look at his face told me that there was no room for jolity in his life. He had a cloud of anti-humour around him. Put a whoopie cushion on his chair and he would either implode or float above the thing. He switched on a video.

The video was one of the usual collages of cheap drama and real brains splattered round the nations roads. It was based around an everyday nuclear family who all had a bit of a rotten day, as it came out. First the father knocked a woman off her bike because he didn't indicate, then the son wrote his car off getting the news by phone from his mum. "Ho ho ho, isn't dad an idiot for crashing his car!" smash! The comedy made me cringe more than the blood on the roads. By the way, what have the road safety video makeers been doing these last thirty years? I can understand them giving up and doing something else, but no-one seems to have made anything since the seventies and eighties. Maybe they all went off to make porn - the production values are about the same.

At this point my group was split into two - upgrades without accidents and those with. It is like streaming at school. I was in the top group, with roughly five percent of those present. This meant I got to skip the test. Everyone else was in the remedial class, with the joy sink. I was back downstairs with a delightfully sarcastic bloke. He told us that passing was not quite a forgone conclusion, and anyone sleeping or emailing on their mobile phone would be failed and would have to join the next bunch of boy-racers and nervebags upstairs with the basilisk. "Don't get too bored," he said. We all promised solemnly, one of us smirking behind his hand.

He went on to tell us about the number of deaths / injuries in the country and in the prefecture. Direct quote; most of the deaths in this area are caused by people not looking out of the front of the car. OK, then. He went on to say that if you divide the number of casualties by the population of the prefecture, it comes out at 1% per year. Let's say a mother has quaruplets and they are fifty years old. If probability has it's own way, two of them will have been seriously injured in a car-crash by now. No wonder the guy upstairs was glaring at the biker-dude in front of me.

The lecture was punctuated with lots of comments like, "so you think japan is a safe country, do you?" and "this is the country you live in." and "it is a sign of the times." We saw eye-to-eye on a number of issues, including recent japanese innability to keep rules and the derioration of manners. In the middle of this little speechlet he extended his finger, rotated on the spot until he was pointing at this one girl off to the left. "You!" he said, "which side of the road should you walk if there is no pavement?" You could more or less see her freeze mid-breath. She didn't answer by the way. I was tempted to put my hand up and say, "the top", but I was worried he might fail me so contented myself with a quick smirk.

At the end he said in a stern and commanding voice, "you absolutely must not have any accidents!" I wrote it down.

That was the end of my japanese driving license adventure. It is up for renewal in another thousand days or so, and I will be long gone by then.

Just a quickie

2006-03-28T10:09:00.000+09:00

For those of you who don't know what a batting centre is, it is a place with a machine tht fires balls at you so you can hit them with a baseball bat. A good place to go on a Monday night when you have already had a full week of hassle. They come in varying dgrees of quality and newness. The one I went to yesterday was really new - it had a digital picture of a guy throwing the ball - and much better all round - I could hit more of the balls.

The mai nproblem for me with these is that there are often tons of guys better than me and they usually watch while I swing the bat where the ball will be or was. Or often where bat and ball share no destiny, alas. Anyway, yesterday was looking good because it was all school kids who were generally pretty pants.

In goes the money - select speed - select height - Sart butt...

"NICK SNESEI!!"

This is an occupational hazard for Elementary English teachers. If the kids see you outside school they want to come and talk to you. After we had all said hello and asked each other how we were - another occupational hazard - I set-to withthe bat.

Ball one - whoosh!
Kids - Strike!
Nick (internally) - fuck off!

Ball two - whoosh!
Kids - swing and miss!
Me - cockbags!

Ball three - whoosh / ting / thump
Kids - Foul!
Me - My position at school is on the line. This will go round the school in seconds.

Ball four - crack!
Kids - ooooooh!
Me - My standing in the community is safe!

Now I am off to Osaka to look at basses. Having done my homework I have found that my plans for the bass will need modifying. It is possible, nay even likely that the cheap chinese import basses will slap itself to pieces in the year that I plan to use it. Also a factor is thatthere is nowhere I could concieveably put the thing without we take it to bed with us at night so here are my options:

Buy a smaller bass and spend a bit more money.

Get a guitar style bass and amp setup. I can get a decent setup second hand well withing budget.

Buy an electric upright bass and learn to play on that. this one come with headphones but without irate neighbours so this could be a winner. It is a bit more pricey but that's ok because this could be easily transported back to the Uk in about 390 days. The one I am edging towoards is the Aria SWB, which you can see here. Any opinions wlecome. I am concerned that it looks a bit pants.

The furious rate of posting continues...

2006-03-27T09:59:00.000+09:00

..but will soon slow down. I am into the spring break proper, and wallowing in my freedom to do little every day.

Yesterday got eaten up helping Rob escape from his apartment. To my certain knowlege he never cleaned the place in the two years he was there, so a whole two years of dust and garbage needed disposing of in just under three days. By the time we arrived Rob and his girlfriend Mio were outside the front door looking bleary-eyed.

"What time did you get up?"
"We've been cleaning since five AM."

It was three o'clock at the time, so they had been at it for ten hours. Aparently, the inside was now clear of detritus. Very clearly, though, most of what had been inside was now outside on the pavement. During the previous week we had recieved a whole bunch of random items including English teaching detritus (dice, magnetic letters), drinking detritus (the cork-screw had been given away before all the wine bit the dust), cooking detritus (mixer, bread-knife) and household leftovers such as six boxes of washing powder. Most of this is useful stuff as I have moved house many, many times and I know that stuff recieved because "it might come in useful" will be a pain in the neck later on, viz all the stuff on the floor in front of Robs house.

By four-thrity we had distributed a bunch of stuff around the neighbourhood. My mate C, up the road, lost the moral high-ground early on in the process and so had to put a brave face on a wider selection of goods than she might have been expecting. That'll teach her to oversleep. Having made some kind of vague promise to help / see him off, she was unnable to resist much of the stuff we had turned down. Plant pots, more washing powder, cushions and a tako-yaki-making-device were amongst the high-lights. For those of you who don't know, tako yaki is an octopus ball coated in stuff like pancake batter with thick sweet sauce and flakes of dry fish on top. The item itself is a cast iron tray half an inch thick with hemi-spherical indentations in it. She recieved it exactly like a guy recieving a present of a candle set. She is a creative lass so I assume she will find something to do with it.

The final amount of luggage amounted to a trifling fifteen bags or so. You can see Rob above staggering under their weight for the three meters to the back of the car. The plan was that all of this was going to be carried on the train, changing trains three times on the way, to Mios flat in Osaka. We took ten minutes to admire the masterful planning involved.

After this there just remained a quick jaunt to the railway station. Thing went downhill after Rob said, "good-bye house." We had "good-bye" to houses, trees, roads, mountains, restaurants, the cementworks, etc., etc. Luckily it is only a ten minute drive to the station. After a brief interlude at the local Baskin Robins, the ice-cream shop, it was manly handshakes, promises to keep in touch and a brief tragi-comic moment as two people got 80 kg of bags up the flight of steps to the ticket counter. Now Rob is off to India after a brief stoppover snowboarding in Hokkaido.

And I have 362 days left to work, 398 days left before I too am off somewhere new, or at least different.

Sunday photobloging - 1 What's it like?

2006-03-26T12:22:00.000+09:00

One question I often get asked is, "what's Japan like?" I often get a bit depressed by this question. Say what you mean! Tell me what you want to know! I suppose what people mean is, "what is it like near where you live?" I can begin to answer this one.

The place where I live is arranged in three rings: In the middle is the lake. Next is the farming bit where I live. Round the outside are the mountains, like the one in the picture. The one in the picture is Ibuki, the nearest place for snowboarding / skiing. Though it might look quite rural we are on the main routes from Tokyo to Osaka and Kyoto so the bumpkin quotient is relatively low. Head two hours due North and it is like being trapped in the 1950s. The only solace to be found is in the form of a vending machine that sells bottles of whiskey. I shit you not.

The brown stubbly stuff at the bottom of the picture is brown stubble. In a few weeks this will be a paddy-field that will go through the following colour changes - Brown, Muddy brown, Wet muddy brown with green shoots, Green, Golden brown and finally Stubbly brown in the autumn. It will probably be white in the winter a couple of times, too.

You will notice that the snow is almost gone from the top. There is still snow in the northern parts of the country but I have been promising myself to save some money this year and the possible purchase of a bass has precluded that the snow season is over for me. My board is still propped in the entrance hall, twinkling it's bindings at me. I haven't quite managed to put it back in it's bag to hibernate over the summer. I assume theree will be tears, recriminations, frosty silences. Especially in the light of certain instrument purchases.

So unlike the british scenery, which is more or less green, the view from any particular point varies rapidly given the time of year. I have been promising myself I would get it on paper for about two years now, so this is the start of it. Further down the line there will be pictures of old women driving tractors and old men sitting around drinking cans of coffee. I kind of have a moral duty to do something with the new digital camera I bought last summer.

Lunchtime update!

2006-03-24T13:19:00.000+09:00

OK, so I had my little bitch about work, but today is "eat out" day, where there is no school lunch offering but freedom to choose what I would. In this case, a slice of pizza, a cup of instant corn soup, a piece of plaited french bread with ham in it and three lots of deep-fried-chicken on a stick.

I asked the number three teacher what time I had to be back. He said " - " and shrugged his shoulders. "Take your time," he said, after he had. As the full significane of this took hold of my soul and gonads I felt my soul soar like an improperly held balloon at a fair. I could, concieveably, get away with an extended lunch, maybe even a dinch (you know, like "brunch"). I could spin things out a bit and maybe take a nap. Then maybe aim to arrive back at school at quarter to five, just in time to finish my chapter and pack my stuff away.

Clearly something must have shown in my face, as the guy broke my reverie with the words, "two thirty meeting." Luckily the whole thing had been an unlooked-for wonder. Plans A and B were still on the table. Plan A: leave something at my other school. It would be odd if I couldn't make that last an hour or so. I should be back just in time for plan B - play with the kids in the glorious sunshine.

And it is no less than 16 degrees C outside. And to think last weekend I was going over the jumps on my plank in the arctic minus two of an Indian Winter.

Question: Where will it all end?
Answer: Rain all the way through my holiday. You makr my words (but not for spelling).

I am doing my job nicely

2006-03-24T11:50:00.000+09:00

which means that i am occupying my desk. no lessons or work to do, no internet, which leaves me mailing by thumb and abusing my capitals out of frustration.

we had the closing ceremony earlier this morning. a deathly experience it was too. at the end the headmaster drained the spirit out of everyone by talking for fifteen minutes, saying he was finished and then talking about something else for a further ten. i should have painted eyes on my eyelids and gone to sleep. the guy is a kind of inverse pied piper. couldnt lead even one kid.

the real bitch is the fact that i have to be here until five to meet some arcane rule of precedence or chivalry or falconry or something. thank the lord for project guttenberg, and an end to the matter

It isn't Easter, I don't care what anyone says

2006-03-23T10:09:00.000+09:00

In Japan there is no notion of Easter. Mention of Easter brings cries of wonder that big chocolate eggs are involved, possibly containing other kinds of sugary treats. The couple of bright kids start asking what the significance of it all is, but the majority just let it slide past in a haze of multiculturalism. It is like a car journey through the world, whoosh! Christmas tree - bullfight - chocolate eggs - people throwing tomatoes - cricket - curry. I'm really not sure how much of it they pick up.

I work at a couple of junior schools teaching English and Foreign culture. I am sitting on the brink of the spring break. Let me just forestall everyone by saying that no, it isn't the same as the Easter break because they don't have Easter and the school year starts and ends around it. Which vis why it is a time of change for me, too. It is one of the rare times I have free. The holida itself is about two weeks, though for me it extends a bit either side because I don't have any lessons. Hence my recent online productivity.

For everyone else, the term ends tomorow. I mentioned before it is the goodbye season and the guy from up the road, Rob, is off back England via India on route to teach again in China. There are going to be goobye drinks for him on Friday, at the local sports bar. If I get my **** together I might even post some photos. Everyone knows; God loves a photoblog. It might bring across some of the bizzarrity of the place. A sports bar in a village, for all love. Though he didn't know it at the time, the guy opened it at the end of my road. It stands a sore temptation, though it will be a Godsend during the world cup.

Anyhow, there was mention of me buying a double bass, at the urging of my esteemed colleague C up the road in Echigawa. She plays the harmonica (which is Old English for saliva collector) and is wooing me with the thought of playing for money. First I have to learn to play the thing. Which brings me back to the spring break, circuitously, as I am going to need a while on my own before people are allowed to hear me practice.

"But," say the wiseacres, as they always do, "why not forestall all those comments we ourselves will surely make about rather playingb the piccolo, by playing the piccolo?" Fuck off, wiseacres! I had a friend who lost hearing in her left ear due to piccolo induced trauma. I played the flute and will retuen to it one day. In the mean time, I intend to play something that matches my inner beast. Let me tell you, my inner beast is booming quite satisfactorily at the moment. No mouselike tootling, nor yet jarring crash of electric guitar, either.

The wiseacres chime in again, "Is this going to be the next in a long line of abandonned instruments, tossed aside to have their cost lamented by all and sundry?" Quite possibly, though surely it makes no odds to anyone. I might, just, surprise everyone by picking up these scattered remnants of hobbies as I cover old ground. Let's not forget, the bouble bass is the close relative of the 'cello, my first instrument.

Lo! All that money wasted is suddenly pouring back dividends. Though it does require a further layout of about 200 squid and, more dauntingly, a telephone conversation in Japanese. Luckily the guy selling lives in the same prefecture as me. It is the link above. I have no plans to buy it online, though. There is a phone number and it would be strange if I couldn't induce the seller to skip the auction charges and show me the item in person, before recieving crisp new notes on the spot. I also, metaphorically, want his balls in my hand while I view the item. A slight squeeze to signify what will happen if it turns out to be a lemon. Not that I expect a Stradivarius for the money but it must be functional.

So there you have it: A spring break full of music, badly played but without none of violinic banshee wails. Also to look forward to: A couple of weeks of long posts as I won't have a great deal else to do.

Off you toddle

2006-03-22T08:13:00.000+09:00

It is that time of year again - actually one of those two - where half the people I know move on to other things. The school year ends on Friday and many of my colleages are heading off into the blue yonder. It works that way for the company teachers. The Government English teachers change over in the summer, for some odd reason.

Anyway, as usual I am a bit down on seeing my mates disappear. I am also a bit down on the ammount of beer and rich food on the menu at the moment. Having fought my body weight under control now it is the party season with no time for exercise and a party every night. Tonight is even worse. Yes to the party but no to the drinking. Nominated driver - if only I had taken the train the other night.

The upside of all these people leaving is the incoming batch. New people and I hope to god that the new person up the road is not one of these stay at home in the dark types. Thinking on it, as I am buying a double bass, a musician might be good.

Anyway, time's up. The net at work seems to be having irrevocable problems with the server / router / colour scheme / chi at work. Not only will they not speak to each other but the one won't even admit the existence of the other. Requests to work at home will be met with grins, chuckles, refusals. My kingdom for a mobile internet card.

400 days - what's it all about?

2006-03-21T11:47:00.000+09:00

For the first time in weeks I find myself with a whole full day to myself, less a few hours for my deserved lie-in. I was wracked with guilt immediately, as I knew I should have been mailing since dawn, phoning people and filling-in some of the gaps that I have left as an absentee friend / brother / son / grandson, etc.

It has been more or less four years to the day since I left the UK to come to Japan and my contact with everyone since has been, er, eratic to say the least. I'm going back in about four hundred days or so, so there is a mystery cleared-up.

The new blog ties in nicely with some other things and there is a "oneness" ringing through my day and if I can only get everyhting done before the party tonight I will be happy that things are moving on as I could wish. Once this is online I can slowly start telling everyone that I have changed my phone number and email address, either by email or by new business card. If anything is going to stop me it will be the business card - I need card, ink and cooperation from the printer.

So there it is - 400 days is a way for me to keep in contact with friends and family and do away with my ultraspam emails (four hundred emails in the "to" box). Anyone who isn't a de-facto friend can become one by leaving comments and being friendly. Anyone who wants to be a member of my family, er, we'll see what we can do.

2005-06-15T16:29:00.000+09:00