Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

2003-11-03T02:22:00.000-08:00

I've moved! Please visit me here now: Confessions of a Grade School Role Model. See ya there.

2003-10-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

Sure living in Japan is a wonderful opportunity. I feel lucky every single day to be in such a bizarre, beautiful, confounding place, where I can't even walk to the corner store for a coffee jelly and a bag of snack fish without my reality being altered by some fortunate little spectacle.

But sometimes it makes me feel like the loneliest insane person on earth.

Five days a week, I divide my mornings between two different kindergartens. Two of those mornings, at one kindergarten, I am staff. I teach, I discipline, I console tears, I break up fights, I help build cardboard-box houses and origami tomatoes, I dish out bowls of rice and soup at lunch, and I sweep and mop the classrooms, just like any other Japanese teacher. The fact that I can't do these things while speaking fluent Japanese is not a problem, nor is the fact that none of my co-workers speak any English. Sometimes the Japanese teachers have to make comical hand gestures at me to clarify an explanation, but it's all very good-natured, like I'm a well-liked owner of a prosthetic leg doing my best in a tango class.

The other three mornings, I am alternately a patronized exotic guest, or an obstacle to be worked around. At least to the adults.

The kids are crazy about me. The three-year olds go into convulsive hopping fits when they see me coming through the front gate. The four-year olds slip me little love notes and hang on my legs, and I've caught five-year olds playing rock-paper-scissors, the ultimate decider of any childish Japanese controversy, over who gets to sit next to me at lunch. They swoon over my thermos-opening strength and coloring skill, and my hula-hooping and soccer-playing feats are the talk of the playground. And when I am slow to stand up or call-and-answer on cue, some of the brightest ones will come over and gently try to explain what's going on using the smallest English and Japanese words they know. I am a very strong, very big pet, maybe like a horse, but I am cherished.

To the adults, I am more of a big slow dumb ox, who is always standing in the middle of their road. While my production skills of Japanese are weak, usually having only nonsensical kindergarteners and dumbstruck adults to practice with, my comprehension skills are decent. I usually can get a rough grasp of what's going on, even if I can't comment on it intelligently. But the adults see far too much gray area here, and find it easier to ignore my existence altogether. Most of them still don't wish me even a "Good morning," even if I say it first.

I spend these days in deep inner dialogue, since the only actual dialogue I typically get is this:

(Small child running at me gleefully) "Karla-sensei! Ahh-poo-roo!"
"Yes. Apple. (Me desperately craving conversation) How are you?"
"??"
"Hooow. Arrre. Youuu. ? Ogenki desu ka?"
"Imfinethankyouandyou! Ahh-poo-roo! Labbit!"
"Apple, rabbit, yeah. Err... (Pointing at a picture on their socks) Pikachu!"
(High-five. Awkward laughing. Small child runs away. Repeat.)

Which would all be fine if I were Hugo Ball attending a meeting of the DaDaist Cabaret Voltaire, but as things are, this is not fulfilling my need for satisfying human interaction.

A typical day. I enter the classroom I've been assigned to that morning. 34 kids jostle to high-five me, and their teacher averts her eyes. I find myself a tiny one-foot-tall chair, and position it in some not-in-the-way back corner of the classroom.

Everyone suddenly gets up, puts on their shoes, and leaves the classroom. I think, if it is "toilet time," then I will just stay here because they will be back before I can lace up my shoes. But if it's like last time, and they have gone for an hour-long walk around the neighborhood collecting wildflowers, then I'd better follow. I wait a moment, see no signs of imminent return, and head out in search of my class. I hear noises from the playground, and follow them outside. Nope, wrong class. Back to the stairwell. Noises from the third floor, follow them, AHA! My class appears to be in the middle of some sort of "tag" game, but I can't tell who is "it." I'll just stand here and watch for a while until I can figure it out, and then try to join in somewhere so I can't be accused at the monthly meeting of non-participation, but not in such a way that right now I'll become a hindrance. Delicate line. OK, I've got it, those kids are "it," and after they tag someone, they -- hey, now they're all making a circle. I can make a circle, here go-- AAK! Now they're doing a synchronized dance, and all the kids behind me are copying me but I have no idea what's going on and the teacher is giving me a dirty look, so I'll just stand back here in the corner until I've figured it out, and Oops! Now they've sat down to do a call-and-response song, oh wait, I think I've heard this one before, but Oh no! it's different, and Hey! Where's everyone going now?

Actual comments paraphrased from the monthly meeting:
"You don't participate in the games." "But I don't know how to play the games. I never played them as a child. And you never tell me how to play them." "But we can't talk to you because you don't understand Japanese." "But I just understood that you told me I don't understand Japanese." "..."

"Your English pronunciation is weird." "Well, that's how people in the English-speaking place I'm from talk." "... [And furthermore, that round crunchy fruit is not an 'ahh-poo-roo' and the fifth to last letter of the alphabet is not 'boo-eee,' but let's talk about MY pronunciation.]

"You are teaching the children the alphabet song. But they don't know it." "But that's why I'm teaching it to them." "But they don't know it yet." "..."

Every morning, as per Japanese custom, I stop by the office to bow and "Ohayo gozaimasu" the principal even though she never looks at me when I do it. Because there is no space for me in the teacher's room, I must crouch in the stairwell between lessons for a throat-relieving quick sip from my thermos, like an illicit tea bandit. No one bothered to give me a map to the Undokai field, and when I finally hunted one down, no one had time to help me translate the street names. I never could find the place, and no one asked me the following Monday why I wasn't there. In September, we had a ceremony recognizing everyone's birthday that month but mine. The most frustrating part about the meeting comments is that they shoot down my strangely comforting theory that maybe this particular school occupies some sort of Twilight Zone-Spielberg space where I am visible only to children, and therefore the adults' behavior is excuseable if they can't even see me. My greatest fear about all this initially was that the children would see and follow their teachers' example. I've always felt the English lessons I teach to be a distant second in priority to being to these children a positive first interaction with foreignness, especially in a nation with such a recently xenophobic past. If the children studied their teachers' attitude toward me closely, I feared the message they would read there is this: Foreigners are an annoying but inevitable obstacle in the world that we must learn to work around. But so far, that doesn't seem to be the case.

2003-10-08T02:40:00.000-07:00

Arnold Schwarzenegger is the elected leader of the state with the fifth largest economy in the world. He is now the head of an organization which makes important choices regarding the fates of 35 million people.

Even after forcing myself to type those sentences, and then make myself stare at them until they form only a blur in my eyes, I still can't believe it. And I still have enough optimism left about my home country to never want to say something like, "Yeah, I'm not surprised," or even worse, "It figures." But the words still threaten to materialize on my tongue.

Um, well, at least he can't be President?

It feels like, after the mentally and emotionally exhausting but futile battle of the Bush "election," American has just given up. Like maybe the few people that actually even vote just go in and fill in the little ballot spaces to make a smiley face or the Van Halen logo or something like they did on the high school history final, knowing it doesn't do much good to choose the answer carefully when you didn't bother to study the material beforehand.

Perhaps it's time to add the office of "Homecoming King" to election ballots so people will have a way to officially recognize the man who is the most photogenic and popular without having to muddy up actual politics.

What are Gov. Schwarzenegger's positions on -- oh, forget it. It doesn't matter.

2003-10-07T15:36:00.000-07:00

Starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight,
PLEASE don't let Schwarzenegger be governor,
please, please, please...

(It was this headline on Salon that really put the fright in me: "Bush says he is ready to work with Arnold.")

Help us all.

2003-10-07T03:08:00.000-07:00

Alright, Japan, I've had about enough of this. I bet you thought I wouldn't notice if you did it again, but you were wrong. Wipe that smirk off your face and repeat after me:

"Corn is not a pizza topping. Mayonnaise is not a pizza topping. Same goes for carrots, scallops, catsup, bean sprouts, mochi (sticky rice paste balls), octopus, and seaweed."

I'm going to let the shrimp slide this time, but remember, I'm watching you. Now stop messing around, and go study your cookbook. For the last time.

2003-10-05T16:43:00.000-07:00

It' s my Japanniversary. Two years ago yesterday, I came to Japan. It was just barely three weeks after the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks, and I arrived on an enormous plane, 56 X 9 seats in economy, with maybe 60 other passengers. I had an entire row to myself, everyone did, and I combatted my nervousness by stretching out flat across a five-seat row to sleep, or going across the aisle to my choice of empty window seats to stare out at the clouds.

I wrote this is in my journal: "In 11 hours I'll be in Nagoya. I must admit to having entertained thoughts at each airport -- Austin, Dallas, Los Angeles, of deplaning and going no further, and heading back home beaten. I am glad I did not, although I'm not entirely certain how serious those thoughts were... I can't sleep. Too nervous, too excited, and I can only stare out the window and occasionally catch my reflection to flash it a look of disbelief... The plane is so empty, it's lonely... The only part of the flight attendant's speech I could understand is that something or other "desu"... Passing over a mountain range now which keeps disappearing under clouds, feeling sleepy..." And then the next day's entry after a sleepless night staring out the hotel window at a fiberglass dolphin bathed in neon lights crawling up the adjacent building, "AM I REALLY IN JAPAN??!!??!!?"

Two years later, I still sometimes flash my reflection a look of disbelief. And that makes me feel very lucky.

2003-10-03T01:31:00.000-07:00

Every morning on my way to some school or another, I get to pass this advertisement: "Super Exciting Pub GOO!" and a drawing of a Mickey Mouse-looking glove giving a big thumbs-up. Such a friendly way to start a morning, I think. I've got to find this GOO, but what if it doesn't live up to the ad? Then I just have to drive by every morning and go, "awwww...," all disappointed.

The last Undokai is tomorrow. I have to be at some high school's sports field at 8:40 in the morning, but then again, I get to fire the starting pistol for tug-of-war, and it's not so often a Texas girl gets to shoot a pistol that early in the day in Japan.

I'm actually looking forward to tomorrow. The four-year olds have a pirate theme, I helped them make the pirate booty out of recyclables and ribbon and glue last week, and the three-year olds are doing some sort of hopping dance while dressed as pandas. Living in Japan has convinced me that small children should probably ALWAYS be dressed as furry animals, or possibly insects. It just makes a better world somehow.

2003-10-02T05:56:00.000-07:00

I have Internet! World, watch out, you are MINE!!

Got my Yahoo BB modem in the mail yesterday, only to run it upstairs clasped tightly in both arms, rip open the box like I'm a Christmas puppy, and then have to put it away in the corner again disappointed. You should have seen my despondent frown, it was pitiful. It wasn't even the Japanese language instructional video that got me, it was the three-prong computer plug that wouldn't fit in any of my apartment's 2-prong outlets, and the fact that the only two stores open that time of night didn't sell any helpful accoutrements. Nevertheless, daylight finally came again, the stupid lazy sleeping probably just at home with their families or something computer store clerks finally opened their doors for business, and once again I have showed this country who is the boss of me.

Hooray for me! Now, if I can only get a day off work, but Undokai ends after this weekend. Yatta!!!

For some reason, in Japanese, this is considered a reasonable grammatical rule: to change "samui," or "It's cold" to its past negative, "It was not cold," simply drop the last "-i" on "samui," and add "-kuarimasendeshita." Easy as rhubarbauberginetomatillosasquatch pie!

2003-09-19T03:45:00.000-07:00

For the next two weeks, kindergartens throughout Japan will be holding Undokai, Autumn Sports Day. Inconveniently falling this year during the hottest, stickiest, heat strokingest part of the summer, practice for this major event supercedes nearly all other normal kindergarten activities. In their color-coded hats, the 3, 4, and 5-year olds spend their days now practicing tug-of-war, drum marches, human pyramids, synchronized dances, relay races, and marching in formation. How their teachers get them to make the three-child high pyramids is beyond me, as I still have trouble getting them to put their chairs in the half-circle we have made before every class for the past 6 months.

Japanese TV continues to captivate me. The last two days' viewing has treated/subjected me to:

"No Kiss League." No Kiss Man, cheered on by No Kiss Man Mama, challenges audience members to bouts of arm wrestling. Those who successfully defeat No Kiss Man are allowed a kiss from the pretty girl who oversees all from her couch. Contestants are chosen from the audience by random calls to their cell phones made by the girl. Their wallet contents are first examined: Gold's Gym card, bus pass, and so on, and then the arm wrestling begins. On the episode I saw, No Kiss Man quickly defeated the Gold's Gym guy, but was just as quickly put down by a skinny guy with glasses. The lucky winner, looking terrified, took his seat on the couch next to the girl, the lights were dimmed, and music cued. "Tonight I celebrate my love for you...". The girl planted the briefest possible peck on his cheek and immediately covered her shamed face with both hands, and the man turned a shocking shade of red. Cut to commercial.

Interview with Angelina Jolie. While the interviewer asks his typical Japanese-person-to-Gaijin questions, "Do you like Japanese food?", "Where do you want to go in Japan?", etc., a man in the corner drew in a sketchbook with a Sharpie, and flashed the work at Angelina while she answered questions. He wrote/drew: a stick figure rapelling down a wall, a man skipping happily down the street, a dog in a top hat, the words "Moon Walk!", "Dog Food," and "Miki House," "KFC" with a sketch of the Colonel, "Horny guy" in Japanese followed by "ICE!" in English, and a cat that when unfolded turned into a pig.

The making of a 26.5 cm sushi roll.

A contest between sushi chefs in a restaurant. The chefs would pick out specific customers via videocamera, quickly design a custom sushi roll for them, place it on the revolving sushi conveyor belt, and watch whether the customers grabbed the one meant for them: steak and asparagus for the soccer players, bacon-lettuce-tomato for the foreign man, French toast (!) and salmon for the Japanese mother. All but the designer of the French toast roll turned out to be excellent judges of character/sushi preference, and points were awarded accordingly.

2003-09-16T02:22:00.000-07:00

I spent a good deal of Sunday driving around looking for a computer I could use. Since I can't read the phone book, and clearly can't look up an address on my non-existent Internet, I headed straight downtown, assuming there must be some sort of Internet cafe that I could just bump into. I went to the tourist office at the train station. "Err,... Intanetto arimasuka?", and prepared my brain to receive the street directions I thought were surely coming.

"No." "Nowhere?" "No."

Oh.

And the library was closed for Random Japanese Holiday #12, so I drove to Nagoya, just a couple hours down the street and take a left.

So that's why you still have no new photos.

Random notes. Will Smith on a TV cooking show hosted by the popular boy band SMAP. He taste-tested various dishes, appeared to like the tempura the best, talked about his wife's Japanimation collection, and gave the teenage heartthrobs/chefs official pairs of sunglasses from his New Will Smith Movie Part II.

Not only does the Magic Bathtub in my apartment fill automatically at the press of a button, but it gauges the temperature and adds a ration of hot water every time a degree drops. For as long as I want it to. Woah.

A store at the mall sells canned Seal Curry. Also deer curry. And despite all the controversy I've heard about Japan's insistence that it still needs to hunt several whales a year for purely scientific purposes, a restaurant downtown offers whale sashimi, not sure what kind of whale.

2003-09-10T03:49:00.000-07:00

Today the Japanese teacher read the five-year olds a lovely story about a mole who pops his head out of the ground only to have his head shat upon. He toddles through the woods observing the darling woodsy animals, who all seem to be constantly poo-ing, trying to learn the originator of the poo he is wearing jauntily on his head like a ten-gallon hat. "Dare no unchi?" Is it the horse's who is even now poo-ing under this apple tree? Why no, his is round like a ball! and so on. The teacher even added a pellety-BB gun sound for the rabbit. Lovely. Unfortunately, this story was a cliff hanger, for she wouldn't finish the story until tomorrow. I won't be there tomorrow. I wonder, will the kids be speculating about the culprit in anxious whispers at snack time?

2003-09-08T03:06:00.000-07:00

It could be the language barrier, but I could swear a three-year old today told me her hamster has a telephone. Right in the middle of a long story about her mom killing a cockroach with a rolled-up newspaper. Another ran up to ask me in her best English, "Ham are you?" (I told her, "Fine, thanks, and you?") Children are weird. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the teacher who, when I was a preschooler, I bit on the toe (she was wearing sandals). At the time, it made perfect sense, because I liked her, but I would like to apologize anyway.

Still no Internet at home. Boo.

2003-09-03T02:59:00.000-07:00

Apparently, it's gonna be a couple weeks yet before I get Internet at the new apartment. And Japan is shockingly devoid of Internet cafes. I'd figured before I came here that DSL would be running through the gutters alongside rainwater and tiny useful robots that run on nothing but positive thoughts, but that's just not the case. So until then, Internet at home or tiny robots, whatever comes first, I guess I'll have to learn how to play outside in the sun again. I'll be back soon, I pinkyswear.

2003-09-01T02:58:00.000-07:00

It's my birthday. I'm in Japan. My drinking buddies are all in Texas. That's a problem.

Advantages of teleporting myself to Texas right now:
a) One year younger for 14 hours;
b) Not alone in a foreign country on my birthday. Again.

Disadvantages of said teleportation:
a) That's impossible, silly.

2003-08-28T23:36:00.000-07:00

This morning with my coffee, I watched a children's TV show featuring Konishiki, the retired champion sumo wrestler. He was dressed in a voluminous orange felt jumpsuit with yellow plastic spikes, and a curly blond British-judge-cut wig, like a friendly beach dinosaur who has lost his way. He recited a tongue twister in Japanese with a tiny 40 pound child, and did an admirable job too.

"Bouzu ga byoubu ni jouzu ni bouzu no e o kaita."
[The monk skillfully drew a picture of a monk on some canvas.]

I've never been a big fan of television. Not out of snobbery, but simply because I forget about its existence. But I know I need to make more of a conscious effort to watch TV in Japan. Maybe I should put up a post-it next to my car keys, "Watch TV." Because in addition to all the more (in)famous Japanese TV exploits of men being locked naked in empty apartments or getting dunked repeatedly in ice cold water, you can see children dressed like insects hopping and falling down a lot, or two full grown men dressed as a turtle and a rabbit playing a serious game of ping-pong, or game show contestants in Monsters, Inc. costumes being thrown into a wall of pies, or a dinosaur-clad famous sumo wrestler reciting tongue twisters. What a great country.

No Internet yet at the new apartment = no photos yet for you. Hopefully soon.

2003-08-20T05:43:00.000-07:00

Here's an excellent multimedia site on the Ainu, the recently-acknowledged-as-indigenous people of Hokkaido. If you wait through the introduction, you can hear an example of their music. You'll need Flash to see it.

2003-08-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

My new apartment has a button in the kitchen I can press to automatically fill the bathtub in a room maybe 6 feet down the hall. The water stops running when the bathtub is full. (I do however, have to first go into the bathroom to stop the drain.) That is so much cooler than the electric toilet seat warmer in my first apartment in Japan. That just felt like someone had already been sitting there.

2003-08-19T18:10:00.000-07:00

Sometime in September I was planning to move into a different company apartment, one not directly above the company's head office. It was offered to me just before I left for vacation, to be moved into at some convenient point in the future. I'm back from vacation now, but yesterday I received the following phone call while in a city several hours from home:

[Ring! Ring!]
Me: Hello?
Caller: Hi, Karla. This is (my boss' name). How is your vacation?
Me: Good. I think I'm going home tomorrow, I haven't decided yet.
Manager: Oh, good. Because we want to move the new person into your apartment the day after tomorrow.
Me: !!!

In Japan, "unfurnished apartment" means no stove, no fridge, no air conditioner (you have to go live in a shopping center if you want central), no light fixtures. I'll have to spend the next day or two between packing boxes and evicting dust bunnies rounding these things up. So unless I can arrange a way to post photos using two empty tin cans (anyone got a good pickled fish recipe?), and some twist ties, it might be a while.

2003-08-14T21:29:00.000-07:00

I had to scrap the mountain-climbing plans for dire lack of money. Oh yeah, Japan is really really expensive. But I did make it to the Ainu Village in Shiraoi, and then took 15 different local trains for 35 total hours over the course of 3 days to get to Fukui City, where I have old friends, and where I am now. Japan is famous for its superfast superefficient trains, which I once heard from an unreliable source are late, every train in the country added together, about 11 minutes total all year. That sounds about right. Even if you can't read the sign for the name of the city you are going to, if you know you will be in that city at 2:11 pm, you can fully expect to hop off that train at that moment, you don't even really have to check whether the train door is open yet or not because it will be, and be in the right city, even though there is an entirely other town at 2:13. It's amazing. Unless there was a suicide on the track that day, but that's another, very grim, story.

This wonderful efficiency comes at a very high price, so for the rest of us who aren't on company expense accounts, there are the local trains. For about a month each twice a year, during the national high vacation seasons, the JR rail company offers the "Seishun Juuhachi Kippu," which allows unlimited travel on local trains for five not necessarily consecutive days for 11,500 yen, about a hundred bucks American. Considering it costs 4300 yen to get from Fukui to Gifu, only two hours away, by express train, that's quite a good deal. Only it's local train, and that makes all the difference. "But Japan is smaller than California!" you may say. "And that one time in high school my buddies and I drove from San Francisco to L.A. in 93 minutes to see Psychofunkapus play at the Whisky, and were back in time to sneak into our bedroom windows before our parents even woke up!" perhaps you added. And then you would get all mad because I would call you a naive fool. Japan is really really mountainous, and filled with tunnels and tiny towns each two minutes apart from which people must be picked up, and to get from this one little spot to this other little spot only 2 km away takes about 9 hours. So anyway.

The Ainu Museum was fascinating. A little contrived perhaps in its recreated village and machine-made replica costumes perhaps, but what else can you do to show a culture that was stamped out by official government decree a hundred years ago? There were performances of traditional group dances which seem to resemble the call-and-response animal gesture dances of many traditional cultures I've seen, and music unlike anything I've ever heard. There seemed to be a great number of trilled "r's" sung, which hadn't expected from an Asian culture, and some round-style singing. It was beautiful and haunting, and I am so grateful to have heard it.

Looking forward to/dreading going home in a few days, and back to the real world of work and apartment-tenancy. But I will have time then to sort through my pictures and stories of the past few weeks, and put some of them here. Now I'm going outside to play in the, er, horrible oppressive humidity of Japanese summer, and call on some old friends.

2003-08-10T18:12:00.000-07:00

At the Museum of Northern Peoples in Hakodate, there is a fairly good exhibit on the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan. One of the few English explanations was on a study of earwax done by an Ainu researcher, complete with charts. Apparently there are two kinds of earwax: the sticky wet yellow kind prevalent among Caucasians, and a dry grey flaky type usually belonging to Asians. (Other ethnic/racial groups and their earwax were not mentioned.) The Ainu have the Caucasian kind. Hmmm.

I guess I would have preferred if the exhibit translator had also seen fit to explain in English about the beautiful Ainu clothing or intriguing tools or musical intruments on display, but it was a rare opportunity to see the word "earwax" printed nicely on good cardstock in a climate-controlled glass case.

Today in Sapporo. The Sapporo Beer Garden, an enormous span of patio tables and paper red lanterns on summer nights in Odori Park, serves the official beer to people in four-foot high bong-like plastic tubes with spigots, one on each table, from which customers then help themselves. It's amazing to see the four-and-a-half-feet tall waitresses rushing them around the crowded tables, one in each arm.

Tomorrow to Shiraoi to see another Ainu museum, and then to Daisetsu-zan National Park, home of Hokkaido's tallest mountain, which I may or may not attempt to climb, um, a little bit of.

2003-08-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

Now in Aomori, itching to write about all I've seen, but needing to control myself until I'm back home and not paying for Internet by the millisecond. Nikko was incredible. Whereas most things in Japan are guided by the aesthetic of "wabi," the eschewing of extravagance and gaudiness, Nikko is a multi-colored, brilliant, gold-gilded and scarlet wonder. Pictures later.

Had a small adventure on my way to Aomori, which ended in my spending the night in a town so small I nearly gave a waitress a heart attack by ordering the Japanese-style breakfast, and then eating the whole thing with chopsticks. I think she'll be telling her grandchildren about that, and I'll become a family legend.

The Nebuta Festival was unbelievable. America better hope Japan never challenges her to a fireworks showdown, because she doesn't stand a chance. All the previous shows I've ever seen in my life, and I really, really like fireworks, wouldn't add up to what I saw last night, if only in sheer number of explosions.

The festival floats were gorgeous. Again, pictures later. I was wandering around the stables where they stow them after the parade, taking pictures, when an elderly man somehow associated with the float spotted me among the million-something Japanese spectators. He asked me something about my camera, and was excited when I answered him in terrible Japanese. He told me about the float, and seemed amazed at my interest. He invited me to the back of the float, where I could peer inside the hollow form, hand-painted paper over a bamboo frame which takes a year to complete, and filled with hundreds of lightbulbs and a huge generator. He brought over a ladder and helped me climb onto the top of the float, and I spent the hour afterwards feeling strangely high, as if I had just been invited to do a solo with Mick Jagger onstage at Wembley Stadium or something. Standing on something so large and so beautiful, a work of art, running my hand over the expertly painted paper, was overwhelming and humbling.

Today I head for Hakodate in Hokkaido, which I know absolutely nothing about. I can't wait.

2003-08-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

Today is my last full day in Tokyo, but with so much city just outside the door of this Internet cafe, I'm too restless to detail my adventures just yet. So a brief rundown: Chinatown and the spectacular Ramen Museum in Yokohama, the Great Buddha and a money-washing shrine in Kamakura, Tokyo Tower, the fountain at the Imperial Palace, entirely too much time (or too little?) at the seven-story Tower Records in Shibuya, and enough walking to give me blisters bad enough for a two-day limp (so far). I love it here. Tomorrow I head to Nikko, and then to this festival. Amusing anecdotes to follow.

2003-07-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

I'm going on vacation for a month. Hooray for teaching! Maybe I'll write in August, maybe I won't. Have a good summer!

2003-07-27T05:43:00.000-07:00

New photos! See "Everyday Japan," "Festivals," and "Shirakawa" folders.

2003-07-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

And on the other hand, there is Matrix ping pong.

2003-07-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

I just returned from the fireworks show at Gifu's Nagara River. Most things in Japan are described as "one of the three somethingest somethings in Japan," and Gifu is supposed to have one of the three best fireworks festivals, but it truly was incredible. Roughly 30,000 fireworks were set off in a non-stop two and a half hour show, each segment sponsored by a different local company, fireworks that would have made Gandalf the Grey jealous. The usual sea anenome-shaped fireworks were there in abundance, but there were also red hearts, yellow '70s smiley faces, rainbow-colored rings, palm trees, sunflowers, the planet Saturn, and a color green I have never seen before, and which may haunt me for the rest of my life. Tens of thousands of spectators simultaneously trying to photograph the spectacle with their cell phones looked in the distance like fireflies in the night, and they tied up phone service throughout the entire city. The requisite festival food booths serving takoyaki, yakisoba, okonomiyaki, and chocolate bananas, and all apparently yakuza-owned, were out in the hundreds to remind me that food always tastes better when it is served skewered on a stick. Musical accompaniment included a particularly dramatic "Pomp and Circumstance" and a very disco version of the "Sesame Street" theme song. "Auld Lang Syne" signalled the end of the show, which is also used in Japan to tell shoppers that the store is closing and it is time to go home, and always makes me think that New Year's Eve parties in America must become very confusing to Japanese visitors right around midnight. Fireworks are a huge part of Japanese summer, you can even pick them up at the convenience store along with a 4-pack of beer and some sushi, but I have never seen any that equalled what I saw tonight. A spectacular evening.

2003-07-25T02:44:00.000-07:00

Words fail me. I wonder how long before they edit the caption. Thanks, Jacob.

2003-07-24T20:25:00.000-07:00

"Do you have a great single friend that you want to help?" urges Friendster on their homepage. Yes, help your single friend! They need HELP! "Some of my best friends are single." "This is my friend John. He's (ssshh! single!) in need of help. Try not to stare at his naked ring finger, though. He's very, sensitive, about that. (Sssshh!) He's had it all his life."

Single in Japan is especially unseemly. I knew a Japanese woman married to a Texan. She told me about how she broke the news of her big white fiance to her conservative parents, and how, now that she was over 25 and "Christmas cake" (no one wants you after the 25th), they were just happy SOMEONE was taking her, and they would deal with their disappointment privately. Relationships are different in Japan. Not all of them, of course, I know a few couples who are actually deeply in love, but these stand out. Here there are roles to be filled, and you fill them. I have never seen the girlfriend of one of my best male friends here. I don't even know her name. I may have gotten it out of him once, and then forgotten it through his lack of repetition. She is not part of his large circle of friends, nor he of hers. They never do anything together socially, have nothing in common, she doesn't like to sleep with him, and he doesn't want to marry her. He is unable to answer simple questions about her, although they have been dating for two years. But he's 33, and there's a role to be filled, and he doesn't hate her.

Another male friend of mine is married with two young children. He seems to actually love his wife, although I didn't meet her for two years. My friend and I like the same music, and we used to go to a lot of shows together, since I didn't have a car, and we're friends. There was a general assumption that we were dating, however, which was never once questioned or considered, let alone shocking to anyone. No one even asked about the nature of our relationship, they just assumed, and they were fine with what they imagined. A married man in my hometown being seen in the frequent company of a woman not his wife would not get such calm and unquestioned resignation from his peers. He would at least have to justify the situation if it didn't stink, or hide it if it did. There was of course nothing between my friend and I, but no one seemed to be concerned that there might be. There was no gossip, no giggles, no awkward staring, just unthinking acceptance. No one asked, because no one cared.

An ex-student of mine spent some time in Canada as an exchange student. Of all the cultural differences between Japan and Canada, she was most struck by the relationship between her host parents. One evening she and her host mother were sitting on the back deck, when the host father brought his wife a glass of wine, and sat down with his family to relax. My student said she almost cried, she had never seen a husband make any kind of similar gesture for his wife, bringing her a glass of wine and sitting with her.

I read of a modern phenomenon among aging Japanese men. The men spend their entire lives, quite literally, in the service of their companies. Before the economy went south, a college-educated man in Japan could count on receiving a decent job upon graduation, and staying with it until his retirement. The company also holds dibs on his social life, and his paychecks are handed over to his wife, who sees to the management of the home her husband stops in at occasionally for supplies. The population of Japan is aging rapidly now, people are living longer, and men are retiring earlier, leaving them with unprecedented amounts of free time in their old age. Men are leaving their offices and with it their entire social universe, abruptly powerless and coming home to live with the women who reign over their household, women they barely know, who have been leading virtually separate lives for the 40 or 50 years since their weddings. Many marriages in Japan seem to resemble business partnerships more than romantic unions, and the men suddenly find themselves under new management. The shock must be excruciating.

Your single friend does not, just by virtue of existing, need help. I have both seen and had good relationships, but I have also seen far too many relationships resulting out of perception of a role to be filled. If one half-person finds another half-person and they get together, they think it will result in a whole person. But, as I frequently tried to express to my high school guidance counselor, there is more to it than math.

2003-07-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

More new photos! I just posted Miyajima and Takayama.

Today I barely resisted buying a T-shirt that said, "Jack Off All Trades."

While I was driving to work, the Vapors' "Turning Japanese" came on my car stereo, and made me laugh so hard I nearly wrecked. I haven't heard that song in a really long time. Certainly not since I've been, you know.

I sometimes find it fun to picture the more mundane scenes of my life as the acts of a very bad musical. I also have a weird fantasy that maybe if a very dull person hears just the right rock song, they will suddenly become enlightened and shrug off the earth tones and pastels of their ho-hum life. I often think that I am the person to help them to this epiphany. Today while I was stuck in traffic behind a particularly pinched-looking salaryman, I imagined changing his life with my car stereo. I was playing "If the Kids are United" really loud with the windows down, and I imagined him throwing his car into park right there in the middle of rush hour, tearing off his white driving gloves and throwing off his tie, climbing out the window of his car, and jumping onto its roof. In my imaginary musical, he gathered together the entire frustrations of his boring middle-agehood and put his fist through the windshield of his Audi, and was running through traffic pumping his bloody, freed fist in time to my speakers. But then the light finally changed, and I had to get back to driving. Right about then, an entire van full of police dressed like the 1960s G.I. Joe police action figure series drove by. They would have been perfect for the big climactic anarchist salaryman vs. cops dance-rumble scene of the musical. Japan ALWAYS looks like it's dressed to be in a musical, for that matter.

2003-07-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

Hooray! New photos here. Now with 50% more resolution! I'll be working on the photo albums over the next week, because I like you.

2003-07-11T04:09:00.000-07:00

Being a foreigner in Japan can feel like being a movie star. Unfortunately, it's usually the Elephant Man.

2003-07-06T07:19:00.000-07:00

Last week, the kindergarten had a visit from Kyoro-chan, beloved cartoon bird and purveyor of Choco-Ball brand chocolate candies. I've since discovered that Kyoro-chan is also a bustling businessbird, with his own fan clubs, video games, and a new animated television series. However, he admirably managed to take a morning off from his busy schedule to go to a Buddhist kindergarten and pitch small boxes of candy to five-year olds.

The kids spent weeks getting ready for Kyoro-chan's visit. The four-year olds glued tiny colored pieces of paper inside the lines of a pre-drawn picture to make an enormous Kyoro-chan mural. Each of the five-year olds colored in their own company-issued pictures of Kyoro-chan, which were taped to every conceivable surface of the building's exterior, and the entire class learned a special Kyoro-chan dance. The air of the entire kindergarten was abuzz with the impending visit from the chocolate icon.

On the appointed morning, the five-year olds were giddily assembled in a second-floor classroom, while Kyoro-chan zipped up his suit outside his van in the parking lot. Just outside the window, a 30-something year old woman with enormous pigtails and a wireless headset microphone practiced her own Kyoro-chan dance in the empty playground. "Genki" does not begin to describe the look of dumb glee that contorted her face.

Finally, the children were filed outside. They were sat squirmily on the ground around the perimeter of the playground, and Kyoro-chan and his genki human friend took over the center. The children wriggled and laughed and pointed excitedly at the vinyl bird, who could only flap his useless wings at them, at least as much as the constraints of his costume would permit him. Meanwhile, his friend launched into a very genki sales pitch.

"Choco-ball candy is delicious! I love Choco-ball! It comes in strawberry, banana, and peanut flavors! They are so delicious! I love Choco-ball! Do you love Choco-ball too? Raise your hands if you love it! Do you love strawberry? Banana? Peanut? It is so delicious!"

This continued for no less than 10 minutes. Then the Choco-ball DJ cued the Choco-ball theme song, and the bird and the woman did the Choco-ball dance.

If you have ever seen a group of Japanese schoolgirls gathering for a photo, and if you mentally speed up all that requisite primping and posing and head-tilting to the pace of a commercial jingle, and repeat it all on a loop for about 5 minutes, then you have the Choco-ball dance. The bird, his poor overheated fluttering birdheart wrapped in all those layers of foam and cheap plastic, danced only as much as his precarious balance would let him, flapping his pitiful wings in time to the beat. The song ended, and the teachers made the children clap uproariously. Then they were all herded into the center to do their own dance homage to the candy.

200 five-year olds in matching hats dancing will ALWAYS be entertaining, overbearing candypushers or no.

Back in their classrooms, the kids clutched tiny boxes of chocolate love from Kyoro-chan, and the teachers told them about their next exciting visitor.

"Ronald McDonald is coming, everyone! He's from the same country as Karla-sensei!"

I groaned.

And for the rest of the week, the school PA system played over and over the Choco-ball theme song.

2003-07-01T05:21:00.000-07:00

T-shirts I spotted today at kindergarten: "The future's here. Popcorn! We are it, we are on our own," and "Drug store's symbol of happiness." At the mall, I saw a prominent children's clothing label sign proclaiming rather disturbingly, "We are in kids daily," however I have elected to not think about that sign ever again.

2003-06-30T06:50:00.000-07:00

Life can have a perverse way of repeating over and over just a handful of heartaches but making sure you alternate sides of them. Sometimes you throw the cream pie, sometimes the cream pie gets thrown at you.

I'm also rediscovering the delicate art of exile. A successful life as an expat requires that you abandon any silly qualms about going to the movies alone. You must learn to romance yourself, cook yourself elaborate dinners, buy yourself thoughtful gifts, take yourself on long walks, have deep conversations with yourself long into the night. The interpersonal connections come later, of course, but first the self-reliance must be mastered. And on some days you have to swallow more pride than water. These are not necessarily bad things. Nothing truly worthwhile is ever easy.

Regret coming back here? Sometimes yes. And mostly no. Depends on when I'm asked. The end of the tunnel always turns out to be so incredible, always there is something waiting there that adds dimension to my life I never could have guessed at. I've become a little addicted to the treasure hunt that comes after the tunnel, and I'd be half the person I am without it.

This last weekend I watched Luc Besson's The Dancer, and it made me cry. I haven't cried during a movie that I can recall since The Fox and the Hound was first released in theaters. But how I cried. Because that movie was about me. It's about a mute dancer. She spends a lot of the movie being frustrated because she can't communicate with anyone. She tries to buy a single token from the New York City subway vendor with a $20. She holds up one finger and mouths through the glass, "Just one!", and the woman gives her a handful of tokens in exchange for her last $20 in the world, and then shoos her away. The dancer tries to reason with the vendor, but in the end she just has to wander back home dejectedly and frustrated and poor. She is rejected from a dance audition solely because she can't say her name into the mike and the casting people say she can't have a part because "communication would be difficult," and she goes home and sobs heavily under a broken heart. The next day, still miserable, she goes to the deaf school where she teaches dance part-time, and the children somehow sense her mood and surround her with hugs and drawings and the sweetest of words, and she cries and then she feels a little better. That movie made me cry because I've had all of those experiences, today, yesterday, the day before. Maybe I should contact Luc Besson for a part. I know for a fact that nobody gives better hugs to a sad person than a child, and I am lucky to know so many children here.

2003-06-30T04:03:00.000-07:00

Katharine Hepburn died yesterday. When everyone else in my middle school English class wrote their biography reports about Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, or what's-his-name from Duran Duran, I wrote mine about her. She was my first public example of a graceful and self-reliant woman, and I am sad she is gone.

2003-06-29T03:52:00.000-07:00

In Japan, "McDonald's" is a six-syllable word, a buffet is called a "Viking," and "shoe cream" is a delicious, flaky pastry. I'm glad I already knew English before I got here, because this might be a confusing place to have to learn it.

2003-06-27T21:06:00.000-07:00

Tanabata, the Star Festival, will be this July 7. This event marks the one night of the year when the mythical lovers Altair the Cowherd Star and Vega the Weaver Star are allowed to meet. It seems like a very sad occasion to me, and I wish that for their own sakes Altair and Vega could just move on, but the upside for us mortals is that we get to make a wish.

Unfortunately, I stopped making wishes a long time ago, when I became aware of the existence of the Evil Genie. This is the genie who is always turning people in jokes into hot dogs because they ask to be made one with everything. He is also the genie who contributed to my life as a cynic.

Me: "I wish I could find a nice and intelligent boyfriend."
Evil Genie (handing me a boyfriend): "Ooh ho!" (I always imagine him with Ed McMahon's voice.) "But you didn't say he couldn't be schizophrenic!"
Me: "Yep, you got me there, Evil Genie." [Thinks for a while.] "OK. I wish for a boyfriend who is nice, intelligent, non-schizophrenic, not running from the law, and doesn't have a crack habit."
Evil Genie (handing me a boyfriend): "Hoo! But you never said he couldn't have a secret girlfriend!"
Me: "No, I guess I didn't. You got me again. I hate you, Evil Genie. Alright. I wish for a boyfriend who is nice, intelligent, non-schizophrenic, not running from the law, doesn't have a crack habit, is single, is heterosexual, won't die an untimely death, is not already dead, is human, won't sleep with my roommate, doesn't have more than one head, is not a monk or priest, and whose lower half of his body is not that of a fish or horse. Did I leave anything out?"
Evil Genie (handing me a boyfriend): "Ooh HO! You forgot to say he couldn't move to Dubai!"
Me: "I hate you Evil Genie! Aaaaaarrrrghh! Just give me a sandwich then."
Evil Genie (handing me a sandwich): "I hope you like sandwiches made of human heads!"
Me: [jumps out of window]

I've found it far too time-consuming and headache-inducing to make wishes anymore, even being the detail-oriented person that I am. I hate you, Evil Genie.

Happy Tanabata.

2003-06-26T08:07:00.000-07:00

What Japan really needs is a nap. Three, maybe four hours, curtains drawn, lights dimmed, everyone's heads down on their desks. It would of course have to be strictly enforced. No sneaking flashlights under the covers for illicit certification-exam study or getting a head start on reading assignments for self-betterment classes or filling out reports. Just rest. And then after a little while, the lights could all be switched back on just in time for the post-work meetings, and later everyone could go to their respective service clubs well-rested.

2003-06-23T06:39:00.000-07:00

I was distracted from a housekeeping rut this evening when laundry reminded me of my slowly-growing collection of remarkable Japanese T-shirts. My favorites:

"Relaxing Confort Under The Ground!! Awesome. She laughs at everything you say. Because she has fine teeth."

"Egoistglamour. When I'm drinking fruit juice I wish I were a flamingo... because then everyone could see how pale red I am about glamorous."

(Front: Picture of cheeseburger)"Junk Food Paradise. It is as delicious as slaver comes out."
(Back: Picture of cheeseburger, "poteto," and "fresh drink")"Junk Food Culture. The American culture where it stuck to the life."

and my newest acquisition, "Encouraging The Good And Punishing The Evil boldly Fully Ripened joyful look Center Interest curry favor with in fluential Distin Guished vital point."

I also have a shirt I bought in Thailand with a large Kanji character on the front. It wasn't printed in Japan. I wonder what sort of ridiculous sentiment it might say in broken Japanese.

2003-06-19T05:41:00.000-07:00

Japan is not yet finished; it is constantly under construction. Whereas I now have a minimum one-hour commute to work every day, I used to have a five-minute walk. And yet, even in that short distance, I never once failed to pass at least one building being put up or torn down, in an entire year's time. Once while making my morning coffee, I heard an unusual amount of noise outside. I pushed aside the curtain, only to see a candy-colored bulldozer on top of a pile of rubble, where only two nights previous, there had been a teenage rock band practicing Bon Jovi covers in a garage. Three days later, they poured the foundation for the building's replacement. Bon Jovi never came back.

When I moved into my first apartment, there was a somewhat non-descript, possibly Italian restaurant nearby. Then suddenly one day, it was gone. And not gone as in, they put a plastic sheet over the name on the sign and covered up the windows with newspaper, but gone as in, gutted. Pipes, so long. Electrical wiring, it's been fun. Floor, catch ya later, gone.

And then about a week later, a construction crew showed up with eager hammers and shiny new linoleum, and put it all back together again. It became a coffee shop, just like that. Easy as an off-off-Broadway set change.

Something I find very charming about Japanese construction crews -- rough, sweaty, hard-physical-laboring bad boys that they are, they always line their shoes up in neat little rows outside of whatever building they're power-drilling and sand-blasting the interior of. I don't know why, but it always makes me giggle.

2003-06-17T16:31:00.000-07:00

I completely bowled over one of my students' mothers yesterday by understanding the Japanese word for "cake." It's pronounced "cake-y."

2003-06-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

It's possible you could convince me there's a worse taste than Japanese mouthwash, but it would be a hard sell.

2003-06-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

Tonight for dinner, I went to my local Denny's, where you can order French Toast, but also octopus spaghetti and a double shot of whiskey. I got the pasta set: salad, entree, dessert, and a beverage; sets are generally a good deal. The set meal has become such a regular part of my experience that I no longer know whether it is a real English-language concept or a Japanese-English one. For my salad, I chose from the menu the most photogenic and most squid-less option, tofu and watercress. The tofu was lightly fried and slightly warm, the watercress was, watercressy. It was yummy, I was happy. Until I saw eyes. Staring at me. From my salad. Woah.

Dozens and dozens of tiny expressionless eyes peered up at me from my plate, peeking from behind watercress and under tofu. I gritted my teeth slightly and leaned in for closer inspection. Someone had filled my salad with creatures.

The eyes were those of tiny, pale, three-quarter inch long, stiffly curled eels? snakes? flatworms? I didn't even want to know. I just wanted them, not in my salad. I picked them up carefully one-by-one and hid them under a ball of shredded daikon. Other diners watched disapprovingly, and I didn't care. What were my bad manners compared to those of whoever had snuck creatures into my salad?! I finished it, really, really carefully, and vowed not to look too closely at the mushroom-spinach spaghetti. If ignorance isn't always bliss, sometimes it'll at least help keep you fed.

2003-06-14T19:59:00.000-07:00

Funny thing about trying to speak Japanese here, which I've heard mentioned by many people before. Even if you are somehow speaking perfectly intelligible Japanese, there seems to be a filter in the brains of some people that broadcasts a white noise over everything you are telling them, which says, "Foreigner alert! It's a foreigner! You do not understand anything she is saying! I repeat, you do NOT understand! It is imperative that you answer her only in broken English or pass her off to a young person! Woo-ooo woo-ooo bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!"

Once during my first year here, when my Japanese was considerably worse than it is now, I was at a restaurant with a visiting American friend. I struggled with my newly-acquired knowledge of katakana and haltingly read over the menu, and managed to assemble our order of sashimi and beer. Sashimi was their specialty. I flagged over the middle-aged waitress to order. We wanted an order of maguro and an order of salmon, which I pointed to on the menu, and backed up my desired quantity of "hitotsu" of each by holding up just one finger. We also wanted two beers, and I requested "biiru (sounds almost just like 'beer' in English) futatsu," for which I held up two fingers. We wanted the "daijaki" size, which I indicated by saying "daijaki" and mimicking a large-sized beer mug with my hands. I lacked confidence in my Japanese, but I had ordered beer and pointed to things on the menu successfully before, and I felt I had given enough accompanying hand gestures to clear up any possible discrepancies.

And yet the waitress was at a loss. She refused to acknowledge my finger pointing at the menu or the one counting numbers, and instead reached into her apron for her cell phone. She told me in English, "I daughter telephone. English study," and proceeded to dial. I was dumbfounded, but unable to argue. The waitress handed me the phone. "Uh, hi?" "Hi. I am your waitress' daughter. She wants you to tell me your order, and then I'll tell her," a bored teenaged voice greeted me. "Um, yeah. Okay. We want one order of maguro, one order of salmon, and 2 large beers." "Is that it?" "Yeah." "Okay, I'll tell her," yawned the voice. So the daughter told her, I expect, "Maguro hitotsu, salmon hitotsu. Biiru futatsu. Daijaki."

A little while later our waitress brought out two large beers and a plate of shrimp.

2003-06-13T21:58:00.000-07:00

Late last night/early this morning, I got outrageously lost. I was driving home from a co-worker's house after a night of gossip and fondue, when I was defeated by the terrible equation of 2 a.m. + Friday the 13th + full moon + utterly exhausted + no streetlights + no street signs + endless acres of uniform rice fields + no natural sense of direction + directions from a tired, drunk person with my shared confusion of left and right + roads designed primarily to confuse the enemies of Gifu in samurai days of yore. Obviously, the odds were against me from the start, but that didn't help my mood any when I finally pulled into the parking lot near the only electric light for kilometers, the "Timely" convenience store.

My only allies in this battle to get home were two small scraps of Hello Kitty stationery with a hand-drawn map, a single meandering line drawn past a lot of quickly forgotten one-letter abbreviations for places that either were on a different side of the road than I was expecting, or had long-since had their neon turned off and were therefore invisible in the dark. Also, there are very very few street names in Japan, and rice fields make lousy landmarks. ("You know that one rice field where the plants are just a little taller than in the one next to it, and there's a small pile of half-burnt refuse in the southeast corner? Turn left there.")

Knowing that pulling off to the side of the road and napping until daylight would do little to help, as I doubted that lack of light was my only problem getting home, I decided to look for help. In Japanese.

I astonished awake the old man behind the counter, and showed him my Hello Kitty "map." He turned it around and around and shook his head. He said, "Jibbajibbajibbajibbajibbajibbajibba desu ka?" I pointed at the final X on my map, and mumbled sleepily, "Koko. Ikitai. Onegaishimasu." "Here. I want to go. Please." Like a caveman, only polite-like. He sleepily scratched his head. I told him the name of a bridge near my apartment, the only landmark I can name. He blinked at me. I wrote the name of the bridge in Japanese, and he got very excited, but only because I wrote in Japanese and not because the bridge was familiar.

Our nervous laughter was shortly broken off when three teenage boys entered the shop. He raced the map over to them and asked them if they spoke any English. One of them looked at the map, pointed at the starting point X, and pronounced with proud flourish, "My House." The old man looked victorious until I translated "My House," the name of the place from which I'd come, into Japanese. I think this was when we all realized the futility of my situation. Nearly a half-hour had now passed.

A sort of impromptu conference on my map had now convened around the front counter, and another man entered the shop and quickly joined. Now well over half asleep and still unable to summon much more Japanese, or any other language, from my exhausted brain, I continued to lead in turn each index finger in the shop along the meandering line of my map. And now I just felt stupid.

Finally, yet another man entered the shop. He seemed to take pity on me, and I was now in no position to reject pity. He knew the location of the bridge I had written, and said I could follow him to it in my car. I accepted, and within minutes was again among familiar rice. Turns out I was only about 5 miles away from home the whole time.

2003-06-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

A strange bit of culture shock today. The five-year olds are making Fathers' Day projects, the first stage of which is to draw a large portrait of their dads. Most of the kids drew their fathers with a great deal of stubble, some holding a cigarette or beer or both. They drew each separate facial feature as a class, "OK, and now let's draw the nose..." and so on. When it came time to draw the eyes, the teacher said, "Now get your black crayon, and let's color the eyes." Having grown up in America, I've never been in the situation to take for granted that everyone's father has the same color eyes, and it was slightly surreal. After class, one of the kids came up to me and stared into my face for quite a few minutes before finally commenting amazedly, "Not everyone has brown eyes?" A blue-eyed teacher I know admitted to me that perhaps her preference for wearing dark-lensed eyeglasses is due in part to her students' frequent comments of, "Kimoi," or "Gross."

2003-06-07T19:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes living in Japan feels a bit like being in a relationship with an ill-tempered but extremely attractive person. You question your motives, your priorities, yourself, and just when you are determined not to put up with even one more unreasonable outburst, it blinks big limpid eyes at you, and you melt, and you kick yourself for being so rash and ungrateful. Once last year, walking home in a dark distraught cloud, I could picture nothing more in my future than getting on the first plane bound for the comfort and familiarity of home. But my route happened to take me right past the train station, and when I turned to catch a glimpse of my escape route, instead I saw a man, briefcase in hand, patiently waiting at the turnstile, dressed head-to-toe like a very furry pink bunny and causing no stir among the crowd. And I knew I could not leave this ridiculous place, if only to see what surprise it might spring on me next.

Yesterday, in the blur of a What The Hell Am I Doing Here Will You All Just Please Stop Staring At Me funk, I wandered into an electronics store. Full-body-massage recliner chairs, tiny clear countertop automatic dishwashers, glorious flat-screen TVs, stereos worthy of art museum display, I was temporarily lost in guilty commercialist ecstasy. I left with an exquisite miniature stereo, on sale mind you, not in my arms but even better in those of the sales clerk who followed me out to my car. The Japanese service industry is right out of the storyboards of Breakfast at Tiffany's, I never pump my own gas or clean my own car windows, and every time I go shopping, I feel like I should have an entourage laden with hatboxes behind me and a small lapdog bounding at my heels. I carefully unwrapped my exquisite stereo, rearranged my apartment around it for the 80th time, and for the 80th time tried to feel at home. After all the frustrations and humiliations I am often left with here, Japan still never fails to charm and surprise me and make me feel like a dazzled 6 year old with a bank account, and I guess that is why I'm still here.

2003-06-03T04:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the way I cope with the sheer multitude of mind-blowing everyday sights here is to catalogue them mentally: unexpected things sold in vending machines, creative uses of English, inexplicable fashion statements, things people are willing to put in their mouths as food, and so on. During today's long commute home, I catalogued those things which have caught my attention on Japan's roadways, specifically those in the last week.

This past weekend, I took a short road trip with a friend to Nagoya via the highway. It will be more fun for the wild imaginations of those reading if I leave out the specifics about the numerous love hotels along the route shaped like towering Bavarian castles or zoos topped by Godzilla-sized zebras and giraffes, or the one curiously called "Hotel America Twin Towers." They look like Vegas except that they're places where people go to NOT be seen. I'll say no more.

I also saw a sign which made me annoyed that my mobile phone cannot take photos at 80 km/h. It was a small blue rectangle with a reflective white drawing of the head of a serene baby with its eyes closed, and three stars above its cheek. No words. My friend said it was to remind people to be quiet because there might be children sleeping nearby, a thoughtful sentiment but a questionable one given its highway-side placement. Just about the time I stopped laughing, we came to a small traffic snarl near a roadwork site overseen by a neatly uniformed flagger. Only he was not a real man, but a flagger MANNEQUIN. Fiberglass, by the looks of him, although the white traffic flag was real, and waving vigorously in the breeze. I could not help but think what an incredibly demeaning sight this must be for all the millions of REAL stationary flaggers who man Japan's countless construction sites.

Yesterday, while stopped in traffic behind a Daihatsu Naked, I watched a battalion of middle-aged expensively-suited professionals, ties or hose carefully intact, wearing plastic gloves and filling shopping bags with trash picked up from along the roadways, chatting amicably, without a look of shame among them. This was not county jail, this was middle management. Try telling the execs at Smith-Barney it's their turn to pick up the street rubbish, and then get ready to run, or to litigate.

2003-05-31T19:14:00.000-07:00

This past Thursday was the first field trip of one of my kindergartens. It was an ill-conceived romp up an extremely steep and slippery, avalanche-waiting-to-happen mountain in the company of roughly 140 five-year olds in matching lime green and white P.E. outfits and age-identifying pink hats. Four-year olds have yellow ones, and three-year olds the blue. Surreal? Yes of course it's Japan. Refreshing mountain-air exercise? No no a thousand times no: steep; slippery; avalanche; roughly 140; five-year olds. I may not have understood everything they said, but I'm pretty sure it was something like, "Are we there yet? I'm tiiiiired. I'm thirrrrsty. Hee hee, look at the cute deadly millipede crawling up my leg. Ow, I almost fell off that jagged cliff again." But finally at the top, we were rewarded with the lovely lovely bento that we had just hauled up on our own backs.

The Japanese nutritional guidelines call for 30 different types of food to be eaten daily, and bento does its best to knock out about half of those at lunch. Bento is whatever you want it to be, as long as it's at least 10 different types of food each in tiny quantities, ideally half of which are squiggly mushy things with daikon, all served up in a multi-compartmented box. It's quite good. In kindergarten, though, bento calls for no-holds-barred maternal competition. A high school ex-student of mine once told me that bento offered Japanese moms a rare chance to show their creativity and love in a public forum, albeit a school lunchroom, and that moms sometimes went to extreme lengths and woke up at terrifically early hours to be able to provide their child with the most aesthetically-pleasing lunch possible. Department stores stock all manner of accessories to help moms turn ordinary sushi rolls into extraordinary tiny seaweed-outlined pandas, hot dogs into octopi, raw carrots into goldfish, onigiri into popular cartoon characters.

The kindergarteners devoured their whimsical lunches and I ate mine picked up earlier that morning from the convenience store, and we descended the mountain with our panda-less bento boxes, jagged-rock scrapes, cell phone photo-memories, and bags full of pinecones and rocks to show for our efforts. We returned to the pink and blue manga character-festooned school buses and sang adorable songs or stared blankly out the window, depending on our country of origin, and rode exhaustedly back to kindergarten.

And of course, there's a few new tiny photos of the whole affair here.

2003-05-24T01:41:00.000-07:00

The building my apartment is in is surrounded by rice fields. Across the rice fields is a temple. Behind the temple is a cemetery. Next to the cemetery, not 20 feet from the nearest headstone, is a playground. Monkeybars, swings, and a slide. See the Mobile Phone Gallery for tiny fuzzy pictures, and I will continue to mull this over.

2003-05-20T21:57:00.000-07:00

What's the last thing you would expect to see printed on the product stickers of two Bridgestone tires riding in the bed of the pickup in front of you on the highway? Is it perhaps, "Be Silky. Be Silky. Be Silky"? Because that was mine. But I'm in Japan, and I need to remember to keep my mind open to such possibilities.

2003-05-20T04:07:00.000-07:00

So much for my scheme to cheat the free Blogger system by putting pictures directly on this page. I will now step back in line. I've created a new "Mobile Phone Gallery" on Yahoo! instead. See link to your left. The pictures will be tiny and blurry, but my good intentions are large and crystal clear. Bon appetit.

2003-05-19T07:11:00.000-07:00

Say, are these new fancy photos loading okay? Anyone? Anyone? Thanks...

2003-05-19T03:11:00.000-07:00

Every town in Japan is famous for something. Gifu is famous for goryo ukai, cormorant fishing, and last night I went to the river to watch. My first introduction to the sport was in a book my grandmother gave me around age 7, The Story About Ping.

In goryo ukai, a team of two or more fishermen and about ten cormorants tethered by long ropes to a boat head out onto the river around dusk. Cormorants are largish dark sleek seabirds similar to loons, somewhere between a duck and a goose in size. One fisherman holds the leashes of the birds, while the other tends to the fire, a wire basket full of swinging burning logs which hangs from a long arched post at the front of the boat, and which provides the only illumination. The birds, still tethered, dive for fish following instinct, but are prevented from swallowing them by the tight rings worn around their necks. Whenever a cormorant makes a catch, the fisherman hauls him in, takes the fish from his bill, and throws him back in the water to catch more. This lasts for several hours.

Ukai fishing has been practiced in Japan for about 1,300 years, but like many such ancient arts, it is dying out. It is no longer a commercially viable fishing method, however it has found new life in the tourist industry. There were about 20 tourist boats besides ours last night, each one capable of holding 15-20 people, mostly elderly onsen guests. So while the few remaining ukai practitioners may not be able to make a living from the fish they catch, the $30 per tourist fee, more with optional dinner service, has enabled them to survive.

For more information on goryo ukai, and far better pictures than I was able to capture with my mobile phone, go here or here.

2003-05-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

The post offices here often give me small presents when I mail letters home. I've gotten a small kite, an inflatable paper beach ball, a package of origami paper, and some sort of plastic whirling toy, all slipped in with my change. Today I received two packets of flower seeds. At the post office in Texas, not even the smiles were free.

2003-05-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

I had to call roll today for a class of 32 four-year-olds. They giggled a lot at my pronunciation. Remember that one really nice, quiet Chinese teacher who used to substitute sometimes in third grade? And during the spelling quiz, every time she said "number three" and "number thirteen," everyone snickered because she pronounced it "number tree" and "number turteen"? Well today, that was me. And if that's karma, I'm already dreading the first field trip.

2003-05-13T03:15:00.000-07:00

Words the kindergarteners have picked up so far from hanging out with me: "Wow!", "Yay!", "Alright!", and "You're welcome" (sort of). Words I've picked up from the kindergarteners: "Dekita? (Can you do it?)", "Dekita! (I did it!)", and "Oshii! (I'm a four-year-old who has to pee NOW!)". I think I'm definitely getting the better language lesson.

2003-05-11T02:58:00.000-07:00

On Friday, the kindergarteners and I spent the afternoon coloring. As an adult, it's easy to forget what simple bliss coloring can be. I was also surprised at how much better I've gotten since the last time I colored approximately 20 years ago, even without any practice in the meantime at all. I recreated the desert island scene I was fond of drawing back in elementary school, blue water, lazy butterflies, a lone palm tree, bright flowers growing inexplicably out of the sand, a koala because it's always Australia, and a bright sun in its universally agreed-upon by children everywhere position of the upper left-hand corner of the page. I was very proud of my drawing, I colored more or less inside the lines, and everyone could tell what everything was without my having to tell them. And then I felt a surprising pang of loss when I realized I had no one to give it to who would proudly hang it on their refrigerator. I hung it on my own refrigerator, but that just felt silly, so I folded it up and tucked it into a book to deal with later. Maybe that's why adults don't color. What's the point, if there's no one to give it to for their refrigerator?

Three children so far have given me drawings they made of me. There's not much in the world as flattering. I've noticed a strange thing, though. Women I've seen so far in Japan are almost unvaryingly traditionally feminine. They have long hair, they speak in high, animated voices, they walk in tiny mincing steps, and they wear lots of pink. At the moment, my hair is short spikey black. Children are so thrown by this, in additon to my unfamiliar facial features and height, that at least twice a day for my first two weeks at the kindergartens, puzzled four-year olds would approach me to confirm that I am a female. They thought so, but they wanted to make sure. Usually this was done verbally, but on a few occasions, they just grabbed. The three drawings I was given all showed me in accurate clothing and body type, but with two long pigtails. Perhaps they couldn't conceive of a girl without them. Last year, when I had long blonde hair, great pains were taken to make the details true-to-life. It's interesting to see how they have slightly altered me since then to fit better with their young world view.

2003-05-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

H A P P Y M O T H E R ' S D A Y , M O M ! ! !

2003-05-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

After five and a half months of serious deliberation, I finally feel comfortable settling on a New Year's Resolution. From now on, I vow to try to put a stop to my endless search for the thing I am just naturally good at without having to study or practice. Just to personally underscore the need for this resolution, I'm compiling a list of things I once suspected/fantasized I might have some kind of untapped precocious gift for, even though I'm now far too old to be precocious, and my suspicions have unvaryingly turned out to be unfounded. Legendary careers I've so far given up on: tennis player, pianist, rock star, journalist, long-distance runner, violinist, muckraking investigative reporter, documentarian photographer, beloved university professor, Olympic archer (thanks, summer camp), rock stars' personal stylist, museum curator, basketball player, young undeclared entrepreneur, some sort of professional traveler who makes good money in an as-yet-undiscovered way, copy editor, theater set designer, playwright, Olympic swimmer, fashion designer, chemist, archaeologist, astronomer, novelist, the person who creates a chain of vegetarian fast-food restaurants whose popularity sweeps the nation, wacky offbeat interior decorator, travel writer, young bookstore owner, record label owner, music producer, DJ, magazine editor, oceanographer, and drummer. Sometimes I wonder whether modern folks would have more, or less anxiety if they were just expected to follow into their fathers' professions without having to go through the humbling experience of exploring natural (in)aptitudes. Like a 19th century blacksmith, or the current U.S. President, for example.

2003-05-08T05:38:00.000-07:00

I am uncertain of what I ate for dinner. I bought it at the grocery store and cooked it myself, yet I am still puzzled. It looked like fried tofu. It tasted like fish. It smelled like WonderBread. I hate not being able to read labels. It once took me four tries to buy hand lotion. I'm still not sure what the first three bottles actually contained, but two of them were sticky. The first time I bought laundry detergent, I had to first peel the label off the bottle I found in the back of a cabinet left by a previous tenant who pointed it out to me when he handed me the key, and I took it to the store with me so I could fish it from my pocket and buy the exact same kind. A year and a half later, it's still the only brand I've ever tried.

2003-05-08T03:08:00.000-07:00

People can remember almost anything if they sing it first. Last week I spent 15 minutes trying to get a room full of squirmy 4-year olds to remember how to answer the question, "What`s your name?", with mixed results. Today I watched a Japanese teacher teach twice as many children the same thing in five minutes by making a song out of it. I have a 34-year old Japanese friend who will always sing a tune he learned 30 years ago anytime I ask him in English which day something will occur, "Sun-day, Mon-day, Tooos-day...", it's actually pretty catchy. My Spanish has gotten rusty since college, but I know for certain I will always be able to complete the phrase, "Para bailar La Bamba...", although I may not be able to avoid humming while I do it.

I was thinking about this during my drive home today, I have a long commute. The longest thing I've ever had to memorize was the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" in high school, in Middle English. I was wondering whether this task would have been easier if there had been a catchy tune to go with it, maybe something from an Andrew Lloyd Webber production of Chaucer: The Musical. To test the theory, I tried to sing the words of the prologue to the tune of Prince's "When You Were Mine," which was in my CD player at the time. It worked out surprisingly well.

2003-05-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

Wow! Thank you Spaceship No Future for this amazing link to a Japanese soy sauce ad (requires Flash). Makes me remember one of the reasons I moved here: virtually unfettered absurdity!

2003-05-05T05:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday or possibly the day before I was sitting in a restaurant catching up on writing a few letters home. There was a table of high-school aged punks sitting adjacent who kept trying to catch my eye, but I was deep in introspective writing mode and ignoring them. They tried out a few tactics from the now-familiar repertoire of Bored But Curious Teenagers trying to get the Foreigner's attention while remaining coolly detached, and I stepped into my role of the amused but not-in-the-mood Foreigner trying to have a day to herself. As often happens, they finally just started yelling out random English. To date, the catalog of random English yelled at or near me in Japan has included "Happy New Year!" in May, "Good morning!" at 9 pm, "Green me!", "12345879...8!" "ABCDEFJ!" and "Elephant!" among others. The restaurant punks began to spell loudly and arbitrarily in English, and then to steal little glances to see my reaction. I continued to ignore them. I've come to really enjoy this game. Finally a very exasperated boy with a Mohawk and a mouth full of fries yelled over the table at his friends, "B! I! O! N!!" This did the trick. The English teacher in me awoke just long enough to wonder if "bion" is a word. The punks and I finally made direct eye contact, and satisfied, they went back to their fries.

My Inner Art Student is currently considering the possibility that Japan has rediscovered Dada, and if so, what their intentions with it might be.

2003-04-28T03:58:00.000-07:00

Today's business/product name picks:
Cars: Mazda Scrum, Toyota Saloon, Toyota Super Saloon
Beverages: Calpis, Pocari Sweat
Businesses: Tit Collection (clothing boutique), Hair Make Pee (beauty salon), Hard Off (new and used electronics and applicances), Book Off (bookstore)

Sometimes this place makes me laugh like a 12-year old boy, heh, heh.

2003-04-27T04:21:00.000-07:00

Today's lessons. 1) Incinerating, while fun, is dangerous. I actually singed an eyebrow a little on my last trash run. I need to buy one of those really long lighters from the 100-yen shop that I thought were for novelty purposes. One man's novelty item is another man's necessary household appliance. 2) Even if my washing machine is really only a glorified spinning bucket, one half of most of my sock pairs will still tend to mysteriously vanish from the laundry. 3) It is impossible to not be happy when I am eating a bowlful of pineapple and listening to Brigitte Bardot sing "Bubble Gum."

2003-04-26T00:59:00.000-07:00

Reading over all this, I feel as if I'm creating some sort of new Seinfeld, the show where nothing ever happens. I do my laundry, and I write about it. I drive to the grocery store, I write about it. I take out the trash, and here that is too. It's these little things though, that really fill out my experience here, and they are the reasons I feel I really live in Japan, that I'm not just a tourist. Sure you climbed Mt. Fuji, Mr. World Traveler, but did you ever try to shop for laundry soap in a Japanese pharmacy? Did you ever try to pay a phone bill in a foreign language? Did you ever order food by walking into the street with the waiter and pointing at what you want in the window? It's wonderful to walk through a temple in Kyoto, to be jostled on the streets of Tokyo, to swoon at a festival in Tejikarao. But the things that have really changed me are these little everyday experiences. It is terribly humbling to suddenly find that, at the age of 28, you suddenly know absolutely nothing, not even how to take care of yourself or your home, and that much of what you've learned so far about the world is useless. It is also exhilirating, and very very freeing. I'd found that the more I learned about the world, the more I felt restricted by it. Knowing the exact names of possibilities in my little world made them see more finite. In the process of trying to come to grips with a new world, I have rediscovered infinity. If something as benign as grocery shopping now is so filled with possibility, what are the new possibilities for the rest of my life - for work, for leisure, for lifestyle, for friendships, for love, for me? As frustrating and even maddening as all these shifted lines can be, it is wonderful to recapture what, as a child, I didn't even know I had. Bad point: When I require only one simple answer, I get only that Anything Is Possible. Good point, there is again more than one answer, and anything is possible.

2003-04-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

I finally took out my trash. I've been living in my apartment almost three weeks now, and this was the first time I've had the courage to face it. This wasn't the usual lazy suburban American aversion to taking out the trash. This wasn't a case of, the anonymous men with the big clean city truck will be driving by my house at their regularly-scheduled weekly interval to take away the pizza boxes and beer cans I've been collecting so I never have to think about them again if only I can get off my butt for two minutes and drag them out to the curb. This was more a woman-versus-fire thing.

In the parking lot on the side of my apartment building is a large rusty free-standing incinerator. It's shaped like one of those big pot-belly stoves from the Ingalls-Wilder cabin, twice as big. I squeeze through a narrow gap between the fence and the building and toss my bags over the top rather than going around. I approach the incinerator with caution, heel-toe-heel-toe, recalling that this thing has been intimidating me for three weeks. My kitchen is too small to be putting this off this long. Here goes.

I eye my opponent carefully. It looks dangerous and hungry. A long barhandle with a counterweight on one end protrudes from its belly, and assuming this to be Step One, I pull it down. An iron-lipped, ash-breathed mouth gapes open in response, and I pour my trash inside. Trash separation here is serious business. Staples are plied from boxes, plastic wrap is scraped from cardboard backings, all refuse is separated into its material components. When you live next to the incinerator, what you burn is what you breathe. Step Three, light a fire. I fish a lighter out of my pocket and search for the least soggy coffee filter. Puff, puff, smolder, whoof! I stare down at three weeks' worth of junk mail and banana peels and food wrappers on fire, until the floating ashes start to collect on my T-shirt. Trusting everything has gone as it should, I swing the heavy door shut. Flames lick out of the rust-eaten smokestack. There is a long-handled fire poker on the ground beside the incinerator, and I am happy to have a reason to peek in every few minutes and stir around the big stew of flames and garbage. When the fire settles into a mellow smolder, I hop the fence back home, glowing with accomplishment. Now I sit at my desk, the smoke from the incinerator trailing past my window, looking around the apartment in vain for some overlooked trash to burn. Incinerating is fun!

2003-04-22T07:08:00.000-07:00

The bank clerk looked really excited handing me my thanks-for-opening-a-new-account-with-us gift bag emblazoned with the cartoon figures of Tom and Jerry, the bank mascots. Inside was a plain green box of tissue paper. My co-worker said that was a really good present in Japan, because tissue paper is so expensive. I wonder what I`d have to do to get a toaster.

2003-04-22T03:19:00.000-07:00

Nina Simone died yesterday. I feel a loss that is inappropriately personal, considering I didn`t know her, although she did make me late for work once, the first time I ever heard her voice. I was driving to work on Halloween day several years ago, listening to the college radio station. They were doing their best to play Halloween music, although after a few cuts by Alice Cooper and Ozzy, they were starting to stretch for material to fill the show. Just as I pulled into the employee parking lot, they started a new song. I recognized the song itself, "I Put A Spell On You," a Screaming Jay Hawkins classic, but the singer was new. The voice coming out of my speakers had the effect of a stun gun, or a Mesmer`s tool. Although music has always been one of my life`s focal points, this new voice had a power I had never encountered. I was trapped, hands on the steering wheel, motor running, idling in a parking space, unable to leave the car until the voice stopped. The DJ innocently revealed the name behind this voice, Nina Simone, not knowing in his little campus DJ booth that he had just changed my world.

I was lucky enough to see her a few years ago when she did a short tour of some university campuses. I remember staring in disbelief at the ad announcing her impending appearance. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine she was someone who could be seen in person, certainly not by me. She lived in France, had for years, word had it she hated America, that she left it behind in body and heart during the turbulence of the 1960`s Civil Rights wars, and understandably so. She had wanted to be a classical pianist, but black women in those times weren`t allowed, and so she started singing. The audience, mostly older, nearly all black, looked as disbelieving as me. A legend was about to ascend the stage. It was as if the goddess of the moon herself suddenly announced she`d be coming by for tea.

And she appeared as promised. She was frail, and her voice was mostly gone, and she had certain strict rules about audience conduct, but she was there, in person, with us.

I once said that if I could wish any person in the world to sing me to sleep every night, I would want her. Rest in peace, Nina Simone. And thank you, more than you know.

2003-04-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

Random observations. Beer is sold in packs of four. Bread, usually white, is sold in packages of four slices, and each slice is one inch thick. Kindergarteners tend to draw their noses in self-portraits as rather large bright orange triangles. I have yet to see a bumpersticker on a car, nor for sale in a shop. There are less varieties of dogs. There is always a seasonal decoration for something (right now it`s fish banners for Boys` Day). Drivers flash their hazard lights in thanks when they are let in to traffic, they do not wave. A public trash can is a rare thing, and strangely also is litter. Body lotion and toothpaste are sold in the same size containers, but body lotion costs ten times more. The "go" portion of a traffic light is usually described as blue, and not green. It is green. There is no Japanese word for "bless you" when someone sneezes. Most people back into parking spaces, rather than pulling forward. People generally do not hold open doors for others. No one at the table may drink until everyone has toasted. No one at the table may refill his or her own drink. Indoor shoes are sold, but they are different from slippers. They look just like outdoor shoes, but they must be changed out of when going outdoors. Items at the dollar store are usually of good quality. Cars are rarely more than three years old. It is acceptable for fashionable people to wear their collars standing up. Fanny packs are OK too. Most young people express fashion through their socks. The people who work at the gas stations are nice. School bus drivers are highly respected people. Apples are enormous. Good sushi is readily available at the convenience store.

2003-04-19T20:29:00.000-07:00

It`s now 10:15 on a Saturday night (just like the song) back in Texas, the land where things still mostly make sense to me. My friends right now are probably drinking Lone Star beer on someone`s porch, or maybe something better if they`ve scored a good job. They`re changing into their second or third evening outfits, and ringing each other`s cell phones to finalize plans, even though they`re still uncomfortable with having cell phones. They`re discussing which band they`re most likely to get in to see free, and later they`ll decide on a party. Tomorrow they`ll wake up late and gather somewhere to eat too much food and talk about how there`s nothing to do.

I am in Japan. It`s just after noon on Sunday. I have spent the last two hours on my computer drinking coffee and listening to stolen mp3s. I am getting closer every day to discovering the magic combination of buttons that will make my rice cooker start without beeping loudly and shutting itself off, and I am optimistic that my now random guesses will one day resolve themselves into a replicable pattern. My laundry is air-drying on a wobbly rack under the heater. I need to take out the trash, but I am intimidated by the free-standing incinerator in the parking lot it must go into. I am running out of coffee and need to go to the store, but I can`t remember how to get there, and I am somewhat afraid to leave my apartment, because that`s when things stop making any sense.

On the bright side, I am wearing a fabulous Japanese T-shirt. On the front, there is a cartoon picture of a healthy-looking cheeseburger. It says, "Junk Food Paradise," and underneath, "It is as delicious as slaver comes out." On the back, "Junk Food Culture," followed by "The American culture where it stuck to the life."

Come to Japan to shop for T-shirts. Stay, and lose your mind.

2003-04-19T04:14:00.000-07:00

Thank you to Michelle from Canada who suggested adding post comments by Enetation. I`ve been looking for something like it, and I appreciate the good recommendation.

2003-04-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

"Something sleeps in us when there`s no change." One of my favorite people in the world just emailed me this quote from Dune, and it`s been rattling around in my head. Change and I this year have been inseparable. Certainly I believe in the necessity of change for any healthy growing human spirit, I am perhaps a bigger proponent of change than most, but I think my share this year has bordered on unhealthy. Aside from gender reassignment surgery, I can`t actually think of anything else I could do right now to further upset my equilibrium, if indeed I have any left.

A small anecdote. I inserted the quotation marks in the above movie line by using Copy and Paste to transfer punctuation from my web log template`s html because I still haven`t found the quotation marks on my Japanese keyboard. I had difficulty even identifying "Copy" and "Paste," because on my Japanese Edit menu, they look roughly like this: %'?$# (for Copy) and $@+!& (for Paste). That`s right, like cartoon swear words. My space bar is about one-third the size I am used to, and the key directly to its left turns all my letters into Kanji. I am a decently fast touch-typist thanks to high school typing class, and my semi-flying fingers tend to hit this key frequently. The first time this happened, it took about 10 minutes of frustrating trial and error to turn my email to my mother back into English. And this is just my computer keyboard. I have a whole apartment full of this stuff. Not to mention the greater world beyond my front door.

Many of the children I teach are still of temper tantrum age. I feel like I know where they`re coming from. When absolutely everything in your world presents a challenge and it seems impossible to catch a single moment`s respite, it`s comforting to know you can still count on the simple flat six-sidedness of blocks, or the forgiving squishiness of a stuffed bear. And failing that, sometimes it feels good just to scream.

In summary: Change is good. Moderation is good too.

2003-04-15T04:21:00.000-07:00

I just drove myself to the grocery store. Then I bought groceries, all by myself. I am indeed a wondrous being.

It`s like I`m 4 years old, and someone gave me my own apartment and hasn`t caught on yet, tee hee hee. Feed myself, dress myself, I can drive myself too!

Driving in Japan is like American Driving Bizarro World. Steering wheel is on the wrong side, turn signal is on the wrong side, gear shift is on the wrong side, lane is on the wrong side, guess where the stereo and lights and passing lane are. Every time I try to do the polite thing and signal a turn, I make my windows even cleaner. And all the lanes are approximately three-quarters the width of my car. Try the math involved in sharing the road with oncoming vehicles. My overworked supervisor-slash-driving instructor is amused by all the little screams and wails I make every time I pass an oncoming car. I am not, because I know it to be the sound of my heart trying to escape from my body.

And then of course there`s the whole adventure of not being able to read the signs. Gifu-shi is a large, sprawling, Houston-10-or-15-years-ago type city. I drive to 5 different schools in the course of my teaching week, all off what I overheard somewhere is Route 77. Being kanji-functionally-illiterate, I have to rely on landmarks for directions, which I heard once women are better at anyway. Not so here. It is not just America that is afflicted with chain stores, and I seem to pass a neverending series of the same 5 or 6 stores on my route, often in similar combinations. So not only do I have to remember to turn left then right at the Uni Qlo, but that it`s the black Uni Qlo across from the purple Gigas by the yellow Gulliver`s, not the one next to the purple Gigas behind the blue Car Lots. I need to follow my kindergarteners` example and make up a little memory song. What rhymes with Gigas?

Grocery Shopping Adventure we`ll save for another day. I`m going to go look through my rhyming dictionary now. Good night.

2003-04-10T04:55:00.000-07:00

Today�@was my 3rd time teaching first grade, and my first day at a kindergarten. I start teaching the English half-hour at kindergartens in May, and for now and the next few weeks I just go hang out on the playground at recess so they can get used to the Big Monster Gaijin Who Speaks a Funny Grunting Language. Me: `Yar yar yar yar yar?` Three-Year Old: `Eeka Neeka Wakka Too!`

Over the last few days I`ve attended 4 new-school-year ceremonies at various kindergartens around this and the neighboring city where I`ll be working. Those went like this: The assistant director of my company who is stuck driving me around until I get my car next week picks me up at 8:45 in the morning. We drive across the city for an hour in various directions making small talk. We park next to a rice field, and we walk a few blocks to a kindergarten bedecked with parade-sized Hello Kitties/Doraemons/Anpanmans, or at one school, an inexplicable enormous sombrero-wearing, moustache-sporting Mexican man`s head, whose unfortunate pink tongue is a slide. We enter an office after making the obligatory shoe to slipper exchange, and I meet several Important Looking People who bow a lot, and ask my companion desperately if I can understand Japanese. The answer is Yes, I can tell you`re talking about me, but No, I don`t quite know how to respond to you, although they never talk to me directly. In Japanese, it seems sometimes responding to people isn`t just a matter of understanding the question asked of you and relating the answer intelligibly, but knowing which set customary phrase is required and in which subtle strata of hierarchical language. It seems impossible to talk to anyone, especially within one`s own company, without consulting a mental flow chart of company positions. A child giggled at me a few days ago because I addressed her too respectfully.

So then I sit in said office and sip tea, ever afraid I`m crossing my ankles wrong or taking too many sips or using the wrong hand or... And when we are called, the assistant director and I change back into our shoes, cross a courtyard, back into slippers, up the stairs, put the shoes in a cubicle, and flip-flop-flip into a crowded auditorium. And sit. At the front. I`m the only foreigner. In front of hundreds of pairs of 4-year old eyes. And then they sing.

There is nothing more ridiculously, absurdly, unreasonably cute than a roomful of Japanese kindergarteners. All in tiny matching uniforms, usually with hats, squirming, shuffling, singing at the tops of their lungs. So cute you want to pull your own hair out. So cute you want to cry.

They sing, they hop, and then they sit. Someone Important makes a really long speech I can`t understand, the kindergarteners squirm and I try not to, Someone Slightly Less Important makes a speech only slightly shorter. An hour has passed, and I am well into day-dreaming. I am playing periodically the `I caught you staring at me` game, (yes you! and you! and you! and your friend! and your mom! and the whole 4th and 5th rows! and...). I am startled back to consciousness by 10 Genki Japanese teachers with lots of Genki body language and loud loud voices screaming things I still don`t understand (contrary to popular belief, people do NOT understand a strange language better when you yell it at them). Someone indicates I`ve been called to the front, a Genki teacher on my left yells something really Genki, and then hands me the microphone. 400 pairs of expectant Japanese eyes focus on me, and I say lamely, `Watashi wa Karla desu. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu.` Silence. Pause, look around, pass the microphone to whomever is closest, and wait to be dismissed back to my chair. Wait an hour/day, repeat as necessary. God I am so unGenki.

What`s Genki? Think high school homecoming pep rally, head cheerleader so full of school spirit her eyes bugged out from under her powder-blue lids and you thought she might explode and get school-colors confetti all over your Bauhaus shirt. Energy, enthusiasm, animated glee. Genki in Japan is a nationally cherished ideal.

I want to remind them all somehow, give an excuse I guess, how hard it is to listen to 4 hours of a foreign language during which one will inevitably be drawn into self-reflection if only for something to do, and then have to pop out full of Genkiness at a moment`s notice and introduce oneself to a crowd of gawkers in a language you`re still quite uncomfortable with. But Japan is not a place to make excuses, nor am I a fan of them myself. But still...

Tomorrow I have recess at a different kindergarten. I may not be Genki, but I can make a mean sandbox mudpie, and for the time being, that seems to be doing the trick.

Kids have had basically one of three reactions to me. Stare, wait for me to make eye contact, and run away, leaving me standing in the middle of the schoolyard waving hello at their backs and smiling like an idiot. Or. Stare, wait for me to make eye contact, run up to me, stare, murmur hello as quickly as possible, and run away laughing to the refuge of a friend. Or. Stare, wait for me to look the other way, run up and poke me/grab me/slap me on the butt, run away laughing.

The ones that seem most drawn to me are the Odd Ones Out, the slow ones, the shy ones, the ones wearing goofy glasses. We seem to have an instant connection, an unspoken understanding, most likely they sense no one there can be more an odd one out than me.

2003-04-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

18 Kurds were killed Sunday by U.S. `friendly fire.` 18?! Made me wonder, could police brutality ever be dismissed so easily as `friendly fire` too?

2003-04-05T18:34:00.000-08:00

I have just figured out my washing machine. To anyone who has never known the joy of living in a Japanese apartment, I assure you this is no trite victory. Something I love about living here, one of the things that has lured me back for a second year, is the ecstasy of accomplishment I get on a daily basis, something that I haven`t really enjoyed since the age of 8, when I finally mastered my bike sans training wheels. Every time a soda in a vending machine responds correctly to one of the strange shiny coins I`ve learned to produce, I want a parade. Sometimes I find myself doing something ordinary, and then looking around to see if anyone has been watching, and is suitably impressed. Maybe they will come up and bowingly compliment my extraordinary skill. So far, not even once. But I know, and I am proud.

So the washing machine. A Japanese washing machine is a strange conundrum. In a country where self-warming toilet seats and remote control air conditioners live peacefully in the same apartment as tatami mats and an oil-burning heater (*sniff* do I smell whale?), the Japanese washing machine is a half-manual, half-electric puzzle. Like the bionic man. Like one of those old washboards my Great-Grandmother used had a freak accident and had to be rushed to a top-secret lab to be refitted with robotic limbs, but inside still beats the heart of a good old-fashioned washboard.

It`s a compact plastic rectangular box with two adjacent narrow buckets sunk inside. Studying it, you assume there must be controls to plug or let out the stopper, fill the bucket with water, make the bucket spin around, and then make the other bucket spin around really fast to whip the water out before you hang all your clean wet clothes on your balcony to dry because you`re living in an insane country that knows no dryer. Matching these abstract washing goals to the controls that will realize them however, is another matter. It`s a word match, only one half the words are only in your head, and the other half are written in strange scribbles. I`ve gained enormous respect for illiterates while living in Japan, it`s not an easy road. Twist this knob to stop the drain? No, that makes an airplane noise. Pull this knob out a bit to agitate? Wrong, that makes the lint trap fall off. Where`s the thing to fill it with water? Oh, right, that would be this garden hose. Where`s the hidden camera broadcasting all this to the public?

I`m thankful actually, for the lack of a dryer. Clothes pins and air I can figure out.

2003-04-04T21:50:00.000-08:00

It`s not that I`m unwilling to learn from my own mistakes. Like any reasonably intelligent, conscientious person with ambitions of self-betterment or actualization or whatever, I know that this is one of the better ways to improve oneself and learn the lessons life offers us. I make mistakes, I acknowledge them, I try not to let them get me down too much, and I hope to do better next time. In fact, I tend to bumble along headlong into things, embracing the ample opportunities for mistake-making with open arms. I think some answer is better than no answer, and I become impatient with the lack of action when others are standing around (yes, wisely, perhaps) deliberating. The problem is the doing-better-next-time part. When I encounter a situation previously fumbled, instead of thinking long and hard about exactly where I slipped last time, analyzing the situation and carefully plotting a better approach, I assume my experience has given me some superhero-like intuition and jet-paced learning curve that will push me towards the correct answer this time, since I couldn`t possibly mess it up in two different ways twice. Or a third time, as the case may be. I just pick a different way from last time, and hop right in. Why haven`t I learned yet? WHY, for the love of all that`s good, DO I THINK I CAN CUT MY OWN HAIR???!!??

2003-04-04T07:47:00.000-08:00

In addition to my figurative guts, I`ve been spending the evening trying to post to the world some pictures from my travels in Southeast Asia on geocities. Only the files are too big, my account is too small, the hour is too late, and MY COMPUTER IS TOO MUCH IN JAPANESE. Grrrrrrr. I`m used to Macs, and I`m working now on a PC, otherwise I could just try to remember where everything is when it`s in English. No such luck. Also, it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to boil water on my Japanese stove. Does EVERYTHING have to be an adventure??!!

2003-04-03T23:05:00.000-08:00

Weblog Omedetou. Two days ago I moved to Gifu, Japan. I haven`t unpacked yet into the tiny apartment where I`ll be taking refuge for the next year, and I haven`t yet met anyone I won`t be working with. It feels like hanging my hat in the wrong time zone. So in order to mask the deafening sound of my phone not ringing and the voices on the streets I don`t understand, I`ve decided to develop a new time-consuming hobby. And what better than a web log? Last time I lived in Japan, I bought a big blank notebook to write in, something to laugh nostalgically about in years to come when I`m living deep in a grown-up rut. Never one to use self-knowledge realistically though, I soon ended up with a mostly blank notebook, and a lot of revealing and descriptive Sent Messages in my email outbox. Perhaps I need an audience to perform. I suspect exhibitionism is a deeply held human need. So here goes. My guts, for all to see.