The Internet is on it's way- thank god.

I'm posting from a Japanese cyber-cafe in the basement of a multi-alley shopping district (old-style excuse for a shopping mall) on a Japanese keyboard (these are weird- where are all the keys) in the middle of the night, so pardon any mistakes.

Blog Update: Long Time Coming


This one’s going to be epic. While I alternate between wardriving (warbiking? I’ll get to that later) for access points in this remote Japanese town with my PSP and patiently awaiting the Magic Internet Man, I’ve been keeping journal entries offline. So now that I have a way to tell you all this cool stuff, here it comes.

I finally touched down at Osaka Airport at about 7:40 local time, as my flight out from America was delayed about an hour. Get this- the air conditioner failed. So they spent half an hour with all of the passengers slow-cooking inside while they diagnosed the problem, and then they ushered us all off so they could fix it. Tack on another fifteen minutes to get us all back on the plane and squared away, and we were off. On the plane I made the acquaintance of a young gentleman named Shota and his entourage of fellow exchange students, with whom I had the privilege of sharing a seating row on the airplane. Shota was coming back to Osaka after spending the summer studying in Lansing, as part of the Japan Diet Exchange (Diet as in governmental body, rather than weight-loss method), and he regaled me with stories of “Crazy Americans” and pictures of the same on his business-card sized camera. Note to self: Gotta get me one of those.

Around the tenth hour of our 14-hour flight, I introduced Shota to American music. He replied in kind. We killed perhaps two hours flipping through each other’s MP3 collections. Previously, we had alternated between sleep, English Practice, Japanese Practice, and bilingual commentary on how much the in-flight movie sucked. Some things are universal.

So I touch down, to get back to where I started, at about 7:40. After the most painless customs check I’ve ever experienced- they neither checked my bags nor asked any questions, nor charged my any money for the items I declared- I stumbled into the Arrivals area to find my coordinator, Naomi Okamura, awaiting me with a little typed “Andrew Moll” sign.

A quick aside (one of many to come): Naomi had better be getting paid BANK for this job. She’s been the most helpful human being in the world, from picking me up at the airport to ferrying me around town to find a bike to fit my gargantuan frame (later, I promise) to ensuring that everything I could ever need is readily at hand, she’s been a huge help. She’s a translator, a go-between, an advisor, a friend- heck, she did my freakin’ taxes. Not to mention the fact that she’s throwing me a party tomorrow night. I’ll post how that goes, don’t worry. If she wasn’t married, and it wouldn’t violate eight million cultural mores, I’d give her a big ol’ hug.

So there she is, and after the first of many misunderstandings we sort out that I am in fact Andrew Moll, and that my upraised hand-gesture was a wave of “Hi! I’m the big ol’ foreigner you’re looking for!” and not a wave of “Excuse me, but I’m not the big ol’ foreigner you seek.” With that international incident defused, we proceed to lug my bags (why did I think packing all this stuff was a good idea…) to the train station, and down a set of stairs to the platform. Culture Note #1: At terminal platforms (at either end of the line), Japanese trains stop for twenty-odd minutes for cleaning. Little man goes in, sign goes up, and you stand outside until he’s absolutely sure that the Queen Mum (should she deign to visit) will be perfectly comfortable eating off the floor of the train.

He’s sure after about ten minutes, and we get on board the train and ride to Kyoto. That’s about an hour- long enough for me to figure out how little Japanese I actually know and how much English Naomi can pull off. This sets the tone for our interactions henceforth- we each stumble in each other’s language until the other says “No, it’s okay, you can use _____________” at which point we look relieved and default to our strong suit.
At Kyoto station, it’s off the train and down the platform, up a set of stairs, down a set of stairs and to the end of another platform- all with my bags, which weigh a combined total of one hundred fifty pounds. From Kyoto, we ride out to Tehara station (the closest one to Ritto on the express line), where a bunch of members of the Board of Education (and my new best friends) are waiting with a van to take me to my house.

Not apartment. Not condo. Nor lean-to nor time-share or any other hyphenated word. House. In Japanese, Uchi. A big one, too- five rooms covered in tatami (traditional Japanese bamboo floors- these rooms are dining, living, and bedrooms all in one, as the furniture all moves and there are futon mattresses in all the closets), four rooms in hardwood, one kitchen, a shower room, and a bathroom. I mention shower room and bathroom separately because this house, being traditionally styled, keeps the two functions from commingling. There are even slippers (gratis!) which you must wear into the bathroom that CANNOT, for fear of bringing shame upon your family and ancestors, be worn anywhere else. But I digress, as always.

My bosses at the Board of Ed take me to my house, and where anyone else might just say “All right, Andoryu (their best shot at my name), have a good sleep. See you in the morning” these folks take me inside, show me around, and proceed to assemble my futon for me to show me how it’s done. This is a complicated procedure- sheets go on a mattress, sheets around a comforter, the whole assembly on a base mattress and a pillow on top- and watching my BOSSES put the whole thing together while Naomi ensures that I am unable to assist (“No, that’s perfectly all right, they’ll take care of it.”) was comedy GOLD. They gave it their all, Naomi literally blocked my path, and I stood, an exhausted and defeated man.

After carefully assembling the futon, my employers took their leave. I took a nap.

The next day is a bit of a blur. I’m still not quite sure what order things happened, but it certainly happened quickly. I went to City Hall in the morning, registered for my all-important Gaikokujin Toroku Shomeisho (Foreigner Identification Card), for which I will wait until the end of September, and then I entered the Gauntlet of Introduction. Naomi introduced me to the Board of Education, the Education Committee members, the Mayor of Ritto, the Superintendent, and reintroduced me to my employers- some of the coolest people I’ve met, and a few of them speak the kind of English you only get in old badly-translated Akira Kurosawa samurai flicks. Then we went for a little walk to meet the leader of my neighborhood association (a really big deal, though I didn’t know it at the time) at his house, but he wasn’t home. Finally, it was off to show me around the city a little, showing me the all-important 7-11, Arka Drug, and Heiwado Supermarket, which form a Trinity of Shopping at three key intersections in town. Each is not only a place where you can buy your necessaries, but essential landmarks- as there are no street signs. They don’t name their streets in Japan, unless that street is famous enough to have a nickname. The streets in town don’t (they’re just “The street that follows the river next to Heiwado” or “The street next to City Hall”), but there’s a street outside the city that runs along a bunch of melon farms that is called, unsurprisingly, Melon Road.

That done, we called it a day. I slept like a rock until exactly 2:18 AM, at which point I was wide awake for the remainder of the day. So I putzed around the house, investigated, and got all unpacked and moved in, and took a little nap that kept me zonked out ‘till six. Bright and early 8:00 A.M., Naomi and …-sensei walk me over to Ritto Middle School, the first of my three assignments. It’s Opening Day. Opening Day at Japanese schools is a big deal, and my schedule went about like this:

8:00am: Walk to Ritto Middle School. Upon entering, remove shoes. Put on size 2 school-issue blue leather slippers. My feet are size 13. I am too big for this country.
8:05am: Meeting With the Principal (nice guy, pretty good English)
8:15am: Introduction to the Staff (My stumbling two-sentence introduction is no doubt the worst they’ve ever seen… after I was done, there was a collective expectant look, like “That’s it? More!” before their tentative applause)
8:30: Homeroom Time- I sit in the Teacher’s Office, at my desk, and pore through the pile of advice the previous teacher left for me.
9:00: Opening Ceremonies Begin! There’s a huge speech in the gym/auditorium (all the students sit on the floor in rows by class.)

A quick note about Japanese Classes: Students never leave their homerooms, and teachers run from class to class to teach their subjects in a bizarre parody of American schooling. As such, you and your class all take the same courses, together. There’s a lot of “group help” involved- we in America call it “cheating”. Each class is numbered according to grade level and classroom number- so if you’re in 2-3, you’re a second grader (eighth grade, as elementary school is six grades, middle is three, and highschool is three) and in classroom 3 for the year. Capice? All right.

So back to opening ceremonies. I walk into the gym, and everyone- all the students, all the teachers- are standing in obedient rows talking quietly. The principal and vice-principal lead me in, and have me stand near a microphone offstage to the right. “Oh, good.” I think. “I can do my speech from here, and not shuffle-walk in these damn tiny slippers up those stairs onto the stage.” The Vice Principal, whose name is Mr. Uno (“Mr Number One, if you forget!) speaks first, for about two minutes. The Principal speaks for a good seven minutes, and almost none of it I understand save the repetition, like a mantra, of Ganbatte kudasai, which means something in the general geographic region of “Good Luck and Try Hard, please.” It loses a certain gusto in the translation.
Then I am afforded the honor to talk, and I’m herded (Oh, god, please, no) up onto the stage (nearly lose a slipper, comedy potential is high) across what seems to be miles of stage floor and finally to the podium. I grip it like a drowning man grips driftwood.

My speech is, in comparison to the poetic eddas of my predecessors, barely long enough to qualify as anything more than an interjection. The kids- hundreds of identically dressed smiling faces- are one big intimidating, welcoming sea. Whispers of Japanese that I’m half-glad I don’t understand bounce around the audience. I exhaust my working Japanese vocabulary introducing myself, telling them how glad I am to be working with them, et cet, receive a wave of applause (ya didn’t screw up, kid!) and shuffle offstage. After a few short hellos among the staff and teachers, I bounce back to city hall to Naomi, to go buy a bike.

We take a city car. Cars here are the strangest things in the world. All of them are little tiny high-efficiency boxes, and if you own a tiny enough box you qualify for a special yellow license plate that means you don’t pay some big-car tax. The city car is a yellow-plate car, and as such is about the size of my kitchen table. My kitchen table seats two and has four-wheel drive, it seems.

The steering wheels are on the right, you drive on the left, and it’s all quite disorienting. Though Naomi isn’t used to this car, I’m infinitely thankful that she’s driving. Streets jump out at odd angles, and at one point she decisively careens across two lanes of oncoming traffic to shoot into a tunnel under a crossing highway. TAKE NOTE, KIDS. THE CRAZY DRIVING VIDEO GAMES ARE REAL. The first store we go to in the Quest for the Bicycle has nothing large enough for me. Naomi and the shopkeep converse, determine that no stores in the area have anything I’m looking for, and he refers her to a big-box store called Dio World that might be able to help me out.

Dio World is like a Japanese Costco. It’s huge, everything in it is huge, and it juts from the landscape of tiny shops and little houses like it just dropped out of the sky and crushed everything underneath. I don’t really think it’s even the sheer size that’s impressive- it’s the relative difference between it and everything around it.

Inside, we find that this Dio World carries a line of bikes that can help me. It’s the same as in the states- they’ve got Giants. The bike technician thinks this is hilarious- he’s going to sell a giant a Giant. Ha ha.

The bike gets wedged into the tiny subcompact efficiency cube, and away we go. Success.

Tomorrow, Friday, is my first day of class.

Friday morning, up and at ‘em, 8:00 AM off to Ritto Middle School. I sit through the overwhelmingly Japanese morning meeting, and proceed to sit and ensure that the desk doesn’t go anywhere for four hours. I have no classes, they have nothing for me to do. Cool.
They only serve school lunch three out of five days, and I haven’t yet figured out which three days they are. The other two days are “Obento Days”, where the teachers each pay 310 yen to get a bento box lunch- rice, main course, two side dishes, all in a box about the size of two computer keyboards stacked on top of each other. That’s about three dollars for a lunch that you’ll have trouble finishing. And it’s VERY JAPANESE. Not cool with fish? Moreover, not cool with RAW fish and dried octopus? The squeamish need not apply. The school lunches are tamer- they involve bread in there, and potatoes- but they’re all homecooked. Nothing microwaved, nothing heatlamped. The cooks prepare it, the students serve it on big trays. The students eat in their classrooms, and we eat in the Teacher’s Office, which if I haven’t explained by now I probably ought to.

These people LOVE hierarchy. Can’t get enough of it. The teacher’s office is adjacent to the principal’s office, and the three desks closest to the door between the two are for the Vice Principal, a Senior Teacher, and the VP’s Assistant. Then, the desks in the teacher’s office are arranged in rows by what grade level the teachers teach. I’m in the 1st-year row, on the very end. There are blackboards at the end of the rows with schedules on them for that class level. Each row has a row leader, and also each department has a head teacher. So there are, at any given time, four bosses you need to answer to: Your department head, your row leader, your Senior Teacher, and your Vice Principal.

Lunch is delicious, but uneventful. There aren’t any classes to teach after lunch, so I sit and wait until 5:15 when the boss tells me I can go home.

I spent the rest of Friday bouncing back from the jet lag. For dinner, I made some curry and some rice- both of which I screwed up cosmically. I think I cooked the rice in with some plastic, as it came out laminated. The curry… I either over or undercooked the tofu, and I definitely undercooked the mushrooms. It rocked me like a hurricane.

Saturday (after recovery), I rode my bike out to route 1 and did some exploring. I went all the way to Otsu (a famous sightseeing town, lots of temples), and on my way back stopped in Kusatsu, a neighboring city. Here, I found the Foreigner Central Station- my rock, my savior, some little chunk of America to cling to, where the menu boards are all in katakana (the foreign phonetic alphabet)- the Starbucks.

Met a guy named Jacob there, a grad student who clued me in on cheap weekly Japanese lessons at the Kusatsu city call. Followed him there, met some Michiganders and a bunch of foreigners from all over. They moved in packs, these guys. Interesting group dynamic: Each group of foreigners tended to mob up with others who spoke his or her language. Americans and Brits and Aussies, together. Indians, together. In the words of my erstwhile Kansas friend Jacob: “There are a TON of Peruvians here for the factories, and they roll together. And the Bengali… the Bengali are TIGHT, man.” He’s been here a little too long.

######## That was one heck of a week of classes. I'm alternately amazed at how much these kids know and apalled at how little they care. It's just like American middle school, except there's a much greater dichotomy between the kids that act out and the kids that don't. Most of these guys go through an entire day without speaking- and there's a scant few who go through a day without a moment of silence. It's an exercise in extremes. More than once I have felt the oncoming appproach of Kancho (those of you who know, know, those of you who don't need to learn the Urban Dictionary- that's all I'm gonna say) simply by the lull in loud, angry chatter.

####################

Last night, Naomi threw me my first Japanese enkai. It’s a party, but it’s also a ceremony. There are set places and arrangements of seating, nobody pours their own drink, there’s a lot of sushi and pizza and snackyfoods. The bigshots from the Board of Education came, and we all sat on the floor in my living room traditional-style. The Director General gave me a gift- a tie pin with an image of the stone Buddhas that are in a shrine here in Ritto that have evidently been here since the beginning of time. Everyone was very impressed- seems it’s a big deal. Matsumoto-sensei, another Board of Education member, gave me three bottles of wine (white, red, and rose) pressed from grapes grown in Shiga Prefecture- Michigan’s sister Prefecture. Again, much applause. The thing about these enkais is that they’re essentially an excuse to get everyone together and get the beer and sake flowing, so that higher-ups don’t have to act like higher-ups and people further down the hierarchy (read: Me) get to talk with them like people, rather than employees. They asked about American slang, and onomatopoeia, and just generally acted like any other group of normal human beings. It was fun- and the leftovers will feed me for a week.

Sidenote: The stuff they put on pizza here is criminal. Potatoes, I understand. Very California Pizza Kitchen. But corn? Eggplant? Squid ink?!

Yikes.



Today: Sunday, September 11th, 2005. Election Day, here in Old Japan, which means as little to me as it does to you, the reader. Being Gaijin, I am not privy to the Japanese voting system. Thank God. Rather than standing in a long line to vote for someone I know little to nothing about (as it is with all elections), I had a very productive day to make up for yesterday’s Big Nothing (also known as Classic Social Gaffes for 100, Alex) in which I successfully screwed up an invitation to a party full of people with whom I could speak English quickly and fluently. There was a Gaijin Bash, and I missed out for reasons that are still unbeknownst to me. You ever have one of those moments where someone asks if you want to do something, and your brain says YES YES YES GO and your mouth says “Nah, that’s all right.”…? I do. All the time.

But today! Today was different. Today, I started with a good-karma binge by filling out my thank-you cards for the people who attended my Enkai, and then I went and indulged in some retail therapy. I bought one of those Sharp Papyrus E-Dictionaries- the kind that have 90-odd dictionaries crammed into one four-inch by five-inch folding square, that every Japanese person worth his salt carries EVERYWHERE. For some odd reason, I had previously missed the boat on these awesome little minicomputers. Sure, they provide at-your-fingertips translation at a fraction of the time it takes to look it up on paper. Sure, they house rooms full of knowledge in the same space it would otherwise take to carry a small stack of 3x5 cards. Why the heck would I want one of those!?!

Because they’re awesome. This thing is nuts- and it provides two very important things aside from translation. One- and this is big- is Confidence. Now, I can walk into a Japanese restaurant- and if I don’t know what the heck that thing on the menu is, I can look it up without lugging out a big ol’ dictionary and giving away the ghost. The second- and perhaps the more useful of the two- is that it provides me with something to mess around with when I want to be available in a public space. I have long envied smokers for their ability to loiter anywhere they want and have the handy excuse of a cigarette to justify their presence. This little dictionary is much the same, except it doesn’t involve all that cancer. I can plop down in a coffee shop, grab a drink, and tap away at my electronic dictionary so that it appears that I’m engrossed in work, allowing me to discreetly people-watch without that creepy “That guy’s been here for hours staring at nothing” vibe. This has already proven it’s usefulness- I’ll explain later.

After buying my E-Jisho (dictionary), I decided to do something different with my Sunday afternoon. So I bought a five-dollar train ticket to Kyoto, and went exploring.

I had underestimated Kyoto. The place is huge. Hello, Chicago. Hello, subway system. Hello, biggest Buddhist temple complex in Japan- I got to see a service, it was freakin’ awesome. The monks sang- though I didn’t understand- there were bells, and gold, and a giant room full of people wheeling through rosaries like Judgment Day was tomorrow. The temples are great- I’ll put up pictures when I go back with a camera- and everything is so ridiculously impressive that I lack the vocabulary to appropriately describe it. Everything’s got so much… history. It’s just… wow.

I had dinner in Kyoto, another indescribable culinary experience (the brain says “It’s raw fish! What the heck is wrong with you?!” but the tastebuds refuse to listen), and rode the train back to Kusatsu station. I then proceeded to put the E-Jisho to the test, and sat down to loiter in Starbucks.

My mother always tells me- a little fatalistically, a little optimistically- that everything happens for a reason. Go with it, and things tend to just work out on their own. I was feeling a little bummed that I didn’t know anyone in Japan yet, and so a solution fell from the sky. Well- from the Air. About five minutes into my loiterathon, a Japanese guy sits down next to me and leans over. “Excuse- do you English?” he says. “Of course.” I reply, in one language and then another. He proceeds to introduce himself as Tanaka- call me “Air T,” he says, pointing to his shoes. He’s sporting a pair of Air Jordans. He’s a basketball coach, and the owner of a sporting goods store in town. He coaches a team of young people in the area- among which, there are a couple of English Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs, in the common jargon), and he wants to know if I want to come hang out on Friday, shoot some hoops. I explain that I am unable to buy a bucket even should someone front the cash for me, and he assures me that that won’t be a problem. They’re not serious- they just like to play, and he prides himself on gathering up English speakers and making sure they have in-roads to Japanese culture- so he can practice his English. He admits it’s self-serving… his store gets to sponsor the tallest team in town, and he gets to learn English for free. But it sounds like a good time, so Friday’s my first practice with the team.

9/12/05

Today, had my first “Special” class. Got a warning from the teacher on the way in- “Have you seen Lainman?” Me: “What?” Her: “L-A-I-N-M-A-N.”

Pause for R-L distinction. Oh. Right. Rainman. Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise. “Oh- yes, yes. Sorry.” She smiled, shook her head. “He’s just like that.”

And damn, this kid was. Special classes here are taught one-on-one; or in this case, two-on-one, and this guy got the best English instruction in the whole school for what appears to be the special need of having a lightning-fast brain crammed in a normal-speed body, a slight stutter, and an intimate knowledge of the calendar (“Your birthday. When?” (answer) “You were born on a Wednesday.”) that somehow qualifies him to be in the Special Ed segment. In America, we’d probably have put this one in a gifted class.

Little things give him away- his shirt’s tucked in a bit too high, he ducks his head like a bird every so often- but otherwise, he’s for all appearances a brilliant kid for the first twenty seconds you talk to him. Then, the hyperactivity, the repetition, the depth of the autism become apparent. He loves video games. He told me this nine thousand times. But I can’t help but be charmed, because he still kicks my butt as far as knowing Japanese. It is a humbling experience, to know that someone the government has slotted away as Developmentally Disabled due to the fact that he is unable to interface with society can still get along more easily than you can.

9/14/5

So here I am, a few days later in this basement/alleyway/underground shopping district below the main shopping district of Kusatsu. It's pretty cool, but the shop (Manga Paradise) is all kinds of dirty, and I'd never have found it if not for a sign at Kusatsu station advertising internet service. Today, Naomi and I sat down and ordered my internet service from THE TELEPHONE COMPANY- NTT. It's like a big, benevolent Bell- a monopoly that uses its power for good- and for goodly keeping the Gaijin down. I say Naomi and I sat down and ordered it, but it's more like Naomi did all the talking and I bopped on the phone to say *Yeah, it's Andrew. Yes, for the love of God I approve of the internet coming to grace my doorstep. Thank you. Thank you.*

Also got my Hanko stamp and everything today. It's your Signature replacement here in Japan- a little stamp with your name in it that you use to sign official documents and stamp your bankbook. You also use it to recieve mail- yay for mail- and all that. With any luck, when the Internet comes, I'll have this thing at the ready to greet it. Only a week and a half until my Gaijin Toroku Shomeisho shows up, and I get to rejoin the information age in a big way- cell phone plus internet means ALWAYS CONNECTED, as opposed to now, when I'm NEVER CONNECTED. I'll be coming back to this internet access hole in a few days- it's kinda expensive- and I'll have another post ready when I do. I'll also be checking for comments- please, let me know you're out there, world.

I go to Otsu Sunday, to see that festival- I'll bring back a full report.

Today at School: Taught four classes- two third-year, one first-year and one Special Ed. During lunchbreak, we watched the 1997 Bulls Vs. Jazz NBA Championship- that was freaking surreal. Here I am, surrounded by middleschool kids, watching a game that was on while I was in middle school half a world away, played in my home country. What. The. Heck. Is. Going. On.

Oh- and yesterday was that Sports Festival- all kinds of crazy fun. I'm PAINFULLY sunburned, but it was worth it- those kids put on one heck of a thing. Japanese gymnastics teams are NO JOKE. Nor is Kendo- in the hot sun, in the middle of the day, beating the crap out of each other in those heavy suits of armor... I don't want to meet any of my students in a dark alleyway. At the sportsfest, I broke up my first fight. I feel so teacherly- and it helps when you're the biggest human being in eight counties. Nobody feels the need to keep scrabbling when OH GOD HERE COMES THE GAIJIN.

My timeclock's almost up- I'll see you when next I can find access.

This transmission has been brought to you by the letters R and L. They are different. Treasure them.

-Andy