Category Archives: Life and Stuff

Drunken and Bitten in German

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A third late one as a result of a work related party. One of these days I’ll have to write about the Japanese version of networking. Until then, hostesses.

Back when I still lived in Niigata, my karate senseis would hold an annual New Years Party with all their students and several parents. The food was usually pretty good. However, because my friend Charles and I were technically adults (behavior not included) we were invited to drinks and more at a Japanese “snack bar”. A snack has little to do with food and a lot to do with alcohol and women.

Basically, a snack is a hostess club that doesn’t charge an entry fee but instead charges a fairly hefty two hour rate that includes basic appetizers and some drinks. The hostesses, or in this case the hostess, is usually attractive and/or charismatic and pours drinks and flirts with the customers to get them to spend money on drinks not included in the service charge. The idea is to get the customers drunk enough that they start spending money on drinks for the hostesses (which are not included in the fee) and on premium extras.

There is a fair amount of cleavage involved, dangerously shorts skirts and a few soft-core “Basic Instinct” moments. Now, because Charles and I weren’t paying, we tended to have a lot more fun than we should have. At one party, for reasons I still don’t understand, I ended up with a 1.8 liter bottle of premium Kubota manju sake to take home. (Note: if you can find a bottle of Kubota, grab it. It’s one of the best on the market.)

However, the evenings were not without their odd moments. Apparently the first time we went, either Charles or I sang the German version of “Genghis Khan” and the second time we went, I was expected to sing it. This request had two minor obstacles. 1) I didn’t actually know the tune and 2) I don’t speak German. Somehow I managed to blast out an impressive version that impressed the hostess. (Something tells me, though, I could have farted out the song and she’d have been impressed.)

At one point, Charles and I took turns slow dancing with the hostess–who, it should be added, spoke English well–however, at one point the hostess, for reasons that, well, for reasons, bit Charles on the neck hard enough to draw blood. At another point she slipped me her address and told me she wanted to see me again. (I don’t know if she did the same with Charles, or if the taste of his blood put her off him completely.)

Either way, I never called her up as I expected there would be more costs and bloodletting involved than I wanted to pay. To this day I wonder how much our senseis actually spent on all that. I also wonder, well, I just wonder.

 

Driving Right on the Left and Left on the Right

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One of the trends that’s followed me throughout my life is that soon after I arrive some place, or reach a certain age, the rules change and I’m no longer eligible for whatever the rules used to allow. When I turned 18 I was legally able to drink 3.2% alcoholic drinks, but seven months later Kansas changed its laws in such a way that I wasn’t able to legally drink until I turned 21.

Japan did something similar to me. When I first arrived in Japan, foreigners could legally drive as long as they possessed a valid International Driver’s License. The could renew it forever. However, about the time I moved to Tokyo someone in Japan realized there wasn’t any money in letting foreigners use foreign licenses and changed the law to require that anyone living in Japan for more than a couple acquire a Japanese drivers license.

Now this in and of itself shouldn’t be that big of a problem. However, Japan being Japan decided to make getting license as complicated as possible. There were exceptions: anyone from a country that drives on the wrong side of the road (left) was granted the ability to get a license without having to take a driving test. Canada filled out enough paperwork that Canadians, despite driving on the correct side of the road (right), were also allowed to get a license without taking a driving test.

The USA, however, having a larger population than most of the wrong side of the road countries combined was unable to fill out the paper work in a way that satisfied Japanese authorities. (Basically, every licensing office in the country would have to fill out the paper work and guarantee that a Japanese could a license without having to take a driving test.) And that’s just the start of it.

To get a license, I first had to prove that I had a license for at least 30 days before I came to Japan. There’s a clerk whose job is to go through documents and match driver’s license dates with entry visa dates. If the clerk’s not satisfied, you will be coming back.

Eventually, to pass this phase, I had to provide all my expired passports and all my expired Kansas driver’s licenses. Luckily, I’m enough of a minor hoarder that I still have all of those. Once that was done I had to get the most recent license translated into Japanese (for 6,000 yen-ish). Then, at long last, I’d be able to take the eye and written test and then take the driving test. (For another 6,000 yen-ish.) Unfortunately, each prefecture (or state) has only one licensing office which makes getting a license an all day project.

History–both personal and as written by other foreigners–and 6,000 for each try says I will fail the test at least once. To avoid this, and because I’d never driven on the wrong side of the road (in an official capacity, at least) I went to the testing center a few years ago and paid 5,000 for a one hour practice session on the test course. (You are expected to know the course when you take the test.) It all went surprisingly smoothly and except for turning on the windshield wipers instead of the blinkers a few times when I was changing lanes, the hour was uneventful.

Unfortunately, at the time I was doing a lot of extra work in the summer and the thought of spending all day at the center only to have spend another day at the center, has caused me to put off trying to get the license for along time.

I hope to do a couple more practice sessions (at least once with a manual transmission) and finally try for my license this summer. Hopefully I’ll only have to do it once; but I’m sure by then the rules will have changed.

A Deadline is Dead to Me if it’s Not Really Dead

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One of the skills I’ve never been able to fully master is the art of establishing and abiding by artificial, self-imposed deadlines. This was especially true at university when I had research papers to, well, research and, eventually, to write. I’d draw up a nice, relaxing schedule that staggered out my research and writing and even included a couple days to set the project aside so that I might edit and finish it with the clarity of calmness instead of panic.

I typically stuck to the schedule for about a week, maybe less. The devil over my right shoulder was always reminding me that the fake deadlines weren’t real and nothing would actually happen to me if I missed them. The devil over my left shoulder reminded me I still had a lot of time to get things done. “Take your time. Take all the time you need. Play with us, DL. Play with us forever and ever and ever.”

Something like that. I eventually finished all my projects, but before each deadline there was a a bunch of denial and a bunch of dodgy math:

A = read one book + take notes + return to room + translate bad handwriting into English + organize notes + return to library for book you forgot
B = Random computer failure
C = Printer out of ink
D = meals + toilet breaks + random internet surfing
E = actual writing – denial + rationalizing
Finished paper ≈ 3A(B^2+2C)+4D-E/2

I know it looks crazy–and it is and it wasn’t the best for sanity retention–but it got me through university.

By contrast, friends of mine had, and probably still have, the ability to set a fake deadline and behave as if it’s real. They even said no to social activities because they “have to get part ABC of project XYZ done by Thursday”.

Give me an actual deadline, and the shorter the better–XYZ must be finished by Monday or there will be actual consequences–and I’ll have everything done.

Tell me that telling myself that is a great way to get things and I’ll agree with you and might even try it out, but I’ll eventually realize it’s all just a fake deadline.

Part of the purpose of these daily posts is to impose an artificial deadline and stick to that deadline, especially if I have no ideas when I sit down to write.

Like tonight.

Lightning and Thunder and Floods but Few Holidays

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Note: To my friends who’ve lost power in the recent hurricane and are able to read this; take care of yourselves. We all hope things get cleaned up and back to normal soon. I will now make light of hurricanes and typhoons.

Although I’m from Kansas, I basically grew up in Colorado. As such, I’m comfortable in both mountains and plains and I am disturbingly comfortable with both blizzards and tornadoes.

Several years ago there was a tornado warning in my hometown while I was hanging out with several distant relatives at my grandmother’s house. The warning said that a tornado had been spotted in eastern Salina. Immediately, the out-of-towners looked at me and said “What do we do? What do we do?”

The devil over my left shoulder suggested I say “We DIE!” The devil over my right shoulder said “Let’s try and see it.” (Yes, if you’re counting that means no angels are present over my shoulders. Long story.) Since we were in Western Salina, the tornado had already passed us. If we were going to die, we would have already been dead. (Which, I realize, was not a very comforting thought.) The paths of tornadoes are pretty consistent (Southwest to Northeast) and once you know where they are in relation to where you are, you can pretty much figure out what to do; where they form is the hard part to figure out and I’ve run to the basement a couple times when the warning announced the tornado was not only Southeast of my mom’s house, but was practically down the street.

However, in Japan I’ve had to learn to live with two forces of nature that are more unpredictable: earthquakes and typhoons. The latter is more on my mind as Typhoon Number 8–the Japanese get so many they just number them–may or may not be on its way toward Tokyo by this Friday or Saturday. Part of the problem is that because Japan is a series of small and/or narrow islands, Typhoons take crazier paths than tornadoes. We’ve seen storms aim directly at Tokyo and then veer away. We’ve seen storms veer away, change their minds, and veer back. We’ve seen storms do a loop in the middle of the ocean and then graze Tokyo. We’ve seen them go North past Japan and then turn back South.

The biggest hassle–besides all the destruction–is that I’m expected to go to work unless it’s obvious that our area is going to be hit and the school calls my company and cancels classes. I’ve been half way to work, soaked from tips of my toes to the middle of my chest and wrestling with a disintegrating umbrella when I learned school had been cancelled. I’ve got to school in that condition and had to teach even though a quarter of the students were absent.

I think part of it is that typhoons are kind of familiar to the Japanese and they are not as scary as earthquakes. Similarly, I remember that, when I lived in Colorado, no matter how much snow we got, we never got a snow day. In fact, the only “snow day” I remember getting was because of a flu outbreak. (And yes, kids, I really did have to walk to school in blizzards so there. No, it wasn’t uphill both ways.)

Luckily, I have a day or two to double check our emergency supplies and hope we keep power.

Peel it Blanch it Dice it Fry it Skin it Eat it

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Back when I lived in Niigata, before I’d met She Who Must Be Obeyed, I was invited to a parent teacher party with the Parent Teachers Association of Isobe Junior High School, which was my smallest school. I was sitting next to the school’s cute secretary, whose name I don’t remember and whose interest in me ranked somewhere between “I’d rather have a root canal on all my teeth without anesthetic” and “I’d rather be set on fire”. She was polite, though, as I struggled through what little Japanese I knew. It is difficult, even if a woman’s interested, to impress her when you’re basically babbling like a child. (This is something I really wished I’d learned in high school and definitely before I got to graduate school.)

Japanese parties, called enkai, are heavily formalized and pretty much all the same, but that’s another post. The food is also usually the same. In this case, we had a tasty deep-fried fish that had been cooked long enough you could eat the bones. I devoured everything and set the heads on the plate (yes, almost all fish in Japan is served with heads; some is even still moving). About halfway through the meal (which, by definition is the party’s one hour mark) the cute secretary whose name I don’t remember pointed to my plate and said “don’t you like to eat the fish heads?” to which I replied, more or less, “um, am I supposed to like them?” I then found a rare moment of situational awareness and realized that mine was the only plate with heads staring forlornly at me. Being a male attempting to impress a female, I quickly at the fish heads, eyes and all. It was actually pretty tasty but she was unimpressed.

All this is a long introduction to the some of the odd differences between the way Japanese eat things and the way I do. I’ve mentioned before how She Who Must Be Obeyed thinks it so strange that I like raw broccoli and raw cauliflower that she can’t actually bring herself to leave it raw. However, I also remember one time, after I’d met She Who Must Be Obeyed, when we were eating somewhere with my adult class and someone started handing out grapes. I immediately attacked the grapes and made short work of them. However, every single other person in the room was peeling their grapes before eating them and they thought it strange that I would eat the skins. I, of course, was worried that I’d somehow poisoned myself, but nothing bad happened.

I thought , at first, it was because they were large grapes, but every Japanese I know will also peel small grapes. Since I’m already finished by the time they finish their first grape, there’s not much else for me to do but watch. They also carefully peel baked potatoes and apples which I find an unnecessary step for eating either.

Interestingly, the one food the Japanese don’t peel is eggplant. This time every year, Mother and Father of She Who Must Be Obeyed send us lots of round eggplant. It quickly gets sliced up and pan fried and dipped in soy sauce and ginger. It gets stuffed with ground pork and deep fried. It gets served in soup. It gets served with meat sauce and pasta. It gets pickled. It never, however, gets peeled. (It also rarely gets salted and sweated.) This shocked me the first time because I still remember the care my friend Steve put into peeling an eggplant before making moussaka many hundreds of years ago.

Now I realize, he may have been wasting his time.

Wasting Time With Pointy Stabby Things

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I’m in the middle of marking exams which meant today was a good day to stop by the Ginza Blade Show down in Tokyo and do some window shopping and loafing.

I’ve mentioned before my rekindled interest in Pointy Stabby Things and today marks the third trip I’ve made to a Japanese custom knife show. As such, the knife makers who’ve been to each knife show have started to treat me like a regular. To-Un Ihara, who I talked with during the first knife show and bought something from during the second, asked where the Canadian was (answer: working) and if I liked and was actually using my knife (answer: yes and sort of). His factory is close to my town and he invited me to visit, which I will sometime this summer.

Another maker showed off his English skills and talked about being in Atlanta last month for the Blade Show. Another guy, who sells knife making supplies, showed off his English and tried to convince me to start making knives. I was like “no way I have too many hobbies and a blog to write” and “well, probably by the end of the summer I might give it a try just for the hell of it”.

There was an odd mix of styles at this show, which made it more interesting than the last one. This is the first show I’ve been to with knives that could be described as “tactical”. The most interesting were from Kiku Knives, who works with Western makers. He had knives, well, swords actually that I think require registration and the good will of the police to own. (More on that later.)

There was also a lot of “man jewelry” and “blade art” that didn’t seem designed to be used. One maker had one-of-kind knives with narwhal ivory handles he was willing to let go for $4,800. The Steam Punk knife with lots of brass and cool bits has lots of painful hot spots and would be impossible to use for more than opening letters (and nowadays, how stupid would you look stabbing your smartphone simply because the LED was flashing).

The most unusual knives, though had glass blades. They were beautiful and kind of cool–and had me thinking “man who has glass knife should not throw it” which isn’t funny at all. I didn’t see the point of the glass knifes and didn’t have a chance to talk to him.

Update, Feb. 11, 2022: The most unusual knives, though, had agate and obsidian blades I first thought were glass. I even concocted the joke that “man who has glass knife should not throw it” which isn’t funny at all. I didn’t see the point, no pun intended, of the stone, knives, other than that they were beautiful and reasonably sharp.

I ended up not buying anything, but I did manage to record a lot of video footage that I will edit sometime in the 21st century. I also ended up confused. After lots of research I thought I understood Japanese knife laws, but after playing with several knives that were long enough to qualify as swords, it’s clear there are nuances in the law I don’t understand which means I’ll never buy one of those knives. Which, in the end may be the goal of Japanese knife laws.

The Voice You Hear May Be Your Own

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There are very few things more traumatizing in life than hearing your recorded voice for the first time. The only thing worse is seeing yourself on television for the first time (more on that later as there are complicating factors).

The first time I remember hearing my voice was, I believe, in the third grade. I don’t remember why my voice had been recorded but the squeaky nasal thing that came out of the cassette player still gives me the creeps. Although hearing your own voice is traumatizing in general, I think it’s especially bad for young boys as we suddenly realize that we sound like our mothers and not our fathers.

My squeaky nasal thing lasted well into university and I remember one instance where I was on the phone with the university or some business and the voice on the other end kept calling me “miss”. When I finally said and spelled out my name there was a quick “oh” followed by a moment of silence and then I became “sir”.

Somewhere along the way I started to take acting classes and part of that involved vocal training. My teacher, Melissa Riggs, told me to read the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy from Macbeth with the deepest most exaggerated “Shakespearean” accent I could muster. I thought I sounded ridiculous but everyone else thought I sounded good (please note: this meant my voice sounded good not that I wasn’t ridiculous or that I’m not an idiot telling a tale full of sound and fury).

Over the years I think I’ve managed to work my voice into something respectable. It helps that I live overseas and teach English, a combination, as I’ve said before, that typically steals accents. Also, since we write and record our own listening tests, I get to hear my voice over loudspeakers quite frequently. (In fact, I did that very thing just today which inspired this post.)

The other traumatizing thing is seeing yourself on television for the first time. This is different than seeing yourself in a video–although that’s pretty bad–because lots of strangers are seeing you on TV.

Oddly, although I’m not particularly photogenic, I am somewhat telegenic (some day I will prove that in one of these posts) as I’m not required to hold a smile. I can just relax and talk.

Unfortunately, several hundred years ago, give or take, when I worked in Kansas City, Kansas for the summer as part of a Peace Corps-style project, I was interviewed for local television.

Now, as a warning to you, when you’re on television for the first time, the better you think you sound, the worse you actually are. I thought I said something profound in a profound manner and that viewers would be moved to tears. However, when I finally saw the segment, my nasal voice was back. Also, because I was taller than the cameraman, the camera angle put me in a “talking down my nose” position that looked snobbish.  To top it off, everything I said sounded trite and superficial. (The memory still gives me a case of the third grade creeps.)

I’ve therefore done my best to avoid TV cameras since then and let other people make the official statements. It’s for the best.

This is the End Before the Begin Again

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I’ve got absolutely nothing worth writing about tonight, so let’s talk about work.

Today was the last day of teaching for Term 1 and I now have a day to relax before exam hell begins. I will, of course, spend the day in the most productive manner possible.

Well, not really. I’ll just loaf.

As I’ve written before, it was a strange term. We have a new building and three new teachers and although everyone settled in quickly, it still felt strange. Then there was the self-inflicted pain caused by having the students make two minute videos. That in itself would have been fine if it were actually the students making the videos and not us. That said, I managed to film my last two students today when they turned up, without any prompting by me, to do their video. They, of course, cheated by gluing their script to the back of their product poster and they lost points for being lazy. (They just sat down and read as if they were news anchors.) But, it’s all finished.

Exams themselves are kind of goofy. We stand around during the exams waiting to answer any questions that might arise and to quickly correct, by writing on the blackboards, any mistakes suddenly discovered in the exams. After the exam, we wait for the proctors to bring the actual exam papers and we then sort them by class and start marking.

Well, actually, that’s what’s supposed to happen. I usually have to have at least one day of denial in which I spend a lot of time parsing time and convincing myself that days actually do have 25 or 26 hours and that three days are actually five. This means I have plenty of time to goof around and play games and I feel no guilt doing do. This period of denial is followed by late night marathon marking sessions fueled by coffee and chocolate.

I first enter the “ah heck, this ain’t so bad phase” in which I make actual progress. Eventually, though, “ah heck, this ain’t so bad phase” smashes into the first wall in the form of “Will this madness never end?” phase in which it seems, no matter how long you mark, as if there’s always the same number of tests left to mark. “Will this madness never end?” smashes into the wall called “My God, my god, why has Thou forsaken me?” phase in which even one test causes physical pain to get through.

Eventually, I get through all the exams and pass them back to the students and all is well, at least until the end of summer and the cycle starts again.

 

That’s About Enough of That For an Eternity

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Thanks to a Facebook post from a writer I follow, I’ve had a medley of Counting Crows “‘Round Here” and “Mr. Jones” running through my head since last week. This isn’t good; it’s actually kind of bad and it has me thinking about songs I used to find entertaining and then heard one time too many and now hope I never hear again.

Counting Crows were already popular when I got back from Albania and headed off to Mississippi for an odd, misguided couple of years. I therefore heard, on TV and on the radio and at friend’s houses, a constant run of the two songs I mentioned above. They were catchy and kind of cool at first, and the lead singer had great hair, and then all of a sudden they weren’t cool and I blocked them out of my memory. It’s no joke that I hadn’t thought of them for years until last week.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a moody relationship with music and part of that involves suddenly reaching super-saturation of a song. I used to like Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” then I heard it one time too many. Anything by the Cranberries can, as far as I’m concerned, replace the ET game cartridges in the landfill New Mexico. “Stairway to Heaven” can join it and it can lie next to “Stray Cat Strut,” “Goody Two Shoes,” “Mony Mony,” “I Love A Rainy Night”, “Flowers on the Wall” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Damn you Mike Myers and your damned Wayne’s World AMC Pacer scene.)

Sometimes an entire group is ruined because the group does the unforgivable and that which has been seen can never be unseen. I used to like Styx, and even forgave them “Mr. Roboto,” until they did the abomination “Music Time” and now I can’t listen to any Styx song without hearing “Hey everybody it’s music time!” in my head. (Look it up, I refuse to link to it.)

The song, however, that provides the soundtrack when I peer down past the gates of Hell is one I wasn’t even a big fan of, but got to hear again and again and again as part of my job.

As part of the English experience, many Japanese English textbooks include lyrics from English songs and the official CD contains the music. Usually the song is “Let it Be” or “Hello, Goodbye” (which both should also be buried somewhere) but In this case, the song was by Stevie Wonder, was from The Woman in Red soundtrack, and was about a man merely telephoning a woman to express his amorous feelings. (I cannot be more specific without losing what’s left of my soul.)

I was invited to a class to walk the students through the lyrics and then help them sing it about five times. This went over so well, according my soulless teaching partner anyway, that she decided to do the song in every class that week. To give you the Devil’s math: 9 classes X (two times explaining the lyrics + five times singing it two the music) = hearing a song way too many times to possibly retain sanity. I can’t even think about the song without having to hum “MMMBop” to kill the ear worm.

Believe it or not, it could be worse. I know one teacher who was a big fan of “Cartoon Heroes” by Aqua. This is madness.

Don’t Give a Blue Moon in June

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At the school where I work, the worst month of the year is June. It’s the month that when you reach it you go “Wow, I can’t believe it’s already June” and invoke cliches about time moving faster when you’re having fun and/or aging. A week later, though, you’re going “Man, I can’t believe it’s still June.”

There are a lot of reasons for this. The first is that June comes at the end of the Spring/Summer term, which starts in April. Although it’s not the longest term (autumn term is) it’s the only one where the weather is getting hotter as the Season in Which it Rains and Rainy Season slowly turn into Hell.

It’s also the one that my evolutionary clock, conditioned by decades of finishing school at the end of May/beginning of June rebels against. Evolution is telling me to go fishing and loaf (mostly it’s telling me to loaf) but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I loaf. The end of June marks the beginning of July exams, meaning we will soon be rotting our brains with bad writing and pondering if the phrase “My Mother is a Tractor” is worth more points than “He is like a soccer.”

Making matters worse is that, for reasons no one fully understands, June is one of the few months of the school year with no national holiday. Once June starts, you pretty much have to work as if you actually had a job. Even one day off in a long month gives you a chance to recharge (especially if it gives you a three day weekend.)

With a few exceptions, Japanese holidays tend to correspond to the birthdays of a handful of emperors. Greenery Day (April 29th), for example, used to be a wink wink nudge nudge acknowledgment of the Emperor Showa and his love of greenery and attacking Pearl Harbor (he’s known as Emperor Hirohito outside of Japan). Recently, the law was changed to allow more blatant celebration of emperors and Greenery Day was moved and April 29th became Showa Day.

My suggestion, therefore, is that June 18th become a holiday as it is the birthday of Emperor Ogimachi who presided over the end of the Warring States Era and, more or less, the start of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which is the era people think about when they think about Samurai. Ogimachi’s reign saw the stabilization of the royal family’s finances and influence and an increase in their power. It could be called Peace Day to mark the end of the Warring States Era.

Quite frankly, he could have eaten children and conditioned his skin with fat rendered from babies and I wouldn’t care; all that matters is the June birthday. I’m selfish that way.