Category Archives: Teaching

Slow Rumbling Freakout in Camp Green Hell

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About this time 18 years ago I was invited to join the Grade 3 (9th grade) Camp at Nou Junior High School. Unfortunately, at that time, I had ears but couldn’t ear English spoken in Japanese. I also didn’t know how to ask the right questions.

Because I was still in the honeymoon, Japan is wonderful phase of moving to Japan, I agreed to go to the camp. Thinking back, I’m trying to remember the exact moment when my colleague told me what to bring by telling me it wasn’t necessary. I was told the teachers would be sleeping in cabins but when I asked what I should bring, I was told I didn’t need to bring anything.

Now, I’m not sure if this meant that because we had cabins I wouldn’t need to bring a tent, or she assumed I understood what was meant by “camp” and “cabin” and would know what to bring. I also pointed out I didn’t have a sleeping bag and that didn’t seem to be a problem. Either way, I went minimal–the camera and a book to read being the most important things I was carrying–and was surprised when I arrived at the gathering point and saw students and teachers loading fairly hefty bags and sleeping kits into a truck.

At that point, if I were smart (and if you’ve been reading regularly, well, you know) I would have hurried home–I only lived a few minutes a way–and assembled a blanket roll but, well, you know. Also, with no evidence whatsoever, I convinced myself there’d be futons in the cabins. We took the train two stops and then began hiking. We went through town, crossed an expressway, went through a field and then followed a road into the hills. The hike itself wasn’t that difficult but it was Japan in August and the humidity was two percentage points away from liquid.

The camp itself looked nice but had apparently been located in the most humid place possible. I, of course, had only one shirt, now sweaty, and it didn’t dry completely while we were there. The cabins did exist, but they were empty rooms with no cots or futons and I would be sleeping on the bare floor.

The preliminaries were fun. The students cooked Japanese style curry for us and there was a bingo game–with the only prizes being a completed bingo–around a campfire. Bingo was followed by everyone heading off to their tents or cabins for sleep. At this point, I was still damp from my hike and, because the camp was in spitting distance of the ocean, it was cool enough to make me feel cold. I figured I could fashion a pillow out of a towel and my pack and eventually fall asleep.

However, the last card had yet to be played. One of my cabin mates, who also happened to be a colleague, also happened to be one of the world’s worst snorers. If I’d had a pillow I probably would have smothered him. I would discover after a manly attempt to suffer through it that he could be heard dozens of meters from the cabins. My usual panic “What have I done” freakout started and went down near the showers and restrooms, which had electric lights, and started reading my book to calm myself down.

I was seen by the chaperones, who would report what I’d done to my colleague who would apologize the next morning even though I was more angry at myself than anything else. Eventually I calmed down enough, and got sleepy enough, that I was able to get a couple hours sleep. The next day we went home and I was never invited to another camp.

The funny part is, as I write this and think back over what was said and what wasn’t said prior to the camp, I’m not actually sure I was actually invited to the camp in the first place. I may have misunderstood what was being said invited myself, which is why I didn’t get any information about what to bring to the camp.

 

The Politics of Work Sustaining Energy Shots

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Our oldest and I got back from visiting the in-laws today and spent the day recovering from the trip, the days sitting on the floor, and the time standing around watching our girls play computer games. All this has got me thinking about little vials of energy.

I suspect that part of the reason Japan was, and partly remains, a smoker’s heaven and a coffee drinker’s hell is the abundance of energy drinks (called “nutritional drinks”) available long before the West discovered Red Bull–an import from Thailand. In some ways energy drinks are better than coffee for workers in a hectic environment: There’s no mess; no one has to worry about being the one who empties the pot and has to waste precious time making a new one; there’s no chance of spilling on the way back to the desk; and there’s no chance some moron will slip decaffeinated evil in the mix. Energy drinks can be consumed quickly at the desk or during a smoke break.

My first experience with one of these came my second year in Japan. Mr. Oguma, the former punk-rock musician working as my Japanese English Teacher, either noticing I was tired or tired of me complaining I was tired, gave me a little bottle of energy drink. I don’t remember the name, but I remember it had coffee beans on the label. It had a nice, tart flavor and was gone in a few seconds. I wasn’t that impressed at first. Then my stomach felt warm; then that warmth spread to my entire torso and out into my limbs. Then I had one of those movie moments where I went “I’m not really feeling it” and then it hit and my teeth bared, my fingers made claws and I hissed. I was ready for work.

Almost every pharmaceutical company in Japan makes some form of energy drink and they range in price from a few dollars a bottle to over 20 dollars a bottle. I know one company that, as a right of passage, sends its new employees, regardless of their job, into shopping centers and into the streets to sell cases full of the drinks to passers-by. Because of the pharmaceutical connection, they were only sold in pharmacies. Several years ago, however, for reasons I don’t remember (best guess: money), Japan changed its law to allow energy drinks to be sold in convenience stores.

This created political problems for some of the pharmaceutical companies. One company has a pharmacy chain as one of their major stock holders. The pharmacy chain refuses to allow the drinks to be sold in convenience stores even though sales would probably double. (It would be like trying to buy aspirin if it could only be sold over-the-counter in pharmacies.)

I still generally avoid the energy drinks. The one’s I’ve tried were, with only a couple exceptions, free samples for human testing from clients. I’ve tried Red Bull a few times, but mostly when the Red Bull Mini and the Red Bull Girls are out in front of the station near where I work.

I prefer coffee.

Locked in and Blacked Out Old School Style

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After my batch of JET Programme members arrived in Tokyo, we were subjected to three days of orientation of questionable benefit. Our prefectural orientation involved a handful of people telling us that we’d get more pertinent information at our August training. One of our presenters then explained that the training would take place at something called a Kyoiku center, which is a kind of education hotel, and that there would be a lot of rules. The most important rule was that the there was a 10:30 curfew. In fact, at 10:30 the outside doors were locked.

This prompted one English lass in the front row to go into shock and keep repeating “You’re taking the piss. Right? You’re taking the piss right?” Our presenter assured us no piss of any kind was being taken. Now perhaps because, at the time, I was pushing 30 and had been in Air Force ROTC and the Peace Corps, I wasn’t surprised. A few years in those institutions will prepare you to handle both random rules and random bullshit. And then there was that “It’s part of the job” thing. However, “It’s part of the job” doesn’t go very far with young people yet to actually start their first jobs (in their minds, the orientations were just an extension of university).

We were then sent to our towns and while those of us working directly for the local governments were required to show up to the office and do “work”, those assigned to the prefecture got a month’s holiday. After that month, though, we all arrived at the Kyoiku center, some of us happy to see different faces that all spoke English and some of us wondering why the hell vacations had been interrupted for more classes.

The fun started right away, when we learned a couple more dirty little secrets of the kyoiku center: not only were the doors locked at 10:30 but it was lights out at 11:00 because that’s when power to all the rooms was shut off, which also meant there’d be no air conditioning until morning. Keep in mind, this was Japan in August and it was nasty hot and humid (those are technical terms). Also, any official drinking could only occur in certain common areas during the half-hour between lock in and lights out as we were not allowed in the common areas after lights out.

The kyoiku center did make one concession by opening the baths and showers in the morning to appeal to our bizarre Western idea of not waking up sweaty and going straight to work.

We were allowed to leave the center for the 5 ½ hours between the end of classes and lock in. The complication is we were in a rural area with spotty train availability. In order to get back by 10:30 we had to leave Niigata City around nine. It was amazing to see how much partying a group of Westerners could fit into the 2 ½ hours available to them.

Not much happened the first year, but in the years after that there were incidents involving loud noise and people pulling fire alarms to get the doors open after lock in.

I suspect things would have been different if we’d gone to the center straight from Tokyo. Please keep in mind we were not in the military and this was not a military institution, although it was where local firefighters did their course work. The organizers kept insisting, though, that this kind of thing was important to the Japanese. It was a hell of a test of flexibility, but it all seemed very old school in a well, old kind of way.

 

Do As It Was Said Not As It Was Done If It Was Understood

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It’s a bad omen when you’re attending a teacher training conference and the people training you aren’t very good teachers. It’s also a bad omen when that happens pretty much every time you have to go to a teacher training. This is pretty much the curse of the JET Programme.

The problems started during the four (or was it only three?) day orientation we had in Tokyo, which should not be confused with the three day orientation we had once we got to Niigata (which requires a whole other post; until then all you need to know is power off at 11).

First there were the touchy-feelies. As a rule I’m not a big fan of touchy-feely teaching workshops. “Let’s all hold hands and tell secrets about what we ate for breakfast. This is totally a technique you can use in class!” or “Write down seven ideas for lessons based on salt. But you can’t write on the board!” (That last bit is supposed to be the challenging twist.) My attitude toward stuff like this is “I’m here to learn something, moron. Stop wasting my time so you can use up all of yours.” (Yeah, I’m a real hoot in the staff room.)

However, the worst lectures involved too much knowledge or too little.

During the Tokyo Orientation I decided to attend a computer workshop in order to have few basic questions answered: Should I buy a computer in Japan? Will all my stuff from the USA work if I do? Will my US computer work in Japan?

None of those questions were ever answered. Instead we got a presentation that would be roughly the equivalent of going to a Rolling Stones concert and having the the tour lighting designer give a detailed explanation of gels, gobos, and the various outputs of the various lights with emphasis on how the brackets were fastened and the metal content of the brackets on the PAR lights and the type of lubricant used to keep the spinning strobes spinning and the intelligent fixtures smart. Doesn’t that tickle your cuculoris? (Cue insider snort/laugh.) All this when all you want to know is “Why does Keith look blue? Is that your fault?” (Which, for the record, is more interesting to me than actually attending a concert.)

All I remember from the computer lecture is something about Dos V and PC-98 and how one or the other is not like the other one because it’s like Apple which means an Apple disc will work but not a Dos based disc and nothing, NOTHING will work on a word processor that looks like computer but isn’t so don’t even try oh and the hotel phone connections might fry your laptop modem for lots of technical reasons.  I thought I knew a reasonable amount about computers but came away knowing less than I’d known before the talk.

The other questionable lecture was at the Renewer’s Conference in Kobe. It was sold as a presentation about Japanese media by a man somehow involved in Japanese media. Instead, he admitted that the didn’t watch TV or read the newspaper. He also had a giddy hyper style with high pitched “oh ho ho ho ho!” laugh and I’m 90% certain he said “yippee!” at least once as he did a little hop and skip. It was all AMAZING! To make matters worse, when he actually did drop an interesting gem, such as about how Dentsu, Japan’s largest advertising company, controls TV ratings and therefore controls Japanese media, he would just move on with an “oh ho ho ho ho” and a skip.

Every now and then I made the mistake of volunteering to lead a workshop. I seemed to lose a lot of friends when that happened.

 

Just One Just One More Just One More Little Bit Won’t Hurt

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I’ve mentioned a few times that we (the teachers at the school where I work) recently moved from our old office to a new office in a new building. During the move I jettisoned 14 years of crap that, at the time I started assembling it, seemed like a good thing to have on hand.

One of the odd things I’ve noticed about being in a new office with a shiny new desk is how uncomfortable and sterile the new desk feels without the dangerous overhang of crap–not all of it mine; they had encyclopedias from 1967–that used to occupy the shelves above the old desk. The new desk doesn’t have that “lived in” look.

(No complaints about the new chairs, though. The new chairs are awesome and I’m happy to sleep, er, live, er WORK in them.)

That said, I’ve been doing my best to keep the new desk organized. This is partly because the new shelves actually sit on the desk and steal a lot space and because the desk itself is smaller. A few scattered pieces of paper quickly make the desk look messy.

In the past, as a form of “cleaning” and “decluttering” I would merely fill up the drawers with the crap–the adult equivalent of pushing everything under the bed before mom comes to check on the room–and call the desk clean. Today, however, I actually spent time cleaning the drawers and tossing scrap paper in the recycling bin rather than telling myself I’d eventually reuse it. (I wouldn’t, of course. I’d inevitably acquire new paper before I could use up the old.)

Part of the problem I have is that one of the full time teachers in the office has a desk that’s so messy that when you first see it you’re convinced his bookshelves must have collapsed onto his desk. His desk looks like the kind of thing you see on the occasional Japanese versions of Hoarders. I’ve always been tempted to send a picture in and see if one of the TV shows would send a pair of comedians (the shows always send young, up-and-coming comedians) to clean the desk.

What’s interesting about this teacher’s desk, is his old desk in the old office was just as messy, albeit a bit more precariously balanced. He moved the clutter to the new office. (I kind of wish I’d taken a picture to see if he’s put it all back in the same place, which would likely mean he has a system.

With that as a comparison just across the room, it’s easy to say, “well, at least my desk doesn’t look that bad”. It’s a bit like hanging out with fat people to make yourself look thinner. Then you tell yourself you’re actually thin and think “oh, this one little thing won’t hurt. Nor this one neither. Nor this one.” and pretty soon people are hanging out next to you. Or are sending comedians to clean up your desk.

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.

The Fine Art of Loafing and Leaving Well Enough Alone

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Today I was so lazy I actually offended myself. I did a little writing, a little reading and studied a little but mostly I did a lot of loafing. Occasionally I stared at the list of things I’d hoped to accomplish today and basically went “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” and went back to loafing.

This is partly because Friday was one of my more hectic days at work. It was a testament to what happens when you make the mistake of trying to change things that worked well in the past and have been running more-or-less smoothly. It was also a testament to the dread that the changes will fall apart and everyone, including you, will blame you.

Several years ago we (the foreign English teaching staff at the school) got tired of the available textbooks for our second year (11th grade) high school classes and instead decided to make our own materials. Our original plan was to collaborate on materials but the pressures of work (we are each in charge of the curriculum for a grade) kept the rest of us busy and the materials more or less became the vision of whichever teacher happened to be in charge of the grade at the time. This kept a supply of fresh material but also required that we either recycle past materials or go absolutely nuts and make something new.

This year, since I’m in charge and we have three new teachers, I decided to go absolutely nuts (shut up–you know who you are–shut up). I jettisoned an entire term’s worth of my old material and moved second term to first term. This doesn’t seem particularly crazy except we decided to have the students make a two minute commercial for a new invention as their final project. That itself would be fine except we also decided to film the commercials and show them in class on the last day.

This means we’ve basically been experimenting on our students. We’ve been like “Here, take this green pill and the little pink one. Now fly.” (Something like that.) Friday was, after a couple delays to give the students more writing time, the first day of filming. I spent the morning running around securing cameras,; realizing we had three cameras but only two tripods; scratching my head and going “what have I done?“; securing rooms and threatening my own students with failure if they didn’t hurry up; and memorize their scripts. It’s no exaggeration that I was more nervous than the students because if something went wrong, it would effect all four of us and not just me.

Luckily, in my class, I was able to film several commercials over the first two periods of class. Third period I had a break but was still on too much adrenaline to relax completely. Other teachers also managed to film some commercials and the results have been pretty good. By lunch time I was finally able to relax. Unfortunately, I haven’t actually stopped relaxing.

Of course, there’s a still a lot that can go wrong. I have to edit all those together and deliver the edited files to my colleagues. Oh, and I need to make a completely new curriculum for next term. I’ll get right on that, some day. But first I have to loaf.

Brief Fits of Violence and Horror

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Yesterday I talked about the different types of parents at sports day. Today I thought I should talk about sports day itself.

My first taste of sports day happened my first few months in Japan. I was invited to attend in a way that made it seem as if my attendance was optional. However, as an Assistant Language Teacher working for the school board, I felt it was my duty to attend and, because I was still in the early glow of being in Japan, I was looking forward to attending. Then I got to school and one of my teachers said “I see you’re participating in the shototoshobugubugu  and in the tsunabunatikihiki.” (not their real names) I went “huh?” and then figured out I was running the obstacle course and the taking part in the tug-o-war.

I’ve mentioned before that, partly thanks to acting, I have a bum knee and pointed out that, in fact, I had a limp and that I shouldn’t be involved in a running race, especially when jumping on and over stuff was involved. I also pointed out that I thought it was optional and didn’t understand why I was scheduled for events. They shrugged and said “ganbatte” which usually means “don’t give up” but in this case meant “Stop bitching and start stretching. You’ve got a race to run.”

The obstacle course involved moving 10 beans from one plate to another with chopsticks, hurdling a bar and crawling under another, crawling under a cargo net, running across a balance beam, fetching a piece of candy out of a tin of flour using only my face (not a joke), running around the track with the candy in my mouth and my face, eyes and lungs covered in flour, jumping on and over a vaulting horse, and then limping to the finish. The tug of war involved teachers and parents and went reasonably well for the other team.

What fascinated and horrified me the most, though, was the surprisingly violent nature of a lot of the sports. At one junior high school there was a tire grab where students rushed to several tires and tried to drag them back to their side. People got knocked down and stepped on and lots of skin was scraped off hands as tires were yanked away. In another event, called kibasen, three students carry a fourth whose job it is to grab a hat or bandana off the heads of rival students. Tempers flare, hair gets yanked out, some students abandon the pretext of grabbing the bandana and simply start pummeling their rivals.

At another junior high, groups of boys held up bamboo poles with flags on them and then formed pyramids that reinforced the flagpoles. Teams of girls then fought to pull down and or capture the opponent’s flag. This involved girls knocking girls down before they could reach the pyramid, girls jumping on the backs of boys in the pyramids to get more height, girls pulling girls down off the pyramid and dumping them in the dirt, and years of bad blood coming out. In once case, a girl was knocked out cold when got pushed backward off the pyramid and hit the back of her head square on the knee of another girl.

The school nurse saw the girl wasn’t moving, ran out into the game, which was still going on, slung the girl over her back and carried her away from the game without checking her once. Now, I appreciate roughhousing as much as the next person–and I’m still shocked that it’s the usually sedate Japanese doing these violent sports–but dragging an unconscious person off the field while play is still going on, causes even me to have a sense of decency.

Some schools have tamed some of the events–students usually grab large hats now instead of bandanas–but there’s still a lot of roughhousing to be had. Even in the elementary school events, my youngest had a bamboo pole grabbed out of her hand and was later dragged across the dirt by several stronger kids.

Darkling Dreaming Teacher

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I’m willing to bet that, no matter who they are and how soft-spoken and mild-mannered they are, no matter how much they enjoy teaching and no matter how dedicated to their profession they are, every teacher has dreamed of telling off a student.

I have lived that dream. Kind of. In a way. Rather disturbingly in retrospect.

It happened the end of my first year teaching in Japan. Japanese public school classes are much noisier than most Westerners expect. As I’ve said before, school is often considered social time and teachers tolerate an amount of noise that would trigger meetings and therapy sessions in the USA. Some weeks you can handle it and getting the attention of the class is a game; the next week culture shock sets in and you get angry and frustrated and you start shouting a lot.

In my case, the second wave of culture shock hit in June. For reasons I don’t fully understand, Japanese school years run well into July instead of ending at the end of May when God intended them to end. (I can’t remember the exact verse; And I say unto thee, go thee forth from thy school when the wind turneth as to the South and prosper ye about merrily in thine own way but mostly in Mine.) Something like that.

The weather was getting muggy and hot and my decades of conditioning resisted being in class that late. None of the student rooms were air conditioned.The result was not pretty, although it was kind of fun. I was teaching first year junior high (7th grade) and trying to help a girl during who was finally speaking to me. She’d asked a question and I was there to help her. The boy next to her, though, kept butting in with the answer and what she was doing wrong as she was trying to talk.

Finally, something snapped in my head. I asked the little shi, er, LAD, “Are you an English teacher?” After a couple rounds of “huh?” and me repeating, my Japanese English Teacher finally translated my question. “Are you an English teacher?” He went “No. No. No.” and I said “Then shut the fuck up.”

The teacher translated it as “Please be quiet sit down” in a tone that said “Please be quiet sit the hell down before the insane foreigner loses his last thread of sanity.”

To this day I have mixed feelings about that incident. He was trying to be helpful and I could have reacted in a different way. On the other hand, the young lass had the floor and he was stepping on it. Either way, after my initial feeling of horror and “Did I just say that out loud?” I realized it was kind of fun and actually felt good to say that.

I haven’t done it since. I’ve already lived that dream.

A Night Out With Teachers but Not Your Typical Girls

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One of the fun things about living overseas is that just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, and you think you finally see what your new home has in common with your old, something happens that couldn’t happen in your home country. Well, it could, but someone would get fired and/or go to jail.

In my case, a good friend and I decided to travel down to Kyoto one summer mostly because we were both bored and we both liked Kyoto. We also felt we should experience more of Japanese culture, even though it was the start of our third year in Japan (Translation: even we had to do something besides play computer games.)

We toured the usual places: Kinkakuji (the Temple of the Golden Pavilion); Genkakuji (the Temple of the Silver Pavilion) and Ryoanji (the Temple of Rocks in Raked Sand). While we were roaming around town trying to decide what Western food to eat, we stumbled across my friend’s Japanese colleagues who were enjoying their teacher trip (at least until we showed up). Having been unable to hide from us, they invited us to dinner, although we got sat by ourselves at the little kids table in a different part of the room and I’m still not convinced we got the full course.

We were then invited to join the after-party, which at first involved roaming around trying to find a bar that could accommodate all of us. We ended up being turned away from a few places and my friend and I volunteered to bail out if our presence was ruining everyone’s evening. Instead, one teacher opted to visit a soapland to, well, get a massage, so to speak. (My US friends, imagine what would happen if that got out: teacher on teacher trip visits brothel.)

After several phone calls, a place was located and we were herded into taxis. As we traveled to our destination, one of asked what kind of bar we were going to and we were told, through a smirk, that it was an okama bar. Since okama meant gay, I think both of us assumed we misheard him.

Our destination, called Club Lactose, turned out to be a transsexual bar where post-op women served as the hostesses and entertainment. Okama can also mean drag-queen, but even that didn’t quite fit. The term for the club was, as I understand it now, a newhalf club.

(Note: Newhalf purportedly derives from Southern All Stars singer Keisuke Kuwata. During a 1981 recording session he asked Betty, one of the people in the studio, if she was a half–i.e. mixed race. Betty said she was half-man half-woman. Because this was a new-spin on the idea of a “half” the word “newhalf” eventually caught on.)

First the ladies did the rounds of the tables and my friend and I got to try out our Japanese (although the version spoken in the Kyoto-Osaka region is much different than what we were used to.) My friend had a dictionary, but all that did was draw laughs when he got caught thumbing through it. The ladies answered questions about their surgery and the condition of their bodies, especially the one who was post-op but wasn’t on female hormones. The entire club was surprisingly family friendly (at least at that point) and it seemed more like a “let’s learn about transexuals” meeting.

The ladies put on quite an impressive music revue, that ended in a surprisingly revealing strip show that my friend and I agree stole from the moment by eliminating any mystery and more or less telling audience members exactly what they secretly wanted to know. The crowd was a mix of ages and genders, including one group that looked to have brought their grandmother along. The next show was going to be the Club Lactose adaptation of the movie Titanic.

To this day I try to imagine what the fallout would have been in the USA if it turned out a group of teachers from a small town grabbed a couple foreign guys and went to a transsexual bar during a teacher trip. It probably would not have ended well for a lot of people.

As for my friend and I, we tried to go back the club then next night to see Titanic, but we couldn’t get in because we weren’t accompanied by any Japanese people.