Party On The Clock, Dude

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In yesterday’s post I mentioned that Japanese parties, or enkai, can be rather formal (translation: boring) and that they are pretty much the same no matter who throws them (translation: always boring). Today I thought I’d explain that in more detail.

The Japanese like to drink and they are capable of throwing interesting parties, before that happens, though, there is an enkai which is pretty much the bastard offspring of a long business meeting and cocktail hour. Enkais are typically two hours long and happen strictly on schedule. There’s no such thing as being fashionably late. If the enkai is scheduled to start at 7:00 p.m. and you show up at 7:10 p.m. you will have missed the opening speech and the opening toast. There will be an empty space on the floor where you are supposed to be and you will be at least two glasses of beer and an appetizer behind your neighbors.

At this point a Westerner begins to encounter a level of culture shock. No only are you hunched up on straw mats behind a little floor table but you don’t actually own your own beer. Instead, in the spirit of collegiality, everyone pours beer for everyone else. To pour your own beer is considered greedy and impatient. In fact, you may not even have a bottle nearby (especially if you were 10 minutes late). Getting beer involves getting someone to notice that your little glass is empty and hoping they will crawl across the mat to you and pour you a glass.

There is also a tradition of waiting until you’ve taken a bite of the most delicious food on your plates (Japanese serve each dish on a separate plate) and then ambushing you with a bottle of beer. You are then expected to down your current beer, ruining the taste of the food, and then present your glass for more beer.

At a certain point in the enkai, about 75 minutes in, people start crawling around with bottles as an excuse to chat with the people they’re not sitting near. With five minutes left, everyone returns to their tables and the closing speech is given. At the two hour mark, the enkai and what is typically unmerciful boredom is over. (Note: New Year’s Parties are longer and usually more fun but that is another post.)

It’s at this point that the fun actually begins. You can either extricate yourself from the proceedings and go home or follow the proceedings to the first of the many after parties. Granted, at this point karaoke is usually involved–and in Japan karaoke is actually a martial art–but whiskey is also involved.

However, be warned, in Japan “drinking whiskey” is actually a form of rehydration. They give you a highball glass full of ice, put about a cap’s worth of whiskey in it and then top it off with water. I remember being horrified the first time this happened and I requested a glass of straight whiskey to accompany the watery ruin. I then had the odd experience of chasing straight whiskey with whiskey and water.

For the Japanese, though, this watery drink has a kind of placebo effect and they start singing, usually pretty well. And then they look at me and I’m like, um, no, not enough whiskey yet because there’s not enough whiskey in this town to make me go up there and sing. Now, at this point, some people go “Oh, DL lighten up. Live a little. Everyone’s having fun. Sing. Sing a song. Sing out loud. Sing out strong.” To which I usually respond “Go fuck yourself.” (Remind me again: Why don’t I get invited to parties?)

Granted, there was that time I sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” with my then boss and there was that other time I sang “California Dreamin'” but the first involved the New Year and the second involved She Who Must Be Obeyed and, oddly, England. (But those are future posts.)

After the Karaoke, the hardcore partiers either go to another karaoke bar or to a “snack” which has little to do with food and a lot to do with well-dressed women pushing expensive drinks at you. Or, those of us who’ve been there and done that and got a concussion because of it, go for a bowl of ramen soup and then go home.

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.

That Which Has Been Seen Cannot Be

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Japan has a reputation for being a country of readers. Until the advent of the smart phone–now everyone’s playing games/texting–it was common to see most people on a train reading books. They would even do this in crowded trains when there was barely enough extra space for air. (On at least two occasions I had to remind people standing next to me or behind me that I was not a book rest and not a particularly nice person.)

The truth is, though, that a good portion of those readers were reading comic books and that a good portion of those were reading comic books that most people in the West would only read alone in the bathroom because they were, how shall I say, graphic depictions of people knowing each other in a Biblical sense often in ways the Bible says are worthy of an execution. They also regularly featured characters too young to have started junior high school.

This version of lolita culture was, at the time, so common that I saw two teachers exchange school girl themed porn videos in the teachers’ office as if it was a natural thing to do, and had to chase two adult students away from the school girl uniform they were oggling during class. After I told them to step away from it they said “but you get to see them everyday” and I was like “step away from the uniform” while my brain was trying to pretend I hadn’t heard that. (For the record, the uniform was in class because it was being passed between two mothers, one whose daughter had finished junior high and the other whose daughter was about to start.)

The worst parts of this culture are changing, though, mostly by force of law. When I still lived in Niigata, I remember looking down a row of magazines in a bookstore and seeing, in pretty much this order: car magazine, literature magazine, child nudity, sumo magazine and, well, I never got to the end of the row because I’m still shocked at what was basically the equivalent of a Playboy magazine for Russian sixth graders. Nothing was covered; it was displayed as if it were normal. Sadly, at that time, it was. Chiaki Kuriyama (Go Go Yubari in Kill Bill) started her modeling career by doing a nude photo book at the age of 12. The book was a best seller.

I remember this mostly because of the controversy it generated and the fact that Japanese law changed soon after her photo book was released to ban the production (although not the possession) of such materials. I also remember that, because she was topless on the cover, the local bookstore had placed the price label in a strategic location.

Raunchy comic books, however, persisted. Soon after I started working at my current school, I confiscated a comic book from one of my 7th graders. I won’t go into details for fear this gets blocked by filters, but I will say it was elementary school girls, various animals and all nasty.

Recently, Japanese law changed to control these magazines as well. Normally I’d be against government involvement in such things, but some things pose an interesting challenge to even the most heartfelt ideals and some things just shouldn’t be.

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.

The Temple of Pens and Paper and Stuff

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I’ve said before that Japan is the Mecca of stationery and things to write with. For part of today, I got the chance to head down to Tokyo to visit Itoya, the central temple of that Mecca. I was mildly disappointed by the trip.

I’ve also mentioned my affinity for places that are both grandiose and kind of creepy.  When I first moved to Tokyo, Itoya met both those criteria. Behind it’s signature red paper clip sign was seven floors (and one basement level) of office supplies fountain pens, ball-point pens, paper, and every office gadget imaginable housed in a thin building that looked kind of worn out and felt vaguely dangerous, as if you’d had to go to a store in the bad part of town (instead of just a block from what used to be the most expensive property on Earth). It had low doors and I had to pay attention as I moved from floor to floor. I was immediately smitten by it all and started spending. If I had nickle for every dime I spent there, well, I’d have someone else writing these posts whilst I studied mathematics.

Part of the fun is that, because the Japanese also have an unhealthy interest in office supplies, Japanese stationers have pens and other items that never make it to the West. Some of the items aren’t worth sending, but the ones that are seem subject to the whims of the manufacturers who may decide that the pen or pencil won’t sell well overseas. When  you house it in a creepy building it’s even better.

Unfortunately, the creepiness is gone as the Itoya main building is now a construction site. The basic pens and paper have been moved to a six story building around the corner that lacks the red paper clip any character.

Clean but lacks character.

Clean but lacks character.

Just down the alley is K. Itoya,which used to be a satellite of the main store, and now houses the fountain pens and art supplies. It also lacks any character, but I like the fountain pen sign.

Nice sign.

Nice sign. No character.

I’m also convinced that the new stores have less stuff than before. Part of the charm of old Itoya was that you could roam around for an hour discovering stuff that you didn’t know existed but suddenly couldn’t live without. The new store is too clean and compact. It’s like replacing the XYZ Shopping Mall with a large convenience store but still calling it the XYZ Shopping Mall.

I hope the new building gets its creepiness and sense of danger back. If it doesn’t, I just hope it has more stuff.

 

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.

Teenager Plus Coffee Equals Headphones for Daddy

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I’ve written before about how I didn’t discover coffee until I was at university and, after a while, became an unapologetic addict. Part of my tardiness in discovering coffee was that the first coffee I remember trying was drowned in non-dairy creamer and artificial sweetener (think about the chemicals involved in that). It was horrid and I can still taste it as I’m thinking about it. Eventually, I tried coffee-plus-desert concoctions until a lack of cash led me to line up espresso doppios like tequila shots on a Saturday night.

The other day, though, I got a shock to the system. She Who Must Be Obeyed had just made a fresh pot of coffee and was pouring herself a cup and as I was walking up to liberate some from her tyrannical clutches (something like that) I saw her add cream and sugar to the cup. My immediate reaction was “The horror! She doesn’t love the coffee.” or that she was disguising the dregs of the morning pot to make them palatable–a step, for the record, I consider unnecessary. I asked her why she was ruining the coffee and she said it wasn’t for her, it was for our oldest.

The conversation then proceeded something like:

Me–Oh, yeah, that makes sense. (Pregnant pause) Why the hell are you giving caffeine to a thirteen year old girl? Don’t you know what can happen?
SWMBO–But she’s studying for her final exams.
Me–Oh, yeah, that makes sense. (Little bit pregnant pause) Why the hell are you giving coffee to a thirteen year old girl? Don’t you know what can happen?
SWMBO–Here’s your coffee.
Me–Oh thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you (long slurp of coffee) love you.

The results of this chemical experiment have been mixed. Yes, our oldest stays awake and “studies” in between YouTube videos on her pink Nintendo 3DS. However, sugar plus caffeine plus puberty equals hyper activity and frequent arguments over Nintendo 3DS use, fights over proper length of study time, frequent back talking and frequent eye rolling. Basically, two caffeine enhanced alpha females begin struggling over control of the house whilst daddy washes his hands and changes his name to Pontious Lively and puts on headphones and listens to “Pompeii” and “Radioactive” on endless loop because apocalypse.

I remember being shocked when I learned some of my Japanese friends’ children were drinking coffee in high school and, given my history, am amazed that my oldest even likes coffee.

She also crawls across the ceiling surprisingly well.