Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Pictures of my high school in Ueda, Japan
































These are views of the surrounding mountains from different rooms in Someyaoka High School.


The room with desks and hanging cables is our English Office.

I cut out surfing photos and lined the bookshelf in front of my desk with them.

There are many covered bike racks on school grounds to cover the hundreds of student bikes. All the bikes look the same!








Thursday, August 25, 2005

Recent Email Value Pack







These are the last few emails that I've sent out about my experiences in Japan.

Email #2

Hello everyone,

We have moved into our apartment in Ueda City, a quaint town 2-3 hours
slightly northwest of Tokyo. The apartment consists of two living
rooms, one water closet, one laughably small shower room, and a little
cooking area crammed into a hallway. It`s small by American standards
but fine by my standards (and that`s all that counts)! Traditional
Japanese tatami mats line the floors and the rooms are separated by
sliding screen doors. Beth, my predecessor, was kind enough to sell
me all her furniture, cooking utensils, videos/pirated Asian DVD`s,
and a CD player for $100. I like the apartment because it makes me
feel like a giant. I need to duck when I pass from room to room so I
don`t bump my head. An occasional bump-er-ooo on the noggin is a
small price to pay to feel like a giant, trust me. I will soon start
roaming the streets, clad only in a panther-skin loincloth with a club
or spear in hand, to tell everyone I meet that I am the Giant from
America that they have all heard so little about. More to come on
that as I search for a panther with a particularly soft hide. The
ones with dirty, abrasive fur are a dime a dozen, but the ones with
fur that feels as though it was crafted by the tiny, ivory, manicured
hands of giggling angels........... ahhhhhhhhhhhhh those are the cats
I seek and dream about, day and night, day and night. Mike Mazanec,
cat lover and cat`s lover, you know the kind of fur I`m talking about.

Ueda sits in a valley and is surrounded by lush, green mountains. The
mountains are visible from most spots in town and are clearly visible
from my front balcony and all of the rooms of Somayaoka High School,
my place of employment. Mt. Taro, a particularly large and masculine
looking mountain serves as my compass when I walk around town and I`ve
noticed my apartment sits in front of a bump on its forehead. It`s
very easy to explore a new area when there is no possibility of
getting lost because of easily recognizable mountains. Ueda is a
lively town with a few main streets and many narrow, quiet residential
alleyways and streets. The houses snuggle closely next to one another
and many houses are connected by shared porcelain roofing tiles and
gutters. The people of Ueda, and it seems the Japanese in general,
take their gardening quite seriously. Flowers fill gaps between
houses and vegetables, familiar and foreign to me, poke up in small
gardens throughout the city. Most days, Colleen and I are the only
white people walking the streets and this is oddly refreshing. The
Japanese are intrigued by us and constantly flash us the peace sign
(or maybe they are simply starting an MC Hammer ``2 Legit 2 Quit``
exchange and waiting for us to reciprocate with an ``L`` sign, I`m
still trying to figure that one out). Many Japanese people have tried
to communicate with us in broken English with little success and it
seems as if most people in Ueda know no English at all. There is
nothing quite like saying ``hello``to an elderly shopowner and
receiving a glaze-eyed, quiet stare in return. Despite their poor
command of my native blabber, the Japanese of Ueda and beyond are
obsessed with English words and clothing that is adorned with
ridiculous half-American expressions and images. Actual
messages\images that I`ve observed on innocent Japanese school
children or in shops that target innocent Japanese school children:

**New York Burnin` (accompanied by a picture of the twin towers
ablaze. This one looks like a slide taken from a terrorists slideshow
that was meant to be shown at a casual coffee shop. --Man sips cafe
latte, swallows, ``This next one`s old hat boys. New York Burnin`,
you know what went down. I won`t bore you with details. Let`s move
on...)

**Roots of the Civirization (accompanied by a picture of Bob Marely.
The Japanese have trouble pronouncing the letter ``L`` so sometimes
they simply choose not to use the bloody thing)

**I`m Osama`s Brother (I laughed immediately after seeing this and
failed to notice anything else on the shirt, on the street, etc. I
basically had a laughing fit and blacked out)

**One Love, One Kill (tit for tat Bob Marley style? Someone
misunderstood a word or something on the Whisper-Down-The-Lane of
T-Shirt Production game)

**Pot leaves (I`m not quite sure about this one, but I`ve seen many
young Japanese children with pot leaves on their shirts and backpacks.
Any possible explanations?)

To those of you who forget what it feels like to live without a car,
let me refresh your memories or bring, old fuzzy memories back into
focus: life is grand without automotive shackles. Unlike a car, my
legs ALWAYS start in the morning and allow me to stop on a dime (or a
yen). When I walk I can look in every single store window if I choose
to and when I leave my house I never have to look for keys. My legs
constantly maintain a youthful, stringy, burning feeling that lives
comfortably with its feet up on the couches of my calves. After
carrying a futon mattress for a mile or two back from the department
store a few nights ago, I felt like I accomplished something. If you
can walk but don`t, start or else I will lead you on a long walk when
I return. We`ll call it Andrew`s Death March and we`ll walk from
Jersey to Anchorage. I`ll carry a whip in each hand and I`ll make
tushies red if I see any sloppy stepping or smell stinky sweating.

Colleen and I went to a Dragon Festival in Miyota on Saturday. The
thematic foundation for the festival was conveyed to us as follows:

One day long ago, before french fries and hair gel, a wise, honest man
lived in Miyota, Japan. This man had many brothers who were jealous
of him because of the honesty and wisdom he possessed. His brothers
eventually decided to kill the man because they constantly lived in
his shadow. They murdered him and tossed him Scott-Peterson-style
into a lake. Upon learning of her wise husband`s death, the wife of
the murdered man jumped off of a high cliff, committing suicide.
Months passed and the murdered man eventually became sick of eating
raw worms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and living underwater. He
emerged from the lake and saw a shocked crowd of people standing
before him. He looked at his body and saw that he had turned into a
dragon! His wife also decided to pay the mortal world a visit at
about the same time and, to the town`s dismay, she also turned into a
dragon! The dragons embraced and ran off to make their dragon scales
all slimy and sticky.

The festival was a reenactment of this story (more or less) and
involved two massive human-supported dragons jiggling and writhing
around in front of a beautiful temple in the woods. I had never seen
anything like it and I shot pictures like the paparazzi outside
Britney`s honeymoon suite. Oooooo! That one whisker on the dragon`s
face jiggled like it was trying to jiggle just for me!! Let me try to
preserve that jiggle for all eternity in my little camera machine! It
must have been a ridiculous site--a barely informed, white festival
goer shooting pictures of an intimate ceremony. Needless to say, it
was fun and fresh. Although I must mention that there were many
amateur Japanese camera enthusiasts in attendance, many had two large
digital-cameras-from-the-future swinging tiredly from their necks,
clicked and shot well beyond their threshold of recommended daily use.

If fat people exist in Japan, they hide inside all day and all night.
I want to hold a party and invite them all so I can meet them. I will
reserve a table for six at the local sushi house in case any of them
want to bring a friend or relative.

More to come as life unfolds..

Andrew

Email #3

Hello everyone,

For the past two days, students from the surrounding middle schools
have attended orientations for Ueda Someyaoka Super English High
School (actual name), my place of employment. Colleen works for
Yashiro Super Science School. The word `super` in the school title
helps label the school`s specialty: English is Someyaoka`s specialty.
Ueda has an international studies track for gifted students
interested in learning about American culture and English. All
students are subjected to classes that focus heavily on English. This
gifted track, however, is the creme of the creme of the creme of the
local crop of students. For those who are interested, it is a crop
that grows to roughly the same size with a few exceptions, requires
little watering, and always grows upwards towards the sun. The
confused plants that can`t figure out which way is up by age four or
five are left to whither in the shade of their peers.

All students must take a test to see if they are even worthy of
attending a high school in Japan. Why force the little buggers to go
if they aren`t smart enough or don`t care enough to pass? Some
students stop school at the 8th grade level to begin working but most
give the high school tests a shot. Someyaoka is the second most
competitive school in this region so all of the students that made it
to the orientation scored well on the tests. Yesterday, 150 students
attended the international track orientation and these students scored
highest on the test. Out of the 150 that attended, all will interview
and take another test and 36 will be chosen to attend Someyaoka.
Today, 1,000 students attended the ``general`` track orientation, a
welcome meeting for the students who aren`t quite as ``gifted``
(basically the ones who still haven`t figured out how to play the game
well yet) and all will test again, some will interview, and 250
students will be granted admission for the coming year.

What I observed in the gym BEFORE the start of the presentation was
amazing: 1,000 students sitting neatly and quietly in rows waiting
for the orientation to start (you could hear a mouse fart in the gym
it was so quiet, although the thing is kept so clean by the
students--that`s right, no janitors in Japanese public schools, that
I`m sure no mice were in attendance), all student hair was pitch black
with not a pink mohawk in sight, not a corn row (made of hair that is)
for miles, all were in uniforms, all faced forward and didn`t break
their seated positions, and all politely bowed in unison as each
speaker addressed the audience. I couldn`t help but wonder what 1,000
American students would do if left to their own devices before the
start of an important presentation. A few would fall asleep, 125
would stretch out and get comfortable, 33 would stand-up, 656 would
float off into an iPod-induced comatose state, 3 would make-out (with
each other), 78 would break away from the group to comb their hair in
the corner, 12 would fight, one kid would shoot another kid, and the
rest would whisper.

I helped teach my first class to shaky-legged, uniformed tots after
the orientation. The students were extremely nervous and refused to
make eye contact with me. I was consulted on a few occaisions by my
Japanese counterpart, Akai Sensei, regarding questions like, ``What
does the movie title, ``Spirited Away`` mean in English Andrew?`` or
``Why does the director call the movie ``War of the Worlds``? How can
`worlds` go to war?`` Akai Sensei assured me that our classes will be
much larger than the dwarfed class of 31 today. To have 40-45
students per class is fairly common, she explained.

As I stated previously, I have no cable, internet or telephone service
at the moment and I feel liberated, plain and simple. I receive a
daily paper that is quite good as it contains mini-sections of five or
six globally recognized papers like the N.Y. times, the Washington
Post, a Britsh paper, and few Asian papers. In the mornings, I eat
cereal and read the paper, and in the evenings I eat dinner, clean-up,
and sit around and read books that I`ve been meaning to read for
years. I feel like a pig belly-up in an ocean of warm, frothy,
rolling shit and I`m convinced that some nights I achieve such a high
level of relaxation that at some point soon I will simply disappear
and blend into the tiny droplets of water that hang in the humid air,
like someone slipping out of an actionless, long single-shot Star Trek
movie. My rent is $100 a month yet I`m getting paid more that I was
making as a 1st year teacher in Montclair, N.J. The biggest perk of
all you ask? Not a goddamn cent of my money goes to the warmonger in
office at the moment. I`m not paying to help bomb Iraqi wedding
parties and I`m not helping Dubya feast on fillet with giblets at
night. When some opportunistic intern wipes his ass with silk toilet
paper, it`s someone else`s dime that pays for it. I`m earning a
tax-free income and it feels wonderful. For two years, Americans
living in Japan can earn a tax-free income but on the third year, the
party stops, the balloons go limp and fall to the ground, and teachers
have to start paying Japanese taxes (I still don`t think they have to
pay American taxes though). I`m not including all of these tiny
details of my working situation here in Japan to boast, I simply want
all of you to know what kinds of possibilities exist outside of the
belly of the American machine. This living situation is definitely
not everyone`s cup of tea, but it is one option picked from a vat full
of exciting, bubbling options. Receiving a public education in
America equates to being advised to follow a prescribed path of
existence, one that basically breaks down to:

get born--go to school--go to college--get job A.S.A.P. after college
to get insurance--work--vacation for a minute fraction of the
year--marry, baby-make--work--die.

Granted, components of the equation are important, but they shouldn`t
be experienced in that order all the time (birth must always be first
and death always last, but inbetween should be a dance with hundreds
of made-up goofy steps).

One J.E.T. said that many J.E.T.`s come to Japan to ``suss out`` their
lives and figure out how and where they are going to begin working on
the ``work`` and career component of the equation. I`ve come to Japan
with a different mentality. I`m aware that this experience IS my
life, it`s not some damn pre-school period for me to sit around and
plan out the future of my life, breaking life into predictable time
periods like it`s a cute recipe complete with labeled ingredients.
Maybe I`ve missed something along the way, but my life has never
played out like that, and with a lot of praying to the God of Life
Organization, it will never play out like that. Life is
unpredictable. Wars, tsunamis, religiously-fueled disputes, drunk
drivers, and lightning always tend to screw up life plans. I`m in
Japan becuase I happened to surf a random beach in Australia during
the same week that a J.E.T. participant was on vacation. We happened
to meet and we began talking about big and little things, and he
described the J.E.T. program to me. I scribbled his descriptions in
my journal like a chore-completing apprentice in the presence of his
sage and when I returned to Jersey, I printed out two applications for
the program and started rolling two tiny snowballs down a big hill,
hoping shit would stick to `em (base camp was Japan). We set a goal,
yes, but we didn`t sacrifice our interests to achieve this goal. This
goal was alligned with our interests. The people that come here to
``suss out`` their lives haven`t been honest with themselves in the
past in the Goal Setting department. Many are in their late twenties
with college degrees in fields of little interest to them (fields that
guidance counselors promised would make big bulges in their wallet
pockets). They have tasted pleasant living in Japan and now don`t
wish to return to their calculators and cubicle wall hangings of token
tropical places, much like a male hampster will reject his familiar
feast of veggies and seeds and will instead prefer satisfying his
appetite with the tender meat of his young babies after tasting meat
of any kind (undoubtedly fed to him by some unassuming fifth grade pet
owner with a devilish curiosity and access to mommy`s pot roast).
Sometimes focusing on the prize takes many precious minutes, days, and
years. Too often, people end up with the prize they have chosen to
chase only after using up years of their lives in the process. I
don`t want to be one of those people who chase for years and end up
with a prize that breaks like a Cracker-Jack toy choo-choo train when
I tap it on the edge of my tooth to see if it`s real.

Anyway, to make a long story a bit longer with one or two more
sentences, check out the J.E.T. program and other programs like it if
you have an interest in getting an inside peek of the schools of other
countries and other countries in general. If teaching doesn`t float
your boat, look into humanitarian programs in other countries (or in
America) that will allow you to do something other than make and
spend. I only mention this because I enjoy the company of each and
every one of you on this list, and I don`t want to be the one trying
to comfort you on your deathbed when you start rattling off your list
of things you wish you had done. If I end up in a situation like
this, I will yelp one big ``I told you so you stubborn bastard!`` and
I`ll hit the switch on your breathing machine or empty cyanide in your
I.V., whichever is easier and quicker, seeing as lying and dying with
regrets is a miserable human state that should always be ended as
quickly as possible.

Interesting comment recently proclaimed by Colleen: ``I like living
without any money.`` Now before all of you email me and say, ``Wait a
hot minute, you both live in a tiny yet comfortable apartment and have
cheap food in the fridge and clothes from the Salvation Army on your
backs, you have all the money you need to be comfortable,`` let me
clarify her statement and explain the circumstances under which she
would proclaim such a seemingly vile statement, one that undermines
everything American, everything ``developed`` countries and the
companies that support their ``progress`` hope to instill in the minds
of their impressionable youth. Both Colleen and I, after paying for
our first month`s rent, our security deposit, our key money (basically
one month of rent that is paid to the landlord, non-refundable, as a
way of saying ``Thank you for letting me live in your apartment,`` and
other start-up expenses, we were left with about $180 each to carry us
through our first two and a half weeks in Japan. Under any other
conditions, this amount would be more than sufficient to keep two
people alive for two and a half weeks. But considering that Colleen
has to commute to and from her school (about $10 a day) and that we
are required to attend a few J.E.T. related events that will require
us to shell out cash, we both have to be mindful of how we spend our
respective money. Colleen calculated that she can spend about $3.75 a
day on coffee/tea or any other non-vital item. By her saying ``I like
living without any money,`` she really meant that she enjoyed living
on a very tight budget, one fit for a crack addict or a travelling
young person with an allergy to home. I found her statement
incredibly fascinating. How is it one can enjoy living with almost no
spending money whatsoever? The answer has much to do with the amount
of pressure that comes with possessing greasy green bills, or in the
case of the Japanese, multicolored greasy bills of varrying sizes and
seemingly astronomical values (I have a 10,000 yen note in my wallet
at the moment and I`m still not rich! Something`s odd here!). As
rappers have succinctly proclaimed for ages, ``Mo money, mo
problems.`` With no money in your wallet, there is no pressure to buy
or consume. Few people experience this release after the great weed
of personal grow begins to grow. How many of you have voluntarily
lived on one or two dollars a day just for the fun of it? I
experienced a similar sort of liberated feeling while traveling on
tight budgets on different trips, but the feeling was a bit different
because I never knew how much the next hostel or the next bus fare
would cost. Because of this uncertainty, I still felt a money-related
pressure. Here in Japan, we have paid our rent for this month and
bought groceries for the fridge. We already have settled into a
fairly stable existence and after paying our expenses, we were left
with a little bit of cash. There is never any question when we wake
up in the mornings as to whether or not we will treat ourselves to a
fancy shirt or expensive dinner. We simply can`t afford to. This
changes the way we walk down the street. I peer through the polished
glass of store front windows with eyes that easily wander from nice
thing to nice thing. Why should I scrutinize any object when there is
no way in hell I`m going to have any chance of buying it anytime soon?
You don`t feel the weight of the mountain when you are one of
millions who let it rest upon your back. When you step out from under
it, and it is possible to simply step out from under it, you look back
and realize what knocked and clanked your vertebrae together for years
and made you feel weird and unsettled standing in the foyers of the
mansions of others was nothing but a silly mountain.

Anyway, I just thought this was an interesting component of our lives
at the moment. I`m not trying in anyway to glamorize poverty, because
we are not poor by any means and poverty aint`t no fluffy, cuddly
thing. Like I said, we have a roof over our heads and food in the
fridge, but compared to American standards and even our standards of
living in Montclair, we have very little at the moment....and I like
it.

more to come as life unfolds,

andrew

Email #4

Hello everyone,

There are 12-15 international English teachers that live in and around
Ueda, most work for companies like N.O.V.A. or J.E.T. but some have
private contracts with small elementary and middle schools. Where
there are a few English speakers from America and Canada, naturally
there also must be barbeques. We`ve attended a few barbeques in the
past two weeks and these events have proved to be a source of
interesting (and sometimes therapeutic) conversation--``Isn`t it
strange how often Japanese people stare at you in public?`` ``Yeah, I
found the best way to deal with that is...`` and so on. Mike and
Patti, a married couple from British Columbia, held a small barbeque
at their house a few nights ago. Sitting around a steaming pile of
home grown corn and eggplant like a couple of squatters around an oil
drum fire on a blustery New England winter night, we enjoyed
eachother`s company and talked for hours, eating loudly with smacking
lips like the wild Japanese boars that supposedly scamper through the
surrounding woods. We had one of those conversations that you can
still hear in the back of your mind the following day, a
conversational garlic burp that catches you while you wash dishes or
walk to the store.

Before I describe the conversation, I first must describe what little
information I know about our hosts. Patti is 32 years old and takes
pride in knowing that she is one of the oldest J.E.T.s in Ueda. She
has golden brown hair that was once maimed at a local, Japanese salon
with a teenage target market (``I will NEVER again go to one of those
places! They only know how to give people mullets!``) and a wide,
dominating smile that gives orders to the rest of her face like a
military general. She thinks her disproportionately big hips make her
stand out in Japan and she doesn`t give a damn about it. She`s pays
verbal homage to her Canadian roots with frequent ``eh`s`` and she is
``bad with money.`` She met her husband while traveling in Central
America in 2002 and after about a year, they talked about marriage,
``There was no real proposal. One day we were both just like `Hey,
let`s get married.` And we did,`` They married at a summer camp
perched on the edge of a lake deep in the woods of British Columbia.
The wedding lasted three days and all of the guests stayed in the
dormitory-style rooms at the camp. There was a large cookout the
first night, and a bunch of hiking, swimming, tubing and marrying the
next two days (not necesarrily in that order of course). Once on a
particularly hot and humid Japanese summer day, she was standing on
the edge of a large rock, debating whether or not to jump into the
river below, and suddenly it struck her--if she was going to jump, she
might as well jump in the buff. She disrobed, looked across the river
and realized she was providing free foreigner entertainment to a few
local Japanese fishermen, shrieked, and jumped. Needless to say, she
doesn`t exude typical 32 year-old-ness and, like her husband, she
seems to have the heart and adventurous spirit of a wide-eyed recent
high school graduate.

While on a rusting ferry floating across a river in Thailand, a local
Thai man thought Mike was Kevin Costner and asked if he could get his
autograph. He obliged because he is used to this sort of ``Hey aren`t
you that guy ....`` sort of introductory question. Often likened to
Bruce Willis, Mike is a man who has a warm smile and piercing blue
eyes. He has a very small pot belly but is stocky and was clearly
once fit and muscular. He grows a bushy beard in the winter for
insulation purposes and is so well-traveled that another J.E.T. named
Richard (aptly nicknamed Big Richard) swears Mike used to work for the
C.I.A. Mike is also 32 years-old and has lived in numerous countries
and states. He plays the drums and has already expressed interest in
starting a music project with me here in Japan. He cleared a small
plot of land in the back of his house and started a garden a few
months ago. Its harvest has prevented them from buying seeemingly
overpriced Japanese vegetables this summer. He enjoys bluegrass
music, and the two Jerry Garcia portraits hanging in his living room
and kitchen have been placed and hung like Buddhist prints in a
shrine, assuming prime, central wall and fridge space. He laughs a
lot and would make an excellent mall Santa Claus in about 35 years.

Anyway, back to the conversation. Being the newbies, Colleen and I
sat and listened for most of the conversation as Mike, Patti, and the
large black man named ``Big Richard`` described quirky aspects of
Japanese culture. The following are the highlights of our
conversation:

1. Japan is a land full of empty smiles. Everyone tries their
hardest to accompany any comment or action with a smile, even if that
comment or action isn`t one that brings them happiness or a feeling of
contentment. Mike explained, ``Basically, if you talk to a Japanese
person and they respond with just a smile and no words, they totally
disagree with what you`re saying. If they give you a smile and a few
words and maybe a nod, they might agree with you but they still don`t
enjoy what you`re talking about. If a Japanese person, repeatedly
smiles, nods, laughs, and replies with many words, they actually enjoy
the conversation and enjoy your company at that moment.`` I was
shocked when I heard this! Colleen and I had been talking the
previous week about how the Japanese seemed to be the goddamned
happiest group of people on the planet. We couldn`t get over how nice
supermarket clerks were to us, how old people on bikes seemed to enjoy
seeing us get in their way as we crossed the street at the wrong time,
how teachers at our schools acted as if we were filling voids in their
souls with good ole` American love and warmth when we bowed and
introduced ourselves. Everyone seemed to gush happiness and joy and
they convinced us that they must eat happily, dream happily, make love
happily (undoubtedly in the missionary position using a crisp, white
sheet partition with a perfectly cut hole in the middle), and take out
trash happily. To learn that all of these smiles were nothing but
froggy symptoms of the pesky repressive Asian culture blues was more
than a bit disheartening--it was frightening. I immediately started
to second guess every interaction I`d had in Japan, wondering which
smiles were real and which smiles were fake. It is incredibly
unsettling looking around at people talking to one another on the
street and wondering if their cheery blubbering is some carefully
orchestrated, culturally mandated two-step.

2. There is incredible pressure on Japanese women to marry early. If
you are unfortunate enough to be 30, female, and single in Japan, you
are welcomed with open arms into the Nippon Spinster Club. Your fate
is sealed with the faint echo of a kiss never had and you are left to
live a solitary existence in a cold bed covered in sheets absent of
holes and wash in a tub filled with your own tears. Patti described a
30 year-old, attractive female co-worker who is single and has given
up on hopes of finding a mate. Her parents have accepted the fact
that she has missed her marital window of opportunity and no longer
ask her about suitors. At a table set for three, dinners are consumed
in silence and the nights pass slowly. A Japanese women who is still
single at age 30 is insultingly called ``christmas cake.`` In Japan,
stores sell a pastry called Christmas Cake around Christmas time and
the day after Christmas, all edible surplus of this treat is virtually
worthless, marked down in price and often simply thrown away. Not
only are women compared to a food that is eaten and shit out by the
masses, but they are compared to a food that is thrown away if it`s
not sold during a certain time period. If they were called
``Christmas Kobe Beef`` I don`t think the label would sting as much.

In addition to being pressured to marry, Japanese women are also
expected to be extremely skinny. Japan has the highest rate of
anorexia and bulemia in the world and there is no shortage of
ad-campaigns founded on the distant gazes of Western, ribby models in
tiny pastel bikinis. I`ve noticed Japanese women rarely eat openly at
school and if they do, they eat as though they`re recovering from
gastric bypass surgery. Portion sizes are small and calorie
information is posted on every menu and food container. When I eat
massive amounts of food in public I can`t tell if people watch with
open mouths and expressions of shock scrawled quickly across their
faces because they are surprised by my insatiable appetite and
revolting love of food or they are just hungry.

3. You rarely hear the word ``no`` in Japanese conversation. ``Hai``
or ``yes`` is used all the time and often fills gaps in sentences
where an English speaking person would insert an ``uh.`` Japan is a
culture that hinges itself on shame, smiles, and yesses. It makes one
want to run naked and frowning through the street, bellowing one
continous, ``Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo`` to see what would
happen. Storefronts would burst into flames, spewing Japanese
pottery, kimonos, and perfectly shaped, pesticide cloaked fruits onto
the streets and people would shake violently before exploding into a
gassy mixture of red smoke and Devil farts. The country would crack
open and slip into the ocean quietly like a thin-hulled ocean liner
after close encounters of the whale or iceberg kind. I won`t go for a
no-no jog until I`ve dusted off the snowboard and taken a few runs at
Hakuba, the Olympically majestic mountain an hour or two away from my
place.

4. ``Big Richard,`` the oldest J.E.T. I`ve yet to meet at 42 years
old, described his tumultous path to engagement with a 29 year-old
Japanese woman. His bride-to-be comes from a very traditional
household, and seeing as Richard is big and black, towering over the
short, black haired native populous from a height of six feet three
inches, the quiet, yessing parents of his fiance tried their hardest
to say ``No No No.`` The parents refused to meet Richard and vowed to
disown their daughter if she married a non-Japanese suitor. Richard,
a once successful salesman, realized the severity of their concerns
early on and decided to create what he calls ``a self-promotion
tape.`` To create a flick that would move foreign audiences to tears
and yesses, Richard shaved and put on his best suit. He rehearsed his
lines and practiced his smiles. He decided to break the tape into
five sections based on the five biggest areas of concern for his
critical, somewhat racist older audience:

1. the first section addressed the issue of finances.
Richard assured the parents that he could adequately provide for a
wife.

2. next section--kids. The parents were staying up at night
dreaming about little half black toddlers running around with Japanese
blood pulsing through their veins and afros-a-bobbin` in the wind.
Richard assured them this fear was completely unfounded and
unrealistic--he had a vasectomy 3 years ago.

3. section three--racism. Richard grew up being followed
around stores and getting the short end of the opportunity stick
because of his dark hue. He wasn`t going to let some good old
fashioned Japanese racism get in the way of his love life. As he
stated, ``When I found about the black thing being an issue, I
couldn`t believe it. I thought `I`m too old for this shit man!` ``

4. next section--Richard described how he would treat his
bride well and would not engage in the typical Japanese male custom of
spreading smiles to a few Japanese girlfriends after marriage.

5. last section--He promised never to take his wife away
from Japan and vowed to live here, with her, in Japan for the duration
of their marriage.

Once he recorded the video, he inserted Japanese subtitles, graphics,
and music. We were shocked by this detail, but I guess if you really
love someone you have to willing to learn a digital editing program.
He sent the video to the parent`s house with a dozen white roses and a
shitload of live shrimp. They watched the video over and over again,
treating their noses to roses and their taste buds to seafud, and
wrinkled their brows a bit less after each viewing. Eventually they
agreed to meet Richard face to face and the rest is history. He`s
getting married in late October in L.A.

It`s hot and I`m filling a small area in the English office with an
offensive, American, sweaty aroma. The pool awaits...

more to come as life unfolds,

Andrew

Email #5

Hello everyone,

Today was the first day of the fall session for both students and
teachers. Never before have I introduced myself so many times in one
day. I started the day by introducing myself to all of the faculty of
the high school. Akai Sensei apologized for her missing peers and
said that normally all 100 of the school`s teachers attend every
faculty meeting. After the faculty meeting, I gathered my materials
and made my way to the auditorium for the opening ceremony, a brief
affair that seemed more symbolic than functional. As I walked in the
halls, every student openly stared and gawked at me, a few, dared by
their friends, ran up to say ``Hello,`` and most simply giggled,
blushed, and quickly looked down at the ground. When I entered the
auditorium, 1,000 students sat and chatted with their friends, a vocal
bumby, bobbing sea of black cobblestones (quite different from the
quiet, dead-man-walking type atmosphere at the 8th grade orientation)
and as I made my way to the front of the gym to wait for my turn to
speak, I left a wake of stunned, whispering students behind me. I had
no idea JET teachers attracted such attention in school and needless
to say, it made me feel as though I had a gigantic ``Kick me`` sign
taped to my back.

The speech I presented to the students was short and lacking
specifics--exactly as my teacher requested. After the speech, I began
making my rounds to different classes to introduce myself and show a
few embarrassing pictures of me standing in front of dark chocolate
colored wax figures of Native Americans (I was forced to use the word
``Indians`` in my explanations because no students understood the word
``Native``) and famous scenic spots in America. I talked about my
hobbies, my favorite meals, favorite music genres (no one knows of
``bluegrass`` in the school so I explained the genre to each class,
promising to incite a Japanese ho-down later in the year). For two of
the classes, the teacher asked all of the students to stand and they
were only allowed to sit after they asked me a question in English.
Right from the start, I could see that this sort of activity could
easily morph into an on-the-spot, thorough interrogation. It proved
to be exactly that as the students asked the following questions (most
questions were asked in at least two or three of the classes I visited
today):

1. Do you like Japanese girls?
2. What do you look for in a girlfriend?
3. What do you think of the Japanese government?
4. What is your blood type? (the Japanese see blood type as an
indicator of personality. When I replied that I didn`t know my blood
type off hand, both classes gasped in disbelief and students
immediately turned to one another and started speculating about what
this shocking development might indicate about my character. A true
Kodak moment--me at the front of the room with a big grin on my face
formed half from feelings of bewilderment and half from amusement,
radiating rays of foreign energy like a radioactive life-size Barbie
or G.I. Joe doll while 40 students laughed and whispered to try to
understand the strange creature standing before them, unable to digest
the moment because they couldn`t rely on their trusty biological
crystal ball, their warm, red letter ``A`` (or B or O or O-), their
one sanguine starsign used to decode another person`s essence--blood
type.
5. How tall are you? (Answer in feet and inches, move back three
spaces, pay owner 400$)
6. What is your favorite English word? (1st class--``Rad`` 2nd
class--``superkalofragelisticexpealidosis)

They also flexed their tiny textbook vocab muscles with ``What is your
favorite music singer`` and ``Do you like animals?`` and ``Do you like
green or red?`` I flipped the tables to the student`s dismay in the
last class of the day and asked them a few questions: ``Why do
Japanese people smile so much? Why do Japanese people smile even when
they are not happy?`` The ``why`` component of this question shook a
few of the students` English language foundations like a baby
earthquake, causing brows to crack and body buildings to shift in
their seats. Unlike ``How are you?`` this question is never talked
about in school, it touches on a feeling that is rarely articulated
because it is so ingrained in Japanese culture that citizens only know
it and how it feels, not where it comes from. Students consulted
hand-held electronic language translators, looked at the ceiling to
contemplate, whispered to speechless friends beside them, and after a
few awkward minutes, no one could provide an answer. My teacher,
trying desperately to give them a foothold, said ``Look, you all are
smiling RIGHT NOW! Why are all of you smiling right now even though
you can`t answer Andrew`s question? What are you feeling right now,
this moment, that is making you smile?`` Despite the fact that the
International class students I questioned had strong commands of the
English language, not one student could articulate an answer. My
teacher later told me that she only began to understand the smiling
phenomenon in the last few years after a foreigner pointed it out to
her. Before the foreigner`s observation, she smiled without having
the faintest idea why she was smiling, attributing the smile to
Japanese social practices without thought like an American shakes a
hand during greetings. I assured the students that I was not upset by
their inability to answer my question, they all smiled, and we moved
on with the lesson.

After school, I made my sixth introduction of the day (by this point,
hundreds of students knew that I like to surf, love burritos, and
prefer dogs to cats) and spoke to the teachers of the English
department. After ``formally`` meeting all of the people whom I`ve
spent the last three weeks getting to know, I went to make my final
introduction at the first English Club meeting of the year. All
teachers in the school are required to advise at least one club in the
school. Because of this obligation, despite the fact that the school
day ends at 3:30, most teachers stay at the school until 6:00 p.m. (it
is now 6:25 p.m. as I type this email and I still have company in the
English department, the echos of students voices are still bouncing
around in the dark halls like lost beams of light in a house of
mirrors). One teacher explained a teacher`s work hours like this:
``All good teachers stay until six o`clock or so, all great teachers,
and there are only a few in each department, stay until eight or
later.`` I get to leave at 4:30 each day, but I normally stay past
4:30 to raise and feed two carpel tunnel syndrome babies that crawl
and shit and whine in my wrists, itching to grow and make their voices
heard, and I stare into the glowing abyss of cyber space, thinking
that if I type enough and keep the flashing line text cursor galloping
across my screen just ahead of pursuing predatory letters, a bunny in
front of the greyhounds, my writing will improve over time and one
day, maybe one day, I will be able to write single sentence birthday
cards, better yet, multi-purpose congratulatory cards, strong enough
to make a dictator or pro wrestler cry in public, musings so delicate
butterflies contact me to make word capes for them to trail in the
breeze like the flaggy, vibrant tendrils they could surely sprout if
they didn`t scrawl their signature of butterfly wing dust across lines
of evolutionary contracts, documents with no grandfather clauses or
loopholes of course.

Anyway, I stay here and type. Ok back to the English club, briefly
because the night is sucking the color from the mountains that fill
the horizon in front of me. If a Martian landed and spoke Martianese
through his belly button and asked me to describe the English club in
English as if I was hungry and working late, desperately trying to get
home to eat dinner, this is what I would blabber:

members: 10 girls

get together 3 times a week for 1.5 hours each meeting to talk and debate

current debate topic--which is better, country life or city life?

they all love English, but they normally speak in Japanese at the
meetings. I asked why they call the club English club if they
normally end up speaking in Japanese, they laughed and explained that
the jist of the club is described by the club motto.

motto: ``We love English!!`` (always with two exclamation points, always)

they all have cell phones in candy colors with lots of jangly things
hanging from them

they don`t want to learn English to get good jobs, as their parents
and government officials believe, they want to learn English to listen
to American bands, watch movies, and travel to English meccas

they smile--always. when they are confused, they smile even more. as
you can imagine, the meetings are quite pleasant because of this
reaction to confusion or any sort of conversation stimulus. Reggae
surely would be their music of choice

they are led by a near-fluent second year student who calls on them
when they raise hands to answer my questions and ends the meeting by
saying ``Ok, this meeting is OVER!``

Most of the ten girls have been outside of Japan to countries like
Australia, Korea, U.S.A., and New Zealand.

they explained that they stay at school until about 6:00 p.m.
everyday, go home and eat dinner, then study until 11:00 or midnight.
When I asked them if they ever watch t.v. during the week, they
erupted into a teethy, close-eyed ball of laughter and the leader of
the pack said frankly after the laughing died down ``That is
ridiculous`` Plain and simple as the sky is blue, obvious fact, how
could I have asked such a silly question.

One girl admitted that she hated studying and the other girls said
``Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh`` raising their voices higher and higher with
each ``h`` out of sheer shock that a student would admit such a sin in
front of a teacher.

The dynamic in the group is strong and I`m so excited I get to meet
with them after school on a regular basis. They all seem mature for
their ages and I think they will show me a side of Japanese life that
I wouldn`t observe simply teaching and living in Japan. They are
curious and honest and love answering English questions: what more
could a person writing emails entitled ``Notes from Japan`` ask
for?!?!

more to come as life unfolds,

the guy with funny colored skin and funny colored hair who prefers dogs to cats