Thursday, May 31, 2007

Wooohooo! 100!!

left: Mike and Patti's little man, Kaden. He really has nothing to do with this post. I'm exploiting his image here to draw people into the blog. I'm fishing for readers. When people hit that "Next Blog" button on the navigation bar at the top of a blog, if they see this cute slobbery face staring back at them, they're bound to stop and investigate. Actually, no, now that I think about it, he has a good reason to be included here: he has his own email account now! He's a member of cyberspace! And he can't even control his own shits yet!! He typed me a one-paragraph-long email yesterday. He's the smartest baby I know, for sure. Congrats Kaden!

That's right folks, I've done it!

This is my 100th post on Savedscribbles, a true cause for celebration. I've managed to do what only 1,343,951,843 other people have managed to do, and let me tell you something: it feels damn good.

The excitement that a 100th post generates inside one's gut is unparalleled. It feels like I reached the summit of Everest without the aid of oxygen, like I completed an unsupported paddle board trip around all of Hawaii's main islands, like I created the first human clone under the cover of secrecy and raised it until it could speak and thank me for creating it.

This day will go down in the history books one day. Yes, mark my words. One day, when society drastically lowers its standards for what constitutes as "history," June 1st, 2007 will be regarded as The Day Savedscribbles Turned Magnificent.

People all over the world will celebrate by scribbling on their faces with permanent markers, and they will recite my previous posts aloud during every waking moment of their lives until the marker wears off of their faces. There will be fasting from sunrise to sunset. Flogging on bare backsides. Donations of money and first-born children. Huge, ornate buildings of solid gold and marble will be constructed and shaped like pens and notebooks. Evil Headscribblers will guide the vulnerable masses of Smallscribblers in the proper ways to scribble and make monetary donations to Headscribblers. Medical virginity examinations will be administered for any woman who, on her wedding night, claims to have never scribbled with a man before.

OK, enough nonsense. Onto the meat...or tofu, rather, of this post.

Every Wednesday, I drive 20 kms to my visit school, Tateshina High School. The school sits up in the mountains outside of Ueda and is surrounded by rice fields and old, traditional Japanese houses. Apple orchards blanket the hillsides and most people I see along the road in the morning wear muddied boots and garden gloves. As I start the drive, I pass a strip of car dealerships on the main road that cuts through Ueda. This past Wednesday (and every other day I have ever driven to Tateshina in the morning), at each dealership, this is what I saw:

Car salesmen, with shirts so white and starched they looked like blocks of soap, bending down to pluck weeds peeking up through cracks in the sidewalk outside their dealerships, dealership receptionists picking up trash that had blown up against the curb of the street, salesmen sweeping the sidewalk in short, jabbing, firm strokes. All wore new cloud-white gloves.

This past Wed., I’m not joking, I saw two car salesmen waist-deep in one of the water drainage ditches that runs alongside their dealership. They were using long metal tongs to pick up some sort of green sludge from the bottom of the ditch and putting it in plastic bags. Why? I don't know. To send off to the lab for testing? To eat as a seaweed substitute? One can't be sure.

I’m fascinated by this.

I wonder,

Is this some throwback to times when religion more strongly influenced Japanese people?

Has Buddhist belief in order and simplicity inspired the cleanliness that the dealerships maintain?


Can car salesmen be devout Buddhists?


I don’t know, but either way, I always get a laugh out of seeing this every Wednesday because I imagine what American car salesmen would say if their bosses ever tried to get them to shed their suit jackets to go pick up bubblegum and pull weeds from the sidewalk. I imagine a big ol' "FUCK NO!" would be their unanimous response.

I'd like to think the cleaning that the car salesmen (and I do mean men, I've never seen a woman behind a salesperson's desk in any of the dealerships) is a type of repentance. These people sell new cars to customers who could very easily buy used cars. They help populate the earth with metal and plastic that will undoubtedly turn to junk in 30 or 40 years. Also, the product they sell farts pollution and fucks up the world for the very kids that play in the Kid's Zone! of the dealership while their parents sign lease papers. They're some of the most prolific slayers of our environmental future. Some real bastards. They deserve to pick up soda cans and candy wrappers from the road each morning.

I’m going to miss Japan when I leave in July. It's a cool country. I dig it. If you speak English here, life is good. You get to walk down weeded sidewalks that are free of trash at the expense of the sweat and toil of white-gloved-car salesmen who are willing to pull sludge from ditches to keep their country purrrty.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot---I want to dedicate this post to my four or five fans. Without your silence and lack of comments or emails about the content on this site, I'd never be able to write with such reckless abandon, such brutal honesty. So thank you!

When a man screams in cyberspace and no one is there to hear it, does he even make a sound? I don't know, but I just got an email this past week from a nice gal named Rinda (who is also a JET in Japan) and she told me that she's been reading this blog for about a year. I was shocked---I thought I was the only one who has been reading this thing for that long!

So, cheers to Rinda and my other secret readers. It helps knowing--or not knowing--you're out there.

A

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Udo's Birthday

left: View from the top of Udo's property overlooking his garden, the BBQ, and the small cluster of houses in his neighborhood.

My friend Udo had a small birthday BBQ at the house he and his wife are restoring. Here are a few pictures. The house used to be an old silk worm farm. More pics can be found on my Flickr page.

left: Inside one of the bedrooms in the house











left: Mike and Kaden












left: Udo, working during his own birthday party!

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Inspired by the Inspired

left: Small street in Kyoto

**Note--The names of the people mentioned below have been changed. I thought I'd give the whole privacy thing a try on this blog for once!**

When Aaron walked in, we were all sitting around the communal dinner table and mid-laugh with our faces flushed pink from alcohol. He tip-toed when he walked into the room and said hello without making much eye contact. When he sat, he rested his arms on his lap as if he were handcuffed and leaned his frail frame over the edge of the table. For a moment, the atmosphere was infused with his sobriety and awkwardness and in danger of being overrun with civility.

First, us at the table:

Marcus—a jovial Brit and veritable story machine always in the mood for a knee-slapping, eye-squinting laugh.

Lua—a gal with a laugh and smile combination that is so continuous it nearly suffocates her most of the time.

A Japanese couple—recent college grads with a shaky command of the English language but a fascination with it and the jokes its speakers told, nonetheless.

Me—later in the night, I was described as a “Yank who was actually cool.”

The table was peppered with empty beer and chu-hi cans and cups of sake that were either filled or empty. The vibe that hung above our heads and seeped out of the screen of the room’s open window was so merry that our small tatami room seemed impenetrable and sealed off from any pressure or situation that existed beyond the guesthouse walls. We were in a bubble of laughter and frozen time, and Aaron, at first, entered the room like a needle.

He had a mat of wavy, orange hair atop his head that was so bright it distracted new acquaintances to such a degree that conversing without staring was near impossible. His eyebrows and the stubble of a lazy, young goatee on his chin were also electric orange. The paleness of his freckled, white skin seemed a result of his hair demanding so much of his body’s finite supply of pigment. His eyes were small and beady, and he was as skinny as a streetlight. He wore a snug-fitting white tank top that revealed spindly arms that hung from his torso like wet fettuccine.

Realizing he wouldn’t say much more to us than a “Hey” unless he was prompted, I spoke up. “How’s it going? Andrew, nice to meet you.” I reached across the table to shake his hand. Our hands were equally small and our grips were equally strong; it felt as if my right hand was shaking my own left hand.

“Aaron. Nice to meet you. Where are you from?”

“America.”

“Ok, I thought so…from the accent. America or Canada, couldn’t tell which. I’m from Australia. Brisbane.”

We went through the usual questions foreigners ask one another when meeting in Japan: You’re teaching English, right?
Which company?
When did you arrive?
How much longer do you think you’ll stay?
How’s your Japanese coming along?
How do you like it so far?
Is everything as you expected it to be?


As the sounds of the beer and chu-hi cans hitting the table kept getting more tinny and empty-sounding, as the carton of sake kept getting lighter and easier to lift, Aaron opened up, cracked jokes, and talked to every person seated at the table.

I learned that he came to Japan 10 months ago to teach English in Tokyo. His girlfriend came out to Japan two months before he did and teaches English three-and-a-half hours away from him in Nagano City. It was her urging and assurance that gave him the confidence to come to Japan--he comes from a family and circle of friends in which traveling is a non-subject, a distraction in the post-high school path to domesticity.

When he left Australia to come to Japan, as he was about to fly on a plane for the first time and shatter his previous distance and duration records for a single trip (he admitted he had never been beyond three hours of Brisbane, and even then his longest trip lasted only four or five days), his family and friends laughed at him and told him he was crazy. The fact that he has survived in Japan for 10 months is something he is wildly ecstatic about; he has managed to silence the laughter back home.

left: Arashiyama in Kyoto

People in the room slowly and quietly fell away from the conversation to their rooms like petals of a dying flower. Only Aaron and I were left as 2:00 a.m. came and went. We were sitting at opposite sides of the table like a boss and his employee at a quarterly review. I tried to prevent the conversation from taking on the feel of an interrogation, but it was difficult because I was so curious about Aaron’s take on traveling, on life. How often do you meet someone who, thanks to a new traveling experience, is now perched on the edge of an abyss of new perceptions of the world and is deciding whether or not to jump? I couldn’t resist grilling him.

“So, what do you think—do you feel like you might want to go and live somewhere else after Japan, somewhere other than Australia?”

“Oh definitely! Definitely. I feel almost overwhelmed by how many places there are in the world now. There are too many I want to visit, too many places I want to live.”

“Hahaha, you say 'now' like those places were not there before!?”

“Well in a way they weren’t, kinda. You know something—I had no interest in maps before I came to Japan. In Australia, a map of the world was something I was forced to look at in school in geography class. Other than that, I never looked at a world map. There was no point. I mean I would never visit all of those places anyway, right, so I didn’t give a rat’s ass about them. Now…whoah! When I look at a world map, I think about so many things.”

“Yeah I know. I feel the same way. I have a world map on my shower curtain in my apartment. When I sit on the toilet, the world map hangs to my right and I just get lost staring at the thing, dreaming. Pissing and dreaming at the same time! The ultimate release! Where do you think you’ll go after Japan? More sake?”

“Yeah, sure. Well, when we finish our contracts, we want to spend four months traveling from Beijing to Singapore. Maybe once we reach Singapore, we will fly back to Australia. But who knows. Maybe we’ll live in Singapore! Ha! Oh man, it sounds so crazy to say—'Beijing to Singapore.' Me!? Beijing to Singapore!”

“Shhhhh! Shhhh! You’ll wake up Lua, her room is next to this one. Have you felt yourself change since you came here? I mean, obviously, your dreams have changed and what you think is possible in terms of traveling has changed. But have you felt your thoughts about other people change? What you think about people from other countries?”

“Well, kinda. At first, I was amazed by Japanese people and I thought everyone was so kind and polite and clean…and…uh, what’s the word……ahhh it's on the tip of my tongue.... oh, exotic! Yeah, everyone looked different and exotic. But, all that wore off after a few months! Ha! No, seriously, I still think that about a lot of Japanese people—the kindness and politeness and all—but I see now that they are just people, just people rushing to get to work, to feed their kids, to get married. They do all the same things we do in Australia, and in a way, I had hoped they’d be completely different from Australians. But they’re not. You know, I can get annoyed by them sometimes just like I get annoyed by Australians. So, in that sense, I feel a little let down. I thought I’d come to Japan and become so tolerant and meet people who were so different from myself, you know?”

“You honestly don’t think you’ve become more tolerant? Like, for example, if you meet a Japanese person in Singapore on the train, don’t you think you’d be more likely to try to talk to that person and learn about him or her after having lived in Japan?”

“Yeah, that’s true. But I’m also afraid I’ll look at them and think, ‘Uggh, you probably don’t think men and women are truly equal and you are probably sadly materialistic.’ I know that’s horrible, but honestly…wouldn’t you think that after living here?”

“I hear you, but regardless of what sort of stereotype you carry with you about the Japanese after you leave here, you’ll still have something to talk about, some point of connection.”

“Yeah. Hey, look, I don’t want you to think I hate Japanese people or anything. I just wasn’t plowed over with tolerance the way I thought I would be before I came. But, I mean, coming here has also allowed me to meet people like you. I mean, Jesus, if I told my buddies back home I met a Yank who was actually cool and who was planning on riding his bicycle all over the goddamn place for a year and a half or so, man they’d call me crazy. They would say, first of all, that all Yanks are bloody Bush-lovers! And then they’d say it’s impossible to ride a bicycle for that long!”

“Hahahaa. Well, it sounds like those are the types of people you need to get out here to Japan for a visit. They need to meet some cool Yanks! They need to see other countries. You could be the catalyst they need to get them out of Brisbane.”

“Yeah.” Aaron thought about just how hard it would be to get his friends out here, to entice people who are scared to travel to actually pay money to do it. He looked down at his sake cup and saw he hadn’t touched it since I filled it. He slugged the liquid back in one swig, and, because it was late and he was fueling a buzz that had already taken about all the fuel it was willing to tolerate, he cringed and shook his head as he returned the cup to the table.

I continued with the whole catalyst thing, “You know, before I came out to Japan, I told all of my friends, ‘You have to come out for a visit! You’re welcome anytime.’ When I told them that, I didn’t think many would actually come. But between my ex-girlfriend and I, we had four groups of people come out to Japan last year. I know for a fact that each group of visitors left feeling differently about Japan, feeling like they had learned a lot about a country that previously was a mystery to them. Really, try to get those guys out here, man. It would be such an awesome gift to them if you showed them around.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It would be good for them to see all this stuff I’ve been seein’…hmm…well, I’ll mention it to them, see what they say.” The shot of sake he had taken a moment before slowly rippled through his body and convinced his brain it was time for sleep. “Well man, it was good talking to you. I have to hit the sack, I’m spent.”

“Yeah, I hear you, me too. It was good talking to you.”

“Hey, you know something—even if you don’t finish your trip—hell, even if you never start it for some reason—you had the idea for it, the courage to try it. That’s so awesome. For someone like me, it’s awesome to meet people with ideas like that.” The intimacy in his words let some of the awkwardness he carried at the start of the night creep back into his posture. He slumped a bit and waved his hand back and forth as if he was buffing a car. “OK, that’s it man, I’m done for tonight. Must…get…sleep…now! Later”

“Yeah, later.”

Aaron left and I finished my sake. I felt good. I felt like I had spent the night saying meaningful things, connecting with a stranger in a positive way. Although I’m sure he never would have guessed it, Aaron, despite the fact that he had never left Australia before, inspired me to keep traveling, keep meeting new people.

Sure, he didn’t share firsthand accounts of some wild place I have never been to. He didn’t tell exciting stories about his past trips. He didn’t even ask me much about where I had been before. But he did do one thing: he reminded me that excitement, whether it be about model trains or your kids or going to the moon, is the basis of dreams. Of feeling alive. Aaron had discovered his own fresh batch of excitement and he was feeding it. Feeding it each time he opted to go out and explore Tokyo instead of stay in his apartment and loaf around, each time he researched on the Internet for his Singapore-Beijing trip, and each time he ventured into seemingly-exclusive guesthouse dinner conversations with hopes of meeting new people. He had the courage to embrace new-ness in his life, and thankfully, that courage is contagious.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Matchmaker

left: A bride dressed in traditional Japanese wedding attire. Many women rent three or four gowns for their wedding day. Rental cost: around $10,000!!! For one day!!!

A co-worker recently told me that she sought out the services of a "matchmaker" in town to help her find a husband. My co-worker is smart, fluent in English, and sociable. She was 33-years-old when she first spoke to the matchmaker to explain that her time for marriage was running out--she needed to find a husband soon or she would forever be single and childless, a fate no Japanese woman would wish upon her cruelest childhood bully.

Why would a smart and sociable woman need the help of a town matchmaker you ask? Because she is an only child. She MUST carry on her father's name and therefore must find a husband who is a second son (ie. more likely to take on her name because his brother, the first son, will have already carried on the family name).

When I asked a Japanese mother in Ueda, "How would you feel if your two sons married women who refused to take your family name?" she frowned before giving her answer--

"Oh no, my husband wouldn't like that at all."

In my mind, I thought, No, I didn't ask how your husband would feel--I asked how you would feel.
A name is a name. To kid yourself and stress about your family name continuing forever and ever until the end of time is just plain silly.

I pray and hope that I will never be so afflicted with hubris that I'd try to influence my child's love life for the sake of my family name.

Friday, May 18, 2007

Graduate, Then Baby-Make!

I teach a class of 40 girls three times a week. The class is comprised of the "international" track students of the sophomore class: the 40 best English speakers out of a class of 350. These girls are hyperintelligent, witty, energetic, and motivated when it comes to learning.

Last week I asked them to cover their eyes and gave them the following prompt:

"Raise your hand if you think that in the future, if you have children, you will have both children and a career. Raise your hand if you plan on working after your children are born."

Out of a class of 40 students, 15 hands went up. Only 15.

To me, this seemed frighteningly low. But I must admit, I expected some similar response. After all, in Japan, marriage and childbirth are seen as hurdles that must be jumped if one ever expects to be taken seriously by family and peers, if one ever hopes to find contentment.

Now more than ever, having children is important for the Japanese because the nation is facing a declining birthrate, one dropping so quickly that an atrophied economy in the next century is now an expectation rather than a possibility. The government is turning the act of having children into a gesture of nationalism: The country needs your children if we ever hope to survive well into the future!

Most of the girls in my school will go on to good universities. Many of them will work after college...but only for a short time. In Japan, when a woman gets a job, she often will work only until she gets married and/or pregnant. At that point, she'll quit. Employers expect this marriage-induced attrition and treat woman accordingly--it's harder for women to rise to positions of power in companies and it's harder for women to earn the wages of their male counterparts. The irony of all this is that these departures from the workforce, departures arranged so that women may have children, are the exact things that will end up hurting Japan in the future as the overall population declines--the women will be sorely missed in an economny that needs every able-bodied worker punching in each and every day.

I can't help but feel frustrated by the fact that students I try to educate are openly admitting they won't work for society in the future. There are serious (but fix-able) problems in Japan and the rest of the world, problems that require the minds of intelligent people. When intelligent people say that they want to sacrifice careers for the sake of family, is it wrong to feel as though they are being selfish? Sure, some of them (as do some members of my own family) feel as though raising a good, intelligent child is their way of giving back to the world. But where does the buck stop? This mentality helps populate the planet sure enough, but how much of our potential can we realistically hope to achieve if large portions of our species are focusing only on child rearing?

I don't know--maybe humankind needs half of the parental unit to stay at home and raise a child in order to achieve anything at all. Maybe we've found an equillibrium over the centuries and are currently running smoothly at high gear, creating at the speed at which we can most effectively create. As tempting to believe and as calming as this idea is, I find it hard to believe.

Male-dominated, religion-fueled, oppression-hungry governmental structures have been ruling the planet for too long with no reprieve for me to believe that anything we've done in the past and continue to do is tapping into the full power of the human race. If the roles we fill have any resemblance to those assigned during times of opression and blatant discrimination in centuries past, we're not there yet.

My female students have no qualms about fulfilling such antiquated roles at a point in history when humans have known more than ever before. Something about this scenario seems strange.

Monday, May 07, 2007

Drop Your Pants. Now Hold Your Knees.

left: The vile parasite that I think I'm harboring in my gut, the one that causes Giardia.

For four weeks, ever since I returned from Vietnam, I had been feeling as if there was some sort of rambunctious creature rolling and swelling in my stomach. Some days it would sleep, on others it would convulse. I had been waiting with hopes that the creature would die after a few weeks of wallowing in my duodenal darkness, but it only seemed to thrive inside of me. This past Monday, I had had enough. I told my supervisor about my gastric drama while we were walking to class.

“Uh, Namiki-sensei, I think I’m still sick from Vietnam. My stomach,” I said as I patted my stomach for effect. Her eyebrows shot up and she stepped to the side, away from me, ever so slightly.

“Really?” she asked. “But Vietnam was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, I know, that’s why I think maybe I should go to a doctor.”

“OK, I will take you to the school nurse after class.”

The nurse asked about my symptoms. Does he have stomach pains at night? Does he hurt now? Does he want some tea? Does he have ‘normal bathrooms’? Determining some sort of prescription medication was in my future, she phoned a few local clinics that only treat teachers and students. We found one with an open slot in the afternoon and Namiki-sensei and I cut out of school early to go to a clinic.

The receptionist at the clinic asked me to fill out a new patient form. I left the box for “Cell phone number” blank because…get ready…I don’t have a cell phone. I know—it’s shocking. When I returned the form, the receptionist turned to my supervisor and said, “Oh, tell him he forgot to write his cell phone number.”

“You forgot to write your cell phone number.”

“I don’t have a cell phone,” I said. Namiki-sensei’s eyes flashed open like blooming fireworks.

“He doesn’t have a cell phone,” she told the receptionist in Japanese. I watched as the receptionist internalized this startling fact. I instantly went from Strange-white-guy-from-America to Threatening-weirdo-from-Saturn’s-coldest-moon. She scribbled something on the form and waved us back to the doctor’s office.

After a short interrogation about my eating and drinking habits while in Vietnam, the doctor told my supervisor I would need two types of tests to determine the root of my ailments. Namiki-sensei blushed as she started speaking to me.

“She wants to test your bloods and your…uh…your stools,” Namiki-sensei said.

“My stools? More than one? Isn’t one enough?” I asked, laughing. Pause. “When do I have to get the two tests done?” I figured she’d say something like, “Oh, you can come back by yourself next week on your lunch break and give them bloods and stools.”

Japanese question for the doctor. Japanese answer for the teacher.

“Now is OK for both,” said Namiki-sensei.

I felt blood rush up into my cheeks like mercury in a thermometer thrust into a primed oven. Hearing the word “stools” spill from the tiny, blushed face of my tiny, overly-polite supervisor supplied me with my week’s worth of awkwardness. I wasn’t up for shitting in cup and having to ask her, “What next?”

There are some people in the world who are so ever-put together, so well-packaged and meticulous in their grooming, so polite and dainty each and every morning when they smile and say hello that you assume they never shit. Ever. You assume they walk into secret, darkened closets in their homes each night so they can feed hidden incinerators with the contents of their tiny shit resevoirs that they keep hidden in lint-free pouches in their pants. My supervisor is one of those people.

“Now you can go to the next room for two tests. I will wait outside the curtain to help.”

My mind started racing—Oh dear Gods! Why me? Not only will she have to translate the nurse’s directions, she’s going to stand right outside some flimsy curtain and hear me shit as well?! What egregious error have I committed in my past to warrant such embarrassment?! Was it that time when I was nine when I cut off the older Dowdy boy as we raced bikes around the court and I made him fall and break his wrist? I’m sorry! I’ll break my own wrist to neutralize the sin! Please, I’ll do it right now! There must be a hammer I could use or at least one of those knee reflex hammers around here somewhere…

The nurse, an old, stocky woman in pink scrubs with an overturned-canoe-shaped pink hat teetering on her sea of curly gray hair, waved me over.

First the blood test. An arm stand and a lonely stool (the kind you sit on as opposed to depart with) were prepared in the middle of the room next door. Without hearing instructions, I knew what I had to do for this part. I sat and rolled up my sleeve. The nurse tied up my arm and flicked a bulging vein. She slipped in the needle and drew what seemed to be far more blood than necessary, completely filling one large syringe. Bandaged, I stood up. The nurse waved me to a bed behind, just as I had feared, a very flimsy curtain. As I stepped behind the curtain to face my doom, I glanced back at my supervisor—she was standing three feet from the curtain’s edge.

“Good luck,” she said.

I tried to smile.

The nurse closed the curtain and motioned for me to drop my pants. I did so. Then she made a sleeping gesture by closing her eyes and holding her hands to her face like a pillow. She pointed to the bed--I was supposed to lay down. I became confused. Where’s the cup or plate for me to shit on? Actually, come to think of it, I don’t see any toilet paper either. What kind of backwoods shit test was this going to be? Am I supposed to lay down and shit in her hand??

I laid down on the bed. She motioned for me to lay sideways. I did. Then she said something I couldn’t understand. She said it again. She wasn’t giving me gestures and I was clueless as to what she wanted me to do. Does she want me to try to shit…right now? On the bed? Will they roll up the blankets and send the whole mess to the lab? Surely there must be a more efficient way to check one’s stool.

She repeated her request. I still couldn’t understand. Then, the nurse trotted out through the curtain and spoke to my supervisor.

Namiki-sensei laughed. “She wants you to pull your knees up to your chest. Hold your knees very tight,” she said.

At this point I had no idea was going on. How in the world am I going to shit like that? I thought.

The nurse came back through the curtain. I pulled my knees up, and, feeling more vulnerable than I think I’ve ever felt before in my life, I fearfully looked over my shoulder at the nurse. She reached into her pink jacket pocket and pulled out a single long-handled cotton swab sheathed in a bulbous, plastic test-tube.

She paused for just a moment and smiled at me. “Gomen, gomen,” [Sorry, sorry] she said.

With seemingly instinctual precision, she removed the cotton swab, grabbed my left ass cheek, and pierced me with her very dry and un-lubed cotton spear. I flinched.

Whooooah, for a cotton swab, that sure hurt! Jesus! How in the world do people have anal sex? I thought.

Swirling it gently like someone fishing for ear wax, she probed for three or four seconds and removed her soiled lance. Bada bing, bada boom, she sheathed the swab, took off her gloves, and apologized once more. She laughed and motioned for me to pull up my pants. We were finished. She had just explored a straight man’s most guarded orifice and seemed happier than a lark. A true medical professional.

In the car driving back to school, Namiki-sensei looked over at me with nothing but concern in her eyes and sincerity in her voice and said, “I hope your stools are OK.”

“Thanks. Me too.”

Baby Questions

On Sunday, I helped a Japanese woman who works for the local government translate pediatric medical forms from Japanese into English. The government wants the forms translated so English-speaking foreigners will be less intimidated about having babies in Japan. I spent seven hours smoothing out her initial translations of check-up forms for 10-month, 18-month, and two-year-old children.

Below are some interesting questions pulled directly from some of the forms (questions are meant to be asked of the child’s main caretaker):

--Who is the main caretaker of the child? (Please circle) Mother / Grandmother / Other

--Do the child’s grandparents live close to you? If yes, how close?

--Are the child’s grandparents still married?

--Do you like to eat sweets?

--When you breastfeed, is the TV on in the background?

The following two questions are development questions:

--Circle the type of rice your baby is now eating: Mashed rice in water / Mashed rice paste / Very soft rice / Normal rice / Firm rice

--Does your child say “Let’s eat!” before he/she eats? [In Japan, people say itadekimasu before they start eating; roughly, it translates as ‘Let’s eat’.]

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Few More Pics...

I stole these pics from Rich's camera. They're from our trip to Kyoto / Osaka over Golden Week. The pictures are of Osaka at night, me riding, and Rich with a guy we met at the guesthouse.








































Friday, May 04, 2007

Kyotosaka

left: Silly goon in Daitokuji moss garden

I just spent one week skating through the tangled mess of temples, apartment buildings, gardens, pachinko parlors, and ramen shops that is Kyoto and Osaka. These two cities have fused together to create a wide expanse of urban sprawl that has made Quiet run for its dear life. Inside some of the inner innards of a few select Kyoto temples, visitors can experience near-complete silence. Beyond temple walls, however, Kyoto and Osaka honk, grind, clunk, and hiccup just like any other metropolis.

Rich, another JET in Ueda, and I drove down to Kyoto together. I spent three days skateboarding around Kyoto and getting lost. Lost in a good a way, in an exploratory way. I love how Kyoto is a place where you can wander around aimlessly all day and stumble into temple after temple that is four or five times older than any building standing in America. Sure, many of the temple structures have been re-built in past centuries, but the temple grounds have largely remained unchanged.

left: Coolest bike I saw on the trip. Skateboard is there for scale!

This was my fourth trip down to Kyoto since I came to Japan and it's now official: Kyoto is one of my top three FAVORITE cities on Earth! (The other two are New York City and Barcelona.) I always used to say, "A city is a city no matter where you go." But now I don't say that anymore. Because it's not true. Because Kyoto is so different from any other city I've ever visited. It has a tangible energy to it that is born from its security, quaintness, natural beauty, really really old stuff, small buildings, and its river that cuts through the eastern part of the city. If you've never visited, do so.

left: Temple I wandered into while skating

I stayed with Kazuo again. Just like every other time I've stayed at Kazuo's guesthouse, I had an awesome time on this visit. It's amazingly cheap, the food is spectacular, Kazuo is the nicest dude this side of the Mississip, and the place has a great communal vibe. I'm excited for him because his fledgling business is expanding (he is almost done renovating the house next door to make the guesthouse twice as big) and he is now married with a baby on the way.

left: Osaka Castle

After Kyoto, Rich and I took trains to Osaka to visit Marisa and Adam, my two friends from university (I can hear Adam correcting me now, "It's college!" I know, but university has come to sound so...right!) Marisa and Adam just moved to an apartment right outside Tennoji Park, an area that is a few minutes by bike from Namba, the epicenter of Osaka's night life. Their new place is dangerously close to $1 sushi joints, ramen and udon shops, and good bars. In two days, I ate a lot, drank a lot, threw a Frisbee around a lot, stayed up so late the sun scared me to sleep one night, and did a little sightseeing. It was good to catch up with people from Jersey, to be around my own kind!

left: Beautiful roof tiles

I don't want to talk about the seven hours I spent driving what should have been a five hour ride coming back to Ueda. It's done, over with, finished! Let's never speak of it again.

Pics from the trip can be found here.

cheers,

A