Trippy Traveller in Japan

The TPP Enigma

2011-11-13T00:20:00.000-08:00

I ask my students whether they think Japan should join the TPP: some say ‘yes’; others ‘no’; and just as many look confused. The issue is one of the few things that Japan cannot get a consensus on. This is reflected at the very top: Prime Minister Noda doesn’t want to make a decision for fear of upsetting someone. And so he came up with the masterful non-decision of deciding that they would talk to the other countries who will be attending the TPP talks. He said in effect that he would talk about going to the talks. The world scratches its head at the Japanese behaving like a lawyer playing with words and procedures.

The only strong reaction in Japan has been from the JA – Japanese Agriculture thingy. They are a union, a bank, an energy provider and have an office in thousands of towns and cities up and down the Japanese islands. They have immense power because their members are easily persuaded to vote as the leadership commands. They have traditionally put their weight behind the Jiminto Party that has virtually owned the Diet since the end of the war.

It is a situation that is hard to comprehend when put in the light of the fact that agriculture only makes up 1.5% of the total Japanese economy; and yet JA wields such massive power. Agriculture is subsidized up to 700%. Traditionally the Japanese have resolutely protected their markets. They take pride in the fact that foreign giants give up on Japan as ‘Galapagos’: too alien, too far away; too differently evolved. While the rest of the world has understood that you don’t need a keyboard if you have a touchscreen, the Japanese continue to make ugly hybrid mobile phones.

It is no accident the Galapagos view of Japan. Across the board government ministries erect outrageous tariffs stopping foreign goods being competitive on the Japanese market. Rumour has it that they even buy their quotas of rice and food from other countries and just leave the produce to rot in warehouses. Ever since the 1970s the Americans have been coming to Japan and receiving assurances from Japanese ministers that the barriers will be dropped and that they will be able to fairly compete in the Japanese market. Within weeks of getting back to USA Inc. they discover that none of the promises have been acted upon. This is because elected ministers have less power than vice ministers who are career bureaucrats, who have spent many years building up influence and grooming their immediate subordinates. They hand over the baton to a hand-picked successor and take a tasty job on the board of a company that they have helped throughout their bureaucratic career. I’s called descended from heaven and it’s been going on since democracy started in Japan. Ministries set up the major corporations after the war and continue to help them. It is unlike other countries where business is separate to and independent from government. The two overlap in Japan and elected officials have always been unsuccessful at implementing their promises both to the Americans and the Japanese people because they don’t have the necessary connections in the ministries.

I suspect that Noda knows all of this. Even if he had a strong will to bring Japan into the TPP officialdom in Japan would silently scupper the agreement and the foreigners would eventually get the message and bugger off.

Here we see the limits of democracy in action. The government that is chosen by the people does not hold the power. They have to share the power with the ministries, big companies and organized crime. Every time one of these groups gains too much influence the others make temporary alliances to restore the balance of power. This is easily done as the education system and media in Japan is one of the best brainwashing set ups ever foisted upon a nation. They have turned most of the populace into robots who have been imprinted to love their company and to shun any type of important opinion. They spend endless hours at school achieving nothing and spend countless hours in the office also achieving nothing. Form has trumped content. It is more important to greet people properly than to make a pertinent comment. They wear bizarre uniforms at school and then wear bizarre uniforms at work. In times of great stress everyone dons a factory uniform. Subliminally this says everyone is the same; it also says that nobody takes responsibility. The ideal decision in Japan is one that arises by itself from the group without anyone suggesting it.

This is the problem with the TPP. The agriculture boys have donned headbands and paid for people to protest. The car and electronic lads who have something to lose by Japan not joining the TPP don’t want to marshal their resources into getting their headbands out on the streets. Conflict is bad form. The illusion of consensus is vital to keeping the populace robotized. Besides they know that even if Noda grew some balls and forced a law through the Diet enacting the essentials of the TPP the ministries would just find other ways to make sure foreign products failed in the Japanese markets.

In a way they are right to do so. The Americans have fallen in love with two very stupid ideas – deregulation and market forces. These two things have turned the world’s economic powerhouse into a laughing stock. Manufacturing has been outsourced so the working class has nothing to do, and deregulation has led to Goldman Sachs and their ilk stealing 700 trillion dollars from the world economy.

The Japanese are trying to hold the car companies in check who also want to outsource most of their jobs. They have never really believed in market forces: instead they set up chains of small companies all working for a few big companies. Prices are set and competition is only cosmetic. Their banks spunked away so much cash in the bubble economy that the card shark charms of the Goldman Sachs of the world have failed to convince a second time; besides the Yakuza would be employed by the traditional power holders in Japan to pull the pimps from the table of power.

It is no bad thing trying to protect your companies and trying to give everyone a job. This lowers crime rates and allows every family to waste their money on flat screen TVs and cars (made in Japan). Consumerism only works when the population has excess cash.

Wall Street has bankrupted its host and so it is pulling the strings to get the White House to open up new markets for American products. Japan and China are the tastiest looking victims for American food and pharmaceutical companies as well as American health providers. Hell they could do with buying American financial products as well. They aren’t offering much in return because Japan and Korea already boss the US car market. The world already knows that you would have to be a complete moron having a bad day to choose a computer made in China instead of one made in Japan.

The only way in which America and the TPP could help the Japanese people is by lowering food prices. Going to a Japanese supermarket is a shocking experience: one dollar for one poxy potato, two dollars for one lousy apple, one hundred dollars for a friggin water melon and eighty dollars for a bag of rice. It is an outrageous monopoly. The farmers are laughing when they can wrap up individual items and flog them as luxury items. Food is a basic necessity not a luxury. No wonder the Japanese are constantly giving each other food as presents. It is worth nearly as much as gold.

The population has been conned into going along with this absurd inflation of prices by being made to believe that Japanese food products are superior to similar items from other countries. This is not quite true. They use environmentally unfriendly fertilizers and pesticides like everyone else and they mistreat their cows, chickens and pigs like everyone else. Maybe they don’t use GM seeds and they don’t torture their animals quite as much as the Yanks, but the difference does not justify charging the prices that they do. It is impossible to convince Japanese people of this since they have been imprinted with these convictions from an early age. Every time a student returns from a foreign country they tell the class that foreign food sucks and that the class is so lucky to eat bland over-priced Nippon food. It is about the strongest opinion that is tolerated by the group.

So what will happen with the TPP? The Japanese will flirt like a high school virgin with America; they will let the Americans get to second base but will resolutely hold onto to their cherry. The CIA will then blow something up in America and will find a pair of chopsticks at the scene of the crime that has miraculously not gone up in flames. This will lead to a wasp Tea-Party nutter getting into the White House and declaring war on chopstick countries. They will suspend all civil liberties at home until all chopstick sympathizers have been weeded out. Congress will vote trillions of dollars to the military industrial complex to wage war on the chopstick axis of evil. This money they will borrow from China. Eventually the 1% of the 1% who pulls the strings in America and Northern Europe will have stolen so much from the world that they will have to move to another planet to avoid paying taxes or giving it back.

Kind thanks to Brad for explaining the TPP to me and to the Dutch bloke who wrote the book ‘The Enigma of Japanese Power’.

The Killing Propaganda

2011-09-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

I’m writing this like Jack Kerouac on Benzedrine, without stopping except to drink beer and smoke tabs. I’m not doing any research. What I have to say all Japanese (except those still hiding out in the jungle in South East Asia waiting for the Emperor to tell them they have won the war and can thus come home) know. They know it because the facts have been continuously repeated by the media. The same media that are telling the people to ignore the facts and move back to their homes in the areas near the out-of-control nuclear power plants.

These facts are that reactors 1 and 3 at Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant are still emitting large amounts of radiation. All can see the pictures that one of them is a mangled mess of melted metal. There are so many holes in the casing for the reactors that there is no effective barrier stopping the radiation from escaping. It is also a well known fact that TEPCO have said it will take 20 years to completely stop all the radiation leaks. Just last week company officials announced that compensation claims for loss of revenues to fishermen and farmers would be unlimited. In other words, they expect to be paying out trillions of yen over the coming years. Thus, they expect lots of farm produce and fish to be exposed to high levels of radiation for the next 20 years.

These are not hidden facts. Even though most people have no idea how much a millisievert of radiation is or how much they can safely be exposed to over a long period of time, they do know that radiation is bad. That it leads to cancer, leukemia and premature death. They know only too well the horrors of radiation from being continually taught at school that the Japanese were victims in the war (ha) of 2 nuclear attacks.

And yet night after night the fucking media are spreading the killing propaganda that some Japanese are somehow doing a shameful thing by fleeing the villages in the vicinity of Fukushima nuclear power plant.

I watch the news every night in Japan. Hoping for some news of progress. Hoping very much against hope that they will announce that they have plugged the holes; that they have turned off the reactors; that the spent fuel rods have been removed and sold to the Chinese. No all we get after nearly 6 months is that they have got some robots inside the one reactor and at the other that they are installing an air cleaning system to let workers get into the damaged core area. None of this amounts to a ‘turn around point’; a point where they can honestly say that the worst is past. The news escaped recently that they tested kids for radiation in the thyroid gland just after the nuclear disaster. These were kids living near the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station. These kids had 50% of the legal limit of radiation in their thyroid glands. That was just after the disaster. What do the kids measure now? Why did they wait so long to tell people this?

These are not questions the media ask. Instead they interview factory bosses who proudly say that they are keeping their factories open although half the workforce have fled. They keep it open for the workers and for their village; that they have a responsibility to their workers. What the fuck? They are encouraging their workers to be exposed to high levels of radiation just so they can have a laugh during their lunch break and can bring home a pitiful paycheck at the end of the month. These factory bosses are like captains going down with their ships and commending the bravery of the crew who decide not to take to the lifeboats. Are they mad? Do they have no compassion? Or is that they have the ability to blatantly deny reality? If so they qualify for the diagnosis of criminally insane.

The media interview farmers who have been forced to stop cattle farming within so many tens of kilometers of the blistering seeping wounds that are the nuclear reactors. These farmers say they want to stay and continue their work. Are they homicidal? Do they not only want to kill themselves and their families but also produce food that will poison the Japanese people?

The media interview mayors of villages who say they are decontaminating their areas and that they want people to return so they can all be happy and together again. The mayors want their congregation back in their boot wearing, radish munching utopia. Are these mayors on some dangerously reality distorting drugs? They may scrape off the top layer of soil but as soon as they do more radiation falls to contaminate the newly exposed soil. You cannot effectively decontaminate until the radiation stops.

It is as if this word ‘decontaminate’ has got in the way of people thinking clearly for themselves. It’s as pernicious as ‘friendly fire’ or ‘pre-emptive strike’. Such is the faith that the Japanese people have in their system (not their politicians, but in the system) that they cannot get in their heads around the idea that there is no solution. That they simply cannot go back to their villages; that they must make their own decisions to go somewhere else and start again. Every day we see pitiful morons in community centers waiting to be told that they can go home. They cannot break away from the mother’s tit that is the Japanese system. They must grow some balls and take themselves and their families away. The government, the army, the beloved mayor can do nothing more for them.

People are always comparing (irritatingly so) Japan to a communist country not because everyone is equal but because people are so effectively molded into good citizens (or comrades), all reading from the same sheet of paper, all pulling together for the grand ideal. What utter and unadulterated shit! Many of the rich fled to foreign countries within hours of March 11th 2011. They certainly sent their kids away to get educated abroad. It is this sad dependence on being told what to do that killed many people during the actual tsunami and that is now killing those people living next to Chernobyl Japan. They are not told to leave so they stay.

And to make it worse the media is suggesting that those (mostly the younger less stupid generations) are somehow traitors for leaving their bucolic paradise of a village in Fukushima. These people should be lauded as sensible and more worthy of emulation than a bunch of bucktoothed factory ladies exposing themselves to dangerous levels of alpha, beta and gamma rays.

The myth of a homogenous Japan is killing Japan and what the media are doing at the moment is tantamount to encouraging suicide and infanticide.

Watch this short movie. Fiction speaks more eloquently than blogging.

THE DOOR - Short Film from Octagon Films on Vimeo.

Japanese Speech Competitions

2011-08-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

Speech competitions are ordeals that are very popular in Japan. People seem to gain an inordinate amount of pride discovering the youth of their country have nothing interesting or useful to say. And just to make it doubly disconnected from reality the young Japanese are forced to mouth their vacuities and generalizations in slurred and butchered English.

There is a reason why kids go to school, and it’s because they don’t know Jack Shit. These are surely the least hopeful candidates to give an enlightening or at least elucidating speech on any subject other than twiddling mechanical pencils, texting or spare time deprivation. What unnatural torture is it therefore that I must get up on a Saturday morning to listen to a bunch of kids spurt and garble out the incorrect English that their school teachers have made them memorize? Perhaps it is karma for my slovenly life and lessons.

As a side-show to the main attraction of ‘our kids’ shining for the community the powers that be will also slip in a few mild mannered Thais and Filipinos who will make an honest fist of speaking Japanese. I call this part the ‘house niggers section’.

The Asians and South Americans working for a better life and to feed their families back home will inevitably make their post-colonial masters happy by mentioning how beautiful Mount Fuji is and how wonderfully bland the food is. The audience gains untold pleasure of tales of slight cultural confusions and how Japan is just deep down better than the dirty and dangerous places from which the house niggers originate. Hearing the gratitude of the servant in the language of the master is one of the secret wet dreams of the Japanese. They were late to the idea of empire and now are making up for lost time. They have intuitively grasped the importance of patronizing the subservient races that they allow to make their cars and look after their old people.

One way to gain an insight into the Japanese speech festival is to compare it to other speech festivals around the world. They seem to be mostly for the young and concerned with ‘good morals’. When I was in China my university regularly held speech contests for the undergraduates. The speeches were interspersed with dances and kung fu exhibitions. The festivals where English was used required my attendance since I was one of only six native English speakers in the city of one million hawkers and spitters.

The topics at the Chinese speech festivals were all about noble service to the motherland and to the people. All about past heroes of the people – striving with every breath to help the masses attain the workers’ paradise that would surely be around the corner if they all pulled together instead of spitting together. No matter what the supposed theme of the speech festival it always in the end became a glorification of communist control.

I would stop listening after two speeches and would pass the time eyeing the audience for fit birds with any hint of a bosom. After two hours I would stand up and say a few non-sequiturs about how well all the contestants spoke English and how noble it is to have unselfish dreams. I would then be lead away by some cadres of the party to spend the people’s glorious money on a banquet that would involve copious amounts of pork fat, cigarettes and a clear fortified wine called bijou that smelt of paint thinner. I never remember anyone winning a Chinese speech festival. I guess everyone was a winner, especially the head of teaching and the work unit party vice president who got a belly full of grease and paint thinner.

In Japan they are far more refined and middle class. Strident love of the motherland is just not the thing. It must be a gentle and wistful love. The Japanese have an innate fear of concepts like ‘society’ and ‘workers’ utopia’. Indeed any concept is best avoided. It is possible in Japanese to speak for several minutes without saying anything about anything. Reading translations of Japanese writing I’m often reminded of cheating company executives in court who say such things as: “It is regrettable.”

The safe topics for Japanese middle school and high school students are ‘My dream’, ‘Why I love ping pong’ ‘My Home stay in Canada’ and ‘I want to go to Mars’ The last speech ordeal I went to had 16 speeches that needed judging. Of those 16 speeches 4 of them had the word ‘dream’ in the title, 2 of them were about home stays and 3 of them were about mother love. One was about an animation called ‘Prince of Tennis’ and another about some martial art that police learn. And of course one was about being the first mother-loving Japanese nob-end to get to Mars and start a ping pong club. (You can guess where my vote went).

As with the Chinese speeches the title really didn’t matter because the composition was always so convoluted and error strewn that comprehension was very much in the ear of the listener. The sentiments of all the speeches reflected entirely the propaganda that is foisted upon Japanese kids throughout their education: a propaganda of sacrificing to the group, of getting along with the group and of studying hard and working long hours to make their parents proud and then to make Japan proud. Throughout it all I scour the crowd for someone below 80 years old with a bosom worthy of contemplation.

I imagine speech festivals in Europe and America would not be much better. The whole thing whiffs of middle class smugness: it is the precocious kid showing off in front of parents.

But just imagine a speech festival in Africa or South America. Imagine a big eyed Ugandan kid with ragged shorts and dirty T-shirt stating his dream is to have a home with running water and a school with text books; or a Brazilian child talking about his class mates who have fallen victim to street violence and drug addiction. These would be speeches worth listening to, and indeed worth recording and relaying to the politicians who do nothing to improve the plight of these children.

Perhaps it is always the way that those who need to be given a voice, those who are morally justified in standing up for their human rights never get the audience they deserve. Send all the ‘my dream’ kids home and let’s listen to teenage English girls who have their clitoris and labia removed and their vaginas sewn up and who are sent back to Africa to get married to misogynists. Let’s listen to the homeless guy who lost his job, home and family when the banks crashed. Let’s listen to the injured war veteran. Let’s listen to the holocaust survivor. Let’s listen to Nelson Mandela. These are the people who are entitled to appeal to the public, to educate the public and to earn the consideration and help of the public.

It doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom of course: entertainment is its own justification. If the speeches are funny, witty, original or provocative then there might be a pleasure to be gained in listening to them.

But no. What you always get is:

“What do you want to be in the future? Do you have your own dream? Having a dream is an important thing for your success. Let’s have a dream. Thank you.”

‘Let’s have a dream’ is that English? Is it code for ‘let’s have a cup of tea’?

Judging one inane speech to be any different or better than another is difficult. Obviously the kids with access to a foreigner to correct their English have an advantage. Also the kids that display something the Japanese call ‘genki’ (which translates as manic and pointless energy like a dog chasing its tail) are regarded as having ‘the right stuff’. The winners are elevated above the group because they best represent the mediocrity of the group. I have no doubt that Jean Paul Satre wouldn’t have won any speech contests in Japan. A nausea that makes it hard to breath is not the genki thing to talk about.

After a Japanese speech contest the token foreigners as with China are invited to a meal. I turn them down whenever possible. At least the Chinese banquets were colorful: full of vomiting and dirty jokes about tofu. Although the Japanese like the Chinese would find it hard to refrain from making a comment to the effect that they are impressed with the foreigner monkey being able to use chopsticks, the conversation and action around the table would be confined to a stifling middle-classness. A chit chat full of mock seriousness whose only dogma is to avoid controversy.

As a footnote to this meandering diatribe, I have a Toyota worker in one of my classes who is in a Toyota speech competition. It seems that every Toyota employee must make a speech about his or her dream; or failing that how Toyota can get a man on Mars; and that’s preferably a mother-loving nihonjin we’re talking about.

If the Toyota worker succeeds in impressing he has to re-live the nightmare in the regional finals. I imagine the reward is delayed retirement: just too much of the right stuff to let go when they are 65. What is interesting about the Toyota student is the amount of time he says that he devotes to his speech. It’s not about cars of the future or Japan’s energy policy. It’s about nothing and surely a waste of company time to listen to. It’s just about torture; about making sure the workers will do anything that is asked of them; and do it without grumbling.

You break a man’s will by asking him to do a pointless action over and over again. This process starts early in Japan and continues throughout adult life. The kids are forced to spend more time playing sports than studying. They are forced to attend after-school schools where they are taught to pass exams. It is unnecessary to learn anything more than the fundamental importance of fitting in, of buckling down, of enduring. Eventually a type of Stockholm Syndrome manifests itself and the prisoner begins to love his or her captivity and begins to respect his or her captors.

At present the Japanese public is slowly but surely being poisoned by Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. I wish I could say it was an unprecedented event in Japan. If history was taught properly at school then the Japanese citizenry would never stand for the criminal negligence that TEPCO has shown. They would probably never have agreed to nuclear power stations in the first place.

Having been told what to think all their lives the Japanese population is in a state of denial. They hear the government say that this bit of meat has a bit of radioactivity in it; that they would have to eat the same meat for 6 months to get any ill effect from it. Such news fills them with relief.

If only some smart kid would stand up at a speech festival and say:

“Hang on a second. We are eating the same meat every day. What they are really telling us is that we will be sick in 6 months!”

That’s my dream. And also going to Mars with my favored paddle.

Japan's Aging Society - Is It Really a Problem?

2011-04-28T02:37:00.000-07:00

A dear old lady that I teach asked me today to write a model answer for the Aiken test that she is studying for. I’ve done this plenty of times before for other classes. It struck me I could do an alternative one for Trippy Traveller. The Eiken test is incessantly writing questions about the pension problem and the aging society in Japan and so I thought it a good topic for my Eiken model answer. Here it is.

It is a fact that now Japan has the oldest society in the world, meaning the average age is higher than any other country. The Japanese media is the same as the European media in trying to set an agenda in there reporting of this fact. They see an aging society as a ‘problem’. This is looking at the phenomenon in simplistic economic terms. The thinking goes that if too many people are retired than the government cannot raise enough taxes to pay for the pension system.

The media in Japan fail to mention that the world is all ready over populated and that Japan has the highest concentration of people in the world. They espouse trying to increase the birth rate: the thinking being that more young people equals more taxes equals more pension money. This is stupid logic. All these imaginary young people are also going to get old and the ‘problem’ will only get bigger; besides the world is already struggling to feed itself. Water supplies are running perilously low – in 25 years demand for water will outstrip the supply.

Imagine another 20 million people were added to the Japanese population that is already nudging the 130 million mark. That’s 20 million more stupid consumers who will no doubt buy cars and consumer products wrapped in plastic. The environmental cost will be immense. More rubbish, more pollution as well as more crowding. Believing that the answer is having more people is the same as believing that the only way out of debt is to borrow more money.

When you are in debt you have to change your lifestyle to reduce your outgoings. You must prioritize and cut out the frivolous. The Japanese must do the same. First they must cut out the cancer that is their media, their education system and their retarded political system and then they must focus on using their resources in the most effective way possible.

The focus of the media is on tax. That is a nicely emotive topic. It is a subject that affects everyone and is related to something everyone can understand – money. The middle class hate paying more taxes. They already pay more than they can afford. The middle class are so worried about paying more tax to look after old people in Japan that they are even toying with the heretical notion of bringing in millions of Indonesians and Filipinos to wipe the bums of the old and make up the short fall in tax revenues. This is pure heresy because the Japanese (as part of their religious credo) believe they are a homogeneous (or dare I say it ‘pure’) race. Risking the taboo will remain forever theoretical in Japan. No government would actually do this.

Instead why not simply reduce government and government spending. Not only are government offices over-staffed, but they are also only averagely productive. Get old people to work for the government for free. And why not spend less on building roads to nowhere, culture centres with no culture, and the countless other concrete projects that pork barreling politicians love? Deduct from the revenues the pension money and then spend the rest on the most urgent stuff.

I am no doubt not the first to notice that governments pull out their wallets for banks and big businesses that are in trouble faster than a hooker drops her panties; but when it comes to paying for their old citizenry they bitch about the cost and talk about how they can’t keep paying what is due to the people.

Why not pay the Mickey Mouse army they have in Japan less? Give them less toys.

Education, pensions and health care must and should come first; at the end of the list should come politicians, bureaucrats and soldiers.

People live longer, thus they can contribute to society for longer. There are more ways to contribute to the welfare of your compatriots than by simply paying taxes.

Rather than imposing an arbitrary age upon the individual as to when he or she is deemed superfluous to the economic life of a country maybe they should be judged on their performance. If you can do your job and you don’t want to retire then why not continue working? If someone is in his late 30s and keeps scoring goals for his team and country why tell him to hang up his boots?

And if a person retires from a job it doesn’t mean they retire from society. People in their 50s, 60s and 70s can still do other work to contribute. They can volunteer. They can work for their local community. They could even do jobs (for free or a minimal wage) that were done by the more able bodied. This would reduce the budget of local authorities. There are masses of jobs in Japan that involve standing around and waving a flag or light saber. Why are these people being paid tax payers money to do this when there are legions of old people who could do it for nothing?

It’s not just grudge work that the elderly can do either. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge to offer. They could work in education, in social work and in care work. Why not get the fairly old to look after the really old?

By re-training the old they that can be empowered to help. Nobody wants to be a burden. Giving the old a way to justify themselves in the eyes of society is the answer. The media are implicitly saying that the elderly are bringing down the country’s economy. If people thought that the elderly were actually helping to maintain the general welfare and economic health of the country the problem would immediately disappear.

What is stopping this from happening is institutionalization. The average Japanese man spends all his life being told what to do. Ever since childhood free time is discouraged. The group ethic is elevated. You work for the company 10 hours a day and when you get home you shut off entirely. Have dinner, watch the idiot box, have a bath and go to bed. At the weekend you are a good citizen by consuming – go to the shops, go to the golf course, waste petrol driving around: just waste the money you have earned. It is an unreflective working life that once it has ended leaves a man in a vegetative state. Having been told what to do for so long, a salary man or a factory worker or a construction worker cannot plan his own time. He cannot for the life of him think what to do with the free time that retirement has given him, other than to consume, watch TV and continue to get up at 5am. It is my opinion that one original thought is worth more than a life time of getting up early.

From the bottom up Japanese people must adapt to the fact that they are getting older. They must stop relying on their politicians – who frankly are clueless. Rather they must work together to make things work and to change the policies of those in charge.

Everyone in Japan knows that local governments between January and April go crazy by spending money on resurfacing roads and re-painting white lines and doing a million unnecessary public works just to make sure they spend their entire budget. Otherwise they will be punished the following financial year with a smaller budget. The fact that everyone agrees this is stupid but nothing changes is indicative of the wider problem.

Why not get somebody to run for office that proposes a policy whereby those local authorities that save money will be rewarded in the future, and those authorities that spend their budgets will be punished with smaller budgets the following year?

There is a yawning gap in Japan between what the people think and what the government does. The average turnout for the last election (April 2011) was about 25%. The electorate obviously doesn’t like any of the political parties. They are not given anything worth voting for. After the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster any politician that made the central tenant of their campaign the phasing out of nuclear power in Japan would surely have garnered plenty of votes. Instead the main political parties side stepped this issue. It wouldn’t surprise me if the media didn’t start banging on about the dangers of an aging society just to divert attention from the fact that the country is slowly but surely being poisoned by radioactivity.

The people of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Bahrain are rousing from their slumber, what will it take for the Japanese to do the same?

A Very Japanese Disaster

2011-03-28T03:13:00.000-07:00

On Friday 11th at 2.46pm my bed started shaking. For a moment I thought that the ground was shaking from the animal magnetism I was exuding in my dream – that dreamy Hollywood starlet was swooning at my crusty charms, delighted at my cheap beer drinking and furious smoking; but no, the flat was shaking. Not just the average temblor. It was a violent toing and froing. My wife and baby were on the other side of the sliding door milking.

It was a temblor like I had never experienced before. I’ve felt quite a few earthquakes in my time in Japan but this one was longer and harder than anything previously. The TV immediately abandoned regular programming and started flashing up a map of the country dotted with numbers showing magnitudes. 8.9! Fuck that was big. Live images started coming through of shaking buildings. I went back to bed. And then another one came: equally as ferocious and that was the end of my Friday afternoon sleep.

At that point the TV took over. We had just been given a new flat screen digital TV because the death of analogue was imminent in Japan. The picture is sharp and clear and my wife now loves watching it when she has a moment when the baby is not demanding love.

It was not long before the most shocking images came on the screen. It was so real it was like big budget movie computer effects. A wave of water was moving rapidly across a flat landscape carrying cars and houses and boats. We shouted at the TV. There were people on bridges seemingly gawping at the engulfing wave. It’s one thing to rubber neck from the comfort of your living room: it seemed both crass and stupid to do so from the actual scene of the disaster.

As the hours went on more earthquakes in various parts of Japan (mostly the East coast) were recorded on the flashing map. The map was now intersected with lines showing tsunamis.

The news was coming in thick and fast, just like the wave. Boards of first figures of deaths were hastily handwritten and held up by TV anchor men. Some of the anchors were wearing hardhats, like they expected at any moment for the studio to collapse on them.

The TV was compulsive watching but at the same time repulsive. Like a horror movie or some nature documentary of a boa digesting a water buffalo.

My wife and I discussed what we should do. Consume. So we got out the baby pram and walked down to a big supermarket in town and bought a bottle of water, candles, matches and extra nappies.

It was the following day (Saturday) that the story of disaster was aced by the story of impending nuclear doom. The reactors at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant had been battered by a 10 meter high tsunami. One looked like it had suffered from an American air strike – just a blackened tangle of melted metal. Two others had only ragged parts of their frames remaining. This was truly shocking news. Fuck that looks bad.

In the days that followed that impression only got worse. An area of 10 then 20 then 30 kilometers around the reactors was evacuated because of radiation levels spiking. It seemed that TEPCO the electricity company couldn’t get in to fix the water cooling system because of the high radiation levels.

On TV very dull looking TEPCO executives wearing factory uniforms tried to deflate the growing hysteria with a technical vocabulary that nobody understood and a natural charisma that only a Thai hooker could find appealing.

The Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, not wanting to be left out of the action, also came on wearing a blue factory uniform (apparently some type of emergency clobber). Luckily for Japan, the Prime Minister does have a personality and his speech seemed tinged with real emotion – anger at the TEPCO geeks and some vague Winston Churchill defiance in the face of adversity.

The whole weekend we watched as the tragedy unfolded. Outside things were going on as usual in the peaceful little rural city that we lived in. Well nearly as usual. It seemed in times of disaster the Japanese reveal odd consumer habits.

Within hours bottle water was sold out at the local supermarket. Not so strange. Toilet paper flew off the shelves. They were shitting themselves. Anally obsessed. Clean shitting was a top priority.
Pot noodles were one of the first things to vanish from the shelves. This puzzled me. If there was no gas or electricity to make hot water, what use was this junk food? Perhaps to wipe your arse with when the toilet paper supplies depleted to zero. Bread also sold out. This only lasts for a few days and was just plain stupid to hoard. And batteries. This made sense to me. Power cuts were being announced all over the country and having a torch nearby and a battery powered radio seemed a sensible precaution. Or maybe the batteries were for the space age toilets.

Monday rolled around and I had to go back to work. With nuclear disaster looming on the event horizon and thousands dead and many more thousands homeless and without homes, heating or kerosene; shivering in community centres as it snowed outside, it all seemed so purposeless teaching English. Earthquakes were still rippling through the main island of Honshu. Would any one come to lessons?

I went downstairs to my classroom with images of broken house trash everywhere playing in my head from watching TV. Odd images of metal hulled boats lying surrounded by rubble with old people picking through the devastation looking for relics of their former lives.

Yes, of course old ladies came to the lesson. About half of them. That is half in numbers not in physical appearance.

“What are you doing here?” My question was pregnant with unspoken assumptions challenging their need to get in a car and drive to the classroom when gasoline was being rationed and the whole country was in a state of shock.

This is a question I repeated every morning to the few idiots who came to lessons. Some of them looked confused about my insistence that we turn the lights off to save electricity. They were and will forever be cocooned with their very Japanese middle class-ness destined to lead the rest of their lives disturbed by nothing but the need to follow forms and traditions, to clean the grave of their ancestors, to go to hot baths, to travel hundreds of kilometers to see cherries in bloom (even though cherry trees are everywhere), to be Buddhist and Shinto without knowing anything about religion.

Every class I resented. I tried to get a conversation going about disaster. Pitiful. Only one young mother seemed to get it. We talked about the fear of radiation sickness and TEPCO’s tight-lipped approach to the situation. She was near tears in her worries. Was I going crazy in wanting to get out?

As the week wore on people outside of Japan – friends and family – started getting in contact. That was a positive. People I hadn’t spoken to for ages (silent facebook friends etc.) sent me messages, phoned me at odd hours of the night and suddenly got my Skype address. It seemed that the British media were playing the Japan card to the hilt and especially the nuclear reactor scandal. My mother actually phoned after one moron on UK TV said the number 3 reactor was going to blow ‘any day now’ and that Japan would be a nuclear wasteland. My mother made an emotional plea for me to pack up my family in a car and head at high speed south away from the impending cancerous cloud that would envelope the mainland and kill everyone.

Well its 3 weeks later now and the cloud of death hasn’t arrived. I’ve been following the radiation levels carefully. They spiked in the water in Tokyo around the time when loads of foreigners fled the capital. The levels have since dropped. Water is a serious issue. It can’t be got for neither love nor money in Tokyo. The local wards are dishing out a few bottles at a time to mothers with young babies. This is not something my mother would know because the British meejah now have the American (er I mean NATO) bombing of Libya to get their teeth into.

Since that interrupted sleep on Friday 11th, I’ve got a passport for my 5 month year old kid, I’ve taken a wad of cash out of the bank for emergencies and I’ve sat through numerous lessons wondering why my students are almost fanatical in not altering their pretty little schedules. The school has bribed me to stay by doubling my holidays.

On the 15th March another quake of magnitude 6 struck Fujinomiya city – a place just north of where I live. The flat really shook. My wife and I ran desperately around collecting emergency supplies and the baby and bolted outside. Nobody was around. I had a fag to calm down and went back inside. The apartment building where I live has cracks up the walls. We didn’t feel safe living there so we moved to my parents-in-laws house, a few kilometers down the road.

The following lessons were all about my delighted old ladies telling me how they saved their flat screen TVs from falling over during the local shaker. Was this any better than discussing toilet paper and pot noodles? That was the week of my birthday and also the week when Patrick cast out all the snakes from Ireland. All depressing. I ended up getting really drunk to celebrate my birthday just in case it was my last one.

Meeting my friends at the weekend was good: somebody to talk to and to put the crisis in perspective. Over the course of the group drunk one idea came through clearly: there are two types of foreigners – those who stay and think the whole thing about nuclear disasters and food shortages is outrageous scaremongering and those who just bolted when their governments told them to. Time will tell which one is the smarter bunch. Naturally, amongst those who have stayed there is a tendency to think that those who jumped boat are Lord Jims who will later regret their cowardice. There are now plenty of jobs up for grabs. Even an idiot like Shnade might land a cushy job.

One of my old lady students was telling the class how sad she was that her Italian son-in-law had fled with her daughter and granddaughter. I pointed out to her that every single one of the old dears in the room would automatically go to the nearest airport if the Japanese government told them to leave a country. The exercise in the second conditional made no mental connection with a woman shorn of one of the lynchpins in her perfect life.

I haven’t left. I’m ready to, but I’m waiting for a clear sign that there is no alternative. It might be that when that comes it will be too late. On my side is the experience of having lived through plenty of power cuts before, of having left places by following lines of Africans merrily walking through the bush because the bus didn’t arrive. We can adapt. Unlike the daft old people in the Fukushima exclusion zone who refuse to leave their homes because well they refuse to change, to show some fucking adaptability.

What is quite literally getting on my nerves are the continued mini earthquakes that are hitting nearly daily. Some are confirmed by the TV, some, it seems, are only noticed by me. I say to my wife: “Another one.” And she just looks at me sadly. I’m hallucinating vibrations. This is paranoia like PTSD. Like a soldier in the jungle, any crack of a twig and I’m on the deck praying for my arse. This is an arse I might add that doesn’t worry about not having toilet paper or pot noodles, but does worry about becoming another statistic on the growing death toll.

The Day I Lost My Job, I Hope

2011-01-12T05:38:00.000-08:00

Since early December last year I’ve stopped going to my juku job. Remarkably enough I haven’t officially lost the job. That is until today.

I had told snot eyes several times that I had quit but by the end of the conversation she would invariably say something like:

“So you will come in on Monday to teach?”
“No.”
“How about Friday?”
“I’ve told you that they haven’t paid me, so I’m not coming in to teach.”

She of the gummy eyes and crumpled wrinkly face was marvelous in her forbearance. She would listen to me using liberal doses of the ‘f’ word both as noun and adjective and allow me to eventually run out of steam before popping up with her succinct:

“So you will come on Monday to teach then?”

It wasn’t that her English wasn’t up to understanding me; it was more that her duty as a disgruntled employee (who had recently been given a month’s notice to quit and move on) was to persevere with pressuring me to continue teaching.

The job had been all right. The pay was lousy but at least I was left alone to teach two brothers aged 9 and 12. They were two smart lads who responded well to my bribes of games for the last 20 minutes if they applied themselves for 40 minutes to their studies. Their studies being the Aiken test: a brand of English efficiency test designed by the Japanese to test Japanese-ness as much as English, dealing with topics that often had no relevance to a 9 year old. At one point the older brother asked me what ‘dating’ was and why a boss would be in trouble for taking his secretary out to dinner at an expensive restaurant. I felt Tiger Woods should have stepped in at that point with an explanation. But unfortunately he was being treated for sex addiction so I ventured my own opinion:

“Women don’t like men having 2 girlfriends.” The child chewed on that nugget of information for a while before breaking into a frown of confusion. I decided to head the Indians off at the pass. “Ask your dad about it.”

So the job was frankly a doss, the conditions third world and the salary second world, but this only served to take any weight of responsibility off my shoulders. I could go in unprepared, give it 30%, take cheeky cigarette breaks and shoot off the moment the lesson finished to get beered up. It was almost therapeutic – like not bothering to confab with the caddy, just lining up and whacking the ball.

It all changed in November when the boss with an interest in my procreative powers decided to move out of his disorganized and dirty hovel of a main office into the disorganized and dirty room where I taught. The advantage being that the new location had more room to dirt up and fill up with filing boxes.

I went in the week of the move to teach and saw that the boss in his wisdom had decided to dye the top of his hair pink and had made the further executive decision to take up three quarters of the teaching space. The white boards with no marker pens and the tatty partitions had all been squeezed into a corner by the door. The acres of space created had been used for a scruffy brown leather sofa and coffee table. The broken computer was gone and the walls lined with boxes of papers and teaching books that I suspected would never see the light of pedagogy. The boss lingered around making loud calls on his mobile phone and another dude in a brown suit that reminded me of China lingered nearby. The kids and teachers were bunched in the corner trying not to elbow each other and doing their best to continue the substandard service above the din of the dick obsessed boss.

My two kids didn’t like the arrangement and liked it even less when the boss took a break from his power brokering on the phone to come over and peer at the lessons in progress. Kids like cats and dogs sense the mean spirited and insincere and recoiled from the boss’s friendliness like little Red Riding Hood being doubtful about her Grandmother’s newly formed big ears.

They later confided in me how little they liked the man and I did my best not to tell them their instincts were Tiger sharp and true.

This went on for a couple of weeks before I noticed that I hadn’t been paid for the previous month yet. I tackled snotty focals about this. She made some bizarre comment about the office move necessitating the withholding of payment for a few days. I pointed out the wages were done by electronic transfer and that it was a simple matter of turning on a computer and inputting in some time sheets and then going down the bank and organizing money transfers. As far as I was concerned Japanese employees were spineless cowards for passively accepting they wouldn’t be paid on time because the boss moved office.

A few days stretched to weeks. I got bored of checking my bank book to find no salary forthcoming. And being a man of limited patience I easily let drop the ultimatum that I would quit if I wasn’t paid in a week.

I wasn’t and so I took it as a given that snooty had communicated news of my resignation to the boss. This was my mistake. Of course in Japan and maybe in Asia generally you don’t do such things. All decisions come from above. I knew this was the case because every week I failed to show up for work gummy vision tackled me at our next private lesson insisting:

“So you will teach in January?”

I stayed silent because I got tired of denying. I felt like a Canute who got bored of ordering the waves to retreat and instead went off to a beach bar to look for a cocktail and a dodgy geezer to score from. Besides I still wanted to get paid. The illusion of being employed although not going to work left me almost philosophical. How long could this go on for? Was I trapped in a Kafka novel? In which case would the boss turn into an insect (surely a better reflection of his true nature)?

Conveniently December and the holidays came round and the issue could be put to one side. I continued to teach gummy oculars on the side and she continued to let fall her automatic refrain:

“If you get paid will you teach next Friday?”

I patiently explained that I had already quit and now I just wanted my money otherwise I would tell the tax office that the Juku was breaking the law and that I would make damn sure that anyone who searched on Google or Yahoo in either Japanese or English for the name of the school would encounter a first entry telling in a no holes barred way why a person shouldn’t send their kid to the school. All of this washed over sticky eyes making as little impression as England at the World Cup.

On the 4th January I checked my bank account and my wages were as absent as Tiger is from the leader’s board on the Pro Circuit. I instantly got on the blower to Vaseline iris demanding my wages. I withheld my anger because I was in the bank and I had only just a few weeks back called an employee of that bank ‘an fing C’. My niceness must have given her hope because she vocalized ruminations about me getting paid and coming back to work. I hadn’t worked at the place for weeks. I had already told my 2 charges that I was finished with the place because they hadn’t paid me. The older one must have realized that this was on a par with taking the secretary out to dinner as he looked downcast when I said sayonara.

And today I get a phone call on my mobile. My wife and kid were sleeping so I took the call.

“Hello. Mr. John?”

“Er, yes. Who is this?”

“I’m the boss from xxxx Juku.” His English then started falling apart. I knew that he was trying to say something about me coming to work. I let him drone on for a few seconds. Making him suffer the English language made me feel good.

Eventually I interrupted him, “Where is my salary? My money? Watashi-no okane doko desu ka?” He understood that and he assured me it would go into my account the following day.

That let the flood gates open. Like Tiger at a celebrity dinner with models in attendance I had the bit between my teeth and wasn’t going to hold back:

“Listen you don’t say ‘sorry’. No ‘gomennasai’ or anything. You arrogant fuckwit. You haven’t paid me for over 2 months now and you phone up and ask me to teach. If you had wanted me to teach you should have paid me.”

“I don’t understand English”

“That’s too fucking bad.”

“You teach this week”

At that point I took the mobile from my ear and held it to my mouth and I shouted at the machine: “You kept my money for over 2 fucking months. Grow some manners you fucking pink headed moron!” With that I cut off the connection.

He phoned back. I didn’t answer. Bogey scope rang while I was teaching. She said the boss hadn’t understood what I said. As if shouting and hanging up and an over-liberal use of swearing wasn’t enough to communicate my anger. She advised my wife to keep my resignation a secret until I got paid. Remarkable since I hadn’t taught there for ages anyway. I truly believed I had lost my job. Calling the boss a fucking pink headed moron must be an automatic red card. But no the parents want the teacher back.

Losing this job is proving as difficult as me quitting the cigarettes or Tiger the center folds.

The Day I Became a Dad

2010-10-31T01:44:00.000-07:00

Well I suppose that was nine months ago but until it happens then it hasn't happened. Just as until the fat lady sings or the whistle blows the game is not won or lost.

It's a good place to start time. Having a baby in Japan is confusing for foreigners. I've recently concluded that the real religion of the Japanese is not Buddhism or Shinto but Japaneseness. As with all national identities it is partly social engineering and partly true cultural reflection. One of the tenants of Japaneseness is that they recognize only their own version of time. Not only do they count the years since their pathetic Emperor ascended to the throne instead of counting the years since the birth of that pathetic Jew, Jesus; but even more objectionably they insist a baby gestates and is born in 10 months and 10 days. When I flatly denied this to one of my classes they seemed quite put out. After all an attack on one’s religion is a serious matter.

It took the smartest (and youngest) of the old ladies to realize that 10 months and 10 days refers to a lunar calendar. Despite all of the women in the class being a mother only one seemed to recall that they did not carry their children in their womb for 10 months and 10 days.

My wife carried our off-spring for 9 months and one week. She was overdue.

They don't like this in Japan. Babies and trains should be on time. Only big cheese bosses are allowed to be late.

So my wife was given her orders and told to check into the hospital and start induction.

Now I remember induction from my university days. That was the first week when we didn't have any lectures so we could dedicate our time to spending our grants down the bar and hopefully get some baby making practice in.

No such luck for my wife. She was rigged up to a drip and told off for encouraging tardiness.

That was Thursday. My wife went to hospital and I stayed in our flat and continued my job. There was no hurry. The doctor had said induction would last three days so I settled back into bachelor life and discontinued the regimen of washing clothes every day.

On Friday morning I taught my last class of the week and duly checked my emails at 10.20am before going back to bed. I had just put down my book and was anticipating an excellently long snooze when I got a phone call from my mother-in-law. When was I going to the hospital? Later I replied. The doctor said the induction would go on for 3 days so I figured that there was nothing wrong with a bit of sleep since nothing was happening. She phoned off. Having my pre-sleep routine interrupted I went back to my book for a further 10 minutes to get back in the mood. Again as Morpheus gently whispered into my ear to follow the blasted phone went again. It was my snotty eyed juku boss wanting to know what hours I had worked that month. For Pete's sake! I curtly told her I would get back to her.

In the end I got 2 or 3 hours decent kip before the phone went again. It was my wife. It seemed that she and the doctors had decided that the induction wasn't going as planned and that now the big C-section was planned to commence at 4.30pm. Fuck. I put the phone down and immediately the mother-in-law phoned and told me to get to the hospital.

I had a hasty coffee packed a bag full of records and my computer and cycled to the station.

For some reason the downstairs reception area of the hospital was chocka with women. Every bench was taken. Standing room only. None of them looked pregnant. If they needed any help with that I could donate some seed, I thought. Proven product after all.

I pushed through the crowd and found the door to the hospital.

My wife was in a narrow room. There was a Winnie the Pooh clock on the wall, a tiny TV in the corner and a dirty patch on the floor where a mat had escaped its mooring. Mrs. Trippy Traveller was in good spirits despite being hooked up to a machine that constantly made a thumping noise which competed with some obligatory ersatz ‘calming music’ coming from a CD player on the dirty floor. She told me that the doctor had decided to cut her open to extract our daughter. She seemed to think it was a good idea since the drugs weren’t working. Was this immunity due to our former frequent forays into recreational altered states of consciousness I wondered. Next door we could hear the clink of metal as they prepared to operate.

We chatted for a while. Her mother turned up and then it was time. They were late. It turned out that the vast gaggle of women downstairs was delaying kick off.

I kissed my wife and told her it would all be all right.

We waited in the corridor. We saw the doctor in his green surgical kit walk past us. He bowed and went into the operation room.

I had no idea how long it was going to take. The sofa was comfortable and so I pulled out my book thinking perhaps I could do a few pages of Anathem and drift off. Just as I was getting heavy-eyed my mother-in-law got all excited. Sporadic cries came from the operating room. I could hear my wife's voice. Thank God. Both my girls were alive.

We waited an anxious 15 minutes before a nurse bought out the baby for me to hold. It was covered in wrinkles. Its tiny hands and feet were ashen grey. The face looked like an old man. I was reminded of Gollum. Oh well. Emotion welled up in me. My precious.

The doctor came out and tarried briefly to receive our thanks. Then he miraculously came out again and told us that the baby’s leg had got tangled in the umbilical cord. Odd. Why hadn’t he mentioned that 30 seconds ago when we met him in the corridor?

The nurse took the baby away from me and placed it in a plastic box in a room with a big viewing window. There were two other babies in the room. One was born just a few hours before. It had hairs on its back and constantly oscillated between crying and sleeping. I stepped over and looked at the fruit of my loins. Slightly less ashen now but she looked so unhappy. It struck me that being born is the first big injustice done upon us. Torn from warmth, nourishment and protection and forced into a world of plastic. I could see her arms flailing, looking for the walls of the womb. This was the start of psychology: the beginning of the hang ups, disappointments and confusion.

It was also the start of my mother-in-law and her obsession with the baby's weight. 3,294 grams (they can't say 3.3 kg in Japan for some reason) was written on a card placed above the Perspex box. My mother-in-law was on her phone immediately texting and phoning her friends to tell them the baby’s weight. Had they held some type of raffle in secret?

Eventually we were allowed to see the mother. She was fine only she couldn't feel her feet. They moved her into a better room that was 27 degrees Celsius. On the table was a knobbly bit of bloodied umbilical cord. A fat nurse in white crocks came and gave my smiling wife some more drugs and changed the water looking drip for a piss coloured drip solution.

My wife and I chatted about our ugly baby and about the fact that two doctors had performed the operation. They were twins. That explained the corridor encounters. I thought it was a good trippy touch too.

The mother-in-law reappeared with her husband. He had just got back from work. His broad grin showed his ill-fitting dentures. My mother-in-law went off on the topic of the weight. Claiming her first was much heavier. I thought 3 kg was a fair effort - nearly twice as heavy as hairy back boy in the plastic box next to my Sophia. It seemed 3kg was nothing. She must have squeezed out a mountain.

And so it continued in the car to the local bar, in the bar to the locals and on the mobile phone to the other witches in the neighbourhood: the story of how much heavier her baby had been. If I hadn't known my brother-in-law (a superlative consumer and average PE teacher) I might have formed the impression that she had given birth to a black hole.

I ate too much katsu curry, drank two beers and phoned a couple of mates. They weren’t in to going out on the lash so I ended up staying at home and writing this.

Goodnight, Sophia. And may flights of angels protect you from exaggeration.

Local Elections in Japan

2010-09-29T02:43:00.000-07:00

"Information is the currency of democracy." Thomas Jefferson

As I write I'm caught in the cross fire of a local election. I've been trying to get my students to talk about this. The majority of them have been reluctant to engage in public political debate. It is a bit like trying to get a discussion going about the pros and cons of incest.

The election is for the local city assembly. There are 21 posts up for grabs and there are 22 candidates running. Already alarm bells are ringing. Only one person doesn't get a job. I like those odds. I'm now considering applying for a Japanese passport so I too can run in such an election.

The campaigns are curious. The candidates don't spend much money on their campaigns. As a result they have three outlets for their electioneering to avoid last spot. The first is a poster which can only be put in designated spots. These spots are billboards with numbers. Each number gets a B4 sized slot.

Every one puts a picture of themselves with their name below and a few words. As is sadly true world-wide image has overtaken content. Spin trumps substance. Psychology prevails over policy. Some candidates have gone for patriotic symbolism – namely Mount Fuji in the background, one has gone for the ‘family-man’ image, and all of them look like business men or women.

The second tool for promotion is the local meeting. The serious candidates set up bases　around the city from which to mastermind their election campaigns. People can drop in and meet the star of the show and perhaps get a cup of tea and a nice nibble. I suspect the quality of the nibbles in itself could guarantee avoiding the ignominy of last place.

And the final way to get your message across is to drive around in a car with a PA system attached to the roof. Naturally, the candidates are too busy being lions of commerce or scaling Mount Fuji or sleeping with their nieces to actually do this in person. Instead they hire armies of very irritating women to (wo)man the speakers. And what do these surrogates say?

“Vote for Pol – he promises to subsidize rice prices.” No.
“Vote for Adolf – he will make the streets safe.” No.
“Vote for Vladimir – he will seize the means of production from the autocracy of the corporations.” No.
“Vote for Tony – He doesn’t believe in anything, but he likes the idea of fair play.” No.

They say 2 things and 2 things only. One is “Thank you.” (I suppose the notion of fait accompli has a certain psychological power – or else they are admitting that the election is organized on a Robert Mugabe rubric). The other thing they say is a masterpiece of contradiction: “We are sorry for making so much noise.”

The rules state that the moving tannoy systems can only operate between 8am and 8pm; and that they cannot bring their noise pollution near hospitals and other places where people need quiet. Both rules are broken. I live opposite a big hospital and I hear the wail of thank you's and sorry's quite clearly as I'm sure do the patients on the other side of the road. Furthermore, PA birds cannot help getting a bit of cheeky 8.10pm off-side announcements in.

I've been asking my students about their political choices. Having neither the interest nor the intellectual framework to simply state their positions, I break it down for them. I give my students a list of p’s: policy, personality, previous record and party. Which of these inform your decisions, I ask?

I've questioned half a dozen classes so far and the students have unanimously avoided ‘policy’. Either the political aspirants don't have any policies or the electorate doesn't think policies are important. I feel this could be a chicken and the egg scenario. Which came first the brainwashers or the brainwashing? Several of my old ladies went for personality. When pushed on this, they all respond – I will vote for him because he looks honest. I presume there were those who thought the same thing about Richard Nixon.

The most interesting response has come from my students who are employed by Toyota. They are simply told by their union (unions here don't fight for pay raises or better working conditions) where they should (a ‘should’ is a ‘have to’ in Japan) place their crosses. I study the faces of these students carefully. There appears to be no signs of discomfort or mental coercion. They see nothing wrong in this. I pressed one of my Toyota workers on this point and he stated that he wanted to see more public facilities built. What facilities? I asked. Roads and traffic signals he replied. If they had any more traffic signals in this city it could end up resembling a rave or a near death experience.

What the students failed to realize or care about is that politicians and big business are totally in bed with each other in Japan. The politicians waste tax payers money on big construction projects that are tendered out to a wide range of companies (namely one) and after a glittering political career of avoiding all policy other than the policy of covering Japan in concrete and cars they step gracefully down from heaven into a sweet high paying job in a construction company.

Where I live is car town. A number of big car companies have factories here. A green candidate here is as rare as a true black orchid. Incest must be much more common.

Before I go on to introduce you to some of the star candidates from this year's election I would just like to do the rare thing for me, and that is bring in some balance to my otherwise lopsided invective. There has recently been a groundswell of opposition in Japan to such obvious bullshit politics. Hundreds of thousands of signatures have been gathered in certain areas of Japan protesting against a number of perceived flaws in the current political landscape. The three stand out points being:

1) A disgust that so many politicians are needed in the first place. This is a very good point. My town has a population of only 50,000 people and yet needs over 20 local representatives to sit in meetings to decide nothing. After all such things as crime and immigration are just not issues. They already have a hospital every square kilometer and a traffic signal every 10 meters. What is there to do?

2) A profound revulsion at the amount of money these under-worked representatives get for following orders from car companies. Some regions dole out over $8,000 a month to each elected representative. Needless to say nothing is stopping local councilors from having other jobs.

3) An intense distrust of big public works programs. Many people feel the days when you could just build another bridge or dam or road to nowhere to give people jobs and pump money into the local economy (I mean local concrete corporation) are judged by many clear-sighted Japanese to be in the past. As the population gets older there is less tax money coming in for environmentally destructive policies. At the same time a growing number of people are calling for a separation of politicians from big business and the ending of the amakudari (descent from heaven) system.

These instances of real democracy – namely democracy truly inspired from the people designed to change what are widely perceived as abuses of power – have met with mixed success. Of course politicians get to vote on the issue of their own pay cuts, and a major can only do so much to address the people's grievances because the major depends on the support of his or her local government. Nevertheless, some areas have managed to cut the number of politicians and the size of their wages.

Those Brahmins who control society in Japan must be very upset at this. They have spent a lot of effort since the end of the war to robotize the electorate. They have already banned ideas from the national curriculum, but I guess just being a democracy carries certain systemic threats to control.

And now that is out the way let's meet this year's hopefuls.

This man is in pole position and so guaranteed a place. He is clearly saying "I like fisting."

This man has a radioactive glow or is that charisma pouring off him.

I prefer to sneer for the camera.

Vote for me because I sleep with a foreigner. A very risque political ploy.

My toupee has slept with over 100 women.

Somebody doesn't like me. Here is real democracy.

A vote for me is a vote for floppy hair and bushy eyebrows.

The vampire candidate - campaigning for night voting.

I'm against eyebrows but you might sleep with me if you were really drunk.

Pictures of a Cram School in Japan

2010-09-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

Japan is proud of its education system. It is a system that has virtually eliminated illiteracy and free thought from the islands.

It is also big business. Really big business. Because competition is fierce for places at the best universities (which have also successfully removed original thought from the syllabus), it is imperative for middle class families to spend a high proportion of their income on extra tuition for their children. What do they get for all this extra money? Well look at the pictures below to see what state of the art facilities are available for those children sent to cram schools to study after regular school.

My wages are as crappy as my surroundings. I try to adjust my effort accordingly, but I feel just turning up on time is giving the shit company who organizes this cram school more than they deserve. This is especially true since I discovered that every month they deduct 500 yen (about $5) from my wages without telling me and for no appreciable reason. (Well I wouldn't appreciate any reason for cheating me out of my slovenly-earned yen).

To read more about the fascinating cultural phenomenon that is juku teaching read:

The Day I Failed To Lose My Job

Cram Schools

Entrance

Teaching resources

State of the art information technology

Hygienic conditions

Always spotlessly clean

Excellent marketing and advertising

In all honesty, when I taught in provincial mainland China in the late 1990s the rooms were cleaner and the equipment was better. And that used to cost students $30 a term.

The only positive in all this, is that it means I can't give a fuck about this job. I have already sworn at my supervisor, not bothered turning up and never do more than 30 seconds in teaching preparation. It is kind of liberating not caring at all. Perhaps this is a modern form of Buddhism in the workplace.

Sora Aki the Kindle Killer Part Two

2010-08-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

'Comfort women' being taught how to shoot.

Gorou and Sora became an item. Officially they were labeled together. Where once other students saw two disparate individuals, they now saw one couple. They were a couple who reflected each other and who magnified the qualities of the other. Both being bright, they were together somehow ‘geniuses. Both being reclusive, they were now no longer anonymous lonely hearts but instead secretive lovers. They were something that was more than the sum of its parts. Their separateness was now seen as something positive. It was because they conformed to romantic norms that the group was keen to re-evaluate the two, to bring them back into the fold.

Gorou saw his relationship with Sora in terms of paradox. He loved dwelling on the topic of how his one and Sora’s one made more than two. How this extra something was a quality and how quality was so hard to define mathematically. Sora enjoyed these discussions because she had just finished Robert Pirsig’s Lila, the follow up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which dealt with the same issue. She saw quality not as a mathematical oddity but as the heart of humanism: following quality is what drove progress. Deciding what had value and what didn’t was the way and the essential benchmark for happiness. And for her, being with Gorou felt right and must be something that increased the quality of her life.

That is not to say that she wasn’t without misgivings. What irked Sora was the threat to her individuality that coupledom imposed upon her. She sometimes felt that her relationship somehow co-opted her essential self. Suddenly people looked at her and saw not the odd-ball loner, but Gorou’s girl. She loved Gorou and felt pride in this status change, but at the same time she regretted a loss of control. It was as if she no longer had autonomy because she was attached to another person whose character and actions somehow partly defined her. Was it true the other way round she wondered? Do I now partly define Gorou? She hoped so.

From their first sex by the river, the couple never looked back. Everything seemed to happen so naturally. More sex, love, more commitment. By the end of their first year at college the two of them were already discussing the practicalities of sharing an apartment in Tokyo or in nearby Kanagawa. Neither of them came from rich families, and yet they hoped that with part-time jobs they could afford it.

Everything was going great until the summer holidays. The long break. The students had to vacate the dorms and find other accommodation. Most people went home. Neither Sora nor Gorou wanted to return home. Gorou was from a Prefecture in the North and Sora from one in the South. It wasn't distance that would separate them but money. High speed trains or airplanes were a luxury they couldn’t afford. The reality of having to go home and find a shitty job in a convenience store or in a cram school hung like a heavy cloud over their last few days of term. If it was just herself to consider, Sora would have made a decision quickly and would have pursued the matter with as much intelligence and resolve as she could muster. For her thought was wedded to action. But Gorou became entangled in ideas and looked so much before he leaped that in the end he never jumped. And so it was with the holiday problem – he over-thought the problem and ended up doing nothing, just going with the flow, resigning himself to going home to his family.

This led to their first row. Sora accused Gorou of deliberately sabotaging her plan for them to find a cheap apartment or even a shared apartment and to find jobs in the city to make ends meet. Gorou didn’t like the accusation and told Sora that she was being impractical, that she was being ‘too much of a girl’ by letting her emotions cloud her judgments. The row lasted two days. During that time they stopped meeting.

On the third day (and the day before the end of term), Gorou was waiting outside Sora’s lecture hall holding a wrapped present. He apologized and mumbled something about being in the wrong. The girls in her dorm had told Sora that she had to punish Gorou and that instant forgiveness and reconciliation was not playing the game. She should hint that she would take him back but that she should only properly forgive him after he had shown enough contriteness. Otherwise he wouldn't value her. As far as Sora could understand her dorm mates believed that it was obstacles that entangled a man. Obstacles to sex and obstacles to forgiveness convinced a man that a woman was worth chasing and keeping. Easy girls were not girls boys wanted to marry. To Sora this made zero sense. Delaying gratification why? Suffering made pleasure greater? Holding back was the way to get more? Weren't these all games based on bunk psychology? If you are hungry you should eat. If you want to have sex you should have sex. Why wait? And so Sora ignored the advice she was given and smiled at the sight of Gorou all wet-eyed and humble. She took the present.

“I missed you so much. I’m sorry I criticized you. It all seems so unimportant to me. What I want is you. What is this?” Sora asked as she pulled at the tape on the wrapping to open the gift without ripping the gift paper. It was a Kindle. Sora had never seen one before. She thought at first it was some type of over-sized cell phone until Gorou explained that it was a digital reader. He had downloaded 50 books onto the Kindle. Among the 50 were books by Mishima, Dazai, Kobo Abe, Oe, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Joyce, Kafka, Keats, Shakespeare, Yeats and Soseki. She loved it and at that moment she loved Gorou more.

“Am I forgiven, Sora? I don't want to fight with you, especially tonight. This is going to be our last night together for two months. I have a little money saved up. Let’s go to a love hotel and drink cold beer and..”

“Fuck. That's an excellent idea.” Sora loved shocking Gorou with vulgarity.

Ever since losing her virginity she felt liberated. Knowing your sexuality and unashamedly experiencing it was like discovering a secret that had been unfairly hidden for years. What had she been waiting for? Softball, tennis, basketball and all the other daft after-school clubs made no sense to her. They were a waste of physical effort; whereas, sex was another matter entirely. It was a thing worthy of supreme bouts of effort. Breaking the tape at the finishing line had a thunderous sublimity; it tore Sora into a closer connection with now. Nothing was more now than an orgasm.

And knowing that pleasure had layers of intensity, layers that blurred and ran through with a dark vein made Sora consider the excitement and the possibilities; the danger and the rewards; the privacy (even in public) and the intimacy, like being encapsulated in an oil stained bubble. These entire feelings and ideas made Sora feel complete - a woman, not a girl.

Gorou on the other hand saw lust as a dark collapse into animal pleasure, as a retreat from the intellect; as a force of creation but also destruction. Sora was liberated by sex, Gorou was imprisoned in passion. For Sora it was like swimming to the surface from a great depth. For Gorou it was like possession by a force that was stronger than his will. A will that was his but wasn’t his at the same time.

The two young people sensed this difference but neither had found the words or courage to address the issue.

So it was that they spent their last night together in the Triple 5 Hotel. They drank, tried new positions and had lots of baths. On their second bout of lovemaking Gorou pulled out two black silk scarves. He insisted they do it blind-folded and that he be passive. Sora loved the idea and within minutes she had straddled the young man and was using her vaginal muscles and hips to gallop with ferocity towards oblivion. She raised her head, faced the darkness and went at speed into the light. As Gorou could hold back no longer he screamed and submitted.

Images: birds and the bees from bakwaasbybiswas.wordpress.com

Comfort women : thinkersblog.net

Catch up on Sora Aki's adventures:

Sora Aki the Kindle Killer Part One

2010-08-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

“How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.”
–Yukio Mishima

Sora Aki meant red sky. It was her nom de guerre as she liked to think of it. Nowadays you had to have a brand and push exposure of that brand hard if you were going to get any real fame or notoriety. It wasn't easy to stand out anymore what with the internet giving mediocrity such an accessible platform for comment. It seemed any real spark of genius was being lost in the deluge of trivia and plagiarism. Any shit head with nothing to say was saying it loud and long. This irritated Sora Aki. Here she was attempting something original and daring and instead of instantly standing out she had to line up behind cake recipes and product reviews in the all encompassing list that was the search engine result.

And then there were the super sluts and the suicides to compete with. What they did always garnered a certain cache amongst the feeble minded – and there were plenty of those in Japan to impress. Sleeping with E-list celebrities or just sleeping with someone else's boyfriend betrayed not only the prurient obsessions of her potential audience but how human weakness titillated. And what was weaker than killing yourself because the world misunderstood you? The feeble minded, to Sora's mind, seemed to rule the roost in Japan. They dominated cultures and sub-cultures with their fanatical autism that rebelled against the standards of the written word, the masterly composition, the flawless narrative, the crystallization of beauty in a picture, the sublime harmony; and instead delved ever deeper into the vacuous world of Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes. Outrageous suntans, dreary derivative pop, perverted cartoons; a lingua franca with adjectives pared down to gobsmackingly inane single figures. A thousand surfaces all vied for young people’s respect in Tokyo. If you wanted to be a 'something' on the scene of cool bars and street corners you had to accessorize your brain like your mobile phone with spangly paste; throw out the real stuff and just keep the fool's gold.

It also helped if you were cute. Cute looks combined with cute attitudes got you a long way in Shibuya and Shinjuku. Get these cute assets mentored by an arbiter of cute and you could really see your stock rise.

It wasn't because Sora lacked cuteness that she became a serial killer. She didn't have killer looks but she was definitely cute. She knew that boys fancied her. And it didn't need her Mensa IQ to fathom why boys looked at her in that way. She had the basics. Thin legs, a little nose and chin, big eyes and a broomstick body were all hers for the flaunting. What's more she possessed the absences that were just as important in Japan. She lacked the facial birthmarks and moles that blighted many a potentially cute face. She escaped the slitty eyes that ruined people’s manga versions of beauty. She also was fortunate to avoid the coffee cup handle ears that did nothing for facial aesthetics. Perhaps she could have been cuter. Her nose could have been more button-like, her face more oval, her bust more generous; but all in all she was a package worth opening.

Sora felt her worth sharply. From an early age she had made the startling realization that women in Japan were retarded. In the metaphorical sense that society from an early age encouraged women to repulse anything approaching serious thought on society, morals, science, philosophy, religion, literature, economics, history; anything and everything academic or theoretical; any play of ideas; any meta-notions were to be repelled. These were manly spheres of thought. A woman should model herself on a child. She should walk pigeon-toed like a child, she should remain 'cutely' petulant, she should play house, worship the power in men and remain endearingly stupid. Just as somethings were fire retardant so women were raised to be idea retardant. Only the whims of consumerism and the concerns of duty and motherhood were the substances allowed to pass the mental barrier erected by social conditioning. She saw how her mother, her aunts, her cousins, her female teachers, her friends and just about every woman that she encountered and who could be considered a role model for the young school going Sora was a victim of stunted mental growth. They had made the basic mistake of letting notions of femininity take control of their critical faculties.

Sora had come to realize this from an early age. At school she was disgusted with her teachers. They never said it openly but their attitudes made it more than apparent that society expected the future’s doctors, lawyers, engineers and industrialists to come from the ranks of the boys at school. Nothing much except fecundity was expected of the girls.

So she studied hard. She despised club activities and sport. All propaganda for sacrificing to the group, all non-think. She did the minimal and often cried off sick so she could plunge into the world of books. Books were her saviour, her lifebuoy keeping her afloat.

Sora remembered finishing the Alex Haley biography of Malcolm X late one night and suddenly grasping why John Lennon said 'woman is the nigger of the world'. At fifteen Sora understood the notion of cultural slavery and the power of fighting back. She saw the innate rightness of defending your rights and in not adopting Buddhist indifference, Confucian acceptance or Christian sacrifice.

Sora was stuck. Shortly after puberty she knew that she wasn't a lesbian and anything like transsexual. She simply fancied boys and conformity to certain rules seemed the only way to get a boy friend. She had her limits though and it wasn't until she got to university that she met a boy who not only liked her but who also was acceptable to her, who didn't patronize, who didn't attempt to put her down, put her in her place; a man with a modicum of free thought. His name was Gorou. He was the fifth son and it seemed to Sora that his birth position was somehow relevant in understanding why Gorou was different to other boys.

Sora met Gorou one evening when both of them had gone to sit by the small river near the university dormitories. Sora had gone there to escape the summer heat and giggling lunacy of her dorm mates. Gorou was sitting on the concrete steps leading down to the river by himself drinking beer.

Sora approached the solitary figure. As she came closer she could make out his features in the twilight. He had a straight high nose, almost foreign and a matching high forehead. Long tousled hair hung over half his face. He had thick, generous lips and as he turned to look at Sora, she saw fragility in his eyes.

“What do you want?” He asked. His words were preemptory but he spoke softly. The tension between form and content intrigued Sora.

“Nothing. Maybe one of your beers.” He pulled one of the cans from the six pack. It was a silver bullet, an Asahi Dry. He passed it to Sora. She sat down next to him, cracked the beer and joined him staring at the slow moving dark water and the distant high rise city scape.

“You know Mishima wrote in one of his novels that murder would be easy on a beautiful late afternoon. I've been sitting here watching the sunset every day this week and I'm beginning to understand what he means. It's a feeling of dying with the end of a beautiful day.” Gorou spoke the words without bothering to look at Sora.

Sora didn't answer immediately. She was considering what the man sitting next to her had said.

“You're not another one of those morons who want to kill themselves are you?”

Gorou laughed.

“So perhaps you want to kill someone then. For aesthetic purposes. I always thought Mishima was partly in love with his own death because he wanted a beautiful corpse. I gather he was a bit of a weakling at school. No doubt the bookish type that everyone picked on. Shame. Just goes to show.”

“What does it show?” Gorou's interest was piqued. He'd never heard a girl speak like this before. And he couldn’t help notice that despite the all-black clothes and lack of make-up this girl was kind of cute.

“It shows that art somehow transcends the pathetically human. You know: the artist can be flawed but can somehow produce the flawless. Mishima's words captured the world's attention but his action of trying to incite a revolution fell nearly entirely on deaf ears.”

“Hey what's your name?”

And so it began. Sora and Gorou met repeatedly by the river at the end of the day and talked and drank beer. Sora revealed her thoughts about how difficult it was to relate to other Japanese women. Her disappointment that so few people took their university studies seriously. The lack of passion she detected in her lecturers. And Gorou agreed with her. He spoke at length about maths. How it was the only pure language, the only language without paradox or ambiguity. A zero could never be a one. And from this basis maths could be made to describe nearly any process. How mathematics was behind every great leap in scientific understanding. How math was what really drove human evolution.

Gorou also spent time dwelling on the dark side of mathematics. How maths also demonstrated uncertainty. How what we thought was the world of solidity dissolved into probability. How at the heart of everything was the chaos of unpredictable sub-atomic particles. Gorou also started talking about how mathematics could demonstrate paradox. For example Cantor’s theorem which threw up the contradictory notion that infinities could be different sizes. Infinity, uncertainty, chaos and paradox were mathematical for Gorou whereas for Sora these mighty ideas were the stuff of art.

On another occasion Gorou returned to the subject of Cantor and his attempt to quantify infinities. He spoke with grim relish about how Cantor had driven himself schizophrenic with his obsession to find a proof for his theorem. Sora wasn't sure if Gorou was showing off or whether madness, chaos and death appealed to the young man. It was as if the discipline of maths was made profound by the darkness that surrounded the clarity of numbers, symbols and equations.

Sora felt herself drop her guards as she listened night after night to the pale loner by the river cast the world afresh for her in a matrix of numbers and formula, algebra and logic. How he explained the motive force of history in terms of the genius of new theories and proofs that could be understood by anyone with a brain from the Aztecs to the Martians. Maths was the real language of the universe.

The young virgin Sora Aki's field was the arts – literature, visual art, sociology, philosophy; and to hear the beauty of the world and the mind described in the completely new terms of numbers and symbols of numbers intrigued her. She grasped at an intuitive level the shared purpose of all real knowledge. And at the same time she gasped at the realization that she was falling for Gorou. His mind was like a beacon illuminating his body. As she saw the worth of his mind so she began to feel his physical presence.

In short she wanted him but felt the virgin's frustration in not knowing how to proceed or deal with her desire. What she wanted was the next stage. That was Gorou penetrating her, being in her. She became to dream about coupling with the pale boy by the river. She couldn't understand why he just sat there night after night talking about certainty and uncertainty, evolution and madness, insight and paradox.

In an attempt to move things along Sora broke her rules of not pandering to the idiocy of female vanity and borrowed a short skirt from a dorm mate and a tiny top. She even painted her lips blood red. She had read that painted lips suggested swollen labia. She looked in the mirror to check herself out and even stooped to ask the other girls what they thought. They cooed and clucked and Sora took that as a good sign.

When she went down to the river that night Gorou did indeed spend an extra moment looking at Sora as she drew near their trysting spot. But the interest seemed only momentary because he soon cast his eyes back to the dark river and started asking her about the writer Dazai.

“Look Gorou. Fuck Dazai. Are you gay?”

Gorou dragged his eyes from the river and looked again at Sora. He smiled a warm clear smile and Sora lunged for his lips.

Gorou gave Sora her answer. His hands squeezed her small breasts and his tongue flickered in her mouth. When he reached up her skirt she was shocked to realize that her panties were sodden with desire. Gorou didn't need any more of an invite. He got up and rearranged his jeans to accommodate his hardness and then took Sora's hand. They walked quickly down the steps to the river and then along the concrete path to a concrete structure that had something to do with sewage or water level control. The one side was half hidden by bushes and tall pampas grass. When they reached the hidden alcove they stripped and lay their clothes on the rough concrete and with a lack of gentleness Gorou forced open Sora. It was like stabbing. She uttered a noise that was half scream and half groan. Gorou muffled the outcry with kisses.

It lasted only a few minutes but for those few minutes Sora had been transfixed and transformed. Her body had already intimated to her the pleasure that lay behind the pain.

When they had finished and the ardor had drained from the moment they dressed and smoked.

“Am I your girlfriend now?”

Gorou looked beautiful in the shadows of the dying day. “Forever.”

And so it began. They fucked by the river, they fucked in karaoke boxes; they sometimes splashed the cash and fucked in love hotels. They fucked where ever and whenever they could and it seemed to Sora that it was getting better and better.

One night pressed to the side of a quiet local shrine Gorou took Sora from behind and without expecting it what Sora had been longing for happened. Her first orgasm. The sensation ripped through her body and left her twitching with bodily joy. And with that orgasm came her first conviction of love. For the first time in her life she wanted to belong to a man. Her intellectual independence was brushed aside by her physical and emotional need for Gorou. She no longer wanted to stand separate and scornfully judgmental of university life. She now felt connected through the man in her life. She even began to catch herself listening to her dorm mates’ never-ending boy sagas. Intricate and ineptly told stories of ups and downs, delights and disappointments. It struck Sora that these women were all trying to train their men to be good partners but that they invariably failed. And yet because of ‘love’ they often excused what seemed to Sora the inexcusable and continued with the relationship. Love was a drug that it was social suicide to reject. Sora's newfound connection with her dorm mates hadn't stopped her despising their shallow outlooks and limited vocabulary. She could empathize with the true meaning of relationship – coital satisfaction and shining admiration, but she just couldn't bring herself to feel even pity for the girls when they spoke in terms of handbags and hairdos, fancy restaurants and expensive presents or worst of all infidelity and begrudging forgiveness.

Sora told herself that Gorou was different. He would never betray her. Theirs was a higher, truer, purer love. A meeting of minds as well as bodies. The stuff of poetry and maths.

Mr. Happy Things

2010-07-25T23:36:00.000-07:00

Otis Redding called himself Mr. Pitiful and in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy there was Marvin the Paranoid Android. Both these cultural icons fire synaptic connections every Monday morning when I teach Mr. T. Somehow these cultural connections blend with my image of a medieval Benedictine monk who has inflicted upon himself a vow of misery and hardship which entails spending interminable hours in a Spartan cell contemplating this vale of tears.

Mr. T. is the only man in the class. The other students are middle-aged housewives who are intent on filling their days with happy sacrifices for their family, shopping and afternoon chats over a long lunch. Every week they have some pleasant tale of food, shopping, travelling or family to share with the class. Mr. T. is the only member of the class with any professed religious beliefs. He is a Catholic and has an austere haircut with a centre parting that no doubt contributes to my mental image of him as a penitential monk struggling with an uneasy conscience. It is not the case, however, that Mr. T. is perpetually depressed like Marvin the Android. It is rather that he seems to only enjoy the dour and morose aspects of his existence. He takes a certain stoical relish in recounting the bleak. It is tinged with maudlin in the sense not of tears but of sentimentality. How he reminds me of Marvin is in two ways – firstly he is very well educated with nearly flawless English. His brain is not the size of a planet but in comparison to the other students it does seem elephantine. And secondly, just as Marvin's rampant depression produces moments of inspired comedy so does Mr. T's bleak outlook create a jovial atmosphere amongst the twittering ladies of the class. It is as if he has sucked out all the sadness from the air and jealousy hordes it. With no sadness to go round we all have to feast on gaiety instead.

Every week I ask a similar question to Mr. T. And it goes something like this:

“Do you have anything happy to tell us today, Mr. T?”

And now it is a running joke for the class. Mr. T. is a touch too pompous to notice that I am taking the piss, but the ladies immediately get my sarcasm and snigger with guilty delight. And like the miserable fool that he is, he runs straight into my trap and without fail manages to recite in his bumbling way a tale of woe. A tale lacking in sound and fury that habitually signifies nothing other than he should have spent his youth getting high and chasing poontang.

Below I will recount some of Mr. T's more memorable happy reflections.

Tale 1

“Anything happy for us today, Mr. T?”

“Yes, last Saturday my wife and I took the train to Aomori Prefecture to lay to final rest the ashes of my father-in-law. It was very hot. They were very busy in Aomori Prefecture because they are extending the shinkansen line to increase tourism.”

Masterful little prose poem this combining with a poet’s lightness of touch the disparate elements of death, tourism and high speed train travel.

Tale 2

“Do you have something happy for us today, Mr.T?”

“Yes, I want to speak about an experience a friend told me recently. My friend is a taxi driver. There was a JAL plane crash. The plane crashed into Mount Takamagahara in 1985. The plane crash killed 500 people. There were only 4 survivors. My friend was a taxi driver. He had to go to the memorial service for the victims. There are no trains on the mountain. No public transport. After the memorial service it was too late to move the dead bodies so they were stored in the local community centre. There were no hotel rooms available so my friend and many other taxi drivers slept with the dead bodies in the community centre. The next morning he drove one of the dead bodies back to its home. Every victim was taken back home by taxi. The most expensive taxi journey was 350,000 yen. JAL paid for the taxis for the dead bodies.”

“And why did you tell us this Mr. T?”

“Because my friend was one of the taxi drivers.”

Mr. T’s account of the plane crash, memorial service and sleeping with corpses was actually much more protracted than my rendition of his speech. Mr. T. squeezed the tale for all the time that he could by filling the classroom with circumlocutions and repetitions. His tone was not one of horror at the awful accident or even of anger for the incompetence of Japan Airlines. Rather it was admiration for how everyone pitched in to deal with the logistics of shifting so many dead bodies and how marvelous that JAL chucked millions of yen away on taxi fares. My only question was why didn't they rent cars and drivers? That would have been much cheaper than going on the meter. And I did mention that I would have slept outside rather than in a hall with 500 coffins.

Tale 3

“Tell us something cheerful, Mr. T. I don't want any more stories about dead people.”

“Yes, OK. Recently I have the feeling that I don't have much longer to live. My life is running out. Now the time is limited. Only a few more times can I see the colour of autumn leaves. There is so much that I cannot do before I die.”

“I see. And what is it that you want to do before you die?”

“I want to plant more fig trees in my garden. Insects ate my last tree. It was an Israeli fig tree.”

We all tried and failed to keep a straight face when Mr. T. delivered this gem of nonsense.

Tale 4

“So Mr. T. please let's have something uplifting today. I know. What did you do at the weekend?”

I was crossing my fingers and praying that it wasn't the anniversary of some awful massacre or natural disaster somewhere and sometime in Japan (it was obvious Mr. T. took no pleasure in the pain of foreigners and indeed felt that only Japanese and only himself in particular could really appreciate suffering and devastation). Mr. T. really excelled himself with this one. We all thought he was going to play a brave and cheerful melody. The first few carefree notes lulled us into a brief moment of hope before he tore apart the illusion of happiness with a series of thunderous chords of pathos.

“I went to a school reunion on Saturday to see my old school friends. The reunion was in Z Prefecture. I grew up in Z Prefecture. I was really looking forward to meeting my classmates, especially one girl that I really loved.

“But she wasn't there. Emiko didn't come to the reunion. I was very sad. She was the girl that I should have married. I loved her at school but after college I moved away and married my wife. That was a mistake. I really wanted to see Emiko.”

One of the ladies couldn't help interrupting. She asked: “Does your wife know about Emiko? About your love for Emiko?”

“Yes, I have told her.”

Silence poured down upon us that moment. I thought yes of course he's going to tell his wife about it. Surely his wife bears the brunt of this Marvin misery nonsense. This man really does want to be called “Mr. Pitiful”. If I were her I would have long ago killed Mr. T. by over salting his food or I would have fled the house in the middle of the night. Not however, before I had hacked to death his fig trees from Israel.

The Three Note Principle or How 'Wa' Works in Japan

2010-07-06T21:12:00.000-07:00

The Japanese are such pussies; and such spineless pussies to boot. And I guess the more they display their spinelessness so the more facetious I become. This is all about the abhorrence with which Japanese people living in Japan (I believe many of them escape both the country and the collective conscious) have with direct confrontation.

Let me step back a bit and give you the adumbrated series of events leading up to my current bafflement and anger.

Three months ago I started a new job which came with a flat above the teaching room. In most ways a sweet gig with few hours, no fucking Saturday morning lessons (if you have done it then you know why that last ‘fucking’ was the most necessary adjective in this whole piece), and no fucking kids' speech contests (ditto). The genius of the job is compounded by the fact that my predecessors have nearly all been complete rookie teachers. A washed-out and badly groomed hippy veteran giving 10% is more effective than a charismatic sophomore giving the job 50%. The same sort of rule applies in armies I believe.

Anyway the school caters mainly for old ladies and the odd white collar victim looking to learn a bit of English. It is run by a committee who meet a few times a year to talk about the weather. There is a secretary who has that very modern sickness of thinking that anything not involving two programs on her computer is outside of her remit. Hence her 'zone' is surrounded by piles of old newspapers, broken equipment and mountains of other unnoticed trash that sadly excel doesn't have a button to deal with.

The secretary is aided in her paid duties by unpaid volunteers who calculate my wages after tax and buy bits and pieces for the classroom. I have always wondered why they don't get rid of the paid secretary and replace her with some well meaning sucker who will work for free; if it can be described as work. I would be happy to share the saved revenue with the school.

To return to my story, three months ago I moved into the flat upstairs. This was difficult because although the last teacher was gone nothing else had been removed. The small apartment was full of the detritus of several years of teachers. Stacks of useless teaching books and magazines, as well as broken pens, irritating fluffy toys, used chip fat and a half bottle of deodorant (that might have been a message) were all squeezed into the few storage spaces which were supposed to be at my disposal.

It was very nice of these previous teachers and the several non-executive school helpers to provide me with a full quota of pointless junk. Perhaps they thought it would allay any feelings of homesickness. However, being odd as I am, I kind of wanted some executing done to make some space for my own personal junk.

Not wishing to make waves before I started the job I begrudgingly took the responsibility for others' crap. Rather than confront my new employers with exhortations to action, I sought to cunningly shift some of the rubbish around.

The weekend before my first lesson I let myself into the classroom. I was in search of a shelf or cupboard in need of a crap top-up. I looked for ten minutes. The teaching room had photos, souvenirs, teaching books, broken equipment, flash cards, pencil stubs, magazines, cassettes and half finished arts and craft projects dating back to the 70s. Was this a time capsule waiting for civilized chimps one million years from now to dig up and discover that there was a thing called ‘Australia’ which was possibly an odd cult involving bad hair cuts, sea festivals and making faces out of paper plates? A cult that valued glitter, broken scissors and ‘English conversation’?

Ah my kingdom not for a horse (where would I put it) but just half an empty cupboard. In the end I found a metal locker that had been overlooked. The thing was only loosely packed. What a find! Like that bloke in The Road finding a can of coke for his post-apocalyptic kid. I quickly grabbed a handful of books about entertaining kids with paper plates from my flat and squeezed them into the lucky locker. Now I too had contributed to chimp archaeology one million years in the future.

Sadly, my ruse wasn't to go unnoticed for a million years. It only lasted three months. If the chimps have records of Trippy Traveller in the future then I do sincerely apologize for this, but if you look in the flat next door to mine you will find a broken washing machine and all kinds of other goodies.

After three months the first of the notes arrived. It was an email from a volunteer helper. She had spoken to the Japanese teacher who gives lessons on Sunday mornings to South Americans keen to learn enough of the local lingo to avoid being sent back to the Andes or the Amazon. The Japanese teacher complained that I had used ‘her CD player’ and done something with her ‘text’.

I got this cryptic email on Sunday night. It was made all the more confusing by a preamble about late nights watching football games on TV. This need to start messages with the inane I find insinuating. Was she suggesting that football was making me interfere with other's equipment and ‘text’? I focused on the intelligible and pointed out in my reply email that there were two CD players in the classroom, only one of which worked. I had no idea that there were any restrictions on the use of the one CD player that worked. After all, it had been left out for 3 months.

On Monday morning I began to suspect something odd and Japanese was afoot. The only functioning player had been hidden. I took a quick look around the classroom but I didn't want to open any cupboard or locker doors for fear of being drowned in shit that the chimps might be needing in the future.

The mystery was cleared up after the lesson. My wife ran into one of the unpaid helpers who explained that the CD player belonged to the Japanese class and I wasn’t to use it. That's why the sad bitch had hidden it. For 3 months (and possibly a year before that) she had left it out and only now was she deciding to get all ‘mine mine’ on me.

A message was relayed via my wife that the other CD player didn't work and I hadn't touched her precious fucking player and that she should take a prize winning Japanese radish and spend a good hour fucking herself. I think a lot of that might have been lost in translation. Instead the unpaid helper went out and bought a new player. For over a year they had had no idea that the last English teacher had no means of playing CDs or tapes (other than gasp shock horror using the Japanese teacher's player). Either the previous English teacher had been so charismatic that he hadn't done a listening exercise or he too should have been made to feel the shame of wrongfully using the Japanese teacher's player.

But that was not the end of it. That evening a pile of books and magazines appeared on a chair along with a note in Japanese attached to the chair back. The writing was in big characters for all to read. All I knew was that it said my name and the name of the secretary. My evening students blithely ignored the note and encroaching rubbish. The Japanese are masters at not seeing things if it affects their ‘wa’ or harmony.

I took a leaf out of their book and did the same. After the lesson I turned off the light and went upstairs to drink beer and watch the footie.

The next afternoon the third note arrived. I had gone into the classroom early evening to prepare a lesson for a couple of middle school girls. Attached to the white board was a note from the secretary. It accused me of putting the books and magazines in the Japanese teacher's locker and that I should either give the books to my students or put the rubbish out to be recycled. Thus, the mystery of the ‘text’ was cleared up. After three months the Japanese teacher had noticed that her locker contained lots of unwanted stuff. It seems her ‘wa’ had prevented her noticing this for 3 months or she rarely used her locker. I guess the latter explanation was the case. She probably used it to store crap she would never use again and just resented someone nicking her trash space. Or she was creating her own unique message for the chimp excavators of the future, and had just let the project slide for 3 months. Anyway I tied up the offending articles this morning and took them to the recycling point.

So with one email shrouded in some unfathomable connection between CD players and football, one note in Japanese and one note in English the buck had been passed until it finally reached me the foreigner. No direct confrontation was required and the ‘wa’ could flow unimpeded again.

Now I'm plotting my revenge. I'm thinking of murdering the secretary and chopping her scrawny body up into pieces. These pieces I'll put in air-tight bags and stash them in the most inaccessible regions of the classroom where only the chimps will find them and conclude that the ‘Australians’ had pharaonic tendencies.

Another Four Years to Add to the Hurt

2010-06-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

I don't know the final score. I expect some smug git will tell me. I wish I could kill the messenger and get away with it. My guts are twisted in bile. Venom is pouring from heart. A venom that turns to self pity in the time it takes Germany to score their fourth.

That's when I turned off the TV. I'm not going to watch another game of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. What is the point? Fuck off to the irritating vuvuzelas (which I've been selling) and fuck off to the shitty plastic Jabulani ball (which I thinking about trying to sell). A ball not stitched but glued. Fewer parts and less possibility for spin. The cheeky Japanese have been using in it the J-league for a number of months prior to the Finals. No wonder Honda and the other Japanese dude were the only ones so far to get it up and down from a free kick. A shit World Cup with a shit sound track and a shit Adidas ball to compound it all.

There’s nothing sadder than impotent anger and I have it in spades. This is so English of me. I rail against injustice and cry for fair play, when what I really want is for my sodding team to beat the Germans. It is going to happen in a tournament eventually. Surely in my life time. That will be a sweet day. England’s chavish populace will go wild. And me too. Publicans will make a killing. The street cleaners will have to put in over-time the following day. Let me dwell on the vision of future victories in this dark hour of despair. Here I am punching at the keys of my laptop trying furiously to work this out of my system. Outside it is raining. After that nightmarish vision of some Polish or Turkish expletive scoring the fourth I went out in the rain in my shorts and crooks without an umbrella in search of alcohol and the promise of oblivion.

I get back and the flat is deafeningly quiet. My wife watches another channel with the sound down low. She knows that I’m looking to burst out in rage at the smallest provocation. I feel like a twat for behaving this way. But how can you turn off your feelings. I seethe at our defence. I rage at the ref for disallowing Fat Frank's goal in the first half. I curse Capello for being just as unimaginative as every other coach we’ve had for the last 15 years. I also hold it against James for not being able to save three goals that shot straight past his body only inches away.

My only solace is the thing I always tell my students when the subject of sport comes up. I tell them (I fear they don't understand despite me laboring the point) it is not your achievement. It is the competitor's or competitors' achievement. It is really nothing you can take credit for. It is a con. A joke. Designed to distract you from the shittiness of your life. These sports people that you love are having a laugh. You invest your hard-earned emotion on them and they get paid anyway. They live in luxury because you imagine stupidly that their achievements are somehow yours. That is the great lie of patriotism. As the war poet Wilfred Owen pointed out the clarion call to sacrifice spouted by Horace of: Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori, is complete and utter shit. There is nothing noble and sweet about dying for your country. There is nothing sweet in cheering for your country. For the average person what they have got is what they have earned. They have paid their taxes to Caesar and owe nothing more to him. Don't worship your keeper and certainly don't step in front of a bullet for a vacuous ideal. Football is the ultimate in vacuous ideals. The world game is just escapism from a world where the 1% own 90%. Do you imagine that for a moment the 1% care less whether Frank’s goal was disallowed?

Oh well. Better this pointless stabbing at ideology then brooding on another disappointing World Cup.

Baby Lecture and Playing Heskey Up Front

2010-06-13T02:23:00.000-07:00

Even Heskey is puzzled at the insistence that he throw on an English jersey.

On a drunk and stoned night somewhere in South America I convinced myself that it was a good idea to try and get my wife pregnant. Inspiration and impaired reasoning seem to have an uncanny resemblance at such moments. The cold morning light rationalist in me wisely counseled me that there were already too many people in the world and that when oil started running out nature would effect a horrific cull on the mammalian species that had attacked the planet like a virus. Opposed to this calm voice was the bacchanalian prophet screaming in my ear about the genius of creation, the possibility of bringing forth greatness into the world.

As I sat in the lecture for fathers who wanted to attend the birth of their children on a Saturday afternoon I began to wonder why I had listened to that drunken nut job of an internal voice. The woman lecturing us had psychotic red lipstick and scarily big teeth. She poured forth a torrent of polysyllabic advice, continually using the question form but not stopping for answers. I was trying my best to ignore her. Would Capello play Heskey? I wondered. Would we go with the standard and predictable 4-4-2 formation or would the new manager surprise everyone and play Rooney as the loner striker with a hungry Gerrard lurking just behind the front man? These were key points to consider, but made difficult to mentally pin down by the rhetorical madness of the woman in front of me. The middle aged government food specialist informed the mothers and fathers present that pot noodles were not healthy food. Yes, yes, but what about Joe Cole? Was his football guile being sacrificed for the work rate of Milner?

My wife had told me well in advance that I had to attend this one lecture as a minimum requirement for being at the birth of my daughter. It seemed like a distant elephant at the time. Now it was coming back to haunt me. After only 10 minutes of being there I was beginning to feel that the whole experience had a similar boredom quotient to cram school teaching. The minutes ticked by slowly in complete contrast to the manic fast rantings coming from the mouth with the massive front teeth. She reminded me of those fake nurses who used to do the rounds of hospital beds in Africa persuading mothers to switch from breast milk to Nestle powered milk. Only Bugs Bunny in front of me was pushing Beanstalk products like a motherfucker. She stopped her verbal assault only to hand out freebie Beanstalk powdered milk and yoghurt. Telling us how it contained extra iron. She pulled out this huge plastic bin and extolled the virtues of the Beanstalk bottle sterilizer.

Would Ledley King last the full ninety minutes? Would Jamie Carragher do one of his dodgy tackles and concede a penalty? God I had two hours of this lecture to last.

Finally, Big Teeth seemed to run out of frighteningly obvious things to tell us and freebies to hand out and let us take a short break. I immediately shot out the building and around the corner to have a crafty fag. How was I going to stay sober enough to focus on a game that started at 3.30am? Where should I watch the game? Would it be off-side as a husband to not watch the England match with my wife? All key considerations.

Being a good citizen I picked up my fag butt and slipped it down the side of the plastic wrapping of my fag packet and walked slowly and reluctantly back to the lecture room.

Back in the small room I noticed a couple of mothers had already scarpered. My wife pulled a face at me when she smelled the cigarette smoke on my clothes.

For Part Two a taller middle aged woman wearing a Winnie the Pooh apron took the floor. My wife liked her, but to me she seemed madder than the last old bird. This one suddenly lapsed into bizarre voice impersonations. I suspected that she had spent so long talking to babies that she couldn’t help modulating her tones and babbling Telly Tubby Japanese. She seemed to be talking about ‘image training’. Was that something similar to what Posh had done to Becks? I pondered. And so I fell back into fretting over Capello’s short-sightedness of playing Heskey who had only scored 3 Premiership goals all season. There was a scary pattern with Emile Heskey. He managed to convince managers of his worth as a non-scoring striker by providing a few neat lay-offs for the scoring striker.

Cartoon voice woman dimmed the lights and started up a CD with image training. It was like one of those self-hypnotism tracks that turn you from a timid under-achiever to a master of the universe in 90 minutes. I looked around the room. Several women had their heads down pretending to concentrate but probably just dozing or perhaps secretly fearing that South Korea would do the business tonight and make Japan look really second rate when they got around to playing. I took the opportunity to pull out my book and read a few pages of God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. Anything to get my mind off the Heskey problem. Would Crouch be any better? Well he was taller, but not particularly good at heading the ball. Stuff about the Catholic Church supporting Fascism in Italy mingled with the problem of playing Fat Frank and Stevie Me together in midfield. The soothing music did some good in calming my nerves. Surely we were good enough to see off America with their sprinkling of Fulham and Everton players. The image training worked. By the time the lights went back up I was solidly confident that it would all come good on the night for the Three Lions. It was a piss easy group and besides the conventional wisdom is that you should build in form during a tournament. It was no good scoring a plethora of goals against the lesser sides and then hitting a dry spell in the knock out stages when it counted.

Salma Hayek breast feeding a baby in Africa because her mother had run out of milk. That's got to be better than Nestle

The lecture was over. Winnie the Poh plugged the image training CD and concluded the presentation. As the CD finished I was reminded for no reason of the constant bee hum of the South African vuvuzela. Humongous Canines was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had an appointment in Africa where the Beanstalk brand had a very poor market share. Anyway, nearly everyone bolted to the front to get their baby book stamped to prove that they had suffered the indoctrination and were thus entitled to use the hospital to give birth.

Outside I told my wife that we should buy plenty of food with iron in to avoid the necessity of getting Beanstalk products. I then walked with my loved one to the station where she was going to be picked up by my mother-in-law. I was off home for a quick nap before the footie started.

It all fell out pretty much as I had feared. Heskey did one decent reverse pass to Gerrard that set up the goal. Capello was now doomed to make the same mistake as Gerrard Houllier and persist with the non-scoring striker. American Fulham put up a spirited fight but it was the ineptitude of our keeper that threw away the three points. I hadn’t even remembered about the English drought of competent goalies such was my concerns over playing Heskey up front.

Robert Green let us down. Not Heskey.

The Power of Dreams

2010-05-10T22:17:00.000-07:00

I have been teaching English to non-native speakers for years. It's not a bad job. I meet new people all the time and often I have a laugh with my students. One thing I've noticed over the years is how people from different countries have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning English. For example, South Americans tend to be great communicators but less than fastidious with their grammar. Asians in contrast often fear verbal communication but have an awesome capacity for memorizing complicated grammatical structures.

At the moment I'm teaching mostly middle-aged and middle-class house wives in a small rural town. Today I tackled the difficult subject of the present perfect. My students were three house wives – Nani-ki, Naninani-ko and Nani-ko. They've all had some type of tertiary education. They've all been studying English for years. The present perfect could not feasibly be new for them. Yet I knew before I started it would be a taxing lesson so I simplified my lesson plan (in my head) and just focused on the present perfect to describe experience. The context was world travel. The activity was a board game. The students had to roll a dice and move around the world collecting experiences. Then after 20 minutes of playing the game they have to report back to the class about where they have been and what they have done. For example, 'I have visited the lost city of Petra in Jordan', or 'I have crossed the Sahara Desert on a camel', or 'I have eaten cakes in Vienna' or 'I have seen the pyramids of Egypt'. In all there are 25 possible places and activities to tick off.

The first thing I noticed about Nani-ki, Naninani-ko and Nani-ko is that none of them knew their way around a map of the world. I'm aware that the Japanese have adopted the Chinese map (what haven't they borrowed from China?) but still once you adjust to the fact that Europe not China is the centre of the world it should be a cinch to find Antarctica or India or Brazil. After all, the countries all stay in the same place relative to their neighbouring countries. But no, I labored with the Nani sisters. They looked for Australia in South America and they puzzled over Siberia looking for Rio de Janeiro.

Not one to be easily deterred from an impromptu lesson plan I gritted my teeth and tried to keep the frustration out of my voice and we saw the game through to the bitter end. I got the Nani sisters to make sentences in the present perfect to describe where they had been and what they had done. I wrote out a lot of prompts on the board to help them. We really zeroed into the grammatical form and when to use it. It was just a pity that a game that should be fun and interesting was so protracted and punctuated with corrections and geographical ignorance that it lost most of its inherent fascination.

Oh well, I thought as the final 5 minutes of the 90 minute class came round. I tried and something of the lesson must stick. I risked my neck for the final moment of the class.

“So, you have a list in front of you of many places in the world and the activities you can do in these places. Tell me where would you like to go and what you would like to do?”

It was chancing it throwing a second conditional question at the Nani clan but I'd done something similar in numerous other classes in Japan. The context should have made the question overwhelming clear. And indeed, Nani-ki and Naninani-ko did grasp the meaning of my final question.

The oldest, Nani-ki, said after a brief brain storm, “Drink coffee in Istanbul.” The grammar was wrong but full marks for understanding the question and getting out an appropriate response.

Next up was Naninani-ko, the youngest and smartest: “I would like to see the pyramids in Egypto.” Other than that irritating “to” spot on.

And for the grand finale, I asked Nani-ko whom I had deliberately left to last because she was the weakest student. Every lesson she arrives 30 minutes late despite having got up at 5am - exactly 5 hours before the class begins. She lives just a few clicks from the school. Not my favourite. I asked the question again:

“Where would you like to go?”

I was kinda hoping in my own whimsical manner for something shocking and left field like, “I'd like to try a spot of sex tourism in Africa” or “I'd love to visit an opium den in Laos” or even “I wouldn't mind clubbing seals in Greenland.” What did I get?

“Driving in Chiba.”

If I had had a gun at that point I might have emptied four bullets into her barely functioning brain. I'm not sure about the exact ramifications of such an act but I think it could have resulted in a net gain for humanity.

Instead, I implored Nani-ko to try again. The other two Nanis coached her in Japanese so there could be no doubt about what was required from her.

“Eat sushi in Tokyo.” Four more imaginary dum dum bullets left a smoking gooey mess where her face used to be.

“You have already eaten sushi in Tokyo. It has to be a new experience. Something you really want to do.” She had a handout in front of her with 25 suggestions. She had the benefit of a Japanese explanation from her fellow students. She had been submersed in world travel destinations for 55 minutes. There was little more I or the other students could do. Even Pankun the performing TV chimp might have proved up to the task if he had been allowed to point to a picture.

We waited.

Nani-ko gave me the thousand yard stare.

It's a wise man who knows when to cut his losses; when to walk away from the table. I did just that.

“OK. That's all for today. Thank you very much. I'll see you next week.”

The Day I Failed To Lose My Job

2010-05-08T02:36:00.000-07:00

The mobile phone rang three times and then went silent. My wife and I were in our flat in Japan. We did the usual routine of hurriedly checking all the obvious places where the phone could be. We soon located it, but the caller had already hung up.

It was the manager of the cram school where I'm working part time at the moment. I was slightly irritated that the old woman with the puss weeping eyes always did this – namely phone and hang up after three calls. And I always phoned back, and often she wouldn't pick up. Irritation like ants in my ear or under my skin flushed through my central nervous system.

I phoned back. Just an answering machine costing me money. I left it ten minutes and phoned back again.

I barely held my annoyance in check as I spoke: “Yes, Meiwaku. What is it?”

The dithering thin voice of the over-weight, middle-aged snot eyed woman began: “You didn't come to your lesson today.”

“You said Wednesday, not Monday.”

“No, I said Monday.”

“I don't think so. We had this same problem last week. I write down the day and time as soon as we arrange a lesson.”

“No, I said Monday because I know you can't make Wednesday.” She got me there because I did say I was too busy on Wednesdays. But on this occasion, the timing was convenient to let me get between my regular job and the filthy cram school classroom. The mountain needed to explain all this seemed to be beyond me.

“Fuck, this is not working out, Meiwaku.”

Silence at the other end of the phone so I continued.

“You won't use email. You cannot remember when I'm supposed to teach. I don't want to work for you anymore. When am I going to get paid? I've had enough. “

“Can you come in to teach on Friday? 4.30 to 6.30?” The witchy nut job voice asked.

“Why is it that you only ring three times and then hang up?”

Silence.

My wife had to go to work and as she walked out the door, this final calming influence left my vicinity. I started shouting.

“Why the fuck do you hang up after three rings? Answer me.”

This elicited an answer: “Because I'm busy.”

“Well I'm fucking busy too. When am I getting paid?”

“You get paid next month on the 26th.”

I groaned like a wild beast in a trap. That was ages away. “OK. On Friday I'll meet you to give you my time sheet. I quit. You are weird. You won’t use email. You hang up after three rings. This isn't working.”

“I am taking a rest on Friday. Can you teach Ryusei and Shohei on Friday?”

This was going nowhere. I wondered if she was having a conversation with a polite me from a parallel universe. I had sworn at the woman. I had interrogated the woman. I had a complete break-down in politeness. How was it that I wasn't getting through? Why was I not being fired?

“OK I'll teach Ryusei and Shohei on Friday from 4.30 to 6.30.” I resigned. I just couldn't get fired over the phone.

Japanese Virgins

2010-04-30T20:56:00.000-07:00

Before I start I should mention two things. First this post is not pornography (but may contain material some people might deem as ‘pornographic’ or ‘lewd’). And second, I don't believe I'm a misogynist (but again, I'm sure there are people who will disagree with that self-assessment). So let me begin.

Ugly girls in Japan are often not that ugly. Fat is a relative term and what is often deemed as ‘fat’ here in Japan would be considered ‘plump’ or ‘comfortable’ in other heavier regions of the globe. The typical 'ugly Japanese girl' may have buck teeth, or wear chunky glasses, or have a prominent birthmark or not have the slimmest legs but to use the ‘u’ word to describe these women is a crying shame.

There is a certain type of female in Japan who are destined to die virgins because they consider themselves not pretty enough to go out there and grab a boyfriend. They stay at home with their parents, do an office job, go to bed early on a Saturday night and if they harbour secret dreams it is to travel to Paris or Barcelona for 4 days and 3 nights. They are viciously referred to as ‘parasite daughters’. They never leave the nest of the family and instead become a burden on their family. As with most Asian cultures, not producing kids, means the girl is not taking the family (if not the family name) into the next generation. That is a crime against the ancestors. Who will worship the ancestors if the blood line dies out?

This is a motivational piece. What I say to these 30 something virgins who have resigned themselves to respectable boredom for their rest of their lives is to stop being defeatist, to get out there and have a go at finding love. It won't find you at home while you are in your pajamas tucked under the kotatsu eating ice cream and watching dull Japanese TV. You need to get out there and make some mistakes like young people do. It is stupid to imagine you are going to find love before you find sex. You Japanese virgins are so god damned cautious and respectable that you foolishly think love will precede any physical encounter. The truth is sadly not made in a basement of Disneyworld. The only way to find Mr. Right is to look for Mr. Right Now. Get out there and suck some cock. Be sexual. Discover your sexuality. It is your human right. Only by making a start are you going to get to the finishing line. Please listen, taking risks in sex is foolish, but so is not taking risks in love. Sexual desire is what nature put in us to insure the continuance of the species. To suppress this because of some middle class notion of respectability is unnatural. You may think that you want love but that is just a clever ruse to get us out there and doing it.

So do it. The reality is that often Mr. Right Now remains just a regrettable bit of fun and bodily fluid exchange. But in 99% of cases a Mr. Right was first just another Mr. Right Now. Don't expect a Richard Gere speaking Italian and dressed in Armani to sweep you off your feet in a five star hotel. More likely the menu served will be sticky drinks and a fumble in a car park followed by stilted conversation and a feeling of embarrassment. But it may lead to another encounter and slightly better conversation and slightly more enjoyable fumbling. And who knows where it will go over time? Wedding bells and babies puking could result from that sordid little car park encounter. And if the second time is worse than the first then throw in your hand and wait for what the next deal throws out.

What I'm saying is that you might think that yours is not a face to a launch a thousand ships. So what? Most faces don't get a single dingy out. It is all Hollywood (and Homeric) nonsense. The media tries to make us worship computer generated perfection and would have us retreat into IMAX oblivion where everything is strikingly perfect and the music starts up at the right time. Luckily we still have the reproductive urge that causes us to get aroused despite our dissatisfaction that the one we are with is not Halle Berry, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Pitt or Orlando Bloom. And if that arousal continues with the same imperfect creature for long enough then monogamy will rear its ambiguous head and there you have it. A partner is found and you are spared from a life of loneliness.

And of course if things go wrong then you just have to pick yourself up, bury your dead, re-group and remount the assault. All those Japanese virgin 30 something daughters need to put aside their respectability or shyness or lack of self-worth and get out there and show the Rocky spirit. You may think you're ugly but you'd be surprised at how many boys out there also think they're ugly and stay at home jacking off. You two should meet up and do the Christian thing and jack each other off. You are not that ugly. Instead of comparing yourself to teenagers in miniskirts or film stars, I would recommend you pay a visit to my hometown, Kidderminster and do your comparisons again. You might be pleasantly surprised. I'm a firm believer in the ‘there is always someone more’ rule. This rule states that there is always someone more handsome or more beautiful or smarter than you out there. Of course that also means the opposite is true – there is always someone uglier, less handsome and less talented then you out there. So stop condemning yourself and instead go out and get laid. That virginity thing is nothing. Literally it has no value so you are not losing anything. It is merely a relic from misogynistic cultures where men need to control women and are paranoid that female sexuality might undo the good work done by centuries of cultural conditioning. Fuck that. Get fucked, you ugly Japanese virgins. You owe it to yourself.

I write this not because I feel that we need any more people in the world but because every working day I encounter female students who live at home with their parents and do nothing to lose their virginity. Instead they go on family trips to Disneyland or the grave of some family patriarch. Bullshit to that. These girls are too good to be condemned to a sexless existence. I can see inferiority complex written all over them. Sometimes I want to stop the lesson and look seriously into their eyes and say:

"I'd do you."

And it's not just me who would tickle their fancy; I've got plenty of mates who also would love to do them. So instead of wasting money and time learning English these women should find themselves a wing girl and go in search of lust and a good time.

As an addendum I would like to suggest some ways to lose your virginity:

1)   Get drunk in a bar or club. Look available. If you meet a guy who is not too revolting or creepy simply make lots of eye contact, laugh at his jokes and allow things to happen. You are old enough to stay out late. If your mate is a kill joy and wants to go home then let her. If you must go home then get a number or email.
2)   Go to a foreign country and see if you have luck in foreign bars. Really, if you've been learning English for years you owe it to yourself to try and get chatted up in English, otherwise what has it all been for?
3)   Join clubs. Not cooking clubs. But clubs with boys. Clubs where you go out drinking together. Who knows what might happen after late night karaoke?
4)   Accentuate the positive and hide the negative. If you've got nice tits wear clothes to show those bad boys off. If you have a bit of a spare tire then don't wear a T-shirt that stops before your belly button.
5)   Get on the internet. Make friends on mixi or facebook. Join online dating agencies.
6)   Ask the male partners of your friends if they have any single mates. Allow people to try and help you with your love life.
7)   Don't say ‘no’ as a knee jerk reaction to any proposal that may come your way.
8)   Make sure he wears a condom. If there isn't one available then manually or orally sort out his randiness. Such kindness might lead to reciprocation on a far more profound level. And next time bring out a condom. Take control of your sexual health.
9)   Be happy. Nobody likes a miserable bird.

Cram Schools

2010-04-07T02:46:00.000-07:00

When I was at school there was a certain common type of student who left their preparation for exams until the night before. On the eve of the exam they would stay up late ‘cramming’. In other words, forcing information into their memories as quickly as possible and hoping that enough of it would stay accessible in their short term memory until the exam. For many this was a successful tactic to scrap through exams with a minimal of effort.

It surprised me when I first came to Japan to hear about a type of after-school learning place that was called a juku. The commonly believed translation for juku is 'cram school'. Why would the well-organized Japanese encourage their kids to ‘cram’ instead of ‘learn’?

I recently started working part time at a cram school and discovered that the name is a complete mis-translation. There is no quick learning going on and rather than cramming information into the minds of their young Japanese charges the main concern for the juku teacher is just to force the kids to follow the book and not fall asleep.

The focus of the cram school is on doing extra study to facilitate passing school examinations. The students have specially designed textbooks to follow their school syllabus. The idea is that the child will go to juku for years, gradually building up the skills and knowledge they need to get ahead in the early rat race that exists in Japan. They must pass the exams to get into the best high school and then pass the exams to get into the best university. Then strangely enough when their thought processes are ready to dispassionately consider deeper ideas at university, they are encouraged to shut down for 3 or 4 years. The examination of ideas is anti-social and can do nothing for group harmony. Instead they pick up the struggle again after graduating university as they endeavour to get a position at a good company. Such is the trajectory along which millions of parents in Japan scrimp and save to propel their progeny. Money buys success and the children suffer because of the unfulfilled ambitions of their parents.

For an early age all free time is rationed. Structured, citizen-building activities are preferred. Kids go to school and then after the academic school day is finished they must stay on at school to attend a club activity. This is usually compulsory. Compulsory fun. On top of this many have ballet, piano, karate, kendo or other private lessons to attend once a week. And on top of all of this, many kids will be forced to attend a juku.

The kids have such a busy schedule and are made to feel pressure from such an early age that it is no wonder that they are perpetually exhausted and when they sleep they dream about sleeping; and when they do have a bit of free time that is exactly what they do – sleep.

The juku where I work is near a famous private high school and university. It is an enclave for the upper middle class. Most parents pay to send their kids through private education because like America, Japan has been made to believe that inequality is the basis of a flourishing democracy. I believe to some extent all jukus are not cram schools but places of torture where information is dripped into the mental pot not forced in bulk. The juku where I work is an extreme example of this.

The classroom is opposite a train station on the second floor of a pink tiled monstrosity of a building. The room is open plan with ripped partitions. The floor is bare concrete with rubber skid marks and litter on the floor. None of the white boards have been cleaned in months and there are no marker pens available for the boards. The desks are small and over 10 years old. They have shelves under the writing top which are filled with scrunched up test papers and litter. At the end of the room is a partitioned off area where broken desks, dust and litter vie for space. And there's no photocopying machine. In short it is a depressing place fit for a Dickensian education and inferior to classrooms in rural China I used in the late 1990s.

The manager is useless and mad. She has three quarter closed eyes that weep puss. She comes late (as do the students and the other teachers), is never organized and has never considered that cleaning might be part of her remit. The president of this fine cram school is Mr. What's-the-matter-with-your-dong. The other teachers are slackers. My Japanese colleagues not only turn up late but also leave the students for ten minutes at a time while they skive off by going to the toilet. While the teacher is away the kids play with their cell phones. Why the upper middle class would think that such a shoddy place and such slack staff would be beneficial to the future prospects of their kids is well beyond my comprehension.

For my part, I try my best – such is my lower middle class indoctrination – but I'm fighting a losing battle because my students are just not equipped to learn effectively. My senior high student studying to pass an aiken test religiously forgets to bring a dictionary. He is smart but apparently cannot read the time – he is always late. It never ceases to amaze me as we plod painfully through the book that he manages to get about 40% of the answers correct. This is a grammar, writing and reading comprehension test. The last two elements of the test especially demand a certain engagement with ideas. My student is very unremarkable in his ability to be unaffected by ideas and keep them at a good arm's length away from his own limited preoccupations (manga, sleep, food, girls and not disappointing his parents); and yet dare to do battle with history, geography, science and politics in order to tick the correct box. Japan is a place where it is preferable to be bright and dull at the same time.

Another student of mine, 10 years old, is nearly always 90% asleep by the time he comes within my orbit. He can speak lots of English and could attain a certain degree of fluency if he wasn't plagued by the Japanese educational system. I find it weird that a kid who can use past, present and future tenses correctly can't read a word containing the magic E. The boy insists on practicing his A to Z phonics just because it is easy and his eyelids are fluttering with the failing struggle to stay awake. I really want to teach the kid something, push on his knowledge of English, but in the end, I reluctantly agree to his stupidly simple lesson plan because it seems to be that or sleep. The only learning that takes place is when he negotiates a compromise for the day's study schedule. I have no doubt that by the time he is 25 he won't be able to speak one sentence of English without making a mistake. Such is the supreme irony of the cram school. Not only is the education not crammed in, but in the long run young minds are damaged by such monotonous and ineffective teaching methods. They are taught not to care about education but to fear failure. They are made to live in a bubble that separates symbols from significance, knowledge from conviction and ideas from context. A bubble that will remain intact as they painfully progress up a societal ladder that is designed to increase dependency on material consumption. In short, a cram school is part of the lobotomizing process to make a perfect citizen. A fate devoutly to be wished for.

Interviewing My Dong

2010-03-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

It's my birthday today. I made it into my fourth decade: much better than the average English cricketer.

As fate would have it I had to go for an interview with the boss of a cram school today. I had already done an interview with a patently lithium taking nut case of a woman that refused to do email and had the gall to insist that I make an impromptu speech about the freedom of the press. I driveled on about South Africa, government corruption and the paparazzi for well beyond my allotted 300 words. The aged woman pretended to listened but I could tell she was relaxing in that lithium space between reality and sleep.

The upshot of the experience with the mad old lady was that I had to meet the cram school President. And so that’s what I did today.

The ‘headquarters’ of the cram school was a cramped room on the second floor of a dilapidated building near my local train station. Four employees, the boss and mountains of paper and computer hardware were squeezed into the room. I inched my way in a circuit of the room to get to the boss’s desk. He sat very casually in a swivel chair. He was about 50 with salt and pepper hair that was oddly shaved over the ears and in a ducks arse at the back. This cut made him look like he had invested in a second hand toupee.

He waved me over and I sat on a stool in a narrow gap between his big desk and a book shelf. He didn't speak any English.

He stared at my paper resume like any moment Google was going to translate it for him. He asked me my age. I told him that today I was 40. He then asked me if I was married. I told him that I was married to a local Japanese girl.

This grabbed his interest immediately. After some puzzlement on my part I realized he was asking me if I had any children. This is when his impressively forthright political incorrectness reared its unashamed head.

I told him that at present we didn't have a child.

He looked in astonishment and said something I couldn't fathom then he pushed his chair back from the desk, clenched his right fist and tucked his elbow into his plump belly. He then said more incomprehensible Japanese and something that sounded like “dong”. He was clearly demonstrating how I should stick it to my wife. He didn't give a rat's arse for the sensibilities of the three young female office workers in that dusty room. He then asked me if I like Japanese girls.

I tried to play along without feeding at the altar of complete chauvinism. I said Japanese girls were “very nice”. This was far from an acceptable answer for the company president. He then wanted to know what English girls were like. I whispered conspiratorially to him that they were often overweight. This sent Jabba the Prez into guffaws of pleasure.

I think that sealed the deal for me because shortly afterwards a geeky minion who spoke a bit of English came over and asked for my alien registration card and passport. We then filled in a form detailing when I was available to teach the progeny of the rich how to pass meaningless tests. It ended with me handing over my bank book so the number and name could be photocopied.

The President stood up and shook my hand in a manly manner and allowed me to go.

I stepped out into the sunny day and considered the possibility that the matrix was glitching and spilling out Alice in Wonderland moments.

Having Nothing To Do But Not Being Allowed To Go Home

2010-03-12T20:58:00.000-08:00

In Greek mythology Sisyphus was a King punished by Zeus for having the gall to tell tales about the head of the gods. Zeus not only disliked someone gossiping about his sexual conquests but he thought that a mere human was over-stepping the mark by presuming to be important enough to get involved in the affairs of the gods. The punishment that Zeus devised was fiendishly clever. For eternity Sisyphus was made to push a rock up a hill. When the rock was nearly at the top it would roll back to the bottom. Thus Sisyphus was condemned to carrying out a pointless task forever.

Such is the resonance of this tale that it has entered the English language: the adjective Sisyphean refers to a task that is endless and devoid of purpose or meaning.

Being an ALT or Assistant Language Teacher in Japan has a Sisyphean dimension. On any average day the foreign teacher will only have a few classes to perform his or her assisting role. That role varies from job to job. Some ALTs do the lion’s share of planning and teaching a class. Others have the briefest of cameos in an English lesson.
What is pretty much true across the board, however, is that the ALT will not be allowed to go home after finishing their classes. The only exception to this is lucky part-time ALTs who can rock up, do a bunch of rote lessons and vanish minutes after the lunch bell is sounded. For those unlucky full timers they are condemned by the principal and their employers (normally some middle-man organization that is taking a percentage of the ALT’s wage for doing sweet FA) to remain in the staff room when they have no lessons to give.

That often means entire mornings or afternoons with nothing to do. Naturally doing nothing is extremely difficult as any Zen master or prisoner will tell you. The ALT’s Japanese colleagues are in the same boat but they have had a whole life time of conditioning, of being denied time off, that they cope with it much easier. They will often find some vaguely work related task and do it incredibly slowly and precisely to fill up the tedium prior to home time. Indeed, with the bell to finish school they will then commence to do some dossy extra-curricular activity called ‘club activity’. It is important to teach the kids that their free time is not their own. They must attend to some pointless task after they have slogged through an official day.

For the ALT the situation is different. They are the foreigners and are not really expected to do much beyond their pseudo teaching duties. They are expected to just hang around when they have no classes to give. They cannot bunk off. If they do they will be reprimanded, maybe fired and definitely not re-hired the following year. But they are not told how to fill the huge gaps in their schedule. No one is telling the ALT to make materials or rehearse a school play. It is a negative injunction. All they have to do is not go home.

That is where the internet is the ALTs savior. I expect some of my bored ALTing friends will be reading this post while they are about their Sisyphean jobs. To them I suggest why not post a comment at the bottom of this post; give the world some tips on how to do nothing but not go home.

YouTube and Facebook are the answers to the boredom question. They are brilliant and entertaining ways to kill time. So entertaining that the rest of us consider it recreational to surf updates and watch dozens of kitten videos. For the ALT YouTube and Facebook are the very bread and water of their existence.

Other ALT friends I know take a more constructive approach. They try to turn a negative into a positive. Such an ethos is laudable. This type of ALT will typically spend their non-leisurely free time learning Japanese (the Japanese love this one) or blogging for ad sense pennies (if the Japanese knew what this was they might not love it).

What is certain is that as Japanese public and private schools gain more experience with dealing with foreigners they realize that this is the aspect of the job that the foreigner dislikes the most. It is the thing which rankles and stops true assimilation. Just as some bad parents hit their kids in an effort to stop the child from crying, so the Japanese powers that be clamp down more on the foreigners’ free time. It is often the case that the foreign teacher will be ordered to attend the school every day for a few hours during the school holidays. That is strange and cruel punishment. One job I know gives only 20 days a year holiday. Beyond those 20 days the teacher has to come to school regardless of whether there are any students there to teach or oversee. Another school I know has started to put a filter on the internet to block Facebook and YouTube. Another school I heard about granted a teacher paid half day leaves to help his wife who had just recently had a baby. The ALT in question left early every afternoon thinking that he had been granted an official dispensation. He was soon quietly criticized for using his dispensation too often.

Another tale: one friend of mine got into the habit of taking a stroll in the afternoon to work off her lethargy. Someone no doubt told on her to the principal. He then delegated someone to get back to the ALT with an injunction to not ‘go for a walk’ because it was ‘dangerous’ and besides the school wasn’t insured for the quite possible horrible outcomes of the ALT being struck by lightning or getting her ALTness drowned in a nearby river.

What does all this mean? It means that the school authorities and the local board of education and those scummy money grabbing middlers like Interact want the ALT to suffer. In Japan work must always be tai hen da or very tough. Having an easy go of it is very bad form. The group must suffer together. That is the Japanese citizen’s true purpose. From the earliest age they are made to wear shorts or skirts in the winter to keep them cold; they have to attend school all the time and then clubs and cram schools; and then they must be continually taking pointless tests. When they leave school many of them will get an office job which will be very similar to school – another daft uniform and long tedious unproductive hours with the pressure of constant arbitrary deadlines and the necessity of doing unpaid and compulsory overtime. Or it is the house maker route of having to clean the bathroom every day; of going shopping every day; of getting up at the crack of dawn to make lunch boxes every day; and of tending to the invalid parents-in-law every day; but worst of all, having to wear a silly pinafore every day.

Suffering together brings social harmony and makes citizens good consumers. Being too drained from work the bachelor will survive on convenience store bread, pasta and lunch boxes. Being too punished at work the salary man will reward himself with an unfeasibly big car to drive to work. Being fed up of doing the thankless task of keeping a household spic and span the housewife will treat herself to lunch out a couple of times a week. My new theory is that as people are given more free time they actually spend less money, presuming that is that they still had an income to spend. When you have no time, you spend more money.

Naturally these two golden rules in Japan that you must suffer and that you must be denied free time so you spend more money on frivolous over-packaged shit DO NOT APPLY TO THE RICH.

The rich can naturally take as much time off as they want. If the rich are busy then it is because they choose to be busy; it is not that are forced to be busy. The rich love their indulgences and luxuries. Life is not tai hen da. They can buy what they want and do so. They buy the very best and live longer for it. If they are busy they can get one of their minions to do their spending for them. These are the rule makers who have made the system as it is in order to benefit from it. They are the Zeuses who have made a Sisyphus of an entire nation for their own personal profit. That is why ALTs must every working day push the giant bolder of boredom up the hill of stretching hours for no other reason than to be constantly put in their place.

The Sisyphus image is from www.spitton.org

Wasting Money and Taking Money

2010-03-10T22:00:00.000-08:00

Asahi Super Dry congratulates Ibaraki on it's White Elephant.

Two seemingly unrelated news articles caught my attention today. The first is the opening of Ibaraki Prefecture Airport and the second is the Mayor of Tokyo’s Bunkyo Ward taking two weeks paid paternity leave. These two stories say volumes for how Japanese are masters at wasting money and geniuses at discouraging people from taking money and benefits that they are entitled to.

The preposterous thing about Ibaraki Prefecture Airport is that it cost $268 million to build and it has one flight a day, the sole carrier being Korea's Asiana Airline. The airport is so typically unnecessary, so Japanese, as it is only a few kilometers from Japan's two biggest airports, Narita and Haneda. It reveals the Japanese penchant for concrete and white elephant construction projects. Anything that will make big inroads into the integrity of the countryside and allow 10,000 construction workers with baggy hammer pants to work for a year or two is traditionally thought to be a wonderful use of public funds. Show me a major river in Japan without concrete banks and I'll show you a public funds work under consideration. There are quite literally roads in Japan that go nowhere, that just end. These frivolous millions are spent to keep construction companies going. And the political payback has traditionally been promises that Jimin-to (LDP) candidates can deliver jobs to an area; in other words, pork-barreling. In return the company bosses tell the union leaders to make the workers vote for the Jimin-to candidate promising to enrich the concrete and construction companies. That's Japanese democracy at work.

Another aspect of the Ibaraki airport story that resonates beyond the particular is that the reason why the airport is so unsuccessful is that ANA (All Nippon Airlines) and JAL (Japanese Airlines) operate a virtual monopoly on air traffic in Japan. Before the first bag of concrete was opened the airport was doomed to failure because ANA and JAL were always going to protect their monopoly.

“We're not planning any flights from Ibaraki Airport,” Japan Airlines President Haruka Nishimatsu said. “It's out of the question.”

If they knew that before building they shouldn’t have continued with the $268 million project. Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airlines and their subsidiaries make up 96% of air traffic in Japan. And they keep the prices nice and high. For a mere $684 JAL will fly you from Tokyo to Sapporo and back. While for $622 China Airlines will sell you a return from Narita, Tokyo to Honolulu. So that’s a short journey to a freezing, dull city or a $62 cheaper flight to lie on the beach in Hawaii. That’s a toughie. JAL and ANA realized immediately that Ibaraki Airport could be a haven for cheap flights and immediately decided to boycott it and thus destroy the business viability of the project. And these two national carriers have powerful friends – there are no plans to connect Ibaraki Airport to existing train lines. Thus it takes one and a half hours to get to Ibaraki airport by train and bus, making any potential money or time savings irrelevant to Tokyo inhabitants - a genius Japanese stitch-up.

The Mayor of Ibaraki insists the airport is not “A Field of Dreams” – a reference to a movie starring Kevin Costner about a man who builds a baseball diamond for ghosts. The famous line in the movie is: “Build it and they will come”. He’s right about that. Why would Japanese ghosts want to go to Inchon in Korea?

The second news item is about the Mayor of Bunkyo Ward in Tokyo being the first civil servant of that branch of local government to take paid paternity leave; correction any type of paternity leave. It is remarkable how the Japanese media give you a snippet of news and bury it. After seeing it on the news I couldn’t get a sniff of it in Japan Times online or DailyYomiuri online. Even Wikipedia doesn't know if paternity leave exists in Japan. Only Kyodo News had three lines about the story. Basically, while it is alright to waste $268 million dollars of tax payers' money, it is considered very poor form for lowly civil servants and salary men and women to take their entitlements. Whatever next? Taking all your paid holiday is damn-right rude in Japan. If you do so you are penalizing your fellow inefficient office colleagues who will have to stay longer hours in the office being inefficient (probably without over-time pay). In other words, millions of workers are shamed into not taking what is their due. Who benefits? The bosses and big swinging dicks in the ministries. Who suffers? Everyone else. The notion has a moral dimension I feel (although stupid Japanese commentators are forever telling us that Japan has no ‘moral’ perspective). It is immoral to take paid holiday (unless you go on honeymoon or are burying your parents). It is immoral to take maternity leave (how dare the women don't just quit when they are pregnant). And it is immoral to take paternity leave (after all there's the wife and mother to tend to the baby). But it is moral to build Japan's 98th airport that has only one flight a day.

I salute Hironobu Narisawa for leading the way, setting an example. Now it will be acceptable for other civil servants in his ward in Tokyo to take paternity leave. I don't imagine he'll be in office long. I expect he'll be airbrushed out of the history books.

Hironobu Narisawa - a dangerous trend setter who felt so concerned about his decision to take paternity leave that he is offering to give his entitled absence of leave salary to charity.

Asimo the Robot

2010-03-05T03:00:00.000-08:00

Last year I took some students to the Miraikan Museum in Odaiba in Tokyo. My students were engineers for a big company that makes wire harnesses for cars so they were fascinated with the prospect of going to a really geeky museum in Tokyo. And on top of that it was a day out paid for by the government, sorry I mean company. That has to be better than being stuck in a classroom with me wandering what the fuck English speakers were thinking of when they invented the present perfect.

We took the bullet train there. I only mention that because the Japanese take inordinate pride in their shinkansen mega-fast train. As much pride as I have disgust in the exorbitant prices and poor service British Rail offer.

In the museum there's a few cool things. Buzz Aldrin came by to sign a replica of a space station. He might have done it on the way back from filming the Apollo mission in some out-of-the-way warehouse in Japan. There's an imax 3-D cinema that knocks the spots off the Avatar experience. You literally have planets and stars inches away from your eyes; the whole auditorium is filled with the universe. Talk about microcosms. But the undoubted star of the museum was the appearance of Asimo the robot.

On the dot his door casing slides up and out comes the cute guy all funny gait and gabbing Japanese. He politely answers the disembodied voice that comes over the public announcement system. Then he does a bit of a dance. That'll be a robotic dance I guess. Then he kicks a ball. Quite impressive, although Peter Crouch does the dance and the ball kicking better. I think Asimo might have the edge on Crouchy as far as the Japanese goes.

Needless to say this is Japan so the audience (which is mostly composed of mothers and kids) go into hysterics of joy. They all say kawaii (meaning cute) and seem to me to be on the verge of having an orgasm of delight in this heap of metal that does some pretty average tricks.

What got me wondering is the name. Is Asimo some Japanese bastardization of the name of that great Russian sci-fi author Asimov? The one who wrote 'I Robot' - a brilliant book that sets out the three ethical rules for robot behaviour (naturally the same applies for people). The first rule being you should never under any circumstances let Will Smith turn your book into a movie.

Another thought entered my head. How appropriate or ironic (depending on how you define irony) that a nation of folk who behave so robotically should be so fascinated with an image of their own slavery to mono-thought and the big communal lie that the group harmony subsumes all other interests. I call it a lie because the government leaders sorry I mean the company leaders don't sacrifice shit. They wallow in the decedance that mega-bucks bring.

Anyway here is the cute fella for you.

Narita Airport Epiphany

2010-03-02T04:17:00.000-08:00

There should be more songs about airports I feel. Why? Because they are such emotional places. They try to be all serious and sanitized and secure but really they are the backdrops for emotional upheavals, sad farewells and expectant beginnings. Nowadays all journeys to far-away places begin in an airport. The ultimate anti-climax to any great new venture is being stuck in a waiting lounge wondering if iPod is not perhaps a new religion or at the very least the soma of the twenty-first century.

Last year when I arrived at Narita Airport and rushed off the plane to get through all that rigmarole of passport control and customs so I could have a ciggie outside (fuck going in that smoking booth), I was stopped dead in my tracks by a big sign on the wall. The sign was split horizontally in the middle. The top half said, “Welcome to Japan” and the bottom half said, “Coca Cola”. That was it! What I had been thinking all along. I knew something was wrong with Japan – now I had discovered exactly what gives. Japan is sponsored by Coca Cola. It all made such perfect sense to me that I forgot about my craving for nicotine. That would explain how you can have politics without policies and ideologies. How people can vote but not have an opinion. It explained why the only real religion in Japan was consumerism. Of course, the country is just doing what its sponsor wants – keep on buying and texting and believing in designer goods and expensive cars and plucking your eyelashes and walking like a retard. Live at the surface of the surface. Let your guide be your navigation system. Let your stomach and your eyes be the arbiters of what is good – cute not justice, cool not cerebral, sugar not ganja. That is the coke cola agenda and it has formed a tidy symbiosis with little east-hailing Japan.

Of course gaining the key to unlocking the mystery of Japan didn’t make me feel any better about being back in the place. While lining up to enter Jaola I had to tell myself in the strictest internal voice to stop it – don’t you dare! I wanted to shout out: “Go back to wherever you came from! It’s much better there. Believe me. This is the matrix of the mundane, the sim city of life; a place for sheep intellects who will not be happy until they coca-colarize you into a facsimile of a human. Don’t do it. Don’t be tempted by the money and the skinny girls. This is a fucked up Babylon where they don’t even understand the concept of Zion unless you turn it into an air freshener for a car.” I twitched and sweated and looked down to avoid eye contact. Any sympathy would start me off on a rant. I managed it and got to the front of the line. The automaton at the desk stamped my passport and electronically recorded my fingerprints and my bloodshot eyes and let me through to the next stage.

While waiting at the carousel with my wife I tried hard not to befriend the sniffer dog and tried even harder not to stare too much at the spectacle of a 100 people going cell phone nuts. Why is it that backpacks always come out last?

At customs the machine-man looked on guard until he met the disarming smile of Mrs. Trippy Traveller. She told him politely that we had just arrived from the heart of cocaine country and we only had souvenirs in our bags. The old Jedi mind trick never fails. He waved us through into Jaola without bothering to inspect our bags.

We went straight outside and relished a fag next to the smoking booth. It was cold. I felt poor and at the beginning of another nasty assimilation that would all end in another flight to freedom.

I should mention that they have updated the sign for the Olympics. Now we have the notion of partnership and psychedelic colours to hypnotise us into believing that the nasty sweet stuff is energizing a country and that this is a matter that goes beyond geo-political borders. It is a worldwide endeavour to make pretend amateur sport the beacon bearer for world unity. Or is that just a flash back to my mushroom days in Cardiff?

Also I have no idea what the short aid toilet paper instrument is for.

Road Rules in Japan

2010-02-22T00:43:00.000-08:00

One in three jobs in Japan is directly or indirectly related to the automobile industry in Japan. Now that the Global Financial Crisis has truly collided with Japan that figure might have changed, but still it indicates just how important the car is to Japan.

Before I go any further I should point out that I am a non-driver. When I tell Japanese people that ‘I can`t drive’, they looked at me all confused. They think I must mean that at present I don`t have a car. When I explain that I simply never learned to drive they look at me as if I`m some sort of care in the community case. This just goes to highlight how fundamental to the average Japanese person`s existence a car is. It seems everyone has a car. Most families have at least two cars. If they are rich they have two cars the size of tanks. If they are middle class then the husband has a juggernaut and the wife has a strange looking little box shaped car with a high roof. On top of that it appears that nobody in Japan can read a map so everyone has a satellite navigation system in their car. Furthermore, it appears that many cannot bear to be parted from the idiot box, so they have a T.V as well in their car.

Another universal truth about cars in Japan is that nobody buys second-hand cars. Driving a used car is as repugnant as wearing used underwear. And the law encourages this wasteful attitude by hiking up the taxes on second-hand cars. On top of that people seem to regard it their civic duty to buy a new car every three or four years. Of course, now that unemployment is a real possibility for many, the vast majority are shirking their responsibilities and holding on to their old vehicles.

So now that I have given you a brief idea of how important the car is to the Japanese psyche, I can proceed to discuss the rules for driving in Japan. The first thing to note is that like most of Asia, the Japanese drive on the left. Someone once told me that the reason for this is that during the wonderfully exploitative days of the samurai people walked on the left so their swords would not bang into the swords belonging to travellers coming the other way. This is all very charming and fits in with the present day nostalgia in Japan for the good old days of tyranny and social injustice.

The odd thing about the drive on the left rule is that it doesn't apply to people on bicycles. This is my own personal bête noire. Japanese consider bicyclists to be on a par with pedestrians and as such can and should ride on the right or go on the pavement. Or if someone has a mind to, they can ride on the left. Often you spot gangs of school kids riding on both sides of the road simultaneously or riding in parallel and one or more of them will be texting at the same time. Considering how narrow many of the roads in Japan are, it is a miracle that thousands of people aren`t knocked off their bikes daily. One more thing to note about bicyclists in Japan is that the vast majority ride heavy 1950`s style bikes with a basket on the front. These are called ‘mama charees’. This is an example of how Japanese love taking a real English word like for example ‘chariot’ and mangling it and then institutionalizing the bastardized English word. If you are a school kid then as well as wearing your trousers below your bum line it is de rigueur to drop your saddle so your knees rise over your handlebars when riding. All in all moronic.

The next rule under consideration is giving way. Japan never caught on to the energy saving and more organic approach to driving that roundabouts facilitate. Instead the country is infested with a billion traffic lights. Only drinks machines out number traffic lights. And the main thing to remember about traffic lights is that when turning left you have to give way to pedestrians who have a green light at the same time. This seems to be the only instance when drivers give way. When driving on a busy or empty road it is rare for a person to stop and let someone into the flow of traffic. It appears to me that the general level of civility in a country is inversely proportional to how polite the drivers are. So whereas in England we are generally a surly bunch who barely acknowledge strangers and provide terrible service, we are fairly considerate to the plight of others on the road. In contrast, the Japanese who cannot bow enough or mouth enough polite inanities to customers and random folk they hap upon are selfish bastards behind the wheel. There is no way in hell they are going to give way if they can help it. And the same is true for pedestrian crossings. You can stand at a crossing for ten minutes before a car will show the courtesy to stop to allow you to cross the road; which is odd because officially you are meant to stop at pedestrian crossings. In all other respects the Japanese hold a red light sacrosanct. I am forever blithely walking across an empty road while my fellow pedestrians wait like sheep for the light to go green. And by the way, it isn't green in Japan, it`s blue. Well the light looks green to me but for some odd cultural reason that part of the spectrum has been designated as ‘blue’ in Japan.

Parking is another area of cultural interest. The Japanese are truly awful at parallel parking and avoid it like the plague. Instead they prefer parking places which they must back into. You hardly ever see someone take the simple option of driving directly into a space. They all back in and keep backing in until they hit a concrete bar with their back wheels. Without these ugly lumps of concrete the country might descend into parking anarchy.

At this point you might be wondering if I have anything positive to write about drivers and driving in Japan. Well I did admire the way they put toll gates on all motorways. The trains are relatively cheap and extremely efficient and when you combine toll charges with high petrol prices you have an environmentally friendly situation that encourages people to stop being lazy and use public transport. The new government, however, has seen fit to abolish a lot of toll gates. There goes another nail in the coffin of the Kyoto protocol. The only thing that the Japanese can use in their defense is that they do lead the world in the development of hybrid cars. Saying that I rarely see one on the road in Japan; I suspect that the whole hybrid phenomenon is another marketing strategy to dominate the world`s automobile market.

And this brings me onto to my final topic: the cars people drive. As I said before, if you have the money in Japan you buy an SUV big enough and powerful enough to deploy a platoon of soldiers in the desert of Iraq. If you have obscene wealth in Japan you drive an imported German car. If you are a gangster or wanabee bad boy you drive a ridiculous American car with pimpy bumpy suspension and spend your nights cruising in circles around the train station looking to pick up young girls with short skirts and long fake eyelashes. You are what you drive. I prefer on the other hand to take a leaf out the feminists` handbook and state ‘big car, small dick’; or to rephrase big car, big dickhead.

The Word "Gaijin" and What Gaijin Think About It.

2010-02-14T22:59:00.000-08:00

Below is a thread that nicely got going on Facebook all about a Japanese teacher that refuses to use the word "gaikokujin" to refer to "foreigners". Anyway, the background is all in there. I apologise for the personal abuse, that was me.

Baz:

Hey guys, thought I would get your opinion on something that came up recently. Feel free to ignore this message!

Anyway, recently Satomi has had a bit of a debate with one of the teachers at her school about the words 'gaijin' and 'gaikokojin'. The teacher refuses to use 'gaikokojin' when referring to foreigners but won't explain herself. Satomi thinks that using 'gaijin' is really rude for a teacher (especially since this woman is a Japanese teacher whose students are all foreigners). She wants to know your opinions about the use of these words. Do you have any? Please feel free to send me a direct message if you don't want to share with others.

My personal opinion is that if an 'educated' person consciously decides to use the term 'gaijin' then they are being disrespectful and that they know it.

Jules:

All Japanese know that the word Gaijin is the impolite word. She is definitely being disrespectful!

Alex:

you're spot on, educated or not. tell her she should be more thankful to the foreigners she teaches for giving her a job. A nice heaping helping of whoop-ass would do her some good.

http://www.debito.org/kumegaijinissue.html

Arthur:

I don't think that there is any impoliteness in the words themselves. It depends more on how they use it and on if you decide to take offense when someone uses the word. I call myself gaijin all the time and if someone else calls me a gaijin then that's ok. A problem may arise however, if the person refers to you as gaijin as a replacement for your name in a derogatory tone.

I'd be interested to here this teacher's reasoning though.

Arthur:

ps, David Aldwinckle is an ass-hat and should be ignored.

Bella:

She is holding the position as a professional teacher so whatever her preference is to refer to foreigners is should be set aside for the sake of professionalism in the classroom. Some Japanese people may occassionally use the word "Jap" to refer to themselves, but we certainly wouldn`t use that word in the classroom. Perhaps she needs a course on politcal politeness.

Dango:

I don't care if someone calls me gaijin unless they are being obviously malicious. It's hard to believe she is unaware that "gaijin" is recognized as a derogatory term and if she refuses to explain herself then I can only see that as wrong because if there is no malicious intent then why not say what you're on about.

Dango:

Who the fuck is David Perrywinckle?

Ray:

That woman should explain herself. As far as me and Mako can see her using gaijin is just lazy. It's another example of them modifying words, shortening things to the point where it no longer resembles the original. It should start with 外国の人 which would be the most formal, then going to 外国人 then 外人. She might not be trying to be rude on purpose but she at least needs to justify her position.

Arthur:

The interesting thing about this whole debate is that foreigners are trying to use their ideas of language to pigeon-hole a word that Japanese people use. It's like putting square pegs into round holes. In Japanese there isn't such a strong stigma attached to derogatory language. In Japanese language there are levels of politeness but no real words that BY THEMSELVES are derogatory. Just because a word is polite doesn't mean that there must be an equally unpolite word like we have in English. English speakers by historical nature are artists with profanity whereas in Japan the absence of language means way more.

The entire field of language pragmatics exists because of this very kind of problem. When you start translating language word for word you're just gonna end up with a mess of culturally actuated bruised egos.

TT:

Far more interesting than this apologist academic spiel is that no Japanese person has commented on this thread, and this brother of Clarke drinks at the totally gay tap room and watches dumb videos by %&$!!!.

Baz:

Just to give a little background about how this came up.

Satomi is doing a Japanese language teacher training program right now in X. .Her and several of her classmates are dating or are married to foreigners. The teacher in question used the term 'gaijin' so many times, and in such a way that those students in the class with some kind of connection to foreigners began to feel uncomfortable with the way the teacher was using the term. At the end of one of their second lesson one of the students complained to the administration that she felt the teacher was being disrespectful by speaking like that. The next class, the teacher didn't mention the word once... until the last few minutes when she told the students that their homework was to look up the words 'racist' and 'gaijin' in the dictionary. She hasn't explained why she prefers to use one phrase over the other... which Satomi thought was rather strange. That's why she wanted to know all of our opinions about the use of the word...

Arthur:

Thanks TT, I was wondering when the personal attacks for no apparent reason would start. Thumbs up!

btw, I don't drink at the taproom and %&$!!! is my student.

Bella:

Well, should be an interesting homework assignment for the students to find the Japanese translation for "racist" I imagine it would be just as hard as finding a Japanese word for "sexual harassment". In anycase I imagine things will all be solved once the students present the teacher with the definition of `racist` and the teacher can learn that it encompasses using non PC terms regardless of her intent or opinion of the use of the word. As Ray explained earlier the order in which foreigners should be refered to should apply especially considering the situation (professional teacher teaching in a classroom environment). However she decides to conduct herself outside of work his her personal choice. I can`t even imagine if teachers in Canada were aloud to use loose terms to refer to foreigners living in Canada. There would be a riot.

Dango:

I don't think anyone here was saying that the term Gaijin is derogatory. I myself said it was recognized as derogatory and that is where all the reactions are coming from. The teacher's behavior after the complaint is evidence that she is aware of the effect of this word.

Dango:

who the fuck is %&$!!! ?

Bella:

No, no, no Dango, your ruining it for everyone. Don`t you see this is a chance for all of us to argue and say all those things we`ve all wanted to say to each other, break up year long friendships, and then make facebook groups against each other. Man!!! Why do you always have to be so...so...so damn diplomatic?!! Yeah, there... I said it. And....sometimes you are just so...so unbiased. How the hell is anyone supposed to argue with you, huh?! Huh?! Let`s have it out!!

BK:

No Japanese have been invited to make a comment on this thread hence the lack of Japanese participation.

I think in this case the teacher is using the word a little too much and probably doesn't realize that what she is doing is being quite offensive. If she does realize and it is intended, then she is being xenophobic rather than racist. Xenophobia, like most dicrimination is a representation of fear or pissedoffness. On the flip-side she may know quite a lot of gaijin who say they are gaijin and may think she is being cool by using it a lot.. who knows. A lot of us here in Japan enjoy our gaijin status and the privileges and/or lack of responsibilities it brings, if we abuse this we deserve what we get.

I don't mind being referred to as gaijin and would refer to myself as a gaijin, as I think most of us would do. However, if the word is used too often and is sneered at me, I will take offence and confront the person. Unless they are right wing or Yakuza. The interesting thing is that in Japan, any non-japanese are referred to as gaijin which if anything is lazy and uncreative. Surely they could be a little more personal about it. In the UK we are a lot better at offending people from other countries and have a long list of specific monikers we use to refer to dodgy foreigners.

Perhaps the teacher has met some bad gaijin who have made her anti-gaijin. Unfortunately a lot of gaijin in Japan don't behave themselves particularly well and let the side down so I think the Japanese should create a new insult especially for those people. How about ウアンカーズ?

Dango:

Thanks for the kind words Bella. Let's start a facebook group.

Baz:

Hey BK! Thanks for your comment. I've actually sent the same message to quite a few of my Japanese friends in a different thread but haven't got any replies.

It seems what it all comes down to is intent (which unfortunately is a rather difficult thing to assess). To me the interesting thing is that the way it was being used in the classroom was making some of the students uncomfortable and this speak volumes about her intent (at least perceived).

Maybe there should be terms that are more specific... I recently had a rather interesting 'debate' with someone over the use of the word Paki who stated that since he wasn't a racist it was ok for him to use the word. Undeniably, the historic use of the word is derogatory. Using the term Jap is quite similar I think. Unfortunately, I have no idea about the use in the past regarding 'gaijin'.

Food in Japan

2010-02-09T02:51:00.000-08:00

Writing about Japanese food is one of the dullest subjects imaginable to me. Since I have to listen to interminable comments about food and restaurants in poor English as part of my job, I've come to dislike the whole subject. So in this blog I'm not going to enumerate all the Japanese dishes that I either love or hate. Instead I'm going to attempt to analyze the sociological concept of food in Japan.

We all talk about food we like and probably take a certain amount of pride in our signature dishes. Many also get a nationalistic thrill when they hear their country's cuisine getting glowing reviews. I think this is the case with the Japanese. Unlike much of Asia they don't use chilies in their cooking. One might be tempted to call it bland. They prefer adjectives that come out badly in translation such as 'salty' and 'oily'. The Japanese are happy as larry when they hear foreigners mention that they like sushi and sashimi. Sushi along with cars seems to be Japan's greatest cultural export. For many Japanese their cuisine along with the fact that they have 4 seasons and cherry trees seems to be at the heart of their national identity. They are removed from the Asian continent by the Japanese sea and they don't exactly view themselves as Asian, just as the Brits don't feel comfortable being European. Having non-spicy food is a key point in their desire to define themselves as other than Asian.

This is of course fictional because much of Japanese culture is borrowed originally from their much older neighbour, China. Chopsticks, rice wine, green tea, Buddhism, kimonos and kanji are all cultural imports. They value the group over the individual as does China. Confucianism with its emphasis on social harmony and everyone knowing their place in society is deeply embedded in the Japanese psyche. And lastly, the Chinese like the Japanese traditionally prefer to eat while drinking alcohol; unlike, for example, in the UK where people have their dinner at home prior to going to the pub for a few pints.

Food in Japan is one entry point into the thorny subject of relations between men and women. Japan is without doubt still a very patriarchal society. In Japan it is a man’s world. The stereotypes largely hold good in Japan: men have political power, they go to work to earn money and women stay at home raise the kids and do the house work. (A growing number have part-time jobs to supplement the household income, but the man is still the main bread-winner.) During the several years that I have lived in a Japanese household I have not once seen my Japanese father-in-law cook a meal, nor I have I seen him wash a plate. Not even a glass. The most he will do is put his beer cans by the sink (he can't crush them up and put them in the correct bin). He gets up so early in the morning that his wife (whom he scarily calls ‘mother’) isn't around to cook him breakfast so he just foregoes the meal. Recently because he has to take medicine he has broken this habit and now microwaves some soupy rice. The man is very old school. His dignity is upheld by how he works incredibly long hours to bring home the bacon. His greatest joy is the evening meal. He lingers over his soft over-boiled food. He pours soy sauce on nearly everything and refuses to eat anything with even a hint of spice. During the hour or so it takes for him to eat he dominates the TV controller. We are all subjected to dull shows about fishing, going to hot baths and eating noodles. The only programs with any type of story he will tolerate are samurai dramas.

I don’t believe my household is unique in any of this. Instead I think this is all very representative of Japan and the rubric of eating in Japan. It is to reinforce the inequalities between men and women. The man asserts his right to be served and be acknowledged as the alpha member of the family.

The Japanese take this trend to its logical conclusion in the practice of Nyotaimori – eating sushi off a naked woman. In this instance the sushi chef is more than likely a man (it is a profession after all) but the naked plate is always a young woman. It is impossible to think how you could objectify a woman more than by making her into a plate. A woman is passive and there for men's delight and delectation. Business man can with impunity treat a woman as an object and ogle her nudity. They can legally do a lot more in the many legal brothels in Japan.

As far as women go, they get their revenge by spending some of the monthly housekeeping money on 3 or 4 lunches in restaurants with their friends while the husbands are working. If you go to nearly any reasonably priced restaurant in Japan at lunch time, especially fake Italian places and places with unlimited soft drinks on the menu, you will find the clientele are mostly women. They chat for hours, eat sweet things and thoroughly enjoy gossiping. And for me the oddest thing is their inability to eat with their mouths shut. Men do it as well, but women are the worst for being unable to pause in their flow of speech to finish masticating and swallow. Instead they will put a hand over their mouth as they chomp and chat. And that makes it all right. This was a shock to me when I first witnessed it. In other things the Japanese have exquisite manners. When it comes to food, however, it is fine to make lots of noise slurping your noodles and hot coffee. It is no faux pas to eat with your mouth open. Sometimes I feel like Gulliver after he returns from his journeys and decides to live with the horse in the stables because he finds humans crass and revolting. I’m sure some of my habits such as smoking other people find offensive, but that doesn’t change my dislike for going to restaurants in Japan. They stuff their gobs and look like Marlon Brando in the Godfather. They make constant noise. They show the world the food half chewed in their mouths. I try to be a cultural relativist but some things I just think are wrong. Would you justify female circumcision because some tribes still do it in Africa?

And that brings me to my final point. Japan is very much like every other country I’ve been to in their approach to ‘foreign’ food. They completely change it to suit their tastes. So Chinese food in Japan has the chili peppers eliminated. They seem to be inordinately fond of adding potato starch to Chinese cuisine so every dish has a shiny appearance. Italian food – pasta and pizzas – comes with seaweed; and that great Indian dish called ‘curry’ has been transformed into the blandest thick brown slop imaginable. It is strangely enough a dish which many Japanese claim to make superlatively. This I find mystifying because the main ‘curry’ ingredient is a curry cube that everyone buys from a supermarket. Pankun the performing TV chimp could make a Japanese curry rice dish and it would taste exactly the same as anyone else’s.

So next time you catch yourself spouting off about how good Japanese food is think about how food reinforces patriarchal society, think about how uncouth the Japanese are in eating it and think about how they are co-opting the cuisine of your country.

White Goat Toilet Paper Making Machine

2010-02-01T01:24:00.001-08:00

This is just so daft you think it must be a spoof. But, no, I think they are for real. It is a machine waiting to go into commercial production. And it won an award!

Estimated cost is $100,000. Such a massive amount that you would personally have to get through a lot of toilet paper to justify buying one. At treecycle recycled you can get 96 rolls of eco-friendly loo paper for $72.50. That's $0.75 a roll. The monster machine called the 'White Goat' makes a roll for $0.60. However, the machine takes hours to make a roll and must consume a lot of electricity which must surely negate the potential $0.15 saving.

On top of that the toilet paper shown on the video looks so thin that it might disintegrate before it gives you a satisfactory wipe.

And finally, where did they get the name from? White Goat? Are goats known for their high standards of anal hygiene? Do people subconsciously want to wipe their arses with a white goat? Is there a masturbatory (randy as an old goat) subtext going on? Perhaps they could install white goats in public high schools and then kids could shred their exercise books to make useful wank cleaning material. After all they don't provide paper towels in school lavs.

And anyway make what you will of the White Goat toilet paper making machine. For me it typifies a certain brand of insane entrepreneuralism which sums up Japan - let's take something incredibly simple and make a machine that can automate the process that seems really modern, eco and cool and sell it to our foolish population. They might, however, have missed the boat. Companies are firing not hiring, and certainly don't have $100,000 knocking around for a toilet paper making machine. Besides it takes up the same amount of space as a toilet would. They also missed a crucial function. They forgot to allow the user to accessorize the made toilet paper. Surely your own hello kitty toilet paper would be the envy of all your friends?

My idea. Why not get workers to bring in all their old newspapers and make them use that to finish off their washroom doings. The newspapers could be encouraged to use non-run ink so employee behinds would not be left with any press smudges.

Japanese Internet

2010-01-30T22:23:00.000-08:00

Japan is leading the world in good ways and bad ways regarding the mighty beast called the internet, or if you're from Yorkshire 'tinternet' or from Japan 'interneto'. Japan easily ranks number 1 in the world for internet speeds: they have a median rate of 6.1 megabits per second compared to the USA's lousy 1.9 megabits per second.

This is offset by the curiously long time it can take to get an internet connection to your home. I'm always coming and going; and when I'm here for a while I order the internet. It can take 3 weeks to a month for them to get round to getting that internet juice flowing into your pad. There are several internet provider options and they all tease you with massive speeds and cheap monthly rates if you move your phone line over to them. It's that old give-something-free to make more money chestnut.

For about $40 Yahoo! BB in Japan is offering an upgraded service of 50 Mbps downloads and 30 Mbps upload. That's awesome news for illegal downloaders. All those films and porn will zap onto the users computer hard drive.

Talking of Yahoo! (what would Johnny Swift have made of that branding idea). It kicks Google's proverbial ass in Japan. The population for some unknown reason (from my point of view) prefers the gauche searches provided by Yahoo! and they seem to prefer selling their odd junk through Yahoo! auction rather than Ebay. I suppose the difference is good. I hate the thought of world domination and monopolies. Unless, that is, I'm in the driving seat. Talking of monopolies I apologise for the broken links in the last post. It seems Japanese TV are keen like Premiership football to chase down all those copyright infringement vid clips.

Which is bizarre because traditionally there has been no government response to that beautiful thing called file sharing which allows anybody with half a brain to get just about any movie, song etc. for free from a host of wicked sites. This sadly is about to change. The Japan Times recently reported that the grey heads in power are keen to tow the corporate line and stop all that good free stuff. So if I were you I'd leave my computer on for the next few weeks to make the most of it before we start seeing 12 year old kids being made an example of in the courts.

Another area of the internet that is soon to change is the unlimited internet access available to third gen wireless mobile phone users in Japan. The folks from the land of the rising sun, it seems, have gone porn crazy. Not content to view the blessed stuff at home they want to watch it on the go and at work on their phones. The system basically is struggling to keep up with the demand.

That brings me onto one of my pet bete noirs. The Japanese obsession with their f##king phones. They play with them like chronic masturbaters. On the train gangs of school kids text away while ignoring their mate sitting next to them. In bars people leave them open on the bar counter just in case. They are forever fiddling with the damned things. No one reads to fill the time. No one, it appears can be without one. Many have abandoned internet email accounts and just keep a phone address. Why have they turned their back on the far more powerful and bigger screen options available with laptops and PCs to sell their soulless souls to the phone companies? Is it that the Japanese have a nasty habit of idolizing the small and cute and over-wrapped item that is surely a driving force behind the forces of environmental destruction? Who knows. I know that no self-respecting short-skirted girl can be seen dead without a mass of fluffy cute accessories that makes the phone itself a lot less mobile and compact. The use of mobile phones at school is at last being recognised for the problem it most certainly is. In 2008 a survey showed that school kids made 20 emails a day but hardly ever made a call. It is cheap to text but also, perhaps, direct real time communication might be becoming too much of a challenge to youngsters. This latest generation of Japanese while being the most internet savvy might also turn out to be the least interesting and interested folk ever to blight the planet.

Pankun the TV Chimp

2010-01-26T00:33:00.001-08:00

This is classic Japanese TV. A must for you Japanheads. It features the unbelievably smart and cute Chimp called Pan-kun, his ugly dog mate, James, his dungaree clad trainer and a variety of special guests. Every episode the trainer tells Pan-kun his mission. He nods his head in typical Japanese fashion as if he understands. And the weird thing is that often he does seem to! Other times he only half comprehends. No matter. The results are endearingly hilarious. If only more Japanese TV was this entertaining.

On a throw-a-way note, I wonder if the subtext is that you can even train a chimp to be Japanese. Sadly, James the dog remains obstinately dog like and un-Japanese.

Teaching in a Japanese Junior High School

2010-01-23T21:39:00.000-08:00

I was recently subjected to the rather odd but lucrative world of teaching in a Japanese public junior high school. It was one of those random, odd gigs that come with the territory of being a foreigner in Japan. I formed part of a team of 6 people who had to visit 12 classes in 3 days. The main thrust of the lesson was learning English, but perhaps more importantly the idea was to deliver a bit of foreignness to the youngsters. Give them a taste of the multi-cultural in a land of mono-culture.

The Japanese in many ways provide an enviable education to its citizens: they have very high literacy rates and they excel in the teaching of math, but where they fall down is in instilling any sense of understanding of the world beyond Japan Inc. This was where we were supposed to come in.

So our merry band of six composed of citizens from England, France, Canada, Australia, Singapore and the Philippines were driven to a high school by the middle man who was obviously making a pretty penny for hooking the school up with a motley rag tag bunch of gaijin. Mr. Middleman reminded me of a Japanese del boy; an unreconstructed wheeler dealer in the shady world of language education. You want to learn something and he’ll fix you up with an unqualified teacher no problem.

Anyway he drove us to a school that had the same name as a supermarket and left us at the entrance. There we had to take our shoes off and put on green slippers that had been designed to fit the feet of dwarves. As I looked down I noticed all the kids and staff are wearing Nike and Adidas. Only we were subjected to the violent green mini slipper that freezes your extremities. We then shuffled along behind the ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) to an empty classroom. As we slid down the corridor we noticed all the windows were half open. It was January, the temperature was in single figures, there was no heating in evidence and the windows were open. Bless this feels character building already. Talking of buildings, school supermarket name was a stolidly rectangular concrete carbuncle with stained walls that looked like it should have been condemned 20 years ago. If only they had painted the walls some bright funky colors like in Latin America, it would have brightened the minds of a thousand youngsters who had slouched through the building and sweated in the playing fields as they received their programming for adulthood.

The ALT was from England; a rotund sparky chap who spoke in a loud voice and had some type of Beckhamized haircut. He wore a dark wrinkled pinstripe suit that could have been plundered from the trash. He seemed to snap in and out of an advanced case of lazy eye that meant for long seconds at a time both his eyes seemed to look just to the side of you, rather than at you when he wanted to communicate. I can only presume that being an assistant language teacher in Japan had caused this rare affliction. Or maybe it was a cunning ploy to minimize his bulky presence and fit into the ethos of anonymity and mediocrity which is at the heart of every young boy and girls’ pedagogical experience.

Young Mr. Beckham Cut whizzed through an outline of the ordeal that awaited us and made polite getting to know you sideways chat as we waited for some students to come and escort us to our first class. They are big into escort services in Japan. After all the population can’t find the toilet in their own apartment without the aid of a navigation system nowadays. And sure enough a bunch of giggling teenage girls in long navy blue plaited skirts arrived at the door and gawped unashamedly at the handsome young French man in our midst and then, reluctantly, lead us to their classroom.

The classroom had a black board and the walls were decorated in propaganda, more of which later. The sexes were segregated into alternate rows of boys and girls. Under their chairs were skanky looking towels pegged to dry – I was later to discover that the bathrooms had no towels to dry your hands, hence the need for the cunning under-seating-drying apparatus. The windows were open and the view was a brown concrete courtyard ideal for a World War Two sniper festival. Our band of 6 lined up in front of the black board at the front of the class while the kids were called to attention and made to stand up and greet us in English in unison with a pathetic lack of enthusiasm. Their ball breaking young female teacher stood in front of her desk looking to unleash untold reserves of ferocity on any of her charges who acted up or displayed any of the early signs of free thinking. I was already fantasizing about her in leathers and a whip punishing my unworthy foreign arse.

After Mr. ALT went through a standard set of questions and answers– What’s the date? How are you? How’s the weather? (It was always cloudy – or was that just the view) etc. He then launched into a quick explanation of the exciting lesson they had in store for them. As a warmer he started off with a game appropriately called ‘crossfire’. I say it was a game but there seemed to be no objective to it or any winners. You stand up, you answer a question and you nominate which row will sit down with you, or if only you will sit down. You are born, you respond and you can retire alone or take others down with you.

Next up, the ALT went through an explanation of the following activity which was to complete a questionnaire about us foreigners. He bizarrely shunned such phrases as ‘taking notes’ and ‘fill out the questionnaire’ and resolutely stuck with the keynote idea of ‘memos’. Perhaps because it rhymed (sort of) with Nemo, that cute fish. They had to ask us questions about places to visit, the money used, things to buy, food and animals in our respective countries. Naturally, the kids understood very little of this English summary of what was wanted from them; but obviously being in the dark about what they had to do was nothing new or worrying for the bright young minds of the future. Dominatrix teacher gave a few curt sentences in Japanese prior to the off. It must have been something about feasting on their hearts if they stepped out of line because immediately they got into ‘lunch groups’ and assumed the necessary seriousness to begin.

And so we began rotating from one group to the next, a few minutes at each cluster of desks. The kids stumbled though some questions and filled out their memos. Those smart enough to notice that Mrs. No Shit had written some of the questions on the board breezed through the Q & A. While the information about fish and chips and London and tea was being doled out by me I showed them a few pictures of my country. They seemed to lap up the visuals, after all anything was better than that view out the window which, if it got you in its sway, would insidiously cast a dark shadow over your soul.

One group followed the other as I made the rounds. I noticed the older Canadian chap was merrily rabbiting on about everything under the sun to do with his back home. It goes without saying that the students couldn’t fathom his meaning but they were in awe of his pictures of colossal amounts of snow. The Filipino bird spoke some odd dialect that passes for English back home and held up a CD of folk songs for the kids to consider. She and the woman from Singapore were both married to Japanese men and so spoke really good Japanese and I suspect spent a good deal of the time clarifying in Japanese.

Blessedly each rotation was mercifully quick in coming and before I knew it the class was over. The students got back into rows and were made to stand up and mumble something about thanking us. We left and headed back to the empty classroom where we were first taken.

We had just enough time for a cup of bitter green tea before the whole process was repeated. We taught 4 classes, following exactly the same routine and being overseered by the dark eyes of Mrs. Whiplash. Such repetition invited me to zone out. At one point I came under the sway of the view, like Bilbo Baggins putting on the ring; only evil can come of it. So I forced my eyes and mind to focus anywhere but out the window. Instead as I went through the motions of memo filling with the students I set my wandering mind to studying the classrooms. This proved most entertaining. Above the black board in one class was the acronymic WBC which stood for “We Believe Class”. A masterpiece of ambiguity that George Orwell would have had something to say about. My favourite, however, by a long shot was the delightful re-working of Alexandre Dumas’ classic motto of brotherhood. Instead of “One for all and all for one”, the huge poster read “One for all and all for all.” That sums up Japan for me right there.

Days two and three followed pretty much the same schedule as our first day. The only difference was that on the third day we did a thing about families. The students told us how many centimeters tall their parents were and how many kilograms their parents weighed. It reminded me of being arrested back home in the UK. The only other variable was the Japanese teachers. On day two Mrs. Blackhawk was replaced by dude in tracksuit and on the final day we had a grey haired bloke with an implacable look of disinterest on his face that might be the great forbearance taught by the Buddha or it might have been a secret surrender to the god of the concrete view.