This is Only a Test

Sorry, folks, no blog to speak of now.  There are plenty of issues going down (nothing quite as substantive as the last few posts), but at the moment we at Gaijin HQ are driving ourselves crazy preparing for the JLPT.  In short, the JLPT is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

...In slightly less short: Jenn and I are taking the JLPT Level 3 test for the second time this December.  Basically, this is the test that gets you a piece of paper that says you can speak (and read) Japanese.  While the uses of this piece of paper beyond Japan may be obscure and unforeseen, one of our goals in coming to Japan was to actually learn Japanese, something that goes a bit quicker with some motivation.

For those of you out there who aren't abreast with the minutiae of our language acquisition, our Japanese has finally, after many, many months of study, progressed from "basically nonexistant" to "bad."  We have Japanese friends, we can make some conversation, we can make a few jokes (ask Jenn, hers are pretty awesome), we can order in most restaurants and even order pizza over the phone...but amazing as all that may seem sometimes, my vocabulary is still routinely dwarfed by 4-year-olds.  It's not an easy language, is what I'm trying to say.

To this end, we enrolled to take the JLPT last July to give ourselves a concrete goal and a way of measuring our progress.  After flailing through a smattering of Japanese textbooks, we finally procured the services of a really awesome tutor, whom Jenn sees three times a week and I see once a week (the life of a kindergarten teacher is a busy one).  She's an awesome foreign language teacher, and this is coming from someone who sees a lot of really sucky foreign language teachers, someone who knows that it's considerably harder to teach English than it is to speak English.  After a good hard 5 months of drilling vocabulary and grammar and a million such things, we went in and soundly failed the test.

With another few months' work of preparation behind us, we are going into the test again on December 4th.  Which is why I have so much studying to do, which is why I don't have time to write...a...blog.

Hm.

Well, as long as I'm here, how about a couple pictures?

A sign posted above the toilet in a restaurant/bar that we frequent.  Translated: "Rather than speed, control."  An important message for us all (well, all us men, anyway).

AAAAAAH!  THE DEAD HAVE RISEN!  This is probably one of the more fun crafts we've had in Free School.  Happy Day of the Dead, everyone!  You'll hear from us again sometime after the JLPT, probably!

Hella Ween

I came to Japan for many reasons: adventure, excitement, fabulous prizes. I did not come here to get paid to make children cry -- that has always been, at best, a side benefit. However, for the last week, a large part of my duties has been to devise cost-effective ways to terrify children into screaming puddles of fear. For you see, we have just concluded the most important season of the ESL teacher's calendar, a holiday as long as Lent, as meaningful as Sweetest Day, as not-getting-you-out-of-work as Columbus Day, and as fun as all three put together: Halloween.

I should point out that I have grown to absolutely loathe Halloween over the last few weeks. By my count, I have had to work at least 300,000 Halloween parties in the last week and a half alone. That plus an entire month of Halloween crafts, Halloween games, Halloween vocabulary, Halloween picture books, and Halloween songs is enough to make a hardworking English teacher run screaming for the unemployment line.

Speaking of: one of the biggest Halloween affairs at the kindergarten is converting Ahiru class into an お化け屋敷, a haunted house. As you might imagine, this is a complex transformation, involving many hours of moving furniture as well as liberal application of black felt and crappy, almost certainly toxic faux-spiderwebs.

Also: haunted broccoli!

For the 2- and 3-year-olds, we keep it pretty mild: lights on, no spooky music, no masks, no jumping out from behind lockers. As you might imagine, they took it rather well. A rough transcript of Yamada-sensei taking Donuts class through the haunted house: "Ooh, wow, spidaa! 見て、見て, ske-re-ton! Oh, look, Harry-sensei! Goo mohning!"

For the oldest kids, however, we pulled out all the stops short of buying more materials. Scary music and sound effects, dropping or throwing dummy vampire bats, a clip from "The Ring" on a loop, the whole 8.229 meters. Having been volunteered for haunted house detail (rather than the just-as-frantic Pumpkin UFO Toss, Mystery Box, or Bat Fishing), I opted to reprise my role from last year as Hand Grabbing At You From Under A Table. I'd like to think that I gave a decent performance--I did the whole bit, knocking on the table, shaking it, growling, etc. etc. Really a classic interpretation of GRR I AM A MONSTER AND I WANT TO EAT YOU.

By and large, I was met with three reactions from the children. The first and most common was a kid being taken aback, then laughing and saying something along the lines of "Oh, it's Harry-sensei. Hallo!" (This is what's known as the correct reaction). The second was, predictably, wailing, tears, screaming. No peeing, thankfully--I've learned that children seem to pee in response to boredom, not fear.

The third and most immediately distasteful reaction was kicking. A lot of the older kids, especially the boys, have had their natural fear responses (and common sense, and social skills) replaced with an all-purpose urge to bellow, "Orra! Monster! I will fight you!" and unleash their 3 feet of fury on the presumed Bad Guy. The more well-mannered ones restrained themselves and just spent the whole trip through the haunted house proclaiming, "全然怖くない！", or, "I'm not scared at all!" These boys accounted for 30% of the kicks that I got from under the table--the other 70% were performed by a single boy who went through the haunted house at least three times for the single purpose of wreaking furious vengeance upon any animate or inanimate object that happened into his field of vision. He punched every prop and every teacher at least once. These are the children they get to star in condom commercials in other countries.

No known photo exists of this kid, as he moves far too fast to be captured on film. Please enjoy this visual approximation.

At one point, Ahiru room's glass door was broken, a spiderweb of glass far scarier than the fake ones within the room. It has not yet been determined if it was broken by the 2nd category of children in panic or the 3rd in rage. This did illustrate for me the important role that a haunted house plays from an educational standpoint, however. I'm not one to enjoy the screams of children (except for a couple of children in particular); one of the 6-year-old girls would only go through the haunted house bawling, clinging to a teacher's torso like a terrified koala, and screaming how terrified she was. My soft side (admittedly, my largest side) felt for her...after all, I hate scary movies, I never went to a haunted house, I ran screaming out of movie theaters during the scary parts of "Temple of Doom" and "Independence Day." Why should we make kids go through such an unpleasant experience? Just for yuks?

No, I think I've just finally reached that stage of adulthood where I understand the meaning of Luke Skywalker's trial at the tree on Dagobah: as humans, we need to know how we respond to fear, and we need to practice being afraid so we can deal with it throughout our lives. The Harumidai haunted house is an extremely safe environment for children to experience a fear response -- when it was finished, some kids flat-out denied having been afraid, some realized with relief that it was just the teachers in masks, but the kids I respected the most were the ones who admitted that they had cried but now had clearly calmed down. If nothing else, the smarter kids learned that the things they saw couldn't actually hurt them, and that ghosts, mummies, and disembodied werewolf hands aren't things to really be feared.

After I finished the school's final party last Saturday (a multi-stage affair that ran from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.), I was far too full of Halloween spirit to do anything but go home and collapse; there were parties aplenty on the town that night, but I couldn't take so much as one more "Boo." Wake me when it's Guy Fawkes Day.

But first, for your viewing enjoyment, a selection of adorable pictures of children in Halloween costumes. Enjoy!

Awww, right? Brief tangent about Halloween costumes: I'd imagine the most popular costumes here are pretty similar to the most popular ones in the states. Lots of Transformers, lots of princesses, a smattering of Spider-men (Spiders-man?). Probably #1 for the girls was Fresh Pretty Cure (basically Sailor Moon), and #1 for the boys would be Goseija (the show Power Rangers was stolen from...yep, it's still running). The only real cultural difference here would be that a lot of boys were dressed as witches, too, with the hat and everything. Seems "witch" isn't quite as gendered in Japan as it is in the States. Go fig. Anyway, back to it:

And here's what I looked like while taking all of these pictures. Even when my last reserves of enthusiasm for Halloween have run dry (which takes about 20 minutes), my enthusiasm for pirates is boundless.

I Am the 2.4% (Of the 1.22%)

So much of the news of the last 2 1/2 years has felt like something out of a dream, stories or fantasies that only exist on the Internet or the occasional English-language newspaper that I pick up: nobody here talks about the obstructionism of the Republicans or the economic crisis in Europe, and if they did, I wouldn't understand a word of it.  Pretty much the last news to come out of America and land over here was the death of Michael Jackson, which they still can't stop talking about (I have 7-year-old students who can Moonwalk).  I have a small group of gaijin coworkers and friends, of course, but most of them hail from places other than America -- according to a reputable source, Americans make up just 2.4% of the gaijin population -- which certainly broadens the conversation, but I don't hear all that much about American politics.  My only political involvement here consists of talking about the Daily Show with my Canadian coworker and talking about the news with Jenn (which is awesome, though we do tend to read the same articles and blogs).

The last month has been a hard time to be so cut off from what's going on Stateside...If I weren't here in Japan, I would be Occupying Wall Street or any other available thoroughfare I could find.  I'll spare the blogosphere a rehash of the typical laundry list of middle class liberal complaints -- others have said it a lot better than I would be able to --

Click to enlarge enough to read the whole thing.  Seriously, do it, this is awesome.

--suffice to say that I think the OWS movement will be my generation's defining moment that will finally get the damn Boomers off our backs about getting off the couch and fighting the power already. I consider myself an ideological hippie through and through, but I've got enough of a pessimistic streak that I honestly never thought a movement like this would come along; I assumed that the only angry mobs I'd be seeing in the newspaper were Tea Partiers waving guns and complaining about how hard it is for white suburbanites in the richest country of the history of the world (I mean, think of the unreasonable burden of income taxes they're being made to pay!  No group on earth has ever been persecuted this way except for everyone in the history of fucking civilization.  *Ahem*  End digression.)

In fact, one thing that (perhaps unwisely) defuses my rage at the Man is the knowledge that, like the Tea Baggers, I am one privileged motherfucker.  Not the Man himself, perhaps, but one who has benefitted from His doings...a Manling, if you will, or a Manlet.  As a white, heterosexual male, I've never had to face discrimination based on my origins or appearance; I'm 100% free of debt; I've gotten an awesome liberal arts education and two degrees for free.  In short, what do I have to complain about?  I guess it's typically been the privileged folk spearheading revolutions in the past, from the landed slave-owners at the original Tea Party through to all of the non-privileged non-white participants in Second Wave Feminism who had to remind the most prominent members of their movement that they and their mothers had been in the workplace for generations out of necessity.  In any case, it's a bit of a schlep to Occupy KC or StL, so I'll do the absolute minimum for the cause and...talk about Japan? Sure.

Returning to the idea of privilege, I really think that I've traded one privilege for another by coming to Japan.  On the one hand, I'm comfortable here, treated very politely by one and all, safe from the scary job market in the States.  I'm afforded some special treatment: I don't have to work the ridiculous hours my Japanese coworkers do, and I don't have to pretend that I have no desires other than doing my job satisfactorily.  On the other hand...

...This is an ad for my school's Halloween Party.  The line at the bottom reads "Gaikokujin no sensei to asobou yo!"  Pretty much translates as: "Come and play with our foreigners!"  I'm a token here.  A novelty for my curly hair and skin tone.  Part of the "Gaijin Zoo," as a friend of mine puts it.

The thing is, I can live with it.  But then, I signed up to be here; people who are subjected to this kind of fetishization or disenfranchisement in the US (and they are many) are being done wrong.  I'm a minority here, with a lot of the attached negative baggage, but I get that special treatment, too.  Some gaijin here make it their life's mission to fight this kind of divisiveness, as previously mentioned.  More power to them (if that expression makes any sense under the circumstances) for fighting the good fight. I'm not invested enough in living in Japan to put too much of myself into changing this country, nor do I really feel like I have the right to as a temporary resident (though I did march in the Kansai Rainbow Parade last year).

As it is, I'm kind of struggling with what my responsibilities are as an expat.  Is it enough to send in an absentee ballot every couple of years?  Do I have a duty to try and make Japan better for guys like me, who tend to have it pretty great everywhere already?  Is there more I can be doing to thwart the plans of the Owners in the US from over here?

Aw, who am I kidding?  By next year the Republicans will make sure absentee (Democrat) ballots are trashed or prosecuted for voter fraud.

Jenn, Empress of the Desert

As mentioned in the last post, Jenn and I got in a lot of traveling in a relatively (read: insanely) short period of time, opting for an overnight trip to Funkytown Japan and a camping trip to Desert World in the same week.  Tottori, located on the sea of Japan, is actually the least populous prefecture in the country, with a population of just holy-cow-that's-a-lot-of-people.  We opted to spend our 36 hours there mostly in the prefectural capital, Tottori (imaginative people, the Japanese).

When I informed my coworkers, friends, and neighbors that we took a trip to Tottori, responses ranged from "...Huh," to "Really?  Tottori?" (they said the same thing about Tokushima, as it happens).  As always, it seems our travel destination calculations were flawless. Wikitravel, our go-to free, mostly accurate, and above all, free travel guide, opens its section on Tottori with a description of a bleak Japanese tragic novel about a desert town that imprisons visitors in an enormous sand pit and forces them to dig for their lives.  It then goes on to point out that Tottori's locals "are certainly friendly — and thoroughly unlikely to strand you at the bottom of a sand pit."  *Cue "Vacation" by The Go-Gos*

As long as we were cramming new experiences into as short a time as possible, we also opted to camp rather than pay for a hotel.  This was the first time that Jenn and I had done anything related to camping that doesn't involve the Rocky Horror Picture Show, so we were thrilled at all the possibilities that awaited us in the exciting field of sleeping out of doors.  What new bugs and/or poisonous plants would we discover in our sleeping bags?  I borrowed the necessary equipment from a coworker, promising that we would return it in pristine condition barring any unforeseen circumstances such as dirt.

On the first day of our trip, we fell out of the early-morning bus and promptly made plans to leave town: according to Wikitravel, in a nearby village was a beach that was made up of a special silica sand that, so the legends go, "sings" under one's feet on a hot day.  After the slowest train ride we've ever experienced in Japan (the train was ten whole minutes late, if you can believe such an atrocity) and an hour-long hike around twisting, pedestrian-hostile roads, we found our way to Idegahama Beach.  The sand, while pleasant, was remarkable in its resemblance to all other sand on the planet.  With one exception, that is: due to the sand's ultrafine nature, we are still turning it up in our shoes, pockets, suitcases, and hair.  No singing.

Thanks to another late train, we made it to our campground approximately an hour after the sun had gone down, so we proceeded to play my favorite game: Assemble an Unfamiliar Tent in the Dark.  I can only assume that we won, though I may have broken the rules when I frantically called the tent's owner and begged for help.

The next morning, we packed up our numerous heavy possessions and set off for Tottori Dunes, which our map claimed was adjacent to the campground. Indeed, just a short walk took us to the Western end of the Dunes.  Most of the attractions, including the largest dune and the guest center (including the restaurant and restrooms) were on the Eastern end.  Pay attention, there will be a quiz on this in a bit.

The Tottori Dunes, which are legally required to be described as either "majestic" or "mysterious," are Tottori's main tourist draw.  Tourists flock from across Japan and all over -- well, OK, just Japan, really -- to visit the Tottori Sand Dunes and...look at them, I guess.  They're good for looking at.  You can also get your picture taken while riding a camel, but we ruled out this option from the start; I established a firm "no camels" policy when Jenn and I first moved in together, and I see no reason to revisit it years later (unless camels have stopped being total fuckers at some point in the last 5 years).  So, no camels for us, then, but fortunately for we city-weary travelers, the Dunes also abutted the ocean, meaning one side of them was a lovely beach (this kind of undercut the Mystery of the Dunes for me).

So, finding ourselves at the edge of the Dunes, we decided to take what appeared to be a short hike down the dunes to the beach rather than make the long trek Eastward to the visitor's center.

Our spirits at the outset, as you can see, were high and glamorous.  The beach was only a quick 20 minute stumble down the huge mountains of sand.  When we got to the water's edge, where we planned to relax and plan out the rest of our day, we were shocked to see that the beach was all but abandoned.  What suckers, these Japanese tourists!  What were they thinking, paying huge sums of money to sit on a resentful pack animal and get their picture taken when there was beautiful nature right in front of them?

After a nice, leisurely swim, we packed up our possessions once again and set off to climb the dunes back to the bus stop, near where we had camped the night before.  It was right about then when the fatigue set in; as it turns out, it's considerably harder to climb UP an enormous mound of sand than to shuffle down it.  Within 10 minutes, we had expended all of our energy.  Within 20, we had finished the last of the water we brought.  After 25 minutes we had turned into every cliche of dying of thirst in the desert we had ever seen in the movies (you know, "go on without me, can't go on any longer," imagining each other with a hamburger for a head, etc.).  In all, it took us about an hour and a half to get back to the top of the hill. By the time we got back to the city center, we had earned sunburns that actually radiated 6 inches away from our bodies.  Deserts, it seemed, were not your average vacation spot for a reason.

At last, Pismo Beach!  And all the sand we can eat!

It will be a long, long time before we plan a vacation around the concept that there is a lot of sand somewhere.

You Will Dance, Sucka

So, in an inspired bout of oh-god-I-can't-take-it-anymore, Jenn and I decided to make up for some lost traveling by cramming several months' worth of vacations into a week. To start, we decided to visit the smallest of Japan's main islands, Shikoku (literally, "Fourth Country"). Shikoku is known for the 33 Temple Pilgrimage, one of Japan's most actual pilgrimage routes, and for being smaller than other Japanese islands. It also boasts a wealth of naturally-occurring tourist traps.

Which brings me to as close to a point as we'll get in this blog: Japan has mastered the art of tourism in an interesting way that will probably be mimicked the world over in coming decades. In general, when sightseeing, the Holy Grail for our generation of privileged white people is Authenticity. We don't want the typical tourist crap that's just made up for foreigners, your Disneylands, your Biggest Balls of Twine and what-have-you; we want real, historical sites and cultural artifacts that are simultaneously off the beaten path AND easily accessible without a car, of and for the local culture AND having information in English for our benefit, unspoiled by tourists AND...y'know, with a gift shop.

Which makes Japan a perfect country for the modern traveler! Japan is absolutely full of tourist hot spots that are completely, authentically historical...in that they were invented for tourists decades (if not centuries) ago. Beppu, for instance, the place that we visited in March, is renowned as a vacation spot for its public baths, which are counted among the 17th century list of the Three Great Hot Springs of Japan (which was written to drum up tourism, more or less).

Also, the whole town smells like egg farts.

Most every city and region in Japan, no matter how remote, is famous in Japan for some specialty produce or snack or folk tale or festival or soft drink that is, almost without exception, blown up in importance to draw in tourists. But, apart from Kyoto and Tokyo, most of these were meant for Japanese tourists, which means they're all nicely authentic, and since they've been passing around lists of the great tourist spots and appropriate souvenirs for centuries, everything is perfectly historical, too!

Case in point: Tokushima. The town on Shikoku that lies on the end of our local train/ferry line, it is raved about on Wikitravel as "pleasant enough to pass through on your way to more interesting places." Fun ahoy!


We arrived, seasick from our two-hour ride on a dingy little commuter ferry, full of excitement and not a lot else. This being just a weekend jaunt, we had taken the preparatory measures of making a hotel reservation at the cheapest place we could find, and...that's about it, really. We've gotten good enough at traveling within Japan by now that we decided to put our faith in the Tourist Information kiosk that we knew would be headquartered in the train station. Sure enough, we found a wealth of information about the Awa Odori Matsuri, the traditional dance festival known across Japan (sound familiar yet?), which would be happening about a week after we were due to leave. Worry not, though: at the Awa Odori Information Center, located 500 m. from the train station, it was Awa Odori every day!


That evening, we took the special Awa Odori Bus that took us from our hotel to the Awa Odori Information Center for the Awa Odori Recital, where we proceeded to sit around until the curtain rose on dozens of people in festival garb, dancing their little hearts out for us. We were the only Westerners in the crowd, an unusual occurrence for us, especially at a touristy place like this. This guy then proceeded to teach us the one step involved in the Awa Odori, which I will now pass on to you:

Raise your right hand and extend your left foot. Withdraw both, then extend your left hand and right foot. Repeat, occasionally yelling something indistinct.

In sum, this dance has about half as much to it as the Hokey Pokey. Still, we watched, attention captured by the sheer scale of the colors and costumes. A festival every day, indeed!


After a good half hour of this, the audience was entreated to come up and dance with the townspeople. Now, having read my fair share of H. P. Lovecraft stories, I know better than to accept an offer to participate in a town's ancient ritual; that's a sure way to be burned alive or sacrificed to an Old One. (Plus, I have a phobia of audience participation that has persisted through two degrees, a high school acting career, a year of musical performance and four years of teaching. For whatever reason, whenever a performer looks my way -- be they a Renaissance Faire wench, a stage hypnotist, or a really anyone with a microphone -- I instantly find religion and pray to anyone who might listen that I don't get noticed.) Still, this being a special occasion, we made an exception; after all, Awa Odori doesn't come along every d...hm. Somewhat sheepishly, we got up and shook what our mothers gave us. When the dust cleared and we were asked to return to our seats, Jenn had been snagged with a lei, which meant that she was marked to remain on stage. I was about 70% sure this wasn't a human sacrifice thing, so I grabbed the camera and sat down quietly.

What followed was an exercise in paranoia made hideously real: the old guy running the show began interviewing the four "winners" one by one, asking more or less incomprehensible questions. The most I could get out of the first two interviews was "ramen." When he came to Jenn, he very politely asked in Japanese, "Do you speak Japanese?", which Jenn answered affirmatively. Unduly encouraged, he then rattled off a series of quick grunts and whistles*, then held the microphone to her expectantly.

Jenn answered very well with her brilliant pronunciation, though judging by the dude's reaction, they may have been answers to the wrong questions. Still, Jenn knows how to work a crowd: she got a great laugh out of the crowd with her Osaka slang (as an imperfect parallel, imagine a Japanese tourist visiting Manhattan and saying "y'all come back now, hear?"). For her valor, she was awarded a beautiful Awa Odori handkerchief.

And thus our trip to Tokushima more or less came to an end. We'd seen most of what the town had to offer already, in that we had been to the Awa Odori Center. The next day, we spent several hours getting to the town's other sight, the Indigo Dying Center, which was a blast, and then several more hours getting back to the ferry. What can we take away from this adventure? Well, up to this point, I had tried to take a Dave Barry line as my motto: "Nobody cares if you can dance. Just get up and dance." Personally, I still believe it, but now I know that participating without self-consciousness is no guarantee that they won't make fun of you in front of a crowd. Just another day on display in the Gaijin Zoo!

Next: Gaijin Patrol World 2-1: Hot, Hot Desert!

*As previously mentioned, Old-Man-Japanese is its own breed of crazy. I think our Japanese has gotten pretty damn good, evidenced by the fact that we can do all kinds of tasks like pay bills, order in restaurants, complain about the weather, and apologize for our rudness -- the full suite of useful Japanese, really -- but every sentence uttered by a man over 60 sounds like barking to me. For instance, rather than saying "Ohayou Gozaimasu" to greet people in the morning, the old dudes at my school shorten it to "Nf!"