Boo! I guess...

I hate this cold. Maybe because I don’t have a blanket or a jacket or insulation. But the primary reason goes deeper than that. It ruins my shower time. I love my showers. They are hot and warm and relaxing. I spend too much time in the shower every day, but it’s worth the water bill to me. Sometimes I just stand there and hug the stream of hot water because I love it so much (by the way, as far as you’re concerned, I wear a bathing suit in the shower so please don’t imagine me naked). But the euphoria of that steamy streamy can’t be enjoyed, because I know in the back of my mind that it will soon come crashing down.

You see, in Japan, Your toilet and your shower are in separate rooms. In fact, your shower is a room covered in rubber from floor to ceiling, so you can splash water on the walls and floor, curtain free. Thus, there is no place to put your towel. Thus, you have to open your door to get your towel. Do you see where this is going?

Japanese homes also don’t have insulation. I don’t know why. I guess being warm just never caught on. But whatever the reason, the fact remains that a Japanese home is pretty much just as cold as the outside. So when I’m feeling nice and happy warm, filled with joy from the steam on my nape, the last thing I want to do is open the door. But I have to.

And it sucks! Opening the door just crack is like having Mr. Freeze, Captain Cold, Ice Man, and Samus Aran blast their ice beams straight at your nipples. Then your skin tightens, you shake, grimace, cringe, and start hating puppies. Nobody wants to feel that way. Especially me. I love puppies!

That’s an extreme example of my hate for cold, though. I really hate cold in all its forms. I’ve hated it all my life. But there was always one thing that I looked forward to when it began to get chilly. One thing that kept me from lashing out at small children in the park. The Holiday Season.

I speak, of course, of that wonderful conglomerate of used-to-be Christian holidays that force us to drown our sorrows in a mix of candy corn, turkey, and presents. I’ve loved these mostly-empty celebrations of nothing for all the superficial reasons. And being in Japan did not change my intense excitement for the holidays. As soon as that chill hit my pasty white arms, I thought, “Ah, I may be filled with rage, but at least Halloween is coming soon.” Yes, I love Halloween. I love candy, costumes, and creepy/grisly horror. So when my school asked me to give a Halloween lesson, I was ecstatic.

So I began planning my lesson with love and care. I even made my own game instead of stealing one from a website! It was going to be grandiose.

The day came when I gave my first Halloween lesson. I showed the ‘This is Halloween’ clip from “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, I showed pictures of my old Halloween costumes, we watched the SpongeBob Halloween special, and finished with my game. I must say one of my proudest moments was getting a classroom full of Japanese kids to say “Don’t cross the streams.” I really wanted to get them to say “This is my boomstick,” but out of context, that line could get me in trouble.

So I taught the lesson to class after class, waiting for my Halloween excitement to rise, as it normally did. But around the sixteenth, I was no more excited about Halloween than I was on the first. Where was my Halloween spirit? Time marched forward, as it tends to do. The eighteenth. The twentieth. Nothing. Lesson after lesson. The twenty-third. Nothing.

Now JET Halloween parties were being planned. People (foreign people, I mean) were talking about costumes and candy. But for some reason, I didn’t care. For the first time, I didn’t want to dress up. I didn’t want candy or scary movies. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.

Finally, after one of my lessons, I asked a student, “Did you enjoy Halloween lesson?” He thought for a while, mostly because he was piecing together the English. Finally he looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Ma ma,” he said.

Ma ma? Ma ma?! My lesson was better than ma ma! It was sugoi! It was jouzu! But it certainly wasn’t ma ma. I went to students from previous classes.

“Do you remember? Halloween lesson? Harowin oboiteiru? Was it good?” They would think and then say “ma ma,” or “so-so,” or “okay.”

This did not compute. This hardcore did not compute! They were laughing in class. They were entranced by SpongeBob’s ghostly antics. They had fun pretending I was a zombie and hitting me with umbrellas. So how could it be ma ma?

Then it hit me. Japan is the country that Halloween forgot. No one celebrates Halloween here. No one here knows the true meaning of Halloween. The schools don’t have pumpkins and ghosts. TV is missing horror movie marathons and ghostly versions of popular cartoons. The stores are devoid of the unavoidable command to buy oceans of candy to give to strangers, lest your house be egged and pooped on. That’s the true meaning of Halloween. It’s about everyone being surrounded by Halloween crap until you hate yourself for not participating.

So that’s why the kids didn’t get excited about one of the best holidays ever. They can’t be. They’re not surrounded by the commercialized hype. And that’s why this year, I just don’t care about one of my favorite holidays. Tomorrow is Halloween and I don’t have a costume. I had an idea, but I just didn’t care enough to put it together. I don’ care about candy. I don’t care because Japan doesn’t care, and I wanted it to care so very much.

But despite this, I’m still going to the Halloween party. I’m still going to watch every Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode I have. I’m still going to play through Darkstalkers with every character. I’m still going to eat bitter Japanese chocolate that doesn’t taste very good because they have no concept of sugar here. Because it’s the right thing to do! It’s the Halloweenie thing to do.

And I know that once I shoddily put together a costume and smatter fake blood on myself, I’ll feel better. I always feel better when I’m covered in blood. So Happy Halloween everyone! I hope your Halloween is scary and bright. I will do my best to make the most of this non-Halloween I have coming up. I’ll do it…for America! Peace out. I leave you with these Halloween drawings.



















This one is just a Halloween greeting I made. Happy Halloween!





















Zombie fighting guy. He has no name. Drawn on crappy paper.



















Zombie fighting guy again. Also, the first time I've tried shading in about two years.

















A gross monster? He just looks like a dumb Ultraman monster to me.

















One of the teachers at my school requested a comic for her birthday. Her birthday happens to be on Halloween.

Obento, My Bento

My allergies are pretty bad here. Just before I sat down to write, my eyes started itching. No big deal, of course. After all, I have Japanese eye drops easily within reach. And reach I do.

Drip. Drip. One in each eye.

There’s a short silence. The world stops. This is the part where I remember. “Wait, these drops burn like Massachusetts maiden in 1692.” Then the burning begins. I squint and grunt and make sounds unlike any I’ve made previously in my life. But that doesn’t stop the burning. You would think this kind of sensation is not conducive to destroying allergies, but it is. After a good five minutes, I get up off the floor and my eyes feel perfectly fine.

The only thing is, the drops smell like bleach. They really, really do. And if I find out that these eye drops are just bleach in a tiny bottle, I’ll be really mad. Because I could be getting a huge bottle of bleach to pour in my eyes for the same price as the little one. Also, putting bleach in my eyes might be bad.

But onto the topic of the day. This is a serious topic, so no more of this funny business. We can’t joke about things like this. It’s life or death. I’m talking, of course, about food.

Food is important. It feeds all the animals and some of us humans. It feeds everything from the mighty blue whale to the tiniest of walnuts with eyes painted on it. Everything needs (or at least wants) food. And I am no exception. I need food.

Before I came to Japan, I knew there would be some adjusting. Food is different here. My stomach, I knew, would have trouble adjusting to unprocessed food with no high fructose corn syrup. But it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. It couldn’t be too hard. After all, I like Japanese food. It can’t be all bad, right?

I was right. It wasn’t all bad. Much of it was, and still is, very very good. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that most of the food here is “fantastically delicious” or “deliciomongous” or evern “satisfactory. But there is one form of food I hate. One that is so foul, that it hurts me to say its name. Obento.

Technically, obento isn’t a food, but rather a collection of foods in a bento box. Bento boxes have little compartments for dropping random foods into. My school doesn’t have a cafeteria, so the best thing they can offer the teachers is a bento delivery service.

If you look up obento in google images, you won’t see what I eat. Probably because your family filter is on. The bentos we get are loaded with preservatives to keep them lasting for the seven weeks it takes to ship to my school. It usually consists of one main compartment of some sort of fried fish or battered animal, and then several small compartments consisting of various slimes. Yes, they are slimes. Sometimes you can see food you recognize swimming in the slimes, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s slime.

Whenever I see a new slime in my bento I lean over to one of my kids.

Me: “What is this?”

Kid: (Something in Japanese).

Me: “Is it good?”

Kid: No.

When I first got my obentos, I approached them differently. “I’m in a new country, with a different culture,” I thought. “I should be open to new things.” So I ate my slime. Every day, whether I liked it or not, I ate my slime. Sometimes, the slime looked like mashed up leaves mixed with coffee. Leaves are kind of like vegetables, so I would lie to myself and say it was good for me.

Sometimes the slime was corn mixed with mayonnaise. Corn is good for you, right? What about chewy slivers of plastic fish bait? That’s got lots of vitamin A. More like Vitamin suck.

Oh, did I mention these obentos are cold? Yes, not a lick of heat in them. So even the fried animal, which would probably taste good, is cold and soaking in its own greases. Needless to say, I didn’t look forward to lunch.

“Well stupid,” you might say. “Why didn’t you just stop buying them?” Because I was trapped. You can’t buy a bento-a-day. No. You have a to buy a long string of tickets to last you the month. Now who looks stupid, you idiot!

So I was cornered. My back was against the wall and a seven-foot tall bento monster was in front of me insisting that I eat him. And eat I did. Day in and day out. Slime after slime. Until the day came, yesterday, when my tickets ran out.

“Huzzah!” I cried, like a Ren Fest visitor accepting his custom leatherwork. My captivity was over. But what to do now? I had to eat something. I had to pack a lunch, but the lunches I’m used to packing in America are impossible here. Sandwiches are right out, as are snacks not containing octopus. So what then?

Soba.

I had been told weeks ago by my friend Dan that soba is the quickest, easiest, and healthiest lunch in the universe. You just boil the noodles, put them in a container, and mix them with broth. Done.

So I went to the store and bought the noodles and the broth. I came home and happily boiled the soba. I stored it in a tupperware container for the next day. But what about the broth? It came in a bag, and I wasn’t about to take a bag of liquid to school and cut it open over my desk. Likewise, I wasn’t going to put the broth in any tupperware that could come open in my bag. So no broth. Big deal. I could handle it.

I got to school today. I taught some lessons, talked to some children, then lunch rolled around. I pulled my container of soba out of the staff fridge and sat down to eat. To my surprise, I found that soba, like most wet foods put in a refrigerator, sticks together. But it was still edible and it wasn’t obento.

I stabbed at my cube of soba, doing my best to cut it with my chopsticks. After the first bite I thought, “Wow, this tastes like nothing. But nothing is better than bento.” So I chewed forward. After the second bite I thought, “Wow, this is the most boring thing I’ve ever eaten.”

And yes, it was boring. Bland does not describe its flavor. Mind-numbingly dull is a better description. It’s like there’s a party in your mouth and everyone’s invited, but nobody came.

Halfway through the meal, I was literally in pain from how bored I was. But I wouldn’t go back. I couldn’t go back to those bentos! Never! So I pressed on. I chomped and chewed through bite after skull-bashingly dull bite. It was as boring as a school field trip to an apple orchard or watching a Mickey Mouse cartoon.

By the end, my stomach was full, but my mouth was about ready to divorce me. And sadly, I still have no way to carry my broth to school. My neighbor Nikki said to get a thermos, but I fell asleep after I came home from school today. When I woke up it was 8:00pm, which is far too late for any store to be open in Japan.

I must be off to bed soon, as it is late again and I can’t risk random napping tomorrow too. But before I go, one thing:

I have recently decided that Fleischer's Bimbo cartoons are the best thing ever. At least the very early ones are. While every other cartoon studio in the early thirties was looping the same dancing cows for forty seconds at a time (I’m talking to you, Disney), Fleischer studios was saying, “Hey, what weird crap can we make Bimbo do?” And man were they weird! So here’s a Halloween toon for you, to usher in the season!

I have to finish preparing my Halloween lesson before I go to bed. Those kids are gonna get their eyebrows scared off. Good morning to my friends in America and Oyasumi to my friends here.

Teaching and Screeching

So I’m a teacher now. Like that’s my actual job. I often forget, because I’ve done it so many times as a half job. I’ve been a camp counselor, a teaching intern, a substitute teacher, and some kind of baby watcher. So I’m very used to this kind of job, but I find it hard to fathom that I am now an actual paid-by-the-city teacher. A sensei even. Actually, since my paycheck comes from the city and not my school, I’m actually considered a public servant. Pretty cool, eh?

Even so, I sometimes don’t think of myself as a teacher, much less a sensei. Sensei (I’m told) literally means, “honorable master.” So as an “eigo no sensei” I am considered an honorable master of the English language. I like English a lot, and I studied it more than other kids in my high school, but I’m really no master of the language (as you can tell from this blog). Still comparatively speaking, I am a master in Japan. Just as any Japanese three-year old is a Japanese master to me.

There are a few things that are expected of every teacher. 1.) Teach the thing you’re hired to teach and 2.) keep the kids in line. Number one is not a problem. I speak English. I can wing it. Number two…that’s another story.

Every ALT has a predecessor, someone whose job they take over. This predecessor is supposed to answer all the questions specifically pertaining to your school. My pred (as the cool kids say) was a super nice girl named Christina. She answered all my questions, including my most burning one. “What are the kids like?”

“They’re nuts,” she said. “They basically run the school. And you’re in the biggest middle school in Shiga, so there’s around nine hundred of them.” She proceeded to tell me a number of stories about her lovely children, which really scared me up a notch. I’d dealt with rowdy American kids, but not very well. How was I going to deal with nine hundred kids who didn’t speak my language?

This began to bother me. It bothered me at home, on the drive to Maryland, during pre-departure orientation, on the plane, in the hotel, at Tokyo orientation, in my dreams, and up until I moved into my new apartment. That’s where I met my next-door and upstairs neighbors, Katie and Nikki.

Now, if you haven’t met Katie and Nikki, they’re great. The end,

So the three of us went to an izakaya during my first week there. Nikki is now on her second year, and Katie is on her third collective year in Japan. So they know what they’re talking about. I asked outright, “What should I do about crazy kids who don’t listen to me? What if they can tell I’m a dork?”

“Japanese kids are just like American kids,” they said. “They want to be cool and want to show you they’re cool. So all you have to do is outcool them, which isn’t hard because you’re foreign.” Be cool. I could do that. Besides, no one knew me here, so I just had to hide the fact that I was a nervous buffoon. Piece of cake.

“Also,” Katie added, and this is important. “Don’t be afraid to freak out the squares. If the kids want to act a fool, just act a fool bigger than them. That’ll shut them up.”

“And,” Nikki added to the add. “Be yourself.” Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. I had to act cool.

So with those words ringing in my ear chasms, I headed to my first day of school. On the bike ride to school I got nervous. I arrived, parked my bike, and turned around. It was a sea of baby-type Japanese kids. Everywhere. Some looked at me. Some laughed. Most whispered. “Be cool,” I thought. “They don’t know you’re not cool.”

“Sup, dogs?” I said. No response, of course. It didn’t matter. I was emanating hipness.

Strutting down the hall, I felt like Sister Whoopi Goldberg when she first walked into that inner-city school. Kids were doing whatever they wanted, however they wanted. Many kids wore street clothes instead of their uniforms. One kids was punching a wall for unknown reasons. It was time to kick the coolness up a notch.

I did some funky fresh nodding to the kids that passed by. “Hey. Sup, yo. Morning, sucka.” They didn’t know what I was saying, but I sure was cool. “Whatevs,” said my strut. “Holla back,” said my one raised eyebrow. And into the teacher’s room. Safe among other nerds. All I had to do was keep up this cool act for two hundred fifty plus days and I’d be home free.

During the morning assembly, all nine hundred kids gathered in the gym for the start of the second term. I had to introduce myself in Japanese by reading a speech Katie wrote for me. But I had to make sure I was cool! This was going to be at least eight hundred kids’ first impression of me. Cool factor five, engage!

And it was cool. They called me up to the stage. I was nervous, but I showed no sign as my sock-covered feet nonchalantly bounced up the polished steps. I sashayed over to the podium. I slapped my speech down and proceeded to be the Will Smith of Japanese speeches. Inside, every organ was pumping every juice possible to keep my nervousness from spontaneously throwing my body into a frenzied panic. But outside, I was like John Wayne eating a hot dog.

The speech was done. No problem. My legs were shaky but I headed offstage. It should be noted here that God has an interesting way of teaching us things. This was a particularly funny way, in my opinion.

I made for the first step and my shaky, nervous, sock-covered foot slipped off the top step. Never one to be the outsider, my other foot decided to slip too.

CHUNKITA-CHUNKITA-CHUNKITA-BOOMF! went my hiney down each stair and onto the floor. I sat in complete shock. “It’s okay, Michael,” I thought. “You can salvage this. Just jump up and say ‘ta-da’ or do something funny. Ready, go!”

I stood up. I looked at the silent crowd. My voice squeaked, “merp…” Silence. I shuffled off to the side wall, where I prayed to find some asbestos to choke myself with. But the building was up to code. Crap.

Back in the teacher’s room, I prepared for my first lesson. It was the self-intro lesson using the videos I had in my last blog. I had been really excited about seeming cool up to that point, but now I was deflated. I couldn’t be cool. Everyone saw me for what I was. A clumsy square. A Doofy Von Chessclub, if you will. And nothing was going to change that. The kids would never respect me and I would never be able to settle their rowdy behinds with an outcool-type nature. Epic. Fail.

But, no matter how much I wanted to crawl into crisper drawer of the staff refrigerator and die, they were still paying me. And I had to earn my keep. So I schlepped off to my first class ever.

I arrived early to set up the video, load my powerpoint, and do other type things. I observed the class and the class observed me. In training, we were told that to control a class, you just have to control the rowdiest student. If he is in line, the rest of the class will be. It wasn’t long before I spotted the rowdiest student, mostly because he was standing on his desk, yelling obscenities.

The teacher arrived and I started my lesson. The lights went down and I turned on my computer to show my first slide. “Hello, everyone,” I said meekly. “My name is…” YELL! The rowdy kid yelled something in Japanese and the class burst in smatters of giggling. This was total teh suck, and it was only first class! The one country where it’s assumed I’m cool because I’m American, and I blow the ruse by falling off the stage! Why couldn’t I catch I break?

Then some words rang in my head. “Freak out the squares. Be yourself.” I looked around the room. They were just kids. I looked at Mr. Rowdy. I couldn’t outcool him, but I could definitely outcrazy him. If there was one thing I was sure of, I could outcrazy any kid any time.

I stood up straight. Meekly I announced, “My name is…” I clicked to my first slide. This picture:

























“MICHAEL!” I yelled, sporting the same pose in the picture. “Wicka-what, ducklings!” The class laughed, but the rowdy kid laughed loudest. I clicked to my next slide, a mishmash of Americana. “I am from AMERICA. America’s got planes!”

A kid in the back mimicked me, “Pureinsu!” I threw some crazy at him.

“That’s right, I said PLANES!” I pointed to him with a hand behind my ear.

“Pureinsu!” he yelled back.

“That’s right, y’all! Every child like planes.” I moved on.

Throughout the rest of the lesson, I yelled things, danced around, high-fived entire aisles, and covered kids’ heads with maps of the U.S. They liked the videos too. All in all, it went over pretty well. Some kids came up to talk to me afterward, and even the rowdy kid talked to me a little bit.

I’ve been doing that in every class ever since. Most classes it works really well, and some it doesn’t. The important thing is I’m having fun. I’m not scared of what a bunch of junior high kids think of me anymore, because whether they like or not, I’m going to be my crazy foreign self around them. Most of them like me and some of them don’t, but thems are the breaks.

In the end, I’m really happy about falling down the stairs. If I hadn’t, I might still be trying to keep up that cool crap, and I know now that it never would have worked. The kids expect cool, but they don’t expect crazy, and that’s what keeps them from thinking they can get away with stuff. And every so often, I’ll be in class or at my desk and I just start laughing. Silently at first, but then noticeably louder. Because falling down in front of nine hundred kids at once is just plain hilarious. Especially if you’re trying too hard to be cool.















And here's my Halloween board! Sorry if I seem pushy about showing this to people, but it took a long time. And I actually like it, unlike most things I make.