Worse Than Coleslaw

So I was in India for a while doing an internship with a human rights advocacy group. A big project I was given at my internship had me researching the history of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 1985. As part of this research, I was required to look at the debates held in Lok Sabha upon the bill’s passage and subsequent renewal every two years until 1995. A quick glance at the Lok Sabha website revealed—well it revealed a few things, not the least of which that the government of India really, really likes scrolling marquee—but also that the website only hosts electronic copies of debates after about 1995.

I was told that I’d need to go to a law library to find the relevant debates in hard copy. My boss suggested the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in the Teen Murti House, saying that the Indian Law Institute was a terrible place that should be avoided at all costs.

Visit the first (Thursday)

The first thing most foreign visitors will notice about the Nehru Memorial Library is that it is small. The Hillsdale Library that I go to in Portland is bigger, and that is just a branch in a mid-sized city in the United States, not a memorial library named for the George Washington of India in the capital of the second-most populous country in the world. Being in Delhi for any length of time without going crazy requires you to give everything the benefit of the doubt, though, so I justified the disparity to myself by saying that the Nehru Library was geared more towards high-level academic research and rare books and things like that. The fact that they didn’t have a giant section devoted to manga shouldn’t be held against them.

Admission for me to the Nehru Memorial Library required a letter written by my employer explaining why I needed access to the library. I also paid a fee of 200 rupees (about $5 US), which got me access for about two weeks from the date of my initial admission. To put that fee in perspective, a three-course meal at a dhaba near my apartment cost about 30 rupees, and a tuk-tuk ride from my apartment in South Delhi to the other side of the city cost about 100 rupees. So for India, this was a non-trivial amount of money, especially since the word “library” in the West is traditionally associated with buildings full of books that anyone can look at for free. Whatever, stuff costs money to maintain, and it would totally have been worth the five bucks to find the information I needed for my project.

After getting all my documents in order, I was given a slip of paper with dates written on it. I was led by a librarian to the back of the library and through an imposing door marked “Employees Only.” We walked through a large, dimly-lit storage area stacked all around with cardboard boxes and arrived at a door that looked as though it should lead to a meat locker. The librarian opened that door, which turned out to lead to a pitch-black room. A short man emerged from the darkness and said something in Hindi. The librarian turned to me. “No power,” he said.1

“Do you have any idea when the power will come back on?” I asked, thinking that maybe this was a regular occurrence.

The librarian thought for a moment. “Come back at three o’clock,” he said. It was about 11 o’clock in the morning. I had enough work to do for my internship, and little enough time to do it in, that I was not thrilled about waiting around for four hours for something that might not ever actually happen, especially since I was fighting a case of the Delhi belly and was not happy about being so long away from a clean toilet. I left, defeated, and resolved to return the following day.

Visit the second (Saturday)

I called my boss and asked him to call the Nehru Library to check if the power was working. He told me that calling the number on the website wouldn’t accomplish anything, and that I would need to just go there and take my chances. I’d checked the hours of operation of the Nehru Memorial Library when I was there, as the library’s website does not contain that information. The sign out front said that the library opened at 9:00 AM and closed at 5:00 PM, Tuesday through Friday. The day after my first visit I had too much work to do to spend the time messing with what I knew would be a trying and time-consuming experience, so I ended up waiting until Saturday to make the trek out there.

I caught a tuk-tuk to Govind Puri Metro Station, then rode the Violet Line up to Central Secretariat, then another tuk-tuk over to the front gate of the Nehru Museum, and walked from there to the library. The trip took about an hour.

The librarian, a middle-aged woman who looked exactly like you’d expect a librarian to look, squinted at the sheet of paper, then looked up at me, then back at the paper. “Go inside there,” she barked, handing me back the paper and motioning at a closed office door. I went through the door and found myself staring face to face with a short, bespectacled man sitting at a desk covered in loose papers. His hair had been dyed with henna. It was orange.

I gave the orange-haired man a rundown of what I was looking for. I said that I needed to go into the Parliamentary debates section.

“That section is closed today,” he said, in a tone of voice like you’d use on a little kid who was asking why dogs sometimes sniff each others butts.

“Closed? Why is it closed?” I asked. The question apparently struck him as being unreasonable.

“You need an escort to take you back to the room where the debates are held, and we do not have enough staff members to take you back there today.” This statement was problematic for at least two reasons. First, as far as I knew, I was not asking to view the original Constitution of India or some other sensitive or valuable materials. The debate volumes were just books. Second, there were at least three employees working at the library that day—none of whom seemed to be doing anything particularly important—and no library patrons that I could see.

The situation escalated. I handled it poorly. I may or may not have offered him a bribe to let me into the room with the debate volumes.

Visit the third (Tuesday)

Visits out in Delhi were best done with others, if for no other reason than it was nice to have someone there to witness crazy stuff happening and confirm that it was, indeed, happening, and also crazy.2 To that end, on my third trip out to the Nehru Library I brought along a coworker of mine who had just been given a short research assignment to complete which also required the perusal of some Lok Sabha debate volumes.

My coworker’s name was Ryan. Ryan and I lived in the same building in Tughlakabad Extension, along with most of the other interns at our office. We took a tuk-tuk over to the Nehru Museum, skipping the metro. Ryan needed to register with the library office. I waited out in front of the office while he got that sorted. When he came out of the office with his own little slip of paper with dates written on it, he said, “That guy in there just told me they didn’t have any Parliamentary debates here.”

“The guy in there is full of shit, then,” I said. Keep in mind, this wasn’t a case of some underpaid teenager dragging his ass while he made my latte at Stabucks. This was a highly skilled librarian working at a respected academic institution who so could not be bothered to get out of his chair to look some crap up on a computer that he would lie straight to my coworker’s face to get rid of him.

We walked up to the circulation desk again and explained what we needed. The librarian working the desk could not think of any new reasons to deny our request, so she called over another library employee who took us back to the room with the meat locker door. The lights were on this time. The room was drab and musty, with shelves that could be moved right up against each other using a crank in order to preseve space. Librarian guy told us to let him know when we were done and left to go attend to his other responsibilities.

The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act was passed in 1985. After five minutes of browsing the debates, I discovered that the index volumes for 1985 were missing. The index volumes were what I needed, as they would allow me to look up the name of the law to figure out where the debates concerning that law were located. I went looking for a librarian who could tell me where the index volumes were.

As I exited the room, a library employee stopped me. He asked me what I was doing. I told him what I was doing.

“Who told you that you could go back there by yourself?” he asked.

“A library employee,” I said. “I asked them where the debates were, and she called up some guy to take me back there.”

“Which employee?” he said.

“I didn’t think to take down his personal information,” I said.3

He looked nonplussed. “Wait here,” he said. He went up to the circulation desk. A few moments later a woman walked up to me and told me she would take me back to the room with the debates to supervise me and help me find what I needed. Once we had passed through the meat locker door, I explained my situation to her.

After scanning the shelves to determine that, indeed, the index volumes were missing, she said, “The index volumes are missing.”

“Yes, I know that,” I said. “Where are they?”

“We don’t have them,” she said.

“So how am I supposed to find anything in these volumes?”

“Just flip through the books until you find what you need,” she said.

The volumes for 1985 occupied an entire library shelf, literally tens of thousands of pages of information organized by date of the debates rather than by topic, making them particularly unsuited for locating specific information without an index volume. “Is there not an easier way to find this information?” I said. She seemed confused at my question.

“All you have to do is look through the books.” She took down a volume and mimed flipping through it. There was a pause as she looked at her watch. “However, it is almost lunchtime, so you will need to leave and come back after lunch when someone can be here to monitor you while you are in this room.”

“What time will lunch be over?” I asked.

“Come back about two o’clock,” she said. It was 11:30 in the morning.

I called up my boss to tell him what had happened. “A librarian mentioned that there was actually a Parliamentary library that should have all the index volumes,” I said. “Maybe I should try there.”

“You don’t want to go there,” he said. “Access to it is very heavily restricted.”

Aftermath

I never did find the information I was looking for. The closest I ever came was a People’s Union for Democratic Rights report entitled “Lawless Roads,” which contained references to the debates I needed but which only cited the source of that information as “Lok Sabha debates, relevant volumes” and was, thus, not helpful. Why any professional organization would think it was acceptable to half-ass their citations like that is beyond me.

It is my sincere wish that this blog post obtain a higher search engine page rank than the actual Nehru Memorial Library website so that all potential visitors to the library have a better sense of what they are getting themselves into. This does not seem like that outlandish of a goal because, as of this writing, only 38,454 people have ever viewed the Nehru Memorial Library’s website according to the oh-so-1995 visitor counter contraption they have at the bottom of the front page. My guess is that almost all of those visitors left without the information they were looking for. Likewise, any person searching for “Nehru Memorial Library” and “hours of operation” will not find what he or she is looking for on the actual Nehru Memorial Library website, which, as I have already mentioned, is terrible and useless.

From what I recall, the hours of operation are 9:00 to 5:00, Tuesday through Saturday.

It was never quite clear what people should call me when I was on the job.

To begin with, my first name, Matthew, carries with it some inherent difficulties when transliterated into Japanese, namely that there is no “TH” sound.  My students pronounced my name “Mah-shew,” which was pretty adorable, but did not really address issues of protocol and respect.  Depending on the school and the class, I was referred to as just “Matthew,” “Matthew-sensei,” “Matt-sensei,” “Mr. Matt,” or by the simple title of “Teacher.”  I didn’t even try to teach them my last name, which contains not only another “TH” sound, but also an “L.”

One day while we were walking to class, the Japanese English teacher I worked with at the School of Suck in Shizukuishi asked me about the origins of my name.

“The name ‘Matthew’ is from the Bible, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.  ”In the Bible, Matthew was one of the disciples of Jesus.”

“Disciples?” he said.

“Followers,” I said.  The teacher nodded and grunted in affirmation.  I said, “Matthew also wrote one of the books of the Bible.”

“In the New Testament,” the teacher said, eager to show off his knowledge of Western religion.

A few days after this conversation I was in a class being bombarded with queries; occasionally we would just give up on the lesson and let the students ask me questions about myself or American culture or whatever, usually translated from Japanese by this same teacher, who supervised me while I was teaching at the School of Suck.  The boys in that class were very interested to hear about guns and the American military, coming as they did from a place where guns are not present anywhere.  One of them asked me if I’d ever fired a gun before, to which I replied, “Yes.”

“What was it like?” they asked, via the Japanese instructor.

I thought about this for a moment.  ”It hurt,” I said.  There were disbelieving exclamations of “Ehhhhhhh?” and “Uso!” that were pretty common occurrences in these sorts of conversations.  To clarify my point, I mimed shooting a rifle and rubbed my shoulder with a pained look on my face, and most of the students seemed to understand that I was talking about the recoil, although it looked as though this was not something they’d ever thought of.

Another student asked, “In America, did you fire a gun often?”

“No,” I said.  ”I do not like guns.”  This was an oversimplification of my general attitude towards firearms, but oversimplification out of necessity was always the way of things in Japan.  My students apparently had a hard time grasping how I could have lived my whole life in the United States and not have spent all my time blowing the crap out of milk bottles and bowling pins.  What a wasted youth.  Then their Japanese teacher pointed at me and said “Christian desu,” by way of explanation.  The conversation that ensued lasted about 15 seconds, during which time I assume he was explaining the Christian idealization of nonviolence—not actually seen all that often in the Western world anymore, but it is technically in the books.  The conversation ended with a lot of nods and knowing smiles.  I did not have the patience or the inclination to clarify that many Christians in my country were actually super hardcore gun enthusiasts, or that calling me a Christian at all was kind of a stretch, thus perpetuating an idealized and largely incorrect  stereotype.

As I’ve said before, I didn’t really have the proper disposition to be a teacher.

A few weeks later I was experiencing a similar barrage of questions, this time from the girl’s side of one of the first year classes at the School of Suck.  It began with them wanting to know if I had a girlfriend in the United States, and also if I had a girlfriend in Japan.

For some reason, many of the girls at both of the schools where I taught were obsessed with getting me laid.  It was endearing, if a tad creepy.

I’d already opened Pandora’s Box by telling them that my regular tutor at the weekly Japanese class I attended was a woman about my age, and they wanted to know why we hadn’t hooked up.  None of my explanations for this lack of action were acceptable to them, and in fact even a year later I actually am still not quite sure about the answer to that question myself, except to say that I am very stupid.

Before the situation became too embarrassing—when my blush reflex is triggered my entire head turns the color of a tomato, which tended to cause a lot of chaotic situations when standing in front of 40 high school age kids who had limited experience with white people—and without any prompting from me, the Japanese instructor mentioned the Christian Hypothesis once more, and all was once again right with the world.  In fact, the Christian Hypothesis became a convenient explanation for all sorts of weird things that I did or failed to do during my tenure as ALT at the School of Suck.

This did not, however, save me from being berated for my failure to take a Japanese lover by that same asshole teacher one night when we split a pizza and a bottle of red wine at this little “Italian” place in Morioka.  I think he thought I was retarded—like, literally, retarded:

“Your Japanese instructor is a woman?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And she is how old?”

“24,” I said.

“And you are how old?”

“24,” I said.

To him it was as simple as that, and he shook his head while his face wore an exasperated frown.  I could have hated him for that, if I hadn’t already hated him for all of the bullshit he put me through during school hours.  Really, the only good thing to come of that evening would be later on when this guy commented how surprised he was at my alcohol tolerance.  “I did not expect you to be able to drink this much,” he said.

Only in Japan would that ever happen.

For a long time after returning back to the United States, months and months, I found myself uttering some permutation of the phrase, “Hey, I just got back from Japan,” to justify all sorts of lapses and indulgences on my part.  If I felt tired and didn’t feel like doing any job hunting on a particular day, I’d tell myself that that was okay, that I had a window of ennui in which it was acceptable for me to act like a college student on summer vacation.  If I didn’t feel like working out or eating healthy food, I’d tell myself that I had a grace period in which to allow myself to lapse.  My feeling was that I had just accomplished something truly extraordinary, and that doors should to life should be thrown open as I walked up to them like in the opening of “Get Smart.”  It felt as if I had just gotten back from Japan up until some vague point several months ago when I found myself thinking of Japan in a wistful and very-much-nostalgic sort of way as if that whole affair had gone down decades before. This shift has been reflected in many small ways throughout my daily life, as in a conversation with one of my coworkers during a slow period at work in which I was trying to justify why it was that I had not yet moved on to bigger and better things.

“Hey, give me a break, I said. “I just got back from Japan.” This must be what it feels like to return from a war, minus the post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Wasn’t that, like, five months ago?” she said.

I paused, my momentum reduced to zero, cocked my head to one side in consideration, and said, “I suppose.”

This conversation took place about six months ago.  I guess that means it’s time to move on.

Lately I’ve been occupied with applying to law school after taking the LSAT and receiving a pretty decent score.  At this point I’ve heard back from and been accepted to nine schools out of a total of 12 applications that I’ve submitted to various places.  Four or five of those schools to which I’ve been accepted are even ones that I actually want to go to, so well done there as well.  The next step is figuring out where I’ll best fit and how I’m going to pay for it.

My decision to pursue a JD flies in the face of several years of liberal arts posturing on the part of my high school and college self.  For a long time I always assumed I would be a writer and that that would become my regular day job through some nebulous process that I did not ever grasp, although I rarely let the label of “writer” define my actions by, you know, actually ever writing anything.  Years later I discovered that being a freelancer basically means that your job is to constantly be applying for jobs, and this career path seemed much less attractive to me.

“Worse Than Coleslaw” should begin being updated more regularly now that I have some distance and perspective on things and am no longer under the pressure to get it all down right now while it’s fresh in my mind holy crap there’s so much happening in every single second and how am I going to write about it all? I foresee future posts taking the form of short, disembodied anecdotes about my life in Japan that I never had the time or the patience to incorporate into a larger discussion of underlying themes or neuroses.  These will be interspersed with details on the law school admissions process, thoughts on the life of a twenty-something semi-recluse, and any other stupid thing that I feel like writing about.

I’ve come to the slow realization that I have already done the scariest thing I am ever likely to do, barring anything crazy like a combat situation or battling cancer.  Whatever else happens, I can rest easy in the knowledge that I spent seven months staring down a roomful after roomful of 30 or 40 catatonic Japanese high school kids and was somehow able to get through it.  I feel pretty good about whatever the future holds, confident as I am that I’ll find a way to handle anything that comes my way.

I have pictures up on Picasa from my trip to Kyoto in April, 2009.  Kyoto is a fun place that every human would benefit from seeing at least once in her or his life.  Here are some choice moments in all of their embedded Flash-y goodness:

I’m in the process of working through all the remaining material from my time in Japan: pictures, videos, amusing anecdotes, and all the rest. Towards that end, photos from my trip to Sapporo for the Snow Festival there can be found on my Picasa page. Or you can just look at the bottom of this entry and use the super high-tech embedded slide show action instead, if that’s more your speed. The pictures are pretty bangin’, I must say.

Social Aspects

1. Determine how comfortable you are with lying to your students. Your relationship with your students will be built on them asking and being asked simple questions such as “What is your favorite musical group?”  Now, maybe your favorite band is Neutral Milk Hotel—and why shouldn’t it be?  However, the person who asked you the question has no idea what the fuck a Neutral Milk Hotel is, and you aren’t going to be able to explain it to them.  Your answer will be met with blank stares and disappointment.  Conversely, if you answer “Green Day,” or “Avril Lavigne,” or even “Nirvana,” suddenly the person who asked you this will get excited and say, “Oh, me too me too me too!”  You have just established a rapport.  You can definitely make the case that this is a disingenuous, Machiavellian way to live—and you are well within your rights to decide that you don’t want to lie to your students under any circumstances.  But given the limitations on your ability to communicate, it is also a very effective way to ingratiate yourself to the people whose continued goodwill you rely on.
2. This is prison rules. Since your job description is quite poorly defined and subject to the whims of the Japanese teachers you work with, it’s important to establish expectations early on.  If you want to go to clubs after school and hang out, do it as early as possible.  Don’t arrive super early or stay late on your first day.  With such a poorly defined position, the expectations of those monitoring you will be formed in large part by your own actions.  You want to ease into certain things, but do everything you can to establish your identity and “character” quickly before you get stuck doing things you don’t want to do.
3. If you do not have the ability already, learn to snap your fingers, moon walk, and do that thing where you put your fingers in your mouth and whistle really loudly. Many of your students, especially the younger ones, will have never seen someone do these things and will thus be very impressed.
4. Buy some weird ties from someplace like CyberOptix or similar. It is not easy to establish your identity as the cool teacher through words since very few of the kids you are teaching can understand what you are saying, you need to establish a persona through nonverbal methods.  Oddball ties are a great way to do further this goal, assuming you are a dude… or a lady who is inclined to incorporate ties into her daily ensembles.
5. Set your hipster street cred on fire. Japanese high schoolers love American music.  More specifically, they love the kind of American music that no self-respecting, tight-pants-wearing “Pitchfork Media” enthusiast would ever listen to even under penalty of death, but you’d have to be stoned or stupid to think that you are somehow earning any points with your students by giving them a bunch of obscure German synth-pop bands no one’s ever heard of when they ask you what kind of music you like.  Additionally, none of the bands whose CDs made your “Top Ten” list this year will have any songs you can sing at karaoke, so stop being a pretentious dick, have another beer, and sing “Wonderwall” already.
6. Don’t like sports?  You do now.
7. Incidentally, your new favorite baseball team is either the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox. Those are the only two American baseball teams your students have heard of because those two teams have popular Japanese players on them.
8. Learn to sing “Linda Linda” by the Blue Hearts. It is a great sing-along sort of tune that is well known by almost everyone in Japan, perfect for breaking out at karaoke while in the company of Japanese people—be they your coworkers or just some people you met on the street—who will be thoroughly impressed by your performance.  Luckily, the chorus is pretty easy to remember.  It goes “Linda Linda, Linda Linda Linda, Linda Linda, Linda Linda Linda.”  Think you can manage that?
9. No one in Japan has ever heard of the pillows or “Cowboy Bebop.” If you have made it to Japan, you have probably watched and enjoyed Cowboy Bebop and downloaded the entire pillows discography after hearing their music in FLCL, and are excited to be in the land that created both of these things.  That’s fine; they are both quality works, and anyone who gives you shit about being a fanboy or whatever is a bad person who doesn’t believe in intellectual curiosity.  If a Japanese person asks you your favorite Japanese band, you will want to say “the pillows.”  This is only natural.  But that person will almost never know what the hell you are talking about.
10. No one will understand any of your jokes. You’re probably a very hilarious person back home, but the rules of humor changed while you were in the air over the Pacific Ocean.  In the context of your daily life, humor consists entirely of sight gags and references to Japanese pop culture.
11. Eat lots of Japanese food. Besides the fact that Japanese food is often delicious, “What are your favorite Japanese foods?” will almost always be the first question anyone in Japan asks you.
12. Figure out your blood type. Offhand you probably have no idea what your blood type is, but blood types are a Thing in Japan.  Your blood type is believed to say something about your personality, like your astrological sign or the results of a Rorschach test.  Your students will want to know what your blood type is, and you run the risk of sounding like a dweeb if you can’t answer them when they ask you.  Not knowing yours is an excellent excuse to give blood, which is a thing that you should be doing anyway.

Professional Aspects

1. Your training will be worthless. Despite the fact that the people doing the training at these things are likely veteran teachers, every suggestion they give you for how to conduct yourself in and outside of class will instill you with a deep sense of terror while still remaining utterly irrelevant to the ways that people actually live and work as ALTs in Japan.  Additionally, the sample activities your trainers teach you will, for one reason or another, not apply to any of the classes you teach.  For example, someone at some point during training will mention that “Battleship” variants are a great way to have students practice combining different phrases to form sentences.  This is 100% bullshit; your students will have never heard of “Battleship,” and trying to explain the rules of such a game to your them using crude hand gestures and bone tools will take up more class time than actually playing it.
2. Even if your training isn’t worthless, it will still be worthless. The job description of an ALT is so poorly defined that every teacher you work with will have different expectations from you: some will want you to teach the entire class all by yourself with no help at all, and some will want to stand you up at the front of the class while they teach and periodically have you repeat words and phrases like a trained monkey so your students can hear the correct pronunciation.  Depending on what company you work for, elementary, junior high, and high school teachers will often be trained together, despite occupying radically different positions.  So even if you receive good advice at training, it will likely be advice for someone who will be doing a totally different job.
3. Learn to speak Japanese. People will tell you that you do not need to know any Japanese to teach English in Japan.  This is true, in that you will not necessarily catch fire if you set foot in a Japanese classroom without being able to compose a haiku in kanji, and you are usually discouraged from using any Japanese in the classroom anyway.  But living in a foreign land—especially in the small town off the beaten path that you are most likely to be sent to your first time out—is not very much fun when you can’t speak the language, and neither is trying to communicate the concept of words like “pudding” or “dugong” to Japanese teenagers entirely in English.  Additionally, since learning a language is an exponential process—that is, the more of a language you know, the easier it is for you to learn said language—you will most benefit from the immersion if you already have a firm grasp of the basics.  Your experience will be so much richer if you are able to at least get by in day-to-day conversational Japanese: you’ll be able to form stronger bonds with your coworkers, you’ll be better able to understand the dynamics of your classes and connect with your students more as a human being and less as a walking test of their knowledge, and you’ll have an easier time getting around during your off hours.  You will be able to have confusing cultural oddities explained to you, which will in turn help you to get a much clearer picture of your host country’s ins and outs.  This is not to say that you should let a low level of Japanese proficiency keep you from seeking a teaching position, but do be aware that there are real and significant downsides to coming in blind.
4. Word Searches are your master. You probably hated doing word searches when you were in elementary school (unless you were clinically insane), but you’ll find that in many cases there are students who never pay attention in class under any circumstances except for when you put a word search in front of them.  You should come to every single class with two sets of word searches with relevant vocabulary for extreme emergencies—one short word search for when your lesson goes south, and another longer word search for when your lesson goes to hell.
5. Over-preparedness is sometimes worse than under-preparedness. Just because you are given five hours each day to do lesson planning doesn’t mean you should actually use all that time to plan lessons.
6. Activities will always end five to ten minutes before you want them to. This is, of course, unless they take twenty minutes longer than you want them to.

Things to keep in mind.

1. The city, town, or small fishing village you are sent to will suck.
2. If the place you are sent to does not suck, fuck you. Lucky bastard.
3. Japanese teenagers do not speak English. Despite the fact that you are teaching them English—which would suggest that it is not something they already know—it is easy to forget just how little of what you say is really understood by your students.
4. Japanese English teachers often do not speak English. There are plenty of Japanese teachers whose English is excellent, but many (if not most) will be deficient enough that communicating with them will be difficult.
5. You are the least important person at your school. Japanese high schools are swirling nexuses of psychotic activity.  Many of the students commute up to an hour to get to school and stay until 6 or 7 at night and come in for several hours on weekends doing club activities.  The teachers routinely work 10- or 11-hour days on weekdays and often come in on weekends to help with the clubs they sponsor or catch up with grading.  Everyone is busy with matters that they take very seriously.  Most of the teachers took English in school but remember about as much as you remember of calculus or art history, so unless you can manage conversational Japanese you will not have a very easy time making small talk with them.  The chair you sit in all day will be the shittiest back-pain-inducin’ torture device they can find, and if you even have a computer it will be an old ThinkPad from like 2001 with unidentified sticky goo all over the keyboard and an ancient Japanese Windows ME install.  And since the students clean the school themselves, there isn’t even a custodial staff for you to feel superior to, just one janitor who takes care of the real heavy lifting.  Your coworkers may or may not even tell you when there is a fire drill scheduled.
6. Most schools will not care if you fall asleep at work. Since the teachers at Japanese schools work such long days, it is viewed as perfectly acceptable for them to catch a few quick Z’s at their desk.  This is usually interpreted not as slacking off, but as some sort of demented dedication.
7. If your schools do care that you are falling asleep at work, they will not tell you. Since it’s not worth worrying about and won’t affect you either way, you might as well just go for the snooze if you are tired.
8. Your kids may be Japanese, but they are still high school students. Your students will probably be much more polite and attentive than American students at a similar sort of school (that is to say, a poor, rural school may still have some punkass kids in it, but they will be less punkass than punkasses in America).  However, a typical Japanese high school curriculum consists of 10 - 12 classes per year, each class meeting two or three times per week.  Statistically speaking, those are not good odds that the class you are teaching (which was not optional and is held right after lunch) is any one random student’s favorite class.
9. Learn what your hometown is famous for. Every town in Japan is famous for something, be it a style of traditional dance specific to that region or a particular kind of food or whatever.  People assume that this is the case for American cities as well and will want to know about it.  If your hometown isn’t really famous for anything in particular, or the thing it is famous for is too complicated to easily explain (“My hometown is famous for being the home of the biggest magnet laboratory in the Southeastern United States”), you once again have to decide whether or not to just make some stuff up.
10. You are probably going to get screwed by your landlord. In Japan there is a practice known as “key money” where your pay your landlord a cash tribute (usually equivalent to one-and-a-half to two months’ rent, although it can be higher) as a way of thanking him or her for renting to you even though you are a dirty foreigner before he or she gives you the key to your new place.  And I know that you are probably saying to yourself, “Yeah, that’s called a deposit, asshole.  They do that in America too.”  But no, key money is not a deposit, but a bribe.  The money goes directly into your landlord’s pocket and will never be seen by you again.  The deposit (also equivalent to two months’ rent) is a separate expense, and If your apartment has tatami mats, a good chunk of your deposit will go towards replacing them when you move out regardless of whether they actually needed replacing.  If you manage to bypass one or more of these issues, you are the lucky exception rather than the rule.
11. Regardless of the age of your students, one or more of them is almost certainly going to try to stick his or her finger up your asshole. This prank is known as a “kancho.”  If none of the kids you teach tries this during your entire tenure as an ALT, you should consider it not the normal state of affairs but a very pleasant surprise.

The job’s over and done with, and my time in Japan is running out.  A lot’s happened, and I have many interesting things to say but not so much opportunity to say them just now.  I’ve been “on the road” (in a purely metaphysical sense, since all of my traveling thus far has been done by train) for about a week and a half now.  Crashed for a few days in a fellow ALT’s new apartment amid the Yokohama Hills—which resemble the movie “City of God” but a lot more upscale—before making my way to Kyoto, and then Osaka.  I’ve visited a lot of cool places and done a lot of tourist-y stuff.  Pictures will be forthcoming, but I’d like to take a moment to write about one of the highlights of my trip, the Iwatayama Monkey Park in the southern part of Kyoto.

The Iwatayama Monkey Park is near the Hankyu Railway’s Arashiyama Station, which makes it sort of a pain in the ass to get to as the Hankyu line is privately run and doesn’t connect seamlessly with the Japan Rail lines that people use most often.  This can be seen as a benefit, though, since it means that the monkey park is not all that popular as a tourist destination despite the fact that there really are only so many shrines and temples—Kyoto’s main points of interest, in other words—one can honestly expect to visit in a condensed amount of time.  And even if you aren’t sick of looking at old religious buildings by the time you make it to Arashiyama, you have to pass through a small Shinto shrine to get to the monkey park anyway, which is an example of working smarter rather than harder.  Once past the aforementioned Shinto shrine, it’s up the side of a mountain along some zig-zagging dirt paths to a flat section near the top. Iwatayama Monkey Park is not a zoo, but a sort of nature reserve; apparently these macaque monkeys are actually native to the mountain and the surrounding areas, which I did not know.  Even along the paths you can see the monkeys frolicking freely with no barrier between them and the park’s visitors.  There are few guard rails on the narrow paths up the side of the mountain, which is pretty normal for Japan.  You can purchase peanuts or apple slices to feed the monkeys for a very reasonable 100 yen, and although the feeding has to be done through a fence from within the rest house near the top of the mountain, outside of that you are able to mingle freely with the nature.  A handout given at the gate to all visitors warns you to not make eye contact with the monkeys because they can be aggressive, and that’s pretty much the extent of the buffer between you and the beasts.

What was great about this small attraction, beyond the fact that it allows you to feed monkeys ohmygosh wow, is that it all just works.  Everyone is cool and hangs out watching the monkeys fool around.  No one screams “OOOH OOOH OOOH AHHH AHHH” noises at the monkeys the way people do at zoos in America.  There is no litter, either along the path or around the summit where the park is located, and none of the trees have asinine bullshit carved into them.  The signs say not to touch the monkeys, so no one touches the monkeys—or if they do, they have the sense not to get caught.  I was there for a little over an hour (I was waiting to meet some friends who got lost trying to find the place), and at no point did I witness anything that could be defined as a dick move.

I spent a few moments trying to imagine a similar set up working in America, and it just doesn’t seem feasible to me at all.  You just know that there would really be only two ways such a venture could end.  I’d give it a week, maybe two, before a monkey would choke on a discarded candy bar wrapper and the whole undertaking would have to be dismantled and the area declared off limits to preserve the animal population.  Either that or the park would get sued out of existence by some litigious parent whose hellspawn looked at an alpha male monkey cross-eyed and got his or her ass bit.  It’d be a race to see who could cry “foul” first.  And if you think I’m being needlessly misanthropic, just look at what happens at amusement parks when some kid undoes his or her safety harness and falls splat to the ground: the ride or even the whole park has to be closed down as an act of penance by its administrators despite the very obvious fact that their mechanical fun machines were not to blame for the accident.

I keep coming back to this point, but one thing that I definitely will miss about living in Japan is not having to devote nearly as much of my time and attention on dealing with other people’s ignorant bullshit.  I mean, where in America would I be able to do this?:

Video of the park and of monkeys doing adorable monkey stuff can be viewed here.