Worse Than Coleslaw

The pillows are a Japanese rock band whose sound is usually compared to that of the Pixies but without all the Spanglish and jokes about fucking. I was first exposed to their music, like most Americans, by watching Fooly Cooly (FLCL), which is an absurdist Bildungsroman Japanese cartoon about weapons-grade Gibson guitars being pulled out of transdimensional portals in people’s skulls and on whose soundtrack the music of the pillows is featured prominently to great effect.

So the pillows are a good band, and “Hybrid Rainbow” is perhaps their masterpiece, a song that I would say almost justifies humanity’s existence despite centuries of war and hatred and every kind of depravity imaginable. I can recall being nineteen years old, a recent high school graduate, watching FLCL for the first time just a couple of weeks before I headed off to college and my first real taste of the great unknown and thinking, man, it would be awesome to see these guys play live.

Imagine my surprise, then, that my arrival in Japan, already a fulfillment of my wildest outdated high school fantasies, coincided with the release of a new pillows album and a tour (codenamed the “Pied Piper Tour,” which I can’t turn into anything symbolic no matter how hard I try) to support said album. The pillows were playing in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture, easily within the range of a driven individual such as myself. Phone calls were made. Tickets were purchased. Travel arrangements were made. The thought rang clear in my mind: “I might get to see ‘Hybrid Rainbow’ performed live.” If that happened, I’d have another item to check off on my list of things I needed to do before I died.

The concert was to start at six o’clock on a Sunday evening in late September. The plan called for me to take the train to Sendai on Saturday morning—this was before I knew about the wonders of highway buses, which are cheaper and faster than trains when going between big cities—and stay with a friend of mine from back home who also does the teaching thing in Marumori, a small mountain town about an hour away from Sendai that feels a lot like what South Park would feel like if it was a real place and in Japan. We would check out Sendai on Sunday morning, and then hit up the concert, which started at six. Since it was a Sunday, I needed to be back in my own place for work the next morning, so I got a ticket for the 8:15 Shinkansen (bullet train) back to Morioka in time to catch the last train to my little podunk farming town. I figured the concert wouldn’t last much longer than two hours, if it even lasted that long, so not a huge loss. It was a perfect plan that failed in a spectacular(ly unspectacular) fashion.

The first stages of the plan went smoothly enough. I made it to Sendai without any problems, and Saturday night passed pleasantly, with much Melon Fanta consumed while complaining about the Japanese public school system and playing videogames. Sunday passed quickly as we explored the shopping arcade that Sendai is famous for, and soon enough it was time for our concert preparations to commence. We met up with another group of Americans, college exchange students or teachers all, and loitered in Sendai Station for a while swapping anecdotes and blocking pedestrian traffic. At about 5:30 I asked everyone assembled if maybe we shouldn’t head to the venue since the concert was going to start in a half hour.

“Doors open at six,” one among us said. “The concert doesn’t actually start till seven.” This was a serious problem.

My friend James, who had handled logistics, had misread (or not bothered to read) the kanji on the ticket, believing it to say “Starts – 6:00, Ends – 7:00” when it actually said “Doors open – 6:00, Concert Begins – 7:00.” Oddly enough, being illiterate does indeed suck as much as the public service announcements on teevee say that it does; that extra hour was kind of a big deal, upon which my entire plan for the evening hinged. In America it would only have taken me about 30 seconds to say “Well, I guess I’m calling in sick tomorrow” and enjoy the concert with no worries a’tall, but in Japan taking an unexpected day off from your job—even your stupid job where you spend the great majority of your time reading novels and and can’t even communicate with 90% of your coworkers—is a big deal that requires an excellent excuse and documentation. So that meant I had a ticket for an 8:20 train and a ticket for a 7:00 concert, which are good things to have by themselves but not such great things to have at the same time.

I was not very talkative as we made out way to the venue and stood waiting in line for the doors to open. Even when the show started I kept vacillating between “To hell with it, I’m just going to stay and figure out what to do afterward,” and “Well, I guess I’ll just try to enjoy the hour that I have.” This process preoccupied me, but I tried to enjoy the show as best I could. The pillows put on a good show, although I was mostly interested in hearing them play a handful of songs that I knew from FLCL, which was older material that they were less inclined to dip into. I was not pleased.

About 30 minutes in, during a pause between songs, someone in the audience shouted ”Hybrid Rainbow!“ and I held my breath.

The lead singer chuckled. “Too fast,” he said, in English. “Too early.”

Fuck, I thought, they’re saving it for the encore or something.

The band played a couple more songs that I was not familiar with and which were hard to enjoy given the circumstances, and during another pause someone else shouted, “Hybrid Rainbow!” At this point I had maybe 15 minutes to get to my train, enough time for maybe one more song before I absolutely had to leave.

“Too fast. Too early,” the lead singer said again. The members of the band began whispering among themselves.

I turned to leave, defeated, as more banter ensued.

I was just reaching for the door to the lobby when the band seemed to reverse their previous decision and started to play “Hybrid Rainbow.”

During those four perfect minutes, I was truly, unabashedly happy. Between the beginning and the ending of that one song, I was exactly where I wanted to be in the world, doing exactly what I wanted to do, and had no reservations or regrets. Just then It did not matter that I had to leave the concert early to go catch a train so I could be on time for a job that I did not enjoy, nor did it matter that I was aimless and unmotivated, that I had so far been too lazy to create anything that felt meaningful out of my time on earth, that I was weird and awkward and unsure of my place in the world; whatever choices I had made in my life up until that point, at that moment they were all the right choices because they had led me to that venue next to the Sendai train station where I watched the pillows play “Hybrid Rainbow” in front of an enthusiastic crowd. My triumph was utter. It was transcendent.

And, like most transcendent moments, this one was not able to support itself for long under the weight of its own quality.

After the song was over there was a short period of silence, and the band started retuning their instruments and talking amongst themselves. I headed towards the door, but, feeling invincible and uninhibited in the afterglow, I turned and shouted “Linda Linda!” before finally making good my escape. I thought this was hilarious at the time, but, given how irritated I used to (and still do) get at those assholes who shout “Freebird!” at concerts by bands who are decidedly not Lynard Skynard, I at least had the decency to feel bad about it later. I stopped just long enough to make alast minute impulse purchase at the merch table in front of the venue to celebrate my newfound enthusiasm for life and love and all the rest, and then I was ready to bounce.

After hearing “Hybrid Rainbow,” the decision to try and catch my train was a much easier one, and the emotional high of that one perfect moment propelled me forward as I ran through the station, retrieved my bag from the storage locker, and hoofed it up to the Shinkansen platform. Hoisting a big backpack and carrying a demented teddy bear in one hand, I’m sure that I made a deeply troubling sight. People left my path well alone. I quickly inquired about what platform I should go to—the guy I asked was trying to convey something to me that I could not get, but he eventually pointed me in the direction I needed to go—and took the stairs up to the platform three at a time.

Panting from the run, I stood and waited, my thumbs looped under the shoulder straps of my backpack, underarms and back starting to feel maybe just a little bit moist from the weight of my load and the unfamiliar exertion, ready to slide into a Shinkansen’s spacious seat and think happy thoughts all the way to Morioka, where I’d catch another train over to my town of residence. I was about seven minutes early. It had taken me less time than I thought it would to get to where I needed to be.

I paced up and down the platform and noticed with some trepidation that there weren’t very many other people waiting for this train. My trepidation turned to panic as the time listed on my ticket came and went. I went back down to the ticket area and made an inquiry of an older gentleman in a station uniform. Unfortunately, his English was not up to snuff, and neither was my Japanese; I couldn’t even remember how to say “I do not speak Japanese” in Japanese, which is a problem that I had had before and have often had since. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable period of him repeating the same phrase I did not recognize really slowly and with different inflections and pointing to different places on the small train schedule in his hands in a coded sequence that I was not able to decipher, he motioned with his hands and said “Wait, please.” About ten minutes later, a young-ish woman dressed in civilian clothes walked up to where I was standing. After exchanging a few words with the station guy, she turned to ask me what I needed help with. I explained my situation to her again. “The train is late,” she said. “Instead please take the Shinkansen headed for Akita when it comes and get off at Morioka Station. The Akita Shinkansen is also late, but it is less late.”

It turned out that “less late” meant “still more than an hour late,” which was especially galling after spending all that time being told at teacher training that the Japanese are shuffling automatons of soulless efficiency and woe be unto he who is even one minute late for anything. I was not happy about having to waste away in Sendai Station when there was still a perfectly good pillows concert going on literally next door. Eventually my consternation gave way to anxiety over whether or not I would make it to Morioka Station in time to catch the last train out to Ho-mu. Things did work themselves out, although I had to do some sprinting once I got to Morioka Station in order to facilitate this. I was told later that the show had gone on for about another 70 minutes after I left, but that only one other song I’d have recognized was played. And on Monday morning I was able to shuffle into work at my School of Suck, tired but on time, and totally tank my lessons for that day just like normal. God was in His heaven. All was right with the world.

So in the end I guess this concertgoing experience is a good representation of my time in Japan as a whole—a bunch of stupid bullshit punctuated by fleeting moments of blinding awesome-ness, a neverending footrace between elation in lane one and despair (or at least extreme irritation) in lane two. Additionally, in some kind of ridiculous Russian doll situation, maybe that is a pretty accurate description of life in general.

Supplemental:
Ride on Shooting Star (Ganbatte-Fest ‘08, Part 3) : Photos of the events described in this entry can be viewed on my Flickr page.

I don’t know exactly why I stay up so late every night. It’s almost like this rebellion against the working day, like I give myself over to the bosses when the sun is out but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let the considerations of the job alter my behavior outside of normal working hours anymore than it absolutely has to. Except that’s a really dumb way to act on such subversive feelings, because who besides me gives a shit whether I am tired or not? The job’s going to get done regardless, so the only decision I have to make is whether I’ll do it with a smile on my face and a song in my heart or with a head full of cotton balls and broken glass. After all, it’s not like I hate sleep—far from it! As someone who so dead tired all the time due to his own stupid decisions, adequate sleep has an almost mystical quality. I think about getting a good night’s sleep the way some people are constantly thinking about writing a novel or building a treehouse for their kid, something always in the back of one’s mind but so rarely acted upon.

Take, for example, right now. It’s almost 22:30! By the time I finish writing this and checking my e-mail and hitting refresh on Google Reader a couple of times, it might be 23:30 or later. I have to wake up at 6:50 tomorrow so I can make the hour-long drive to the school of rock and teach two 30-minute lessons on how to say “I feel sick” and one 70-minute lesson on “Conversational English,” whatever the hell that ends up meaning…and have this two hours’ worth of work somehow occupy a full eight-and-a-half hours through the space-time distorting effects of the Japanese work ethic. Also, it turns out that the School of Rock is so far away from where I live that it actually has different weather, and that this school is in such a small town that Weather.com doesn’t have any listings for it. So I never have any idea what to expect or how much extra time to allow for icy roads and decreased visibility, except that said different weather is usually inclined towards more snow rather than less.

The impending morning commute is not stopping me from continuing to not go to bed, although this knowledge does weigh heavy in my mind like a prophetic vision of the future that I can’t shake and can’t change no matter how hard I try; I think there was a Greek play whose plot was along those lines. I don’t remember the name of it, probably because I slept through that day of class.

Jet lag actually did me a world of good back at the beginning of my tenure as an ALT, wherein my internal rhythm was so pulverized by a 20-hour journey and a 13 (now 14, thanks to Daylight Savings Time) hour time difference that it reset and I just naturally started going to bed at reasonable times and getting up at also-reasonable times. So there were two months there at the beginning where I really never felt sleepy during the day because I was, for the first time since middle school, maintaining a sane cycle of sleeping and waking. I remember thinking to myself one afternoon at work, upon realizing that it was already lunchtime and I still didn’t feel like murdering every of my coworkers, “Wow, this must be what normal people with better impulse control feel like every day!” I even thought about eating breakfast a few of those days, but in the end an extra twenty minutes of sleep won out like it always does.

As time passed my proclivities for staying up late began to exert themselves more and more as I began to enjoy my teaching job less and less, and I find myself back in a familiar situation: chronically tired and pissed off, my lips chapped and the rings under my eyes resembling those of a raccoon, ready to compose great treatises on the subject of sleep deprivation but steadfastly unwilling to do anything drastic, like,logging off AIM an hour early or cutting back on my caffeine consumption. I guess, in the end, “I am my own worst enemy.” I think it was Kierkegaard who said that.

There are lots of ways to measure how “civilized” a particular country is. None of these methods are definitive, but when grouped together they give us a general idea of where are the nice places to live, and where are the places to be emigrated from with all possible haste. How a society treat its prisoners. How they treat their dead. How they treat the marginalized and less fortunate.

Gross domestic product.

Mean income.

Strength of currency.

Literacy rates.

Cultural exports.

After spending three months in Japan, I am inclined to also say that the widespread availability of pizza delivery is also an important factor to consider when evaluating a country’s quality of life.

I mean, sure, in many ways America is like a Third-World country with delusions of grandeur, what with its medieval healthcare system, its broke-ass public schools, and the rampant baseness of its national character, but in almost every city and town in the Land of the Free there is at least one establishment you can call to have delicious—or at least moderately tasty—pizza delivered to your home or office or arbitrarily designated dropoff point on a street corner or someplace like in the first “Ninja Turtles” movie. In Japan this service—and indeed, real pizza in general—is not available outside of major cities.

Now, I’m not saying that a country has to have pizza delivery in order to be civilized, or that pizza delivery automatically categorizes a society as somehow more evolved. All I’m saying is that pizza delivery certainly strengthens the case.

I have this idea in my head that people who are driven to come to Japan (or anywhere else, I guess) to teach English tend to be cut from a different cloth than the rest of humanity, and that I myself am not of the normal overseas teacher stock. I say this because my own interpretation of shared events differs wildly from that of the other ALTs I have spent time around.

I am testing this theory by giving the following quiz to as many foreigners living in Japan as I can find who will talk to me. I used everything I learned while sleeping through Statistics and Cultural Anthropology class to conform to the standards of scientific rigor, so hopefully the results will give me a clearer picture of the tendencies of the ALT mind. I would be interested to see what kind of answers the readers of this blog would give, so feel free to give a response in the comments section. This is based off of something that really happened to me and the wild variation in perception among a group of about five other English-speaking ALTs of what seemed to me like a fairly straightforward descent into madness.

So, here we go:

Say you’re in a restaurant with some other people. Since they are all fine upstanding bohemian types, said restaurant is a little hole-in-the-wall kind of place off of the main thoroughfare, a real “authentic experience.” You go to order food and the menu has no pictures and is written all in kanji, which no one in your group can read because it is obtuse by its very nature and was designed in ancient China to make learning it as difficult as possible in order to elevate the literate class. The proprietor of the establishment regards your inquiries about the food with a nervous smile and a shake of the head. So your order blind, just point at something that doesn’t cost too much and hope for the best. Maybe the food’s good, maybe it’s not. You have no way of knowing what it is until it arrives at your table–and even when it’s in front of you, you still might not know!

How awesome or not awesome would you rate this situation on a scale from one to five, where five is the most awesome and one is the least awesome?

This happened to me when I hung (hanged?) out with other teachers in my prefecture back at the beginning of my stay in Japan, and was in fact one of the early signs that I might have been in over my head. I would not consider this restaurant incident to be any fucking way to live at all, sort of a misguided attempt to expand one’s horizons that strays too far into the realm of lunacy to be a very valuable learning experience. But most of my contemporaries thought it was totally sweet, all “I can’t wait to tell the folks back home that I ordered some food without even knowing what it was!” whereas I was sort of inclined to keep that a secret from all but my very closest and most trusted friends.

I posted a short update regarding my apartment and my preparations for the long Iwate winter.

Apartment Tour, Supplemental

So after school I teach conversational English to a group of five second year students whose English is already quite good. They are practicing for a short homestay trip in, I dunno, January or February or some such, so we study things like giving directions and vocabulary for shopping and stuff. I have no idea how to teach this class, but the students are good-natured enough that we usually have fun despite my occasionally fumbling about for things to occupy the time.

Even though I speak almost no Japanese and the kids have a hard time forming English sentences, we are still able to get stuff done without the presence of a Japanese teacher. Part of the reason for this is that my students in this class have a couple of electronic dictionaries to share between the five of them that they use to translate any words that I can’t make them understand with pantomime and synonyms. These dictionary things are totally slick. There’s not been a word yet whose meaning the students have been unable to suss out with the aid of their trusty electronic dictionaries, and with the help of these devices combined with the students’ quick wits and considerable knowledge base, I’ve mostly been able to avoid the communication problems I experience in my other, larger, less motivated classes,

Sometimes when class kind of tapers off like it so often does due to my legendary lack of ability to plan things, the kids’ natural intellectual curiosity will drive them to look up random idioms on the dictionaries’ idiom finder and say said idioms to me just to see what I’ll do. Yesterday, I saw two students, the only boy in the class and the girl who sits next to him, passing an e-dictionary between them, whispering in Japanese and glancing up at me. Finally, they did a little surreptitious jan-ken-pon (which is identical to the American “rock-paper-scissors” in everything but the name), and the loser turned to me and readied herself to speak, glancing down at the LCD screen a couple of times to make sure she had it right in her mind. For my part, I tried to look as non-threatening and good-natured as possible so that she wouldn’t feel too nervous about speaking English. In an American high school you’d expect them to come up with stuff like “I have a raging hard-on” or “Fuck you, GI,” but I don’t have to worry about that so much in Japan. Still, I’m never quite sure what to expect when this kind of thing happens.

The first go round I couldn’t make out what she was saying because there was a lot of noise coming from outside the classroom as the baseball club ran drills out in the hallway. From time to time I could see them looking through the door’s window and trying to sound out the stuff I’d written on the board. “What was that?” I said, and leaned in to hear her better.

More confident this time, she said, “I feel like a million dollars!”

If I had to be all pithy about it, I would say that I don’t particularly like the job I am currently committed to performing for the next six months or so despite the fine opportunity for cultural exchange and personal growth that it presents. Luckily, I am under no obligation to be pithy, or even to be concise, and so have the luxury of going into greater detail about the melange of emotions—bad and good—that are evoked each morning as I walk into the teacher’s lounge of whatever school I am scheduled for that day and shout “Ohaiyo gozaimasu” in the high-pitched rumble that characterizes my oft-unused “outside” voice.

Ironically enough, the four years I spent as a high school student are both the reason I am here and the reason I have had so much trouble adjusting to the job.

Back when I was in school, my favorite teachers were the ones who made class interesting by sheer force of personality: Fr. Jesuit for his scatterbrained historical tangents and well-developed sense of irony, Dr. English-teacher for his puns and eminently dash-able one-liners, Dr. History-teacher for his frequent references to the use of LSD. Sure, there were discussions in all of these classes; however, the emphasis was still on lecturing, and I was content to just go to class and listen to my teachers talk about interesting things for fifty minutes. Under normal circumstances my teaching style would be shaped by this preference, and I would focus on attempting to fill my class time with dry humor and tangential ramblings. But since my audience consists entirely of non-native speakers, trying to adapt this method to my current responsibilities does not work, not even a little. It’s just the nature of teaching and learning a foreign language, and doubly so when you are teaching students whose language you do not speak.

My least favorite teachers traditionally were the ones who made me get out of my seat and actually do stuff in class. I always used to resent it when my Spanish teachers made us practice dialogues in pairs or do group activities, more so since I didn’t know anyone in any of the four Spanish classes I took throughout high school and college and at the time was hampered by somewhat crippling social anxiety that made every such class an ordeal. But now I get paid to try to get my kids to do exactly that which irritated me not that long ago.

“It’s a weird position to be in,” I told one of the other assistant teachers working in my prefecture. “Back then I would totally have hated having a language class with me as the teacher.”

“What would have gotten you to pay attention in Spanish class, then?” she asked me. “If you knew that you could do it in your classes now.”

“I’m not sure anything could have,” I said, after giving it some thought. The only thing I have been able to come up with even after a lot of pondering is if the practice dialog was on video and took place between two naked women and a man who was fully clothed but also on fire. I might have lifted my head out of the puddle of drool on my desk for that. My lack of interest in Pictionary and Word Finds as viable class activities wasn’t one of those “Jesus this is so boring, I could totally do a better job of this,” sort of thing. Like Socrates, my criticism of the system did not go so far as to suggest anything better. I simply was more interested in sleeping than I was the subject matter just then, and Pictionary and its various ilk prevented me from being able to sleep by forcing me to get out of my chair and engage the material. The main difference I can see between me and the kids I am teaching (many of whom, at least at my ghetto school, seem about as interested in English as I was in Spanish way back when) is that I was able to snooze my way through high school while still taking AP classes and maintaining a 4-point-something GPA, which is great if you can swing it, but not recommended for the general population.

I’m not trying to say that I think games and activities are a bad thing or that they shouldn’t be a part of the learning process. My point here is that my experiences as a student have colored the way I approach the business of teaching English, and this is a problem because I am still coming from the perspective of a fashionably jaded, 19-year-old slacker prince. Back then I would have considered anyone who told me “Hey, here’s a board game you can play to practice the passive tense!” to be a total cheeseball who was not to be trusted. Even once I got to college this mindset did not disappear completely; when I took Conceptual Physics (Physics for Non-majors) junior year, I skipped all the lab days where we ran experiments and stuff because I was unwilling to expend the effort for such a minimal return. Labs counted as extra credit and I already had an “A” in the class and was confident in my ability to maintain that good grade without any help. My job right now is basically to be the embodiment of the very persona I would have scoffed at not too long ago. This makes lesson planning extremely difficult because I am incapable of coming up with my own ideas. I am so quick to write off the kind of vocabulary-building games that are encouraged by my superiors that my brain no longer possesses the mechanism to come up with those kinds of ideas by itself. I thus get all of my lesson ideas from books and websites—no big deal, there are plenty of resources for ALTs out there that I can cherry pick ideas from—but this too presents a problem because my immediate reaction to every potential exercise is “That sounds totally retarded” no matter how well it would probably work in class, necessitating multiple readthroughs of such material to extract as much quality material as possible. More than that, though, it is hard for me to sell the idea of Bingo (a time-honored ESL tool) to a classroom full of Japanese teenagers. The whole thing comes off as half-hearted. I also am further limited by the necessity that, since most of my students do not speak enough English to understand the instructions I give in class, any such activities I use be simple enough to explain via demonstration using gestures and crude bone tools.

Of course, I knew that my job would involve all of these elements. I simply underestimated how much I am a product of my experiences, and how little those experiences have prepared me for the situation I in which I find myself.

So I would say that so far I enjoy teaching, and that it’s the “teaching English as a second language” thing that is really my problem. Being able to talk to my students, even if it’s just asking them what their favorite sport is or what kind of music they like, and having them come up to me in the hallway to start conversations, is one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life, and teaching is probably the best way there is to really learn about a new culture. However, the problem with ESL is that it puts me solidly outside my niche and prevents me from playing to my strengths while exaggerating my weaknesses. Language has always kind of been my thing. Whatever problems I had interacting with people in my life, I have always usually managed to compensate for these problems by being funny or verbose or both at the same time. You take away my ability to communicate and what do you have left? Mostly you have a skinny-ish guy with glasses that don’t stay on his nose who doesn’t look people in the eye for more than two seconds at a time and who only has enough control over his body language to express three emotions: “nervously cheerful,” “neutral,” and “good-naturedly confused.”