Worse Than Coleslaw

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.

So I spent five days in Tokyo at the beginning of my Winter Vacation and have made a short detour to Miyagi prefecture with some friends before I head back to the frozen northlands from whence I came. Miyagi prefecture, with its milder climate and larger and more interesting capital city, is still a major improvement over the town in Iwate where I currently lay my head, but it seems like a major drag after the kidney punch to the senses that was Tokyo, the world’s largest metropolitan area. While this does mean that I have some time to breathe and do some writing, it wasn’t easy for me to get on that northbound bullet train, to leave behind what seemed like a great gig—all the glitz and glamour and energy from such an enormous population combined with a crime rate that would be phenomenally low for an American city a tiny tiny fraction of Tokyo’s size—for the promise of rice fields and sub-zero temperatures and poor cell phone reception. I’m not knocking rice fields, exactly, but they’re not really my thing.

As I rode the Shinkansen up to Miyagi, when I wasn’t sleeping or listening to the old man in the seat across from mine suck off a toothpick for what seemed like (and actually was) two hours, I spent some time reading a book about the ending of the world and allowed my mind to wander, entertaining visions of moving to Tokyo and doing the big-city thing after a lifetime spent in places where a bunch of my friends and I could get together and while away half the night standing in a circle asking each other a million permutations of the question, “So, what is there to do?” without ever coming up with an acceptable answer. Sure, the rent’s high and I’d continue to have trouble communicating with people due to my lack of Japanese ability for the foreseeable future and would still probably feel isolated and alone more often than not even amidst all those huddled millions…but my thinking is that if I can put myself in a place that has the best of everything to offer, I can at least be hopeful of eventually finding whatever it is that I am looking for—be it serenity, security, a decent cup of coffee, inspiration, motivation, and/or creepy anime memorabilia for me to browse through in back-alley storefronts and then not buy in quantities sufficient to last an Age. The seasons of my soul (or whatever) have often been characterized by unnamed longing, so a big city seems like it might be the right place to hang out in. It’s simple mathematics: even though I still don’t know what it is that I want out of life, it is statistically more likely that if I ever do figure that shit out, I will be in a better position to obtain whatever Thing it is in Tokyo than I would be in most other places. Unless that Thing I wanted out of life turned out to be snow, in which case my current place of residence would provide a pretty solid foundation on which to build my future.

In Iwate prefecture—a place that sucks even compared to the other sucky (and not-so-sucky-but-still-kind-of-meh) places I have spent significant amounts of time in, and sucks even more than a similarly proportioned American town would simply because of the language barrier—I often feel like I am drowning, so far removed from anything that moves me or even feels real that, for all my complaining, I don’t even know how to go about improving my life other than to wait for my current contract to expire in March and toss the dice again to see if the next place I end up will be an improvement. It’s hard for me to tell whether my current existential discomfort is due to my own bad attitude and inability to experience joy even while inhabiting a place that actually is beautiful and serene and magnificent, or whether I have 100% accurately described said place as being total ass and am thus justified in being a little disgruntled every now and then while I plan my escape. Am I making a Hell out of Heaven, or am I merely seeing Hell for what it is?

If I moved to Tokyo, though, maybe I’d finally be able to tell once and for all whether it’s me that’s crazy, or whether it’s everyone else.

I have a lot to say about Tokyo, although it might take me a while to get it all down. Stay tuned.