Worse Than Coleslaw

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.

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.

I attended my Hell School’s Winter Sports Festival on Saturday of last week. This consisted of various snow-related games and activities. The first event was a relay race where three people worked together to drag a tire with a small child riding on it around a cone and back to the starting line before passing the tire on to the next team. The soccer field was completely frozen over with ice that was in turn covered by a thin layer of hardened snow that . In other words, designed in the laboratory of the Creator to be unto me and my history as a resident of the Sunshine State as kryptonite is to Super Man.

I was in the first group for the first race, and only made it about four steps before my feet caught in the snow and I fell to the ground. The rope attached to the tire remained clenched firmly in my hand, and I was dragged a pretty decent stretch behind the team before the two other teachers noticed that I was no longer level with them. The teacher relay team ended up not winning that race, although this was not entirely my fault. It’s cool though: I totally brought it home during the tug of war segment later that day.

I walked away from the race with my hands all scraped up and bleeding from being dragged on the ice. As I was taking stock of my injuries, I walked by a couple first-year girls huddling together to stay warm. “Good morning!” they both said. I waved at them. One of them pointed at my face and had a brief conversation with her friend. A group of Japanese teenagers who have been taking English for a while form a sort of gestalt organism; on their own they’d have a hard time communicating with me, but in a big enough group, they can usually come up with about the same level of conversational ability. This is a process that I am pretty used to by now: a group of students will approach me, and one of the brave ones will attempt to ask me a question. For example, “Where you from?” was popular when I first started teaching. The phrasing may be perfect, or it may be a little off. Either way, the asker of the question will then cock his or her head and say “Eh? Eh?” and will turn to converse with the other people in the group, running through several variations of the question in order to try and form a consensus. It actually is pretty interesting to see them perform these translations out loud because it helps me understand the differences in grammar between the two languages. “You where live? Are? Where are you… where are you live? From? Where are you from?” This can take 45 seconds or more, and I sometimes feel like I ran down the escalator at the subway station just in time to watch the train leave and right then understand that I’ll have to wait the full ten minutes for the next one.

“Red,” she said, and pointed at her face, and then at my face again.

“Ah, yes,” I said, after a moment of blank stares and awkward hand gestures. “My face is red. It is very cold today.” I mimed shivering and rubbing my arms. This was my best guess as to the meaning of their inquiry. It didn’t seem to satisfy them, but they appeared unwilling to take this line of questioning any further.

There was a short period of silence wherein we all stood there without any of us making a move to walk away. That was my cue to start asking them questions in English; both of these girls were in a class I taught and were noteworthy for being well-behaved and good-natured in a school full of angsty hardasses, so I was interested to know what clubs they were in, what their favorite subjects were, that kind of thing. This went on for perhaps ten minutes, at which point one of the school’s English teachers walked by. One of the girls motioned him over and asked him a question in Japanese.

“Blood,” he said, and then repeated it to make sure they had the pronunciation right. “Blood.” She pointed at my face again.

The teacher turned to me, nodded in recognition, and said, “You have blood on your face.” I reached up, and, sho’ nuff, my hand came back with red smears on it from what would turn out to be a few small scrapes on my cheek and upper lip. To their credit, the girls both took it in stride and were able to manage answers to every question I asked despite the sight of a crazed-looking gaijin with blood on his face staring them down. Good for them.

Pictures of the snow relay can be found on this Picasa Web Album. I have started using Picasa after discovering that Flickr limits you to only three photo sets. Hell with that.