Those crazy kids

Being an ALT in Japan is about as close as I will ever get to being Zac Efron.

I assume it is different teaching in a big city, but in a small League of Gentlemen township like mine, the white man really does walk alone, mainly because there are no other white men within a radius of 50 kilometres to walk with him. For many of these young, country schoolgirls, the only westerns they have seen have been separated from them by a TV screen and several time zones. Even these avenues are limited. There is a movie theatre in my town but it is one of those rickety Cinema Paradiso things without the charm. It sits slumped down a backstreet with peeling paint and posters of films features Japanese boys who look like they have had way too much Ecstasy (but ironically will probably never touch the stuff) and girls with pigtails wearing Alice in Wonderland dresses. The cinema has shown three English films in the last nine months; Atonement, P.S. I love you (Hilary Swank doing a romantic comedy about a treasure hunt from her dead boyfriend played by the lead Spartan off 300) and Mamma Mia, which arrives next week, a year after its western release.

The next ‘real’ movie theatre is in Sapporo, several hours drive away. Apparently movie going in Japan isn’t quite the lark it is back home; a fellow ALT went to see Burn After Reading and found that he was the only one who laughed the whole movie while the rest of the audience sat in complete silence. This is rather impressive slash mortifying if you have seen Burn After Reading, which IS hilarious and would surely a laugh from the drabbest individual when Brad Pitt calls John Malkovich a ‘dickwad.’ Also, Japanese people don’t get up and leave when the movie finishes but sit stonily until all the credits have rolled. Then they leave quietly, in an orderly fashion, not speaking until they are well outside the theatre. Even then, I doubt there is much in the way of banter.

Anyway, back to Efron. My arrival in the country prompted a Mexican wave of Japanese wonderment from the girls in my Local town. My two former ALTs were both girls and as far as I could tell, this was the first time most of these schoolgirls had set eyes on a Western male outside of a Harry Potter movie. For months, my route around the school could be traced by the sound of screams, giggles and sharp intakes of breath. Girls would cower into whispering groups in corners, waving to me and then shrieking with delight when I waved back.

Months went by and things didn’t end. I would be spotted by two girls in the local supermarket who would proceed to peek at me from behind the minimal produce section. The next day, I would be informed dryly from one of the teachers that someone in his class had seen my buying a bag of eggplants and now everyone wanted to know if this was true. The first question I was asked in a new class was “Do you have a girlfriend” to which I would smile secretly and shake my head. The group of girls who had plucked up the courage to ask this would then become hysterical and, after another few minutes of feverish whispering, usually follow it up with the slightly more awkward “what kind of Japanese girls do you like?” For this, I would stare out at the eager classroom of 15 year olds use my favourite Japanese word: Himitsu (Secret). This didn’t do much to calm them down.

Believe me, this is not a subtle attempt to blow my own trumpet. I could have rubbed myself raw with a cheese grater and pulled out a row of teeth and I don’t imagine the reaction would be any different. And I tried to feign off the fawning in any way possible; food stains on my shirt, unwashed hair, deep sighs whenever I was waved to in the corridors. For I while I even adopted a limp, but this only resulted in sympathetic glances and kindly smiles from the girls and at the end of the week, a ‘get better’ anime pencil charm turned up on my desk in the staffroom.

Good grief, they were persistent. Once, I received an email from a fifteen year old student from one town over. She insisted we could be ‘good friends’ if we met up sometime (wink face). I have no idea who she was or how she got my email address. She sent me a follow up email a week later when I didn’t reply, which was empty except for a sad face and the phrase ‘I cry now.’ Another girl accosted me in a classroom during cleaning time and showed me a tiny purple condom nestled in her Hello Kitty wallet. I smiled nervously and vowed to stay as far away from her as possible.

I hope that when I leave, my successor will be a women; kind, maternal, preferably late thirties and hair in a bun. There has been enough excitement in Local town for the next few years; Zac Efron has no place trying to steal the preciousl things of the shop. Heck, she could even get a cat.

Cleanup time

My supervisor, possibly realizing that my school day malaise is largely the result of having absolutely nothing to do, has given me the task of aiding with the daily classroom cleaning of him form class. Every day, from 3pm to 3.30pm, I am summoned to assist class 1A to cleanse their home room on the third floor. This is a school-wide ritual, something I assume was established to slice janitors from the school budget (although there are two little old men in overalls who are part of the staff and whom I often see fixing broken chairs and carting rubbish to the incinerator).

Upon arrival at the said room, the class (42 students in a tightly squeezed desk grid, girls on the left side of the room, boys on the right) bows politely and begins to divvy up the tasks at hand. In the corner of the classroom (and in every classroom in the school) is a cleaning cupboard, stuffed with mops, buckets and squirty things galore. On the classroom wall is a task sheet, made by some administrator with no life in which the class divided up into different ‘task groups’ on a daily basis; window washing one week, mopping the next.

The chart is so confusing that usually Mr. X gives up and lets his students decide on what tasks they want by way of ‘Jung Ken;’ the Japanese version of ‘Rock, paper, scissors.’ The difference is that ‘Jung Ken’ is played in massive groups of ten-twenty people, in which everyone stand in a circle and yells “Jung ken....ho!” and displays their paper/scissors/rock hand manifestation. Of course, this doesn’t work so well with more than two players, and the general rule is that there can be no result unless there is one rock and nineteen pieces of paper. As you can imagine, this can take hours, and I have to stand in the corner and grit my teeth as the students yell out “Jung Ken...ho!” over and over again, completely unperturbed by the fact that they could be trapped in their ridiculous circle for the rest of their afternoon.

Once the tasks are allocated, the cleaning can being in earnest. And I mean that. The cleaning is carried out with the precision of a nuclear bomb scare; the desks are suddenly stacked at the front of the room and a team of moppers begin to sweep across the floor with eyebrows furrowed. A group of girls grab the squirty stuff and begin to deal with the windows; carefully scrutinizing every corner for the fingerprints of some foolish third grader during lunchtime. Another team is put on dust monitoring. They work their way around the room in a chain, checking every sliver of surface for particles and also attacking everything with the squirty stuff. There is a two page print on how to dust off the blackboard. I attempted this seemingly simply task on the first day and had the handout shoved at me by six horrified girls. Apparently the key is to start with vertical strokes and move on to horizontal after that. Good to know.

Because this mission is carried out on a daily basis, the whole cleaning thing becomes redundant. The girls squirt cleaner onto windows which are already spotless. The boys with the mops are unable to find anything to mop up. The dusters haven’t given the dust enough time to settle from their particle scouring 24 hours prior. The inside/outside shoes distinction already takes care of most of it. To be fair, I have never seen a cleaner school in my life, especially compared to my debris-infused high school in the Hutt Valley.

Talking of trash, last night I was fool enough to watch John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. It was a film that made me miss my group of Gummo-adoring friends, as scene after scene of celluloid offensiveness went reeling by me. Especially of note were the heinous Marbles couple (the wife looks like a hideous B-Grade Tilda Swinton) who keep pregnant girls chained up in their basement and sell the babies to lesbian couples. They also give each other orgasms by sucking ravenously on each other’s toes. Across town, the obese drag queen Divine lives in a trailer and puts a steak between her thighs to warm it up for dinner. Her similarly obese, brain damaged mother sits in a play pen and is obsessed with eggs and her son, Crackers, likes to have sex with the chickens. It is a fucking offensive movie and I loved every minute of it. If only cleaning could be this Divine.

Death by horse

The Rhinestone Cowboy has lived up to his name. An awkward conversation with him in the lunchroom led to the revelation that his arrival at the high school had seen him promoted to the head of the equestrian club. No surprise really I though, given that he has the petite frame and hardened calves of a jockey. However, it turned out that the poor kid was no jockey and had in fact never ridden a horse before in his life. He even admitted that he had a slight trepidation towards the beasts in question, hence the lack of equine skills.

Despite this, and the fact that he had coached basketball for the last three years, it was the horse club where he was placed. No question. The rule for Japanese high schools is that a new teacher must teach the club their predecessor taught, regardless of preference, ability or logic. My supervisor spends four hours a day coaching volleyball, even though he had never played it before in his life. At his last school, he conducted the school band and ran the music department.

Unfortunately, upon his arrival in our Gummo town he was informed that the musical department staff was already allocated, and so he was to coach the girls volleyball. Every day at 3pm, he heaves a mighty sigh and puts on his neon red bib. If a western actor had to play him at this precise moment, it would be Alan Rickman.

The whole situation reminds me of that scene in that Family Guy episode ‘Da Boom’ where the Griffins establish a new town after the world blows up. Every time a new person comes to the town, Peter makes them pick a job out of the ‘job hat’ so that a qualified doctor is given the role of village idiot and the dentist in a horse. In this society, that wouldn’t surprise me anymore.

Also, there are no sip top bottles in Japan. Why? No matter how many convenience stores and supermarkets I traipse through, I am cursed to settle for the runner’s worst enemy; the screw cap. As a result, Japanese treadmilling is a much more perilous experience than back in the west. Trying to get that damn cap unscrewed and then rescrewed takes both hands while your legs are whirling takes skills verging on amateur acrobatics. Oh, how I mourn the humble pump bottle.

Out there on the ice

The new English teacher has arrived. He is 23 and looks like he is sixteen. When I met him, he was wearing a baby blue tie with diamantes on it (or rhinestones for you Americans). If this was New Zealand, he would be deemed suitable effeminate to have the homosexual checked and double checked by any curious onlooker. But this is Japan and it’s hopeless trying to tell the gays from the straights in a culture where the macho baseball captains hold hands in class and sit casually on each other’s laps. I once spent an entire evening drinking sake and flirting with the Japanese boy next to me at a salsa bar. After a good hour of (by Western standards) rather forward under-the-table signals, I attempted to seal the seemingly done deal and he told me that he actually only liked girls. What a fucking crock.


Seen from this context, my hopes for the Rhinestone Cowboy are slimmer than his tiny Japanese hips. Perhaps I will have to settle for a buddy to drink sake with; it will be nice to have someone in the town who speaks English and is under 45. The Seinfeld thing was always wishful thinking anyway (the Japanese are a nation of Friends worshippers; argh). And of course, he is a far superior crush to the grey haired Moltisanti. Perhaps a better comparison is that of Twin Peaks’ James Hurley; generating a level of allure that is not quite Seth Cohen-obsession worthy, but definitely a few steps up the ladder and has crush-crossover potential to the outside world.


Two excellent Japanese anecdotes then. The first was the discovery that none of the female
teachers at our high school wear high heels. Ever. Curiouser and curioser I thought and questioned my female English co-teacher about this over a cup of instant coffee. The principal has outlawed the said items for the reason that ‘in an emergency, they cannot run fast.’ I guess this makes sense in a Japanese kind of way, but it does ignore the fact that Japanese women in heels can move faster than steroid- infused athletes. As one of my ALT friends put it: “If Japan ever wanted to win any Olympic sprinting race, they just need to have a woman in heels in the line up and put a man with an empty beer glass at the finish line.” This may sound sexist, but trust me, it is incredibly accurate.


I also suggested that in the unlikely event of an emergency, a woman in heels could simply TAKE HER SHOES OFF. I imagine that shoes would be the most likely cause of death in any Japanese emergency, because the indoor/outdoor footwear code still applies. Even in our semi-terrifying earthquake drill last year, the teachers found time to lay out an enormous, elaborate mat between the front entrance and the tennis court so that as they escaped certain death, their shoes remained unsullied. The same lack of logic became apparent at last week’s moving ceremonies; movers would attempted to change from outside to inside shoes even while struggling under the weight of a half ton fridge-freezer. Surprisingly, there were no broken backs.


The second story comes courtesy of another ALT but desperately needs to be mentioned. At another Hokkaido high school, a rather portly female teacher fell over on the ice and broke her leg. The principal called an emergency meeting of all staff and informed them that the newly incapacitated educator had in fact slipped over because she was too fat. He ranted about how irresponsible the teacher was (I believe the phrase ‘how dare she’ was used repeatedly) and instructed that everyone in the school go on an immediate diet to prevent the same thing happening again. This is, perhaps, the perfect example of ‘adding insult to injury’.


I have slipped over on the ice at least five times this winter (not counting a lot of very close calls) and I cannot imagine anyone making it through a Hokkaido winter without doing the same. The island becomes an ice rink for four months and you are constantly one slip away from a broken collarbone. I have taken to shuffling my feet along the ground penguin-style and have shacked up an impressive collection of bruises. People stop drinking altogether because it’s too dangerous to walk home from the pub. Every car in the island has to change its tyres.


All this is my attempt to try and explain how ridiculous and offensive the above anecdote is, but to be honest, it does a pretty good job of that by itself. I can only imagine the poor woman waking up in the hospital to find a get well card and a bunch of celery.


As I type this, I am starting out the window and can see the buds growing on the trees that have been bare for the last four months. The season is finally changing. I cannot wait to see what perplexing anecdotes The Spring has to offer.