"I'm disturbed, I'm depressed, I'm inadequate, I've got it all!"

Working at a meaningless job is a like having motor neurons disease.


When you arrive, you are a normal, functioning human being, dressed immaculately and carrying a packed lunch. You greet everyone in the office (as best you can through the language barrier) with a beaming smile and hand out small treats to your co-workers. You make daily plans for what you aim to accomplish and include highlighted windows to learn the language so as to better find out the office gossip.


As the days press on, you begin to realize that all those lesson planning seminars you sat through were a waste of hours. Your schedule is to help teach two classes a week, and this involves standing behind the teacher and reading a list of selected verbs out of a textbook. On a good day, you will be able to engage in impromptu conversation with your students; on a bad day, you will sit quietly at your desk for eight hours. Bliss, you say. Try it for a year.


And so, things start to shut down. That immaculate suit which you made sure you had dry cleaned once a week is left crumpled on your bedroom floor. You think about hanging up your jacket and decided it against it. On a good morning, you will wipe off the chalky patches with a damp cloth. Usually, you just shrug. The shirts, which you used to iron with a Bree Van de Kamp-efficiency, are now stuffed into a draw and pulled out one crumpled mess at a time. One day, you forget to wear a tie. As with the shirt and the chalk patches, no one says anything. From then on, you go open collar.


Your shaving ritual collapses. You drag a razor across your chin once a week and spend the next five days letting the stubble grow longer and uglier. Instead of getting up an hour before school to shine yourself up in front on the mirror, you roll out of bed with twenty minutes to spare and arrive at school late, your hair hanging limp and sodden from the shower you just jumped in and out of. Some days, you wake up even later and don’t even bother with the shower. You flick the sleep out of your eye and attempt to subtlety pat down your cowlicks with a salivated hand, Bristol Palin style.


Your appearance is not the only thing that disintegrates. After weeks of having your chipper ‘is there anything for me to do today’ plea responded to with the solemn shake of the head, your work ethic finally dies on the respirator. You give up studying Japanese, and suddenly find you can’t concentrate on anything. You spend hours staring at the computer screen, clicking on links on Wikipedia and pouncing on anyone fool enough to sign into Gmail chat. Soon, even this doesn’t satisfy. You find your attention span has completely disappeared. Replying to emails is too much hard work. So is reading books. Sometimes you make yourself a cup of coffee just to see how many sips it takes to drink it.


Your morale destroyed, you also give up caring what anyone thinks of you. You give up the fake polite smiles when you realize no one has talked to you in days. You start turning up late, leaving early, taking naps on your desk. You play your ipod too loud and silently bop along to ‘Raspberry Beret.’


Throughout all this, no one says anything. And you realize, if your existence is a joke to them, then you might as well treat it like one. And now that your spirit is broken, the delightfully awful question arises: just how far can you push these people?


You begin watching TV shows on your laptop, starting with a half hour during lunch and eventually you are having Weeds marathons twice a week. You laugh at the jokes; even the ones that you don’t think are funny. You SLURP your coffee. You yawn loudly. On the morning they have an important meeting about swine flu, you cough and blow your nose loudly and specifically buy pork for lunch. It’s almost fun.


Ten months on, the fresh faced idealist has been replaced with a lazy, sloppy, bitter, nervous wreck of a person, who doesn’t even have enough discipline to wash out his coffee mug before using it to make tea. His functions have all shut down. He traipses the two minute walk from his house to his school at 7.59am and returns the opposite way at 4.01pm. He realizes that everyone in the office despises him but he no longer cares. He no longer cares about making a difference because no one allows him to do any real teaching. This is what happens when you are given a job that could be done by a nine year old. You start acting like one.


In an ironic, blog-themed twist, I have turned into George Constanza. God help us all.

Next time, use your fingers

Yet another faux par on my part. My, how they do add up.

Our scene is set at lunchtime, or at least the when I choose to eat it. The hour between eleven and midday and hunger pains in my belly from the lack of breakfast I should have filled it with four hours earlier.

Breakfast in Japan is a rather dreary prospect at the best of times. With the lack of any kind of bread that isn’t sliced and bleached to within an inch of its life, and two kinds of cereal flakes, both of which taste like cardboard chips, the only real option is the Japanese version of rice, miso soup and natto. Call me westerner but the thought of rice as the start to my just doesn’t gel, especially when it is frequently the staple of the day’s other two meals. And natto, a revolting product made of fermented soy beans is possibly the most revolting substance ever to pass my lips. The beans are held together with sticky strands that remind me of seamen but smell like chemicals. I one discovered a packet of the stuff I’d left at the back of the fridge for several months and on opening it, it looked and smelt exactly the same. All of the good ALTs persevered with it until it gelled with their taste buds. I gave up after a week. It makes me oddly nostalgic for brunches and boyfriends.

And so lunchtime arrives early and greedily. On this day of blunders, I had homemade udon bento box in front of me, A cup of black, hideous coffee sat steaming to one side and a Frasier episode sat ready and waiting on my laptop (I am pretty sure that watching sitcoms at work is overtly frowned upon, but now that my work week consists of a single of hour of teaching over five days, I have given up trying to look busy. I have no idea what I am expected to do for the other 39 hours...sit in composed silence perhaps?). Suddenly I realized that I was sans chopsticks. A wave of panic rushed over me; the coffee, the noodles, Daphne...was the highlight of my dismal day to be cruelly taken from me?

Suddenly, I spied the container of chopsticks on my supervisor’s desk. They were the disposable kind, the kind that we westerners tap on the edge of the table before we break them in the hope that they will split evenly (this does NOT work). Please consider the following points before you judge me on my decision:

1) There were at least sixty pairs of chopsticks in the container.

2) These chopsticks can be bought in bulk for a few yen at any supermarket in Japan and are available for free at every convenience store in the country.

3) In all the months I have watched my supervisor eat his lunch, he has never once snapped apart a pair of these disposables. He instead employs a trendy black pair which matches the lunchbox set that his wife fills with delicious Japanese treats.

4) There was no one in the staffroom.

5) Daphne.

And so, I reached across and eased out a pair of the dratted things and, breathing a sigh of relief, settled down with udon and the Crane boys.

The next day, I could tell something was up. My supervisor hadn’t spoken to me since I arrived at 8am, but then this wasn’t particularly unusual (When I got back from my trip to Tokyo, no one spoke to me for two days. Apparently they are all just really busy). It was only when I snuck a peek at his desk that I saw the pathetic jig was up.

Each pair of chopsticks in the container had been accounted for. The closest pair had a tiny ‘1’ written on the left hand chopstick in black vivid and a tiny ‘2’ on the right hand one; the next pair had ‘3’ and ‘4’ and so on. The numbers reached into three digits; rather impressive given that this called for six numerals crammed together on a single pair of chopsticks. It may well be the most extraordinary example of passive aggression I have ever witnessed. Even the great Gareth Keenan would have trouble keeping up.

Today, I bit the bullet and offered my supervisor a pair of the same disposable chopsticks, apologizing for my actions and telling him it wouldn’t happen again. He gave me a tight smile and went back to his report without saying a word. I have a feeling this could drag on for the rest of my tenure.

And people wonder why I hate my job.

Buddhist shrines & puppet freakshows

Twelve days around Japan and a large chunk of token Japanese tourism can now be satisfactory crossed off. Tokyo’s futuristic architecture and acid trip teenagers have been sought out, drooled over and snapped with a digital lens. We strolled dreamily through the most beautiful gardens in Japan (located in the captivating city of Kanazawa; my first choice for my teaching placement), stood captivated beneath the breadth and beauty of a snow covered Mt. Fuji and sipping green tea in a traditional Geisha district. We even sat front row at a sumo wrestling tournament, watching hour after hour of morbidly obese men in G-strings try and wrestle each other to the ground. I’m sure there is a lot of tradition in it, but most of the westerners around us spend the whole time whispering things like “Oh my god look how fat that one is!”


The highlight of the trip was a trip to the local town of Takayama, famous for its traditional Japanese craft shops and locals wares. We stayed in a Buddhist shrine run by a bald American called Woody. He wore massive baggy jeans and stunk of cigarettes (later on, we saw him smoking in the temple). He claimed to have lived in Japan for eleven years and had run the Buddhist hostel for five. He told us he was a ‘Buddhist apprentice’ in a voice that made it clear that we would never understand his inner Zen.


The shrine itself was a rundown affair; the hot water was turned on for approximately four hours a day and the floors creaked. It appeared that Woody was the only person who lived in the temple; he informed us that the head monk was in Tokyo for a conference (??) and there were no other monks to be seen. The temple itself was off to the side, in a dusty room with the lights off and the curtains closed. Woody informed us that we could use the room for our own private meditations if we wished. We did not wish.


The walls to our room were actually made of paper, and as a result we could hear Woody’s swishing baggy jeans from the other end of the corridor. He spent most of the time in his office, smoking and watching his flat screen TV. He told us he meditated a lot, but I would have guessed something else.


The markets at Takayama consisted mainly of precious things and pickled vegetables. My hopes for a Japanese Scarborough fair faded away in a medley of wooden dolls and small gherkins on toothpicks. Dispersed throughout these delights were variants on the town mascot; a hideous, faceless rag doll thing, reminiscent of Tubbs off The League of Gentlemen.



In typical Japanese style, it was available in every colour and variant from key rings to jelly moulds. I freaked out and had to go out onto the street to escape from it. Still, it is not much better than Sapporo’s mascot, which is a small bald green man with a bulging erection.


We finally managed to find the museum Shi-shi Kaikan; a supposed must see in Takayama for having over 500 lion masks on display. Inside, we instead found ourselves at a bizarre puppet show, in which magnetised emperors hacked each other to death with samurai swords. A small child ran around the stage and showed the audience how all the tricks were done; the whole thing was in Japanese so I had no idea what was going on. The highlight came at the end, when another emperor changed from a human to a lion and fought a duel with a meddlesome pumpkin. I managed to record it through spasms of laughter.







Back at the shrine, Woody told us that there was no hot water for a shower because he forgot to turn it on, he muttered some half-assed apology and walked away scratching his ear.

I stole an umbrella when we left.