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.
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Monday, April 27, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Vampire Weekend
The weather grows warmer; a fraction of a degree at a time. The snow, once a blanket covering every visible surface, has transformed into hard, dirty clumps which nestle stubbornly in driveways and gutters. Exams are over and students are back to breathing normally. The school year is almost complete and one can hear the odd smile and titter amidst the usual empty silence of the staff room.
Having finished my T.C. Boyle book about Mexican immigration (The Tortilla Curtain; a delight. Read it now before the Kevin Costner/Meg Ryan movie comes out next year and ruins everything), I have moved onto Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle; a slick piece of dystopian fantasy about the state of the world if the allies had lost WWII. In Dick’s narrative, America has been divided into a Nazi’s controlled East coast, a Japanese controlled California and a rocky mountain buffer-zone between the two. It’s grizzly and bizarre and totally not the sort of book to be reading in a Japanese high school staffroom. The cover features a blatant amalgamation of the Nazi and Japanese flags. I guess I should start hiding it in my desk when I teach my one class a day.
As the week had been somewhat void of wacky Japanese behaviour, I have resorted to my permanent plan B; films and alcohol. On Monday, I settled down with a cheap bottle of merlot and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. A pretentious and not particularly agreeable combination, especially as the feature wore on and the bottle became empty. My top five favourite scenes, through my wasted, semi-acidic haze were as follows:
Rather a delight all things considered, although David Lynch was clearly wasted the whole time he was making it.
I also watched Deathproof; Tarantinos’ half of the Grindhouse flicks and not nearly as good as Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. Basically the whole movie is Kurt Russell as a stuntman with a vendetta against sexy young girls whom he runs down on desert roads with his badass car. The first half is pretty good with an Russell getting a sexy lap dance (and Tarantino getting a boner) and Rose McGowan turning up in a blonde wig. Then in the second half, a heinous New Zealand brown stunt girl turns up and ruins EVERYTHING. Imagine having Shortland Street’s Alice Piper trade quips Pam Grier in Jackie Brown and you’ve got the idea. As she tried to engage in sassy, blaxploitation-themed dialogue with Rosario Dawson, saying things like ‘sweet bro’ and ‘yeah, sister’, I felt like slitting my wrists and decided that I have never hated my country more. Unfortunately, she is one of the ones that doesn’t get run over with Russell’s sweet wheels and ends up being the heroine of the movie. Where the fuck was Uma??!!
Let’s be honest; rather a letdown. McGowan is way sexier in Planet Terror, especially when she gets a machine gun stuck in her amputated leg stump and goes on a zombie killing spree using her sweet stripper moves. Plus, Planet Terror has Rico off Six Feet Under in it, who is still sexy even as a piece of tattooed up white trash. He and McGowan make out. Hot.
Finally, I put the Suntory whiskey bottle within arm's length and watched Let the Right one in; a Swedish vampire love story. All the rage these days with HBO’s True Blood and that awful Twilight thing. This movie was AMAZING; little blonde boy falls in crush with the weird girl next door who only leaves her apartment at night and who’s uncle slaughters homeless people to feed her nightly bloodlust. Stunningly shot and put together and man it really sucks to be a vampire. The best scene is when a newly bitten vampire woman gets attacked by a roomful of cats. Slash there at least three other scenes that are as good as that, especially the last scene in the swimming pool. Good grief. Anyone who has lost faith in films should watch this; it is about a billion times better than Oscar-wankfest dogshit like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire.
Having finished my T.C. Boyle book about Mexican immigration (The Tortilla Curtain; a delight. Read it now before the Kevin Costner/Meg Ryan movie comes out next year and ruins everything), I have moved onto Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle; a slick piece of dystopian fantasy about the state of the world if the allies had lost WWII. In Dick’s narrative, America has been divided into a Nazi’s controlled East coast, a Japanese controlled California and a rocky mountain buffer-zone between the two. It’s grizzly and bizarre and totally not the sort of book to be reading in a Japanese high school staffroom. The cover features a blatant amalgamation of the Nazi and Japanese flags. I guess I should start hiding it in my desk when I teach my one class a day.
As the week had been somewhat void of wacky Japanese behaviour, I have resorted to my permanent plan B; films and alcohol. On Monday, I settled down with a cheap bottle of merlot and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. A pretentious and not particularly agreeable combination, especially as the feature wore on and the bottle became empty. My top five favourite scenes, through my wasted, semi-acidic haze were as follows:
1. The man with intense facial leprosy who sits by a cracked window pulling levers and snarling.
2. The woman with massive jowls who was dressed like Baby Jane doing a tap dance and squashing the worm things that kept falling on her.
3. The dinner scene when the main guy tries to cut up the roast chicken but it starts menstruating all over the table causing the mother and daughter to leave the room in a fit of emotion.
4. When the deformed worm-foetus-baby thing gets sick is covered with crusty sores.
5. The random two minute shot of a dog being suckled by about twenty puppies.
It should also be noted that the title is not a cryptic metaphor for the bleakness of society; they actually do make erasers out of someone's head.
Rather a delight all things considered, although David Lynch was clearly wasted the whole time he was making it.
I also watched Deathproof; Tarantinos’ half of the Grindhouse flicks and not nearly as good as Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. Basically the whole movie is Kurt Russell as a stuntman with a vendetta against sexy young girls whom he runs down on desert roads with his badass car. The first half is pretty good with an Russell getting a sexy lap dance (and Tarantino getting a boner) and Rose McGowan turning up in a blonde wig. Then in the second half, a heinous New Zealand brown stunt girl turns up and ruins EVERYTHING. Imagine having Shortland Street’s Alice Piper trade quips Pam Grier in Jackie Brown and you’ve got the idea. As she tried to engage in sassy, blaxploitation-themed dialogue with Rosario Dawson, saying things like ‘sweet bro’ and ‘yeah, sister’, I felt like slitting my wrists and decided that I have never hated my country more. Unfortunately, she is one of the ones that doesn’t get run over with Russell’s sweet wheels and ends up being the heroine of the movie. Where the fuck was Uma??!!
Let’s be honest; rather a letdown. McGowan is way sexier in Planet Terror, especially when she gets a machine gun stuck in her amputated leg stump and goes on a zombie killing spree using her sweet stripper moves. Plus, Planet Terror has Rico off Six Feet Under in it, who is still sexy even as a piece of tattooed up white trash. He and McGowan make out. Hot.
Finally, I put the Suntory whiskey bottle within arm's length and watched Let the Right one in; a Swedish vampire love story. All the rage these days with HBO’s True Blood and that awful Twilight thing. This movie was AMAZING; little blonde boy falls in crush with the weird girl next door who only leaves her apartment at night and who’s uncle slaughters homeless people to feed her nightly bloodlust. Stunningly shot and put together and man it really sucks to be a vampire. The best scene is when a newly bitten vampire woman gets attacked by a roomful of cats. Slash there at least three other scenes that are as good as that, especially the last scene in the swimming pool. Good grief. Anyone who has lost faith in films should watch this; it is about a billion times better than Oscar-wankfest dogshit like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire.
The teachers have started changing into their tracksuits which means club activities for them and home time for me. Can I think of a witty sentence to sum up? Nah. Your mum.
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