Ms. Benes moves West

Wellington.

Winter in the capital and the sun shines bright. In the past two weeks, I have soaked up vitamin D than my entire year of glacial Hokkaido. As I write this, I wear sunglasses to shelter my eyes from the much appreciated glare and stop every few minutes to eat a piece of camembert with my eyes closed. To my right sits the converted plastic cuisine I brought back from the Far East, shimmering on the coffee table amongst my mother’s trendy ornaments. 

They are the only things in plain sight that I have to remind me of Japan and that suits me just fine. 

I have settled back into the Western World with disturbing ease. Over the last two weeks, I have  formulated the answer to the inevitable ‘How was Japan’ question—asked politely by friends and parents friends who don’t care but pretend to—down to a sharp, three sentence response. “Oh yes, it was great” I begin, my eyes wearily lighting up. I follow up the probing questions with an intoxicated roll of the eyes and something like: “I don’t even know how to describe Japan, its such a whack place!”  At this point, my voice develops a warning tone, fending off follow up questions with a tight smile. If pushed, I have a few anecdotes up my sleeve (‘Black Obama’, Run crippled boy run, Fat Teacher on Ice) and I must admit, the gaping faces of disbelief do please me somewhat. But after this, it all closes down rather firmly with concluding crap about ‘good life experience’ and some serious nodding. In and out in three minutes and no mention of those soggy Suntory marathons.

Aside from these asides, my world has become flooded by the pleasures that the East could not provide. Blue vein and olives; merlot and Shortland Street; driving and sunbathing; gay people, bagels, beaches, skinny jeans and Malaysian restaurants. The ocean is not obscured by wartime blockades, and is in fact a place to be enjoyed, even in the so called winter. There is no J-Pop to be heard and even the dub music sounds sweet by comparison. Cliché after cliché and I’m sure you’ve heard them all before. I am even tempted to quote our gay ally Judy Garland and say that there is no place like home, but that would suggest a sense of tackiness that Bombay & Elaine does not encourage. Let’s just say that I feel like I have finally broken up with a boyfriend that I always hated, and the wave of relief is awesome. 

I have begun dating a boy five years my junior; a bright wee design student with the kind of perfect cheekbones and big brown eyes that I spent hours dreaming about in my Gummo town. I laugh off the ‘cradle snatcher’ jokes and walk down the street with him arm in arm. Homosexuality is relatively acceptable here, at least on Cuba Street. We smoke cigarettes as we walk and try to avoid the pigeons.  Gutter birds they may be, but after a year of crows, I could almost kiss their gnarled little feet. We throw our cigarette buts on the street and don’t get arrested. 

The design student took me for a night out at The Ivy; the new (and only) gay bar in the city. The first floor is a garden bar where balding men in sports jackets sip vodka tonics in the corners, their pinkie fingers raised at 90° angles so that even the most intoxicated patrons get the message. They make half hearted fuck eyes as the young boys in tight jeans who bounce around at the bar and wisely ignore them. The tight jeans bounce back upstairs, drinks in hand to the dance floor. 

The top floor is a spectacularly sweaty meat market with young bucks embracing in every direction. In the centre, a wasted girl grinds away blissfully surrounded by a circle of adoring males. From time to time, one or another will peel off to try their luck with a lonely looking solo dancer, usually returning to their queen bee and trying to hide their bruised ego. The speakers blared out Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys, which I took to be some kind of 90s themed novelty night. Later, the design boy told me that this was in fact the only music that they ever played at The Ivy. He told me of a now legendary blonde jock who would break into a mad interpretative dance every time ‘Mambo No 5’ came on (which was disturbingly often).  

The middle aged men don’t venture up to this level. Their shiny domes are cruelly illuminated under the wandering spotlights. They know that eventually their time will come, usually in the shape of a teary 22 year old, dejected after failing to find tenderness from the sweaty throng a floor above. A few drinks and a firm hand around the shoulder and the two will leave together, under the disgusted eyes of the bouncer. 

Gay bars aside, Wellington is of course, no more than a stopping point between journeys. As the days go by, the novelty fades somewhat and my feet begin to itch with the promise of travel and adventure. New Zealand is a beautiful place but a tiny one. In two weeks, I will be sipping Budweiser in the Californian sun. I can almost taste the Twinkies now. 

In Urakawa, things go on as usual. Sato Sensei cancels his weekend away with his increasingly estranged fiancé when his volley ball team wins their tournament. The music tyrant schedules overtime for his terrorized brass band as the school’s opening ceremony approaches. Yukki sheds a tear and practises her phrasal verbs.  And though she feels like she’s in a play, she is anyway. Or a blog at least. 

It may not resonate in my ears and in my eyes with a McCartney- refrain, but it’s there somewhere, nestled between various organs like an appendix. I guess that counts for something. 

The Love Song of J. Alfred Sato

Mr M.’s replacement, Sato Sensei, represents for me the stereotypical put-upon Japanese male. In the four months since his arrival, we have up struck up the closest thing I have to a real Japanese friendship. He’s a nice guy; friendly and soft spoken with a perfectly pressed suit and his hair gelled into an awkward fringe. The system has not yet beaten him down, but I predict that it is only a matter of time. Also me to spin for you the traumatsing tale of the everyman from Japan.

Sato Sensei didn’t want to teach in my small town. He is in fact from Sapporo; the largest city and, by my reckoning, the only bearable place in Hokkaido (the second largest, Asahikawa, is a sprawling ugly wasteland of a place with the coldest temperature in Japan). He worked hard during his school years and went straight to teachers college. Here, he was unable to partake in the (semi) boisterous life of the Japanese student as he lived with his parents who forebode his from drinking even at age 21. Post-graduation, Sato not-yet-Sensei asked to stay in Sapporo with his family and friends. More fool him. As with all teachers in Japan, choosing a teaching location in not allowed. Ever. You can make requests, sure, but you won’t get them. Instead, our protagonist was shunted to a small town, a sobering five hours drive from everything he ever knew.

(Readers may, at this point, as why Sato Sensei was not in favour of a more exciting placement than Hokkaido’s frozen terrain. Apparently, a Hokkaido teaching degree does not translate the other islands of Japan. If a teacher has a sudden urge for the bright lights of Tokyo, he must spend another two years completing a diploma which permits him to teach outside of Hokkaido. This makes no sense given that the teaching curriculum is exactly the same throughout Japan. For a country so obsessed with ‘Black’ Obama, change is disturbingly low on the list of priorities.)

And so, unable to travel afar and unable to stay put, Sato Sensei was placed in a non-descript small town which I believe was famous for growing turnips. Here he stayed for two years, coached the basketball club, making a few teaching buddies and finally began to feel like he was part of the turnip-themed community. Then, as with all teachers, he was relocated to ANOTHER Gummo-esque town three hours north. This one was bigger but colder and here he coached the archery club because he had to. Still, things started looking up when he began courting the school’s demure, tracksuit wearing P.E. teacher. She was the only female teacher not married and they had romantic dates at the town’s local yakiniku bar and held hands under the desk at the teachers’ meeting. He even sang her a shaky version of The Carpenters’ ‘Close to you’ at the end of year karaoke party, after which the other male teachers slapped him on the back and told him that he was now ‘a real man.’

A year went blissfully by and the happy couple got engaged. This was not altogether unexpected. Japanese teachers nearly always marry other Japanese teachers, for the simple reason that most of them never have the chance to meet anyone else. This is especially true in deathly small towns, where men and women never go to the same pub.

Unfortunately, this declaration of love meant nothing to the Hokkaido School Board. Being the Iago in our Shakespearean tragedy, the Board completely ignored the pleading requests for the two to continue their journeys through life side by side. Instead, the new engaged couple was split up and placed six hours apart at opposite ends of the island. There were tears and the exchanging of personalized coffee mugs and then they parted ways; she for a town of 12,000 to the north and he for a small town in the south known primarily for its seaweed.

It is here where your humble narrator came across the poor fellow, two desks down from his own and struggling to unpack a box of tattered English textbooks. He gave me a weary smile and after we began to converse in fractured English, I could see that this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Upon his arrival, Sato Sensei was instructed to coach the tennis club, which involved standing huddled in a corner of the freezing tennis courts for four hours every afternoon from Monday to Saturday. If there is a tournament on Sundays, he has to organize rides for all the team members; weekend plans be damned. As a result, he is only able to undertake the six hour journey to visit his fiancé about once a month. He told me this on one of our cigarette breaks (which happen often, him being addicted and me being bored), showing me a tiny photo of the women in question and telling me in a sad, tiny voice that he might only spend ten nights with her in one year. He told me that he hated tennis and tears welled up in his eyes. I felt a lump in my throat and took another long drag of my Lucky Strike. It’s times like this that smoking is not only acceptable but pretty goddamn mandatory.

Sato Sensei is stuck here for at least three years and from there is it wherever the Hokkaido School Board chooses. He stares wistfully at my travel plans, knowing that he will probably never get a chance to see the wide world. Teachers in Japan get maybe one week’s break after club activities are all set and done and these are mostly spent visiting their parents or their parents’ graves. Some do attempt to fit overseas travel into their limited vacation time like Mochi Sensei; the teacher at my school who flew to Europe for a three day 'holiday of a lifetime' in between softball tournaments.

Sato Sensei hopes to one day settle down with his tracksuit-covered beloved and raise a family. Still, on the likelihood of this, he is unsure. The Hokkaido Board is no more accommodating to a married couple than an engaged one. It may be ten years before the two can be together again.

And yet, I have saved the most heartbreaking part of the story for last. Sad and lonely, a stranger in town no one would ever want to call home, Sato Sensei decided to get himself a pet. A cat, a dog, a hamster...anything so long as it would be glad to see him when he returned after his six hours of teaching and four hours of tennis. Upon finding this out, the Hokkaido School Board contacted him and informed him that pets were not allowed in the house he was required to live in. Not even a goldfish.

In five weeks, I will leave my small town forever and breathe a sigh of long anticipated relief. I hope Sato Sensei will be ok. I have promised to send him a postcard from the magical world of America and may even attempt a Skype conversation at some point. As I write this, he is frantically trying to prepare his fifth lesson for the day, his brows furrowed with concentration. Sometimes when I walk past him, I give him an affectionate pat on the back. He turns round, startled and confused, and smiles weakly.

Does he dare disturb the universe?