LOCAL!!!!

A new phenomenon has appeared on the rural Japanese horizon.

At present, our high school is in a blissful and short lived period of nonchalance. We are in limbo between school years, between the frantic period of drunken ‘end of year’ enkais and drunken ‘beginning of year’ enkais. I can arrive at school between eight and nine and am free from my despised shackles of suit and tie.

Last week, we had the traditional ‘musical desks’ day, as the teachers who leave clear their workstations and everyone moves to a different desk in the immense staff room. I am one of the lucky ones; I have been upgraded from a desk facing the back wall to one right in front of the windows. I now have a view of the local co op, baseball field and a side view of the hospital. It is bliss to watch the crows swooping and screaming, to see tiny old people creeping to and from the co op; so old that their backs are bent into Quasimodo hunchbacks and they stare permanently at the pavement.

My grey haired Moltisanti crush is leaving, but my hopes are high that the new 23 year old English teacher will be a more than satisfactory replacement. I envisage a young, studious man with good teeth and a killer smile who is fumbling with his forbidden attraction to the better sex. I will take him under my Caucasian wing and teach him the ways of the western world, starting with Seinfeld and we will argue about the greatest character (I will say Elaine; he, of course, will choose Kramer) and then move on to even more uncharted waters. At school, we will blush as we pass each other in the corridor and meet for a secretly romantic lunch of sushi and green tea, using the guise of ‘man to man bonding.’ I will teach him the meaning of ‘clandestine’ and he will laugh and pretend that he that already knew it. It will become his favourite word and he will use it every day, but never quite get the pronunciation right. He will try to teach me more Japanese, but I will tell him I am only be interested in learning the dirty words. He will oblige.

Mr M. is also leaving. He had an English teachers’ lunch for him last Friday, which was a sombre and slightly awkward affair as we toiled over bowls of bland pasta at the town’s mediocre Italian restaurant. I had learnt before lunch that all the other English teachers despise Mr M., and one of them flew into rage and yelled “He is a fool man. He is not a real man. He is joke face.” I was semi speechless and murmured something in agreement. When we returned to school, I informed Mr M. that he had spaghetti sauce on his shirt. He looked down, horrified, and carefully replied:

“I am sorry. Mmmmmmmm......I will now go and cream myself.”

I will miss him inexplicably.

This too-ing and fro-ing of teachers lead to the phenomenon I spoke of; moving day. It turns out that all the teachers must partake in the arrival and departure of all their peers; we have a schedule booked solid throughout the week. First off was the principal; a man with a perfect comb over and steely eyes who has always terrified me, but looked a lot less intimidating in a backwards cap and an anorak tucked into his khaki trousers. The entire teaching staff (a good thirty odd people including the receptionist, the janitor and the school nurse) got amongst it and formed a human chain from the house to moving van, passing along boxes and bubble wrapped armchairs with Amish-worthy precision. Two dozen school students also turned up, for no reason other than that they wanted to help. All the while, the principal’s obedient wife went round bowing and thanking everyone. When we were finished the principal gave us another formal thank you and gave us of as a can of beer and a small bottle of green tea.

This went on all day. Another teacher’s moving session was so emotional that a group of his students started crying. Another one had a bunch of his ex-pupils drive two hours to our town specially to lend a hand with the move. Someone gave a speech and took a photo for the town paper. A small child tried to climb onto the moving van and was pulled off, crying, by his mother. My supervisor explained that the child was sad because the only toy shop in the town had closed down so he wanted to move to Sapporo with the teachers where the toys were. No such luck.

I am expecting another full day of moving ceremonies tomorrow and my only regret is that I cannot take photos to document the bizarre ritual. Unfortunately, my camera is out of action since it fell of a piece of interactive artwork at the top of an Osakan skyscraper. So far, I have ended up with five cans of beer and a lot of green tea. The new crush arrives tomorrow afternoon. I will be sure to shave and wear a tight T-shirt and stand close to the moving truck to keep my eyes peeled for framed photos of Mariah Carey and boxes marked ‘HOT PANTS.’

Coffee, Crushes and Criminals

On hiatus due to much needed escape slash holiday to Kansai (see Facebook for photo updates), Bombay & Elaine is now back with some sort of coffee-infused vengeance.

It is odd for me, the coffee thing. For the entirety of my life, since my first sip from a Beatrix Potter mug at about age eight, I have been a tea addict. Tea with breakfast, with every snack, after every meal and every drunken purge. It is the perfect hangover cure, the perfect elixir for both first dates and catch ups with Grandmothers. I can go through several pots a day; full pots which I will refill and top endlessly. My bedroom is a mess of mugs with thick brown rings down the inside. I was given the name ‘Tea Wench’ in my favourite university flat because of my consistent meddling with the kettle and the Dilmah. Earl Grey is the king of them all, followed by the Lady Grey and then English Breakfast. Herbal tea can, for the most part, shove it. I am no tea snob however; I like it strong, plentiful and, above all things, hot. Milk is compulsory, sugar is sacrilege.

And now, for the first time in my life, the dreaded beverage of coffee has all but taken over. Coffee has always been there, occasionally delicious and frequently disappointing, but never necessary. And now, at school, I find myself addicted to the god awful stuff. And it IS the god awful stuff; a jar of instant granules which look like they’re been scraped off the factory floor. In addition to this, I add a good heaped teaspoon of BRITE; some sort of hideous milk powder which revolts and obsesses me at the same time. I add it because it’s there and because the thought of drinking the stuff black makes me shudder. The BRITE drains my beverage of any sense of naturalness, turning the liquid a revolting shit brown, like the kind of paint no one would ever choose to colour their walls with.

And down the cups go; four, five, six times a day and I am addicted. Fuck. But you should see typing speed.

I have developed a crush, of sorts, on one of fellow teachers. It has taken me months to figure this out due to the fact that he is, in real life, low on the attraction scale. I think he may even have a bit of grey in his hair, although colour distinction has never been my best subject. Still, it makes me feel old. What makes the crush so interesting to me is the fact that my brain (or other organ) has become so bored and desperate that it has sought to seek out the individual with the most crush-worthy disposition in a staffroom of middle aged crowd fillers. And now, after months of thinking that I was safely off the hook, I have fallen victim to the most ridiculous crush of my life and feel like I am in The Office.

It has taken me all weeks to figure this out; this weird little allure of the Japanese man in track pants. I shall call my theory ‘The Moltisanti appeal’ and therefore lay all future copyrights. It is my belief that, if one spends enough time with a group of individuals—no matter how heinous or dull—they will hone in on the one in the group that is the most attractive, despite the fact that in real life they make ‘ewwwww’ noises and discard them with a flick of their heads. A crush must be established in EVERY collective group in life, no matter how repugnant the group is. Every high school form class, every university hall, every summer job. The situation is completely hopeless and there is nothing that can be done about it.

For those of you have watched The Sopranos (which is incomprehensively few of you considering that is a very serious contender for the best TV show ever made), you will understand my title. Christopher Moltisani, the hot headed, insecure younger cousin of Tony Soprano, is NOT an attractive person. He has an oddly shaped nose and the suspicious beginnings of a monobrow. He wears wife beaters (and IS a wife beater or at least a fiance beater; poor Adrianna) and tracksuits and hideous gold jewellery. And yet, through the many, many hours I have spend soaking up the intensity of HBO’s masterpiece; I have been sucked into crushing the little bastard. Why? Have you SEEN the rest of the males on The Sopranos? By comparison, Christopher is a regular (pre-emo band phase) Jared Leto.

I realize the absurdity of having a homosexual crush on a character in a show where the only gay character gets beaten to death. And I must reiterate that it is not a life changing crush; I don’t intend on plastering my walls with pictures of Michael Imperoili or pausing the show on scenes of him sans shirt. In fact, Christopher is perhaps my favourite character on the show (along with Janice) for completely different reasons—because he’s such a complicated, fucked up mess who was doomed from the start—but if I was to invest so many months in The Sopranos universe, I had to find someone to crush on, and thus Moltisanti it was.

And so, with my mandatory eye candy pinned, I can relax. It is simply not natural to spend that much time with a group of people, be they real or imaginary, without singling out the one you would most like to get with if the ridiculous hypothetical ever arose. Because, who knows; maybe one day it will. As I type this, my office Moltisanti has left for lunch. When he arrives back, I will smile secretly and make myself another cup of deathly coffee. Life of sorts, is sweet.

The best video on youtube

My favourite part is how the gayest band of alltime is getting hard over a bunch of henious chav women. Slash the cop in the leather pants.

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:

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.

You got yr. cherry blossom bomb....

School has been like Fort Knox during the last week. And I mean that.

Let me go over a few of the exam procedures undertaken by Japanese high schools. First off, during the days in which students are taking their future determining tests, teachers, receptionist and caretakers and not allowed to leave the school grounds. Two intimidating teachers are stationed at the front entrance to keep an eye of the rest of us; heaven forbid we should sneak off to the supermarket across the road to plant answers in the sushi trays.

Needless to say, the rest of the school is also out of bounds. Teachers have to eat their (pre-packaged) lunch at their desks as the lunchroom is somehow off limits. The true level of bizarreness became clear when I was told that for the five days of exams, No one was allowed to use their cell phones or the internet. Exams apparently call for complete and utter isolation from the outside world, even to those people who have no idea what the exams consist of and cannot speak the language.

For the five days I speak of, I sat at my desk from 8am to 5pm, occasionally dipping into my T.C. Boyle book and listening to lots of Grateful Dead. I watched Even Dwarves started small on my lunch breaks which is a highly offensive film about a bunch of German midgets who take over a mental institution. My favourite scene involved two of the midgets getting locked in a bedroom and ordered to copulate. However, they cannot go through with it because the key German midget is too short to get up on the bed. Many of the teachers gave me stricken looks as they walked past, but I remained indifferent and chuckled quietly into my udon noodles.

However, the highlight of the exam period was the bomb scare. A few days before the dreaded lock in commenced, I was joyfully tinkling away at one of the school’s grand pianos in the music room (there are actually TWO grand pianos side by side in the music room, another phenomenon I have not been able to figure out; do they expect two people to practise different pieces at the same time? Anyone who has ever played ANY musical instrument knows that this is completely impossible) when the door flew open and a gaggle of anxious teachers practically dragged me into the corridor.

It turns out that once, a good decade ago, a couple of cheeky high school kids rang their Hokkaido high school (not this one) and in an inane attempt to get out exams, said that they had planted a bomb in one of the classrooms. Obviously the plan worked like a dream. The bomb squad was called to check not only the school that got pranked but in fact EVERY high school in Hokkaido (there are about 250). The boys eventually confessed (and probably got life sentences or deported) but even so, every year during exam period, each Hokkaido school has a series of bomb drills. This involves checking every classroom and evacuating the whole school. Then the police arrive and check every classroom again. This happens for three days in a row.

I wondered quietly as I stood freezing on the tennis court how many years this futile exercise would continue. Surely after a decade of checking for evidence of a glorified practical joke, common sense would kick in. The police would hang up their helmets and students would be given one less thing to worry about during the most stressful part of the year. Things would go back to whatever kind of normal things were beforehand.

And then, I saw the police talking into their intercoms in Die Hard mode and I and I suddenly knew that this charade would never end. This is Japan and common sense comes several notches behind tradition on the cultural hierarchy.

The teacher who sits opposite me wears the same Christmas tie every day. It has reindeer and snow covered Christmas trees on it. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Most days, it makes it makes me want to cry.

Exam-attack!

Panic gripped the student body today. It is exam period at my high school and every teenager who knows what’s good for them is stressed to breaking point. In the depths of winter, girls in round rimmed glasses mop the sweat from their foreheads. Boys develop nervous twitches and teachers have private tutorials booked around the clock. One cannot walk down the corridor without hearing the sound of hyperventilating or quiet sobs. This is how it goes in a culture where one feels that they have shamed their family by playing a wrong note on their clarinet during concert recital. Once, after I failed an inept student on a communication test, she slumped down on the desk and cried for the rest of the lesson. The test was worth 10 % of her final grade.

Amid this whirlpool of pressure, Mr. M once again surfaces in our narration. A gaggle of befuddled school girls cornered him in his office and asked if the English exam would include an ‘either or’ question; the hardest thing we’ve studied this year. Mr. M paused for a moment, and then said “mmmmmmm....” and shook his head. The girls breathed a sigh of relief and ran off to tell the rest of the class. For the next two weeks, they studied all the relevant sections of the English course, calling each other on the phone between cups of coffee and practising their street directions till the early hours in the morning.

As it turned out, Mr. M had got it completely wrong and the ‘either or’ question was the main part of the exam. As a result, only four students passed and a lot of them drifted through the corridor to my office post-exam, too tired and exhausted to cry. When he found about the dire mix up, Mr. Y yelled at Mr. M, who didn’t say anything and pouted quietly in the corner.

There may be no more terrifying moment in life than turning over an exam paper only to find a question you have no clue how to answer. The heart stops beating for approximately ten seconds and then starts moving at triple speed. Things start to blur and you realize that you have three hours to plead your case before you hit the liquor store for that critical bottle of vodka. And so, I pledge you all to have a little sympathy for these kids of mine, who cannot drink and who may well have their futures severely dented by the most useless teacher in Japan.

On another note, Mr. M did tell me I looked like Tom Cruise last week. I smiled shyly and batted my eyelids. To be honest, I am not sure whether to take it as a compliment or an insult. I think I will take the former; it would probably the first compliment I’ve ever got in this country.

ATMs and that

The Japanese don’t like change. They’re terrified of it. You can see it in their eyes when someone suggests a new teaching plan or stops wearing a tie to work (both me). Japan is still running things like they did in the 1950s; a half century of Happy Days reruns without the happy part. The hierarchy of offices is still based around who has worked there the longest, with no attempt to rearrange the pecking order for the young rookie with a headful of new ideas. In order to be the boss, one must simply wait it out, until the superiors have died or retired, and then and ONLY then will you be able to pitch that proposal. And, if it is even the slightest bit radical, it wills probably we rejected anyway.

Gender relations are also firmly cemented in another decade. Japanese offices are extremely male-centric. Women employees get less holiday, don’t get paid for overtime and at the age of 30, receive sizeable pay cut in their salary. This is because of the unwritten fact that women are supposed to be at home making the babies by their third decade, and those at work obviously don’t need to be earning the big bucks to support the family. By contrast, 30 year old men receive a pay rise for the same reason; to keep the wee wife and kids happy. Women were not allowed to vote until 1945; half a century after New Zealand. An Equal Employment Opportunity Law was created in 1985 (twenty years after the rest of the world), but there are still less Japanese women in legislative positions than most Muslim countries.

Apparently most female college graduates stay out of the corporate world, and instead aim for jobs as air stewardesses. Even these are incredibly hard to get, with over 50 applicants applying for each job. This is supposedly the ‘glamorous’ lifestyle for a Japanese woman, much like a model or actress would be in the western world. If Sex & the City was set in Japan, Samantha would be an air stewardess. So would Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte.

The Japanese also refuse to partake in daylight saving. A when they tried to introduce it in the 1950s, the population freaked out and thought that it was some new age scheme to make them work longer hours. As a result, the night descends upon Hokkaido around 3.30pm during the winter, and I die a little inside.

However, my main qualm and issue with the Japanese conservatism (for the moment) is their inability to move beyond a cash based society. If you have a credit card in Japan, it is probably gathering dust. They are not used. Ever. Even worse is the matter of debit cards, or lack thereof. Japan does not believe allowing money to change hands electronically, and thus, any attempt at shopping, fine dining or in fact any good old fashioned consumerism must be done through the medium of cold, hard cash. However, my favourite part about the whole system is the ATMs; the only medium for getting money from the account in the hand. ATMs are scare, and can be found in the occasional convenience store, if you live in a city. Small towns such as mine, have one or two, and they are usually hidden away down a dark alley behind the post office.

Last Saturday, a friend and I were sipping beer and sharing travel tips, gearing up for a fun night out on the town with the other gaijin. Stupidly, we were so involved with our conversation that we lost track of the time, and at 6.30pm, decided to get out some cash for the evening ahead. This is where we learnt our first lesson about Japanese cash flow; ATMs close at 6pm during the weekend and that, as they say, is that. There is no way of getting cash until the next morning through any medium. Any attempt to use a credit card at a bar will result in an ‘are you fucking serious’ expression and a shake of the head. And so, we were forced to scrape together the last of our coins, convince the barman to let us put our drinks on a tab and went home at 9pm with our tails between our legs.

And so begins the obligatory list of hypothetical situations; what if you knock over a wine display at the liquor store on your way to your friend’s birthday, with the shop keeper demanding all the cash in your wallet, which was meant to take care of the present, the subway and of course the alcohol now lying in pieces on the floor? What if it’s your round at the bar and after all your friends have left at 3am, you realize you’re apartment is on the other side of the city and you haven’t got enough taxi money? Or suppose you need an emergency operation on your foot to remove a tumour and have to pay for it with the money for the next morning’s train? The latter is a real life situation which happened to me two weeks ago, and I was only saved by the generosity of my neighbouring JET.

The alternative of course, is to forgo the banks altogether. After all, their 0.5% interest rate, the logical situation seems to be to stuff your money into a hole in your mattress. For the country with the world’s second biggest economy, there’s definitely something missing.