Well Balanced Examination in Japan

By the moons of icy Hoth,

It's David Lee Roth!

Alert all of you who are looking for a well balanced examination of the Japanese educational system or similarities and differences therein. 20 weeks left from a full complement and I have found the worst one and intend to bitch about her without restraint or volume regulation.

<from here on, shouting and waving index finger like a despot> Unfortunately for neuronally-starved her, society dictated that for the period of 8 o'clock to 10 o'clock yesterday evening she was loosely in my employ to bring me plates of raw meat and ginger ale for my delectation.

Now I very much realise that this is not Tokyo. I realise it every day when an air raid siren goes off at 11 and 5 just in case there's an emergency (Yankies on the starboard bow I assume) and the only wild life one might encounter are GPS-less crabs. And I have made my peace with occasionally being thwarted when it comes to simple requests being rendered impossible by the complicated Japanese being spoken and the fact that English as a thing hasn't really ever cracked southern Japan. Much like wine, fruit or sit down pooing.

I grind my teeth bitterly when I read about jonny foreigner having trouble practicing his Japanese in Tokyo as everybody will automatically speak English to him. Git.

The truth of it is, the amount of times in a day anybody here encounters a foreigner depends very much on the schedule of one Mark-sensei. Whoever he is... sounds handsome though.

However when said foreigner learns your pissing language, speaks in the most slow and even tone possible, explains the thing several times with pictures and visual aids and you are still bewildered.... YOU HAVE A BAD BRAIN!!!

Pictured: The corporeal vessel of all her hopes, dreams and thoughts.

And a vital source of starch.

What's more is pissface then trudged about trying to avoid us for the evening and giving me the most severe of stinkeyes at any and every opportunity. She at one point looked to Meg for help to translate what I was saying (from Japanese to guttural grunts and clicks I must assume) who assuming it was her turn to order ordered corn. Or in Japanese "corn." She also pointed at the picture. The picture was also of corn.

20 minutes later a large platter that was mainly a variety of mushrooms landed on our desk. The rubberband of my ire tightened still further.

I commit my anger to the digital library of the internet in the hope that one day she will learn... any language, and will have my grievances explained to her in depth at some future time. You are all witnesses.

In happier news, my nose has returned to some kind of normality after weeks of acute pain on the tip. Much like a pimple, it was red and hot though weirdly the pain extended all the way into my nasal cavity. Attempts to pop the sucker led merely to sneezing and weeping. Sneeping.

After consulting some dubious websites I rubbed the area vigourously with warm water until... (read away now if squeamish) the tip of my inner nose hair eventually poked out ever so slightly, allowing me a one tug remedy that was immediatelly followed by the ingrown hair hole being filled with blood and dribbling down my face.

Apparently this is a thing that happens...

Though I will say it's no weirder than the time I found a chunk of baby tooth in one of my gums, then due to a lack of alternatives ground the thing up with my adult teeth and swallowed. Please enjoy that image.

Over the weekend I was held hostage to a fervent desire to nap for long periods, culminating in a 5 hour slumber bonanza yesterday afternoon. Solid.

You might recall I mentioned potentially going to the naked man festival, my reason for not going was due to an unknown Fun-Shithead quotient. For an explanation of this detail at length, check previous emails.

Instead we discovered a new mexican bar in Matsuyama and played a little table football. This allowed me to regale them with my undue amount of knowledge about the Professional Fussball League and it's activities in Ireland. Essentially it's 4 guys who all live together in the Dublin suburbs subsisting on takeaways and a regimen of not changing their underpants and living off of the tables they make and install in bars in the capital cities' pubs. Heroes all.

Every sport has it's pretty boys

My male students are still worryingly penis obsessed, goading each other by yelling phallic foods at each other. As comparisons to their downstairs business.

  

"Wiener!" 

"Baguette!"

"Radish!"

This... obsession is only highlighted by the opening of the Tokyo Sky Tree, the new second tallest structure in the world after Dubai's Burj al Metaphor

This just screams, "I have nothing to be ashamed of" Japan.

Visible from large parts of Tokyo, it dominates the skyline and lances kindergarteners with falling icicles at a rate of one a day.

Speaking of, a kid turned up at Megs school a few days ago with a limp and crying. Due to the cold floors in his school and their refusal to allow shoes, the kid has frostbite. It took all of one day for another student to tread on his tender tips, eliciting a spine chilling shriek and a pair of bloody socks.

As I have been asked to accept before, it is... a Japanese way.

Well Balanced Examination in Japan.

p.s. fuck that waitress.

Bikan in Japan

He lives to hurt,

It's evil Bert!

Hello there mellayella fellas,

Another week, another grimfaced stride into the perverted underbelly of the Japanese public school system. Ready? Yes? Picture of a marsupial copulating at hand? I thought you said you were ready...

As the school year judders to an end (ending at the rear end of March, just before Gridzer presents her credentials) my kids are getting a bit more relaxed than usual. Something that I would usually welcome as they usually look like they're trying to carry around a piece of white hot burning Magnesium between their bumcheeks such are their anxiety wrought faces. But with the applications to High School in, the load is well and trully off and they have as one creature decided to tell me about their privates.

Usually this includes some, more or even more utterances of "Big Pen-iss!"

Some highlights have included:

"I want to swim in the sea...to see cougars(the Japanese word for which being Jukujo)"

"I want to go to Hawaii... to see big pen-iss"

"Mark-sensei... Peniss Japanese size or Irish size?"

"Mark sensei girlfriend, big?(chestal gestures)"

"Mark sensei, do you have AIDS?... I have AIDS"

"Big thighs? Big Pen-iss."

And so forth.

For some reason that I have not researched but that necessitated a bankholiday (on a pissing Saturday) Meg had a long weekend, even longer as she took the Friday off with one of her Victorian style swooning illnesses. The Consumption. The Quinsey. The Lurgy. The 4 day weekend. Treacherous killers all.

Anyway, on the back of this we scheduled a trip to the mainland city of Okayama in order to see whatever it is Joe Okayaman gets up to in his busy day. Much as with any mid-sized Japanese city we did the standard shlep to the castle, early lunch, plod down the covered shopping street, try to find a decent glass of something. Nap.

The only things that point out Okayama as a city of note is an antique shop on the main street with a 94 year old proprietor that beat like a government mule any museum/gallery/castle I've seen here for sheer density of amazing Japanese historical and artistic items. The auld lad himself was a thunderously nice chap too and he gave us his business card which I believe indicates he also has wee shops in Tokyo, Kyoto and London. An enterprising one so he was.

Further to this is the legend of the "Peach Boy" (or Momo-Taro) or some baby that was found in a peach and then killed a demon with his animal commando squad of a dog, monkey and a pheasant. Sounds like a cracking read I know... But on the upside, aka the creepy side there are anatomically correct statues of the nude peach boy all over the city, with his wangdangdoodle braving the scourging gales of the February cold. And his ass hanging out like a fatty wino.

He could eat a peach for hours

We hit the Okayama bar scene at about 8 only to find it was closed. There was one miserable ex-pat bar that was the El Grande Bratwurst of sausagefests. I swear to God they tried to erect a small shrine to Meg when she came in, so starved were they of female contact. Then we tried a small cantina we spotted in the day, only to find it closed forever. You win again Japan.

The next day we ended up in the Japanese Colonial Williamsburg type attraction of Bikan, an old Japanese style set of streets with few cars (apart from ours storming up the main potentially pedestrianised street) and few reasons to bother ones hoop about going into any of the yee olde shops. Except that I found a bottle of White Chocolate Beer, I'll keep you posted on that one.

Meg very much felt she earned her 4 day weekend with her trip to the hospital to get something for her strep throat. I had been in days previous to get a few anti-bios for an arm cut that got a mite infected and had mentioned in passing how 2 weeks previous I had had a touch of flu. This was all the green light they needed to administer "The Test."

This involved ramming extra long cotton buds up both her nostrils to the point that her tears and snot flowed freely as one salty stinging stream. An American-Japanese pharmacist who was acting as interpreter answered her nasal shrieks with,  "I know, archaic isn't it?"

Frankly I'd take the day of work and the evening time self-administered whiskey-IV over that in a hot minute. 

In other news it may be that Megs soft drink of choice, "Mello Yello" has gone out of production in Japan. It had been re-introduced here after a 27 year hiatus, and the nuclear piss yellow drink has been putting a sugary spring in Megs step ever since. Especially as her quaff of choice (Diet Coke) is not available here. Prompting the slightly hysterical quote:

"Japan takes away everything that I love!"

Word is starting to filter around to certain teachers that Mark-sensei is outta here with a bongo-cherry on top. And bells on. I'm leaving. I explained to one teacher (that I've worked closely with for a year and a half mind) that I wanted to study some more and her rote response was "I hope your dreams come true."

"Um, yeah... cheers."

Another fantasy football drubbing has left my haggard array of overpaid nags swerving violently onto my shit list. If one more week goes by without one of my strikers making some effort on goal I'll I'LL.... continue to stew in impotent rage.

I've an event coming into my sights called the "Naked Man Festival" next weekend that I will be attempting to attend.

<rubs hands gleefully>

Let's naked Japanese men!

Bikan in Japan

T-Shirt and Little Pants in Japan

Conqueror of moose,

It's President Theodore Roose

Another fine rice flavoured morning to all of y'all. Despite already having had my obligatory sickness for the school year my crappy body crapped out on me big style in the past 7 days when I got IN-FU-RU-EN-ZA, a very big deal indeed.

Remember that image you have of various Bird Flu/Sars emergencies in Asia where one guy who was actually living inside a huge chicken caught a sniffle and suddenly it looked like death himself walked the streets and was only satiable by making everybody wear ridiculous face masks?

If not...

<dab dab>

Well it turns out they ALL do this during the winter months anyway, it wasn't a reflection of how serious (SARSious) they took the disease. Anyway,about two weeks ago I looked up at the class that had just walked into my ignorance bunker and all but one was wearing one of those masks. During the starting portion (Me-"How are you?" Them- "How are you!!") I tried to see who was sick with what.

Number of sick=0

So I asked why they were all wearing masks. This lead them to make an I've-been-found-out face that made one think of a lawyer whose client is so damn guilty their hand sizzled touching the Bible.

For example here are some guilty types (I'm onto you Cliff!)

My question hung in the air like the curry fart I just presently made in the staff room (waft waft). Eventually somebody said "Yobo." Immediately everyone was out-Yobo-ing each other.

"Yobo!"

"Yobo's the guy you want."

"I'm twice the Yobo you'll ever be."

"Yobo forever!!"

To which I responded, "Guys what in salty frig is Yobo?"

Turns out Yobo=Guard.

Even though no one was sick, they had all their mouths covered for no other reason just that they might breath in some errant germs from no one. I pointed this out to them gleefully.

Response? "...yobo"

Anyway despite all the Yobo about, I still got a touch of flu and spent my mid-week sweating and shivering while working, eating or sleeping. To those of you who have never been sick in a foreign country, store it up. It's one of life's choicest net-bags of shit to fling at you. Though by now I have what I need to scrape myself through with the minimum bother, mainly a local brand of not poisonous whiskey for sleeping and access to the restauraunts of Imabari via motorised auto-carriage.

It might sound odd but I find work helps too, as it distracts you from the constant registeration of inner-awfulness that your body is performing.

In Japanese current affairs, the TV gave over an hour of televisual programming to the breaking news that two dogs were hugging. Frankly I thought they were making a bit of a scene of themselves and were a studded collar away from some bizarre fetish video, but then so is everything else here.

A bunch of the dames from AKB48, that juggernaut of J-Pop and having their faces plastered on tatty merchandise (think of 48 Japanese Krusty the Clowns in miniskirts) got kicked out for not being single enough.

Somehow, somewhere Ivans body temperature went up by 1 degree

I organised an event last Saturday night, which was mainly a bunch of us foreigner types cooking food together, playing board games (they should call them BORING games(no they shouldn't I love them more than life itself, that was a test, a test which you failed person that laughed)) and having a few glasses of wine.

I served up one of the few actual meals of the night (as opposed to nibbily bits) with a meat, spuds, cabbage with an onion and beer gravy. Irish style. <thrusts peace sign towards listener>

Subsequently we got to hear more from Kiwi Mark's time in Cork, where he sold a broken mini-fridge to one guy and ended up getting his car impounded. For utterly valid and reasonable reasons. We also found out his girlfriend is "quite beautiful..." though not as much as her sister and that he is the black sheep of the family with all his other brothers being accountants in major global cities whereas he sells knives down the Long Mile Road and generates reasons for his girlfriend to dump him.

In other news I caught myself miming going to the toilet on a student. He was sitting in a bunch of old tyres looking glum, and having spent the previous 3 hours with 7 year olds I thought it'd be really quite the ratherest thing to jump up on the tyre and pretend it was a squatter toilet. Unfortunately the kids didn't see the funny side and looked very much how you would expect an adult to react if someone came up and started miming going an indeterminate number on them (1 or 2). Their patience with mark senseis antics that day was subjeted to that last heavy straw causing the camel to buck and sway... before it righteously slaps you with a lawsuit and a camel smelling fist.

I'm in a t-shirt and little pants at the minute (ladies...) as I dared to go out in the cold to leg about with the children over lunch break. The rest of the school staff who are wearing 4 layers if their wearing any at all, keep telling me how brilliant I am for being slightly chilled, but then they remind one another that after all, I am from Iceland.

Was called over to my Board of Education last week for something. They wanted me to sign a document. Which I did. Just not in the box that said "Another year of Japan please."

See yez in July!

T-Shirt and Little Pants in Japan