Part V, or, I Am the Literary Angel of Death

Before I continue relating my adventures over here, I feel compelled to tell you all of my inextricable involvement in literary deaths. Last summer, in the US and in Oxford, I bought a bucketload of English-language books to tide me over during what I (it turns out correctly) anticipated might be many empty hours in Japan. One of those books was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, aggressively advertised to me by two generations of American visiting students. Then on September 12 of that very same summer, Wallace de-mapped himself (as he would no doubt have put it).

Well I of course thought nothing of it and continued to live life much as I had before. But four days ago the New York Times front page greeted me with the news that John Updike had died of lung cancer. This would not have caused any particular emotion for me, had I not also bought a copy of Updike's seminal Rabbit, Run last summer. The message, finally, was clear: the authors whose books I had bought last summer (those who were still alive, anyway) were dropping like flies. My buying spree was slowing turning into a protracted killing spree. If Cormac McCarthy (aged 75), Don DeLillo (72), Thomas Pynchon (71), Salman Rushdie (61) or Michael Chabon (45) are reading this now, I can only urge them to finalize their wills, because they won't be able to stave off the inevitable.

On that note let's look at what I did with myself when I wasn't toiling away at the elementary school. Despite my new implacable working hours (8 to 4:30, and sometimes later because on Wednesdays there is a general meeting of all the teachers which I must attend despite the fact that it is entirely in Japanese and—from what I can tell—no use whatsoever; I will have more complaints about Japanese work and management styles), it goes without saying that my little escapades with Veep and Canett continued. Two days after my introduction at the elementary school (October 30th), I was summoned to the junior high school to make another completely pointless speech at the students' morning assembly there. They sang the school song with noticeably less gusto than the elementary school kids.

After that I was shown around the school, and then we all went back to the vice-principal's headquarters to chillax with some piping hot green tea, "all" being Veep and Canett and assorted people from the junior high and high school. One of these, whom we shall call Stanley, was an English teacher at the high school and had I think the best English I've encountered among employees of the King Bear empire. He also wore a tie covered in the names of various books of the Bible, which would have tended to indicate that he was one of Japan's one or two million Christians, although in this country it could just as well have been worn purely for the roman characters on it.

Over tea I'm pretty sure we were treated to a rendition of Canett's Trip to America, a sort of chanson de geste whose performance admits no variation and which is always greeted with great joy and anticipation by all people present. It begins with Canett telling us that he was about thirty when he first went to the United States, on a Fulbright Scholarship—"very difficult" to get, Canett is proud to remind us. In those days, it took fourteen days to get from Yokohama to San Francisco, by boat! He studied biochemistry at the University of Oregon—despite his mastery of the English language, which he teaches, he is in fact trained as a biochemist. Oh, Oregon! (And here occasionally I find myself obliged to admit that I have never been to Oregon.) But during his stay in America, Canett was fortunate enough to visit no fewer than eighteen states! Yes, the US is a very large country. Japan, of course, is much smaller, but it has much beautiful natural scenery. Japan—and this is inevitably the punchline, the climax of the story—has four seasons. There is a certain group of Japanese people who are unable to realize that, far from being an exclusively Japanese phenomenon, four seasons are noticeable throughout much of the globe's temperate latitudes. I would love to have gotten to see young, fresh-faced, Fulbright-Scholar Canett, just off the steamer, running around 1950s Eugene, OR, earnestly explaining to everyone that Japan has four seasons (!!!!!!!!).

Anyway, that was followed by the usual protracted devious plotting by Veep and Canett in Japanese, and finally I was returned to the elementary school.

That weekend I had a nice little stroll through the "skyscraper district" of Shinjuku, one of the few guidebook-approved areas of Tokyo I hadn't already visited on my previous visit. It's not a particularly exciting part of Tokyo, with its wide, almost empty avenues, but there are a few buildings there where you can get a good view of the city for absolutely free. One of these is the terrifying Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which my guidebook describes as "a computer-chip version of the great cathedrals of Europe." You may judge for yourself:


This is also the area of Tokyo where the Park Hyatt Hotel, made famous by the movie Lost in Translation, is located. I had a walk down there but it didn't look familiar to me at all. This may have been because the hotel itself only occupies the top floors of the skyscraper in which it's located, and I didn't have the courage to take the elevator up. (The hotel bar where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson bond beautifully really exists and has fantastic views and is open to the public, but I am still waiting for someone willing to fork over tons of money for one drink to come with me, although maybe one day I'll go by myself and hope someone as ruvry as Scarlett Johansson is striken by my drunken deadpan charm.) On the ground floor, though, there was an electric Yamaha piano being grandly showcased, but no-one was paying any attention to it. Seeing this poor little piano playing sadly to itself was heart-rending, especially since it was playing some hilariously crappy power ballad that unfortunately I can't remember now. By the time I got my camera out, the piano had already started on the outro. Here is my completely uninteresting video of this piano:

Actually my computer won't upload my Sad Piano video, which is probably for the better, and which means that you won't be getting any videos until I can figure out how to do this. Do any of you technologically savvy people know a program that allows me to convert videos into different formats?

The next weekend, my iPhoto tells me I went to Omotesando, the avenue often called Tokyo's Champs Élysées—mostly because it is lined with high-end brand boutiques, and not because it runs from a victory arch to an ancient Egyptian obelisk, though. There, I had Japanese desserty-type things that looked like this:


They're actually much better than they look.

Then my friends and I walked to the end of the avenue, which leads to Yoyogi Park. There we saw youngish Japanese men in leather jackets and greased-back hair and Japanese women in floral skirts dancing to rockabilly music. I have a video of this too, but in its current absence here is a picture:


I am clearly a terrible photographer. Anyway, I have no idea why these people were doing this, but they are a fairly regular sight on weekends there. To indulge in an absolute cliché, Japan is a land of contrasts: on the one hand, their favorite proverb is "the nail that sticks out will be hammered down", and on the other they do things like this in public, apparently fairly indifferent to attracting an audience or not.

Later that evening I was invited to dinner by the family of one of my RA-ee friends, at a great seafood restaurant where I was able to eat freshly chopped-up octopus—so freshly chopped, in fact, that the tentacles were still writhing when I picked them up with my chopsticks. This is the sort of thing that makes traveling worthwhile, although I am still waiting to find a place where I can do this. My friend's father is also fairly typical of Japanese salarymen in that he likes to pound the drinks when he's off work (this is transparently indicative of existential despair), so I am treated to a couple of beers, then some sake, then another type of sake, then a couple of types of shochu, which is Japan's distilled alcohol (usually about 25% alcohol). That night he then took us to a wine bar and we proceeded to put away a couple of bottles of wine on top of that.

This brings us to the following Wednesday, November 12th (you can do your own calculations if you don't believe me), the day of the elementary school concert, an all-day cutefest that us teachers were asked to attend. Each class performed a song in Japanese followed by a song in English, and I have on my computer a video of class 1-3 doing Old MacDonald, complete with animal gestures, but due to technical difficulties blah blah blah. In lieu, here is a picture of one class regaling the audience with a recorder instrumental interlude:


Awwwwwww!

The concert, by the way, started with a standing rendition of the school song by all people present, and then spectacularly closed with a collective interpretation of a song written, in English, by Veep herself, entitled "See You Tomorrow". Since this song is beyond parody, I shall simply copy the words for you here:

Thank you Friends
Thank you for your Lovely Smiles
Thank you Teachers
Thank you for your help
Thank you for our school.

Thank you my Family
Thank you for your Loving eyes
Thank you for
the blessing of this world
Thank you for everything

Thanks every one
Thanks for being with me
See you Tomorrow (bis)
Thanks for Everything in this world

In case you were wondering, the melody sounds like the bored improvisation, the musical doodle of a five-year-old with like two months' worth of piano lessons.

Apparently this was not the first time Veep composed for a school event: apparently last year she wrote a "lunch song" which made quite an impression on my English-speaking colleagues.

After the concert was over, Veep (who of course attended; I don't know what she does all day besides hang around her father's various campuses and attend events) asked me whether I could come to such-and-such station that very evening. I said okay, but I was planning to meet someone at 9 that evening (this was true), so I would have to be back before then, and what exactly was I going to be doing at this station? Now Veep clearly understood my question, but panic started to gleam in her amphibious eyes, and after about a minute of verbal flailing she told me I didn't have to come to the station after all.　おかしい (okashii, weird), as the Japanese might say. But in any case, this demonstrated that it would be possible for me to get out of Veep activities if they were suggested to me without much notice.

Before returning to the school after the end of the concert (this was a Wednesday, after all, so there would be a Japanese-language meeting), King Bear, who was there at least for the end of the concert, grabbed hold of several of us native English teachers, as well as of the Cat, and dragged us to the coffee shop of the place where the concert had been held, and all but forced us to get some tea and cake to eat (he paid for it all). Then, he subjected us all to a free-flowing meditation on various subjects, including education, hospitality, and religion, all translated for us by the Cat, who also added a sarcastic running commentary (with remarks like "This makes no sense, but I think what he's trying to say is…"). Right under poor King Bear's non-Anglophone nose! Talk about a dysfunctional professional relationship. This lasted about an hour.

That weekend, I went to Akihabara, the area of Tokyo famous for its electronics stores, and also for being the favorite district of Tokyo's manga-obsessed nerds who walk around dressed as their favorite cartoon character. This was a bit of a disappointment, though, because I didn't get to see any of these costumed weirdos. Maybe I came at the wrong time, I don't know. What I did see were another instutition to cater to these colorful eccentrics: maid cafés. Maid cafés are just like regular cafés, except more expensive and staffed by young women all dressed in French maid outfits. The idea is that the poor, lovelorn nerd can come to these cafés and talk to real-life females, dressed as maids for added… servility? While I was in Akihabara, many maids handed out fliers extolling the virtues of their maid café (one of the most striking things about walking around a Japanese city is that people are constantly trying to shove fliers into your hands, screaming at the top of their voices), and I fully intend to visit one as soon as someone sympathetically-minded comes to visit me. I am told there are also butler cafés in Tokyo—the equivalent for women, so I assume these are not the dignified, gray-haired butlers of European lore. Also, the Japanese word for butler (執事, shitsuji) sounds a lot like the word for sheep (羊, hitsuji), which I think is pretty funny.

Also in Akihabara, I spotted a couple of examples of Franponais, which is Engrish but where French is the language that is being mangled beyond recognition. Those that find Engrish a little bit too mainstream—passé, if you will—will find Franponais fresh and full of life. This is because it is not as widespread as Engrish, and because the Japanese speak French even less well than they speak English and so make almost no effort to get the language right. Here are a couple of examples:


I think this PIA place is just a video game arcade, so I have no idea why they decided to jazz themselves up with a little bit of Franponais, which is usually reserved for perceived high-class stuff, like cakes. For instance, I also saw someone carrying a bag with the following slogan: "Nous offrons avec corps et âme, un cadeau de satisfaction." I don't remember where the bag was coming from, but I think that's just beautiful.

That Saturday I also attended yet another school festival, although this time briefly, just for lunch (which, surprisingly enough, consisted of fried noodles and takoyaki, little fried doughballs with a little octopus inside them—they're pretty good!). Veep was there, as were Canett and Stanley, who was once again wearing his hello-I-am-a-Christian tie. Veep, I should have mentioned, not only invariably wears a Winnie-the-Pooh pendant around her neck (quite often paired with a smaller, silver bear pendant), but also frequently has one or two full-sized teddy bears pinned to her lapels. It looks just as ridiculous as you might imagine. I'm surprised she doesn't keel over forwards with all of that bear weight attached to her.

The purpose of my attending the festival was so I could be photographed, of course, but also so Veep could tell me (through the translation offices of Stanley) that that very Monday (November 17th), after school, I would have to take the train into Tokyo with Stanley and attend a special high-class event organized by King Bear, where various professors of the school were going to be honored. That's as much information as I was able to gather at the time. The description of this event gets a separate post because I wrote it for therapeutic reasons as soon as I got back home after it.

Still that weekend—which was clearly my busiest weekend ever—I went to a rickety little old amusement park right near Senso-ji, Tokyo's biggest Buddhist temple and a big tourist attraction here. This was fun and distinctly brought to mind the St Giles Fair, for all you Oxonians out there. There were some good rides, including one where you are suddenly dropped from a great height, which I must have ridden about five times (since the weather was pretty bad, the place was not very crowded). Here are a couple of pictures, varying in quality, taken from rides, obviously:


Isn't that nice? There was also a ride called Bikkuri House (which means "Surprise House"—there's also a chain of restaurants here called Bikkuri Donkey), the principle of which was that you sat down on a bench and then the walls, floor and ceiling of the "house" started to turn, so that you had the impression that it was actually you being turned upside down. For some reason this ride made me horribly nauseated, even though it was clearly the kiddie ride of the amusement park. On the plus side, I was briefly able to convince a little Japanese boy who was riding with us that I was in fact a Japanese person—basically by saying "I am a Japanese person" to him. The gullibility of youth!

The following weekend I went to the Edo-Tokyo museum with one of my friends who's a bit of a history fanatic. There was a very nice exhibition of Japanese woodblocks, including some by Hokusai, and also the permanent exhibition which is devoted to the history of the city of Tokyo. Here I am lording it over the riffraff in my rickshaw, eyes aglow with the fires of Hell, apparently:


And I think I'll stop there for now. Next time, the month of December.

Part IV: So What Kind of a Place Is this Elementary School?

To understand the guiding philosophy of King Bear and of his educational empire, one must realize that the man himself is an ardent anglophile. This is immediately apparent upon perusal of that prospectus repeatedly shoved into my hands by the tremulous arms of Canett the day I arrived in Japan. I have found a copy of the prospectus, so now is as good a time as any to regale you with some tidbits.

From p.5, describing the "elite education system" which comprises the grade schools of the educational institution (everything sic): "For the establishment of elementary, Junior and high schools, founder, president [King Bear] has been learning from the top-flight British public school as Eton (founded in 1440), Rugby (founded in 1567) and Harrow (founded in 1571), and he has adopted an educational philosophy of British public school, stressing cultivation not only of intelligence but also of a rich sense of humanity, character and morality and the spirit of freedom and self discipline and sportsmanship indispensable to a genuine elite. In addition, president [King Bear] has placed great emphasis on the education of good manners, greeting, cleanliness and sophisticated personal appearances which are important characters of ladies and gentlemen." (I'll admit that the stuff about "personal appearances" kind of scared me at first, considering that I am a bit of a slob and frequently fail to do a very good job of ironing my shirts.)

From p.6, in describing the elementary school specifically (once again, everything sic): "On the basis of the School Motto of our Institution, sincerity, reliance, and service, and learning from such top-flight British public schools as Eton, Rugby, and Harrow, we have adopted an educational philosophy stressing cultivation not only of intelligence but also of a rich sense of humanity, character and morality and the spirit of freedom and self-discipline indispensable to a genuine elite, and ladies and gentlemen." As you can see, the prospectus boldly eschews standard stylistic prescriptions concerning repetition.

From further down on p.6: "Our elementary school built of elegant brick is located in the natural beauty of Musashino plain where small birds sing and flowers bloom all the year round. In this blessed educational environment, we educate students in order to develop their well-rounded character and intelligence."

From p.8, now describing the junior high and high schools: "Based on the School Motto of our Institution, sincerity, reliance, and service, and learning from such top-flight British public schools as Eton, Rugby and Harrow, we have adopted an educational philosophy stressing cultivation not only of intelligence but also of a rich sense of humanity, character and morality and the spirit of freedom and self-discipline indispensable to a genuine elite, and ladies and gentlemen."

Okay, that's definitely the best bits of the prospectus, which is ten pages long and also provides detailed descriptions of the vocational schools' departments of speech therapy, of culinary arts, of clinical technology, of nutrition, and of prosthetics and orthotics. I hope the aforequoted passages give a sense of King Bear's anglophilia. Also worth mentioning is p.2, which is labeled "Founder's Educational Philosophy". Under the sub-heading "Spirit of Foundation of the school", we have:

"*cultivation of scholarship and skills
*spirit of gratitude
*indomitable spirit"

I'm not sure King Bear has ever been to England. Canett certainly hasn't despite his many trips to America. In effect, then, the obsession with England is an obsession with a fantasy-world England where the brand-name public schools educate stiff-upper-lipped young men whose sense of noblesse oblige sends them out into the world to bring civilization and dry wit to the barbarians (I am obviously extrapolating). King Bear's anglophilia is all the more delusional in that he speaks absolutely no English. This has some very unfortunate results, such as the school's "Educational Policy", as stated by the orientation pack I was given upon being shown my desk and told of my teaching responsibilities at the elementary school:

"Thou shalt do everything wi' heart;
Thou shalt be a man o' iron will.
Thou! Dost stick to th' ultimate end!"

King Bear also likes bears, surprisingly enough. A little sign outside the elementary school explains that this is because bears have an "indomitable spirit" and survive rigorous winters, but I suspect that this is a post-hoc rationalization. I'm not sure where the obsession with bears comes from. The man himself is a little bit bear-like, but in the way of a teddy bear, and not of a real bear: he's a bit shorter than me, with a round face and large round glasses (in front of tiny eyes), and the rest of his body is pretty much round as well. In short, he's small and fat. The front courtyard of the school as no fewer than three statues of bears, one of which is standing on its hind legs eating a fish. The front room of the school, which is also the staff room, has a few giant teddy bears in it, as well as a row of shelves containing the Harrods teddy bear for each year going back about twenty years. Apparently Harrods issues an annual teddy bear, slightly differently-dressed each year. I later discovered a disused storage room on the third floor which contains a terrifying amount of bear-related stuff, including what looks an awful lot like a real stuffed bear (although I'm pretty sure that's illegal).

In one of the staircases, there is a set of posters made by one of my native-English colleagues that makes a valiant attempt to find at least one "famous bear" for each letter of the alphabet. The bear for K is of course "King Bear of XXXX Elementary School". (Incidentally, never before coming here did I realize how much of an elementary school teacher's job consists of decorating walls, either with the students' own artwork or with educational posters such as the bear-themed ones.)

The school also features a lot of odd English slogans scattered across the walls. They give a new meaning to the word "empty". The main slogan is "Reveal your ambition to the heavens", which is featured prominently in the front courtyard of the school (as well as at the junior and high schools). Also, for instance, the library has a poster on one of its windows that says, "Read many books, immerse yourself in the feelings", which I find hilarious although I'm not sure why. There's also, on the wall next to the door used by the students to leave the school, "We are looking forward to your future."

I'm also going to include this picture, taken by me surreptitiously on my last day of work before Christmas, of a sign just outside the school, for some sophomoric laughs:


(You can click on it to make it bigger).

My working hours are from an inhuman 8am to 4:30pm. As I said to one of my bewildered Japanese friends, this was already more than the legal maximum working hours in France. This is strictly controlled by time-card, so there's no chance for pushing the limits. Of course I could always turn up late, but considering that I'm being paid ridiculously well I would feel bad doing that. Another inducement to arrive on time is that at 8am sharp everyone in the staff room springs to attention and goes over to their designated spot around the outside of the teachers' area, forming a large circle. Everyone then recites this litany, punctuating each line with a little Japanese bow:

おはようございます！ (ohayou gozaimasu, "good morning")
ありがとうございます！ (arigatou gozaimasu, "thank you")
失礼します！ (shitsurei shimasu, "I'm sorry")
すみません！ (sumimasen, another form of apology)
報告！ (houkoku, "report")
連絡！ (renraku, "contact" or "communication")
相談！ (soudan, "consultation")
And then: オヤシスにホウレンソウ育てよう！ This is the first syllable of each of the first four lines, followed by the indirect-object particle ni, then the first syllable of each of the last three lines, and then the volitional form ("let's ____") of the verb for "to foster, to cultivate". I don't completely understand the structure of this sentence, if it can be called that. But anyway, this little ceremony, I would later find out, opens just about every official gathering of employees of the whole educational instution. (Although once, when none of the various heads of the elementary school were there, the teachers dispensed with it—what does that say about the work culture here?) Then the meeting, which is usually just a couple of minutes long, proceeds with any teachers having any announcement to make making them, and the list of all absent kids being read out.

This is an inducement to be on time not because it's a thrilling experience, but because if you're not there it makes it abundantly clear to everyone that you are late.

At about 8:20, the famous bit from Spring from Vivaldi's Four Seasons is pumped over the PA system, and one of the kids gets to make an announcement, where they say "good morning" and say what the weather is and the day's special activities. After this, a subset of the students lines up in the front courtyard for their morning assembly. They have this at least once a week, because on Wednesdays the whole student body attends. These assemblies are usually opened with a collective rendition of the school song, complete with recorded orchestral accompaniment. Whenever I have to attend this, for the amusement of the kids I make a big show of not really knowing the words, but then belting out the name of the school when it comes up in the climax of the chorus, a bit like in this Mr Bean clip (the relevant bit starts at about 7:15). Then five kids come to the front and say, in English, the various things that all the kids are supposed to promise to do (I don't really remember what it is, stuff like be nice and well-behave and all that). The rest of the kids stand with their hands on their hearts, and after each promised item they yell, "Yes I do! Yes I do! Yes I do!", while brandishing their arm three times. In any other country this gesture would immediately set off Nazi-alarms, but not over here.

Then the kids get a speech from Mr. Mumbles (mentioned in the previous post) about God knows what, stuff about being good and working hard I suspect, which he delivers in bravura style, raising and lowering his voice like a kids' TV presenter on amphetamines. Occasionally some other teacher has to say a few words, and when King Bear is there (only on special occasions like the last day of term) I am silently motioned to the front to say a few random words. On one occasion King Bear beckoned me to the front, and then held my arm fast while he lengthily described my language skills to the student, skills which apparently include fluency in Spanish and Latin, of all languages (I was also able to pick up that he told them that the Oxford entrance exam (whatever that is) included a Latin section). He then asked me to say hello to them in Latin, which I refused to do, although I now realize I should have just said veni, vidi, vici and dura lex sed lex and been done with it.

At the end of the assembly, the PA system plays the Radetzky March, and the students all stomp their feet to the rhythm as they slowly peel themselves out of their formation, column by column, to go back inside. (Wikipedia tells me the Radetzky March is played on every El Al flight prior to departure!) These assemblies take place no matter what the temperature, and are only moved to the gym in cases of torrential rain. Since the younger boys have to wear shorts as part of their uniform this strikes me as lawsuit-worthy in the US.

Normal classes start at 8:45. On Wednesdays and Thursdays I have a gym class in this first period, class which is frequently held outside in the absolutely freezing cold. The poor kids' gym uniform consists of just a short and a T-shirt, and they shiver miserably. Some of them get to wear long sweatpants and a zip-up jacket; my guess is that it's because their parents said they should get to, but I'm not sure and I will ask one of the teachers and report back to you on this question.

Gym classes start with the kids forming four columns and standing facing the teachers (i.e. myself and the Japanese teacher in charge of the class). This is accomplished almost instantly because, clearly, these kids are taught from a very early age to function as part of a well-oiled machine. They all know which group they belong to when the class is split into four, or into six (all the classes are supposed to have 30 students). There are two "PE monitors" whose responsibility it is to ensure that these opening procedures go smoothly. Once they have lined up, they proceed to "the greeting" (挨拶, aisatsu). The monitors say "Good morning teachers!", which is then repeated by the whole class. Then they all bow and us teachers bow back to them. Then it is my responsibility to say, "Good morning everyone, how are you today?" They say, "I'm fine thank you how are you?" And I say, "I'm fine/great/something else along those lines."

After this comes the warm-up, which is the main thing native-English PE teachers have to do, because it is in English. We go through a ritualized five/ten minute warm-up which drills expressions like "stretch your legs" and "swing your arms". Then it's on to the main activity of the day, and my job is essentially just to yell encouragement at the kids in English and to help monitor them. When I first arrived, the activity for all of my classes was 鉄棒—tetsubou, which literally translates as "iron bar". This was a set of horizontal bars out in the playground, sort of like high bars in gymnastics, only obviously not so high. The kids had a set of exercises they had to accomplish on these bars, which were laid out on an A-4 sized card complete with little diagrams and a box next to each exercise for the teacher to tick once the kids had successfully completed it. These exercises are apparently determined by the national curriculum. My job during the 鉄棒, then, was just to make sure no-one fell on their head, and to help the fat kids with the more difficult exercises.

PE is one of the three classes (along with arts and crafts and music) besides English itself which form part of the school's English immersion program, which is tastelessly referred to as an "English shower" in the school's literature (I would put this down to more of King Bear's whimsy, but a Google search reveals that this term is in very widespread use in Japan). The elementary school is only in its fifth year, so the program is still quite young, and it's clear to me that PE is the class where the English immersion is the least successful. The idea is that us native teachers are supposed to introduce some vocab related to the sports activity at hand (and we have monthly meetings to discuss this stuff), but for some activities no vocab is decided upon. This was the case for 鉄棒, which, as you can see, doesn't really have a satisfactory name in English. One of the more difficult activities for the kids (especially the fat ones) was the thingy where you hold onto the bar, then run under it and jump up and flip around it so that you are now up on the bar. I have no idea how this is referred to in English, and neither did any of my colleagues, so I ended up calling this "doing the saka agari", which (坂上がり) is what it's called in Japanese and literally means "going up the slope". Even if there were an English term for this, it would be of little day-to-day utility for these little Japanese kids.

On every day but Wednesday I have lunch with the kids in one of the classrooms. My favorite lunch day is Tuesday, when I eat with the first graders. They are always eager to make English conversation, even if it is rather limited. (One of the highlights was when one of them asked me "Do you like friends?", clearly practicing the "Do you like X?" sentence structure.) The class of fourth graders I have on Fridays is also pretty talkative.

During lunch more musical accompaniment plays over the PA system. In the (long) run-up to Christmas, this was a medley of Christmas songs. Now they play drastically shortened versions of "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions", as sung by the same children's choir that sang the Christmas medley. I have no idea who makes these musical selections.

After lunch there is a short recess, followed by cleaning. The school doesn't seem to have much of a cleaning staff—in fact, on days preceding important events like parent-teacher day and open day, the teachers go on a cleaning spree to ensure optimal impression-making. Some of the kids have indoor cleaning duties, and they accomplish their chores to the tune of Kachaturian's Saber Dance, the overture to Carmen and Wagner's Flight of the Walkyries, which, to me, immediately evokes Apocalypse Now. (As if this crazy musical accompaniment weren't enough, the school also has unicycles which some of the girls ride around the playground during recess.) I am in charge of supervising the second-graders with outside cleaning duties, however. This, for the moment, has mostly just involved the kids picking up dead leaves in the playground with their bare hands. I think the point of the activity is mosly to instill a sense of responsibility in the kids, rather than to accomplish much in the way of physical results.

On Monday and Wednesday afternoons I have arts and crafts with the fifth graders. My responsibilities here are to drill art-related vocab at the beginning of the lesson, and then to help out the kids (in English), but mostly to discipline them (in English), since they are notoriously rowdy. But I'm a really laid-back teacher, so the real art teacher (a lovely Japanese lady only two years my senior, but already married with a baby) is usually required to keep them in line. The fifth graders have been on a school trip to England, where they learnt the expression "Shut up!", and one of their favorite things to do is to say "Shut up!" to each other in a really whiny voice of which I don't know from whom they picked it up.

I never thought of myself as a kids guy, but I have to say that working with these Japanese kids is really not so bad. For one thing, besides the fifth graders they're very well-behaved, and they're amazingly considerate to each other, apologizing to each other with an air of great, pained sincerity whenever one of them hurts the other by mistake, for instance, on the 鉄棒. (This is not to say that they don't make fun of each other: among all grades, the kids love to call each other fat; even the slightly chubby, baby-fat-covered ones are branded as fat. This is, you must remember, a nation of scarily skinny people. So I've made it my duty to be extra-nice to the fat kids, and have realized that most of them don't really seem to have any self-esteem issues anyway.) For another, it's very touching to have them run up to you and smile at you with their snaggle-toothed smiles and say "Harro Rémi-sensei!" out of their little Japanese faces. The Japanese insist that "Western" (i.e. white, let's call a spade a spade, no racist pun intended) kids are the cutest, with their big blue (invariably) eyes and blond hair. I suppose this is part of the same esthetic that covers the DVD cover of any movie that could possibly be tied to the romantic-comedy genre with a torrent of pink hearts. But I say, for the more discerning eye the Asian child is of superior cuteness.

That's it for today. Tune in next time for whatever I feel like writing about.

Part III: In Which I Am Given a "Real" Job

You might ask yourself what I did with my plentiful spare time during those two first weeks in Japan, between being exhibited in Canett's English classes. The answer is I don't really remember. I went out in Tokyo a couple of times with my various RA-ee friends and once with the jovial (American) Aoyama Gakuin University professor who came to Oxford last summer while I was an RA. He took me to a British pub in Shibuya called the Hobgoblin, which serves the same Wychwood Hobgobin beer as do various pubs in Oxford (e.g. the St Aldate's Tavern). How a little Oxfordshire brewery ended up with an East Asian empire I'm not entirely sure.

I also suffered from one of the most crippling bouts of jet lag I've ever experienced, and it took me about a week before I stopped waking up at three in the morning unable to go back to sleep. Unlike Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, however, I had a computer packed to the gills with Media, and so I spent many wee hours watching the first season of Mad Men, several seasons of Family Guy which have been sitting on my computer for years, as well as the complete Monty Python's Flying Circus. Incidentally, the first episode of this that I decided to click on contained a sketch called "Erizabeth L", which features Terry Jones as Yakomoto, a "Nip" (as one of the characters puts it) impersonating the famous Italian director Luchino Visconti. The same episode later includes (as well as the famous Argument Clinic sketch) both Terry Jones and Michael Palin in blackface. Ah, the late sixties in England! (The full script of the episode can be found here.)

You have to remember that during this time I was still visa-less, and thus unable to buy a telephone or set up an internet connection in my apartment. I was also without a bank account (banks require you to be legally resident). The DVD rental place also requires a telephone number to join. My only channel to the outside world was my local internet cafe, two train stations away (or a bike ride away once I had bought Carol Pastel). (The Starbucks near my apartment, on that same road with the McDonald's, is—alas!—not WiFi equipped. For a Nation of Technology, Japan has very few WiFi hotspots, even in Tokyo, but this may be because Japanese cell phones are all web-capable, althought it's really not quite the same.)

Internet cafes in Japan, by the way, are quite different from those in Europe, for those of you who have ever been to one (my experience of European internet cafes is entirely limited to the great country of Bulgaria). Most of the computers are set up in private booths with sliding doors. The booths are also equipped with huge reclinable leather swivel armchairs and frequently with video game consoles like PlayBoxes and X-Cubes and all of these new-fangled Nintendo whatnots. In some cafes you have the choice between armchair booths and Japanese-style booths where you take off your shoes at the entrance and sit on the floor (what fun). The cafes also double as manga cafes, which means they also offer a wide selection of Japanese comic books for the customer's perusal—although why people go to these cafes and pay to read these mangas when they could just go to a bookshop and read them for free is quite simply beyond me. And they are open 24/7, so that if you are a "salaryman" (which—サラリマン, sarariman—is how the Japanese designate men who have faceless, dreary, overtaxing office jobs in huge "trading companies", which seems to be about 95% of all Japanese men) stranded in Tokyo after the last train back to your God-forsaken suburb, you can set up camp for the night in an internet cafe booth in the comforting company of your favorite manga or the interactive glow of the internet. Even my local internet cafe (located as you will recall about half and hour from Tokyo) offers a special price for the hours of darkness (figuratively speaking), as well as the rental of slippers, dressing gowns and bath towels if you would like to take a shower (for which the facilities are available, although this is something I still haven't done). If you are planning to visit Tokyo, I heartily recommend spending one night at the internet cafe—a real Japanese experience which will also save you most of the price of a hotel room.

At my internet cafe, apart from the nearly 100 booths on offer, there are also four non-enclosed desk stations, protected from the prying, inquisitive gazes of fellow internet users only by substantial partitions and curtains. These are a bit cheaper than the booths, so this is where I did most of my surfing, considering I still had no idea when my first paycheck was going to arrive. (The first time I asked for an "open" station, the dismayed desk clerk warned me that I would have no privacy, but I replied that I had nothing to hide.) This was during those halcyon days before John McCain had his ass handed to him and before Barack Obama magically fixed the economy, so I needed to get my almost daily fix of John Stewart, of Stephen Colbert, of Sarah Palin impersonations and of various websites that aggregated polls to prove beyond statistical error that Obama would win the election. I occasionally corresponded with my parents, also.

And so the two weeks passed. I explored my neighborhood eateries, bought necessities, and occasionally even took advantage of the aggressively warm and sunny weather to go running (a habit that lasted a very short time). All this until Tuesday, October 28th, the day when I was scheduled to visit the elementary school. I arrive there around 8, accompanied by Veep: a handsome, fairly new-looking red brick building (unusual in Japan) with an unmistakably church-like steeple. At the front gate stands an avuncular man, whom we shall call Mr. Mumbles, facing the incoming stream of uniformed students. (The younger boys wear soft cornered caps with tassles, the younger girls little bowler hats; the uniform is designed for extra cuteness.) Each student in turn bows to Mr. Mumbles and belts out an overenthusiastic "おはようございます！" (oyaho gozaimasu, or good morning), to which Mr. Mumbles replies, avuncularily. As usual, upon entering we are sat down and served instant Japanese tea.

Before I get introduced to any of the elementary school's staff, we must complete Mrs. NWDFT's interview. She is here, asking questions, and the head English teacher at the elementary school, whom we shall call the Cat, a Japanese guy in his early-to-mid-thirties by my estimation, is translating. There are no more questions about elite education in the United Kingdom. I don't remember exactly what we talked about, but after the interview was over, the Cat, baffled, told me he had no idea what the hell point of this interview had been. Instantly my growing worries over the two last weeks were washed away: finally some confirmation that this being trotted around and asked to say bland and random things in English was indeed not normal, even for Japan.

But immediately afterwards I am ushered into the school gym, which is labeled "King Bear Hall". In front of me, the entire student body of the elementary school (five grades, about 400 students) is standing in front of me, impeccably lined up, with teachers evenly spaced at the back of them. They are a uniformed parallelepiped of little Japanese faces staring out in either curious anticipation or boredom, I can't really tell. There is a microphone. I stand off to the side with a few other teachers while Veep takes the stage and gives a hysterically hortatory speech. Then someone from the elementary school makes a speech. It is clear that I'm going to have to say something. I ask Veep who is standing next to me what I should say. Whenever I am asked to make a speech and I ask her that, she seems terribly pained and starts to panic. This time she tells me to introduce myself, and also to keep in mind that the kids know the words "smile", and "happy", and that if I use these words in my speech this will be pleasing to them. She then tells me to smile, overstepping (in my opinion) the line which states that, barring specific circumstances, employers have no control over their employees physical expressions.

So I go up there and do a standard "I am Rémi, I am French and American, I am looking forward to working here" bit, without any real idea about how much of this the kids understood, considering I haven't yet spoken to any of them. Then, the kids get to ask me questions. A few of them line up and take the microphone in turn. Almost all of their questions are along the lines of "Do you like X?" They are absolutely adorable. One of them asks me, "Do you like [pea/a homophone of 'pea']?" I'm at a loss for what to say, until the Cat explains to me that they are talking about P.E. As people who know me from high school and before will attest, P.E. has never been my strong suit, so I give a kind of half-hearted, "Yeah, I like it all right" sort of answer.

At the end of the assembly, I am physically mobbed by the kids. At one point I am in physical contact with at least thirty of them at one time. This indicates, I suppose, that I made a good first impression on them, and I am gratified. In the hallway outside the gym, there is a wall covered with the names of the recipients of the "Golden Bear Prize". Since these are all Japanese I assume that this is nothing to do with the Berlin Film Festival.

We make our way back to the staff room, and the Cat shows me to my desk, next to that of the two other full-time native English teachers. More on that later. We then turn to my responsibilities. It turns out I will be an assistant teacher in the arts and crafts classes for fifth graders, as well as the P.E. classes for second and third graders. So much for my less-than-passionate endorsement of P.E. in the assembly.

Well this post is already really long, so more about the organization of the elementary school will have to wait for next time.

The "this is where I live" post

I live in a fairly nondescript neighborhood in the outer suburbs of Tokyo, just outside the boundaries of Tokyo Prefecture. Let's have a look around!

This is the main street near my apartment. What a beautiful January day! The air is crisp and refreshing. This street, which is 300–400 m long, has, no exaggeration, at the very least five hair salons on it. I think the reason Japanese unemployment is so low is because of the sheer number of hairdresser jobs clearly available.


This is my local supermarket. "Tsurukame" (鶴亀 according to my computer) means crane-turtle. The shop is full of fish, octopus, squid, seaweed, lotus roots and so on, but is there any way to get long-grain rice or not-from-concentrate orange juice*? Oh no!

*I have found another shop that sells fresh orange juice at extortionate prices, but I still haven't resolved my long-grain rice problem.


This is a 100-yen shop, part and parcel of the urban and suburban landscape of Japan. They are misleadingly named because all of the items inside actually cost 105 yen. Here you can buy pretty much anything, from plates, cups, etc, to cleaning products, stationery, whistles, wasabi, and crap like sushi-shaped keyrings.


And Japan is a civilized country!


Across the street we have Mos Burger, Japan's answer to McDo. You might think of it as a Japanese Quick.


This is Family Mart, one of my two local convenience stores, or コンビニ (conbini). They are open 24/7 and you can go there to buy everyday items such as snacks, sake, mangas, contact lens solution, and so on, as well as to pay your bills, send mail etc.


That big apartment block on the right is where I live, as seen from the street we have been exploring so far with such verve and energy.


This is the local train station. On the express train it's just over 30 minutes to Ikebukuro, the rail hub in North-Western central Tokyo. Convenient!


This is my apartment block again, as pictured in an artfully disorientating photograph.


This is a more honest picture of my apartment block, as seen from the train station (see how near it is!). The big empty space in the foreground was a parking lot when I first arrived here, but I'm not sure what they're planning to put there now.


This is my other local conbini, sunKus. Interestingly, this is pronounced "sanks", which is as close as people get to "thanks" around here.


This is my bicycle. Her name is Carol Pastel. I didn't name her. She is made in China and has a durability of three years, according to the guy who sold her to me. Say hello to Carol everyone.


This is my floor. Let's go visit my apartment!


This is the view from my front door. Seiyu, you might have been wondering since it's popped up in a couple of pictures, is I guess a department store where you can get household appliances, clothes, and there's even a subterranean supermarket. Very conveniently located!


This is my living room.


This is the kitchen.


And here's my traditional-style Japanese bedroom, with my futon on which I repose nightly. There's also a bathroom, with a toilet called "Toto Washlet Apricot", which has a heated seat and will squirt water up at your ass should you so desire.


This is the view from the living room and the bedroom, towards the train station.


And this is a box of tissues. As you can see, the manufacturers of even the most mundane of products in this country feel imbued with a holistic sense of responsibility, which they never hesitate to share with users on their product's packaging. Just about everything you buy here has a little broken-English message for you, even the disposable chopsticks you get in a bar. Rest assured, examples shall follow.

Same as above, part II

Well it's becoming patently obvious that at this rate I'll never catch up with the present, so I will try to abbreviate by conflating similar days and so on. I can do this right now: looking at my handwritten schedule for the first two weeks (mentioned in the previous post; incidentally, on my copy of it, the days from the 16th to the 24th are marked with hearts: this is because this is Veep's way of ticking off days that have already elapsed) I see that on the 17th, 22nd, 23rd and 24th I attended Canett's lectures at four different campuses of the 学園.

Each of these lectures unfolded in roughly the same fashion: I was ushered into the classroom with Veep, and we both sat to the side next to the blackboard as Canett introduced me at great length. While I didn't understand most of what he was saying, I was able to pick out that he was describing Oxford as the world's oldest university, and ergo the world's best university. This would have brought a tear to John Hood's eye. After interminable ramblings about God knows what sort of additional misinformation in Japanese, he would then switch to his own special brand of English and re-state my CV with variable coherence ("Mr. Rémi Jeffries [occasionally Mr. James Jeffries], Master of Philosophy, major in————————Politics!") and explain that he was very old ("born in 1929") and that the first time he had been to America was fifty years ago, and that hence his English might be slightly antiquated, which is why the presence of a speaker of modern, cutting-edge English such as myself was required.

Canett, you see, is trained as a biochemist, but he also gives scientific-English lectures to the students at the university and colleges. His teaching method is simple: before the beginning of the lesson, about a page's worth of material from a scientific USA textbook relative to the students' course of study is copied onto the board, and then a student comes up in front of the class and reads the text, sentence by sentence. After each sentence, Canett repeats the sentence, corrects pronunciation errors and translates difficult and technical vocabulary. On these celebratory days when they were fortunate enough to have me in the classroom, my job was, after each sentence had been parsed, to read it back to the students slowly and clearly (in what Canett described to the students several times as "the Queen's English" before I forcefully indicated that this was not entirely accurate). In other words, I was playing the time-honored role known as the human tape recorder, which I understand countless young idealistic English speakers coming to Japan have found themselves playing over the years.

These classes usually lasted about an hour and a half, and were then followed by lunch with Veep and Canett in an office room. Over and after lunch, Veep and Canett would talk to each other in Japanese for long periods of time, and although I couldn't understand what they were saying, it was obvious from their frequent use of my name and of the word "hospitality" (often in combination with the word "Oxford": "Oxford Hospitality"!) that they were plotting ways to make use of me at various "hospitality events" (recall that "hospitality" is the 学園's totemic term, plastered all over its PR material, although completely voided of its significance). Clearly Veep had not yet given a huge amount of though to what my responsibilities would be, concretely, during my year in her employ. Anyway, eventually the result of Canett and Veep's parlays would then be transmitted to me, usually in the form of simple instructions to be in a certain place at a certain time, without much indication of what I would have to do there. At the time this was really pretty frustrating. Then the meeting would conclude with a few more ritualized enjoinders from Canett to read that prospectus very carefully and occasionally a recounting of "Canett's First Trip to America", which I will pot for you readers in a later post.

On one of these occasions, at the campus of the college of medical technology, I met a young professor of prosthetics, who seemed like a pretty friendly guy and proceded to make me try on various artificial legs, arms and hands that he and his students had created. Certainly one of the more surreal things that have happened to me here. These prostheses, incidentally, are pretty clever little pieces of nuts-and-bolts technology: for instance, the artifical arm's grasping mechanism is entirely controlled by moving your shoulders and thus activating systems of strings and stuff that I'm not very good at describing. For some reason I had always imagined that these things were entirely electronic, perhaps with an audio help function narrated by an inhumanly perky Japanese lady.

On Saturday, October 18th I attended the school festival (poetically named "HOSPIVAL": can you guess which two words this is a portmanteau of?) at the university campus, which is located right next to the secondary school campus (which is itself about a five-minute drive from the elementary school, for you geography freaks). A convivial affair, with many stalls selling yaki-soba (fried noodles), fries, okonomiyaki (Japanese pancakes, approx.), Vietnamese food (the stall run by the Vietnamese students), soft drinks, etc, and also a big stage for student bands, student dance numbers and so on. The festival concluded with a cross-dressing competition, with some extremely convincing entries, during which Veep confided to me that she found the guys' frequently bared legs very pretty.

Veep, incidentally, was not looking good during most of this period. When she came to Oxford, she was pretty well put-together, i.e. she looked the part, hair tidy, clothes immaculate etc. However, when she came to the airport, she was wearing pretty uncool glasses and her hair was kind of all over the place. Since we frequently took the train together during our campus-hopping, I had much time to observe that her complexion was the ghostly, sweaty, waxy pale of alabaster and to notice that she was carrying some sort of cough around, which she would emit in infuriatingly wimpy bursts every thirty seconds or so, frequently without covering her mouth. When she did cover her mouth, she would almost always grab my arm as soon as she was finished, being unusually tactile for a Japanese lady. This cough kept going until at least mid-November.

On Monday the 20th, in the evening, I was taken out to dinner by Taz and Veep at an Italian restaurant (Italian restaurants here, though, have a definite Japanese twist to them, since their dishes incorporate much more seaweed and fish roe than I remember seeing on the authentically Roman menu of Pizza Express), to be interviewed by Mrs. Noodles-with-deep-fried-tofu (Mrs. NWDFT), a journalist for a local newspaper whose daughter goes to the junior high school. This was pretty informal, to the extent that neither Mrs. NWDFT nor Veep had thought about how to express their questions to me in English (Mrs. NWDFT's English is good, but not at the level of grappling with more complex sentence structures). What I remember most about this interview is being asked about "elite education" in England (as though I were an authority on pre-university education in England). Since the elementary and secondary schools pride themselves on providing an "elite education", what they were clearly expecting from me was an answer extolling the virtues of Eton, Harrow etc. I refused to provide the goods however, instead launching into a lecture on the dangers of overusing the word "elite" (which Canett was, embarrassingly enough, more than willing to throw around in both the Japanese and English portions of his introductions of me to his students) and its cognateness with the decidedly unflattering words "elitist" and "elitism". I can safely say that I completely failed to get my point across.

Finally (for this post), on Tuesday the 21st, I was dispatched to one of the college campuses to meet the "sing circle". At first I thought this was some sort of student singing group, but it turned out in fact to be a group made up of housewives ranging from middle-aged to Canett-aged. They were rehearsing a medley of traditional Japanese folk songs (most of which I think could safely be classified as kids' songs) for performance the following weekend at the school festival of this particular campus. After performing the shortest piece I knew on the electric piano used by their group leader/accompanist, I was given the music for the songs they were singing and urged to sing along. This I did for about the hour of the rehearsal, trying to decipher the words as I went along (they were written mostly in hiragana, one of Japanese's two syllabic writing systems, although there was some kanji (Chinese characters as used in Japanese, of which you need to know 2000 for basic fluency) thrown in there as well). And then, the following weekend, I "performed" these songs along with these lovely old ladies in front of a small crowd of students and parents at the school festival. It was pretty embarrassing. After that I was asked (by the ebullient accompanist) whether I would like to make this hangin out with the old ladies and singing my heart out with them a regular thing. I politely declined, citing all sorts of professional and personal (namely my lack of singing ability) impediments.