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.