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.