Meghan's New Job

Hello peoples,

Gonna make this quick but just thought I would catch the world up on my life a bit (assuming you care…). This coming Monday will be my last day of work at my wonderful job. As you may well know, I have been working at an English school that caters to the afterschool kid crowd and some adults. Mostly I teach elementary school kids, so we have a blast playing lots of games aimed at building vocabulary and picking up choice phrases like: “What is this/that? It’s an eraser”, “I like peaches”, “I want pizza”, and the classic “Is it a pen? Yes, it is.”. I have one class of more advanced kids who I have been getting into past tense, but this is a pretty advanced class of 5th graders who are now mostly able to answer the question “What did you do today?”, assuming they 1. went to school or 2. ate something.

I also teach a handful of Junior High kids, who are much deeper into the past tense and future tenses and love to answer questions like “How often do you watch TV? I watch TV everyday”. And finally I have a collection of High school and adult students who I actually carry on full blown conversations with. I love them all and have a great time teaching them all, so its been a really sad two weeks as I have had to tell them I am leaving. I have had a few kids cry, which breaks my heart a little, but mostly I have held it together. We’ll see how I do when I have to say goodbye to my boss, who has been possibly the best boss I have ever had.

So why you ask am I leaving this job I love so much. Well, as always, for a boy. Christophe and I work reverse schedules, he from 8:30-4:30 and me from 3:30- 10:00, meaning we only get to see each other in the brief morning and the tired evening. And as much as I like to be a proud independent and powerful woman of this modern age, I do miss cooking dinner. And hell, Ill admit it, I miss cocktail hour. So starting April 1 I will become a full blown High School teacher at the local Catholic High School (which currently only has one Catholic- the priest who teaches religion class). I will go to a regular person schedule of 8:30-4:30, which I think will be good for me since despite my many plans I usually just spend my mornings sleeping in, watching random streaming television and spending way to long looking at emails. Now I can do that in the afternoon and not feel so bad about it ‘cause I will have already done something with my day (gone to work). And I can have cocktail hour again, just in time to enjoy the coming nice weather, sitting on our patio watching the sunset. Here's a link to the schools website- if you download the PDF on this page you can see lots of cute pics of the kids and school. The English page is shite, but I have been asked to clean it up so check back in around 6 months (I've decided to teach myself proper website building, so it might take me a while).

So my first day will be April 1 and I will be sure to post about the school once I get there. For now I thought I would just let people know what’s up with life here. Christophe and I recently invested in some very beautiful road bikes, but I will leave it to him to post photos of them and such. Bought our plan tickets for the upcoming trips to Maui (May) and Borneo, Malaysia (Aug)- looking forward to both of those. Cat’s gotten into the habit of knocking down flower arrangement, which is a bit of a problem what with the water spilling all over everything. We are still working on the best ways to deal with this recent development of life with a cat. Any suggestions welcome.

That's about all for now.

Later crew,
meghan

14 Year Old Cotton

So today I went to the dentist. My dentist and I are friends, which is novel for me. It’s novel because, as a general rule, I hate all dentists. I’ve had lots of good people work on my teeth, but I have never been able to separate the fact that they are working on my teeth with the fact that they are people, let alone good people. But here in Japan anyone who is trying to learn English is probably going to become my friend and some of them become true friends in time. My dentist is one of the true friends. And to be clear on how much I hate the dentist, I have to wear headphones blasting music while they clean my teeth because the sounds freak me out so much. If I could talk them into it, I would be gassed for every cleaning.

So I went to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned- actually only my top teeth because Japanese insurance only lets you get half your teeth cleaned at a time… I don't know why, neither does my dentist. Post cleaning we started talking about my tooth that died when I was 10 years old and is very slowly turning black. We decide to take an x-ray of it to look into ways to bleach it, because it was a special root canal that I needed when it died since the tooth was so small and basic bleaching doesn't work on dead teeth like mine. Observe a brief summary of how the conversation about the x-ray went:

“So how’s my tooth look”
“….mmmm…. not good.”
“what’s not good?
“He did bad job.”
“So is my tooth going to fall out”
“…………mmmmm……….”
“What! That is not the correct answer! When is my tooth going to fall out?”
“no no, not fall out. Just, bad job.”
“What do you mean, bad job”
“………do you have time?”
“sure”
“okay, please sit down”
“Wait, what are you going to do?”
“I will drill a hole in your tooth and fill it with medicine”
“A hole?”
“Can you come back on Monday so we can check on the hole”
“I’m going to have a hole in my tooth until Monday?”
“Yes, we will check on it.”
“I don't think I can be walking around with a hole in my tooth right now. I am talking to student’s parents, saying good byes, then next month I start a new job, this might have to wait. Is my tooth going to fall out this month?”
“No, not fall out. Bleach tooth.”
“With medicine? What will the hole look like, will it be obvious? Will you see it when I smile?”
“It is small hole”
“but what color will the hole be, how big?” (I point at my tooth to indicate, wondering when I can possibly get away with a hole in my front tooth).
“No, in back of tooth”

You get the idea. Welcome to life in Japan.

So they finally get me in the chair, lay me back, I pop in my headphones and start blasting music into my ears and he begins to drill a hole in my tooth. (Just a note, my dentist is Keisuke, he works for his father who owns the practice. He comes from a family of dentists, including is brothers, father and grandfather who was the first dentist in Muroran (the town we live in). So he and his pops are leaning over me as he drills this hole.)

Now in the Japanese language there are many ways to say “what the hell is that”. As they sprayed water and cleared away the hole, I heard all of them. I lay there, mouth open, Keisuke tugging at something inside my tooth with his little pliers, his father and the nurse leaning over him exclaiming different versions of “what the hell is that?”

Long story short, there was a small ball of cotton that was buried deep within my root canal. They yanked it out. I got the root canal give or take 14 years ago. The cotton looked pretty good considering its age.

So they filled the hole, once it was totally emptied of cotton, with some kind of bleaching medicine and called it a day. And now for the reason why you should be friends with your dentist- he gave this little bleach hole to me for free.

Oh, and guess how they closed up the hole. They shoved cotton into it.

PS- Today is the spring equinox. How do I know this? Because in Japan, it’s a national holiday! Japan, your people may be awful workaholics, but man do you know how to give us days off.

Cat Hats

With winter comes a lot of snow here in Hokkaido. In many ways this is a bad thing- its cold, they don't plow the streets, I have to do lots of shoveling, I often slip on the snow/ice and have lots of bruises as a result. Still, it can also be a good thing- great snowboarding conditions, always pretty white snow none of the gross grey old stuff, and lots of time for indoor activities. One such activity for me has been making hats for the cat.

It actually began as a mask-making project. February 3rd in Japan is a holiday called Setsuban. For setsuban you make someone put on a devil or demon mask (there is no singular devil here, lots of different ones exist). Then you have them walk in through the front door and everyone else in the family throws peanuts and dried beans while yelling at them “Out bad luck, in good fortune” or something to that effect in Japanese. Apparently it doesn't take much to scare off a demon, because they are then supposed to turn and flee.

As a general rule you have the “man of the house” don the demon mask. But Christophe wasn't up to it this year, so I got the other boy in the house to dress up- our little cat Inu Chan. They give away free masks with peanuts and dried beans around this time of year, but naturally those masks are a bit big. So I improvised with the peanut packaging and created a kitten sized mask.




He did a good job running away when we threw peanuts at him. He later returned to investigate the peanuts, although by then he had lost his mask.





More recently, I decided to make him a hat. My vision is based off the Mario 3 frog suite. The hat is as of yet completed, but Ill give you a sneak peak.

I pretty randomly decided to sow him a hat, but have since been putting reasons behind my decision. One such rational is that it is a “I’m sorry” present, since next Tuesday I will be taking him to the vet to have (as it was translated to me) “his testicles popped out”. Not sure that forcing him to wear a frog hat is really that good of an I’m sorry present, but what ya gonna do. The even better justification for the hat actually came yesterday. As it turns out February 22 is cat day! So it is his cat day present. The reason it’s cat day is a bit complicated, so bear with me.

In Japanese any given kanji (picto letter) has multiple pronunciations. So, for example, the kanji for 1 can be pronounced as “ichi”, “hito”, or “eee”. The kanji for 2 can be “ni”, “futa”, or “nia”. The sound “nia” is very similar to the sound cats make in Japan- not meow but nian. So when said fast, the date 2-22 sounds like nian, nian, nian- so its cat day. In English it would be meow, meow, meow day.

A quick side note before I part- all the animals in Japan make different noises from the ones in America (when imitated by small children). This is by no means surprising, but I always get a kick out of it. My other two favorites are dogs- “wan wan”- and frogs –“gero gero”.

Catching Up to Do

A pretty crazy amount of stuff has gone down over the last three months. To begin with, Meghan and I went home for the first since in over a year. To tell the truth, I was a bit anxious about going back home. What would it be like to go to a place where everyone speaks your language? What will have changed? What would I do without a drink vending machine and convenience store every 13.5 feet (4.11 meters)? Which side of the road would I drive on? Well, gladly, these things barely came up – with the exception of driving on the wrong side of the road, which only happened once. It was great to be home – to see friends and family – and both wonderful and frightening to be back in a place where everybody understands what you say. Wonderful was the feeling that I didn’t ever have to struggle through an explanation that the DS I was sold had a broken pixel. Frightening was the feeling that I had somehow lost the ability to smoothly and calmly communicate with people that spoke my language. In the first couple days, it seemed that in every interaction with people (other than friends and family) I found myself questioning my body language and how I was presenting myself. Most of all, I was shocked by the directness, loudness, and – despite only happening a few times – rudeness of people I encountered. For the sake of conversation, let’s limit ourselves to shop clerks, and whatnot.

Service

One thing that Japan has over – most likely - the rest of the world (definitely France and America) is the way in which shop clerks/employees-in-general treat patrons. In my experience so far, I don’t think I have come across one single rude employee in the hundreds of restaurants, shops, karaoke establishment, and bars that I have been to. This isn’t to say that these establishments didn’t have pissed off, underpaid, overworked employees. They simply didn’t take out their shit on 1) people they didn’t even know and 2) anybody that was paying them for a service. In the two weeks back in the States, I was on one occasion totally speechless at the rudeness of a bar owner and totally baffled by the total lameness of several other misc.. America is by no means the worst but it it’s pretty clear that most people don’t give too much of a shit who you are – whether you are paying them or not. Reverse culture shock. If there’s one thing I will take away from my time in Japan, it’s that a little courtesy goes a damn long way.

"Look Around You" Rant

Another fear I had when coming back to the States was that I would return to find a place full of life and opportunity that I was missing out on by living half a globe away. This seems to be a common fear among the language teachers here and, I can only assume, young expats throughout the world. Many ALTs in Japan come here directly from an undergraduate college (as Meghan and I did). This combined with jobs that often lack intellectual stimulus and sometimes any stimulus at all, leads many, especially during the winter of their first year, to questions whether moving to Japan was the right idea. This anxiety is magnified by the remarkably quick and easy access expats have to their best, stateside friends. It’s tough to watch your friends go on to gradschool or build careers while you attempt to legitimize your reason for staying abroad another year. But this comes down to the questions of success, happiness, growth and youth. What makes you a successful person? What makes you a happy person? What allows you to grow both your world experience and understanding of yourself? How old is too old to begin a career? What is a career?

Going home was not the ball of regret and missed opportunities that it could have been. Instead, I felt that my thoughts of staying yet another year in Japan were bolstered. Sure, America still has my family and friends and I do miss them incredibly, but all things told, there’s too much I haven’t done in Japan to jump ship now. There’s too much I still am doing and too much I have to learn about myself and the people around me. This is a critical point that I feel many expats in the same position – generalization alert – seem to miss. They are so blinded by what’s going on at home that they miss out on what’s going on around them. In this, I think the same JET experience twenty years ago - without the internet - would have been a significantly deeper and more meaningful journey. The internet allows one to feel much closer to distant loved ones, but keeps us inundated in our own, more comfortable culture and potentially keeping us from the culture that physically surrounds us. Of course, all this is what you make of it. Maybe I just spend to much time on the interwebs.

Moving

In other news: upon returning to Hokkaido, Meghan and I (who had put in a request to rent a house much closer to Muroran’s more lively Nakajima area) began the packing process and eventually moved toward the end of January. We have finally moved from a moderately sized, government-owned apartment on the fourth floor to a 5DK with a garage in a much more desirable part of town. The house has some serious character. Being built in the 1970’s, the house has a more Japanese feel than most modern Japanese homes. The majority of the rooms are tatami with sliding doors. One of the rooms has a space for a Buddhist alter (which will house the tv – awesome) and flower arrangement/hanging scroll thingy. Because of this, the house was super-undesirable by regular folks. Most people in the market for a house are looking for mostly western-roomed homes with all the modern amenities. After our apartment with no hot-water, a 1970s home seems like the distant future. The fact that the rent is disgustingly cheap helped a bit too. We’re still unpacking but, on the whole, we're moved in. The perks? I can now bike to 1) the sushi place 2) the video store 3) the recycle shop 4) the train station 5) everywhere. It’s awesome. The only down side is that we live on pretty much a cliff-side. Architects must have studied the grazing habits of mountain goats for years to figure out how to get a house to stay on a hill this steep. So far it hasn’t been much of a problem (knock on wood) despite several large snows.

This past two weekends, Meghan and I indulged in the fine snow and ice structure building skills of Hokkaido’s population. The first trip was to the Shikaribetsu Ice Village and the second was to the ever popular Sapporo Yuki Matsuri or Sapporo Snow Festival. Here are some pics from both but check out the flickr page for all the goodies which if I haven't updated by the time you read this, will happen soon.

Generosity Grows Wild ...and Dangerous

Finding a turkey in Japan is no easy task. Seeing as Thanksgiving is right around the corner, we’ve been trying to find one for – I don’t know – the past month. Last year, a friend of ours ordered a turkey from an “exotic meats” butcher in Sapporo but had seemingly misplaced the number. So it was up to Meghan and I to find a large, native-to-north America, piece of fowl.

One of my attempts was to ask all of my teachers about turkeys and possible turkey farmers in the area. There have been many foreign teachers at this school and one of them must have, at some point, desired our North American Feathered Friend for everyone’s favorite “Thanks for the corn and here are some slightly used blankets” Day. Apparently there are no turkey farmers around these parts. But, I did get an interesting story from one of the teachers. While asking about turkey acquisitions, she brought up wild mushroom hunting.

Every summer (at least in Hokkaido), people of all ages strap on their bear bells, hop in the undersized SUVs, drive to the middle of a mountain and begin the hunt for the elusive, yet apparently delicious, mountain vegetable. These are just regular root vegetables but they’re all natural and whatnot and apparently don’t taste that much like dirt. Well people also do this for mushrooms. As we all know, mushrooms can be dangerous. Eat the wrong one and you – in the worst case- die and – in an only slightly better case – watch trees breath and gain a better appreciation for the color blue for about six hours. But there are a couple other brands of poisonous mushroom that may only exist in Japan.

While explaining the intricacies of wild mushroom hunting, this teacher offhandedly mentioned, as if everybody knew about it, the mushroom that makes you overly generous and then kills you. Being well versed in this teacher’s particular brand of sarcastic humor, I laughed aloud and followed it by a “Good one!” This time, however, there was no laughing.

“I’m serious,” she said. “People sometimes eat this mushroom by accident, give away something very valuable and then die. It happened to my cousin. He went mushroom hunting and ate the wrong one. He then gave away his car and died.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I couldn’t contain my laughter so instead of being overtly rude I tried to mask my inability to stop laughing by proclaiming between each giggle my amazement with “Wow!”s, “I can’t believe it!” s, “I’m so sorry.”s and “That’s so horrible!”

She warned me once more about the dangers of wild mushroom hunting and walked off to class.

Oh. She also mentioned to me the mushroom that, should you eat it once, will cause you to laugh for the rest of your life. I told her I thought I’d heard of that one.

In other news: it snowed yesterday. Lightly, but it still snowed.

UPDATE: it snowed a lot today. A lot.

UPDATE x 2: I looked around a bunch on the interwebs (read: I googled it once and pareused the first 2 pages of results) and found no mention of wildly lethal, generosity mushrooms. If anybody finds anything on these fungi, let me know.

Rib Rike Prant 8

Hey hey. Here's a new Live Like Plant. Numero Ocho for those who are counting. I was gonna include a track from Saul Williams' recent The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust but decided you better just go and check it out yourself. They decided to do the same thing with this album as Radiohead did with In Rainbows. However, the only choices are $5 or $0. Trent Reznor produced it. I had no idea the man had so much funk in him. It's a good album. I'm still taking it in right now but so far: me likey. Check it out. Anyway, here's the new LiLiP. It's weird and a bit on the short side. Oh, and google broke my embedded player so just click on the link (you can do save as or just let it play in browser.

Live Like Plant Vol. 8 (46 minutes)

List of playing:

Justice - Genesis
Daft Punk - High Fidelity
Cansei de Ser Sexy - Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above (Spank Rock Remix)
New Young Pony Club - Ice Cream
Data Rock - I used to dance with my daddy
Hermeto Pascoal - Remelexo
Manu Chao - La Vie A Deux
Hot Chip - Down With Prince
Fugees - The Mask
Wilco - You Are My Face
Wendy Carlos - Concerto Brandebourgeois 3 in G Minor - III Allegro

Ramblings de Religion and FFVII Potion

It's getting cold. Me no likey. During the day, the chill is acceptable (barring the wind) but at night it's downright frosty. Sadly, this cold has very little to do with the "Two Months of Assorted Sickness" that Meghan and I are finally seeing the pseudo-end of. While I don't really want to go too deep into it, know that it went something like Meghan coughed and hacked up green shit for 3 weeks straight and finally went to the doctor to find out she had a mild infection in her trachea and I was stung by something that resulted in massive, puss filled boils that covered the majority of my fore-arm and leg. Phew! Anyway, we're all fixed up now, thankfully.

What's as of late. Hmmm. I recently ripped through Resident Evil 4 - a game that any and every zombiephile should play. The game is seriously excellent. Few times have I played a game so complete on all fronts (with the exception of one seriously tacked on plot point and the final boss battle). The cinematics, the story, the controls, the sound - all excellent. I never got a chance to play it on GameCube so it was nice to be able to get it the third time around. Plus it's in English with Japanese subtitles as opposed to being the other way around. HA!

What else has gone down. Oh yes, Sunday, Meghan and I (well, really, more like Meghan) were invited to attend one of Meghan's students' Shichi-Go-San (7,5,3) blessing. The ceremony is one where girls at ages seven and three (and boys at age five) get all dressy and are blessed by a priest in a little ceremony. I'll let Meghan tell you more about what she got to do and I'll just give you my thoughts on the actual ceremony itself, seeing as it was my first real Shinto ceremony.

Christianity, in the forms that I've experienced it, is a very personal religion - it's all about your personal relationship with Christ or whoever. Now, I don't even begin to pretend to know much of anything about religion, Eastern, Western, or otherwise. If I really wanted to make any sort of educated comment on the differences between styles of worship between Japan and the United States, I would go out and read volumes of scholarly material - not to mention the original religious texts themselves. But, as I'm sure you are aware of, I am unabashedly lazy. So I will instead make most likely wrong and ridiculous assumptions and generalizations and hope you enjoy them.

This past school year, I have been assigning opinion essays to my higher level students in an attempt to have them give me their ideas and their own thoughts, something that is often overlooked by their other teachers, on things ranging from music to human cloning. (For the record, the idea came from the late, great Dr. Peterson who did the same project at a different school.) One of the essays I decided on was "Religion is important for a good and moral society." I honestly was quite interested to see their responses - mostly because I wasn't able to predict what they would say as I had with so many of the other essays ("Students should not be able to have jobs." 90% responded with something along the lines of "I disagree. Students needs jobs so they can get money. How the hell else am I supposed to buy my designer wallets? I would have to start mugging people. Sheesh.")

Their answers were interesting, to say the least. Most ran along the lines of "I know about religion but I don't think Japanese people need it for a good and moral society." They told me about how politeness, courtesy and a willingness to keep a community together through friendship were the most important parts keeping a good and moral society. One or two student's responded with explanations of religion in their homes - their altars where they pray to their ancestors or Buddha. A fair number of students had an interesting inability to differ between religion and cult. For them they are the same thing - a society or group that share a belief. This I found quite intriguing especially since the line between religious zealotry and cult fanaticism can sometimes get quite fuzzy. The essays that really got me were the ones that not only explained that Japan did not need religion but questioned why other cultures needed them if they only caused war. A surprising number of students shared this sentiment. Sure they don't understand the much deeper and meaningful aspects of Juedeo-Christian religions - teaching respect and compassions, etc. - but it's what they see that allows them to create their opinions.

This idea comes from the "America is a violent place." comments that I get so often. While America may not always seem like an overly violent place to those who live there, most Japanese people will tell you that they are afraid of traveling to America (New York, DC, whatever) because they are afraid of being mugged/killed/etc. At first, I found this to be ridiculous. The more I started to pay attention to the news, the more I realized that the only news that most people get about America is violent. So in their minds, they create America as a very violent place. Switching to religion, most Japanese see Christianity/Islam/Judaism as directly related to the war in Iraq and the coming war in Iran. To them it's not necessarily a "we gotsta keep our freedoms so we can sells it on ebay later", it's a religious conflict that is confusing and downright detrimental to the face of the involved religions. Not to mention, the rest of the news Japan gets about American Christianity revolves around hating gays, blowing up abortion clinics (which Japan has tons of, by the way), and influencing the government to do the same. It don't look so purdy over here fellas. News of soup kitchens and homeless shelters gets lost somewhere around Guam. And it really is too bad. Religious groups do an amazing amount of good through numerous different institutions. Outside of news of the religious Middle East conflict, Japan gets Mormon's and Jehovah's Witnesses. Yeah. Not painting a great face is it. War and people who bother you on the street and at your front door asking you if you've accepted Jesus in your heart. Hmmm.

The thing that got me above all else: these are highschool students. What answers would we get in an American highschool? These students are no angels, they'd rather pluck their eye-brows in class and draw hug-nippled renditions of Billy Blanks on the desks than listen in class but it's quite amazing what they pull out when you ask them their own thoughts on a serious topic.

Two interesting quotes I received from my students (they might not be perfect but you get the idea):

Religion is a thing that imposes a one-sided view on people and it coerces people regardless of personal dignity and volition. I can't hit on an advantage of religion.

I think religion is a good thing but it is not good to threaten people like, "if you don't believe in christ, you can't be rewarded."

Back to the ceremony. As I said, Christianity is a very personal religion. Shinto is not. Or it is, but in a very different way. This ceremony was not. The temple is a very golden place that regular peopleses can only exist in a limited portion of. The ceremony itself was mostly on the part of the priest. He walked around the rest of the shrine - chanting and doing his thing - and we just watched. Only twice did he acknowledge us. The chanting itself is done in a language so old that it's barely understandable even to Japanese people - much like Latin in Vatican I. The priest is there, I'm told, to call the gods to the shrine - not to speak through him. Quite different.

Anyway, as I've lost my line of thought, I'll continue to bore you with my ramblings on religion later. And I'll be sure to have Meghan tell the awesomeness that she got to take part in (pictures included).

Side note: I received a little bit of Final Fantasy VII goodness today from my co-worker. Suntory is making a commemorative beverage for the 10th Anniversary of Final Fantasy VII - Potion. It's yellow (should be blue). It re-ups your hit points. Here's the original commercial and a taste test from earlier today.