Japanese

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about my relationship with the language. In some ways the longer I am in this country the easier it becomes for me to get discouraged by the fact that I am not yet fluent in the language. Then recently I found a lovely, and perhaps quite insane individual who espouses the following basic method of learning Japanese:

Spend literally every waking hour(or in his case even the sleeping ones) doing something in Japanese

He went on to go from zero to fluent in 18 months, in the middle of Utah, while carrying on a full course load, and a social life.

He has a wonderful collection of surprisingly motivational articles up on a site of his, but the sheer insanity of the idea as first presented really got me thinking about my own relationship with the language.

I spent 4 years "studying" Japanese, but in that time how many hours did I actually spend listening to and reading Japanese? Probably surprisingly few, especially given that I was clinically lazy outside of class. And often in class, for that matter. 1 hour x 3 days a week x 52 weeks x 4 years = 624 hours. Maybe 1-2000 if you add in Tokyo, and some out-of-class work. The average Japanese toddler has somewhere in the range of 40,000 hours of Japanese listening practice. To poach a quote: "It is a poisonous combination of ignorance, arrogance and innumeracy to expect to have even passable Japanese WITH AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LESS EFFORT than even a typical Japanese toddler has put in." I am a miserable failure.

Or maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm just finally coming around to the wonderful reality that life is not a matter of talent, genius, or education. It's not even so much a matter of effort. Your work need not be painful for it to have value. It's persistence. Just showing up, day after day after day.

New Years is fast approaching, and in the traditions of America-land, we generally view this as a time to change ourselves. New Years resolutions have always been one of those surreal practices which I have never quite been able to grasp. This year, I am going to will myself to enact some sort of change, not so much by actually changing anything, but by WILLING IT SO. This year, I will go to the gym every day, despite the fact that I find it cripplingly boring and tedious, and would really rather pull out my fingernails with pliers. Maybe the answer is not to resolve to fight harder, struggle through the pain for a brighter tomorrow, and blame our failures on our own weakness. Maybe we just need to play more.

Next year I'm going to play more.



...and ask that waitress out.

Dive Shop Bounenkai

it begs mentioning that I am still at least moderately intoxicated, but I shall try not to make a fool of myself while recounting the events of the evening.

Tonight was the first night of what I am dubbing the mid-year exam for my liver. We've trained hard for this day, and survived with flying colors. I do not believe my cup ever dipped below half-full all night long, because a table full of toothless but ever vigilant fisherfolk would spring up to refill my glass the minute it was lowered from my lips. Still, I pace myself moderately, bringing all the drunkenness avoidance tips I had at my disposal to ensure that tomorrow I would still be among the living.

The dive shop I frequent is on the opposite side of the island. On such a small chunk of land, you would not believe how drastically different each of the tiny villages of no more than two-hundred people can be. They're all fiercely independent, competitive, and proud. Soumachi is the 2nd biggest town on the island, home to its own middle school and something that constitutes an infrastructure: food store, restaurant, etc. There is a motley collection of fishermen, construction workers, dive rats and middle schoolers pretty much perpetually gracing the halls of the Yonemuri household/dive shop/restaurant. I do not know how they know, but when ever there is any kind of food being prepared, they descend like clockwork flies.

Tonight was no normal night though. The meal began with what I can only describe as shark jerky. Not as chewy as the dessicated beef stuff designed to survive nuclear holocaust, but certainly with a certain dried, salted quality to it. It was delicious. The meal proceeded through to steaming nabe, a pot of broth into which various sea critters are thrown, along with vegetables. No less than 300 dollars worth of Kikai giant prawns found its way into those pots. Along side were plates of fresh caught squid, faint purple skin-tones drawing praise from a very discerning audience, and garlic marinated yakogai, Kikai conch which may or may not be endangered, depending on if I ever ask anyone.

After the nabe had been bubbling along happily for a while, and I had dodged my social obligation to drink to unconsciousness by playing with the Yonemuri's kindergartner Nao (who will one day be just an absolute nightmare of a grade schooler, but I love him anyway. He says hello by kanchoing you, and refers to me as "grandpa".), a chef who had been brought in specially for the event began churning out plate after plate of sushi, using fish which the locals had caught probably earlier that morning. Yakogai, raw sweet shrimp, and the mother of all sushi toro, a fatty tuna which can command tens of thousands of yen in high end sushi shops. After the first round began to dwindle, slices of raw horse, basashi, and its rice-bound brother basashi-zushi found their way onto the table. I am not the type who would go out of my way to order raw horse, they're one of those animals which humans have just gotten a little too close to for us to overpower the empathy of consuming Mr. Ed or trusty Silver, but I do rather enjoy high-quality raw meat when it's put before me.

A nearly endless stream of rice-riding fish and horse flew forth from the skilled hands of the sushi-chef, but the valiant fisherfolk steadied their wills, poured themselves another glass of 20-year old shochu which had been tapped specially for the occasion, and made short work of the would be challengers. Nao ran around with a large length of green rubber tubing, and demanded people hold it up to their ears while he spoke, and then blew, collapsing into fits of laughter. Eventually this was met with reprisal, when one of the fisherfolk tied Nao to the banister with his green plastic tubing, and left him to find his own way out.

I chatted with Taka-sensei, and his strangely young wife Chi-chan, an activity which has become a lot easier now that I understand a) Taka is totally cool with me speaking English at a normal pace, with a few simplifications and b) Chi-chan, whom I was originally quite intimidated by, is actually rather intimidated by me, a relationship I tend to do much better with for some reason. I can make people feel at ease, as long as they're not myself, I suppose. Taka has offered to loan me another one of his wetsuits, double thick and slightly larger, so that I can continue diving through the winter. I might go this weekend. That would be fantastic.

The meal finished with a chocolate Christmas cake iced with chocolate mousse, and just because it's Japan, and just because tomorrow is Christmas, for once I just raised a fork and dug in, instead of denouncing it a false prophet, herald to a heathen Christmas. It was quite good.

I left early. Yoda-san doesn't drink and from that point on all that was left was the endless, sloshing, march towards oblivion. I was glad to escape before the truly awkward drunken Japanese banter struck up in full. Though seconds before my departure one of the men said something along the lines of "you should get a girlfriend, because you're a man, and men need relief", cue the lewd hand gestures, which is actually a fairly common sentiment when Japanese men start drinking and I tell them I am single. I believe this particular man was either trying to set me up with a friend of the man sitting next to him, or perhaps even with the man himself, I was unclear on the point because the man had a fairly strong accent either because he was raised on the island or was missing literally every tooth in the visible spectrum.

Bounankai. They're worth a story or two.

Tomorrow: Yakuba (Kikai public office) Bounenkai.

Monday: Live concert with Yoda-san, his wife, and his older daughter.

New Years Eve: Live concert with Yoda-san, his wife, and both his daughters.

New Years and beyond: I haven't the foggiest. It will be marginally traditional, and brand new.

I can't wait.



P.S. Thanks Dad. It means a lot.

Christmas in Japan

"Are you going anywhere for winter break?" it's a question I get a lot. Half the time the question is not "are you going" but rather "where are you going". There is an inherent assumption that if I'm going to be anywhere this Christmas, it will not be here. I generally explain my decision to stay here as financial "going home is expensive" or seasonal "I hate winter, and cannot in good conscience move any closer to it". These are valid points, but half-truths at best. Honestly, I'm just really curious as to what Christmas alone, in a strange land with only the vaguest grasp of Christmas, will be like. I have explained my theory of novel unpleasant experiences to some of you before. Even if it's awful, depressing, and soul-crushingly lonely, I've never actually done it. Maybe it'll be interesting. I'm the kid who probably touched the stove full aware that it would burn him, because he was curious what being burned felt like.

Christmas in Japan is what you would get if you observed an American Christmas from a long range spy plane, with a telescope. Cosmetically, things manage to come out as an eerily close approximation of the American tradition. There are lights on houses, things resembling trees,albeit made of plastic or fiber-optic cables (which are way cool, by the way). Presents are exchanged, people sit out front of grocery stores and collect money for charity (although when I asked them what the charity was, they couldn't actually tell me. I'm hoping this was a language issue, although I suspect it was not). Occasionally one even witnesses the wearing of tacky seasonal sweaters and ties. Christmas music fills the radio waves, classic Christmas favorites remastered in Japanese, and rarely some that manage the trans-Pacific almost entirely intact. Aside from the pervasive Christmas cake phenomenon (French, I think?) Japanese Christmas is pretty darn close, as long as you don't scratch at the foil. The problem is that somehow, thorough all this, the part of Christmas which always made Christmas a special time got overlooked. It reminds me of Jack Skellington, from The Nightmare Before Christmas. "This looks like fun this looks like fun, oh could it be I got my wish?" But then what he tries to make once he goes back to Halloween town just goes horribly awry.

I have never been particularly imbued with Christmas cheer. I have fond memories, but by the time I was in high school Christmas had started feeling like a day I was quickly outgrowing. I think it happens to a lot of people. The awkward gap between the time when you are a little kid, sweating with anticipation unable to sleep with thoughts of the bounty that is to come, and the the time when you have little kids of your own. The gap between believing the story of Santa and getting to turn around and tell this wonderful lie to future generations. Still, despite this relative lack of giddy Christmas excitement, I have always appreciated how the season itself manages to feel somehow different. Everywhere you look, people seem to be conspiring together in the cause of general mirth. I once challenged a friend of mine who was still head-over-heels for Christmas to explain why she liked it so much. "The true spirit of Christmas" she replied, without irony or embarrassment. The true spirit of Christmas. It is the one part of Christmas which Japan does not have. And the only part which you really need in order to call it Christmas.

There is plenty of other stuff to look forward to during this season on Japan. There are the endless Bounenkai, end-of-year parties which are written using the kanji forget-year-party, a feat which they take both seriously and literally if the amount of drinking is any indicator. There is Oshogatsu, the Japanese New Year, which is the real winter holiday in Japan which I'll be spending with my dear friends the Yoda's and their two daughters who are in from Tokyo and Kyoto. And I'm quite glad to be able to have these experiences, wonderful, rare and certainly new. But tomorrow, on Christmas Eve, when I'm sitting around in the office learning Japanese since classes are over for the year, I can't help but wonder if I'll be a little bit sad that for the first time in my life, the 25th will just be another work day.

Adventures in pedagogy

If you work out my relative pay rate I make about 10,000 yen, or around 100 US, a day, if you just pretend that weekends are work days. I don't feel particularly bad doing so, because aside from the fact that I am not physically required to be somewhere, I probably do about the same amount of teaching as I do on school days. Probably more, depending on the day. Like tomorrow for example I am being paid approximately 100 dollars to go eat lunch. That's all. No classes or anything. Just lunch.

I'm not particularly complaining since it's at the criminally large elementary school, and as much as the kids there are generally charming little bastards like the rest of them (often times more so) I tend to have a much higher rate of classroom train wrecks there. I think it has something to do with the one-shot ALT situation, the fact that I only show up at any given elementary school once, maybe twice a month.

At the smaller schools, where I can get to know the kids in about 30 seconds since there are 3 of them, the fact that I only visit once a month doesn't actually get in the way of me getting to know the kids and form a relationship. At the larger schools there is certainly a degree of frantic celebrity which I just don't get at the small schools which is a lot of fun for about 10 minutes. Then you have to try and teach them something, and end up spending hours of your life trying to get them into a line so they can play a game. I don't think the Japanese on that one is particularly hard. I fail to grasp which part of "ok, make 2 lines!" is causing them to stick. I suspect it's that they're afraid of being the first person to try something, and then if they get it wrong the will be publicly shamed, if not stoned to death. So usually 5-10 minutes of dragging and prodding later, we have two lines, and class time is up. Good thing I was teaching fruit, which they have probably learned 4 other separate occasions, and probably knew before they had to learn it the first time. The jump from "ba-na-na" to "ba-NA-na" is not particularly taxing.

I'm rather looking forward to 2-3 weeks off of class for winter vacation. I thought about going to Okinawa for part of it to do some diving, but a good friend of mine pointed out that the water will be just about the same temperature, and going to Okinawa in the winter is kind of silly. People do it for sure, but I'd much rather enjoy the place when it's sunny, bright, and I can dive without restraint. It looks like I'll be kicking it here on Kikai, counting my money. Turns out that unless my spending changes drastically over the next 3 months, I will be debt-free by spring. Ahh, the world is full of possibilities. Maybe I'll get my sport diver license, and start planning that trip to Fiji I've been pipe-dreaming about.

In which our hero is a moron

Those who know me best, the cohabitants of dorm rooms past, the occasional snuggle buddies, and the odd parent or two, are probably aware that I am, despite my many to borrow a Japanese expression "charm points", a profoundly stupid human being about 90% of the time. Do note that relatively speaking, the average human might be profoundly stupid upwards of 99, even 100% of the time, so I may be well ahead of the curve. Still, there are certain things, which I routinely find myself doing throughout the course of my life, which to the outside observer would seem like an elaborate system of self-handicapping. As if the world were simply too easy, and required additional self-inflicted challenges to give it a sporting chance.

For example, for the past 2-3 weeks I have been showering by using a tub spigot, and a large plastic basin. This was because my shower-head decided one blustery fall day that it would only accept vague suggestions as to what were acceptable temperatures. It understood the far ends of the spectrum pretty well, the freezing cold, and the literally boiling, but the whole middle habitable bit was apparently beneath its refined sensibilities. For a while I attempted to dance in and out of the liquid fire shooting from its mouth, and then when that failed, attempted to switch the temperature from boiling to freezing approximately every 13 seconds so as to maintain a temperature somewhere in between the two. It was a lot like flossing with a cobra, which is to say impossible, not to mention dangerous. Eventually I gave up and switched to the romantic, but all together ridiculous bathing procedure seen in Japanese period pieces, involving long takes of a steamy room, and quaint wooden buckets which samurai and ladies of the court would use to pour water over themselves. Only my bucket was molded plastic, and my tub, in so much as it was apparently designed with whales in mind, takes about 1-2 literal hours of water running to fill it to the point where one could scoop water with said bucket. So why not, I think to myself alight with cleverness, just fill the bucket right out of the tap! Aha you old dog! You've done it again!

This method of bathing turned out to suck. Increasingly so, the colder it got. It turns out that the period when you're actually dumping water over your head is all well and good, but the minute intervals in between treatments are just long enough for the thin sheen of water on your back to practically frost over. Apparently samurai and ladies of the court were tough old bastards, at least in so much as cold was concerned. But I soldiered on, freezing and huddling around the faint trickle of the tap, and counting the days till spring.

Sometimes, I have what I have come to call "good" days. Feel free to use the term, I'm quite proud of it. On these days, for reasons perhaps outside my control, something incredibly small goes right, very early in the day. Today, it was class getting canceled, due to the teacher being absent. I was informed of this before I even left the office, an utter rarity, and thus had a whole eight-thirty to four-fifteen stretched out ahead of me, brimming with possibilities. I spent the entire day whacking around the kanji charts, learning words such as: memorization, mnemonic device, record (world, and court), standard, and crushing defeat of the soul. I even managed to produce a fine set of cards, so that I could continue practicing these kanji in my ample downtime on buses and the like.

I return home to a world still inexplicably brimming with possibilities. I go for a run for the first time in...actually I don't think I've ever gone for an actual run in which I moved and the floor did not. I went for the first run of my life! On the way back to my house, I ran past my favorite little swimming hole, but in its place was an Atlantean continent of algae-covered coral. Apparently I have never been there at low-tide, which is indeed quite low. It was beautiful. I ate real food, which I had made the night previous, paid off my loans for the month, and checked on the yen-dollar rate and found that despite its brief rebound it was again forecasting a very bright future for the yen-earning JET. I went exploring, and found a Christmas tree, and ornaments, which I placed beside my television. Hidden cleverly next to the boxes, disguising itself as a space heater, was a space heater. How wonderful! I can turn it on in the mornings, and instead of facing the horror of stepping out into a world tens of degrees colder than my warm cocoon of bed, I can ease into the transition. And then to cap the night off, I hopped into the shower-cubicle to throw buckets of water all over my head!

But then I got to thinking: it has been one of those "good" days so far. Why not see if I can't keep my streak going and fix this shower? About 3 minutes later, I have done so. I, ladies and gentlemen, am a moron. Somehow in the entire time between the shower-head rebellion and the great reconciliation (as the events shall be known in the history texts) I never once actually sat down and TRIED TO FIX THE DAMN SHOWER.

I apparently inherited, if not the raw mechanical acumen of my father, at least the basic ability to put the things I take apart back together, most of the time. It turns out that this can solve an amazing number of problems. Like for example, when one removes the shower head and finds that the "hose" portion of the shower does not have heat-schizophrenia. Or when one removes the metallic plate with the holes in it, and finds that there is a cumulative cup and a half of sand lodged in them. Apparently, and don't as me exactly how or why, the makers of this particular water heater/shower unit decided that obstructed water flow could potentially cause explosions or the apocalypse if the water were at an appropriate temperature for bathing, and some sort of fail-safe was put into place for the sake of unborn generations.

I will not say that the world is looking brighter. I will however suggest, that the world has always been plenty bright. If you can just get over yourself long enough to take the blinders off.

Repetitive Stress Injury

Winter and I have never, in so many words, gotten along particularly well. There have been times, knee-deep in the Minnesota winter, watching the snow fill the sharpest silences I have ever experienced, when we have put aside our differences to appreciate a rare moment, but when the magic wears off it's right back to teeth and throats.

I came this island in the middle of Kikai-summer, a season characterized by heat which leaves you a sopping, naked puddle every time you step back through your door from say, a trip to office, or your mailbox. I loved every sweat-drenched second of it. Not so much out of any perverse pleasure in my resemblance to a lake, there is just something about it being that hot which throws you into overdrive. When the simple act of cooking dinner pushes your fragile human cooling systems to their limit, everything seems inexplicably alive, and imbued with purpose.

"Winter" on Kikai is, as with most things on a sub-tropic island a decidedly relative term. When you can go to work in short-sleeves in early December, I hesitate to raise any kind of stink about "winter". But there are other parts of the season which snuck up on me.

When it gets past a certain point, diving and swimming become, not so much impossible acts, as desperate ones. Yes, you can enter said water, and if you're attired in the latest in modern wetsuit technology, you won't even be that cold. But there's a certain feeling, like Christmas decorations in April. You're out of season, and you know it. Something just feels wrong.

More surprising is the daylight. I hadn't really noticed it before this week, but these days the ven-diagram of "daylight" and "time at work" are an eclipse drifting towards totality. I get home from work and have maybe an hour of daylight, and for some reason this is incredibly depressing. The weather gods are, as expected, also in on it. I think it rained maybe once in the first 3 months here on Kikai (aside from, you know, the typhoons). I believe the ratio has definitely shifted towards the polar opposite for weeks now. Too many clouds. I think I miss the sun. More than the cold, I miss the sun.

I think as far as winter bottom-outs go, this one won't be particularly bad. Winter is a very hard time for a lot of JETs. Japan is a land imbued with robotic, talking toilets, who greet you with something disturbingly similar to a grin, launched from automatic-rising toilet seats. For all this unbridled technological prowess, Japan stubbornly refuses to believe in insulation, or central heating. It's not even something which "some" people do. They are mythical creatures, like unicorns or mermaids. This leads to the unfortunate kerosene heater solution, which has you juggling hypothermia and asphyxiation, or foregoing a heater and sleeping huddled in a ball on your heated rug. Add to this the lack of Thanksgiving in Japan, and the even more damaging vague hints of Christmas, just enough to remind you that somewhere in the world there are real Christmas-like events occurring even as you ponder where the hell Christmas cake came from, and wonder why Japanese kids are willing to buy a skinny, blonde Santa (more on this in later posts). Plus you will probably at some point realize you are completely and utterly alone in a world of bobbing black hair, and suits. Cold, lonely, homesick, plus all the usual work stress and whatever cultural adaptation problems you were having before you became cold, lonely, and homesick. Yes, winter does indeed suck.

Compared to this, my life remains comparatively fantastic. Hell, the winter solstice comes at the end of December, then my biggest gripe starts to turn itself around. I'm in kind of a Middle-school arc of my job right now, but honestly I like middle school. All my English teachers a) speak fairly respectable English and b) have me actively participating in the planning of lessons despite the fact I only show up once a week. These are both awesome. The kids are hilarious little bastards, and I could see how they could drive the occasional ALT to madness, but they're not malevolent or anything, even when the entire 2nd year class of 60 kids runs up to you and starts grabbing your fat. "IT FEELS LIKE MOCHI!!!" my favorite little bastard Keisuke screams. Hahaaa...he'll pay. As soon as his back brace comes off and I can throw him again.

I'll try and keep the posts coming more regularly. November was...just one of those months. Life gets a little bit ahead of you, and before you know it three weeks have passed.

The Sub-Aquatic Adventures of Captain Castaway

To this day, some still swear he came from space. Still others claim he was from the future, sent back in time to save us all from some terrible fate. Those who knew him best understood him to be a simple scholar and wanderer from the far-off land of Ohio...who happened to also be a time-traveler from space. He carried many names in his brief 2 years on the island: Adam, Eiichi, The Captain, Gaijin, Gaijin-san, and any derivative form therein containing the word "Gaijin". He fought the good fight, offering up knowledge with unusually high production values with one hand, and vicious flashy-pink hammer blows with the other, always his head in the clouds and his heart in the loving embrace of the sea. Many things to many people, this Paul Bunyanic paradox personified lives on in the legends of this tiny aquatic neverland, each story more contradictory than the last.

The debates rage long into the night, over gallon-bottles of throat-searing black sugar Shochu liquor, this dive-rat swearing he once saw him riding a whale and speaking with the turtle-people of Keraji Point, this one claiming he wore the tank for only decoration, and in fact possessed gills, hidden beneath the thick-padded orange wetsuit-overalls, and BCD (Buoyancy Control Device) studded with patches from a mysterious land known only as "Canada" that were his trademark.


Those who remember the man before the legend, when he was a mere roguish man-boy school teacher, striking poses of roguish man-boy skepticism and sending middle-schoolers into fits of epileptic rapture with his golden hair and chiseled 12-year-old physique, look back fondly on the moment he first entered the water. Dive Instructor First-class Yoda never forgot that first moment, releasing the air from the vest and sinking below the waves, only to look up and see Adam still floating serenely on the surface, the faintest hint of confusion flitting across his face as if to say "Odd. I should be sinking." Yes his mighty Gaijin mass was indeed a formidable force for buoyancy in the world, requiring that several dozen additional kilograms of solid metal be wielded directly onto his skeleton before the waves would even shuffle his application into the "maybe" pile, on the college-admissions desk of the deep.

He learned with an almost superhuman quickness. Instructor Yoda recalls: "I had taught him how to do a half-mask clear, for when you get a little bit of water inside your mask and you need to blow it out, and had gone up to the surface to help out another student. Next time I came down, Adam had not only filled his entire mask with water and successfully cleared it, but had also filled his entire lungs with water, and successfully cleared them." a feat considered by most to be akin to suicide even for the most wily of sea mammals, to speak nothing of the relatively water-averse humanoid.

His love of the sea only grew from that moment forward. He would spend hours at a time staring vacantly out the window, out towards the sea, probably when he should have been doing something work related. His life became a shallow facsimile, a support structure existing only to drag his cumbersome land-meat along as far as the next weekend, the next dive.

On his first dive to maximum depth of 18 meters, he was the gleaming golden god Cortez to the trembling Aztec Clown Fish of the Somachi Cliffs. He spoke in a booming voice, conjuring torrents of bubbles from thin-water, and striking fear, or at least mild-bemusement, into their orange and white-striped hearts. And it was it this moment, as he floated alongside these strange denizens of the depths, and cast his eyes across an endless alien field of coral masquerading as Alveoli, Brains and Nervous-systems, that he knew love. And like any man confronted with the wonder and terror of the infinite unknown within himself, he set out to make this world his own the only way he knew how: violent conquest.

He dove the endless plains of Onotsu to broker alliances with the Morays, underwater street thugs with a penchant for dark alleys, and intimidation. He dined with the giant conch people, and then when peace could not be reached, he dined on the giant conch people. Some say the last of their now extinct brood is kept in his freezer, a grisly reminder of what happens to those who dared to cross him. He subdued teeming shoals of jack-fish, and sparred with the rock-shrimp before they sealed up their holes forever, choosing to take their chances weathering the siege in their vast underwater tunnel network, instead of dare challenge the new lord of the sea. He observed the highly venomous sea-snake from a comfortable distance, but you can bet he did so with malice and hatred in his heart, and was in no way intimidated by said sea-snake when it showed up later in the dive about 2 feet away from him, and kind of looked him in the eye, and maybe winked a little. So great was his power and influence, that by the end of a mere 4 open-water dives, he had driven the turtles, sharks, whales and dolphins away from these waters forever, with the mere force of his presence—for why else would he see no evidence of any of them?

Unfortunately, it was his ambition that would eventually be his downfall. His dominion expanded faster than his delusions could maintain, and he was discovered one day, half-mad, curled up in a dirty-blanket, bits of seaweed clinging to his dive-overalls, a half-eaten snorkel hanging limply from his lips as he mumbled curses at the sea who had bested him. He disappeared from the hospital that night, and was never heard from again. Some say he returned to the future, or to space, his mission accomplished, our grisly fate averted. Others say he grew weary of the fight and, his bloodlust sated, followed the turtles and dolphins Westward, to new lands where he could live in quiet solitude. Either way, the seas of Kikai will forever remember the courageous young man: lunatic to most, visionary to an important few.


Though he is with us no longer, we dive on in his image, remembering the simple message he fought to spread with every moment of his short, underwater, life:



"That Peace Sign thing you guys do in photos? It's silly."

Hideaway

I'm 30 seconds into a nap to which I personally feel quite entitled. 5 classes in a row yesterday followed by shamisen practice has put the proverbial fork in this week. I'm just looking to curl up on some tatami with a pillow, and sleep until dinner. But lately there has been an ongoing rash of random people showing up at my house, not in any sort of coordinated way, just in a general karmic increase sort of way, and today will be no exception. I shamble over to where my front door is, swearing that if it's those Jehovah's witnesses again I'm going to invest in a better cover story than "sorry, I'm American." It actually worked surprisingly well, don't ask me why. I think they just read into it what they wanted. Knowing nods and "Oh of course, sorry to bother you."

So I open the door, preparing a volley of heretical barbs which would wither the pope himself, if only he could understand Japanese, but am instead delighted to find that the much awaited day where my students a) figure out where I live and b) muster the courage to come bother me, has arrived!

Three of the 3rd grade girls from the big elementary school who were at the kids' sumo tournament up the street have apparently taken it upon themselves to come, ring my doorbell, then engage in an intense whispered argument about which of them will talk to me. You'd think they'd have this figured out beforehand, but hey, maybe they had a brief moment of intense daring and could not stay their hand from the buzzer. I'm willing to give them that. Besides, they're setting a new standard for oh-my-gosh cuteness by nervously hopping around from foot-to-foot, trying desperately to get each other to say something, so I don't particularly mind. I am fairly certain a good 15 minutes of more-or-less silence passed while they tried to figure out just what the hell part 2 of their daring one-part-plan would be. I felt no particular need to speak, or give them a hand, as honestly I was preoccupied trying to keep the laughter from exploding, inflicting severe psychological trauma on the three of them.

Eventually some sort of consensus is reached and one of them stops fidgeting...relatively speaking:

"Are you coming to our school again?"

Awww.

Of course I am.

"Good. Bye bye!"

And they run like hell for the street.

Something about tough little kids

Aden elementary school. If I were a kid, I'd go there. Three classrooms overlooking the ocean, waves exploding over the tide pools in your backyard, while the goats graze around in the banyan trees. Smells perpetually of the sea, in the best way possible. No more than 20 kids in the whole building, almost every single one of them a charming little thug. They all come up and ask questions about English all the time, and half the time they surprise me with the weird words they already know. I got a letter at the office from one of the 3rd grade girls yesterday before my visit today, actually mailed it, stamp and everything, asking me to come to their cultural festival on Sunday and see her, to translate from the Japanese: "Speak in a very loud voice". How can you not just melt? Every time I think they've hit a cuteness singularity, by gosh they go and find something else.

But as perfect as the place is, it has this one kid who I just don't know what to do about. He's maybe 12, severely ADHD, and kind of a bully. More than kind of, he's a downright terror, especially since the Japanese school system leaves discipline up to classmates for the most part. You don't really have teachers stepping in to break up fights. My first day at Aden he grabbed firm hold of my leg and would not be removed until I had managed to walk half way across the school on my way to narrowly catch the bus home. I call him Tatsumaki, Japanese for tornado. He calls me Goldman.

Today I was playing with one of the little 2nd year boys, real pistol of a kid with a mole right on the end of his nose. He's also incredibly ticklish, but refuses to let the fact that I am about 8 times his size deter his efforts to get me back. He ran outside and managed to seal himself behind a door in the music room, so as to better make faces at me. "HEY GOLDMAN!!!" come the cries from behind me. Seeing a possible opportunity to maybe play with the kid instead of fight him I ask him to help me out. He does so. By running down this sweet little kid and bitch-smacking him just about as hard as he can.

I swear I have never been so angry in my life.

Tornado wanders off somewhere, and I'm left standing there watching this little kid stand near the doorway to the school building, hand on his cheek, this confused little look on his face trying desperately to make sense of what just happened. And then here's what kills me. I can see he wants to cry. Hell, his face is turning red and swelling up, I wouldn't blame him. But he doesn't. This tough ass little 8-year-old, sniffling and wiping his eyes, but he doesn't stop to cry, not even for a second. He goes over to the turtle pond, and sits down to watch them swim. And my heart just breaks. I go over and sit down next to him, and wish there were anything I could do to make it right. But there isn't. So I pat him on the back, and then get one of the turtles to come over and try and eat my finger, which makes him laugh a little.

There has always been something about little kids being tough beyond their years, which just destroys me.

Ikyunakana

We shuffle up on stage behind a half-drawn red-velvet curtain, propped up by just enough mic-chords and other wires to break the illusion that the stage is not yet a stage. I take my seat, second row center behind a line of grade-schoolers putting forth a valiant effort through sheer force of will to be both taller and blonder than I am in order to shield me from the crowd down below. They fail on both counts, but I appreciate the effort. I pick up my Shamisen, run my hand over the synthetic snakeskin, and rest my little bamboo plectrum on the middle string. I look over at Hiroki, my teacher and friend, and wink at him. He responds with a beaming grin, and all I can manage to think before the curtain rises is: "Got me again Kikai, you ambush-happy bastards."



Her name is Naomi. Instruments need names, otherwise they're just tools. Name it, and you acknowledge that it's a partnership. That in some fashion, it is an extension of you, or that it embodies part of your soul, if you are of the type who is partial to the belief in souls. Naomi is named after a character in a Japanese novel, a young girl who is taken into the home of a wealthy man, after he falls in love with her, and decides he is going to mold her into a proper woman. She goes on to evolve into a scheming, manipulative dominatrix, and absolutely crushes him. What can I say? I wanted my Shamisen to have spirit.

I started taking lessons a month, month and a half ago. Originally I used an old, flaking shamisen I was borrowing from the guy who runs the dive shop I frequent (licensed now, by the way. I'll throw up something once I can get the fantastic photo of my first solo dive). It sounded more or less like it looked, emitting a sort of muffled spongy thud rather than the crisp twang my teachers', and prepubescent classmates' instruments produced. For an hour every Friday I would sit around in formal Japanese seiza posture, slowly going numb with a smile on my face, and pretended to play along with some of my favorite 10-year old ruffians, and an increasingly senile old man who invented island shamisen music. Sometimes Hiroki, the grandson of the family, and heir to the shamisen throne, shows up and I actually learn things. Perhaps it is because he my age, or because he speaks Japanese instead of Kikai-go, but I can spend 40 minutes as an utter disappointment to my family and country with the group, then go bang it out perfectly in the next 20 when it's just Hiroki and I dicking around. He also has a wonderful habit of picking up my ticks in English.

Naomi arrives eventually, and we get along swimmingly. She sounds great, looks beautiful, and unlike most of the other Japanese instruments I meet these days she has sass. We go home together and sit up all night, drinking coffee and getting to know one another.

Week after week we show up together at the Yasudas' house, and set to work. Yoishima, Ikyunakana, Honenbushi, names becomes songs, this one bouncy and festive, the next somber and mournful, the final fast and sharp. Progress is made, walls are hit, funny faces are made at inappropriate times. I'm no prodigy, but I have a good ear, and as long as I can avoid taking it to seriously I'm enjoying myself.

But then, oh you black-hearted ambushing islanders. It's 2 weeks ago, and I can maybe play 2 songs in parts, though haven't gotten the familiarity to string it all together yet. The matriarch informs me that there will be some sort of festival coming up, and I'm going to play Ikyunakana with the kids. Oh neat, that sounds fun. You do know I can't play that right? Oh, you do. You say it's not a problem. Well, I suppose if I'm up there with other people one song isn't going to kill me, and I have some time to practice still.

Wait, what's that you say when you finally get around to telling me the actual date? It's on Sunday? Oh, well that's still ok, it's over at the dinky little elementary school up in the hills with 14 kids. It'll be like, what, 30 people tops, assuming they bring their extended families? I can look foolish for one song, I've certainly done more embarrassing things since I got here.

I show up to an auditorium of about 300 or so, including my boss, and most of the principals on the island. About half way through tuning up, it becomes readily apparent that I will be on stage for all three songs, including the one I've never even heard before. Oh Kikai, when will I learn?

It actually went alright. I faked my way through it well enough that unless you were both familiar with how to play the songs, and looking at me the whole time, you probably didn't even notice. I like to pretend that the entire audience being native islanders over 60, and myself being the only tall blonde man on a stage of short, black-haired girls, do not almost guarantee this state of affairs. But I survived it, scoring even more unstoppable bad-ass points. Stuck around for the rest of the festival and to watch Hiroki play the twangy dance-hall version of island shamisen...


...annnnd also maybe flash some of my newly acquired bad-ass points to flirt with one of the younger teachers. But that is neither here nor there.

And there will be days

It is the days like these, watching the boys take their first steps into manhood,



and the girls take their last steps out of childhood;



watching a boy named Shogo who is fearless in English class, fight like a demon to win 5 fights in a row, against boys twice his size,



while the old women beat their drums, and cheer on their pint-sized champions.

It is the days like these, watching children follow in their fathers' footsteps, as far away from the lights and explosions of Tokyo as one can go, that I am aware of the rare gift I have been given.

I get to watch an island grow up.

Sports Days, Chibi-ko sumo, and other adventures in drunkenness

Let it be known, just so that there are no surprises, that Japan is a society profoundly rooted in the consumption of alcohol. So much so that I would comfortably say that most Japanese social gatherings are some form of excuse to consume said alcohol. I've finally, after a comfortable stretch in Tokyo and my two months in taste-like-paint-thinner-goes-down-like-water Shochu land, managed to find a comfortable way to participate in these shenanigans without having to curl up into a ball and die at the end of the night...and then go to work the next morning dead. So while I have been drinking since...4 pm? I am by no means what one would call "drunk". Oh Japan, where to begin?

My office is fond of ambushes. Usually social, occasionally military-tactical. The mother of all ambushes was sprung on me this Sunday. It had been casually passed around that there was going to be "a relay race" of some kind and that I "would be running in it!" which was all fine and dandy. I like running. I'm fast, somehow, despite the fact that I spent the last 4 years pretending it was either too hot or cold to go running. What they didn't tell me, was that the entire island would be attending this event, which would take the better part of the entire day, and the partying afterward would extend well into the night. The whole town must have been in on this one.

For those of you in Japan, you are well aware of the unique Japanese "sports day" phenomenon, which is the deranged offspring of a track-meet and a Japanese festival (discussed previously). A series of races are run, cheering is elaborate and well choreographed, and other strange events crop up all over the place. The race where they tie 8-10 kids together and make them all run in unison comes to mind. As does the 1920s stick-and-metal-hoop race. I really can't find a way to describe it beyond that. Go google images of children playing before the depression. Normally these sports festivals occur at a school—the Wan Elementary School Sports Festival! etc. But Kikai has never been satisfied with doing what is normal. We're a special breed of loonies. We need to divide the island into administrative blocks, and then make everyone on the entire island compete for the better part of 8 hours. I only had to run in the one race, but I managed to increase my gaijin-cred significantly. I think some people are actually beginning to suspect that I am infallible, but I won't be satisfied until I reach the point of ineffable. Not because I have anything to prove, I just think it's a fantastic word. Adam the Ineffable...

After the awards ceremonies, and the tear-down, and the green tea kampai (like cheers...but cheerless), I was informed that the board of education was going to be going and having dinner together. My well honed ambush-sense began tingling.

It is surprisingly hard to avoid drinking to excess when the cultural norm for drinking is to pour other people's drinks. I think it is the vaguely depressionesque clean-plate dynamic clashing profoundly with the Japanese hospitality imperative. What am I supposed to do? NOT drink it? It will get warm, and that's just wasteful. But I've found that the relatively low alcohol content of Japanese beer means as long as I pace myself I can avoid undue trips to the trauma center. Usually. Unless after the first party, and its 6 different kampais, I am whisked into an unmarked car, and driven to a second party for the winning neighborhood, and am subjected to a further 3-4 kampais. And then another neighborhood...and another. Thankfully, I managed to lose my party somewhere around this point, and ended up with a group of teachers from the high school. It didn't stop the drinking, but at least it stopped the alcohol IV the Board of Ed guys seemed to have me running on.

The rest of the night was spent jumping from izakaya, to bar, to coffee shop...serving alcohol. I kind of hit a new people saturation point around the 8th round of introductions, right about when I ended up alone in a room with a 50-60 year old guy who was drunk beyond all possible rationality, and who kept talking not so much with me but at me in very fast Japanese while insisting on shaking my hand literally every 20 seconds. No really. No hyperbole what so ever. He shook my hand every 20 seconds for about 15 solid minutes of "conversation".

Celebrating in Japan can be...dangerous. The night ended well though, and I made some new friends, assuming I can ever remember exactly which random Kanji in my phone book represents each of them.

There's a part 2 to this story, because unless I that celebration managed to run from Sunday evening through Tuesday evening, logically I am talking separate events here. I'm tired though. For now lets just say that a) every time I think that nothing could be cuter than (something adorable the kids did) they surprise me by finding something cuter, like elementary kid sumo wrestling, and b) being good with kids in Japan apparently is defined as "being able to carry on a conversation while holding a beer in your hand, and 2 kindergartners on your back".

I'll pick out some of the choice photos of little kids throwing each other around a ring, and get back to you some time later this week.

The Aftermath Report with Adam "You Can't Kill Adam Golder" Golder

Spent my 8 hours in washing machine Melor, with minimal loss of life, limb or property. I regret to inform the readership that my lovely flowering tree, which did so gallantly stand guard at my front step, defending my gaijin-decency against the prying eyes of the Japanese, met with an unfortunate end at the hands of gale-force winds, being ripped limb from limb, until a mere stalk remained. He will be missed, as will his brethren on other properties which previously prevented me from even knowing I had neighbors. These newly discovered neighbors may consider themselves lucky (or unlucky) that it is no longer the blisteringly hot "naked season" here on Kikai.

Aside from that:

The children of Dai-ichi Middle school suffered the tragic loss of a single day of my wonderful presence. Many of them may have gone on to become senators, star athletes and astronauts, if only they had that one extra day to bask within my confidence bolstering aura. Now, they'll probably turn to drugs, and die in a gang turf war. Will your cruelty never end Melor?

My fingers suffered some minimal burns, caused by an abundance of candles, hot melted wax, and boredom.

A pot of rice also suffered a terrible fate when the power blinked off again, right around dinner time.

Finally, someone, somewhere, is missing a single roof tile, a corner piece if I am not mistaken. If you can describe it, you can have it back.

Pregaming Typhoon Melor

Just a quick shout out, in the case of my highly unlikely typhoon related demise. Kikai is due to get obliterated by the charming but deadly Melor sometime tomorrow. I can't really sift through the exclamations of shock and awe in Japanese well enough to know if it is actually a huge typhoon, or just an average typhoon which happens to be headed towards Kikai. But the news sources I've looked at seem to refer to it as a "super" typhoon. So...it might be pretty serious business.

Know that I am well stocked with provisions, combustible fuels, light sources and reading materials! My house is the very model of sturdy, single floor craftsmanship! My laundry racks, picnic table, and large concrete cinder blocks have all been taken inside, safe from being tossed through my window and crushing my sleeping body! And take solace in the fact things are not bad to the point that I am actually in danger of getting a day off work or anything. I'll be biking my ass up that hill, 150 km/hr wind gusts and all.

Kikai has been getting its pear-shaped ass handed to it by typhoons since before there were Japanese people to stubbornly go to work despite of them. We've got this covered. And I promise, I'll be back after the main event, to tell you all about it.

They're coming faster than I can tell them

Some things are just going to have to get lost in the mix, sadly. I have too much going on. The great satsuma-sendai tug of war may just have to be one of them. I'll write up something short, but I'm beat. Spent all day underwater, and continued to prove that as long as it isn't talking within sight of the incredibly pretty doctor/gangster's girlfriend/(fingers crossed!) daughter (Edit: turns out they're married. Problems solved!), there isn't anything I'm not instantly awesome at.

There was something oddly epic about 3000 men coming together to get excessively drunk, and engage in a godzilla sized version of a child sized game. But here's the truth of it: all said and done, basically all Japanese festivals are the same. 1) a gathering is called. 2) drink is imbibed. 3) something is venerated. Now in this case it was a giant rope, but it could just have easily been a raccoon, an ice castle, or a giant stone penis. Yes, these are all real festivals. 4) competition is often then involved. Like tugging said rope, hunting said raccoon, building said ice castle for judging, or ramming one another with said giant stone penis. 5) everyone gives up and drinks more.

Grats, you've now good as been to 90% of Japanese festivals.

But here's some photos anyway:


From top left:

1) The rope before the festival, they spend the day before making this rope. It is about as big around as a Japanese dude's torso, and it went from one end of the main-street to the other. So...it weighs lots.

2) Everyone was snapping photos of themselves on the rope, and the kids were climbing all over it. It was actually one of the coolest parts of the event. You got a real sense of the community coming together for this incredibly ridiculous, time honored ritual.

3) We were entertained by a number of groups, ranging from the traditional and very serious Taiko drumming troupe, to the guy who basically seemed to be air-drumming (in a traditional and very serious way), and finally to the oh-my-gosh-dorable kindergartners hammering away, producing something resembling the drumming which came before, minus rhythm, plus cuteness.

4) I go to Japanese festivals for the food, just so we're clear. But it was a cool photo of the kid who accidentally jumped in front of the lens. He was dressed in miniature like all the men in the festival, and I wondered if his dad or brother or both were out there in that shochu-fueled brawl.

5) Some of the men spent the whole event riding on the shoulders of others, waving flags. They were usually fairly bad-ass individuals, with their fair share of tattoos. Also featured, center-right, is the giant plastic bottle filled with 50-60 proof Japanese Shochu. Mmmmmm! At first we thought it might actually be water, because they kept dumping it over their head much as one would a large, refreshing bottle of water. But the announcer kept calling it "strength water", so...

6) Seconds before the mayhem started. A lot of intensity. Once the drums started pounding we pretty much lost sight of the rope. The groups up at the front don't even pretend to touch the rope, they just go push each other. People assured me that this was "strategy" but I've been to enough punk shows to know a mosh pit when I see one.

All in all, a wonderful end to a much needed vacation.

Now to start writing about Kikai again. It has not disappointed dear readers. No it has not. Everyone is a surprise waiting to happen. You walk in to get your flat tire changed, and end up watching the owner of the bike shop hop around his garage on the back wheel of his homemade trail bike. But the stories will have to wait. I need to get some sleep. I finish my dive skills training tomorrow.

stumble home

The good days, are the ones where you come home and collapse, unable to maintain the pretext of boundless energy any longer. But you made it, got through the door. They bought it. Technically, off days are bound to happen. The job is no different from life. But if half the job is teaching English, the other half is showing them what they could be, making every fumbling sentence seem like a step forward, instead of a failure. Because it is, it is, every time they find the courage to open their mouths even if it's just to say something completely wrong, it is. And I need them to believe that. And everything you have is just enough, to make them believe.

That's my inspirational sermon for the day. If I find the sanity, I'll throw something up over the weekend talking about the middle schools, and my new 11 year old friend, this absolutely fantastic kid named Daigo in the learning disabled class at the big elementary school. I also owe something about the tug of war festival and the end of Kagoshima. It has the grounds of a wonderful story. I'll try to fit it in over the weekend, but I have 4 dives planned. Getting my license! So much writing. So much busy.

Feels good.

Cue the Montage: Part 2

We are not, so to speak, the types who would traditionally do this sort of thing. But we both agreed on the ride over, that we were perhaps, the types who would like to have done this sort of thing. The poster proclaims boldly "Hell Ramen", and presents the would be challenger with a hand-drawn representation—a tower of noodles poking out from thick tonkotsu broth, the kind made from marrow, ringed by pork slices. Green crayon curls of spring onion, and a plump cherub, crossed eyes and bursting belly, complete the picture. And yes, all this could be yours for a paltry 2000 yen. In fact, if you can manage to eat it all in 25 minutes, we'll give it to you for free.

I would like to say, that the noble gaijin sallied forth, spoons and chopsticks in hand, and vanquished the lofty foe. But here's what really happened. "It's a holiday, and we're really busy, but if you want to wait an hour..." Well...a whole hour? I guess, there are always other trips. Afterward it was agreed that we would have died, and painfully, had we attempted the feat. I still think, someday, we will.

The day continued with a drive along the coast, through kilometers of one lane mountain roads, laced with blind-corners, and cleverly concealed rain ditches lurking in the undergrowth. The sea flashes out between gaps in the trees as we fly along. Our destination is irrelevant. We're just driving to see what's out there. But then...

Some of you may be familiar with the perhaps unfortunate Bond film which took place in Japan? In English: "You Only Live Twice" but in Japanese the much catchier moniker of "James Bond Dies Twice". Oh yes, dear readers, it was filmed in Kagoshima. The scene where James Bond flies out to find the evil island hideaway in his gyrocopter? Cross it off the list. Been there, seen the plaque, photographed the evil island hideaway.




We returned to home base, secure in the knowledge that we had entered an elite group of gaijin.

I really did intend to get caught up tonight, but whoever coded flickr has some sort of horrible vendetta against humanity, and the 30 minutes I just spent jerking that god forsaken program around, begging it to let me sign in, has sapped me of precious sleep time. Tomorrow is Dai-ni middle school. My 2nd to last first day. Gotta keep the energy up.

So tomorrow you'll get to read about:
truly epic, booze drenched, tugs of war;
my life as court-jester in a middle school, laying down the entertainment, and saying the hard truths because I'm the only one who can without getting beheaded;
and the evolving oddity that is Kikai island. It continues to delight and surprise.

Cue the montage: Part 1

Our hero steps out the door of a classroom full of commercial high school kids, the ones who aren't going to college, even if they want to. He spoke to a crowd of silent faces, and played every card in his hand to win a few laughs. But it was worth it, when at the end of class half of them come up to the front, and look through the photos he has brought of his life. They speak in broken half-sentences. And smile.

Later that day he helps them clean, sweeping leaves with a split-bamboo rake while the brave ones invite him "welcome to toilet! It is my clean!" and the shy ones catch his eye through the windows, turning away giggling. He is no longer embarrassed by the attention, but still goes through the motions. Eyes down, focus on raking, and pretend like you're trying to stifle that goofy smirk.

The next day our hero stands in his little one room airport, and realizes he calls it "his" airport. He walks through security, out the door towards the little prop plane to the mainland and the security guard asks "you're coming back, right?"

An old friend, getting older, greets him at the gate: "my god you're blond" or something to that effect. "How the hell you been!?" or something to that effect. Eli. Were they 6 or 7? Our hero just picks one, whenever it comes up. It comes up a lot, and every time our hero is glad that somehow, they are on this adventure together.

They eat noodles in a shop on the third floor of the airport, and our hero enjoys the simple pleasure of being just another gaijin, instead of the gaijin. They told him he would be a rock star, a celebrity. They neglected to mention that on an island of 8000, this meant he had responsibilities. When he walks into a restaurant on Kikai, it makes the town gossip.

Our hero is seated at a table in an izakaya, Eli next to him, and Shinji, his sister is friends with Eli from Tokyo, across from him. They get very, very drunk on the local shochu. He even likes the taste, after he's had a few already. The waitress comes over while Eli and Shinji are off in the bathroom, and smiles at him while complimenting his Japanese. He does not remember speaking to her. She is really, very pretty.

Fight through headaches to stop by the sports day of a middle school which is closing later that school year. There are maybe 30 students. The banner on the wall reads "never forget our last scene" in English. For some reason, it makes him want to cry. A girl attempts to beat her own high jump record. But chokes. Everyone our hero meets gives him little green oranges. The fact that he does not find this strange is strange to him.

An Indian restaurant in Kagoshima city, as the Japanese exhaustion threshold is reached, and awkward pauses fail to fill the air. They drive around with Shinji for a little while, and find an overlook of the city, with the grumpy silhouette of Sakurajima puffing in the background, across the bay.

Night time and our hero is seated in the corner-booth of a Joyfull. Family restaurants are what Japan did to Denny's. A foreign standard of quality injected into an American hallmark. He likes the Japanese version better, except for the atmosphere. Like 50s diners in America, where the waiters have to grease their hair. The nostalgia for a world which never existed is stifling. Everyone at the table is a native speaker of English. It is the first group he has been with in 2 months, which did not require him to think.



More to come tomorrow. Ramen eating contests, drives along the coast, James Bond, tug-of-war festivals with man-sized ropes, the middle-school years, and further adventures in Kikai.

Our hero needs to write more, to keep such backlogs from accumulating.

A day in the life

I have been invited squid fishing by a bus driver, and am inexplicably now scheduled to teach art as well as English at one of my middle schools. I was also asked what was in my pockets by a 3rd year during question time. I am being given a much longer leash than I anticipated. I may just be able to do some good after all.

I can outrun the soccer team, and for reasons I cannot explain, also out play them. Have I been practicing in my sleep? Because the year I spent pretending that someone else was closer to the ball in Jr. high really doesn't account for my current level of ability.

I then spent the evening translating a diving certification test into English, on an island where I am the only English speaker. The irony...was not immediately apparent.

What a strange Thursday.

Groundhog day

I have now been to every elementary school on the island. This means that whenever I see a child between the ages of 6 and 12, I can rest assured that I met them, probably even shook their clammy hand while they chanted:

"Hello. My name is Adam. I like soccer. Nice to meet you."

Example sentences. When you don't know the meaning of "my" "name" or "is" it is a logical conclusion to assume that what comes next is naturally "Adam". When you can't read, you shuffle things into your short-term memory to survive the day. You have to trick them into accidentally remembering.

My job on day one is not so much to teach, as it is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I am a world-destroying bad-ass, who can and has done everything. My self-introduction, a carefully constructed portrait--a best of reel. And I make them tell me I'm lying first. That's the best part really. It's a game I play with them to keep the self-intro interesting, where sensei says something and you get to say whether you believe him or not. Teach "true" and "false". It's fantastic. You make them choose a side, and then either prove they were right, affirming how awesome you are, or prove they were wrong, affirming how awesome you are. Yes, I did climb Mt. Fuji. Yes, I did go to college all the way up in Minnesota. I love dancing.

You speak slower and slower, the longer you do this. You learn which bits you need to translate to begin with, to keep your team-teacher from translating all of it. You ask for questions, with a list of answers prepared. Green. Camel. Tacos. 22. Single.

I teach every lesson at least 9 times. You have ample opportunities to find out what works and what doesn't.

After 2 weeks of the same self-intro, the challenge is to keep smiling, keep jumping around, keep singing your questions in Japanese. To keep showing them that you are a loon, to show them that you're not the type of person who is going to judge them for making a mistake, as long as they make an attempt. There isn't really room for an off day. It's taxing. But it's worth it.

And boy, if you thought you were famous before. Hello, Bai-bai, Oh! Adamu! I don't stop talking from the time I leave the office to the time I get home. And I am going very fast on a bike for all of it.

And oh katakana. Let me count the ways.

I suspect, that on a long enough time line, Japanese and English will slowly converge so that one is actually a dialect of the other. To speak Japanese, just take the English word you know and love, and insert a vowel between every consonant block. Convert certain troublesome sounds into easier ones. And write in katakana. Sometimes apply non-standard usage, "at home" becomes an adjective, implying a comfortable sort of feeling. "Viking" remains a noun, but denotes buffet-style eating, rather than a pillaging horde. Because vikings are hungry.

If I ever find myself in a position where my words carry any kind of influence on this island, I'm using my powers to get phonics inserted firmly into the English curriculum. Call it a pet project.

"Not. Tall."

If you've never experienced rain on only half a building, it's a pretty surreal sort of experience. You swear that some joker must have turned a fire-hose on the one side. But that is the reality of island weather. If the weather report calls for rain, it does so in 30 second intervals. And there is every possibility that you will watch a line of pavement trace itself dark inches from your feet, while you remain bone dry.

I walked into Shitooke Elementary school, knowing little more than they has asked me to take the bus, instead of sending a car like the other elementary schools. I chatted with the bus driver for half the ride, mostly about my life on Kikai, though with an occasional incredibly odd aside about a) why everyone was crying at Michael Jackson's funeral, then b) doping in competitive track and field. I really don't think I can comfortably answer those in English, so me answering them in Japanese amounted to "He was many populars, and has much influence to American music" and "I think humans can go fast. Maybe they are not drugs?" ...can someone old get on the bus now so I have an excuse to give up my seat and move to the back? Before you ask me to explain human anatomy?

The first class I had in Shitooke was this odd mix of 12 ghosts, and 4 hurricanes. I walk into the classroom and 4 highly excitable 10-11 year old boys start screaming "SE GA TAKAI!" (He's tall). Feeling fresh and teacherly I explain in English "No! Not tall! Short." while I mime tall and short. But, as with all things in Japan, wily spirits cause the children to hear the following:

No. Natto. Short.

Natto is a Japanese breakfast food made by taking soybeans and forgetting about them. Then remembering them years later and deciding the layers of slime and the odd half-feet half-bodily secretion smell are charming, delicious even, especially when mixed with a raw egg, and some mayo. It is my culinary arch-nemesis. For the rest of the day at this particular school, I had these four violations of conservation of momentum screaming out "Nat-tooooooo!" "NAT-TOOOOOO!" just about every time they saw me. I tried to explain several times, even in Japanese:

No NO "Not. Tall. Not. Tall." They would say it once then return to the version which was clearly more correct, and more fun to say.

As the day progressed you'd hear it being shouted down halls while I was in different classes. Nat-tooooo! By the end of the day the whole school was doing it.

It just got funnier and funnier.

My job is awesome.

Nat-tooooo!

Dreams of starfish

There is a poet, major leagues only by the meager standards of the Twin Cities underground. Janitor/teacher by day rapper/poet by night. He goes by the name El Guante, and I happened to hear him speak once, at a Black History Month poetry slam a good friend had taken me to.

He read a poem called "Starfish", and I knew then that it would one day be important to me, even though at the time I knew it was not.

It is a poem about his time teaching poetry in the public school system.

"And my job these days, is to turn all the lights on. And pretend to be brave." Today was my first day at the high school. 6 more to go. One's island celebrity is based on a number of factors. For the elementary kids, things like your height, shoe size, the mere fact that your hair somehow exists, and does not cause the fabric of space and time to rip with its oddity, are all fascinating. You're still famous at high school. It's just a different kind of famous. You can't dazzle them with games where you roll around on the floor until you introduce yourself, and win a game of rock-paper-scissors.

I honestly don't know how all you out there who don't speak Japanese do it. It took every morsel of Japanese at my disposal to keep that class from descending into a narcoleptic coma. You see they tell us time and time again that it's not our place to criticize, and that we're not here to change the system. But what do you say to a class of kids who have studied English formally for 6 years, and still can't or won't pull out "my name is, I like"? I walk out of 2 classes and have a new understanding of what dentists go through. Pulling teeth. "and my job these days, is to melt the winter with a flashlight."

I sit in the office after class, helping to grade the 1st year students tests. The high score is an 84. The next three are in the 70s. The rest rarely clear 25. "and my job these days, is to identify bodies."

My job these days is to be the Disney-World-full-body-suit Sisyphus.
My job these days is to dream of starfish.
Tens of thousands, gasping for breath on the beach
being pulled apart alive by the Seagulls.
I tossed a few back into the ocean and people tell me that I'm making a difference.
but there is no honor in triage,
only necessity.

Go watch the poem (link embedded in the word "poem", just click it) now. You need to hear the whole thing, to understand where things go next. Why the first thing I did when I sat down in my shiny new office a month and a half ago was to change my desktop wallpaper:







My job these days, is not to make a difference.
It is to fight for a world in which I don't have to.



Given the state of language education, kids don't run up to you after class and thank you for being an inspiration. By high school, they're probably years behind where the textbook keeps telling them they should be. But you see even if we're not here to change things, we are here to show them that they could. I am, anyway. And no, there is no Brian in my story. No "Thank you", but there is the joy of getting to write an 84 on a test, and an unwillingness to believe that a 12 couldn't some day do the same. Even if all I can do for the high school kids is keep English from sucking for 7 hours a year, I intend to do what I can, and hope that over time, year after year, ALT after ALT, it adds up. Until Japan doesn't need to hire thousands of English speakers every year anymore. As much as we'll miss the opportunity.

A while ago, before I came to Japan, I was surrounded by courageous, idealistic young Macalester students swearing that they were going to save the world, but taking few concrete steps towards it unless they were courageously idealistically throwing their livers under the bus to protect the planet. I remember thinking that there is something about the human psyche, or at the very least the American one, which desperately craves the big win. The idea that change happens because of singular events--that you can elect a new president and wake up tomorrow morning to your bright shining new America. We don't like to wrap our heads around the idea that most of the time, ultimately, change comes from hundreds, of thousands, of millions of people, all stepping up and doing something. Even if it is only one or two at a time.

So here's to teaching starfish to fly. Even if it's only one or two. So that maybe, if I'm lucky, they can teach their friends,
and their kids,
and their grandkids,
and future mes can be out of a job.

Went out walking and found myself an eel

New photos up on The Flickr. Follow the link embedded in the photo and fish around in the Walks in the Tide set. Just went for a walk down on beach and watched the typhoon waves explode on the tide pools for a while. Some really cool stuff.

Also while I'm at it, for those of you interested in a JET experience that doesn't revolve around being marooned on an island, and eating strange animals that have just been yanked from the sea, my friend Maggie recently gave me a shout-out over on her blog and she more than deserves the same. She lives in Kanazawa, which is a city, instead of a rice paddy (though she has those too). Brilliantly quirky way of writing, and I dare say she manages to get into even more shenanigans than I do. Also, she's much better at emotions that are not dry sarcasm, but then she was an English major so that's cheating.

In which our hero finds himself suddenly, very, very busy

I am still, perhaps, a little happier than I should be when I hear that a typhoon is coming. It's not my fault really. I grew up in a place where hurricanes were abstract beasts inflicted upon Floridians and Southerners to punish them for their soothing tones of voice, and perpetual summer. That'll show them, we all secretly think in between exclamations of concern and caring. But it is just so cool to hear the wind come flying through your living room, and watch the clouds race across the sky, suddenly bolting towards some unseen destination with all the tenacity of white rabbits in wonderland.

It's not actually going to hit Kikai. So don't anybody start worrying about me being crushed by my collapsing house.

I have in very short order, accumulated two new and wonderful ways of whiling away my hours. My first shamisen lesson was this Friday, and my first dive the day after.

For those of you who don't know (and haven't already googled it) the shamisen is a 3-stringed Japanese instrument not entirely dissimilar from a banjo in terms of its twangy, percussive sound. Mainland shamisen are played with a wooden paint-scrapper, laughingly referred to as a plectrum. They are also made of cat or dog leather. No really. Google it. The island shamisen on the other hand is played with a bamboo stick, about 5 inches long, and are made of snakeskin. Ergo, they are better. Open to neither debate nor discussion.

The place where I take lessons is the house of a venerable ancient god of island shamisen, his wife who is the brains of the operation, and their grandson Hiroshi who is in my adult conversation class, and I actually like a lot because he's really vocal, and outgoing in the way that only someone who is assured of his position in society can be. I've heard him play. He's really amazing.

I sat down in a little room, with Hiroshi and he walked me through the basics of shamisen operation while the army of my grade schooler classmates practiced in unison in the next room with the grandfather. I can't tell whether I actually picked it up fast, or if Hiroshi was just jozu-ing me. The strange habit of people to burst into spontaneous exclamations of "JOZU!!!! (SO SKILLED!!!!)" whenever I do anything. Like, you know, speak, or eat. Either way, it was a lot of fun, and then I went and sat around with the grandfather for a little while and played along with him. I'm borrowing a shamisen for now from a friend of Yoda-san. I suspect that this "friend" is perhaps also in grade school, and perhaps found the shamisen not quite to his liking. Stay tuned.

Now there are people out there who will tell you that the day before a typhoon may be making landfall is not a great day to go diving for your first time. But a large collection of reportedly responsible people suggested that it would be no different from going any other time, except for the waves. And I with my rallying cry of "sure, why not?" set out at 3 in the afternoon for Araki harbor, my entire orientation to diving consisting of "Remember to equalize the pressure in your ears, if they start to hurt."

The diving party was a ragtag Gilligan's Island-esque collection of hardened dive-rats. There was the skipper Yonemuri, and his first mate who I swear was named Paolo. There was the 54 year old doctor Takahashi, with multiple ear piercings and tattoos, and his amazingly beautiful 24 year old girlfriend/daughter/friend Chie (I can't tell, and really almost have no desire to ask). There was Yoda-san, who dove in wearing jeans and a t-shirt. There was the Catholic Deacon. There was the blond-haired, green-eyed foreigner. And then there were 3 other girls, who I didn't really get to know, but were all hospital employees of some kind (like...half this island seems to somehow work for hospitals. Maybe because the other half is old people?).

Fast-forward 30 minutes of donning comically sized dive gear, either being uniformly too large or too small, and a short boat ride around the point. The experienced divers roll off the side of the boat first, and sink under the waves. Yonemuri and Paolo rock-paper-scissors each other or something and Yonemuri ends up with me, while Paolo ends up with the deacon who is also on his first dive. Sit down on the side of the boat, pop a comical salute to Yoda-san, grab my face mask and fall backwards into the ocean.

Initial thoughts: funny, I figured I'd sink. I mean, I'm wearing 30-40 pounds of gear...and it was my impression that scuba diving was largely an underwater sport. Then Yonemuri came up beside me and grabbed hold of the up-down controls. I'd never actually thought about it before, but in order to achieve a neutrally buoyant state, you have to abuse the crap out of Archimedes principle (google it) with an inflatable vest. So you actually have an up-down control button on your dive gear. Also, because I and my deacon friend were singularly uninformed about any of the operations of dive gear, Yonemuri and Paolo were actually shadowing us the whole way along, making sure we were breathing alright, taking us up and down as needed. I understood the necessity, but found it somewhat frustrating for some reason.

So we swam around for about a half hour, saw some cool looking fish, even a clown fish playing around in an anemone. Then we went back up to the boat and waited around in the increasingly strong tropical swell while the others went deeper for another half-hour or so. Chatted with the deacon a little bit, saw a double rainbow, and relaxed.

Spent the evening sitting around, eating and drinking over at the dive school with the whole group. Takahashi brought over his Jack Daniels, and proceeded to pour me a drunks worth of shots, while we chatted about his time in Indonesia, and about diving. He's a cool guy, invited me to come to a barbecue with him sometime this week.

All in all, one hell of a weekend. Now it's back to hanging out with grade schoolers.

Island Legend status: obtained

Another day, another festival, another impromptu "SING US A SONG IN ENGLISH!" moment. I mean hell, I already did it once, why not a repeat performance. Also more dancing, but this time it was a lot more awkward because no one seemed to know exactly what was going on, so my ability to watch and follow was severely hamstringed. Eh. Guess I better get used to the fame, because I only foresee the Acts of Bravery increasing with time. I will be fighting sharks with my bare hands, and eating live eels before the month is out. Maybe teach some English along the way.

Shamisen lesson tomorrow. Diving on Saturday. Unless the typhoon coming in makes it impossible. Hooray!

UPDATE: OBON FESTIVAL

So there I was, minding my own business, hanging out with Yoda-san and my new teacher friend Kishimoto-sensei, drinking my solitary beer of the evening, when the principal from Kamikatetsu saunters up and we proceed to have a conversation which goes something like this:

Principal: "Tell me a song from Ohio!"
Me: "We don't have songs from Ohio."
Principal: "Then tell me a song from America!"
Me: "I mean, I can sing you The Beatles or something. I don't know many songs off the top of my head."
Principal: "OK LETS DO THAT! YOU'RE UP NEXT ON STAGE!"
Adam's Brain: "...what?"
Adam's Mouth: "Sure, why not!"
Adam's Brain: "WHAT!?"

So I sang my lovely rendition of Smokey Robinson's Tracks of My Tears (Thank you Trads) in front of maybe 100-200 people, including most of the kids from Kamikatetsu Elementary. I then proceeded to give a short speech about my impressions about Kikai, and about my life on the island.

None of the above (song excepted) even entered the territorial waters of English.

Then, although my reputation as a loon had been quite established, I went on to join in the big circle of people dancing. Dancing in Japan is vaguely like line dancing, in that everyone is doing the same thing. It's easy enough to pick up, as long as you can use your eyes, and then get your body to follow along. 2 months of Japanese festival dance practice to the rescue!

I think back, to a younger me, to times when I had a choice between taking a chance and perhaps making a fool of myself, and playing it safe and ducking out, and wonder what ever could have compelled me to take the second choice even once in my as of yet fairly short time on this planet.

Day one. Dagnosis: awesome.

Thus begins the life of Adam-sensei. Whether he come to be famous, or infamous or merely serve his tenure and retire into obscurity remains a mystery. But by god, it is going to be fun.

Thanks to the 3rd and 4th years from Kamikatetsu Elementary for the snazzy backpack upgrade. And for bringing me 6 names closer to knowing every student on the island.


I'm going to their Obon festival (google it) later tonight with the 3,4 year teacher.

Salient points from today:

1) Elementary school children, are fast.

2) My stomach has returned to it's Japanese standard size, which means I can eat about half of a school lunch, at least in as much as they insist on giving me more than everyone else so I can maintain my gaijin prowess. But I do so prefer the 6-10 small meals scattered throughout the day approach...no really, it's awesome. You're never hungry and you're never full.

3) Having successfully taught a day of classes with nearly zero idea of exactly what the hell a day of classes would look like, I have few doubts that I will, at least, survive this year. The fact that the day got easier and easier supports this theory. Also, that the same 3 games could be fairly easily adapted to not only multiple subjects, but also levels of competence. Times 9 grade schools, annnnd chuckle.

4) There's always one. I don't know if you actually want to go google "kancho" but it's basically a concerted effort by small Japanese children to stab you in the asshole with their fingers. For the most part, the school seems fairly kancho-averse, or at least kancho-neutral. But there's that one damn kid who has made it his mission in life. Fortunately, he is 7, and not particularly stealthy. Also I am ten times his size. But it does require an extra degree of diligence on my part.

I'm going to go eat spaghetti.

First and starting line

There is a delicately structured chaos to the waves, and being able to see them from shore to horizon makes you uniquely aware of the patterns you simply cannot perceive when you're up close and swimming.

There are some other photos on the flickr in a folder labeled "island life" from my trip around the island and my dinner party with the guys at the hospital. I think you should be able to find them fairly easily by following the link embedded in the photo, but this is all very experimental so, who knows.

I was invited to another such dinner party this Friday, in which Masa and Higuchi went way out of their way to make a bunch of croquettes and invite me and one of the girls from the hospital named Tomomi over. Actually, wait a second:
That's Masa and Higuchi from the right. The girl is named Ai, but she was just in town visiting from Tokyo. Also, that's more or less what I look like these days. Slightly more tan, significantly less burnt.

At any rate, I am for some strange reason surrounded by friends. I left the Kagoshima orientation slightly cheesed that I was missing out on a chance to get to know some of the other Kagoshima JETs. They were all going to a sort of language learning retreat, which I wasn't signed up for, and due to the flight being booked couldn't shift things around to go on. But then I got back here, and had a lovely weekend with some of my friends, and realized that I'll be just fine without a crowd of English speaking compatriots. I've got Eli for those rare "what the hell is up with JET?" moments, and this blog and all the fine people back home for the rare times when I'm pining for my native tongue.

Japanese has been hitting that overdrive point lately, which is ironically characterized by everything seeming to slow down. It's the superhero drama, the sport star watching the pitch coming in and thinking for minutes in slow motion "curve ball, eh?" Learning all sorts of new goofy words, and using points of grammar I didn't even remember learning, or at the very least remembering having forgotten. It's super fun.

I hesitate to talk too much about "things that are going to happen" but here's my week in brief:

Wednesday: First day of school. So relieved. Been working on a way to make my self-intro more fun by taking every point I want to talk about and making a bunch of really simple true-false type questions about them, with a bunch of obvious and not-so-obvious lies. My name is Sean Connery, etc. I think it'll keep the kids from glazing over, and I'm trying to design it so it can kill a really short period, or a really long one depending on whether I walk into the class and am met with "Talk about yourself for 50 minutes!" or "Say your name, then lets get on to real teaching". I have also recently started producing my own vocab picture cards, with alarmingly high production values. When I finish them, I'm going to get some hosting, and throw them up for all the JETs to download. There is a real dearth of free, high-quality picture flashcards suitable for Japanese elementary school kids.

Thursday: My weekly dinner with the Yodas. It's getting a lot easier to just sit around and talk, as evidenced by the relative amount of time between they finishing eating, and me finishing. When I'm struggling to speak, I stop eating. Today we were nearly equal! Also, I find it incredibly odd that Japanese people peel grapes. But they found my insistence on eating them equally strange so, eh. I think it's because the big Japanese grapes tend to have a lot of that dry quality that wine has. Shibui, in the Japanese.

Friday: First Shamisen lesson! Like a Japanese three-string banjo. The island ones are particularly high in bad-assery, because they are made from snake skin. We'll see how this goes. I think Mr. Yoda is going to be taking lessons with me, which will be cool.

Saturday: First dive! and I could not be more excited. I got Yoda to loan me a dive manual he had lying around (in English, handy enough. I have no desire to translate 40 pages of technical Japanese dive-speak), and am starting my basic dive theory education.

The busier I get, the more free time I seem to have, paradoxically. It's that starting momentum problem. When I'm running closer to the wire, I don't have time to procrastinate. So I get things done, instead of rotting to death.

My walk down by the Kagoshima harbor failed to accomplish its original goal, but I didn't mind. The air was full of dragonflies, hundreds and hundreds of them, dancing all over the boats and walls. The sea ripe with the August jellyfish bloom--fat little masses of tentacle twitching in the water. And always the volcano in the background, occasionally spitting out a puff of smoke and ash, to remind you that it still has fangs.

I always have loved graffiti, graffiti in Japan doubly so. In a society which stresses conformity and heralds the hammering down of nails with the audacity to stand, the graffiti is a reminder that dogma and reality are, mercifully, rarely coincident.