Konnichiwa!
Onee-chan here--that's big sister for the folks at home--guest blogging, since I am VISITING JOSH in JAPAN! It has been a whirlwind few days, one of the technological highlights of which has been getting Josh's computer up and running again, thus enabling me to report on our doings. So. Let's see.

First I traveled for about two days, all told--first a short flight to Dallas, then a long flight to Osaka seated next to a cute but not very bright 21-year-old girl who told me that her "sugar daddy," I kid you not, had paid for not only her airfare to Japan but also her laptop, ipod, and her very first real not-a-Canal-Street-knockoff Prada bag (she dangled it up for my perusal). I thought, why do I not have me one of these here sugar daddies? And then I remembered it was because I still have my self-respect. Anyway we disembarked in Osaka, where I killed a few hours at the airport by purchasing an absolutely delicious can/bottle of grapefruit juice (it tasted FRESH SQUEEZED, people), surfing internet in 10-minute intervals, calling Josh on the phone, and playing my ukulele quietly to myself while waiting for the bus ("bahs") to take me to the ferry port ("ferry poruto") where I boarded the Orange Ferry.

This is an overnight ferry that is sort of like a floating hostel--inside are small co-ed dorm rooms where you draw the curtain to your little bunk and put on the yukata robe waiting there for you, and then take yourself to the baths, where many unself-consciously naked women and girls sit on little stools soaping and scrubbing, then rinsing and soaking in the hot water pool. It is wonderful to relax and feel clean after the long flight. I am the only gaijin aboard as far as I can tell, but luckily Josh has briefed me on the proper procedure and I know to buy my little towels at the shop on the first level before going to bathe. Early morning, the ferry arrives in Toyo on the island of Shikoku, and I board a bus bound for Imabari. My gigantic suitcase blocks the aisle for everyone else and I get to practice saying "sumimasen": excuse me.

A Note on Toilets

So far in my experience, toilets in Japan have been either rather primitive--squat-style glorified holes in the floor--or bewilderingly sophisticated, with heated seats (why don't we do this?) and an array of buttons. The toilet in Cafe Verdure, where we enjoyed a lovely breakfast yesterday, featured several different buttons that each, when pressed, prompted a stream of water directed at my bottom. There must have been some subtle differences in the stream depending on the button, but Lord, for the life of me I could not tell you what they were, even after repeated testing.

So after the 2 planes, and the bus, and the ferry, and the other bus, I finally arrive at Imabari Station, where Josh appears to meet me. Yay!

Since then, numerous delicious things have ensued, which I shall try to enumerate.

1. Udon at what basically amounts to a fast-food place, but there are dried bonito flakes and fresh minced ginger as condiments, and as much green tea (o-cha) as we can drink.

2. Surprise dinner party with Japanese friends of Josh my first night, with sushi and drinks including chu-hai, a sweet girly fizzy alcoholic beverage that tastes like lychee. I want to bring this stuff home to drink for the rest of my life but I'm not sure how well it will travel. Also, I suspect this is the Japanese equivalent of Zima.

3. Breakfasts at the aforementioned Cafe Verdure and the cafe at the train station, where we ordered Viking bread, which means you can pillage the bread station as much as you want. Many croissants and strange sandwiches are eaten.

4. Mekons! Japanese clementines, small with delicate papery skin that comes off in little pieces that are now all over Josh's apartment. The man who works in one of the local Hello Kitty paraphanalia stores gave Josh two giant plastic shopping bags filled with the little oranges a few days ago, so we have been eating them constantly. Pretty much any activity is accompanied by mekon eating. Scurvy is no longer a concern.

5. Ome-rice. Imagine a fast food joint whose specialty is a cross between an omelet and rice. Ketchup might be involved. Also chicken.

6. Muscat soda! Tastes like green grapes.

7. Last night we went out to dinner with Murakami-san, one of Josh's aikido friends, and his wife and 15-year-old daughter at a really fancy nice restaurant. Murakami doesn't speak a lot of English, but he does a lot with a little. "Your wife is very nice," says Josh as Murakami is driving us to the restaurant. Murakami thinks for a moment. "Dangerous," he corrects Josh. "Does she do aikido also?" I ask. "No," says Murakami, and grins. At the restaurant we eat more food than I think is possible for me to eat in a sitting, first fried dry fish bones and little pickled things, and then delicious fresh sushi, and then the best tempura I have ever, ever tasted, and miso soup with bonito in it, and tai meshi, which is fish and rice cooked together in a little hot pot, and tall Asahi beers, and hot sake, which you have to pour for everyone else but not yourself because someone else will pour yours. Somehow the conversation is relaxed and fun and wonderful in spite of being effortful due to the language barrier--Josh is the only person at the table who is really conversant in both English and Japanese--and by the end of the meal, when Asaka, the daughter, is trying out her English a little more, it feels like we are all participating in a real moment of genuine cultural exchange. Oh, and we did some origami. I'm serious.

8. For lunch today Josh took me to to the Kaiten sushi near his house, which has plates of sushi going by on little boats in front of you, and you take what looks good, which is pretty much everything, pure white silky looking squid and squared-off pieces of buttery-textured salmon and fresh fresh shrimp, and order other things off the menu like fish eggs that pop in your mouth, and Josh is friendly with the staff who are all running around trying to fill New Year's orders because it is New Year's Eve tonight and they are busy. The wasabi is fresh and coarsely ground and penetratingly pungent; there are hot water faucets in front of every other seat at the counter so you can drink all the o-cha you want, the teabags in plastic canisters labeled "canister" though it's hard to imagine anyone's English vocab including the word, semiotics with no meaning, and there are also canisters of pickled ginger, not labeled anything at all. At the end you pay by the plate, and it comes to about $10 each for 16 plates of sushi between us and an order of edamame.

It's a good thing I like Japanese food so much, because it makes me the perfect guest. Other reasons why I am the perfect guest: I have absolutely no agenda of my own here. I love riding bikes, which is the way to get around here; it's flat and there are bike parking areas in every parking lot, which makes me happy. Oh and I did Josh's dishes. There was quite a buildup. The hot water for the dishes comes out of a box on the wall like a miniature boiler--turn it on and a flame goes on, water goes through, presto, hot water. The shower is a similar arrangement but more complicated, with a switch to turn on the gas and then a burner that goes on and a CRANK and then you can actually turn on the water. Thankfully the hot water is therefore plentiful, a blessing in an apartment that is colder than outside, more or less. I am writing this entry from beneath Josh's kotatsu table though so I'm okay.

Oh and I forgot to mention JOSH'S RADIO SHOW. Which was hilariously fun. The radio station people are super cool, and Josh and I rocked two separate segments, one at 10:30 and then one at 4 in the afternoon. My brother seems to know his way around all the equipment, which is kind of impressive, and he gets to do pretty much whatever he wants for his show. Which, this week, included making me play two Magnetic Fields songs on the ukulele, and convincing me for a few minutes that Carlos Santana was actually Japanese. "He was born in a Japanese internment camp," Josh says, deadpan, on the air, when I say, "Santana, huh? Is that a Japanese name?" We play a lot of Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, and both "Peaches and Cream" by Beck and "Cream" by Prince.

Right now Josh is putting away some laundry, and then we are going to go to the store so we can cook dinner. Later we'll end up at Imabari-Jo, the castle, to ring in the new year with everyone else in town, practically all of whom seem to know Josh. We will drink beer. It will be festive.

Yoii o toshio!
Ellie

Atatakai means WARM

Brian writes:

You can pretend, Josh, that you've never before lived in an apartment with holes in its exterior walls, but I think we both know this is not the case. Which reminds me, do they have squirrels in Japan?

God, I don't KNOW if they have squirrels in Japan.  What a good question!  Well, things they DO have include roaches big as a baby’s foot, bigger-than-life DEADLY POISONOUS CENTIPEDES, biiiiiiiig Hercules beetles, and terrifyingly big DEADLY SPIDERS.  Well, okay, I don't KNOW if the spiders are deadly, but they look big enough to capture and eat any child in the nation, easy.  The centipedes tho?  Stay away.  Actually deadly.  And like a foot long.  Black, orange legs.  Nightmares.

Anyway, if we're being technical about it, Brian, my room was the one where the floor didn't meet any of the walls (it was like, "How is the house standing?  What is the ceiling resting on?  Or the floor?  What am I standing on?  Where AM I?" ... it was better just not to think about it), and your room was the one with the squirrel door.  Oops, I mean "holes in the wall."

Then of course, there's the racoons.

Yesterday was a weatherproofing day though, and check me out: I FIGURED OUT HOW TO WORK MY HEATER!!!  I AM A GENIUSSSSSS!!!!!  It gets a lot warmer in there now, although it also smells like Kerosene.  Which doesn’t mean, “no, you didn’t figure out how to work your heater,” it just means that that’s what kerosene heaters do – they smell like kerosene.  But I got weatherstripping stuff for my sliding doors (and need to get some more – boy it helps!) and will get some for around the window panes, and I got some plasticky stuff to go under the sliding door to my room so it doesn’t squeak anymore when it slides shut (yay!), AAAAND I got a power cord for my kotatsu table!  

What the hell am I talking about?  The kotatsu is a small table with an electric heater slung underneath and draped with a special thick quilty futon that traps the warmth down around your legs as you sit.  In winter it becomes the center of family and social life here in Japan – everything happens around the kotatsu, where it’s warm and toasty.  Last night I even saw a talkshow kind of thing on TV where the twelve or fifteen folks on the show were all sat around three sides of this one massive kotatsu table, their legs stuck beneath the futon and feeling nice and cozy (while the live studio audience, I’m sure, froze watching them).  The kotatsu is supposed to have a kind of heavy panel top that holds the futon down, but mine, uh, doesn’t.  It came with the apartment, and it just, well, doesn’t have a top.  I don’t know why not.  Nor do I have a kotatsu futon; I’m just using a blanket.  These things I need to buy.  It all adds into my growing list of “how the hell did my predecessor live here for two freaking years?” questions; according to my handler Mami-chan, the person before me never used the kotatsu!  Shock!  I guess that explains why there wasn’t a power cord for it – sheesh.  The thing totally rocks though, it makes doing anything feel cozy and nice and fun.  Shopping for a top (I may just need to get a whole new one actually) and a futon are on my list for the coming week.

It is so freaking cold. And let me explain, it’s not that it’s chilly outside and then you get to come in and cozy up and escape from it, it's like you're outside, all the time. They just don’t insulate places like we do it back home – back home being “anyplace in the first world that isn’t a historical heritage site.” It’s like we’re living in caves. And you just have to think, WHY? WHYYYYY!!!! I mean, that's why people invented "inside" thousands of years ago, so you wouldn't have to be "outside" all the goddamn time. Except, you know, in my apartment, or in school, or in restaurants, or in my apartment, where as much as it may look like inside, nono, you're outside – you can tell when the wind blows, “outside,” and papers flutter around on your desk, “inside.” What the hell is the matter with these people? Do they just not know – dudes, “inside" is totally one of the best ideas ever. I think we should go back in time and find whoever invented "inside" and give them like a big prize, like a washing machine or a bubble-gum dispenser from the supermarkets or a hug, and then leave them back there in the far-gone ancient past to be revered as a God for their cache of bubblicious and their eerie knowledge these things the future man calls "hugs."

One may think of this “we are outside all the god damn time” as characteristic of the Japanese cultural mentality that lives much more in tune with the natural world and its changes than the American cultural mind ever will, but I think this is mainly a load of horseshit and that there’s no reason why my apartment should be designed with big unpluggable holes built into the walls to let the wind, rain, cold and (in summer) bugs through. Nor is there any reason, ANY CONSCIONABLE REASON, why the girls should be made to wear skirts to school year-round. Because if it’s cold in my apartment, the one place it’s colder is in school. in school, it is unbefuckingleivably cold. Yesterday at Tamagawa JH we had an anti-drug assembly in the Taikukan, which is Japanese for something like “vast-like-the-tundra and just-as-arcticly-cold-in-winter gymnasium.” The first thing they did was pull all the big shades closed over the windows and turn off all the lights. You know, so we could see the clip art powerpoint presentation. No, not so we wouldn’t notice when our neighbor solidified bodily into ice. No, where did you even get that idea from? No! Anyway, it is insanely cold in the taikukan. It’s a big airplane hanger room with metal walls and no heat, and it’s not connected on any side to the main building at school; it just sits there, rocklike in the tundra, eating the wind. So I sat in the back with the PE teacher, Kuwabara sensei, my friend at the school, and he brought his electronic pocket dictionary (which he actually bought just so he and I could talk more, which is unbelievably sweet); I think he wanted to make sure I was all up to date on my anti-drug-tactics-for-middle-schoolers stuff, like, “and if they keep on asking you to try drugs with them, say that your mom or your sensei told you not to, and if that doesn’t work, then run as fast as you can away from them!” I kid you not. Anyway, all the sensei (myself included) are in there wearing about ten layers of clothing and almost all of us are wearing our winter coats, but the students are there in their normal uniforms, jacketless even, and freezing. We can all see our breath. And there are the girls, massed on the right side of the gym, shivering quietly in their skirts and short socks while this lady cop drones on about not how tobacco may effect your speed in school races. I looked in Kuwabara sensei’s dictionary for the word “sympathy” and tried to tell him that I felt really bad for the girls, forced to wear skirts in the HELLISHLY FREEZING COLD, and he says,
“Oh, don’t worry about it. They’re young and they are very tough; they don’t even notice the cold.” I asked for his dictionary and punched in letters till I came up with what I wanted and handed it back to him. He looked at it for a minute or two, quiet, thinking, and then his face cracked as he started laughing. "So so so so so," says him, looking at the little screen. "'Bullshit.'"

No I won't Be Afraid

Okay, class.  Let’s play, “Name that movie!”  The passage below is taken from my JH 3rd year text book, and is (supposed to be) the story of a popular movie.  Take a look!

When I was 12 years old, I had three friends.  Chris, a big boy, was our leader.  Teddy had many problems.  Vern was not interested in school.  We were all different but we were best friends.  We had a tree house.  We often got together there.  
One day, Chris, Teddy and I were in the tree house.  We knew through the papers that a boy from the town was missing.  Then Vern came with some exciting news.  The boy was dead and he knew where the body was.  
     We decided to find the body before anyone else.  We wanted to be heroes.  We said to our parents, “We’ll go camping.”
     Then we left for a two-day trip along the forest railroad.
     The trip was our first adventure in the outside world.  We had a very good time.  I told my friends stories.  Only Chris, among them, saw that I had a talent as a writer.  
     As we were walking along the railroad I got to talk with Chris alone.  He often said that I was a coward, but I found out that he was worried about me.  He said, “Gordie, you should go on to college and become a writer.”  I answered, “I’m not a chicken.”  Our friends that that boys going to college were cowards.
     Then he said, “I don’t have any hopes for myself, so I want to see how your talent develops.”  I couldn’t believe these words were coming from a 12-year-old boy.  They really moved me.  
On the second day, we found the dead body.  We made a call to the police, but we didn’t give our names.  It was no longer important for us to be heroes.  When we got back to our town the next morning, it looked smaller than before.  Maybe we grew up a little.  
Some years later Vern and Teddy both died in accidents.  Chris once gave up hope for his future but he got over a lot of difficulties and tried to get his dreams back.  
Everyone was surprised.  Chris was called a coward, but he went on to college and then law school.  Now Chris is dead.  
I became a writer.  I live happily with my family.  I am still alive.  

I really love the last line.  Also, “Vern came with some exciting news.  The boy was dead!”  Yippee!!  Anyway, you guessed it (maybe).  The movie is “Stand By Me.”  When I walked in today my 3rd year team-teacher says “do you know the story, Stand by Me?”  I’m thinking, what, the movie?  Yes, the movie.  We’re doing the first page of this three-page text in class today, and she wants me, before we start, to A) EXPLAIN THE STORY TO THE CLASS, and B) DESCRIBE THE FOUR BOYS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO ONE ANOTHER, USING PICTURES I CAN DOWNLOAD OFF THE INTERNET, to make the story “more interesting to the students.”  As fucking if.  I’m sorry, what the hell am I supposed to say to the kids about the movie?  “Okay kids, see, there’s this movie but it’s nothing at all like this story, but I have no way of communicating it to you, and anyway nothing I could possibly do could possibly make what you have in front of you in any way interesting.  Here’s some pictures!!”

Now I have to go download pictures.

Yesterday at Kuwa Sho we had an emergency procedures drill, where a bell rang and the kids all duck-and-covered and then we screamed out of the building in lines by their teachers like paratroopers on the jump, assembled outside for an insanely long time while the principal talked very very slowly about, as far as I could tell, the dangers of smoking?, and then had to march through bays of running water before re-entering the building (because we wore our shoes outside). The drill was supposed to cover three kinds of emergencies: fires, earthquakes, and “crazy people coming into the school to take, kill, or attack with sticks the children and/or teachers.” Which was, I found out the hard way, no laughing matter. I mean, I thought it was momentarily, but, um, I was proven wrong. DOLPHIN! GO AWAY! DOLPHIN!!!!! Okay, he’s gone. Right, so apparently this happened in Osaka like three years ago; a crazy guy came into school and then something bad happened … I couldn’t really tell what, but something and it was bad. I think it involved sticks. I have to say, I don’t know what the hell good that drill would do against situation #3 up there. Like, you assemble the whole school and then the senseis have to fight the crazy guy off duel style to champion the kids? That would be aaaaawesome. This country rocks.

The best part of the fire drill was just after we washed our feet off to come inside; there on the ground in the doorway are towels to step on, thin and rectangular like long dishtowels. The one I’m standing on is off-white, and has a picture in pink of a woman’s shoes and the bottom few inches of her dress, cartoony-like and walking briskly across the terrycloth. Below her heels midstride it read:

“I would feel even more pretty, I think,
If only you would give me a few words of praise.”

Amazing.

Japanic Attack

Things that are freaking unbelievably awesome:http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=UXR2SWKAS4URACRBAEKSFFA?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=10414645 In other, shall we say "related" news, my first kyu test for aikido is on Saturday, and AHH!  AHHH! AHH! I have been, shall we say, more than a little nervous about it.  I got a really extremely unimpressed performance review last Thursday after class.  Part of my test is called ryokatatedori jyiuwaza -- that's someone grabbing for both your wrists and you not getting killed and not hurting them neither, aikido style (free technique, I mean).  Thursday they put me up for three minutes and were really unhappy about it afterwards, but they told me what I was doing wrong and what I needed to be doing better, and I've been working on it a lot.  I think I realized that I was scared all throughout the bout on Thursday, and felt like I was competing with everybody that was coming up to grab me.  "That Nakata san!  I'll show him!"  "Take that, Murakami-san!  You're no goddamn samurai!"  Anyway, I did some resting and thinking and reading afterwards; came across a bit in a really good essay by Ron Kobayashi sensei (out of the book Aikido in America) where he talks about things that make aikido special, and one of the ones that shone out to me as something I have STOPPED thinking about was the "True victory is self-victory" idea.  It's one of those things you read and you're like "well yeah, duh," but I had been letting my training be very competition based and really been ignoring that whole inside part of it.  It's a lot about what I'm doing to the other guy.  So I've been keeping that as a mantra and my training has gotten a LOT better since then.  I've been able to be a lot more calm and less scared and less aggressive (when I remember), and I've been getting really good and positive feedback.  Training a LOT right now, but also being good to myself: getting good sleep, doing my laundry, eating fruit, doing sword cuts by the temple; I even cleaned up my apartment real nice and watered my plants ... oh yeah, I got plants!  I GOT PLANTS! They're wonderful.  I even got adorably cute handsome Japanese pottery to rest them each in so their water doesn't run all over my floors and cabinets.  Some are dark green and leafy, some hangy, some tree-ey, lots of little flowery ones, some frondy, and one little little piney one on my desk (but I think it's gonna get a neighbor soon!).  They make me unbelievably happy.  I'm such a dork.  There's one huge one that I have on a little stool and it just makes me feel so nice.  I like sitting under it when I iron things.  I'm such a dork. Oh yeah, so the temple thing?  One of my sempai has been teaching me about proper saburi - that's sword cutting - for aikido, and it's been super great for helping me figure out extension and posture and stuff.  He says that the way I've been doing it is the right kind of way (I imagine he means "more or less" and by which he would actually mean "less") for if I were studying kendo, but that aiki-ken is different; more extension and energy flow in different vectors and with different foci.  So I've been doing saburi in one of the courtyards by a huge temple near the city gym; it's freaking awesome.  Temple 56 of the Shikoku 88 Temple Pilgrimage path, with huge scary buddha statues and cool temple buildings and shriney things and ancient trees and stuff.  I found out that you're legally allowed to do just about anything in public places like parks or temples (anything that's normally legally acceptable, doncha know), like camping or playing games or whatever, so I figured sword practice HAS to be okay.  Right?  Right?  The first time I went I found I big tree with a little space next to it, kind of out of the way, and I could see the guys inside one the buildings eyeing me very warily the whole time I was locking up my bike and getting stuff out of my pack.  Then I took out the bokken (practice sword) and they were all like, "ohhhhhhh, he's just doing sword cuts," and all went about their normal business.  When a car rolls up and this woman gets out to talk to me, I think she's come to tell me to stop, but no, she just says, "umm, a child lost some keys here earlier...have you seen them?  And by the way, I teach a dance class here every saturday, so you should come whenever you're free."  If anything, she seemed more at ease to find me with a sword than she would have been otherwise.  Sword cuts in public at the temple.  Complete social acceptance.  This is a crazy life.   So we'll see how the test goes.  I think it should be fine; I've prepared a LOT for it (although my hamni-handachi katatedori shihonage still kinda sucks), and I still have like three or four classes to go to before the actual test.  So word.  Our dojo's shihan (that's japanese for "teacher-of-teachers," or "scarily calm powerful jedi guy") is coming down from a far-away prefecture to supervise testing, so that's an element of, how do you say, "scary" to consider.  I guess in Japan each dojo is recognized by it's connection to a particular shihan, like a lineage of touch connecting you to the aiki-Source or whatever.  Ours is named Nakamura shihan in Yamaguchi-ken - and it turns out he's actually the same dude as Allison's dojo's shihan!  Meaning he is both Allison's and my teacher - check this out: whoever your dojo's shihan is, he is also de facto "your teacher," because his is the pedagogical line you are a part of.  Even if you never see the dude.  When people ask me about training in America, my teacher was "Saotome shihan" even if I explain that I never actually got to train with or be terrified by him in person, ever.  Kinda weird, but makes a lot of sense with the way they do things over here.  There's the ostensible and the real, and sometimes they don't really have anything to do with each other. Okay, gonna go.  Got lots to do -- including rerecording my radio show since I botched the hell out of it yesterday, going to the bike shop to review my new bike ----NEW BIKE!!!!---- with the dude, Ezaki san, and see what he says, and, of course, Aikido class at 7.   Wish me luck!

Japananna Republic

Hi!!!
I’m writing from the end of a pretty long feeling day, but I wanted to get in a quick catch-up post because it’s been a while.  I can’t go to bed right away after this, although it’s late and I’m sleeeeeeepyyyyyy and really should, but I still have to hang some laundry up outside …. which seems like a really bad idea actually; it’s super super windy and the stuff I already have out there is whipping around like it’s liable to fly off the building.  Maybe I’ll just let the other stuff rot in my washer for another day and rewash it tomorrow.  Sigh.  This happens too often.
Oh shit, I think I just lost my bathrobe.  

I need to plan something or other for my san-nensei English elective class tomorrow.  It’s a funny crowd, the elective class. They’re the third year junior high kids, a small class (maybe 8 kids?) and their English abilities vary hugely – on the one hand is a kid who seems to know less English than I know Hungarian, and next to him someone who speaks like he’s being carefully computer scrambled to protect his identity from the mob or the government.  On the other hand, there’s Mia.  
Mia, in addition to having a normal-to-us sounding name, speaks English.  On the first day of school I had to go around to each of the kids and let them introduce themselves, which meant they said their names (unbelievably and thus incomprehensibly quickly) and some other stuff (one teacher had apparently taught her class the conversational phrase, “please call me,” but without teaching really why or when we might say it, so lots of the kids stood up to say things like, “my name is Koskei.  Please call me … Koskei.”  You’re the boss, Mr. Kosukei.  I mean Kosukei!  Kosukei!  Shit, sorry, I got confused.)  The forced handshake part of the introduction is also something that falls into the limbo between hysterical and endearing and awful – man, these kids suck at handshakes.  They also had to tell me ‘something about themselves,’ which meant, “I …. PLAY ….. SOCCER!”  Or, “I ….. like …. BANANA!  NO, PINEAPPLE! I LIKE …. PINEAPPLE!”  “I ….. LIKE …… CAT!”  
Now me, I like pineapple too, and cat, just never, you know, together; the tastes just don’t go right with each other.  Anyway, we’re going around the room with this, which takes an enormous amount of time and is endearing, if somewhat, shall we say, monotonous.  One kid in a third year class memorably stands up and fights out, “I LIKE ….. ORANGE….. AND …… ICE CREAM!”
“Ohhhhhhhhh!” goes the class.  “Sugoooooooiiii!”  And yes, well done; it is hard, I do realize.  Still, after four classes of this it’s become pretty grinding, especially when their vocabulary is limited across the board to fruits, sports, and animals.  Right when I think I’m reaching my wits’ end, I get to Mia.  Mia stands up, shakes my hand firmly, and says without any kind of accent, “Hi.  My name’s Mia.  I like animals, soooo … when I grow up, I want to be a veterinarian.”
No response from the class, likely because not a person could understand what she said, but me, I could have given her the Silver Cross for bravery and skill right then and there.  
So tomorrow I have the sannensei elective class – these 8 kids signed up to do these extra English lessons with me – and as of this week I’m fully in charge of planning and running it, so I gotta get something together, and something good; I really do like all these kids –especially the one who speaks through the cable TV style scrambler stuck down his throat– and they deserve a good activity.  I last had them two weeks ago, when I told them to watch a movie in English with Japanese subtitles and to write down some comments about hearing the language – if they could pick up any words, if they were dubious about the subtitling process for some things, if they heard things they wanted to understand, if they didn’t get a word of it, anything.  I actually watched the Beat Takeshi Zatoichi tonight, in Japanese sans English subtitles (it was on TV and there was nothing I could do about it).  It was a lot better the first time around when I could understand what the people were saying to each other, but it was still really good – I’d forgotten how unbelievably well done of a movie it is, how bizarre and poignant and cool.  And how well lit.  That is one well lit movie, let me tell you.  I found it on TV after turning off Lethal Weapon 3 halfway through.  A poorly lit movie, I have decided.  Lethal Weapon 3, in case it was on your Get list, is completely unbelievably terrible.  Lethal Weapon 1, enjoyable if somewhat belabored and dumb.  Lethal Weapon 2, a stretch on the ‘belabored’ and ‘dumb’ parts, but, you know, still fun.  Lethal Weapon 3?  Terrible.  Why am I watching Lethal Weapon movies, you ask?  
I think I’m working through the 80’s light-comedic light-action movies; in the last few weeks I’ve watched Kuffs, the first two Lethals Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop 1, and another one or two whose names aren’t coming to mind.  The 80’s light-action light-comedy is a theme around which we apparently made about eight hundred thousand different variations.  I think many of them are “buddy movies.”  Oh dear lord.  Ghost Busters 2 is next up for me; God help me if I ever get to Stripes.  See, I found a bunch of mediocre movies for sale at the Book Off – second hand CD’s, books, and Videos, and they’re the same price that rentals are just down the street so I got a bunch; this way I have something at my place I can watch, albeit somewhat painfully, with any Japanese friends that come over, and everyone can understand most of what’s going on (except of course that the answer to “why are we watching this?” will probably still remain a mystery).  Stupidly, I left Batman behind and someone else snatched it up.  But, you know, I’ve got 3 Lethals Weapon movies.  Thankfully, they don’t have number four, so I don’t even have to worry about trying to resist the temptation.  Yet.
Who is hammering outside at 12:10 in the morning?  Don’t they know this is Japan?  This is unbeleivable.  Oo look!  There’s monkeys on TV!  AHH!  AND SQUID!!  AHH! AHH!!!

It's beginning to look a lot like Halloween

Of all the luck, I’m at Hidaka sho an extra day this week but the teacher here that I’m conducting my secret scandalous affair with is off on a business trip.  Even without her though, I’ve had a GREAT day.  It was supposed to be really stressful and hard, too, an it’s been great.  Woke up with enough time to shower and eat breakfast, and I got to use my newly procured shower stool for the first time –honestly, the best thing ever and no, I don’t care how much it betrays about the progression of my cultural indoctrination here; I got to sit on my little stool while I showered and it was wonderful– got to school EARLY for the first time since maybe when used to take the B-5 bus to elementary school, found the dice and blocks I needed for the hairbrained game I hatched last night and finished my prep work for class in the NICK of time before class started.  6th grade in Hidaka, maybe my favorite group to teach.  The sensei are fantastic and fun, the classes are genki and enthusiastic and, on the whole, pretty darn good, and I get to teach them whatever the hell I want to.  Today we did: “How many X’s do you have?” “I have this many Xs.”  Pluralizations are really hard for them to learn, especially to learn the circumstances when we use the plural and when we use the singular.  So we started out with the old “throw things at the students” game, which my GOD I love doing: I launch something or some several things at a kid, the whole class asks him or her, “how many balls do you have?” and the kid says “I have two balls” or “I have no balls” or “I have sixteen balls.”  By the way, yeah, using balls makes this otherwise exciting activity hands-down hilarious.  Then we reviewed parts of the body, with a kid as the demonstration dummy and me poking and prodding him as the class answers what the parts of his body are called in English and Japanese, and then we played our game.  The Homeroom sensei and I would demonstrate: she rolls a big cube that I’ve taped the words, “head,” “foot,” “arm,” “hand,” “leg” and “body” to the six sides of, like a D6.  Head, it says.  “How many heads do you have,” she asks me.  I roll my normal 6.  “I have 5 heads!”  And she draws my five heads on her side of the board.  “How many legs do you have,” I ask her, rolling the big die.  “Three,” she answers.  It’s Halloween, I tell the kids, so we’re drawing each other as monsters.  They not only catch on right away, but really get into the activity, even using the English questions and answers and making great pictures of each other, which we all put up on the board afterwards with magnets.  Three classes of this; genki kids and good teachers to boot.  And afterwards, the teachers came up to me in the office room and told me that it was a GREAT class and they were really impressed and amazed that I’d thought of it on my own (especially as recently as last night) and that I was, they said, the best ALT they’d ever seen.  So that’s a pretty good day.

And AFTERWARDS, we carved pumpkins!  I had tried to include pumpkin carving as an activity for tomorrow’s Halloween Party here, but it got mega vetoed.  But the sixth grade teachers said that they wanted to do it anyway, and since I was here an extra day this week, we should make a special period out of it.  They got three HUUUUUUGE pumpkins from god knows where and we went outside with their classes and carved pumpkins together for like two hours and played and threw pumpkin gook at each other and got messy and had a wonderful time.  And I got to use the knives.  And the kids were totally into it and really great (although they were downright obsessive about cleaning out the insides of the things … one of the tops doesn’t fit back on anymore because they carved too much of the inside meat out around the opening …I tried to tell them it wasn’t a big deal, just scoop out the goop and start makin a face, but you know these folks: they do a job right to the end), and the pumpkins are awesome.  And the first ones anyone has ever seen like this (what the hell did the last ALT do during Halloween?  Isn’t this a no-brainer necessity activity?  Come on.).  And to think, I was stressed out about today.  

I still have to make my costume for tomorrow’s party (and I’ve seen some of the kids’ ones in the art room in the school – things involving paper mache and sewing and props and shit – I’m gonna have to not half-ass this one) and get some props for tomorrow night’s conversation class (we’re having a Halloween party and I need to get some snacks and stuff, and I want to get things so we can play the time-honored “stick your hand in the creepy jar” game, which will be hysterical with a group of old Japanese obaa-chans (grandmothers)), and set up my radio set for tomorrow afternoon’s recording session; but ya know, I think it should be a pretty good day.

workin late

want to go hooooooome.  still at work.  it's late.  will be here much later.  i want to go home.  blaaaaaaaaaah.  i want to be done with the work i have for tomorrow.  and this week.  it's a stressful week.  i want it to be next week and for it all to have gone well and for me to be done with it.  that would be awesome.  instead it's monday.  i have a halloween class to prepare materials for for tomorrow - monster drawing i think, with like twister spinners for parts of the body and dice for numbers of arms and legs, and practicing "i have ## _____s" with pictures of your partner.  I have three heads, I have ten eyes, etc. I have four chins, which will be hysterical because "chin" means "penis" in japanese if you say it with a cartoon mexican accent.  "Cheen."  If this were the states in a foreign language class and i had just told them that the name of part of their face is an interlinguistic homonym for male genetalia, you'd be sure that one of my kids would be bound to end up with four giant penises drawn sprouting at every angle from his head, but as it is i think they'll just giggle a lot and the teacher will look vaguely scandalized and i'll feign utter ignorance, the one impenetrable redoubt against the idiosyncrasies of teaching here. 

So while my computer was booting up (so slowly) I began to compose this post in my head, and it was supposed to start like this: “I’m sitting in my newly rearranged and freshly cleaned apartment debating a second McChicken sandwhich and wondering if I can remember all the cool things that happened today,” but, unfortunately, tragedy has struck and I have to start out my post like this:

I’m sitting in my newly rearranged and freshly cleaned apartment already regretting a second McChicken sandwhich, and mildly regretting the first as well, and trying to remember all the cool stuff that happened today. “MacDonald’s,” I can hear you ask, incredulous, “you’re eating at MacDonald’s?”

Well let me tell you a thing or two: there is, firstly, a tremendous amount of value in things tasting exactly like you expect them to, especially in a place where even when you brace and condition yourself to expect it to just taste like that fish-smell in chinatown, you’re just never really prepared for it anyway and at the odd times when you realize you’re eating it anyway and not really minding, you think maybe you’re losing your soul. That’s thing one. Thing two is that it’s late and I don’t feel like cooking, because I wouldn’t do my dishes before going to bed and then when I woke up tomorrow it wouldn’t feel as neat and tidy in here as it now will; thing three is of course that going through the MacDonald’s drive-through on my bike FREAKS these people out and there’s no easy way for them to tell me that I can’t because I can’t understand what they’re saying to me and it becomes easier, at a point, just to let me do it. It reeeeally screws with their tacit rule system, and I love it. Also, the drive-through’s open till 11. And did you know that they don’t make you wait at a little window for your food, but let you drive to the front or park and then they BRING IT OUT TO YOUR CAR. Nuts, these people are: nuts. It’s a land o service here, you don’t know the half.

So today is the middle of a glorious three-day weekend, Monday being the national holiday in commemeration of Japan’s first hosting of the Olympics (they take this stuff seriously over here); and this particular acation made all the more sweet and tasty by the fact that I didn’t make aaaaaaaaany kind of big plans; I got to do all my dishes, vaccum, clean, rearrange, put my bed away for the first time in weeks, do some house shopping (I now happily sport a bevy of colored tea-candles in little stone holders all over my pad, which freaked out the japanese guests I had over last week – they discreetly blew them all out at opportune moments when I wasn’t looking; a display of what I interpret as a deeply set architecturocultural fear of fire), I’ve got laundry going through a conveyor belt cycle so I can get through it all, and I’m even airing out my futon. Friday I went out with my friend Hiroko from the Bari Bari (that’s the radio call sign) station, first a nice Italian kind of resterant in a town called Toyo about an hour away and then walking on the beach between here and Matsuyama, black inky sky and black inky water and brown sand under foot, both of us exhausted and resolutely denying it; it was a fun time and a nice change from our normal coffee dates. I can’t tell if it was supposed to be a ‘date’ date or what; I really don’t think so and it didn’t feel like one during, but afterwards we sent short “I had a nice time” emails and then suddenly I got to wondering, but I think it was only the exhaustion that played tricks on my mind.

Speaking of, I’m BEAT. And I think I’m getting up for morning keiko (that’s shorthand for ‘Aikido class’) tomorrow; since there’s no work afterwards I can just go back to sleep once it’s done, and going won’t make me late or overtired for anything important later on. I got an unspecified date-ish kind of thing¾playdate is a word that should re-enter my vocabulary¾I got a playdate tomorrow with the supercute teacher at one of my schools, and that’s exciting but not something that interferes with morning keiko, so it looks like it’s on. Lots of keiko is going to be more and more important because I just got told that I’M TESTING in DECEMBER! December 3^rd our shihan (ie: Super Jedi Teacher, our official pedagogical link to the AikiSource) will come down to run testing and I’ll be going for Ikkyu, the rank before black belt (which, should I pass, I can test for next December, they all tell me excitedly). Which is awesome, because I get to humiliate my new friends and teachers in front of their official sponsor jedi. My only hope is that if we’re forced to commit seppukku afterwards, I get to watch at least one of the other guys go first, those sons of bitches. Don’t scoff the seppukku idea; it’s not as if at least one person won’t bring a three hundred year old live-blade knife to the test just in case; shit like that really goes down here, like today in my friend Murakami san’s parent’s house, where he called his father into the room for a conversation that went something like:

“Hey pop, where’s the sword?”

“Which sword? Your sword? It’s over in that closet I think.”

“In these drawers at the bottom?”

“No, above, behind those doors that are held shut with a pencil.”
And Murakami san takes out a $15,000 wakizashi and its accompanying $1,000 bag, beautiful and light and precious, and we play with it for a while before they put it back in the closet and clost the doors with the pencil through the handles.

Going to bed for now, I’ll explain all about how I got to Murakami san’s parents’ house tomorrow.

Subarashi yume,

(By the way, my test is supposed to include, amongs many other things, a four minute free-technique bout; four minutes of being attacked and narrowly escaping certain death ... i mean, uh, tossin out some cans o whupassssssssss. Bring it, baby. BRING IT!!!!! WHOOO!!!!!!!!)

nothin special

I'm having a nice day today at Miska-sho, the fifth of my four schools and the one in downtown Imabari (if it can be said to have a downtown).  I taught four fun if nearly identical classes on counting and numbers, got to throw balls and magnets and markers at kids (rapidly, and in quantity), and in one class the other sensei even played gunner’s mate with an armful of books, standing next to me so I could here whip them across the room at the pack of frenziedly counting children.  1 book.  2 books.  3 books and a magnet.  4 books, 3 balls, 4 magnets and a marker, fi …you get the idea.  I also had one kid spontaneously "SUP!" me in the hallway, and, although not hardly as loud as it really needed to be, it was a great start.  I will break this country, I swear it.  

Aikido last night was really great too, even though I got the holy hell kicked out of me by a man old enough to be my great-grandfather and tough enough to clear the guerillas out of the Colombian rainforest, who also told me I should start doing pushups with the backs of my hands on the floor to toughen up my wrists (and he demonstrated).  Yeah, whatever.  Thanks, old-timer.  Here, I'll go do that while you go tow this schoolbus through the city with your teeth.  I have to go cry now.At the end of class he started talking to me in his almost completely indecipherable old-japanese-man voice, a long speech the only (terrifying) parts of which I could catch were: "test," "you," "next," and "ganbaru," which is the japanese equivalent of Good Luck, and is dispensed with the intended connotation of "fightfightfight!"  Me? Test? Next? Fightfightfight?  Oooohhhhhhhhhhmygodohmygodohmygod.But there's no sayin' No to a man like that.  He could kill you. 

After class they asked me to come to Namikata, another nearby town, for more training but I had to go record my show at the FM BARI BARI station.  Always fun but a bit different this week, on account of the new radio season starting with the new month.  They’ve moved my time slot and I can’t do the show live anymore, which is poopy, and now it’s at a crappy time, which is even poopier: Friday at 11-11:30 and again at 4, which means that it’s during the workday and no one I know can listen to it.  I’m part of the gaijin block of daily airtime, and I guess it doesn’t get a lot of listeners.  But there’s new schedule come April, so I’ve got a while to change their minds …

Next week I can record the radio show at a different time and be able to go to the after-class class, which means both more training, more high-level partner training, and more flirting time with this girl named Mari, 20 years old and a really good 5kyu, only been in aikido for a while but LOVES it, and is super cute to top things all off.  She has a boyfriend, but I don’t know that, so the flirting’s all all right.  

Otay, gonna go read or something, maybe find somewhere to take a nap.
More soon,

School Daze

So hi!  I’m writing from work today, at Tamagawa junior high school, where I’ve just secretly installed the Blogger for Word toolbar on the office computer to make it look vastly more innocuous when I’m sitting here for huge chunks of time when everyone else is working.  Thanks, Blogger!

And I should probably be working too; today’s pretty much a no-brainer (the JH classes are much less inclusive so far than the Elementary school ones, where it’s pretty much my show to run) except for the 3rd-year elective class where I might need to plan a bit more; but the rest of the week is real work.  Tomorrow should be a breeze but Wednesday needs some thinkin’ for: Wednesday is my day at Hidaka Sho, the largest and closest-by of my five schools, not to mention the one with the best collection of really attractive young teachers.  One of them, Yoshimatsu Michi sensei, whooooooo-ooo! is she cute!  We flirt some but the only place to do it is in the staff room, so it’s only in these short bursts.  She cute though.  Anyway, last Wednesday we sat down at the end of the day to plan out the coming week’s lesson, me and the 6th grade teachers; the school is big enough that I get one grade on any given day I go there, and it works its way down from 6th to 1st before starting over.  So next week I get the 6th graders, who have AWESOME teachers named Matsumoto and Higashino, and they said that I could pick between two topics to plan a lesson around: countries of the world, or Halloween.  Well.  Since I’m not sure if I could do an entire lesson around Yakko Warner’s “Nations of the World” song (although it could be kind of completely amazing), it becomes an even easier question than it ought to have been: Halloween.  The problem is, this week’s class is still almost a good month before Halloween, so it would be kind of silly to get all dressed up and Halloweeny when it’s just too early for it.  So I proposed a plan, and the vice principal (‘kyoto sensei,’ everywhere) thought it was great and OK’d it: we’ll do a Halloween lesson each week for the next 3 with the 6th, 5th, and 4th graders, and then in the last week of the month we’ll have a giant Halloween party in the gym!!  It’s GENIUS!!!!!  So we get three weeks to prepare and stuff, and then I get to throw a Halloween party.  So I need to figure out before Wednesday what exactly that entails.  Obviously, costumes: I want to see cowboys, pirates, the walking dead, robots, anime characters, gundams, demons, you name it walking through the taikukan (gym) at the end of the month.  So maybe some costume vocabulary, and maybe a costume-making session?  Obviously, Halloween vocabulary: scary, candy, boo!, witch, ghost, trick-or-treat, costume, etc.  Also, tactile vocabulary: squishy, gross, sharp, gooey, cold, warm, etc., for playing the “pass around the creepy items” game.  Jack-o-lanterns: I’m not sure if we can get real pumpkins in quantity on the school budget, but maybe each class can make 1 jack-o-lantern (voting on designs, selecting carvers) and then there can be a contest at the party.  And we can make them on paper too I guess, to decorate the gym with.  Trick-or-treating; tell me, someone, what’s the trick part of that?  What can I make kids do to earn treats?  Language games or physical challenges I guess.  Suggestions?  I can have different sensei around the gym with different challenges, too.  That would be fun.  Maybe we can bake pumpkin seeds too.  Any more suggestions, please send ‘em my way; I got to plan this out and plan out the party too, and SOON!

And Tuesday’s no good for planning because I’ve got a DATE! with Ayako!  It’s date #3, we’re meeting in Matsuyama at 7 or 8ish and then catching dinner; she’s curfewed at midnight (no, it’s not what you’re thinking, she’s not like 15 or something, it’s just the living-with-parents and parents-being-unreasonable business, the former being a Japanese youth-culture characteristic and the latter being more globally prevalent) and I’ve got to make the last train home at 11:15, so it’s just a quick dinner date, but still exciting.  

Okay, can’t wait to tell you all about my weekend full of adventure, but for now I gotta go look busier.

izz my birthday!!!!
i just got back home from an izakaya and a karaoke bar (my first in japan) with friends from the Tamagawa town office, Morking, Hiraoka, Hiroshi and some friends of theirs who i've presumably met before but have forgotten the names of. They gave me presents! They gave me three pairs of socks! 2 go-hon yuubi socks, 5-toed socks, which i had told them before that a japanese girl named Ayako had taught me the name of and i bought her a pair as a cute present when we went on a date (and she thought it was super cute) and one pair of tabi socks, the kind with the seperate big toe, and i'm wearing them right now and they're soft and super comfy and nice. And they got me a Yukata! a nice summer robe! the told me it was to sleep in and i sid i sleep naked and many of them were scandalized until some of the others revealed that they too sleep naked...scandal! Morike also drew me a picture and framed it, of a can of "Georgia Coffee" because that's how they all say my name, so he drew it as a can of "Joshua Coffee" and it's really sweet, and he gave me a can of the coffee to go along with it. Good friends i got here. And almost the whole night, no one including me spoke a word of English. Except for the Karaoke, of course, because Madonna and Frank Sinatra and Bobby Darin and Arrested Development just aren't the same in Nihongo. Now i gotta tak off my socks and g oto bed. Sleepy! School tomorrow! Love love,
-josh

It’s Thursday now, Mokuyoubi, and I’m At Kuwa Elementary School or Shogakko, the fourth of five schools I’ll be teaching at. It’s just before noon, so I’m mostly done with teaching for the day. Listen to my schedule, verbatim from the sheet I was handed this morning.

8:20 – 9:05 Free; Ready of Lesson
9:15 – 10:00 1st grade, Ichinensei
10:15 – 11:00 3rd grade, Sannensei
11:10 – 11:55 Free; Ready of Lesson
11:55 – 12:40 Eat a school lunch together with 6 graders.
12:40 – 13:05 and
13:05 – 13:20 Free (have a good time with children.)
13:30 – 14:15 5th grade, Gōnensei
15:45 – 16:00 Free; Ready of Lesson

I really like the directive, “have a good time with children.” Encouraging and straightforward, but liberatingly vague.

***

It’s 2:40 now, and I’ve just finished with the sannensei class; they were fun, but the other two win my heart for the day. The gonensei were enthusiastic and awesome; before class began they made a huge putsch for the front of the room so they could shake my hand or hi-five me; the casual physicality that we implant into social contact is something that is done either differently or not at all over here, so the kids just jump (quite literally) for it. In the chugakko this Monday, the middle school I teach at, a bunch of kids were really shy about their handshakes and really unpracticed at it – I got a lot of jarring ones and a lot of dead fish. I feel like it’s an important cross-cultural skill though, the handshake; people really suck at them over here because they don’t do it a lot, just like lots of us suck at bowing and knowing when to change our shoes, and just like the chaos and chagrin we bring to people by doing things like unwittingly showering in the bath, the Japanese will certainly incur some jarred confusion or vague mistrust for their discomfiting vulpine held-too-long handshakes. I had an argument with Shalini about this last night, who says that people don’t really make character judgements based on things like how you shake their hand, but I just don’t think that’s really a complete picture of how first impressions work, especially cross-cultural ones. A hearty handshake is important, and as these kids grow up and learn English and travel with it they don’t want to freak out any foreigners they could otherwise be befriending or hitting on or making global policy negotiations with.

So I made a big deal out of praising good handshakes and giving pointers on them as I went around the classroom introducing myself, which the kids all got a real kick out of. By the end of the day they were pumping my hand like politicians. I really like it there at the chuugakko, the Junior High; I think partially because my JTEs (like the senior counselor to my CIT) speak good English and a lot of the kids are really pumped about learning it and have a good grounding already, but it’s more than that: the kids are really interesting and fun and Genki and exciting; they want me to hang out with them and play in their clubs, and I am only to happy to be a part of things. Last Friday (my first day of teaching!) I changed to leave at 4:30 but didn’t get on my bike till 7 – I had wandered outside to wave goodbye to the kids and before I knew it I was practicing with the Takyu (Ping-Pong) team and then the basketball team asked me to play with them – and I was great! It’s like I’m getting a second renaissance for all the things I was too shy or too uncoordinated to do the first time around through childhood and adolescence: lemme tell ya right now, I may have been last pick for years, but as of now I kick ass at middle-school basketball. And before I left I jived with the school’s brass band, who gave a mini-concert just for me. It was 7:30 before I made it home, and I was happy as a clam. Today I’m going by the Junior High again. One of the volleyball players sprained her wrist this weekend so I’m bringing her a get-well card and an I LOVE NY pencil. I wish I’d brought more NY chatchkies; when I go home I guess.

Going to pack it up and go home soon. Today has been a long one, even with the generous amount of free time. I had to be here at 8 to introduce myself to the school at an assembly in the gym, which really meant 7:50 so I could say good morning to the teachers and then change clothes, which means I had to leave my house at 7:25 this morning to get here on time by bike. It’s nothing to complain about I guess, but it still means I was up damn early and I haven’t figured out how to go to sleep early yet like the real person I’m slowly admitting I’m becoming, so I’m grossly underslept over the last week or two or three, and it’s catching up on me now that I’m teaching. The teaching itself is tiring as heck, and there are all kinds of hidden body-costs, like “cleaning time” which happens slightly differently at each school – yesterday at school #3 I kind of just walked around the hallways high-fiving kids, but today I was outside in the sandy gravel field raking the sand and gravel around in the broiling midday sun for a half-hour until I couldn’t see from the glare of sun off the sand and was close to just passing out on the dirt. I felt like I was in Bridge over the River Kwai. I think we were raking the sandy gravelly tundra so the marks from the kids’ half-hour recess wouldn’t mar their then upcoming sports-day practice, currently in session with the marching band. But now it’s the end of my day, time to change and go home, so I’m free to sleep till tomorrow.

Sarah asked about my weekend, and I told her that I might get a radio show hour come October.
"That's way better than what I've got," she says. "They're making me talk over our town PA."
Sarah tells me that her town has huge loudspeakers rigged up all over the place; 6:AM announcement, daily, a song at half past, and regular announcements throughout the day. I told her I couldn't tell if it sounded more like prison or M*A*S*H. "How long do you have to go on for?"
"I don't know, three or five minutes. It's every Tuesday afternoon."
"What are you supposed to say?"
"That's the worst part: no one in my town speaks English; it's not like they're even going to understand what I'm saying!"
I ask her if she knows any other languages.
"Sign Language," she tells me, and then we both burst into laughter.
"Catholic Sign Language."
"What?"
"I went to a Deaf Catholic School." We are laughing so hard we're making the Japanese professors at our lunch table excuse themselves for more tea. "And I'm not even Catholic."
We're almost squealing now.
"Or deaf," I say, and then we each upset our lunch trays, thrashing around with something like a profound awe at our own stupidity. "But that's not really what I meant anyway."

Today's a mixed bag; there hasn't been as much of it as I'd thought there would be and It's been mostly half-hearted chore work. I stayed up a bit later than I wanted last night (as in several hours) reading through Howl's Moving Castle, which I'm liking more as I go along and which I'll send home to Ellie when I'm done with it. It's by one of our favorite YA-Fantasy authors and was the inspiration for the new Miyazaki film of the same name, which someone should see and tell me how it is. "But you're in Japan," you say. "Can't you just see it yourself?" Au contraire. True, I'm in Japan: here's where the anime comes from, here's where the Kurosawa films come from, here's where a bevy of good martial arts and action movies come from, my favorite TV show Abarenbo Shogun, a whole world of manga, haiku, art films. But I can't see any of them. I'm in Japan, where everything's in JAPANESE. It's one of those forehead-slapping moments of realization, something that should have been blindingly obvious all along but only dawned on you in a video store two nights ago as you considered renting "Ran." On the same token, I'm denied access to French or Spanish or Chinese films too: they're subtitled alright, but not in friendly friendly English. As Pepe Le Peu would say, "Le sigh!"

But a trip to the video store means that I must have got my gaijin card, my alien registration card, and now the world of points-cards and store accounts is at my greedy fingertips. The first day I got my gaijin card I raced right to the Tsutaya, the rental place a few blocks away, and walked out the proud leasor of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Haven't seen it in years, and it was hysterical. Made all the funnier by a surprising cultural relevance: "Bill," says Keanu, "Strange things are afoot at the Circle K." Although they apparently have them in San Demas, CA, the Circle K convienience store is a stranger to the East Coast ... but not to Japan! Here it's one of the most common conbini chains, the sight of many a microwave gyoza or late-night beer run and the hang-out for neighborhood highschoolers ditching cerfew. An interesting picture, Bill & Ted, very American in ways that must not be totally obvious to Japanese viewers -- things like the California surfer-dude accents probably don't call up any immediate connotative markers like they do for us, and even the film's marked vocabulary probably doesn't transfer: they didn't seem to have any way to consistantly subtitle any of the key phrases in the movie: "excellent," "dude," or "party on!" But on top of all the cultural baloney, it was also just a great movie to watch. Its stupidity is almost sheer genius, especially the parts with Napoleon eating the little kid's ice cream and cheating at bowling.

My more recent rental experience was not as satisfactory: after being assured that both the Road to Perdition and 12 Monkeys (minkeys?) were both going to be in English I ended up with a 50-50 split ... or maybe a 60-40 split, since the previews on the Road to Perdition tape were in English, even though the movie wasn't. Decievers!

But the movie-watching highlight of my life in Japan came earlier this week with two girls in Matsuyama, my friend Miyuki and her friend Ayako. You want internationalization? Two words: Mary Poppins. They made dinner and we rented Mary Poppins. We're coasting along watching it, sitting on the floor in Miyuki's sparse apartment and eating a full course of tofuey misoey soup, rice, a weird chicken-wings-and-veggies-cooked-in-ketchup kind of dish and a yummy canned fruit served in juice, soda, and italian ice desserty dish, and none of us are really too into the movie. On the one hand it was at least a break from belabored quasi-lingual conversation we'd been working at all night, which itself is fun and real but exhausting for everyone. On the other hand it's really not a very exciting movie in a lot of ways, and the otherwise engaging quaintness and subtlety of the movie's victoriana worldview seems to be lost on both Miyuki and Ayako; and you can't even commisserate about Dick van Dyke's abominable cockney accent, it's just lost on them. So we're all just barely staying with it, and then they jump into the chalk. And it's lovely. Once Dick van Dyke shuts up and just starts dancing with those Penguins, the whole movie's suddenly exciting again. And then the magic happens, or should I say, the magic word: IIIIIIIIIIIT'S......

Supercalifrajelisticexpialedocious!
Even though the sound it makes it something quite atrocious!
If you say it loud enough you'll always sound precocious:
Supercalifrajelisticexpialedocious!

Super california expedition syrup lolly osis? Suupa colly fraggle whistle jingle halitosis? Supra curly frashelipstick ....? It was hysterical. After about fifteen minutes and several rounds of back and forth transliteration, me writing it in English and them writing in Katakana and us comparing, and rewinding and pausing it so we could see the katakana subtitle, and lots of singing and shouting and laughing so hard we were all almost shooting fruit juice out of our noses, Ayako could get it if she squeezed her eyes shut and balled her hands into fists and sang it at lightning speed at the top of her lungs, and Miyuki was completely hopeless: "santa claus's frijjle lissik...." I told them I remember having the same hysterical conversation with my sister every week or so for maybe the three years before I turned 7. I also told them it was one of the most famous songs in America, which is probably true, and that any time they met an American or almost any other English speaking native, they could always make them laugh by singing it, which is definately true. Who would have thought? Internationalization in a word: "ssssssupercalifrajelisticexpialedocious!" Dumm diddle iddle iddle dum diddle ay!

Just got back from a night of "jazz" at a neat hidden kind of ritzy club on the outskirts of Imabari. It was a trio of drums, guitar and a vocalist, and if they were kind of a one-trick pony they still sounded pretty great. The singer had a great voice, she really did what she did really well, but it wouldn't have been that captivating without the free-drink vouchers that came with entry (and amongst their ten kinds of liquor they had Bailey's to make me very happy and classy feeling). But it was a really fun night. Shalini, my downstairs neighbor, and I got picked up by Hiroka, a woman we met at the Imabari-shi gaijin welcome party last week. She knows Neil pretty well - he's my new Irish friend - because he does a radio show, and she helps run the station. So I told Neil how cool I thought it would be to do a radio show, and he passed it on to Hiroka, and it looks like come October I might have my very own block of broadcast time! If knowledge is a virus then suddenly I'm transmissible by airwave my friends. Who knows what kind of trouble I can get myself in now. I'll try to record the shows onto MD so I can send them home. Hey, maybe I can do a podcast! The opportunities for mischief go fractile.

The club was neat and hidden in a darkened hillside near a school and behind a project, and was super classy and filled with all kinds of trendstery people, most of them 30's or later 20's, but because we were with Hiroka everyone was excited to meet us and really happy to have us there. Right as we were handing in our tickets at the door a guy with a TV or high-style video cam came up and said "Camera! Ok? Ok!?! Please!" Sure! Of course it's okay! So he pulls the ticket reciept and drink stubs out of my hand and gives them back to the woman at the table and gives my ticket back to me, and pointing the camera at our hands, says "Ok! DOZO! GO!" And we hand in our tickets again. And get our stubs and vouchers. And wave once at the camera. But the cameraman was really happy.

A good time with Neil, who may well become my close friend in JAPAN. A cool guy, very relaxed but smart and interested in things, and funny and raucous without being a gaijin party-kid like a lot of folks seem to be that I meet. Our best moment tonight came when the singer lady took up one of those little egg-shaped maraca shakers to accompany a song and held it facing her body, with the back of her hand and three fingers turned out towards the crowd and her pinkey and thumb totally hidden behind the egg. After the first minute of the song, I lean over to Neil and say, "She looks kind of like a velociraptor." He almost breaks down laughing, and says he was thinking the same thing but never imagined anyone else in the world would agree with him. Velociraptors remained a discussion point for the rest of the evening. Did I mention how classy this place was? Very classy.

Allison gets not one but two honorable mentions this evening, first for calling me from the street in Himeji while I was in the Jazz club and shouting, "Can you hear this??" It was the Mario Brothers music, being played in what may have been a spontaneous outburst from a street performance trio. Second for telling me when I'd gotten home and was feeling kind of at a loss for myself to go take a bath and read a book, which is what I'm about to do; the bathwater's been filling while I've been writing and now it's probably nice 'n' steamy. I'm going to be especially naughty tonight and just go right for the bath, barbarian style, instead of scrubbing down first. Take that civilization! I can bathe like a barbarian!

Okay, I go bathtime now

All that Jazz...

Going out tonight with Shalini and my new friend Neil, a second-year JET in Imabari, to the first night of the Imabari Jazz festival. Festibal! Woo! Wearing a newly purchased cowboy shirt from a Matsuyama second-hand shop ... thrilled with myself, only 900 yen. Cowboy shirts and a Japanese Jazz Festival; ain't nothin' wrong with this picture.

“Atsui!” says Mami-chan as she comes into the office.

She’s not kidding; today’s a scorcher, and the ride in this morning was grueling enough that Taeko-san saw me and brought me to the showers before I even had a chance to step into the office (why didn’t they show me there were showers before? I’ve spent the last two weeks sopping the sweat off me with a grody towel and trying to get as much of my body as possible to fit into the tiny wind-tunnel automatic hand dryer in the men’s bathroom). The shower was fantastic–actually my first one in a few days–and by this point it’s several hours later and I’ve reached a nicely air-conditioned level of general equilibrium comfort, but I agree, letting the first syllable roll around in the gravelly bottom of my throat for emphasis: “Atsui neh!” I add, “and tired,” with a short smile.

“Taiyado?”

I nod yes. It’s been a long weekend, coming back from Matsuyama orientation in poor shape and then helping with the O-Bon festival in town, and a surprise drinking party and a missed fishing trip to really bring me well past that critical exhaustion point. Mami asks me a question in Japanese that I don’t understand, so she translates: “but yesterday, many many sleep desu yo?” “Yes,” I tell her, “but today I need many many more.”
Even after the mingled raucusness and irrelaxation of the past few days I’m happy to be at work again. Today and tomorrow are likely to be my last two days at GreenPier, the Board of Ed office. I know it can’t really be called that, but whatever it is called sounds just like GreenPier when I hear it so that’s what it’s called for me; it’s probably Kyurinpiyaa or Gurinpiyaa, but I hear GreenPier and when I say it to someone they know what I’m talking about, and that’s good enough for me. Wednesday I go back to Matsuyama to begin a language course that lasts until the end of the month, and after that is September and teaching, so I’ll be based in the schools: no more GreenPier. And TEACHING! Aah! Aahh!

I’m sure it will all be great, but I’ll miss it in this office; especially Taeko-san, who has totally been becoming my mother-away-from-mother. It’s unbelievable to me and completely endearing how much she is taking me under her wing. We totally bonded doing the dancing lessons from school to school leading up to the Bondori. I think that especially because I’m her son’s age she feels really inclined to looking after me. Almost every day she’ll give me some new food to try, and she always tells me what it is in Japanese and she’s always really proud of me when I can write it down correctly, and she gets especially happy when I like it, which I do almost all the time. I wish I could describe stuff more than “oishii,” which is what almost everything is. “Delicious!”
Today’s treat is called Ichi-roku Taruto. It’s a really sweet yummy cake thing like a bit of sponge cake wrapped around some very sweet and kind of minty/spicy red bean paste. It’s exactly the right kind of yummy to go perfectly with tea. These should get shipped to England to be the new afternoon tea craze; they’d be perfect with some Earl Grey. Gray? Grey? Got me. But these little cakes are scrumptious.

My favorite so far has been the Tetsumaimo (I think it was called that) which was a spicy warm purple-on-the-outside/yellow-on-the-inside sweet potato. Taeko san makes me repeat the names of things a lot, and then later she’ll point to it and say, “what is it?” and when I say “Tetsumaimo!” she just glows, proud and content and motherly. It’s like she’s taught me how to tie my shoes or do my multiplication tables. She’ll even tell other people about my daily accomplishments, and then make me tell them too. “Kacho-san! Joshu-san tried a new food today! Joshu-san, tell Kacho-san what you tried. Did you like it? Kacho san, ask Joshu-san if he liked it. Was it the first time you had it?” “Abe-san, Joshu-san and I went and taught dancing today at two different schools. Joshu-san, tell Abe-san which schools we went to. Abe san, ask Joshu if he’s good at the dancing. Oh, he’s just being shy, he’s very good at the dancing.” It is completely awesome. I am her four year old child. I can’t wait to learn more Japanese so I can be like her ten-year old child, and then she can take me to little league practice and things. Once there was a really delicious thing that someone else had grown and prepared that Taeko san gave me to eat, and I wrote the other person a thank-you note for it, and Taeko san showed everyone in the office, who were all obliged to admire me as they would any child of a proud mother.
I like being especially gentlemanly to Taeko san to keep some sense of equilibrium in the relationship; give and take. Of this she is always a mixture of delighted and scandalized and proud. Today she came with Takatomo-san and I on the lunch run and I held the car door open for her; as I came around to my door I looked to see her leaning over to Takatomo to explain: very confidential she tells him, “ladies first!,” and nods once as she says it, smiling ever so much and only to herself. Once I get my place set up I’ll invite her over for some kind of American food I can figure out how to cook up here. I think that would be really nice. There’s a place called Baron’s that sells imported foodstuffs (and lots of imported alki) and if they have Bisquick there then I’ll be in business big time. Otherwise omelletts or french toast, grilled cheese and milkshakes, who knows.

I'll miss Takatomo san too. He’s been the designated “take Josh to buy lunch at the grocery” guy for the last week or so, and it’s been a fun daily routine. We go to the A-Coop (pronounced Cope) and get soba or yogurt or a croque (which is exactly like a knish, and has totally become New Yorky comfort food since I figured it out), and we always have a really good time. He drives a really cool Jeepy kind of car that’s loaded with tiny stuffed animals which he says are for his brother’s daughter (but I know better). Takatomo san seems like he’d be fun to go hit the town with; I think he’d be a fun wingman for bar hopping or other otherwise funning it up.He’s single too so I bet I could bring him to have fun with some some of the gaijin girls I’ve met; they’re all complaining that Japanese guys are not only less available but way less attractive than the J-girls are, and Takatomo’s both so everyone should be happy. When I asked him if he had a girlfriend he blushed bright red and said “no no no” in his sheepish voiceless whisper. Hazakashi, I guess.

Good week so far. I really like being part of this office, I’ll be sad to leave it come September. But there’s exciting things happening outside the office soon – tomorrow I go to Matsuyama for the new-JETs orientation and I’ll get to see the other Ehime JETs I met in Tokyo and hopefully learn some job skills (oh please god). That’s for tomorrow and Friday, and Friday night we’ll have an enkai (2 hour all you can eat/drink party … it’ll be like 3,000 yen but I think it’ll be worth it for the enormous meal and imbibing and people time … and I’m supposed to get payed today so it should be okay to blow a bit of it too quickly, but they haven’t said anything really about it in a while; still, they’re kind of amazing at keeping stuff in mind without actively prioritizing it, like a super-attuned compartmentalization sense: on one of my first days here I asked Katcho san if I could take October 13^th off (Yom Kippor) and he kind of said “maybe,” and then almost two weeks later came over to my desk and told me it was okay) so there’s some fun to be had in Matsuyama. I get to take my first train trip and first foray into Matsuyama and see friends and learn things about my job, so I’m pretty excited about it. Ooo, also, there’s the big Matsuyama summer festival over Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so I’ll be able to be there for some of that.

BUT! I have to be back on Saturday FOR the BON FESTA!!! That’s the annual Festival of the Dead, and in Tamagawa it’s a big deal. We’ve been doing all kinds of preperations for it, and I’ve gotten to do a lot of stuff to help. Last Tuesday morning was the most utterly dull clock-ticking morning I’ve ever had, just sitting at my desk trying desperately not to look like I was sleeping with open eyes. On the same page in my japanese textbook for an hour and the whole office was dead, no conversation and no activity, and then suddenly there’s a whipcrack burst of life and everyone in the office is crowded around my chair in a kind of excited and hopeful, unintelligable frenzy: they want me to do something. Is it okay? Will I do this thing? With Taeko san? Will I go with Taeko san to do something? Is it okay?

Yes, of course I will do whatever the thing is you want me to do. I’d be happy to. With Taeko san? Wonderful. Iiii desu yo!

I get in the car with Taeko san and we drive to pick up another teacher named Keiko from one of the elementary schools, Kambei, and then we drive to a different school, Kua. The car is a Fa-mi-rii-caa, a Family Car, what the japanese call anything bigger than a coup, and it’s cool as hell. It looks like a slim sliver box, tall and narrow like a half a Zippo lighter stood on its side, but inside it’s like being in one of the shuttles from Star Trek. It doesn’t look or feel big or bulky in any way but there’s tons of room inside; several rows of collapsable cushy bench seats, curtains to screen the windows and separate the rows of seats from the cockpit, lots of visibility and more leg and head room than I had on the flight to Tokyo. And Taeko san and I have a nice time talking in the front while we wait for Keiko san; she’s apparently got a son my age in Osaka and a 19 year old daughter at school somewhere else, and she was reverantly surprised like everyone at my parents’ age (I think there’s a general idea here to have some kids pumped out by the time you’re 30 or so), and she thought Ellia was a pretty name for my sister who lives in the unheard of and mysterious Brooklyn, somehow like New York but somehow different. Taeko san speaks no English really; I guess she understands a lot of the vocabulary I use to describe things or she follows my gestures really well but she’s a joy to talk to, and has totally taken to mothering me while I’m in the office; largely a result of this trip.

Keiko san gets to the car and I get out to let her have the front seat – it’s very weird feeling not only like the foreigner, but still so much like a kid in a world of adults, and all my etiquette instincts kick in and overlap in overdrive sometimes. But I get out and Keiko san blushed as bright as she has in all her 60 years I’m sure, and she and Taeko san start talking about how nice of a boy I am and tittering to each other in the front while I lounge in the back of the shuttlecraft. When we get to the school we have a little while to wait before whatever it is we’re there for starts, and we sit in green folding chairs in the shade next to the gym. Taeko san and Keiko san commisserate for a while and then turn to me with a question, Taeko san leaning forward to ask in English while Keiko waits with her hand hiding her mouth: “Joshua san.

“Is it true that in America, it is ‘ladies first’?”

Keiko seems not to notice the fact that I speak no real Japanese and she owns not a single word of English; with Taeko san as a go-between she’s making me converse as rapidly and deeply as if we could understand each other perfectly. And thank god for Taeko san, who not only helped translate Keiko’s questions, but somehow helped me find the best answers for most of them to keep the conversation running until it was go time.

Go time: when the kids who were in the gym emptied out and a new crowd of them showed up from nowhere, a whole mess of kids of all ages, each in a drab little uniform and a bright sunburst-yellow hat, fishing hats for the girls and ones with little blue brims for the boys, and they all made a messy straight line in front of me so that each one could introduce him and herself before running into the gym to play. They were the cutest things I have ever seen. I particularly liked the group of shy boys who started to pool at the front of the line like a small tributary broken off from the main current, each pushing the others to go first and all squealing when I waved at them, and also the tiniest little girl I have ever seen. They would all walk up and would giggle or squeal or sometimes reply when I say “hi!” and when I asked, “what is your name?” they would all say something like:

"Myyyyy naaaamu iiiiis ...…… mastubayarashimanashigirichoshakuchan!"

And I’d say, “what? Could you tell me again?”

And they’d say,

"Myyyyyyyyyyyy naaaaaaaaaaamu iiiiiiiiiiiiiiis ...……”

And then we’re all in the gym together and I have to make my self-introduction to the group, and Taeko and Keiko say that we’re there to teach them something together: we are their three sensei for today. And we get the kids in a big circle around us and Taeko san tells me to stand behind Keiko. Who begins to dance. Not terribly slowly, but with a fair amount of repition and instruction in Japanese; and then we’re up and dancing! We came, apparently, to teach the kids the special tradtional local dance for the Bon Festa, where they will compete against other dance groups in a gigantic dance off I can’t even begin to visualize. Especially since after we taught them the basic pattern in a circle, we got them into lines behind each of us and paraded around the gym to music from a PA, around and around and around again. I was brought along to help teach a huge group of Japanese kids the tradtional dance of their local annual festival: and the next day we did it again. At a different school! And the next day too! Me and Taeko san and Keiko all together, and pretty soon I was a pro. The story that deserves more fleshing out is how I got to be part of a team myself, but I am, I’m part of the Tamagawa town office team and that’s why I have to be back from Matsuyama on Saturday, so that I can dance the dance of the dead in Tamagawa town for my first Bon festival in Japan, and a milestone in this new life.

Everyone is super nice, even if sometimes it feels like I’m only part of the furniture and not part of the staff. This week I’ve gotten some busy work handed to me though, which was awesome: today I got to fold posters for the upcoming town festival and stuff them into envelopes, and Monday I got to do a lot of rubber stamping on record books. Neat, huh?

Taeko san seems like she does the most work out of anybody, but that could just be an illusion based on the fact that I sit next to her so I can see her being busy, while everyone else is mostly blocked by a wall of mid-desk books.

Whew! It’s ten past two on what I have now finally realized is Wednesday and not Tuesday afternoon, and I’m ‘at the office’ on Mami-chan’s computer. Her internet’s down but it only means I can type more innocuously over here and I’ll later pull it over to Takatomo’s computer with my thumb-drive and upload it to the world outside. So, there are two clusters of desks in a long room that makes up the office. One’s for the bosses: Katcho san, Kakaricho san (which means Boss Jr), and someone I’ve never met called Katcho-Hosa san, who as far as I can tell is maybe the school cook? Or something? Then the second cluster, with six desks: Kancho san, which means like community-activity-boss, Taeko san and I make up the row close to the windows, and Takatomo san, Naofumi san and Mami chan face us.

Kancho-san, Taeko and Mami are women, about 60, 48 and 28 respectively and the rest are men in their 30’s-50’s. Takatomo’s the youngest, but like many people I’m meeting, he’s probably ten years older than I think he is; maybe 30ish? Naofumi san was telling everyone today that some youngster passing him in the street today called him “ojiisan” or ‘grandfather’ and sighing as Kacho san commiserated with him; I think that puts Naofumi san in his 40’s or 50’s and the salt in Kacho san’s hair reads about 50 as well. Mami chan is 28, which I couldn’t believe when I first found out since she’s got the hyperactive bubbliness of a Japanese teen. Kakaricho san’s a mystery, but not a very interesting one; 40? 35? More on their office hyjinks and personae later!

It’s really a nice place. Lots of laughter and a good working atmosphere, and lots of low key work. There’s a window to the lobby and any time anyone comes up to it they say 'good morning' or 'good afternoon' and bows, and the whole office responds together and bows back to whoever it is, and in the space of time before someone jogs up to the window to help them, i can always see that whoever it is is very suprised to see me there bowing along with everyone else. Whenever anyone comes or goes from the door there’s a round of communal call/response: itterasshai! ittekimasu!; i'm going! i see you're going! It’s really quite nice, like everyone keeping up with each other and checking in with where everyone else is in their day. I’m learning which things to say for when but I haven’t gotten a chance to unleash our house favorite, ‘okaerinasae,’ or as we like to say it, OCARINA OF TIIIIIIME!

Every once in a while (I’m sure according to some schedule I’ll never have an intrinsic understanding of) Taeko san or Mami will bring around a tray of drinks for everyone, sometimes coffee, o-cha (green tea), or Calpis, a milky/watery yummy refreshing kind of drink (I think we’ve got in the states but it’s called called Calpico, since when you say it out loud, Cow-Piss isn’t a great seller Stateside). Yesteday I made a funny feaux-pa (someone help me spell this) trying to bus Taeko-san’s mug for her when I was bringing mine to the kitchen. The whole office got in a big whirlwind of giggles and outright disbelief; at first they didn’t know what I was even trying to do and then when they finally figured out I was trying to take her cup for her it was such a shock that they actually tried to stop me; I couldn’t possibly know what I was doing. It was like a warning that the stick I was reaching for was actually a poisonous snake. When I finally just took it to the kitchen all of us were laughing ourselves to pieces and most of us were blushing (Katcho san came in half way through and they had to tell him about it, with the air of surprise appropriate for “Joshu-san just discovered cold fusion!” and he was laughing and blushing too). Taeko san didn’t stop bowing and thanking me until after I was done drying the dishes. I can’t wait to try offering to bring someone else a drink; it may be something they’ve never even thought of!