RABU, UKE, X Y Z

Tomorrow morning is my big ukulelelele debut! Our Hawaiian Band in performing tomorrow inside of the mall in Imabari, and there are to be many many hula dancing children there to draw a crowd. Actually it’s more like the other way around, that the dancers are some kind of local community group thing and we’re there giving them music. But we’re performing! It’s totally exciting. I have been practicing up a storm, I’m sure much to the delight of my neighbors and schoolchildren (yes, I even practice at school). Last night I went and practiced with the band leader Ya-Chin at his bar, and he said I was in good shape. Whew! There’s some strange business about who’s actually performing though – I think it was supposed to just be the four real band guys minus the junior ukulele chorus, but Ya-Chin had told me about it a few weeks ago so I asked him for the details again at practice on Tuesday. Everybody seemed a little put on the spot, but I couldn’t entirely follow the conversation that went on afterwards. I guess the ukulele girls weren’t expecting to play? Or they were, but weren’t expecting me to play too? I’m not really sure about it all. One of them, Miho chan (she's on the left in the picture), seemed to say that it was great that I was going to play because the girls weren’t allowed to perform with the group yet. But again, I’m not really sure about any of it. Alls I know is that tomorrow morning I’m putting on my best Hawaiian shirt and playing my little fingers off for a crowded mall of strangers, and I’m thrilled about it.

Not entirely strangers. Yuu-chan is coming, and she’s bringing her older sister (whose name, I kid you not, is Mai) and the sister’s boyfriend, and afterwards we’ll go double date somewhere in Imabari. This will be my first double date since high school when it was the lamest thing I may have ever done ever in the entire world. Then girlfriend Katie and I went out with our friends Will and Jess for a feaux fancy dinner at an Italian place that was only one in a long line of unremarkable and identical restaurants that each folded and reopened with different personnel on the same site across from the Starbucks in New Rochelle, each doomed from conception for lack of parking or even a body of potentially interested clientele. It was pretty super lame. An empty place with thick air and bored waiters, the inside decorated entirely in terracotta—“the color of sicily,” to use a line from Snow Crash—and the food hearty enough to weight down any kind of light hearted conersation. I guess we went there to try to feel adulty? That seems to have been a priority around then. Now I’m just hoping that tomorrow we can go out for pizza and milkshakes or make out in a movie theater, but alas, neither of these are necessarily viable options where I’m living right now. Does anybody else double date? Is this a thing that happens outside of movies about the fifties?

The date is not on my worry list though; things are going great with Yuu-chan. The only difficulty recently has been from an email the other day; it was entirely in Japanese except for her salutation at the bottom: “LOVEU.” I have no idea what to reply to that, or even in fact what it means. As for the first point, me I’m comfortably staying at “I like you” for the time being, because while I do like her quite a lot, that’s about as far as my verbal commitment level is going right now three weeks into a relationship. Moreover, I have no idea what LOVEU really means to Yuu chan. As far as relationship-speak goes in Japanese, lots of words from English have come across into common usage, but their meanings, weights, values and nuances have mutated during the transition. When people use English words in Japanese, there’s often no clear connection between the meaning they’re trying to get across and the sign you think they’re employing. There’s no easy way, for example, to connect the sign and signifier for something like “RABURABU,” which is everyday Japanspeak for “love love.” When people say, “you and your girlfriend, is it RABURABU?” what answer could possibly be correct? Best steer clear. Sorry, Yuu-chan. But I’m excited she’s coming to see me play tomorrow. I hope she RABUs the show. I know I will.

Soup for One

There was no school lunch to eat while I was working at the town office a couple weeks ago, and mostly I’d go to the Circle K on the corner and get some sushi or onigiri and maybe a sandwich, and either I’d take them back to the office or, if I could find any kids around I’d eat outside and hang out with them until break was over. But because it was rainy one day and I felt like sitting somewhere and actually having a meal, I went out to the Udon shop across the street. As far as I can tell, it is one of a slim three locations where you can get food of any kind in the town of Tamagawa, and this includes the Circle K, but still, I’ve never been there before. For one thing, I live closer to the city Imabari than to the town-let Tamagawa, so I end up doing most of my hunting and gathering down there. And anyway, whenever I’m in Tamagawa it’s because I’m working, ergo I’ve got a lukewarm and protein-rich lunch full of fish heads and kelp waiting for me at school. Neither of these are the real reason I’ve never gone into the place; really, it’s just because it’s scary to go into new places.

Maybe not scary. Well, sometimes scary. More like difficult though. It’s difficult to go into a new place. There are certain obvious reasons why: sometimes it’s that you know you just can’t read whatever they’re going to show you, and this can be rather dissuasive by itself. Sometimes the menu is indecipherable and sometimes there aren’t menus, just rows of identical looking vertical signs tacked ceiling height onto the walls around the counter. In these cases, even when you can read some of the signs, you feel like a bit of an idiot standing on your tiptoes and squinting real hard for ten minutes straight at a sign that says something like, EGGS, TWO DOLLARS. And then you don’t even want the eggs! But maybe it says something like, LIVE SQUID FEET, TWO DOLLARS. In that case you should go with the eggs.

Soup for Two

It is getting more frequent however that I can read at least a portion of these menus, although I have discovered that I’m not only slow to decode but also rather slow to decide, or at least, slower than my server expects me to be. They will always want to know what I want before I am ready to tell them, and I do not yet know how to say, “still looking!”

This can be, in a word, exhausting. Reading/not reading/semi-reading is something involved in going out, well, anywhere, and is one of the things that makes it exhausting to go out, well, just about anywhere. The only thing more challenging than semi-reading while your stomach's on the growl is of course, semi-having a conversation. And everything here involves conversation. Everything. Nothing is simply a cash-for-services transaction; always the conversation. And really, it’s lovely: I know I’m totally lucky for the genuine warmth and small-town attention that people shower you with here. But sometimes, just sometimes, you just want to go somewhere and eat. Eat and nothing else. Not tell someone where you’re from, or how long you’ve been in Japan, or how old you are, or how old they are. And sometimes you wish that no one would tell you how wonderfully adept you are at using your chopsticks or ask if you want to marry a Japanese girl like maybe their neice, or ask if you can teach them English sometime whenever you’re free. It’s exhausting having these kinds of mechanical interactions, without input or interval. Sometimes you just want to eat your eggs. Or you know, your squid feet or whatever.

I went in to the Udon shop and looked up at the panels above the cash register and saw one that read Udon Te-Shoku, which means “set,” and it was exactly as much money as I could spend and still ride the bus home. I rattled it out without a stutter and sat me down on a stool between two guys eating. Just a normal Joe. Cool as a cucumber. Then one of the guys finishes and gets up, and today's old guy comes in.

We specialize in old folks here. We should export them. They are like our number one national product. It's amazing how many of the folks there are rattling around in these parts. They're like lovable, crazed, ornery tumbleweed, just rolling on through. Today’s old guy sits down next to me and we make eye contact, and he says in Japanese, “where do you come from?” I have discovered that there is no way to answer this funny, no matter what you say. You can say Tokyo, you can say Just down the road there, you can say Pluto, you can say the Congo, you can say anything you want and it’ll never come of funny. So I say, America, from New York. We chat, he asks me questions. Big city? Big city. Do you like it here, too? Sure, everyone’s friendly here. New York’s different? I guess. Everyone’s mean there? No, you get mean folks everywhere…nice folks too.

He asks me, How old are you? Well, how old am I? 28, he guesses. Lower, I say. 24? Lower – 22. 22? 22. You’re…maybe you’re 38? (I always guess down as a policy, but I was not giving him more than 12 years room). Who’s 38, he asks. Maybe 42? 60, he says. I can’t believe it. He shows me his drivers license, we try to do the math. Year 20 of the Showa, he was born in. My foreigner’s residency card says I was born in 58. He’s 60. Then we are quiet, we eat our soups.

A sushi chef, he says. Yoshi-something san, I didn’t really catch it. You should come to the kaitensushi place in the mall sometime. Sure, I’ll come by. You like sushi? Everything. Maguro? Everything. Maguro’s good you know.

And then we’re quiet again, and we eat. The soup’s good, the rice is good, it’s warm inside and raining on the roof and shutters. And then he’s done, he leaves half his noodles and the wakame in the bowl. I guess he just got done. He picks up both our checks when he stands up and he says, It would make me happy to buy you this lunch. And gives me his business card, and doesn’t mind that I don’t offer him one. I don’t even have one, but I don’t say that. And then he smiles at me once, and he pays, and he leaves.

And when I walk back to work in the rain, I’m spinning my umbrella above my head and I can see all the raindrops spatter in their big hemisphere in front of me on the wet street, and I feel happy, and full, and not at all exhausted.

Reliving Glory Days

I've been at my junior high all week and it's the first time in months that I've even been here at all (let alone for a week straight), so I'm really enjoying it. I LOVE the students here. Like, I absolutely love them. They make my heart glow. And besides being completely fantastic in their own right, they become additionally endearing for how completely and unabashedly they adore and idolize me. In ways, this school is a microcosm of a nigh-ideal world: all the girls are completely in love with me and all the boys worship me, I am slightly revered for my magic language powers, I am given a good and important job to do (and often allowed to do it), I'm gaining some camaraderie amongst the other teachers, and there's free coffee every day (of course, it sucks). But I know, it's not a complete world here - and that's why I've got a date with Yuu chan when I get off work! Woo hoo! It is a good day.

Somehow I had forgotten about the actual teaching part of teaching in the several weeks of interim we've had since real classes. In addition to being gladly reminded of the fun rewarding side of it, I'm remembering that it's also drop-down exhausting. I taught periods 1-2-3-4 today and I'm BEAT. One of the classes was totally great - I got the handicapped class today (just two students this time) and went in to teach it with our new vice principal who was SUPER SUPER NERVOUS, and it was the most relaxed easy time in the world. We got to just hang out acting silly in English. It turns out I'm pretty good with being relaxed with kids and teaching them stuff. In the past I remember having a lot of self-confidence squalls when it came to interacting with kids I don't know, or kids I think I don't undersnatd what to do with (like kids with mental handicaps, for instance), but I'm getting more relaxed about all of it now. It probably helps that I'm totally like a little kid half the time anyway. But kids are awesome, they got like the best ideas ever about things. Like, kids haven't forgotten you don't ever need a reason to be enjoying yourself, you can just be having fun and that's ok. Today after lunch I spent like twenty minutes hitting a volleyball up in the air with kids. We didn't even have a net. Just a ball, and we'd keep it up in the air. Guess what? That's still totally fun. Like, it didn't stop being fun after we stopped being teenagers. Simple fun stuff is still simple fun stuff. In fact, I think I'm going to go remind myself of this by interfering with table tennis practice. I like to make them play with me (they're all insancely good) and do things like bank it off the wall or tennis serve it from across the gym. Rule breaking - it's the most important thing I can teach these children about American culture, for goodness sakes. Is that not my job? IS THAT NOT MY JOB?!?

Put Me in, Coach

I crashed the first half of a gym class today with the third graders, who are my favorites. It's the first class of the new year so the kids had to introduce themselves to the new PE teacher. He tells them that they have to say their names and their hobby or club, and then say something else about themselves too; and I, from behind where the kids are sitting on the gym floor, say: "in English! Introduce yourselves in English!" After all, didn't we all JUST do this yesterday and the day before for the new English teachers? "In English," I say and everyone laughs; these kids are all smiles. The shy ones mumble, "really?" to their neighbors and the louder ones say, "no way!" to the teacher, but after a moment's pause the first kid, Taiki, stands up and goes "Hello! My name is Taiki Watanabe. I'm in tennis club ..... THE tennis club! I'm in the tennis club. Thank you!" And when he sits down, all the rest of the kids give him this big round of applause, and then the next one stands up and does it too. They applaud for every kid (and we didn't even practice it this time!). The super unconfident ones started in Japanese but I managed to make even them do it in English. One really shy girl, Yuuka (who I like a lot, she's on the volleyball team and all those girls are really friendly) even added her own sentence at the end, "and my favorite volleyball player is Kasturaya Hirabashi," or someone. This week I've been spending more time with the baseball club, so when one boy stands up and says he's on the team, I ask what position he plays. "What?" He's already in the middle of sitting down, and is so startled by this new question, suddenly outside of the safe self-intro speech, that he ends up caught in the bent hunch between standing and sitting on the floor, looking up at me. "What position do you play?" All the other kids echo, "what position!" "Oh," he smiles after a minute. "Bench."

Boston?

I have been thinking about Boston recently, wondering if that's the place I should end up living, but I haven't really been sure why until I got an email from Ellie saying just that: she'd been thinking about Boston and if that's a place I could end up living. Thank you, psychic twin link.

Yeah, I don't know. I have a lot of built up biases against Boston, but I can't really tell which ones are real and which ones only have to do with being from New York. Like the sports thing: my years spent as a New York kid in a Boston-heavy boys camp has helped me be acutely aware of how unbelievably stupid the stupid obsessive Bostonite sports thing is; the nigh-religious blinding forfeit of self-awareness and rational decision-making, the wilful acquiescence to deep-structure predjudice and bigotry that comes with the donning of a BoSox cap. Yes, I probably feel more strongly on this for having been the ostracized--and me barely a follower of the sport of baseball aside from Field of Dreams and Ballpark Franks--but that doesn't make it any less truly ugly, and its viral proliferation inside the Boston beltway turns me off.

The plus side is of course that almost every positive thing that has happened in America since 2002 has happened in Massachusetts. It seems to be the state to be a liberal in.

But I don't really have much of a real feel for the city itself, Boston. All the people that I know from there are actually from the suburbs of there, and let's face it, it should be some YEARS before I end up even potentially wanting to live in the suburbs. Urbs I can see me doing, and demi-urbs and small towns and country locales, but suburbs feel like they shouldn't happen. Suburbs is like the end of life.

But Boston. What is Boston even like? I get the feeling that it's not all that great, that the things to do there are geared towards frat boys or yuppies, I kind of hate being surrounded by each of those kinds of lives. Most of the images I have in my head about Boston involve the meat head beer helmet sports bar crowd or the crew cut sweater vest snowboard on the weekends kind of crowd and not the underground reggae hula band hookah bar kind of crowd or the literary art making kind of crowd. Is there art and music? Is there nightlife? John lived in Boston for 4 years and he never spoke too highly of those aspects of the place. But there must be, there are like sixty five colleges and universities around there. What's the deal with Boston? Someone fill a brother in.

We all have our reasons

This week the kids are still on spring vacation, which means that all the teachers and office people still have to go to school and spend hours staring at their desks or running the club and team practices that the kids are required to go to throughout vacation, which the teachers are required to hold. Ever see the movie Brazil? Anyway, it means for me that I’m working at the office I spent last summer vacation in, with all the same old faces – my boss Kacho san, my surrogate mother Taeko san, and my handler, friend and life planner Mami chan. The difference is that the office itself has changed locations; from up in the lush Greenpier building—majestic on its hill above the town and fit with all the modern conviniences, like heating and insulation and hot-and-cold running water in the sinks—now we’ve been demoted to down in the town office building with the rest of the city personel. The shi-sho, or Town Office, evokes a building from a still-in-use mental hospital from like a hundred and fifty years ago, the kind you still see when you go driving around the sticks in the Berkshires in New York or Massachusettes. The entire place is built out of what seems to be a single, massive pour of concrete with a couple large meatpacking rooms where most of the town clerks work, and some smaller offices where the rest of us work. The plus side of this, and the only one that I can see, is that on Monday when Kacho san said to me, “well, this place sure is a heck of a lot smaller,” I got to tell him in perfect Japanese, “yep, that’s why I shaved my beard.”

Out with the Old, in with the Yuu

So last month I was seeing a woman, Yuriko, who was the PE teacher at one of my elementary schools. This was not unawesome. She was real sweet and, being the PE teacher, she was in great shape. And we had some nice times together, although we didn’t go out very much. But it was kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I was really happy to just be dating someone. Winter got to be pretty lonely, yo. And it was cool to be dating a hot teacher. We had this whole super-secret-affair, making out in the office break room behind the file cabinets thing going. As the other boy JETs told me, this was a manifestation of “living the dream” on JET. So this was cool. But on the downsides, she was 30, and she was a PE teacher, and she was leaving. Something to do with prefectural teaching licensing stuff, she was moving to Kyoto at the end of March, and this would be the terminus of our romantic project. Which, let’s be serious, probably was what allowed for us to have a big secret affair in the first place – we knew it wouldn’t really go anywhere. So, she’s left. A little sad, sure, but as they say in the Japanese, shoganai. Or as we say in English, “c’est la vie.”

That was March, right before the end of the school year (wacky, huh?), and also right before my parents came to visit (also pretty wacky, huh?). And now, this Monday morning April 10^th, a gray raining beautiful spring day, this Monday, April morning finds me with a girlfriend. Yes friends, I am girlfriended. Yuu-chan. The co-ed. Yesterday we got together for the first time since the middle of March, and it was magic. I don’t know what it is, but I think I really like her. She just drives me crazy. Yuu-chan’s just started her last year of college at Matsuyama Daigaku, and in fact as I write this she’s racing to her professor’s office to try and change some of her classes around after the deadline. Ah, school. How well I recall the days of your never never met deadlines. In addition being apparently perennially just a little bit late to everything, Yuu chan and I have some other things in common, the big one being aikido. We met at the Matsuyama dojo’s new years party, but we’ve never gotten to train together yet. Which is good, because she is much, much better than I am. She’s been training with the amazing teacher in Matsuyama for three years, and is one of his favorite students. He likes me a lot too, but mostly because I make a lot of mistakes. I’m slightly-to-moderately nervous about when Yuu and I finally train together and I embarrass myself terribly by totally sucking. But, as the French say, “whatever.” For now, life is great.