Tuesday, June 29th: Dewnouement

My friend Michelle stopped by today to drop off the following gift:

Ah, how unpredictable life can be, leaving me maddeningly Dew-less one day, yet swimming in it the very next. See, now that's a goddamn friend. Furthermore, you will all note that Japanese Mountain Dew has Citrus Taste and is apparently 'King of the Street'. God...that just makes me want it even more.

Monday, June 28th: Do the Dew, to the X-Treme!!!

Today was one of those days where I really hope there's a God, because otherwise that laughter I hear in my head just means I'm crazy.

Arrrgh, and what really blows my mind is, today was actually a good day. It was just two seemingly small, yet so entirely stupid events immediately after school that reminds me how easy I can crack since coming here. The first came when I hopped on my bike at the end of the day, only to discover that oh joy, some kids had been fucking with the tantalizingly-pushable gear-shift levers on my old-as-fuck bike, meaning that that as soon as I pushed my food down on the pedal the chain got all tangled up the gears. This isn't the first time this has happened. Kids will come over, see my bike, and go Oh wow, buttons! and immediately set about pushing them.

See, I'm sure this sounds like no big deal, but in reality it embodies everything I hate about children: no respect for other people's property, can't keep their touching-fingers to themselves, have no concept of actions having consequences; making me sound old and stodgy for making complaints like these. As I sat there in the blazing hot sun, clearly not going home any time soon and instead feeding my fingers into a rusty chain and jagged metal teeth, a curious second grader came over and decided to punctuate my thoughts by asking a series of assorted helpful, non-obvious questions like Hey, is that Chow-Sensei? It is! What are you doing Chow-Sensei? Is something wrong with your bike, Chow-Sensei? Why don't you fix it, Chow-Sensei? Hey, Chow-Sensei, can I fix it? and so on, until I began wondering if I could now just take the chain completely off and use it as a makeshift noose. Oh, and the best part came when he -- clearly being able to see that my fingers were placed between the rusty metal chain and the teeth of the gears, which are of course connected to the pedals -- decided it'd be a great idea if he, oh, stepped on the fucking pedals. Hooray, tetanus! I hate my job and all life.

Maddeningly insignificant-yet-infuriating incident #2 came after I finally fixed my bike, or I should say, after some helpful teacher who actually knew what he was doing fixed my bike. I was literally 30 seconds from home when a brilliant green glint in a soda vending machine caught my eye: Mountain Dew! Another one of those things that I wouldn't even bother throwing at a homeless man back home that suddenly transforms into edible nostalgia-comfort when in this country (see Donald's, Mc). Mountain Dew is such a rare find in this area, and to be just 30 seconds from my home -- oh, suddenly things were looking up. I put a 500-yen coin into the machine, pressed the button, and, as an afterthought, pressed it three, four more times. Spare no expenses, that's me! Why not, I had a shitty day, right? May as well hedge my bets and count on needing further Dews to counteract any future shitty happenings in the day. I am an IDIOT.

The smart ones among you (are there smart ones among you?) have probably already realized the problem here: see, these vending machines are really only made to dispense one, maybe two cans a time. So when you order four or five without taking some of them out as you go, removing them from the machine becomes somewhat...okay, well, impossible. As soon as I reached for the first can, I realized how incredibly moronic I was, and felt my sanity crack just that much more. Oh, how ironic! By trying to get more Dews to fix future problems in the day, the Dews themselves had become the very problem! Curse you, fickle foot of irony, always descending from the heavens to boot me square in the junk.

Seriously, I am still getting over how very stupid this makes me feel. I must've sat there in front of the machine, again out in the blazing hot sun, struggling with the slot for like ten minutes but to no avail. I pushed, I pulled, I yanked, I tugged; I tried to push the cans back up into the machine, I tried to use a stick to wedge them out; I seriously considered smashing my similarly infuriating bike into it until they both smashed and I could have all the goddamn Dew I wanted. High school kids slowed as they passed, justifiably laughing at the no-doubt surreal-looking scene crazily unfolding before them. A father carrying his child actually crossed over to the opposite side of the street rather than come without five feet of the psychotic-looking vending-machine rapist. Finally, tired of looking like a goddamn idiot not 30 seconds from my apartment, I decided the Dews were just not mine to have, and in one final, sheer pointless act of frustration, actually put in the money to send one more can down the slot just to ensure that whoever happened by to buy a drink next could not only not have my Mountain Dews, but would be totally FUCKED in getting his own drink, too. Did I mention these cans were a buck-twenty a pop? Yeah, I know, I'm an idiot, shut up.

So there you go, two seemingly stupid but insignificant things that can drive a normally sane man to molesting a vending machine and considering using a bicycle as a bludgeoning weapon. Seriously, I just wanted a a fucking Mountain Dew God, is that so much to ask? One of these days I will end up shouting the same thing when spraying bullets from a bell tower, and only the fuckbots reading this will know why.

Four more weeks to go.

Wednesday, June 23rd: Predge Arregiance to the Frag

The other day a friend and I were talking about thecurrent (latest) nonsense surrounding the recitationof the Pledge of Allegiance in American public schools. To be honest,it's not exactly a topic I've spent a great deal of time thinking about, due to low content of circus bears riding unicycles and/or naked women kneeling on blue tarps. If I did have a prior opinion though, it was probably that who gives a shit and shut your stupid whiny anti-Jesus hole. "-under God" or no, the pledge takes 10 seconds; I said the damn thing every single morning in school and I didn't end up turning into some nationalistic religious twat. Right? Right. In conclusion, shut up and go get me a cup of coffee.

However, despite my airtight, well thought-out argument, my friend managed to completely annihilate it with just one simple, incisive question:

What if they recited a Pledge of Allegiance in Japan?

Answer: I would freak the fuck out. Hell, it cracks me up enough that at the start of every period the children are called to attention and stand there rigid as boards as the elected kid for the day barks out the period number and class. What if, every morning, I'd walk into school only for children as young as 7 to rise to their feet as one and recite something like the following in monotone unison:

I SWEAR UPON THE BLOOD OF MY ANCESTORS UNDYING FEALTY
TO THE MOST GRAND BANNER OF THIS GREAT JAPAN
AND THE ACCOMPANYING EMPIRE WHICH IT HAS BUILT
ONE POWERFUL TIGER-LIKE HOT-BLOODED UNIT
AS CREATED BY THE ALMIGHTY PAGAN GOD SUSANO-O
MAY DEATH COME SWIFTLY TO OUR ENEMIES.

Okay, so I dressed it up a little, but seriously, if America didn't have a pledge and Japan did, that woulda been one of the FIRST things I ever would have written about in this journal. I would have found it one of the oddest things I've ever seen or heard: "Oh my God, can you believe it? Japan is so strange it forces kids to swear loyalty to the country every single morning from first grade through twelfth. What a bunch of scary nationalistic freakshows. Also, they made bukkake, ha!" And this isn't even one of those things that only becomes weird when the Japanese do it, because y'know, that's what they do; it's something that is just plain weird on its own, and a little creepy, period, when looked at from an outside perspective.

That settles it; if I ever, Susano-O forbid, have children, they're gonna join the little weirdo Jehovah's Witnesses kids as the ostracized freakshows who don't say the Pledge because their uptight parents won't let them. I would deny them a thousand lifetimes' worth of normal social interaction and sex lives before I see them pledge even one cubic allegiance unit to anything other than the back of my hand.

Saturday, June 19th: Interpretive Galvin

Yesterday my students, at the behest of their homeroom teacher, drew pictures of me. You see, simply due to the sheer number of different schools and classes I teach, I've already started to have my last classes with a lot of students, even though I don't leave for another month and a half. So apparently the teacher decided the best way her students -- many of whom have difficulty recalling what color the sky is without first consulting a box of crayons -- could say good-bye would be drawing pictures of me that will likely make it difficult for me to comfortably look into a mirror for years to come. Yessir, nothing quite like seeing yourself as rendered by third graders to give the ol' self-image a good kick right in the junk.

Oh, don't listen to me; I'm just a crotchety, bitter old man who is uncomfortable with any open displays of emotion. The pictures and cards the children gave me today are actually quite touching, though you'd be hard-pressed to find me admit that outside this sentence. One girl even began uncontrollably bawling because she felt the card she drew me wasn't good enough. Hell, you can't really help but be touched even just a bit from something like that, even if you don't enjoy the scent of children's tears to the degree I do. Not that I believe she fell into this deep emotional mire entirely on her own, mind you. I mean, even though I think it's necessary for kids to eventually realize that people can drift in and out of their lives like so much sand in an hourglass, I didn't really think the teacher repeatedly and bluntly emphasizing that they would never ever see Chow-Sensei again EVER because he's leaving you all FOREVER the way she did was entirely called for. Sure, it's nice to see 'em show a little emotion in seeing me go, but that doesn't mean I want to see them totally traumatized.

So yeah, anyway, time to post some of the pictures the kids drew of me and mock them all for the fleeting amusement of strangers on the internet:

This first one I actually kinda like. Although I don't think it's some kind of law that if one arm is drawn freakishly long the other must be drawn freakishly short as a counterbalance. Must be some kind of 'Conservation of Anatomy' principle.

Not surprisingly, some of my students apparently have difficulty determining, or at least convincingly rendering, my gender. I mean, look at that one on the right. Tell me that is not a very sexy curve my buttocks have going on there. Fuck, I'd hit it.

Similarly, this one appears to depict me as some sort of transvestite Latino hooker. Why you so stoo'pid, stoo'pid? *snap*

This doesn't so much look like me, as is it does some obsessed kindofcrap reader running around pretending to be me. What am I, some Bond villain's henchman?

RUN, RUN, AS FAST AS YOU CAN, YOU CAN'T CATCH ME, I AM THE FUCKING GINGERBREAD MAN APPARENTLY

Hey, remember that time I showed up to class wearing nothing but a colored box and without my nose? Yeah, me neither, dipshit.

Monday, June 14th: Gallagher

Sunday afternoon brought a beautiful riverside birthday barbecue for Teacher of English Mark, at one point of which I shot said Mark in the birthday knuckle with my BB gun. Which was awesome. Happy birthday, Mark!

Good timing on that barbecue though, because after an absolutely dreadful week of near-nonstop rain we had possibly THE most wonderful day weather-wise literally since I've got here. I used to be fairly indifferent to rain, snow, and the assorted muck -- never setting foot outside ever may have that effect -- but since coming here my mood has become inextricably tied to the weather. Unless it's a sunny day, I'm simply not at my best; if it's a rainy day, hoo hoo, better hide the fucking cutlery. But this Sunday -- so gorgeous I feel justified in obnoxiously mispelling a standard adjective by telling you it was a bee-YOO-tiful day. I mean, check out this view:

Sunday was one of the first days the tip of famous local landmark/active volcano Mt. Asama has been fully visible in months. Did I ever mention before that my town is located right next to an active volcano? Every day I pray that the molten lava contained within bursts forth and as though guided by divine forces somehow manages to destroy each and every one of my elementary schools while leaving everything else intact.

Getting back on track, a special attraction at this Sunday's barbecue was putting on a blindfold and and trying to smash open a watermelon with a stick. Which of course sounds like something we just stupidly came up with after several hours of drinking, but is actually a traditional part of Japanese culture. Which of course is yet another indication of just how much of Japanese culture must've been originally derived from drinking. Anyway, as you could probably guess, playing this game is rather simple. First, you put on a blindfold (or you could just pull your shirt over your head like Mark, showing off finely-toned abs in the process), as people spin you round and round to disorient you:

"Haha! Let's make a foreigner act like an idiot and say it's our culture haha!" "Haha! Okay haha!"

Then, after you're good and dizzy, and let's face it, likely more than a little drunk besides, you listen to the shouts of "right!" and "left!" and "by the way I diddled your wife" to guide where to swing the wooden sword (or plastic cricket bat, in this case).

Above: A scene from one of the less scary horror movies

Then basically you repeat this over and over again because let's face it you're drunk, blind, and possibly Australian so you ain't gonna hit shit. Actually Mark got it on the first or second try, but that's only because his kind cheat at everything. Anyway, you keep whacking at it until you get a picture that resembles the following:

"All right! No Vegemite and eucalyptus sandwiches tonight!"

As you can see, the whole thing is kinda like a pinata, only instead of kids scrambling for pieces of safely individually-wrapped candy you pick pulpy chunks of fruit off the hygenically ant-covered ground and thrust it in partygoers' faces demanding they eat it all in the name of culture and fun. Me, I don't even blink twice at this stuff anymore; I just smile, nod, and accept my mangled hunk of watermelon while nervously proclaming aloud "Ha ha, yes, this is normal! Personally I prefer ALL my food to be violently beaten immediately before consumption, don't you?" And in between bites of bitter, unripe, no-doubt disease-ridden watermelon, I smile.

Six more weeks to go.

Thursday, June 10th: Because It's There

Today's entry has been relocated to the third photo page, because frankly, that page required at least one more entry to justify its existence. Simple, no? Anyway, click and go read; it's probably one of the better things I've written recently. ERROR FOLLOW-UP SELF-DEPRECATING COMMENT NOT FOUND

Also, for those of you not following Paolo's saga of a stupid high school kid running into his car thus exposing to the police his lack of driver's license, I suggest you head over to his blog to check it out because he's managed to turn all his hassles into some quite comedic shit. Of particular note is the hilariously kowtowing 'ass-kissing bullcrap letter' he wrote to apologize to the police. The two best lines of which are probably:

• Because traffic law in California is very strict, I have received a very rigorous training and testing
• My family (in Italy) battled the Mafia just as you battle the Yakuza.

Seriously, go check it out; this is the kind of letter I would write at first but then ultimately chicken out on actually handing it in. The scariest part is, it'll probably work, too.

Monday, June 7th: B-I-N-G-ugh.

I've been playing a lot of regular, boring ol' Bingo with my students lately, as part of a coordinated effort to stretch my limited remaining reserves of sanity as far as possible. Initially I was afraid the students, having been conditioned to expect Chow-Sensei's usual wacky, this-is-barely-education-this-is-a-circus-but-with-more-resultant-orphans classes, would revolt at the prospect of such a relatively mundane, low-key game. However, luckily for whatever reason most Japanese students are highly into Bingo, to the point of erupting into applause when I announce that we're playing it. Even most of the sixth graders; which is strange since normally the only reliable way to get any reaction from them is with the aid of a flaming bullwhip. So Bingo has surprisingly turned out to be one of my most successful activities, which makes feel like an idiot for somehow not thinking of playing it earlier instead of basing all my classes around games that involve me running around putting in actual effort. Score one for Team Chow-Sensei.

At least, that was my attitude about playing the game when I first started using it in classes. Being Japan, it has taken a little under two weeks for a simple, innocent game to transform into a highly aggravating exercise that makes me want to try to chop a tree down with my face. It's like how I used to enjoy playing Pictionary with my students, but soured on it after dealing with too many students who would balk at the idea of having to draw anything more complicated than a random scribble of chalk on the board. I know I shouldn't get frustrated, since many of my students have only just recently learned not to eat let alone tie their own shoes. But God help me, I just can't help it.

If you had to guess what the most difficult part of playing Bingo in English for Japanese elementary school students was, what do you think it would be? Learning how to count from 1-50 in English, right? Maybe overcoming the lack of a "th" sound in Japanese to pronounce "thirteen" and "thirty" specifically. But nope, the former takes five minutes tops and the latter requires only a simple lesson in proper tongue placement (no, not that way). No, the most frustratingly daunting task in playing Bingo for students turns out to be...drawing the frickin' Bingo grid itself. You'd think that drawing a square, dividing it into smaller squares, and then writing numbers in those squares would be a fairly simple task no matter what the student's current stage of development. Yet somehow, they manage to routinely fuck it up, transforming it a well-nigh heroic task on par with performing complex neurosurgery using only a pair of the World's Larget Salad Tongs.

Seriously, you would be amazed at how complex a task as simple as drawing a 5x5 grid becomes in the clumsy, unsure hands of my students. First of all, as soon as I tell them they have to draw their own grids, at least half of them will immediately whip out rulers, protractors, or in one or two cases, highly advanced robots from the future whose sole function is to draw 5x5 grids to absolute-to-the-millimeter perfection. Honestly, children, I don't care what your mother country has told you but no small kittens will die if you somehow fail to draw a grid with lines that are not absolutely straight. I will not transform into a whirlwind of frenzied blows if your grid is not made up of entirely perfect, immaculate angles. It is not as if you will somehow end up with some weird fucked up shape like a dodecahedron on your paper if you even attempt to draw a square without the aid of a protractor. Seriously, children, just DRAW THE FUCKING GRID BEFORE I DO IT FOR YOU IN YOUR OWN BLOOD.

Then there are the kids who will somehow manage to churn out grids with horribly non-correct measurements like 17xwhat-the-fuck-ever instead of the nice 5x5 one I showed them on the board. I'm like kid, I appreciate the fact that you're only nine, but surely even your young eyes can perceive some sort of difference between the pleasingly symmetrical 25-square grid on the board and the 86-rhombus monstrosity you've created on your paper? No? Tell me something else, kid -- here's a Picasso on one hand, and over here is a turd I smeared onto a napkin. Can you tell the difference between those, genius?

Probably the most emblematic of my traumatic Bingo experiences involved this third-grader named Tomoki. Tomoki is a good kid; he just gets easily worked up over anything and is very loud, feeling the need to constantly narrate his thoughts aloud for the benefit of everyone around him. Once just for fun I tried to convince him that the first three letters of the alphabet were A-B-D; he just about had a coronary. Anyway, I was playing Bingo with his class, and Tomoki as one of the few kids was able to draw his 5x5 grid without any major crap-ups, was busy filling it in with numbers, making sure to let everyone within hearing range know of each he had chosen: "I'm writing 23 now! Now 46! And now 11, because that's my age! And 3, because I was born in March!" He seemed, surprisingly, to have a very grasp of what was going on for once. Then, about 20, 25 minutes into the period -- during which the word "BINGO" had been written on the board in huge letters, during which the word "BINGO" had been spoken at least 40 times, and during which Tomoki himself had quite competently rendered a numbered grid often associated with the game, "BINGO" -- I hear a gasp, and Tomoki pipes up even louder than usual --

"No way! Chow-Sensei, are we going to play Bingo with this paper??!!"

...

"...yes, Tomoki. Yes, we are."

(non-ironically)"Hooray! Hooray, I knew we'd be playing Bingo, I'm a genius, I'm a genius!"

"...new game, children. It's called, 'Help Chow-Sensei Mix His Medication'. And if the past two years are any indication, I believe most of you are already quite familiar with the rules..."

Thursday, June 3rd: Choo Choo

My parents were visiting this past week, figuring they should see Japan again while they still had the excuse to do so. And for that, I really have to hand it to them: not many parents would fly halfway around the world to visit their kid three times in two years. That said, it should also be stated that vast stretches of mountains and sea -- and some of your less severe tornadoes, I'd wager -- are really no match for a worrisome Asian mother.

But yeah, I'd say I had fun with my parents; even though every other sentence coming out of my father's mouth started with the words "Here's something I bet you don't know" and my mother was constantly pointing out obscure kanji and then sighing a loud, exasperated sigh when I'd inevitably admit to anything less than complete familiarity of it. To be fair, despite my complaint about Asian mothers earlier, they certainly did give me my space. They didn't ask I take any time off from work, and mostly just went off on day trips by themselves, coming back in time to have dinner together. In fact, the only day in which I spent a really extended period of time with them was last Saturday, when the three of us boarded this steam locomotive for a sightseeing tour.

Something you should know about my father; while he certainly has a sense of humor, he's generally what I'd classify as a serious man. This is a man that would consistently keep dinner table conversation revolving around the economic relationships between corn harvests and rent payment and then chide his six year-old youngest son on not looking interested.

Actually, I think hanging out with my parents becomes more interesting as as time passes; because as I grow older, I start to see, much to my fright and discomfort, much more of myself in them, and vice-versa. I sometimes describe my father to friends as "exactly like me, but with a work ethic", but as time goes by it's seeming less and less like the joke it started out as. Every time I spend twenty minutes flip-flopping in a store aisle over whether a purchase I'm about to make is "really necessary", or whenever I find myself walking an extra ten or fifteen extra minutes to a store that sells something for much as two whole cents less than what it goes for at nearer stores, I find myself thinking, "Damn genetics". Come to think of it, my sometimes-bizarre sense of humor can probably be traced back to my father as well, seeing as when I was little he'd constantly tell me and my brothers that we were purchased in component parts for a discount price at Sears. I'm not even going to mention how old I was before I actually stopped believing him.

But I digress. Despite the weird sense of humor I'd say my father is a pretty straightforward guy. Put him around trains, though, and he basically transforms into a 63 year-old child. Near the end of our time on the steam locomotive he kept opening the window so he could stick his head out and take pictures of the lead car as it went around curves. It was pretty much all I could do to restrain myself from shouting something like "Get your head back inside before you lose it!" That part, by the way, I'm betting I got from my mother. The impulse to yell things like that is the sort of thing that makes me sure I never want to have children of my own.

Anyway, back to the train: being Japan and all, my father was hardly alone in the Freakishly Obsessed with Trains department. If my dad is #1 in that ranking, then the obviously retarded man who we were surprised to see took up the fourth seat in our booth ranks at probably at least #2. And when I say "obviously retarded," I am not merely crudely commenting on his level of love for trains, I am saying, he was quite apparently mentally retarded, but seemed to greatly love trains. He didn't really say much during the trip; he mostly just kind of stared happily out the window, occasionally (like my father) sticking his head out of it. Every now and then he'd record something in this little notepad he was carrying, go off to purchase a souvenir (the price of which he'd then record in his notepad), or get up to go stand by the door so he could be in good position to run off the train at the next stop and buy some of the special, limited-availability food waiting at some of the stations. Actually, given the precision with which he performed this last task, I got the feeling he rode this train a lot. I bet he and my father probably could have had a pretty good conversation; had my father been able to speak Japanese, and he not been retarded, of course.

On a side note, I must say that, if we really had to have a lone passenger intrude on our own little family booth, I'm glad it was a retarded guy rather than a normal Japanese guy. The retarded guy was quiet, polite, and never seemed to mind our presence in the slightest. Had a normal Japanese guy found himself surrounded with three foreigners however, it would've only been a matter of time before he lost his composure and tossed himself out the window in fear. Just yet another instance where I prefer the company of the mentally invalid over the normals.

One weird thing I noticed about it was that everywhere we'd go, there'd be people standing outside waving at us. And I don't just mean the standard little kids I sometimes spot outside the window of regular trains waving to pretty much anything that goes by, I mean actual adults, or sometimes entire families. Sometimes we'd be going over elevated tracks and I'd squint down to see groups of people, once or twice entire tour buses, waving up at us. I kept thinking, what, did we accidentally book ourselves onto a train being used for the next Steven Segal movie? Were there a bunch of naked big-name female celebrities secretly strapped to the sides of the train? But no, the real reason was nothing so exotic of course. Turns out, lots of Japanese people just like trains, steam locomotives being particularly neat. At nearly every station, many times even at stations we'd only pass, there were always at least four or five people waiting there with cameras on tripods set up. Which struck me as kind of funny at first, until it dawned on me that, not only had all these people journeyed out to Bumblefuck-Nowhere Station just to take a picture of a passing steam locomotive, many of them had actually researched the schedule down to the precise minute to predict when the train was going to pass. That was when this little band of train paparazzi made the transition from kinda cute and quirky to downright sad in my book. I mean, and people say I have too much free time.

At any rate, the steam locomotive sightseeing tour, despite having a healthy vibe of "let's humor your father" for me and my mother, turned out to be a pleasant, quaint experience. Which is of course not to say that I would ever, ever do it again -- but hey. It would hardly be the first good experience I've had that I'd never, ever want to do again.