Well, someone requested I put up more photos of Japan other than the odd few scattered among the journal pages, so who am I to refuse? I've actually wanted to for a while anyway, but officially, I'm doing this for YOU. But don't thank me, thank Geocities for solving my bandwidth problems by offering free webspace for every e-mail address I register! Anyway, come away with me now, as I guide you through a visual tour de force of Japan...or uh, the tiny town I live in, at least...
Where to start?
Okay, well the place I'm sitting in as I type this seems like a good place to begin. So here, a picture of my apartment.
...just kidding. No really, here's some shots o' me closet-sized apartment:
EXCITING!!!!, no? Uh, keep in mind that those pictures were taken when I first got here, so my apartment is not quite as messy as it looks in Pic3 especially. On the flip side, it sure is dirtier now.
Moving right along...let's take a look at Yachiho Junior High School, where work takes me half the time. Good thing too, 'cause it's actually my favorite school by far. Elementary school visits have me teaching by myself, in Japanese, for 4-6 periods a day, but at my junior high I really only act as an assistant to the actual teacher, for only 2-3 periods to boot. The rest of the time I sit at my desk, drink coffee, and read the paper. Quite a good deal.
Here's a picture of a 3rd-year class. I STILL find it funny that they all wear pink jumpsuits. Incidentally, the kid in the second row from the back on the left touches my balls so frequently that in some cultures we'd be legally married.
Here's Mr. Niimura, one of the two English teachers at Yachiho. His English is pretty good, but he has the weird habit of exhaling really deeply when talking in English. Like when he sees me in the morning, he'll say "Good morning Galvin, how are you doing?" but it will sound more like "Good moooorning gaaaaalvin hoow you doooing?". Okay, so that didn't exactly come across in written text. Anyway, nice guy.
This is Miss Koyama, the other English teacher. She's well-nigh fluent, and I always have pretty productive classes with her. Funny story: one day she presented me with a dialogue to be performed by the two of us in front of the class. Here's an approximate transcript:
"Hi, Galvin!"
"Hi, Miss Koyama!"
"Galvin, let's play baseball at the gym!"
"Okay!"
"But wait! I don't have ANY balls! Galvin, do YOU have any balls?"
"Yes! I have TWO balls! (reaches into pockets and pulls out two baseballs) Here! Let's use my balls!"
"Okay! Let's go to the gym and play baseball with your balls!"
See, at first I thought she was testing me but it turns out she really had no clue how bad that dialogue sounded, as sure enough, we performed it in front of the class with me barely able to contain myself. Anyway, that's why I classify her as only "well-nigh" fluent.
Here's Misa, a 2nd-year student, and Sadae, a 3rd-year, both of whom often hang out in the teacher's room during breaks. Generally only the somewhat...socially inept kids hang out there, but they're both pretty cute I think. Kindred spirits, of a sort. Except for the "cute" part.
And here's a...teacher whose name I can't remember. As a joke, I threw that girly mag on his desk, told him to look at it for a second, then snapped a picture. See, it's funny, because in the picture he looks like he's reading a girly mag in school, so he looks like a pervert, ha ha! Perhaps not coincidentally this teacher has not talked to me much after taking this picture.
Finally, here's some pics of "cleaning time" at Yachiho. Apparently Japan does not believe in professional janitors, because at every school there is a designated cleaning period where the students and teachers ineffectively swab rags over random patches of floor. As for me, I usually hide/try to look really busy whenever this time comes around. By the way, most of my schools are pretty fucking grimy.
As this is Japan, there's pretty much some cool temples and such to see no matter where you go. Nagano is no different -- here's a picture of Zenkoji, probably the biggest temple in the prefecture, which means it is also the most commercial. It's pretty interesting seeing the miniature civilizations that sprout up around famous landmarks; Zenkoji, like some other famous temples I've seen before, has several hundred yards' worth of shopping streets packed with tourists leading up to it, where you can buy anything from local delicacies to wooden swords to Buddist sutras. I've seen some other temples like this that are really so commercialized that they leave a bad taste in my mouth (Asakusa in Tokyo, if that means anything), but Zenkoji is juuuust low-key enough to appear bustling without being obnoxiously touristy. Still, selling salvation from a vending machine is pretty funny, though.
An interesting thing about Nagano prefecture is that it's CLEAN. I mean sure, you always hear about Japan being super-clean and everything, and I suppose compared to America it is, but really, in a lot of ways Tokyo, Osaka and the like are huge, gray, smoggy DUMPS. Now, I'm not exactly Captain Nature myself, but even I can appreciate how gorgeous a river like this is. I'm surrounded by some flat-out unbelievable mountains as well, although really that picture don't do 'em justice. It DOES kinda look like it was painted by that guy with the afro who used to have a painting show on public TV, whose name escapes me at the moment. "Bob" something or other, I think.
This doesn't really count as "nature" but hey, it's outside, so gimme a break. Anyway, I'm showing it mainly to prove my point about me not being an outdoorsy type, i.e., a huge nerd: the moment I saw those rows of torii gates, I felt an immediate instinct to propel myself on top of them via my FLUDD water jet-pack and hop from each one to the next.
I took a field trip in the mountain forests with one of my elementary schools once. It was pouring all day and colder than an Eskimo debutante, but the general good-lookin'-ness of the area helped balance that out. As did my constantly wondering just how long it would take the authorities to uncover the tiny corpses of the 60 screaming kids I was with. And yeah, I call my kids annoying all the time, and even threaten to murder them sometimes -- jokingly! jokingly! -- but really, this one is pretty cute. He was trying to be a rabbit, I believe...
International Christian University, or ICU as it is often called, is where I spent my junior year of college and was the first time I lived in Japan. It was an overall good time although, like much of life, parts of it really sucked tremendously as well. Anyway, I got a chance to return to the ol' semi-alma mater a few months ago, whereupon I was seized with the absolute biggest sensation of nostalgic deja vu in the history of my admittedly short life. Looking back on that year at ICU it feels mostly like a dream, so it was weird enough being back there after two years. But it was made weirder by the fact that I was there with Mooney, who I mentally categorize as part of my American college life but is now also part of my current life in Nagano. I can't really describe it and my attempts to are drifting dangerously into high-school-philosophising, but let me just say that it was several worlds colliding at once and thus really SURREAL. At any rate, I mentioned parts of ICU sucking and primarily I am referring to the school itself, which, I have since discovered, looks really freakin' ominous at night.
Oh, also while at ICU I stopped by my old apartment and was 2 seconds from knocking on the door and terrorizing its previous occupants with incomprehensible nostaligic ramblings of a time two years past, but better judgement eventually prevailed (despite me making a GIANT deal of the fact that they were STILL USING the green curtains I bought for the house TWO YEARS AGO IT'S CRAZY AND FEELS LIKE A DREAM). Not helping my bittersweet ravings was visiting the "Happy Plaza," the little mom 'n' pop grocery near my apartment that I used to frequent like every day on my way back from school. It actually took me a fair amount of time to summon up the courage necessary to walk through its dingy doors once again. It felt kind of like knocking on the door of an old girlfriend or something. However, much to my relief the proprietor immediately recognized me, else he would not have submitted to this candid photo. I asked after his family, he asked after my old housemates. All in all it was quite the touching little scene, until I proclaimed I would buy something "for old time's sake", which turned out to be only a pack of Mentos, and the owner immediately remembered what a cheapskate I always was. Oh well.
I spent 10 days of my winter vacation in Hokkaido, which is Japan's northernmost island, famous for its cows, ramen noodles, and arctic temperatures. Yes, it was especially smart of me to go to the coldest part of Japan during the coldest time of year, but well, y'know. Besides, it's the only major island of Japan I hadn't been to yet.
Anyway, it turns out the legends of Hokkaido's arctic-ness are true, because on literally the second day I got there -- the day we were supposed to take a big road trip to Sapporo, by the way -- we opened the door to find that about 4 feet of snow had fallen on us while we were sleeping, and showed no signs of stopping. It was also particularly fortunate that we had neglected to put the car in the garage, so it was now covered with a good 10 pounds of snow or so. After a good 3 hours of shoveling we finally managed to get the car dug out to the point where we could move it. Unfortunately, we were both so exhausted and irritable at that point we ended up ramming into the side of the very, very narrow garage, much to my horror. The damage to the car, thankfully, was relatively negligible,and by that point we just wanted to get the hell inside anyway, but that crushing-Coke-can sound of the door being crunched will be etched in my mind for a while.
Despite or maybe because of the snow, however, Hokkaido really is a damn beautiful place, even though/again maybe because my friend lives right out in the asshole of the middle of bumblefuck nowhere. It was especially amusing because the next block over was inhabited by cows, while the block in the opposite direction, we were amazed to discover, contained a churchful of Jehovah's Witnesses. I guess Japan didn't have enough wackos so they needed to import some.
One of the more surreal parts of my visit to Hokkaido was being dragged out of bed to see a sort of fireman stunt show, which is apparently performed every year. Rachel had to go into work that day, so I was sleeping in, but her supervisors actually forced her to come get me to watch this little spectacle. Naturally, since they were so excited about it, and so insistent on me seeing it, I thought it must be a pretty big deal in the town. And you know what? It was. I'd say just about everyone in the town, all 200 of them or so, had turned out to see the spectacular fireman stunt show. Of course, it turned out to just be a couple of fireman flailing about in semi-acrobatic poses on a ladder, which I suppose is impressive enough in its own right, but with all the fuss they were making I at least expected someone to be shot out of a cannon.
Overall, however, the trip can best be summed up as "lots and lots of snow." It snowed one more time while I was there, though thankfully not as bad. What was worse was the fact that there was so much snow already, and it was damn windy, so often we'd wake up to find that all our shoveling had been undone simply by the wind blowing new layers of snow back onto the driveway. All in all I'd estimate I logged in about 8 hours of shoveling in 3 days, which of course is not exactly a relaxing task but for whatever reason I found it strangely calming. Anyway, to give you a good idea of just how much snow piled up, here's a couple of pictures of me have jumped right in to the deepest parts. I'm about 5'8", and look how far the damn stuff came up to me:
Anyway, it was about at that point that my camera battery died, so unfortunately I haven't anything else to show you. I DO so wish I got a snapshot of the travel company called "Nice Beaver," however. I am wondering just what sort of packages they offer.
I'm gonna put every photo I've ever put on the frontpage here, mostly because I like them and have nowhere else to put them. Even though I'm probably going to start a second photo page soon, all future former frontpage photos (if that makes any sense) will still go in this section. Anyway, here they are:
These Photos Scare Me.Please Let Me Go.
