Leaving Tokyo
Now Playing: Who has time for music
Leaving the hotel, I kind of latched on to this half Japanese dude that we’ll call Mr. Y. He’s a pretty chill guy. Not arrogant or obnoxious like a lot of people I’m running into, but a little shy. We talked on the Shinkansen bullet train and we got to see the looks of rural Japan. There’s not a lot of rural Japan. I was expecting large rice fields and expansive gardens. No. The rice “fields” were squished between residential areas, with tea and other gardens too. It’s sort of like someone played Tetris with vegetation and residential architecture. We also saw Mt. Fuji. There was less lava than I expected. Much less. None, in fact. But it was still sweet. Pictures coming soon, I promise.

At the hotel in Osaka, which was significantly smaller than the Tokyo one (check out the picture of me in the bathroom), we had a short orientation meeting. It consisted of us going over the schedule for the next couple weeks and the fun business side of being an ALT—all the paperwork we had to do and stuff. The woman director spoke most of the time, and she had a heavy accent, although an expansive vocabulary, which seems to be the trend with Japanese. They are encouraged to learn to read and write a lot of English to get into college, but they don’t speak much. So she spoke very deliberately and with a very short but very noticeable pause. Still, it was many times over better than whatever childish hold on her language I had. After almost everything she said, she repeated, “Thees-ees-vary impotont. Plees-do-not-loos thees,” or, “Plees, do not-be late- too thees. In Jahpahn. Eef – you – ah – Layt – you wiww – loos – da – toorahsootoo (If you are late, you will loose the trust).” I think I will lose the trust very soon. We signed our contracts and the man said, “Now you are ours. You cannot escape!” followed by a nervous laugh from everyone. Is he joking? This is as funny as Japanese humor gets. Unless you like the guys on Japanese T.V. that do weird dances with sound effects. That’s pretty good too.

After the painful seminar/meeting/orientation, we had a crazy good feast of Japanese food and introduced ourselves to the group, including the prefectural directors—two dudes and a woman. My speech was thus:

“(sigh into mic) I’m --, and I’ve come from Minnesota in America. I’m very dizzy right now, and I’ve been sleeping less and less each night I’ve been in Japan. So if you have a lot of work, please call me, I’ll be up all night, and I’d be happy to help you prepare lessons. Ah, I’m teaching at Kishiwada senior high school (aaa, soo desu ka from the directors) but I don’t have anywhere to live yet, so I’ll probably set up a cardboard box near the school. Feel free to visit.” I don’t know if the Japanese thought it was funny, but at least the English speakers laughed.

Later, Mr. K, our prefectural advisor (PA), took us out to a bar. JETs are not all party animals like myself, but instead are mostly academic or in their own world. This makes socializing difficult, I found. Instead of talking about how I “totally pissed off that dude in the hotel, man, oh, I don’t even believe I said that, you know?” we talked more like, “but did you consider the cultural tensions between and within the groups of South Africa?” which is cool to, don’t get me wrong; I like a little social commentary like the next guy, but usually when people get to topics like that, they tense up and don’t really express what they think, for fear of sounding like—god forbid—they have… a PREJUDICE or BIAS. Such filthy words. I will repress them from my memory immediately.