I went hiking near a waterfall, which was terrific fun. Pictures here. One video here.
I’ll have more eventually. I rarely take pictures of people, especially of myself, so I should be getting some copies of group photos, me doing tea ceremony, and whatnot eventually. I’ll post again when I’ve uploaded them.
Category: japan
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Side note
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Sweet holy god no
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-UJXCw6vyk
You don’t need to know any Japanese to watch this video. They are saying exactly what you think they are.
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Oh, daiba.
Two things:
First: My school had a mini-culture day yesterday. This involved them bringing in a former boxer as an inspirational speaker — a nice man who spoke very fast, liked gambling, and ended every sentence in “ne.” Poor bastard got assaulted by every special ed kid in the school when he opened the floor to questions. They just kept asking in rapid succession. He was really confused.
After that, they separated everyone out into random groups for learning aspects of traditional Japanese culture. They of course put me with K-chan, the “special” kid who’s always trying to steal my watch, in learning Sadou (tea ceremony). It was us two, one other random guy, and a ton of women. The guy students laughed at me as they went by. It was overall pretty fun, but HOLY HELL does it hurt sitting in the seiza (traditional Japanese sitting position). They took pity on me after a half hour or so and let me recline a little bit. I almost fell over when I finally stood up, because there was no blood in my legs.
Afterwards, I found out that the boys who were laughing at me were stuck doing flower arrangement. Ha ha!Second: So I took a trip into Tokyo today and went with my friend Ananda to Odaiba, a man-made island that is kind of like San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf on crack. For starters, there’s a smaller-scale Statue of Liberty there for no reason. Behind it is an imitation Golden Gate Bridge for no reason. Afterwards, we went into Sega Joyopolis, a massive arcade that afforded some very bizarre entertainments. I took the opportunity to shoot some video on my phone, most of which didn’t come out great, but you get my witty and incisive commentary. Check it out:
- Sega Joyopolis – Overview 1
- Sega Joyopolis – Overview 2 (addendum)
- Sega Joyopolis – Dark Chapel
- Sega Joyopolis – Ball Rocker
There was also an attraction called “the room of living dolls,” but the video was crap. It was creepy as hell. We didn’t go in.
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Winter in Silent Hill
Sorry for the depressing bloggery. Here’s some random tidbits that have kept me amused in the meanwhile:
- So a couple weeks ago, I stepped outside into the thickest fog I’ve ever witnessed in my life. It made me rethink video games a bit… well, let me explain myself. You know how cars only explode into flames in movies? Well, that’s not true. They really do explode into flames in California. I saw it a lot when I was there. Since they make movies in California, they must assume it’s natural for cars to explode. I figure it’s the same with games — you think that distance fog is just because of clipping plane issues? No, it actually happens in Japan. Take a look.
- I have taken to calling one of my kids “Zipper kid.” This is actually the same student that made the Ultraman bracelet earlier. He’s taken to pointing at my crotch and yelling “Open the zipper!” The first time, it was slightly open (blame the pants, not me), but every time after that, it’s been closed. Finally, today, the kid does it again, and I’m like, “No, it’s not open.” Then he reaches out and PULLS OPEN MY ZIPPER. I zip it back up and say, “You shouldn’t do that.” The other students are like, “OHMYGOD YOU’RE SO CREEPY, ZIPPER-KUN!” Normally I’d agree, but something’s been going wrong with the poor guy’s life, though I don’t know what. He’s stopped paying attention in class, and he is in the teacher’s lounge every day, getting chewed out by someone different. Today he was actually crying.
- The 2nd graders at one of my elementary schools put on a Winter Festival this week. They made a bunch of festival-type games, gave everyone tickets, and manned booths, giving away origami as prizes. It was unbearably cute. Here are some choice photos.
- To motivate my students to study English, I told them about the following things: my found-in-Japan I Hate Myself And I Want To Die t-shirt (which I showed them), how English-speakers generally react to the name “Wii” (specifically, the phrase “playing with my wii”), and All Your Base Are Belong To Us (even showed them the video). After that, they were significantly more motivated to learn English, because they didn’t realize how silly they looked.
- I played Mad Libs with my students, in order to to practice possessive pronouns (e.g. “a dog that eats natto, “a girl who is running in the park”). They weren’t as creative as I’d hoped, but one of them, for the “a food that descriptive clause” blank, wrote “Mr. Yoshida, who is playing sekuhara (sexual harassment).” I stopped class and taught them how sekuhara was a contraction, like pokemon. I taught them how to say it correctly, had them practice it, made sure they used the correct verbs, and after they’d got it, told them in strict yakuza-style voice to never say it in class, or I’d kick their asses.
On a similar vein, while teaching about the future tense, and practicing “I will XXXXX this weekend,” I had the following conversation with one of my kids, a 13-year old boy:
Kid: “I will play sex this weekend.”
Me: “I will HAVE sex this weekend. HAVE sex.”
Kid: “Oh, I will have sex this weekend! Okay!”
Me: “Who will you have sex with?”
Kid: (thinks a second, points at me) “Jason-sensei!”
Me: (in Japanese) “No, you will have sex with yourself. Alone. In your room.”
Kid: “No! I will have sex with Jason-sensei!”
Me: (in Japanese) “You will have sex with a toy. A doll. Of a dog.”
Kid: (laughs a minute, then looks at me seriously) “I will have sex with girl.”
Me: “Oh yeah, who?”
Kid: “Wait a minute!” (runs off, grabs a girl and drags her back with him) “Her! Her! This girl!”
Me: (to girl) “Isn’t that boy kind of creepy?”
Girl: “He’s really creepy!”
Me: “He says you will have sex with him this weekend.”
Girl: “NO WAY! GROSS!” (hits the boy as hard as she can square in the chest)
Kid: “OW!”
Me: (cackle)
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Everything I know about Japanese culture I learned from immature teenagers
Been a bit since a substantial blog entry, and I apologize. I’ve had a bad run of things, and have tried to get out of the house more, to improve my mood. Results have been mixed at best. Anywho, the Kyoto trip was a pretty big deal, so I figure I should blog about it. Here we go.
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The Unrepentant Awesomeness of Mayonnaise-san (and other stories)
I just got back from 3 days in Kyoto, and am completely bushed. I uploaded 134 photos to my flickr account, so check it out.
Some of my favorites:
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The indescribable awesomeness of my kids
So I gave my 3rd-grade elective class an in-class assignment to write a paragraph or two about a fictional trip that they took, using the textbook as an example. I gave them each different places, some of them normal (Osaka, London, Sydney), and some of them weird (Howl`s Moving Castle, Neverland, the moon). Three kids came out swinging with some incredibly weird paragraphs.
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Masters of Fashion
So, I’ve mentioned Eimi in the blog before. Eimi is the trauma survivor JET who’s out looking for new and spectacular ways to get herself killed every weekend, preferably ones that will take as many of us out at one time as possible. Basically, her job is to get us into trouble; suffice it to say, she’s quite the model worker.
In fact, it is due to Eimi’s diligent craziness that we’re now friends with Yuusuke, our friendly neighborhood yakuza. This is the story of how we all met.
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Speechless
It’s been a whirlwind weekend, and at this point I can barely talk. Three consecutive karaoke-filled days — especially considering the way I sing (“scream” is probably a better verb) — will do that to you. So let’s cover it from the top.
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I Heart Ibaraki
Whew, another busy weekend come and gone. So, first order of business: I updated my flickr feed with more pictures. I updated to a paid account, so I am making sets of photos, for easier perusal. There’s plenty of pics that don’t fit in the sets, though, so check it out.
So I mentioned last time that we were having some weather problems. I believe my phrasing was something along the lines of “I f-ing hate typhoons.” Well, the weather really put the screws to the festival I’d been working on for the past three weeks, cancelling it entirely on Saturday, and pushing everything to Sunday. It was lots of fun (look at the photos!), but more on that in a bit. First, Saturday.
Given a magical extra day of freedom, I decided to go into Tokyo to get a haircut, do a bit of shopping, get a halloween costume, and whatnot. Well, this all went well at first — I decided to splurge and go to a real hair stylist, as the other Ryugasaki JETs were doing. While the price (6000 yen) was a bit steep, it did include a very relaxing scalp massage, with the added bonus of being able to talk to the stylist in English. He really liked my hair, saying it was very soft and that I could be a hair model (to which my friend Ananda, currently working as a hair model in Tokyo, chortled, “I told you so!”).
However, for all the pros, there was one major con: I walked out of there with a haircut that was half “Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber”, and half “Plastic He-Man Action Figure.” It was pretty terrible. I have one picture, which I grudgingly will put online, that you all may have a good laugh. I got the gel out of my hair and it looks normal now, but I spent a good 8 hours with bangs. Shudder.
After that, I spent some time hanging with Ananda, wandering about Shibuya. We went to a store called Condomania, which was pretty much what we expected. We also managed to find a 5-story tall Sega arcade, which had not a single DDR machine.
We were supposed to meet up with either of two groups of friends, both of whom proved to be insanely difficult to get in touch with (one girl apparently drunkenly dropped her phone in a toilet). In the end, I barely made it back on the last train to Ryugasaki, because trains were getting cancelled left and right due to the gale-force winds. All in all, kind of a crap day.Next day was sunny, so we headed up to the the Daisuki Ibaraki (“I Love Ibaraki”) festival. The JETs descended there in force, manning around half the international booths. I was running the America booth, which was 3 times larger than any of the other booths. Tragically, our consulate seemed to have about 1/3rd the stuff to send to us as the other countries, so our booth looked a touch anemic. Lots of flags. We looked very patriotic, although none of us really are. Being the American with the best Japanese skills, I ended up fielding a lot of the visitors, all of whom ended up talking about travel across Asia. In the end, it was a great time, I saw lots of awesome street performers, had some delicious food, and I got to square dance in front of a lot of confused Japanese people.
Monday was a Japanese holiday commemorating sports. In honor of this, we decided to climb a mountain and hang glide off the top of it. We planned it out, got rides arranged, made reservations, and promptly scrapped the entire idea upon stepping outside into post-typhoon winds. I planned stuff for my classes instead, and drew some Halloween monsters to teach my kids, playing to the Hallmark conception of the holiday. I think they came out pretty well:
I wanted to try and teach a bit about the origins of Halloween, but considering how difficult it was to explain the concept of Paganism to the co-teacher who’d been studying English for 16 years, I decided to skip explaining it to first-graders.
More later.
