holding hands

The only things keeping me grounded at the moment are Nintendo games, Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. My tastes could be decidedly less wholesome, and no doubt they would be were I still in Melbourne, or hanging out in Tokyo with the boys. As for The Adventures of Augie March, I have rarely been so impressed by the density and scope of any work of art, and that it could be the product of a singular mind, calling upon nothing more but narrative skill and delicate observation of the intricacies of human existence just make it all the more inspiring.

It just feels so complete, as Bellow can address everything from nihilism to professional relationships to class struggles through the prism of middle American life in the 20th century with such clarity, and identifies hidden motivations, weaknesses, and agendas in every character it introduces, from lowly union foremen, the the numerous women who come and go, to the matriarchal Grandma, to Augie’s various mentors, and so on.

Not to mention that the plot and pacing are nothing short of immaculate; characters’ true intentions are only ever slightly hinted at so as not to prematurely spoil any eventual climax or create unnecessarily gratuitous tension where there need not be any. Nevertheless, through the strength of Bellow’s descriptions alone we feel like we know the characters well already, so that their actions never come as a complete surprise, either. Everyone is flawed, undoubtedly even more so than Augie himself in all his restlessness. And that’s the thing; it’s so human, it doesn’t romanticise except where absolutely necessary, life is unfair and it doesn’t shy away from this fact. Augie’s biggest struggle is between his desire to preserve his own integrity and the weight of his aspirations.

The thing felt like it lost steam over the last 100 pages or so; since Augie spends the entire first half of the book talking about Grandma Lausch and Einhorn, it seems slightly rushed when he joins the army, goes on three tours of duty, marries, and resolves with his estranged older brother within the space of a couple of chapters.

Anyway, after months of toil, I finally finished it a week ago, and I’m worried that whatever I get stuck into next will either be too lightweight or comparably far too existential and depressing. Options include Tender is the Night, Cat’s Cradle, The Trial, and Speak, Memory, something I’ve been threatening to read for years. I guess this is what happens when I try to prepare reading lists months in advance – my moods and expectations change, and then I feel like a petulant kid being forced into doing some kind of boring homework when I have to start a new book without an entire bookshop at my disposal.

I’m gonna go ahead and call this movie ‘death affirming.’ It’s almost perfectly acted and despite a fairly predictable ending, still works really well. The characters are well balanced, suitably eccentric when they need to be and yet always compelled by real and honest motivations, rooted firmly in compassion for their families and their fellow man.

Personally, I had no idea these kinds of professions were so scorned in Japan, and really, you would think that someone with such responsibility would at least be quietly respected, but apparently not. The movie’s greatest success is how it frames the deceased body as a vessel for transgression, as much for the living as for the dead. It really ends up being quite reverential, and some of the embalming (is that the right word?) scenes are painfully, wonderfully emotional, without any dialogue being necessary.

I wasn’t ever really sure where the cello-playing aspect was supposed to fit in, other than as a showcase for the lead actor’s obvious cello-shredding skills. But that’s OK, as it lent a nice subtle soundtrack to the proceedings.

All in all, a pretty good movie.

Haneke is a director who really matters. This guy makes films that are not only deeply disturbing, but very relevant. Think you know what a scary movie is? Go watch Hidden and get back to me.

Anyway, his new one The White Ribbon is quite a departure from his other films. For a start, it’s much broader in scope, is set eighty years ago and is shot in black and white. I guess many of the themes are familiar: guilt and shame, violence and repression; but given it’s historical context I think this film is even more salient than his other works, even if perhaps it’s not as purely entertaining or thrilling. Haneke has insisted that we’re not supposed to see the movie as simply a foreboding prelude to the atrocities of Nazi Germany and World War 2, but as a snapshot of ignorance, intolerance and terrorism in all it’s forms.

The acting is top-shelf, production values are through the roof, and to be fair there are some truly gripping scenes, but overall I just wasn’t as engaged for the whole duration, like I was with Hidden. This is serious, formal film making, and I fear it’s just too cool, too self-aware, too detached to ever really penetrate. Nevertheless, definitely not for the weak of heart or short of patience.

Also, it became clear to me as I watched The White Ribbon that the only German phrase I have remembered from my high school days is keine ahnung. That figures.

OK, enough of the heavy stuff. Raymond Chandler has been keeping me entertained and rescuing me from the depths of being-foreign-and-alone-at-Christmastime-related despair through the strength of his biting dialogue alone. Here are a few choice cuts from the first fifty or so pages of Farewell, My Lovely:

“His smile was as cunning as a broken mousetrap.”

“Suspicion climbed all over her face, like a kitten, but not so playfully.”

“She was as cute as a washtub.”

“It was Malloy all right, taken in strong light, and looking as if he had no more eyebrows than a French roll.”

“Dames lie about anything – just for practise.”

And, arguably my favourite so far:

“She’s a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge’s second term, I’ll eat my spare tyre, rim and all.”

Man, people just aren’t as eloquent (or as charming, apparently) as they were seventy years ago. I seriously believe that our tendency towards email, in all its benevolent, automated glory, is hampering not only our literacy, but the very stuff of our interpersonal relationships. In the past, a scorned lover would compose page upon tear-stained page of hateful yet poetic hand-written prose in order to purge him or herself of heartache. Nowadays, retribution is as easy as uploading a photo to Facebook. Yikes! The sad thing is, even the retorts are borderline unintelligible.

But seriously. As recently as ten years ago, flirting with a girl involved carefully synchronised ‘chance’ meetings, a delicate dance of hints dropped here and there at measured intervals, and a whole lot of good timing and luck. These days, it’s as easy as dropping a text message: ‘hey. i wna ride u like a black mercedes.’ Charming, no?

Yes, my eloquence is slowly dying, and with it, my patience and tact. I only have myself to blame for this, and I feel the only proper remedy would be self-imposed exile from the internet, and more time spent with the likes of Chandler, Bellow, Nabokov and those countless others who express so much with so (comparatively) little.

I bought a snazzy little netbook computer! It’s an Eee PC 1005HA.

Inluded with the iPhone to give a proper sense of scale.

In fact, I’m using it right now. The rad silver colour is not available outside Japan, so TAKE THAT, WESTERN CONSUMER MARKET! What’s more, the construction feels way more solid than my pricey elite Dell machine. It’s running Windows 7, effortlessly installed off a 4GB SDHC card, and does everything I need, like typing, and wasting my life on stupid websites. Also, with the strengthening of the Aussie dollar, this stuff has become ludicrously cheap. Like $350 kind of cheap. Party!

On a more personal note. I’ve resolved to spend the winter break seriously improving my Japanese. The last couple of months (and in particular, the last month itself) have seen my conversation skills increase significantly, and although I still have more than my fair share of furrowed-brow, panicky ‘wtf was that word again!?’ moments, at least I can keep a conversation more or less going now. I mean, that is, as long as the person I’m talking to doesn’t get bored and give up. To them, it must be like talking to a toddler with learning disabilities.

I did learn something interesting lately though; according to one of my supervisors who studied linguistics at university, dyslexia is far less prevalent in Japan (and presumably also in China and Korea) than in the Western world. This must be something to do with both the form of their characters and their grammatical constructions. After all, it’s hard for most English speakers to imagine a first language where each ‘letter’ corresponds to an entire syllable; where words can be pronounced phonetically without any danger of misplacing stress or timing, and where an entire universe of meaning can be contained within one simple symbol, such as 空, or 人. The Japanese and Chinese don’t learn to spell, so much as they learn to paint pictures of the world through language. Likewise, reading isn’t a constant deconstruction of bunches of letters, or educated guessing at the appropriate phoneme; everything is there as it’s written, except in the case of an unfamiliar kanji character, where, upon encountering these new characters, a Japanese person will simply ask their neighbour,  どういう読むの? or この漢字の読み方は何ですか? (“How the fsk do you read this?”).

Furthermore, owing to the grammatical hierarchy of the language, the relevant reading for any given kanji is immediately apparent to any native speaker of Japanese; there is no guess work necessary. It’s pretty remarkable.

According to The Language Instinct, Japanese (and to an extent, Korean) are something like language orphans which have evolved separately, leaving behind little grammatical resemblance to other East Asian languages. This isn’t so hard for me to believe, because as I’ve said before, Japanese more or less resembles the exact grammatical inverse of something like English, and I’m sure this has a considerable impact on the structure of society over here, especially when compared with our own.

The main point I wanted to make when I started this huge theoretical rant, however, was that I’m at a point where Japanese people no longer feel comfortable gossiping about me in my presence, because they fear I might just be able to understand them. Pretty satisfying in one sense, although I was kinda enjoying being able to eavesdrop as I pleased.

Well, on that note, it looks like I’m gonna be all too alone for Christmas, and unless I get my act together and ask for paid leave, I’ll be sat at my office all day without any other kindred spirit (ie. lost soul) in sight to share the holiday with. I’m not a religious person, but I guess I am a pretty sentimental one, and despite all my misgivings about Christmas and the sham that it is, I do feel an unwelcome sense of isolation as the year draws to an end. It’s not that I’m depressed. There’ll be plenty of time for that come 2010. But I just kinda wish I had stayed in contact with more of you this year. So I’m sorry. I guess that’s it.

Stay tuned for my best and worst of 2009, along with the usual solemn reflections and empty promises, in the next edition!

So long.

falling pianos

I’ve always been of the opinion that most people are far too hasty to distinguish between intellectual life and physical life. Why do we do this? People place an incongruent value on scholarship and other intellectual pursuits, while frowning upon drug use, promiscuous sex, etc. Even those that work out all the time seem to be sniggered at by academic types who invariably value mind over body. It is no coincidence, therefore, that these people are usually out of shape and without any tangible sense of style. Conversely, gym junkies like to scoff at intellectuals who spend more time with their faces in books than getting tans. This is most obviously manifest in the common ‘nerd’ stereotype.

I’m advocating a healthy balance between the two. I don’t see why we need to neglect our physical desires, or give inordinate amounts of attention to intellectual appetite. They are both equal parts of the same whole, and what’s more, they both exert the same monolithic influence over it, whether it’s for better or worse. Truly balanced and sensible people should look for pleasure not simply of the body but of the mind, and seek wisdom not only through quiet reflection but through actions.

I’ve been forced into this perspective recently through my own single-mindedness, and the realisation that to absorb oneself either in books or exercise alone is no remedy for restlessness, frustration or inadequacy. Well, the scales have levelled out pretty nicely, or at least they had, until I went ahead and put my foot right into one of the most uncomfortable and regrettable situations of my life in Japan so far on Saturday night. But heaven knows, and I’ve said this a hundred times before, that a public blog full of self-indulgent rants is hardly the place to go into juicy details.

I don’t know why Japanese culture and language attracts such hardcore, militant foreigners. Similarly, I don’t understand the bullshit false modesty that accompanies so many of this country’s permanent foreign residents. Shyness is an inherent part of Japanese culture, sure. But it very unbecoming on foreigners, especially since it makes their endless lust to fit in over here all the more blatant. The irony is that is has the opposite effect: it just makes you look like a wanker, when I ask you if you can speak Japanese, and you say no, and then I find out that you are 1-kyuu level. Have you ever even known what it’s like to not be able to speak Japanese? When my friends and family back home ask me if I can speak the language, I give them the honest answer: I know enough to get around, day to day, enough to order food and ask for directions. Nothing more. But Japan seems to be the only country that gets this kind of cult following from the West, and while modesty might be endearing on the natives, it is pretty sickening on foreigners.

You can’t fire me, I quit.

Way too tired to write anything more in here at the moment. I’ve gone way too hard lately and I’m exhausted. Today was rainy, and my bike was stolen. Not the best conditions under which to decide to write a blog entry, but that’s life. I’m hoping I can straighten myself out over the next week or so and leave this trail of destruction behind.

it’s a jungle out there

This blog is rapidly turning into a place where I can air my identity crises. The crucial difference between this blog and real life, though, is that around here I can’t be interrupted. In their past lives, my blogs were forums for confidence issues and (barely) veiled jabs at various girls who had gon’ up and don’ me wrong, but I guess these days my problems are more existential in nature, and are probably, in the long run, better off for it.

My desk is a hideous mess of Australiana (dig that rad kookaburra), lollies I use to bribe minors, Japanese textbooks that I have skimmed, not read, and a variety of teaching materials that, surprisingly, have been getting a pretty solid workout of late. While it is true that at times I may have been something of a lazy ALT, that trend has definitely been reversed as I’ve been able to identify the more bothersome areas of my job and work on improving those, rather than the aimless stressing of eras past. I’m steadily realising that bored, unmotivated students aren’t the problem; it’s disorganised co-workers. I am repeatedly inundated by inconsiderate and illogical requests for help with classes that aren’t mine, translations of things of a singularly personal nature, and so on. I believe the thought process resembles something like this: Darren is an ALT, and ALTs aren’t busy or just don’t work very hard. だから、Darren mustn’t be busy. It’s beautifully Socratic.

Anyway, in light of these revelations, job satisfaction is at an unusual high, as I have adopted an even more nihilistic approach to my job: I chat with students whenever I feel like it, and about whatever I please. I play DS with them and snap unflattering photos of them. I ask them about their boyfriends and girlfriends and point out cute girls in magazines. So when it comes to classes, most of them are comfortable enough with me by now to play along with whatever I come up with. However, I think the main thing that has improved my working life is that, as the months have rolled by of late, I have become increasingly willing to strike up a conversation in punctuated Japanese, and the kids have started to realise that I am actually a living organism of equal or greater intellectual capability, one who has thoughts and feelings of his own and the gift of self-expression. Who would have thought – a foreigner!

I’m definitely beyond repair. When I start visiting – and enjoying – websites such as this (a cute girl appears in the day!) there seems to be little chance of redemption. To make things even worse, this link was sent to me by a female Japanese friend of mine. There’s just something irresistible about homely girls posing for coy photos and bashfully describing their personal traits.

The longer I spend observing other cultures, the more convinced I become that the world we inhabit is governed primarily by sex and money. The sex industry in Japan is omnipresent and, as a young woman, there is no better way to make easy money than to become a hostess or waitress in a fancy bar. Middle-aged men pay through the nose to merely be in the company of these creatures, and while prostitution itself is outwardly frowned upon, its no secret that money can buy everything, the porn industry is rampant, and the vast majority of establishments fronting as pleasant, classy lady bars are little more than extortionately-priced brothels. On a more personal level, it seems that wherever I go in the world, the thing that impresses the majority of girls with the most boring regularity is a boy with money and the willingness to flaunt it, both on himself and on his girl. The extravagance that passes for class and style in Japan can be truly sickening, especially when a dude in parachute pants can be considered cool just because they cost hundreds of dollars. Oh, and on that note: fuck you, Ed Hardy. I hate you and everything you create.

I always misspell the word ‘opinion’ and it comes out looking something like ‘onion.’ Perhaps there’s something in that.

Dudes. I’ve been all over this new Paramore single for a week now. How is it better than anything they have done in the past? Let me count the ways: Hayley’s voice isn’t as pitch-perfectly auto-tuned as the last album, and, moreover, she sounds way more pissed off on this track. Whilst ‘Misery Business’ was definitely a catchy (dare I say good?) song, it always seemed a little trite and forced to me. On this one, she simply spits out the lyrics in a much more natural meter, and the whole song is better off for it. Next, this song plays with time signatures and syncopation in a way that would make even the most capable metal bands envious. Its structure consists of multiple layered elements and constantly blurs the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge distinction. The arpeggios in the pre-chorus and breakdown are simply insane. Paramore’s drummer is awesome and is clearly the most impressive thing about the band besides Hayley’s voice. Listen carefully next time!

This movie was rad. The first half of District 9, in particular, takes the now-familiar mockumentary style into pretty interesting and challenging territory, offering a charicature of bureaucracy that is comical, satirical and confrontingly honest. Its themes are superficially obvious, and its a kind of wonder that it has taken so long for sci-fi films to come up with this idea. But the allegory extends further that just ‘how should governments deal with illegal immigrants,’ into far more personal territory: how do we overcome language barriers with foreigners? Is there any way to deal with the issue whilst retaining personal sensitivities? Indeed, can there even be a non-violent resolution to these kinds of problems? It nods towards the pervasive racism issues with a handful of ingenious quips, the kinds of slips-of-tongue usually reserved for mid-level politicians that are likely to see their superiors caught up in some heated PR backpedalling:

“I mean, you can’t say they don’t look like that, that’s what they look like, right? They look like prawns.”

It is amazingly well-acted, particularly by Sharlto Copley, who carries the second half of the film single-handedly and prevents it from ultimately becoming little more than a gruesome FPS-inspired alien blastfest, although even Copley can’t save it from crashing and bashing its way to a somewhat underwhelming end. District 9 combines some of the cinematic elements of Independence Day, Children of Men, The Host and…well, Starship Troopers, but its South African orientation gives it a pretty unique feel overall. Definitely see this movie!

Well, there was going to be more, but now there isn’t. ‘Til next time!

paris syndrome

I don’t know what to do! It’s 3pm, I’ll be heading home reasonably soon, but literally nothing awaits me there besides a living room that requires vacuuming. That’s right, I’m so lonely in this tiny little country town attached to my job that I would rather stay at school than go home. At least my workplace has the tell-tale signs of human life in it. I’ve already been for a run today. Last week, I upped my distance from around 6km to around 12km, out of sheer boredom. I was halfway through when I thought to myself, ‘I have nothing to do after I stop.’ So I just kept going.

The last handful of weekends have consisted of some truly devastating nights out, whether measured in terms of financial strain, magnitude of hangovers or accumulated emotional baggage. The cure? Repeating the whole procedure the following weekend (or, ocassionally, during the week). But we won’t get into that now.

For the sake of a yardstick you may use to measure my boredom, I’ve read every book I have with me except one. One of the things I’m most looking forwards to when I visit Melbourne in September is to replace these books with others from my library back home. However my impending trip back hasn’t stopped me from abusing Japanese Amazon and buying copies of books that I already own. Like this one:

Not for some time have I been so captivated by a book. Since living overseas, I have tried to broaden my literary horizons by sampling some of the most well-respected works that those countries and cultures have to offer, from ultra-modern stuff to classics from bygone eras, etc. Along the way I have subjected myself to some real crap, but also to some true diamonds in the rough. Rarely has anything compelled me to (gasp!) blog about it.

I have been reluctant to even open In Cold Blood, simply because I want to savour the whole experience as long as possible and I am scared of taking too big a bite out of it. This might seem like a strange thing to say about a book that is basically a true story, especially one of which everyone knows the ending. But it’s the writing, the pacing…the narrative switches between the reckless road story of two outlaws to a grotesque painting of a once-peaceful town that has been frozen stiff by tragedy and fear. Capote deftly weaves the two together until their numerous inevitable convergences, which, when they finally happen, he treats with simplicity, economy and cool-headedness – the closest he ever gets to plain journalism. There is no fanfare, no cheap page-turning tactics at play here.

The rest of the time, it is so lifelike, so tender, so human that you can often forget that you’re dealing with two murderers. You want to know Perry’s backstory, you want to empathise with him, you want to see him…well, succeed. If there was one failing of the novel, I guess that would be it. But Capote was never trying to pass judgment or condemn anybody; he was only guilty of trying to manipulate his readers, to paint a picture and to bring his characters to life, which every writer invariably strives to do, and in this sense he succeeds completely.

I’m enjoying this so much, especially since the last couple of books I have read have either gone way over my head or just been flat-out not very good.

This one made its Australian debut at the Melbourne Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. I took notice because one day at work the girl who sits opposite me asked if I knew the book she was reading – The Sky Crawlers. I asked her what it was about and got a typically vague Japanese type of answer; I think she said something about ‘romance’ (but let’s be honest – everything in Japan can be classified as roomansu or dorama, usually a combination of the two). She said it was sugoi kanashii, and naturally I was skeptical. But when I saw that it was selected at the film fest, and did a bit of follow-up research, it seemed pretty cool, and it is. The CG animation used for the dogfights is simply astounding, as kinetic as any war film but with just the right amount of artifice and artistry. Anyone who knows me well knows that when it comes to anime, I value art design and mood more than the story itself, and this one is no different.

The one that has really grabbed my attention, though, and subsequently the frontrunner for being the first film I see in general release in Japanese cinemas, is the upcoming Studio 4°C work, First-Squad. International anime collaborations really interest me, and Studio 4°C has a pretty good track record. Monster was, of course, set in Germany, and its strongest attribute in my mind was its representation of Germany in the 1980s. The atmosphere of political suppression and its cultural side-effects permeated every episode/issue. So, long story short, I’m really keen to see First-Squad when it comes out.

This post has succeeded in wasting my time, and yours. Til next time!

the third wheel

Alright! Summer holidays. No classes for five weeks. I do have a list as long as my arm of things I need to do, such as developing photos, posting certain things home, marking hundreds of haiku, and preparing for my school’s open day, but in the meantime…

I guess I’m caught in some kind of vortex where I am neither in touch with Japan nor completely alien to it. This results in a number of misunderstandings and presumptions. For example, the assumption that as a white guy in Japan I am only here to try to hook up with Japanese women, contrasted with the shocked gasps from my students when they ask me ‘Japanese girl is cute?’ and I say ‘yes.’ Likewise, some people go bananas when they hear me utter even the most basic Japanese phrase, while others refuse to talk to me until I am fluent in the language.

Ironically, the thing that most reliably earns me the admiration and acceptance from Japanese people, particularly my students, is the fact that I carry around my Nintendo DS with a Japanese dictionary loaded on it. Of course, it’s not because of the fact that I’m making an effort to learn the language that they recoil in shock, but rather that I have a DS, and I didn’t buy it over here.

There are probably two easy routes out of this situation: either to become completely immsersed in Japanese language, culture and tradition, or to reject it completely. However, neither of these options appeal to me, for obvious reasons. I guess I should have known before arriving here that I would be destined to remain on the liminality between being a real person and a prop, but I could probably have never predicted the repercussions and reverberations, or how simply being identified as an outsider can effect every facet of my daily life over here.

I have chosen to profile some of my more memorable students in this blog.

Many of them go to my special school. It’s still really hard for me to go there. I’m not fnding the experience any more comfortable even after a year. The kids don’t have any chance of learning a foreign language, so the fact that they insist on even having English classes still doesn’t make sense to me. I would be just as useful, if not more so, in other classes where I could freely participate, instead of standing at the front of the room reciting phrases that they will forget as soon as I produce a picture of a koala (to be fair, this phenomenon is not exclusive to my special school).

Nevertheless, there are a few individuals who make the arduous experience more enjoyable. For example, Yuta. This kid always had a smile on his face. In some ways I kinda envied that about him. I wasn’t ever really sure what he was saying in Japanese, cause my Japanese still wasn’t good enough when I was teaching him. But he did know three or four very important English words: “I like ~,” and “yes.”

Our meetings would proceed as follows, never straying from this basic but effective formula: Yuta would spot me from across the room/hallway/yard, and come barreling over towards me, coming to an unsteadily gleeful stop about a foot away from me. In his eyes was an unbridled lust for life and a complete lack of intimidation.

“I like….sushi!”

“Haha! Really?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“What’s your favourite sushi?”

“Yes! Yes!”

He would then turn on his heels and bound away from me, perhaps at a greater speed than that with which he arrived. Sometimes, he would switch it up.

“I like….hanbaagu (Japanese for ‘hamburger’)!”

“Is that so, Yuta?”

“Yes! Yes!”

Vrooooom.

He was hilarious.

These days I spend the most time at Nishigo hanging out with this girl called Yuka. She’s 16, but owing to whatever disability it is that she has, only looks about 11. I like her because even though she knows I usually can’t understand her, she never slows down what she’s saying and comes to hang out with me week in, week out. She always asks me to sit next to her on the bus and then tells her (speechless) friends about it. She asks me questions like, “are there birds in Australia?” Which may seem stupid, but is actually really cute. She loves singing and, like Yuta, doesn’t let a damn thing bring her down, ever.

She tells me how she fell over on her arse at school, she warned me to take care cause of the swine flu when I went to Hong Kong, and talks about the scary bugs around her house. She comes into my office every Monday at 3:20pm to warn me that the bus is coming soon and I shouldn’t be late. Sometimes I have absolutely no idea what she’s saying and have trouble identifying a single Japanese word amongst the torrent. But I like her because she talks to me more than any student or teacher at that entire school.

Back at Kohnan, there is Yurie. I am not sure whether it is me or Australia that she is in love with (I suspect it is the latter), but we became friends through her proudly presenting me with a new flavour of Tim Tam each week. The first one was something like wild raspberry, and I was suitably impressed. I guess her older sister lives in Tokyo or something, and has more reliable access to strange and exotic (and exorbitantly priced) foreign delicacies. Anyway, she always says to me ‘Australia ikitai! (I want to go to Australia!).’

Her English is, I guess, fairly standard for a san-nensei student at my school, or maybe a little above average. She understands everything I say to her, and I mostly understand everything she says to me. It’s a bad habit, that I usually speak in English to my students and they usually speak in Japanese to me, but in the end I suppose it’s the most reliable way to communicate with them.

She is really pretty and outgoing, which is why it’s hard for me to understand why she’s not somewhere closer to the top of the social pecking order at my school. She always has a dazed, anime-style look in her eyes and an adorable habit of always showing up five seconds too late to whatever it is that has grabbed my students attention, and then lingering around for a few moments after the cacophony has subsided just to smile at me and make sure I had seen it, too.

Nine times out of ten when I see her, she is alone, either knitting or reading in an empty classroom. She enjoys horror movies and I burst out laughing when I was describing No Country for Old Men and she cocked her head and chimed in with a quizzical “splatter!?”

As for the boys, easily the most noteworthy must be The Rock Star. This guy! At my school, wearing a uniform isn’t compulsory, and he takes full advantage of this fact. I’ve never, not once, seen him wearing regulation school pants. Before school, after school, during lunch, even in the ten-minute break between classes, he is perched upon a desk with an acoustic guitar, and a handful of doe-eyed Japanese girls staring up at him. He is also prominent in that he has probably the waviest hair of any of my students, so much so that one of the girls commented that we look ‘like brothers’ together. He also likes to exploit this particular gift that has been bestowed upon him, since he gets his haircut like every two weeks. Needless to say, we look nothing alike.

But by far my favourite moment with The Rock Star, was one day a couple of months ago, when I arrived at school to see him decked out in bright blue skinny jeans, a Strokes-esque vest and a bright white t-shirt underneath. By the start of the fourth period, he was wearing three-quarter length jeans, and a hoodie. After school, he had regressed entirely into a pair of shorts and a V-neck t-shirt, designed entirely to accentuate the fragile lines of Japanese dudes’ shoulder blades and collar bones. Yeah – three costume changes in one regulation day! And not a school tie to be seen. He’s soooo dreamy.

The punchline of the story, however, has to be the fact that this guy hates me, because one sad day he realised that I can play guitar way, way better than him. And I don’t even have to dress up to look like I’m in a rock band.

I guess that’s enough for today. But do not despair, avid reader! I have plenty more anecdotes to share with you. Stay tuned for another edition of ’serious breaches of privacy and potentially inappopriate student-teacher relations in the Land of the Rising Sun!’

So long!

home truths

I need a haircut. Of course, this isn’t news to anybody who has laid eyes on me over the past six months. But I feel like this time it signifies something more.

My hair is the embodiment of all the unchecked and misguided behaviours of the past eleven months. It is a painful reminder of my awkwardness and utter inability to assimilate. It is the end result of what happens when you remove someone who has barely come to terms with his situation in his hometown and the spiritual connection he has forged with it, and place him somewhere that is more or less ignorant of all the values that have become so close to him over the course of his short existence. I hate to trot out all the familiar cliches of culture shock, and to be quite honest I’m not sure that that’s the problem here. Any problems I have encountered on that front can probably be attributed to my own apprehension. No, friends, this is a much more internal conflict.

Hark! The unrepentant tug of loneliness prevails! The blogosphere attracts the isolated, the mediocre, the desperate as if it were an immeasurable whirlpool of the kind you would only read about in the seafaring tales of eras past. Surprised? Neither am I.

I went to China.

The point was to escape the groove that I could feel myself settling into, and you know what? It worked. Although it was but a brief adventure, and it lacked the same sense of discovery that enveloped me the first time I went there, it gave me the perfect respite: anonymity, an absence of expectations, and despite the incessant hustle and bustle of China and Hong Kong, it also gave me some peace and quiet.

I often jot down notes to myself, intended to serve as lightning bolts of inspiration when it comes to actually writing something. Of course, as I’m writing them, I say to myself, “yeah, this is good, there is no way I will look back on this in a few weeks’ time and not know what I was going on about.” I don’t need to point out that it never works out that way. What in the hell does ‘A guide to better living in Japan’ mean?

So long, friends.

flutterby

The onslaught of material worth writing down in Japan is so torrential that it washes away all other consecutive cognitive processes in a mire of fractured memories and splintered shards of recognition. I should resort to poetry or (gasp) lyricism. Alas, all that inspires me to write is that most inappropriate of sources; that want for an audience of sorts, or recognition of the fact that I have but finally put pen to paper, or fingertip to typepad, as it were.

Japan, I’m sorry. You alone cannot force my hand, not this time, no sir. It requires a mocking tenacity, goading persistence of spirit to cause this bird to rear, retreat, take flight, open the gates, surrender the fort. Greatest pleasure of late has been found in mapping out an itinerary for persons not myself, lining up the dominoes in order to hastily and improperly knock them down, setting myself again the task of restructuring and organising, resolving and inevitably abandoning in the larval stages the germs of real accomplishment.

Documentation and opinion to be redirected henceforth towards a more wholesome and practical arena. Endless depths to be explored and then occupied, both here and there, but to different ends.

A handful of albums that have had a considerable effect on my life, my worldview, my perspectives on certain events and my appreciation for art and beauty, presented in the chronological order in which they appeared and ignited something within me. Apologies to those who probably deserve to be on this list but aren’t. These are, after all, my formative years that are in plain view.

• Oasis  - What’s the Story (Morning Glory)?
• Everclear – So Much For the Afterglow
• Propellerheads – Decksanddrumsandrockandroll
• Lagwagon – Double Plaidinum
• Saves the Day – Stay What You Are
• Staring Back – On
• Jimmy Eat World – Clarity
• Jets To Brazil – Orange Rhyming Dictionary
• Smoking Popes – Destination Failure
• Blueline Medic – Text_Bomb
• Miles Davis – Miles Ahead
• The Black Keys – Thickfreakness
• Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros – Streetcore
• The Lawrence Arms – The Greatest Story Ever Told
• Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Hearts of Oak
• Elliott Smith – X/O
• Built To Spill – Keep It Like a Secret
• Common – Be
• The Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America
• mewithoutYou – Brother/Sister
• Twin Vickers – Demo
• Muscles – Guns, Babes, Lemonade
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – The Boatman’s Call

Until we meet again – so long, friends.

days of yore

I figure I owe it to myself to blog in the old-fashioned way, before this whole Japan experiment got started, back when I had too many dreams and aspirations to fit into my days (as opposed to not enough). I’ve been reading over some of my old blogs – from my adolescent halcyon days – and they are quite seriously littered with hilarious anecdotes and controversy. Like our anonymous stalker who kept prank-calling us around the clock, seven days a week and the thirty-two comments it spawned. Or my ingenious relationship smasher service (patent pending). Here’s a quote I am particularly fond of, presented here in it’s original letterbox format (i.e. without any grammar or capitalisation):

as for those people who believe that soccer is the ‘world game’: i’d like to see all those square-jawed, golden-haired euro trash pretty boys sacrifice one fucking hour of their time and earnings to get together in the name of charity, not to mention saving lives. soccer is a fucking joke and if you support it you are naive and stupid.

This blog has always been marginally more serious than my previous efforts, though, so for that reason I have avoided late night ramblings or personal anecdotes. Plus I’m not sure how many readers I’ve got. Who knows who might be watching. Probably all those future employers who want to recruit me but are afraid (owing to my prior history) I might slip up and are therefore tracking my net footprint. 

Here’s a list of things I miss about Australia.

• Good coffee. I thought I could do without it, and for a while, I could, but there’s only so much tepid dishwater I can reasonably be expected to imbibe. I guess the only reason I still do it is that I would lose my freaking mind sitting here for eight hours a day without the intermittent excitement of getting up to make myself a hot drink.
• Fish and chips and meat pies. I would make a killing if I opened up a fish and chip shop over here. Y’all gots no idea. If the Japanese are up for anything, it’s food, and they love their poutato furai. I could charge an exorbitant amount of money for this and get away with it. As for the meat pies…well, it sure beats the tepid floating menace that is oden when the weather is cold.
• Talking. To people.
• Outspoken bigotry, impatience, impoliteness. Gotta keep things interesting, you know?
• Music. Melbourne famously has one of the best live music scenes in the world. I have become far too accustomed to going out at night without music or, worse still, making my own (karaoke).
• Being able to keep up with current affairs. Watching the news over here is pointless, because even though I can’t understand most of it, I can definitely understand enough of it to know that it is insular, blinkered and (really) only a step or two away from flat-out nationalist propaganda. At least in Australia, where I can speak the language, I have the freedom to select where I get my news and opinions from.
• Learning stuff. When not battling with a language, one is much more freely able to research and investigate topics that they find interesting. My weekly excursions into bookstores have completely stopped and I only buy the occassional thing off Japanese Amazon.
• My family and friends. Somewhat self-explanatory.
• Over-saturation of Aussie rules football. This is probably my number one most-missed thing from Australia. Fkn BigPond in all their benevolent wisdom have made it impossible for people outside of Australia to watch their videos online, thus shunning the biggest demographic of people that would ever want to watch their shitty Windows Media format streaming videos online. Also I miss cricket. It is has just finished being summer back home, after all.
• Phone conversations. I remember talking to a good friend of mine in year 12 every time we had a literature essay due. We would spend hours making pointed and highly intelligent observations to each other and eventually digress and start talking about eighteenth birthday parties and school assemblies and how we wanted to start a lounge act (still the best unfulfilled dream of my life…and there have been many).
• Philosophy. As you are no doubt already aware, most of the thinking I do over here relates to being able to communicate with the people. I used to think about social trends and the media and artificial intelligence and the artistic integrity of video games and things like that, but it’s hard over here. Also I’m a lot busier.

Totally got a care package in the mail last night. It contains all kinds of survivalist rations. I am a hoarder of the first degree. But I am one with mini Mars Bars and Minties and deodorant. Yeah I still stink though. My stomach is growling at me like a caged animal cause I haven’t fed it today. It seems like for as long as there has been a recorded history I have had the same anxieties about accomplishment and procrastination. Would it be better for me to just ignore it and spend as much time as possible distracting myself with meaningless (let’s call them ‘cultural’) endeavours? Or is this something I need to address swiftly and comprehensively? I guess I’m just searching for some kind of evidence that my life since finishing high school hasn’t been a complete waste of time. I wouldn’t dare venture something so stark as a list, though. It would end up short and flaccid.

Dude in my office compulsively brushes his teeth without toothpaste, gargles without mouthwash, and slurps all his food and drink, from instant noodles to plain old tap water. So much of the conversation that goes on in my office is hollow and formal. Here’s a full transcript of everything that was said in the last hour:

“Ah! Muramatsu-sensei. You brought the bento! You have my sincerest gratitude!”
“Why no, it was simply my pleasure to bring you this bento!”
“How is your honourable bento?”
“But of course, it is utterly delectable!”
“I will now return the empty bento to the office!”
“Shibahara-sensei, you’re too kind! Will you be eating bento again tomorrow?”
“I certainly shall! Tomorrow is the last day of bento!”
“You are indeed correct, Shibahara-sensei.”

I suppose when this is all I get to listen to each day, I am actually better off not knowing much Japanese. If they only knew that I am talking about them right now!

I couldn’t sleep last night. Not sure why. I had an itch on my leg (the outside of my leg, perverts) that I couldn’t stop itchin’, and maybe the old electric blanket was up a little bit too high. I read yesterday that when sleeping, your body needs to reach a minimum core temperature for the sleep to be meaningful. It always leaves the next morning. It never says thankyou and I feel cheated and used. Anyway I suppose having the electric blanket up too high would explain why I feel even more lethargic today than I have in a long time despite going to bed relatively early.

Yeah, the blogs were definitely better than they are now. Post more comments, people. I know you’re out there. You’re not alone. After all, the internet is the one place where you can really, truly, be yourself, right?

but the thing is, i just can’t listen to meaningless music anymore. why listen to a song that says ‘i love you’ when you can listen to a song that says ‘this list is what went right, your name is written twice’? i dunno.

i’ve been sitting here so long, staring at a blank page that should be full of either the musings of a poet or the calculations of a genius. unfortunately no amount of rhyme or reason can break this spell that i’m in. it’s a daydream at night, but it’s not a fiction. it is a life, or so they say. is a life spent materialising the sensations we encounter, every day and every night? that is how a life should be sold, not bought. i’m in a different time zone. i have a different exchange rate. my all-ordinaries are fucking strange. my mind set sail before i had checked it in. i bought insurance when i should have gotten assurance.

matter of fact, i’ll make a journal entry at 2:20am. who says maths exams can’t be fun on five hours sleep and even less time studying. i do. i’ll make it fun. i’ll make it fun by pretending that two plus two equals five. or that complex numbers are not in fact any different than real numbers. in fact, complex numbers often make more sense than real numbers. here’s a complex number: there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. here’s a real number: about 400 people between 15 and 24 commit suicide in australia each year.

Yeah, I got a lot of catching up to do. Over and out.

cleaver me

A whole week with no appointments, deadlines or obligations would be a blessing for many people. Think again! I’m sitting here, rheumy eyes glazed over, brain feeling much the same way, tapping away on the keyboard in an effort not to draw attention to my general droopiness. For now, it’s working.

The reason I find myself in this position is that it’s entrance exam week at my school. That means that the whole place shuts down and only the most hardcore of teachers need to show up. Yep, that includes me. Good thing I’m here, too. These hours won’t waste themselves. So to get to the point, there are hundreds of wide-eyed junior high school kids here today sitting their entrance exam. I’m not sure why they bother, to be honest; mine isn’t the most academically excellent of schools. And we’re not talking about desirable real estate, either. Surely kids don’t need to do an hour-long English exam when all they want to do is play baseball or cheerleading. But what would Japan be without hours upon hours of inefficient customs and beauracracy? I’ve said it before: I stopped asking permission to do anything around here a long time ago. I realise this may seem presumptuous of me, but so far it has only resulted in startled admiration from my co-workers (“you organised this all by yourself? Darren-sensei, you are very busy だよ!”). It’s not because I’m subverting authority or because I don’t wanna talk to the vice-principals (OK, actually it is a little bit of both of those), it’s just that if I did things by the book, I wouldn’t do anything. 

I don’t feel like writing movie or music reviews here anymore. I’ve lost my critical edge. Oh no! The smoothening has begun! I can feel my jagged and caustic personality being whittled away to an inconspicuous sand dune with every passing day in Japan. Opinions are as rare over here as good coffees. I find myself retreating in a sea of self-loathing every time I venture an opinion thanks to the startled looks I get from my co-workers. And then I step back and realise that my brain is rotting away. Time that used to be spent criticising art and music is now being spent semi-consciously trying to conjugate verbs or thinking about the housework I gotta do. I should get back in the habit of hating everyone and everything. Life was good back then, the world was so full of possibilities. 懐かしい。。。

I started snowboarding a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, started, in late February. But it’s OK because the snow season goes for like six months of the year in these parts. We went up to Zao which was everything you expect a Japanese ski resort to be, complete with eery ghost-like steam emanating from the natural hotsprings.

I was alright at snowboarding, actually. Better than I probably should have been on my first attempt, so naturally on the second time around, my head got a little too big and as a result the benevolent forces that be decided to plant me firmly on my arse. Big head = sore arse. That’s how it works when it comes to snowsports. But it has only strengthened my resolve to go out and drop heaps and heaps of cash on gear that I’m probably only gonna use a handful of times. We are located within two hours of about a dozen ski resorts over here, it’s pretty mental. Every Japanese girl on the mountain is dolled up in brightly coloured jumpsuits and beanies, regardless of their ability when it comes to, you know, going. Down the mountain.

Let’s see, now. A few us dropped a crazy number of yen on tickets to Fuji Rock in July! To be honest I’m only lukewarm on the lineup at this stage but I figure it will be fun regardless. Three days, at the foot of a mountain. You have to hike through forests and cross over streams just to get between stages! I’m also going to Punkspring although the lineup is pretty lame.

Today is bento day. When there are no classes, they have these bento days where the teachers are supposed to eat bento together and strengthen their office relationships. Well, I’ve been here for two hours and nobody has said a word to me. As if relationships needs strengthening! The bento days are the same as any other day, except there are no students bouncing in and out of the office, and your lunch is cold and costs 1100 yen. No thanks! I’m planning on taking myself off to the supermarket on my bike and getting some yaki soba or ramen. 

The olds are arriving for a visit in April. They’ll probably be around my area for about eight days. The following week is Golden Week – named not for any special celebration but simply because there are four public holidays within two weeks. So I’m looking at going to China again during that time. I don’t have any desire to go to Korea, have just been to South East Asia, and definitely don’t wanna go to Malaysia or Indonesia. Plus there is so much of China I haven’t seen, and the food is incredible. This time I wanna go further south (but avoid Shanghai). 

My mate and I are campaiging to take over the local JET newsletter for the upcoming year. I would be lying if I said it had nothing to do with my brain going stale. Any opportunity to be able to express things in my native language is welcome, as far as I’m concerned. We want to make it entertaining and pleasant to look at. There is no reason why it needs to be bland and utilitarian. We’re living in Japan, for God’s sake (神の酒?), there should be no lack of inspiration. A well-written and entertaining publication is as important as an informative one, and if we can lure in a solid readership I think it will only become more and more popular and attract more and more contributors. If you are reading this, you are probably already familiar with our campaign or you are in a position where to actually care about my editorial aspirations would be an enormous waste of your time. It’s just something I’m looking forwards to doing.

There’s only so much Japanese study I can take in. I recently bought a textbook with an accompanying workbook and CD. It’s so intimidating that I don’t wanna start it yet. I think I know enough by now that I could comfortably skip the first half a dozen lessons, but then who knows what nuggets of wisdom I might be missing out on? It’s a daunting prospect, taking on an entire language textbook without any guidance or prior experience, but I guess by moving to a foreign country with very limited English I haven’t left myself with much choice. My conversational Japanese is still clearly my worst point, which is a shame but I guess it’s understandable. A month or so ago I threatened to take on the 3-kyu JLPT in December but, considering I have  taken in very little new material since then, it’s looking unlikely.

This thing is losing steam. Peace y’all.

abraze

It’s been SO LONG since I wrote anything substantial in here. For those of you in any doubt, that is an indication that I’m really busy here and trying to make the most of things by getting involved in and around my schools more. It should be understood at this point that I’ve decided to stay here another year. This was a pretty easy decision to make once I realised that I had only just begun to scratch the surface of Japanese culture and the complexity of this strange and beautiful place.

After the first two or three months, while I was by no means unhappy over here, I felt that my expectations of Japan had been somewhat too high and that yeah, while it’s often kooky and the food is good and and there amazing-looking human beings lurking just around every corner, I’ve pretty much got the hang of things over here and nothing could really surprise me. Thankfully, with each week that goes by I’m learning and appreciating more about Japan, its people, its history, the essence of the country that makes it so unlike any other place on earth. Small trips to local eateries with coworkers can be as insightful as group trips to other prefectures if you care to look at them in the right way. I realise that this is such a cliched and foreseeable shift in attitude for JETs such as myself at this stage in their tenure in Japan; I never experienced any culture shock other than occasional outburts of anger at things in my apartment like the lack of curtains or the fact that my clothes usually come out of the washing machine caked with soap suds and with dirty areas seemingly untouched, but I couldn’t help but feel a certain degree of apathy towards this whole ‘Japan’ thing in general.

I’m not sure exactly what changed my mind; maybe I’m just becoming more accustomed to the tempo of things over here (how you can feel you might be stampeded to death in Shibuya yet can be waiting for up to an hour for your pizza to arrive) or maybe the fact that I can understand the language a bit more now is helping me to appreciate the fundamentals of Japanese society better. For the first few months after I arrived, something in the back of my mind kept thinking that Japanese language was repetetive; over-simplified in terms of meaning while layering on the formality. I got annoyed that they can’t pronounce the letter V and that their grammar is utterly back-to-front  and that it lacked the song-like quality of some dialects of Mandarin and that there just aren’t enough different ways to express yourself (because the nail that stands up will be hammered down). But now I’m starting to realise the symbiotic relationship between Japanese language and culture; its economy of syllables, the way it bubbles around and the way women manipulate this fact to make every little thing sound impossibly irresistable, the way even the most banal of comments turns into an exercise in servitude when there is even a slight whiff of dignity in the room. People take pride in their language over here. Even my worst students’ English handwriting is better than most kids back home, beacuse they respect and celebrate the inherent beauty in language and every character that it contains.

Please believe this has nothing to do with wanting to watch more anime and play Final Fantasy and everything to do with wanting to feel like I know what’s going on around me. It is in fact entirely possible to fall in love with checkout chicks at the supermarket based on their over-genki mannerisms when handing you your change and the stream of polite thanks that accompany them.

When I was in Cambodia (and to a lesser extent, Vietnam) over Christmas and New Year, there were definitely times when I missed the security of Japan. Knowing that nobody would try to steal my wallet, or rip me off even for a single yen, or haggle me to buy anything, or even talk to me without a written invitation for fear of offending my privacy left me feeling strangely alienated. My ears perked up whenever I heard any Japanese exclamations from my fellow sightseeers (usually not extending far beyond kawaii, kirei and sugoi). I guess coming from Melbourne rather than Sydney – apparently the only place in Australia worth having heard of before, for the most part – never gave me that much exposure to Japanese people before I came here, which may have also contributed to my ignorance for the first little while after I arrived.

I guess the point is that I’ll be staying here for a while longer yet, at least until the Australian economy requires that I think twice about what to do with all these yen I’ve got lying around, and I guess I’m gonna try to make the most of it while I still can. I’ve already begun negotiations into altering my timetable for next year so I don’t spend so much time loitering in the corner of a classroom, staring out the window and daydreaming. It will involve more second- and third-year elective English classes (i.e. kids who actually choose to learn English and are more interested in learning than in the colour of my tie). Gonna make an effort to see more of the sites and get a taste for different cultures around Japan, because you only need to drive an hour in any given direction before you’re in a different place which is famous for some other kind of food, or have a weird dialect, or interesting history, or whatever.

Speaking of which, we just spent a few days up in Sapporo for the annual Snow Festival (yuki matsuri) where the times I wasn’t drinking I was looking for ramen or figuring out how to thaw out my toes. Sapporo is a pretty cool place but I couldn’t tell if the appeal was only cause it’s perpetually covered in a few feet of snow during winter. Being from one of the hottest and driest places on earth of course made me pretty excited to see that much snow in one place. The festival itself consisted of numerous statues of various sizes and quality carved/sculpted entirely from snow and ice. Pretty straight-forward. There was a huge group of us though so we were able to gaijin smash basically the whole city. I’m sure the locals are used to it though cause word is that over two million people visit every year. The best things about Sapporo are the girls in beanies and the miso ramen, but if I had to choose, it would probably be the ramen.

We caught the ferry there and back which, given the limited space available for exploration and the likes, left us with little else to do than to drink ourselves into oblivion, which seemed like a pretty good idea but resulted in some extraordinarily uncomfortable bus trips at either end. At any rate it was fun. I heard that the eldery Japanese guys on the boat were getting annoyed at the horrific noise emanating from the karaoke booths which we dominated. But srsly, just cause we’re gaijin doesn’t mean we sing worse than you guys. On the way home a few of us made a detour to Matsushima which is allegedly one of the three most beautiful sights in Japan. It’s probably in the top three of what I’ve seen so far. It consists of hundreds (we only saw dozens) of strange windswept rock formations of various shapes and sizes sticking out of the water. They are all covered in pine trees and are pretty striking. Hard to get any good photos however as the boat we were on barely slowed down for the entire hour. Matsushima town itself is really beautiful and rivals anything I saw in Kyoto. They have a temple which stands amidst a tall forest and all those cool old Japanese-style building that have given way to drab shopfronts all across Fukushimia.

By the way the reason there are no pictures in my blog posts anymore is cause of the ludicrous new photo uploader at WordPress. To upload, resize, realign and put a border around an image requires opening up the edit box fourseparate times and is just not worth it. By the time I’m done I barely feel like looking at the picture anymore and I’m sure you wouldn’t either. If you are reading this, WordPress, do something about it. Stop arsing about making widgets and themes and all of that other bullshit.

Ths school year is winding down. In fact, all my third-year kids have already left and done their exams. I asked at one of my schools if I could have an opportunity to say goodbye to them and was flatly denied. I thought this was pretty cold, but then I remembered that everything requires six months’ notice and to be signed in triplicate (and duplicates of the triplicates) before anybody even entertains a new idea. Consequently this I why I don’t ask permission for anything I do anymore, but that’s a whole different story. I was pretty bummed cause the third year classes that I had at this particular school were the only ones I actually enjoyed and as such they were the only students at that school that I cared about. Now, chances are I will never see any of them ever again (the graduation ceremony for all public high schools is on the same day across the prefecture). I’m pretty bummed, actually. I might see the Kohnan kids on account of Kohnan is my home base and they will be back here for various things and obviously I am obligated to go to their graduation ceremony rather than the other one. But it all went by with very little fanfare. I started to realise that this must be what every teacher goes through on a regular basis with all their students and the trick is not to get too attached (not to imply that being attached to students is a good thing). The older I get, the more this happens, not just in school but in general. I feel a kind of intertia where I don’t want to go home because I will inevitably discover how many people are gone or changed and I kinda like the people I likd as I liked them when I was there. But it’s sad. A big part of my wanting to do this job involved getting to know my students and now I can’t help feeling like I am way more into them than they are into me. They probably just see me as the dude who never gets his haircut and can’t understand a word of what’s going on, whereas I see them as one of the reasons I relocated myself in the middle of nowhere on the opposite end of the world. Then, of course, are the other JETs who are leaving at the end of this school year, which is a huge bummer cause I’m finding it pretty hard to believe that anybody could actually replace them. We all seem to get along so well (despite those Iwaki jerks not being friendly), it would be a huge shame to break up the group. Zannen. But I suppose there is a circle of life in work just like in everything else and most of the people I’ve become close to are staying as well as me. So that’s a plus. And we’ve got Fuji Rock to look forwards to in July.

Quickly, before I sign off:

The new Propagandhi album is the jam. Probably punk album of the year. iTunes is still the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The Death Note anime adaptation is one of the most stylish and captivating shows I have ever seen. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the most overbearing and melodramatic tripe I have seen in a long time. The Planet Earth series is something that every human being should be made to watch. Catch-22 is even more poignant and hilarious the second time around. Tetris is dangerous.

Lastly, I can’t write this without mentioning the utter devastation that is happening in my beautiful home. I know people who have been directly affected by the Victorian bushfires, not to mention that all my friends and family live there. I could barely concentrate at school the other day after one of the teachers asked about it and if everything was OK. At least the rest of the world seems to be taking somewhat of an interest. 

This is the worst natural disaster in Australia’s history by far. For more unbelievable photos, please click here.  If there is anything you can do to help, please do it. You might consider donating to the Red Cross Bushfire Appeal. They don’t take any administrative fees from your donation.

So long, friends.