A day in the life

Vignette 1:
Like a lot of people, I heard that in Tokyo, during rush hour, there are white-gloved train station attendants whose job it is to push people into the train before the doors shut. I've never seen them because I suspect they aren't actually necessary; the passengers do an admirable job themselves of squeezing in more people than is comfortable, or even likely safe. I stand on a morning Musashino line train bound for Tokyo, pinned between an office worker in a cheap black suit, a high school girl sending a text message on her pink cell phone with little Hello Kitty baubles hanging off it, an old man, and several college-aged men with bleached, rust-brown hair, cut in a mullet, which I suspect took the better part of the morning to arrange. I literally cannot move an inch in any direction. A hundred bodies radiate heat in the cramped quarters of the train car. I hope they turn the air conditioning on someday soon.

Vignette 2:
The bell rings, I take a last swig of coffee and gather my files and textbook. As I open the door to the classroom, I give a big, genki "hello, how are you?" to the lone student sitting nervously at the table. "Yes! My name is Masanobu!", he says. I let it slide. "I don't think we've met", I said. I was just transferred to a new school, so I don't know a lot of the students still. He cocks his head to the side and gives a long, throaty "Eh?". His intonation a long, exaggerated curve, starting somewhere in his stomach, up through his vocal cords, ending a few steps away from falsetto. This is Japanese for "I don't have any idea what you're talking about", "no way", or "You're a fucking idiot". You get the idea. "First time?" he says, gesturing between his nose and me with his forefinger. "Yeah. First time. Nice to meet you, Masanobu". Familiar territory now. "Nicetumeechutoo!", he belts out. "I am Masanobu Tanaka. I am salary man. My company is valve-design company in Kawasaki. Do you know? My hobby is sleeping and sing a song. I am 38 years old. Nicetumeechu". "Good to meet you too, I'm Quinn".

Vignette 3:
Kids. These ones are little. They're not even in kindergarden yet. They're the kind of kids who, when they meet someone, say their name, and hold up a number of fingers indicating their age.
"Ok everybody, let's see your homework!" I say. "Ok, Chiho, let's see yours first. Oh-kay, What is it?" I point to a crayon scribbled picture of a ball. "Ball!", she says. "It's a ball!" I say. "Ball!" she says, louder. "It's... A... Ball!" I enunciate as carefully as I can. "BALL!" she screams. "Ok, very good, high five, Chiho!".
The A/C is up a bit too high, and the room's a little chilly. Chiho winds up for her chance to hit the teacher, but at 5 years old, she mostly just hurts herself. She turns to the other students, and in Japanese says "Quinn sensei's hand is cold! Try it!". As I review the homework and high-five the other kids, they nod in agreement. "They're cold, huh", little Kenji says. "It's 'cause he's a foreigner" says Chiho, with the confident air of someone who holds up 5 fingers when they meet someone new. Kenji pipes up next. "Quinn sensei rides on an airplane from America every day. It's a long trip, huh.". Chiho shoots him as withering a look as a 5 year-old can muster. "No he doesn't, you idiot, he's always here. The airplane takes like 4 hours. I took an airplane once".

Vignette 4:
I'm in the general conversation room with all the regulars. We're practicing telling stories. The theme is animals. The demographic is mostly retired. "I have a story", Satoshi says, and clears his throat. "After... Eh... How do you say... World War II, we, didn't not have, ehto, the food, but I have two animals, chicken and rabbit. First, we eat eggs from chicken, then one day we... Ehto..." He trails off and searches for the word, finally resorting to mime, making two fists and twists them in opposite directions. "You know, like with a wet towel", and as he mimes breaking the chicken's neck, two college-aged girls visibly squirm. "Also, we have the rabbit. It make a very good neck warmer for winter! Verrry warm! Also, we eat rabbit hotpot soup! Verrrry delicious! You see, chicken and rabbit are pet AND food!".

Vignette 5:
The train home is crowded with overworked office workers who hang from the hand holds half asleep and all drunk. Men in their 50's sit reading comic books the size of phone directories. As I leave the train station, the gangster types are standing around, advertising hostess bars, prostitutes hang out, advertising themselves, drunk businessmen crash through the ticket gates without paying, and Tokyo slowly empties its working population into the suburbs,.There, they'll sleep for a few hours, until the whole thing starts over tomorrow morning.

August sixth, 1945

Inside a glass case, resting on a waist-high pedastel sits an old brass-bodied pocketwatch. The glass that covered the ivory colored face with its handsome black roman numerals has been missing for years. It belonged to a man named Kengo, and it was given to him by his son one year for his birthday. They say he wore it and wound it unfailingly every day until one morning in early August. Kengo must have been a punctual man, since the hands of the old watch stopped at 8:15 on the morning of August sixth, 1945, the precise time at which Little Boy, a nuclear bomb loaded with uranium, detonated 516 meters directly above the Shima hospital in the middle of Hiroshima. He was several hundred meters from the hypocenter, but the blast burned his entire body, and he was blown into a boiling river by a wind of over a hundred kilometers an hour. He survived somehow, and made it to the foundation where his home used to be, and there he died of massive burns, his melted skin peeling off his arms, hanging down from his hands, face swollen and black, regonizable only by his voice, although his esophgas was horribly burned from the superheated air.

Accross the room from Kengo's watch sits a three-year-old boy's tricycle and metal helmet. The frame is twisted, warped, melted and rusted almost beyond recognition. It was buried in the place of the boy's body, which was completely anhilliated by the blast and heat, which reached up to three thousand degrees centigrade five hundred meters from the hypocenter. In the immediate two hundred meter diameter of the hypocenter, the air temperature reached a million degrees centigrade, leaving not one single soul alive. That two hundred meter radius was covered by the blast in a matter of less than one second after the bomb detonated. By the time it was over, the blast radius covered several miles, enveloping all of urban Hiroshima. Structural members from the t-shaped Aioi bridge, which was used as a target by the B-29 that dropped Little Boy are on display, their inch-thick steel massively warped by the extreme heat. Name tags from school uniforms are on display, their black lettering, which absorbed heat more readily, burned through, leaving only the white cloth with the names of their former owners eerily empty. The Hiroshima atomic bomb museum is filled with relics like these, each one with a story. Most of the stories are from children, who were conscripted to help tear down builidings in the central urban area in an effort to cut the risk of massive fires like Tokyo experienced when most of its wooden buildings were detroyed by repeated firebombing. Ironically, Hiroshima, along with Nagasaki, was spared from the bombings that occurred in most Japanese cities so that the effects of the A-bomb could be more accurately studied by the United States department of War.

One hundred and forty thousand people died on August sixth, 1945. A hundred thousand more died in the after from burns, leukemia, and other after effects of the bomb. Even one kilometer from the blast, shards of glass driven by massive winds penetrated flesh and concrete walls. Supplies of medicine ran out within hours, leaving the survivors with nothing to do but give their loved ones water that they so desperately craved. On August sixth, there was no help for those hundreds of thousands who survived. They had no idea what had happened. When they finally found out, the rumors came, saying that nothing would grow there for seventy-five years. Six months later, when weeds began to sprout after a winter spent in temporary barracks style housing, the Hibakusha, or survivors of the attack gained some small measure of hope. If the weeds can come back, and the blossoms can flower again, so can we, they reasoned.

My first impression of Hiroshima, as I stepped off the bus after a twelve-hour overnight ride, was that it was like smaller cities and towns in California. So many cities in California have little more than fiifty or sixty years' history since their founding, giving them an unlived-in feel. The city was completely re engineered after the bombing, and now has the widest thoroughfares I have seen anywhere in Japan. It has an open, green feel that puts Tokyo to shame.

Today, all that remains of that day in 1945 is the ruins of the former Japanese Industrial promotion hall, renamed the Genbaku Dome, or A-bomb dome, which is designated as a UNESCO world heritage site, and according to a mayoral decree in 1966, is to be maintained in its current condition into perpetuity. The rest of the city except for the city hall building was completely leveled and covered in grey ash and dark streaks where radioactive black rain fell after the blast.

In the museum, hordes of schoolchildren scurried around, taking notes for their school assignments, glancing over the exhibits for a few moments, then scurrying on to the next. Maybe because I rented an English audio guide that made me stop to listen to the story behind each exhibit, I spent more time there. Maybe they were too young to really understand, but there was too much joking and yelling from the children; as if they didn't realize what they were looking at. They could have been transported to a natural history museum, looking at dinosaur skeletons, and the reaction would have been exactly the same.

Outside, I sat on the concrete steps outside the museum, processing what I had seen. School children from a junior high school in Osaka walked up to me with their English homework, reading their introductions off the top of the page:

"Hello, my name is Misako Tanaka from Osaka junior high school. May we interview you?"
"Sure"
"How are you?"
She and her four friends waited for my response.
"I'm fine", I said. The Japanese are typically unprepared for any response that differs from that stock response.
"Nice to meet you", she read, her eyes following the text visibly from left to right. "What do you think of the Atomic Bomb Museum?"
"It was..." I paused. I didn..t really know. It wasn't good, in the sense of being enjoyable. But it was worthwhile. They waited, anxious to find the next foreigner to accost for their homework.
"Powerful". I said, after a moments.. thought. They looked at each other, conferring, translating to each other. Sometimes I think that..s why the Japanese have such a hard time with foreign languages; they approach it like they do for science and math, using a group to work it out, so when they are put in a conversational situation, they flounder. Finally, after some nodding to each other, they presented me with a paper. "Please answer these questions", Misako said, and handed me a thick green mechanical pencil with a picture of Hello Kitty on its barrel.
1. Is this your first trip to Hiroshima?
Yes.
2. How did you feel about the atomic bomb museum?
It was a very powerful experience.
3. Should nuclear weapons be used again?
No.
4. What should be done for world peace?
End nuclear arms and poverty.
Simple answers I hoped they would be able to understand. But the antsy feet and glances to each other gave me the impression they were only doing this for the grade. I signed it and let them go, and they ran off to talk to an Australian couple a few meters away, skipping, giggling, and doing what Junior high schoolers do.

Sanya

"One more beer, please!". I absently pushed my empty beer jockey around on the bar. The bar was built from two-by-fours worn on the edges and corners from use, and had a greyish, half-glossy sheen that, as far as I could tell, was less the result of varnish or laquer, and more from years of accumluated spilt beer and ramen broth. "No problem, man", Sou replied. Sou has an excellent command of English on account of having lived in an English speaking country for some time. Hes also the only Japanese person Ive met who says "man" at the ends of his sentences.

My hangout is a one room ramen shop, about the size of my apartment. That is to say, it's small. It could accommodate about twenty-two customers, and standing room is not a possibility. The walls are unfinished concrete, the black markings from the construction workers still clearly visible, and completely legible, provided you can read Japanese. At the heart of the stereo system of the place is a set of two turntables which spin a continuous backdrop of hiphop and reggae. The crowning glory is pints of Asahi beer for 450 yen, or roughly equivalent to the price of good beer in the states, half of the going rate in Tokyo for a pint of beer.

A fresh pint arrived in front of me, in typical Japanese style: 70% beer, 30% head, and Sou slapped me on the shoulder. "Here you go, man", he said as he walked past me. "Cheers", I replied.

"Sou, man, I need somewhere to go. I wanna see something different. Something gaijin dont see", I said. He looked at me, and thought for a moment. "How about the Meiji Jingu shrine in Harajuku?", he asked as he arranged half a dozen potstickers in a huge cast-iron pan. "Nah, Ive been there a lot already. Besides, Im templed and shrined out". "What about The Shinjuku national garden. You know, Shinjuku gyoen?". I tried to sip my beer, stymied by the inch and a half of foam that the Japanese consider indicative of a well-poured brew "Nah, same thing with gardens. I saw Rikugien last month, Shinjuku Gyoen for the second time, Ritsurin Kouen in shikoku, and Kairakuen in Mito. No more gardens". He turned around to stir some noodles boiling in a giant pot. "You should go to Sanya. Foreigners never go there. Its a Japanese ghetto. It might be interesting for you". I raised my eyebrows. "Yeah? Where is it? Ive never heard of it, its in Tokyo?" I asked. "Its near Kamagaya, I think. Or maybe Nippori. Actually, maybe its near Ayase. Anyway, it doesnt matter, man, you shouldnt go there, almost everyone there is yakuza, you know, Japanese mafia. Its a dangerous part of town". I looked around the room, silently counting all the tattooed, nine-fingered patrons. "Hows that different from here?" I said.

"Dangerous part of town", for the average the Japanese person roughly corresponds with 'Seattle on a tuesday night' in English. Still, I was intrigued. In an age when it seems like everything under the sun has not only been done, but has been documented, fully explored and blogged about by at least a dozen people, the idea of going somewhere in Tokyo that gaijin never see was too much to resist. "Have you ever been there?" I asked. "Yeah, one time. But I was in a car. Its too dangerous. There are no vending machines there, they always get smashed up and robbed by homeless people and poor gangsters". "Can you draw me a map?". I offered a pen and paper. "Dont go, man, youre taking your life in your hands. It is dangerous".

I found it, eventually. Its situated in the Shitamachi (literally "downtown") area of northeast Tokyo, between Taito and Arakawa wards. It has been removed from maps of the city, but its easy enough to find if you know what to look for. On a rainy tuesday afternoon, I took off walking from Minami-Senju station, over the old freight yard to Namidabashi, or the "bridge of tears", where convicts were once gathered before they were executed. Beyond Namidabashi lies Sanya, a place that never felt the effects of the windfall economic successes of the 1980s, at least not until the bubble burst and the homeless population of the city jumped dramatically.

They lay sprawled on the sidewalk under rotting store awnings on the main drag, or huddled against buildings, smoking broken, scavenged cigarettes and drinking cheap sake. The homeless in Japan are markedly different from those of other countries; never once have I seen any of them panhandling or even interacting with anyone outside of their circle. To my knowledge, there arent many homeless shelters in Tokyo; the Japanese homeless either live on the streets or take up residence in shacks on the banks of rivers, or underneath bridges, building one room huts made of found plywood and blue tarps. Most of them have old shopping bicycles parked outside, and fish for carp and turtles in the murky waters on their doorstep.

In Osaka, where the offical count of homeless people numbers around seven thousand, a homeless association has been formed, made up of destitute residents in the citiys parks. They grow much of their own food on a plot of land that was given to them, eating it in communal dinners and selling part of the harvests. In Tokyo, the story is different, with the shacks being relegated to the outskirts of the city. Those who live in the city don't have the luxury of space to build much of anything. Vacant lots typically don't stay that was for long here, and you wont find any dwellings at all in Ueno park, which is known for its homeless population.

Down a side street, underneath a large convered area, a circle of half a dozen men sat cross-legged on the concrete, gambling, drinking, and singing. Down another, old men relieved themselves over storm drains. The smashed remains of vending machines that once sold alcohol stood on the sidewalk, sat sunbleached and forgotten. On street corners, empty single-serving cups of sake and cans of beer and chu-hai (Japan's answer to Zima and hard lemonade style drinks) were carefully arranged in seperate piles, sorted and ready to be picked up for recycling. Even Japans homeless, apparently, get in on garbage sorting.

One of the most salient features of Tokyo is its tendency to cannibalize its own real estate. Buildings here are not usually built to last. Most buildings here have a lifespan of only about twenty to twenty five years. Sanya, in contrast, consists largely of slowly decaying pre-war wooden houses that survived firebombing and earthquakes only to succumb to the slow death of neglect. In spite of this (or perhaps because of it), I saw more greenery and space devoted to flowering vines, miniature vegetable gardens and potted trees in the one square mile of Sanya than I have in any other suburb of the city. Most Tokyoites live in massive concrete hive-like edifices in the outlying suburbs of the city that leave no room for such things by virtue of their design. These are the future of Tokyo, and most of its present, as well. Places like Sanya are the only reminders of what the city must have been like before the war, with its strange, parabola curved streets, street corners at odd angles and ramshackle wood houses. In the 1970's the government went on a national campaign to modernize its towns and cities, and many older buildings were replaced by western-style concrete shoeboxes, and previously irregular street patterns are gridded, like the suburb I live in in Chiba prefecture.

A week later, at Gohongi, Sou flagged me down as I was leaving. "Hows it going man?", and I parked myself on a barstool. "Not a lot. Walked Shitamachi the other day. Hit up Sanya". He raised an eyebrow "Lots of homeless, huh? Its dangerous". "I dont know, man, its not any worse than a lot of parts of Seattle". He turned to cook up some noodles and glanced over his shoulder "The Sanya is already over, you know? Theyre going to tear it down soon, replace it with something new. They already drew up the plans". And so, the cycle of demolition and rebuilding which characterizes so many other parts of Tokyo has finally caught up with Sanya. What began with its removal from maps of the city ends with its expungement from the city itself. But the younger generation, who dont even know it exists, wont miss it. Nor will the older people, who are noticeably perturbed by the smallest mention of its name. Sanya will go quietly, and the bridge of tears will become just one more place name with an obtuse etymology.

A view from the Chiyoda line

The Japanese were the first to miniaturize music. In 1979, Sony offered the Walkman TPS-L2 to the general public in Japan. It caught on in Japan largely as a way to pass the time during Tokyos infamously long train commutes; a boon to the sanity of the hapless salaryman who is twice daily subjected to the relentless, cramped quarters that characterize the cars of the Tokyo metro system. Listening to music over headphones gives you a sense of isolation from the people around you, and even if its just in your head, it still relieves the feeling of being boxed on from all sides by anonymous bodies for ninety minutes at a time.

Foreigners can never be a real part of Japanese society, but I feel distinctly Japanese when I tune out all the other bodies on the train through my headphones.

With my head buried in a motorcycle magazine sent from home, dreaming about better ways to get to work, and my ipod earbuds nested in my ear canals, I rode the Chiyoda line on its southwest-bound stretch towards Tokyo to work early one sunday morning. Absorbed in the mechanical intricacies of a motorcycle with the price tag of a Lexus, I didnt notice at first the woman standing in front of me who was trying to get my attention.

"Excuse me, do you speak English?", she asked. I looked up, removed my earbuds and closed my magazine . "Yes, I do...", I replied, stretching my vowels like an accordion player stretches his bellows, hoping she would detect my retincence to talk to her through my intonation. A lot of Japanese people will try to make conversation with you either on trains or on the station platform so they can practice their "English" for free. At first its endearing, but with time, you start to feel like an animal in a zoo, as it seems as if they dont realize that non-Japanese are, indeed real, living human beings like themselves. The Japanese are typically not very worldly.
"Is Japanese OK?", she then asked in Japanese. I was intrigued. "Yes, Japanese is fine", I replied in Japanese. Her face lit up, "I am Michiko Harada, pleased to meet you!", she beamed. "Makkaashii Kuin" I said, as my name is rendered in Japanese, pleased to meet you too.

She was older, in her late fourties or early fifties. The twilight age at which many women who have managed to get by on looks alone begin to realize gravity rides everything, and start to desperately overcompensate, chemically filling up every crease in their faces with powders and liquids and gels like bondo in an old dented Camaro.She was one of those women. She mightve been attractive in her younger years,but each passing year has been accompanied with another fraction of a milimeter of makeup, giving her skin a powdery, matte effect.

"Well, Im very sorry to bother you, but I run an English conversation school in Aoyama, it is called the 'Hana kurabu'; in Japanese, that means -"
"Flower Club, I understand" I said, starting to wish Sony would make a more effective social isolation device than headphones. "Wonderful! You have such skillful Japanese! Thats tremendous!"
"No, its really not" I mumbled. Warning bells were going off in my head. She was one of those "faaaabulous" people, the type who overuse superlatives, and have dogs the size of a five pound sack of sugar with annual grooming bills the size of a semesters tuition at Stanford.
"Well, anyway, I was wondering, since you are a foreigner, do you happen to be aquainted with any English teachers? My current teacher, Matt-san is going back to New Zealand soon".
"I cant imagine why. Yes, I know a lot of English teachers, I work at an English school now. I can ask around for you if youd like"

Her face lit up so fast I thought her makeup might fall off. "Its my lucky day! I was so worried! So, when would you like to come to my school? Just to take a look, maybe we can talk about hours and pay and all that kind of thing".

"Me?", I said, wondering what I had missed between the part when I said "Ill ask for you" and the part where she hired me.

Neuroscientists, philosophers and self-help authors have all said that there are small delays between the stimuli that your senses register and when those stimuli hit your brain. Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintainence claimed that due to this delay, what we percieve is all in the past, and since the past does not exist objectively, what we percieve is not, in fact, real. Stephen Covey, author of The seven habits of highly effective people, talked about a similar delay between cognition and response, and in that fraction of a second, we determine our responses to a situation, and by being aware of our automatic responses we can become less erratic, more responsible people. I failed on both counts.

"Sure. Sounds good, when and where?". Somewhere halfway around the world, Stephen Covey felt a psychic twinge of dissappointment in the deepest recesses of his mind. Not that it mattered, because apparently nothing is real anyway.

From a Louis Vuitton bag that probably cost about half of what I make in a month, she removed a Louis Vuitton wallet that cost about as much as I spend on my rent, utilities and cell phone bill combined. She presented to me, in typical Japanese fashion, an unremarkable business card in an elaborate ritual, with the card held out in front of her in both hands, in a half-bow, the jostling of the train not permitting a proper bow. I graciously accepted, sliding it gently into my plain brown leather wallet that I bought when my old one could no longer hold bills or my drivers license reliably.

"Would thursday be alright? My school is in Aoyama, it is callled 'Hana kurabu', you can get to it on the Chiyoda line, if you get off at Omotesando station I can meet you there".

On thursday, I found myself on Omotesando, the Champs-Elyssees of Tokyo.

"Oh my, your suit is very nice! Youre wearing a colored shirt! So many Japanese salarymen wear white shirts with their suits; Yes, colored shirts, its a very handsome look, dont you think? Well, shall we go to the Flower Club? Its quite close. We can drink some coffee or tea there. Which do you prefer, coffee? Tea?". Human language is at its core, a means of expressing relationships of ideas. The human brain doesnt work in linear ways the way speech does, but since we can only express one sound at a time, our minds structure spoken language linearly. Some people, for better or for worse, struggle with that physiological barrier to non-linear communication. Some have a dozen ideas that want out, but invariably reach that bottleneck that is the human vocal tract, and as a result, stutter and try to start the same sentence five times in five different ways, desperately attempting to say everything they want to at once. Others just let loose, throwing continuity to the wind.

We walked up three flights of stairs and down a walkway to a grey metal door. Printed on a magnetic strip the size of a bumper sticker was a sign advertising dried and live flower arrangment classes. She peeled it off and replaced it with one that advertised English conversation classes. "We have an English school here!" she said and smiled, as if it was the first time shed mentioned it.

The school was a one room affair converted from a studio apartment. It was tidy, its shelves populated with dried flowers arranged in small vases and small porcelain figurines of animals and children. "Would you like to see my photos? Ill show you some photos of my friends!" Bewildered, I watched as she rooted around in her closet, removing a photo album and placing it on the table in front of me. She opened it, pointing to a photo of a group of people eating in a backyard somewhere. "Thats prime minister Koizumis ex-wife. This is his son. Shes bitchy!". She smiled and turned the page. "This is my friend, shes a member of the national assembly. Dont you think shes fat? Kind of ugly, too". "Certainly is" I said without much conviction as I swirled the dregs off my coffee around the bottom out my cup.

Four hours later, we sat in a coffee shop on omotesando drinking the most expensive latte I have ever laid eyes on. I had been speaking Japanese for over six hours, and my head was beginning to hurt. I swirled the dregs and foam of a ten dollar coffee around the bottom of a bowl shaped mug and wished I was at home, sleeping. Sensing this, she again reached into the brown Louis Vuitton bag and removed a one thousand yen note. "Here, Ill pay for your return trip", she said. Good Japanese manners dictated that I refuse twice before accepting her offer. "Thanks a lot, Ill give you a call sometime, I have your business card" I said, slipping the note into my back pocket as I stood up. One of the perks of being a foreigner in Japan is that you dont have to observe good Japanese manners any more than dogs have to observe the etiquette rules that dictate which fork to use first. If you do, its a miracle, if you dont, its nothing shocking. "Thanks for the coffee" I said, bowing, then turned on my heel and walked towards the Chiyoda line.

Fuji

The melting point of rock is between approximately 1290 and 1800 degrees farenheit. But at that point, who's counting, right? When melted rock, or lava, collects under pressure, deep under the ground, it seeks a way to relieve the mounting pressure, and "pipes" are formed, channels that lead toward the surface of the earth. When they finally penetrate into the open air, the openings they create are known among scientists as "vents". When lava passes through these vents, it causes an event known commonly as a volcanic eruption. Accumulated cooled lava and ash combine, creating landmasses that we call volcanos.

The particular volcano I was visiting that thursday evening was a stratovolcano, defined by their tall, conical shape, composed of alternating layers of lava and miscelaneous particles of crystal and older volcanic rock emitted through eruptions.

The bus pulled uphill, around hairpin turns, and everything went grey outside the windows while we passed through the clouds. The sky opened up around us and we all saw the sun for the first time that day. It was that time of day that photographers call the "magic hour" right near sunset, when colors seem so much more vivid and alive. Cameras clicked all up and down the left side of the bus, facing the sunset, taking it all in, knowing they wouldn't see daylight for a while.

The intercom clicked on and static noise filled the bus as the driver took a breath to speak. "Thank you for riding the Keio bus lines today, we will shortly be arriving at the fifth station, the terminal point of this bus. Take care to not leave any of your belongings in the bus when you leave. We look forward to you riding with us again". No matter where you go in this world, bus announcements never get any more interesting.

Mount Fuji. Its name is rendered most recently in characters that mean "abundance of warriors", a reference to a Japanese myth called the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, which is considered to be the oldest Japanese story known. In it, the emperor falls in love with a princess from the moon (bear with me), but she is eventually taken by a host of heavenly guardians back to the moon against her will. He then orders a host of his own soldiers to the tallest mountain in Japan in order to burn a letter from the emperor to the moon princess so that it may, by some conveyance I don't understand, reach her on the moon. Thus, an abundance of warriors.

Every year, an army of climbers, around two hundred thousand people, climb Mt Fuji, about a third of whom are not Japanese. Like visiting temples and ryokan (traditional Japanese inns), it is one of those traditional Japanese things that only non-Japanese people do. Most Japanese laugh about this if you bring it up, but in a nervous, titteringly embarrassed way, on account of they have no concept of irony, and instead take it as a point of shame.

The typical way to climb Mt. Fuji is to do it like we did, starting at the fifth station, about halfway up the mountain and hoof it from there. This is more difficult than it sounds.

I surveyed the more or less flat area that was station number five. There was a hotel, a few restaurants and a handful of souvenier shops. I found a janitor outside the information desk, which had been closed for about two hours at that point, and said "excuse me, where's the bathroom?", on behalf of a Belgian girl we had just met. "That way", he said, gesturing towards a building. "And there's no charge". Back home, that would be taken as in jest. In Japan, where the sense of humor doesn't stretch into those realms, it is to be taken quite literally.

Myself, my roommate Rob, Eleni, his Australian quasi-ex girlfriend, and four random strangers we met on the bus, began to climb Fuji at exactly 7:40 PM thursday evening. The sun had just retreated below the horizon, leaving us dependent on our flashlights to see the dirt path in front of us. After twenty minutes of flat, wide dirt road, the trail turned upwards.

The brown dirt road gradually dissappeared in favor of gravel, which in turn was replaced by stones about the size of melons. We reached the second mountain hut, station number seven, and rested while we had stamps burned into our walking sticks to prove what sore muscles and blistered feet couldn't. At every station, there are huts that, for a fee of two hundred yen, burn a stamp into the side of the octagonal walking stick that you can buy at the fifth station. The stamps indicate the altitude of the station at which you buy them, in this case two thousand, seven hundred meters above sea level. You pay a thousand yen at the bottom, but I got nine stamps (there are more huts open during the day, as well), which, when you take into account the "special price" of the summit stamp, comes to a total of one thousand, seven hundred yen in stamps. Fuji is nothing if not a tourist trap. The higher the altitude, the more higher the price of everything becomes, and nothing short of divine intervention or a helicopter will stop your wallet from emptying itself any more slowly. At two in the morning, five hundred yen for a dixie cup full of hot instant coffee starts to sound more an more reasonable in light of the rapidly dropping temperature and increasing wind chill.

By the time we had reached the halfway mark between the fifth station and the summit, Eleni had succcumbed to altitude sickness and had taken to vomiting every hundred and fifty to two hundred meters we climbed. Towards the end, even after sucking down three bottles of oxygen, Rob and I had to push her up the mountain one step at a time, past the radpidly increasng number of prone bodies on the sides of the path of the ones who couldn't be asked to spend a few thousand yen for a heated bunk.

After pushing Eleni around the corner of a steep, gravelly incline, a mountain hut appeared. "We gotta stop, Eleni needs to adjust some, lets get a cup of tea and warm up" I said to Rob. I opened the sliding glass door to the hut, and a lanky old man with short grey hair stopped me and said "you order, twenty minute only!" I forgive the Japanese for not being big on plurals, but not for being assholes. "I was wondering, where can I order? Do I have to go to the kitchen window?" I said in Japanese, hoping he'd be less ornery if I made a token effort to be multicultural and polite. He wasn't. Pointing in the general direction of the door, he once more made an angry mockery of my language "you go there! out!". And I did.

?"What'd he say?" Rob asked. "Dunno. He's an asshole. Either we can't order, or we have to do it outside. To hell with this, I'm cold, I'm just going in there" I said in mid stride towards the door once more.
In my rudest Japanese, I said to the man "Hey, get us three cups of tea, we're gonna sit down at this here table". I have a theory about Mount Fuji's customer service, and it goes something like this: Somewhere hidden away, there is a blacklist of Japanese employees who just plain don't know how to deal effectively with people, and somehow they all get shunted to Fuji, where management seems minimal and they can be as rude as they like, because a lot of the people who climb Fuji are foreigners, and everyone knows people born outside Japan don't have feelings anyway. Call it damage control.

"You want three cups?" he asked. "Yeah, that's what I said. Weren't you listening?" I snapped back. "Hai!" he said back. The way some people say it, the Japanese word for "yes" sounds like the verbal equivalent of a soldier doing his snappiest salute. "One moment, I'll bring it shortly". My tactic worked, and I was back to the level of customer service I'd become accustomed to over the last seven months. For a while, anyway.
"You twenty minutes, now go please. You let's go!" he said while walking towards our table. The last three words came out machine-gun style, slurred into one.

Without the sun, the numbers on your watch don't mean a lot. Everything is smothered equally by a swathe of darkness, so shadows don't change, except in response to a jostled flashlight. Without a sense of time, the winding path up solid rock offers no sense of distance. Just endless steps forwards seen through the slit between the hood of my poncho and the bandana pulled up over my nose, desperado-style in an attempt to keep my face from going numb. Fuji. Its name was formerly rendered in two Chinese characters meaning "not" and "exhaust", or "neverending".

At about half three in the morning I had walked on ahead of Rob and Eleni, hoping to arrive at the last station before the summit and get a bit of shut eye before the last push to the top. Ahead of me was a wide, flat area covered in sand and pebbles. A faded sign with paint peeling off in ragged strips indicated a toilet was to be found fifty meters ahead of me, and it was about that time. The wind was even stronger this far up, cutting through my poncho, sweatshirt, long sleeve cotton shirt, thermal long sleeve shirt and cotton teeshirt like a bullet through butter.

A sign printed in dark, pine green letters posted on the door of the restroom boasted of the eco-friendlyness of composting toilets in three languages. I slid the unfinished wooden (therefore more eco-friendly-looking) door aside, to find four bodies huddled inside to keep warm, and recognized the faces of the Belgian girl and her American friend. "Jesus jumping Christ it's cold out there" I said, "And we still got one more station before the summit, eh". "We are at the top already, no?" replied the Belgian girl.
"No way. But, I thought there were ten stations. This is the ninth"
"Yes, the tenth is the top of the crater, this is the summit station though".
I let out a whoop of joy, and had the most satisfying piss into a hole into the ground I have, and will likely ever have experienced.

"It's here! It's here!" Someone called in Japanese. People crowded out of the restaurant on the summit to catch the first rays of the sunrise. A group of people wearing identical yellow raincoats stood on the crater around a world war two Japanese battle flag, and sang a song I couldn't understand, but inferrered was likely something rather nationalist. Some people clapped. Everyone shivered. Clouds mulled thousands of feel below in a thick carpet, and smaller mountain peaks thrust through the cloud cover like islands in a roiling sea. The perpetual roar of the wind was joined by a chorus of shutters snapping and clicking like a tapdancing convention. What I saw that morning was worth the cold, the injured knee, and fatigue. It was glory, and I can't draw analogy to it. I took pictures, but that doesn't tell the whole story. Fuji. It's said it was once written as "not" and "two", or "without equal".

Pachinko!

"Ok, everybody, let's close our books, yah?"
The usual groans from the students who live under the mistaken impression that learning English simply involves reading off the page.
"Yep, that's right, it's time for some practice, people... Ok, let's make a menu for the role play, let's start with appetizers" I said. We were practicing how to order food in a restaurant.
"Corn soup!" one college-aged young woman called out. I involuntarily made a face indicating the deep revulsion I have towards this, the only non-Japanese soup my students know and love. "You do not like a corn soup?" she said, with genuine puzzlement. "No, I don't really get it. I don't think anybody eats it in America. Perhaps because it bares such a striking resemblance to vomit".
The puzzled look continued, unbroken.
"Ok, corn soup it is. But lets do some others, too. Like minestrone. Or chili".
The deer had been caught in the headlights, and was unable or unwilling to move. Clearly, Kaori's idea of western soup revolved around that odious yellow-brown sludge that the Japanese adore.
"Ok, well, corn soup, then. It'll be the soup of the day".
Kaori was satisfied by this and we continued making up a menu.

Later that day, I sat in a dirty little bar and restaurant in Matsudo with some coworkers. I bought a ticket for a 24 ounce bottle of beer and a bowl of miso ramen. There are no waiters at this kind of restaurant, just a pair of machines that take your money, dole out change and print out a ticket, which you then take to the kitchen window.

Halfway through my beer, the ramen arrived, complete with a mound of corn on top.
If it's possible to develop an animosity towards a vegetable, the corn and I have reached that point. I didn't care for it much in the states, but it's a national obsession here, and I've only grown to find it less and less appetizing. You can find corn on pizza, ninety percent of salads, egg salad sandwiches (an unpleasant suprise, I can say from experience), and of course, pureed in soup, arguably its most repugnant form.

I ate around the corn, and by the end of the beer, we were all three vacantly watching a TV news program that none of us really understood. We had run out of Irish jokes, and were approaching the tale end of our repertoir of jokes that begin with somebody walking into a bar.

"We gotta do something, you guys" I said, my attention divided between a news segment about the north korean misslie tests and the general sluggish atmosphere that generally prevails when it's 80 degrees with 80% humidity and you're drinking at 5:30 in the evening.
"LIke what?"
"I dunno... Let's try pachinko", I suggested.
".... Ok, yeah, why not."
Slowly breaking free of ennui's gravity, we gathered our things and set out to find a pachinko parlour.

Pachinko, it should be explained, is a Japanese game involving an arrangement of pins and buzzers, like pinball, but vertical. LIke pinball, it uses steel ball bearings, except in pachinko, the balls are smaller, the size of a blueberry or so, and come in quantities of hundreds and thousands instead of one or two. The balls are controlled by a knob about the size of a tennis ball. To be exact, the balls aren't really controlled, the knob simply controls how strongly they are propelled out of the chute. The balls then fall down, bouncing off pins and buzzers, and the idea is that they ideally land in a little hole, curiously marked "start". The idea is to get the balls to be thrown at a consistent velocity that is mostly likely to send it to the hole and just hold it there. The trick is wedging a 10 yen coin in the knob so it doesn't go anywhere.

If you are wondering where skill comes in to this, the answer is that it basically does not.
"Where's a pachinko place?" Asked Eleni. I looked around. "There's gotta be one within a block or so, we're next to the station.... Yeah, over there, check it out". Sure enough, in glaring luminous neon letters, was a pachinko parlour. Total time spent searching: Under one minute. They're everywhere here.
The doors slid open, and the clamor of hundreds of machines accosted us, all of them projecting ultra perky, hyperactive techno music. It had the volume of a rock show, but none of the cohesion. Rows upon rows of people sat, staring at ball bearings, smoking and feeding money into the machines, accumulating baskets of balls won over a span of hours. Pachinko is an essentially passive activity. Unlike pinball, the only things you can do to influence the result of the game is to either change the velocity of the balls, and add more money to the machine to buy more balls. It ought to be mentioned at this point also, that this is what a lot of Japanese people do to unwind. One of my students once spent twelve hours at a pachinko parlour (showing up 30 minutes before it opened, as well) because they had just released a new machine.

As we walked down the narrow aisles between rows of seated players, the occasional head raised and made double takes in our direction. It's not that foreigners aren't welcome in pachinko parlours. It's just most of us have enough sense to not go in them in the first place.

The staff were more than happy to help us out, I think they were mostly curious to see what it would be like to watch a bunch of gaijin try their hands at pachinko. I didn't really know how it worked, so I asked (All dialogue is in a rough approximation of Japanese) over the caterwauling techno music from a couple hundred machines:
"EXCUSE ME! WE DON'T KNOW HOW TO PLAY!"
"AHH, WELL, FIRST YOU _______ IN THE ______, AND THEN YOU SEE, THE _____ COMES FROM HERE AND THEN THEY _____ LIKE THIS, SEE, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA, UNTIL THEY _____ AND THEN ________ HERE ______ BUT YOU HAVE TO _______ OR ELSE _______."
All of this was accompanied by a lot of gesturing with the cigarette held between two fingers on the left hand of the staff.
"RIGHT. BUT, I DON'T UNDERSTAND. WHAT'S THE POINT? HOW DO YOU WIN?"
He either didn't understand the question, or there is in fact, no point. My instinct leans toward the latter more than the former. He gestured towards the bill slot to my left. 1000 yen dissappearned, replaced by a cascade of ball bearings into a molded black plastic tray in front of me
"PRESS THIS BUTTON! SEE! PRESS IT LIKE THIS AND THEN _____ SO _____ RIGHT? DO YOUR BEST!"
I pressed the indicated button, and the balls dissappeared through a hole, and were propelled up and out of the chute, and I realized I may in fact be the worst pachinko player in recorded history. I turned the knob like the staff showed me, but failing to see any point to it, gave up, and began to turn it wildly, hoping something interesting would happen, and at some point I would become something less than a passive spectator to my loss of 1000 yen. Meanwhile, the staff were standing behind us, pissing themselves laughing at the three foreigners playing their infernal game.

I think pachinko may somehow relate to the fatalistic attitude the Japanese seem to live by. "Shou ga nai", they say, which roughly translates to "what can you do". In a society where people are expected to make personal sacrifices for the larger social circle, dreams are deferred, and dreams deferred become dreams denied. So, what can you do, right?

We left after dropping 2000 yen to watch ball bearings fall, in the vain hope that it would somehow make sense, that we could somehow divine some deeper significance out of this national phenomenon. Or at least have a little fun. Shou ga nai, ne?

A cloudy sunday

Sunday mornings in Japan are quiet. Japan doesnt open for business early anyway, but even less so on Sundays. Its the middle of tsuyu, the rainy season right now, and althuogh my students tell me "there is not many rains" this season, the humidity is thick and heavy in your lungs, the moisture feeling like an extra pound being gained and lost in rapid succession, like a college freshman with an eating disorder.
And I have to wear a suit to work.
I walked deliberately and slowly to the stairs leading up to the school leaning on my general-issue 500 yen black umbrella. A burst of static electricity finishes the job my 2 cups of morning coffee and black-black chewing gum (high-technical taste and flavour! Which I later discovered had not only caffiene, but nicotine, calcium and a mysterious "vitamin P". High technical indeed) could not, and a wave of unnatural contrast hits me as I breathe in the air conditioned atmosphere of the school.

"Ohayou!" I call to the Japanese staff, and she parrots it back to me. We exchange morning pleasantries and I leave the 2nd floor, braving the humidity until I reach the 4th, where the classrooms are (its common to see businesses here the take up several non-consecutive floors). I plan my first lesson in about 3 minutes, wait. about 5 minutes before the first class begins, the teacher room phone rings.
"Moshi moshi", I say, and one of the Japanese staff replies with a worried staccatto: "Yesu, anou... Please... Nandakke, planning help teacher lesson. Help teacher still come. Wakatta no?".
"Gotcha, no problem".

The overtime teacher scheduled to teach that day from open to close had not yet arrived, so I pulled the files for his first class, arrayed them on the table, and found of the 50 that comprise level 6, a lesson that neither student had yet done (D1, "living abroad"), folded the files placing them on top of the lesson plan book along with a sheet of scrap paper, patting myself on the back for being such a thoughtful guy.
At exactly 9:58 (my watch is set to Japan Rail time, which may in fact be more accurate than the atomic clock back home) a man in his 40s rushes through the door, sweat beading off his forehead, wearing a short sleeved button down shirt that clearly was never intended to be worn with a necktie. The vomit-stain hues of the shirt collide with a tie of a brownish grey color with red stripes, tied in a sloppy, uneven half-windsor knot. The collar was wearing was unbottoned and not long enough to fold back over the tie, giving the vague impression that he was wearing a noose affixed by a hung over executioner.
"Hi. Uh, I picked a lesson for you, your files are there on the table. Hope you dont mind D1"
In between the ragged gasps of one whose interests center around activites that emphasise remaining stationary, he replied "Living abroad. No problem"
"Yeah, well, its wide open, Hiromi's new and Ikuko just leveled up, so do whatever floats your boat. I'm Quinn, by the way"
"Harry". More gasping, but it's beginning to subside. "Kanda branch". More gasping.
The class bell rings, a 12-chime doorbell style ring, and I go to talk about crime and punishment with a trio of deprived housewives in their 50s. Sundays are short, the usual 15 minute breaks in between lessons cut down to 10, but I can tell already this is going to be a long day.

His second lesson is with an eleven year old kid who lived in Massachussets for part of his earlier childhood, and speaks English more or less like any normal 11 year old. He also has a photographic memory. My second lesson is with Mariko, a young teenage girl in the apex of adolescent awkwardness. She has a discomfortingly high voice that I have yet to get used to even after five months of teaching her. Today we are talking about ordering fast food.
Harry, two rooms down, meanwhile, is clearly unprepared to deal with the fact that his 11 year old student may in fact be more intelligent than he is:
"What... I... Want to know... Is... Where... Did.. You... Learn... English?"
"Well, I grew up in near the great lakes, my dad used to work there, but we moved back to Japan a couple years ago"
"Wow... You... Are... A... Very... Smart... Little.... Boy!..." He says with awkward deliberation. Mariko, meanwhile, is wrestling with the fact that we do not, in fact call french fries "poteto furai". We're roleplaying a fast food ordering situation, with me as the McMonkey and her as the honourable customer-san.
"Hi, what can I get you?"
"Anou... Cheeseburger setto... poteto furai"
From room 6 I hear Harry and his student: "Wow, ok... Whats 2 plus 2?"
"Haha, thats too easy, its 4. What 35 divided by 3 and a half?"
"Youre a very smart boy! Ok, whats the hippo doing in this picture?"
"Ten! Its ten, you know?"
"No, its yawning. Y-a-w-n-i-n-g. The Hippo is yawning. Whats the hippo doing?" Harry asked.
"Well, yeah, but 35 divided by 3 and a half is 10"

My company is generally thought to be the cheapest English school in the country, and as such, attracts a lot of interesting clients, such as the mentally ill. Psychiatric help is rare in Japan, and those psychiatrists and psychologists who do practice are about on par with the skills of the average Japanese physician, which is to say, they are frighteningly underqualified. Consider, entrance exams are the most difficult part of entering universities here, after that, it is universally recognized that graduation is simply a matter of going to class a couple times a semester. But that is neither here nor there, I suppose. Anyway, it is often the case that psychiatric patients will be directed to English conversation schools as part of their therapy. There appears to be no solid logical foundation for this, but its not my country, and I don't make the rules. It certainly doesn't make the teachers any more normal though.

There are two varieties of lessons that I generally try to steer clear of. The first is those having to do with free time or weekends, on account of the Japanese typically do nothing with their free time. Exhibit A:
"So, Megumi, what are you into?"
"eh?"
"What do you do in your free time?"
"heh?"
"What is your hobby?"
"Ah! Hobby! Yes!... Sleeping!"
"... That's not a hobby"
"I like sleeping. It is my hobby"

Everything youve heard about workaholic Japanese is basically true. After spending a whole lifetime in cram schools and doing overtime at work, they just dont really know what to do with themselves when theyre off work.
Ive asked, a few times for advice from other teachers on how to deal with this problem.
"So, I really dont wanna do C10, but its the only one open. Any advice? They never have anything interesting to talk about"
"Yeah. I always make them imagine they have a life, and do roleplays from there, give it a try"
"You mean I should say imagine you have a life?"
"Nah, they wont get that, its too casual. Assign them a life, yknow, like this weekend, I went to Tokyo Disney, then went out for some fusion cuisine at a new restaurant in Ginza'"
I dont like doing that kind of thing, it seems patronizing. So I usually just grit my teeth and prepare myself for a very long forty minutes.
The other kind of lesson I dislike revolves around offering opinions. The Japanese are notoriously averse to openly showing their standpoints on things unless they already know what theyre expected to say. This is a result of cultural practice that places great value on the segregation of personal feelings (known as honne, rhymes with "phone-neigh") and what you "should say" to keep the harmony "tatemae"). Tatemae is the bread and butter of the Japanese business world. The individual is expected to sacrifice for the group, and this most frequently involves keeping your opinions to yourself. That means not whining about work, or a headache, or the fact that, as a Japanese, you only have sex 43 times a year, on average. When an opinion is elicited, they will typically do one of two things: First, they will defer, passing the question on to someone else.
"So, Haruka, whos the best baseball player in the world?
"Mmmm... I dont know... Who do you think is the best baseball player in the world?"
Second, they will agree with you:
"I really think Adolph Hitler was perhaps the worlds greatest advocate for peace in the 1940s"
"Yes, I think so too"

There are three pass/fail aims for lesson D48, or "Expressing opinions". The first is to ask for and provice opinions regarding sports figures, movie stars, and other celebrities. The second aim of the lesson is to support those opinions with a reason. The third is to agree or disagree with those opinions. Some students will repeat that lesson three times, and still never pass the third aim. They can always agree, but disagreement is beyond the scope of their tatemae restricted social graces. Such was my experience. Until saturday.

"Ok, very good work everyone. I heard lots of good supporting reasons, and a good variety of agreement phrases. But I didnt hear anyone disagree with anyone else. I asked you all to argue about who was the best player on the Japanese national soccer team, and I dont believe that it was so easy for you to just change your minds just like that."
Sheepish grins and silence ensue.
"So listen... Im going to ask you to do that last excercise over again. This time, if I dont hear all of you disagree vehemently, Im going to fail every last one of you. Do you understand?"

Generally speaking...

"All Americans eat hamburgers", said Naofumi.
"No", said Miyoshi, followed by a pause as he closed his eyes to think of a"free answer" to the drill question. "No. They also eat hog dogs".

I sighed quietly. "Ok, right, when I said think of an answer that challenges the generalization that your partner makes, that wasn't really what I had in mind". I thought about it for a moment, and followed up: "A lot of Japanese seem amazed that I can use chopsticks even though I'm not Japanese. They say 'Oh, wow, the foreigner is so skillful with the hashi, look at him. Kuin-san, where did you learn to use hashi?.' You see, Miyoshi, when people think that all foreigners must not know how to use chopsticks, that's a generalization, and they are often not true. I can use chopsticks. I am not Japanese. Understand?"
"Ah... But many Americans eat hambugers"
"Miyoshi, where did you learn to use a fork? You are Japanese, but you use it so well!"
And so it goes. I can never decide if I love or hate lesson D46, "questioning generalizations".

Tokyo is probably one of the only major cities in the world that doesn't make try to lure tourists into its city limits. There's a glut of English almost anywhere you go here, but like I've said before, it's not aimed at English speakers, for the most part. There are day tours, and of course, there's Roppongi, where the gaijin expats unite in the bars and clubs every day, but Roppongi isn't a tourist destination. If it is, it's only so in a peripheral sense. On one hand, I see ads for "Kokusai bijinesu" (international business) english classes and classes in general, which seem to aim at internationalizing Japan, but on the other hand, they don't welcome foriegners here in many other senses (that is not to say they are inhospitable. Very much the opposite is true. They just aren't interested in having a bunch of tall-nosed gaijin running around Tokyo). I am here to create more economic opportunity for Japanese by means of teaching them English, the lingua franca of the world economy. Or, more commonly, because they want to watch Hollywood movies in English or "talk to foreigners". It's all in their student files, and "talk to foreigners" comes up as a study goal in an eerily consistent way. No one's really sure what it means, except it seems to illustrate the Japan/Gaijin dichotomy that is so firmly entrenched in so many minds here. The argument goes something like this: If you are not Japanese, you are a foreigner. All foreigners speak English. Therefore, if you are not Japanese, you speak English. I sometimes feel like a baboon in a cultural zoo here, I'm a person in a vague sense, but children are afraid of or fascinated by me, and I'm always the last person on the train to have the seat next to me taken. But at least I'm starting to settle in.

Racehorses

Hideo is a businessman; he, along with his partners own three purebred racehorses. He charges to let these horses be used in races, and apparently makes enough money to make a business out of it. he owns four cars, most of which are company cars (all Toyotas). His favorite is his blue Vitz, a subcompact car which displaces just one thousand cubic centimeters amongst four fuel-injected cylinders. He likes it because the GPS system tells him good morning when he gets in for his commute to the office.

I don’t have the figures, but in our client files, there’s always a page listing students’ interests, previous travel experiences, reasons for learning English, school experience and occupation, among other things, I have gathered from these that a good many Japanese men have a predilection for gambling in many forms. Pachinko is the most obvious manifestation of it. Salarymen and office ladies (“oeru”, as they are known, it being the Japanese pronounciation of O.L.) spend hours in Pachinko parlors, watching ball bearings fall, hitting buzzers, bonus buttons and spewing a caterwauling noise which, when multiplied between several dozen, or hundred machines, is a caucophony that defies my ability to draw analogy. If I had any religious sensibilites, I might imagine that the sound the emits from these places and vomits into the street when the automatic doors open briefly to admit a new patron or as another one leaves, is the soundtrack to hell. The noise hits you like the stench of a porta-potty long-overdue for cleaning in a wave that lasts for a few seconds, then is muffled by the glass doors as they return, and becomes background noise along with all the cars, scooters, rumbling trains, station announcements, and conversations that characterize the sound of the biggest city in the world. Amazing, what they do with glass these days.

Pachinko parlors aside, the Japanese love them some gambling, if the number of files listing “gambling” or “horse racing” as an interest is any idication.
The lesson for Hideo that I chose today was on the topic of status symbols. At the end of the lesson, there is always a section that allows the students to make use of the vocabulary and phrases they learned in a conversational situation (as opposed to the majority of the lesson, which is comprised of drills). For this lesson, part of that section was reading and discussing phrases that related to status symbols. The first was “bigger is better”. He disagreed, for the most part. His Vitz was very small, but it had a keyless entry and ignition system.
The second was “you have to pay for quality”. Again, he mostly disagreed, his argument being that Toyotas are very well-made cars, and he only paid 1.5 million yen for his Vitz, shiny and new straight from the factory with GPS and keyless ignition included.
“Appearance is eveything”, I said. “What do you think? Do you agree?”.
“Ehto... Well, no. I don’t think so. It is important to have balance. Many Japanese wear nice clothes, and drive nice cars; cars are very important to the Japanese; but they neglect their houses. Because they spend all that money on appearance, they are left to rent small apartments with what remains”.
“Do you think that appearance is irrelevant?”
“No... It is important. In business, it can be very important. When I go to a Honda dealership, they don’t have very comfortable chairs. And their desks are not very nice. But at the Toyota dealers, they have very comfortable chairs” - He leaned back and mimed stretching out in one of the fold up padded black metal chairs to illustrate his point - “And very nice desks, with plants. It makes me feel more comfortable, and makes me feel better about buying their products”.
The Japanese love their packaging. No matter how small the item you buy at any supaa (supermarket) or konbini (convenience store), it will come in a bag unless you specifically ask them not to. At a bento shop (little boxes with your choice of a variety of different foods) one stop north of Abiko, you first choose what foods you want to buy, and place them in a clear plastic container, and placing two rubber bands over it to keep it shut. When you take it to the counter, that plastic container is then placed into a small semi-translucent plastic bag about the size of the plastic box. That bag is then secured with tape, and placed inside another, larger bag. That too, is secured with tape.

Packaging is a good example of the care the Japanese pay to appearance. It’s not done in a superficial way; they don’t use it to cover up shortcomings of the product contained within, but rather where westerners are primarily concerned with the end result, or the product, the Japanese see the all parts of the process as important, and would no sooner sacrifice presentation as they would the parts that led to it. It seems that, to them, the packaging and the product are part of the same thing. So, for Hideo, the “packaging”, in this case, the sales offices of his favorite Toyota dealership, with all its comfy chairs and nice desks, is evidence of a better product, or process, as it may be. But I still refuse to let them put a single, individually wrapped mochi ball that I’m going to eat right after setting foot on the pavement outside, in a bag at the konbini

Onegaishimaaaasu!

Tired, haggard commuters passed by, talking to their cell phones and friends in the cold early evening.
"Should I do it in Japanese, or in English?" I asked the office manager.
"It'll be great, you are native speaker!"
"That's not what I asked"
"Do you know how we say in Japanese?" She asked.
I bowed to her, offering a packet of tissues in both hands, arms extended in front of me and in my best Japanese accent said "Onegaishimaaaaaasu!". It more or less means please.
She laughed. "No, no, like this. 'Nova desu! Onegaishimaaaaasu!"
I shivered in the cold air, in spite of the day-glo green longcoat I was given especially for this task. As the next wave of commuters advanced past the ticket gates, I hung the bag of tissue packets on my left wrist, reached in, grabbed four or five with my right, and as the first of them passed by, proffered them up to the public.
In Japan, people are much happier dealing with real, live people, at least when it comes to business dealings. Also, in Japan, very few restrooms have paper towels to dry your hands, and some municipal toilets don't even have toilet paper. Thus, in the marriage of advertising handed out in person and hygene products is a happy one. People get much-needed tissues and businesses get an advertising venue. Anything from internet cafes to bars, to sleazy massage parlors to language schools advertise on little packets of tissues. Which brings us to the story so far. The last lesson of the day was a no-show, so I called downstairs to the J-staff in the office the office to find something to do.

"Eikaiwa no Nova desu! Onegaiitashimaaaaaaasu!" I called as I offered the packets to the shivering commuters.
"Eye-contact is best! And you should step forward with a little bit when you say it", said the office manager.
"Nova desu! Onegaishimaaaaaasu!"- I handed out another two packets -"There's a method to this?" I asked.
"Eikaiwa no Nova desu! Onegaishimaaaasu", she cried to the throng, and then turned to me, "Yes. You hand them out too fast. It scares them. You don't want to surprise them. More like this, see?"
All those years of University. All that time, frustration and money, and this is where it gets me. Handing out tissues in front of a podunk station on the local line. My only consolation was that some people do this as an actual job.
If you ever find yourself presented with an opportunity to pass out packets of tissues in Japan, remember: First, always say it in the Japanese marketing voice. It's hard to explain, but in Japan, when people are hawking some product or special discount in the street, they change their tone of voice. With women, it invariably goes up at least an octave. It's been explained to me that they can yell louder that way, which I don't necessarily believe, but it's certainly not because it's pleasant, so I'm satisfied with that explaination for the time being. Men are a little more subdued about it, they are mostly just expected to be genki.

Second, since you are offering a product, you must step forward and offer it. It's harder to avoid you that way, and people will take your tissues just to get you out of their face.
Third, and most important is bowing. I've started doing it since a few weeks after I get here. You just start to feel awkward when the 7-11 employees bow to you after buying a single beer, or some other insignificant transaction, and you can't help but follow along. I bow to everybody. Convience store clerks, McDonalds employees, the postman, the random guy in the street who gives me wrong directions. Can't help it. This is another affliction that doesn't effect the ones who don't speak the language. Bowing was originally a Chinese import, by way of Confucianism, and the idea was that you are showing your trust and respect towards a person when you present your head in a position when it could easily be chopped off. However, there have been studies in the field of Anthropology that suggest chimpanzees do the same thing. Chimps will kneel with their hands covering the top of their heads and lean forward toward their superior in a gesture of submission. I really should've studied anthropology in school. Amazing, such a civilized habit is rooted in the behavior of animals that fling their own shit at each other.