New Apartment!

Greetings from the east friends!  I see I have not posted since Golden Week, so get you all up to speed let me start by confirming that I was indeed nearly volcanoed a month ago.  My trip to the big island was wonderful, and I got to see the lava coming out of the volcano the day before the eruption caused the closure of the viewing area!  Overall we stayed one step ahead of the volcano the whole 6 days and didn’t experience so much as a travel delay!

Back in Japan things are normal.  I work more hours this year, including a grueling 11am-10pm Friday, but classes are much more stable.  At the Friday meeting each week I get to hear the other teachers complain about the branches they took over from me, but other than that I have nothing to do with any of my students or coworkers from last year.  Oh well, moving on…

Last weekend I moved into a new apartment!  I had been contemplating it for months and finally pulled the trigger.  I moved just across the street and have the same land lord, but my new place is probably three times the size.  I have a nice big living room to have friends over, a veranda and two Japanese style Tatami rooms that I plan on never using or cleaning.  Let me know if any of you need a place to crash in Ogaki!  I’m also on the 5^th floor so I get a constant cross breeze.  I had my AC cranked up in my old place, but now don’t need it at all!  My rent is about $100 more a month, and I have to buy furniture still, so no loans for any of you this summer!

Besides that weekends have been a bit more fun and social lately.  I went to a strange rock concert in a one room venue in Nagoya.  After we paid and went through the door, we almost went into the wrong show because there two simultaneous concerts in adjacent rooms.  My coworker helped an American band fly in to perform, so I am one of maybe 50 people who have seen the Balinda Butchers live in Japan.

What else?  I found a free one room art gallery inside of a bank near my house.  I ate Hawaiian food for the first time after coming back from Hawaii (the restaurant Gravy Sauce is 20 minutes from my house).  I also spent a Sunday serving ice cream to kids at our annual ice cream party.  This year my students were actually invited which made it more tolerable.  Sadly no one brought red bean paste as a topping this year. 

I also signed up to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test on July 1^st.  I’m taking the top level this year so if I pass, I can actually say I speak Japanese.  Woo!  I’ve studied a ton over the last few years, but it always seems like there are a million things I’m still missing.  Oh well, wish me luck!

And hey don’t let me forget, I’m coming home over summer break.  I’ll be in MN from August 9^th to the 20^th.  See you then!

Okay that should do it from my end.  I am off to search for a sofa at the recycling shop.  Keep it real!

Snoring, Leotards and Huge Apartments.

As quickly as a flash of lightning, I finished my spring break, roared through my first three weeks of classes and am somehow on vacation again.  It takes time to adjust to having nine weeks of vacation a year I guess.

So anyhoozle, the last half of my spring break was pretty pleasant.  I did an overnight trip to Takayama, a city in the far north of Gifu.  It is renowned for its mountain scenery, it’s preserved historic district and its ratio of 18 foreign tourists per local resident.  There were literally more foreigners per square meter than Tokyo or Kyoto.  It was quite a shock as I was expecting an isolated town in the heart of the mountains.  I stayed in an interesting hostel that provided me with a screened off sleeping room.  So it was totally private except I could hear everything happening in the other 19 sleeping pods.  One guy was snoring so badly I thought aliens might be sucking his brain out.  Hostels are hit and miss.

After coming back I started teaching with all-new students and coworkers.  Classes are much smaller, I have lots of materials, and I see the same students every week, so this is promising to be a much better year.  I get to work one day a week in Nagoya, the big city 45 minutes away.  Unfortunately it looks like our branch there is going to close this fall, due to lack of students.  My boss told me (no joke) that he is transferring me to work in a gymnastics center on Wednesdays.  Details TBD but hopefully I get to wear a leotard to work.

Outside of work, it seems like we have a pretty good group of Americans this year.  Last week we had our annual tradition of watching wrestle mania together.  It’s has become something I can only enjoy under very specific circumstances, specifically with fried chicken, beer and a very nice couch.  We’ve also been watching movies and hanging out in the apartments which has reignited my desire to get a less crappy room.  The land lady showed me an apartment next door that has four rooms and is on the fifth floor.  I can get it for only $100 more per month, but I’m not sure what I would do with basically two empty bedrooms.  We’ll see.

Starting today, I’m on vacation again!  Woo, Golden Week!  On Monday I’m flying to the big island of Hawaii to spend 5 nights with my parents.  They are desperate to get away from the Minnesota weather, although I don’t think Hawaii will actually be that different from Japan.  It’s been 60’s and 70’s here for what seems like forever.  Summer is sure to be upon me soon though.  Tomorrow I am going to pack up and then go on a date with a non-English speaking dentist.  Wish me luck!

Okay thanks for tuning in again guys and gals.  See you next time!

Spring Break!

Welcome back folks!  The school year is over and I am on an extra long two week spring break!  Somehow I survived the final weeks of a dismal school year, and I am now looking forward to starting fresh next Monday.  My last week passed with little fanfare, and I can’t say I’m sad to leaving any of the branches I taught at this year.  It didn’t seem like many of the other teachers even knew I was leaving.  Had I stayed, the majority of my students would have changed anyhow.

So after my classes wrapped up I had a week to shadow teachers and train for my new classes.  Next year I will be back in Hellos, which is where I originally taught from 2009-2011.  I have met most of my students, and there doesn’t seem to be any major problem in any class.  I am especially excited to teach high school students that actually speak in conversational sentences.  The only class I am worried about is a preschool class I’ll be taking over with one 3 year old girl who I’m pretty sure is 1 foot tall (I’ll measure her and get back to you.)

So the school year ended, we lost one American teacher and two new female teachers joined, one Japanese and one from Texas.  I got a chance to meet them both this week and both seem fun and uninhibited.  I feel astonished that new teachers are now almost 10 years younger than me!

So I’m on spring break, yay!  This weekend I went on a three day trip around the Kii peninsula.  It’s the largest peninsula in Japan and located directly south of me.  It’s almost all mountains, forests and little fishing villages that dot the rugged coastline.  There is a train line that runs along the coast around the whole peninsula, and I spent two days riding slow local trains from town to town.  It’s fun to see what life looks like when you’re 5+ hours away from the nearest big city!  People are friendlier in rural areas, although to my disappointment there were many other foreign tourists, so I didn’t get to be the first ever American in any town I went to. 

So I basically spent two days hiking around, riding very slow old trains and taking pictures of cherry blossoms which are in full bloom at the moment.  It’s been a very warm spring, with temps in the 70’s for the last week, so the blossoms are about a week early this year.  It’s wonderful now, but I am dreading summer.

I crashed in a cheap hotel the first night, but couldn’t find a place the second night.  I intended to stay in Wakayama, a large city 90 minutes south of Osaka, but I couldn’t find a single room.  On my way in to Osaka, my phone died, which left my roaming the city at 12am.  Finally I found a 27 story hotel with one non-smoking room left for $150.  Oofda.  But better than sitting in the station until the 5am train!  The hotel in Osaka doubled the cost of my entire trip!

Anyhow, I’m back home now in Ogaki.  Today I helped train the new American teacher.  Because she didn’t get her visa in time, she is doing all her training over break and will not even get a chance to observe a class before she starts.  Yikes!  Then I’ll five more days of vacation until I start 100% new classes.  (Yikes again).  Stay tuned and wish me luck!

Tokyo Report and Looking Forward

Oh hi!  Looks like you’ve stopped by for this month’s installment of The Michael in Japan Show!

I guess I should start with Tokyo!  We arrived at 5:30 am, well before sunrise and went to Tsukigi fish market.  I had been there before, but I must have been either half asleep or still drunk from partying all night, as I didn’t remember how huge and utterly fishy it was.  There are literally thousands of people running, yelling, arguing and frantically trying to buy the best of whatever had just been unloaded from the boats.  The fishing industry in Japan is huge and hyper-competitive.  After our visit, I am content in returning to experiencing it through educational TV programs.  

After Tsukigi we did a couple of famous temples and then tried to go up Sky Tree, the tallest building in Japan, but it was so overcast that we were advised to return the next day.  Then we decided to have lunch at an owl café, only it wasn’t just owls there, and it wasn’t a café at all.  It turned out to be a weird sort of petting zoo with exotic pets that had been discarded by their owners.  And there was a vending machine and bench.  I don’t know why you would want to call your petting zoo a “café” as that would seem like a health department red flag, but that’s what showed up on google.  So after petting some owls, a monkey and a capybara, we drank our free vending machine coffee and went off to a Mexican restaurant for lunch (actually a first in Japan.)  That afternoon we explored a forest in the middle of Tokyo (Meiji shrine) as well as Shibuya, which has the famous world’s-busiest cross walk.  We crashed in a crappy hostel and went back to Sky Tree the next day.  (It’s worth the $20 to get to the top.  You can see every neighborhood of a city of 30 million).  After that I met an old friend for lunch, strolled around the imperial gardens, and took the bullet train home.  It was by far the most sightseeing I had ever packed into two days.  I'm still a little tired out from it...

So, since then (it’s been a month hasn’t it?) I’ve been mostly working and thinking about my next break in 2 weeks and my new work assignment.  Starting next school year (April) I am completely abandoning all of my branches and starting again, mostly working at two Hello’s schools a mile from my apartment.  It’s a much needed fresh start, as the experiment of renting me out to our parent company has pretty much failed miserably.  The trend of bad behavior and little support has continued, and at this point most of my students don’t want to be in class and most of my coworkers barely talk to me (they don’t really talk to each other much either).  It’s a night and day difference compared to my last time in Japan.  Hopefully my move back to Hello’s will set things straight.  This week is my last on my current schedule, then I train for a week, and take over new classes after the April vacation. 

What else?  I’ve been to a few movies lately- I enjoyed Beguiled and Black Panther (especially the first ever token white character!)   I also worked the last two Sundays, one training and the other teaching a free lesson for prospective students.  I taught four classes with 5 students and two of them singed up on the spot.  Not bad considering I didn’t even know where the books and flashcards were when I showed up! 

Other than that I don’t have much more to report.  I am happy that so many of you keep reading despite my relative lack of adventures/ run-ins with law enforcement.  Hopefully things start getting more interesting soon.  Happy spring interneters!!

Setsubun in Tokyo!

Good evening friends and frienemies, it’s time for another of my increasingly infrequent updates from Japan!  I enjoyed a lovely Christmas in frozen Minnesota shortly following my last post and have been back basically in Ogaki since then.  Winter has finally started in earnest and we have a few melting piles of snow around the parking lot.  The big news is that I’m in the middle of another one week break!  Why another break already you ask?  Well the Japanese teachers are doing parent teacher conferences, so we have no classes to teach, yay!  But actually all of branches I teach at finished their conferences long ago, so there is really no reason that I have off other than my loud and frequent complaining!  Now for the rest of the year my breaks are the same as the other Americans, which makes no sense from a class schedule perspective, but is a huge improvement over texting my boss every day of the break to ask if I have to work or not.  But enough about my corporate overlords, I’m on vacation!  Yesterday I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time with six other Americans.  It took five hours and I only got to kill one person (and steal a guy’s clothes).  I am not so sad now that my brothers excluded me from their games when I was six.  I also went on one long hike from the town of Motosu to Gifu.  I took a back road through a mountain valley and discovered the prefectural prison, complete with watch towers and barbed wire.  When things aren’t going my way I always imagine the many things I could be thrown into Japanese prison for, and then I feel more grateful for my life!

Later tonight two of my coworkers and I are taking a night bus to Tokyo!  It only cost $40 one way.  We are going to hang out there and do some sightseeing Friday and Saturday and then come back probably on the train Saturday night.  So far on the agenda are: the Tokyo Skytree, the Tsukigi Fish Market, and hopefully one of those weird animal cafes.  (At first there were only cat cafes, but now there are rumored to be owl and hedgehog cafes as well.  Have to try them all before the health department shuts them down!)  Saturday is also Setsubun, the festival where people throw beans to ward of demons, and eat long sushi rolls.  Hopefully we can sneak that into our program as well.

Other than that things have been pretty quiet here.  I’ve been running, lifting weights with the old people at the gym and still trying to read my mini novel in Japanese (I’m on page 170).  I bought some folding chairs so I could now theoretically fit 3 people in my apartment.  A Japanese friend drove me to the furniture store and also gave me chocolate eggs with star wars toys inside.  I thought she liked me, but it turns out I have to give all the toys back to her after I finish the chocolate.  Okay, keep in touch and stay tuned to see how if I get kidnapped by Yakuza in Tokyo!

The Christmas Rundown

Allow me to adjust my red felt hat and jingling belt before I begin typing.  The holidays are upon us, and that means Christmas jingles and lights everywhere, fried chicken ads on TV and excitement building as we approach the birthdays of Jesus and the Emperor.  We had our usual children’s Christmas party last weekend, and my group did a hidden picture search, with giant Christmas themed pictures projected onto the whiteboard.  Can you find the hidden Christmas fish, Billy?  No more kids parties this year, hooray!

Last weekend I attended a UNESCO workshop for high school students who wanted to discuss global issues.  Unfortunately the organizers decided that we had to discuss EVERY global issue in English within the time limit.  (There are 17 of them according to the UN in case you were wondering).  For next year I’m suggesting that UNESCO focus on funny cat videos, so the kids can get a little more conversation going.  There were over 60 kids and 12 or so English speakers, so I got a chance to network a little with some foreigners I hadn’t met before.  At the end of the event we were paid 3,000, and then I immediately got on a train to Nagoya and went to a concert that cost 3,100 yen.  It was in a little basement venue and the bands were playing a genre called “shoe gaze”.  It’s a form of rock with a lot of weird ambient noise that is apparently geared towards Japanese people who have a hard time making eye contact.  The event was organized by a coworker who spends months recruiting the best shoe gazers from around Japan.  Some people were supper into it, although I probably won’t listen to much shoe gaze until next December.

So this week I had Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off.  Then I’ll work tomorrow and fly home on Friday.  No one else I know had the last three days off, so I picked up some discount train tickets and explored for a couple days.  On Tuesday I went to Kobe, which is the sixth biggest city in Japan.  I checked out the famous harbor and went to the top of this huge neon-clad tower, where I gazed at the sprawling metropolis and the giant light up “Merry Christmas” spelled out on the hills beyond the city.

Yesterday I went to a huge lake called Hamanako and explored a series of little islands that are connected by bridges.  Then I explored more in the nearby city of Hamamatsu, which I knew nothing about except that sometimes trains out of Ogaki terminate there.  It turns out it’s a huge city with 700,000 some people and a 50 story tower next to the train station.  I was going for two towers in two days, but sadly the Hamamatsu tower observation deck closed at 5:30.  Both trips took over 2 hours each way but only cost about $20 each thanks to a special seasonal ticket that lets you ride unlimited local trains for a whole day. 

Okay, I’m off to pick up a few Christmasy things and then start packing.  I’ll see everyone in a few days.

November

I see I’ve let nearly another month pass without a post, so let’s see what I can dig up to report.  Last weekend we had a huge Thanksgiving party at an American coworker’s house in Nagoya.  We crammed 16 people and about 50 pounds of food into a little living room that was about 200 square feet.  Our host somehow got a turkey (not available in stores here) and brought stuffing mix from the States.  It turns out Japanese people love stuffing for some reason.  I even got to watch the Vikings beat the Lions on tape delay!  It turned out to be almost all work people so it felt oddly like another company event, but fortunately there was also a ton of alcohol (including jello shots) so we were all able to communicate smoothly.  I made a solid 20 servings of mashed sweet potatoes, which unfortunately were underappreciated, so I have been eating sweet potatoes every day for the past week.  They are starting to grow on me.

What else?  I went to another opera concert, although this one was not followed by a raging after party or a cross dressing bar.  Come to think of it, I haven’t even cross dressed since my last blog post.  My singing coworker is taking a break from opera after this, so I soaked up as much of it as possible.  At the concert I also met my land lord and the president of Shimon.  Ogaki can be a really small city sometimes.

Other than that, I have been a little stressed about work for a while.  My boss gave us our new schedule for next year, which initially had me working on Saturday and continuing on at my three least favorite branches.  I balked at that and after hearing how badly my classes have been going, he agreed to give me a new schedule with no Saturdays.  He is also going to spread my crappy branches out amongst four Americans next year, so now I will have some people to commiserate with.  I will be teaching four days a week in Hellos, which will be similar to the classes I taught last time around.  I will still be “rented out” to Shimon on Wednesdays.  My other boss (the Shimon one) was very understanding about the change.  Although he invented the program I’ve been teaching this year, he admitted that many teachers have been having problems teaching it, including many students that are not trying or misbehaving.  It’s a relief to have this out of the way, as I’ve been getting progressively more frustrated with work over the last few months. 

Well the only other news I have is that I a got a ridiculously cheap ticket home for the holidays.  I got a direct flight from Tokyo to MSP for only $880.  I will be home from 12/22 to 1/1.  Let me know if you want souvenirs from Japan!  Otherwise you’re all getting used panties for Christmas!!