Ha.

Shomura Sensei definitely just said, "今、ちょっと、vegging out しています。" That's awesome.

So after the vomiting...

I went to this Hideki Matsui museum. For those of you who don't know, Matsui grew up in Kanazawa, where he kicked little Japanese kids' asses at baseball, judo and sumo (yes, sumo), until high school, when he kicked little Japanese teenagers' asses at mostly just baseball, until he graduated and moved to Tokyo, where he kicked little Japanese mens' asses at Pro Yakyu. So anyway, there's a museum in Kanazawa. I went with this old guy, Okada-san, who's always kind of randomly showing up at Crazy Granny's house offering to take me places. Not gonna lie, it was pretty creepy for a while. Maybe still is. Crazy Granny seems to think he's harmless, but I mean, she's Crazy Granny. She thought if she put the not-quite-ripe peaches in the fridge for a while they'd get ripe and delicious. Anyway, this being about my fourth date with Okada, I figure I can stop carrying my pepper spray...but maybe that's what he wants me to think. Oh well. I could probably take him in a fist fight. He's pretty damn old.

Anyway, he took me to the Matsui Museum, which was farely cool, all the stupid Yankees' garbage notwithstanding. I now know lots of useless crap about Matsui, like his hat size and that his seventh pro home run was a walk-off home run, etc, etc. After that, we had some time left over, so he took me to this tourist trap where you pay a bunch of money and paint a stupid picture on a stupid tea cup, they bake it for you, and you have one ugly, expensive tea cup. I actually have two ugly, expensive tea cups. Okada-san is like the best sugar daddy ever.

So since then, I've pretty much been sitting at my desk watching Yasuda-san's ridiculous smiley-face clock tell me it's only two hours and thirty-four minutes until lunch break. And that I only have like four days left in Japan. I'd say it's bittersweet, but when I think bittersweet I think mostly bitter, but kind of sweet. But with this, it's mostly sweet, and kind of bitter. I don't really know. I'm not really bitter or sweet.

The koto really does suck that much.

The koto is like a Japanese harp thing. It's pretty much like the Japanese equivalent of the recorder: a shitty instrument that sounds like crap, which nobody would ever bother getting good at, but they teach little kids how to play it in music class. As it turns out, one of this week's useless seminars was teaching music teachers how to PRETEND that they're good at the koto. No joke! The stated goal was not to make them good at the koto, but to teach them a few specific things that will trick their students into believing that they're good at the koto. (Can you see why Japanese education has made me a little frustrated?)

Anyway, so I'm sitting in this little room, and I can hear nothing but koto, and they're making me play the koto, and I'm thinking, if I hear one more shitty rendition of Sakura (a shitty song in its own right), I'm gonna boot. And then I did. And I gotta say, it was interesting to compare Japanese food boot to American food boot. It was a much lighter color than most vomit I've seen, which I imagine is related to the reason that Rice Chex are a lighter color than Corn Chex. And also, you haven't lived until you've seen half-digested shiitake mushrooms. Yum!

Just thought I'd give y'all a nice pleasant post, to remind you why you read my blog. In closing, I will say that there's a chance I threw up because of food poisoning, but I choose to blame the koto. You may choose to believe whatever you want. Also, I don't think I'm ever eating Chex again.

[Insert pun about Noh drama here.]

I have a few stories to tell.

So at the end of last week, we had a farewell party for Michael, who leaves in a couple days. I'll be lonely for my last week and a half at the center, but he really needs to go home, or I'm afraid he might start shooting. Anyway, at this farewell party, Kitajima-san, the quiet, sweet and innocent seeming guy who sits across from me in the office got totally plastered, which, as usual around Japanese people, yielded some hilarious results. For example, we were talking about sumo (what else?), and he asked me if I had ever worn a mawashi (the loin cloth thing), and everyone within an earshot cracked the hell up. But the funniest part was when the boss was asking Kitajima to take me to Zazen sometime, to which he responded, sure, but if you come you should wear a kimono. Seemed a little out of the blue, but I just let it go. But then for the rest of the evening Kitajima would find a way to link every topic of conversation to why I should wear a kimono to Zazen, why I should wear a kimono to Noh, why I should wear a kimono to work, until finally Yasuta explained that, "It's cool. Kitajima-san just has a kimono fetish." Ha! Quiet little Kitajima-san has a kimono fetish! Classic! I actually ended up going to a Noh drama (in jeans) that Kitajima performed, so I got to see him in a kimono. It was really interesting to see how different it was from western drama. Noh makes no effort to convince the audience that they're not at a play. The house lights stay on, and the chorus and the guys playing the goofy drums and flutes sit right on the stage, not hidden or anything. So instead of focusing on the plot, you're forced to focus on the sound, the music, and the visuals, and take them for what they are, not as tools for creating a reality for the play.

So after the farewell party I went to Nagoya and watched approximately 25 hours of sumo in a three day period. It was sweet.

Then another week of work. My sanity continues to decline, and the gum chewing is spiraling out of control. One day this week, Michael brought in a bucket of gum containing about 50 pieces, which we chewed in about two hours. I think that's bad. I haven't had any gum since then, but I want some. Real bad. We had to sit through this seminar on Friday, some training on how to teach Japanese second-graders how to say "sea cucumber" and "The mouse likes to eat candies" taught by a woman with a giant frizzy mullet, whom we can only assume makes most of her living as a crack whore. And her husband was even nuttier. "Captain Jim," as he calls himself, was both a ship's captain, and a family and marriage counseler. Are we to assume that he performs therapy aboard a ship? At any rate, as I played Simon Says and sang painfully moronic songs about aquatic animals, I realized that 6000 miles is a long way to come to be subjected to this. And that I really, really HATE origami.

On a tangentially related note, I was watching TV for a few minutes the other night, and there was a program on about dance or something like that, which had some Japanese people visiting some European country, and they were interviewing some Japanese students of dance or something like that. The point is, it wasn't about this country in Europe, but as the credits rolled, as the cheesey theme music played, in the background they showed a group of white people smiling and waving at the camera. At that moment I realized that in Japan, I am neither human nor animal, but something in between. When you see a white face, a black face, a Hispanic face, you must be nice to this thing, but it's not something you talk to, not something you build a relationship with. It just looks cute when it smiles and waves, like an animal in a zoo. It's easy for me to understand why foreigners who have been here for a long time grow to hate the Japan they loved from across the ocean. It's a beautiful place, full of fun and exciting things to do, but staying here as a foreigner comes at a price. But hell, maybe I'm just talking this way because Japan doesn't have furniture or grass or Hoagie Haven. I'll think about it more after I've eaten an enormous cheesesteak.

Fucking French.

Hmmmm....what's been going on since break?

We got another exchange student in granny's house. He's French, and goes to school in Canada. His good qualities? He brought real Canadian maple syrup with him, and he speaks pretty good English. His bad qualities? Well...he kind of invited me to come to his room topless one time, so that was weird. He also likes to talk about how every country in Europe is inferior to France. I mostly avoid him for fear of being head-butted or raped. But the maple syrup is tasty.

I also visited a couple of special needs schools this week with the JET guy (Michael) who works in my office. I should probably talk about him for a little bit, since we've become fairly good friends, he's never asked me to come to his room topless, and he's a fairly interesting character all around. He's half Chinese half Panamanian(?), grew up in Wisconsin, and he's been in Japan for three years now, and it's sort of taken its toll on his sanity. He has an unhealthy obsession with pandas, randomly breaks into song, chews gum at a rate of maybe a one or two hours per pack, and is very proud of the fact that he once cut a table into tiny pieces and threw it away over a month's time in burnable garbage. Michael mostly seems frustrated with the Japanese education system and a lot of the really fake and pointless crap that it involves, and how hard it is to accomplish anything significant. So we mostly just sit at opposite ends of the office, I'll talk about what retarded thing the Japanese want me to do (today it's more origami), he'll talk about how meaningless life is, then we'll both add another piece of gum to the four we're already chewing and overall we're pretty happy with things.

Anyway, the special needs schools. Visiting them has been maybe the coolest thing I've done in Japan so far (at least as far as work related stuff goes). Earlier in the summer I visited the best high school in Kanazawa, and the teachers had to practically beat responses out of the kids. But the deaf kids, the kids in wheelchairs, the kids with leg braces, they're the sweetest kids in the world, and they're making an effort, and they're doing what they can. It was simultaneously ironic, moving, and sad.

Gotta get back to the origami. Back to Nagoya this weekend. w00t.

Viggety vacation.

A few stories from my four day trip to Tokyo and Nagoya:

• When I first arrived in Tokyo via night bus, it was really really early, so I took a train to Ueno park, which is maybe the equivalent of New York's Central Park (though in my opinion, much prettier). I was just kind of sitting by the pond, watching some ducks and turtles and fish, when this guy walks up with a box of graham crackers and starts feeding the carp. He offered me half of the box, and we fed the carp and the ducks for a while. Neither one of us said a word. Like he could have been Chinese or Korean and I wouldn't have known. It was...cool. He just showed up, we fed carp, and then he left.
• I went to the zoo in Tokyo. Yep. The zoo. It was actually kind of funny. In the building with the reptiles and amphibians and fish and stuff, they had bluegills and crayfish and American frogs and toads, stuff I used to run around and catch as a little kid. It was weird to see that kind of stuff in a zoo.
• I went to the Tokyo Met to check out some art, and I gotta say, I do not recommend museums in Japan. You know how when you go to a museum in the US and there's that annoying Asian tourist who's like stepping in front of the display and doesn't know when to be quiet and stuff? Yeah, well there are hundreds of them here. All the same, the art was really cool. Many of the paintings were just of a kanji or two. As annoying as it is to try to read and write Japanese and Chinese, I have to admit that their characters are really beautiful.
• Went to another Baystars game. They won 2-1 in extra innings. They had the bases loaded in the bottom of the 10th with two outs, and Kinjoh hits the crap out of the ball, and I thought it was going to be a walk off grand slam, but instead it hit the wall for a walk off would-be double. I was told that this was the 11th straight game the Baystars had won. Nice!
• Since I hadn't had enough baseball, I also hit up the Japanese baseball hall of fame. To my surprise, you're allowed to take pictures inside, so I now have pictures of Sadaharu Oh's 756th and 800th home run balls, a bunch of Ichiro and Matsui crap, bats signed by Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson, and tons of other cool junk. I think their museum must have doubled its supply of stuff after the World Baseball Classic. They had a lot of stuff from that.
• I went out to the bay area of Tokyo, and the beaches there, like all beaches in Japan, were terrible. But the weather was nice, and there's a beautiful view of Rainbow Bridge and a bunch of the Tokyo skyline, so I stayed until sunset and took some beautiful pictures, and then I rode a boat back to the mainland. Sweeeeet.
• The next two days were spent in Nagoya doing sumo whatnot, which nobody cares about except people I've already told.
• When I got back to Kanazawa, it was the Fourth of July, so the interns and I bought a huge bag of cheap Chinese fireworks and set them off down by the river. Before too long, the people who lived in the house across the river from where we were came outside to see what all the racket was about, then promptly went back in their house, then promptly came back out with their own huge bag of cheap Chinese fireworks and put ours to shame. Nothing says inter-cultural understanding like blowing stuff up together.

The End.

I think I'm all set for the 4th of July.

Perpatrator: One Cindi Textor
Time: The 18th year of Emporer Heisei, June 29th, 18:37 JST
Location: Family Mart Convenience Store, Kanazawa, Japan
Items Purchased:

• One (1) can of Asahi Super Dry (500 mL)
• One bag of cheap Chinese fireworks (1 crapload)

Cost: 1560 yen (app. $14.50 American)

Comments:

Yeah. I think I'll blow that crap up on Tuesday when I get back from Tokyo and Nagoya. And we're not talking sparklers here. Fireworks. The kind that rocket up into the sky and explode in a colorful display of light and sound. For $15. At a convenience store. I love this country.