We were incredibly miserable for the first few days, isolated and physically shattered, without aircon or phone or nice food or TV. Feeling sick, and having migraines from the time you wake up until you finally manage to get to sleep can make you pretty miserable. We were ready to jump on a plane and come home by Saturday, until our mothers threatened to make our lives hell if we came back to New Zealand - in that way that only a mother can. So we're still here - for how long, we don't know. At least 3 months, anyway.

So, early thoughts about Japan - It's hot. Very, very hot. On humid days it feels like walking into a small laundry, with several driers full of moist towels. On the not so humid days it isn't so bad, unless you have to walk around in the sunlight. Train systems are confusing at first, but they are very efficient. You have to buy a ticket from a vending machine, then put it through an automated gate. The trains are always on time (if they're late, they have a guy at the destination handing out forms that say how long the delay was, for people to give their employers). They have the most annoying music to signal when to get on and off trains - it's kind of an elevator music version of a soap opera theme tune. Incredibly annoying, and they play it at every stop.

Speaking of elevator music, we keep hearing cool Japanese mall muzak: Oh bla di Oh bla da(Oh bra di in Japanese accent), Zippidy Do Da, When You Wish Upon A Star.... They're very big on Disney here, and Winnie the Pooh! Schoolgirls (in sailor suits) have accessorised cellphones - the phones are getting so small that they have to hang stuffed Winnie the Pooh dolls off them in order to be able to find them. There are t-shirts and condiments and Winnie the Pooh shaped pasta (and sauces). The most ubiquitous is Hello Kitty, that silly cartoon. It is on bank machines, and school stationary, and personal MP3 players, and stereos and t-shirts and every kind of cutesy merchandising you can imagine (and a whole bunch I'd never have guessed - Hello Kitty Curry Sauce). Weird.

They have cool ads here, with Hollywood actors whoring themselves out for bucketloads of yen. My personal favourite is Ewen MacGregor, with bleached hair and a cheesy smile, on posters all over our neighbourhood. He looks so clean and friendly, a slick image so unlike his normal persona. Brad Pitt advertising jeans. Pierce Brosnan selling J-Phones. Selling their souls to the Japanese market. Kinda like us, only they probably got paid a lot more, and didn't have to come live here.

We haven't done much other than sweat since we got here, but a few highlights:

We went out bowling (at our local bowling alley, about 10 minutes walk from our apartment) with Mike, Debbie's brother in law's brother. Mike's been here for almost a year, and though he's lost a bunch of weight and become more than a little cynical, he's loving it here. Well, maybe not loving it, but he's planning on staying another year or two. We bowled, then went to a Karaoke bar (by our local train station). It was a little weird, in that each group got their own 8 x 10 foot soundproof booth in which to sing (so you only did Karaoke with the people you arrived with). There was a phone at the back of the room, for ordering more beer. Between Mike, Debbie and myself we managed to spend 9000 yen in two hours - that's about $180 NZ. I'm not sure how much of that was for the karaoke, and how much was for the beer (which we drank a lot of - and it was about 500-600 yen a glass). Then we staggered back to the apartment via a convenience store, which is a weird thing when you're really hammered - standing around, staggering between the aisles looking for snacks that are labelled in english, unable to talk to the clerks or each other, communicating in exaggerated gestures and waving of thousand yen notes. A hangover in this heat is no fun, but somehow we survived.

We went in to Shinjuku, one of the big stops on the Yamanote line - a ring-rail that circuits the centre of town. It's pretty huge - the Shinjuku station, the surrounding city. You really feel like you're in Tokyo when you wander around the crowded streets, surrounded by huge buildings, some adorned in English advertising, most in Japanese. Seeing other white people is not that uncommon, but you really do notice them as they pass you by among the hordes of japaneses.

Our cool ironing board. We both hate ironing at the best of times, but this joyous dwarven montrosity makes it all the more fun!

The main drag of Kogane, our suburb. Those tiny things in the distance are the train station and department store

Some of the smaller buildings in Shinjuku, outside of rush hour. Don't take rush hour trains in Japan, they aren't cool.

Our apartment in Kita Kogane. We're the top left flat.

Matt: Debbie wanted to write y’all a message in a play format, so you could act it out for the amusement of your friends (and ours).

Deb] And so you don’t blame me for the crazy things Matt writes. I take no responsibility for anything he says. He’s gone crazy. Well, actually we both have.

Matt: Yeah, crazy with the heat and the japaneses. It happens to all white folk who come over here, or at least it seems that way. Crazy.

Deb] Mind you we’re still not as crazy as the locals, that’s for sure.

Matt: So, you’ve probably got my long and quite boring email about Japan. What’s left to say? We don’t like it here, but it is kinda cool.

Deb] Its like having a weird party and the next day’s hangover at the same time.

Matt: We haven’t really recovered from the flight (and I suspect we won’t until after Summer), so everything we do seems a little surreal - we’ve succumbed to the national fad for sleep deprivation!

Deb] It’s like noone over here ever really sleeps but on the other hand they are never really awake either. Often on the train you see rows of Japanese with their eyes closed on their heads nodded down from exhaustion (and this is on the way to work) but they still seem to know when to leave the train. Japan is like a giant bee hive. Millions of worker bees that go about their zombie-like life with out ever really waking into an individual.

Matt: My hair feels funny. I put some japanese hair wax in it yesterday, as I was looking a little like a hayseed in the big city, and now it’s all funny.

Deb] Thanks you for that input Matt. I’m sure everyone can rest easy now that they have had an update on your hair. (He looks like an Amish boy at work, Shirt and tie with suspenders and a boffy hair cut. Matt’s hair has swelled in the heat like a 10 egg pavalova).

Matt: Luckily, the japanese have little or no fashion sense (and neither do I). Unfortunately I have already broken the NOVA corporate dress code, and it’s gone on my permanent record. I forgot to take out my earings before Orientation! They asked me at the door to take them out, and I did straight away, but the hassled me about it three days later at training!

Deb] The point is you entered a NOVA building with earrings! What if a paying student had seen you?! Matt has already been marked as a potential trouble-maker though. At training he kept on choosing negative words for our lesson plans rather than perky, positive NOVA words.

Matt: The main words I used were Sleep, Food, and Smelly. This country has a definite stank in the summer, and I don’t like it. We’re getting used to it, but you still walk past some street corners and go “Damn man, that’s a powerful stank!”. All the fish markets around the place don’t help either, but I think it’s a whole Japan stink, that seeps into the people and the air and the water, up out of the tainted Japanese soil. Even my farts smell Japanese now, and my whizz is also redolent of this odorous nation.

Deb] I can certainly testify to the smelly flatulence. Also our sweat is smelly now. Like if you left a smelly fish and some grass clippings on a bale of hay in the hot sun for a couple of hours and then smeared it on your body, that’s what our armpits smell like. Needless to say we are having an awful lot of showers..

Matt: Our shower is pants. It’s a gas shower, which has its own pilot light which you have to crank up, and is adjustable between very cold and very hot, without any settings in between. And it’s labelled in Japanese. And the gas man who showed us how to work it on the day we arrived spoke no English, so we have only a rudimentary understanding of how it works. Ditto for everything. Today, we’re waiting around for our aircon to be installed, then catching a couple of trains into town to find an internet café to send this from. There’s a good one in Shinjuku - 380 Yen an hour, with endless refill drinks for an extra 180 yen.

Deb] You should tell them about all you can drink pubs!

Matt: Oh yeah, Mike told us about a bunch of pubs (and we saw an ad in the Tokyo Classified, a free English language publication about what’s happening in Tokyo) where you pay at the door, and can drink yourself into a coma from 7-10pm. It’s heartily encouraged. Kind of a work hard play hard ethic.

Deb] Make that a work hard play hard Sleep little ethic. Although I suspect that the work hard thing may not be accurate. The Japanese work exceedingly long hours but it is not very intensive labour. They have short attention spans and it can be hard to get your students to stay focussed (or even awake) for the entire 45 minutes of the lesson. We have to break our lessons down into 10 minutes chunks (warm up, listen and repeat, declension drills, reading comprehension, and an ‘application’ ie a game. The japanese like guessing games but struggle with roleplaying (that’s corporate NOVA roleplaying not the RPG dice rolling fest). The majority of students I taught so far are really unimaginative and you have to give them flash cards or pictures to work from because they just can’t make stuff up even when they know the language/words.

Matt: Some of them are pretty good with making up crazy crap in class - mainly the middle aged women, who have a great deal of enthusiasm and love slagging off their husbands. Yeah, we’ve each taught 5 full classes (solo teaching) during training, and we’re starting full on work on Saturday. That’s 8 lessons a day, with ten minutes between for planning. You usually can’t pick which lesson you’re going to do until five minutes before class, as you don’t get any prep time at the start of your shift, and new students can enrol in a class up to about fifteen minutes before start time. The lessons aren’t taught in order - the students are just assigned a rank when they arrive at NOVA and can do any of the lessons within that rank (in whatever order) until someone recommends them to go up to the next level. So you have to pull out the files for each of your students (up to 4), check to find a lesson they all haven’t done, or one they haven’t done recently (up to 3 repeats of a lesson is fine, as long as they’re not too close together), then plan the lesson, get up to the room, and teach for 40 - 45 minutes. You also have to mark your students from your previous class, all in 10 minutes. We’re not looking forward to that pace. During training, at our fastest we could prepare lessons in 30 minutes, and that was with help from a trainer. Ugh…..

Deb] I’m too sleepy. I hope our air conditioning gets here soon, otherwise I’ll melt into a puddle.

Matt: People have been dying from the heat. The news is broadcast in Japanese and English, so we get to see all about the wonder that is Japan. US Servicemen raping Japanese women is a big news story - about 10 minutes of coverage, right at the start of the news. Some Japanese guy killing a Japanese woman in her apartment, forty seconds coverage half an hour into the news. Heat wave, record highs, five minutes right after the Us serviceman thing. I don’t like heat waves. It’s about 30 degrees now, maybe a little hotter, and the crap thing is that we can’t cool our house down, but if we go out then the aircon guys are bound to turn up, not be able to do the install, and have to come back next week. Debbie and I have grown very fond of department stores, for while everything is hugely overpriced and there’s Hello Kitty merchandise everywhere, they reliably have good air conditioning. Hmmm, 8 floor department stores with supermarkets in the basement. In Shinjuku there’s an 8 floor bookstore, with CD’s and videos and stuff. We have yet to check it out, but we’re pretty keen (especially once we start earning some yen). One cool thing is that the movies and videos here are all subtitled, so we can buy videos (or rent them once we have our Resident Alien cards and can get video store membership) and watch them without having to learn Japanese. So far, we bought Interview with the Vampire for 980 yen (about $20), and some cool 80’s bargains from Book Off - The Golden Child , the pilot movie of Hardball (Debbie’s favourite 80’s cop show, alongside 21 Jump Street) and Roxanne for 350 yen each. That’s about seven NZ$, which is pretty cool. Book Off (a chain of book stores) has hundreds of 80’s movies, from 350yen to 1550 yen. It’s very cool, except that they seem to be sorted by the translated titles, not the originals, so you really have to wade through to find stuff. Pretty cool though. Hmmm, Debbie’s gone to sleep on the couch, which seems the best way to cope with the heat, so I’ll sign off there. Until we meet again,

Sayonara from Tokyo (well, Chiba)

Matt and Debbie

So Harajuku is a cool place. It’s on the Yamanote line, the big ring rail that circles central Tokyo. It’s what I always imagined a big city to be like. There are sky scrapers and giant TV screens on the sides of buildings, but more interestingly there are little crowded streets full of crazy stores, selling all sorts of weird stuff. Japan is not big on individuality, but if you had the urge to buy outrageous (and outrageously expensive) clothes, Harajuku would be a good place to start. Lots of cool gothy shops selling outfits that are a cross between a french maid and a nun’s outfit. Full on 80’s glam outfits, David Bowie space man style, but bigger and tackier and japanesey. Big black guys with shaved heads loitering outside anonymous buildings, occasionally leaning conspiratorially close to passers by to whisper illicit offers. If you wanted to find drugs in Japan, Harajuku would be a good place to start looking. It’s cool and exciting (though it would be more so if you were full on exploring and partying, not shopping for videos or going to your corporate orientation), and makes you want to become a degenerate just for the hell of it. The atmosphere of rebellion is contagious and appealing in the same way that the atmosphere of conformity and drudgery seeps out of train stations and business districts. It’s in the air, and you can’t help noticing it, feeling it. I like Harajuku, but I don’t like the hour long train ride there (especially at rush hour when the trains get so packed that you can’t help but lean on the people around you as the train lurches and shudders, and the doors open at a new stop and you’re sure no more passengers could fit, then suddenly you feel the people pressed tight against you lean even further onto you, balance all but gone as a few more people force their way into the crowded carriage, and you realise suddenly and terribly that there are thirty people in the five feet between you and the door, and that you never realised before just how claustrophobic you are. Then the motion sickness and the sore feet and the heat exhaustion start churning through your body and you just want to collapse, to be done with the day, but you know that rush hour lasts another two, maybe three hours, that riding it out, getting home is the safest option, home where you’d rest if you could but the heat of the day is all stored up and no electric fan could make a dent in it, but you need to take off your shoes, and drink about a million glasses of water, and shut out the world around you, so you sit in your apartment too hot and too tired to talk or touch the one person in the whole damn country who makes you happy and keeps you sane, you just collapse and sweat and suffer together, and dream numbly of the day you get aircon, you get used to your job, you get to go home.

Matt