More Amazing Crap About Matt and Debbie In Japan

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More Amazing Crap About Matt and Debbie In Japan!

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Wednesday 11-07-01

We’ve started volunteering for overtime, as it’s very well paid, and there’s not much else to do on our days off. We figure 1 day a week to recover is enough. Our aircon is very good – it sometimes gets cold in the lounge if we leave it on long enough. There was a special on Beef at the supermarket, so we got some OK steak for 400 yen. Not as much as we’d eat back home, but enough to make us go mmmmmmm. Debbie cooked german potato-onion stuff, which was yummy too. We’re running seriously low on yen (down to our last 2000, which is $40 NZ), but we’re getting our bank books and ATM cards tomorrow, and we should be getting our salary advances 200,000 yen. It’ll be nice to be financially stable again.

We’ve finally started getting a respectable amount of email, so we say hooray! Keep the messages coming people, we love them!

We have voice training on Friday. It required a stupid homework assignment but it does mean that we’ll get to teach voice lessons as well as regular classes so it will be worth it. Voice is a conversation lesson, where your job is to sit around with as many students care to show up (up to 20, but usually 4 or 5) and have a conversation for 40 minutes. If their English is poor, you have to organise games for them, guessing games like "Where am I?". We may also pushed into teaching Kids classes. These are really unpopular because while Japanese kids are extremely cute looking many of them are violent psychotic brats. We have already heard tales of four year olds that kick/grab their teachers genitals to cause immense amounts of pain. The brat war stories include a kid that ran around the nova building for a full forty minutes and the poor teacher was forced to try and chase it back into the classroom. Unlike Japanese teachers Nova teachers are not allowed to thump children. This can make students hard to discipline. There is one guy at my work who is getting transferred because he allegedly pushed a student. According to him the kid was running around the classroom and tripped and fell over. The kid then told his parents that the teacher hit/push him. The parents tried to get the guy fired and Nova have transferred him to another city to make it look like he doesn’t work there anymore. This has made the guy really hateful and angry because he has to move into a more expensive flat in a city four hours train away from his girlfriend. She is trying to get transferred with him but her transfer hasn’t been accepted so they are separated because of some bratty kid. This is how things are over here. If a Japanese person (even a bratty kid) accuses a white person of anything there is no investigation/inquiry, the white person is automatically guilty. We have tales of Nova people getting in trouble and being kicked out of their flats because one of their Japanese neighbours didn’t like them and complained. One guys was accused of throwing buckets of water over his neighbours futons while she was airing them on her balcony. The fact that it had been raining that day was not relevant. It was obvious that the evil gaijin had deliberately wet her futons. Another tale of racist prejudice was another Nova bloke was accused of emptying his personal ashtray into the main lobby ashtray four floors down from his apartment. The guy didn’t even smoke. We think we are lucky because our neighbour seems friendly. He even said ‘konban wa’ to us last night. This may not sound like much but I think he is the first Japanese person (not counting shopkeepers and nova students) who actually has spoken to us. It is incredible what a warm fuzzy it was. Wow! A japanese person voluntarily speaking to us when they don’t have to. Cool!

This is the first in a series of photos Debbie took out of the window of our train, on the way to work. Kind of a slice of what we see every day (and are already coming to ignore). I like the bikini babes.

Shinjuku, just outside the station. This is a cool neighbourhood, where we've done some investigating. It's kinda what you'd expect a huge Japanese city to be like (unlike our sleepy suburb in Chiba Prefecture).

A small area 1 stop past Debbie's work, 2 stops before Matt's. The name's Kanamachi, and it's kinda nice. We spent 2 hours wandering around here trying to get a phone, before giving up as we weren't yet Registered Aliens, so we couldn't sign a contract. We'd applied, but registration apparently takes four weeks. Land of Efficiency my arse.

A slightly larger shopping area, also a stop on the way to Matt's work. This may be Ayase, but I can't remember right now. Then again, who's going to challenge my version of things? Anyone who wants to come visit us and set us straight on which street is which is more than welcome! (we'll do karaoke and go to a 24hr bowling alley, it'll be cool).

This is downtown Tokyo. It's much smaller than we expected, and at 3pm it's virtually a ghost town. Not a japanese person in sight... They hand out free money to foreigners who can speak more than 3 words of japanese, as a government incentive to learn Nihon-go. Or it's Ayase again, I can't remember which.

A river Matt crosses every day (twice). It's nice to see water, and open space. There are 2 rivers on Matt's train route. Alongside the first is a golf course, all green and open, and the second has a baseball field (2 actually). It's nice to see something other than houses and office buildings.

Many of my students have really bad BO. However, the most disturbing thing is their teeth. Dental hygiene has not happened to Japan. Not only do their teeth jut out at seven different angles but often their teeth are rotten with grey calcium spots and lines, and their gums are black with gum disease. When you combine this with the fact that the majority of them smoke, their breath is so bad it makes dog breath smell like air freshener. It is hard not to feel a bit ill when having a conversation with them in close quarters. This is not merely cultural intolerance it is physically hard to deal with. Often the manual labourers are seriously physically deformed. Surgery here for the average person is really substandard. Medical insurance with a reliable company is a luxury few can afford. I have one student who works as a craftsman making musical instruments. He is a nice bloke and quite intelligent but his hands are so creepy. One of his fingers has been chopped at the nail and the stump is scarred black (you know how scars are normally pale and shiny well here they often go black, I hope its not gangreen). The really freaky thing is his third finger has a massive scar below where the knuckle should be and at first I thought he had no knuckle but then I saw him try to use his left hand to hold his book and realised they had sewn his finger on upside down! He couldn’t bend the finger and there was a scarred bulge on the underside like a chopped up knuckle. On his right hand all the nails were missing and he had big scabs where the nails should be. It made me really angry and sad. This poor guy is still working (no doubt overworked) in a really unsafe place. Even after all these injuries. I felt like telling him not to come to Nova, to keep his money for medical care and leave his job. I would teach these people (the cool ones not the nasty ones) English for free except that Nova fires us if we teach anyone English outside of Nova. But I strongly feel that hard up people should not be spending money on Nova lessons. The uni students and the business men/ rich housewives I can deal with being ripped off but it is damn evil that Nova takes money off people that have earned it with blood and sweat literally.

It's kinda cool that the position of a teacher is socially respected (although we're the Mcdonalds of language schools). The bowing thing is the usual thing when meeting someone and it is amazing how natural it has become. I think even when we come back to NZ I will still be bowing.

14-07-01

We’ll we’re still here despite the daily temptation to jump on a plane back to NZ. We are at least getting used to things in Japan (a little). In Japan you are either in one of two states: finding everything strange or finding everything normal. When you find everything normal, then you worry. Anyway, I wouldn’t say that we’re enjoying Japan yet but it is definitely bearable (mostly, the heat isn’t) but you see some freaky and interesting stuff and it is probably a good experience that we will look back on in our dotage as a fine adventure. It’s like we are astronauts travelling to Mars. Its small, claustrobic and the food is crap but you get to see interesting stuff. Japan is pretty much another planet ( to extend my analogy (phwaor, extend – sorry but working over here drives one crazy and you develop a crass and juvenile sense of humour and dirty mind ( even more so than you already had)). I work with mainly Aussies and Canadians and the office talk is really dirty and stupidly rude jokes. Terrence and Phillip from South Park aren’t that far removed from the reality of Canadians. Whilst I have never seen a Canadian fart on another persons head (yet, I hasten to add. Tomorrow night is Nova teachers Quiz night at the pub and I suspect that once that once they are drunk things will only deteriorate).

Debbie update: I won the quiz (my team actually made of myself a moronic Aussie and a cool guy from Liverpool. We ignored the Aussie when ever he spoke and thus wiped the floor with the other teams). Woo-hoo! I won 3500 yen for my superior general knowledge and bad 70s 80s and 90s music. Matt's team didn't do so well. He was stuck with dim Australians. Quiz night kicks ass.

The kimonos here are ridculously expensive ( and that’s the tacky looking ones) and they are all midget sized. While there are relatively normal sized Japanese women, they all wear modern (I won’t say western ‘cos we stopped wearing skintight ultra-mini skirts and dumb ‘cute’ tops several decades ago) rather than kimonos. Only the old conservative women wear kimonos and so they are all made really small for the tiny old ladies. Kimonos are actually pretty rare. We have seen maybe 5-10 women wearing kimonos since we got here. What I can offer to get is some of the kinkier outfits that are currently trendy with the wild, rebellious youths of Japan. One of the strangest fashions is the nun/french maid look. The dress are short, full skirts like french maids and they wear fishnets but the tops are like a habit and often have big crosses on them. Weird. Of course you might prefer the school girl sailor suit uniforms ( the drunken salary men on trains certainly prefer this look.), or the scaringly popular Winnie the pooh/disney clothing ranges. You can get anything from lingerie to bikinis to dresses with disney stuff on it. Merchandising here is scary. In fact you can get just about anything with pooh or hello kitty brand. I have seen pooh kimonos but they were for kiddies, very cute but not easy to wear. I suppose you could dress a teddy bear in one or embarrass a small child by making it wear it.

Anyway, that's it for now. More later.

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Matsudo, where Debbie works.


This is the first in a series of photos Debbie took out of the window of our train, on the way to work. Kind of a slice of what we see every day (and are already coming to ignore). I like the bikini babes.		Shinjuku, just outside the station. This is a cool neighbourhood, where we've done some investigating. It's kinda what you'd expect a huge Japanese city to be like (unlike our sleepy suburb in Chiba Prefecture).

A small area 1 stop past Debbie's work, 2 stops before Matt's. The name's Kanamachi, and it's kinda nice. We spent 2 hours wandering around here trying to get a phone, before giving up as we weren't yet Registered Aliens, so we couldn't sign a contract. We'd applied, but registration apparently takes four weeks. Land of Efficiency my arse.		A slightly larger shopping area, also a stop on the way to Matt's work. This may be Ayase, but I can't remember right now. Then again, who's going to challenge my version of things? Anyone who wants to come visit us and set us straight on which street is which is more than welcome! (we'll do karaoke and go to a 24hr bowling alley, it'll be cool).

This is downtown Tokyo. It's much smaller than we expected, and at 3pm it's virtually a ghost town. Not a japanese person in sight... They hand out free money to foreigners who can speak more than 3 words of japanese, as a government incentive to learn Nihon-go. Or it's Ayase again, I can't remember which.		A river Matt crosses every day (twice). It's nice to see water, and open space. There are 2 rivers on Matt's train route. Alongside the first is a golf course, all green and open, and the second has a baseball field (2 actually). It's nice to see something other than houses and office buildings.