Today I had to transcribe a portion of BILLY BLANKS’ BOOT CAMP WORKOUT so it could be used to teach high school kids English. Quite why you’d want to teach anybody how to talk like Billy Blanks is beyond me.
My favourite phrase?
YOU GOTTA WRAP THE SPECIAL-OPS BAND AROUND YOUR WAIST.
It`s the height of summer in Japan, with the mercury consistantly scoring in the mid 30s - even after the sun has set. As such, you`d expect the nation`s children to be out kicking football, breaking windows and capturing butterflies, or at the very least, sitting at home in front of their Playstations.
Not so, however. Instead, though term time has ended, the schools are full of teachers and students. The students are there for their club activities, and are insessantly drilled for hours and hours every day. The Japanese approach to sports offers an interesting insight into their psyche - prior to the introduction of Baseball with the opening up of the country, sport simply did not exist in Japanese society. The closest they had were martial arts, and in many ways they based their approach to sport around their approach to martial arts.
As such, kids stand out in the hot sun all day repeating the same activity again and again and again until they improve. It`s an approach that is completely at odds to the Irish mentality, and seems to value achievement and self-betterment over enjoyment and the social aspect.
While the students are outside fainting in the heat (and sadly, even dying - as happened to one local Junior High School student recently), the teachers are inside working. Except that, with no classes on, there`s no work to be done. And so, they just pretend that the`re working - putting on a magnificent, if not thoroughly convincing, spectable as they rush around the office (but not too quickly!) , photocopying documents, filling in various unimportant forms and writing feverishly on their word processors.
The mask does occasionally fall, however. Notably, if two teachers share a quick joke, everyone in the office makes a bee-line for the offending couple and try to join in the merriment. More notably, a look around the office will typically reveal at least one teacher sleeping with their forehead pressed against their laptop keyboard.
And yet, nobody will admit that they`re not working. It`s a big charade that everybody is in on but that nobody will acknowledge. And so I must play along…
Here are some shoddy videos taken by Liz over the course our the last week or so in Japan:
There is a post on my thoughts of the new Transformers movie coming, but before that I would like to share one of those only-in-Japan expierences - which, as luck would have it, happened as I was en-route to Cinema-Town to see Transformers!
So, that`s the scene. Myself and Liz cycling out to Cinema Town, a multiplex that`s pretty remote but pretty swish, when we stumble upon a street party cum festival happening in a local park. Curiosity aroused, and with an hour or so before the curtain, we tentatively stick our heads in to see what`s happening. However, no sooner have I dismounted my bike than a microphone is thrust into my face and, as the music stops, I`m implored to give a speech to the now silent, motionles and staring-straight-at-me crowd. Quick-thinking Liz captured a video of slow-thinking me blurting out fractured niceties in my rough, impolite Japanese. I`ll stick the incriminating video up in a later post, whenever YahooBB deliver my interwebs.
Speech over with, we were then thrown into a series of increasingly perplexing traditional Japanese dances (which, to be honest, weren`t a million miles from the macarena) - a new routine commencing just as I would get the hang of the previous one.
Exhausted both physically & mentally from my dancing ordeal, I then entered into a willy-waving contest of sorts with the local men, where I was plied with booze and barbequed food until I could take no more, and the locals were satisfied in their powers to consume more skewered chicken than a stupid gaijin.
If you`ve stumbled upon my blog from an aggregator or blog search engine, you may be a little miffed to find that my entries tagged with Japan thus far havent been a celebration of the technological mecca which the country so cearly represents for many people. So, this is for you.
I bought a new phone, or `keitai` as we say over here. The phone itself - a Sharp 912SH - is beautiful, with a crystal clear rotatable display, 3.2 megapixel camera, digital mobile TV tuner and a proper web browser. It`s a perfect example of the mythical Japanese mobile phone - well designed, feature packed, technologically advanced, unlikely to be for sale on a high stret near you soon.
That, however, may be no bad thing, considering the ordeal I had to go through to get one. In Ireland, you can buy a phone in literally 2 minutes. In Japan, you`d better bring a packed lunch. Whole forests were ravaged and octopi drained to produce the reams of paperwork required to obtain my phone. And if - as happened all too frequently - a comma was misplaced or an i left undotted, everything was ripped up and we started again. And again. When we eventually finished our form filling, the people at the other end of the infernal fax machine had wisely long-since called it a night, and we were big return again tomorrow.
At which point, it all started again.
I have since come to the conclusion that the whole process of buying a mobile phone in Japan is designed to break the human spirity, to render you a shell of a man, ready to be filled with convoluted price-plans and add-ons. Kind of like A Clockwork Orange, but with lots of photocopying.
Oh sorry, ranting again. Hey, I did see a `Brain Training`-styled `Face Training`game for the Nintendo DS today, where you imitate the on-screen facial expressions in order to train your face. For what, I don`t know. Look like a spastic, maybe.
Oh wait, that`s Mario Party 8.
Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire. Having put a plane journey between ourselves and the Tokyo heat & humidity, I`ll admit I wasn`t quite prepared for the Okayama climate - walking into which felt like trying to walk through a brick wall. A very hot brick wall.
As such, I greeted news of a fast approaching typhoon vigorously, and when it just about missed Okayama I was as disappointed as a kid who awoke on Christmas morning to find instead of GI JOE in his stocking, Santa had emptied his bowels inside. Co-incidentally, this is almost exactly how certain areas of Okayama smells on a warm morning.
What makes the heat that much more unbearable is that my predeccessor, upon clearing the apartment, obviously decided that I was undeserving of an air-conditioner, and ripped it from the wall and took it with him. Thanks, you fucking guy.
Forgive me for painting a negative picture of my time so far in Okayama, as it`s really not the case. Though the Lonely Planet guide was possibly scribbled on a single sheet of two-ply in the bog of a domestic flight somewhere over the city, there is actually plenty to see and do.
The two most well known sites are Korakuen Gardens and Okayama Castle. The former is a huge, sprawling Japanese garden which turns into an illuminated beer garden by night. The latter, meanwhile, is a reconstruction of the original distinctive black castle. I`ve been all over Japan, and invariably the castle I`m feverishly taking pictures of and marvelling at was burnt down hundreds of years ago and reconstructed in the 1960s. So, here`s a tip for budding Japanese feudal warlods, don`t build your fortresses out of fucking wood.
Sorry, started ranting again there.
It`s been quiet around these parts recently, as I`ve been upping my proverbial sticks and heading for Japan. I arrived at the end of last month in the sweltering heat of Tokyo`s Shinjuku. In what perhaps turned out to be something of a curse and a blessing, given the humidity, myself, Liz and the thousands of other JETs were largely confined to our plush, air-conditioned hotel, for some more lovely orientation. As such, much of my memory of my Tokyo stop-over consists of me sitting in gigantic lecture hall with a numb arse and an even number brain.
There are more interesting memories of Tokyo over those few days - looking out from my hotel room over a sea of neon, or looking out from the hotel bar over a sea of neon, or even looking out of a karaoke booth over a sea of neon, but I think Sofia Coppola has covered all that already.
I`ve more orientation awaiting me this month, but this time it`s local and will hopefully provide more information than the `You`re in Japan!` and `You must be tired` themed lectures of Tokyo. Hopefully whatever it is we need orientating on won`t take three entire days either, but I woudn`t bet on it.