memoirs of a gaijin: WINTER

Pecked out on a frosty day in February:

Believe it or not, I will have been in Japan for six months this week. That amount of time is very strange in that it's simultaneously short and long. When I consider the amount that I've learned, been exposed to, seen, tasted, felt, and experienced since August, I am amazed that it can all fit into a paltry half year. Then again, when I think about how much more I have to learn before I can make some headway on understanding this perplexing island nation (not to mention the lingo), it seems like I might as well have arrived yesterday.

It seems that these reports are coming in quarterly installments. My last missive touched on the fact that winter was on the way. Well, it's here. And as far as winters go, it's relatively mild. In fact, the outside temperatures are very rarely uncomfortable, even for ME (the biggest complainer about cold there ever was). My Japanese coworkers are always asking me what the winter is like where I come from. I tell them that in Virginia, it's colder outside in the winter...but in Japan, it's much colder inside. For a country that is supposedly so technologically advanced, for a populace that's addicted to ingenious solutions, it is unbelievable to me (and to any other non-Japanese person you ask) that these people have not managed to make the winter any more comfortable. Firstly, buildings are not insulated. My apartment is an ice block when I'm not heating it. The saving grace for me is that I have wall-mounted heaters in my bedroom and my living room, both of which have timers! I can set them to come on an hour before I come home from school. In more temperate times, I can set my heater to come on an hour before I wake up in the morning. These days, I sleep with my heater on. It's gotten cold enough that if I don't have it on, I wake up in the middle of the night with a cold nose and feet. There is no heating element in my bathroom, which means that a trip to the toilet is usually a frosty experience. Now I understand why so many Japanese toilet seats are heated! (And the ones that aren't have those nasty fabric covers.) At least I can take comfort in the fact that I don't have to sleep in my coat, and my olive oil doesn't freeze (as is the case for some of my friends).

The cold in my apartment is one thing, because I can regulate it myself. At school it's a different story. The individual rooms are heated, usually by kerosene heaters, connected by unwieldy metal pipes to outdoor exhaust, and usually equipped with humidifiers (giant kettles or pots of water sat on top of the stoves). The hallways are torturous. Windows and doors stay open for "ventilation" and as a consequence the hallways are actually windy. Teachers wear coats to walk from class to class. Those students who have the misfortune to be female and required to wear a skirt and knee socks as part of the uniform wrap fleecy, Disney-character-emblazoned blankets around their legs like skirts. (Actually I think they're allowed to wear tights, but most of them don't, so I can't feel TOO sorry for them. Victims of teenage fashion, victims of themselves.) People run down the hallways because it's too cold to walk. And as for the bathroom....let's just say you might as well be outside. People OPEN the WINDOW in the bathroom! And the tap water is of COURSE unheated, which means that the next logical step after using the bathroom is always running down the hall back to the teachers' room and grabbing the handle of the giant kettle on top of the stove so that your poor frozen digits can be revitalized.

With all this frozen discomfort abounding, my new favorite thing to do is visit onsens - hot springs on top of which there are public bathhouses. These places are everywhere. There are thousands of them in Japan. For the price of anywhere from 500 yen to upwards of 2,000, you get to enter and make use of all the health-giving, sweat-inducing facilities. Men and women usually have separate areas, due to the fact that no bathing suits or clothing of any kind are allowed. After putting your things in a locker or basket in the changing area, you enter through the sliding glass portal into the steamy wonderland of the bath area. You can take a tiny little towel with you, which can be used as a washcloth, and you can take your own shampoo etc if you don't want to use the products that the onsen provides. There is a row of plastic stools, each one in front of a low mirror with its own shower head and tap. Before entering the soaking baths, you are supposed to clean yourself thoroughly. Once you've soaped up and rinsed off completely, you can soak in the large baths of various temperatures. Some have jacuzzi jets and some are still. Onsens often have outdoor baths, which are particularly nice at this time of year, especially if there is snow on the ground! After a day of shivering, of frozen fingers and chilly hallways, there is nothing better than sinking into a swirling hot bath. The air is steamy and lends an extra element of protection from the world outside. After you can't possibly sit and sweat a moment longer, you emerge into the carpeted changing area. There is always a luxurious mirrored sink area, where there are hair dryers and usually several mysterious lotions and potions that you can use if you desire. When you're all dressed and dry again, you can reunite with the males in your party out in the lobby area. Onsens usually have restaurants, and you can eat and drink together after the bathing experience. I usually just go home in order to melt into bed in a warm, soft, clean puddle. This is my idea of an excellent Friday night in Hitachiota. :)

While my own rural surrounds are less than thrilling, I'm lucky to be close enough to Tokyo to go into the city fairly frequently. Tokyo is a strange kind of place. It's a giant metropolis that has no central downtown. Rather, it is an interconnected mesh of various "towns" that flow from one to the next and give the city multiple personalities. For a visitor to Tokyo, it's hard to get a sense of the city because of precisely this schizophrenic character. The best thing to do is go to the top of a very tall building and look out. Tokyo is an ocean around you that stretches past the horizon. It's hard to conceptualize all the things that are happening in a city of nearly 13 million people. (In the entire metropolitan area, that number goes up to over 35 million.) This explains why Tokyo can feel like a different city every time I go.

On one recent trip, I met my friends in Shinjuku on a Saturday night to visit some themed restaurants. These are some of Tokyo's stranger offerings. The first one was called the "Christon Cafe," a name whose etymology clearly points to its theme: Christianity. Good-and-evil-themed drinks ("orthodox cocktails"), decor purportedly from European churches (baptismal fonts, an altar, stained glass windows, plenty of red velvet curtains and rampant iconography), and staff dressed in Christian pop-art t-shirts make the place worth a visit. The food and prices make the place not really worthy of a second visit. My overall impression was that the place was actually quite elegant. I hadn't expected the Christian aesthetic to translate that way. Even rustic wooden sculptures fit into the baroque excess when they're sharing wall space with gargoyles.

The next stop of the evening was called Alcatraz-ER. As you might gather, the theme was "prison hospital." The result was a restaurant that felt like a theme ride at Disneyland. You push a button to indicate your blood type to open the door, and a doctor and a nurse are waiting for you in the caged reception area. They handcuff one member of your party and lead you to your cell. We were put in the brain surgery chamber. The drinks are all based on the mad-scientist theme - test tubes, brightly colored pills, and severed heads are involved. It's exactly as bizarre as it sounds. The atmosphere and service might have been enough to classify it as a pleasantly absurd outing...but then they put on a show. You know how some restaurants sing to people on their birthdays, make them stand on the table, or wear a funny hat? Well. At this restaurant, the "lucky" customer was kidnapped, dragged around in a stretcher, pinned down on the floor and violated. One waiter (dressed as some sort of creature whose connection to the overall premise was tenuous at best) held down his arms and the sexy nurse dealt with his lower half...let's just say that I didn't expect to have a side order of bare ass with my appetizers. And all this took place two feet from me, just outside of our caged chamber. I high-fived the guy when it was all over.

On the more traditional side of culture, I had the opportunity to attend the second-to-last day of a 15-day sumo tournament last weekend. I don't know too much about the sport, so I'd been watching it on tv a little bit in order to get mentally prepared. I must confess that I didn't learn that much. Most of the wrestlers still look exactly the same to me: huge man-mountains with baby faces. But I did learn enough to know that there is an incredible amount of culture and ceremony behind the sport. Each match lasts a matter of seconds, but the entire event is full of symbolism and meaning. Many of the elements are derived from Shinto beliefs. The dirt ring is under a huge roof, which looks like it's from a shrine, that is suspended in midair from the ceiling of the arena. The wrestlers stomp the ground before the bouts in order to drive evil spirits from the ring. They throw salt into the ring to purify it, and cleanse themselves by washing their faces with water and wiping them with paper. The referees are dressed in beautiful, colorful robes, whose elaborateness corresponds to the class of wrestlers. Some things are universally common to sporting events: stadium seating, french fries and beer. Sitting on cushions on the floor and eating bento lunches, however, is decidedly Japanese.

Afterwards, I went with a group of Ibaraki JETs to a restaurant, where we ate as the sumo wrestlers do. Apparently part of the reason they are able to get so big is that their days look like this: they get up and begin training on an empty stomach. Then they eat a huge lunch of "chanko nabe," which is basically a vat of soup with all kinds of meat and vegetables. Afterwards they go straight to sleep and wake up in time for dinner. Our meal wasn't as hefty as the fare that the wrestlers consume, thank goodness. That kind of overeating is one of the factors that contributes to their short life expectancies.

In case anyone was waiting for a report of the wedding I went to in October, let me fill you in. It was really a lavish affair. Apparently it was a traditional Japanese wedding reception (only the family attended the Shinto wedding ceremony) but it looked a whole lot like a western wedding. There was a huge cake that got ceremoniously cut, there were speeches, there was a ton of food and endless toasts. But there was also karaoke and there was no dancing. The whole affair looked a lot like a wedding that we'd recognize but the feel of it was a lot more like a graduation or a coming-of-age ceremony. It definitely had a lot to do with progressing in life rather than "soul mates" or "true love." The bride wore a kimono first, which was a gorgeous navy blue with some patterns and golden accents. She had roses in her hair along with some other pins and decorations jutting out at artistic angles. Later she changed into a white western-style wedding gown. The food was amazing - lots of courses. It was sort of like a tasting menu. Lots of seafoody things, lots of things that looked too artistic to be edible, steak, sushi, sashimi, desserts, coffee, champagne, sake, tea, etc etc etc. Every guest got a gift to take home. We all got a lovely cup-and-saucer set by a famous Japanese designer and a box of little cakes. The groom's mother also gave me a box of chocolates, for some reason. I got to play a special role in the festivities: every English teacher from our school gave a toast in English, and I translated it into Japanese for the other guests. "Translated" should be understood loosely to mean "read the translation phonetically from a cheat sheet." It was a huge hit with the crowd and at least one guest liked it well enough to make me pose for a photo with him afterwards. Haha!

As for work, I've had a love/hate (ok, like/hate) relationship with my job. Some days I really enjoy myself. Those are the days on which I actually get to teach a class. All too often, though, there is nothing for me to do because my classes seem to be always getting cancelled. The students are forever having exams, preparing for exams, going over the results of exams, ad infinitum. You think Virginia has a problem "teaching to the test"? Japan's test-oriented mentality is nationwide and even more deeply rooted. The entire system is based on one all-important exam at the end of high school - the university entrance exam. Students spend their entire high school careers learning things expressly so that they can pass this exam. School curriculum is dictated by the content of these exams and there are cram schools in the afternoon and on weekends that are supposed to give students extra preparation. But I digress. When I actually get classroom time, my days pass more quickly and I enjoy interacting with the students. One other thing that's been exciting lately is a pen-pal exchange that I set up between the girls in the English club and some high schoolers from an internationally-oriented club at Loudoun County High School. Last week we got the first package from the US, and it was full of booty! Candy, magazines, music, and of course letters. I'd made my students start writing drafts of letters a week earlier, so we were able to send fairly content-heavy replies back to VA along with our own little treasure chest of magazines, manga, and eccentric snacks.

I've even gotten into a rhythm with the school that I go to on Fridays. The technique that I have adopted is to spend almost no time planning. A few weeks ago I literally came up with the idea for the lesson while on the bus on the way there. I had them make fortune tellers and write in prognostications for the new year. (I had to write a list of fortunes that they could just copy because there's no way they could think of eight fortunes on their own.) This was a huge hit and even made a splash in the teachers' room. Haha! It seems counterintuitive that lessons that take no forethought work so much better, consistently, than ones that I try and think through. Maybe it's because the thought-through ones are more complicated than the flash-invented ones.

Another reason that things are going better on Fridays is that I've gotten to know the students at that school a bit more. I went to their school festival one Saturday. Each class had made some kind of food (donuts, udon noodles, octopus balls, chocobanana) and the event was basically a gorge-fest. I showed up by myself and spent most of the time talking to two third-year girls. I also get a bit of extra time with them because I have to ride the bus out to Satomi village some weeks. And by bus, of course I mean the school bus. I commune in misery with the students when I catch the 7:09 am bus. They sleep all the way there, despite the piercing "door-open" tone and the recorded babble of the woman announcing stops. In the afternoons everyone is awake, and I'm usually regarded at a distance with some confusion, but lately some of the girls have been making an effort to talk to me. Grass-roots internationalization, I am your pawn.

Ok, I think I've exhausted myself and your attention span. Warmest greetings from snowy Japan!