The Daily Grind, Catering Success, Stunt Bikes, Busking and the Long Arm of the Law...

Ooh cripes a lordy, I really am getting tardy at keeping this thing up to speed. I was aiming to get it to at least two entries a week, more if I actually do anything interesting but I seem to have become mind-numbingly busy lately. A number of extremely tedious tasks have been occupying my time at work - in no particular order, marking some students' attempts at writing a Wakayama tourist guide, writing and recording a listening exam on a tape recorder which insists on randomly chewing up cassettes, teaching myself Japanese from the free CLAIR correspondance course and assembling a presentation on using Audiovisual technology in the classroom to be given at a JET conference taking place next Tuesday, among all the usual teaching duties. Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

So, things of note then; well, throwing all temporal order to the wind for the simple reason that I can't remember what I did and when, I atttended the last of my cooking classes where I whipped up a couple of extremely tasty okonomiyakis which you can see up there. Made from flour, eggs, yam potato, cabbage and pork, these little beauties are just the things to warm one's cockles over the winter months. I had actually attempted one before at home using the enormous custom-built hot plate left behind by my predecessor without knowing what I was doing, which rather predictably ended in disaster. Still, I know where I'm going wrong now so who knows, I might even entertain guests at a dinner party at some point. Maybe.

Also, Kinokawa High School (my place of work every Thursday) played host to its own bunkaasai recently. Somewhat more low-key than the all singing, all dancing Wakayama High offering I blogged at length about elsewhere, the floor show consisted mainly of one extremely impressive chap showing off what he could do with a stunt bike, some boxes and a stage, while several lads subsequently demonstrated what damage could be done with a microphone, a pre-recorded backing track, a passion for karaoke and a dearth of talent. Still, I got to partake in a tea ceremony and sip me some wonderfully bitter green macha so all was not lost.

I also recently had the pleasure of serenading the blissfully ignorent citizens of Wakayama Shi with a spot of aural ultraviolence in the form of a busking performance featuring Sean (pictured above with city resident and fellow JET Mike) and my good self. 'The Man Who Sold The World' went down quite well, with my mini slide solo attracting a couple of appreciative stares from two ageing pensioners, but our acoustic rendition of Rage Against The Machine's 'Killing In The Name Of' seemed engender little more than looks of brazen hostility from more than a few passers by, can't think why...

*I have just this very second experienced a genuine earthquake tremor*. Christ, haven't felt one of those since last year...calming cigarette now in hand, heartrate slowly returning to normal, I think I'm good to continue. It doesn't matter how small they are, for those first few seconds when you realise what's happening, you've know idea how bad it's going to be. This one was just a slight judder, thankfully, but bloody hell...

Well, I wasn't going to add much more to this bit really, besides mentioning the rather messy night had by me and a few fellow ex pats in Iwade Town last Saturday where one too many GNTs at this nice cozy bar led to me dozing off in a karaoke booth, then getting stopped by the police as I was walking home. They asked me where I was going, to which I was able to respond 'Watashi no Apaato, tabun juu fun koko kara'. - 'My apartment, maybe ten minutes from here'. They then asked me something which to my drunk, Japanese-ignorent ears sounded like 'dokgjn ngkdlg jnssoi djg odfgn?' to which I could only respond 'Watashi no nihongo wa amari yokuarimasen' - clueless idiot Japanese for 'My Japanese is not particularly good.' Thankfully they just gave up and drove off. Fair play though, there is something awfully suspicious about a foreigner wandering around a built up residential area at three in the morning...

Mind you, it could have been worse - Gemma fell off her bike while cycling back to hers, while Sean woke up at sunrise in a roadside ditch. I reckon I got off pretty lightly, all things considered.

And that earthquake earlier? According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, and if I can read the kanji correctly, it was a force 2. Nice...

Remember kids, safety first. Especially out here when an earthquake can strike without any warning and decimate an entire city within minutes. In response to questions I’ve fielded from various teachers about whether or not there are any earthquakes in the UK, my answer’s always been no, of course, and followed up with a little anecdote. Back when I were a wee nipper in pre-school, I remember a page in this large picture book with a map illustrating the locations of all major earthquake activity throughout the world, as indicated with a small red dot. The green landmass of Japan, I recall, was completely concealed beneath a sea of red. Thank goodness we don’t have any earthquakes in Britain, I thought to myself. They look really scary. That place Japan has loads. Why would anyone want to live there? As they say, with age comes wisdom.

Because of this ever-present threat to lives of Japan’s citizens, all public and private institutions regularly hold disaster training exercises as a matter of course. Last Wednesday it was the turn of Kii Cosmos yogo gakko or ‘special needs’ school. I had been present at the one held at Wakayama High a few weeks earlier, so had a rough idea of what to expect, though the Cosmos one seemed a bit more engaging.

Having caught one or two utterances of the word jishin (‘earthquake’) during the morning meeting, I was quite chuffed at knowing a drill was to take place before my non-English speaking supervisor at the school, Kurayama Sensei explained it to me in more basic terms. Thus, at 10 O’Clock I was already on my way to the assembly point outside, when I was somewhat surprised to hear a cacophonous rumble, building to tremendous roar blaze out of the school’s high-quality PA system. This struck me as quite a good idea, adding realism to the role-play aspect of the exercise, but at the same time potentially troublesome for the kids in a school such as Kii Cosmos. When some of the more severely mentally disabled students barely know what day it is or what someone is saying to them at any given moment, I thought it entirely possible that some may get hysterical. Well, more so than usual, anyway.

As it was, the timed evacuation of the building clocked in at a total of six minutes, rather than the recommended five, as the visiting fire chief took pains to explain to everyone above the usual clamour of some of the younger students howling and trying to climb over each other. What struck me as rather amusing, but really shouldn’t have, was the fact that all the students emerged with small cushions or pillows wrapped around their heads, presumably to protect them from falling masonry. A sensible precaution, obviously, but it did mean that the massed ranks gathered on the school’s baseball pitch rather resembled a multi-colored Ku Klux Klan rally having just raided a branch of World of Bedding.

After the fire chief had done his bit, we all then got to go on the ‘Insta-Quake’ machine. There’s some other name for it I’m sure, but what it basically consists of is a small room on the back of a lorry which can be made to sway and violently vibrate from one side to the other in emulation of an earthquake. Don’t believe me? That’s it up there. Of course, yours truly gave it a try and I can report that going on past experience, its emulation of a lower-level tremor is uncannily accurate. As the intensity increases, it becomes like some demonic fair ground ride, quite good fun in this context but rather frightening when you imagine how accurate to real life it probably is. I was in it with another teacher and about six students, at one point having to put my arm around the girl with down’s syndrome sitting beside me to stop her from banging painfully into the wall. This was then followed by a short skit acted out by the teachers in the school’s gymnasium, basic ‘What should and shouldn’t you do in an earthquake’ type stuff. All in all, diverting, but also highly thought-provoking.

Oh yeah, and that afternoon myself and another teacher gave a heartfelt rendition of Peter, Paul and Mary’s peacenik anthem classic ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’, followed by explanation of the words ‘flower,’ ‘young girl’, ‘husband’, ‘soldier’, and ‘graveyard’ complete with my own lurid chalk illustrations and arrows so as to explain the cyclical nature of the song. And to think that The Sun labels the teachers in Britain all loony lefties, they’re just not looking in the right place, are they?

On matters culinary...

Yeah! Get a load of that! A plateful of sushi made by my own hand. Alright, so it might not have been the best sushi ever, but it was tasty enough. After skiving off my Sunday morning cookery class in favour of Osaka the previous weekend, I made up for it last week by getting stuck into crafting some dainty makizushi. Surprisingly difficult to make the actual rolls though, especially the small ones, though matters improved when I came to realize that making sushi is much like making a large spliff, only using rice and fish instead of tobacco and Mary Jane. I ended up with stacks of the stuff after the three-hour lesson, far too much for me, so palmed some off my neighbor Makiko and got a huge pear and a persimmon for my efforts. So runneth the Japanese food economy it would seem…

On matters drunken...

In a desperate attempt to maintain chronological order and not miss anything out, a brief summary of an all night bender, typical of the ones us good-for-nothing JETs have from time to time, in Osaka around two weeks ago.

Well, said weekend had apparently been earmarked by someone or other as officially being Halloween. As a British citizen, Halloween means little to me besides greeting card shops making a fortune, having a few more sweets than usual as a kid, pseudo scary stuff on telly and trying to avoid answering the door to opportunistic teenage delinquents for whom the words ‘Trick Or Treat’ have virtually the same meaning as ‘officially sanctioned extortion’. For those hailing from the Land of the Free (and obviously by extension Japan, never one to shy away from the more bombastic commercial aspects of notable American holidays) it’s a time for great revelry and mischief making, preferably while wearing an extraordinarily elaborate costume.

This goes some way to explaining why it was that at 9.30pm on a Saturday myself, Sean, and fellow Brit Noel found ourselves wedged into a carriage on Osaka’s central Loop Line barely able to breathe while being squashed up against a 35 year old Junior High School student, Morticia Addams and Jason Voorhees. This was because of a so-called ‘Annual Event’ organized, I believe, over the internet (in an instance of what the media used to call ‘flashmobbing’ until about five minutes ago) whereby hundreds of foreigners in and around Osaka flock to JR Osaka station, board the loop line in possession of enormous amounts of alcohol and then proceed to have themselves a party on the train. At every one of the four or so stops between there and Tennoji in the southern central part of the city, everyone disembarks, moves one carriage down, gets on again and off they go. Why? Christ knows.

All I do know that my companions and I were able to withstand the general chaos for one stop before having to get off and catch a different train. None of us were anywhere near drunk enough to appreciate the whole thing properly, and when it emerged that there were ordinary, frightened-looking Japanese civilians going about their business on the train and got caught up in the melee completely by surprise, well, I just felt a bit bad really. Apart from anything else, a baying crowd of hundreds of drunk, noisy and disorderly foreigners in the otherwise civilized climbs of Japan is just slightly unsettling. It’s fine when there’s 10-15 of us, but you don’t want massed mobs, oh no…

Following this, we three hooked up with a slightly larger group in ‘young person’s going out place’ Shinsaibashi where we promptly fragmented, some going off to spend horrific amounts of money to get into places happily contravening every health and safety law going with the multitude of people they contained inside like battery hens, while others, myself included, took in the entertaining bar/club ‘Playpen’ (no entry charge) and upon talking to two Japanese girls dressed as sheriffs and one dressed as a French maid, following their advice, went to an insane bacchanalian techno night being held at a place by the name of ‘Underlounge.’ With very few foreigners present, a huge amount of Japanese trendy types sporting all manner of dress from impossibly cutesy costumes to what could be described as borderline fetish wear and some particularly brutal techno pounding away over the top of it all, the night ended on a high note.

Back to a capsule hotel (with incomprehensible emergency signs, see above) after that for three hours sleep, and a prolonged walk around Den Den Town the following day, where I was very good and didn’t spend stupid amounts of money on some piece of useless technology like I usually do. Ah Osaka, every time a good time…

On matters cultural...

Ooh, crikey - managed to let the old journal lapse into neglect once again these past few weeks. It's mainly because I'm spending most of my considerable downtime at school between lessons beavering away at this free Japanese languge course we get to do courtesy of the JET corporation. Spending my evenings indulging in my ever-swelling PS2 games collection isn't really helping either. Nor is spending time at Aikido, at Nohan onsen, attending social gatherings, yada yada yada...

Anyway, want to make a note of this, so let's get on with it. Two weeks ago(ish), October 21st or thereabouts saw Wakayama High School host its annual three day Bunkaasai or 'Culture Festival'. Yeah, you can stick your Sports Day where the sun don't shine, this is the real deal...

An idea that ought to adopted by the UK's Secondary Schools forthwith, the Bunkaasai is a sort of three-way cross between an arts showcase, a talent contest and a school fete. The first event to get underway is the poster contest. Every form class designs its own poster advertising the Bunkaasai itself which takes place over three days in October. Drawing heavily on the high-contrast, bright, brash style of anime, the standard of these is incredibly high, as one might expect from teenagers in the country that came up with the artform.

Next up are the displays/diaramas produced by some classes and one or two clubs, usually illustrating a cultural tradition, either from within Japan or abroad. With these projects usually underway weeks in advance, the days of the Bunkaasai itself are centred around an elaborate talent contest that takes up the morning and afternoon, and on the Saturday, the temporary 'food village', erected in the school's car park (aside from a sandy baseball pitch, Japanese schools tend to have no open playing-field type areas to speak of whatsoever). Here, the students of various forms prepare and serve a variety of Asian foods with the assistance of their form teachers and sell them to the remaining staff and students, as well as parents, siblings and other visitors to the school. Employing a ticket system whereby one purchases coupons of various denominations (roughly 50p up to 5 pounds), the school gets to cover its costs and also make a bit of money on the side.

The really good part? Over the course of the Bunkaasai, EVERY student has to do something, whether it be to help with a display, do something for the talent show or cook. My contribution was getting the after school club to put together a display illustrating that great British tradition, Bonfire Night. We even made a Guy and everything, though my distinctly amateur painting efforts on his papier mache head left him looking like a rather unsettling combination of my dad and the Aphex Twin. Alas, Japanese health and safety laws forbade us from burning said effigy and letting off fireworks in the process. After the initial reaction of my colleague Toyoda Sensei to what Bonfire Night is actually about ("Okay, so basically there's this terrorist who attempted to blow up the UK's seat of governement about four hundred years ago, and we make dolls representing this person that we then ritually cast into a blazing inferno...no, really..."), perhaps that was just as well. Judge my efforts for yourself...

The food fair really was great, during which I had the pleasure of sampling the Korean dish shizhimi for the first time (reminded me greatly of particularly spicy falafel) as well as moku roku which I was assured comes from the Japanese community based in Hawaii. It essentially consists of rice, sauce, egg and pork served in a plastic cup. Most odd. With many of the students in attendance in pretty high sprits to say the least (as can be seen up there), much fun was had by all, even before taking in the karaoke contest being held simulataneously in the school gardens.

A quick word about the talent show - similar to last year, I found this to be pretty much in line with what I remember from watching my own school's talent shows all those years ago. The glammier female members of the student fraternity took the opportunity to wear not very much while performing a variety of somewhat risque dance routines, while the lads tended to treat the whole thing as a laugh, mugging and gurning for the benefit of their mates in the audience. Wearing drag seemed to prove surprisingly popular among the boys, however, with many a schoolgirl's sailor uniform used to accommodate the unsuitably bulky frames of various members of the school's Baseball and Judo team. Those crazy guys.

As if all that weren't enough, as the day was winding down the school hall played host to a frighteningly professional school band from Osaka (winners of a prestigious inter-schools competition held in the Kansai region, apparently). With ten members and a huge amount of extremely expensive-looking equipment onstage, they performed renditions of a number of J-Pop tunes I completely failed to recognise but Wakayama's student body joyously reacted to, as well as a blistering rendition of that unbearable pop standard, 'Wannabe' by the Spice Girls. The latter was improved immeasurably, however, by an unfortunate linguistic error that resulted in the vocalist stridently delievering the immortal line, 'But if you really bugger me, than I'll say goodbye'. Top class.

All in all, an event by turns informative, gloriously absurd and highly memorable. Just a bit of a shame that I probably won't be around to catch all the madness again next year...