nagasaki blues

“I don’t get it. What do you mean, you’re afraid of animals?”

“I’m afraid of all animals. Definitely all of them.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re scary.”

Ayumi and Nana are walking to school beside me, and as is fairly normal, they’ve taken a break from attempting to speak English and have thus mostly forgotten I’m there. In the process they’ve also forgotten that I understand their Japanese.  I didn’t know that Ayumi was afraid of all animals. Because I am bored, I keep listening:

“What about harmless animals, like birds?” Nana is incredulous.

“Unacceptable. If I see a bird on TV, it’s okay, but if the bird looks at the camera, I have to change the channel.”

“What about mice?”

“All girls hate mice.”

“Not me. I love mice. They’re cute.”

“Only Mickey is okay.”

“And Pokemon? They’re not really animals.”

“Pikachu is cute.”

“Is Pikachu supposed to be a boy or a girl?”

“Boy.”

“And what about Anpanman?”

“His name is Anpanman, not Anpanwoman.”

“His head is made of bread. What’s his body made of?”

“Plastic. Just a guess.”

High school students are high school students wherever you go. Not much changes as you cross oceans, and students still have the same wandering, pointless conversations they always do regardless of place. They speak for the sake of filling silence as much as anything else. There is no need for personal breakthroughs or deep meaning. The day before:

Risa: “Do foreigners get acne?”

Mika: “No.”

Shiho: “Of course they do. That’s why that weird Jessica Simpson lady is on those Proactive commercials.”

See? Mostly indistinguishable from American conversations, only with different cultural cues. That’s what makes today interesting. Today was the presidential election. Ayumi and Nana humored me about this and pretended (I think) to be interested, asking once an hour, “Obama win yet?”

When it was all said and done, they asked a more intriguing question: “Now, do you want to go back to America?” I told them I was here for now, then asked them if they wanted to visit sometime. Both shook their heads ‘no’, and when I asked them why, they made gun shapes with their hands and little gunshot sounds. “Don’t want to get shot,” said Ayumi, and the entire time that I was explaining that TV is sensationalist and that it’s perfectly safe to travel to the U.S., I was embarassed.

You can’t blame them, really. They have always known a country with a remarkably low violent crime rate. America’s murder rate is nearly 9 times higher than Japan’s, and it doesn’t help that some of the more popular American TV shows are things like 24, Prison Break, CSI, etc. It seems that the average person I talk to thinks we’re pretty bloodthirsty. They might be right.

A few times a week, strangers ask me where I’m from. I tell them I’m American, and every time I do I’m aware that I’m donning the fabric of these preconceptions. I say, “I’m from Tennessee, in the United States,” and I know that I’m simultaneously admitting to whatever preconceived notions they may have about us. This bothered me more a year ago than it does today, but I can’t say I like it.

The entire point of this is that an hour ago, a man waiting at the car shop beside me asked where I was from. I told him. He replied with: “I have hope for America. I think good days are ahead.”

I agree.

To those who have recently left Nagasaki or are leaving in the upcoming days:

Thank you.

When the cold is awful or the heat is unbearable, the mosquitoes are out in full force, and all the vice principals of the world have teamed up to make things a problem, you’ve kept it worth it. Homesickness ain’t a damn thing when people make you feel at home, you know?

I don’t go out of my way to spend time with people I don’t like. I just don’t waste the effort on it. I spent time with you all because you have made life here better in innumerable ways.

Please keep doing what you’re doing. Good luck.

To those of you who have just arrived in Nagasaki:

You’ve got big shoes to fill.

Don’t blow it.

Fish are dying.

This, in and of itself, is not entirely special, but the specific circumstances are. In one Japanese river in particular, 2 tons of dead fish (including 2,000 eels, if I read it correctly) have washed up in the past few days, and nobody seems to have a great explanation for this. News channels are running footage of men with nets in rowboats shoveling fish carcasses into styrofoam containers and scratching their heads.

In other news, the Iwate-Miyagi Earthquake tore mountains apart and caused massive landslides, blocking the flow of rivers and causing lakes to rapidly form, resulting in extensive flooding.

In Akihabara, a man drove a truck into a crowd of people. Armed with a knife, he then set upon the crowd, killing 10 and injuring more, including one police officer. Another cop attempted to stop him with his baton before apparently remembering that police are armed. He eventually drew his gun, at which point the attacker surrendered. Too little, too late, isn’t it?

I’m hearing an awful lot of talk about why things like this keep happening. Kids spend too much time on their cell phones. Video games are violent. We’re too reliant on technology.

As if disasters ever needed a reason to occur.

Occasionally, some switch in my head goes off and I can’t stop watching television. I could ride a bike. I could get some work done. I could, theoretically, do my laundry or pull the weeds from the garden. There are any number of things I could be doing instead of watching five hours of House a day, but none of them are quite as satisfying as allowing my brain to degenerate into a state pliable enough that I diagnose myself with encephalitis caused by toxoplasmosis, then Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, before finally accepting that all that is actually wrong with me is that I’m housing a parasitic Ascaris worm.

At the very least, my excuses for taking sick days will probably become more interesting in the upcoming months.

Plenty of people are quick to villainize TV as a soul-sucking black hole that makes you stupid, but this is a dramatic oversimplification. These are the same people that believe that aspartame causes cancer despite the fact that no legitimate medical evidence exists to support this theory. The fact of the matter is that television is an intricate window into society. More than that, it’s a great way to take a mental vacation for as long as you might need to.

Still, it’s not really normal behavior for me. I watch TV, but not usually in huge blocks. One might diagnose this as a self-preservative need for a temporary form of escapism. That would certainly be a fair conclusion, something that Dr. Foreman or even Cuddy might agree with. But not House. No, not a chance. Because House knows there’s something bigger going on. House will call you on your bullshit between mouthfulls of Vicodin. This is because House knows (somehow) that you have nothing worthwhile to escape from. Everything is going well. The weather is outstanding. Work is fine. The students are fine. Why not enjoy the beach for a few hours?

Because I’m only on Season 2, that’s why.

Out the window, the ocean’s doing this stellar trick where it catches the sunlight just so and scatters it like glitter on the half-hearted waves of the Ariake Sea. It is a beautiful day, and I’d almost forgotten them.

When it’s cold here, this place feels desolate. On the other hand, when it’s pretty, it’s gorgeous. If it would only get warm enough to swim and fish again, maybe we’d have something going. For now, I’ll settle for longer afternoons.

I’m doing this in place of grading papers and tests, hundreds of which I have in stacks covering my desk. You may remember similar behavior from the times I exhibited it in high school, college, and every job I’ve ever held. The students just finished their speaking tests, which are simple enough: they write a relatively brief skit using the grammar and vocabulary they’ve learned during the current term, then perform it in class. The results are varied. These must take place in an airport or on an airplane.

Exhibit One of One:

Flight Attendant: Do you want chicken or fish?
Takuya: Fish, please.
Yuya: Me too.
FA: We don’t have fish.
T&Y: OH MY GOD. CHICKEN PLEASE.
T: How much does it cost?
FA: It 1 dollar.
Y: How much for your smile?
FA: Priceless.
T: I want you.
Y: Me too.
FA: I don’t make the decision. Tell me your good things.
T: I have dog.
Y: I have father.
T: I have my plane.
Y: I love father.
T: Do you love dog?
FA: We are landing in New York. Please sit down.

~ fin ~

Well, at least they’re making an attempt at creativity.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and all I’ve heard all week is about how I’m going to get so much chocolate, like this much, and how I shouldn’t eat it all at once, and how I should be careful because I’ll be expected to give candy in return on White Day. Well, let me be the first to say that I couldn’t care less. I’m ready for handouts. I feel pretty confident it’s coming, too, since as I write this three girls (not in my class) are standing in front of my desk and giggling like the schoolgirls they are every time I glance upwards. In my book, this spells candy.

For me, Valentine’s Day is generally a pretty apathetic affair punctuated perhaps by the occasional Lifetime special on wife-beating or an anti-romantic meal with other frequently-single people. The last one I remember sticks out vividly in my mind:

There we are, listening to Foreigner on a Waffle House jukebox, when I notice that the guy at the counter next to me is staring at the waitress ringing up checks. Not checking her out, not vacantly gazing. Staring. Needless to say, this captures my imagination, and I’m on the edge of my seat 20 minutes later, when he finally speaks to her. The conversation happens like this:

“You got any kids?”

She didn’t even bother to make eye contact, clicking away at her register, but answered, “Two of ‘em,” in a low Southern drawl.

Silence followed for another few minutes, and he asked, “You gotta man around?” Getting to the point, I would go on to learn, is sometimes appreciated.

“Yeah.”

“You wanna come over sometime?”

Surely, I thought, this man was not serious. He did, after all, ask the prerequisite question about whether or not she was in a relationship, implying that the answer mattered to him in some way. Learning she was attached, he continued right along with his proposition as if this was no concern to either of them, which it apparently, mind-blowingly, was not.

“Sure. I don’t want no wife catching us and trying to come after me, though.”

At the time, I thought: Flawless. This is better than television. This is better than any bar conversation I’ve ever heard or any quiet exchange over coffee. This is better than most books. How many people get to see this kind of exchange up close? It’s like watching humpback whales mate, a sight a handful of people on the Earth have been lucky enough to witness. In six sentences, they had managed to decide that, yes, they would be sleeping together. That’s the magic of Valentine’s day.

Well, I don’t need all of that, but empty calories would be nice. I want to snack on rice balls tomorrow about as much as I want to see the world’s paraplegics challenge the world’s morbidly obese to a naked make-out contest, which just isn’t very much at all.