“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.

Believe it or not, I have plenty to write about. I just don’t have as much time as I’d like, nor the will.

I will do better, I will do better. Videos to come as well:

Tomorrow in class I’m trying to bring Halloween to Japan by teaching the kids how to light dog crap in brown paper bags on fire and how to conduct prank phone calls.

This a compilation of my notes from the last week:

Monday, 10:42 PM

The Japan-to-Tennessee jet lag has decimated my biological clock. It is Monday evening, but I have been asleep for the past six hours, waking to a house empty aside from my father, sitting alone in a darkened living room, hands folded in his lap.

He’s waited to tell me that there’s been an accident, that my uncle was riding his motorcycle home when drag racers overtook him on a quiet stretch of highway, sending him flipping across the well-manicured lawn of a local church. He’s dead at 46. He is dead, and my mother has already gone ahead to be with her family. My mother has been mourning the loss of her brother for four hours while I have been asleep in the guest bedroom, dreaming of girls, beaches, and other things that suddenly seem less important.

“Can you believe it?” he asks me. “That it happened on a motorcycle?”

I can’t.

(more…)

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.

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.

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.

The good news is that I have ambition.

All great men become great through conquest. This may be an unfortunate fact, but it is a fact nonetheless. Whether it’s conquering people, nations, ignorance, or societal norms, there’s always a usurper and the overthrown, and if you think I’m wrong about this, consider this point: I’m not.

The point of this is that I’m going to conquer the ocean, or at least a small part of it. The pirate in me is rearing its eye-patched head, and I feel the call of the sea. So we’re building a raft. We’re sailing this raft across the Ariake Sea to a small area of Kumamoto Prefecture. Actually, you can see the exact path we’re taking if you happen to use Google Earth; just search for “Kuchinotsu, Japan” and look across the bay to Futae. It’s not so far, but I’m pretending it’s a huge victory in the hearts of men because it makes it more enjoyable all around.

As far as names go, I’m leaning towards the S.S. Sussudio. I’m considering this name for the following reasons:

1) Instances of the letter ’s’ make up more than half of the name.
2) It sounds kind of poetic.
3) People might ask about it, which will afford me the opportunity to explain that I think Phil Collins sucks.

I didn’t say Genesis sucks. I said Phil Collins sucks. There is a huge difference here. “Sussudio” is not a word despite the fact that he uses it as one in the song by the same name, and Phil himself explains it thusly: Apparently, he was sound checking and just using a made up word as a place holder, but no actual word sounded right after the fact. So “Sussudio” became the name of the girl in the song, and later became the name of his daughter’s horse. In an interview, he apologized to all the people of the world who are now named Sussudio. I thought that was rather arrogant, assuming that adoring fans had named their children after your song title all over the world, but a quick search on Facebook and Myspace reveals that, unfortunately, there are people named Sussudio out there. If nothing else, Phil has dicked them out of the opportunity to have a respectable first name.

This is mostly about not liking Phil’s music, because for all I know he’s a nice guy. I do know he left his wife for someone half his age and completed most of the divorce proceedings by fax.

My point is, it’s my raft, and if I want to call it Sussudio then who’s going to stop me? You? I don’t think so.

The crew is assembled, and it is a sturdy crew indeed. We’ve begun preparing materials. I hope to set sail in the early summer, though as of late new dangers have come to light. For one, the waters in question are reportedly shark infested. To me, this is a non-issue. Essentially all ocean water has the potential to house sharks from time to time. This seems like a silly reason to be afraid.

Not a silly reason: deadly whirlpool. I just heard about this, though all the fisherman know to avoid it. Nobody felt the need to point out the existence of the whirlpool to me until last week, which seems a bit late in the planning stage. Apparently it’s about halfway between our start point and end point, and I’m imagining something huge and frothing and vicious and inherently angry despite being unable to feel human emotion. I can already tell I’m going to personify the hell out of what amounts to moving water, but I can’t help it.

Updates to come. Any suggestions for alternate names or any tips for sail construction?

Out the window, they’re holding big boquets and failing in attempts not to cry and generally making a big mess out of their parents’ attempts to take pictures, and I’m not going to see that again. Acknowledging the fact that there will be more students (even equally special ones) in the future doesn’t actually help.

They’re still in the parking lot, but they’re already gone. I’m only writing about this in the first place to keep them here a bit longer, to pretend that they’re still happening to me.

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.