Lost in Translation

You know, I never really talked much about the times I went to drink at the bar in the hotel that Lost in Translation was filmed in. That film is sepcial to me because when I first thoght about going to Japan, it was with the JET programme (a government-run scheme where young foreigners can be classroom assistants in Japanese schools for English lessons). Although Tokyo had always facinated me, I never really thought seriously about living there until I watched this movie. When I tell most people this, they usually say that the movie made them especially not want to live in Tokyo but for me, it really caught me. I seemed to like the idea of it being the ultimate metropolis, a place of opportunity, surely, a place of excess and noise and light, yet many other things that we would never consider but Lost in Traslation starts to get you thinking about such things.

This photo was taken on my mobile I was issued with out there. It wasn't a great model so the picture resolution is poor but even so, it shows the warmth of the barm, which incidently in on the very top floor of the Park Hyatt hotel in a central area of Tokyo called Shinjuku. It was really special to be there. I first went with the guy in the picture, Justin, a good friend, who like me, felt like this was somewhere we had to return to one day, once we were successful and full of money. It cost £10 just to sit down, with nothing included. But the atmosphere was bang-on exactly like you would have expected form watching the movie: classy, warm, intense, and smooth. There was even a jazz singer just like in the movie. I still carry the receipt around with me in my wallet. Is that really sad?!

My Local Market

Here's an odd bit about the local fruit and veg market near where I lived, unfinished.

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Every morning on the way to work, I’d pass by the local fruit and vegetable shop. It took a while to muster up the courage to actually buy anything from there as it looked like once of those places only regulars ever go to. I didn’t want to feel like I was invading some private unofficial club by attempting to purchase discounted fruit and vegetables. I guess the beauty of big soul-less supermarkets is that you are never in danger of feeling out of place.
This particular market was next to the local 7-11, about a minute’s walk from my apartment, and it was fantastic, offering everything at much lower prices than supermarkets offer. The rule of cheap huge supermarkets verses more expensive independent shops doesn’t seem to apply to Japan, although the price of a watermelon in either location is still around $25. Having asked and asked about why fruit is so expensive here, I’ve been met with as many answers as there are varieties of rice-dishes in this green and mountainous land. In fact, the mountainous landscape of Japan has been one such answer: the farmers have such little fertile flat land that they must charge hugely inflated prices to justify any farming at all. Another answer involved the Japanese desire to have their food look as good as it tastes; dirty looking apples, battered lemons and non-spherical oranges just won’t do. The fruit does indeed look better than any other fruit I’ve seen, a lot of it being individually wrapped with protective foam, which is nice, but I guess at the end of the day, I’ll just be eating it, rather than putting it on my mantle piece for visitors to comment how orange my oranges are or how perfectly hairy my kiwi fruit is. (Speaking of Kiwi fruit, don’t you think it’s strange how this is the only fruit in the English language which doesn’t have a name of its own, just a reference to its origin. I spend many a lonely night thinking up names for this poor forgotten fruit. How about “Hairy Fruit” or “Scoop fruit”?)
This market was one of those semi-outdoor/indoor types with the fresh stuff on display outside and a selection of what seemed to be anything you could possibly need (for a Japanese kitchen) inside. When I pass, I am usually running to catch the train, but on the rare occasions when I am not attempting to cover the course of a 7 minute walk in 2 minutes, I sometimes say ‘hello’ to one of the market assistants. I have been surprised to get a response in English from her sometimes, usually ‘good morning’. This one assistant was the only person who gave me definite eye-contact, thus inspiring me to actually offer some kind of pleasantry. She doesn’t look Japanese, her skin is darker and her face has sharper features, and she seems to be working for the owners of the market, rather than with, even though she appears to be approaching middle-age. The other workers looked typically Japanese, and there is one pretty girl, maybe about my age, who I always wonder about as I pass. She was probably the daughter of one of the market owners and I know it’s wrong to say, but she just looked too pretty to be working in a fruit and vegetable market. I’d never spoken to her of course.

Another Student's Essay

And this one is titled "Why Is the Media Coverage on Japan So Biased?"

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Why Is the Media Coverage on Japan So Biased?
Seven Problems that Prevent the Improvement of Media Coverage on Japan

I have come to realize that many of the articles in the media in the western countries especially in the United States publishes on Japanese society and culture, received from its office in Tokyo, are heavily biased. There should be, I would imagine, a certain set of reasons behind why these kinds of heavily biased articles are written over and over again. The subject of these articles may differ, but the quite a lot lately about the issue of biased media coverage on Japan, and have come up with several problem that seem to permeate articles in the foreign media.

First of all, all national media, in both Japan and the United States, are geared towards a domestic audience and are self-absorbed. The Japanese media has assumed all these years that no foreigner would read what they write in Japanese, and has indeed written what could only pass uncontested within the nation. For example, we should be reminded of the famous Marco Polo magazine scandal; in one of their issues, they published an article which claimed that ”Nazi gas chambers never existed,” without any historically-founded evidence. The publishers decided to include this article in their magazine, never questioning nor even trying to verify the claim. Consequently, the magazine was heavily criticized by Jewish organizations abroad. One of the magazine’s sponsors, a foreign firm in Japan, withdrew its sponsorship, and soon after the magazine was forced to discontinue its publication. I believe this could happen because the editors were ignorant about what was going on in the international scene, or, even if they weren’t entirely ignorant, they probably thought they could get away with it, imagining that Japan functions in a vacuum, completely isolated from the rest of the world. There sure was a perverse sense of complacency in the belief that only Japanese would read articles written in Japanese.

But times have changed. In this day and age, non-Japanese read the Japanese press even when articles aren’t translated into other languages. However, although English language media is already widely read all over the world, the “national media” image of the American press is quite strong, much stronger than that of its European counterparts, and the American media seems rather reluctant to imagine the reactions of the foreigners portrayed in their articles. In that respect, the American media is as self-absorbed as the Japanese press is.

The second problem has to do with a tendency of the media in the U.S. to ridicule issues concerning Japanese women. Ten years ago, one could already predict that Japanese women would become the next target for Japan bashers. Since Japan has become triumphant in the U.S.-Japan Trade War and other economic conflicts, the United States began to run out of trump cards in its battle against Japan. There was a time when Japan could even brag about its lasting marriages while the United States was dealing with an increasing number of families falling apart. Because women in Japan pay the price for the stability of the Japanese family, I was expecting that Japan would soon be attacked for being an underdeveloped country when dealing women’s issues. Sure enough, I was quite right to assume that sooner or later, the phenomena surrounding the family, such as the fact that Japanese marriages don’t fall apart so easily or that the divorce rate don’t go up because people in Japan don’t marry out of love, would be used as symbols of Japan as a mysterious or a backward country.

Thirdly, there is a problem of orientalism. The word “orientalism” originally came from Edward Said’s book of the same title. “Orientalism” refers to a specific gaze which views “the East” as an exotic, mysterious, unintelligent, and underdeveloped “other”. What is often misunderstood is that orientalism isn’t an attribute to the East, but rather part of the self-consciousness of the West trying to hold up its own supremacy. It naturally follows that, even if you understand what orientalism means, that does not mean you understand the East. It does mean, however, that you understand what Westerners think the East is (or what it has to be, or what it wants it to be). Successfully subverting the meaning of orientalism by pointing out that it isn’t about the “other” but about the consciousness of the “subject” itself, is Edward Said’s noteworthy achievement. The notion of orientalism, therefore, is closely connected with issues of gender. Because the subjects casting such a gaze are exclusively male, there is a tendency to feminize the other. And male subjectivity is established through the female “other”. Orientalism isn’t situated in the Orient. It’s in the heads of Europeans, and nowhere else. Likewise, the Japan featured in such kind of the New York Times or something only exists in the heads of journalists.

The fourth problem is the way in which orientalism is paradoxically supported by the Japanese, in a kind of reversed orientalism. During the hype of Japan bashing, Japanese theorists on Japan chose to criticize the United States on its deteriorating states of familial relationships. The logic they used to do this was exactly the reverse of orientalism. They advertised that the success of Japanese society is due to the stability of familial relationships in the country. In this kind of discourse, the Japanese family or marriage is idealized, in a reversed direction from that of the orientalist discourse. You could call this reversed orientalism. The logical structure in both discourses is the same.

Japanese cultural theory that reinforces orientalism by reversing it was never in short supply. Those cultural theorists (most of whom are men) go around making statements along the lines of “once you get married, it’s the wife who calls the shots,” or “women are more than happy with the way things are, so why bother with women’s liberation?” Orientalism and reversed orientalism mutually reinforce each other. I think the orientalism that surfaces in the media is dangerous, but the Japanese discourse on Japan which reinforces it from the other side is equally dangerous. We have to do something about it.

If we would like to discuss issues of sexuality and gender in both countries, it is necessary to compare the two through a careful examination of historical and/or cultural differences. But in reality, “women” are used as being emblematic of a “backward Japan.” I am tired of such a schematic way of thinking. Both history and culture always have their own specificity, and it is impossible that only the United States and Europe can be universal.

The fifth point is concerned with the nature and credibility of representation in those articles. People often say that the writing in Japanese media lacks a sense of distinctive individuality, when compared with its Western counterpart. But I have the impression that the American press, always determined to increase readership, is very arbitrary. There is a specific style in American journalistic writing. A journalist would write, for example, “Hanako Yamada, a 22-year-old office worker, says…” This style is part of a method firmly established in American journalism, to attract the reader’s attention and to make identification of the subject of the article easier. But when Hanako is quoted, no mention is made about Hanako’s representativeness as an example. There is no guarantee that Hanako is a typical example.

Another characteristic of American journalistic writing is that articles are signed by their writes. It is rather favorable as they don’t pretend that there is such a thing as objectivity or neutrality, notions which the Japanese media are so much obsessed with. However, those people or the words they are reported to have said are only arbitrarily chosen, in order to give the article, with a byline on it, a seeming credibility. I have a lot of doubts about the storytelling and sensationalist style of American journalism. Even in such an influential medium as the New York Times or something, there often appear very exaggerated articles, written in such a style that may more appropriate in tabloid magazines. If they are to use a particular informant, they should also give readers the necessary contexts. For instance, how many more people are there who hold the same or similar point of view as the informant? Or, what kind social, class, or cultural background has this informant come from? These pieces of information should also be given alongside the actual report. The article is probably based on actual facts, but I can’t keep from having the impression that examples are chosen to fit the story already formulated in the writer’s head.

Problem number six is the commercialization of media. This is also a serious problem in Japan. Media sources always justify this phenomenon by claiming that they publish what the readers want to read-the kind of information they are looking for. The press likes to say that there are no complaints from their readers, and that their publications are well-read. At the moment the commercialization of media might be even more severe in the United States than in Japan, although it will surely get worse in Japan. It’s hard to say what one could do about it, but in any case it is better to be conscious of the fact that the media is rules by commercialism.

Lastly, I have to point out that there is a desire behind orientalism to construct a universal “Western subjectivity.” Japan is often ridiculed through such ways of identification as “In the West…” or “We, Westerners…”and there is something perverse about the way in which these words are used by Americans. Americans are not aware how particular their society really is, when it is looked at in the larger scheme of world history. Especially in the way in which the population of the contemporary United States is constituted of immigrants from all over the world, one can hardly say that American is representative of the “West.” The American gaze directed towards the uniqueness of Japan is reflected back onto itself in order to prove the universality of the United States, and this alleged universality is referred to through the sign of the “West.” There is a kind of parochialism to the American national media and they have no idea how their face is read by others.

This is, of course, also the case for the Japanese media. It would be better if journalists were more conscious of the fact that national media crosses borders.

A Student's Essays about Japanese Culture

I had a student who spoke English pretty well, and seemed to be able to criticise her culture more than any other Japanese person I had meant. She wrote very well, and I wanted someone to keep her essays, so here they are. This one is titled "Re-write the terms of Marriage". I'm sure she won't mind me putting these here.

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Having been struggling to balance my career and family in this male-dominated society, having been told by my foreign acquaintances many times,“ So much for Japan being a developed country!” I was just wondering how come women’s social advancement can’t be realized in Japan, despite the fact that late－marriages and late-births are now the norm (I thought it meant there must have been a lot of possible female workforce, though) in Japanese society, and the ratio of unmarried women is high.

Lately, some of my male friends (in their early 40’s) rushed into arranged-marriage, and somehow all their brides are 39 (it seems that most of Japanese people must draw the line whether or not she is fertile, or her marketability as a woman ends at 39 years old. It’s deplorable. I believe I’m still available. And more surprising thing for me was that the letters of invitation I received were all written under the name of their fathers. I know it’s just in the Japanese manner. But! Over forty guys! And much more surprising thing to me was almost all of my male friends got married to the first woman they met at the first set –dating, maybe with their parents. for prospective arranged―marriage. Furthermore I suppose their partners (women) also could have been in the same situation. To be honest, aside from men, I was just wondering how they are supposed to be able to develop a good relationship before really knowing each other well, just knowing their backgrounds. I just can’t understand why they want to get just marital stage, not real love (actually it depends on how you define true love, though), If he/she loves her/him dearly, and wants to share their life, all they have to do is living together, they don’t have to rush into a lawful marriage, right? I suspect they have mistaken having good feeling for real love. I’m sure it doesn’t apply to young generation.), and all their brides had no jobs before their marriage.
Then many young women, college students I meet in particular, say to me,“ For us, it’s more important to find Mr. Right (probably, a prospective rich doctor) than studying in our college life so that we don’t have to continue our jobs.” So I asked why they thought so, they answered, “Because, if I give up being a businessperson in this society and I submit to being a woman, all I have to do is to compete with only women . That is the possibility to get the status of“勝ち犬, top dog ,winner” becomes ｄｏｕｂｌe, right?” （Currently the phrase“top dog, under dog” is quite popular in Japan. Simply speaking, in this case, top dog means to become an advantaged housewife, under dog means to remain unmarried after turning thirty years old or a drained working mother.）
I don’t know what they want to win against, and I don’t know why 負け犬,under dog, loser is evil, either. In the first place, how come they want to divide everything into winning and losing? Is something wrong I being an under dog?
Statistics says the number of women working outside the home is rising. But young unmarried women seem to think they don’t want to work.

Since last year, the government has created incentives to reproduce(actually that made me blush, though) against the birth rate continues to plummet and it has been on going, and sad to say, many officials－mostly male-blame the women, saying women value their careers more than children, so they don’t need to be educated. But number of kids born to working mother is almost identical to full-time homemakers. So simply demanding that women dump their job and have two kids instead of one to pump up the number of births to the replacement rate is unrealistic. And the latest survey says 90% of young adults in their 20’s have strong desire to marry, and more than 80% of women are willing to resign their jobs after their marriages. And they prefer a baby girl (*1).The latest magazine said young men tend to think that they want to have family(baby) in their 20’s, because they seek for the “healing”. Even if young men seek for healing in young women, it’s impossible. Because young women also seek for the healing (*2)(The American magazine called Forbes said, Japanese “Host Club”( I think it doesn’t exist in other countries.) is becoming a trend. one of owners, whose two host club shops earned 1billion yen last year, said that “Not only the idle rich mesdames but also young business ladies have become to come here to seek for healing, so I became successful”).
The survey in 2002 says the ratio of the women who want to be a single because they want to devote their job was less than 10%. In other words, no matter how much the government plans to increase day-nursery or alter the Labor Standards Law, women in question are not interested in such issues. Many young people say,“we don’t marry simply because we have not met the eligible person so far. Besides we find ourselves being no longer young.”

Then,
What are terms and conditions of marriage?
What is the eligible person like, for them?

Take conceivable opinions of young people,
>>>Women’s opinion
A reputable person=having a more educational background than hers=make sure not to become 坂本竜馬
A person having a dream=becoming getting higher income=make sure not to become an adventure after quitting your job.
A person being kind=working only for the sake of enriching her life=make sure not to lend your money to the needy kindly.
（Women dissemble their actual intentions so that their fictitious innocence can be evaluated.）
>>>Men’s opinion
A beautiful woman.(good grief)
A thrifty woman, no job=so that they don’t have to feel inferiority complex
A woman who likes kids=so that they want their wife to take care of themselves(not kids).
(Men dissemble their weakness.)

Thus, they seem to marry to satisfy their egoism. That is to say, we could say,顔と金の交換(exchanging face to money) is done in their marriage. Then, after clearing these conditions, becoming “top dog”, how do these couples live in their life?
Here is an intriguing investigation done by Ms.小倉, the author of 結婚の条件(Terms of marriage), a socioloｇist.
She said in her book, her survey has shown 3 patterns in their marriage life. There can be divided 3 courses depending on wives’ academic backgrounds.②is the state of top dog)

①----high school graduates
>>before marriage－less job- marriage to survive(生存)
>>after marriage – part-time job to support their life
②----college(2year-university, so-called 短大) or middle-class university graduates
>>before marriage-enough job, but after 4-year-perfunctory work on average, they become parasite single-marriage to depend（依存）
>>after marriage- stay-at-home mother to be dependent and satisfy self-realization (*)
③----top-class university or graduate school graduates
>>before marriage-to secure career－marriage to conserve（保存）
>>after marriage－as a matter of fact, the job of the women who have been able to continue their job until their retire age are a nursery teacher, an elementary school teacher, and a government official or a doctor, a nurse.
. (And Ms.小倉also described,
Lately, if a girl student could pass several universities, she would choose rather lower level university to enter, being afraid of “Fear of success”. Even after joining a company, she doesn’t seem to want to get promoted. She is willing to take a back seat to realize ②states to become “top dog”.　Lately, the number of colleges has been going down, so ② and ③ situations are getting closer.)
(*)She continues, more than half of women are in ②, And the number of women like them are expected to increase. In addition to 3 pattern mentioned above, she said the forth course④ has been appeared. That is specialization of ②, sort of special-class housewife state, after raising children, they get so-calledカタカナwork, like flower arrangement, a tea adviser, a color analyst.(what is it?) and so on. These jobs have one thing in common. That is kind of a instructor.
Actually their incomes are less than the costs to maintain their rooms, clothes as much as to be envied by their students. They work to consume, they would probably waste quite a lot of time just arranging their jobs to become professionals, and invest their husbands’ incomes in maintaining their jobs. She coined their behavior “Labor to consume”
They make their husbands be toiling away and work to consume. They say, “ Just because I am only a woman, that is why I deserve to be conceded the privilege of getting away with labor. That is the very top dog
(On the other hand, in spite of getting the state ②, in today’s shaky economy, there are housewives who have to work, because of a pitfall such as their husbands’ layoff.)

What does this signify?

I think there are 3 possible reasons for that. Specifically, from the aspect of law, predisposition in parenting, and history.

----In view of law

Various legal factors are taken into account, here is one example.
In Japan, in general, unmarried status is equal to being single (the ratio of living together, cohabitation is 1.7% in Japan, on the other hand, it is 40% in north Europe), and it also means low birth rate.(I think the reason for that is in the current outdated marriage system. For example, people have to hand in a child birth certificate filled in, asked if you have a registration of your marriage, when you started to live together, what your occupation was at the time your baby were born and your present job, and so on. In other words, the government implies it doesn’t want a couple to have their baby without living together, and illegitimates are inevitable to be distinguished from legitimate children in many situation especially inheritance, even though The Supreme Court ruled these articles related with discrimination has no constitutionality in 1993. In general, many couples don’t want any trouble, as public sentiment. In terms of laws, people wouldn’t presume to become minority. And our culture of shame places emphasis on outward standards of conduct. ) In other countries, being single doesn’t necessarily mean living as single or having no children.) I happened to find an article written about this issue.
Thus, the nation tends to control people’s lawful marriage. (Shot-gun marriage still has certainty for a lawful marriage)

----In view of parenting

One of sociologists,　山田昌弘氏 who coined “parasitic single” said, cited a research into Japanese couple vs American couple has been under way for over 10years, “The results of such researches indicate the obvious difference between them. Compared to other countries, Japanese tend to feel that parenting is a burden for them, and seldom get satisfaction out of their parenting” He gives some reasons for that as fallows;
For example, in the U.S., a married couple shares and enjoys raising their children, because they think all they have to do is raising children until their children become 18 years old. After that, the couple enjoys their own life each other. Basically, children are supposed to take their responsibilities in life, after becoming adults (it seems natural to me). Therefore parents don’t have to feel parenting is a burden. (.But if their life is not enjoyable, they change their partner. It was interesting for me. At first I couldn’t understand the meaning “because American are very married, they get divorced.” As a Japanese, I had a silly mind set, that is “If you value your marriage, you shouldn’t get divorce. You have to compromise to keep your marriage.” This perception gap must affect the difference of divorce rate.)
Meanwhile in Japan, people have their own roles as a member of family, and they rarely act together. According the survey which researched so-called salaried-man families, how much the couple can get along with depends on their children’s school scores. In Japan, almost all of education tuition costs are supposed to be paid by parents (I think it also applies to the U.S.), so an academic background they have is equal to the class they belong to, that is, child’s school score is the symbol of their wealthy. So they tend to use their children as a tool of competition
Even worse, although, in pre war era, children couldn’t live without relying on their parents, so there is an authority of parents or a bond between them, now, parents cannot believe the bond and are afraid of being abandoned and being hated by their children, they give their children huge financial support to keep their relationship after their children’s leaving their home, in case they feel they no longer useful. .

---- In view of history

In the 1940’
War footing, the nation had controlled people’s sexuality to keep social order, especially there was a need to make men go to the war, as a pretext or justify whose catchword was “to protect your loved one (who is supposed to love only you)”
Therefore, at that time, as a propaganda,
Nation= the biggest family
Numerous family were existed under the emperor system
Patriarchal system controlled women and children. Their sexuality and eros were allowed only within household to make a strong bond of honor between a husband and a wife.
Polygamy, free-sex were considered pre-modern and died out.

1955-1973
The end of the war brought about dramatic changes in social structures. The ancient family system gradually but irreversibly gave way to new development. And the period of high growth and economic success in the post-war era started.
Democracy had been formed. Everyone could seek to become a member of upper class.
Even though democracy could help individuals release from family system, people have been dwelling on becoming upper class, that is, people thought children from good family, if not blue-blood family, never had premarital intimate relationship and stuck to their so-called romantic love (monogamy, eternal love), so premarital relationship couldn’t get publicity.
Ms. 小倉 said, a reconstructive surgery of hymen (where is it?) was common in those days.

After 1990
Premarital relationship or relationship out of household are becoming acceptable.

--Mother’s history
Mothers’ ressentiment
Their parents said to her,“There is no need to be educated to become a wife of the masses. You don’t have to study.”
So she couldn’t achieve hypergamy (from middle class to upper-middle class)
She did part-time job for daughters tuition cost（not for living）
She wants daughter to achieve hypergamy and go easy life
She made her daughter the person who seemed to have everything in life.
She wants her daughter to keep at least the present level in her life even after her marriage.

--Fathers’ history
Fathers’ war trauma
They got through the struggle of existence to find themselves having a sense of loss. They believe only money and estates.
He always has focused on financial incentive and keeps being in a financially strong position.
He made his daughter a good material girl.
He thinks his daughter’s marriage must be an exchange with a person who stores equal values.

It seems to me that they don’t want to feel any financial disadvantage in their daughters’ marriage. And daughters also think they don’t want to reduce their living level.
But it is obvious that young men can’t maintain their rather fancy life feeding his housewife.


These views bring me to another point of discussion, that is “escaping from labor”. Considering my experience as a teacher and an observer of changing society, I feel many people seem to think that labor is disadvantage (According to the statistics, more than 30% of young men also think they don’t want to work, if possible.) And I think it is obvious this thought produces a lot of spontaneous so-called “フリーターfreeter”.
From only financial and materialistic point of view, if you have to do elderly care, you have to do work for living, and you have to do take care of several children, and you can’t afford to buy something you want, you can’t afford to spend enough time you want, it might be disadvantage.
I just would like to ask you, if you suffer an overwhelming disaster, if you are diagnosed serious disease, if you lose your loved one in unexpected accident, are they disadvantage for you?
If you can live in trouble-free life, you might be happy. But it doesn’t sound like happy to me.

It is not your fault even if you have to get involved unpredictable misery. But you can be leaning a lot of things from it and process it better. You can break through your constrains and move forward.
What do you want out of your life? What matters to you? What does labor mean to you? I think I can associate these questions with 結婚の条件.

I have been thinking about it.

(*1)
Statistics says, up to 75% of young Japanese mother now prefer baby girls. Daughters are seen as easier to handle. Boys don’t listen and are harder to rise. Besides boys and their mothers seem to have a weak bond, but mothers and daughters stay close all of their lives.
Although inheritance laws in Japan no longer favor sons over daughters, and failure to produce a male heir is no longer grounds for divorce, pressure to bear sons -especially in rural areas-has not vanished altogether, as they say a traditional proverb, “A bride who doesn’t have a son finds her position is weak.”
In 1982, the survey found that of those families who wanted only one child, 51.5% wanted a boy, but by 1987, only 37.1% wanted a boy, and by 1997 it was just 25%.
More parents want girls because life is no longer sweet for Japanese boys. It’s tough to be a man, even when they little boys have to compete. They have to get into a good university and get a good job. There ‘s a lot more pressure on them. Life is easier for girls. They have more choices. Mothers feel pressure to raise these boys as they always did. Become a good man. Of course, these pressures existed in the past, but then men had special privileges. Now the privileges are gone, but they still have all the responsibilities.

(*2)
Let’s move on to thinking about the word “healing”
Why do they want to be healed?
Although Japanese parents are perceived as rather responsible, Japanese children don’t feel the bond with their parents so much. Rather they feel they have mental scars given by their parents.
I doubt there have been many young adults who had a troubled childhood and were abused both mentally and physically. I don’t think many of them had to come through the ordeal.
But their parents conditional loves have various adverse affects on children who have no strong self.
For example, their parents’ saying even “We have expectation for your future.” is ,strictly speaking, the metaphor for “I am not satisfied with what you are.”
So children seek for healing to make up for the sense of not having something. They love someone to seek for being accepted who they are. They value their own feeling that I love you, kind of self-love, so as long as they can benefit from the love each other, it continues. And they confirm their love in the way that how much he/she loves me depends on how much he/she is at her/his demands, kind of mutual dependence, more like addiction.（it might be the beginning of ストーカー.）They love someone to satisfy their self-love for themselves as their parents have done
(I guess this emotion is associated with Japanese suicide style, a double suicide, accompanied with kids) emotional involvement.

In addition to that, I think having children never gives healing to them. God knows, raising children is serendipitous, but at the same time having children is being pulled back to their own childhood. It makes people confront realities they have been through and they might prefer to ignore or forget.(it might be the beginning of child abuse.) And I think having family doesn’t give healing to them, either. When you get older, the relationship get more complicated, all kind of feeling is there. Some of those feeling are changing, becoming different kind of love. In the near future you might have to think, like how we can love someone, even if the loved one has lost their former attraction. I might say your expediency is not available in your real life.


( I really hate this word “healing”. You might have known, anywhere anytime, anybody seeks it. But I convince, before people feeling that I want to be healed, they must have had the feeling that I was victimized or got hurt by someone. By whom? Nobody hurts you. Only yourself, right?)

Nova Sucks

Here is a bit I wrote when in Tokyo about Nova. It really is a poor company and here's why.

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I’m not writing this as a result of a particularly bad day. I have no reason to lie about Nova. I wouldn’t bother writing this unless there was a good reason. I haven’t had any major personal reason to write this about Nova, I haven’t been fired so disciplined by Nova in any way, nor have I been treated any more unfairly than most employees of this company have. I just want people to know the truth about how bad Nova is. Here are a few things that come to mind:

- The vast majority of Nova employees have little choice but to start by living in a Nova apartment and most employees will continue to live in this apartment until the end of their time in Japan. Nova charges exceptionally high rent for what it provides its employees. Figures of over 70,000 yen a month to share with other people in a very normal apartment in an area that is not close to a major city is common. Nova takes advantage of foreigner’s ignorance and rips them off. Nova makes money from the excessive rents.

- When new employees arrive, there is no social plan, no cultural initiation, and no effort to make the employee feel at home. My experience appears to be common. I was picked up by a woman who seemed ill at ease with what she was doing, answered all my important questions with bare-minimum one-word answers, and simply dropped me off in my flat with no other to help me any further. I was left alone in an empty flat in a completely unfamiliar country with no back-up plan.

- Nova rips off the residents of its apartments by process of “inspection” and official cleaning. If it deems an apartment unclean, instead of asking the residents to do something about it, it hires cleaners and then over charges the residents for the work done, surely another way for Nova to make money. In my case, my housemate ad I were charged $150 EACH for having two cleaners some and scrub the shower. That was all they did.

- Nova hires questionable “teachers” and seems to make a habit out of hiring very close-minded, career obsessed foreigners as bosses. Although it official states that all of its employees have University degrees, this is simply not true as many, particularly Australians do not. Any type of degree is deemed acceptable and at no stage at all is the Nova “teacher” tested on their grammar.

My Japan Email Diary

Here is a compilation of all the emails I wrote to friends while in Tokyo. A few friends have said they liked them so I put them here for them to have a laugh at, and for me to remember just how much fun it was. It all started here...

To all the people this goes out to: thanks for reading and it would be great to hear from you soon! I thought I’d update you about my first month here in Tokyo.

The only bad thing about the British Airways flight was that I had a window seat next to two Japanese women who liked to sleep a lot. So every time I wanted to go for a wee or try to prevent deep-vein-thrombosis, I had the choice of waking them or just waiting for the blood clots to form. I flew through customs and my first spoken sentence in this nation was rather poorly: “I only speak English” to a customs official who jabbered to me about not filling in the correct landing card . My first few hours in the country were pretty euphoric, as tends to happen when you enter a foreign country, and the enormity of what I was doing and where I was really hit me when I noticed some girls pass me by in typical Japanese-style white socks, twenty minutes after landing. As I waited for the Nova representative to pick me up, I listened to the “Lost in Translation” soundtrack while I walked around the shops in the airport. I noticed a melon that cost 2940 yen, which is around 15 pounds. With fruit that expensive, you’d expect Japan to have the highest rate of constipation on the world, a fact I have yet to confirm on account of my poor Japanese.
As the Nova representative accompanied me on the train, dusk fell over the strange landscape of curvy-roofed buildings, foreign-looking trees and the odd cluster of Neon signs as we passed through some small towns. I was already pretty scared by now and this Nova woman was doing me no favours, as I asked her various questions about what the hell to do once we arrived, and she gave the shortest, bluntest, coldest answers. As we walked through the small city I now live in for the first time, I told her that I hadn’t eaten all day, and so she led me into a small supermarket and left me to get some food. I kindly reminded her that I had in fact been in Japan for a total of 6 hours and had no idea what anything in the damn shop was. She seemed remarkably surprised at my last comment and made the feeblest of feeble attempts to help me out. I bought some ham, 6 thick slices of bread (that’s how you buy it here) and some butter, which comes in ready cut segments. As we continued to walk, it became clear that we were now passing the heart of the city as the streets darkened and the traffic lessened. I was really quite nervous by the time we reached the three-bedroom apartment, the empty three-bedroom apartment, and she told me two things: that I was the only one living here and to “enjoy my stay”, before she promptly left. I wanted to run after her and yell something like “EXCUSE ME, BUT WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW?!” but I just walked into the apartment, turned on the light, and cried.

It turned out that I did in-fact have a flat-mate, a Canadian called Jon who is my age, and a decent guy. After the usual greetings and opening questions, he stated his intentions to transfer to another area of Tokyo. It seems that our home town wasn’t great.

I tried to suppress the initial thoughts of “why the hell did I do this?” during the first few days by keeping busy. I wondered around a few suburbs, went food shopping (a near impossibility when you’re new to the country and everything is labeled in gibberish) and chatted to my flat-mate. I had 4 whole days to kill before work started and told myself that once work started everything would be fine. Once work started, I told myself that once I get used to work, everything will be fine. It’s been four weeks since then and things really have got better. I have made friends quicker than I though would happen (why do I always think that I’m the only one having a tough time of it and that everyone else is fine?) and have got into the swing of work. As for the job, well, it’s not difficult, and I do sometimes look at myself laughing and chatting with Japanese English students and think “wow, I’m getting paid for this!” and at other times I look at myself repeating the work “wont” six times to a low-level student who can’t say who she is and think “at least I’m getting paid for this.” In that sense, it’s like any other job.

I go out with friends pretty regularly, about every other day, and have compiled a list of 4 good things about the little city I live in.

The 7 floor 100 yen store, where you can buy almost anything from electric speakers to tins of tuna for 100 yen (50p)
A little Italian restaurant where you can have a pizza or pasta for 400 yen (2 pounds) or just drink as much tea/coffee/soft-drinks as you want for 120 yen.
A great bar, where you and a hundred mates can all sit around a huge table and eat and drink good stuff fairly cheaply.
The local Karaoke centre where you hire a room per hour and sound like the greatest singer to have ever sung… in that room… during that song.

I guess I’ve spent so much time worrying about whether things will get better here or not that I haven’t consciously noticed things improving when they have. I’m picking up bits and pieces of the language, enjoy the odd adventure into Tokyo central, and have found myself to have a remarkably busy social-life. Alas, no Japanese girlfriend (why did SO MANY people back home tell me that they’d be fighting over me, it’s simply not true) and bad TV (it’s all in gibberish apart from a 7 and 10 o’clock news programme) but a nice balance of routine and adventure keeps me happy, although I miss my friends, my family, Cadbury’s chocolate, decent black tea and cheap… well, cheap anything. Everything here, apart from the things listed in the list above, is very expensive. Let me quash a few myths:

You cannot buy used school-girl’s underwear from vending machines here. You can however buy cigarettes and beer from vending machines.
The Japanese DO sweat. Someone told me they don’t. Oh how you notice it on the packed trains when all the business men swelter over the poor submissive Japanese women.
Electronics are cheaper to buy in England. You’d think YAMAHA keyboards would be cheaper here. Amazingly, they are more expensive.
The Japanese language is not easy to learn.


Thanks for reading. I’d really love to hear from you and would appreciate a line.

Take care
Trevor





Hello. Thanks for being in touch. There are some advantages of living in a foreign country that I had never thought of. For example, I can talk about people who piss me off in front of their face, I can claim to be an ignorant foreigner if I ever get caught buying child tickets for the otherwise expensive Japanese railway system, and I don’t feel guilty anymore when I pass Big Issue vendors, what with not being able to understand the squiggles on the front cover (and just not wanting to buy it anyway). But unlike America and Australia, you always feel far away from home here and just in case you start to feel at home, perhaps in the local Starbucks or McDonalds, you are quickly reminded of just how far from home you are when you watch young heavily tanned Japanese girls apply their thick black eyeliner for hours, or natter on their dinky mobile phone with a hundred trinkets hanging from it, which I think defeats the purpose of a small light mobile phone. I have been to a couple of sushi conveyer-belt style places, due mainly to peer-pressure resulting from the constant “have you eaten suhi yet? Have you eaten sushi yet?” and the problem is, it’s really nothing special. If you like smoked-salmon, you’d like sushi. For me, it’s just not filling enough. On my birthday, I ordered fried chicken cartilage, thinking that it couldn’t possibly be what it sounded like. It was, and it tasted pretty much like you’d expect, like bloody cartilage. What is wrong with these people?! A few weeks after being here, I put in an advert in a magazine for English speakers, saying that I was a piano player looking to do anything. I got an amazing response. It was from the Tokyo Comedy Store, saying that they were looking for a keyboard player for their Friday night comedy improvisation performances. I met-up with one of the comedians, he seemed to like me, and an hour later, he took me to the local Yamaha shop so that I could pick out a keyboard for me to play in the shows. “Er… that one” and he bought it. Incredible. So now, on Friday evenings, I rush straight from work, catch 3 trains (and change at the station where the terrorist gas attacks took place) and go to Roppongi (very popular clubbing area) to play for an hour and then hang out with thespians, comedians, and other odd people. It’s a great experience and the doors seemed to have opened to many opportunities, with the only problem being I work full time at Nova. Nova really is the McDonalds of private English language schools here: you find them everywhere, you get sick of all the advertising, and the staff can’t speak every good English. I’ve been clubbing a few times, once to this amazing little pokey place full of Western models and rich men where you pay 12 quid to get in and can drink as much as you like. Oh, and girls got in for free, and they can also drink as much as they like for free. Could you imagine this policy in England. The place would be in bedlam within an hour of opening. But here, things are more civilized, and the clubs have a really nice friendly atmosphere. A couple of days ago I caught the last train home from Tokyo to where I live. I was literally crushed from all sides for an hour, and counted 5 people squashed beside me. I genuinely started to panic as I started finding it hard to even breathe. I though of sardines in a tin, and realized that it was a bad analogy: sardines are practically free-ranging compared to being on the last train from Tokyo. It was a surreal experience, wedged between sweaty bodies, not needing to hold onto anything because we were so crammed together. And nobody says anything, they just get on with it. I was doing my best to remain dignified, trying to move my hands away from this woman’s chest, but it only made things worse. No wonder stories of the Tokyo Metro fumblings exist. I had been seeing this cute little Japanese girl called Misaki who is 28 and it was good, although her English was pretty basic. But the strangest thing happened. She said that she was ashamed of herself because her English was not good enough . Since after that, I haven’t heard from here. Blimey, I thought, I’ve never heard that one before. My vocabulary has completely dried-up from the constant low-level English that I deal with. Nova is reminiscant of the America-Africa slave trade. They round up all these westerners, ship them out to Tokyo where they suck all the language out of us. When I go back to England, I shall talk like a stupid four year old. Even typing this email has taken ages as I try to find the right words, like “typing” and “even”. Somewhere in the Tokyo smog, my vocabulary is floating about along with all the other Nova teacher's lost vocabulary: words like…. er…..you see? I can’t think of them. One day, all these long heavy words will fall from the sky in a big storm, and all Tokyo people will suddenly sound like academics and poets. This is what I predict. Thanks for reading. Please stay in touch. Trevor




Hello again, thanks for being in touch!

When asked how many hours of sleep they get every night, the Japanese normally answer 6 hours or so. When asked how many hours of work they do each day, they normally say that they start around 8 or 9am, and finish at around 7pm. Quite a few people have said that they start at 9am and finish at around midnight. They all work so hard here, and it makes me feel slack for doing the 38 hour week that I do. The people who study English really study it, they dedicate all of their spare time to it. I have been regularly amazed at the amount of Japanese people who have managed to speak pretty good English just by having English lessons, and watching films. Nova is a very expensive hobby for many of them, it costs them around 3000 pounds for a set of 600 forty-minute lessons. And to think that many of them have difficulty in answering why they are actually studying English: “er… so I can watch movies without Japanese subtitles”, wow, that’s dedication.

I on the other hand can still barely speak Japanese. What I can say however, really well, is the phrase “I can’t speak Japanese very well” which they seem to take as utter modesty and reply in fast fluent Japanese, to which I just say “hai!” before the realization quickly dawns on them that I am indeed bluffing and have no clue how to lead any kind of Japanese conversation, other than that of a retarded 3 year-old. There are people who have been here for 10 years, and still can’t speak the language well. English and Japanese are about as compatible as Mac/Microsoft software, and I have a nasty habit of crashing all the time.

One of my housemates is really started to bug me, because he has a little squeaky Japanese girlfriend who seems to spend more time in my flat than I do (she’s bloody here now, squeaking away), and they spend their time making-out on the sofa and giggling sweet-rubbish to each other. I wouldn’t mind, but the Japanese girl seems kinda stupid, she says “nanny? Nanny? Nanny?” all the time in this really nasty nasally voice, which is not a call for her grandmother, but translates as an informal way of saying “what?”, perhaps a bit like “whaaaaaaat?” like really stupid people say. And the thing is, he cheats on her all the time, and she has no idea. People like him give people like me a bad reputation. I try hard to explain to Japanese people that I did not come here for the Japanese girls, but it falls on death-ears, mainly because they can’t understand what the hell I’m talking about, but also because there are so many lust-hungry western guys here who quite clearly can’t get laid in their home country.

So we’ve had a couple of typhoons recently, which are always exciting. I walked home yesterday while in the middle (literally) of one. Because it was the very middle of the typhoon, everything had suddenly turned warm and humid, and the wind had died right down. Once I got home, they winds started up again, about 150km, and 10 people died. This poor country gets battered by typhoons, devastated by earth-quakes, worn-away by floods, and raided by randy westerners, no wonder I catch the occasional sinister glimpse towards me on the subway train by a Japanese guy. It’s as if they are saying “you are coming here to take all out beautiful women, and there’ll be none left for me, which is why my wife is an old bearded wrinkly crusty lady-boy. Go home westerners” or I could be unfairly elaborating.

My poor diet continues. I have discovered an instant meal in the supermarket, which is very tasty but I suspect, not at all healthy. It costs 80 yen, (40p: that’s the appeal) and consists of noodles and a milligram of something green (I think it’s the vegetable content) and 2 milliliters of flavoring sauce. I like to think it is healthy for me but can you really label something as being healthy just because it contains water? It is labeled rather strangely as “UFO” and I can’t think why. But that’s Japanese through and through. The amount of nonsense English around here is astounding. I think English is used in Japan as a marketing tool, to make products appear trendy and fashionable (English seems to be ‘cool’ here) and whether it makes sense or not, is not important. My housemate said to me one night: “what you eating tonight? UFO?” and I said yeah. If that small verbal exchange was heard back home, I’d be in the nut-house before you could say “just add water”.

There’s a Nova policy where we can’t see students we teach socially outside of Nova, ever, which is a pretty harsh policy and one I don’t plan to follow. Anyway, one evening, me and my mate Steve were drinking coffee in a Starbucks here (they’re everywhere) and one of our mutual student’s walked in and came over to us after ordering a coffee. This would be fine in most cases, but this student was a very odd, 32 year-old woman who seemed intent on telling us just how single she was, and how happy she was to see us, and how nice we were, and, well, it went on, and my coffee tasted more and more awkward with every passing minute. She started handing us little “presents” from her bag, things she just happened to have on her and we didn’t want, and she insisted on buying us more coffees. Not wanting to be rude, we stayed. Two hours later, things were getting ridiculous and we make our excuses and left. She proceeded to follow us out:
“Er, don’t you have a bike?” Steve said, recalling a recent conversation with her,
“Oh yes” she said, rather disappointed, “but I will walk you to the station” and so she left her bike and walked the 10 minute journey to the station. As we approached the station, Steve whispered to me,
“what if she just keeps following us?! What if she comes all the way to mine or your house?” and the panic set-in. Thankfully she didn’t, but if I see her again, it may-well happen.

I’m currently watching a TV program, where 4 women dress-up as school-girls and are whittled-down to one by a guy dressed in school uniform. The guy has to guess their age in order to find which one is the true school-girl and can date the girl of his choice. You really can’t tell how old Japanese women here are, but I had no idea that Japanese people can’t tell as well. It’s crazy here.

Love Trev

#203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN





Hello, thanks for reading.
Before I came out here, I assumed that Christmas would not be celebrated at all, what with Japan being a Buddhist society, yet I am now surrounded by neon Christmas trees with pixies singing Japanese carols in high prepubescent voices, which is scary enough the shake the Christmas spirit out of anyone. Christmas is a complete paradox here, and very typical of the Japanese desire to take something from abroad and make it their own. Christmas here is all about the cuteness of it all, the novelty factor, and most importantly, the potential to make profit out of it. And so Christmas is a big deal here, but only according to the leading department stores, who try their hardest to convince everybody that Christmas is a wonderful time of year, even though 90 percent of the population don’t do anything different on December 25th. In fact, I had to put in a request to take the day off work two months ago, and it even looks like I may still have to work (but I may have to be ‘sick’ on that day).
There are some Christmas traditions here though, obscure as they are. Most people make a Christmas cake, which is nothing like the rich matured cake we have at home, but is a strawberry sponge cake. For some reason, Kentucky Fried Chicken is considered to be a Christmas treat here in Japan, I have no idea how this came to be, but I do know that people queue up outside KFC’s everywhere to get their buckets of fried chicken. Some families give each other presents but the vast majority just treat it like any other day. But seeing life-size models of Colonel Sanders dressed in the Santa outfits is just too strange.
As for me, I’m going to be spending Christmas with my mate James who is coming to visit me (a guy I lived with last year during my PGCE), and with Akiyo, who I think is excited at the prospect of seeing how genuine Westerners ‘do’ Christmas, so James and I will have to do our best to give each other crappy presents (come on, admit it now, who bought their father Gillette Sensor gift packs because you couldn’t think of what else to get?!), start drinking in the afternoon, light a pathetic blue flame on the Christmas pudding on the forth feeble attempt and watch as everybody gasps at how small the flame is, play board games while still drinking, and feeling bloated and so tired by the evening, that we just end up sitting around the box, watching Jim Davidson and Bruce Forsyth wishing everyone a happy Christmas. Oh, except that I wont be able to get that here, what a shame.
I walked around a famous district of Tokyo called Ginza the other evening with Akiyo, which was genuinely beautiful, with the Christmas lights, decorations and neon signs of Panasonic, Canon, Rolex and just about every major company in the world. Ginza is like a giant Piccadilly circus, yet many Japanese people tell me how their favourite part of London is Piccadilly circus, which must be a tenth of the size of Ginza. As we walked through the small side streets of open bars with the hundreds of salarymen drinking beers in an attempt to warm-up (it’s really cold here now), I thought “Christ, I’m actually in Tokyo, this is amazing.” These salarymen are the people who work 12 hour days, never see their kids, have housewives and usually stay in the same job all their lives. I’ve met some real interesting characters, such as a train conductor who works 9am to 9am every other day and is responsible to piecing together suicide victims who jump in front of the train from the platform. Around 30,000 Japanese people do this every year (30,000?!) and it is the job of the conductor (not the police) to scrape the dead body of the track/train and make sure that the train system continues running smoothly. He gets the equivalent of 50 pounds extra for each body that he recovers. He’s had to do this about 5 or 6 times so far. All in all, he gets paid less than me. As I say, things are very different here.
My music life here is taking off a little more, and I have had some amazing offers to play for an hour, getting paid 25,000 yen, which is about 125 pounds, a figure I’ve never been paid for such a short time! I was also offered the position of hotel lounge pianist in a different area of Japan for 2 months, with the possibility of staying longer, my flights and accommodation in the hotel all paid for. I’m sure it would have been a great way to save money, but a hell of a lonely experience. I could picture myself living the life of “Lost in Translation” every day, but without the novelty of Scarlett Johansson.
I’ve been spending a lots of time in a quirky bar called “Sala”, mostly filled with Japanese, but also lots of foreigners, and it’s a great place to meet Japanese people. One time, my friend and I were asked to come over to a table full of Japanese girls and to just talk to them in English, I’ve never felt like a hostess before, but this must have been pretty close. There were some Japanese guys with them, who turned out to be in the Army, so I was concerned with what they thought about me and Justin. Anyway, they were all perfectly friendly. Another time, an older Japanese business man overheard me trying to talk Japanese, and approached us. He invited us to his table and paid special attention to his female friends, of whom he kept telling us were single. So once again, Justin and I made strained conversation, feeling a little bit like conversational prostitutes, as he paid for us in beer. It was raining that night, and he kindly lent me a spare umbrella he had, and I promised to return it to him 2 weeks later when we’d both be at the bar again. So 2 weeks later, he was overjoyed when he discovered I had kept my promise and bought me more beer and introduced me to more women. Oh, it’s a hard life here.
Please stay in touch.
Happy Christmas and look forward to the New Year.
Trev





Hello,
Sometimes as I am running down the street, trying to do up my tie while eating a piece of extraordinarily thick toast dripping with butter (I’m trying to put weight on), I am stopped by the dreaded railway tracks. You see, on my way to the railway station, I have to cross these tracks and in Tokyo, the barriers come down every few minutes and you have to wait ages for the seemingly never-ending train to pass. And quite often, the barriers stay down once the train has passed because there is another train passing in the opposite direction. And then, I have to face the pedestrian crossing, which gives you all of two seconds to cross between hour segments of free-flowing traffic. I always ignore the red man and just cross when there’s a gap, to terrified Japanese onlookers, who are probably thinking how crazy I am to be risking my life so unnecessarily. Well, the Japanese are what you might all ‘over-cautious’ – many of them consider themselves sick if they have a headache. If you’re not fully functioning in all ways, then you are sick here, that’s one of the many differences in mentality. So I have been officially late to work twice since I started, well, that’s not bad for 4 months is it? God, it’s been 4 months already!
I have to say it’s been a bloody tough month of ups and downs. Having a Japanese girlfriend is turning out to be a total mind-job for me: never really knowing quite what she is thinking, and wondering if I am saying something that will offend her. Our times together are lovely of course, but she works hard in the week and has weekends free, while I have easy weekdays but work all weekend, so it’s certainly not ideal. We’ve been going out for almost two months now, and she is lovely, intelligent, funny and cute. And she’s older than me, 28. Last week she started asking about our plans for a summer vacation, next year. Blimey, I thought, I’ve never thought that far ahead in my life, let alone with a girl. But I guess that’s a good sign!
Recently, I have really been out and about, seeing some amazing things and feeling like I’m really in Japan. I went to a district about an hour train ride away full of beautiful gardens and temples, with the different colours of the autumn leaves everywhere. The area was open and clean, spacious and full of symmetry, amongst the 800 or so year-old temples, with incredible old and intricate wood carvings that must have taken a lifetime to achieve. The clear blue sky contrasted beautifully with the reds, greens and yellows of the autumn leaves, and I really felt happy to have finally seen some true beauty in this mysterious country. The next week, I went to a huge temple district with 3 other (Nova) friends and found even more beautiful temples and gardens, with intricate little rivers and astounding temples which seemed to glow when the late afternoon sun hit upon the deep red and gold colours. The day was rounded off nicely as I shock a fortune shaker, in which a single thin rod of wood falls out and predicts your fortune. I was told that things were going to get much better for me! Well, it sure made me feel better. On my way home, we met a sharp contrast in culture, as we stopped off at a TGI Fridays for half-price drinks and hamburgers.
I came here partly because I wanted to be in Tokyo, and I must say that the novelty of the central areas is hard to ware-off. There are many centres to Tokyo, no particular central area. In “Lost in Translation”, you would have seen Shibuya, perhaps the busiest area in Tokyo besides Shinjuku. I once organized to meet a friend at Shinjuku station, and when I arrived, I remembered the fact that Shinjuku was the busiest railway station in the world, and also the second largest in the world. Needless to say, it took quite sometime to actually find each other. But sometimes, the business pisses me off, because it just never stops. Someone here said that the problem with these busy areas like Shinkuju and Shibuya is that it’s like Christmas eve everyday there, the frantic rush, the masses of people, the stress, and so it can be a little wearing! Recently, I went into an arcade centre with the same friend, and we played this game where you hit these big traditional Japanese drums called Taiko drums, with big thick sticks in time to some frantic trance music on the screen. We were really getting into it and before we knew it, we had an audience of a few guys and mostly attractive Japanese girls who clapped and cheered us as we completed each section of the song. We got chatting to them afterwards, and as we left the arcade centre, I was once again reminded of the craziness, the novelty, the fun of living where I am living.
Also, the kindness shown by some Japanese people towards me has been astounding. I was recently told, by a Nova student, that I could have his keyboard if I wanted it (I have been long moaning about the fact that I have nothing to play in this country). I said that’d be great, and he assured me that he didn’t play it anymore. Well, he met me and took me to his home, which took about an hour on the trains, where he set the keyboard up and asked me if it was good enough. It was great, and he said he would take me home in his car. Well, we left at 2pm and got into my home city at around 6pm having stopped for lunch on the way. I had no idea that he lived so far away from me, but hr refused to accept any petrol money, or any money for the keyboard. So I got a free keyboard, which was worth about a thousand pounds when he bought it, with free delivery. He said “buy me a beer when I visit England”.
Thanks for reading and please stay in touch.
Trevor

203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN





There is a certain type of person who comes to Japan, whom I resent greatly. They are labeled “Mr Charisma” man, a which comes from a comic published in a monthly English magazine here in Japan, which depicts the life of an English teacher who came to Japan because he couldn’t get laid in his own country. These are the type of goofy looking guys who act geeky and awkward in their home country, but suddenly become Mr Charisma when they are in Japan, surrounded by beautiful girls who mindlessly admire them for no good reason, other than being an exotic foreigner. These guys quickly let their ego explode and act as if this kind of attention is the norm. The other night I was in Sala, my local bar, when I saw this rather ugly looking guy with a strong northern (English) accent chatting to two much younger Japanese girls. He was giving them some kind of impromptu casual English lesson, and suddenly declared that he would given them his mobile phone number, to which the girls exploded with delight, clapping their hands frantically and making out that it was the greatest news they had heard, although in actual fact, this was just them being polite. So this ugly goofy guy walks to the other side of the bar with a walk which suggested he had some kind of bowl irregularity, or maybe he was trying to look cool. He takes his mobile phone and walks back to the girls in a walk that said “I’m the coolest cat around here” or “I’m a total dickhead” to me. After giving them his number and announcing that they should do “something together soon”, he throw his jacket over one shoulder and walked out the bar in a manner that suggested he was the coolest man in the world, or at least, trying to be.
Unfortunately, as I’m walking down the street with my Japanese girlfriend, Akiyo, I can’t help but think people are looking at me thinking “he’s only here because he can’t get laid at home” and I want to tell these people “actually, I wasn’t even attracted to Japanese girls before I came out here, and I didn’t know that Japanese women were particularly attracted to foreign guys.” My friend, James, who visited me over Christmas, got some first hand experience of this. One night we went to a Japanese pub, where we sat near 4 rather drunk Japanese girls. Two of them came to sit next to us (highly rare for a Japanese girl to do) and one of them asked James if she could be his girlfriend for the night. Well, it doesn’t get much more direct than that does it?
For Christmas day, James and I cooked a traditional English style Christmas dinner for Akiyo and her mate. He had even bought a Christmas pudding from England. It seemed a near-impossible task, what with Akiyo’s oven being the size of a toaster and her only having one gas hob. But amazingly, it all came together and the girls were mightily impressed, as were we to be honest. It was a lovely day, and a Christmas I’m sure James will never forget. The preparation was a little bit much, and I felt bad that James’s Tokyo holiday was too much work, but he didn’t seem to mind. We spent a couple of rather stressful hours shopping for Christmas food in the largest supermarket I knew. We couldn’t find gravy anywhere so we made do with a demi-glace sauce, which turned out to be gravyish enough. We went to a café to relax before the big shop, and James asked the girl who served us if she spoke English. She replied “yes” in a really sweet English accent. I asked how she had such an accent, and it turns out that she went to my University, Oxford Brookes, for 4 years! She told us what a wonderful time she had in England, and seemed sad when she added “but now I’m here”. As James and I sipped our coffees, I thought that she was too good to miss, so I wrote my email address on a napkin and passed it to her on the way out. I’m so glad I did, because now we are good friends, and see each other lots. In fact, I saw her last night, we drunk beer and did Karaoke. She spent the whole night telling me that she was no good at singing, so I thought I had found an ideal Karaoke partner, what with my singing being as stable as Iraq/American politics. Unfortunately, after my shaky off-tune rendition of “Man in the Mirror”, she proceeded to sing a Japanese song, perfectly, with faultless tuning, and a really sweet soft voice. God, I thought, I need another drink.
I had a really nice moment on the 27th December, when we went into Tokyo and had drinks in the same bar that I went to after my first day in Japan. The first time I visited this bar I was unsure of everything, nervous, and anxious, but now, this time around, I was surrounded by genuine friends, I was stable in my job, and I had a great relationship with Akiyo. It was nice to compare. I remember thinking, during my first visit to the bar, if I would return here again, what situation I would be in by the time I did. Actually, things with Akiyo took a battering over the new year (something I kinda expected) as she spoke about wanting to get married, and how her being 4 years older than me was a problem. Things were on the cusp, but they cleared-up, after some serious chats, and now things are better than ever… and I’m left with a heavy decision to make… shall I go back home in May as planned to find a job teaching music, or stay here another year, get a better job, and try to make a go of it? Answers on a postcard please. Serious stuff. I have until April to decide.

Thanks so much for reading. Please stay in touch.

Trevor
#203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN





Hi,
As I stood wedged between 5 sweaty businessmen (yet again) on a late train from Tokyo, I was suddenly pushed out of the way by another businessman, clearly over-worked and under loved, who was making a mad dash for the door, but in his sleepy stupor, he was barging the wrong way, and was actually heading down the train instead of out the door. He eventually remembered that most modern trains have doors on the side and headed out of one, with his head down, still looking half-asleep. As I watched him disappear back into his world, I felt so sorry for him. Businessmen in Japan work more hours than any other country, and sleep the least.
I was coming home from a period of teaching I had been doing, but it wasn’t English teaching, it was… ready?... it was Improvised Comedy Singing… for Japanese people. Now, I don’t know how it happened myself but somehow I have managed to start teaching weekly two-and-a-half hour classes to the Japanese Comedy Store group. All their comedy is improvised. I had a guy translating for me… which made me feel so important, you’ve got to try it sometime. So there I was, with 12 young eager Japanese comedians doing everything I tell them. It’s like someone asked me what could be the best possible job for me and then gave it to me, I feel lucky indeed.

Nova (the English school I work for) continues to be crap, boring etc but more and more bearable. I have developed a bit of a “them and us” mentality, and it’s nice being back at school: bitching about the bosses with like-minded colleagues when the bosses are out of the room, doing practical jokes on each other and generally mucking about when the bosses aren’t looking. There was a leaving party for 8 Nova teachers, most of whom were utterly forgettable people. I went to be polite, and found myself totally indifferent to the fakeness of the whole thing-
“Oh we must stay in touch” or
“Come and visit me, you’ll always have a place to crash at in Kansas (or whatever daft place they came from)” or
“It’s been great working with you, really great”.
… yeah yeah yeah, why are you going home then if it’s so great? I hate to sound so cynical but most Nova teachers hang-out with other Nova teachers because they can’t be bothered to find other friends, especially Japanese friends, so they hang-out with each other, foreigners with foreigners, just because they are there. 99% of all these people will never see each other again. Let’s not pretend we’re the best of buddies, just because we work together.

I went to Kyoto a couple of weeks ago and it was great fun. A small portion of Kyoto was featured in “Lost in Translation” and I made a point of going to that area. It was of course beautiful, although it rained of the entire 3 days we were there, bar a 2 hour period during which we visited the “Golden Temple” made out of solid gold, which just glowed in the brief intense sunlight. We got a bullet train to Kyoto from Tokyo (isn’t it funny how To-kyo and Kyo-to are the same name reversed?) which was …well… fast. Other memorable times on the trip included watching Geisha chatting-away on their mobile phones, visiting a wooden temple that claimed to be the largest wooden structure in the world (along with a dozen other places I’m sure) and going to a sweet little restaurant in a sweet little district called Gion where this sweet old Japanese lady (who couldn’t speak a work of English, not that she should) served us a sweet dinner, and then sweetly ripped us off by charging us 15 pounds each for some meat and salad.
The highlight of the trip was a visit to a very large temple which was half way up a mountain and the weather was very dramatic, stormy, rainy and moody. It was really atmospheric, as the rain swept in from the sides in the strong wind, making me wonder just how stable Japanese woodwork really is (considering they never use nails for building, just wood locking). That evening, the late evening sun was strangely strong and as it hit against the green bamboo forests, everything lit-up an intense green and looked beautiful.

Things with my girlfriend Akiyo are great, although I’ve recently found myself to be in an utterly original situation. I had a (really quite sexy) student ask me to give her some help with an English test she was taking, outside of Nova. Not giving a damn about Nova’s anti-student-socialising-outside-of-work policy, I happily agreed and was subjected to 5 hours of thinking “am I a nice guy? Am I a nice guy?” as she told me to dump Akiyo and go out with her. In the end, I told her that the idea would probably be better than reality, but I was chuffed indeed.

And then there was Tomoe, this great girl with a wicked sense of humour, who I had some drinks with the other week. She …er… made things clear… and once again, I did the whole “I have a girlfriend routine” and told her that I’d love to be good friends with her. She was astounded with that, and later told me that no foreigner guy had ever wanted to be “just friends” with her and that I was the first. So, as it happens, we are good friends now, and we organised a drinking party for my single friends and her single friends. We ended up doing Karaoke and running up an enormous bill (150 quid) and everyone missed their last train home because of the fuss other the money. So Tomoe and Chris, a good friend from England, came back to my flat and I politely gave them my room (in which I had prepared 2 futons) and slept on the sofa. The next day it appeared that only one bed had been used… my bed, and not the spear futon, which was consistant with Chris’ and Tomoe’s good mood.

I still perform for the Japanese and English Comedy store every Friday, which is great fun, and occasionally I play in a one-off gig somewhere, like in a Secondary school. A couple of weeks ago I played for 40 minutes and got 100 quid, which was great considering I was only expecting 25! I also give piano lessons to two middle-aged housewives who are remarkably good, and their speed of progress frightens me a little!

Thanks for reading. Please stay in touch.

Trevor
203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN





Hello,
My company, NOVA, has a popular and mildly witty phrase associated with it that many students tell me is “NO VAcation” with highlights their rather poor treatment of employees. We are essentially numbers, easy to get in, easy to get out, because the company offers hardly any incentive to stay at all, which is particularly unusual for a Japanese company. If you stay for a year, the common pay increase per month is twelve pounds, which I think is a bloody insult. The average length of time a NOVA employee stays within the company is 9 months and that’s just now NOVA likes it: a constant stream of fresh ignorant employees means no need for high promotion salaries. You have to wonder at the people who work at Nova for more than a year or two.

I catch myself unawares sometimes, as I realise just how normal my very abnormal surroundings have become. Sometimes I look at the masses of Japanese people cramming into the electric burrows under Tokyo and it hits me again, where the hell am I?! What am I doing here?! And when I come away from teaching the Japanese comedy group, or a nice lesson, or a good night out with some nice Japanese friends, or from my girlfriend, or from one of the comedy shows, I am reminded again of why I’m staying here, but I’m still not comfortable; I think it would be wrong for this place to become the norm, to become comfortable.

I saw a really sweet thing the other evening. I was riding a fairly quiet Metro and opposite me sat a very unusual couple, a large black man in a traditional African dress, holding the hand of this tiny Japanese-looking woman who was wearing a more feminine dress made of the same African material. They seemed to be holding onto each other for dear life, they looked so in love, and they were talking in English. It occurred to me that English was clearly a second language for both of them, and while they were pretty good English speakers, they had heavy accents of their home country. It was the most cosmopolitan and cutest thing I’d seen in Tokyo. Just an observation.

The other night, Akiyo (my Nova-student girlfriend, 7 months now!), and myself were talking about people’s names. I realised that she didn’t know what my middle name was so I asked her to take a guess. I was mortified to hear that all of Aki’s guesses were characters featured in the NOVA textbook, “George? Jeffrey? Dave”. When I told her it was Anthony, she seemed a little perplexed, as if a name not mentioned in the NOVA textbook could possibly exist. I became a little nervous as I wondered just now far this kind of thinking could go… does Aki decide what our social activities are based on the adventures on George and Jeffrey in lesson E27? Does Aki compliment me using only the phrases from the “praise and compliments” lesson? Does she tell me she misses me only because that’s what Dave says in lesson E11 when his girlfriend goes away for the weekend? OK, so these aren’t serious concerns of mine, but I realised that Aki’s Novafied English was crafted by the very people I hate, the morons in the “Education Planning” department who are responsible for the absurdly poor textbook. I only hope that my various Briticisms have the strength to overpower the nonsense that is NOVA English.

So I’ve been here a while, over 9 months now, and I’m starting to get a bit cocky. The other day I was in a McDonalds, queuing to order some fatty monstrosity, when I remembered the trouble I had had in a previous MacDonalds, trying to order off the Japanese menu during which the woman serving me had promptly turned over the Menu to reveal an English menu. So as I was queuing, I thought I knew what to do. As I approached the counter I made the usual futile attempt to order a “cheezu-ba-ga, fo-lai-do potato”, totally expecting the usual panicked expression from the poor MacDolands girl that read something like “why was he allowed to enter this country to ruin my sense of harmony?”. But this time was different! I remembered the previous time when the other girl had turned the menu over, so with a rather smug expression, I turned over this gibberish menu to reveal… another gibberish menu, all in Japanese, exactly the same. She looked at me as if to ask “and exactly how is that going to help the current situation?” and I turned a little red, and resorted, once again, to the rather pathetic point-at-the-picture-and-raise-a-finger method, tried and tested by foreigners all across Japan. Why did I ever think I could break the method?

Japanese people use three sets of symbols, and once of them is used almost exclusively for foreign words. This set is called Katakana, and it basically makes an English word sound Japanese. For example, cheeseburger, becomes Chi-zu-ba-ga, and drink becomes do-li-n-ku. By far the most annoying thing about the Japanese language is when I try to say an English word to a Japanese person and they go ahead and correct MY English by pronouncing it in Katakana. So there I am in MacDonalds, screaming milkshake! Milkshake! Milkshake! and after ten attempts the poor MacDonalds girl clicks and pronounces “Ah! Mi-ru-ku shi-e-ko!” as if my proper English word bares no resemblance to the authentic and true Japanese pronunciation. Madness.

Just a small thing here: you know how one language has words for something that another language doesn’t? Well, I recently discovered a case between English and Japanese. In English we always talk about a dog barking or a cat meowing or a chicken clucking, which is ridiculous when you think about it. Why don’t we just have one word that describes any animal ‘talking’? Well, the Japanese do, and they think it’s crazy that we have a specific word for each animal. But that’s the thing! We don’t do we?! I mean, what does a Wildebeest do? How about a Reindeer? And what exactly does a penguin say? Madness I tell you.

Please stay in touch. Thanks for reading.

Trevor
#203 Junes Kaijin
1-31-31 Kaijin
Funabashi-Shi
Chiba-Ken
273-0021
JAPAN





Hello,
It’s strange to be experiencing the same kind of weather I knew a year ago here. I’ve never been abroad more than a year and so I’m feeling kinda nervous: will I be Japanesified if I stay here too long? Will I become “slitty eyed” like the great Prince Philip once remarked, what a guy.
I guess I was looking for something to make me stay and it certainly came, Akiyo’s pregnant… no not really, something else. I’ve been offered the job of Musical Director for a pretty big production in Tokyo. I’ll have to compose/arranged music for a full length musical-style pantomime, based on “Sleeping Beauty.” It’s very daunting but I think I can do it and the director is a good friend of mine, who I know will help me. So there we are, I’m staying, at least until Christmas, because this show is on in November. So if anyone wants to visit me, come in November and see the show!

Recently, all of my best non-Japanese friends left to return to their country, which left me wondering if it was worth staying here anymore, but it’s been ok, although I miss them sometimes. I have many Japanese friends but it’s hard to see them regularly, what with always bloody working over the weekend. I never fail to be surprised at how this suits some Nova teachers who are happy to just teach rubbish English and then go drinking, repeat x5 for the week and spend the two days off doing nothing. I find myself distancing from my Nova ‘friends’ more and more. In fact, I can’t take the leaving parties anymore. My best friend here, Justin, had a leaver’s party and amazingly, all the staff he hated turned up, just to make a formal showing. I suspected he felt like he had no control over his own leaving ‘party’ and I had an utterly crap time. I found myself constantly turning to the stranger next to me and having the same mundane conversation which always starts with the questions “Where do you work?” and “Where are you from?” and very quickly I switch-off, numb to the continued alcohol-enthused conversation about Japanese girls, the job and shallow pointless observations about Japanese society. It sounds immensely arrogant of me, but I sat there thinking “I’ve actually got a life here, I have Japanese friends, I’m busy, I have a proper girlfriend, I have commitments and things to do every week.” So I feel like Nova is simply the money earner while all the fun stuff happens outside of work.

The auditions for “Sleeping Beauty” were very strange for me. I had to test the singing of fifteen people, all older than me, all far more experienced in the theatre than me. In my attempt to put people at ease, I asked them to sing very basic tunes that everyone knows, like “Head Shoulders Knees and Toes”. There was one woman who simply refused to sing what I wanted and instead gave an overly long and ornate rendition of some jazz tune. Sure it was great but it made me think “damn, if she doesn’t do what I say now, how are rehearsals going to be?!” At the end of the auditions, I met with the director and assistant director to discuss who to cast. I felt like such a fraud as we disgusted the pros and cons of each person. Much as I hated it, it seems that the jazz-singing woman is going to be Sleeping Beauty.

The sheer volume of people here can get a bit much sometimes, it’s just relentless. Normally when a train pulls up, it’s so crammed full of people that there isn’t much window space with sweaty skin not pressed against it. And then the doors open and the only people to get off are those who thought that somebody behind them needed to get off, but of course nobody does actually get off, so those people who got off in the first place have to squeeze back in and the new people have to attempt to squeeze in. When the doors slowly shut, you can just feel the noses being scraped and faces rubbed against. As I find myself wedged under the armpit of the only Japanese man in the world who has a severe sweating disorder, I try to get out a book or my CD player only to find that the woman I’ve accidentally gently poked in the process is staring at me like I’ve just pulled out a bomb. Surely, you wouldn’t be surprised to receive a little accidental poke now and again in a train crammed to beyond rationality.

A lovely thing about Japan is that you very rarely encounter people arguing or creating any kind of bad atmosphere. It’s a far cry from the Romford pram-pushers back home who shout and whack their kids until sufficient mental scarring has been achieved. On the contrary, kids in Japan appear to be able to do what they want, which isn’t a bad thing, since they are inherently much ‘better’ behaved. And another huge difference is how safe you feel, even if you’re walking home at 3am past a group of drunks. I’ve never felt threatened in the least and I’ve never had a bad word said or action made against me, well, at least anything I’ve understood. I’m sure it happens but ignorance is bliss. I know that when I get back to England, I’m going to have to quickly break out of the habit of talking loudly about the person in front of me to my mate next to me.
“Blimey, look at his trousers; they’re wedged right up to his shoulders.”
“Yeah, maybe this mother still dresses him.”
I’d be killed instantly if I said this in Essex.

And I like the sense of fashion here: it’s far more individual and whacky than back home. I don’t know why. Maybe a bigger attempt to make themselves individual is needed when a monoculture lives in such close proximity. A fellow Nova teacher once pointed to a case of stairs in a train station that hundreds of Japanese people were pouring down and he said they all looked like salmon rushing to get somewhere. Just before I was about to say it was no different to back home, I realised it was: the monoculture makes everyone look much similar. I’m still working out if such a monoculture is a good thing or not. Most of the population in Japan seem torn about that too.





So I phoned my dad and mum hoping I could use their credit card number, but neither was in. So I phoned my brother, who’s only number I had was his mobile, which was ridiculously expensive to call from a Japanese mobile. I explained the situation and he said that he didn’t have a credit card and he’d try to contact mum or dad or me and would get back to me. Now in full panic mode, I reluctantly turned to Akiyo who did have a credit card. Could I use a Japanese credit card to pay for some UK travel insurance? I went to her flat and explained apologetically that I was running out of options. Then my brother called me to say that mum or dad didn’t have a credit card. So I had to use Akiyo’s card, which thankfully worked. Now I needed proof of having bought the insurance to satisfy Nova and I only had about 5 hours before the UK business would stop for the day, but the time difference meant it was well into the night here in Japan. I phoned Endsleigh again, got cut-off, phoned again and begged for them to call me back, to which they said they couldn’t. I explained that I needed them to email me a copy of my insurance policy immediately, to which the girl said that she couldn’t do that until 4 hour’s time. I said that that only gave me an hour’s grace before Endseligh would be shut, so they absolutely had to email me the policy without fail. She absolutely promised me they would. It was about midnight now, so I went to bed for 4 hours and set the alarm to wake me up at 4am to check my email.
And of course, there was absolutely no email. I called Endsleigh again, got cut-off by them as they forwarded me to the travel insurance department, phoned again, got cut-off again, by which time my once-full calling card had about 10 minutes left. And of course I had to go out into the streets to make these calls, since if you make any noise in a Japanese apartment, a hundred sleeping people will wake up. So, in an utter panic, I went to a 24 convenience store and went to the trusty automatic international-phone-card topper. It was making strange noises and I couldn’t get it to work. I eventually guessed from the shop-assistant that it was ‘resetting’ itself, which it does for 30 minutes at 4am every morning. It was now about 4.30am so that was useless. Endsleigh would be closed in 30 minutes and I would lose my job. I only had 2 minutes to explain my entire and unusual situation again to yet ANOTHER Endsleigh insurance member, having already explained my story to about 5 different staff. I phoned them and was put on hold again, for about the sixth time, this time for about 8 minutes, and they cut me off again. With one minute remaining, I phoned Endsleigh, now in a total panic, and to the first person who answered I gave the following speech at rocket speed:
“I’m very sorry but I’m calling from Japan and I only have a minute left to speak. I desperately need you to send me an email of my insurance policy. I’ve spoken to so many different people at Endsleigh and nobody has helped me. You keep cutting me off. My name is Trevor and my insurance policy number is BAC4558656. You must call me back. I have no way of calling you.”
By now it was gone 5am, and Endsleigh was shut. There was nothing more I could do. Defeated, I walked slowly back home (by now I had wondered the majority of my home-town, looking for shops which sold call-cards but all the machines were ‘resetting’) and as I approached my flat, my phone miraculously ringed. It was a girl called Lisa, which a strong northern accent,
“Hi is that Trevor? This is Lisa from Endsleigh Insurance. Just to let you know that we’ve emailed you the policy.” I thanked her from the bottom of my heart and went to bed totally knackered. My name must’ve been circulated in about 10 different Endsleigh offices.
I woke up at 11am, relaxed. All I needed to do was to print a copy of the insurance policy and fax it to Nova since Nova had no email address I could send it to. I don’t have a printer so I went into the town where I worked, dressed formally (I needed to use the fax machine there so I had to dress up) and went to the main internet café. I tried to explain that I needed to print something out and pointed to the computer close to me that had a printer attached. The café assistant told me that I was prohibited from using that computer and printer (for some enigmatic reason) and that I needed to ‘rent’ a printer. So he actually handed me a printer, with all the cables hanging from it. I had to ask for paper. I went to the prescribed booth, number 100, which was 5 minutes walk away. Once I was there, I discovered there were no spare power-points for the printer so I unplugged the unnecessary overhead lamp and used that socket. I connected it up and turned on the computer, which promptly told me that I needed a CD-ROM to install a printer driver. In a state of disbelief that this was really the normal procedure for wanting to print something, I took the long hike back to the café assistant, who had now changed into a slightly less nervous-looking guy, and tried to explain that it wouldn’t work. He looked at me and pointed at the original computer and printer which I had been told by the first guy I couldn’t use, and he said “why don’t you just use that?” Honestly, it’s hard not to think “is it because I’m a foreigner?!” sometimes. It worked fine and I faxed it OK with 2 hours before the deadline of losing my job to spare.





First of all, I’m coming home from September 15th (my b-day) until the 27th so please contact me if you’ll be about in England then because I’d love to meet up.

I’ve been here for over a year now, the longest I’ve been away from home! I marked the anniversary by waiting for an obscene amount of time in the local immigration centre to renew my visa, getting increasingly frustrated with every passing minute. Japan seems to over-employ people in every possible situation, apart from of course, this particular immigration centre. So I collected my “no.84” ticket and sat down to watch the two staff members deal with a hundred different families, all equally huge, all with one ticket per family, with each person needing a new visa. There were times when the number didn’t move for twenty minutes or so… and it was at no.42 when I arrived.
Another new boss has arrived in my branch of Nova. He’s been here for 6 years and is possibly the biggest tit I have met in Nova, which is really saying something, since Nova seems to have more tits working for it than everybody on the books of “Playboy”. His name is Greg and the first ever conversation we had was about how terrible he thought my teaching was. It’s fascination how people-skills just seem to by-pass some people.

I was in McDonalds the other day when a group of dynamically-dressed mid-teens decided to point at me and laugh and giggle, which isn’t particularly rare. What was rare however, was when one of them turned to me rather cautiously and said “hello” in a manner which suggested she was coaxing some timid animal out of its hiding place. I politely repeated the same greeting back to her and her reaction was one of “wow, it can talk”. Never before had I felt like somebody’s play-thing, a mere amusement, like an animal in a zoo. She followed with “where are you from?” and I told her. Then she said “you very cool” which I decided to translate as “you are very cool” and I replied “no, just a normal person” to which she and her friends lost interest and continued to play with their mobile phones with mountains of dangly things hanging off them. I felt absolutely flattered that my ability to say “hello”, “London”, and be a foreigner marked me as being cool. But of course, it’s not cool as in popular, funny, respected and sophisticated, no, it’s cool as in having ‘wide eyes’ and a ‘pointy’ face. Such superficial character judgments for foreigners are commonplace here and can be pretty grating sometimes.

Another thins that marked my year’s anniversary was the expiry of my travel insurance, which I had completely forgotten about. Apparently, Nova had been sending me warning letters that if I didn’t renew my insurance, I couldn’t work for them anymore (a law for foreigners in Japan) but these letters had gone straight to a dusty inbox that I never check. So, one day before it would expire, I was handed a letter telling me I had a day to renew my insurance and to send evidence of the new insurance to Nova head-office in Tokyo. Otherwise, I would lose my job, and would have to go through a reinstating process that took ages. The thought of having no proper income in a city as expensive as this gave me chills. First, I went online to the Endsleigh Insurance site and entered the details of my UK switch card to pay for a new period of insurance. The computer refused my card. Not terribly worried, I knew I had a credit card, so I entered in the details of that, and again, it was refused. I then phoned Endsleigh and tried to pay on the phone but the girl told me that neither card was recognized. A little panicked (how was I going to pay for UK insurance if none of my payments worked?), I phoned Halifax bank who promptly told me that both of my cards were out of date, even though the expiry date on the actual cards were in the future. They told me that I needed to register a lost card and that I’d have to wait up to 7 seven working days for the new card to arrive. I explained that I didn’t have that time available to me, and I was cut-off. I called again and was forwarded to the same department but in the process I was cut-off again. I called again and explained that it was too expensive for me to keep calling them and asked if they could call me back on my Japanese mobile. They said that I could ask the operator of the country I was in to make a reverse charge call to Halifax, and they would pay the charges. I replied with “um… can you tell me how to say that in Japanese?” It still astounds me how people assume the world speaks English. I asked them to tell it to me straight, is there anyway I’d be able to pay for anything using any of my bank cards within the next 20 hours, and they replied “no”. Anyway, this story kinda goes on and on, so if you want to read about about it, open the attachment.

A couple of nights ago I was invited over to one of my student’s mansion to watch the fireworks (it’s currently the season for many firework displays in Toyko). I’m sure everyone reading this is picturing some glorious housing estate overlooking the Japanese countryside, right beside the firework display. No. It was just a small apartment (the Japanese use the word ‘mansion’ meaning apartment, when they speak in English) about a mile away from the display. It was a very urban experience, as we climbed to the roof top of this large block and drank beer with many other families, who were also out to see the display… a mile away… on top of a block of flats. Overlooking all the rooftops of Tokyo to see a tiny version of what would have been a great display up close seemed to me to be a wonderful and very Tokyo experience. There was clearly a real sense of occasion with all the families there, even though the display was easy to miss.
A few weeks later, I had planned to spend the evening on the boat meandering through Tokyo’s main river (yes, there’s a big river that runs through Tokyo, did you know?) to watch more fireworks, this time up close. This had been planned for months by a friend of my girlfriend’s and I was looking forward to it, especially considering it would cost 50 pounds. I told everyone at work about this trip and they all said how great it would be, and that there’d be food and drink flowing, unlimited, as much as you like. Well, we turned up to the rickety docking area to find a small white fishing boat, the kind that featured in Jaws, well, a bit more modern, and without all the shark-fishing equipment, minus Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider, although we did get attacked by sharks, no, that’s not true. BUT there was no elegant ball-room, so flowing champagne, and actually, no food or drink at all! Just about 50 people crammed onto this boat, oh, and it rained. I had visions of me and my girlfriend waltzing around on a beautifully polished ball-room floor, surrounded by caviar and champagne, but no, just a dirty great boat.

Don’t forget, I’m coming home from September 15th (my b-day) until the 27th so please contact me if you’ll be about in England then because I’d love to meet up.

Please stay in touch
Trevor





Hello all, thanks for staying in touch.
First of all, PLEASE VISIT ME! Come and visit me over Christmas/New Year, it’s a great time to be in Japan. If you’re a guy, I promise you’ll get laid, if you’re a girl, then, well, there’s all the culture stuff. But seriously, flights aren’t too expensive and it’s great to have someone around at Christmas time.

I’m forgetting things recently, more and more so, and this really depresses me, because I want to be able to remember all the amazing stuff that’s happening these days. It’s all too often that we find ourselves in colourful situations which quickly turn to monochrome and then to dust via the intermingling of too many lesser memories. If we judge our lives on what we’ve done and experienced, then memory is primary to measuring such things. I guess secondary is as honest an account of these events as possible, so I write this diary. I guess memory is everything.

The behavior of Japanese people on the train never stops to amaze me, in particular their ability to sleep. Sometimes, you’ll see a businessman rushing through the denser-than-lead crowds and leap onto the train a millisecond before the doors shut. He searches for a seat, along with the five other businessmen who all have their eye on the single remaining seat, and he plunges towards it in a manner which is brisk, let polite, that kind of walking/running thing that people do when they really want to get somewhere quickly, but don’t want to look too fussed about it. Then as soon as he sits down, he’s out like a light, in a deep sleep like he hasn’t sleep properly since he started employment at his company twenty years ago. Once I saw a man whose face was covered in deep shadows, such was the intensity of his tiredness. And then he yawned, a horrific yawn that suggested profound constipation rather than simple tiredness. The Japanese can sleep in any situation. I’ve seen, and this is true, people sleeping while they are standing, people sleeping while they are gripping steadfast onto their briefcases, and most impressive of all, was a woman sleeping while she was eating. She was mechanically placing small sweets into her mouth, yet clearly snoring at the same time, but also managing to chew and swallow to some degree. And you know, these people have inbuilt timers, or some magic form of external hearing during their sleep, because when their station is due, they leap out of their seat and get straight off the train, like they’d been anticipating this journey’s end all this time.

There’s a really annoying thing that Japanese people do when they are crowded in a train; they just lose all sense of muscle control and become limp, like dead bodies. There seems to be a cut-off point between normal self-supporting standing and the utter limpness that accompanies Japanese people past a certain point in density of the crowd. Everybody leans on each other and just seems to give up with supporting themselves. So I find many sweaty bodies swaying into me. So I tried this myself and of course, the reaction was different, I was promptly pushed back into an upright position by some anti-foreigner.

So I’ve been having rehearsals for “Sleep Beauty”, a production in Tokyo for which I’m musical director. I had no idea how annoying people could get. The actors were telling me how they’d like their song to sound, and how the composer should have done this and should have done that. I really didn’t have the heart (or the guts) to tell them that I was actually the sole composer. Still, it’s good fun, although there is one person, who plays the evil godmother, who told me her song was too “scary” for children, which I completely disagree with. I asked what she had in mind, and she suggested a slow soulful jazz number… hmm, I thought, and what has that got to be with being evil? I wanted loud drums, cymbals and startling melodic phrases, but she thinks mellow trumpets and a brush drum kit is more evil. Perhaps the fact that she has her own regular jazz singing shows has something to do with it.

I recently started giving private lessons to lady called Kiyomi, who turned out to be a bit of a surprise. I have no idea how old she is, this is well hidden by expensive cosmetic surgery, but she’s got to be at least 35, and she has an 11 year old daughter. She is separated from her husband who she only refers to as her “future ex-husband” as she is going through a lengthy divorce process. I had no idea how much money was involved. She picked me up from the train station in her new Mercedes convertible, and drove me to her detached fairy-tale house. “Do you like my glasses?” she said, as she sat on the mini blue sofa in the ‘study’. I replied positively and she told me that they were titanium frames, possibly rather expensive I thought. She then told me that she just liked the look of the frames and doesn’t actually need them. Sure enough, they were just unfocused plain glass. As she smoked cigarette after cigarette, she told me various accounts of the people she’s met and how everyone seems to be after her money. The irony is that she is solely dependant on her husband for her income, via humungous support payments for her and her daughter, and so her husband’s money is paying for her lawyer to fight him in court! She asked me what she should do as her daughter in currently in a private school in Australia, but an ex-friend of hers in Australia is trying to revenge on Kiyomi via the exploitation of her daughter in some way. I said I didn’t know, move her to a different school or something. Kiyomi said she had been thinking about that, and she asked me what good schools I knew. I said that I only knew about English schools and that there are some very good private schools in England? “Really?” she replied, her unnatural face lighting up. A week later, and again, this is true, she moved her daughter out of the school in Brisbane and is now going to live with her in England, where her daughter is going to Wells Cathedral School. At the end of the two hour lesson, she handed me a 10,000 yen note, fifty quid, and said “thanks for listening.”

Book those flight to Tokyo now!
Thanks for reading.
Trevor





NOVEMBER 20th

I’m guessing this is the first email I’ve wrote from on the train. I have my laptop on my lap, it’s just gone midnight, and I’m on the last train to my hometown. Even though it’s a Sunday evening, I just about got a seat, and as usual, about 70 percent of the people here are asleep. I’ve just finished my 6 show run of “Sleeping Beauty” which was of course, great fun, although there were more technical problems than I would have liked, and the whole thing seemed to obliterate the phrase “it’ll be alright on the night” as some things certainly were not aright. We’ve just had the after show party, which consisted of much self-congratulations and cheerful reflections of how wonderful everything ran, even though the technical faults were enough to make the show look like a shoddy amateur production at times. I had 15 of my friends come to watch, which was really nice, and it seemed like a poetic way to say goodbye to everyone, had I been leaving, but I’m not leaving yet, so it wasn’t, but I did sometimes picture having my bags packed and ready for the final encore to finish and then I’d rush to the airport and arrive in London, still glowing from the show. But no, I’m still here.

Edit: I assumed someone wanted me to write a brief bit in the programme for "Sleeping Beauty" so I prepared a paragraph, but it never got used. Here it is anyway:

“His music successfully combines the humorous with the sublime”, “funny yet painfully touching, a triumph in modern pantomime music” and “yet another extraordinary score from the legendary Trevor Ferdy” are all reviews that I just invented for myself but I like to think that they are well written. As for my music, I hope it does the job. Should it do more, then that’s a wonderful bonus. I researched for months, spending time with various Beauties, (but they weren’t asleep quite all of the time) and various fairy-tale fictitious characters, such as the Nova Usagi, Pikacho, and speedy immigration visa staff (now, they are certainly fictitious). You may well ask how I came to find such melodies. Well, one night, as I slept, I dreamt of many wonderful and sweet melodies, none of which feature in this show, as I forgot them all, but anyway, I hope these tunes make you happy.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I have to go back to Nova tomorrow morning, which will have my stupid boss Greg there. I’ve recently realised why I hate him so much. It’s because he has no imagination, none whatsoever. He needs to follow the instructions in the lesson guide word-by-word and fears anyone who deviates from this, so he gets angry with then and tells them off, like he’s done with me. Right, I’m too tired now. I’m gonna join the 70 percent of the people here and continue later…

DECEMBER 8th
And now it’s later, I’m writing this from another train, this time from a “bullet train” which is one of those super fast 200mph trains where you arrive to your destination before you leave. Technology these days. These trains are much more luxurious, although they consist of exactly the same clientele as regular trains: stressed-out office workers, like the guy sitting next to me, who I’m hoping can’t read English. I’m on my way to a city called Osaka, to work at the main head office of Nova. I don’t know how, but word got past around I could make music and somehow I was asked to record all of the music for a batch of Nova Kids English education CDs, so I have to make tunes to sing the days of the week to, the months, numbers, alphabet (although that’s generally sung to Twinkle Twinkle isn’t it? I may do a trance remix). But Nova being the awful company that it is, offered absolutely no incentive for me to do this, their attitude being one of “it’s a privilege for you”. They asked me to work 6 day weeks, and I’d have to stay in Osaka on my days off. I quite clearly said no, and if you wanted me, you’d have to let me work normal 5 day weeks, and pay for the bullet train home every weekend (which is 75 pounds for each single journey!) They reluctantly gave it to me.

DECEMBER 12th
So I’ve already spent a few days working in head office: this is where they produce all the crappy textbooks, all the crappy Kids materials, all the crappy speech CDs, crappy illustrations, crappy flashcards and crappy crap. I am astounded at how unprofessional this whole set-up is. Nova is a huge company, one of the biggest in Japan, and the biggest English school in Japan. They put everything together in such a slap-dash last-minute way, it’s shameful. There’s no proofreading department, so all the publications are filled which mistakes. But of course, the Japanese people just accept it, being a culture of acceptance and minimal complaint, an attitude which is starting to get on my nerves.

Actually, I really want to play Space Invaders or watch a DVD on this computer but I feel that I can’t: I’m wearing shirt and tie, and I mix in fairly well with all the stressed office types, so I’d look a bit weird if I did that… sod it, I’m gonna watch “Meet Joe Black”.

DECEMBER 16th
Back on the bullet train 5 days later, next to two business men who are happily drinking out of their silver Japanese beer cans. Drinking is quite a different thing in Japan. The idea of day-time drinking doesn’t seem to be an issue. You can buy beer with your hamburger at Wendys here, and from vending machines on the street. Japanese beer is strong, at least 5% and the drinks that are catered mainly for women are even stronger: the alcoholic lemonade is 7%. But most Japanese people can’t really tolerate alcohol, and some not at all. They either go bright red after one drink or just get drunk very quickly. Seeing business men slumped on the floor in their shirts and ties is not uncommon in Tokyo on a Friday night. I’ve seen many people drunk, mostly women. I regularly see some guy holding back the hair on a woman who is dribbling out sick onto the train platform. I’ve seen women with plastic bags dangling from their heads, under their mouths, each handle looping around their ears. One time I saw a woman expelling an incredible amount of puke onto the platform and hanging over it in pain, then her mobile phone rang and she actually answered it and conducted a business-like conversation. That’s the thing: the women you see drunk off their face are not young girls or homeless, they’re business women.

JANUARY 9th
Christmas has come and gone. I had ten people round in my tiny apartment and cooked a semi-Christmas dinner. It felt great to have so many Japanese friends with me, like I’d really settled here. I went skiing for the first time after Christmas, it was my first time here and the friend I went with had only been once before, so the blind were leading the blind. I pretty much taught myself the basics but the one things that took ages to work-out was how to walk up a slight slope. Many episodes of slowly sliding backwards into complete strangers could have been avoided had something just told me : V-shape skis, dug inwards. It snowed all the time, and stupid though this may sound, it was too cold, and too snowy for comfortable skiing. The first day was great, having learnt an entirely new skill, it was like being a kid again. The second day was also good, having perfected some more basic maneuvers, but on the third day, I was getting annoyed with not being able to get any better. It was a 3 day holiday so just as well.

On New Years eve I went to a club in Tokyo, which was a bit of a mistake, as it was mostly full of foreign men looking for temporary new year girls. The highlight was the 4am breakfast in McDonalds. Blimey, that wasn’t a joke as well.

Then January came and I suddenly realised, I’m going home soon. I’ve started making plans to go home. So many things to consider, but it seems like I’ll quit Nova at the start of March, travel somewhere through March and April and be home at the start of May. So to everyone in England, I hope to see you soon. And if anyone can help me to get a teaching job in September, let me know!

From Trevor





It’s hard to sum-up an entire nation. I always thought I’d need to give the final word on Japanese people in this last email from Tokyo. But it’s not needed, because I simply can’t come to any conclusion about a nation which I still don’t understand. But there are some key things which have occurred to me over the past 20 months.

There seems to be three things that are important in Japan: honour, politeness and cuteness.

Honour is one of the main reasons that 30,000 plus Japanese people kill themselves every year: they find themselves unacceptably unemployed, or have brought shame on a family. It’s not uncommon for a mother who wants to kill herself to kill her baby too, chiefly because of a lack of honour. But honour is also the reason people work so hard, and Japan achieves so much technologically. Japan is very good at perfecting something that has been created by somebody else. Surprising though it is to say, Japan is not good at creating things from scratch and the Japanese have a profound lack of imagination. An opening gimmick of mine is to ask the student what their job is, and to then ask them to make-up an entirely different job; you wouldn’t believe how long it takes to get an answer.
Part of honour is conforming. Conforming is a big necessity here, nobody wants to stick out. Being exceptional is seen as dishonourable, as if grinding against the common grain, trying to stop the greater good.
One’s job is key to having honour, and everybody is expected to stay behind after hours to work late, at least until the boss leaves, be it 6pm or midnight. The working environment in Japan is an almost sacred place, where things are taken very seriously, and everyone must report on everyone else. Pressure is high, in many forms, even social: one is expected to drink with bosses and colleagues and important work decisions are made here. Formal meetings in the daytime in the workplace are mere acts of formality to seal what has already been decided in a bar somewhere over beers and sushi.
I find it hard to see the good points about such a strong need to be honourable in Japan. This is because I don’t understand why it is so important when it causes so many bad things.

Politeness is taken to new levels in Japan. When I have a conversation with regular Japanese people, I have stopped bothering to ask for opinions because Japanese politeness renders such talk pointless. In a group of people, if I say that President Bush is crazy and terrible, everyone will nod their heads enthusiastically and hum hums of approval. If five minutes later, I say that President Bush is a good leader, everyone will nod their heads enthusiastically and hum hums of approval. Nobody EVER says that are good at something, which has slowly lead me to the false impression that nobody is actually any good at anything.
Politeness includes making constant small compliments about one’s skill for various things. The classic example is when I incoherently mutter a few words to Japanese and the response is “oh, your Japanese is so good”. Of course it’s usually nice to hear such praise, but I’ve slowly come to disbelieve every compliment paid to me. As a result, I’ve simply stopped believing any compliment that anyone gives me, which isn’t good.
Politeness is closely related to honour. One wasn’t kick up a fuss, or complain. Acceptance of one’s situation is honourable. This is why Nova gets away with such a low quality service to the Japanese people. The rules are so completely different here! Nova has got into financial trouble recently, and branches are closing down. This has lead Nova to increase ‘tuition’ prices, and the advertisement for such a move was made with the opener, “until now, we’ve been too cheap, so we’re raising our prices!” Can you believe that?!

Cuteness is the nicest thing. It works on many different levels here. A small child clutching a stuffed toy is cute, and a young woman with boots, tiny skirt and low top is cute. A pink rabbit with a beak for a mouth is cute (Nova’s character), and almost anything small is cute. Girls feel a pressure to be consistently cute, and perhaps that goes the world over, but it’s certainly prominent here. In the workplace a guy can just ask someone to do something for them, but when a girl talks to a guy, she needs to talk in a ‘cute’ voice, turn their head the right way, or use the right ‘cute’ body language. Essentially, guys can just get on with it, but girls needs to imply “oh we’ve having such fun together aren’t we?” while they try to get help from other guys.

Trevor