Konnichi wa everybody,

Firstly - this will probably come up a lot - sorry if I haven't got back to you recently, I've had very little time at home in the past couple of weeks!

Well here’s my first letter, it’s from sunny Devon and not from the mountainous slopes of Yonezawa just yet.  My flight is scheduled to leave Heathrow Airport on Saturday the 26th, at 3.45 pm.  Needless to say my pants are getting slightly whiffy at the prospect of this given that it’s so soon, but I am looking forward to it too…

I'm taking my inspiration from Ruth's brother Simon who (as I've probably mentioned several hundred times) is due to leave Japan this August, having been on the JET Programme for two years in Yamagata City, the same Prefecture as me!  The fact that, despite the fact I've never met him, our lives seem so inextricably intertwined seems to be pure coincidence, unless some force from above is trying to keep tabs on me!

There's been so much going on recently that the very idea of sleeping in my own bed is bizarre.  Ruth and I went to Ireland the other week to attempt to see the sights in four days; funnily enough we didn't quite manage it but we at least got to kiss the Blarney Stone and get through a few pints of Murphy's (in Cork) and Guinness (in Dublin).  The Blarney Stone is meant to confer eloquence upon those who kiss it, well I don't f***in' know what that pile of t*ss is about but I'm trying to convince myself it works by using words like "inextricably" and "intertwined".  I will try and put some photos on the web sometime after I get back from Coventry on Tuesday.

The final pre-departure orientation for the JET Programme has happened in London and so there's not a lot left for me to do - just packing and tidying my room which has become a tip once more.  On Monday and Tuesday I had Japanese language lessons with Mrs Chopsticks (actually, this was Mrs Corner but the pronunciation - "Hashi" -  was the same and I preferred Mrs Chopsticks).  It's reassuring to know that my Japanese is at least "basic" and not "beginner" after however long I've been studying it!  The lessons were quite good, my ability has now increased from "My, haven't you got a lot of CDs" ("Shii dii ga takusan arimasu ne") to "I would like to try eating Natto" ("Natto o tabetemitai desu").

As far as I can gather, Natto is fermented soy bean paste which nobody (except of course the Japanese) likes.  It seems to have an almost Marmitey "love or hate" quality.  In fact at the Ambassador's reception which one was at on Thursday I made a deal with a teacher from Japan that he would try Marmite if I'd try Natto.  I'm sure I will get LOTS more interesting things to try once I'm there though.  Like eel.  Yummy.  No of course I'm not being sarcastic.

So once I'm back from Coventry (seeing my dad and family) I'll be shoving stuff into a box to take to the Post Office - I'm sending winter clothes by sea - and relaxing while I can before I go.  I also seem to be gaining weight, however I'm justifying this by saying I'll lose it all again once I'm in Japan, the food not exactly being the thing which endears me to Japan the most.

As for e-mails, I intend to keep on sending individual ones, although I won't have a lot of free time before I go away and while I'm settling in so bear with me.  As for my going away party in Exeter on the 24th, if anyone else wants to come can they please let me know!  I look forward to hearing from you.

Love

 Andrew 
 

Letter 2: Tokyo ni ikimasu yo! 
Tokyo, 27 July 2003 2.54pm (Japan time)

Hello!

This is just a short message to say that I arrived in Tokyo and am now
sitting in the Keio Plaza hotel in my slippers.  I'm about to go off
and explore the area (Shinjuku) and see if I can work out how the
toilet works.  The hotel is extremely posh by the way, it's also
massive, as is everything else round here.  This includes the many
photos of David Beckham plastered around the city.  If I get the chance
I will go to that big crossroads that everyone always takes pictures
of.  But I need to work out the underground system first.

Well I'd better stop talking and actually go and do these things - I'm
so excited to finally be in Japan!  I will try and keep in touch but
need to find out how to plug my laptop in first.

Hope you are all well, missing you already!  (unless you're in Japan,
in which case see you very soon!)

Love,

   Andrew
 

Letter 3: Atchi muite GET'S! 
Yonezawa, 4 August 2003

Hello again, and GET'S!   I'm writing this from the Yonezawa City Board of Education's office, sounds grand, actually I'm spending most of my time tidying my desk and drinking green tea and iced coffee which is constantly being made for me.  If you've sent me an e-mail then thanks a lot!  I'll hopefully have more time to reply when I get internet facilities at home!   GET'S by the way is the latest craze in Japan (it will be out of fashion in a month's time though, like "Nande daro" and "Inochi" - just don't go there...).  It involves pointing both fingers at someone with thumbs up and saying (guess what) GETsssssss! with an extremely smug grin on your face.  I love it, but then simple things please simple people... 

Well here is my address is Japan, I expect tons of post immediately. 
Funayama Haitsu C-5 
2-6-23 Kanaike 
Yonezawa-shi 
Yamagata-ken 
992-0012 JAPAN 

My phone won't be working until a day or two's time, however when it does my number will be:   (Country code 81) 0238-22-2898. 

I had a great time in Tokyo and will hopefully get the chance to send out some photos soon... Shinjuku is like Piccadilly Circus only 100 times bigger, and the rest of Tokyo goes on and on... I've already tried a range of Japanese food including eel, octopus, salmon roe ("fish poo, my lady"), squid, sea urchin, egg sushi and Natto!  Natto tastes like the mould from Stilton cheese.  It's OK!  (Totemo OK desu!) I'm avoiding kimchi though, as it contains cucumber and radishes.   The British Embassy has also been quite hospitable what what, with nice wine and Taiko drumming.  And the hotel was swank on a stick (you get lots of things on sticks in Japan).  Do Assistant Language Teachers really deserve to get PAID to stay in a five star hotel and drink Asahi beer? 

Luckily Yonezawa isn't too much of a comedown... the shinkansen train was on time to the second and I arrived, greeted by my supervisor Umetsu-sensei, Corbin (who I'm working with - he's American) and about 20 schoolchildren who greeted me in unison!  I've had to do an introduction to the rest of the office, and was left silent when the circle of people around me expected me to say more stuff.  Luckily Corbin helped me out once my very limited stash of Japanese ran out. 

My flat is fine and comes with air conditioning, it's a lot bigger than I'd been prepared for, although it still has to be called "compact".  It's got a balcony which is great for sunsets and it's very close to where I work.  Work perhaps being an inappropriate word as I have been writing e-mails for the last hour.  However I start at school - lovingly named Middle 5 - on the 25th, which is making me nervous!  I've also got an English Camp to go to tomorrow night and prefectural orientations to go to.   Sorry I've gone on and on... I'd better stop now as it's lunchtime, it's been such a hard morning!  Although the Japanese work very long hours in general, it's the being there and not the work which counts... apparently.  Anyway I hope you're well and keep sending those e-mails!  I will try and reply soon!

Love
 Andrew 
 

Letter 4: Shibuyaaaaaa!
18 August 2003

Hello! 

Thanks for the e-mails... I still want to send personal ones out but don't have internet at home yet.  But I really appreciate all the messages I've had! 

I've just had a week's holiday with Corbin and two other American friends, which means I have no money left, it's been a fantastic time though.  We all stayed in a Love Hotel room at Narita - it's a garish but well-equipped and cheap place to stay, there are loads of them in Japan!  Not only did it have enough space for four of us to sleep, it also had a sunbed, sauna, giant bath, karaoke machine, fruit machines, revolving lights and an old-skool Pacman machine!

After that we went via Chiba-ken, where we got sunburnt once the typhoon had passed, to Tokyo for three nights.  We've seen a lot of sights including the Sony building with robotic dogs, the Imperial Palace, the temple at Asakusa, lots and lots of neon and sushi in Shinjuku, Shibuya and Roppongi, and the famous Golden Turd which is meant to represent a golden flame, at the Asahi Beer headquarters.

After that we stayed with a friend's grandparents in Mie-ken and saw a rare thing, a big Japanese house.  After seeing the Ise shrine (where the whole Shinto thing started, it's so holy only the Emperor can go in) we went on to Kyoto.  The railway station itself is a tourist attraction as it's extremely modern and spacious, but we also got the chance to see one of the bigger temples and wander around the Geisha district (Gion).  My life now feels complete after having seen a maiko (trainee geisha)... she was accompanying three businessmen at the time and had awful teeth (I think the white face brought it out even more!).  Sadly I don't have a photo, if I did, I would probably file it under "dental mishaps".

I'm now back in Yonezawa but will be away again for a few days as I have a prefectural orientation thing (language course and staying with a Japanese family for one night) for the rest of the week... hence keeping in touch is a problem.  However I've now received my Gaijin (foreigner) Card which means I'll be able to get a mobile (once I get paid).  Even the most basic ones have cameras on them!  The handsets are quite slinky too and they have animals that jump around on the screen when you dial a number. 

Well I'd better get back to Work Avoidance... I haven't got a lot to do until school starts on the 25th.  Hope you're all well, sorry I haven't e-mailed back yet!

Love

 Andrew 
 

Letter 5: You Are Good Stuff
Wed, 03 Sep 2003 08:55:40 +0900

Hello again,

I'm still struggling with internet access, I think I've been duped by
the cuteness of Jolly The Dog who is the service provider's logo.  I
have already been back once and explained to them that it doesn't work,
but I think they just think I'm stupid (well, I am foreign after all!)

Thanks again for e-mails.  In fact, I've bought a mobile phone
(Vodafone!) in Japan so you can e-mail me on that!  Sorry the address is
so crap, I didn't get a choice:

[email protected]

Some messages get to me and some don't.  I think for me to be able to
read them, you need to send your message in Plain Text with no
formatting - you can change this on the Format menu of a message on
Outlook Express for example.

The number is 0(081)-90-6687-7150, though why you would want to phone me
on my Japanese mobile is beyond me.  I don't think texts work but have a
go if you're bored.

Well I've had just over a week at school and it's going well so far.
The biggest dog log is getting up at 6.30 in the morning, as a result
I'm tired before I start any lessons!  So far I've mainly been doing
self introductions with a Blockbusters-style quiz at the end to see how
much they remember.  I also try and find out who's cool and who isn't by
doing polls on which J-pop artists they like.  (Kick The Can Crew,
incidentally, are a comedy Japanese rap trio, try downloading their
tunes if you get the chance.)  I teach all three years of Junior High
School (ages 12-14) and the first years have just started English.
They're a lot less shy than I thought they would be, but it can still be
difficult getting something "difficult" like a letter of the alphabet
out of them when playing Hangman.  It's intellectual stuff.

I've only just realized - I'm being paid a fair amount of money to be in
Japan and play Hangman.

Actually, that's not quite true.  One of my "obligations" is to go to a
welcome party on Thursday with free beer and food.  In Japan you never
pour your own drink, which means it gets topped up at regular intervals
and you lose all knowledge of how much you've drunk.  It should be good
as long as I don't end up vomiting in my toilet slippers then walking
around in them.

Instead of sending out lots of photos by e-mail I'll try and put them on
my website... I'll send another e-mail when they're ready.

I don't have to go to school for the rest of the week; the students are
on Work Experience or something, so it'll be 3-day work avoidance.  And
lesson planning if I feel like it.  I'm quite glad of this in a way; one
of the teachers is on a mission to tire me out.  During Cleaning Time
(the whole school goes and cleans the building) she makes me race the
students by pushing a wet flannel along the floor.  I also played
badminton without a T-shirt to change into, as a result I was a big
sweaty mess afterwards.  However she makes me lunch and sends me
mysterious e-mails, for example:

Hi. Thank you e-mail.
You are good stuff.
You will be a good teacher.
We enjoyed talking  things over.
I am not a game player.
See?you.

Please bear in mind that she is about 50 years old and has two
children.  No that does not mean I'm interested!!  I hope I haven't
inadvertently added her to my mailing list.

Well it's past my bedtime (10.45).  I'll be sending this message from
work tomorrow morning.  Meanwhile if anyone wants to send me Marmite
then please do - my supply has run out until my box of stuff arrives.

O-yasumi nasai - bonne nuit - buenas noches!

        Andrew-chan

--
http://www.geocities.com/andrewgaijin

Subject: Photos!
Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2003 16:07:16 +0900

Hello,

I've put some of my Japan photos on my website to save clogging up
anyone's inbox ("can I clog your inbox darling?")  Enjoy!

http://www.geocities.com/andrewgaijin/jphoto.html

Allez voir!

Your British Chum,

        Andrew
 

Letter 6: Grasshopper On Toast
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 20:46:42 +0900

Hello again!

I have bought a toaster!  That makes me very happy!  If only my Marmite
would arrive...

So here's the next instalment from Yonezawa (which means Rice Swamp).
It's a rural place by Japanese standards and has TV adverts for combine
harvesters... however there's quite a big community of foreigners that
I'm slowly discovering.  Apart from Brits, Australians and North
Americans I've met an Indian, some Iranians that run a Persian
restaurant, a German, a Norwegian, a Russian, as well as Koreans,
Vietnamese and Chinese people.  None of this stops me getting that weird
stare when I'm on my bike though, maybe it's just because I'm strange.

There are one or two simple names that I can now read in kanji (Chinese
characters) of people and places.  It turns out that the nearby town of
Nagai is "Long Food" (spaghetti?) - also "hon" means origin (and book),
"da" means rice field, and "ni" means sun.  Hence Honda and Nihon
(Japan, the land of the rising sun).

I now have one of those things you can't be seen without in Japan, a
mobile accessory.  It is a man (made, incidentally, by Honda) who lights
up red when my phone receives a signal.  Aside from the camera and
bilingual e-mail facilities, my phone also has a built in torch and
mirror (the screen somehow becomes more reflective!)  On the downside,
I've started getting junk mail already on it; it's always in Japanese so
I can't even tell if it's junk or not by myself.

I've recently changed my mobile e-mail address, so it is possible after
all!  The new (shorter) address is:

[email protected]

E-mails only work in Plain Text; if there's any formatting then it just
says "Invalid Message Text".  If it's anything important then stick to
the Yahoo address, I just won't be able to read it as quickly!

I've had lots of parties recently and have another two this weekend...
last Thursday was my office's welcome party ("enkai"), last Friday was
Tracey (my predecessor's) leaving party, and Saturday was a JET
party/camp in the woods.  At the first one, there was a wide selection
of food, from grasshopper to watermelon, guess which one I ate!  The
grasshopper actually tasted quite nice, it was quite heavily fried and
had a sweet taste.  I would definitely choose it over watermelon if I
had to choose!  The small whole baby crab was edible but a bit seafoody
for my liking (wrong country, I know).

The rest of the party was good, I saw my bosses doing karaoke and made
an attempt (or five) at Japanese songs which I had studiously learnt
about 4 years ago.  I've also learnt that the bosses have a "tsukebe"
ranking - tsukebe means "perverted".  They take pride in being the most
perverted of the office, though how they measure this I've yet to find
out.  The other parties were more of a "just go out and drink" variety
but still fun.  Tomorrow the teachers from my school are getting
together and on Saturday this strange woman called Tomoko has invited me
to a party which is going to have a large proportion of the
aforementioned foreign community.

School is going well but I never realized how tiring it could be
standing up for so long.  Different teachers like doing different things
so some lessons are more textbook-oriented (which means I become a human
tape recorder) and others are more fun (these tend to be of the Hangman
variety).  I also get to play badminton and table tennis from time to
time, which is fun but makes me extremely sweaty.  The school's
temperature is usually around 30 in the day and there's no air
conditioning.  On some days I eat lunch with the students which gets a
bit chaotic but they teach me what's cool and what isn't (GET'S really
is out of fashion now, sadly).  I've also learnt that "agoppari" means
"big chin" but whether that was referring to me or not I don't know.

I'm also in the process of booking a flight to Taiwan for Christmas,
from the 20th to the 28th of December - this will hopefully stop me from
being buried in snow for a week as everyone has pleasure in telling me
how snowy it really gets here in winter!

Well I'd better stop writing and do something useful... Hope everyone is
well and please keep on e-mailing!

Love

        Andrew (^_^)v

--
http://www.geocities.com/andrewgaijin
 

Letter 7: Mitsubishi Peach Slices
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 23:51:02 +0900

Hello from Yonezawa,

Yes, Mitsubishi own everything round here.  Not just vehicles (including
the "Mitsubishi Guts", a small van perhaps designed for the Tokyo Fish
Market where I saw my first one), but also a bank, marker pens, tissues,
peach slices... those things you instantly associate with cars.

I'm still enjoying myself here although school really tires me out -
luckily I'm not the only one because I do occasionally have students
falling asleep in my lessons, something I had been warned about before I
came to Japan.  I'm venturing beyond Hangman and have now tried Bingo,
Battleships and my own version of Blockbusters.  My favourite activity
so far has been one teaching the structure: "I have a ______ that has
______ ______."  All the students invent their own thing and attempt to
draw it ... the example I gave was "I have a hamster that has shiny
wheels".  So far I end up with lots of Snoopys and Dorameons with long
hair, but I've also had a cup that has long legs, and a house that has
three sons.

Doraemon is a blue robot cat from the future and ranks just above Winnie
the Pooh (Pooh-san) and just below Hello Kitty in the popularity stakes.

Outside school things are still quite busy, I've been to the houses of
two people I work with and eaten far more than I should have (though not
as much as was offered to me).  Sadly I had to cope with copious amounts
of cucumber on one day, which is down there with umeboshi (pickled
plums) and miso soup with shrimp heads floating in the bottom as one of
the worst things I have eaten so far in Japan.

I've also been to a couple more onsens (hot spring baths), and stood,
naked and steaming, up a mountain.  Perhaps I already need to put more
photos on the internet.  The other Tuesday I took part in a French
lesson (as a teacher!) with Erin who's from Canada and teaches at Senior
High School in Yonezawa, it was a great experience and very relaxed but
a lot of the words I wanted to say came out in Japanese!  Which is
reassuring for my Japanese but not for my French.

Finally my box has arrived from England which means I have a jar of
Marmite!  I celebrated with four slices of toast and Marmite.  However
it's just the one jar so if anyone were to accidentally slip and drop a
jar of Marmite into an envelope addressed to Japan it might not be such
a bad thing!!  I also now have the Japanese textbook I've been studying
from so I suppose that means I should actually do some studying rather
than fumbling my way around conversations like I am now.

So now I have everything I want in my flat except for internet access,
I'm still taking my laptop to work to send and receive e-mails.  Maybe
soon...  I've signed up to a cheapish phone company though, so if anyone
wanted to ring me I'd be happy to ring them back!  But from Sunday to
Wednesday please ring before 10pm my time if possible (2pm British time)
as I need my beauty sleep!  From England, you need to dial:

        0081 238-222-898.

Had better get to bed I suppose.

Keep sending e-mails and I'll try and write back (honest!)

Love

        Andrew
 

Letter 8: Two Fingers
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 17:31:19 +0900

Hello.

I thought it was about time for an update on what's going on in Japan,
on the one day of the week I can send e-mails.  Also I've managed to put
more photos on my website, so please have a look on
http://www.geocities.com/andrewgaijin .

I've already finished at one school (Number 5) and have now started at
the next one (Number 2).  The students and teachers are cool but the
school's monument is dodgy, namely two fingers stuck in the air which is
a little abrupt...!  I will have to take a photo.  I've just been on
another trip to Tokyo last weekend with Corbin and Steve (another ALT
from Yamagata).  I met up with my friends Kiriko and Mikie and explored
some more of the famous areas, including the Fuji TV building, with cute
dogs and big balls - metallic - everywhere.  There was also some karaoke
in Roppongi, probably the area with the highest gaijin population in
Japan, and a trip to the main Kabuki theatre in Tokyo.

I had neither the time, money nor inclination to sit through the full
five hours, but you're allowed to come in and watch one act at a cheap
price.  Only men are allowed to perform Kabuki, so some of them dress up
as women and do effeminate dances, to the backdrop of traditional
Japanese music and lots of people seemingly going
"uuuuuugggghhooooowwwww" with an increasingly pained expression.  It's
pure chin-stroking stuff, I just didn't understand a word of it.

The next day featured a trip to Shinjuku and a climb up the Metropolitan
Government building to take lots of photos of skyscrapers, you really
get the feeling that you'll never get out of Tokyo again as it's so
big.  Then we did the same thing in Ikebukuro at Sunshine City (guess
what, it's a skyscraper!).  Right opposite that building was a branch of
Yonezawa Ramen (a noodlery), so Yonezawa is obviously on the map
food-wise with that and its raw beef.  Despite so much beef in Yonezawa
I've yet to see a cow anywhere, maybe they keep them in underground
sheds and feed them on nothing but Natto.

That evening we went to Shibuya and tried out an excellent Vietnamese
restaurant, then went to a bar which sold nothing but whisky.  Despite
the fact that a glass cost the equivalent of £5, it was a generous glass
and it was good stuff (I knocked back three glasses of Laphroaig).  In
Tokyo I also spent two nights in a capsule hotel, something I'd been
very eager to try.  Although you feel like you've been put into cold
storage there was more room than I thought and I got a reasonable
night's sleep.  The worst thing is the lack of privacy, you're only shut
off by a thin blind, and the fact that everyone's alarm goes off at 6.30
in the morning and they don't seem to be there to switch it off.  The
second one (in Tokyo's red light district!) also had the option of
putting 300 yen into a slot for 30 minutes of porn - and yes I resisted
the temptation, but there were a lot of coins being put into slots in
adjacent cubicles, I tried not to think about that too much.

Before leaving the next day I visited the park in Ueno, it's so quiet.
Tokyo has so many contrasts and you really feel quite peaceful there,
especially on the approach to the shrine.

Other highlights from the last couple of weeks have included a trip to
Yamadera, a 1000-step climb up to a temple (Ruth sent me a postcard from
there in February - how surreal!) where the weather was perfect.  Also
in nearby Yamagata City I've found a bar which sells Bass and Newcastle
Brown Ale - surely I'm allowed little bursts of Englishness between an
immersion in Japanese culture?  The bar is quite well themed, there's
lots of old looking wood everywhere and there's even a tassled
lampshade!  However bonsai trees are not a usual addition to English
pubs, and fish and chips normally is a lot greasier and the potatoes
have been peeled first!

It's getting late - even Japanese people have started leaving the office
- so I'd better go.  I might have one more push at internet access this
weekend, but I'm despairing at how difficult it seems to be.  Why can't
I just pick up a free CD and stick it into my computer?

This weekend is going to be fairly quiet, but I might meet some of the
people from my French class that I've been to twice now and I've got
plans to go drinking tonight and tomorrow, and I wonder why I'm not
losing any weight...

Hope you are OK.  Have a good weekend!

        Andrew
 

Letter 9: Flet's!!
Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 18:44:23 +0900

Hello!

Well believe it or not I'm finally able to connect my computer to the
internet at home - it only took me three months!  The service is called
FLET'S, if anyone knows what it's supposed to mean then let me know.
And it's super-fast internet too - as a result I'm listening to the
Radio 1 Breakfast Show now, of course I'd listen to Japanese radio but
I'm told it's rubbish.  Also if anyone fancies an internet chat
on Yahoo then let me know - Japan is 9 hours ahead of GMT and my
username is, predictably, andrewgaijin.

I've still been finding enough stuff to do since my trip to Tokyo the
other week.  I've been a "special guest teacher" at Corbin's school and
done yet more self-introductions, but one lesson involved making a
Devon-style cream tea.  Admittedly clotted cream is hard to come by in
Japan but the scones and tea went well.

Outside school I've seen a Karate championship - it's not often you get
to see 10-year-old kids kicking each other in the head!  I've been out
and played tennis for the first time in about 10 years, and last weekend
I went to Hokkaido (Japan's northern island) for the first time!
Although I have a lot of reservations about how much it cost - we flew
there and only stayed for one night - I was really excited to go there.
Sapporo - the main city in Hokkaido - was my first choice for where to
go for the JET Programme, although perhaps given the choice I wouldn't
have gone with a bunch of drunken Japanese teachers (who started
drinking at 11am in Sendai Airport)!

First we went to Otaru, a nice town north of Sapporo which was fairly
quaint, at least by Japanese standards.  Then the same evening we
checked into the posh hotel in Sapporo and headed for a "Ghengis Khan"
restaurant, which means all-you-can-eat-meat and all-you-can-drink.
After that the teachers wanted to go to another place to eat (an
izakaya, which is a Japanese-style pub) which was a bit strange - I
braved a piece of defrosted tofu which was not unlike a washing-up
sponge in terms of look, taste and texture and some fish lovingly
presented with its head staring and fins waving from the plate.  I
managed to break away and explore the entertainment district (Susukino)
which was like Tokyo's Kabuki-cho, involving repeated offers of massages
from women in puffa jackets, and no I didn't take up any of the offers!

The weather was perfect when we were there and the next day I had a
couple of hours and a Lonely Planet guide with which to explore as much
as possible.  So I did the done thing of going up the tallest building
and taking lots of photos.  Sapporo also has a tiny clock tower and some
nice parks looking autumnal.  I definitely want to go there again, the
Asahi Beer tour is certainly high on my list but I'd also be quite keen
to see the stadium where we beat Argentina in the World Cup!  I do
respect David Beckham for some things, just not the ones where he ponces
around in Japanese adverts.

One such advert is for chocolate sticks called Fran.  He is standing in
a field with people dancing around him.  Everybody is wearing white.  He
turns towards the sunlight and says in his wispy voice: "Like blooming
flowers.  The new Fran.  One love, one peace.  Be sweet."  T*sser.  He
monopolises the adverts for Vodafone here too, as well as car rental
adverts (all he says is "I love cars".)  Victoria is not much better,
advertising small cars as "My Premium Small" with her tinny pop music
playing in the background.

OK well I'm off out this evening to do an English conversation session
with Nick (another British JET in Yonezawa) and get paid 5000 yen (£25)
for the privilege, with free snacks.  I'll also try and improve my
e-mailing skills from now on!

        Andrew
 

Letter 10: Porno Graffiti
5th December 2003, 21:51

(Make yourself a cup of tea, I realise that this is a long e-mail...)

Hello,

Good evening from my futon in Yonezawa, where it's getting cold and
Music Station is on the TV.  It's Friday night and I'm on the internet! 
However I do have a life, honest.  My favourite bar so far in Yonezawa
is Baby Lock, which makes a change from the izakayas which generally
provide some kind of soggy sponge with pickles and chicken cartilage for
you to wash down with your Kirin Beer.  The other trouble with izakayas
is the low tables; Japanese people really must have small knees.  Baby
Lock however has plenty of space to sit, an Othello board, and stays
open until 2am which is as good as it gets here.

Last Saturday however I went to Sendai with a whole group of gaijin
friends and we stayed out all night - it feels so good to go somewhere
where there are clubs.  My main reservations about the club was that is
was 50% gaijin (so hardly an authentic Japanese experience) and there
was absolutely no Japanese music for the 6 hours we were there.  I know
that Japanese music can be good and I am trying to pick up more J-Pop
skills with a possible view to presenting the J-Pop seminar at next
year's ALT seminar!  But at the same time, J-Pop can also be very bad. 
Take for example the latest single by Exile:

Fun fun we hit the step step
So don't keep yourself we know we love oh
Heat heat, the beat's like a skip skip
To the paradise, take me please oh
The choo choo train

I'm starting to collect a few examples of bad Japanese English, however
the best place by far to look is http://www.engrish.com/ - enjoy if you
have a few spare hours.  But pop group names are pretty good too; SMAP
are Sports Music Assembly People, and recent Top 10s include Porno
Graffiti and Thee Michelle Gun Elephant.  I've also yet to hear Bump of
Chicken!  The trouble is, being here after a few months, your English
goes down the pan and you stop noticing how stupid Thee Michelle Gun
Elephant really sounds.

In terms of the job, I'm feeling that I've got the core of the job
pretty sussed out (except it'll be a bugger correcting everyone's
mistakes after watching Music Station!)  I have two weeks at the school
I'm at and move on to Middle School No.4 in January.  With pretty much
all the classes I teach, I can usually do a self-introduction and
several grammar-based things such as a bingo-type game, a
battleships-type game, a drawing activity, an acting activity, something
a bit more cultural, and some other kind of quiz.  By keeping records of
what I do, I can make sure not to repeat things and not to think up more
activities than necessary.  I've also got a stock of shorter games and
can usually plan a lesson which the students seem to enjoy pretty
quickly!  As a result I'm spending a lot of the time when the students
are in lessons learning kanji which I'm really keen on.

Hopefully at the next school I'll start being a bit more adventurous and
make a bulletin board with various Britain type articles in, I think
it's a bit too late at my current school.  I finish there on the 18th,
then after another primary school visit followed by a work party the
next day, I'm off to Taiwan for a week on the 20th to visit Yu-fen and
Peipei (and of course their two bears!)  It won't be a White Christmas
there... but it never is anyway at home!  I'm looking forward to it
loads but have yet to learn any Chinese... I knew there was something I
forgot!

I come back on the 28th and I'll meet Paddy in Tokyo, I'm sure we'll
tear sh*t up there and in Yonezawa, where we'll probably be at New
Year.  Then once he continues his worldly travels I'll have a quiet week
or two before starting at school again.  I've also arranged a trip to
the Sapporo Snow Festival in February.  On top of that, Ruth has booked
to come towards the end of March, and my parents will be here for the
first half of April, so I'm not going to get lonely!  I had better
organise my paid leave sometime...

Apart from all that Corbin and I have had a few visits to primary
schools - it's amazing how genki the youngest children are.  All the
ALTs in Yamagata had their mid-year seminar a while back and it was
great to meet everybody, in some cases for the first time.  One of the
teachers at my school also came along and his fondness for gaijins
became apparent when he pulled a girl from Australia.  He also wants to
come along on the next Sendai clubbing trip.

One week after that (the weekend of the rugby final) I went to his house
and met his wife and one-year old daughter.  Marriage doesn't appear to
be such an institution in Japan!  The two of us also got through a
bottle of whisky together and played drunken Bomberman on their Super
Nintendo.  Despite his arguable attitudes towards women we get on really
well which always makes lessons that bit easier.

The time is going far too quickly here - the first flakes of snow fell
yesterday, and the extreme sweatiness of summer still feels recent. 
Soon the snow will get serious, although I'm told we'll have a milder
winter this year because some insects buried their eggs deeper or
something.  Even so, people from Yonezawa never fail to go on about how
life is so difficult in January and February, so I'll get the thermal
undies ready.

Apologies once more for the long e-mail.  Please write back!

Love

        Andrew
 

Letter 11: Akemashite Omedetou!
Sat, 03 Jan 2004 02:24

Happy New Year from Japan!

It looks like things might be calming down after a stressful couple of
weeks before Christmas, my fun holiday in Taiwan and my few days with
Paddy in Tokyo and Yonezawa.  I hope everyone had a great Christmas and
New Year.  I hope I'll be able to stay in touch more personally!

Since things were getting a bit crazy, for various reasons, before
Christmas, going away to Taipei was perfect and I had a great time.  On
top of that, I took over 200 photos there so I'll try and put the edited
highlights on the web sometime.  I had such a good time with Peipei and
Yu-fen and they looked after me very well (especially since I could only
say about 3 things, badly, in Mandarin).  It was also a break from the
cold weather of Yonezawa - on Christmas Day the temperature got up to 25
degrees C and I was wearing a T-shirt a lot of the time.

The weather was pretty sunny most of the time so we managed to get out
and see lots of stuff - memorial halls to former presidents, Buddhist
temples - generally more colourful and fragrant than their Japanese
equivalents, tall buildings (e.g. Taipei 101, currently the tallest in
the world), museums, sunsets, gardens, shops, markets, universities, tea
houses and puppies.  Despite being busy I felt very relaxed for the
whole time there.

I liked Taiwanese food which seemed more substantial, sweet and cheap
than Japanese food, although one thing, translated as "stinky tofu",
tasted like the smell of a pig farm full of poo.  Every country must
have its own thing that foreigners hate I suppose, I'm going off Natto
and we have Marmite in Britain.

The people seemed a lot more down to earth (and, in some cases rude, but
not that often) than the Japanese.  The only rude people tended to be
middle-aged women there, whereas in Japan they're the people that invite
me to lots stuff at short notice with the line "Do you have any plans
for tomorrow?" in such a way that I can't think of an excuse not to go. 
It's nice being invited to things, but there are a lot of times where
you feel like you're just the token gaijin rather than a normal guest
like everyone else.

On coming back to Japan I met Paddy at Narita Airport and we headed for
Tokyo.  We've had a great few days.  We stayed there for 2 nights and
explored the main areas, including of course SHIBUYAAA!!  We tried a
nightclub there; expensive but we were really getting into it before we
had to get back to our place for 1 o'clock.  And we did a lot of walking
around the centre including Tokyo main station, the Imperial Palace and
Akihabara (the electronics district).  We also went around Shinjuku with
Mikie and found a good place to eat after all the chips we'd been
getting through.

On the 30th we took the Shinkansen back to Yonezawa and for New Year we
went to the Uesugi Shrine in the middle of town; there was a huge queue
of people waiting to pray around midnight.  I bumped into a lot of my
students who were exceptionally hyper that evening, and on the stroke
(or boom in our case) of midnight two random Japanese blokes gave us
drinks and pizza!  The next day we went to nearby Takahata and ended up
having a spontaneous onsen (hot spring bath) that evening, and today we
cancelled that out by cycling all around Yonezawa in the rain, followed
by a seven game pool session.

I start back at work on Monday, though that will only be in the Board of
Education.  I don't start again at school (the next one is Number 4)
until the 19th so I'm hoping the next couple of weeks will be relaxing.

Anyway enjoy the start of 2004 and please keep in touch!

        Andrew
 

Letter 12: Cow Intestines
Sat, 31 Jan 2004 19:09

Hello everyone!

Good evening and welcome to the next instalment from Yonezawa.  I'm
having a little breather this weekend as I've been kept very busy
recently, mainly with work-related stuff, and I'm still recovering from
getting up at 6.30 on a Saturday morning.

It maybe comes as no surprise that I've signed up to spend a second year
here in Yonezawa.  My supervisor has also given me a provisional "please
stay" too so I'm happy about that.  I've felt it was the right decision
for a while because one year is nowhere near enough to feel like you've
experienced Japan.  I like the job, the people I meet and work with and
the immense Japanese hospitality which you have to be careful not to
take for granted.

There's a constant cycle of snow here, it covers everything, gets
squashed and ploughed, melts a bit, then starts all over again.  However
it's not quite as horrendous as people made out before Winter started.
The worst consequence is not being able to cycle around Yonezawa (hence
missing out on trips to Yamaya, the foreign food shop which sells tea,
wine, pasta sauce, chilli, Guinness...) and having to walk to school
sometimes.  But I'm coping.

On the plus side I've been snowboarding three times with interesting
results.  I can go down forwards (on my heels) without falling over
much, but any attempt at turning results in acceleration, panic and
falling over, usually just at the moment when one of my students is
passing by on the chair lift.  But I really enjoy it and I'm not the
only beginner, I hope the time will come when I'm not outclassed by
five-year olds on skis who swoop past.

School itself is busy, the teachers keep handing me their marking to do
when I'm in the middle of something else, I'm actually keeping occupied
enough to go home at the same time as Japanese teachers!  The school is
really nice though, my favourite one yet as far as the staffroom
atmosphere goes.  The teachers are nearly all friendly and give me stuff
all the time, the students are genki too.

I've also started going to calligraphy classes which I like, the old
woman there gave me my own calligraphy set and I need to practise
hard... so far all I can write with any skill is "Book" or "Origin"
(Hon), "Day" or "Sun" (Ni) and "Japan" (Ni-Hon) over and over again.
It's amazing how hard an innocent looking dot can be to draw on "more
advanced" characters.  This has been on Mondays.  The last two Tuesdays
have had French classes which I'll probably be taking over when Erin
leaves.  On Wednesday all the English teachers in Yonezawa got together
for a 15-minute meeting followed by food and (alcoholic) drink... all at
3pm.  Thursday was Corbin's birthday, we went out to the local gaijin
hangout called Anniversary for pizza, pasta and beer.  And, following a
JET regional seminar in the day, last night was an early night in
preparation for a cultural event today with lots of local children;
people did sports and games but I thought I'd try a bit of "olde worlde"
calligraphy, popular in tea shops up and down the UK (especially Dunster
in Somerset).

Other recent highlights include eating cow intestines at a local izakaya
(they taste like liver), trying to convert everyone I know away from
disposable wooden chopsticks (erm, it hasn't worked) and getting a few
students to try Marmite (that wasn't very successful either).  Also
there was a tiny earthquake a week ago, just strong enough to wake me up
and make my whisky wobble around in the bottle... I got excited because
it was my first one, luckily they never get serious here (fingers
crossed).

Coming up I've got a trip planned to the Sapporo Snow Festival from the
6th to the 11th, one of the things I'd been looking forward to since
before I came to Japan.  Then it's back to work for a while, recently
we've been working five-day weeks following visits to primary schools
and the shock is proving quite hard!

Well it's a party tonight at Corbin's house (mine is too small for that
kind of thing) so I'd better finish this.  Hope you're all well and let
me know what you're all up to!

Love

        Andrew
 

Letter 13: Sapporo Sapporo Sapporo
Tue, 17 Feb 2004 20:58

(subject line to be sung to the tune of "sakana sakana sakana")

Hello from a snowy and rainy Yonezawa which can't decide whether it's
spring yet or not.

Hopefully a shorter one this time round.  This "bulk" e-mail is mainly
to say I had a good time at the Sapporo Snow Festival and to say that
I've put some more photos on the web, please go to:

http://www.geocities.com/andrewgaijin

We went by overnight ferry to Hokkaido and were in Sapporo from Saturday
to Tuesday, there were about 80 of us as we went with JETs from
neigbouring Miyagi prefecture too.  Once there we fragmented into much
smaller groups.  Having spent a long time going round all of the
sculptures we found our way to the beer factory and the chocolate
factory, the former being free and providing a free (full) glass at the
end.  So it was a good opportunity to indulge in the Japanese tradition
of drinking at 2 in the afternoon - or earlier.  The other highlight for
me was the Hokkaido Modern Art Museum which had a lot of interesting
glass works and suggestive cartoon-style pop art; this is Japan after
all.

Anyway I'll let the photos do the rest of the talking; on top of all
that I'm sure it's obvious we went out for a few drinks every night
too...

On coming back to Yonezawa I've been finding things a little stressful
recently.  I've even been busy at work!  I just seem to busy all the
time at the moment... as a result sorry if I haven't replied to any
e-mails for a while!  So I'm trying to make fewer unnecessary plans
(like giving one-to-one English tuition to 10 year olds for a start).
Admittedly though going snowboarding last night was a stress reliever,
to be honest I really needed that and I feel I'm getting somewhere with
it now!

Well I'll try and get round to replying to e-mails, meanwhile hope
you're well and not covered in heaps of snow.

        Andrew
 

Letter 14: Bourgeois Gentilhommes and Blazer Buttons
Thu, 18 Mar 2004 22:42

Hello again (in an impersonal bulk e-mail type way),

Here's probably my last e-mail for a while as I'm off to Tokyo to meet
Ruth tomorrow!  She's going to be in Japan until the 30th of March and
then my parents arrive on the first of April.  They're staying until the
16th.  Lots of exciting things may or may not be lined up, I'm looking
forward to showing off loads of Japan and of course it will be fantastic
to see Ruth and my parents again!

Almost all of the snow in Yonezawa has melted now, yesterday was really
warm and then it got really cold again today.  The only snow left is a
kind of mucky sludge that swallows you up to your knees if you try and
walk on it (as I did when taking a drunken shortcut to an izakaya the
other night during the teachers' post-graduation party).

The Junior High School students I teach all graduated on Tuesday and
there's always a big ceremony, the students mainly get really emotional
to be leaving... quite the opposite from Britain I think.  It's a really
serious thing (very little clapping and cheering) but ours was
accompanied by a rousing chorus of "Alleluia" (this being such a
Christian country) and Auld Lang Syne, those two famous Japanese songs. 
I think it all goes to show how much school is a part of Japanese
students' lives... they spend so much time there after all, though
perhaps that is because there's not a great deal else to be doing in
Yonezawa... Still, in most other countries, students don't wear their
uniforms at weekends.

Later that day all the teachers and parents had a big enkai together, I
made it to the 4th party (youjikai) and joked with the headmaster about
him being a member of the yakuza - almost anything is OK when you can
use drink as an excuse.

Last week was busy as Erin and I needed to practise for French readings
- I had tried to learn a passage from one book (with varying degrees of
success) and then together, we both performed a short bit from Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme - a flashback to A-level French Literature - where
M. Meursault is being taught how to pronounce different letters... with
"hilarious" consequences.  Luckily that went OK, seeing as most of the
audience didn't know any French.

Recently, Corbin and I have had loads of visits to primary schools, they
can be fun but really do get tiring.  Now we have to perfect the art of
avoiding "kancho" - this literally means "enema" but is also a name for
when little kids poke you up the bum.  This is a difficult thing to
avoid as the children have a cunning plot... they usually do it when
you're giving another kid a piggyback at the end of a lesson, or simply
when you don't have your back against a wall.  Or they just poke you in
the front instead.  Apparently the normal teachers don't have this
problem.

Apart from that there have been a couple of parties including the White
Festa ("Love and Happy") and the Yonezawa Spring Fling where us
foreigners got to dress up in kimono and parade around like the gaijins
that we are.  I managed to get my picture in the Yonezawa and the
Yamagata newspaper, quite surprising really seeing as this Iranian bloke
called Ali wore Persian clothes and had a huge sword - he looked much
better.

One final thing: Corbin and I have made a website for students with
simple English and stuff about us and our countries.  If you get the
chance then please have a look and tell me what you think; the address
is:

http://www.geocities.com/yonezawa_alt

Or there's a link to it from my own site.  Any better sugegstions for
the photo on the front page?

Well my head hurts - I've just caught a cold now I'm about to take some
time off work - and I need to pack.  Hope you're all well and are busy
planning your trip to Japan (no charge for sleeping on my floor).

Kaze o hikanaide!  Ki o tsukete!
(Don't catch a cold!  Be careful!)

        Andrew
 

Letter 15: About that time again
Tue, 04 May 2004 16:33

Hello!

I'm still here.  Sorry for a prolonged absence of bulk e-mail, I hope
you're all well and have put the kettle on - I think this is going to be
another long one...

Here's the latest update from Yonezawa.  Since I last wrote, I've had
visits from firstly Ruth and then Mum and Clive, I've started at a new
school (Nanachu = Number 7), the snow has all melted and it's started
getting hot and humid, and I've been running around with a sword and
samurai armour, but more about that later...

Needless to say both visits included a few days in Tokyo and visits to
most of the major attractions (except Tokyo Disneyland).  Then I was
able to show off Yonezawa, my office, one of my schools and a whole load
of onsens... there was loads of stuff going on over nearly a month and
although it was all really good fun I don't know if giving an exhaustive
list is going to be so interesting...  instead, it's best to wait until
I put some photos on the web (and that could take some time as I've
taken about 300 photos since meeting Ruth in Tokyo).

In Tokyo it's especially easy to get carried away, fit too much stuff
into one day and feel knackered at the end of it all; luckily Ruth and
my parents coped with it very well despite Tokyo being perhaps the
craziest place on Earth.  (By the way, Mum, Clive and Ruth, please
excuse me referring to you in the 3rd person in this e-mail...)  Perhaps
that was helped by them having seen Lost in Translation, a film I have
yet to see.  But it all involved lots of neon, sakura (cherry blossoms),
skyscrapers, shrines, temples and an overwhelming number of people,
usually walking in the opposite direction, at huge zebra crossings and
places like Shinjuku Station.

After that, things calmed down a bit.  Probably my highlight with Ruth
was the trip to Kanazawa, one of the few truly historical places in
Japan.  We went with a few other gaijin friends and stayed in a hostel
in the middle of the geisha district, however we missed out on seeing
one this time.  The Kenroku-en garden there is especially beautiful and
provided a first proper view of sakura in Japan, only partially obscured
by the bus loads of Japanese tourists who had the same idea as us.  I've
now been to the top three places in Japan I picked for the JET
Programme; Sapporo was my first, the Kanazawa region second and the
wider area I'm in was third.

With my parents, things were slightly different as we borrowed cars from
Erin and Nick.  This being a hugely car-dependent country (outside the
big cities), even more so than Britain, having a car admittedly made it
easier to get round and see some nature.  Nature, believe it or not,
actually exists in Japan.  This is however only in small pockets and
national parks; everywhere else is either inaccessible mountains or a
mixture of convenience stores (konbini), plastic houses, reinforced
hills and concrete riverbanks.  The Japanese like their nature to be
neat and tidy, i.e. unnatural.

With this extra freedom we were able to see lakes (still frozen over),
historic onsen villages and, on my Mum's birthday, a beautiful island
near Sendai called Kinkasan.  Near the bottom there were lots of deer
wandering around a group of shrines, and the view from the top was
amazing too.  It was a really good day, hampered only by the fact that
Clive twisted his ankle on the way down.

All in all the whole last month was amazing (even if busy) and it's been
great to see my parents and Ruth again as well as being able to see
Japan more objectively.

Since then things have calmed down, Nanachu is a good school full of
students who don't need to be worrying about exams and stuff; it's a new
school year here.  They're really cool and the teachers all seem pretty
laid back too, I'm sure they all work from time to time though.

In Japan, we're currently in the middle of Golden Week, a series of
national holidays, and I've been staying around Yonezawa as travelling
can be a nightmare at this time.  Every year they have the Uesugi
Matsuri, a festival celebrating the former ruling family of Yonezawa.  A
lot of people come and visit the Uesugi shrine in the middle of town,
where a lot of people set up stalls all seemingly selling banana-shaped
chocolate cakes on sticks (don't ask me why).

Yesterday was the climax of the festival, where one of the famous
battles for the town is re-enacted and a load of people dress as samurai
and fight by the riverside.  A few other foreigners and I joined in; how
many other opportunities do you get to do that?  Before the battle we
had lots of time to wander around and get stared at EVEN MORE than
usual; going to 7-Eleven and buying a beer wearing samurai armour with
swords on and flags on our backs probably got the most attention.  The
battle itself was amazing - we got to run through the river carrying
flares then go into the the battle and get killed (all the foreigners
have to die, sadly).  All really good fun, except we all had sunburnt
faces and a white strip across our foreheads where we wore headbands.

Well, that's pretty much as much as I can condense the last month and a
half into one e-mail, things will almost certainly be a bit quieter
until Corbin's replacement arrives in August and I start my second year
on the JET Programme.  Later this month I'm taking over from Erin with
the French classes and in June we have a re-contracting conference in
Tokyo, in the meantime it's back to school and thinking of ways to make
learning English slightly more interesting.

Otsukaresama deshita!  (Thank you for your hard work).

        Andrew
 

Letter 16: Flower Hats and Big Buddhas
Sun, 15 Aug 2004 14:02:31 

Good afternoon from Funayama Heights!

First, the usual apologies: sorry I've left it so long and sorry if I
haven't replied to your personal e-mails.  I'll try to do that soon,
honest.

Recently I've really been enjoying myself; it's pretty hard to get bored
here and there's been loads of stuff going on as usual.  A large part of
that has been parties; emotional farewell parties for the JETs who have
recently passed on to the Real World (that must be scary) and happy
welcome parties for the new JETs who arrived around the same time.

I've already spent one year in Japan and I wish I could say exactly
where the time went, but I feel really positive about the whole thing. 
I'm staying for another year, but as for whether I make
it a total of three years, I have no idea yet.  Answers on a postcard to
the usual address, please.  I'm definitely missing home, especially
everyone there, yet I'm having a really good time here too and don't
want to throw away the opportunity to keep on doing a job I enjoy for
decent money in an interesting country with friendly people.  I could do
with less being stared at and being told how good I am at chopsticks
though.

A quick check reveals that it's been three months since I last wrote a
big e-mail, so here goes...  Firstly there have been regular calligraphy
lessons, french classes and nomikais (drinking parties) followed by
trips to local karaoke places.  And (obviously?) work has taken up a
fair bit of time; I've had my longest school visit at Nanachu - 3 months
- which went well.  It has to be one of the coolest schools yet.  I
still have yet to understand how the students are so happy despite
having such little time to themselves.  My next one, Minami-hara-chu
will start on the 30th for me.  It's the most out of the way and takes
about 30 minutes to cycle there, but I need the exercise so I'm not
dreading that too much.

The hay fever season came and went, then there's been about a month of
extreme heat and humidity where the temperature is above 30 degrees most
days and I've been reduced to a lardy, sweaty mess (though you do get
used to it).  It's been a bit cooler this last few days though; I
haven't been waking up sweating at 3am recently.

All first-year recontracting JETs got to go to Tokyo once more and stay
in the Keio Plaza hotel - woo-hoo!  Tokyo karaoke has much more choice
than Yonezawa karaoke.  Oh, and we picked up some useful teaching tips,
too.  Besides from that, it's been more enkais, English seminars and
events and trips to nearby towns and cities.  I won't go into too much
detail but I'll say that I've put more photos on the web; please go to
the usual address:

        http://www.geocities.com/andrewgaijin

While you're there, if you could have a look at my almost-finished J-Pop
site and let me know what you think, then I'd be grateful!  I'm
preparing it for the seminar for new ALTs later this week.  The deal
basically was, if I did a professional looking Team Teaching
demonstration for all the new people, then they'd let me do the J-Pop
seminar too, which I really wanted to do.  Oh, I must remember to
prepare for that sometime soon...  I must admit I'm getting a bit
nervous about it because everyone will be able to understand everything
I say during the class.  It's different at school; if you make a mistake
you can usually cover it up pretty easily.

Still, at another recent seminar for local teachers that I helped at,
things went pretty well.  I can now say that I've got a hall full of 60
teachers to make animal noises at 9 in the morning, all in the name of
"fun, communicative activities for teaching English".  Ha ha ha.

Outside of work, I was recently roped into the Yonezawa Hanagasa (Flower
Hat) festival; like the Yamagata one, but smaller.  This meant that I
had to learn a dance involving twiddling a hat around to a Japanese folk
song whilst wearing a lurid green jacket on the most humid day of the
year.  It was fun once I got the hang of it, but very sweaty, and
off-putting when little old ladies by the side of the road spotted me
and said "Ooh, gaijin", making me mess my dance up.  We got free beer at
the end of it though, so the clumsy prancing around was not all in vain.

And up till now I haven't mentioned that I've met a girl called Chie;
we've been going out for over two months now.  And yes, I know her name
sounds funny in French!  There's a couple of photos of her on the
website if you want to know what she looks like.  It's going well; in
fact we recently spent 3 days in Kyoto, passing by Tokyo and Nara.  This
was a good opportunity to sample real Japan experiences: The good
shinkansen, Mount Fuji, temples (gold and silver) and shrines, big
Buddhas, weird gelatinous Japanese snacks, ryokans (Japanese style
hotels), the obligatory purchase of souvenirs for the office, and
Starbucks.  Well, you can't be Japanese all the time and Japanese coffee
is a bit hit and miss.

That's some of what's been going on over the last three months, though
I've missed a lot of stuff out too.  Every day still has the capacity to
surprise, whether you stumble upon a countryside temple and get invited
in for drinks and a guided tour, or whether other City Hall employees
are wearing badges around their neck saying, "It's over 27 degrees, and
since we'd rather save on the air conditioning, please excuse me for not
wearing a tie in this heat".  There are so many little things that you
forget about.

Anyway, let me know how it's all going on back at home (or wherever you
are) and I'll try and write again before long.  Meanwhile, as the
great(?) David Beckham says, "One love, one peace.  Be sweet."  I'll
leave it at that.

        Andrew

PS - if you prefer not to receive these e-mails then please let me know;
I won't be offended. 

PS - si vous aimeriez mieux ne pas recevoir mes mails (surtout si ça
fait chier que je n'écris pas en français) alors dites-le moi; je ne
serai pas offensé.
 

Letter 17 - Ego Wrappin'
Wed, 03 Nov 2004 19:49:31 +0900

Hello!

And welcome to another bulk e-mail, written just as the most powerful
country in the world is on the verge of spending another four years
being ruled by a moron.

Apart from that, things are going OK.  Well, I've been more stressed
than usual this last couple of weeks, but nothing major.  Just all the
people in Yonezawa who want to speak English or French, or who want
their three year old children to speak English, or just want to meet
foreigners, and the fact that my current school is one of the busiest
despite being small.  So, excuses, excuses... and apologies for a lack
of communication.

As a result, first things first, I'm thinking that this is likely to be
my final year on the JET Programme and that I'll probably be coming back
home next summer.  Although Japan is still really interesting, I really
feel that I'll have seen enough by next summer, and that the prospect of
a third year is a little tiring.  I like the job and there are lots of
really friendly people here, but the novelty and challenge is starting
to wear off.  On top of that, I miss things like beds, dry air, roast
potatoes, solid buildings, concrete-free riverbanks and not being stared
at.

But I know I'll miss Japan too when I leave and can imagine getting
pretty emotional.  The students really make the job worthwhile, but I'll
also miss peoples' hospitality, maguro(tuna?)-sushi, J-Pop, interesting
weather, cheap restaurants and being able to do karaoke without people
throwing things at me.  It goes both ways.

Recently, I've felt like I've had little control over my time.  I've had
a whole week without having time to "sit down and have a cup of tea". 
I've been on a three-day English camp with some senior high school
students (it's nice to be able to have whole conversations with students
in English, something I'm not usually able to do), I've been trying to
keep French classes fun and entertaining by recycling the ideas I use
for 12 year olds at school, I've been helping Dave move away from our
block of flats (his decision!) and I've been someone to speak English
at.  It feels like ages since I've been out for a drink (though not
actually true).

It turns out that the earthquake was more serious than I thought, I
think over 30 people died.  Yonezawa was safe, but we could still feel
aftershocks four days after the original earthquake.  I spoke to man who
was 83 who said that he only remembers one stronger earthquake here, but
he was in the mountains and didn't notice it at the time.  We're pretty
lucky as far as natural disasters go.  I think the biggest danger here
is from losing one's mind through excessive pachinko.

Apart from quick sightseeing trips to Yokohama (during the typhoon) and
Niigata (before the earthquake) I've been more or less in Yonezawa.  The
foreigners here agree that it takes about a month before you really need
to get out for a day or two.  That time is about up, so I'll try and fit
in one more trip to Tokyo before Christmas, which is when I've booked 11
nights in Sydney.  It'll be an extreme break from snowy weather to
burn-your-face-off weather and I'll be meeting Ruth there; we'll be able
to have a Christmas barbecue on the beach which will be another step
from wandering around Taipei in temperatures of 25 degrees and eating
Christmas dinner in an Italian restaurant.

When I get back, it'll be snowboarding season which I'm really looking
forward to, it's amazing how exciting the prospect of falling down a
hill with your feet strapped to a piece of plastic can actually be.  And
the snow covers up all of the plastic houses and concrete riverbanks
which is a bonus.

On that note, I'm off out for some sushi.  Have a look at the photos if
you haven't already, and please e-mail me with careers advice seeing
that I'll probably be home in 9 months.  Time flies when you're having
fun...  Hope you're all OK, keep in touch and who knows, I may even
write back sometime!

        Andrew
 

Letter 18: Origami and Cheesecake
Thu, 23 Dec 2004 18:21:51 +0900

Hello from snowy Yonezawa!

It's a while since I wrote my last big e-mail and my memory's going a
bit funny (it must be all the sushi), so I thought I'd write a quick
update before leaving for a complete change of season.

In under 48 hours I'll be in Sydney... I'm due to arrive on Christmas
morning.  The weather forecast says non-stop sun, although the maximum
temperature on Christmas Day is only 25 degrees which surprises me. 
It's all pretty hard to believe at the moment, sitting in my little flat
with thick snow outside the window.  I'll be meeting Ruth and three of
her friends who've been travelling all around New Zealand and have just
arrived in Sydney.  There aren't many fixed plans yet; only what I've
read on the Lonely Planet website, so if you know anywhere I have to
see, then please let me know.  I'm back on January the 6th and start
work on the 7th.

Ah, had better pack pretty soon.  My night bus to Tokyo leaves in a few
hours.  Yonezawa has been fun (but busy as usual).  Yesterday I finished
at my 6th school out of the eight Junior Highs here.  I had a really
nice send-off in the school assembly with flowers and speeches (in
English) from two of the best students.  Some girls built a huge snowman
for me (called An-chan) and at lunchtime we made mochi (squashed, sticky
rice).  The method is easy: hit it with an enormous hammer.  The
headmaster and most of the other male teachers joined in.  From the
strength of the hitting there's a lot of stress built up in the staff,
even though it doesn't usually show.

I'm still enjoying the teaching, especially because I'm getting more
chances to try out new ideas.  Recently I've been concentrating on
teaching the students basic phonics.  It's difficult trying to teach
pointless and boring things like "An ocean of grasslands surrounds
Ulaanbataar" (a sentence from the second year textbook) when they can't
even pronounce the sound of the letter "d".  Let alone such difficult
sounds as "th" and "v".  In any case, the students still have so much
enthusiasm for a bunch of teenagers.  From time to time I also get
presents of things like origami, cheesecake and manga character trading
cards which are technically illegal at school.

A couple of weeks ago I took a Japanese proficiency test (Level 3; 4 is
the easiest and 1 is the hardest).  I have no idea if I passed or not
because my time organisation was very bad and there were a lot of
(semi-educated) guesses, but we'll see.  The results come out in the
middle of February.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying myself and am still managing to get some karaoke
done.  I was so eager to get one song out of my system that I programmed
it into the ultra-advanced remote control before we even entered the
karaoke room.  And Chie and I have been together for nearly seven
months; things are going really well, so I'm happy.  It's just a shame
her job as a care worker pays peanuts and that she can't get holidays
for more than three days in a row.  But we still manage to see a lot of
each other.

Well, I've rambled on once more, but I wish you all a merry Christmas
and a happy new year!  And I'll try to write back personally soon...

Have a great holiday!

Love

        Andrew (aka Andoryuu)
 

Letter 19: Kangaroo-on-a-stick and Strawberry Sandwiches
Sat, 22 Jan 2005 12:48:24 +0900

Happy New Year!  Akemashite Omedetou!

It's about time for the first update from 2005.  How are you?  Thank you
very much for all the e-mails and greetings.  It's really good to hear
from everyone and I'm missing you lots.

Again, I've wanted to be in touch individually more but straight after
coming back I seem to find myself with very little time to myself
again.  After coming back from Australia it's become more obvious how
something about Japan leaves you little time and space to breathe.  I've
been writing this at school; I started at Number 1 on the 11th.  Up
until now it hasn't turned out to be as busy as the last one which is a
bonus.

I had a fantastic time in Australia even though it was overshadowed by
news of the tsunami.  Arriving on a warm but cloudy Christmas Day,
meeting Ruth and her friends, seeing the Bridge and Opera House then
later going to Manly Wharf for a Christmas meal of chicken and chips
with beer has to be one of the more surreal Christmasses I've had. 
Following Christmas Day we had a couple of days of wandering around
Sydney which was full of British people; around that time it was hard to
find any Australians.  I suppose they were all tucking into their turkey
and stuffing and bubble and squeak, the lucky b*ggers.  Actually it's
the roast potatoes I miss the most; I tried some in Australia but they
just weren't the same.

After getting our bearings (i.e. finding The Rocks with a high
concentration of British-style pubs, and finding a place that did
cracking beans on toast) we all ventured out a bit more.  This included
visiting the Blue Mountains nearby and being able to see huge expanses
of nature; something else I've been missing a great deal.  Also that day
we saw the Olympic park, went on the world's steepest train, walked
under and over cliffs, tried Tim Tams (the Down Under equivalent of
Penguin bars - many people rave about them) and saw real penguins,
koalas and kangaroos at Featherdale Wildlife Park.  The last stop was an
opportunity to throw boomerangs, something I hardly mastered but did
with such grace that the tour bus driver called me Julie Andrews for the
rest of the day trip.  Although he was a little deflated by being
threatened with a fine of $500; it's actually illegal to throw
boomerangs in Australia.

One of the big highlights was New Year's Eve in Sydney; Ruth's friends
found a great spot and stayed there from 6 in the evening to watch both
the fireworks at 9 and then the big ones at 12.  A mental photograph of
the fireworks over the Opera House backed by a techno version of "Tie Me
Kangaroo Down Sport" will stay in my mind for a long time.  The kebabs
were fantastic too.

We really wanted to go on a wine tour (well, I did at least, having been
disillusioned by Japanese red wine which is ridiculously sweet and
served chilled).  But they were all booked up.  However we did manage a
one-night trip to Canberra. Canberra is a strange place.  It's like a
village in the countryside which has some really wide, empty roads, a
few glassy tower blocks here and there, and a Bond-esque Parliament
House inside a hill which is annoyingly difficult to get to by bike or
on foot.  It has a small pond in front of it, no doubt filled with
sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.  The
(artificial) Lake Burley-Griffin was picturesque and there were a few
art galleries and museums near it that would have been good to see had
we had more time, but once we'd walked around the thriving centre (of an
excitement roughly equal to that of Melton Mowbray's but without the
pork pies) we only had time for the Parliament House which just about
made the three-hour-each-way coach trip worth it.  Sadly I don't have
any good photos of the interior because I left my digital camera at home
that day and had to use a crappy disposable one.  I've realised how
attached to my digital camera I have now become.

Back in Sydney, I did some last minute shopping for chocolate,
anti-perspirant, flouride toothpaste and yeast extract products and got
ready to go back.  There were the above highlights, but so many smaller
things made the trip amazing too. Things like solid stone buildings,
historic monuments, people being a little blunt but genuine, baked
beans, full English breakfasts, beer gardens, beaches with no concrete,
multiculturalism, trains being ever so slightly late (though not
excessively so), people saying "How are you?" in shops even though
you've never met them, koalas and fish and chips made it all a great
experience.

Coming back here was a shock due to the sheer amount of snow when I got
back.  Walls of it line the streets and will be here until sometime in
March.  It was also a shock to come back and see strawberry sandwiches
(complete with cream) being sold in 7-Eleven.  As well as the usual
plastic houses, overhead power lines and concrete rivers.  I'm currently
reading "Dogs and Demons" by Alex Kerr; I recommend it if you want to
see precisely how far Japan goes to mess up the beauty it used to have in
abundance.  It's interesting but depressing to see how completely beyond
logic this country can go sometimes.  Even so, Japan still has a lot of
subtle beauty in temples, shrines, gardens and people's houses; enough
to still make you feel passionate about the country.

It was really good to see Chie again.  Maybe next time I go on holiday
she'll have a job where she can take more than three days off in a row. 
Her current job (as a carer in an old people's home) gives her a rubbish
wage and NO paid leave.  It's similar for many people here.

I've got back into the rhythm of school and am having to do huge numbers
of self-introductions due to the number of classes here.  I never
thought I would get so sick of talking about myself.  Students are
currently applying for senior high school which makes for a slightly
tense atmosphere sometimes; the third year here are pretty miserable
although all the other students are as crazy as usual.  They still have
time to teach me the latest cool things though; they all like a group
called Kishidan who have huge, ridiculous quiffs right now.  (Do a
search on Google for pictures.)  But different groups of students have
different "in-jokes" so it's a challenge to remember which cool gestures
go with which students.

I have until the 4th of February to make my final decision about next
summer, but will probably hand in the form tomorrow; then I can start
mentally preparing for coming home.  Which probably won't be Exeter
anymore.  Watch this space.

Before I forget, I've put some new photos on my website:
http://www.geocities.com/andrewgaijin .  Enjoy!

It's time to go to a lesson so I'll stop writing.  Meanwhile I'll be
trying to make the most of this winter by snowboarding and drinking warm
sake.  Not at the same time.  Hope you're all OK and keep in touch,

love

        Andrew
 

Letter 20: Beans, lots of beans
Thu, 17 Mar 2005 16:36:30

Hello!

How are you?  Time for an update.  Despite being under a huge wall of
snow for the last two months, there's been a fair amount of stuff going
on.  I hear it's been snowy in England, too, yet here, even when it's
metres high, people still manage to get to work and school and trains
run on time.

The lowest point of the last two months was when I got the flu and was
off for about a week, but apart from that things have been OK.  In fact
I've almost completely forgotten about it with the delight of
discovering that it's now possible to buy Heinz Baked Beans in
Yonezawa!  Although I had a beans fix in Australia, the happiness
brought on by eating beans on toast on a snowy Tuesday evening in Japan
cannot be described.  Other items available include Dairy Milk chocolate
and Newcastle Brown Ale.  On top of this, by going on a trip to nearby
Fukushima or Sendai, it's possible to buy Sharwood's Korma curry sauce.

I've got to the stage where I feel well enough acquainted with Japanese
culture that I'm allowed certain creature comforts to balance out the
more annoying things about Japan.  These include:  Why is it so hard to
turn your car engine off outside a convenience store?  Why do people
think I'm unable to eat rice?  Why do people not consider the huge
amount of plastic and paper they get through to be a waste?  Do people
seriously enjoy eating cod testicles here?  And why am I still being
stared at like I'm Saddam Hussein after one and a half years?

Even so, life is more than fine if you have no desire to question what
goes on here.  For example, we had the Yonezawa Snow Lantern Festival a
few weeks ago and I was given a personal guided tour with five guides
and got paid 5000 yen (£25) for the privilege.  I still get celebrity
treatment from students even though I probably do less than half the
work that Japanese teachers do.  And now that school's finished, I get
days to sit in the office and write e-mails, and still get paid.

I had one week near the end of February where I was followed around all
Tuesday, having two people from the City Hall taking photos and
interviewing me for the Yonezawa International Relations newsletter. 
Then on the Thursday I gave a 30 minute speech to the Yonezawa Rotary
Club about my view of Japan and Japanese culture (in Japanese).  I tried
not to let the fact that I was treated like an honoured guest by a room
full of local company presidents and people that schools and hospitals
are named after over-inflate my head, but it was difficult.  I enjoyed
watching a room full of old people ringing a bell and singing the Rotary
Song like they're back at school.  They took me to karaoke afterwards
and asked me to sing both Japanese and English songs.  But they stopped
asking me to sing when I started getting better scores than them.  I
also found these people to be very touchy-feely once they get drunk,
although not as touchy-feely as 6 year-olds get in primary school
lessons.  Oh and there was free food and drink and I got paid 10000 yen
for it.

Last weekend I also had my first attempt at DJ-ing at a dance party in
the Sunroute Hotel.  Although the allotted time was short, putting in a
few Japanese crowd pleasers amongst some European stuff seemed to work
OK.  Next I want to try it out with records and headphones; what I did
was the simple job of programming a few tracks into my iPod, which was
fine except for the time it inexplicably stopped half way through the
first song.  I think it's going to be a while before I'm playing the big
nightclubs.  Even so I got another 5000 yen to add to the collection.

So I've been treated like a celebrity just for being foreign and have to
wonder about the shock of that stopping when I get back home.  On the
subject of coming home, my contract will end on 27 July and I plan to
come back in the first week of August.  Also, Chie's been successful in
getting a Youth Exchange visa to come to England which is fantastic, and
we plan to come back together.  She'll also be able to work and study
and with any luck, we'll find somewhere to live in London.   OK, so now
I REALLY need to start thinking about what kind of job I want to do when
I get back.  Ideas please!

As I said earlier, school has finished; we had the graduation ceremony
yesterday.  It was pretty solemn and official and dragged on a bit
because I couldn't understand what most of the speeches were on about. 
But it was still a very Japanese experience and some female teachers
wore kimonos to add to the atmosphere.  I also got the chance to sing a
song ("Sayonara to iou" - "Let's Say Goodbye") with the other teachers
near the end; I slipped up a couple of times because it's not the same
as karaoke and I can barely read music, but hopefully not many people
noticed.  And there were a few tearful farewells going on at the end of
it all.

Then tomorrow evening I'll be off to meet Steve, who's arriving first
thing on Saturday morning.  We're going to go to Hiroshima and Himeji
(with a famous castle) together and later meet Puja, who's arriving on
the 28th.  We'll spend time in Tokyo and Kyoto before coming up to
Yonezawa.  I can't wait to meet them and can't believe it's all so soon,
it'll probably be my biggest tour around Japan so I want to make the
most of it.  As a result I'm not going to be around much over the next
three weeks; I've been pretty much constantly in Yonezawa recently so
it'll feel really good to travel again.  And it'll hopefully be just in
time to see the last of the snow followed by the much-hyped cherry
blossoms.

Well, it's nearly the end of another hard-working (ahem) day, so I'm off
to make some more travel arrangements.  Hope you're all well and keep in
touch,

love

        Andrew

PS - here is an amusing link about Magical Trevor:
http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/37/ .

Letter 21: Mankai Banzai
Thu, 28 Apr 2005 06:36:19 +0100 (BST)

Hello!

It's time for a slightly overdue update from Japan.  When I last wrote
I was about to meet first Steve, then Puja.  Now they've left and Tom
and his girlfriend Kate are about to arrive!  Japan really feels like
Party Central at the moment.

I had a great time with both Steve and Puja when they came all the way
to visit in the Easter holidays.  With Steve we spent some time in
Hiroshima.  Having shelled out 18000 yen (or 90 pounds) for a one-way
ticket from Tokyo, our train ended up being over an hour late! 
Admittedly it was due to an earthquake, but it was a big surprise. 
Once finally there, we spent some time around the hypocentre area - the
Peace Park - and in the Atomic Bomb museum.  I'm not going to go into
too much detail, but it was very emotional and I recommend going if you
ever get the chance as it poses some big questions about humanity... 

Aside from anything related to the bomb, Hiroshima has a really good
atmosphere; it's spacious, has cool old-fashioned trams rattling along
the main streets and it has funky bars (both British funky and American
funky).  Everyone seems really nice too.  Sometimes over-friendly, as
we got propositioned by women asking if we wanted a "massage"...

Nearby was one of Japan's "Top 3 sights", the island of Miyajima, where
there's the red gate in the water, another one of those
once-in-a-lifetime sights.  We climbed up the island in our T-shirts;
it was a big shock to go back to Yonezawa and still be having piles of
snow falling.  I went back for a couple of days (after we went to
Himeji with Japan's biggest (and real) castle) then back to Tokyo to
meet Puja.

It was great to meet up again and we pretty much went straight to
Kyoto.  Although I'd been there a couple of times before, we managed to
do lots things I hadn't seen.  One highlight was the Ryoanji Temple. 
Here I realised how Japanese I've become, because I panicked ("no no no
no no no!") when Puja made a slight shoe error, something which is easy
to do here.  The person at the desk didn't seem to give a damn and
everyone no doubt thought I was crazy!

Once inside, there was a Zen raked stone garden, something I hadn't
seen before, unless you count the one in the middle of the pick-up area
at Narita Airport, which I don't.  It has 13 rocks, but from wherever
you look, you can only see 12, suggesting that you can't know
everything.  Feeling suitably Zenned-up, we saw our first cherry
blossoms of the year and saw plenty more shrines and temples, whilst
still finding time to drink coffee, surf the internet and eat
omelette-rice-pizza.

We also spent a day in Osaka for a dose of urban sprawl, neon and
packed-to-capacity underground trains, before heading to Tokyo and
meeting back up with Steve.

We stayed in Asakusa, the place with the big Senso-ji temple, the Asahi
Golden Turd and the long souvenir street packed with the majority of
Japan's tourists.  Following this were karaoke in Shinjuku with Mikie,
and the next evening clubbing all night in crazy Shibuya with Kiriko
and her friend Yumiko.  The atmosphere in a Japanese club is amazing, a
big choice of music (the techno version of Livin' on a Prayer was an
inspired choice), nice people - even the bouncers, and free internet
and darts on the top floor.

The next day was difficult, so we just kept it down to a trip to
Harajuku, where the crazy people live, and Shinjuku, to have a look at
the dodgy shops in the dodgy area of Kabuki-cho; it's all part of the
Japan experience and interesting (and sometimes worrying) to see what
Japanese men get a kick out of.

Coming to Yonezawa, we managed to see a sight I'd never seen before,
the sake brewery, doubling the number of sights I thought Yonezawa had.
 We also amused ourselves with calligraphy, onsens, renting bikes and a
trip to my last school where the students were just as crazy as usual. 
Many of the students were there even though it was the holidays.  They
take their clubs so seriously, although they don't always have a say in
the matter.  And they were really happy to see Puja and Steve too.  We
joined in a little bit before leaving them to it and having a banquet
at a friend's house; an English teacher who just happens to be the best
cook in Yonezawa.

All of a sudden Puja and Steve had both left and things were much
quieter - and more boring, back to office days, trips to the gym and
cycling to the shops on my granny bike, swerving around bad drivers
(i.e. most of them).

I'm now at my last school of the eight in Yonezawa: Junior High Number
3.  The students are easy to recognise with their bright orange
tracksuits and seem to be the craziest of all.  Just chatting to them
between lessons seems to take up lots of energy.  The work isn't so
hard as I can generally fall back on activities I did a year ago, and
I'm trying to spend a bit more time after school with the students,
trying to join in with their clubs (and being very bad at them).  It
all fits in with my image of "goofy gaijin".  Today we're all going to
go and see the cherry blossoms while eating dango - squishy rice balls
on sticks - and making haiku.  Then tonight I'm off on the night bus to
Tokyo to meet Tom and Kate - I'm looking forward to another week of
gaijin-based fun!  And next week is the Uesugi (samurai battle)
Festival in Yonezawa.  I'm just watching this year but I can't wait;
the blossoms should still be out and Chie has said she'd wear a
kimono...

By the way, Mum and Clive will be moving to Yorkshire in May!  It's
still too big to contemplate fully, but they seem to have all-but
secured a really nice house close to Hebden Bridge.  I'll keep you
posted with more details once it finally happens.  It will be strange
to come back to somewhere else when I come back; I hope I'll get the
chance to go back to Exeter from time to time!

Hope to put more photos online soon.  Let me know what you're up to,
hope you're all well.

See you soon,

love,

  Andrew

Letter 22:  The Art of Hot. Because Please Don't Cry.
Mon, 04 Jul 2005 21:39:20 +0900

Hello! 

I’ve left it a while as usual, but I have about a month left in Japan
and thought I’d take the opportunity to write my last big e-mail before
leaving, before things get ridiculously busy.

I’m reaching the end of my stay at my final school, finishing on the
21st, then my contract officially ends on the 27th when I cease to be a
participant on the rather cushy JET Programme.  The sayonara parties
have already started and I’ve started writing even more lists than usual
in order to think about going back.

Where I go back to will be a different place, however.  Recently, Mum
and Clive have moved to Yorkshire, somewhere I’ve always liked, but
it’ll be sad to leave Exeter behind.  I will be staying at home while
looking for jobs and somewhere to live with Chie, in London, if there’s
anywhere non-extortionate left to live.  So my new permanent address,
from 7 August, will be:
        32 Church Street,
        Heptonstall,
        Hebden Bridge,
        West Yorkshire,
        HX7 7NS  ENGLAND
        Tel: 01422 844219  (I plan to use the same mobile when I get back).

Chie and I will leave Yonezawa on August 2nd, stay for 4 nights in Tokyo
and Yokohama, then leave on the 6th and fly to Manchester via Malaysia. 
It’s still all hard to believe, but I don’t have too much time to think
about everything because I’m accounted for pretty much every day up
until I leave, mainly with different types of parties, including Bryan
(an JET who’s been here for 3 years) and Rika’s wedding at the Uesugi
Shrine in the middle of Yonezawa on the 17th.

I still feel that two years was the right amount of time to spend here. 
I know I’ll miss Japan very soon after I leave, but right now I’m just
really looking forward to getting back and seeing family and friends in
England.  It’s been a long time.  I’m also trying to prepare myself for
some reverse culture shock once I’ve got over the thrill of eating roast
potatoes with gravy.  I know I will try and speak to people in Japanese
and bow at least once, wondering why they aren't bowing back and are
looking at me in that funny way.

I think that the last time I wrote, Puja and Steve had recently left
Japan and I was getting ready for Tom and Kate to arrive.  I’m really
happy that so many people have come to visit; I’ve had a great time with
everyone and it’s kept me aware of what’s going on in the real world. 
With Tom and Kate it was no exception, and although we didn’t get to
spend so much time together, we had a good few days in Tokyo and
Yonezawa.  The latter was especially fun because we were able to see the
annual Uesugi Battle festival (we just watched this year, rather than
taking part).  It also seemed that every student I’ve ever taught was in
town around that time, given the number of chance meetings at the shops
or in Mister Donut.  However, I have now been to every junior high,
which makes for a total of about 3000 students, not mentioning a few of
the 8000 primary school students in town...

With Tom and Kate it was also good to see new parks in Tokyo, walk from
Shinjuku to Shibuya, as well as seeing what seemed like the entire
district of Ginza full of people queueing to buy the new operating
system in the Apple Store.  After Yonezawa, they separated off to the
mountains, spending time in Takayama, then to Kyoto, where they seemed
to visit about twice as many places as I’ve ever been to there.

Since then it’s been lots of fairly routine weeks at junior high number
3.  As I spend a lot of time daydreaming about coming back, I’m not
exactly spouting new teaching ideas anymore, but relying on the things I
used a year ago.  However I still never want to take the liveliness of
the students for granted and if my teaching plan is really boring, they
can still provide a catalyst for the lesson to be fun, or at the very
worst, bearable.  It is a cliche, but I will miss the students most when
I leave, whilst pitying them for having to live lives with no free time
(as they spend it all practising for their sports teams or doing
homework).  I suppose it keeps them off the streets and out of the
karaoke booths though.  If that’s a good thing.

Chie and I have now been together for over a year, and celebrated our
anniversary in a posh restaurant in Sendai, at the top of a 30-storey
building.  Now, that’s something you can’t do in Hebden Bridge.  And
we’re thinking a lot about what things will be like in England; us both
looking for jobs and looking for somewhere to live together, and I have
to admit I’m getting nervous about it all because we won’t be gently
ushered along like JET participants are here.  But it’ll be nice to have
a challenge again and get used to adapting to not being given priority
treatment just for being foreign.  The concept of having to EARN respect
is hard to imagine after two years in Japan.

Just over a week ago, we also took a day trip to the Aichi Expo.  It’s a
long way (think London-Liverpool) so we took a night bus, there and
back, on consecutive nights.  Apart from the HUGE number of people
(hundreds of thousands a day) and the heat and humidity (it got to 36
degrees) it was fun.  Instead of queueing for three hours to see the
famous Toyota trumpetting robots, we decided to just make time for the
world’s biggest kaleidoscope, then visit country pavilions (our longest
wait was about 30 minutes).  Highlights included being rained on in
Singapore (as I said, it was a hot day), being able to speak three
languages in France, watching an effects-filled film about people and
animals and stuff in Canada, an elegant blue room in Morocco and
finally, a stuffed lion in Kenya.  (Where can you see lions?  Only in
Kenya.  http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya/ )  Oh and the UK wasn’t
bad either, trying to be all modern and innovative, with over-friendly
staff.  The official website for the expo is here:
http://www.expo2005.or.jp/ .  We tried to stay in the lovely,
air-conditioned indoors most of the time, but the site itself was pretty
nice, being green (albeit sculpted green) and a bit like Alice Through
the Looking Glass where, in order to go one way, you actually have to go
in completely the opposite direction.  I don’t think that was
intentional, but I consider myself to be OK at maps, yet we had to turn
around several times.  But that was all part of the fun.  That, and
sweating profusely.

I don’t have time to fit in too much before leaving, and it’s scary to
think I have only 12 days left at school.  My 2-week-to-view diary
doesn’t make things easier either.  I’m going to leave Japan, not only
with a knowledge of how to use chopsticks (coupled with a sense of ego
about how good I am with them), but a feeling that that’s enough of
being paid too much money to do too little work, even though I probably
won’t get to do anything else as amazing as this in my life (but you
never know), a reluctance to say goodbye but a strong desire to be back
with everyone back at home.  Japan has the capacity to inspire such
mixed emotions at times, but I’ll always have a fondness for Japanese
people, their friendliness and their strange quirks (for example, the
circular hand motion that accomanies the word for bicycle, the
exclamations “ohhhhhhhhhhh?” and “yoisho”, death-defying driving and
concrete).  I'm pretty sure I'll be back, but I don't know when and for
how long yet...

When I go, my position will be filled by an American bloke called Reid,
he's 23 and has already spent a year and a half in Japan (it was his
degree subject), so it shouldn't be too difficult for him to find his
way around.  He seems like a nice bloke, too.  I should get to meet him
when he arrives on the 28th.  And, when I go, I'll have to look for jobs
of course... bugger!  Wish me luck!

Well, I'll finish this e-mail before your eyes explode.  Apologies once
again for length (a couple of my lessons were cancelled today, so I had
lots of time).

Thanks for reading through all of my messages.  I'll let you know when I
put some long-overdue photos online, and then will probably put a stop
to sending you junk mail (I hope it wasn't a complete waste of time!) 
In the meantime, enjoy yourselves, keep in touch and see you soon in the
UK I hope!

Love

        Andrew

-- 
http://www.geocities.com/andrewgaijin

RIP Richard Whiteley

Letter 23: Sayonara
Thu, 28 Jul 2005 23:01:38 +0900

Hello everyone,

This is just to say hello and goodbye from Japan as my two-year stay
comes to an end.  I'll be moving out of my flat tomorrow and staying at
Chie's house, then leaving Yonezawa on the 2nd to go to Tokyo and
Yokohama.  Chie and I will then leave Tokyo on the 6th and arrive at
Manchester Airport on the 7th.

Right now I'm just putting stuff into boxes and listening to the news
before I disconnect from the internet.  I should still be able to check
my messages before I leave Yonezawa, however.  I'll also have my mobile
(0081-90-6687-7150 from the UK) until the 5th or 6th.

Thanks for reading all my e-mails.  And sincere apologies for being so
bad at keeping in touch, however it doesn't mean I haven't been thinking
about you.  I just hope things will be easier when I stop living two
lives and move back to one in England.  Thank you for keeping in touch
with me.

I'm so sad to be leaving Yonezawa but I'll be leaving my job in good
hands as my successor Reid seems like a good bloke.  And I'm really
looking forward to coming back and seeing you all.  I'll need a very
quiet first week when I arrive back as I've heard that reverse culture
shock can be pretty serious, I hope you'll appreciate this.  But I hope
I can meet everyone soon as I really have been missing you.

I need to get on with the packing now, so look after yourselves and I
hope to see you again soon.

Goodbye, good luck and hello again.

Lots of love,

        Andrew