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To Mori-sensei, the son of the a vice-principal at one of my three schools. I crashed at his appato (apartment) for a week last year when I visited Kyoto and have been doing proofing-"giri" (duty) ever since. Actually, he only asked me to read one other paper on penguins based on the six months of research he did in the Antartic.
>Of course, I'd be happy to read your latest manuscript and am anxious to
>hear about what it's about. Perhaps seals? Because I dreamed about being
>attacked by a giant seal. Why would I dream about a giant seal? Maybe a
>prescient dream telling me that you were going to send me this manuscript.
Thank you very much for your reading my manuscript.
This is about penguins in Ueno Zoo.
In this manuscript, seals are not mentioned but the killer whale is mentioned
as a predator that attack penguins.
I would appreciate your revision.
Mori
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Yoshihisa Mori
Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science
Kyoto University, Kyoto
So Kamikura-sensei is getting married, and I am invited to the reception. Only close family members are allowed at the actual ceremony. And I'm expected to give a speech and a fair sum of money (around 200.00). This is all quite a hassle as far as I'm concerned, since it's the third weekend that I am stuck in Isesaki and I've been wanting to get up to Niigata on the northwest coast to visit Mark Frank since the Edo period it seems, and I want to get up there while there's still plenty of snow. The train trip through mountains of Nagano is absolutely gorgeous, especially during winter. You leave Gunma's modestly mountainous area, disappearing into a hillside through the longest train tunnel in Japan. A good while later you emerge into a blinding flash of sunlight and white snow. For the next hour-and-a-half you're in the heart of the Nihon Alps. Two weeks in a row I substituted for a friend who was going to Jamaica. A class of toddlers on the top floor of Ito Yokado the department store in Maebashi. This makes the fifth time I've worked with them and I know all their names now. Why is it that kids named Shun are always troublemakers? Don't ever name a kid Shun. Amazing class though, really. I've got a three-year-old who can repeat after me, intelligably, and five and six-year-olds who understand what I mean when I say, "Could you please take this to the office and make seven copies?" Well, they don't catch every word but they get the jist of it and bring back seven copies. Not bad. Don't know why, but by the time they hit junior high most can't even tell you how old they are; perhaps the result of the educational system's forcible lobatomy. Anyway, I am cornered for a third week into staying in Isesaki by reception-giri (giri being an old samurai term for "duty") and not only that, but I've must fork over ichi-man (the 100.00 I settled for) to someone I barely know. It's not like we're drinking buddies. Actually, he's the most nervous teacher I've ever worked with, though I have respected him for coming to the city-wide English teacher's meeting not wearing a tie. Only I am supposed to be able to do that. Well, it should be interesting, although I had hoped that I could escape such responsibility until Eiji and Chie tie the knot. Sho ga nai. (Literally, "It can't be helped.")
I'm wearing my suit today and have a fancy wedding money envelope replete with festively colored bands cords and ribbons in my vest pocket. I walk from the station to the Tokyu Inn and take the elevator to the fourth floor. A year ago I got on this same elevator with three sumo wrestlers, one of whom treated me to his rendition of "Georgia on My Mind." (Osumo-san often have rich and mellow singing voices.) The elevator opens and I step off to exchannge greetings with about fifty or so teachers and other people I kinda sorta know. I sign in, giving my envelope to a man at a banquet table and do some mixing. Then we all file into the large reception room, sitting at our assigned tables. I'm sitting next to Watanabe, and after the first toast and several more beers, he tells me how embarrassed Miyachu (my #3 Junior High) is to have me come to their school because of all the trouble they've been having with their 7th graders recently (of which you all will read later in a different transmission more suited for Halloween than Easter). The bride and groom are seated formally at the front of the room, our principal to his right and the principal's wife to her left. Dinner is served--quite a nice one in fact--and while the guests eat and drink speeches are made, most of them long and boring, mine short and humorous (in Japanese). I think mine was the only speech to which people actually stopped and listened, and they laughed in the right places so my pronunciation must be alright. Kocho-sensei (the principal), known for his incredibly long speeches, gives the longest most boring and most uninteresting speech of all oblivious to the fact that he is undoubtedly the ost hated man in the room, and certainly the most hated principal in Isesaki.
Oh but why? I shall digress briefly. Mr. S__________ is in his early sixties and stands about 5'5". (Some of you may have the idea that I tower among the Japanese at 6'1", but it ain't so at all. Improved diet and other factors have increased the height of the average so that I'm only slightly taller than most of my co-workers and one or two are taller than me.) So kocho-sensei is very short even in Japanese standards, and this the point of many spiteful jokes told behind his back. Although he always shown me every kindness, is extremely inconsiderate of everyone else. Strange man, really. At my welcome party a year and 11 months ago, he served beer. This wouldn't be so strange except that it was on the back porch of the teachers' office during work hours. Thinking that this was a little strange I only drank two, even though he tried to press a third upon me. I noticed that no one else was drinking though and slipped the third back into the cooler. And those beers are still in the school office refrigerator to this day.
Poor Mr. Nishiyama. He was only a temporary teacher, but while he was here Miyachu JH had it's 50th anniversary. Mr. S__________ thought that it would be just brillll if the program handed out to the alumni included a list of the names of every student who had ever graduated from Miyachu over the last fifty years. So Mr. Nakajima, who was only temporary, and therefore without the slightest incentive to brown-nose, was given the task of typing this list. Every few days I would mock him by asking in a singsong voice, "Oh Mr.Nishiyama, Have you finished typing those names yet?" or "Haven't you finished that list? How long much time could it take to type ??? names?" Now he's working for a taxi service that will drive drunks home at night and also take their cars to their home for them, but he hopes to get a teaching position again soon. He has some good stories.
Mrs. Mori, the vice-principal, had to tolerate Kocho-sensei's misogyny for two years now. [the letter above was written by her son with whom I stayed last year when I visited Kyoto.] Once when she and I went to his office to inform him that we were taking the students to the speech tournament across town, I saw him shake his pencil at her and yell (in Japanese) "I'M BUSY. DON'T BOTHER ME!" He was mad because he hadn't been included in the planning of the speech tournament, and even worked to have it canceled. He's so selfish. Mori-san says "Selfish Selfish Man!"
At a city-wide educational ceremony once he was seated on stage next to a female principal and he was so angry that he folded his arms and sat for over an hour staring sourly into the audience.
Once a couple of female insurance salespersons visited our school (that's pretty normal--why, even last week a couple of women demonstrated a vacuum cleaner right here in the teachers' office.) Anyway, we were sitting in the lunch room when Mrs. Mori brought them into to meet him. But he turned his back rudely crossing his arms and stared out the window, leaving Mori in an embarrassing position.
I was once coaching some ninth grade girls in the gym for a speech tournament. My most difficult job was getting them to relax so they could read more naturally. Finally after they'd calmed down a little, Mr. __________ came in and yelled at them for almost three to five minutes about how they weren't trying hard enough. What does he know? He doesn't even speak English. Later that day I learned that he had come back to the teachers' room and been angry with Mr. Watanabe for asking me to coach the girls. He had wanted to do it himself, his way, without me present.
He's had me over to his home twice. That was funny, because he'd heard I was a vegetarian, even though I'd only said I prefer fish and vegetable. After inviting me to his home, he stopped by my desk two days later and said, "I hear you are vegetarian. Next week, my home, fish okay?" I said that was fine and thenked him for being so considerate. Next week at his home the vegetable selection included iceberg lettuce and canned corn. There was no fish, just a big plate of red beef. I ate and enjoyed, but I thought it was kind of strange that he'd bothered to ask about my diet,then ignore it. His wife's a wonderful woman. I always wondered what it has been like being married to him for so long.
Another time at Christmas he gave me tickets to come watch him sing in the choir. They were performing Beethoven's 9th. I'd have prefered Handel and so taught my private classes instead, then dropped by and slipped into the balcony for the last fifteen minutes. Later I joined his family at a nearby family restaurant and his daughter and her boy-friend stoically suffered through the experience. You could feel the pressure lift when he said "Let's go."
Yet this tyrant can be seen sometimes in the early evening after the teachers have gone home practicing his roller-blading in the school parking lot. He's a little crazy, actually.
So it's no wonder that during a city-wide English teachers' drinking party at a bar, at which he's not present that a few teachers take the opportunity to publicly besmirch his already infamous name. Mr. Watanabe, who, two years ago at a similar party got very drunk and took off all his clothes, recently proposed a toast to Mr. ___________ in which he called him a son-of-a-bitch and said "We hate him so much." Of course, Mr. S________ wasn't there at the time. Everyone agreed to this in Japanese, and someone said, "He can go to hell!" Mrs. Mori the vice, sitting in silent agreement, conceding only that yes she had suffered much the last two years. (She has since escaped and is the principal at an elementary school).
Anyway, so even though Kamikura, the room would probably rather murder the guy, instead, due to the importance of the workplace in Japanese people's personal lives, Mr. __________ ends up sitting at his side on the happiest day of his life and is getting a little drunk and when I walk onto the platform to introduce myself to the bride, he slaps me on the chest quite taking me by surprise, and laughing heartily about something I don't undertand. I'm drinking myself for the first time in twenty-nine days, having recently decided to dry out. I was trying for 30, but it seems rude not to drink at a wedding reception.
Kamikura and the bride walk around lighting the centerpiece candle at each of the thirty or so tables. Mr. Watanabe dips the wick of ours in soy sauce so it takes longer to light. Some students are ushered in to present a gift of flowers, and then are quickly ushered out so they can't see what a good time everyone is having. Later there's an unorthodox rite not usually performed I'm told, in which the bride and groom are dressed in red cloth diapers worn over their clothes (difficult with a dress).
A few minutes later the tone gets very serious. The light dims and I see that couple are standing in a spotlight at the opposite end of the room. they are flanked by their parents, and the mood is particularly somber since the groom's mother and the brides father recently passed away. A speaker is standing at a mic reverently reading some passage about the parents and how their good upbringing has resulted in such remarkable examples of Japanese manly virtues and feminine grace in an extremely fomal dialect of which I can only barely understand a little. The seriousness is accentuated by the moving tears of the bride's mother. However, this touching moment is somewhat blemished by three or four men who are laughing garralously and shouting "CHIGAU!" (meaning "Different!") and "USSO!" (a more impolite word that means, literally, "That's a damned lie!"). I can't see who they are in the dark, but I later learn these riff-raff are members of a rather rowdy and raucous mountain climbing club to which the newlyweds once belonged. They quit because the members were too crazy and like to climb in dangerous places, so Kamikura says. The four honorable subjects of the speech pretend not to notice--but just see if anybody invites the mountain climbing club to another wedding reception!
As the reception is closing, I'm walking around politely saying hello to everyone I should and meeting a few people. I'm introduced to three or four "gentlemen" at one table, and instantly I know this has got to be the table of the rude bastards. One of them, Mr. Isha speaks great English and asks me to join them for at a bar in Isesaki afterwards. Well, it's a free ride back, and I won't have to walk to the station, so I give them a hesitant maybe, explaining that I've got to speak with some other people before I can say for sure. Mr. Isha translates this to Mr. Nakazawa, (a 40-something guy with crazy bloodshot eyes and a shaved head who I later learn is the groups heaviest drinker and biggest troublemaker) and he gets angry and whacks me on the head. Open-palmed head-whacking is a common way of expressing familiarity and even friendly affection in Japan, so I'm not insulted by this, just a little surprised since we just met. As my sight returns, someone takes my arm and leads me away to another table. It's Mrs. Kobayashi, the "worm-hearted" (see "To Be Announced") at whose juku (cram school) I part-time on Tuesday evenings. She introduces me to a table of friends.
"This is Mitsue. She is not married." (Embarrassed laughter, hands placed modestly over mouths.)
Since standing up and getting whacked, I am beginning to feel a little lightheaded from the alcohol after 27 days abstinence, and what else can I do but go along with the joke and stand with them for a few snapshots.
Mr. Isha reappears again pulling me aside. "Have you spoken to your teacher friends yet?"
"Uh, no. I think they must be in the atrium."
"Of course, you must speak to them first. Please excuse yourself and come with us. City workers are so boring. They are not normal people, but we know how to have a good time, and Mr. Nakazawa, he is waiting for your coming."
"Mr. Nakazawa is a little 'kowai' (scary)."
"So desu ne, (that's so isn't it). He is especially dangerous when he drinks, but please don't worry. In his high school days and in college he used to fight everytime, but he had some problems and now he drinks powdered calcium every day. Several ounces of it. It can make him mellow now."
I slip away and I do some more mixing and then slip out into the atrium make a few bows, shake a few hands. Turning around, I'm caught by surprise. Mr. S__________ asks me if I would like to join him for coffee at his favorite family restaurant.
"Thank you, but I'm very sorry. I've made a promise to go with those gentlemen," I say pointing to the mountain climbers coming through the doorway.
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