Meanwhile at the Sock Kiosk...

Introducing the official socks of the Rastafari religion:


I've been told this is revenge for marketing lattes as "zen".

Scary Japanese Toys 日本の怖いおもちゃ

As seen in a claw vending machine at a mall near you:

Bits and pieces of Gloomy the magic bear!


No idea what these are, but they look like blood parasites of some sort. Maybe actual size.


Not sure about this fella either, but he seems to be a communist. I wanted him SO BAD (not in that way) but I suck at claw games, and they only give you one chance.


I've never seen Usavich, but I gather he's a guard. I was thinking that Usavich and Putin-chan might be capitalists or American spies or something, since why would the communist have put them in jail otherwise? Anyway, like I said, I've never seen it but I've worked out a pretty complex back-story in my head that I'll share sometime.

Whale!


Since this is food, it does not technically count as a toy, but it reminds me of a webcomic of years past and made me happy. This may or may not be whale-flavoured potato chips.

Anyway, my girlfriend is handy with the scoop machine and got me a Usavich masukotto, so this will have to do for now.

UPDATE: Usavich

Product Test: Suntory "Chocholate Sparkling"

"Chocolate Sparling", or チョコレート・スパークリング, is chocolate flavoured soda and is about as disgusting and horribly misguided as it sounds.


Let me preface this by saying that in English "sparkling" is an adjective and not a noun, and is translated into Japanese as 発泡 (happou). Just to make sure, I checked out Yahoo's Japanese dictionary, which had no entry for スパークリング (supaakuringu) at all. And for the record, this drink has NO BLOODY BUBBLES AND IS NOT SPARKLING IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD. So congratulations, Suntory. You've managed to fracture both the English language and the Japanese language in one go. That's a new one I think.

I was sceptical, but like with many impulse purposes in Japan, it had to be done for science.


It obviously doesn't have any chocolate in it, and it tastes less like real chocolate and more like scratch n' sniff chocolate. Or more specifically, at one of my schools the language lab key's key chain has a small scented plastic mock-up of a bun with chocolate syrup on top, and Chocolate Sparkling smells exactly like it smells. Chocolate Sparkling tastes like a key chain.

Since I began this article, I finished the bottle. I had to stop halfway for a while because I began to feel nauseous and dizzy. Less than 200mls to go and I began hallucinating and was rambling and speaking in tongues and imagining surviving snails on the edge of straight razors in no time.

Here's an after picture:


In short, stay away from this.

Follow-up: I Want You Under My Wheels

I felt kind of bad for writing that, because I was definitely kind of hard on Saga. But since then, three very telling incidents have occurred:

1) An old man in a small truck almost hit me when he was driving on the wrong side of the road.

2) A woman almost hit me when I was crossing on a pedestrian crossing on a green, and she slowed down and just managed to avoid killing me, and when I passed she sped up again and went through the red.

3) Just today a woman was blocking a cross walk and she had a black courtin covering her driver's side window.

This is within the space of four days.

I Want You Under My Wheels

FACT: The Japanese verb for "to run somebody over" is hiku (轢く). The kanji for hiku is made up of two kanjis: "car" (車) and "fun" (楽しい, or 樂しい in it's classical form).

If you have ever driven, rode a bike or walked in Saga City, even if for a single day, you've almost been hit by a car. You might not even have been aware of it, but your life was in grave danger. If expressed as a percentage, there is a 99% chance as a cyclist that you will be hit within 24 hours if you don't absolutely watch where your going, because god knows the drivers aren't.

FACT: This isn't just a(nother) gaijin complain-a-thon!

Saga is also well known in Kyushu for it's drivers. A quick search around the Japanese internets for the words 佐賀 (Saga) 運転 (driving) 怖い (frightening) gets some interesting responses.

「佐賀は運転が荒い人が多いから怖いんですよーー（涙）」(source)
"Saga has a lot of wild drivers, so it's scary -- (*breaks down in tears*)"

One user, asked their worst memory in the entire island of Kyushu, gave Saga drivers as one of many Sagan examples:

「運転が下手で車が怖い・・・激突、ザ・カー」
"The drivers are bad and cars are scary. Crash, SA-GAAAAAA."

On the same page, another user wrote,

「佐賀の運転マナーは九州一最悪だな。もういっぺん自動車学校に行って基礎から習え！！！」
"Sagan drivers have the worst manners in Kyushu. Go back to driving school and learn from the beginning!"

So as you can see, Saga well known for it's colourful driving culture.

For example, the other I was riding my bike to the mall, and I passed the entrance to a parking lot. The driver was sitting across the sidewalk (stupid mistake #1), well across the solid line marked with "止まれ" , or "STOP!" (stupid mistake #2). She was looking right to see if traffic was coming her way and kept her head at a 45° angle as she began to pull out (stupid mistake #3), barely avoiding hitting me (stupid mistake #4-- well, while technically #3 and #4 are the same, almost hitting *me* put her own life in immediate danger). A half second away from being under her wheels, I swung my hands wildly, and said "What the HELL do you think you're doing??" in English. She had a stupid look of shock and horror on her face similar to Sadako's victims in "The Ring".


"佐賀人の知らん日本語"

A couple of weeks ago, I was riding to the station with my friend, and we almost got hit twice within three kilometres. This is not a joke. Luckily my friend was in-between me and the car both times, which would have probably provided cushioning for me to survive if worst came to worst, but between a guy not looking to see if anyone was coming before pulling out (and already well across the solid line marked, of course, with STOP!), and a guy flagrantly going through a red light in front of the biggest train station in the prefecture, it's almost comically ridiculous.


One theory is, that similar to the film Maximum Overdrive, the cars in Saga have somehow gained senscience and are waging a terrible war against mankind which have enslaved them for over a century; their hapless drivers watching in horror from behind the wheel as pedestrian after pedestrian, cyclist after cyclist is mowed down like so many toy soldiers under the feet of wanton boys.

On the highway home from Fukuoka, there's a big sign saying "Be careful. Fatalities due to car accidents are increasing." Right there on the highway bus, I muttered between my teeth, "No shit!"

And when I say I have close calls on a nearly daily basis, I'm not kidding. I have no idea how I've made it this far. I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a victim here. I'm a survivor. And I used to live in Montreal! I know stereotypically bad drivers when I see them.

Thirsty?

How about a bottle of Marie Antoinette's placenta?


Yes, it looks gross, but the name has a definite article, so you know it's quality.

On Host Clubs, Racism and Robotics

This is a pretty snazzy little documentary by Japanese-American Adam Yamaguchi for the show "Vanguard".



Usually when I see Westerners talk about Japan about TV, especially when they talk about major cultural differences like femmy men pouring drinks for yuppie spinsters, or the emergence of robots in the workplace, they present it as being extremely weird-yet-common place (in a "that's so Japanese" sort of way), so it's refreshing to see something that's well analyzed and with a knowledgeable host.

I still don't quite get the robot thing though. Maybe Kyushu is too inaka (ie. the boonies), but I've never seen a robot in Japan. Not once, ever. But, unlike other news magazine documentaries I've seen about the robotics-versus-immigration debate (or, "non-humans versus sub-humans"), this documentary actually talks about cultural differences behind this phenomenon.

I was thinking too, about how people act in stores. I was just at the grocery store and was watching the kid in front of me at the till. The cashier was using ultra formal Japanese with him but not making eye contact. The kid took his change, didn't look at her or respond, and just walked away. This is not really unusual in Japan, and from a fuh-fuh-fuh-foreigner's point of view, at first it was kind of nice, but the ultra-formal Japanese sounded so scripted anyway after a while that now it doesn't even feel like they're talking *to* me. My point is, replace that cashier with a robot and no one would notice.

And I really feel sorry for the Koreans, Chinese and Brazilians in the documentary. I mean, there are enough angry rants in here as it is so I'll save it, but I feel for you, dawgs.

Edit: I want to become a host because, as some of you know, it's been my life-long dream to get drunk every night and talk about virility for some old grand-mama who might be-- nay-- is decked out like a Christmas... tree

The Furious Guide to Being Passive Aggressive in the LL Room

Or, "How To Be An Asshole So Overtly That No One Can Really Be Offended" (volume 1)
Or... "I had a really terrible week at work."

If you're a long-term reader, you may remember, my pièce de résistance "The Furious Guide to Being Passive Aggressive in a Japanese Office Environment", which gave instructions on the following leftist revolutionary activities:

- If a coworker leaves a stack of papers on your desk, hide it

- Abuse the laminating machine

- Blame your own bad English on your "dialect" (etc.)

I wrote a guide on being an ass of an ALT, which many of us certainly are, but many of my Japanese coworkers have expressed concern that I took the ethnocentric route and ignored the Japanese point of view, because, dammit, we're all human beings and human beings are basically evil, spiteful simian turd-throwers.

So, in my second volume, I will give advice for any team teacher unlucky enough to be forced into working with a lazy, stupid, badly-dressed punk of a gaikokujin. Sometimes, if they push you, you gotta shove back.

So let me present, the The Furious Guide to Being Passive Aggressive in the LL Room.

1. Talk about the ALT to the students in simple, understandable Japanese in front of the Japanese-speaking ALT.

Have you ever walked into a classroom, noticed an ALT chatting with some students, and announced in a loud voice "彼は外人だから英語がぺらぺらだね！" (He's a white, so that's why he's fluent in English!"). If you have, then you're probably the former principal at my school.

2. Got team teaching class? Mark some papers!

Your prefecture spends $40,000 a year to bring a foreign language teacher in to assist you in your classroom to enrich the classes for both you and your students.

But this is probably a good opportunity to get some of that pesky marking done. So while the ALT is up at the front of the class "assisting" you, you should stand at the back, completely ignore him or her, and get the real work done. Marking tests and quizzes.



(Alternative: still ignore the ALT, and give him or her these tests or quizzes to mark!)

3. Bring up the war with a nuance of blame (even if the ALT is not American).

There's absolutely no better environment than an international communication class to bring up the war. Not only bring it up, but avoid any association with your country and any aggression, while still demonizing the enemy. POWs? Huh? Unit 731? What's that? Seriously-- what is that? I've never heard of it. Should I know? ...Let's talk about Hiroshima instead.

4. What's his name? I think it's "ALT" or something.

It takes time -- and time is money, as the students inexplicably all know how to say in English -- to ask the foreigner it's name, and it probably wouldn't understand the question in the first place, so let's call it by it's job title. The ALT. No wait-- ALT-sensei to be polite. Well... ALT-san, anyway. And the ALT don't mind if you use it's job title to describe it while talking about it in front of it as though it wasn't sitting right there looking at you. It is an ALT after all. It's like calling a spade a spade, or a German Shepherd a German Shepherd.

If correctly used, this guide will ruin all international communication, effectively destroy the chance that the ALT will choose to recontract, and spread hideous lies about xenophobia in Japan the world over.

Disclaimer: Dear bosses, there is no Nishimura-sensei. If there was, I'm sure he would be very nice.

The Difference Between "Gaikokujin" and "(Go Home You F'ing) Foreigner"

One of the first things any ALT hears during orientation back in their home country is "don't try to change things." The system is what it is, the culture is what it is, and trying to change everything will probably alienate you further and cause you much frustration and gnashing of teeth. 99% of the time, this is true.

But back last winter, I was given a stack of essays to mark by students who made a trip to Asia Pacific University, a major international school in Beppu, Oita Prefecture. They met some of the foreign students there, of which there are many, and came back and wrote about their experiences. Most of them were okay, but maybe 20-25% of them kept referring to the full-time Japanese speaking students as "foreigners".

[Editor's note: In Japanese, gaikokujin (外国人) means "non-Japanese", though literally means "foreigner". It's applied very liberally, and has no particular negative nuance despite exclusion and generalization. Japanese people generally don't refer to people by race or nationality, for better or for worse. Most people here just think of people as being Japanese-- or not. So if you're a Canadian tourist, for example, you think of yourself as being a foreigner in another country. However, if you're a Japanese tourist, you might think, 'Ooooh look at all the foreigners here.' And just a side note, last time I went on vacation to Canada I said in shock and horror "God damn there're a lot of white people here!"]

So they kept calling these Chinese and Indonesian and Sri Lankan students "foreigners", and it kind of dawned on me how the students clearly don't know the difference in nuance between the benign word "gaikokujin" and the much more negative word "foreigner", so I showed them the distinctly negative definition in the Oxford English dictionary:

1. a person who comes from a different country
EXAMPLE: The fact that I was a foreigner was a big disadvantage.

2. a person who does not belong in a particular place
EXAMPLE: I have always been regarded as a foreigner by the local folk.

and left it at that.

Next essay, a couple of students talked about "the foreigners" [actually "foreign" fish from tropical "countries" invading Japanese waters], so I figured, yeah, I guess I really can't change anything. If Japan wants to be weird and xenophobic, they can do it without me.

But then when I got to school today the teacher from this particular class asked me to correct a draft of a speech one of these students wrote, and the whole thing was about the word "foreigner" -- about realizing through the experience at the university and my little lecture about it that the word "foreigner", or even "gaikokujin", can hurt or offend people. He went on to give his own opinion that this is left over from Japan's period of national isolation and said we should try to look at each other as being simply human beings before than anything else. Dude! I was absolutely floored, because, to be honest, I've been really sick of the whole "gaijin" issue lately. Sick of it being an issue. Both for recent depressing personal reasons, and broader reasons [for the latter, read the last two posts].

This is the first time where I know-- not hope, but know that I've made a difference here. So despite whatever you hear at orientation, if there's something that's really important to you, don't just do the whole "ALT gaijin clown" thing even though it's easier and it's what they want you to do, but do your duty as a teacher and as someone representing your country and at least try to tell people about your point of view. If you do it respectfully, it won't hurt the wa, and someone out there might just be listening.

You know what I mean...