Musings on Japan #5 : Gaijin desu

This next installment of my musings on Japan was inspired by a recent incident in my sleepy hometown of Adelaide.

I was happily walking down one of our main drags, when a pair of Neanderthalian louts made some unsavoury remarks to two young Asian girls just in front of me. I’m a fairly large sort, who is easily angered by xenophobic rantings, and decided to bellow a few words that you wouldn’t hear on Sesame Street.

These brave blokes buggered off, with a few mutterings back at me, delivered from a distance.

The girls were obviously shaken up by the boys’ babblings, but they didn’t seem too surprised by it. They shrugged it off and said, in lovely Adelaidean accents, “it happens all the time.”

It got me thinking about what I would do if I had to face constant racial vilification from those who think they are better than me because of colour/creed/nationality.

Then I realised that, to a very, very small degree, I experienced something similar in Japan...

Non- Japanese people hear the word “Gaijin” a lot. An indirect translation is "foreigner". This is what is meant by the majority who say it, and what is printed on the registered alien cards that all working non-nationals must carry. It is considered a benign word, a word with no hidden agenda, a statement of fact.

However, the direct translation means "outside person". It is this connotation, the reference to otherness and not belonging, that I occasionally endured.

Usually it was late at night, when some disgruntled salary-man, fuelled on sake, would feel compelled to direct their chagrin at me or any other foreigner that happened to be in sight.

It never amounted to anything more than a murmured "gaijin" or, what I have phrased, the "lip smack of hate". This was an unusual tut sound they made to express the horror of my existence.

As an example, there was a train line that I had to catch at least 4 days a week called the Mita line, or "the tuttin' train", as I liked to call it. The line seemed to cater to very old and very bitter men. They never failed to greet me with a lip smackin' symphony.

These small incidents never fazed me, afterall, Japan is an amazing place. I miss it every day that I’m away from it. I love its mixture of the new and old.

However, it is because of this mixture that one senses Japan as a nation still very much in search of its identity, with a dialectical battle between homogeneity and diversity being waged to determine just what it means to be Japanese in a global age.

There is a pervasive perception of Japan as a monocultural, ethnically pure society; an idea still widely circulated within Japanese society. Within this framework, comes the quagmire of the gaijin question. As Japan's foreign population increases, so, in equal measure, do proud assertions of its ethnic purity.

I believe it was understandable for me to think of myself as a perpetual outsider, who will only be accepted as "gaijin-san". I was only there for a relatively short time, but even if I was born and raised and married and had children there, my eyes are green and my skin is white, so I felt that I would forever be considered as foreign.

Despite this, my personal experience of Japan was generally an incredibly positive one. The vast majority of the Japanese I met were generous and genuinely interested in the World around them. They were also incredibly patient with my mangling of their language and frequent etiquette faux pas. Quite frankly, I'm addicted to the place!

Moral of this story is – let’s all just get along people!

Koi-nobori in May

My good friend Junko sent me this image after seeing my Koi tattoo blog.


It was taken in May during the Tangu no Sekku festival, or "Boys' Day". These koi-nobori, carp streamers, can be seen all over Japan and celebrate boyliness.

Koi tattoo: inking #01

Before - pastey white canvas, with just a hint of trucker's arm.

After - ouchy! Only 3 more inkings to go:(

My musings on Japan have mainly focused on some of the whackier and more annoying things that happened there. Consequently, readers assume that I’m not overly fond of the great country.

On the contrary, my confreres; I love Japan. So, to show my affinity, I have (after much research and reflection) decided to mark my body again for life with a quintessentially Japanese symbol. No, I’m not talking about a roaring Godzilla, a pimply Otaku, a giggly girl in a sailor’s uniform, nor a groping salaryman – I’m talking about a Koi.

The Koi is basically a good-looking carp. Sure, the Aussie versions are a pest and a pain in the Murray Darling Basin. But in Japan they are seen as a symbol of perseverance and success in life. These nuggety little characters are capable of swimming upstream against seemingly insurmountable currents in order to get to where they want.

According to Chinese mythology a carp which succeeds in swimming upstream and hurdling the upper rapids of the Yangtze River will be transformed into a dragon. I have no intention of evolving into a scaley fire-breather, but the koi is emblematic of my effort against particularly unrosey things that happened earlier in life. Memories of this time were submerged but raised their hideous head in my 30s. As a result, I was a bit blue for a while. However, I have long managed to burst out of that quagmire of gloom, to become a much shinier and happier me. And I want to celebrate this fact with the aforementioned tattoo.

You may have seen many koi tattoos with what appears to be a crown. These appear on the Tancho Koi; some of the rarest, and most expensive. The circle is believed to be representative of the symbol of the rising sun on the Japanese flag. For that reason, Tancho is the most coveted Koi in and out of Japan. Although, I’m intrigued by this element, I do think it reeks of elitism and materialism, so I chose not to have it included in my tattoo.

Many thanks and praise to Andy P, a master tattooist at the Tattoo Gallery, Rundle Street, Adelaide. Only 3 more inkings before my fishy friend is completed…

Musings on Japan #4: Hallelujah, it’s raining rain!

I live in Adelaide, which, despite what everyone says, is actually quite a nice place, and has a few claims to fame.

Some are good - such as our plonk, Coopers Stout, great pubs (Grace Emily to name just one), and … some other stuff that may or may not involve alcohol.

Some are negative, such as the Snowtown massacre, and West End beer.

The latter involves miserable, chemically fluids … actually, so did the former.

West End claims their beer is perfect for South Australia because it quenches the thirst of the "driest state on the driest continent". The quenching bit would not hold up in a court of law (afterall, beer is a diuretic. And West End beer is poop). However, the dry bit is unfortunately very accurate, as SA has suffered a drought for quite some time.

That is, until yesterday, when the heavens opened up on us like a drunken footy team relieving themselves on a bus stop.

The aforementioned deluge leads me to a convoluted, yet seamless segueway ... the next installment of my Musings on Japan.

When I lived in Koshigaya, Saitama, there was something that was optimistically categorized as a river nearby. It was, instead, numerous brown viscous puddles, connected by sluggish tributaries of slime.

That was until the wet season, which, I was reliably informed by everybody, would last from the beginning of June till the first week of July. Because that was what their calendars said. Well there must have been a misprint, because instead of the promised 5 weeks of torrential rain, we got, at a stretch, a few days.

But these few days were enough to transform our boggy, stinking riverbed into a raging, stinking river.

While looking from a bridge at this fast-flowing, brown soup, I remember seeing, honestly, at first, a dead carp bobbing along, all-glassy eyed and fetid. Following that was a dead cat, bloated like a fugu. Then there was a dead dog with its mouth gaping wide, seemingly in mid-bark. I waited to see if the old lady from the fable, who coughed up these delicacies, would follow.

She didn’t. Which is unfortunate because it would have finished this story off nicely.

Musings on Japan#3: Terrible terebi

Tokyo is the most exciting city in the World. To some extent, the reason for this must be because the free-to-air television is just plain awful, so people are forced to devise ingenious ways of avoiding it. I will never complain about British and Australian television ever again. If you look up banal in the dictionary, a selection of “Nihon no terebi” highlights will be flickering up at you in glaring colours.

Every show seemed to involve either cooking or comedy. Or, if you were very lucky - "comedy cooking".

It was like watching "Ready, Steady, Cook", 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on 10 channels.

I have always championed the genius of Ainsley Harriet (even if it is deeply buried in a quagmire of dullness and wrapped in a thick gauze of stupidity). But even I couldn't stand Ainsley's brand of hilarity for more than 30 minutes a day. Japanese television has Harriet to the power of a thousand, and it is all in a different language.

Despite the language barrier, there appeared to be only be 2 words you needed to know to get the most out of your viewing pleasure: "oishi" and "sugoi". The former word means "delicious", the latter means "amazing". Apparently, everything was either delicious or amazing, or, if you were very lucky, a combination of both. This would refer to anything from a bowl of plain rice to road kill.

Occassionally, we were given a reprieve with K1 fighting, which pits large, powerful men against other large powerful men with the victor being the last large powerful man standing. But they took it to the extreme by taking Akebono out of mothballs. He is a former Yokozuna – a Sumo grand master, part of a proud sporting tradition. However, this lumbering giant was reduced to slapping at the air while his lithe opponents fancy stepped around him. His only hope was if they tripped on their own fancy footwork, and he pinned them with the belly flop of doom. To make matters worse, a little man from NHK - the state television station - came around once a month and asked for money - there was actually a license fee for this?

Musings on Japan#2: Students I hated

I generally loved teaching. There is such a buzz when your students get it, and use the language you have taught them with confidence. However, there are a few students that you just wish would burn in the everlasting flames of Hell. Here they are for your reading pleasure...

For legal reasons, the names have been changed, let's just call each one arsehole, and number them sequentially.

Arsehole#1
Not so much an individual, but a whole class! The following is the beginning of my handover notes, the joyous day that I was finally rid of them:

This class made my decision to resign a very, very easy one. It is populated by the thickest and most malicious children I have come across. One, you will soon discover, is a mountain-sized, hairy knuckled Neanderthal, more about “her” later…
Do not employ an ounce of “genki-ness” with this mob, stride into that classroom full of vengeful fury and get medieval on their asses!

Arsehole#2
The formerly mentioned mountain-sized, hairy knuckled Neanderthal rates her own special mention. She was, according to her birth certificate, an 11 year old girl. Personally I thought she was a Russian sailor that went AWOL and, in order to evade authorities, decided to take on the guise of an 11 year old Japanese girl. Am I the only one who knows the truth?

Arsehole#3
Again I will flout the grammatical rule of singularity and combine a plurality of little shits into one pooey mess, now known as arsehole#3. The following are my handover notes for the next suffering teacher.

Out of the 100 or so students I teach, I only dislike 3 of the them. These two cackling little witches are 2nd and 3rd on the list (this was, of course, before the hell of arsehole#1 and #2 entered my miserable existence.) If this was Lord of the Flies, I would have been dinner long ago. However, I have fought a bitter and prolonged battle with them, and in the last month I have experienced a detente of sorts. They are North Korea, and I am South Korea - I suspect they have nuclear capabilities . . .

Arsehole#4
I must say that my "problem" children (ie arseholes) are usually girls. The boys are generally quite good, except for ...

Arsehole#4 is a very annoying little brat. You can see his future every time he opens his horrible little mouth and shrieks his horrible little incantations: he will be a chu-hi swilling, hostess-butt-rubbing, wife-beating salary man. The following is a typical list of my commands to him that I must roar over his unrelenting shrieks:

“Arsehole#4, stop hitting him”, “Arsehole#4, put that down”, “Arsehole#4, be quiet”, “Arsehole#4, take that out of your mouth”, “Arsehole#4, get your head out of her skirt",“Arsehole#4, stop crying like a little pansy”, “Arsehole#4, stop bleeding”

Oh, the joy of teaching children.

Musings on Japan#1: First Impressions

There I was, a fresh-faced, wide-eyed boy from the south of Australia, suddenly standing in the land of ninjas, high quality mass produced consumables and Godzilla.

From my dead end job in London, I made the decision to travel back to the other side of the World in the quest for wealth, experiences, some cultural stuff ... and maybe even a little cuddle.

So, with no real skill set to fall back on, I decided to teach the Queen’s English in Japan.

This required me to do a CELTA course, which instantly turned me into an educationalist capable of nurturing the minds and boosting the spirits of all the people of the world who have not yet had the enlightening torch of English pointed towards the receptive recesses of their mind. All this in one extensive and expensive month.

I soon realised that the job was not as good as I hoped for. But, not nearly as bad as I expected.

I hoped to end my London rut and get myself on a better wicket. Instead of being on a better wicket, I ended up fielding around the boundary. Because I wasn't actually in Tokyo to start with (I later moved to Akabane, which is on the cusp of Tokyo), but in a prefecture just north called Saitama. Well, I wasn't actually in Saitama either. I was where the arse end of Tokyo rubs up aggressively, and not at all seductively, with the arse end of Saitama: Koshigaya.

Hip Tokyoites actually have an insult to those they consider uncool: “dasai”, which is short for “Datte Saitama no” which translates to “But that’s from Saitama (therefore it is boring/crap/backwards)”. This gives you an insight into just how dull this place is.

At the start, I taught at 5 different schools: Takenotsuka (Saturday), Soka (Monday), Akabane (Tuesday), Kawaguchi (Wednesday), Warabi (Thursday) and wherever my Overlords wanted to place me on my "days-off".

Takenotsuka is a crappy looking council estate town. It used to be a Yakusa city, hence all the "Lady's Clubs" and "Pubs", which are synonymous with the naughtier side of life.

I also taught at Akabane, a notorious red-light district famed for one particular street that is bursting with Thai Lady Boys.

The other schools were so non-descript that I can think of nothing either witty nor damning to say about them.

The hours were often quite silly - my students will never get much Present Perfect out of a bleary eyed yawning Mike whose Past Simple involved 5 hours of “Head, Shoulder, Knees and Toes” with screaming children (or the spawn of Beelzebub). I apologize for the lame grammar joke.

Talking of demon spawn. There is a sport amongst Japanese children called “kancho”, which roughly translates to stick your finger up teachers arse. Believe me, after you have experienced this a few times you never turn your back on some angelic looking child in a sailor's outfit.

Uniforms run rampant over there. Even parking attendants are decked out like Napoleon. They also have these great big pink truncheons always at hand. They light up to an eye-achingly lurid neon pink to beckon the seemingly blind drivers to a car's resting place.

On a linguistic note, I did find my favourite Japanese word: “hanamizu”. “Hana” means nose, and “mizu” means water: nose water. Or, as we say, snot!