Floating Papers on the Sea of Japan by Keith Fenske October to December 1999 Copyright (c) 1999 by Keith Fenske.  All rights reserved.

October 1999: Some Adjustment Necessary

My contract calls for 25 teaching hours plus up to 15 office or travel hours per week.  This is not the 40-hour work week of North America where you go to work, put in your 8 hours, and then go home to your personal life.  I start around 9:30 AM to get ready for late morning classes.  On travel days, the afternoon means a trip to another city (Sagae, Tendo, Tsuruoka, Yonezawa) with classes in the late afternoon or early evening.  When staying in Yamagata, the afternoons are free to go shopping, write letters, etc.  I usually finish around 9 PM.  By the clock, that's eleven hours.  Actual working time is much less.  If you wait to do your personal business after work, you will find that there's not enough time left in the day, and all the good stores are closed.

inside my apartment

I can't decide if the apartment is big or small.  It's big enough for what I need, although it did look rather small as I was unpacking with various piles of stuff all over the floor.  There is one main room with a hallway to the front door.  On one side of the hallway is a storage closet, a kitchen area, and a closet with a clothes washing machine and spin dryer.  On the other side is a toilet room and a room with a sink, shower, and half bathtub.  The door to the toilet room only serves to hide the toilet when not in use; it's not possible to sit on the toilet with the door closed.  I'm sure there are reasons why the toilet wasn't combined with the shower/sink/bath into a single larger wet room....

Emi, the dog across the street that barks at everyone except me

The apartment is fairly new.  The neighborhood is generally quiet.  The dog across the street barks at everyone except me -- amazing what a few corn flakes can do!  Everything in the apartment works, minus a few items that went missing before I arrived, such as all the coat hangers.  (The school is near a good discount department store so necessary household items were easily replaced.)  I'm lucky that the apartment has a good heater and air conditioner.  This unit has two parts.  Outside on the balcony are the burner (heater) and compressor (A/C).  Inside are the blower and heat exchanger.  The heater uses the main LP gas line and the A/C uses electricity.  Thus, I can safely heat my apartment in the winter with all the windows closed.  Compare this with many older apartments that use kerosene space heaters which vent fumes into the room.  To prevent asphyxiation, an outside window must be left open.  Of course, this allows more cold air to enter the room, partially defeating the purpose of the heater!  Then there's the task of buying and carrying around jugs of kerosene.

The kitchen area is my excuse to eat out a lot, not that I need much of an excuse since I'm the world's laziest cook.  There is one gas stovetop element on the left, with a sink on the right for washing dishes.  Above the sink is a draining rack for wet dishes, and above that is a single cupboard where I keep my Miffy (the rabbit) glass, cereal bowl, and spoon ... along with a few non-Miffy items like a fork, knife, plate, and chopsticks.  Below the sink is the usual collection of toxic household cleaning chemicals.  Below the gas burner is a small refrigerator.  It works but is currently unplugged (pun intended), having been replaced by a larger combined fridge and freezer in the living area.  There are many other dishes in a cabinet.  They look pretty through the glass doors.  I only need one set of dishes, I only have room to wash and dry one set, so only Miffy gets to come out and play.  (The other dishes are much too serious.)  I looked for wooden Miffy chopsticks in adult sizes but only found plastic ones in child sizes.

The apartment is clean, warm, and dry.  There are no strange smells or signs of insect vermin.  Even when I pulled out the small fridge and looked behind the kitchen cabinets, all I could find was construction debris -- which I removed with the vacuum.  Previous teachers thought that the vacuum was broken.  No, the dirt canister was full and blocking the air filters!  Similarly, the washing machine worked much better after I emptied the lint filter.  Several minor repairs like this convinced me that previous teachers were not mechanically inclined.  How could anyone sit on a loose toilet seat for months without once attempting to tighten the two plastic bolts that hold the seat to the bowl?  One wonders.  I did laugh when I found a broken clip for the phone cord taped to the top of the telephone!  Did they think that someone was going to glue the clip back together?  No, most people do what I did: buy a new cord.  Cheap, quick, and a lot less trouble than trying to use a phone whose plug is only taped into place and may disconnect every time you move it.

Is the apartment comfortable?  Consider living with no chairs.  I sit on a cushion on the floor.  I eat and work at a low table.  My bed is a futon.  (No, there is no soft and warm Japanese pillow.)  Standing up is truly a pain!  For a few steps, I walk like an old man.  There is one definite advantage: I can't possibly fall out of bed!

Next month's story: more on the job and the city.  Still to buy is a small stereo with a radio and cassette/CD player.  (The apartment feels too empty.)  A Japanese-made electric shaver is also "hoshii" (desirable).  My Braun shaver was designed for 110/220 Volt power and the cutting head vibrates too slowly to cut effectively on the Japanese 100 Volt, 50 cycle power.  And a reminder to look right then left before crossing the road!

November 1999: From The Last Yubin Bango

typical neighborhood street map, since the streets don't have names, and the houses don't have numbers

Finding an address in Japan is like walking an old country road.  The streets have no names, and the houses have no numbers.  Where you are can only be described in relation to somewhere else.  Starting from a district name, you navigate by major landmarks: stores, restaurants, etc.  Being on a particular road is not always of help because most roads twist and turn, start and stop, end and begin in patterns of lace.  As you get closer to your destination, you may find a neighborhood map posted on a wall and written in kanji, for those who can read.

Reading kanji (Chinese characters) may be the biggest obstacle for foreigners living in Japan.  Most signs are only in kanji.  Some signs have hiragana and katakana (the spelling alphabets that children learn first).  Katakana is used for foreign words imported into Japanese.  Even when I know that a katakana word is supposed to be an English word in Japanese phonetics, I can't always guess what the original English word was!  Then I'm happy to see romaji: the romanized script using the "English" alphabet.  This makes it possible for anyone speaking a European language to sound out the words in Japanese.  Airports and train stations post location signs in kanji, hiragana, and romaji.  Major directional road signs usually have both kanji and romaji.

garbage schedule for my neighborhood

Garbage is a color thing.  I have five different colors of bags for five different types of garbage: burnables, plastics, bottles/cans, composite materials, etc.  (There are other categories, but they don't apply to me.)  Each type gets collected on a different day, probably by the same garbagemen on the same route.  A bag with the wrong items in the wrong color won't get collected, and a large sticker announces your mistake.  That's what happened to me when I tried to use a blue recycle bag from Canada instead of the regulation clear Japanese bag with blue lettering.  I carried the bag back inside my apartment, brought the notice sticker to school, and asked my students to translate.  A good topic for discussion.  Later, I bought the correct bags and my garbage was accepted.  The system makes sense and helps Japan deal with an enormous garbage problem caused by 120 million people living in a small space.  The city helps by providing brochures in Japanese and English.  Many government publications are available in several languages.

Available on the street corner are free pocket-sized packages of facial tissues.  They are handed out as advertising.  Our local supplier is a loan shark.  I see them once or twice a day on my way to the bus terminal.  I could easily collect more tissues than I will ever use.  Who their customers are, I don't know.  Considering that the school is near a restaurant and club district, with three pachinko parlors, my guess is sorry men who wasted too much family money on pachinko.

Owen Junior at work

Pachinko is a form of gambling that combines a slot machine with a pinball machine.  The player has a small amount of control over the initial placement of steel balls -- not as much as in pinball but more than in a slot machine.  This gives the illusion of control, making the player think that next time he will do better.  It's easy to spend Y10,000 (US$100) in an hour.  As in all forms of gambling, sometimes you win but most often you lose.  Pachinko parlors have the biggest parking lots and the parking is "free".  Half of the energy consumption of Japan goes into their bright lights.  (Joke!)  And they're always busy.  Me, I prefer real pinball where you pay to play the game.  If you're lucky, you win a free game.  The entertainment is in playing the game, not in the expectation of winning unearned money.  Although, I do have an offer from Owen the Raccoon.  He assures me that with a little practice, he could win me lots of money at pachinko!  I think he is fascinated by the little steel balls bouncing around, and soon he'll be just another pachinko addict.  So I won't be lending him any money to play pachinko.

Kokoro, a kindergarten student

The name of my game is teaching English.  My bosses play the same game.  We all teach full-time and share the same schedule.  This makes them very reasonable to work with.  The job is as was advertised.  Nothing was hidden from me before I came here: not the long travel time to some of the company classes, nor the small children who come to play in English (my "Uncle Keith" persona).  I appreciate the honesty of an employer who tells me both the good and the bad, and who doesn't ask me to do something that they aren't willing to do themselves, or aren't already doing!  Much different than a manager who only sees work being done without having any understanding of how to do the job.

The school secretary gives me my teaching schedule two weeks in advance.  The schedule includes which bus to catch or train to take.  Each morning, she gives me pre-paid bus or train tickets, or cash for taxi fare.  If I ever have to pay for something out of my own pocket, she refunds my money as soon as I return to the office.  I must get receipts for all company expenses, because this is a business, and only documented expenses can be deducted.  Since I travel almost every second day, and everything here costs about twice as much as I think it should, I simply can not afford to fund the travel expenses for a week or a month and get paid back later.

Days that are not travel days are often laundry days.  The apartment has its own washing machine and spin dryer.  I was able to figure out the Japanese instruction labels while getting my feet wet only once.  The spin dryer removes enough moisture from the clothes that I can hang them out on the balcony while still damp.  This is very convenient for me since most of my clothes are 100% cotton.  When they finish drying while hung up, I don't have to iron them!  A sunny morning before going to work is a time to wash clothes.  A rainy afternoon while at work, with wind from the wrong direction, is an opportunity to wash the same clothes again the next day, to avoid a musty smell.  I don't know what I will do next year during the rainy season when nothing dries by itself.  For the coming winter, my problem is figuring out the remote control for the heater/AC -- it has enough buttons to land the space shuttle.  I have it locked on "heat" mode at a comfortable temperature, and I have no idea what the other buttons do.

trail motorcycle rider

On the weekends, I wander around with my camera and take pictures.  I usually get only one set of prints because there are no discounts for ordering a second set of prints when the film is developed.  The first store I tried here did a lousy job: the prints were too light (washed out) and there was no color.  Some of those pictures had been taken near sunset because of the golden tones, and this first store redid the prints to remove the unusual colors!  The second store does a better job (although only in glossy finish), and they're happy to see me when I walk in the door.  One or two rolls of film each week is good business for them.  Most are scenery shots of Yamagata, both big and small.  The things that amuse a photographer are not always the things that interest the general public.  One Sunday morning, about 7 AM, I went to the mountains to see trail motorcycle riders.  It was their last competition for the year; I was invited since one of my students belongs to the club.  I took about 60 pictures, hoping for ten good pictures.  I got five.  Of the rest, 25 were decent enough to give to the club, and 30 went into my garbage.  Sports pictures waste a lot of film because the subjects are moving.  Photographers who know this and deliberately use a slow film (ISO 100) instead of a fast film (ISO 800) in the shade of a forest ... waste even more film.  Then if they set the shutter speed to 1/30 second to blur the action while popping the flash to freeze a random part of the same action, that would explain why only five pictures turned out!  One is outstanding and is worth all of the expense.  Do the club members know what they're getting?  They will be polite whether they like the pictures or not.  Maybe, someday, if one of them identifies the good pictures, then I will know.

Let's see.  What other observations have I found amusing this month?

The dust bunnies grow very well in my apartment.  You can wash the linoleum floor in the morning (it has a pleasant hardwood pattern) and by evening, there is enough fuzz to make a new dust bunny.  No, I don't know where dust bunny fluff comes from!  That's a mystery of the universe.

Clever bakers in Japan have solved the problem of people who don't like crusts on their loaves of bread.  Packages of bread here only have slices, maybe six thick slices or eight thin slices.  There are no crusts.  Perhaps the bread is baked in long loaves with a certain number of slices going into each bag.  Quite different from North America where one bag means one loaf of bread.

There was a minor earthquake on Monday morning, November 15th.  This was my third earthquake after Grande Prairie and Trois-Rivieres.  I thought that a big truck was driving by the office, until I remembered that we are on the fourth floor!  Yamagata is not in one of the earthquake zones, so nobody gets too excited here.  We watched to see if anything would fall off the desks or shelves (nothing did).  There was no disruption in the electricity; our office computer kept running happily.  People outside on the street continued as normal.  The shaking was so small that I doubt that the drivers felt it in their cars.

While cars drive on the left side of the road, people tend to walk on the right on sidewalks or stairs.  They are by no means consistent about where they walk, so a crowd going both up and down a stairway is a bit of an obstacle course.

Supposedly, the first snowfall of the season happened early on Wednesday morning, November 17th.  I was awake at 7 AM and all I saw was rain.  Before that, while lying in bed, I heard heavy rain.  Everyone else in the office commented on the morning's heavy snow.  I guess I missed it!  Either that, or the weather is different in my neighborhood....

Comparison: Chopsticks

December 1999: My Personal Demons

Japanese coins

Japanese Y1000 (one thousand Yen) paper money

Ben and his two brothers, David and Chris, are looking for e-mail pen pals in English.  Attached to their names are e-mail links, so write to them if you're from some foreign country (not America or Canada).  Ben also does web pages; here's a link to a sample.

No, Ben is not one of my personal demons!  Those are problems that you can't run away from because they are inside you.  Living in a foreign country, that means loneliness, boredom, confusion, frustration, and depression.  I've been here long enough to learn my job, but not long enough to do it well.  A good day with the children is a great day.  When the lessons go poorly, it feels like a disaster.  Some kids I see only once or twice a month, so it's hard to have a classroom routine or to accurately judge their learning level.

There seem to be two approaches to teaching English here.  The first is favored by high schools largely because of their class sizes: grammar with reading and writing at the expense of conversation.  This leads to students with six years of English lessons but who don't know what to do when you say hello!  They know far more grammar than I ever will, mostly because I feel that the more obscure grammar rules have little practical value.  (Make no mistake, I think that basic grammar is very important.)

The second approach is "fun" conversation classes.  You can learn a language by only speaking and listening.  That is, when you have the chance to practice often.  Daily is good, such as living in a foreign country.  (Don't ask me about my Japanese!)  Once a week is okay, if the students are motivated and want to learn.  Our adult students are generally highly motivated because they make a personal choice to come to English class even though their lives are already very busy.  Some of the children like English class, while others are only there to keep their parents happy.  Those who want to learn, do learn (and this teacher enjoys teaching them very much).  Those who are filling space, waiting to go home, they remember nothing from one week to the next.  They do what the teacher tells them to do, sometimes, if they're listening.  However, since they don't remember and don't practice outside the class, and you only see them once a week, teaching difficult concepts such as writing or spelling becomes an exercise in frustration.  It's easier to just skip those sections of the textbook.  Even the children's textbooks that are mostly visual eventually build up into more complex recognition of letters, numbers, and words.  By skipping the hard parts, there is a growing difference between what the students can do and what the authors of the book are expecting.  Eventually the class gets stalled because the students don't have the necessary skills to progress further.

An unlucky teacher inherits one of these classes.  The classes aren't going well, for no apparent reason, and the new teacher is expected to correct the problem.  Going backwards to rebuild the missing skills is not easy because the students are convinced that they "finished" those pages.  (Note the idea of finishing a book versus actually learning the material.)  I acquired two beginner classes where the children had been coming to another English school for several months.  I had to move them back to the first page of their book.  Previously, textbook lessons were done quickly and forgotten.  The workbook was used as an activity coloring book to fill up extra time, completely unrelated to the corresponding pages in the textbook.  The authors of this book series expected students to have started learning printing and spelling.  Those were not taught (maybe this was too tedious), so the students could not recognize simple words because they honestly didn't know the alphabet!  My hope is that soon they will recognize their own names written on the front of their books, without looking inside to check the handwriting.

Frustration grows easily when we want to do something but can't.  Should the reason be inside us, then we are feeding our personal demons.  So sometimes we do things just to prove that they can be done.  The goal may not be remarkable, but the accomplishment of that goal is.  In October, I ate pizza.  In November, I bought shoes.

The pizza was in Tsuruoka.  There is a Pizza Hut restaurant near the highway.  You get a quick view as the bus heads towards the train station.  The route is not direct and it's easy to get lost as I found on my first attempt.  (However, I did see four pachinko parlors glowing in the night.  Maybe I should do a photo essay on the pachinko parlors of Japan.  Do you think that National Geographic magazine would buy the story?)  Two weeks later, I was successful.  Turn right at the temple, take the left fork over the bridge, and stay on that road even as it turns.  Now do this in a strange city, at night, in the dark, walking forty minutes each way, and you can see that the taste of the pizza was not important.

The shoes were in Yamagata.  My old light hiking shoes were worn out.  The heels leaked water and, in November, that water is awfully cold! With money in my pocket from my first full paycheck, I went to Takeda Sports, a large sporting goods store near my apartment.  They had a decent pair of walking shoes at a price that I could afford: Y7650 plus 5% tax (about US$80).  The display shoes were one size too big: 25.5 cm (US size 7.5) and I wear 25.0 cm (US size 7).  Stacked under the display shelves were boxes of shoes -- but not in the style I wanted.  None of the floor clerks (salespeople) were nearby; they seemed to be over in the ski department counting the new skis.  The front desk clerks (cashiers) ignored me even as I was wandering around with one old shoe and one new shoe.  They were probably afraid to talk to me since they didn't speak English, and didn't think to call someone braver away from the ski patrol.  I was annoyed because I thought they should make an effort to sell me the shoes!  I walked out after twenty minutes.  Three clerks said "welcome" to me as I was leaving.  I kept walking.  It was still raining and my feet were soon cold again.  I went downtown the next day to buy a pair of shoes from another store that wanted my business more.  However, either I didn't like the price or I didn't like the style.  And I didn't like what I hadn't done: I hadn't used my limited Japanese to get what I wanted.  I had let the situation defeat me.

I went back to Takeda Sports.  By making the same effort that I had expected of the store clerks, I got what I wanted.  My conversation wasn't brilliant ("This shoe is big; do you have a 25?"), but the clerk went somewhere and came back with the right size.  I wore them home.  Now my feet aren't cold and instead of avoiding that store, I'll go there again.

Monday, December 6th.  My kindergarten kids made me proud today.  We were playing bingo.  I changed the rules: normally we play with bingo cards and alphabet letters; today we used Christmas pictures cut from a sheet of paper and randomly rearranged into a bingo square.  The prize was bottle caps.  The kids figured out that if they all had the same pictures in the same positions, then they would all win each time at the same time.  I remember playing a game in a high school social studies class taught by Fred K. where my classmates were so concerned with winning individually that they didn't realize the rules allowed everyone to win ... if we all cooperated, without exception.

Yonezawa Eki (train station)

Tuesday, December 7th.  Winter came briefly.  Snow was thick in the air as I began my late afternoon train ride to Yonezawa.  The ground was first wet, then speckled, then white.  The evening's darkness reduced our view to swirling snow outside the train windows with occasional lights from the towns and cities.  We arrived to sidewalks and streets covered in slippery wet snow.  Tuesday night was not a good night for driving, and I was glad when one of my students chose to stay at his new (not yet furnished) apartment in Yonezawa instead of returning to Kaminoyama.

Wednesday morning was warm and sunny.  The snow was gone.  Thursday morning changed to cloud.  My two-hour bus ride to Tsuruoka saw 10 to 20 cm (4 to 8 inches) of snow beside the road near Mount Gassan, followed by sheet lightning, heavy rain, sleet, and hail in Tsuruoka.  So much snow falls on Mount Gassan that it's not safe to go skiing until spring; the snowplows have already been busy clearing the highway.  And to think that, in September, my boss actually apologized for not having a company car!  Sitting high up on a big bus is a much more comfortable seat than driving a small car on these mountain roads.

Saturday, December 11th.  I saw my first Japanese movie today.  No English, no subtitles.  Japanese only.  I understood the plot and was able to follow the character development.  The ending wasn't much of a surprise.  Then again, it never is in a Godzilla movie....  "Godzilla 2000 Millennium" has the usual bad guys (the military), the usual good guys (a fringe scientist, his young daughter, and a female newspaper reporter), and a monster even worse than Godzilla (a spaceship squid thing).  Godzilla saves Tokyo once again, but not before laying waste to half the city.

Thursday, December 16th.  Another trip to Tsuruoka.  I can no longer tell how much snow has fallen near Mount Gassan, because there is no bare ground (away from the road) to provide a reference point for measuring.  I guess that it is between 50 cm (20 inches) and one meter (40 inches).  Today I noticed the "raccoon crossing" signs and a sign that looks like "dog crossing" or "cute deer with pointed ears".  Japanese raccoons are shorter, fatter, with skinny legs and different color markings compared to North American raccoons.

In Tsuruoka, freezing rain made the sidewalks "crunchy" -- or "crunky" as one Japanese "choco" bar spells it.  English words imported into Japanese tend to get shortened and then converted into Japanese phonetics.  Japanese people think that they are speaking an English word, but they're not, and an English speaker often has no idea what they are talking about.  A "chocolate bar" becomes a "choco bar".  In fact, "choco" is an adjective here!  A "delicatessen" is a "delica".  Other words have altered meanings, such as "potato" for french fries.

why I don't eat lunch before the bumpy bus ride to Tsuruoka

Monday, December 20th.  Coming back from Tsuruoka, I usually have a minor sore throat and a headache.  The headache is easy to explain: I don't eat breakfast before the bumpy 2-hour bus ride.  The sore throat was explained by another teacher who had a similar problem.  It seems to be caused by the recirculated air in the hotel (probably) or on the buses (possibly).  Either way, it should be gone by Friday afternoon.  Not this time!  By Saturday at lunch, I couldn't swallow soba noodles.  I finished my classes, apologized for not attending a Christmas party planned by one adult class, and went home to bed.  Headache, fever, chills, and loss of appetite don't make for much of a weekend, or for a Monday at work, or the Tuesday that follows.  The hotel air theory is probably correct, since this week was the first time that I turned on the heater/AC fan in the hotel room.  What an advertising slogan: "Stay with us and we'll make you sick!"

And the snow continues to fall....  I hear the singing of tire chains on the buses and trucks.  Is this really the same city that holds the record for the highest temperature in Japan: 40.8 degrees Celsius (July 25, 1933)?  To quote the book "Yamagata: The Other Side of the Mountain" (by Group "Kaze", 1988, page 127): "The record temperature was caused by the foehn phenomenon, in which moist winds from the Pacific Ocean dumped all their rain on the Pacific side of the mountains, leaving only hot, dry winds on the western side.  Another high temperature of 40.1 degrees Celsius was recorded in Sakata on August 3, 1978.  On that occasion the water in the rice paddies turned hot, and cicadas in the trees fell to the ground dead because of the heat."

(The "foehn" winds sound like the "chinook" winds of southern Alberta.)

Saturday, December 25th.  From the decorations on the stores, you would think that Christmas is a holiday of special significance to Japanese people.  No, Christmas is just another marketing season for the stores.  One of my students, an accountant, tells me that 25% of sales are at Christmas.  He was surprised to find out that in North America, some stores do 50% of their annual business in November and December.

I celebrated Christmas Day with a traditional meal and a movie.  The Big Mac cheeseburger, french fries, and a medium Coca-Cola cost Y630 at the downtown McDonald's.  An even more traditional flavor almost like turkey would have been the spicy chicken sandwich across the street at Kentucky Fried Chicken.  The movie was "End of Days" with Arnold Schwarzenegger, in English with Japanese subtitles.  One ticket was Y1500 (US$15) after a Y200 discount coupon!  A movie about good and evil, church and faith, and the end of the millennium was entirely appropriate for this Christmas in 1999.  On my way home, I watched some workmen taking down Christmas decorations.  After the 25th, nobody wants Christmas cake in Japan.

My advice for the century?  If you get a piece of dental floss stuck between your teeth, it will fall apart by itself in less than a week, so there's no point in worrying about it.

This will be the last Japan newsletter that I send by regular mail.  Photocopying and stamps simply cost too much.  Photocopying is Y10 per page and the postage is Y190 for 12 pages, that is, six sheets of B5-sized paper printed on both sides.  Paying over US$3 per envelope is stupid when most people can read the same notes for free on my internet home page.

Copyright (c) 1999 by Keith Fenske.  All rights reserved.
 

table of contents	June to September 1999	January and February 2000	home page