I try to avoid shaking hands here as much as possible. It's pretty easy to avoid because obviously Japan is not a hand-shaking culture. However, every once in a while someone feels compelled to shake your hand when you meet them. As if they are displaying their vast intercultural knowledge they extend a hand toward you as they utter 'Herro'. I loathe this part. I know what's coming next - a limp, overly long handshake that makes me feel like I've entered into some tacitly gay understanding with another man. Of course, all Japanese men are not gay; judging by the number of straight sex establishments in the country, I'd say very few are. It's just that the Japanese have never properly learned how to shake hands. The handshake is a subtle act in truth. We grow up with it and it becomes second nature like speaking a language, but in fact it the handshake is a social pact that has been practiced again and again.

Rule number one: It should be firm (unless you're French and then the limp wrist is ok)
Rule number two: It should be quick. It shouldn't last more than a second or two.
Rule number three: Both partners stop at the same time.

What's problematic is that Japanese men tend to break all three handshaking rules (though from what I've seen of their mature films the adhere to such rules during sex).
I can't claim to be a competent bower. I tend to just nod my head a lot, but refer to my entry on the 24th of November if you want to know about my feelings on behaving in a Japanese way. I suggest that Japanese men follow my cue, and when we meet the head nod and 'herro' will suffice.

I'm on day six of a long work week, so my enthusiasm and energy have waned, sorry. I was going to ramble on a bit about how great Japanese service was, how everyone in stores, restaurants, etc. was extremely polite and how my experience here will have ruined me for dealing with people in service positions in other countries. Just consider it done. There, a positive entry about Japan. It's taken me over a week, but I knew I could come up with one. Stay tuned for my next entry which will feature an expose on my upcoming psuedo-date with a Japanese girl I'm not really interested in. Cheers!

Today's theme is irrelevance. I was asked by a student how I felt about obligation in Japanese society. I thought to myself that this was one of the most irrelevant questions anyone could ask a foriegner in Japan. Akin to asking a polar bear if it were concerned with the cold, nothing could matter less to the gaijin. Being an outsider, not only are the subtleties of obligation inapplicable to you, moreover, it would almost be out of place to try and conform to them. It's preferable to play the ignorant foriegner than to try and join the fun. Case and point, not long ago I was invited to a funeral for the father of a friend of mine. Now, I never met the man, and rumor had it he didn't like non-Japanese, whatever the case I went for my friend's sake (and saké). The snag is that at a Japanese funeral you're supposed to bring a monetary gift of at least 5000yen - that's about US45. Hah! This old racist fart was a rich man to boot. I'm not dropping no stinkin' 5000yen in his honor. So, I played the ignorant foreigner card. Did it work? Do the Japanese eat rice!? "Sorry, I didn't know about the money." "No no. Don't think anymore of it. We're happy you could come." A white face at the funeral, father must have been an important man - once again (like the time I gave a wedding speech in English for a couple I had never met) I added an international flair to what would have been an otherwise drab event. Japanese obligation you say, sorry I don't know anything about that. You invited me, you're obliged to forgive my ignorant ways.

Some have commented that the Japanese are polite in private and rude in public. I'm not sure that I agree. Certainly at first glance this might appear so. The Japanese are inclined to cut in front of you in line, walk directly onto the train without letting you get off first and smoke right next to you while waiting for the bus. I could cite a host of other behavior that would generally be considered rude. The Japanese themselves consider such behavior rude. So why do the Japanese perpetuate this lack of decorum while in public? According to my theory (and that's all it is, a theory), most people who are guilty of impolite actions have no idea that they are committing them. There seems to be a general sense of solipsism - the world is only me - on behalf of the Japanese when they are outside the home. I imagine that it has something to do with living in a very populous society that is fairly safe. Since childhood the average Japanese person has been squeezing into crowded trains, pushing through hordes of people on the street and generally mingling in close proximity to strangers on a day-to-day basis. The net result of all this is a desensitization to those around them. They often use the word hitogomi which means 'human garbage' to describe large crowds of people. If to be rude is to not consider others when you act, then so far as this is true, the Japanese are rude. On the other hand, if to be rude is to purposely ignore others when you act, we might have to rethink whether the Japanese are truly rude. They have all mastered the zen art of being alone in a crowd, so when they step on your foot and say nothing it is because you simply do not exist.

I'm fighting a bit of a headache this morning after post meeting drinks last night. Not the most eventful Trainer's meeting from a drinking point of view. I stayed fairly late and I still ended up home at eleven o'clock. I don't know if anyone continued on to Karaoke afterwards, but it certainly would have been a small contingent.

I have often said that this job facilitates a drinking lifestyle to a dangerous degree. First off, most instructors start work at one pm, so there's plenty of hangover recovery time. With a one o'clock start the day ends at nine. This means that the gym is closed and it's probably to late to want to cook dinner, might-as-well head to the local izakaya, a bar with a food menu. Some instructors find themselves at the izakaya almost every night. And on the salary we make it's not impossible to drink away your pay in fairly short order.

More contact with the outside world, I got another email from a former teacher who is now back in Britain. She indicated that she missed Japan and was thinking about coming back for a visit. It's hard to speak with an accuracy on one's future feelings, but once I leave Japan I doubt that I will want to return. That's to say that there are so many wonderful places that I'd like to see and go that the prospect of return to the dreary, middle-class nation of chicken-coop houses and endless railroad tracks hardly seems, even now, appealing. I don't intend to turn this blog into a Japan bashing forum, yet I just can't help myself. Certainly there are the breathtaking vistas of Fuji and the artistically inspired temples and shrines of Kyoto, nonetheless the true treasures of Japan are few and far between and if you don't crop your photos, doubtlessly some smoke-stack will appear on one side. My relationship with France is much different. I don't think I will ever stop wanting to return. The country is endlessly beautiful. This despite the French themselves. The two countries are really on opposite ends of the spectrum, but I digress...

Today I got an email from an escapée. She broke out of Japan about a year and a half ago. It was interesting following her escape because so many of us dream of it and yet we don't have the guts to do it. In part, the following will prove why this is so. She made her break, but she took a perilous route...via Southeast Asia. Now, some might claim that if you're gonna make a break you should head back to the homeland right away, while others say it's good to travel, transition - "You'll never have another chance to do this again" is the philosophy. The hook is that when you spend close to half-a-year in Thailand and India you kind of lose your bearings on the way stuff goes down in the Western world. For instance, it would be hard to live on a couple bucks a day in the US. Anyway, our intrepid adventurer eventually makes it back home and does what any escapée would do - she looks for a job using Japanese. This finds her down in D.C. where, apparently, all such jobs exist. After some arduous searching she lands her international job...in a sushi restaurant. She claims she likes it. After all, that's what really counts and far be it from a conversational English teacher to look down his nose at anyone else's job. That said, she could have given us imprisoned a bit more hope. In fact, I was rooting for her to pull off a big foreign service job, thereby forging a path for me. Well, maybe this sushi thing will take off? I've always liked sushi. Hey, Molly do you need a maître d'???

I'm trying to dry out a bit, and therefore I'm not off to my usual Tuesday night drinks. It's a bit depressing. I walked really slowly by the bar where we all meet hoping that someone might give me a ring on the cellphone so I would at least have the excuse of peer pressure to fall back on, but no such luck. This Friday we have an area meeting which essentially means that Trainers from individual branches get together to scheme up a series of pointless improvements that we will dutifully institute and then start neglecting right before the next month's meeting. Actually, the company no longer allows us to scheme up improvements. They have come up with their own uniformed improvement ideas, which is really better because then we can all neglect our duties in unison. And that builds great company spirit. In any case, we always go out for a big piss-up after the meeting, so the process of forgetting our newly given duties starts almost immediately. I love my job.

All of my friends seem to be falling down and hurting themselves. I had one friend who face-dived into a staircase (he was going up, not down) while drinking. And just yesterday another friend went over the handlebars of his bike and dislocated his shoulder. He's now in the hospital and has surgery tomorrow. I hope this trend doesn't extend to me. No matter where you are being hurt sucks, but I would far rather be hurt in the ol' US of A than in Japan. The hospitals here are extremely drab institutions. I had another friend a while back who got tuberculosis and had to stay in the hospital for close to half-a-year. That's a sure recipe for insanity. They don't even have TV in a lot of the rooms. What's one to do - read? My god, both your body and mind would atrophy. Well, I best be off to work. I'll watch my step; the last thing I need is rest and mental stimulation.

A subtlety frustrating day at the office, err, school. I had a tax form go missing and co-presented a less than stellar Toeic/Toefl seminar. On the up side, I only had to teach three lessons and I got almost two hours for dinner after finishing the seminar. Teaching is like a lot of things in that you have to find a groove and then the day runs smoothly. The difficulty is transitioning between presenting rather complex ideas to native-speakers or your own language and then trying to convey the past tense to low-level learners. "The Toeic test is graded on a curve, which means that your test results are relative to those of the other test takers who do that particular Toeic test, whereas the Toefl is computer adaptive, meaning the computer assigns a degree of difficulty to the questions and adjusts the difficulty depending on your previous answer. Ok Takahiro. Good, but the past of 'go' is...'went'. Yes, that's right. Very good."

The Thailand / Japan debate is one that I've encountered a lot lately due, not only to my personal life, but also to the travel habits of a lot of people I work with. You see, Thailand is the number one travel destination for those of us silly enough to teach conversational English in Japan. I arrived at work this morning to be subject to an anti-Japan rant perpetrated by a teacher who just arrived back from the Land of Smiles. To be honest, her words resonated quite true with me, but after further consideration I think that the issue should be explored in more detail. "What's wrong with the Japanese? I was in Thailand and everyone was so friendly. They could see that you were a foreigner and they did their best to help you whether they could speak English or not. I'm just sick of Japan. Today I was on the train with a friend and some lady gets up out of her seat and starts yelling at us to be quiet and babbling all sorts of stuff I didn't understand for no good reason." I don't know if I've done her story justice or not, but we get the point. Now, the example is fraught with stereotypes, anecdotal evidence and general generalizations, nonetheless I can see her point. I won't digress into whether she's right or wrong or go into all the positive experiences I've had in Japan with people helping me out or, for that matter, negative ones in Thailand. For the purposes of this entry, I will concede her point that Japanese people are sullen, unfriendly bastards and the Thai are a wonderfully friendly angelic people. That said, let's delve into the situation. This teacher took three weeks off to go to Thailand, three weeks. And she will also be off for ten days at Christmas. In addition, she gallivanted from the North to South of Thailand hitting every conceivable tourist area. I conservatively estimate she spent two thousand dollars US - granted that includes airfare and Thailand is cheap. In any case, she works full time in our company. Based on her longevity with the company (about a year), I would say she's making just under three thousand US a month. After monthly expenses, and I'm not including what she pours down her throat, she probably clears US one thousand. Looking at jobs for experienced English teachers in Thailand US one thousand is about what they make - and might I add, she has no previous experience. Of course, the cost of living in Thailand is much lower, but with good apartments starting at five hundred dollars, well, you won't be doing too much overseas travel.

What's my point? It's fairly self-evident. We work in a relatively rich, yet overpopulated, overpolluted country that's damn boring to boot. Despite this, we work an easy job and people throw a fair amount of cash at us for being native-speakers of a language. Life is tit for tat. You take the good with the bad. The crazy thing is I'm considering giving up my comfortable lifestyle over here in the Land of the Rising Sun (and I clear more money than the above-mentioned) to go work in the Land of Smiles. Obviously, money isn't everything, but I have to bite my tongue when I'm taken with the urge to complain too much about Japan. I'm signing off. I have to go watch my satellite TV or maybe check out a DVD. I could just continue to cruise the net on my high-speed connection. This Japan living sucks!

For some the prospect of living in Japan might seem an exciting one, and while I'm still thoroughly amused by certain aspects of living in Japan, the novelty has well worn off five years after my arrival (ok, more like four and a half). My brother stayed with me four a couple of weeks at the end of October and it was interesting seeing things from his perspective. He spent most of his time laughing about the sounds that Japanese people make. I'm not talking about the language - it's more a collection of sounds that are unique to the Japanese which express surprise, astonishment, and general bewilderment. The idea of surprise is central to life in Japan, but it is often without genuine meaning. Someone will say hi to a friend at the gym and the other person will say bikkuri shita "You surprised me", but there is not a hint of actual surprise because, of course they see each other at the gym every night. It's some sort of strange social lubrication to act surprised when you see someone without actually having planned to do so. In any case, ehhh, ahh, euhh, ohh are all sounds that are indispensable in Japan. My brother left without having learned any Japanese, but he started grunting and ehhing at everything I said about halfway through his stay.

It's my day off. I say day off because recently I've been pulling six day weeks in order to pad the coffers for my next trip. I'll depart from Narita airport on the 17th of December at noon and arrive in Thailand six hours later, minus the two hour Japan Thailand time change, making it four o'clock Bangkok time. I find myself looking forward to my Thailand trips more and more. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy that I spend all my time in Japan with my nose to the grindstone in order to travel, thereby rendering my Japan experience more and more lackluster, in turn making me long for travel, which forces me into a six day week, and so it goes. In any case, the countdown has begun and I'm into the detailed planning stage of my trip.

View photos from my trip to Bangkok/Koh Samui in August