Working Ourselves to Desu

Aaron + Michael Go to Japan: Days 3-5 from Joe Smith on Vimeo.

Dear all,

Okay,okay, okay, okay, okay, okay…okay. I suck. We start a blog. I write every day for two days and then disappear. Where did he go? What happened? I’m sure at this point you’ve gone on with your lives and stopped asking these questions. But despite this, I am marching onward and blogging away whether anyone reads or not. It’s healthy for me. A writing exercise, if you will. Just because I’ve run off to teach in Japan for a year or seven doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten my true calling. I am a writer, and write I shall! Not for you, or the people, or even for myself. But merely because I’m bored.

So what has happened since I stopped blogging? Well, the other two Americans arrived, Peter and Michelle. Peter is the brother of Lauren, who did K-SEP last year. Lauren was supposed to come this year, but she decided she hates Japan. It’s fine, because Peter is super cool and we all get along really well. Michelle is Lauren’s childhood friend from childhood, and she really likes to laugh. Well, I don’t know if she likes it or not because it seems spontaneous, but she certainly does it a lot. All in all, the American troupe of four is pretty dang cool.

The first night they were here, we all went back to Ueno just because we had nowhere else to go. The next day the seven or eight Canadians arrived. There’s a lot of them and they don’t talk to us that much, but I’m pretty sure their names are Zach, Michael, Seobahn, Alissa, Krista, Masha, Stephanie, and Bippo. I like all of them except Bippo. He’s always pulling down my pants and honking my nose and making me smell flowers that actually shoot cologne in my eyes. What a jerk.

The next day, the four Americans met up with Will, Jesse, Naoko for a day of Tokyo driftin’ unlike they have anything they’ve seen before (Except for me. I saw it last year. Snotty-snot-snot.) The Canadians went on a guided tour and ended up as slave labor for a few hours. The rest of us went through Harajuku and Yoyogi Park, where we saw middle-aged men dressed as fifties greasers doing the twist. It was pretty awesome. We got all of it on video, so it will be on our next vlog once we get five consecutive hours to edit. After that, we returned to Akiba, where I found the coolest Mario encyclopedia, and bought it of course.

But that was the end of the carefree fun, because the next day we began teaching. Seriously though, the teaching has been great this year. My class is full of great kids, all who are wonderful artists. I gave them their assignment and they’re all almost finished. Last year, we were down to the wire, so I got them all started early. Now it seems I may have gotten them started too early, so I’ve been doing a few subtle things to slow them down. Setting their assignments on fire seems to be working pretty well. Also, I’ve hired a professional burglar to steal their supplies while they’re not looking. They never know what hit ‘em!

I was walking to the Kasukabe station one night to meet Jesse, Naoko, and Wendy for dinner, and I was late (as usual), so I was booking it quick. The weird thing about the Kasukabe Station area is that the evening time brings a million jillion birds who fly and screech overhead as you walk toward the station. They fight in swarms and make a loud, loud ruckus the whole time. And of course, just as I’m late and power walking like a geriatric at the mall, a big old birdie plop lands straight on my hand. “No way. This is not happening. No way!” I ran toward a lady handing out cards for a restaurant, hoping for a bathroom I could use. “Toire, sumimasen.” I said. She just looked at me. I didn’t want shove my poop-covered hand in her face, so I politely tried to pull her attention down to my hand. “Etto…tori…” (tori means bird by the way). Silence followed. “Hai! Tori!” She said pointing to the sky. “Iie, iie. Sumimasen. Tori…tori…uuuuhh…” I looked down at my hand. Her eyes followed. “Ah!” She said finally noticing my trouble. She ushered me downstairs where I was sure I would get to use a sink. “Chotto matte,” she said and went into her place of employ. She returned with a tissue. And a small one at that. I wiped off the splatter as best I could, and asked for more with primitive grunts and asking, “more, more?” as if she knew what I meant. She gave me another tissue, which did the trick, but left my hand unwashed. She smiled all the while. “Bad luck,” I said as she nodded in firm agreement.

For days and days we taught with no break, but finally last Friday we got to go to an Izakaya with the teaching staff. It was wonderful fun. We had food and drinks and really got to know our superiors. Naoki (another teacher) and I pretended like we were gorillas and Aaron ate some octopus. It was great. Afterwards we went to Karaoke, where we sang such favorites as Ghostbusters, Don’t Stop Me Now, and Pop Star. I must say I had a ton of fun.

After that it was a day of teaching, which involved watching High School Musical with the kids. As most of you know, I love gut-wrenchingly horrible movies. But this one was really really painful to watch, which made it all the more enjoyable for me. If you haven’t seen it, you are missing out on some top-notch unintentional hilarity on par with Robocop 3.

The day after that, the four Americans met Jesse, Will, and Swinky (Jesse and Will’s roommate from Kenya [she’s super cool]) at the Kasukabe Matsuri. A matsuri is a festival, by the by. We saw some cool Taiko drumming, Mikoshi-shaking, and game swindling. Yes, the Japanese swindle children out of money with carnival games just as well as we do. It was an amazing sight.

Aaron and I bid farewell to the group from there and headed out on our capsule hotel adventure in Shibuya. We didn’t have a plan, or really any idea where to find a capsule hotel but it couldn’t be that hard, right?

On the train to Shibuya, a middle school girl fell asleep on my shoulder, which was really awkward. I didn’t want to wake her up and make her feel weird, but I also didn’t want her sleeping on my shoulder. Aaron took a picture of it with his film camera, so I hope it comes out okay. When the train came to a stop, I used the momentum to nudge her over to her friend’s shoulder and crisis averted.

In Shibuya, Aaron and I walked the streets like a couple of bummy gaijin, and it was pretty fun.

After walking around for a while, we decided it was time to find a capsule hotel. It was about 1:55am when we began asking people. When we asked where we could find a “capuseru hoteru,” Japanese people just gave us funny looks. Of course, foreigners knew what we meant and gave us directions that always led back to prostitute alley, and there was no way we were staying anywhere near that place. So Aaron and I began the long process of finding an internet café, looking up a capsule hotel address, finding a police box, asking the policeman for directions, walking, getting lost, and finally finding the capsule hotel.

We have footage of the capsule hotel, so I want go into detail. Mostly I’ll just say I was really underwhelmed. I guess I just read so much about capsule hotels and knew what to expect so I got into the capsule and just sort of thought, “Well, here I am. It’s like being in a tent made of hard plastic. Goodnight.” Plus we got in the capsules at around 4:00am. I was way too tired to care.

The next day brought an unshowered Shinjuku trip. I didn’t mind, because I didn’t come to Japan to waste time in a shower. I’ve got places to be and kids to teach. So we walked all up and down Shinjuku shopping our little hearts out. By the time we got home it was 5:00pm. Needless to say, Aaron and I spent the rest of the night just chillin’ with Peter and watching movies.

We are now in the dorms at the Olympic center with the kids. I’ll cover everything that led up to that in the next blog. The video for Days 3-5 covers stuff I didn’t talk about, and future videos will also cover stuff I didn’t mention. So look forward to that, because I definitely like editing when I have the time.

I love you all and hope to see you in my dreams (unless you’re some sort of monster. In that case, stay out of my dreams.)

-Michael