Internationalising

I was invited to a real Japanese meeting yesterday. It came just after teachers from all of our feed Elementary schools (numbering three- the schools, not the teachers) had introduced themselves. Well, the new ones, anyway.

We split into groups and discussed things. Our group was all about internationalisation. Mighty long word, that one. Alongside a dozen or so teachers, Mari-Sensei was present, who spent two years in Uzbekistan and in whose form-room there is a slogan in Uzbekistani above the blackboard.

More introductions done, gazes fixed on desks, the floor, very-important-things-that must-be-written-with-great-care and other objects that demand absolute concentration like you're you're trying to levitate them like Silent Bob. This kind of reticence isn't unusual in Japanese schools, it's just usually it's the students you're bribing with smiles to speak. Any sense of conviction in the group topic whisked away like rainy season clouds that threaten and don't deliver their payload until far out at sea and out of sight.

Later, Joe and a beer fixed my bike and I and a beer watched on. Wife Heidi and baby Hana (his not mine nor the beer's) came out...a neighbour and toddler Shuu-kun appeared and hung about hunting down rocks and staring up open-mouthed...another neighbour, pregnant, wandered out and cooed over Hana while Shuu tackled walls and mum nattered in broken English and Japanese with Heidi.

And that's where the real exchange was happening, 8km away from the circle of silent teachers and that faint conviction.

Bowing Yellow Mango Clouds

The rice fields have all been flooded and planting begun. The heat broke and the sun spilled out clouds across the sky today that broke in turn in sodden wisps around the mountain peaks and belts alike and snagged in water in the rice fields, reflected.

I have never seen 31 students more unimpressed with a rendition of 'Yellow Submarine' as today, 1st period, 1-1.

Atsushi, or At-chan to his classmates, managed to post his own and 8 more portions of frozen mango through his mouth at lunchtime.

As I cycled back I re-realised, it doesn't matter how low you bow to some people, they still won't acknowledge your brown hair and green eyes, your white skin, you.

Cleanliness

There is some very incongruous music played at school, over the announcement system, at various points during the day. Everyone else just kind of carries on like it's normal and I've figured this is the best way to act. Don't stick out, doubled over crying with laughter in the corner.

A 2 minute slice of an instrumental version of 'Danny Boy' heralds the end of cleaning time, when we can all return to what it was we were doing and which brings sweet relief on my part. Everyone has got their section at cleaning time, you see, so no matter where I try and help, I'm stealing someone else's routine.

Another piece of music (a dandy little classical number) indicates the beginning of cleaning time. Sometimes, the kids in charge of the announcement room are a little slow, and everyone else dons their white caps and starts pushing brooms and rags across the floors without the music.

Not me.

'The music hasn't started yet, it's not cleaning time yet, the music hasn't started, I don't know what you're all doing, I'm not starting until the music starts!!' : is what runs through my head.

 

Purikura

'Now come on, you'll ruin it!', Dad'd said as I gleefully splashed digital tropical fruits all over the image of us and the tall building in Tokyo we'd climbed. It didn't matter it seemed to me he'd missed the point about Purikura photo-taking- on a trip where I had mostly led the way, gabbling bad Japanese to anyone that would listen, here was a moment the Dad-Son axis righted itself and roles bobbed back round upright, to their established correctness, like a bucket in the sea.

It wouldn't be Japan if there wasn't a Purikura photo booth (that's Japanese English for 'Print Club'...'Purinto Kurab'...'Puri Kura'...get it??) on the 42nd floor of that particular Metropolitan Government Shinjuku building. Who wouldn't want to superimpose their face onto an image of the building before decorating with hearts, hats and cartoon beards?

Curiously enough, the 42nd floor of that building beats the 52nd of another famous Shinjuku skyscraper, in which Bill Murray and some others made a film a few years back. 'Lost in Translation': you might have seen it. I don't know how 42 tops 52, but I do know that sometimes there's an upside down or even kaleidoscopic logic to things in this land. Who knows, maybe that's spatial as well as Dad logic.

 

RIDE

'Why move when you can cut' Joe said this morning deep in the woods. Max, Joe and I had encountered a fallen tree on our ride that lay across the trail, barring our path. Joe rummaged in his bag and when he turned back he was brandishing a foot-long, fold-away saw.

Having been a mechanic before, Joe knows a lot about bikes. It was great to hit the trails with him because, in his own words, he is only too keen to 'micro-manage', giving us heads-ups on the nasty bits, teaching us how to get going again once you've stopped on a Steep hill and how to walk the bike on narrow, un-ride-able parts, with the handlebar at your chest and the front wheel in front of your head.

I think I'm, what's the expression, down with the lingo now too. If it's steep then you don't brake with your front brake: you feather it. The first climb was a hellacious hill and on the down you've got to get your ass off the seat if you don't want to endo. Come to think of it, maybe it's just the way Joe speaks rather than mountain bike lingo, but it's great.

A while ago Sean took me on the same trails on my virgin ride, without a helmet. I wasn't exactly prepared for what I was getting myself into. Sean would brief me a little, mostly of the, 'Ah, I think you'll be fine' variety rather than Joe's technical equivalent. But in a strange way, I think I learnt just as much on that first ride, finding out for myself about cartwheels and the aero-gymnastics you're capable of when you brake and don't feather and end over the bars, into the moss and bracken again.

Paper me

I went to my Japanese lesson in the usual place and found, along with Suzuki Sensei, a man who wore bandages wrapped round his hands,looking more like a fighter than a leper. There was a single piece of paper between them. Ah, the paperwork. We'd been ousted from the usual room in the international centre by new management and new rules.

So this week we had our lesson in the foyer area of Kajo Central in an Imoni bowl themed table. Surrounded by the bowl and imitation blocks of beef, leek and devil's tongue, we talked about Golden Week, what she did and all that me and my Dad did.

Half way through, Suzuki Sensei gave me a newspaper clipping of me. The reporter had come to school a while back. Most of the interview was spent giggling at one another as I fell back from true answers, to slightly true answers, to down right lies, but lies I could express in Japanese.

I thought I wouldn't have a copy of the article (front page of the Yamagata Evening newspaper!) to send back home. How wrong I was. The clipping Suzuki Sensei gave me falls roughly in the middle of the following timeline:

Tuesday: I text the City Hall and manage to arrange a copy of the clipping;

Wednesday: Ito-Sensei shows me the article and gives me the paper...Oba-Sensei is exhilarated to tell me I was in in the paper;

Thursday: Oba Sensei gives me the clipping...Suzuki Sensei gives me the clipping;

Friday: A letter arrives (from whom I still do not know) at school, with the clipping pasted on a piece of paper...A copy sent by the Yamagata Evening Newspaper awaits my return at home.

Looks like you'll get a copy after all Mum!

Plants

We met gangsters with kittens on the street, on the way to a bar after the end of the plant festival tonight. Told you it was good.

Readers!

Sorry there's been nothing new to read here lately. I was off travelling with MY DAD. Now I'm back in the Yama-G-Shi and the hurly-burly of the plant festival in my neighbourhood (it's better than it sounds).

Keep watching this space: .