Seven Walking Club

The tracksuits arrived. Mine is black but some of the other teachers got it in blue and each is embroidered with our name (in English) in sloping script on both trousers and jacket. They're windobureakaas, don't you know. On the jacket chest are 3 large, bright white characters, SWC, and tumbling off them like three kite tails the decapitated words 'even' 'alking' and 'lub'.

K-t seemed especially happy with his. He tugged on the trousers over his suit trousers the instant he'd thrashed them out of the plastic bag. Then he pulled on the jacket and trotted off to 'patrol' the school. I've seen him from a classroom before, pacing along the corridor seemingly without purpose but standing tall and casting a very deliberate eye into each room nonetheless.

Every day the same music signals the start of cleaning time and all the kids slouch to their assigned position and flop a small broom about, or pass a wet rag over the same semicircle patch of floor in front of them. The end is HanSeiKai, when we reflect on the hard work done during cleaning time. K-t will always use this as an opportunity to teach the kids something. Ever the professional.

Tracksuited, he took the students through a short review and then introduced the new material for the day. 'G'die mayt' 'g'di mayt' 'g'diee mayt' 'g'die mayt', four students chimed in turn. There is nothing more bizarre than Japanese Australian English. (We've moved on to it from British Japanese English). The new lesson was 'Bonzer'. 'Bonzer jacket!' then resounded four times.

Potatoes

Today I ate fried potatoes twice, breakfast and dinner. You can do that when you have no-one to answer to (except yourself). Oh Yes, that's the kind of carefree living I'm enjoying right now.

Let's drive to Zao on the weekend

What a funny little place Yamagata is. We had three and a half of those cold, beautiful days this week when the sky stretches further than usual. I saw mountains I never knew existed, pinched between the great big blue and the horizon. Isolated peaks of Gassan and Hayama to the north, beside the Asahi-Machi range, and the larger, closer range that crowds around Zao to the south of Nanachu. There's usually a large dark cloud snagged on Zao, but not this week.

I'd nothing to do (school tests) so I climbed to the fourth floor when all the kids had gone and took pictures of the mountains on my kei-tai, leaning out of the window. I caught a shadow in the corner of my eye and turned to see Abe-sensei, watching me.

He approached and told me about the peaks and the ranges and tried to explain the topography of the ken and 'bowl' was the best word I came up with. We never usually talk. 'Basin', I heard K-T saying to Abe-sensei when I followed him back to the teacher's room a little later.

It was the second time that day I was aware of being watched. Earlier in the day I'd posted off a Japanese test and took my time, scuffing my shoes (they were loose) against the concrete on the way back. I bumped into the lovely Tomoko, who'd come to pick up the car-keys and the car from Mum and from school. A chance encounter in the sunshine. It ended awkwardly and I turned back to the school building to see a pair of legs and white trainers snatched back inside an open window, quickly following Mizuki's prying eyes.

Last night was a blind date a double date, the first date I've ever been on, with Ian and the girl he met in Rough Roll and one of her friends, and me. We went to Pikuri Donkey and then they drove us up Nishi Zao to enjoy the night view: make out point!! What a joke. Max and I will chuckle when we pass through the great big orange torii gate on the way down from Zao and the Shi unfurls before us in all its glory, and I couldn't help chuckling last night at the situation, at the view, at the Shi. I've grown bored of thinking about the wider picture.

The Algorithm March

Just when this country was beginning to seem normal...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV1pyICsR6M

look for more: there's dozens on youtube

Feeling surprisingly Hopeful

Hope can kill a man in Yamagata: so said Max.

You hope for a night on the tiles, talking with new people, no, seeing new people, no, just in the same room as other people and it doesn't happen. I'm in rural Japan. This place has natural beauty in abundance but night-life it does not have and increasingly, it seems no young people either. All the young people clamber into burrows half way up the trees by night.

I've also learnt to expect surprises here. Mostly to do with food (I seem to be writing about food a lot recently.) Oh, it might look just like a mini omelette sausage, innocent enough, unnassuming, yes it might even look tasty but wait, oh no! the crunch comes, it's a crabby, wet and cold crunch and who thinks to put crab meat in a cold omelette sausage anyway and you realise you know NOTHING of the crunch.

..Do you see where I'm going with this?

Last night was a James Brown Memorial Party at J's bar (it even has a real bar you can sit at and lean on and everything!) organised by Dom in town not Dom from out of town who came to town for a night in the Shi (imagine! travelling for a night in Yamagata!). It paid off. Dom from out of town coming to town not the James Brown Memorial Party.

In fact, Johnny double booked (the sly devil) and the James Brown Memorial Party was held in the backroom on a discman linked to the karaoke machine sound system. In the main room, the room with the bar, was the monthly hiphop night that I have just noticed happens monthly.

So we all hoped hard for the James Brown Memorial Party but whaddeyouknow, there's young people, they climbed out of their trees and its a surprise you see, it's a surprise (that's why I wrote about surprises here back there) to see them, it's a surprise when you end up dancing with them and takling, sorry talking with them many gin and tonicas later and it's a surprise when we all pick up numbers. I couldn't give a monkeys about hiphop but for all that, once a month, I'm going to hang up my hopes on J's bar.

Special K

Kasuya Sensei is one in a godzillian.

Being the teacher in charge of kyushoku, she gets away with tucking away scraps for me on Fridays (when I'm elsewhere engaged, with smaller scrots at Meiji Shogakko). Today was an ice cream puff (eaten in the car on the way home), a fried fish, tail poking out of the sesame-fry crust (wolfed down after a jog in ankle deep snow by the river) and a raisin bun- breakfast tomorrow.

She's done a lot for me. Mostly food things. She baked three cakes for me last December. She brings me treats all the time. A couple of weeks ago she came over with a saucer of cheese and proposed a taste test. She looked a little crestfallen when I smugly announced, 'Brie Cheddar Parmesan' without so much as a nibble. I felt an arse.

But I felt even more of an arse the other day when she came and sat down near me with a hi-fi as big as her and listened to a tape of Australian English on repeat. The fifth rendition of 'Let's have a barbie on Saturday avo' grated my nerves, a little.

Our relationship depends on mutual favours and acts of kindness. She makes food or brings me food. I buy small presents.

'Do you have a pair of headphones Kasuya Sensei?' I asked.

Why is it you run out of everything just when you run out of money?

Toothpaste (teeth are furry). Food (no snacks and the same meal four nights on the trot, carrot broccoli and udon). Beer! (Distraught). Toilet paper (not quite, but rationing and thinking of stealing from school soon). Inspiration ( ).

And how did I get so skint anyway?!

Tarento

Robert (Bob) 'The Beast' Malcolm Sapp's got his fists bunched under his chin and is reeling from Mirko 'Cro Cop' Filipovic, peering over gloves at his opponent's open stance and red and white chessboard pants. The man The Beast is an American kickboxer, mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter and former world champion professional wrestler and professional American Football player' and, wait for it, has 'released a music CD entitled "It's Sapp Time".'

There's more of them. A dozen or so listed on Wikipedia (where else?!)

Dave Spector, writer, TV personality, wearing a lead grey suit and a broad grin, looking not exactly at the camera but still smarting from an article about him entitled 'The Incredible Inflating Man', probably. Thane Camus, grand-nephew of philosopher Albert Camus, who ' quizzes Japanese people on English and foreigners on Japanese' on TV. Bobby Ologun who is famed for making fist-in-mouth gaffs. Kent Derricott, about whom those Wiki-geeks seem to have found nothing more interesting to say than 'He is approximately 180 centimeters tall and weighs 75 kilograms.' Maybe his picture speaks for itself.

Really, it's all there- I'm just transferring, siphoning this. But Wiki lets me down when it comes to our man Daniel Kahl, home-spun Yamagata hero who's slapped a shadow of himself on any foreign somebody in this place brave enough to try and integrate themself. For him, you've to look elsewhere, apple-bob in a Google shaped ocean.

..And these are the guys who have made it?! The foreigners who have become a success here? What the hell is stopping me?! Lay down the red carpet and shower me in blossom, I'll flog my identity to steal into that limelight!

Draft

Even if you are to snag a lady to simply smooth your thumb over on a breezy Sunday morning, or stroll with, or talk with (or be with).

Japan is a society of values, none more so than privacy (be it personal or collective). Izakaye's box people up with lashings of food and booze, they prime people and prompt them like any other watering hole, they tease out those knots of stress, but still, all you'll meet beyond those you came with are barks of laughter and snatches of wanton merriment, echoing, closeted (unlike any other watering hole). The Queen, your neighbour or that girl you saw the other day could be drinking there too, and you wouldn't know it.

So, I give you Guerrilla Karaoke. Any number of solutions present themselves to the gregarious izakaye client at the after party venue, but none more so than this, of shock entry, thrashing open those closets and puncturing those beer-tight seals.

Marvel at their expression!

Accompany their surprise!

Grin like you've never grun before, you're drunk now, you can do anything- except back out. Wrong room for the right reason! Why shell privacy, why ensconce in isolation, why why sing alone or just with friends? Why not with strangers, why not with inebriated strangers. Then will you've rattled loneliness till it's shaken apart.

Namakuro ato de

All sorts bottled up upstairs and not a jiffy to snatch to scribble it out so I'm afraid it's all coming out in one big splurge all over this bloog and you'll just have to excuse any speling mistakes or tipos.

Today one little kid had a pocketful of smoothed small gems, maybe, not sure i don't know, he pocketed them again pretty sharpish after I'd cooed 'wooooow!' over them. Later he came and gave me one and the look on his face said 'Yes I've done the right thing' rather than anything else because the little scrot, bless his cotton cap, he's grown up learning someone likes something of yours and says as much so, you give it them. Made me feel like an arse. It's all topsy turvy here.

I joked in japanese for perhaps the first time aside from those pathetic little humourous quibbles with cross-language puns- he said itsu! i thought he said it's!!!!! rrrrrawwww-haw-haw de haw!! k-t bathes in sho-chu every night. that was the joke. and it was part someone else's joke so maybe it doesn't count.

Happy sad Happy happy sad Sad haaaapy sad. such is life just now. but January's always a shit month right?

anarchist

I didn't know they made karaoke bars like it. There was only one room to start with, and only one person serving. And only one karaoke machine. One other group in there, one party we'd been to before, part welcome to me, this was now the nijikai. Koji sensei insisted I have more than one dynamite though and the rest of the night was washed away in a giddy blur and somehow I awoke the next day half way up a mountain, our mountain, Zao back when it was green not white, in a tent with sweat collecting in puddles on me and three other bodies.

It was all rather plush and transpired the lady of the bar was Koji-sensei's aunt, this was why he could so brazenly snatch at bottle after bottle of suntory whisky from the cupboard.

Koji likes British rock music. He sits next to the internet computer so I talk with him lots. Often he used to say 'I am anarchist' but I didn't really believe him because he's the ichinensei form head teacher and a father too. Today I'd printed off a picture of Guy Fawkes to help explain November the 5th by way of the text book's introduction of fireworks at Niagara Falls (where I have never been).

Koji pointed at the picture after I'd explained and said, 'He's anarchist!' and suddenly it was Koji who pushed straight whisky under my nose until my nose no longer wrinkled and not Koji who still thinks I'm laughing at him and not at him as a funny person and how can you explain that in pigeon or pantomime without it coming out all wrong, he was sitting next to me and the internet computer.

He backed out of the room, bowing, then turned and dashed like he'd seen the corridor trumpeting down towards him.

I forgot about it and busied myself with nothing in particular at my desk. The other teachers arrived. Each flipped their wooden name tile over, from red to green, and briskly set about their day.

Later, I spied him through a door window. He had shrunk into a corner of the adjacent room and peeked out of a second door, into the corridor. The other students were arriving and he was hiding. He hadn't noticed me watching, ensconced as he was in his own business of quiet observation.

Maybe the walls shuddered a little more on top of him for he suddenly backed sharply and turned to see me watching him. He bowed low, low, the stiff, wingless collar of his jacket edging closer and closer to his knees.

Bye Bye Helen

One of the happiest goodbyes I've ever been a part of, leaving or staying. Salopettes greasy with wet, soggy trainers and the wind still prattling around our ears MaxSeanGuy hotfooted down the mountain, down Eki Mae and bowled into the station to wave off Helen. There was a Goodbye committee! Friends all. Each bought a platform ticket and we all raced along beside the Tsubasa Shink and waved and panted as Helen stood tall and welling up on the other side of a very small door-window. We watched the train draw along the tracks and the clouds snuffed out the last of the sunshine we saw today.

Momiji

Little Momiji from nearby Sendai, the big smoke the bright lights and Teddy's Diner. She's called Sayaka-chan but dyed her hair red once before and must have taken autumnal blush readily enough for her nickname as it survives to today, to the point I'm here.

Lately she's come downstairs to the teacher's room often, in tow with a grin from ear to ear and her shirt untucked or a shoelace trailing or a smudge of lipstick (prohibited) bruising her mouth. Earlier today she was tearing a folder, shredding the cover in the middle of a class. She's precisely the kind of kid whose name you end up knowing first (both of it) for all the outbursts and whinings and cackles she comes out with. She's also the kid who could figure it out if she was bothered, but seems to see through it all, straight through the worksheets and word tests and parroting, right through to fags and lifting her mum's kei-tai.