Pure Poetry

Ramen
Tastes good.
Chaashuu, Miso, Tonkotsu,
I love them all.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Yamagata
Mountains, people,
Snow and sweat.
Did I live here?
Nda.

Japanese
Itchy knees
One two threes
I still don't understand!
Moozooi.

Orang-utan;
Big, orange,
A lot of fun.
But why so hairy?
Thinking.

Run the four poems I came up with in the 3rd grade classes yesterday and today.

It's fun translating what the kids want to write. One kid wrote about steak and finished his poem with the word 'MEATGOD'. Another wrote about morning, a new day starts and ended it 'Good Morning', the quintessential English class refrain, which I thought was really quite clever.

The atmosphere is completely different in class. All of the kids rise to the challenge of expressing themselves in a foreign language and they're proud of what they've created when they're done.

For something as fluid as poetry, it's funny to see how the textbook goes about encouraging it, and how effectively teachers are invited to stamp the life out of it. Poems must begin with one word and follow from there and there are assigned topics for each line. Rules are set and where so much poetry thrives on undoing such fastenings, Japanese-English-Junior-High-Poetry does not belong.

I read in a book of one case noted by one Teruhisa Horio a while back 'in which the Ministry of Education failed to approve a well-respected work of literature because it did not use the official onomatopoeic word for a river's sound; "We can only conclude from this that the Ministry's inspectors feared that the children might get the idea that it was all right to play with the national language in ways which would encourage them to think of it as something belonging to them rather than as something whose use is controlled by the State for them"'.

Perish the thought they might consider what they've learnt of English as anything belonging them either.

The Day I Learnt to Fly and Other Stories

Sometimes it's difficult to know where to start. You can size something up as much as you like, peer at it and scrutinise it from every angle and still hesitate to kick things to life.

2 years in Yamagata is nearly up so I feel I can justifiably write about where-it-all-started on this jolly vaunt. It started not so much with the sizing up and the peering and thinking, but a leap into a big blue screen, perhaps looking like a leap off a cliff on the silver screen months later. I didn't know what I was getting my self into, I didn't know what was ahead. I didn't know if I'd land on my feet or fall flat on my arse. If you can spot a parallel looming, full marks and ping pong to you.

SundaySaturday I went to an ultimate frisbee tournament with students from Yamagata University. I missed a farewell occasion in Sakata with a lot of other English teachers and a lot of friends in order to go. Chatting Skype with one friend, Sakata was karaoke til the sun came up and a cupboard in the karaoke booth and I felt wholly content straight off I'd not gone along but headed the opposite way to a frisbee tournament. A little piece of Japan I'd carved out for myself, not another inherited friend, not something prepared, something I'd found and worked hard to make good.

But let's hop back to the start and sizing up something or rather a jump off into the blue. Saturday was swelteringly hot and I crispened and flattened out from fingertip to foot-sole for lack of water inside me. Sunday the teams were jumbled up, in the spirit of the game, and I found myself playing with strangers. At the death of the game, I threw a bum pass that was intercepted. He who'd marked me raced into the end-zone to receive the scoring pass that would take the game away from us. Markee now marker and lagging behind, I tracked my man and saw he'd just beat me to the pass. Nothing for it, I threw myself into the air, I took off with one last thump of a leg, I flew,

I flew,
I'd learnt to fly.

I still missed the pass, we lost not tied the game seconds later and our team slipped down a position in the final tot-up, but that's not the point. I'd learnt to fly.

For the rest of the day, I dared someone to throw a pass I could fling myself at, desperate to try it again, to leap off into the blue. The grass was very soft after all. I didn't have another opportunity, but being as I wasn't hungover Sunday and everyone else was, I pulled a blinder out of the hat (!) in the final game, with my team-mates from Yamagata University again.

Sunday en route back sat in an aluminium chair in the buff and the spit coming down before a torrential summer shower, at the onsen, I felt wholly content. Facing a bare wall plastered over with pictures of beautiful places somewhere else slowly drying off, I took one more dip inside and a large man passing barked out one single shout in my direction with a face held steady. The sound swelled fullsome, as sound keeps in a bath-house. Later Junji explained he was Yakuza, paying respect to another Yakuza, possibly the boss, sat 2 yards next to me in the scorching water but that there's one other of those stories.

Daikon Team

There's a game I play, well there's lots of games I play, but it's kind of a game within each game I play, more of a joke really rather than a game so let's call it a joke not a game and I don't suppose it would be very funny for anyone except a group of 30 or so Japanese elementary school kids so maybe not even a joke but just something I do, or have done, an awful lot at elementary school.

I've done it so much that I decided to spice it up a little last Friday to make it more interesting for me rather than anything else but I ended up making a terrible, terrible mistake in front of 30 or so elementary school kids.

It's really very simple. I divide the kids into teams for lots of games. Each time I do, I name the teams...see where we're going with this? I give every team a normal name, except one team which I give a funny name. The funny bit is, it's always the same funny name, and it's always the last team I name that gets the funny name- Daikon Team. Daikon are 2ft long white radishes that sell for tuppence in season and crop up everywhere in Japanese cuisine. Like their distant cousin, the turnip (I should imagine), they are an ugly vegetable. Hence the joke.

It gets better. I draw a strawberry on the blackboard for Strawberry Team, or an orange for Orange Team or whatever and then at the end, I draw a giant white blob with the slightest tuft of green for the greens at the tip. It's really rather funny, or at least, the kids would have you believe so.

Well anyway. Last Friday I did the same, but on the spur of the moment I thought 'F&*k it!' (I was at elementary school after all), I'm going to draw a big bum-shaped daikon and see if anyone notices. A big bum with two big fat bum cheeks. I started drawing my Bum-Daikon and drew two big fat bum cheeks at the bottom and heard kids laughing and shrieking BUM!! BUM! i BUM!n Japanese and I thought great they picked up on it, but then the terrible thing happened.

I drew the bum cheeks, but then the tail of the vegetable kind of ran away from me and tapered into a fat wriggle at an angle from the bum cheeks so as to suggest it was neither Bum nor Daikon nor Bum-Daikon, but in fact, something much, much worse. It was only when I stepped back from the blackboard that I could see the big picture, I'd drawn it that big. I'd drawn a Penis-Daikon.

Letter from home (forgive me Dad)

23rd June

Dear Guy,

Good to hear from you this afternoon and you will be pleased to hear that the doctor is happy with my blood pressure and all the tests I have had (middle-aged man's regular check to make sure that I am still here) except cholesterol which I have to 'resit'. I am supposed to fast for 12-14 hours beforehand and didn't, so that the test was useless.

Should I suggest that your school football team enters Euro 2008? They could almost certainly beat some of the teams who got through. I have Spain in the Office Sweepstake and we are through to the semi-final so I may win the £32-00 at stake (whoopee). I have done a profit sharing deal with three other teams so that at least there will be a drink in it.

Grandma's 94th birthday is on July 2nd if you are near a phone (0044 1--2 ------) otherwise I will pass on an e-mail. We have a gathering planned for 6th July although mostly my age group rather than yours.

The village fete went well: I was the Book Stall this year and pulled in about £80-00 selling at 50p a throw (less for kids on pocket money). Good time had by all, but some dog came and crapped on my hat which I had left on the ground. Gross! Still it will wash off.

The vegetable garden is causing concern. Black fly has ravaged my broad beans but the tomatoes, lettuces, courgettes, potatoes, artichokes (Jerusalem) and herbs seem alright and I have also planted sweetcorn and beetroot. We'll see- speak soon and let me have contact details in Tokyo and beyond.

love, Dad.

Boris and the Cotswolds

 
 
 
 

Mud, blood and cherry stones

I'd figured it might be the death of my bike to take it down the slopes of Mt. Zao through tall grass and plants where before I'd only known snow and a landscape a good giant taller. So really, I shouldn't be annoyed or surprised at the outcome. The front brake is now held in place with a plastic tie, both wheels are bent and rub against the brakes, brake cables have splintered, the tyres run down right through beautifully even track to a smooth evenness marked by gristly patches where something under the rubber shows through...

Rainy season starting to live up to it's name, Hiroshi came round and picked up our bikes right to the top of his car and attached them to the roof rack. Oba-kun came over too and one stop more at Omi's place and 5 people 5 upside strapped in bikes were on our way to Zao. Max had bags of cherries, just one from the cute next-door neighbour with just the one small razor blade hidden inside. We ate and spat stones out of the car window, and as far as we could from a manhole cover in as straight and true a line as we could when a little bored as Hiroshi strapped the fifth bike in.

Not hiking nor biking but more hike-biking we slid and crashed through mud over rocks along a trail that wasn't perhaps meant for bikes, after we'd passed through the clouds in a ski gondola with only a pair of tourists aside braving the rain for god knows what. Moments when enthusiasm wilted with the leaves under the weight of the rain nicely countered with the sheer joy of sliding down a muddy bank on arse, the hilarity of watching someone else slip on the mud.

Whimpers from the bushed, bugs and mozzies, old cuts not yet healed shredded back to life, brakes pinging out mid-ride, a horrific moment listening to a rock crash down the undergrowth and the hill with awful volume and a numb terror we might have bitten off more than we could chew or spit without choking when it looked we mightn't get off the trail for a while.

All of that washed off with the mud at the bottom, in Zao village. An open onsen spot in the ground with pipes worming between rocks and over the sulphurous, pale green onsen water. Some glances from out-of-towners wandering about with brollies.

BUGGER!

What happened to my blog?! All I wanted was a little picture at the top!