To begin with, my first name, Matthew, carries with it some inherent difficulties when transliterated into Japanese, namely that there is no “TH” sound.  My students pronounced my name “Mah-shew,” which was pretty adorable, but did not really address issues of protocol and respect.  Depending on the school and the class, I was referred to as just “Matthew,” “Matthew-sensei,” “Matt-sensei,” “Mr. Matt,” or by the simple title of “Teacher.”  I didn’t even try to teach them my last name, which contains not only another “TH” sound, but also an “L.”

One day while we were walking to class, the Japanese English teacher I worked with at the School of Suck in Shizukuishi asked me about the origins of my name.

“The name ‘Matthew’ is from the Bible, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.  ”In the Bible, Matthew was one of the disciples of Jesus.”

“Disciples?” he said.

“Followers,” I said.  The teacher nodded and grunted in affirmation.  I said, “Matthew also wrote one of the books of the Bible.”

“In the New Testament,” the teacher said, eager to show off his knowledge of Western religion.

A few days after this conversation I was in a class being bombarded with queries; occasionally we would just give up on the lesson and let the students ask me questions about myself or American culture or whatever, usually translated from Japanese by this same teacher, who supervised me while I was teaching at the School of Suck.  The boys in that class were very interested to hear about guns and the American military, coming as they did from a place where guns are not present anywhere.  One of them asked me if I’d ever fired a gun before, to which I replied, “Yes.”

“What was it like?” they asked, via the Japanese instructor.

I thought about this for a moment.  ”It hurt,” I said.  There were disbelieving exclamations of “Ehhhhhhh?” and “Uso!” that were pretty common occurrences in these sorts of conversations.  To clarify my point, I mimed shooting a rifle and rubbed my shoulder with a pained look on my face, and most of the students seemed to understand that I was talking about the recoil, although it looked as though this was not something they’d ever thought of.

Another student asked, “In America, did you fire a gun often?”

“No,” I said.  ”I do not like guns.”  This was an oversimplification of my general attitude towards firearms, but oversimplification out of necessity was always the way of things in Japan.  My students apparently had a hard time grasping how I could have lived my whole life in the United States and not have spent all my time blowing the crap out of milk bottles and bowling pins.  What a wasted youth.  Then their Japanese teacher pointed at me and said “Christian desu,” by way of explanation.  The conversation that ensued lasted about 15 seconds, during which time I assume he was explaining the Christian idealization of nonviolence—not actually seen all that often in the Western world anymore, but it is technically in the books.  The conversation ended with a lot of nods and knowing smiles.  I did not have the patience or the inclination to clarify that many Christians in my country were actually super hardcore gun enthusiasts, or that calling me a Christian at all was kind of a stretch, thus perpetuating an idealized and largely incorrect  stereotype.

As I’ve said before, I didn’t really have the proper disposition to be a teacher.

A few weeks later I was experiencing a similar barrage of questions, this time from the girl’s side of one of the first year classes at the School of Suck.  It began with them wanting to know if I had a girlfriend in the United States, and also if I had a girlfriend in Japan.

For some reason, many of the girls at both of the schools where I taught were obsessed with getting me laid.  It was endearing, if a tad creepy.

I’d already opened Pandora’s Box by telling them that my regular tutor at the weekly Japanese class I attended was a woman about my age, and they wanted to know why we hadn’t hooked up.  None of my explanations for this lack of action were acceptable to them, and in fact even a year later I actually am still not quite sure about the answer to that question myself, except to say that I am very stupid.

Before the situation became too embarrassing—when my blush reflex is triggered my entire head turns the color of a tomato, which tended to cause a lot of chaotic situations when standing in front of 40 high school age kids who had limited experience with white people—and without any prompting from me, the Japanese instructor mentioned the Christian Hypothesis once more, and all was once again right with the world.  In fact, the Christian Hypothesis became a convenient explanation for all sorts of weird things that I did or failed to do during my tenure as ALT at the School of Suck.

This did not, however, save me from being berated for my failure to take a Japanese lover by that same asshole teacher one night when we split a pizza and a bottle of red wine at this little “Italian” place in Morioka.  I think he thought I was retarded—like, literally, retarded:

“Your Japanese instructor is a woman?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And she is how old?”

“24,” I said.

“And you are how old?”

“24,” I said.

To him it was as simple as that, and he shook his head while his face wore an exasperated frown.  I could have hated him for that, if I hadn’t already hated him for all of the bullshit he put me through during school hours.  Really, the only good thing to come of that evening would be later on when this guy commented how surprised he was at my alcohol tolerance.  “I did not expect you to be able to drink this much,” he said.

Only in Japan would that ever happen.

“Ya ya ya,” she said. “Eigo de ‘scissors paper stone.’” I was impressed.

Also in attendance are a little five-year-old girl and her mother, who started the class a couple of weeks after I did. Since she’s so young, it’s pretty likely that I am the first non-Japanese person this kid has ever seen, so she gets pretty shy around me. She spent two or three classes studiously avoiding my gaze, but one day as we were all gathered around the massive space heater during a break, after a good deal of hesitation and several false starts, she whispered something into her mother’s ear and pointed at me. The mother walked over to me, smiled, and said, “Ninjin wa Eigo de nandesuka?” which means “What is the word ‘ninjin’ in English?” The little girl held back, using her mom as cover.

After six months in Japan I’ve grown used to people asking me basic, GED-level questions in Japanese and having to shrug my shoulders with a meek smile on my face, which doesn’t work as well as it should because the shrug is not a recognized gesture here. Lately I’ve started nod enthusiastically in such situations hoping that the person I’m speaking to will assume I understand even when I don’t; this is a technique I learned from my students, who frequently use it to great effect, cementing in my mind the idea that teaching involves a two-way flow of information between teacher and pupil. So I in this case I actually had to blink a couple of times before I was able to respond, because, strangely enough, I knew the answer to the question I was being asked.

“Carrot,” I said. The little girl poked her head out from behind her mother, and I sounded the word out more slowly so she could see my lips forming each syllable and hear how it was pronounced. “Carrot.” This is one of the very, very few instances in quite a while where I have been able to display something resembling competence in my day to day life. After six months spent as a cheeping baby bird—stranger in a strange land working at a strange job that I don’t have any idea how to do well—it was nice to finally be able to feel like I was capable of, like, occasionally affecting my surroundings in a positive way. It was a revelation.

I consider this an epic win.

Addendum: I uploaded the Winter Sports Festival pictures as a video slideshow. Also, the pics from Tokyo are up a mere two months after the fact, and can be viewed here on Picasa because Flickr is asinine, and stuff.

I was in the first group for the first race, and only made it about four steps before my feet caught in the snow and I fell to the ground. The rope attached to the tire remained clenched firmly in my hand, and I was dragged a pretty decent stretch behind the team before the two other teachers noticed that I was no longer level with them. The teacher relay team ended up not winning that race, although this was not entirely my fault. It’s cool though: I totally brought it home during the tug of war segment later that day.

I walked away from the race with my hands all scraped up and bleeding from being dragged on the ice. As I was taking stock of my injuries, I walked by a couple first-year girls huddling together to stay warm. “Good morning!” they both said. I waved at them. One of them pointed at my face and had a brief conversation with her friend. A group of Japanese teenagers who have been taking English for a while form a sort of gestalt organism; on their own they’d have a hard time communicating with me, but in a big enough group, they can usually come up with about the same level of conversational ability. This is a process that I am pretty used to by now: a group of students will approach me, and one of the brave ones will attempt to ask me a question. For example, “Where you from?” was popular when I first started teaching. The phrasing may be perfect, or it may be a little off. Either way, the asker of the question will then cock his or her head and say “Eh? Eh?” and will turn to converse with the other people in the group, running through several variations of the question in order to try and form a consensus. It actually is pretty interesting to see them perform these translations out loud because it helps me understand the differences in grammar between the two languages. “You where live? Are? Where are you… where are you live? From? Where are you from?” This can take 45 seconds or more, and I sometimes feel like I ran down the escalator at the subway station just in time to watch the train leave and right then understand that I’ll have to wait the full ten minutes for the next one.

“Red,” she said, and pointed at her face, and then at my face again.

“Ah, yes,” I said, after a moment of blank stares and awkward hand gestures. “My face is red. It is very cold today.” I mimed shivering and rubbing my arms. This was my best guess as to the meaning of their inquiry. It didn’t seem to satisfy them, but they appeared unwilling to take this line of questioning any further.

There was a short period of silence wherein we all stood there without any of us making a move to walk away. That was my cue to start asking them questions in English; both of these girls were in a class I taught and were noteworthy for being well-behaved and good-natured in a school full of angsty hardasses, so I was interested to know what clubs they were in, what their favorite subjects were, that kind of thing. This went on for perhaps ten minutes, at which point one of the school’s English teachers walked by. One of the girls motioned him over and asked him a question in Japanese.

“Blood,” he said, and then repeated it to make sure they had the pronunciation right. “Blood.” She pointed at my face again.

The teacher turned to me, nodded in recognition, and said, “You have blood on your face.” I reached up, and, sho’ nuff, my hand came back with red smears on it from what would turn out to be a few small scrapes on my cheek and upper lip. To their credit, the girls both took it in stride and were able to manage answers to every question I asked despite the sight of a crazed-looking gaijin with blood on his face staring them down. Good for them.

Pictures of the snow relay can be found on this Picasa Web Album. I have started using Picasa after discovering that Flickr limits you to only three photo sets. Hell with that.

After spending the entire day loafing around Jamie’s apartment, him and James playing “Valkyria Chronicles” while I read the Murakami book I’d picked up in Sendai, the three of us stopped at a Daily Yamazaki, which is a well-known chain of Japanese convenience stores (or “konbini” as they are often referred to here), to get some latenight snacks. As we entered the store I heard the opening strains of a familiar tune from back when we were all in high school. “Dude,” I said, “It’s Jimmy Eat World, the one song with the video where everyone’s in their underwear.” We proceeded to make our way around the store picking up its various delectable wares, all the while singing along and doing a kind of shuffling walk that was almost-but-not-quite a dance. The only other person in the store was the middle-aged Japanese man working the cash register, who had obviously been trained to display no emotion. I found this to be an extremely cool little moment, and as we were driving back to Jamie’s apartment I realized that this experience really reminded me of that famous scene in Reality Bites where Winona Ryder and Janeane Garofolo dance around a convenience store to “My Sharona.” Except in Japan. Adding “except in Japan” to the end of any anecdote that evokes a particular memory from the past just increases the awesome exponentially.

Even though I speak almost no Japanese and the kids have a hard time forming English sentences, we are still able to get stuff done without the presence of a Japanese teacher. Part of the reason for this is that my students in this class have a couple of electronic dictionaries to share between the five of them that they use to translate any words that I can’t make them understand with pantomime and synonyms. These dictionary things are totally slick. There’s not been a word yet whose meaning the students have been unable to suss out with the aid of their trusty electronic dictionaries, and with the help of these devices combined with the students’ quick wits and considerable knowledge base, I’ve mostly been able to avoid the communication problems I experience in my other, larger, less motivated classes,

Sometimes when class kind of tapers off like it so often does due to my legendary lack of ability to plan things, the kids’ natural intellectual curiosity will drive them to look up random idioms on the dictionaries’ idiom finder and say said idioms to me just to see what I’ll do. Yesterday, I saw two students, the only boy in the class and the girl who sits next to him, passing an e-dictionary between them, whispering in Japanese and glancing up at me. Finally, they did a little surreptitious jan-ken-pon (which is identical to the American “rock-paper-scissors” in everything but the name), and the loser turned to me and readied herself to speak, glancing down at the LCD screen a couple of times to make sure she had it right in her mind. For my part, I tried to look as non-threatening and good-natured as possible so that she wouldn’t feel too nervous about speaking English. In an American high school you’d expect them to come up with stuff like “I have a raging hard-on” or “Fuck you, GI,” but I don’t have to worry about that so much in Japan. Still, I’m never quite sure what to expect when this kind of thing happens.

The first go round I couldn’t make out what she was saying because there was a lot of noise coming from outside the classroom as the baseball club ran drills out in the hallway. From time to time I could see them looking through the door’s window and trying to sound out the stuff I’d written on the board. “What was that?” I said, and leaned in to hear her better.

More confident this time, she said, “I feel like a million dollars!”