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.

So the pillows are a good band, and “Hybrid Rainbow” is perhaps their masterpiece, a song that I would say almost justifies humanity’s existence despite centuries of war and hatred and every kind of depravity imaginable. I can recall being nineteen years old, a recent high school graduate, watching FLCL for the first time just a couple of weeks before I headed off to college and my first real taste of the great unknown and thinking, man, it would be awesome to see these guys play live.

Imagine my surprise, then, that my arrival in Japan, already a fulfillment of my wildest outdated high school fantasies, coincided with the release of a new pillows album and a tour (codenamed the “Pied Piper Tour,” which I can’t turn into anything symbolic no matter how hard I try) to support said album. The pillows were playing in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture, easily within the range of a driven individual such as myself. Phone calls were made. Tickets were purchased. Travel arrangements were made. The thought rang clear in my mind: “I might get to see ‘Hybrid Rainbow’ performed live.” If that happened, I’d have another item to check off on my list of things I needed to do before I died.

The concert was to start at six o’clock on a Sunday evening in late September. The plan called for me to take the train to Sendai on Saturday morning—this was before I knew about the wonders of highway buses, which are cheaper and faster than trains when going between big cities—and stay with a friend of mine from back home who also does the teaching thing in Marumori, a small mountain town about an hour away from Sendai that feels a lot like what South Park would feel like if it was a real place and in Japan. We would check out Sendai on Sunday morning, and then hit up the concert, which started at six. Since it was a Sunday, I needed to be back in my own place for work the next morning, so I got a ticket for the 8:15 Shinkansen (bullet train) back to Morioka in time to catch the last train to my little podunk farming town. I figured the concert wouldn’t last much longer than two hours, if it even lasted that long, so not a huge loss. It was a perfect plan that failed in a spectacular(ly unspectacular) fashion.

The first stages of the plan went smoothly enough. I made it to Sendai without any problems, and Saturday night passed pleasantly, with much Melon Fanta consumed while complaining about the Japanese public school system and playing videogames. Sunday passed quickly as we explored the shopping arcade that Sendai is famous for, and soon enough it was time for our concert preparations to commence. We met up with another group of Americans, college exchange students or teachers all, and loitered in Sendai Station for a while swapping anecdotes and blocking pedestrian traffic. At about 5:30 I asked everyone assembled if maybe we shouldn’t head to the venue since the concert was going to start in a half hour.

“Doors open at six,” one among us said. “The concert doesn’t actually start till seven.” This was a serious problem.

My friend James, who had handled logistics, had misread (or not bothered to read) the kanji on the ticket, believing it to say “Starts – 6:00, Ends – 7:00” when it actually said “Doors open – 6:00, Concert Begins – 7:00.” Oddly enough, being illiterate does indeed suck as much as the public service announcements on teevee say that it does; that extra hour was kind of a big deal, upon which my entire plan for the evening hinged. In America it would only have taken me about 30 seconds to say “Well, I guess I’m calling in sick tomorrow” and enjoy the concert with no worries a’tall, but in Japan taking an unexpected day off from your job—even your stupid job where you spend the great majority of your time reading novels and and can’t even communicate with 90% of your coworkers—is a big deal that requires an excellent excuse and documentation. So that meant I had a ticket for an 8:20 train and a ticket for a 7:00 concert, which are good things to have by themselves but not such great things to have at the same time.

I was not very talkative as we made out way to the venue and stood waiting in line for the doors to open. Even when the show started I kept vacillating between “To hell with it, I’m just going to stay and figure out what to do afterward,” and “Well, I guess I’ll just try to enjoy the hour that I have.” This process preoccupied me, but I tried to enjoy the show as best I could. The pillows put on a good show, although I was mostly interested in hearing them play a handful of songs that I knew from FLCL, which was older material that they were less inclined to dip into. I was not pleased.

About 30 minutes in, during a pause between songs, someone in the audience shouted ”Hybrid Rainbow!“ and I held my breath.

The lead singer chuckled. “Too fast,” he said, in English. “Too early.”

Fuck, I thought, they’re saving it for the encore or something.

The band played a couple more songs that I was not familiar with and which were hard to enjoy given the circumstances, and during another pause someone else shouted, “Hybrid Rainbow!” At this point I had maybe 15 minutes to get to my train, enough time for maybe one more song before I absolutely had to leave.

“Too fast. Too early,” the lead singer said again. The members of the band began whispering among themselves.

I turned to leave, defeated, as more banter ensued.

I was just reaching for the door to the lobby when the band seemed to reverse their previous decision and started to play “Hybrid Rainbow.”

During those four perfect minutes, I was truly, unabashedly happy. Between the beginning and the ending of that one song, I was exactly where I wanted to be in the world, doing exactly what I wanted to do, and had no reservations or regrets. Just then It did not matter that I had to leave the concert early to go catch a train so I could be on time for a job that I did not enjoy, nor did it matter that I was aimless and unmotivated, that I had so far been too lazy to create anything that felt meaningful out of my time on earth, that I was weird and awkward and unsure of my place in the world; whatever choices I had made in my life up until that point, at that moment they were all the right choices because they had led me to that venue next to the Sendai train station where I watched the pillows play “Hybrid Rainbow” in front of an enthusiastic crowd. My triumph was utter. It was transcendent.

And, like most transcendent moments, this one was not able to support itself for long under the weight of its own quality.

After the song was over there was a short period of silence, and the band started retuning their instruments and talking amongst themselves. I headed towards the door, but, feeling invincible and uninhibited in the afterglow, I turned and shouted “Linda Linda!” before finally making good my escape. I thought this was hilarious at the time, but, given how irritated I used to (and still do) get at those assholes who shout “Freebird!” at concerts by bands who are decidedly not Lynard Skynard, I at least had the decency to feel bad about it later. I stopped just long enough to make a last minute impulse purchase at the merch table in front of the venue to celebrate my newfound enthusiasm for life and love and all the rest, and then I was ready to bounce.

After hearing “Hybrid Rainbow,” the decision to try and catch my train was a much easier one, and the emotional high of that one perfect moment propelled me forward as I ran through the station, retrieved my bag from the storage locker, and hoofed it up to the Shinkansen platform. Hoisting a big backpack and carrying a demented teddy bear in one hand, I’m sure that I made a deeply troubling sight. People left my path well alone. I quickly inquired about what platform I should go to—the guy I asked was trying to convey something to me that I could not get, but he eventually pointed me in the direction I needed to go—and took the stairs up to the platform three at a time.

Panting from the run, I stood and waited, my thumbs looped under the shoulder straps of my backpack, underarms and back starting to feel maybe just a little bit moist from the weight of my load and the unfamiliar exertion, ready to slide into a Shinkansen’s spacious seat and think happy thoughts all the way to Morioka, where I’d catch another train over to my town of residence. I was about seven minutes early. It had taken me less time than I thought it would to get to where I needed to be.

I paced up and down the platform and noticed with some trepidation that there weren’t very many other people waiting for this train. My trepidation turned to panic as the time listed on my ticket came and went. I went back down to the ticket area and made an inquiry of an older gentleman in a station uniform. Unfortunately, his English was not up to snuff, and neither was my Japanese; I couldn’t even remember how to say “I do not speak Japanese” in Japanese, which is a problem that I had had before and have often had since. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable period of him repeating the same phrase I did not recognize really slowly and with different inflections and pointing to different places on the small train schedule in his hands in a coded sequence that I was not able to decipher, he motioned with his hands and said “Wait, please.” About ten minutes later, a young-ish woman dressed in civilian clothes walked up to where I was standing. After exchanging a few words with the station guy, she turned to ask me what I needed help with. I explained my situation to her again. “The train is late,” she said. “Instead please take the Shinkansen headed for Akita when it comes and get off at Morioka Station. The Akita Shinkansen is also late, but it is less late.”

It turned out that “less late” meant “still more than an hour late,” which was especially galling after spending all that time being told at teacher training that the Japanese are shuffling automatons of soulless efficiency and woe be unto he who is even one minute late for anything. I was not happy about having to waste away in Sendai Station when there was still a perfectly good pillows concert going on literally next door. Eventually my consternation gave way to anxiety over whether or not I would make it to Morioka Station in time to catch the last train out to Ho-mu. Things did work themselves out, although I had to do some sprinting once I got to Morioka Station in order to facilitate this. I was told later that the show had gone on for about another 70 minutes after I left, but that only one other song I’d have recognized was played. And on Monday morning I was able to shuffle into work at my School of Suck, tired but on time, and totally tank my lessons for that day just like normal. God was in His heaven. All was right with the world.

So in the end I guess this concertgoing experience is a good representation of my time in Japan as a whole—a bunch of stupid bullshit punctuated by fleeting moments of blinding awesome-ness, a neverending footrace between elation in lane one and despair (or at least extreme irritation) in lane two. Additionally, in some kind of ridiculous Russian doll situation, maybe that is a pretty accurate description of life in general.

Supplemental:
Ride on Shooting Star (Ganbatte-Fest ‘08, Part 3) : Photos of the events described in this entry can be viewed on my Flickr page.

I am testing this theory by giving the following quiz to as many foreigners living in Japan as I can find who will talk to me. I used everything I learned while sleeping through Statistics and Cultural Anthropology class to conform to the standards of scientific rigor, so hopefully the results will give me a clearer picture of the tendencies of the ALT mind. I would be interested to see what kind of answers the readers of this blog would give, so feel free to give a response in the comments section. This is based off of something that really happened to me and the wild variation in perception among a group of about five other English-speaking ALTs of what seemed to me like a fairly straightforward descent into madness.

So, here we go:

Say you’re in a restaurant with some other people. Since they are all fine upstanding bohemian types, said restaurant is a little hole-in-the-wall kind of place off of the main thoroughfare, a real “authentic experience.” You go to order food and the menu has no pictures and is written all in kanji, which no one in your group can read because it is obtuse by its very nature and was designed in ancient China to make learning it as difficult as possible in order to elevate the literate class. The proprietor of the establishment regards your inquiries about the food with a nervous smile and a shake of the head. So your order blind, just point at something that doesn’t cost too much and hope for the best. Maybe the food’s good, maybe it’s not. You have no way of knowing what it is until it arrives at your table–and even when it’s in front of you, you still might not know!

How awesome or not awesome would you rate this situation on a scale from one to five, where five is the most awesome and one is the least awesome?

This happened to me when I hung (hanged?) out with other teachers in my prefecture back at the beginning of my stay in Japan, and was in fact one of the early signs that I might have been in over my head. I would not consider this restaurant incident to be any fucking way to live at all, sort of a misguided attempt to expand one’s horizons that strays too far into the realm of lunacy to be a very valuable learning experience. But most of my contemporaries thought it was totally sweet, all “I can’t wait to tell the folks back home that I ordered some food without even knowing what it was!” whereas I was sort of inclined to keep that a secret from all but my very closest and most trusted friends.

Apartment Tour, Supplemental

As with any jaunt outside of one’s zone of comfort, noteworthy events occur much more frequently here than they would under normal circumstances. So, whereas back home I could take stock at the end of a month and find that the only events worth writing home about during that time were that I finished, say, reading Transmetropolitan and continued my long-standing streak of not getting laid, the same amount of time in Japan has yielded so many new experiences that time itself seems to have warped and even wrapping my head around all the stuff I need to tell the folks back home about is overwhelming.

I have some backlogged content that I am working on writing out to chronicle the story so far in greater detail, but here’s a general overview of the situation.

I arrived in Narita, Japan on the scheduled day with no knowledge of where I would eventually end up, prepared to spend up to a month waiting around for any additional information. I’d even allowed myself to think that spending a month in Tokyo with nothing much to do while getting paid a monthly salary would actually be a pretty swee. However, fortunately (or perhaps <em>unfortunately</em>, it’s still a little early to make that call), a placement was found for me while I was in the air over the Pacific Ocean, and upon arriving at the training site I was given the name of the city in Iwate prefecture where I would be living for the next seven months. The name itself meant nothing to me, which is a shame, because if I’d had any conception of Japanese geography or demographics I might have asked them if there was possibly another place they could send me and avoided a lot of irritation. It turns out that Iwate is like the Wisconsin of Japan, cold and desolate and kind of a backwater.

Meanwhile, despite the remote location, my apartment is actually super-nice. The problem is just that it is super-nice in all the wrong ways. I have an intercom with a built-in video camera peephole, a keypad lock on the door, three huge rooms and a bathroom with an enormous bathtub… but was not provided a refrigerator, a stove, or lights, and was not able to obtain Internet access for four weeks because I had to wait for the service provider people to come to my apartment and install something onto my phone jack. Skulking around my apartment all day with my makeshift furniture and lack of practical amenities with all the aforementioned, unused bells and whistles makes me feel like some kind of post-apocalyptic savage curled up among the ruins of a long-dead but highly advanced civilization.

So I spent the first two weeks of my tenure with almost no outside contact save a payphone on the corner that eats ten-yen coins like they are the antidote and whatever Internet cafe action I could find when I took the train into Morioka on weekends; a number of my very good friends from New Orleans and the surrounding areas recently got screwed over by another big hurricane, and I didn’t know about it until almost a week later. Even now that I have a phone and an Internet connection, the logistics of living in a place where almost no one speaks any kind of language I can understand definitely take a toll. The isolation has been a little overwhelming. Seriously, there were puppets.

Some nights when I get home I will say the word “fuck” a few times just so that I can be sure that I still remember how.

As far as work goes, it is something of a mixed bag. I am teaching at two high schools. The first school, let’s call it The School of Suck for anonymity’s sake, is in the town in which I live, and is about a ten minute walk away. The students I teach there are mostly punks who talk in class and make teaching extremely unpleasant. I also teach at the School of Rock three days a week, and the students there are much nicer, although when I teach them I am usually tired because the commute by car is about an hour.

On days when there is snow on the ground it supposedly takes much longer.

I am to understand that it snows there constantly between November and March.

Great.

So far I have missed my family, my friends, pizza, burritos, and seeing movies in theaters.

So far I have not missed the “Your mom” jokes.

Rather than trying to summarize the last month in the “This happened, then this happened, and it was super fun, and then this happened” format, which I am not such a fan of, the next several entries will most likely be focusing on the deconstruction of specific small elements of my observations in Japan, along with short narrative descriptions of incidents that can be thought of as representing some larger aspect of my overall experience. Or, you know, whatever else I feel like writing about.

I uploaded the first batch of pictures that I built up during my exile. They can be viewed on my Flickr account. Hope you enjoy them.

So here we all are. The name of this site is “Worse Than Coleslaw” because coleslaw is just about the worst thing there is. The title is somewhat optimistic by suggesting that, in a world where the most terrible thing conceivable already exists, the condition of the world can only improve; but the title is also pessimistic in that it implicitly acknowledges the possibility of something being even worse than the worst thing. Hope and despair in one convenient package.

I figured the best way to start things off was to reprint the speech I gave at my college graduation as Senior Class Orator, and go from there. It’s been a year, but I’m finally trying to follow my own advice.

Senior Orator Speech, 2007

If you’ve never written a graduation commencement speech, what most people tell you is to always open with a quote.

I’m not an expert in the construction of these kinds of speeches, but I’ve been around enough to have noticed that generally they fall into two structural approaches that pretty much every student graduation speaker I’ve ever heard has adhered to very closely. The first is the traditional approach, where the speaker opens with a quote from George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Voltaire or some other big name in Western philosophical thought. This approach hasn’t actually been entertaining or particularly moving since about 1963. In the second structural approach, the speakers do a kind of post-modern thing where they complain about how they’re supposed to use a quote from one of those aforementioned stuffy, un-cool, old-school establishment type guys, and—since they assure us that they are edgy, rebellious, free-spirited individuals—they give pretty much the same speech, only they quote Bob Dylan or Jerry Garcia instead, and this is supposed to be like their idea of really stickin’ it to the Man.

I’ve decided to try and avoid that trap entirely by not quoting anyone at all. You’re all smart people. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by getting up here at your college graduation and giving you a graduation speech that sounds like someone generated it out of a template in Microsoft Word. You’ve already heard that speech a million times, could hear it at any college or high school in the country. Hey, this is COLLEGE UNIVERSITY. We have more elevated standards here, coming as we do from the legacy of our Jesuit education. Do you think Ignatius of Loyola—he’s the guy who founded the Society of Jesus, for those of you just joining us—do you think he would have gotten up here and been content to spout some trite, platitudinous nonsense? No, of course he wouldn’t do that—and not just because he’s dead. He wouldn’t try to pull that kind of thing because he’s St. Ignatius. He doesn’t quote people, people quote him. I’m just trying to live up to his good example, because I think the world would be a much better place if we all tried to find our own words to describe the things we are actually feeling rather than relying on the words of others to describe how we think we are supposed to feel.

Here’s the thing: Thomas Jefferson is dead, and he has nothing at all to say about our lives or what it means to me to be standing up here and talking to you today. What could he have to say that could possibly hope to begin to describe what all of us are feeling now, the complex, bittersweet ambivalence that characterizes such an occasion? This moment is very precious, and we’ve come too far and worked too hard to waste this truly excellent moment on prepackaged emotions and sentiments assembled in a factory sweatshop.

This college graduation thing is, after all, kind of a big deal, to the point of being almost miraculous. I wouldn’t normally presume to speak for any of you, but, as the Powers That Be were quick to remind me, that is kind of what you all voted me up here for, so I don’t have to feel too bad about that. For me at least, I can say with quite a bit of confidence that the four years I’ve spent at COLLEGE has been the greatest time of my entire life. It meant so much more to me than just a way to increase my future earning potential. In the time I spent at COLLEGE, I went from being that weird kid in the corner to being an actual, viable human being. This school was where I emerged from the shell I’d been in my entire life, where I made some friends who I really love and respect and admire, and had classes with some awesome teachers and expanded my understanding of myself and the world around me. And what could Oscar Wilde possibly have to say about how cool it was to go to a school that was so small that I could actually go to the houses of my professors, to eat dinner at Dr. ENGLISH’s place or drink wine with my fellow English majors at Dr. ENGLISH ALSO’s house, or have Dr. SCIENCE give a bunch of us tarot card readings on the coffee table in her living room?

It hasn’t been all peace, love, and happiness. We’ve seen some pretty heinous stuff these last few years: two major hurricanes, the death of a much-beloved teacher—Dr. CHEMISTRY, who I didn’t know very well, but he liked my newspaper column, which was enough to make him cool in my book. We’ve gotten less sleep than is perhaps recommended by conventional medical wisdom, and have dealt with plenty of personal crises of the small and large varieties. And there are plenty of things that I will not miss: for example, I will not miss driving on the roads in THE CITY, which are terrible—all those intersections that empty into other intersections and stoplights every five feet and those darn service roads that I still can’t quite figure out and all the crazy drivers who seem to become more incompetent as the roads become more convoluted. But do you think Sophocles has anything to say that could possibly console us in our grief and discomfort and annoyance?

Still, in a way all that bad stuff kind of adds to the charm, like. Or maybe it’s better to say that it contrasts with the good stuff and makes the good stuff seem that much better. Even things that used to really bother me seem kind of endearing at this point—all the weird smells in the dorms, or that disconcerting blur effect that affects your vision when you go without sleep for too long. And even all the HUGE. EMOTIONAL. DRAMA. was actually, for me at least, just starting to get interesting, after, kind of, evolving past the “Lifetime Original Movie” type petty underclassman nonsense into some really epic, Shakespearean type tales of love and betrayal and scorn. Heck, I’ll probably even miss that crazy genderless statue.

Now, as the Everyman (and woman!) of our graduating class—and not just of the undergraduates, but the graduate and Lifelong Learning students as well, shout at to all those folks—it’s my job to give you a proper sendoff, a sort of warcry “HOO-ah!” Army kind of thing to encapsulate your experience here while inspiring you to go forth, onward and upward, to do great works with the knowledge you’ve been given. Honestly, I’m not sure I’m up to that task.

All I can say is, you worked hard to get this far. Don’t screw it up by being stupid, and don’t waste it by doing anything with your life that isn’t completely and utterly amazing. Let’s be a generation that constructs our own words, that doesn’t just settle for whatever’s already on the books to get us off and get us by. There’s plenty in this world that needs fixing, and it would be oh so lame if after four years of struggle we all just sat around watching teevee and drinking and becoming jaded, uninteresting, overweight nobodies who use other people’s words to justify all the dumb things they do. Your new lives are just beginning, so be sure to make the most of this amazing achievement.

Anyways, I’d better wrap this up. I’d stay longer, but it’s really hot, and I have to move out of my apartment by five o’clock or I’ll get fined. I love you all. Thank you, and God bless.