That said, I do have dental insurance here, after a fashion. More than I’ll have when I return to the land of the free and the home of the brave. A few weeks after arriving in Japan I noticed what looked like a hole on the front of one of my lower premolars, which was not so surprising considering I hadn’t been to a dentist in years. It didn’t hurt unless I just brushed the crap out of it, but several months later I decided I’d get it checked out while still residing in a country known for its low-cost dentists, if not for said dentists’ quality.

“Getting it checked out” in this case involved me phoning the company I work for and scheduling an appointment with my IC, or “Independent Contractor.” ICs are usually housewives who my company calls upon periodically to assist helpless baby birds like me with procedures that are still well outside my capabilities to navigate. My IC showed up at my apartment on a Saturday morning and had me drive the three blocks to the nearest dentist’s office.

Upon entering I was told to take off my shoes and put on a pair of indoor sandals in order to maintain the cleanliness of the floor, which is pretty normal here but which also is an example of irony since the dentist himself wore white slacks with grease stains all along the front of them, such that he looked more like a mechanic than a licensed medical professional getting ready to stick his hands in my mouth. I noticed that his own teeth were pretty whacked out, which did not fill me with confidence either. I was ushered into an examination room and sat down in one of the chairs there. One of the assistants held out a special stand for me to put my glasses in, which is so totally Japan. The dentist selected some prodding instruments from a tray to the right and began the examination, which lasted all of a minute. He started in with some kind of explanation, his gaze darting back between me and the IC like he wasn’t sure who he should be addressing in this situation.

“None of your teeth are bad,” my IC said. “Do you have a pain?”

“No pain,” I said. “But I thought I saw a hole in my tooth.”

“But no pain?” She seemed confused as to why we were there if I didn’t have a tooth that felt like it was already rotting out of my mouth.

“I have no pain now, but I may later, right?” It took me about three minutes to explain my thought process behind getting a hole in my tooth looked at before it started hurting, and I pointed to the tooth in question again to make sure she knew what I was talking about.

A few more words between her and the dentist. “It is not a cavity,” she said. At this point she pulled her electronic dictionary out of her purse and started tapping at its keys while muttering “nandake, nandake” under her breath. Eventually, she looked up. “Not cavity. It is a baby tooth.” More conferring with the dentist, and then she said “These three teeth”—I held my lips down and looked in the mirror, and the dentist pointed at one premolar on each side of my lower row, and one premolar on the upper row— “these three teeth are baby teeth.” Looking at them now, they do look much smaller compared to the rest of the teeth in my mouth, but since reality for me is a construct of my own consciousness, I just assumed that that’s how premolars were supposed to look.

“Are you sure it’s okay, though?” I asked. “I mean, that really does look like a hole in my tooth there.”

This question led to the quickest mouth x-ray I’ve ever had. The dentist spoke as he pointed to the developed x-ray film, which led to more discussion between him, my IC, and the female dental assistant. Finally, my IC said, “Your baby teeth are not supposed to stay in your mouth this long. So they are damaged because they are not so strong. But I’m sorry, there is nothing he can do about this problem.”

My question is, how was this not caught before? Like, I admittedly have not been to the dentist in five years, since before I started college, but even at 19 it would have been unusual for me to have three baby teeth sitting in my mouth, right? Why am I hearing this for the first time via some dude who I need a translator to communicate with?

Despite being a waste of time, this trip to the dentist—including an x-ray—only cost me 2500 yen, or about $25. And that’s without any insurance, since my dental coverage doesn’t kick in until the yen equivalent of $75. So it may have been an abortive attempt to receive treatment, but at least it was a cheap abortive attempt.

Another interesting thing I noticed was the imagery used in the posters hung up on the walls of the waiting room, which definitely demonstrated a difference of perception between the East and the West. Consider the following example of a poster I saw near the entrance to the office (I made up the title, but everything else was just illustrated with pictures):

The Wonders of Nitrous Oxide -or- My Trip to the Dentist
Panel 1: A woman drawn in an angular style sits in a dentist’s chair with a nitrous oxide mask over her nose. The dentist prepares the tools of his grim trade nearby.
Panel 2: The same woman is shown walking on a rainbow as clouds in the shapes of adorable woodland creatures float in the sky around her.
Panel 3: The woman dances on giant piano keys.
Panel 4: The woman slowly awakes from the dental procedure, her eyes half-open. Having holstered his various sharp objects, the dentist stands over her looking reassuring.
Fin.

Not sure that would fly back home.

“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.

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.

I live in Iwate prefecture, which can be thought of as kind of the Wisconsin of Japan—cold, rural, backwater-y, and not particularly exciting, the punchline to a million jokes that few people care enough to tell, but charming too, like most places can be especially when you can’t understand all the potentially hateful and base things the average John Q. Takahashi on the street is saying. Being such a backwater, Iwate prefecture—and specifically the town that I live in—does not have many English speakers, to the point where, since I am going for at least some vestige of anonymity with this thing, I am reluctant to even say exactly where it is that I live on my blog because doing so would instantly identify me as one of maybe three native English speakers in the whole place.

So I don’t have a lot of contact with other foreigners, and when I do see another person who looks like they might speak fluent English, I get kind of excited. I want to run up to them, give them a hug, and say, “Will you be my friend?” Living life without reliable avenues for communication is a lot more exhausting than people realize. And really, I don’t feel like this impulse is all that unusual. I mean, due to the homogeneous nature of Japan and the difficulties foreigners often face in adjusting to life in this country, it would make sense to assume a certain amount of camaraderie between non-Japanese living here, a badge we all wear with pride like veterans of some long-forgotten war. A secret handshake. A clubhouse in the woods. Midnight rituals. Fucking bylaws. I’d even be cool with just a wave or a thumbs-up as we walk by each other on the street, some simple gesture of acknowledgment between two human beings sharing a common bond as they pass each other all awash in a sea of Other-ness, as if to say, “Holy shit, dude, we’re in Japan!” It’s not much, but it’s a connection, something to keep the isolation at bay.

Operating under the assumption that other people in a situation similar to mine will share these sentiments, I try to smile and nod whenever I see a foreigner while I am out and about, especially in smaller towns where such a sight is a rare occurrence indeed. Back at the beginning of my stay this was to acknowledge a common bond, establish a dialog, maybe the occasional bit of small talk between comrades and arms in such. Initiating contact with strangers has never been my way, but the idea was that if I looked friendly and stuff that people would think it was okay to say “hello” to me. But I quickly discovered that most foreigners, when presented with this situation, will avert their eyes and pretend not to notice my doing this, as if I were their crazy ex-girlfriend or that irritating guy from work with with fifteen cats and a kee-razy story about each and every one of them. Since coming to this realization, I still make eye contact and nod “hello” to every foreigner I meet simply to make the statement that there has not been some sort of mutual decision on both of our parts to ignore the other’s existence. I passed one hipster-looking white dude in Sendai on a staircase, me coming up and him going down, and since casting his gaze down towards the ground as is normal would in this case have caused him to meet my eyes, he opted instead to turn his head so that he was looking at the blank wall next to him rather than, you know, the stairs.

I like to think that I would not have chuckled had he tripped because of this, nor would I have been doubled over with laughter had he broken his neck due to said tripping. But I can’t be sure. I’m working under the assumption that, since these encounters are so fleeting, these people do not yet have substantial reason to avoid me specifically, and so that their refusal to acknowledge my existence is illustrative of some larger reluctance to interact with other foreigners outside of controlled circumstances.

It still is not clear to me why exactly strangers in a strange land, when faced with the rare-ish opportunity to converse in their mother tongue, would choose to pretend like that opportunity does not exist. It probably has something to do with maintaining one’s sense of adventure or something. You make it to Japan, you go through the rigors of homesickness and culture shock and come out the other side reborn a semi-functional (if illiterate) member of Japanese society. You feel like a stupendous badass, a world-traveler, a self-reliant and dynamic personality. Even little things like being able to order at a restaurant or ask for things at the post office seem like feats of epic win. It feels good, like you’re capable of anything, and I guess some people either feel like it’s presumptuous to try to horn in on a random stranger’s nomad Bohemian fantasy or are living out said fantasy and are thus reluctant to have contact with foreigners for fear of upsetting the illusion.

Regardless of the reason, my existence was not acknowledged by a non-Japanese stranger in public until I visited Tokyo, a trip which took place after I had been in this country for almost four months. On Christmas Eve my friends and I took the train over to Akihabara, Tokyo’s legendary electronics district. There I was able to finally fulfill my long-time fantasy of playing a round of Dance Dance Revolution in an Akihabara arcade, and in that arcade we ran into a white dude with glasses and an “Arizona State University” sweatshirt who was waiting in line for some esoteric cube-based rhythm game. He turned to look at us.

“Do you guys speak English?” he asked.

“Yes we do,” I said.

“You can always tell here,” he said, motioning to the Japanese people all around us. “It’s convenient.”

“You have no idea how nice it is to hear you say that,” I said.

Japanese Laundromats: a Study in Cultural Differences

Take, for example, right now. It’s almost 22:30! By the time I finish writing this and checking my e-mail and hitting refresh on Google Reader a couple of times, it might be 23:30 or later. I have to wake up at 6:50 tomorrow so I can make the hour-long drive to the school of rock and teach two 30-minute lessons on how to say “I feel sick” and one 70-minute lesson on “Conversational English,” whatever the hell that ends up meaning…and have this two hours’ worth of work somehow occupy a full eight-and-a-half hours through the space-time distorting effects of the Japanese work ethic. Also, it turns out that the School of Rock is so far away from where I live that it actually has different weather, and that this school is in such a small town that Weather.com doesn’t have any listings for it. So I never have any idea what to expect or how much extra time to allow for icy roads and decreased visibility, except that said different weather is usually inclined towards more snow rather than less.

The impending morning commute is not stopping me from continuing to not go to bed, although this knowledge does weigh heavy in my mind like a prophetic vision of the future that I can’t shake and can’t change no matter how hard I try; I think there was a Greek play whose plot was along those lines. I don’t remember the name of it, probably because I slept through that day of class.

Jet lag actually did me a world of good back at the beginning of my tenure as an ALT, wherein my internal rhythm was so pulverized by a 20-hour journey and a 13 (now 14, thanks to Daylight Savings Time) hour time difference that it reset and I just naturally started going to bed at reasonable times and getting up at also-reasonable times. So there were two months there at the beginning where I really never felt sleepy during the day because I was, for the first time since middle school, maintaining a sane cycle of sleeping and waking. I remember thinking to myself one afternoon at work, upon realizing that it was already lunchtime and I still didn’t feel like murdering every of my coworkers, “Wow, this must be what normal people with better impulse control feel like every day!” I even thought about eating breakfast a few of those days, but in the end an extra twenty minutes of sleep won out like it always does.

As time passed my proclivities for staying up late began to exert themselves more and more as I began to enjoy my teaching job less and less, and I find myself back in a familiar situation: chronically tired and pissed off, my lips chapped and the rings under my eyes resembling those of a raccoon, ready to compose great treatises on the subject of sleep deprivation but steadfastly unwilling to do anything drastic, like, logging off AIM an hour early or cutting back on my caffeine consumption. I guess, in the end, “I am my own worst enemy.” I think it was Kierkegaard who said that.

Gross domestic product.

Mean income.

Strength of currency.

Literacy rates.

Cultural exports.

After spending three months in Japan, I am inclined to also say that the widespread availability of pizza delivery is also an important factor to consider when evaluating a country’s quality of life.

I mean, sure, in many ways America is like a Third-World country with delusions of grandeur, what with its medieval healthcare system, its broke-ass public schools, and the rampant baseness of its national character, but in almost every city and town in the Land of the Free there is at least one establishment you can call to have delicious—or at least moderately tasty—pizza delivered to your home or office or arbitrarily designated dropoff point on a street corner or someplace like in the first “Ninja Turtles” movie. In Japan this service—and indeed, real pizza in general—is not available outside of major cities.

Now, I’m not saying that a country has to have pizza delivery in order to be civilized, or that pizza delivery automatically categorizes a society as somehow more evolved. All I’m saying is that pizza delivery certainly strengthens the case.

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.

Cow!