Not Quite So Content

No Longer Quite So Content

He hides his wedding ring with a gesture that draws more attention than it deflects. “Perhaps if I weren’t married...” he says, his sentence trailing off into silence. It’s almost as though he is talking to himself and I just happened to overhear. We are the only two people in the room though and I choose to humor him. I smile and nod amiably, as though this is something that is also of regret to me. It is not. It is, however, the second time he’s brought up his failing marriage. It is the second time in forty minutes.

This is what I know about this person that I’ve spent forty minutes alone with: He’s been married for ten years and has no children. He loves Armani and just bought a new Armani suit. He doesn’t particularly like his job because it is very stressful and he doesn’t think himself suited to the work. He’s been playing soccer since he was a child and on May 22, he tore his Achilles tendon and had outpatient surgery. A week after the surgery, he took the TOEIC exam and scored less than six hundred. He says that trying to say that his relatively low score is related to his injury is “just an excuse.” He drinks everyday. He is from Kyushu and came to Tokyo to study international business and he had to acquire a Tokyo accent pretty damn quick. That was more than fifteen years ago. He lived in California for four months. He studied at another English school and didn’t like it. He practices English in the bathtub.

I am not attracted to this man except a little. He speaks English with a slight French accent and when I ask him about this his answers make me realize that this is the result of his personality and not of his ever having spoken French or spoken English with another non-native speaker. There is a regretful cast to his outlook on life and I find myself drawn to that bit of near darkness. Though he is not particularly good looking, he is not particularly bad looking either. He has a somewhat depressive personality that seems very Left Bank somehow and I am intrigued by that.

I’m intrigued. But that is all. A failing marriage is still a marriage as far as I’m concerned.

He wants to say more and can’t. This is very Japanese. He will hate himself later for being as forward as he has been with me and failing. This is very human.

Sometimes a student will show up for a lesson and if there are no other students, I will take the time to talk with the student to find out about him or her. The conversations generally center around their experiences speaking English: Where did you learn your English? Why do you study? What are your goals? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Many students answer these questions with a dizzying lucidity and thank me later for asking them about these things. More than one student has commented at the end of the lesson that they feel very fortunate to have had the time to talk one-on-one.

But sometimes during a one-on-one lesson, a student will admit things and then I won’t see them again for weeks and weeks as they process the things they’ve allowed themselves to admit. Sometimes they don’t come back again ever.

Several weeks passed before I saw a young woman who told me she wanted to go to graduate school in the US but felt like she might not have the English skills to keep up in classes. One woman I never saw again. She was a housewife who complained about her husband not being a very good father to their children. “He’s never home,” she said. Having lived in America for a year (because of her husband’s business) and seen her neighbors’ seemingly equally financially successful husbands spend a comparatively lot of time with their young children, she was no longer quite so content with her own children’s father.

Run That By Me Again

One of the units this week is practicing asking for repetition and meaning. Why do we practice this? If a student doesn’t understand something I say, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they will smile and nod and say, “Oohhhh.” This is how I know that a student doesn’t understand something. If I see someone smile and nod, I slow down, simplify my English, and repeat what I just said. Then I watch for the end to the nod and smile that means, “Oh, I actually do get it now.”

I have perhaps two students that I want to carry around in my pocket because when I say something they don’t understand, one will say, “Just a minute--what does that mean?” Sometimes he even interrupts me, which is just unheard of. When he does this, I want to go over and shake his hand. Another young woman will also say, “I don’t understand what you just said.” And I always thank her for speaking up.

The first time I taught the class, I began a list of idioms and slang on the board. By the time I was done, the list lincluded about thirty things, including ripped off, clueless, hand-me-downs, on top of the situation, down under, goof/goof up/goof off, end-all-be-all.

The students were two women in the highest level classes. They’ve gotten a bit lazy about their studies. They know the grammar and they’ve been through the classes that aren’t focused on grammar before. They don’t study outside of class and they’ve had a run of foreign teachers who understand even the most heavily Japanese-accented English and who let mistakes pass because they have grown tired of correcting things like, “I’m going to shopping.” “I’m going to snowboarding.” If I correct pronunciation, it’s an amusing exercise for them but it doesn’t stick. One woman keeps her dictionary (which is on her cell phone--welcome to Japan) open on her desk. Fine. But it’s the way she gets out of prepping everything. Usually, my take on students like this is: It’s your money. If you want to spend four to six thousand dollars a year to practice pidgin English with the foreign teacher, that’s great. You want to watch the Western woman clown around like a fool? That’s great. I can do that. I do that all day. I might as well get paid to do it. But, I want to say, if you don’t work at it, don’t kid yourself that you’re learning anything.

At the very end of the lesson, as the women were leaving, I was joking and ran a bit of (to me) real American English at them and it went something like: “So that guy Ben? He’s always goofing up at work! One day, he screwed up this lesson and the students were as clueless as he was. I mean, he’s not on top of things at all!” I think they understood “so” and “students.

I don’t feel as guilty as I should probably for doing this. Nor do I kid myself that this wasn’t mean...

I’m stil thinking about this, so I’ll come back to it.

The JR Deal

Instead, I’ll talk about the social deals that people here make.

One social deal people make is with the okane, the money. When you go out, the bill is split equally, no matter what anyone eats or drinks. This is perfectly acceptable to the Japanese. It has been explained to me in this kind of what-goes-around-comes-around kind of terms. They consider okane well spent if they have what they want and some good conversation. This, they explained, is very sociable. So, yes, it is acceptable to the Japanese. And, yes, it drives almost every Westerner I’ve encountered here absolutely crazy. I’ve heard the worst things come out of the mouths of Westerners over this. “That guy’s skimming off the top,” one complained of the Japanese man who came up with the figure we each had to pay. In Japan, this kind of casual stealing just isn’t done. It’s true that there may be a few hundred yen difference between what gets collected and what the bill is and that money may go into the pocket of the person who takes charge of the bill, dividing it up, collecting money, and dealing with paying, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s the cost of doing business. And if you consider that people here are generally so honest about money that it moves from habitual to nearly ritualistic, I’m willing to sacrifice what amounts to a dollar or two from time to time just to not have to deal with the rest of it.

Another social deal is the one that everyone here makes with JR, Japan Railways. These are the terms (that I know) of that deal: Let’s begin with the assumption that you are family oriented. Because this is the case, naturally you want to be with your family at the end of the day. (This is in direct opposition to the belief that companies have that you are company oriented and so want to spend as much time working or drinking with your coworkers as you can.) But JR’s terms continue thusly: Because you want to spend time with your family, you do not want to be drinking until two a.m.--or even until one a.m. Maybe, they concede, you want to drink until midnight. That’s okay. So, JR says, we’ll run the trains until, say, twelve thirty. Sounds good, ne? And you agree because--well, because you have no choice if you want to take a train. JR doesn’t mind if you want to take a taxi. That’s your business, ne? Ne. So, drink all you want--until midnight. At midnight, your carriage turns back into a pumpkin and you have to catch a taxi. Before twelve-thirty, it might cost you as little as 200 yen to get home. After twelve-thirty, just to sit in the taxi will cost you more than three times that amount. If you actually want the taxi to take you anywhere, you’re looking at a minium of 2000 yen. That’s a minimum. One teacher took a taxi home one night that cost 9000 yen. That’s nearly ninety dollars to get home.

Okay, so the taxi is not your only option. You might, for example, not have 9000 yen. You might have 5000 yen. For that amount, you can do karaoke (not in Ginza) all night. You can spend the night in a mangakissa or comic cafe. You can spend it drinking. (This is the most popular option I’ll bet.) That’s right, you can drink all night and many bars and nightclubs stay open all night for this reason. (Yes, they do have some law against bars staying open all night, but so long as the bar offers food, they’re called a restaurant and there is no law against a restaurant staying open, ne? Ne.) There are hotels, but these are generally so tiny and expensive that you might just as well tell the taxi driver to drive you around all night while you nap in the backseat.

So, yes, if you get caught out after the time JR thinks you should be home--and you don’t have enough money for a cab, you’d better damn well make sure that you have enough money to drink or read manga all night. Otherwise, you’ll end up napping in the station doorway, waiting for first train. (Which isn’t until a bit after five a.m.)

Post On

It’s raining tonight and I just got in from Kachi-kachi with Ben, Ran, Akiko, Jun, and Chie. I’m going to post this and get into bed.

Ahhh.