A New One In Place

A Day

I finally get out of bed at eleven. I wake up already tired, the kind of tired that can’t be caffeinated or showered out, even though I try doing both. I get dressed. I’m supposed to meet one of the students (and a friend) at 3:00 and I’m supposed to meet the New Guy at Yurakucho Station at 6:00 and I’m supposed to pick up a couple of hyaku-en presentos for a gift exchange and write out a list of questions for a game we’re going to play at the Christmas party and there’s no real food in the house so I should probably get some lunch first and I’m sick and I had wanted to go to the gym, but there is no time for that certainly. And I’m tired. Did I say that I was tired?

1:00 Out The Door

I’m out the door about 1:00.

I have a map that Mark drew for me, but the map is such that I took one look at it and couldn’t even tell which station the map depicted. I have some idea, but I want to check out our meeting place, so I take a different route into Ginza so that I can arrive via the Yamanote Line at Yurakucho station and check out the meeting spot where I’m kind of sure I’m supposed to be at 6:00. I find the spot and hit a bakery nearby for a bagel that I intend to carry over to The Kaisha and eat for lunch. (Remember, there is no eating on the street in Japan, and I didn’t want to deal with sitting in a restaurant when I had so much to do.) On the way to The Kaisha though is a kaiten sushi place, so instead of eating my bagel (and suspending the hesitation to sit in a restaurant), I stop and have a quick eight plates of raw fish. Ahhh.

I finish lunch around 2:20 and head over to The Kaisha, where a student (Yuka) is in the lobby. Her greeting to me is a hearty, “You look tired!” Ben laughs at this (as do I), but when I walk into the back room and look in the mirror, sure enough, a woman ten years older than I am looks back at me.

2:50 Chinese Tea

At 2:50, I walk over to the Sony Building where I am supposed to meet Akiko for Chinese tea. We spend about two and a half hours over the most amazing tea I’ve ever had. While we drink tea and eat our tea snacks, we chat about a million subjects. Akiko is one of my favorite students in part because she reminds me a bit of my mother (though Akiko and I are the same age) and in part because she is unabashedly confident and outgoing in a society that still rewards subservience in women.

At about 5:40, I part ways with Akiko to head off and meet the New Guy.

6:10 New Guy

I remember arriving in Tokyo. Arriving in Tokyo was something like being shot out of a cannon. I remembered that feeling that as I stood at the station gate at Yurakucho station and waited for the New Guy. I remembered feeling overwhelmed by Tokyo, and I was sure that that overwhelmed feeling had been reflected in my eyes. I’m sure of that because I saw the same look in the eyes of the New Guy as I stepped up to meet him.

Yurakucho station is not one of the busiest stations on the Yamanote Line, but it’s busy enough if one is unaccustomed to Tokyo. People streamed out of the gates, surrounding us as we stood there, and though I am used to managing the sensory overload of the crowds and the lights and the tall buildings and the blaring television screens and the cars and the lights and the people and the tall buildings, I could see that the New Guy was a bit...in sensory-overload mode. He was, to his credit, trying to take it all in and memorize the walk to The Kaisha and listen to me and think of questions and, and, and...

We arrived at The Kaisha and the women did that thing that the girls here are wont to do when a new Western guy walks into the room: They turned into giggly fourteen-year-olds who alternatively tried to deflect and attract his attention. (I have watched this happen with all the new male teachers who have arrived, so I know it’s not an isolated thing.) I offered New Guy a cup of coffee and then sat and chatted with him. Truthfully, I felt a bit responsible for him and I was watching him very carefully even though I had to do a few things at work and to get ready for the party. I introduced him to people as they came in, and after a bit classes ended. We were in the back room and I could hear Ben chatting with students out front. Ben’s Aussie accent cut through the din of familiar students’ voices. As I listened, I felt at the edges of sadness in myself and in the situation. Beyond the coming situation--Ben meeting the new teacher--was the reality that Ben is really leaving.

After a moment, Ben came into the room. New Guy stood up. I stood back, behind Ben.

“Hi, I’m Ben,” Ben said, reaching out to shake hands. They shook and Ben asked, “How was training?”

Let me just say here that that was definitely not a fair question for New Guy.

Okay, it’s an obvious question for someone just coming out of training and everyone asks it of new people because honestly, what do you really know about the new person except that they just came out of training? But it’s not a fair question because Kaisha training is the first thing that new teachers go through and, for me at least, was almost the last thing that I went through. Because Kaisha trainers to a one seem to assume that you are twelve-years-old, never had a job, and came to Japan to sleep with all the pretty girls and drink in Roppongi until first train---er, and maybe that’s a fair assumption and maybe it’s not. But they assume it about every single person who they come across, regardless of history or gender or whatever, so they have no ability to modulate their behavior and that kind of cookie-cutter attitude is somewhat needlessly insulting. (Though I understand that there are other reasons why they do it, and not every single one of them does it, though most of them do.)

The other thing is that The Kaisha is not really in the business of teaching English, they’re really in the business of making money. It’s easier to make money through entertainment rather than teaching (just compare the salaries of your average successful actor to your average successful teacher and you have some idea of this), so The Kaisha seems to focus on turning people who sincerely want to teach English into people who sincerely want to entertain. It’s not an easy sell to an intelligent person though really, and it creates a lot of resentment in said people. It did me, and honestly, I nearly left Japan after a few days of this kind of behavior. I’m not sure that if it hadn’t been Japan waiting for me with open arms on the other side of my week-long training that I would have stayed.

So Ben met the New Guy and my heart broke and I picked up the pieces and put them in my pocket next to the pieces of my other hearts, the one that broke when Seth left, the one that broke when the Ex-Student left, the one that broke when David left, the one that broke when my grandmother died. I put a new heart in place--the one that will break when Jun leaves later this month--and I got on with the business of getting ready to attend the Christmas-slash-Ben’s farewell party.

And it’s late! So I will write more about that later.