Notes To Self

I am at work at the moment, in classroom number seven. Across the way is the Sony Building and Hermes' flagship store (seven stories of overpriced merchandise). An unexpected internet connection leads me to post the following:

Note to Self

More train notes to myself, with explanations:

kamakura w/ yo

I met one of my friends after work on Tuesday. She used to be one of the part-time Japanese teachers at The Kaisha, but then had a bit of a run in with the five-year-old head teacher and the boy wonder of a manager so she transferred to another Kaisha branch. Needless to say, she isn't popular in the school, so we met in Ginza, near Mitsukoshi Department Store and she asked me if I had ever been to Kamakura. Of course, I thought she meant the city of Kamakura, which is near Tokyo, about an hour away by train. I went to Kamakura (blogged it maybe at the end of last summer), and told her so. She laughed and said, no, Kamakura is also the name of a restaurant in Ginza.

We walked the streets of Ginza and rode an elevator to the seventh floor where the restaurant is. Stepping off the elevator, we were greeted by a hobbit-sized hole in the wall and a sliding wood door. A tiny woman, she bent over to go through the door and I followed. I'm not entirely sure what the "kamakura" of the name refers to--her explanation was something about the kinds of ice houses that are built in the north of Japan during winter. (Maybe the houses are called kamakura? Maybe there's another city called Kamakura?) But the restaurant was filled with these structures made to resemble the ice houses, which look a bit like the ends of trimmed sugarcane and are large enough to fit three or four diners. We couldn't get one of the houses, so we sat in another room that was made of wood and so tiny that I couldn't stand upright to take off my coat. We ordered drinks and food. The special drink was called, of course, the Kamakura and was served in a round class and looked innocuous, but slapped me around silly. We had a Caesar's salad, some kind of yakitori, and niku jaga (rhymes with Mick Jagger, which is the kind of joke the Japanese appreciate).

As we ate, we talked about the teacher that I wrote about in an earlier entry, the one who no one can stand.

There's a lot to be said for a friend with a wicked sense of humor--so long as that humor is pointed in another direction and not at oneself.

Enough said.

a man on the train, spanish, with the fingernails of a guitarist

Matthew had the same fingernails, disturbingly long and used instead of a pick. The man, short, young, with a moustache (which is unusual on men in Japan) was on the train in Asakusa. He didn't have a guitar but carried a red backpack with the Ferrari logo on it. He fell asleep or feigned sleep almost instantly, and was still doing so when I exited the train in Ginza.

all foreigners in jp are eccentric. they laugh

I taught a unit about describing personality last week. I asked the students to brainstorm some adjectives and one of them was "eccentric."

"Good or bad?" I asked.

The answer was immediate. "Bad."

I explained that it wasn't always bad to be eccentric and they laughed. (New Guy said that someone in his class said right out, "That's an American point of view.")

I encouraged their laughter, saying, "Foreigners in Japan are all eccentric, aren't they?"

its amazing how much he has learned from reality

From an article in The New Yorker that I was reading on the train at the time, said of Maurice Sendak.

bowing its not so much the act as the sentiment behind the act

I bow. I bow because bowing is what's understood. I'm not good at it and people make fun of foreigners who do it, but I do it because one is in Rome and one should at least attempt to do as the Romans do.

nosepickers

The train is rife with them, and when New Guy and I commented on this, asking if it was somehow not rude to pick one's nose, the head teacher asked Aki, "Is it a new thing?" She meant: Is it a new thing not to pick your nose in public?

Aki mused on what one would do with the product of said activity.

on the train a woman quiets a fidgeting baby.
there it begins

The Japanese are very behaviorally conservative and it is so pervasive that one has to wonder when the training begins. Sometimes very small children are boisterous, but by the time they are perhaps five or six or seven, they have a nearly seamless ability to control themselves in public. When does that happen?

I was seated on the train across from a woman who was holding a baby (perhaps all of ten months old) on her lap. The baby began swinging its little leg. The woman unconsciously reached down and held the baby's foot still. When she let go, the baby continued to swing its little leg and she reached down again and held it still. When she pulled her hand away, his leg stayed still.

uniqlo t i'm not afraid of life & mary

On the day I went shopping for jeans at Uniqlo (say "Uni-clo," which is short for "unique clothes"--and which is an utter lie because it's the Japanese Old Navy), I came across a t-shirt that I almost bought. The Virgin Mary was on the front of the khaki green shirt, and below her was the caption, "I'm not afraid of life."

english sentiments

I am at a loss to explain this note to myself. Maybe it followed a conversation I had with Tom, one of the teacher who's been here for three years. We were discussing how sometimes a student will reveal the most intimate details or ask the most inappropriate questions in class. (For example, one woman, a fairly high level student said, "My boyfriend has been cheating on me.") Tom and I agreed that this is partly a function of studying a foreign language. But I wonder...

zebra this is a pen

My commute takes me past the Zebra Company's office building in Asakusa. Zebra makes pens. The slogan "This is a pen" is in English on the side of the building, and it seems very Magritte-esque, but is, in fact a kind of joke. "This is a pen" is the first English that a student in Japan learns. They move from "This is a pen" to "Is this a pen?" and so build their English skills from there. If one has attended school in Japan, one has had the Zebra slogan drilled into them from a very early age.

That's some advertising, ne?

a life with love is happy, a life for love is foolish

A Chinese proverb.