That's a little inappropriate don't you think?

So here's a few things that have made me go "WTF?!?" For dangerousness, offensiveness, or sheer WTFness.

1. Where's the socket?

I assume this was supposed to be plugged in, but no, they decided to leave it out in the snow. Electricity's not dangerous in Japan - the next time I saw this sign, it was turned on. Also, I have noticed that it tends to start snowing only when I've just shaved my head and left my beanie at home. Not much fun.


2. Whale Chips

Yum Yum. Cheap too, I think these were only about 200 yen.

3. Africa works

So I didn't take this picture, my friend Tim did. I wish I had though, it's brilliant. "Africa Works". It sure does. This is a clothing outlet, but I didn't see any waders there.


4. How Cheap?

This one's my favourite. It was outside a sex shop in Shibuya. I have little experience with sex paraphernalia or the price thereof, but I assume this place probably gave a good deal. Otherwise they'd be lying!

Hanami!!

Last weekend was hanami weekend for Utsunomiya. On Saturday, I met up with Danielle, self proclaimed “best Canadian ever” (she actually is pretty cool), Aussie Brooke, and English Matt, and headed to the park in the centre of town with the hope of finding other ALTs. After a tedious three or four minute search, we gave up and started drinking, eventually finding them four or five hours later, and hung out with them for a few hours. Then it was off to “yakitoridori” (chicken alley) for dinner, where I’m relatively certain no-one ate any chicken… And then, yet again, karaoke, for maybe the sixth time that week? Grand old times, karaoke is. Then, it was Sunday morning, and time to head back to the park to break Brooke’s bike lock – she lost her key, then off to another park for some more hanami with some more friends, this time alcohol free, for me anyway. Here, we played ultimate Frisbee, although, to be fair, there was nothing ultimate about what we were playing, it was quite pathetic really. Then we met some new foreigners and played Charades while doing some night hanami, which is the same as day hanami, only in the dark (for those who may be easily confused). Provided this week’s rain hasn’t destroyed all of the blossoms, I may do some more hanami this weekend, and will definitely be doing so next weekend up in Fukushima.

An American wedding in Japan

On Friday night, my friend Nate got married to his fiancé Ai. The wedding party was pretty cool, it was at a modern bar, which had a couch/bed thing (I know it has a fancy name, but I can’t for the life of me think what it is), and a stream that ran both inside and outside, as well as the good old Japanese all you can drink for 3 hours? I think. After that, we headed to another place for another three or four hours before heading home. All in all, it was definitely a western wedding, with nothing standing out as Japanese except for the announcements by bar staff.

Finally... Getting up to date!

Last week now, not much farther to go! Yay! So, Sarah headed off on her way to Hirosaki on Wednesday morning, and that evening was the farewell for Jen, who has gone back to Canada. First we went to a Chinese restaurant, because that’s what we eat in Japan, Chinese food. After a couple of hours there, it was time for karaoke, but not before I spent half an hour trying to find an open petrol station! Karaoke was great, and quite affordable really. We were there for 5 hours, and it only cost 1,350 yen. After this, we headed to another restaurant, and eventually got home at about 6am, the first time I’d been up that long since I was about 16!

A visit from an old flattie

The other person to visit me was Sarah, who’s now up in Hirosaki on exchange. Sarah arrived about 5 days before Spring Vacation started. She came to school for a day on a Friday, and joined me in two classes. The kids were so excited that I’m pretty sure a couple of them at least wet themselves. It had been a big week for some of them. I forced a few to talk to my sister on the phone, and then meeting another living, breathing foreigner. Oh the excitement! Then it was time to introduce Sarah to the friends, and what better way to do so that all you can drink at an izakaya (Japanese bar) for a few hours, then all you can drink karaoke for a few more? That’s right, nothing’s better. Well, almost nothing anyways. I finished school on the Monday, then we did a few things around town, including visiting Oya, a nearby town which has the oldest remains of civilisation or something in Japan. It was pretty cool, even though I don’t remember what it was famous for. There were many Buddhist statues carved into cave walls, and an 11,000 year old skeleton, and frogs! So many frogs! Sarah and I stopped counting after 7,216,318, and decided that we were nearly half way there. Big ones, small ones, yellow ones, green, orange, they were everywhere.

We also drove up to Nikko, hoping to see the lake the way I had back in autumn, but the chair lift was out of order, it was snowing, and we didn’t feel like hiking up to the top. So we went to see Kegon falls and the shrines before heading home. The next weekend, we went to Tokyo. We met Sarah’s friend Juri, who took us around Harajuku, Shinjuku, and Shibuya, then met Jen, a Canadian from Utsunomiya, with friends of hers from all over at a very upmarket nineteenth century styled bar called Elephant. After a few hours at the bar, we headed to “Womb” a club, were we would meet up with Liz and her friends. The club wasn’t bad I guess… It wasn’t amazing either though. It had a 4000 yen entry fee, there were at least 3.5 million people packed into it, and 175ml bottles of water started out at 500 yen a piece, so I’m pretty sure that it’s the kind of club I only needed to visit once. We were supposed to go and do hanami (cherry blossom viewing) on the Sunday, but the weather wasn’t the best, so we just came back to Utsunomiya.

A visit from an old friend

During my time at Kunimoto, I was visited by two people that came to Japan with me in 2001. Kelvin arrived in Japan in December, and worked near Nagano for a couple of months, before coming to Utsunomiya for two weeks in February. It was awesome to catch up with him, as we both recognised the same changes around the city, most notably the name of the main shrine in the centre of town that we used to use as a meeting point. When we were here before, it was called “Futaarasan”, but has since changed to “Futaarayama”. It’s still spelt the same with the Chinese characters, but is said differently. Apparently this happens every now and again. Also, while Kelvin was here, we went on a trip to Mt Fuji. We left Utsunomiya at 5am, and stopped first at a cherry blossom festival in Izu, near where Liz lives. There were maybe five trees in bloom, as we were about a month early. Mt Fuji looked cool though, we stayed at a Japanese lodge for the night, and got up and watched the sunrise over Fuji. I, being the genius that I am, left my camera locked in the bus, so missed out on a couple of awesome photos. But it was great fun. There was a lot of snow, and I even saw my first frozen lake.

Speaking of Snow
We had a fair amount of the white stuff this year, but sadly, unlike Dunedin, everyone keeps working when it snows here. People don’t like driving, but they are still expected at work and school. Both times we had particularly heavy snowfalls, it lingered around for about a week afterwards, and made it a challenge to bring my scooter into it’s parking pace. It has finally started to warm up here though, which is always good.

The Good School

A while has passed since I updated this thing. A whole school term, in fact. I had spend the last term at Kunimoto JHS, and am now back at Takaragi, the “bad” school. Takaragi really isn’t that bad, as I have mentioned before, but Kunimoto was absolute perfection. The children sat quietly and listened to me. When I asked them to speak, they spoke, to write, they wrote, and to stop, they stopped. Most of them actually understood the instructions I gave them too, which was good, and at least three students were able to have a conversation with me that extended past the day, date and weather. Teachers were also great, I made friends with not only the English teachers, but others too, particularly with one of the Japanese teachers, who helped me out a lot when I was studying.

I saw several festivals there too, including a job fair, where students went out and did all sorts of odd jobs – at the sports park, convenience stores, police, hospital, even the zoo. Also the graduation ceremony, the last ceremony for the third graders. At least eighty percent of the school was in tears at the end of the ceremony, and not all were students. When I came here in 2002, I met an ALT who said he couldn’t believe the relationships students had with their teachers, and now I see what he meant. At Kunimoto, they had a system where a teacher would start with the first year students one year, and teach them right through until they were in third year, so the students didn’t have to deal with different teaching methods. This worked quite well, and also created really good relationships between student and teacher. Also, another thing that’s different here, is that if any child gets in trouble for something outside of school, and is in trouble with the police, they often call the student’s homeroom teacher before they call the parents, and teachers try to deal with it. Kunimoto, of course, doesn’t have any problems like this.

The only problem was it’s distance from my house, but this was only temporary. I fixed this problem by buying a scooter, thinking that this was a brilliant idea. It was a good idea, in that it reduced my trip to school to 15 minutes, but since it was smack bang in the middle of winter, I would often arrive at school near frost-bitten, despite wearing thick gloves every day. Also, I was surprised to learn, and a bit slow to learn, too, that the speed limit for scooters isn’t 50km/h like it is with everyone else, but 30km/h, and that scooters aren’t much fun to drive through snow, so I eventually upgraded to a car, much better, and slightly less scary. Tochigi is renowned for being the most dangerous prefecture to drive in, with the most road fatalities in Japan. Couple that with the fact that Utsunomiya has like the highest ratio of cars to people in the world. So not only am I driving amongst the worst drivers in the country, but there are also more of them.

Scary thought that.