Tired Mii...

Christ it has been a busy week and a half. I thought that Christmas in schools is supposed to be all making Christmas cards and dossing, but apparently not in my school. I have been running around like a 5 year old on skittles, never stopping, occasionally clunking into things, not actually getting anything done. But the countdown is on: three more days of class then i am out of here for a week or so, destined for Hong Kong and all the food it has to offer.

So what with the busyness, the extended hangover from last Saturday's AJET Christmas party (it started with beer, it graduated to tequila, it ended in a big fuck off mess...), the arrival of an ex-exchange student to stay with us, the abrupt breakage of our gas supply (no cooking, no hot water, no life), and the addition of our new wii to the family (yes we finally got one. hurray!!!), i have barely sat down to answer emails all week. the wii is an especially demanding mistress. so far myself and amir have made Mii's (that'd be the little characters that play the games on screen) of ourselves, we've got our friends to make their own likenesses, and now we're moving on to pastures greener by making Mii's of famous people. So far, our Hall of Fame consists of Hitler, Einstein, Gandhi, Orson Welles, Conan O'Brien, Monica Belucci, Condoleezza Rice (complete with gap in teeth), George W. Bush, and some others that i have forgotten. what we really want to do, though, is make one of Mother Teresa, so we can have a Mother T vs. Gandhi face-off, but technology has thusfar eluded us on that count. On a related note, if anyone can think of a person interesting enough to become part of our Mii hall of fame, don't be shy, gimme suggestions.

right, this one is staying short and sweet, as i have a gas supply to fix. cos this washing self with a bowl of microwaved water is getting oooooooold....

From the mouths of adolescents...

My kiddies all have tests this week, so i have no classes to teach. Which is great cos i get to have a nice easy week of dossing, freezing, and marking homework journals and tests. The homework journals belong to my first years which, since i teach senior high, means that they are all 16 years old. Some of the kids write great stuff (one of them wrote a great piece on saving the environment and preserving the Great Barrier Reef a while back). Some of them write utter crap (quote: 'i rove music, do you liking too?'). And then there are some people who write as if they are 6 years old. I just came across this one today, and it is worrying:

"I want to go to America as I want to meet Elmo, cookiemonster and other Sesame Street characters."

Now, i don't know how quickly any of you matured as you were growing up, but did any of you think that Sesame Street was real and that you could actually go to a real live street in America called Sesame Street and meet Elmo when you were sixteen????? How is this girl unable to separate puppetry from reality? Of course, i should have realised that she had a screw loose when i read the first part of her entry that read: "America is the middle of the world." So she must watch and believe that other institution of the make believe on tv, Fox News (har har har!!!).

All the nerds in the house say Nyeeeeeeeehhh!

Everyone that I've met over here has been a closet nerd in some way shape or form. Obsessive readers, book binders, mask collectors, internet bunnies, cosplayers, manga addicts, theatre fetishists, hippy human rights (currently not so) activists, comic book collectors: god bless us, but we're secretly one step away from putting on some broken Get Carter glasses and orthopedic shoes and developing acute sinus problems. And Japan really is the place to allow the nerd in you to run free. So, since arriving here in August, I have spent my time geeking out in Tokyo as often as I can, flitting between the likes of Akihabara (Tokyo's electronic city) and Harajuku Bridge. But today, on this chilly Monday evening, I have come to the conclusion that nerding is really, really bad for my health. Because i am a broken woman after this weekend. And it's all because of the Wii.

For those of you who have no idea what i'm on about, the Wii is Nintendo's new games console, the main selling point of which is that you can use the controller (or Wiimote) by moving it in order to play your games. So, if you're playing Wii Snooker, you hold the controller like an actual snooker cue and pot the ball like you would if you were playing real snooker (in my case, with immense difficulty...). Maybe i'm not explaining it so well, but it is a GENIUS idea. So this weekend saw the launch of the Wii in Japan, possibly the most games obsessed country in the world. And, true to form, amir decided that he wanted to buy one and check out the launch buzz around the place, so we decided to head to Tokyo to join the masses of gamers who were queuing up to get their hands on this marvel of modern technology.

The trip meant an early start, so we kipped for a few hours on Friday evening and got up at 1.30am to get the 3am train, coccooned in about 8 layers of clothing. The cycle to the train station was surreal as hell, because Numazu (the town i live in) was completely dead, apart from some crazy 80s saxophone and electric guitar version of Jingle Bells blasting eerily out of one of the shops near the station.

Tokyo was another story. Even though it was 5am, it was busy like rush hour. Salarymen in suits and insane teenage girls in shorts and knee boots journeyed to wherever the hell they were going, while i sat hating the world for making me be awake at this ungodly hour.

Needless to say i was angry at the world for being awake so early...

But nothing prepared us for the queues of THOUSANDS of people, waiting for the Wii at every electronics store in Shinjuku. We got to the massive Bic Camera in Shinjuku first at 5.40am. They weren't letting anyone else join the queue (later news reports informed us that they stopped letting people join that queue at ... wait for it... 5.40am, when the queue reached 4,000 people! Gutted!). Same at Yodobashi camera, same everywhere. The only place we came across that had a queue we could join was outside Sakuraya, and it was mental.

These poor souls were the ones standing behind us. The queue in front rounded three corners and went under a bridge.

The only ray of hope was the fact that the middle of the queue was comprised mostly of homeless people sleeping. In a nutshell, we stood for hours, watched the sun come up, saw a homeless guy drop his keks and take a dump on the street then sweep it up with a bockety sweeping brush that he was carrying around, and were finally politely told to fuck off by the Sakuraya people at 8.30 cos they were all sold out of Wiis. As we walked away we noticed that all the homeless people were still standing there, with tickets in their hands. BECAUSE SOME TOTAL BASTARDS HAD PAID THEM OFF TO STAND IN LINE FOR THEM WHILE THEY SAT IN STARBUCKS DRINKING FRAPPUCCINOS AND LAUGHING AT THE POOR FECKERS STANDING OUTSIDE. amir tells me that this happens at every launch, but it doesn't make me despise these particular fuckers any less.

Long story short, we put our names down in, and lost, a Wii lottery that was being held from 9-11am in Shinjuku, legged it to Akihabara where amir ended up third in line to the last 2 Wii's in all of Tokyo. or at least in that shop. By this point, we were experiencing a sensation close to jet-lag mixed with a hangover. So we (wii?) called it a day and accepted defeat. Later, when we got home, we learned that people had started queuing from Friday morning (and it didn't even go on sale till Saturday), so we were fecked from the start. Bollocks. Not a totally wasted trip though, because we went to the Dali exhibition for a few hours (i have a rant in me about that but it'll have to wait) and stumbled across an Irish pub called Lansdowne Road which we found open, empty and with all the lights turned off except for the bathroom.

Tempted to pour ourselves a pint and leave the money on the counter, but concerned that this pub had just fallen victim to a yakuza style slaying-fest with the dead owner hanging out the back with the beer kegs, we went upstairs to check next door when it would be open and were told that it was closed Saturdays. So i don't know for the life of me what the owner was thinkin leaving the place wide open. Only in Japan...

Oré, Oré, Oré, Oré!!

Well folks, I have been meaning to start this blog for a while now, if only to remind myself of all the random things that I have experienced since moving to Numazu, Japan, and I figured that today was as good a day as any. Because today is the first day that I came into work with a stinking hangover. Yes, after FOUR MONTHS of responsibly ensuring that I am sober and in good shape to teach English to my lovely high school kids, I have finally stumbled in to work with a bottle of the Japanese equivalent of Lucozade (it’s called Pocari Sweat – dodgy name I know), a nasty headache, and a hatred for all living things. I had forgotten what it felt like to have to work through a hangover – now I wish I hadn’t reminded myself. Anyway, in the spirit of alcoholic excess and irresponsible conduct in general, I have decided to spend the day doing as little as possible. Cue: my first blog entry.

The reason for my disheveled appearance and barely functioning brain is Shimizu S-Pulse. They’re a soccer (or football to all English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh people) team in Japan’s J-League, and hail from Shimizu in Shizuoka, the prefecture that I live in. I had been meaning to go to see them play for a while now with the other foreigners who are hardcore fans, but for some reason or other I always had something else to do on the days of their home games. But not yesterday, oh no. Yesterday was Labour Thanksgiving Day, which meant no school, no work, no worries. We headed out to Shimizu pretty early to get half decent seats at the stadium, and ended up sitting next to a massive array of mental S-Pulse fans. We had only got there a few minutes when some guy behind us tapped me on the shoulder, pointed to a big pile of cloth on the ground and shouted ‘Assist! Assist!’ over and over again. From the general gestures we got the gist that he wanted us to help haul this cloth monstrosity down over the rest of the crowd every time S-Pulse scored. Which they did – 4 times!!! Twas a magic game, and even though I spilled half my beer over the big banner (was gutted that I had wasted the grog, and mortified that the Japanese owner of said banner might now hate me and all foreigners like me, but no matter…), everyone stayed in high spirits and the banner owners stayed friends with us.

To be honest, I think they were just really excited to see gaijin (that’s ‘foreigners’ in Japanese) supporting a J-team. Some of the group I was with even became minor celebrities, with Jake the Amazing Strawberry Blonde Wonderboy being worshipped by the people sitting next to us (and being given a box of hard-boiled eggs to share with the rest of us. Apparently if you’re a fan of S-Pulse and you don’t eat a hard boiled egg just before the match, S-Pulse will lose. Random…) The match was fantastic anyway, and S-Pulse won 4-3, so we celebrated by going for yakitori (that’s chicken on a stick to all the non-Japanese speakers out there) and continuing to drink ourselves stupid in a bar called the Hippy Shake. The owner, whose name I think is Taka, is a bit of a legend and is always lovely and accommodating to us gaijin drinkers after the matches. If you’re ever in Shimizu, go have a beer and make friends with him. The drink continued to flow, anyway, and I even managed to teach the barman how to construct a good White Russian. All in all, not a bad way to spend a Thursday.

Emily, Sean, Jake, me, Aine, Sarah, Melissa and Katie enjoying a fine day of family fun at the S-Pulse match. Excuse the peace sign, but I live in Japan, I do it almost compulsively for all photos now...

And I learned some useful insights into Japanese culture and The Way of the World while I was at the footie, so I guess I’ll have to share my wisdom with you. So, in no particular order of importance or interest, here goes:

1: Japanese soccer fans do not behave the same way as gaijin soccer fans. Especially not Irish and British ones anyway. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be as much aggression in the way the supporters act both during and after the games. Everyone just seemed so smiley and happy. Now, granted, we won the match at home so of course the atmosphere was going to be pretty positive, and last week when the ref made some really bad decisions against S-Pulse at home the police had to be called to escort him off the pitch cos the crowd got so hostile. But from what I hear there was no trouble in the end – no tearing up of seats, no fights in the street between team supporters, no drunken rioting. They just went home after the game. Very weird.

2: Team support at Japanese footie matches is co-ordinated. And I don’t just mean they can manage a few verses of You’ll Never Walk Alone without falling to pieces. Each team and its supporters have cheerleaders at the matches to conduct and direct the cheering. Now, a few things to note before you conjure up images in your mind of overly bubbly blonde American girls with short skirts and pom-poms. Firstly, the cheerleaders are Japanese so the odds of them having blonde hair are minimal. Secondly, and most importantly, cheerleading in Japan is done by men. It is called ouendan and usually involves a group of men dressed in black suits with armbands (causing them to look like tiny Japanese Nazis) shouting chants. In the school that I work in, there is an ouendan group, with one kid from each homeroom making up the membership. They walk around like some kind of militia in the school and the younger ones in the group have to greet the more senior members by bowing and shouting “konnichiwa!” at them in their most war-like voice in the corridors. Except that it doesn’t sound like konnichiwa, it sounds like “chwa!!!” But I digress. So at the footie match there was nothing as elaborate as uniformed kiddies shouting death chants. Instead, normally dressed men stood at the bottom of each terrace, literally conducting the audience. They would show us when to raise our arms, when to clap, which chants to sing, and when to stop in unison, in a bid to terrify the opposition with our sheer force of co-ordination. The best thing about being an S-Pulse fan is that there are a few Brazilian team members, so most of our chants are half in Portuguese and the songs have a samba rhythm to them. This is, of course, aided greatly by some of the cheerleader guys who play big fuck off drums to keep us all in time. All in all, I wasn’t sure whether I was at a football match or at Carnivale. Either way, it was a great laugh. And in case you're wondering, yes, they do say "Oré" instead of "Olé" when they're chanting. Bloody marvellous.

3: If I go to the toilet during play, the other team will score. It happened twice, once in the first half and once in the second. I had to go cos the call of nature was too strong after flatlining 4 pints of Sapporo in the first 35 minutes of play, but after seeing the destructive power that my dunny-hopping has, I’m holdin it in till half time from now on. Seriously though lads, both fecking times! What are the odds of that???

Anyway, if you're still reading, your stamina is commendable. Because it is now Saturday and this has turned into a really long and rambly post. I'll try to keep it shorter and sweeter next time. If I manage to be organised enough to write another one. Who knows.