BLANK Of The Day 8

Mid-skit, where I was a shopkeeper and the teacher was a shop assistant, in front of a class of 40 and a few men in suits from a super-duper important office somwhere in the back of beyong who we were demonstrating too, my teacher says 'My Father would like something to eat'...'F***' I think. We are doing a skit about shopping for souvenirs to bring home from England and he is buying something for his Father to EAT in spite of me asking him roughly a thousand times to choose READ (matching my typically British Harry Potter flashcard) or LISTEN TO (matching my typically British Beatles CD flashcard) but he chose EAT, one that I had specifically asked him not to choose as I looked at the board to see that I had a choice of his three carefully prepared flashcards as options for souvenirs to take back for his Father from England....a bowl of curry and rice, and ebi fry (a deep fried prawn) on rice, and an omuraisu (an omelette filled with rice). What the hell am I supposed to do with that??? Offer him a Japanese dish of deep-fried prawn and rice to take back to Japan on a plane as a gift?? I said, how about chocolate, choosing to ignore flashcard situation and said jokingly 'omuraisu isn't not really omiyage (souvenirs) of England'...'It's FROZEN omuraisu,' he laughs and says to a class who don't understand the word frozen. I understand frozen but I don't understand the reason he said it. A whole big, fat portion of misunderstandings and rice is my souvenir of that lesson!

Fuss Of The Day 10

Calpis, the Japanese sort of milky and very sweet drink, named after its taste of bovine urine, have made a new product called "Calpis Cream" (カルピスクリーム) to spread in a cake or on a sandwich, giving it that lovely hint of cow's piss, that had always been missing from your sandwiches until its invention. We got TWO TINY samples (sort of half a McDonald's ketchup size) for a staffroom of almost forty people! It was like sekihan in reverse...how to share two mini portions between four people. Fuss-o-rama (this was fuss number two, after the first overreaction (screaming, panting, orgasming) over the fact the new product in itself) broke out. I think it was still going on when I left to go home, but there was talk of someone bringing in some bread and trying to share it round us all tomorrow...watch this space. I'm sorry, but this was clearly someone at Calpis' marketing department having a laugh about how big a fuss they could cause in Ita-where's staffroom...FORTY people and TWO samples!!?? Evil, cow-piss-creaming bastard!

Fuss Of The Day 9

Wow! Do I have a big-fat-mama-sized fuss for you today or what? Yesterday was sekihan-gate. Sekihan is a sticky rice dish with red beans. The rice is soaked in the bean juice before it's cooked or something or nothing to turn it pink. Yesterday, there was no school lunch due to exams, meaning the kids go home early, which is enough to cause a bit of fuss anyway, so we were already in the mood for a big old overreaction.

We have bought a new rice cooker at school (another long, drawn out, fussy decision). I feel like this is a history lesson of sekihan-gate with the "Causes" and "Triggers." So...they decided to test the rice cooker (not sure why a new rice cooker wouldn't work) on exam day by making shit loads of sekihan, thereby hopefully ending both rice cooker fuss and the "what should the teachers do for lunch fuss?" simultaneously. Which I suppose it did, only to offset it with the biggest fuss I have experienced since being in Japan. The first huge box of sekihan arrived. 21 plastic boxes inside. Large plastic boxes, each one with enough sekihan to feed two people probably. Bear in mind that many staff take time off on exam day, so we are looking at about 25 staff and 21 boxes (42 portions) of sekihan. Then comes big box number two. That's 25 staff, 42 boxes and 84 portions of rice. Cue fuss. Dishing out lunch is fuss enough at the best of times. Mid-fuss, along comes big box number 3. That's right: 25 staff, 63 boxes, 126 portions of sekihan. Sekihan hysteria is breaking out. The secretary yells at the 20/25 staff who are for some reason ALL needed to give out the sekihan (I dont know why I'm criticising - I was one of them) "Still only start with one box per table, in case there's not enough for two." OK, Japan's culture might be different to many, but even here 63 boxes of rice go around 25 staff twice. Everyone is discussing how much they should eat, how many family members/neighbours/passers-by they can dish their sekihan out to and we just about settle down to there only being about 10 boxes (20 portions) left over, when, I kid you not, I yet out a yelp as BIG BOX NUMBER FOUR comes in. Keep in mind that it's the lady responsible for school lunch carting them up the stairs, so no-one can be rude, we all grin (if she can see us grinning behind the pile of sekihan boxes on our desks) and go "mmmm, loooovve sekihan, thank you!" until she leaves the room and we all burst into tears. We are now on 84 boxes, 168 portions of sekihan, and what's worse, we are down to about 18 staff as 7 others have taken holiday only for the afternoon and the selfish beggars have got away with only one box each.

It was at this point that I thought to myself...THIS is going on my blog as fuss of the f***ing year. Little did I know that it was only just beginning. I refused to take a third box of sekihan, saying that I lived alone, it wasn't fair. I've been told that it's freezable, so I have two portions eyeing me up from inside my freezer as we speak...I never want to see the stuff again, let alone eat it. ANYWAY, the fourth big box is sitting on the side being ignored and the fuss is dying down, when stupid stupid stupid me (full of one box, two portions of sekihan that I've wolfed down, because I didn't want to take 3 portions home) decide to throw myself right into the centre of the fuss. Why oh why I thought any more sekihan-related discussion, no matter how simple it would appear to be, could go down without a massive fuss, I do not know. I was thinking mid-original-fuss that we should have just rang the community centre across the road, or the town hall, or any other workplace in Ita-where the day before and mentioned that we were going to create a world's supply of sekihan and not to bother bringing lunch the following day...but that would have been too simple I suppose.

However, I thought (STUPIDLY), all is not lost. I was about to go to the Board of Education in the town hall for a meeting. I mumbled to the nurse next to me "maybe I could just take a few boxes with me to the Board of Education, seeing as I'm going anyway", thinking that it would just help to ease the problem. She said "good idea!" Let's ask the nutritionist, who had to ask the secretary, who had to ask the Deputy Head, who had to ask the Head (I'm late for my meeting already). We spent a long time discussing (all 6 of us, including the two most important people in the school (wages well spent)) who I should hand it to at the BOE, how much I should take, whether there would actually be any left over at the end of the day (!!!). I said "don't worry, don't worry, nobody's asked me for it, they aren't expecting it, it was just an idea." In face, I said that almost as many times as I'd been offered sekihan. I wanted the ground to swallow me up, even hell would be better than hearing the word sekihan again. I wish that I had never ever spoken, when will I learn??? "Do you think they want it?" chirped the head teacher. "Well WE clearly don't, the town hall has more than 18 staff in it, and we already have at least 4 portions each - the fact that I didn't want it didn't stop me being accosted with it" is what I thought. What I said was "sou desu ne." But I was in for the long haul now - I couldn't get out of it. The Head teacher wound up ringing them to warn them it was coming. (Mid-conversation by the way, another bowl of sekihan arrived, as there were no more plastic boxes). Then they remembered that I go around by bicycle. "You can't take it by bicycle!!!" The whole staff room starts wetting themselves. "Mark-chan" whimpers someone. I was like "I can." It's all in boxes, I have a basket and a backpack, I wasn't gonna take the whole 84 boxes, I was thinking about 10? "No, no, no." "muri muri (impossible)" We fussed it out for another 15 minutes (my meeting was supposed to have been over by now), and the final decision was that the poor school nurse, had to get signed out by the head teacher to make a special trip to the Board of Education just to deliver 10 boxes of sekihan that they didn't even want!! Let alone a blog post, I could write novel about this one sekihan episode.

Fuss Of The Day 8

茶毒蛾, chadokuga, which Wikipedia tells me is Tea Tussock Moth Caterpillar in English, although I'm sure you all knew that already were out and about in Ita-where a few weeks ago, and BOY, was it the talk of the town. If they get on you, you get a rash it seems. A rash in Japan, at least in my school, is often enough to get you sent home to rest (after the potentially 45-minute bike ride that is), so, you can IMAGINE the mega fuss that comes when somehow a boy gets a rash ON HIS FACE. An announcment was made in the staff room between lessons, saying that all teachers should tell students about it, and then, after a supplementary mini-fuss, it was decided that it would be better just to put an announcement over the tannoy for all students to beware of caterpillar-face related rash danger. Then, quite literally 15 minutes later, an exterminator-type man, just like the ones I've only ever seen on the films, because in the UK our biggest problem is probably woodlice or something, was in the school, spraying all of the trees. In a country where I am currently undertaking a 3-week-long discussion with no sign of ending about when/where/how/whether to throw away a virtually rotting kotatsu futon from my flat, how can these things be organised in 15 minutes??? Maybe if I told someone my kotatsu futon had given me a rash...can I cope with the fuss that would result though? Catch 22!

Random Event Of The Day 14

Whilst volunteering at an adult English conversation class in my town the Saturday before last (when I was originally asked I was told it would be mid-week...not too happy about the change in schedule there), I was given a list of "important phrases." We are going to focus on these at the start of each lesson, because if they are so important, I was told by the main teacher. We set about repeating after me, Japan's favourite learning method (there are literally about 80 of them, so it's taking half of the lesson every week it seems), starting with "hello." It's a beginners' class, but none of them are such beginners that they can't say "hello," especially as towards the end of the lesson, we have moved onto repeating a whole entire cabin crew aeroplane safety announcement after me, just in case they go abroad, the flight attendent faints, or gets stage fright, or loses her voice and one of the people in my English conversation class has to do the announcement for her. Anyway, one phrase that struck me as being particularly important, was the Japanese ハクション！　In English : achoo. Yes, I had a room full of 50+ year-old Japanese farmers repeating how to sneeze in English after me...words fail me, they really do.　

Random Event Of The Day 13

I've been eating lunch with the kids over the last couple of weeks and have taken some photos I've pinched from online of school dinners in the UK. One has an innocent little black boy in it, eating his lunch, blissfully unaware of the fact that not one, not two, but three of my students has looked at this page of 8 photos or so and immediately pointed at him and yelled "Obama!" and burst out laughing...casual racism alive and well in Japan. I asked them what they would think if a Brit thought they looked like Keisuke Honda, just because they were Japanese and all three went "Keisuke Honda's cool...yay" Point safely lost there. I have also been told that I look like Justin Bieber and Daniel Radcliffe this week (probably the only two famous young white men in Japan). My internationalisation work has clearly paid off.