Finally the Christmas holidays are here! My last lesson of the year was a voice lesson with two of our most insufferable students. It was forty minutes of dreadful, stilted conversation and stifled yawns. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
Now I’m out, and I’m going to sleep for days. Then I’m going to wake up and go to Hawaii.
Various parties have been going on around the Christmas season, with one apparently resulting in a chip pan fire. Somebody was trying to deep fry potatoes under a grill if you can believe it.
Ai and myself went out to a jazz place in a hotel ostentatiously named The Cerulean Tower, to see a singer-songwriter called Suzuki Yasuhiro. We sat at a little round table amongst other little round tables, and ate a pretty incredible meal before the show. I had foie gras with a raising puree. The closest I can get to describing it accurately is “meat ice cream” without the negative connotations. Not bad at all. Probably resembled my own liver at the end of the night.
You can probably see from the picture that it’s pissing it down in Tokyo today, and as I type there is a huge storm brewing outside, complete with light and sound. Interestingly, kind of, it seems to be semi-common in Japan to believe that thunder is in some way linked to volcanoes. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work.
Well I hope the rain keeps up, because then I have an excuse to do sod all tomorrow.
The party season is getting into full swing in Tokyo, as can be seen from the steady proliferation of drunkards crashing on train station benches. Students are coming in to work with hangovers. The coloured leaves have left the trees and now everybody is settling into the long, cold, dry winter. Hibernation in Izakayas has begun and the imbibing of atsukan (hot sake) takes the place of beer or hapochu (fake beer made from beans). Potential differences build up as people shuffle about in their slippers in the cold, brittle air and are discharged when they touch door handles or sink taps.
It gets harder and harder to get out of bed every day. Our particular bathroom is not a moulded plastic cubicle like most Tokyo bathrooms. It is a boxy outhouse of tiles and stainless steel, more in line with eastern European design than Japanese. We have to build up a head of steam and close the window just to make it bearable, and that takes about ten minutes. The water pressure and shower head combine to deliver a delicate sprinkling perfect for moistening the back of a postage stamp. So it’s much easier to stay in bed in winter, since the thought of that ordeal is so distressing.
For Japanese people Christmas means buying your girlfriend something and going drinking with the boss (more than usual). It’s all about the Yen for the shopping centres around Tokyo. To workers it also means a one month Christmas bonus. Almost all companies in Japan give a one month bonus in Christmas and one in summer. Except, of course, Nova.
One more thing: I am being trained to teach Chibiko. My co-worker and I have managed to stay under the training radar for a while, but due to conspiring circumstances, not the least of which are a new batch of Assistant Trainers, I now must be trained or risk the wrath of my superiors’ infamous and well-practiced Condescending Disappointment (used extensively when offering overtime). CV builders get fifty quid extra a month to deal with things like scheduling problems or people calling in sick, and to learn the full catalogue of Condescending Techniques. They also forfeit some of the their entitlement to engage office banter, particularly about students or lessons.
Particular prescribed lesson plans are not ‘rubbish’, the simply haven’t been sufficiently personalised to meet the needs of the students. Phrases like “all Zone E lessons are crap” are not answered with mumbles of agreement. Instead the reply is “well, choose a bad lesson and alter it to make it your own”. I know that is what I have to do and that is what I will do. But it’s like boys listening to girls’ problems, and making the mistake of offering them a solution, when all the girls really want is sympathy. All around the office you can hear accurate and descriptive profanities being rebuffed with mawkishly nauseating euphemisms.
And now there are more ATs than normal teachers. They had a big AT meeting in Shinjuku and without the trainers the branches were almost empty. So come next month or so I will be on my knees in Kids classes pandering to the parents’ belief that sitting their baby in front of a prancing foreigner for forty minutes every week will eventually get them into Tokyo University. Jump like a kangeroo, jump, jump, jump. Maybe I will.
Ai finally got out of hospital yesterday, after persuading the doctor to let her go. In a dramatic U-turn the doctor has allowed Ai to leave the hospital, under the condition that she is really careful; that means no shoulder-barging people in crowded train stations and absolutely no arm-wrestling, and only one slam dunk per week.So that’s the end of the hospital saga, and everything is almost back to normal – I am working back in Oizumi for the first time in three weeks which will be weird. It gets me away from Iruma and a certain pain in the arse who works there and likes to give the teachers room a run down of every one of his or her lessons.
It's getting colder here every day, and drier. I have bogies like tennis balls and my throat feels scraped out. I think I got something from Nick, because last week I lost my voice and had to call in sick.
I had my end of year evaluation which went well – I had one of my lessons observed by a trainer and she talked to me for about forty minutes and during that forty minutes I have to remember and regurgitate as many Nova bullshitisms as possible. I’m going to get ‘good’ or ‘very good’ in most areas, except attendance. In a Japanese company “poor attendance” means you called in sick or were late once in a decade. So that may affect my asking for another contract, but we will see.
If I don’t get another contract I could try looking for a less degrading job – like a position in the zoo getting rogered by sea lions for public amusement. It’s not that bad, but I definitely need to look for something a little more rewarding.
Speaking of degradation: I got on the train the other day and sat down between a man and a woman. I underestimated my width by about half a foot and found myself wedged uncomfortably between them. The man had no space beside him so he couldn’t move. The woman on my right had plenty of room, but was so absorbed in her mobile phone that she didn’t budge up. The man fussed and fumed and finally stood up in disgust and stood next to the door. The woman was completely oblivious. I felt like taking her phone and feeding it to her. It was a weird situation.
On a different note me and Ai have booked our tickets to Hawaii for new year. We will actually be in the air for the bells, which is a first for most people. Before we go to Hawaii we will go snowboarding; Needless to say Ai will go to an onsen (hot spa) while I snowboard. Nick is going back to Australia for New Year, to endure temperatures on the other end of the scale and throw another shrimp on the barbie and to re-aquaint himself with his estranged pet koala, which Australians are all forced to adopt from birth.
Ai is now up and about, albeit still in her hospital room. Her arm is in a sling across her front now, which must be kind of like wearing half a straight jacket. This is the second stage in which she must stop herself from going mad looking at the same four walls everyday as opposed to the same ceiling. In a few days she will begin her rehabilitation which could last up to one year. Her arm muscles obviously haven’t been used in a long time so it’s going to be a painful process.
To keep her sane the doctors allowed her to go home for one night. At Ai’s request her mother drove us to a steak house, and then home, where she (her mother) cleaned the apartment – it hadn’t been used in a couple of weeks and needed some air. In the shower there is a bowl which had been full of water for that length of time, and in the water small black wriggly things were floating. They must have literally grown from bacteria.
So that’s about it. I’ve been seeing her almost every day, and I’ve had some of my shifts swapped about in order to visit her in hospital, so I can usually see her in the evenings. I just had five days in a row off, which was originally for Guam. I think we might get away somewhere in the Christmas holiday. I don’t actually know when my Christmas holiday is going to be yet as Nova haven’t told us – don’t even get me going on that one.
You may have noticed I have changed my website address again – sorry. It’s JunkenPoi.com now. Which roughly means “rock, paper, scissors”. I wanted something Japanese and I didn’t want to use my name. Junken is used in Japan to a surprising degree, and is almost a kind of past time. Not a very challenging one, but they do have several hundred different ways of playing the game – or rather several hundred different rhymes to say when they shake their fists before revealing their hand. They don't really do heads or tails here, but if they did there would be a special thing to chant while they did it.
Hey folks. As you know recently Ai fell on an indoor ski slope and broke her shoulder. The cup shaped thing that holds the ball joint in place is broken. The place where her collar bone connects to her shoulder is snapped I think. She fell on it in a way that meant the broken ends were separated and didn’t go back to their original positions. This means that her arm is to be held up in a brace for a couple of weeks, and she will be in hospital for maybe four weeks.A lot of trouble for a little fall on a fake ski slope, but it is a lesson in how everything can change in one moment; she is a choreographer, but she won’t be able to dance for almost two years until she has completed rehabilitation. My last photo of her before the accident is one of her swinging from the hand loops on an empty train. Won’t be doing much of that for a while.
The hospital is old and small, reflecting the difference between public establishments in Japan and Europe in general – in Britain we have vast hospitals with state-of-the-art equipment and absolutely no nurses or doctors to staff them; in Japan the hospitals may be pretty crappy looking but in the daytime at least they are relatively packed with staff.
Ai is stuck in one position for weeks and weeks, so obviously she is having her ups and downs. She expressed a desire to do something other than dance before the accident and now it is a kind of forced opportunity to do just that. She doesn't know what she wants to do but she has time to think about it, and I know that whatever she does she will do it wholeheartedly. She just has to get through these weeks which are made worse by constant pain.
Just today she had to have her bone reset because it was setting in a bad position. A troop of nurses and two doctors came into her room and told her what they were going to do. There was no advance warning other than a few minutes. Her mother was advised to go to another part of the hospital.
The nurses held her down and the two doctors literally, and I do mean literally, broke her shoulder a second time, without anaesthetic.
It struck Ai as outrageous bad luck that the bone had reset awkwardly, and unfortunate that they hadn’t given her anaesthetic and that it hurt quite as much as you imagine it would. It struck me as barbaric. The docs said she was on sleeping pills so they couldn’t give her anaesthetic. I would have thought they would get around that conundrum by foregoing the pills for a day or two and then have a crack at it with anaesthetic. If anybody has heard of bones being reset without painkillers let me know.
I have put pictures up on Flickr but you won’t be able to see all of them; I obviously don’t want all the pictures of her in hospital viewable to anyone in the public so I have marked them as “friends and family only”. That means only people with a Flickr account and my permission can see them (which include my mates here). Sorry! You can get a Flickr account for free at www.flickr.com.
