Melon Time

Brother Phil pointed out in a comment that my most recent post was from quite a while back and about drinking a lot of beer in one sitting. I realize this may have raised some issues about my state, but rest assured that rumors that I was kidnapped and taken to Kyushuu to work on a melon farm were highly exaggerated. The melon farm was in Sendai.

At any rate, I am alive an well now. And though it appears to be Friday night, it is still a "school night," as we have a day-long seminar for the second-year international course students tomorrow. Sunday will be doubly good as it represents my only weekend day as well as the day my new couch/bed thing will arrive by delivery.

I need to clean up because I'm hosting overnighters tonight, so I must go. Farewell.

Keep eating melons. It keeps people employed!

All one can drink

I shall try not to think too much about the delicious Thanksgiving meals currently being planned by various wings of my family back home. I'll just stay safely wrapped inside my Japan bubble, where the commonly used household cooking devices are not even close to big enough to host a turkey for an afternoon.

Oh, and the pie.

But no -- I must not focus on the pie, in all its wonderful varieties. No, it's just another week in Ise. Tonight I'll be heading down the street to the Ise Brewery for a twice-monthly tradition. For 1,000 yen (less than $10) per person, you get all you can drink on quality beers on tap, some which are made in the house. This is not your normal super-light (and super dry) Japanese beer, which I certainly don't mind. This is quality black beers, brown beers, bitter beers, amber beers. And some wildcards which are best kept in the "sampler" size ... I'm talking about the green tea beer, here, mainly. Not to be trusted.

This place is just a dash away from my house, just before the 100 yen shop and the drug store. Four or five or six of us meet there for the twice-a-month all-you-can-drink festivities, and if we are not satisfied with the night by the 11 p.m. closing time, we usually meander (stumble?) over to my apartment and try not to piss off the mean downstairs neighbor as we push through to 1 a.m. All this on a school night (for most of us). Fortunately this is just a couple times a month at most. But I feel fortunate to live so close to Ise's best source of good quality beer.

Then on Thursday I will teach only two lessons before a three-day-weekend. Nothing special planned at the moment so maybe I'll stay local and aim to save money right after payday instead of right before.

Happy birthday wishes go out to my father, Bryan, back in Oregon. Happy holidays wishes go to all of my friends and family. All I ask in return is that you simply think of me this holiday season. Also, fax me some gravy.

Budgeted In

Even though I had a chance to more than double my buy in, I played it safe -- that is, I didn't play at all. Rather than forking over the 2000 yen buy-in plus transportation plus food and drinks, I stayed home on Saturday, cooking my own dinner, etc., in a end-of-pay-period conservation drive.

Sunday was not much different. I rode around on the bike for a bit, and later went to the grocery store to sustain my higher rate of eating in. We do get paid on Wednesday, though I should increase my eating in even during normal times (it does not take a financial expert to realize that I wouldn't be broke if I worked a little harder on balance).

Anyway, enough of that nonsense ...

We're entering another busy phase at work. We are in the planning stages for a day-long English seminar for our second-year students set for Dec. 1. The hardest part so far has been recruiting other ALTs to come help ... we offer them about $30 for a days work but it's on a Saturday so we've gotten a lot of "maybes" (JETs tend to be very active on their weekends ... I'm not sure where they get their cash).

Meanwhile, one of the members of the English Club is preparing to participate in a regional speech contest after qualifying at the prefectural level. If she wins again she'll go on to the national competition. Starting tomorrow we'll be working with her after school.

Speaking of the English Club, we're suppose to plan a party with Thanksgiving as the theme. Any ideas? Not sure how practical it would be to try to ... you know ... cook a turkey. What else could we do? The floor is open.

Poker Face

The week is fading into weekendery here in Japan, with only a couple more hours of work on the slate. Tonight, Friday, we will be attending a farewell party for two student teachers who have been here for two weeks. Both are Yamasho graduates and both now attend a university in Nagoya. One plans to go on to a career as a teacher. At any rate, it has been fun to have them around. Sam and I had lunch with them last Sunday and strolled around the historic shopping district near the Grand Shrine.

On Saturday night I will join a charity Texas Hold 'Em tournament in Matsusaka. The entrance fee is a little less than $20 and the potential winnings are probably near $100. There will surely be lots of competition so I'm counting on the cards to carry me. Also some bluffing, perhaps. I cannot reveal my strategy in this public forum.

That leads to Sunday which I currently plan to spend doing nothing and spending no money. Even though I didn't buy a $450 camera this month, the bank account seems to have shed yen faster than any previous month in Japan. So until the 21st I'm in conservation mode, which includes a higher frequency of eating in and a lower frequency of going for a drink at Nanaimo.

In about 10 minutes I'll head to my final lesson of the week. Then I somehow kill an hour before I am released into the wild.

A Couch Crisis

I officially need a couch or something.

The situation is this: I have hardly any furniture. In the "main room" you will find a small bookshelf, a large shelf for dishes and other miscellaneous items, a "normal" size table, two "normal" size chairs, and a low table. That's it. No recliner, no couch, nothing to sit in while enjoying, for example, television, or a book or an impromptu nap.

The bedroom isn't much better. It features a twin small bookshelf which actually stores clothes, a tiny bedstand, a tiny ironing board, and two futons, one stacked on the other, representing my bed.

To an extent, this is the Japanese style ... people often sit on the floor, or on thin mats, when having meals together around the low table. Futon mats are your basic bed setup. But go to most Japanese homes today and you'll find couches or recliners.

So I need to do some exploring. Can I afford a couch? Or a maybe a sort-of-couch-that-folds-into-a-futon? And how I can I get it home? Do they deliver? Is that crazy expensive? Will I need to bring a a real life Japanese person along to set up this alleged delivery service? Can I find a good deal at a second-hand store? Where ARE the second-hand stores around here, anyway?

Well, at least I've identified the questions.

Which far-flung country are YOU traveling to?

Many JETs go back home at Christmas. Others travel to exotic or interesting or cheap-to-travel-to Asian countries. Others, of course, stay in Japan and travel domestically.

I flirted with going home for Christmas, which would certainly be nice, but airfare was through the roof when I started looking.

There's a lot of pressure to have exciting plans for the winter holiday, which spans about two weeks. The pressure comes from other JETs or people at school. "Have you made plans for winter break yet?" they'll say knowingly. "You better book now! Flights are filling up!"

Well, even though we JETs get paid fairly decently, I don't have loads of spare cash on hand to just "book now" for some big trip to Thailand or Cambodia or Islamabad. So for the last few weeks I've been deflecting such questions with half-answers fit for the White House press secretary.

"I'm looking into some possible options."

"I may go home, but it's too early to tell."

"This is really up to the American people to decide."

And so on.

Mr. Suzuki, the principal at my school, seemed shocked, in a muted way, when he heard I wasn't going abroad. Since I wasn't going home or to Vietnam or something, he suggested that I head to Japan's Great White North -- Hokkaido.

That sounded fun, but also pretty expensive and also requiring fast action.

I hedged.

"That would be really fun," I offered. "I'd really like to go there."

And I would, no joke, really like to go there. Some day I will. But I managed to put off travel planning so long even Hokkaido is now in the "maybe next year" category.

Then came today, when I chatted with a Tokyo friend about the holiday break. I ended up deciding to go to Tokyo from Dec. 23 until Dec. 26. The plan is to visit various Tokyo friends whenever they have free time.

At least one friend will be available for nearly all of my time there, so that's good to know. Others will likely be available to meet up for an evening or a lunch or a drink.

I'll travel by overnight bus, saving loads since I'm avoiding the bullet train. The hotel is booked via a discount Web site that'll save me about $100 on my three nights. I'll be in Tokyo at Christmas, and back in Ise on New Year's. Ise is a major New Year's magnet, since it's home to the holiest of holy Shinto shrines, the Ise Grand Shrine.

I'll spend New Year's with whatever members of the local crew aren't off on exciting trips which they certainly booked in, roughly, 1992.

And the bunny goes bust

As I settle into my third month in Japan on the JET Program, thousands of other foreigners in Japan are facing eviction from their apartments, searching for new jobs and going day-to-day unsure about from where they might get their next meal.

This is because Nova, Japan's largest English conversation school and the nation's largest employer of foreigners, has gone belly up after months of scandal that highlighted years of shady business practices ... that short-changed students and treated instructors and domestic staffers like, well, bunny crap.

The story is still making headlines. Here's the UK's Independent from the Nov. 5 edition:

In a country teeming with cute cartoon characters, few are cuter or better known than the Nova bunny. The pink mascot stood in the doorways of language schools across Japan, promising a short educational encounter with an exotic foreigner. But now, thousands of teachers and students have found that the bunny bites, hard.

The collapse of Nova, Japan's biggest employer of foreigners, has left 4,000 teachers – including more than 900 from the UK – stranded without work, money and, in some cases, a place to live. "There are people who don't know where their next meal is coming from," said Bob Tench, an official with Nova's union. "It's very distressing."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3129679.ece

Nova started back in the early '80s, when Japan was booming and so too was English. Native speakers of the world's language to come to Japan and make $100 an hour, says this take in the Christian Science Monitor.

But in recent years, the demand for English has been dropping. Wages for foreign teachers have fallen as more candidates put in for positions. (The JET Program, meanwhile, hasn't changed its flat-rate salary since it started more than 20 years ago ... it's still a decent salary but maybe the program is due for a raise?)

When I was doing my "what if I went to Japan and taught English" research on the Web, I found mostly bad reviews for Nova from past and present instructors. Some of the complaints were common to all English conversation schools -- the emphasis is on sales, they only want you for short periods, little chance for promotion, little valuable work experience. But Nova had the worst deal, said the consensus. They sometimes shoved three instructors into one apartment and made them all pay full price. (They also paid the rent directly, deducting from salaries, so when they went bush they also forced their screwed-over teachers to deal with angry landlords.)

In recent months, more and more complaints from students came to the surface, which got more attention in the Japanese media. Nova was signing up students for up to three years in advance for lessons. If students ever decided that they didn't like what they had paid for, Nova wouldn't offer refunds. Japan's high court squashed this practice in the summer and governing bodies imposed limits on Nova's operations. Then as October faded to black the Pink Bunny filed for bankruptcy, closing its doors across Japan and leaving students without refunds and teachers without livelihoods.

In Ise, a couple from England who had been working for Nova got out just in time and found new jobs in the area. They also traded in their Nova apartment for one just as big but for half the price. They're wise; they're lucky. One other local Nova teacher, who had just arrived this summer, left Ise last week to stay with her sister on a U.S. military base near Tokyo. She's also lucky in that she has a place to go but she would like to stay in Japan, and finding a job right now is going to be tough for anyone in the English industry.

Meanwhile, the word is that court-appointed overseers, who fired the corrupt president of the company last week, are trying to line-up a savior for the chain, somebody to re-invest, pay off debts, and give some teachers their jobs back. But it's unclear if any company is willing to scoop up the damaged goods.

And finally, enjoy this video for some backgrounds on the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad company:

Three months then?

Suddenly, and without warning, it became November. We are approaching three months in Japan, which seems like kind of a long time. But since I do expect to stay here for at least two years, and more likely three, and possibly more, it seems like I can still call myself "new."

Routines have been set. Alarm bells ring at the same time every morning. I know which room all my classes are in. I don't second-guess my route to the train station. Life is normal.

I still haven't explored everything. There's so much out there, but not so much with the free time or means of transportation.

But at home thing are normalizing. I recently moved in to the bed room, which for the summer was used only as a storage space for a mess. Since the air conditioner was in the main room, that's where I slept in the Period of Brutal Heat which will sadly return in a year.

But as the temperatures mild-ized I expanded to the bedroom. The mess, naturally, has migrated to the main room, and I'm still waiting for a free day so I can sort through the crap and finally achieve balance.

Meanwhile, this weekend marks the end of speech-contest-season, which was in full swing when we arrived. This has meant almost daily meetings of the English Speaking Society (ESS). That means working past our contractual go-home time for 4:15, usually until 5 or 5:30. It also means occasional treks to speech contests, which are strange affairs indeed. Perhaps some time I'll write about them, but for now, this posts is begging to be submitted.

Good day