March 11th Earthquake

Earthquake alarms sounded on our phones in the teachers room and I didn't think much of it because I'd had alarms before and they were only ever followed by small earthquakes.

We went outside and maybe a minute passed and the ground shook and then it shook harder and harder still. Three of the women held on to each other and they started crying and there was a sound like horses stampeding, horses from under the Earth which still shook and it was getting harder to stand.

Everyone crouched to the ground as we could no longer stand and I looked around and saw on my left one man standing stoically with his arms folded and on my right the three women crouching together crying as though they were grieving for something.

People evacuated from the coast because the tsunami was coming. Not knowing what was happening beyond our school on the hill was frustrating. The unfolding March 11th disaster seemed to be happening somewhere else. My girlfriend, Chie worked in an aquarium next to the sea and I assumed and hoped that she had evacuated somewhere.

A line was drawn under all the things that mattered ten minutes ago and they were forgotten. People talked about a 7 metre tsunami hitting the coast of our town and I didn't believe it because I couldn't imagine what that would look like or what it would do and I didn't want to. An big aftershock scared everyone and shook everything and these would become regular. Teachers started to drift off to do different things and I was still standing in the same place I was during the earthquake.

Me and three other JETs hung around in the gym for a while and asked if there was anything for us to do and we were told no. Feeling more out of place and useless than usual I went home.

There was no water in my flat or anyone else's and every TV channel was talking about the earthquake and there was a map of Japan warning of tsunamis pretty much across the entire east coast. Me and the other JETs, now four, decided to head up to another school on a hill to be safe. I took some bread and a pack of grated cheese with me. The road up the hill was cracked and the pavement on the other side had collapsed into the hill.

We were greeted warmly at the school because we all knew teachers there and a third year girl called Mika who had just graduated junior high school that day was there and she didn't know where half of her family was. I tried the school phone to call Chie but it didn't work. Mika helped me by talking to teachers and telling me what was going on.

I sat in the gym and used someone's iPhone to facebook my brother and tell him I was okay and he called my parents to give them the good news. The JETs, Mika and I sat in the gym for maybe an hour talking.

The teachers said the tsunami threat had subsided so I went home again. On the way back we went to a convenience store and it was completely empty apart from cigarettes and Japanese style snacks like rice crackers and seaweed. Which proved my point once and for all that no one likes those Japanese snacks, not even Japanese people.

My phone rang and it was Chie. She was already back in my flat. I got home and I opened the door and she was sitting on the floor and she looked up and it was anticlimactic. There was a pile of wet and muddy items salvaged from her destroyed car on the floor and they were of no value and my floor was a dirty mess but it didn't matter. There was no water and little food and neither of us had a helicopter or a time machine.

Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain is a difficult game. It's not hard to play, it's just hard to describe and to judge, and hard to enjoy but also hard to dislike. For all the times that I admired the effort that's gone into making this game "cinematic", I just as often found myself wondering, "Isn't this supposed to be fun?" Heavy Rain goes to such lengths to be serious and dramatic and to break the mould of a video game, that it ended up losing something along the way.

Every character in the game is so dull. Take Ethan for example, the protagonist, the hero, the man on a mission. He is totally lacking in charisma and personality. Maybe this was an effort to make a lead character that didn't fit the Nathan Drake model of video game leads, but Heavy Rain goes too far. Ethan is so dull that by the end I didn't care what happened to him.

The problems with the characters might be the result of poor acting. Simply casting actors as though you are casting a movie does not mean you are going to get high quality cinematic performances. Using state of the art motion capture techniques does not guarantee that the characters in your game are going to be totally believable. The performances are all very dry, and seem restricted by the seriousness that looms over the entire project. I really believe that no matter how well you capture facial expressions, you're not going to get anything natural or entertaining out of those poor guys sitting in a booth with balls stuck in their faces. Technicalities aside though, I don't think any of the actors involved were any good to begin with, which is a problem for a game whose big selling point is human drama.

The director pushes so hard for the dark realistic tone that it overwhelms and swallows whole everything else in the game. It's admirable to try and maintain a harrowing tone for an entire two hour movie, but maintaining that tone for a 10+ hour video game is misguided. I felt sympathy for none of the characters, all of whom seemed depressed, bored, confused and lonely. The aggressive effort to deliver an involving dark cinematic experience went so far that it pushed me away.

And I don't care what anyone says, the gameplay is nothing but quick-time events. There's no other way to describe it to anyone.

Hot Taxi

The Rock's promo on Raw last night was so awesome that it inspired me and I thought about channelling some of that energy and charisma in my class. I have some dialogue to read out and a vision of The Rock appears in my head and starts to take shape and it is warm and close enough to touch but The Rock fades out of focus and dissolves and is gone.

I settle for reading louder than usual and the students follow but by the end we are not so loud, which the other teacher notes. Was that because I dropped off or did the students lose interest? Maybe both. Sitting down hurts my thighs and my knees and my back and standing back up is so hard that it hardly seemed worth sitting down in the first place. Everyone is enjoying the Pokemon trump game I printed off (but did not create) and walking around seeing the children smile and laugh reminds me of something that was once lost that might one day return but the memory is now too weak and it slips away.

Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's movie podcast entertains me on the taxi ride home. As cold as it is outside, all trains, taxis and staffrooms are just as hot inside. The contrast is too shocking and it makes me sick and everyone is wearing winter clothes anyway so it doesn't need to be so hot inside right? I roll down the window just to breathe and the driver turns off the heater. Nothing is said.

On my bike on the way to the post office to pick up my books which couldn't fit in my post box a little seven year old girl is in the middle of the path swinging her school bag around and she stops because she recognises me but she is mistaken because I have never seen her before. Her pink t-shirt looks like a rag draped over bones. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed she starts to form a word "Ja... Jan..." and her big wet eyes follow me as I ride past almost hitting her. The image is like something out of a movie about poverty which doesn't fit because my movie is about alienation, anxiety and gaining wisdom through loss.

The woman at the post office speaks Japanese. She says that the books have not yet returned but if I am home between seven and nine they can be resent to me and I say okay. During this she attempts some English words because she maybe thinks I don't understand even though I am nodding my head and responding in Japanese. It doesn't annoy me because the woman is just being considerate and I do not look lucid and smiles are not coming easily.

Lunch and Interculturalism

I finally built up the courage to tell one of my teachers this fact: The more Japanese the school lunch, the less delicious it is. The best school lunch menus are curry rice day and cream stew with bread day, which are Indian and, what, English? The worst is the mushrooms that coagulate the soup, which tastes like crap. That’s Japanese.

One day someone found a bit of seaweed or a mushroom and discovered that it was edible, so they decided to eat it - but only because there was nothing else available. Time passes and food that people originally ate out of necessity is then called “traditional” - like the fish that is covered in putrid sauce and is mostly skin. I would only eat that if I were desperate or in a war. If you put Caesar salad and smoked salmon in front of someone they wouldn’t turn round and say “Actually I was thinking about putting mushrooms and seaweed in a bowl of water.”

What I want is more screening of the food that reaches my school lunch tray. At the moment the screening process seems to be –
Is it safe to eat?
Yes.
Stick it in.
And this leads to people eating crab, for which you need a special fork to scrape out the edible parts. A special fork to scrape out the edible parts. Not worth it. In a perfect world the screening process would be –
Is it safe to eat?
Yes.
Is it tasty?
Maybe.
Would I ever choose to eat this over any of the food that is freely available today?
No.
Then forget it, get rid of it.

With this system things that look like erasers and soggy paper would definitely not make the cut. The Japanese style lunch menus appear to be people doing the best with what they’ve got, like making a lawnmower on Scrapheap Challenge. But outside of Scrapheap Challenge, the contestants will most likely just buy an actual lawnmower when they need a lawnmower. We don’t need to scrape together a meal using whatever edible things the Earth has to offer. Why am I eating fish eggs? Why is that happening? There are at least four proper delicious kinds of fish available, isn’t that enough? Let’s just make the tasty ones extinct first and work our way down.

Kindergarten Cop-out

Kindergarten week is a time that comes but once a year. Everyone says that the kids are cute but I just don't see it. To me, playing with a room full of three year olds is the same as playing with a room full of dogs. No attention spans, wet noses, and massive homicidal temper tantrums. If you put a small child in a kindergarten/nursery school there are higher expectations for his/her/its behaviour. They may be expected to draw or write or sing but when you look closely it's obvious the teachers are forcing them to do everything or just doing it for them, because there's no chance of any of those three year olds doing anything by themselves. If they were left at home they would dribble, eat paste and smash toys together, and what's wrong with that? Still, I respect the women (and it is all women) who work at the nursery schools because they're basically babysitters who have to stop thirty babies from killing themselves and each other everyday. Whilst coming up with activities to make it look like kindergarten is more than a just holding facility, which it is.

Day One - Mercifully there are five other English teachers here so we can have a pow-wow in the staff-room. As usual everyone pretends the Japanese tea is good but I drink from my bottle of tap water instead, which I brought in anticipation of my mouth becoming dry due to anxiety and despair. The two of us that are teaching (dealing with?) the three years olds are told "If you speak to them in Japanese or English, they probably won't listen to either. They're only three." Which begs the question*, Why did I pass up all those chances at a quick and easy suicide?

Go into the classroom (pen?) to no reaction from the ten or so kids in there. Make a mouse out of play-dough, a boys smashes it. Make a butterfly out of play-dough, the same boy smashes it. Turn around and there's a really pale boy with dry skin and dead eyes and it's like looking into a mirror but he has so much snot under his nose that I actually feel physically sick. Grab a boy (not the snot boy) by the hands and let him walk up my body and he ends up upside down with his back to me and I'm still holding his hands and how can this possibly end well? If he flips over backward and I keep holding his hands I'm so sure that he will dislocate both his shoulders but I can't drop him either. I wrap my arms around him and lower him gently to the ground in a kind of mangled anti-climactic pile of human. Snot boy comes over with his hands raised toward me. No chance. Against any sense of logic or responsibility I let another boy climb up the same way and he steps right on my right testicle and it really really hurts, but I totally deserve it for the negative blog post I am already planning to write. Children's games, attention from the women, reading a picture book, anxiety descending.

Day Two - The plan is for me to dress as Santa while Sarah dresses as Santa Lady, we'll answer questions and give out presents and be merry. In the staff-room I ask for water, not tea, which I drink happily. We talk about starting businesses and going back to university and the future seems good but the conversation is cut short, it's time to put on our hats and take to the stage. This felt like a moment that summed up everything.

I give a pro-wrestling style promo about giving out presents "Right here, TONIGHT!" which I think is brilliant but it doesn't get a pop from the kids. Sarah laughs, sympathetically? About fifteen minutes in someone asks who our friends are, we list some children's characters like Mickey Mouse and Shrek but when I say "Doraemon" it pops the crowd huge. Next I say "Anpanman" and I try to remember "Rilakumma" but I can't and it stops the building momentum. Give out presents to everyone and shake hands - must remember to wash my hands later. The Santa beard covers my face which makes all this a lot easier. A professional looking photographer has been taking pictures of all this, where are the pictures going? No consent needed? We play outside for a while - in costume - and me and the kids chase each other around. I realise that I'm grateful for everything that has ever happened to me, that it's been another brilliant year, and that I'm being paid to do this so whatever I'll smile under the beard even though no-one can see it.

Mizuishi Mountain

Me and my buddy Peter went on a bike ride up a mountain called Mizuishi. It took two and a half hours. After about half an hour I started to think that maybe it was a bad idea. It wasn't easy, but it was really good fun. The weather wasn't great for our ride, it rained and it was foggy. Some of the pictures here are from another day when I went up the mountain by car, which took twenty minutes.

We pushed our bikes up this treacherous mountain path to avoid riding up more winding mountain roads. 

 

Every 15 metres the path was blocked by these huge scary spiders. We ducked under their webs or just destroyed them.

The end of the footpath. The steps led up to a temple...

 

 

I thought it was amazing that a temple was built half way up a mountain. There are a bunch of other buildings too. Old style houses and other small temple things that have names.

 

This is the best temple in Iwaki. It's one of the oldest, and the location is great.

After two and a half hours we finally made it to the top. This was the view. We didn't really care about the weather though because it was a great ride.

Wild horse roaming around the woods.

The top of the mountain on a nice day. Minus bikes.

Picnic spot.

 

Man at Drug Store

A man at the register at the drug store was wearing a black t-shirt with the word "ALCOHOLIC" written on it. I went outside and there was a car, with its engine still running, parked crooked in a disabled parking spot next to the entrance. I waited and the man with the ALCOHOLIC t-shirt came out of the drug store and got in that car. I find it hard to believe that anyone can be in a such a rush that they have to leave their car running and park in a disabled space. Let alone a man wearing a t-shirt with the word "ALCOHOLIC" printed on it. I would have been more angry but I'd just bought two boxes of chocolate cereal so deep down I was very happy.