Arriving in Tokyo

So this is the start of my JET journal, where I will be able to write down most of the best experiences of my trip, and maybe actually keep up with it this time. This is the 4^th time I have been to Japan and I have never been able to keep up a blog or any written accounts of my travels, but now that I have a steady job that might change. Of course this blog did not get off to a good start considering it has been almost a month since I got here and this is the first entry that I have been able to make. I have been incredibly busy and every chance I have gotten to write in the past month has been replaced with either sleeping or drinking. Because of this long gap between my arrival in Japan and my first post the details will be few and hazy, and I am only going to try and write about what I found most memorable.

Tokyo orientation was surprisingly a lot of fun, despite the fact that we had to get up at 7:00am every day with jetlag. I remember the first night I was in Japan I was able to have dinner with a kid from Denver, who I have regrettably forgotten his name, and two random other JETs from Chicago. The only memorable part about this was that all four of us went out for Ramen and the Ramen restaurant played only American Country music the entire time we were there, which was not what I pictured to be the first music I would hear in Japan. On the second day I ran into basically everyone I knew from before JET, which was a good and bad thing I suppose. Perhaps the most awkward run in was with a girl named Jasmine, who at one point was my friend during my study abroad in Tokyo. Now due to some confusion that has finally been cleared up to me thanks to Darek and Tate, I had made enemies with one of her best friends. I was still optimistic that this would not affect our friendship but I believe I was wrong, because that was one of the more awkward conversations I have had in my life. I have come to realize that for some reason I have a great talent for annoying women, but that is another story that I do not need to get into now. I also ran into Katie Weller, another Tokyo friend, who is now living in the south of Nara prefecture in a full size house. It is interesting to have a mixture of jealousy and sympathy, knowing that I have been crammed into a small apartment with a town, while she is put into a large house but with very little civilization to amuse her. As of now I am going to assume that her, and everyone I have met so far, is having as great of a time as I have been, and that everything balances out in the end.

The first full night in Tokyo was very interesting, and I could not have predicted what would happen because again it all happened out of pure luck. After our meetings most prefectural groups decided to gather up and go out drinking together. Unfortunately the Yamagata group was not so lucky, so when it came time to head out I was left alone to fend for myself. At first I was going to go out with Kiri and her prefectural group, but it felt odd to tag around with a group of people I would never see again, so I decided against it. Instead I went upstairs, watched a little TV, and then headed down to the lobby to get a snack. When I got down there I ran into Michael (Hope that is his name, I did forget it and I feel really bad about it) and his friend who I will never pretend to have known his name. I had known ‘Mike’ from our Denver orientation, as well as our flight in to Tokyo and a few of the classes that we went to the first day. After talking to him and his friend I found out that they wanted to go to out and sing Karaoke, but they were not able to make a group due to the fact that most people had plans by 8:00 at night. So instead the three of us decided to go out and find a bar on our own. Now JET had given everyone a map of Shinjuku (The area we were staying in) to let people who did not speak Japanese know where the nearest banks and restaurants were. It was a very detailed map, except for the fact that they left out Kabuki-cho (The old red light district). JET figured that this area was too dangerous and that foreigners should not go there, so naturally that was the first place we started looking. Within five minutes of entering Kabuki-cho we were called out to by a man from a restaurant who said that they had a nomihodai (All you can drink bar) for one hour for only 1000 yen (12 dollars). This sounded too good to be true but we decided to follow him inside and get a table and see for ourselves.

Well we were right, or at least so we thought, because as soon as we entered he started telling us that even though the nomihodai was 1000 yen, there was also a 500 yen (6 dollar) table charge that we had to pay as well for a 2 hour all you can drink bar. Well we were outraged at the idea of paying 18 dollars to dink all the mixed drinks we could handle for 2 hours, so we left in search of a better deal. Now a few minutes outside of the restaurant we realized that we had made a huge mistake, and after seeing the prices of all of the other bars, that ranged from 20 to 40 dollars, we knew we had passed the best deal in town. Unfortunately, we could not go back and say to the man, “So I know how we said we would drink at your bar, had you bring us water, then storm out at the price and called you all liars, but mind if you get us another table.” So we were forced to spend another hour wandering around Kabuki-cho in search of cheap liquor. Eventually we did find a hole-in-the wall bar that advertised a 1000 yen nomihodai. It was basically only about 10 feet wide and maybe 40 feet long, and when we entered we were told to sit in chairs that were made for people much smaller than us. Another thing I realize I need to point out is the nomihodai culture in Japan. When you are a foreigner, and you hear that you can go and drink all the beer you want for 2 hours for under 20 dollars you freak out, go to the restaurant, and drink them dry. However Japanese are a little different, they go to the nomihodai, order one round of drinks, then a round of snacks and start making long speeches. After this they order dinner, and maybe one more round of drinks, and again begin with the speeches. This means that in the 2 hour time at most each person orders 4 drinks as well as one or two items from the menu each. This is how nomihodai’s make money, the food.

Therefore, when the three white boys entered the bar the waiter knew he would have to work very hard to make us order enough food to make the bar a profit that night. He asked us what we were going to order, and when we only said a drink order he waited around, hoping we would say something else. After he left we felt a little bad and ordered some teriyaki (Basically its Teriyaki chicken on a stick) because it was the cheapest thing on the menu. However after a few more rounds of drinks we started to feel worse and worse for not ordering and finally caved and ordered Shabu Shabu. Some people may know what this is, but in Japanese Shabu Shabu is actually the sound for stirring and refers to the motion you make when you take a very thing piece of raw meat in your chopsticks and stir it back and forth in the boiling water until it cooks. Usually this is a very expensive item and rarely eaten, so when we saw it in a dive bar it was probably not the best idea to order it. When the order arrived it turned out to be a bowl of boiling water that he filled with cabbage, and on the side he had a plate or raw cut up bacon. This was not the best tasting meal, and I still do not know if you can cook bacon in 40 seconds in boiling water, but nothing I can do about it now. So if you ever go to a nomihodai, or any bar in Japan you should know one more word, Sa-Wa-. A Sa-Wa-, or sour, is when the bartender takes some weak whisky, and mixes it with a drink of his choice. Usually this is fruit juice and you can order a mango sour or a lemon sour, but at this bar they had Ramune sour, which is a bubbly Japanese soda that you open by hitting a marble at the top of the drink and it always instantly fizzes over the top.

When our time was finally up in the bar we headed out into the “dangerous” Kabuki-cho once again in search of my least favorite activity, Karaoke. I was kind of hoping by this point we had drank enough that the guys would have wanted to return home and sleep, but they were persistent so we had to find a place before it was too late. Now I put “dangerous” in quotes because it really is not that scary of a place, but there are very annoying things about Red Light Districts. For instance most strip clubs decide to employee Nigerians who live in Japan as ways of getting foreigners into their clubs. For some reason they think that if they get some loud Nigerian to follow you and scream things like, “Do you like boobs?” at the top of his lungs, that you will turn around and say, “Why yes I do” and walk in. We had this happen to us three times that night, and one man even followed us for five blocks trying to get us to talk to him about where we were from and where we are staying, so in that regard, Kabuki-cho is not for everyone. However this is beside the point, eventually we found a karaoke bar and headed up to sing. I do not need to remind anyone how bad I am at singing but thankfully the other guys liked to sing so much that they would drown out my bad voice as they stood up and danced to their own voice. For some reason whenever you tell someone you don’t like to sing at Karaoke they always decide that what you really mean is that you secretly love singing, it’s just that you only want to sing Disney or Madonna songs in a high pitched girly voice. I still have not figured out the logic to that to this day, but I will be here for a year so eventually I will understand Karaoke, or develop a good enough voice where I don’t feel too weird singing in public. We left the Karaoke club at 1:00 and headed home for a 20 minute walk and then a 4 and a half hour nap before starting or second real day of training, all in all I made only smart decisions that first day.

The best part of the second day was getting to go out early that night to hang out with my friend Kenta from college. He had recently moved back to Japan with his family for work, and luckily we both had the night off to catch up. I met Kenta in Asakusa, near the ninja café, and we went out for a medley of Japanese food, half of which I had never had before. That has actually become the most popular game for Japanese people to play with me, the ‘I wonder what this Gaijin (Foreigner) can stomach at my expense’ Game. Upon meeting Kenta I began using Japanese for the first time since I graduated college, and after 3 months of purely American thoughts, it was a rough transition. One of the reasons I have always thought of Kenta as such a good friend was that he could actually put up with my horrible Japanese, and pretend that it was actually not too offensive. Of course after Kenta had been in Japan for an entire month the idea of speaking was clearly not too appealing to him, and he quickly told me that I would not be using any of it tonight. I unfortunately do not remember the names of the dishes that we ate that night, and I was not clever enough to bring a camera with me, but I do remember my favorite Japanese dish.

The new rule that I have discovered in Japan is when it comes to cooking, if it’s cheap, put it on a stick. This means that any part of an animal that is not top quality meat gets dunked in Teriyaki sauce and put on the skewer, as well as random fish parts and vegetables. They also have this thing that is basically a chicken hot dog…on a stick, that is ground up chicken meat and surprisingly tasty. Now I might not have given this food the justice it deserves, because it really is my favorite snack I can get here, yet it does have its downsides. The worst in my opinion is the pigs liver on a stick, and in a tie for first and second to worst is chicken skin on a stick. It is perhaps the tastiest meat on a stick I can find, but if you eat more than 3 or so you will feel incredibly sick. Well getting back on topic we had a typical Japanese night out which involved too much to eat and drink, and then a long walk afterwards. Kenta was nice enough to take me around where he worked, as well as showing me the Diet and the Prime Minister’s house. As a politics nerd this was really cool, I have always wanted to go into the Diet when it was in session, so hopefully I can do that once while I am here. Eventually I caught the last train back to the hotel and arrived in my room at 1:00 am, one of the latest arrivals that I have heard of. Basically that does not make me cool for staying out late drinking, it just makes me stupid because like it or not, my body always woke me up at 5:00 am every day.

This was an annoying habit that took me over a week to break, but every day I would get up at 5:00 am for a morning that didn’t start until 7:00. I know the logical thing to do would be to go back to sleep, but the curtains were so bad at this hotel that once you were awake it became impossible to fall back asleep. So after the annoying awakening I would have to get my suit for the day and go down 40 floors to use one of four irons that were available to every single JET in that hotel. I want to point out now that ironing is bad enough, but waiting in line to iron at 5:00 am makes it even worse. After ironing I usually had time to go back upstairs to change then come back down the same 40 floors to use the community computer supplied by JET. Now the hotel had internet and I had a computer, but I was too clever for this simple process. I had to decide to buy a computer that has a three-prong plug, and when I bought the right adapter, I made an even more clever decision to leave that adapter in the wrong suitcase. So anyways that meant for the first three days I could only use the computer for 20 minutes at a time, which is not a lot when you are trying to tell everyone that you are ok and write as many emails as possible at once.

I was however fortunate enough to meet some very nice people during orientation. The cruelest thing about orientation is that you get to meet a lot of nice people with similar interests and situations, and then find out that they live half a country away from you. One of those people that I met was named David, and he was a pretty awesome kid right of the bat. Actually besides Kristin, he was the only other person who I could have known from before JET. Kristin is best friends with an old friend of mine, Eddie, so technically I could have met her somehow before I left for Japan. David on the other hand was from Colorado College, and actually knew of Ariella, due to the fact that it’s a small school and my twin has an amazing ability to be known, or at least heard of, by everyone in the world. Well I was able to have breakfast with David on the second morning of orientation, as well as hang out with him in 2 learning sessions and during lunch. I was smart enough to get his email, but not smart enough to email him yet, I should get on that. I realize now that I have not talked much about the actual orientation part of orientation. It was interesting, but again due to time and sometimes lack of paying attention, I have forgotten a lot of about the classes that I took. I do remember the ‘Teaching at Multiple Schools’ to be incredibly helpful, and the ‘Driving in the Country’ to have some very good pointers in it. For instance in Japan you cannot make a left turn on a red light (since they drive on the opposite side of the road that is actually quite shocking when you think about it). Furthermore, there is a no tolerance alcohol policy when it comes to drinking and driving. So if you have a sip of beer in Japan you are not allowed to drive, and if you get in the car with someone who has had a sip to drink, and you get pulled over, you get in trouble as well for not preventing them from driving. So the question is how does a country of alcoholics survive when there is absolutely no drinking and driving? Well they have come up with a quite brilliant solution (and the Japanese name escapes me at this time) where you can drive up to a bar, get wasted, and then call the taxi company to come pick you up. The taxi company sends a car with two people in it, and when they arrive one gets out and you give them your keys before getting into the taxi. The second driver finds your car and then follows the first taxi home and parks it for you. I have more interesting car facts but I figure I will write a post about renting my car in Japan soon and I can continue from there.

Now along with my good classes, there were some pretty awful sessions that I went to during orientation. The worst was one called ‘Understand the MEXT Handbook.’ MEXT stands for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and is the organization that founded JET, even though they are not our bosses. Each JET has a different boss depending on what prefecture (state) they are in, and what grade level they teach. For instance there are five JETs in Shinjo, and we have different bosses. Kristin and I work for middle schools and elementary schools, so we are employed by the Shinjo Board of Education (BOE). On the other hand, Alyssa, Peter, and Amanda all work at high schools and therefore employed by the Prefecture of Yamagata. This is why even though Shinjo has had high school JETs for years, Kristin and I are still considered knew because the Shinjo BOE has never hired anyone before us. Well now I should get back to explaining MEXT. In Japan education is completely centralized, meaning that what the government says should be taught is taught, and the states and teachers have little say in the matter. This is important because there are many teachers out there that do not want to do team teaching with a JET, and who will resist it at every turn. That is why MEXT made a handbook in both English and Japanese so that when a teacher does not want to use a JET, we can simply tell the teacher that it’s what the government wants, and there will be no more arguing. This handbook is incredibly thick and dense, so when I saw that there was a session that would tell us what to read and what it would mean, I jumped at the opportunity. Well luckily for me so did Sara (a very funny girl from Colorado) and Kiri (a girl from my college), because it was the most boring hour of my life. The presenter basically told us some general guidelines of what was on a few pages, but gave no hints as how to navigate the book. Instead they kept telling us, “This is important, so read the entire thing.” So in the end I did not take the speaker’s advice, and instead made a very good paper football that I flicked at a random person, and missed them completely. So this has been a bit random and scattered but that was the real important parts of Tokyo Orientation, if you have any questions or want me to try and add something to this just let me know. When I actually get the time and motivation I will start keeping a regular blog so that people can keep up on what is going on without me having to write hundreds of long emails, and instead I can send more manageable emails on a regular basis.