Skool Dayz

Small update from school. Tomorrow is Bunkasai, or the school Cultural Festival. Kids have been making stuff for it for a few weeks now, and over the past few days the school has been in the grip of bunkasai fever, everyone staying late and practicing their songs, making banners, posters, selling tickets for food (the kids seem to have realised I will buy any ticket they try and sell me, so I have tickets for green tea, octopus balls, boiled fishcakey stuff, sweets, and a couple I dont know what they are... now when I see kids with a box of money and a book of tickets I sort of run away.) Should be pretty fun, I get to play piano 'fun quiz like music' during their quiz at the end of the day when they're picking the answers (I'm thinking the countdown theme) and hit them with a little 'Spain' after lunch, havent played that for ages so having a first practice yesterday was really fun. I'm kinda under the weather right now (my JTE looked at me as if I had aids, recoiling while saying "um... you don't look... fine... please don't work so hard...aaaaaaagh"), all bunged up and shivering so I hope that doesnt affect any of that stuff. I really like my kids so I'm looking forward to it and hoping they put on a good show. Woo!

Slightly funny thing: I had to fill in a JET questionnaire this week, basic stuff about job satisfaction, how I'm finding the whole experience etc. There was a question on sexual harassment (which in Japanese is given the much cuter term 'sekuhara'.) Now it wasn't merely "have you experienced any sexual harrassment so far?" as you might expect. Check out the level of detail you can go into about sexual harassment:

Have you ever experienced sexual harassment from any of the following while on the program? (mark all that apply)

1. Mayor/Governor etc.
2. Head of your section/school, principal/BOE supervisor etc
3. Your supervisor
4. A collegue/fellow teacher
5. A fellow JET
6. A student
7. Someone else I know
8. A stranger
9. I have never experienced sexual harassment on the programme

followed up by 2 follow up questions. Not saying sexual harassment is funny, but the sheer range of options they gave made me chuckle/die a little inside. Maybe my friend who got a note from one of her students saying "Hey there, I'm 15 years old. I'm on the baseball team. How about it?" can say she's been on the receiving end of sekuhara from a student.

Also a little funny is this excerpt from a textbook we teach from, it's Japanese stereotype number 2: they love robots. The chapter is 'Living with Robots'.

Receptionists will be replaced by robots. Robots will take care of children while parents are out. Children can play and study with robots. At night, robot guards will protect you and your house. If they find a suspicious person, they will threaten the person with light or smoke.
By living with various kinds of robots, our lives will become more comfortable. Robots will help us and support us as partners.

Beyond the home securital impotence of threatening an intruder with a light, Japanese robots are cool. Right under the 'partners' sentence is a picture of the slightly creepily almost good looking robot "Actroid", although she does seem to have the whole 'bluetooth headset knobber' look going on (there are actually none of those guys in Japan, for all the GPS and stuff in the phones, not that many seem to have bluetooth.) "I'd like to 'partner' her", etc.

SOIL! SOIL! SOIL! SOIL! SOIL!

"We call it....... DEATH JAZZ"



This weekend I went to see Soil and Pimp Sessions in Shinsaibashi in Osaka, on the fourth floor of a building called called 'Big Cat'. I can't generalise to every gig in particular, but there were some pretty big differences between the times I saw them in the UK and here. *The crowd went nuts from the start. Not like Cargo, where everybody's way too cool for that and it takes a while to get going, these guys went from silent to crazy in a heartbeat like it was the best gig ever from practically the first note. *No one was really drinking. The bar was in the next room, and no one left to get drinks and come back that I could see. *I could see really well. I heard before I came that Japanese people are in general shorter, but I haven't found that to be the case usually, but at this gig, I could see perfectly over everyone's heads. Lucky! *No talking. I kind of liked this one. Nobody was talking AT ALL throughout the entire gig, even between songs. It was a little... eerie, but coupled with the next thing, *amazing sound quality, best of any gig I've ever been to, the music sounded reaaallly good, especially when they cooled out as they always do on 'Mo Better Blues'.


Soil and Pimp are much more chatty at home in Japan. They also seem to talk a lot of crap. I couldn't understand most of it, but at one point, Midori, the drummer, was going off on one with a stupidly fast bossa n breaks solo, and Shacho (the 'flava flav' guy) was like

Shacho: "hang on a sec Midori". (Midori stops.) "Sounding pretty good there. What did you have for dinner?" (?!?)
Midori: (In a gangsta sounding voice) "I had......... OMURICE!"
Shacho: "I see. So I guess OMURICE MAKES AWESOME DRUMMER!"
.......
(Midori starts again)

Oh also you couldn't take pictures, which we only found out when a guy came over to stop my friend taking them. (Which is why these blurry ones are all I have). Wish I could have taken better ones, but then again was really good not to be in a situation like back home with everyone just filming it on their mobile not really looking like they were enjoying it.


The tunes they played were really cool, but as always the ones off their first album were far and away the highlights. They haven't matched the quality of songs on that one yet - although the latest one, with tracks like 'Sabotage' came pretty close. (In fact an even more disco-ey version of Last Long off Pimp of The Year - borderline speed-lounge in fact, was kinda fun.) Oh, and for soil and pimp fans, the following was pretty cool:



The smudge in the middle is Josei (keyboardist) rocking out on a keyboardy guitar thing like this during the encore, a stupidly fast version of 'fuller love', which was fun in itself, but the smudge on the far left is shacho playing the piano backing! He wasn't amazing, but it's cool he's even more talented than a regular claves and egg shaker man.

The crowd was nuts though, jumping about like no ones business, finishing off with a girl with a back covered in a massive snake tatto riding on a guys shoulders to just in front of us to flash the band. All jazz should be like this.

Saturday I went to help judge a speech contest in Sanda, at a stupidly beautiful school. Seriously, it looked like a really nice villa or something (and not in a cheesy way) with elevated wooden walkways around a lake surrounded with tall trees, a tall tower.... man. Check out these pictures:



As we got out of the car, the school orchestra was practicing the theme from Phantom of the Opera, which added to the mood. I was reminded of how lucky I am with my school and my teachers, I went with my supervisor and another teacher from the department who's cool, and we had a real laugh, some of the boring middle aged grey suits who didnt smile didnt seem so fun.

In the evening, maybe as punishment from god for enjoying such good music the night before, eating in a pretty nice restaurant in Osaka with a friend, nice decor, soft lighting... and Craig David's album on loop? With a whole bunch of identical remixes of Fill Me In at the end? Why, Japan? Did remind me of high school though, which was okay.

Sunday I engaged with the nerd in me and went to the Nintendo World exhibition in Osaka where they were showing off the Wii.



Was fun, although the queues to try stuff out were loooong. We just tried Golf and Tennis and they were really fun. Even Casey who I was with who first thing she said when we got in was 'I can't BELIEVE i'm HERE' seemed to enjoy it. Kind of made me want a Wii, but been spending too much money anyway. Might give in and get one though.


It is getting COLD round here. I have an electric futon now though, which is the business. Things are more settled into a routine, I'm no longer OMG JAPAN at everything, which is kind of nice, but also you need to look a little deeper to find something a bit more. Hopefully it'll give me motivation to study Japanese.

AWAJI AWAJI AWAJI

Went to Awaji Island this weekend for a cooking sort of thing, it was called a 'Town Meeting', no idea why. Had to meet at a market first thing Friday morning and ended up feeling reeeaaallly rough cos Thursday night went out with a friend in Kobe and we ended up sleeping about 2 hours in an internet cafe. Incidentally, on the way down to Sannomiya (central Kobe) to meet I saw for the first time a particular Japan Stereotype: salaryman reading porn on the train like it was just a novel or something. The bar we went was fantastic, little faux european joint with all the belgian beers (stupidly expensive, way more than even central London prices, but sometimes I just don't bother converting the price in my head at the time if I know it will hurt, and the place was nice enough to warrant it), and what really sold it to me was they played Snowboy and the Latin Section's "Afro Cuban Jazz" album through in its entirety twice. Thats a massive album for me, I still have the cover of it up on my wall in Harrow. Koooobeeeeeeee.


So next morning we met at a market famous for its seafood and stuff like that, wandered round and ate some food at little stalls and had the sweeeeeetest lemon drink ever served by the oldest woman ever, then went off to Awaji over the longest suspension bridge in the world. I feel like I should mention that even if its not so interesting. It was a kind of group trip, on a coach, which I normally try to avoid unless it's a unique opportunity, which this was, and I really enjoyed it anyway so maybe I'll rethink about stuff like this.



We stopped to eat our bento (packed lunch... kinda but better) at this beautiful area. Everywhere in Japan seems to be 'famous' for something. Awaji, apparently, is famous for flowers and onions. This seemed to be the only place on the whole island that had flowers though, so maybe it's all A BIG SHAM.



So the place we where headed was right on the south coast of Awaji (you come across to the north when you come over from near Kobe) so it was a long drive with lots of opportunities to stop and see stuff. When we pulled into the next place, there were cows, and my heart sank (I thought this might be where we're staying... and I'm not so much down with the cows.) But it turned out it was just a 'famous' Awaji milk place, so we just wandered round for a while, were slightly bemused by the giant milk carton, tasted some milk and patted some cows (??).



So then we got to the south coast of Awaji where we were staying. The place in the second pic is where we were staying, like a big kind of centre where different groups could go for different reasons. It was really nice, cool artwork on the walls in one place, nice food, a BED (futons are cool and all but you cant beat a bed), and a beach 10 secs from the front gate. Oh and check the pic with the two guys right, there are two grown men doing a demonstration and drawing a diagram of how to FOLD SHEETS in our room. At one point another guy jumped up to help, so THREE PEOPLE were explaining very carefully how to fold sheets. Very strange.



There was a flag ceremony thing first night (no idea why) and all the various groups staying at the place lined up and a couple from each went to help get the Japanese flag down... including a couple in multicoloured gimp suits from a volleyball team who was there... I only had my mobile so the pics are on that, but I'll try and update tomorrow when I get a mini SD reader and can transfer pics off of my phone.

We also went and planted 'famous' Awaji Onions.... hard work. Like seriously, sweatng like a pig. In November.



Saw the bridge that leads to Shikoku (big island below little Awaji), it was so beautiful round that area, my pics don't really do it justice.



So the first day we had food lectures about Japanese food, there was an awesome Japanese chef running the show, really cool guy and so skillfull. We all cooked a few Japanese dishes (I gloss over this but it took ages and was the main thing) and then had a massive meal where we ate what we cooked and shared it around. We kind of ran late, so we had roaring fires going around the place to keep it warm, a strange but cool mix of classical and 70s japanese pop music on the stereo, and I gutted my first fish, which was kinda fun. Look at him right there.



Second day we all cooked dishes from our home country and had a massive meal. The music selection reaaaallllly added to the experience, it was different from the previous day, eclectic and weird but really fun. As we ate breakfast there was a bossa/lounge version of Moon River, then as we cooked there was stuff like the solo piano version of the love theme from Final Fantasy X, a classical music version of 'you raise me up', a female lounge version of 'what a wonderful world', a strings lounge version of 'tonight tonight' from West Side Story, the classical theme that played when Cookie Monster (as Alistair Cookie) introduced Monsterpiece Theatre in Sesame Street, and a track of Oscar Peterson's. So I'm not much of a foodie, I'd happily eat flaming hot monster munch and a picnic bar for dinner every day, but this meal was stunning. I think 3 types of korean food, vietnamese food, some south african style fish, polish salady thing, my indian curry (woo), british soup, american cheese steaks, oh man.




Came back Sunday and had to go back to Kobe on Monday to get my passport stamped so I can go India at Christmas. Went and changed my phone contract to use more internet as I realised my phone has this AMAZING feature: if you take a picture of something and tell it to add GPS data to the picture, then when you're browsing the pictures in the album, you can just say 'take me to this place' and it'll give you a satnav map (except with a little man icon instead of a car if you say you're walking) and give you the route there, updating as you walk. So cool. Went down to harborland in the evening and it looks really nice at night, I'll put the pics up tomorrow when I get them off my mobile. I'm loving Kobe, really chilled city. In a cool cafe my friend knew about heard Lee Konitz' version of Favela and a string jazz version of Someday My Prince Will Come. Japan always hits me with music I love (or some lounge which I dont love but find strangely soothing here) wherever I seem to go.

Speaking of music, if all goes to plan this Friday I'll be seeing Soil and Pimp Sessions in Osaka. Woo! And in two weeks Jazztronik live in Kyoto. Woo! And next month, check this out right, in Tokyo, TOKYO JAZZ/CROSSOVER FESTIVAL 2006 that I am going to go to. Just look at the lineup (only included the ones I really love)

LIVE:
Koop
Sleep Walker ft. Bembe Segue and Yukimi Nagano
Kyoto Jazz Massive ft. Vanessa Freeman and Tasita D'mour
Mark de Clive Lowe
Cro Magnon
Frank McComb

DJs
Jurgen von Knoblauch from JAZZANOVA
Shuya Okino from KYOTO JAZZ MASSIVE
Ryota Nozaki who is JAZZTRONIK
Yukihiro Fukutomi
Karma (on COMPOST records)
DJ Kawasaki (ESPECIAL records)
Shacho (from SOIL AND PIMP SESSIONS)
Masaya Fantasista (from JAZZY SPORT crew)
Piranhahead ft. Diviniti

Music things are looking GOOD. In fact most things are looking GOOD. Except my Japanese level...

Our Man in Hikami Nishi

Things are going pretty well at school. My school is really small (only 176 students) so I know pretty much all of them by face already, even if only about 10 by name. Also because it's a low level high school, theres not as much pressure to perform as there is at more academic schools, so I often drive home just after 4 and see my kids hanging around outside Family Mart (conbini - corner shop but so much better), which I personally think is much healthier than staying around for extra classes and clubs for 3 or 4 hours.

Lessons are impossible to predict. I've had intricately planned lessons be a bit of a mess, and then today, when given 5 mins to prepare a lesson for my worst JTE, an impromptu game of scattergories was one of my best lessons, as the kids got really into it, and team DISRESPECT came from behind to beat team NO FUTURES in the closing moments. (They love choosing cool team names and weirdly the less able kids come up with the most fun stuff.)

Last week had a bit of a nightmare: I'm often right on the cusp of being late, and on Friday I managed to scratch another teacher's car as I hastily grabbed the last spot in the car park. Cue a day of stress and annoying stuff as everybody whispered about it around the staffroom and I awkwardly wrote a letter in bad japanese apologising (well, good Japanese after my friend Dylan made it, well, less shit). Many bows were bowed that day. Turned out the scratch was easily fixed so nothing to worry about there, just the hassle it caused. To smooth it all over I bought a little sorry gift of chocolate almonds from starbucks so hopefully thatll be the end of that.

UPDATE: Kocho sensei (headteacher) just appeared in the staffroom and said I need to practice driving more, slapped me on the chest and said if it was his car I'd have to pay LOTS, laughed uproariously at this and then disappeared. Interesting.

Just now a group of 3rd year girls came into the staffroom. They came over and tried to say their practiced English sentence. It was 'Sometimes your breath は general'. I had no clue what this meant. Maybe I have bad breath? So they tried again. Then enlisted the help of my supervisor (after accusing him I THINK YOU TWO ARE FRIENDS). He got them to write it down, and it turned out to be 'i feel your breath'. WTF? The three girls and my supervisor stared expectantly at me. 'I... don't get it.' They looked upset. 'It is... we're so close I can feel your breath. Sometimes I love you, sometimes not,' said my supervisor. Er...... okay? 'A little inappropriate?' I suggested. Apparently not in Japanese as he explained to them how its a bit weird - but only in English. 'Thankyou!' and they traipsed out, leaving me a hand drawn picture of Disney's Stitch.

So school is fine. I'm so fucking behind on studying Japanese, I've entered myself for a test in a month today, and I don't even know a quarter of what I'm supposed to. Going to have to work my arse off - it's like Uni all over again. Except this time I will actually do the work. Definitely.

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The weekend was cool,went down to Kobe area Fri night and just relaxed, we tried to watch Howl's Moving Castle in Japanese (seen it a few times so probably can just about follow) but of course I fell asleep. Ate Omerice for the first time which is omelette and rice and is pretty underwhelming which makes me wonder why its half my school's favourite food. Picked up a stupidly expensive purple puffy jacket that cost a month's car rental but wanted it for ages. It's from Beams which seems to be like the Japanese version of Urban Outfitters, but way more popular and a little bit more upmarket. All about the collabos there, bought a porter × beams boy bag for a friend and my jacket's millet × beams. Went to Osaka Sat night for FREEDOM TIME again and of course patrick forge killed it.

Before we hit the club we popped into that same bar as before (9 seats 3 barstaff), love that place. James Woods movies on the screen that time and playing George Benson off of LP. Headed down, DJ Kawasaki on Especial Records first of all, loads of brazilian house which was wicked. Then P Forge came on, bit of broken funk but essentially was about the deep house, few tunes I recognised from back when I used to listen to his innervisions show, but its all about breaking you down and opening you up.

NOW THAT WE FOUND LOVE WHAT ARE WE GONNA DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

which is this but a deep deep house version with the vocals looped for time before the beat kicked in. And of course a version of Another Star (really subtle rerub of the original, just a more prominent kick and hat for a house feel) that seems to be a theme for this kinda night which I'm loving. And the 4hero version of John Coltrane's Naima that I still don't fully get but I'm getting there, into Phuturistix's Cohiba, which reminds me of doing radio at URN in Nottingham as my mate Max played that a couple years ago on a mix he did for the show and I was like WHAT IS THAT??!? And Reel People's Second Guess... all about the classics. As we left, they had a table of LPs on especial records, picked up Sleepwalker's "The Voyage"... I already have it on CD, it's only 5 of the tracks, and I don't have anything to play it on out here. Still though.

No pictures as I took them all on my sparkly keitai (mobile) and as yet haven't figured out how to get them on the computer. Working on it.

HIROSHIMA × FUKUYAMA

This weekend went to Hiroshima on Fri, then to Fukuyama to stay with my UK jet friend Rose. I've ridden the shinkansen (the bullet train) before, but this is the famous super fast one and I nerdily took a picture of it.



Hiroshima still has trams, (like Nottingham wooo) so I boarded, sat down, and only realised halfway through I was riding a bus instead. They are quite similar. Checked out the Peace Museum. Seriously sobering stuff, but the millions of elementary school kids running around in their cute yellow hats seemingly oblivious to the sombre tone of the place made it less heavy. Don't want to get too far into this as it's kind of obvious and it's more being there than anything I can say about it, but really hits home about what happened here and really makes you hope the joker in charge of N. Korea doesnt ever get so ronery as to be in a place where he can hit the big red button. I've heard different arguments about whether it was necessary or not to drop the bomb, but the museum isn't about that at all. It reports both the facts of the war and the science behind the bomb quite dryly - and that is emotionally heavy enough. (The little red warheads on the globe represent the amount of nuclear weapons in the world.)




Then wandered through the end of the museum and through the Peace Park, based at ground zero of the explosion. There's the burnt out A-bomb tower as it's called, one of the few buildings that (barely) survived the flattening of the city, and its been preserved exactly as it was. Don't know if it's the done thing to take your pic in front of atomic ruins, but here it is. Some hippies were singing loudly and badly under the bridge.



At lunch I had Hiroshima style Okonomiyaki. I think I mentioned it before, round here we have Osaka style which is fantastic, over there they put noodles in it and it's more eggy. Sorry Hiroshima, yours is okay, but nothing on Kansai style. Had more plans to wander down past the shopping area to a big park where there's a museum of contemporary art and a cool sounding manga library, but got stuck firstly in the shopping area trying to work out how to send stuff at the post office and then in



Oh Tower. How I missed you since you shut down your London branch. I spend close to 2 hours browsing the jazz and hip hop and club jazz and broken beat and I love this place. It's in a large department store building on the 9th floor with a club on the next floor up. I don't think I would find this very cool in the UK but this is Japan and it works (can you imagine drunk punters taking a department store lift to the 10th floor for a club - and down again after the night's over?). Then it was time to take a more conservative shinkansen over to Fuk.

First night we went out, Rose my friend from the UK, Yann her French boyfriend, and 4 teachers that she works with, 2 guys 2 girls. She had trouble recognising one of the teachers at first cos he was dressed like a little wannabe rudeboy, with a cap off to one angle and baggy sportswear. Even the other guy looked like a teenage dressing up for a night out, little ring on a chain etc. Anyway, we went to an izakaya (eaty drinky place for groups) and had loads to drnk, eat and was fun (rudeboy teacher turned out to be hilariously addicted to Pachinko. We were talking about birthday celebrations in Japan and he was like 'This year birthday, Pachinko. Last year's birthday.... Pachinko. One year my birthday was on my graduation! ............. and then pachinko.' - Pachinko is a dull as shit gambling game that looks superficially a bit like pinball.)

Next day hung around with Yann and Rose in Fukuyama. Really nice to see people who you met before Japan, it's almost like going home in some little way. In the evening another UK jet came down, Hannah, and we went out for some Fuk people's birthday to an izakaya..... that turned out to be the same one as the previous night. Hehe. Food was all different though. Loads of JETs there, maybe close to 30 or 40? Big noise big atmosphere. At times a bit in your face for the European contingent but we all had a good time overall, good food good drink with friends. After we headed out of there, headed out in Fukuyama and had a fantastic night, met some wicked people.



Cool things about Fukuyama: BATS. Loads of bats. Coming back next to the river one night there were loads swooping and soaring around. Next day next to the station there were MASSIVE flocks of what looked like birds doing their formation thing but on close inspection it seemed to be bats...woah. FUTARINORI. Like a lot of cities here, it's a bike place. 2 to a bike is technically illegal here but very popular and it's called futarinori and Yann and Rose quickly became masters at it, leaving me to ride the badass girls bike with two baskets you see above. BREAKFAST. Okay so this isn't a Fuk thing, more Yann's French influence but brioche and drinking chocolate for dipping is a hell of a step up from the sub frosties Calpee stuff I normally eat. Oh and check this building: Looks like a church, right? It's a fake chapel where they have weddings and functions - and they hire a western guy to dress up and pretend to be the priest! That's just beautiful.



Everyone on JET has a different experience. We're all in different situations in different schools in different sized places in different regions (I could almost feel some difference in being out of Kansai) and we all make different lives out of it. Mine's like the traveller, living out of a suitcase and getting around - which is really fun, but feels kind of transient. It was really cool to visit Yann and Rose who have more of a 'place' set up (in an awesome apartment), a dose of normality in crazy Japan.