Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

It makes it much harder to resent having to be at work at 8:30 on a rainy Sunday morning when you get to talk to small children dressed as chickens.

Yesterday was our school musical. There were dance numbers by chickens and ladybugs, fighting scenes by four-year old samurai, musical interpretations of two different Japanese fairytales, and a taiko drum performance. Plus, some five-year old who kept running up to me and yelling, "Mamma mia!" and then disappearing.

I participated in a taiko drum performance by the teachers, as this was at the school with the staff that talks to me. We performed two songs, one drums-only, and one to a pre-recorded tape. I've been doing after-lunch cleanup for the past several months so the teachers could all practice drums in the auditorium, so it came as quite a surprise to me when they asked me last week to perform with them. For having only two practices, I think I did okay, and my friend's advice to mouth the word "watermelon" over and over during the song to make it look like I was singing worked quite well.

In Japanese, the word "ganbatte" is something of a cross between "do your best" and "good luck." Maybe it's along the lines of "May the force be with you." Got a tough exam coming up? "Ganbatte." Spending a late night finishing up an exhausting work project? "Ganbatte." 　Asked to negotiate between the serpentine bureaucracies of two different countries to get a driver's license? "Ganbatte."

Yesterday I left school early to hit the one hour per day, 3:30 pm-4:30 pm Monday through Friday window at the driver's license center an hour from my apartment. The law rather illogically allows Americans here to drive for one year with only an American-issued permit, and no experience, test, or license for Japan. After that one-year trial period, during which one has been driving on the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of the car through labyrinthine narrow streets with no street signs, if one is still alive and mobile, one can take the test and get a real license. If the test is failed, even with one year's experience now safely tucked into his belt, that American can no longer drive. But during that first and most dangerous year, the American driver in Japan has free reign. Sadly, my free year is almost up.

I assembled my seven forms of paperwork copied on the specified A4-sized paper, my precisely 3 centimeter by 2.4 centimeter photograph, and my 4, 130 yen in exact change. After following remembered landmark-to-landmark directions to the office for lack of street signs, I had a surreally complicated conversation with a coffee shop owner about whether I was allowed to park in her parking lot, the only one within walking distance of the office, and under what conditions. I took my chances and parked there anyway, not really understanding what she wanted after all, and headed for a large office building. The sign out front said in English, "International Driver's License 2F." It should also have said, "Last English for 3 km," but it didn't.

There were four different staircases leading from the first-floor lobby to 2F. One might assume they all would just lead to some different interconnected point of 2F, but one would be wrong. My third staircase guess led me to my first sign of life, and the man at top pointed me toward an unmarked broom closet door. The broom closet door turned out to lead to a back winding passageway through the sky to another building, and in that building I finally found the office.

No one was waiting for me at the service window, so I looked in vain for a bell. I poked my head through the window and saw no person. I listened carefully and heard no person. I coughed a little, and then a lot, and no person came running. There were only 54 minutes left of the one-hour window. I finally backed up into the hall and yelled, "Sumimasen!" and a person appeared.

The person spoke at me in rapid Japanese, as if she also felt the pressure of time. If she had looked up at me from her desk, she would have noticed I am not a native Japanese person and perhaps she would have spoken more slowly, but unfortunately, she never looked up.

I finally recognized a few words, and handed her my Gaijin resident card, my American driver's license, and my A4 copies, and she told me to wait downstairs for one hour. There were only 49 minutes left, but I kept quiet and hoped she wouldn't catch it. "Which staircase -- nevermind," and I headed back through the broom closet.

46 minutes later, a man appeared, my documents carried neatly in a basket. He motioned me over to a desk, and pointed at my license, and spoke in maybe the third-fastest Japanese I've ever heard. He pointed at a particular kanji on the official Japanese translation of my license I'd had to send away for, and I could read only the word after it, "nashi," meaning "nothing." He turned my license over and indicated the black magnetic data-containing strip Texas includes on the back. I finally figured out what he wanted. The information that should have been there instead of "nashi" was encoded in that strip, and he needed to know exactly what it was.

I can bungle my way through most everyday situations, but I'm not equipped with the language to deal gracefully with the following: the information we need is encoded in this magnetic strip on the back of your driver's license. Please get a printout. I clarified as best I could that this was what he wanted. I think he said yes. I asked him how to get this printout, what exactly is it, and from where. He said, "Ganbatte," and left. This was only the appointment to make the appointment to take the test. I can't wait for the test.

From boingboing:

Send flowers to a random couple at SF City Hall

A Minnesotan got the idea to have congratulatory flowers delivered to a random gay couple on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, and now s/he's trying to start a movement.

He called a florist and they agreed to do it. He told them to deliver to any couple -- it didn't matter who -- standing in line to get married, with his blessing. The card will read simply "With love, from Minneapolis, Minnesota." Once they understood, they were very touched and thought it was a great idea.

He told another co-worker who did the same thing. And now we want to start a movement. Wouldn't that be cool if people from all over the country, gay, straight and otherwise, started sending flowers to the people waiting in line to get married.

A link from boingboing lists participating florists in the Bay Area, including Flowers on the Bay, 888-217-9119 .

I took a quick glance at the instant messaging board on the site I use for tracking. "So hwat have you been up to? Skol again?" someone wrote. Then they realized their spelling mistake. "Skool?" they corrected. How strange that misspellings are so standardized.

Japanese emoticons are different than American ones. It's interesting to me that in English, which is written horizontally, a smiley looks like this :-) , but that in Japan, where things are often written vertically, punctuation prefers to smile like this (^_^) . The Japanese language's strong visual and symbolic structure has leant itself to the creation of an entire emoticon language. More examples can be found here. (^^)//

Lying sick in my hotel bed in north Vietnam, I sorely regretted not seeing the world of the trek I was supposed to be on. Steep rice-field terraced mountains, remote villages only recently reached by the outside world, where people wore traditional tribal costumes because that was their clothes, and both transportation and dinner often means water buffalo. Sa Pa had gotten a paved road connecting it to the rest of the country only five years earlier. But the world I glimpsed on television, the world of Communist programming, was nearly as fascinating. I felt like I had tapped into transmissions from another planet.

Modern written Vietnamese uses Roman letters, this system was adopted in the 17th century, but in ways unfamiliar to Western ears. On the Vietnamese Wheel of Fortune , a contestant would make an unearthly sound, and an "N" would appear. "I'd like an 'ooOun'gh', please," *applause*. I was transfixed for a while by the letter sounds.

Another channel played a Communist military musical variety show that looked something as if Ho Chi Minh had once been guest costumer for The Lawrence Welk Show. On one, there were two separate groups of three men in light green and four women in dark green military uniforms on a studio stage, the women with red bows on their braids. The two groups took turns performing light ballet in front of a line of alternating man-woman-man-woman formally dressed smiling Lawrence Welk-esque singers, the women in beautiful traditional ao dai.

There was a channel seemingly devoted to mini-documentaries glorifying the blue-collar worker: glowing handsome young sweatshop seamstresses, cogsmen, and assembly-line stampers, smiling with the humble satisfaction of another honest day's work. Vietnamese banknotes feature similar scenes.

And inevitably, there were American shows, Roswell and mediocre Hollywood blockbusters, dubbed into Vietnamese. Vietnam, though, apparently has only one English voiceover actor, a woman, who does every single voice, and the effect was disquieting.

Imagine, for instance, a scene between a petite blonde femme fatale and her beefy muscleman lover. The couple sits watching the autumn leaves fall from their porch, their precocious Hollywood dog curled at their feet. The mailman is making his rounds.

"I love you, baby," says the woman, in the feminine voice of voiceover actor A. "I love you too, baby," responds her masculine companion, also with actor A's voice. "Woof!" says the precocious dog. "Good afternoon to ya," says the mailman, in the voice of actor A.

See? Disquieting. After a while, I had to turn off the sound.

My friend returned from his trek a few days later and regaled me with stories of picturesque landscapes, colorful tribespeople, home-cooked water buffalo, and a floorless hand-railed outhouse built directly over a running stream. The next day he rode in a Soviet military jeep to a faraway market where he watched a girl try to break up a pair of arguing water buffalo by throwing rocks, and a woman getting a cavity filled with a foot pump-powered drill, out in the open next to a pig-butchering stand. I stayed in bed and tried to imagine these things, and attempted to guess what vowel might need buying on the Wheel, with no success. One of these days I'll have to return to Vietnam.

Unfortunately, near-misses and horror make for the strongest travel memories. Like the time I thought I might die in Vietnam. Long, disgusting story short, in Hanoi last year, I caught something which turned out not to be just food poisoning and didn't just go away by next morning. Using the combined powers of optimism, ignorance, and an overwhelming need to escape the noise and stench of downtown, I hobbled aboard an overnight train bound north for Sa Pa, near the Chinese border.

The longer version. I didn't like Hanoi, and I felt guilty about it, and boarding that train let me leave my dislike and my guilt behind. I respect Hanoi, no doubt. The city has been continuously occupied for over 1000 recorded years. In the center is a beautiful lake with many legends, scattered throughout is a lovely and curious mixture of French and traditional Vietnamese architecture, and its streets pulse with life the strength of which I'd never seen before. It also holds the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, another story altogether, perhaps for later. I regard travel as a privelege and good fortune, and I appreciated the opportunity of going to Hanoi. All the same, I hated being there.

The Lonely Planet Guide on Vietnam: "Basically there's only one road rule: Small yields to big, or else. Traffic cops are often there to be paid off. Vehicles drive on the right-hand side of the road (usually). Spectacular accidents are frequent."

My old journal on Hanoi: "It makes me want to stand on a corner and yell, 'Oh, for f***'s sake!' I want to swing over the top of it from vine to vine. The traffic is the lost 8th wonder of the world... It's a nightmare of honking, yelling, smoke, and aggressive salespeople of everything. Even the tourists are rude. But maybe I'll like it better tomorrow."

Shortly after dinner in a cheap downtown cafe, I started to feel a bit strange. By the time I reached the block of my hotel, I was staggering down the sidewalk doubled-over in pain. I spent the rest of that night sick in the bathroom, and missed a planned daytrip to the Perfume Pagoda the next morning. I needed to recover quickly -- we had booked a trek in Sa Pa for later in the week, so I rented a $2 bed in a dorm to spend a couple days in while my friend explored Hanoi. The next evening, I boarded the train for Sa Pa, expecting to feel better at any moment.

Lao Cai was the train's final stop, and where everyone and our enormous backpacks deboarded before getting into vans or buses bound for Sa Pa. I crawled down exhausted and sleepless from my bunk and stepped into the crowded aisle towards the door. I had spent most of that night in the Trainspotting-filthy bathroom of the sleeper car. A few steps into the aisle, in the smothering line of backpackers, four of my senses suddenly went blank all at once. There was nothing else I could do in that crowd, so I felt my way along the narrow walls and out the door, and luckily my senses returned just in time to guide me down the stairs to the platform. I took a few cautious steps out and looked for my friend,... and suddenly there he was, standing above me, with maybe a dozen other people, on the train tracks. I had fainted and fallen off the platform, face-down onto the rocks beneath the train.

It was too perplexing a question at that moment why I should be fainting off of platforms, so instead the small crowd turned attention to my knee, which was rather bloody. My friend and the two actors who had shared our compartment gathered me up and carried my backpack to the minivan that was to carry us two hours further north. I limped to the station bathroom and paid 500 dong to an attendant, and splashed cold water from a bucket and ladle over my face and bloody knee -- there was no running tap. I settled grimacing into a hard-seated, cushionless minivan ride, one damp rolled-up pants leg sticking out from under the backpack where I nestled for warmth. I was miserable, and scared, and nauseous, and definitely not getting any better.

At the hotel, our guide phoned the tour company and arranged to transfer my trek money into room and board. I was disappointed, but protest was absurd. Our trek involved several days hiking over steep terrain. My knee was swollen and purple and could barely help me up the shallow stairs. I accepted the hotel room and dragged myself hand-over-hand up the railing to my room, one leg trailing stiffly behind. I had not been able to eat or drink anything in days.

My friend was worried and torn, and I told him to go on the trek. I didn't want him to miss this, it was one of the things we had most looked forward to in all of our 6-week trip, and frankly it's awkward to have someone around when you're constantly vomiting anyway. He left his supply of powdered rehydrating solution in case I should ever regain the power to drink liquid, and at the last moment, his Walkman, and I crawled into the bed nearest the bathroom, where I stayed for the next three or so days.

With all the trekkers gone, the hotel was silent. Silent as a tomb, one does not care to think when one is quite that sick, and yet still does. Three times a day, hotel staff would quietly slip a meal ticket for the adjacent restaurant under my door, but I was only just improving my odds with plain water, and didn't risk it. After a couple days, they started to worry, and brought me a tray. When I caught myself mentally writing a will, I decided to call my travel insurance company.

It took me several tries to demystify the phone at my bedside, but I finally placed the toll free call to America. I briefly explained my situation to the agent, and realized there was much more about my situation I simply could not explain, not to her.

"It's OK," she assured me in a Midwestern accent, "Now just go the hospital, and have your doctor email us, and we'll take it from there."

"Uh, I'm in Sa Pa. North Vietnam, near the Chinese border. There are no hospitals here, I already asked the hotel staff."

"OK, well a doctor's clinic is fine too --"

"No doctors. No email."

"No --? Well, whatever. Tell the doctor, fax is fine too, now --"

"No email, no faxes, no hospitals, no doctors. People just go to the pharmacist here and tell him what they want. I'm not sure you understand -- look, it's very primitive."

"Ha ha, primitive. Yes, I understand, look I'm in Wisconsin. Now just --"

I kind of lost it here. "No, no. Primitive! Village in northern Vietnam primitive, Chinese border primitive, not Wisconsin primitive. I'm not talking 56K dial-up primitive. I'm talking-- you don't-- look, I can see live water buffalo right now. I'm downtown."

I finally gave up on the insurance agent, feebly clawed open a packet of powdered rehydrating solution, and prepared myself to die in my hotel room on that water buffalo-filled north Vietnamese lane if it came to that. I telepathed a loving message to my mother, grasped for the remote, and found Vietnamese television to be fascinating.

Surreal is trying to explain instant macaroni and cheese to someone in Japanese. They don't have any here. I did have a good time miming waiting for the water to boil, ripping open the box, and especially mixing in the cheese powder. It was almost as good as actually doing it, except that now I can think of nothing but Kraft, and I have none to eat after all my efforts.

I do, however, have Yakisoban. Also here.

Shirakawa-go

Shirakawa-go in northern Gifu Prefecture is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is a sort of living museum of traditional Japanese culture, and the small village of 600 people contains 113 traditional "Gassho style" buildings, a type of snow-resistant architecture unique to the area. "Gassho" roughly means "praying hands" and refers to the shape of the steep thatched roofs. The buildings are hundreds of years old, but extremely well-preserved, and most still currently house families and businesses catering to tourists.

Tojinbo by Takeji Asano, 1900-1999

(Image from artelino.)

Legend says that in the 900's, a Buddhist monk named Kakunen pushed another monk named Tojinbo off a steep cliff near Fukui. Some say the murder was inspired by a rivalry for the love of a beautiful woman named Aya. Others say Tojinbo was a very unpopular monk who often shirked his duties and angered his peers. Some suggest the two had been drinking. In any case, Tojinbo died, and being understandably upset over his own untimely demise, he haunted the cliff each April and caused violent storms and waves.

Some years later, another monk took pity on vengeful Tojinbo, and called for a memorial service in his honor. Tojinbo was somewhat soothed, and the storms stopped.

Or was he?

Today the area named for Tojinbo is as famous for its picture-postcard views and unique geography as it is for its plague of suicides. Geologists note it for a specific type of columnar jointing which is found in only two other places in the world. Most other people note it grimly as the site of almost one suicide per week on average. A small island lying directly across from the morbid cliff is said to be haunted by the bodies that frequently wash up on its shore. The island Oshima is so well-known as a haunted place, it was even featured on one of those "True Stories of UFOs and Ghosts" type TV programs a couple years back.

After hearing last year Oshima was haunted, I of course wanted immediately to go. I asked a few Japanese friends with cars, and one finally agreed to take me, at midnight even; he was a big, cool, slightly cynical, punk-rock sort of man in his early 30s, and he wasn't afraid. We met at a bar at 11 pm, and made the walk across downtown to his car, chatting and joking amicably on the way. But as we neared his car, he started to walk more slowly, and by 11:30, he had backed out completely. He called his own bluff. He was scared.

Last weekend I returned to Fukui, in my own car, to visit friends. And again I determined to see Oshima. I took two friends with me for the sorely-needed trip out of town, and I stopped by my ghost-scared Japanese friend's shop to invite him for a second chance. He turned me down. Not only were there ghosts, he assured me, but his band's bassist had just broken her leg at Oshima a month previous. Because of ghosts, he said. Whatever.

Our schedule wouldn't let us make the trip at midnight, so dusk had to do. We made bad jokes about the ghosts that my friend said would follow us back home, but as we actually neared the island, we all became palpably quieter. By day, the tiny island is the home of a rather unremarkable but ghostless shrine, and we parked the car amongst family station wagons leaving for home. Still, there was definitely something desolate about the place, and even creepy.

Unfortunately, the island proved anti-climactic. A long red bridge connects the tiny island to the mainland. At the end of the bridge is the shrine, and off to the left a path. The path circumscribes the island, about 2 km around, dotted with signs detailing the area's geographical wonders for visiting school groups. There was a small grove of unabashedly creepy trees, a couple of creepy-sounding bird calls, but that was about it. Maybe we should have gone at midnight after all. We drove on a couple minutes to Tojinbo.

Tojinbo is gorgeous, stunning, picturesque. Its geography is strange -- 20- and 30- meter columns of vertical rock pieced together into cliffs. In low tide, pools of vivid green water are created immediately adjacent others of vivid blue. In high tide, violent foamy waves seethe amongst near-black rocks. Tojinbo is at all times dramatic.

The first time I visited Tojinbo, a friend told me about a free telephone booth near the top. Because the area was such a popular suicide spot, a free phone booth was actually provided to give those in a moment of desperation a chance to call a friend or family member and talk. I didn't actually see the phone booth that first time, but I was stunned by its existence anyway. But this time, perhaps because of the letdown of Oshima, I suppose we had half-wanted to see at least a flying candle or hear some disembodied wailing in Japanese, we decided to seek out the booth.

The main area of Tojinbo is well-photographed, and we wandered all over the recognizable part of it without seeing any phone booths. The cliffs seemed awfully touristy and public for a suicide spot, but then again, Tokyo train tracks don't exactly offer privacy to their frequent jumpers either. We finally gave up and looked instead for a restroom on the way back to the car, as it was getting dark. On a pitch-dark side path near a smaller, hidden cliff, there with grotesquely-glowing lighting in the near distance, was the phone booth.

It wasn't where we expected it to be, but after a moment it made sense. This was the part of the cliff not photographed, less dramatic, more private, and... directly across from Oshima. We recognized the booth though immediately. It was not free in the sense of no coin-slot, instead it seemed to be supported by donations. On the tiny shelf where the phone book usually sits, was a small hill of change, mostly bronze 10-yen coins oxidized green with age, or salt-air. Several brand new coins gleamed unsettlingly on top. The phone books sat stacked on the floor. A lonely path led briefly along the cliff, and of course we had to look.

We stared out at the view that must have been the last sight of so many other people. It felt strange to be staring at this as a group of three, when it was so clearly a view meant for one. A lone Japanese pine twisted out over the sea, defying the sober finality of the drop below it.

I don't know what we were expecting, but somehow it wasn't this, and it was. There was no high fence here to obstruct anyone from jumping, instead a single low chain ran for several meters only and then stopped. My friend translated a simple black-on-white sign further up the path near the edge as, "Make that call," and another directly across from the booth as, "Don't hurry to die; no one can replace you." The ghost-hunting suddenly didn't feel like lighthearted fun. There was nothing to be said that didn't feel trite, so we said nothing at all for a long time. It made me feel only sad, and helpless, and then glad to be alive, and more than that, glad to be glad.

Today was Setsubun, the bean-throwing festival. Setsubun is supposed to mark the last day of winter, but its timing is based on an old Chinese lunar calendar rather than realistic weather conditions. At temples across the country, people gather to wear plastic "oni", devil, masks and throw dried soybeans to scare off evil, yelling "Fuku wa uchi, oni wa soto!" ("Fortune in, devils out!"). Good fortune can be further assured by eating the number of soybeans equivalent to one's age. Cheap plastic oni masks and small packages of soybeans are sold at supermarkets and convenience stores.

We celebrated Setsubun at kindergarten today too. For weeks, the kids have been making their own oni masks out of paper and yarn. The Japanese devil has a mess of curly rainbow-colors clown hair, pointy teeth, and either one or two horns. He tends to dress like a caveman, and seems fond of eating live whole animals and children.

At 10:30 a.m., the children were gathered in their respective classrooms and issued their oni masks and an empty origami paper envelope. The teachers put a scant handful of dried soybeans into each cup, and the children donned their masks and crouched anxiously behind a table waiting for the devil. Some sat towards the front, boldly and full of excited smiles, others shook timidly in the corners and clutched their bean envelopes in terror. I knelt confused on the floor with a child in each arm, two on my lap, and one at my neck, and peered out at the playground clueless.

Drumbeats. The children's eyes burned and spun. A pink-haired devil appeared at the door, wearing the bus driver's shoes. 27 four-year olds screamed simultaneously.

Paper and pompoms-covered cardboard boxes and a willful suspension of disbelief had turned our small fleet of schoolbus drivers into a gang of child-hungry, bean-leery devils. A few unsuspecting kids at the front were pushed from behind towards the devils, and the bean-shower first trickled, then was unleashed. Soybeans rained on all sides from a height of three feet. The cardboard devils veered and retreated and lurched, fallen ammo was desperately scrambled-at and relaunched, cornered children wailed and were saved, and finally the pelted oni ran off in the direction of the five-year olds' class.

Congratulations were made, tears were wiped, the floor was swept, and the battle-weary children were gathered together for the victory speech. The teacher made it clear that, while we had won this battle, the only way to really assure our freedom from oni-harrassment was to listen to the teacher, be nice to each other, sing all our songs energetically, and eat all our food at lunch. Never have the lunch plates been so clean as they were today.