Taste.

This post is actually several months late, and to the person who sent me this parcel of goodness, I apologise profusely. But better late than never, I always say, and although some of you may indeed think that this could be my very own personal motto, the day I am actually on time with something, you'll all be late anyway.

One of the things that I enjoy most about travelling and living somewhere else is the different styles of food that you can experience. Experiences that are unique to the place that you are visiting, and experiences that are intrinsically the same in all cultures - after all, everyone has to eat.

I will try to remember this the next time someone offers me chicken sashimi, natto or sea urchin. Especially the sea urchin.

Coming from Australia, where they have a myriad of flavours and foods all mixed, all separate, all catering to every whim or craving that you might have, to Japan, where multiculturalism and it's subsequent variety of available cuisines are yet to be fully embraced and I am faced with the dilemma of wanting to eat the best Japanese food I will ever have, while balancing the need for foods that I had taken for granted like Lebanese and good Italian.

Food, for me, in Japan, is all about polar opposites. Raw fish, sashimi, is the best I have ever eaten, and having sashimi and rice in the Tsukiji fish market at 8am was a cool experience. Being served kaiseki ryori with the PTA in an old restaurant in Kyoto was special because of the ceremony and importance behind it. Being expected to eat the boiled and simmered fish head while watching other teachers suck out the opalescent eyeballs can be described as nothing else than an experience. Same goes for fish ovaries.

Food in Japan is revered and this is reflected not only in the 4 hours of nightly cooking shows that highlight some special oishii dish that is accompanied by looks of shock and amazement for the very thing that the c-grade celebrities have just popped into their mouths, but also by the way that every time I mention that I'm going somewhere in Japan, I'm told that the area is famous for special soba, or special udon, or special fish, or special water. Sure, some of these things may be special, but there are people who will travel extensively just to eat udon noodles that to me, taste no different to the udon noodles that I used to buy from Daily in Highgate. Japanese people are obsessed with food.

But, like I mentioned before, the influence of multiculturalism on the variety of foods available has had very little impact upon Japan. Finding good Indian is no longer a matter of a ten minute drive to Maya Masala. Instead it's a mission into Osaka. However, it certainly makes you appreciate it that bit more when you've had to change trains twice and walk through the crazy streets of Amemura and hope like hell that you can find the restaurant that you went to 4 months previously on a whim. The things you miss can mostly be found at international stores, albeit at inflated prices, or for the Americans among us, Costco.


The offshoot of having hours upon hours to kill at school, once I've studied of course, is that you generally end up spending a fair amount of time reading the longest book ever written, The Internet. Online, I managed to find this cool little swap thing that involves you sending a package of food stuffs from your country to someone else in another country. I think my family are sick of the weird yet wonderful types of pocky and crazy kit kats that I send them, and some of the Japanese snack foods are so odd that they deserve to be shared with as many people as possible. So this way, not only do I get to buy some of the craziest stuff I've ever seen, I also get sent a package of slightly less crazy, but equally exciting foods from another country. And postal costs aren't nearly as much as a flight!


This is a photo of the package I received in December. It was so cool to open something that a complete stranger had obviously thought carefully about, and had even cared enough to make home-made Christmas biscuits. I got different teas, some fantastic dark chocolate, Christmas biscuits, some chocolate scented bath bombs, some butterfingers and a few other things as well. It's surprising how small the world is sometimes, as my swap person had friends who lived in Perth, and she was from San Francisco. A pleasure to give, and certainly a pleasure to receive.

Hentai.

Just when I thought Japan couldn't surprise me anymore, that I was completely blase when it came to 'what the fuck' moments, that I was, essentially, too cool for school, along comes Sunday night, smacks me around the head, and leaves me completely gobsmacked. Well, not literally. Thank God.

Robyn and I were walking back from Onomachi station, completely minding our own business, when we noticed this guy who had pulled up on a dark section of the road and appeared to be looking for something on the edge of the rice fields. This is no big deal, people stop for a pee all the time, and being in the country, it certainly wouldn't have been unusual. Kinda gross, but not unusual. However, when walking up to said man, he turns around, and he has pants pulled down at the front and his cock in his hand, and he's certainly not peeing. He just walked to the side of the pavement, so we had to walk past him, holding onto his fella the whole time and leering.
Gross gross creepy pervert.

So mostly I'm just really mad that someone decided that it was ok to do that to me, purely for their own perverted kicks. I feel like I've had a horrible part of Japan exposed that previously I had kind of known about but had chosen to ignore. You hear stories about people and the dirty men that have ogled them in the street, who've felt a hand exactly where it shouldn't be on a peak hour trains, or been warned not to dry your underwear outside because it goes missing, but walking home in the country, you do not expect to be the person who has the story to tell about the man waiting for you to walk past so that he can openly masturbate in front of you.

Where the wild things are

When you're the world's biggest scaredy cat, and you're watching Twin Peaks in a storm, and the episode finishes in a timely David Lynch cliff hanger, do not expect to get much sleep. In fact, expect to spend most of the night listening for things that aren't there, making sure the doors are locked, that the blankets are pulled up tight under your chin so that nothing can get you, and then wondering why a cupboard door, which would have no reason to be opening, would be capable of pushing itself open and shut a fraction every time the wind tries to blow itself inside out. Expect to reason with yourself, many many times, that it's just your overactive imagination in ADD hyperdrive, and that really, monsters do not exist.

Despite what David Lynch may be trying to tell you.

Release

So this is graduation the second time around. The same pomp and ceremony, the same 4 hours spent cleaning the school the day before, the same suits from last year that haven't been busted out since the last time, the same twee-ness of the corsages for the graduate's homeroom teachers. And then, like I do for special occasions, I put my cynicism away, and watch these people stand for the last time and walk away from what has probably been the most influential period of their lives.

Sometimes I think teaching is kind of addictive. The beginning part is fucking hard, you're completely winging it, ballsing stuff up, but always, the saving grace is the students. It starts getting easier, you gain a tentative grasp on what's needed, confidence grows exponentially, but is just as easily shredded into itty bitty pieces. The students, the few who actually listen, the majority that don't, are what keep drawing me back into that classroom, to teach the same lesson for the sixth time, for that one moment where something is suddenly clarified or you manage to elicit a genuine laugh from a student you've been working on for weeks and weeks.

Say what you like about JET and our lack of qualifications, and the pay that we get for doing not much, but at the end of the day, on days like graduation, you realise that you've had a chance to have an influence on the next generation, that this is your chance to stop complaining about our parent's generation and their fuck-ups, our generation and our fuck-ups, and that this is a chance to actually make some kind of difference. Maybe I notice it more in Japan because there are such apparent societal disparities that I could not stand were I to live here indefinitely, because I'm still not cynical enough to be totally indifferent, because I'm not happy with the answer of "It is the Japanese way". But now, with the opportunity of teaching given to me and these kids who are so open to learning, it's been special to have been of some significance in their lives.

Having just come through a completely hellish time with my school, arguments and tears and more arguments and cultural clashes and really, that's a whole new story, there have been days when I've woken up and wanted nothing more than to not to go to school, having had to convince myself just to go through the next logical step of going downstairs and then having a shower and then having breakfast until eventually I'm walking through the school gates, one of the few things that made me keep going is that I'm vain enough to think that by not being in class would disappoint at least one kid. In not being there, I would be depriving them of an opportunity of viewing an opinion that different to the populist bullshit that seems to drive the education curriculum here.


Graduation is special. The bonds that form at school you think will last forever. For the first time in your life you're being told that the future is up to you, that you're finally being trusted with making big decisions, and from a teacher's perspective, that you've been prepared as much as possible for whatever may come your way. You leave school no longer as one of many, but as your own individual person, full of ideas and ideals. And for whatever crazy notion made me decide to move to Japan (hey, that sounds fun and I can put off real-life for a bit longer!), at no point did I consider that I would be in this privileged position where students were actually coming to me to thank me for teaching them.

This is where I wish I had the Japanese to convey just how much of an influence they've had on my experience of Japan. And sure, call me a JET poster child, or whatever throw-away insult you may care to find, but if only this could be genuinely conveyed to more people, and their schools and powers that be, before spirits are irrevocably broken.