Wild Boar

I have not turned down many meals in Japan. In fact, I think I can honestly say I have eaten more than my fair share of the vast majority of the food placed in front of me.

I have proven an ability to eat all sorts of crazy stuff like natto (fermented soy beans that the kids frenziedly stir with their chopsticks until it resembles regurgitated snot [yes, that's what I meant]), fish with eggs still in the tummy, a plethora of vegetables I don't know the names of, not because I don't eat veggies but because these are harvested from some dark crevice or recess unknown to the Western world, trees (seriously; these people will eat anything), and an assortment of animals in various stages of preparation and mammals in a variety of forms.. You know that school lunch when they tell you "oh, it's many different kinds of fish"? You're eating whale. They consider it a fish.

Even after living here for over a year, I shock my friends and colleagues by explaining that yes, I do eat raw fish (sashimi) and I know what wasabi is, even though i incorrectly pronounce it as wasabi. In general, I just try to be polite and grown-up - unless I think something will make me physically ill, I eat it.

Take wild boar.

Last night, my office had a practice end-of-year party for those of us who would be at alternative end of year parties. We ate stew made from a boar my boss trapped outside his house. (How's that for locally farmed?)

Normally, this would host no problem. Except they put the hide in the stew. Which made it taste like hair.

What's more, I don't know if you've ever tried to de-hair a wild boar, but it ain't like plucking the down from a baby duck. Those follicles stay put. So the hair was still in the meat as well.

Now, I tried to be reasonable. Most everybody was eating the whole thing, so I gave it a shot.

Then I gave it up. It was the singularly most unappetizing meal I have had in the last ten years. And I include my own cooking in this (which is why I mostly eat raw fish).

Later I realized the hide had most of the fat and had floated to the top of the stew. So after a few servings, what remained was the richer meat from closer to the bone. It looked delicious, but the broth still tasted like hide and hair. That was a no go for me.

To make things better, later in the evening as more people drank, they left the hide alone. Only a few old codgers (and one young wife) ate the parts that got stuck in my gullet (and my teeth).

Japanese food is delicious. But let's leave the local farmers to what they're best at.

Rice.

Last Week and Last Week to Go

So last week I was out of town at the Mid-Year Conference for Kochi ALTs. This year they renamed it the Skills-Development Conference, but don't think that changed anything. Last year was pretty horrible - boring, dull, filled with contradictions and frustrations. This year was a step up. Fewer contradictions and some actual development of skills.

First up we had a lovely speaker who told us all about why Japanese students are
1) just like all students around the world and
2) put off of English by random shit we do of which we have no conscious awareness.So fix it.

That's an over-simplification, of course. It's hard to fit an hour and a half speech into a snarky two sentence summary and still hit all the main points, but I'll try.

For one thing, the professor pulled out a number of excellent ideas for fostering independence and confidence in foreign language acquisition, all of which I would love to implement. Reality confronted, however, and let's remember I'm an assistant who has been here a year and a half and was only yesterday allowed to lead a fifteen-minute portion of the class. And that was after the teacher gave the students a speech telling them how stressed they were going to feel, but not to worry because even she didn't understand me in English or in Japanese. I'm happy to say that the kids did very well, they were more energetic than I have ever seen them, they mostly participated, and none of them suffered debilitating hysteria or strokes of any kind, nervous or synaptical. (not a word, just in case you were wondering..)

The speaker's other point was to say that Japanese students are put off by things like 1) beards, 2) technology, 3) their peers (I can't do much about that one), 4) our attitudes (truth be told, my attitude is sometimes poor - I am trying to mask utter rage and frustration and the closest I can come to content is probably boredom), and 5) their own Japanese-ness. This is true, of course. If the group is unintentional in its acquisition of new skills, the individual may just be paralyzed by the idea of becoming 'different' or skilled at something. Especially if there seems to be little application for it in everyday life.

Other than those little snippets of inadequacy, though, the conference was a success. We got to the end of it and survived, so I count it as a success.

We had a culture day, too, where we got to try out different crafts and projects that we may not be able to do in our own villages. I did calligraphy and martial arts. The calligraphy was fun - more so because I was so bad at it, the sensei (teacher) couldn't even lie to me like she did to the other kids. She wandered around the room giving excellent advice and guidance, happily complementing the kids who did passably well. When she walked by my table, she pursed her lips and tried to smile, but I could feel her soul wilt inside of her as she glided on. I don't hold it against her; I completely understand the feeling. Every time a child runs up to the piano bench and bangs Fur Elise out with nothing approaching grace, sophistication, or even basic rhythm. Story of my life, sister.

Martial arts was pretty awesome. My six months of karate training helped out with the basics. I even recognized the names of the moves the teachers brought out. Then we moved on to nun-chucks, long spears, and a few self defense moves. Loved. It. There is nothing so fantastic as remembering your technique, even if it was over two years ago. The senseis have a dojo in Muroto, but that's quite a hike. I have taiko on those nights, I'm sure.

Anyway, now we're back in our own little villages, back to the grindstone and the wild times of Tano cho. Tomorrow is our last class for the year - we are having our Super-Super (Really) Fun-Fun Grand Review tomorrow. I have to go buy some kit kats or something to hype them up for the end of it. And me. I am definitely going to be drinking from Thursday until 2013.

The Wednesday Post

                                   

 Tano is actually a very scenic little town. It's full of character (and characters) and the lack of trees ensures a lack of spiders and also very stark plays between light and shadow, especially now during the icy-bright winter days, where the sun is close, low and entirely devoid of warmth, and the clouds are high, far-apart, and glittering with silver linings.

When I straighten my hair, the adults say - wow! It's straight.

When I wear it curly, nature's way, my kids all study me

in deep suspicion - Perm?

I like this gate. Of course, it's in the narrowest rode possible.

Somebody once said, a house without a cat is a like a body without a soul. But what about a town with a cat population that rivals the human one? It's not a problem, per say, but it's not a solution either. People need to spay and neuter their pets. And then put collars on them and keep them safe from the kids who throw rocks at them because they are so prolific as to be considered a nuisance. . 

This guy lives outside my house. Once a day, I give him

a goldfish cracker. Not enough to build a dependence, just

enough to encourage an expectation.

The dockyards especially attract the little beasts. The fishermen

clean, scale, and gut their fish here, and the cat population flourishes

on the refuse. 

Blogger Hates Me

Which is why the format is all whacked out in the past two posts. It says one thing here in editing, and then it looks entirely different on the actual blog.

$#%&!#@@!!!

The Infamous Office Party

Japan is a "high stress" culture, some Japanese will tell you. Mostly this is because they place a lot of stress on themselves when they really don't have to. For example, teachers get forty days of paid leave a year. I have yet to meet a teacher who has taken more than one day off from work, even in the summer.
Office workers would rather shower you in bacteria-filled mucus deluges than take their disease-ridden bodies back home two hours early on a day when business is so slack, they've sat at their desks chatting through their surgical masks with coworkers. No one goes home early, unless you're the slacker foreign assistant English teacher who literally has no work to do once classes finish for the day, and often before classes start for the day.

One of the by-products of this way of life is the full acceptance of alcohol being the only answer.

Kochi prides itself on its drinking culture, its drinking games and the funny little ill-balancing cups they produce in pottery sheds across the prefectures, and on their ability to drink like fish and not get wobbly (unlike the cups):

Famous Kochi bekuhai drinking cups - ugly as sin, but that doesn't matter since you won't
remember it tomorrow anyway.

The office party becomes that moment when you are able to finally relax, let your hair down, and tell people what you really think of them. For instance, at our party this week, one of my coworkers was routinely told that he was getting fat while another had written on his hand "don't talk" as a way of reminding himself not to get carried away (he is known for being much too blatantly honest at these sort of events, even for a drinking party). 

It always starts awkwardly, especially if you happen to sit next to a stranger who pales at the thought of communicating with a foreigner. I was late to this party, even though I live closest to the establishment, and so through a process of eliminated seats, ended up next to two dudes from my office and one very young nervous fellow, who tried to avoid eye contact all night long. 

For the first twenty minutes or so (after the speeches, which were pretty funny since my town's Board of Education hosted and we are known for being painfully tight with our money and very entertaining), everybody looks around anxiously, piteously helping neighbors with food and drink and politely declining anybody helping them. 

Then you're on your third round (this is Kochi - most sparsely populated region in Japan; number three for drinking beer, outside of Tokyo, which wins by volume, and Okinawa which is inhabited solely by surfing drunks), and all the asian faces turn bright red. They can't help it, that's how it goes when they drink.  

Suddenly, your neighbor is happily arguing with you about cooking shows and proper etiquette for farting in public, and the coworker who sits across from you at the office and never says three words, is arguing that you're the one who never talks to him and when are you going to come play basketball with the community team? Your boss's boss plunks down next to you with his potato-sake and after they spend five minutes telling you "potato, Merry, not rice!" he orders a hot sake pot and you begin the endless cycle of pouring each other drinks. 

This year was especially fun because last year when my boss's boss tried to talk to me, somebody had to interpret. This year, we got along without help, although everyone around us threw in as many irrelevant Engrish words as they possibly could to better facilitate understanding, except for the new father at the end of the table who looked like he was going to fall asleep at any moment. 

When I got compliments on my Japanese, I explained it was because I was drinking. Moshi nondara, nihongo ga jouzu naru yo! Which may not be correct, but was comprehendible. 

It's unfortunate we can't drink at the office itself. We would get a hell of a lot more done and be much less stressed.