Oh, Korea.
There is something very unsettling about leaving one Asian country where you can read the signs, follow the conversations, interpret the menus, and count out change with obnoxious precision, and heading to a country where the people look the same, but everything else is totally alien.
And no, I'm not racist, I'm realistic. They think we all look alike, too.
Last night, I was an articulate and intelligent, if slightly hammered, citizen of the world, chatting and kanpai-ing with my local sushi chef, comparing sake from Osaka to sake from Kochi, and making bad puns involving ginger and supermarket cashiers. ("Shouga? Shou ga nai!" It doesn't translate.)
Today, I'm running up to the poster at the front of the restaurant, pointing at a faded depiction of rice, eggs, and bamboo shoots, and smiling like a big white fool while the old lady running the joint is complaining to herself about my lack of comprehension, and the waitress is saying, "Ooh! Look! She wants bi-bim-bap! How cute!"
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
It's not enough that I tried to get on the wrong bus outside the airport and was saved only by a kind man who spoke enough English to ask to see my ticket, and gently point out that I really wanted to go to that other departure gate. The cashier at the coffee shop had to patiently help me find the correct change for my lunch, because apparently my math skills are closely linked to my language skills. Not only have I become deaf and mute, suddenly I can no longer add.
People may very well roll their eyes and get put out over my inability to tell a good joke in Korean, or for that matter say "thank you" correctly (I've tried - it's not working out for me), but it doesn't mean I care. For some reason, this trip at least - less than a day into it - I don't take it personally. It's all part of the game. You can't get anywhere if you don't go somewhere new and take a chance.
With a stomach gurgling over with kimchi and bean sprouts, a backpack spilling over with snacks that were purchased at an earlier time for that very probable moment when I'm starving and stuck at home, and my mind brimming over with humor at myself and my awkwardness (I'm not usually clumsy, but today I've knocked over everything I've touched - I almost include the plane in that; if it weren't for the gusty Osaka bay winds, I swear, it would've crumpled when I boarded), I wandered over to the taxi stop.
There was a long line of cars and a short line of people. I watched this one cabbie drive up, on his phone the whole time, and I figured he was going to pull right out of there when he saw a luggage-laden foreigner with her finger on the translate button of Google-talk, wobbling slightly on her trusty, but rather dilapidated after an inadvertant mountain trek, sky-highs.
Instead, he bobbed his head at me and opened the trunk.
Somehow I managed to pronounce the name of my destination correctly. He nodded again, and took off, like I was just another passenger.
That's right. Nailed it.
2014/04/04
2014/03/25
99 Bottles of Beer
"Dinner together or be drunk?"
This is a message I received from the junior high school vice principal's daughter. They're my kind of family.
I forgot how much alcohol is an inegral part of Japanese socializing. It is totally normal and acceptable to go down ten or so glasses of beer while at dinner with your boss, his boss, and the boss of everybody, his wife. Granted, the glasses are pretty small. I went to the Parent Teacher Association graduation party, and everybody had a rosy time. But if I were counting honestly, I would have to say each person probably only had two or three 12 ounce bottles of beer over a two hour period.
This is not much to a bulky Anglo-Saxon.
It is a lot to a petite Japanese person.
The PTA enkai was pretty funny, mostly because my students' parents look an awful lot like their kids. It was a little like looking into a distorted futuristic mirror that showed me exactly what twelve-year-old Seiyuu would be like in twenty years, and after three rounds of henpai (that grand drinking game, where you pour for your neighbor, and they reciprocate, and you reimburse, until the bottle is empty and you have to Thor-style it to the waitress: "Another!").
I made the mistake of being able to identify match a few parents and students without asking, and this meant for the rest of the night parents wandered up to me and said, "Quick! Who'm I? Can you guess?"
Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm slightly apalled at the hints they give.
"I have a daughter," one dad tells me. "She's kind of big."
"You mean tall?" I try to be diplomatic.
"I mean chubby. Fat. Big." Followed by an illustrative gesture.
Nice.
These introductions are always followed up by personal questions (let's face it - every question in Japan is a personal question: how tall are you, how much do you weigh, do you have a boyfriend, are your parents dead?). "Do you have children?" one mom asks me. I have about two hundred by now, if you count students. "No, not yet," I reply. "Are you married?" "No, not yet." "Do you have a boyfriend?"
If I did, he probably would be pissed off that I went to Japan for a month without him.
"No, not yet."
Surprisingly, though, when you talk to younger parents, they are very patient with you.
"That's okay," one mother tells me. "I didn't get married until I was in my thirties. You have to wait to find a responsible, hard-working man, who is financially stable. Nobody wants to marry poor."
I'll drink to that.
As the evening passes, you get up and move around to talk to other people, to drink with your superiors, and express gratitude to the right teachers. The principal came around to chat with me, knock me over with a feather - she's a nice lady, but we're not what you might call convivial with each other - and before we'd gotten two sentences out, some old dude plopped himself down and began chatting with us in extremely thick Tosa-ben.
The Principal translated into standard Japanese and I must have been pretty blotto by then, because I do not remember anything he said to me, although I remember he seemed to have a marvelous time conversing.
I am a great conversationalist.
At the end of the evening, I sneaked over to the sixth grade teacher and said thank you for being such a good teacher. This class was really tough - there were a lot of students and they did not work well together before he came along. In fact, two years ago when I met them, I worried that they were on the breaking point - something that most of the teachers also thought at the time.
By the time we broke up the party with the single unanimous hand clap (which must have an official Japanese name, but I sure don't know it) most folks were swaying, happily-red-faced, and ready for Bedforshire, myself among them. As I walked out the door, the junior high Vice Principal stopped me and asked, "When are we going to izakaya? Maybe get drunk together?"
Like father, like daughter. I really missed this place.
This is a message I received from the junior high school vice principal's daughter. They're my kind of family.
I forgot how much alcohol is an inegral part of Japanese socializing. It is totally normal and acceptable to go down ten or so glasses of beer while at dinner with your boss, his boss, and the boss of everybody, his wife. Granted, the glasses are pretty small. I went to the Parent Teacher Association graduation party, and everybody had a rosy time. But if I were counting honestly, I would have to say each person probably only had two or three 12 ounce bottles of beer over a two hour period.
This is not much to a bulky Anglo-Saxon.
It is a lot to a petite Japanese person.
The PTA enkai was pretty funny, mostly because my students' parents look an awful lot like their kids. It was a little like looking into a distorted futuristic mirror that showed me exactly what twelve-year-old Seiyuu would be like in twenty years, and after three rounds of henpai (that grand drinking game, where you pour for your neighbor, and they reciprocate, and you reimburse, until the bottle is empty and you have to Thor-style it to the waitress: "Another!").
I made the mistake of being able to identify match a few parents and students without asking, and this meant for the rest of the night parents wandered up to me and said, "Quick! Who'm I? Can you guess?"
Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm slightly apalled at the hints they give.
"I have a daughter," one dad tells me. "She's kind of big."
"You mean tall?" I try to be diplomatic.
"I mean chubby. Fat. Big." Followed by an illustrative gesture.
Nice.
These introductions are always followed up by personal questions (let's face it - every question in Japan is a personal question: how tall are you, how much do you weigh, do you have a boyfriend, are your parents dead?). "Do you have children?" one mom asks me. I have about two hundred by now, if you count students. "No, not yet," I reply. "Are you married?" "No, not yet." "Do you have a boyfriend?"
If I did, he probably would be pissed off that I went to Japan for a month without him.
"No, not yet."
Surprisingly, though, when you talk to younger parents, they are very patient with you.
"That's okay," one mother tells me. "I didn't get married until I was in my thirties. You have to wait to find a responsible, hard-working man, who is financially stable. Nobody wants to marry poor."
I'll drink to that.
As the evening passes, you get up and move around to talk to other people, to drink with your superiors, and express gratitude to the right teachers. The principal came around to chat with me, knock me over with a feather - she's a nice lady, but we're not what you might call convivial with each other - and before we'd gotten two sentences out, some old dude plopped himself down and began chatting with us in extremely thick Tosa-ben.
The Principal translated into standard Japanese and I must have been pretty blotto by then, because I do not remember anything he said to me, although I remember he seemed to have a marvelous time conversing.
I am a great conversationalist.
At the end of the evening, I sneaked over to the sixth grade teacher and said thank you for being such a good teacher. This class was really tough - there were a lot of students and they did not work well together before he came along. In fact, two years ago when I met them, I worried that they were on the breaking point - something that most of the teachers also thought at the time.
By the time we broke up the party with the single unanimous hand clap (which must have an official Japanese name, but I sure don't know it) most folks were swaying, happily-red-faced, and ready for Bedforshire, myself among them. As I walked out the door, the junior high Vice Principal stopped me and asked, "When are we going to izakaya? Maybe get drunk together?"
Like father, like daughter. I really missed this place.
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