O-niku suki suki, O-niku suki suki...YEAH!

Music. I love it, you love it, we all love it. The Japanese of course take things a step further. Their desire for music or noise or stimulus of some kind appears to be more of a pathological need if the busy areas are anything to go by. Every time you step off a train you are greeted by a fanfare of happy jingly WELCOME! chimes - Kawasaki station in particular plays a loop of twittering birds over the stairs towards the ticketing gate.　　￥100 shops frequently have a little stereo outside, with blaring techno and a little lady shrieking "Irasshimase!" (please come in, be welcome or something like that). Such is the prevalance of random sources of music in central Kawasaki, I managed to pretty much completely miss a rather fierce Trance event, noticing it the third time I walked past it.

It doesn`t stop there. There`s a shopping street, a good mile away from the centre, with greengrocers, fishmongers, takoyaki stalls, green tea merchants & lamp-posts festooned with tiny tinny tannoys, belching forth the latest offerings from the glitter-spattered denizens of the J-Pop world...

...J-Pop is actually pretty nightmarish. They have a penchant for ballads. It wouldn`t be so bad if they were power ballads - at least then they`d be funny. No such luck. Mainstream J-Pop is a tapestry of saccharine horror. This country spawned The Boredoms? Actually, I`m not surprised, although nobody seems to have heard of them over here ("Boadomusu?" "Hai. Nihonjin desu." Baffled silence...), but this entry isn`t about J-Pop or Japanoise (I haven`t made that term up)...

...all the schools I`ve visited have the Chimes of Big Ben separating each period. The ring tone for Kyomachi`s telephones is "The Entertainer". Fujimi and Nakanoshima alternate between light chamber music & Celine Dion during their lunch hours, but it`s the shopping areas that seem to be the main source for constant muzak. The mini-supermarket I use has an advert on a semi-permanent loop for "O-niku". I knew the word before, but it`s only recently clicked in my mind what it actually means. It is a constant source of amusement for me that the chorus of chirpy, cheerful, hellishly cute Manga-heroines who shout "O-niku!" at the start of the jingle are actually shouting "MEAT!"

Finishing in the pop vein, and it seems that not even Japan is safe from the rampage of Katie Melua. Where`s Godzilla when you need him?

Cross-cultural language education

All this week, I`ve been at Nakanoshima Junior High, a half-hour train journey out of Kawasaki. As a result, I`ve been getting up at five in the morning, staring bleakly at the clock on my laptop (still set to GMT) thinking that a session down the pub would be just about getting started...no more. I`ve finished at this particular school for the forseeable future. Apart from the absurd rising hour, this has been a fun week - I`ve been giving the kids a speaking test, which unfortunately has meant asking the same questions to about two-hundred and forty students, but things like that really bring out the characters. Here I`ve encountered the most fluently spoken english student yet. I asked a teacher if she knew what he was actually saying, and she responded with
"Not really, he uses a lot of very hard words." I`ll say. He`s learned all of his English from Hip-Hop albums (he even did a little yo-dance for me), and apparently "it`s the fucking shit, motherfucker."

Nihon no reigisaho - Japanese etiquette

Just before I start...I CAN use chopsticks. I can pick up individual grains of rice with the things. They`re like extra fingers. Of course, as soon as I go out for a meal with a couple of Japanese people, I turn into a meat-fisted clusterfuck. Very nice evening all round, courtesy of Komada sensei & Mrs Komada. Didn`t pay a bean, ate like an annual conference of kings.

I spent a good portion of my time before the meal learning a few Japanese phrases that I could drop into the conversation. This proved to be futile, as the whole evening was spent conversing in English, but I was determined not to let my efforts go to waste. I tried to use the phrase "Nihonjin wa aisoo no ii totemo desu" which, according to the Collins Pocket English/Japanese dictionary, means "Japanese people are very friendly." What it actually means (unless I pronounced it incorrectly) is "Japanese people are very cynical". I am reminded of the Monty Python sketch, where a Ukranian John Cleese is proclaiming loudly in a shop that his hovercraft is full of eels, and that his nipples explode with delight. Komada sensei tells me he had a similar problem when he was living in New Zealand. I reckon it`s a conspiracy to ferment inter-racial tensions, and what better place to hide it in than a billingual dictionary?

Neither of them were drinking, Komada sensei because he was driving, Mrs Komada because she`s a "sensitive" drinker, so I was doing my best not to let the conversation descend into a roaring drunken monologue on my part. I think I succeeded, but it`s hard to tell with Japanese people as they`re generally too polite to tell you if you`re being a fool or not.

The Japanese are incredibly polite. Too polite you might say. They always seem to be apologising. The word "sumimasen" generally means "excuse me", but it`s also a way of saying "thankyou" and a way of saying "sorry". A more serious way of saying sorry is "gomen nasai" but they have a third level of apology - "moshi wake gozai masen" which is the ultimate "I`m truly, unbelievably, utterly wretchedly sorry and I`ll never ever do it again". Even that`s not enough for a discrepancy that warrants this kind of apology, & it has to be backed up with repeated bowing and letters to various bigwigs saying you`ll endeavour to improve your behaviour. I`ve never had to do that...yet.

There`s nicer elements to Japanese etiquette. "Please" and "thankyou" are lovely words in any language. "Onegaishimasu" is a favorite of mine - at the start of each lesson the kids all face the front, bow solemnly and then there`s forty tiny voices screaming "ONEGAISHIMASU!!" I love that sound. Makes me grin like a loon. It`s the politest way of saying "please" - in the context of the lesson, I think the kids are saying "please teach us", whilst the teachers are saying "please learn from us"...or something. When put at the end of "dozo yoroshiku" (pleased to meet you) it makes it even more polite, "dozo" already meaning "please", when offering something.

There are four levels of saying thankyou - "domo", which is very informal (cheers); "hai, domo" which is more of a standard thankyou; "domo arigato", thankyou very much indeed and "domo arigato gozaimasu" which is something along the lines of "you have improved my life considerably by what you have done...YAY!" Of course, this was the first way of saying "thankyou" that I learned, so it slips off the tongue quite easily, often inappropriately (Wow! You sold me some socks! THANKYOU SO MUCH!).

I have no idea what`s being said in the teachers meetings at the start of each day, but I recognise enough words to know that before they launch into the issues they want to raise, the teachers are all roughly saying "excuse me please, thankyou for listening, I have a suggestion that I would be very grateful if you would hear, thankyou so much" - the speech is humble, but the manner is confident and businesslike.

That`s just the language. I`ll save day-to-day things for another entry. This one`s already too long, but in closing, for a moment I saw a hideous echo of myself in the writing style of this guy. Then I kept reading. Prelude to a nervous breakdown? I reckon.

Grrrrrr! Brrrrrrr!

A shorter entry than I`d hoped to leave this week, but needs must (I`m at work y`see). There`s nothing less likely to motivate students (or teachers for that matter) than three public holidays in a row & the first day back being a Friday. Insult to injury, it`s buggering cold, wet grey and miserable. Nothing more to say. Serves me right for gloating over my glut of holidays.