Keep calm and carry on

Commuting makes me a bad person. It’s true. Nothing brings out the rage in me like the morning commute of my Tuesdays and Fridays. I start by catching the bus down the road from my shoebox. Err.. I mean.. apartment. This is the smoothest part of the journey. Less than ten minutes down the narrow, winding road, it drops the passengers off at the train station - this is where it all goes wrong. I head towards the stairs and get swept back by the school kids on their way out of the station. I try to use the ‘up’ side of the stairs but it is being used mostly by people coming down. I grit my teeth and dodge the onslaught as best I can, powering my way up the stairs and into the station. Once through the ticket barriers, I hear my train arrive on the platform so I make a break for it… but ignorant businessmen push in front of me, blocking my path with their huge ‘I’m so important’ suitcases. Then, they commit the biggest crime of commuting (in my opinion) - once they have pushed in front of me, they SLOW DOWN. Gah!

I miss my train by mere seconds. I watch it pull away without me as the businessmen settle on the platform to wait for the next train which goes to Osaka (and, coincidentally, does not stop at my station.)

When the next train that I can take arrives, it is full to bursting. I get on and am pushed in all directions by many people. Half of them are wearing facemasks and I feel like I might be in some movie about a deadly virus and the end of the world. Half of them are not wearing facemasks. Those who aren’t wearing facemasks cough without putting their hand in front of their mouth. Someone coughs in my hair and I fight the urge to head butt them on the nose.

Two minutes before I arrive at my connecting station, someone breaks wind. In the warm and crowded carriage (so crowded that if I were to faint, I would remain on my feet until the doors opened) the cabbagey scent is suffocating. I fight the urge to vomit.

At my station, the end of the line, the doors open and belch the passengers onto the platform. Small schoolchildren as young as five run out and weave in between people’s legs to hit the stairs first. Sometimes they trip me up. Most of the time these days, I see them coming. The escalators have a system - stand on the right, walk on the left. Needless to say, the times that I choose the escalator some jerk always steps out in front of me and STOPS on the left. Naturally, people behind me get irate. Must be my fault of course, they can’t see the guy in front of me and I’m very obviously a foreigner. I can’t have figured out the walking rule yet! Gah!

Inside the station I charge down to my connecting train and see it waiting on the platform. Once again people stretch across the staircase, sleepily blocking my path down to the train as they stare into space. Sometimes I say a loud SUMIMASEN as I squeeze past and force myself through the closing doors of the train.

Half the journey complete, and this train only has to go one stop. It is less crowded than the first and is mainly carrying school kids. At my station the door opens and I step towards it.. but the children don’t budge. It takes a good three SUMIMASENs before they scowl up at me and step aside to let me off the train. Seriously kids, WHY stand in front of the door if you don’t want to move aside when people need to get off??

I now need to get the bus to the top of a not inconsiderable hill. The bus is already full when it leaves the bus station, and luckily I learned very early on to stand at the front. As it happens, when you need to get off the bus too, people seem to think that if they ignore you then you won’t need to walk past them and they won’t need to stand aside. The bus picks up a large number of passengers on the way and literally heaves its way up the steep incline. By the time I step off the bus I have been coughed on at least two more times and every second time I get this bus one of the kids breaks wind (I have learnt not to breathe too deeply on this bus.) I think it may be the same kid each time. When I work out who it is I will call his mother and tell her to stop feeding him or her cat food before school.

From the bus stop it’s a ten minute walk uphill to my school, and though it’s the coldest or sweatiest part of my journey, depending on the season, it is also my favourite part. Why? Because I normally have full-on commuter rage by this point and need to breathe calmly and deeply before I eventually walk into the office with my cheeriest ohayo gozaimasu..!!

Out of the habit

Last night I went out with some friends for food and karaoke. We went to a restaurant called ‘Saizeriya’ which is the cheapest restaurant I have ever come across in Japan. The food was predominantly Italian, with pizzas a mere 400 yen. Glasses of wine were 100 yen each (though I was advised against these by a friend) and the beer was almost as cheap as that from the convenience store.

Like most restaurants in Japan, it had a smoking section and a non-smoking section. The smoking ban only came into effect in the UK a few years ago, but I had really got used to being able to go to bars and restaurants and not smell like an overflowing ashtray. In Japan one of the biggest culture shocks has been the acceptance, and even encouragement, of smoking. Whilst it has (only fairly recently) been banned in school staff rooms, smoking is actually perfectly legal in offices and workplaces. Some places even prefer you to smoke indoors as businesses can end up paying fines if their workers or customers drop cigarette ends on the pavement outside.

In the restaurant in question, the only seats available were in the non-smoking section (which suited us down to the ground), though it’s pretty obvious that the smoke gets everywhere. The sections were half-heartedly separated by plastic screens, which did nothing to hold back the fog of tobacco smoke that ultimately clung to our clothes and settled in our hair. It was like being in a British pub five years ago.

Japan has a much higher smoking rate than the UK, and it’s mostly males that indulge. The age at which you can buy tobacco, however, is 20 years old. Does anyone else find it shocking that people would start smoking after the age of 20? Surely you don’t need to do things like smoking to fit in with your friends after that age. But then, the Japanese do like to fit in. There are vending machines in the street which can be activated with a TASPO card (a swipe card with age and identity information on it), rows and rows of cigarettes in supermarkets and convenience stores, and cigarette adverts sporting beautiful people adorn such establishments. In one, a model has glamorous gold lipstick and gold fingernails. Her teeth and hair are perfect and she’s seductively gazing at the camera, cigarettes in hand.

I was around cigarettes for a lot longer than the UK smoking ban has been in effect, so it shouldn’t shock me to see these adverts as not much time has passed.

But it really, really does shock me. And frustrate me. I had to wash my hair once I got home so I didn’t take the stale odour to bed with me. Come on Japan, sort it out!

You've got male

On Friday morning one of the more enthusiastic teachers came to greet me in the staff room. He is not an English teacher but loves to practise his conversation skills.

"Good morning Sir!" he cried.

Good start to my day :P

Odd moments in the classroom

I often forget about the funny stuff that happens in the classroom, and hardly anything filters through to anecdotes these days as things happen so often that most of it just fades from memory. This might be down to the fact that I’m almost always running around like a headless chicken, making photocopies and churning out lesson plans, but it might also be because the funny stuff that I recounted with such gusto on the phone at the start of the year has itself become fairly routine. So I’m going to try and remember some episodes from this week to demonstrate that my life isn’t all photocopies and grammar.

In the classroom:

There is a boy in one of my classes who sits at the back. When I ask ‘any volunteers?’ he waits a moment, shouts ‘choose me!’, then when I call on him he looks around and says ‘no volunteers.’ Drives me a bit crackers.

As a warm up I often use the telephone game (Chinese whispers for those back home, I changed the name to make it more politically correct.) Today the word I gave was ‘answer’. When it reached the board, it had become ‘question’. The girl at the front was pretty dismayed, but her ‘team mates’ cracked up at their own wit.

As a warm up in another class, I used a world map and asked for names of countries in English. When I pointed to China, the answer that I got was ‘Australia.’ Sometimes, there are no words.

A teacher that I work with sometimes doesn’t understand what I say, but before checking, he ploughs straight in and translates incorrectly into Japanese. When I pointed at Sweden on the map, the students weren’t getting it so I said ‘a hint – Ikea!’ He jumped in and said ‘yes! ‘I come from here,’ that’s what she said, so where is she from?’ Err.. I am not Swedish.

Similarly, I pointed to Sweden in a different class and gave the same hint when a different teacher charged forward and said ‘no! You are wrong!! It is not this country, it is Finland.’ When I quietly explained that I had said ‘Ikea’ and not ‘Nokia’, he allowed me to continue, but I have since decided to exclude Sweden from my quiz.

After doing an exercise on directions using a miniature map of Manhattan, one student was heard to say ‘what is Manhattan?’


Last term I did a lesson on travel, and explained that 新幹線 (しんかんせん) is translated as ‘bullet train’. The JTE was determined they should work out themselves what bullet meant, so drew a bullet on the board. It looked a bit obscure with no context, so he added a gun next to it.. a long thick tube shape with a stubby handle (do we say handle?) Anyway, this shape coupled with the proximity of the bullet the decoration of speedlines meant that when he stepped back we all realised that it looked like a giant ejaculating penis. Cue the most frantic board erasing I have ever seen in my life as the students and I collapsed in hysterics.

I’ll try to write random happenings like this when they occur, because I easily forget. I should read over them often though, this stuff really cheers me up when I’m having a bad day! Does any other job bring this kind of satisfaction?

KitKat Challenge - January

A delayed update for you folks, but here are the latest KitKats of my challenge.

Almond: Tastier than I expected! Rather than putting almond paste or flavouring in the wafer part of the KitKat, there were ground up pieces of almond in the chocolate coating itself. Nom. (Picture at the bottom)

Strawberry: These were ‘biglittle’ (packet wording, not mine) balls of KitKat with milk chocolate on the outside. The strawberry part was in between the pieces of wafer, making it a truly delicious, if sweet, little snack. (Picture at the bottom)


Strawberry cake: Pink strawberry flavoured chocolate on the outside and slightly biscuity flavoured wafer on the inside. Not as nice as the simple strawberry ones, but nice all the same.


Soy sauce: Contrary to what you might expect, this one worked really well! The malty soy sauce flavour in the wafer was complimented by the sweet white chocolate on the outside. I would absolutely buy these again (except I got them in Tokyo, which is a two and a half hour bullet train ride away.)


Mikkan: (Japanese orange) Also bought in Tokyo, these were like Jaffa Cakes but with wafer instead of jelly. Sooo good.


Sweet potato / Yam: An oddity, this one. The outside is rather sweet, and once it’s in your mouth it simply tastes like a sweet KitKat. However, if you break it in half to share it (as I did) before you eat it, the wafer smells really really strongly of.. potato. A little disconcerting.

Here, as an added treat, is a photo of the wrapper of many KitKats so far. This is not an exhaustive list.

Top - Soy sauce / Strawberry cake
Middle - Almond / Roasted green tea / Kobe tea / Cheese
Bottom - Mikkan / Strawberry / Sweet potato


Plus an additional one for the challenge, a KitKat from home (thank you Kate!)

A sense of responsibility

The buses in Japan have a wonderful system. There are two doors, one and the front by the driver and one in the middle or towards the back. You get on the bus using the latter, and at the end of the journey you pay at the front using exact change or a preloaded travel card. Small children, I have noticed, are able to use passes which they show to the driver. Handy, given that they are often to small to reach the magnetic swipe panel. When my boyfriend was here, he remarked to me sadly ‘it’s a good system and it works so well, but you couldn’t have it in the UK because you would just have chavs jumping out of the back door and running off without paying.’

He’s right, of course. If we had such a system back home then people would be taking advantage left, right and centre. The Japanese are such law-abiding citizens that if anyone does take advantage then I’m sure the incidents are few and far between. Why is this? What makes an entire nation so respectful of the rules and social harmony?

I couldn’t possibly hope to analyse all the reasons this might be, but I have noticed aspects of school life that I am sure are partly responsible. At the end of the school day, the school gets cleaned. Not by a hired cleaner, but by the students themselves. It does mean of course that the school is pretty dirty compared to a UK school (these are kids after all, they’d much rather leave the classroom quickly and find their friends), but it does teach them valuable lessons. They learn the importance of working together to get a task done, of taking it in turns to do difficult or unpleasant things (the students clean their own toilets), and of having respect for communal places and facilities. This mutual respect for other people and their possessions, coupled with a national determination to ‘not rock the boat’, means that Japan is the cleanest, safest place I have ever lived in.


It doesn’t end at school; the values that the students learn seem to be carried with them throughout adulthood. A few weeks ago I was at a bus stop at 6:30am (in the freezing cold, I might add), when I noticed a male jogger coming up the street towards me. He glanced at the other side of the road and seemed to notice something, so he jogged across the road to it. I watched him crouch down and pick up a chocolate wrapper, jog back to my side of the road and up to the convenience store on the corner. There, he put the wrapper in the bin and continued along his route.

I would add that there are hardly any bins anywhere in Japan. In England I have genuinely heard people complain that the nearest bin is across the road, and drop their litter where they stand. In Japan, people put their rubbish in their pocket until they find a bin. And don’t even think about dropping a cigarette stub on the pavement in Japan, they have made that much illegal. This is, almost certainly, an unnecessary measure as I doubt people would drop their cigarette butts on the streets here even if it weren’t accompanied by a hefty fine.

This sense of social responsibility is undoubtedly one of my most favourite things about the Japanese people. It is also one of the things I will miss the most when I come back to the UK, and I certainly feel a twinge of apprehension when I remember our city centre streets laced with litter, smatterings of dog dirt, and the occasional splat of congealed vomit (a Sunday morning treat for anyone walking to the train station through town.) I can’t help but feel it’s too late to re-educate our nation, so I’ll just enjoy clean streets and public transport while I can!

The end of a holiday

Hey everyone, sorry for the pause in posts again. To say I have been busy for the past couple of weeks is a bit of an understatement. I feel like the past two weeks have passed in a whirlwind of outings, classes, train journeys, cooking experiments.. I have had an amazing time with my boyfriend arriving in Japan, so I'm writing this post now whilst I'm buzzing and feel positive about everything. He got on a plane home this morning and I still feel on cloud nine to have seen him, but I know this will wear off when the evening draws in. I'm already missing the sound of his voice.

I feel.. revived. (Not physically, I may actually have an acute case of tonsillitis, but more about that another time.) I have a renewed determination to do so many things. I want to try harder at school and do better in my classes and make things more interesting and relevant for the students. I want to study Japanese even harder and really get some vocabulary down. These past two weeks I haven't had the safety net of my linguistically gifted American friend to fall back on, so I've had to muddle through for us as best as I could. We managed quite well (I like to think) but I'd like to do better now that I've done okay.

I want to discover more places and learn more about Japanese culture. Unlike many JETs, I'm not all that interested in visiting as many places as possible in a short space of time. I like to visit slightly fewer places and meet more people and learn about specific things. That way, when I see something unusual in Japan, I can truly grasp the meaning behind it instead of having a brief overview. There are so many things about this country that I don't understand.. why were the shrines selling arrows during the New Year holiday? Why does a big carton of orange juice cost the same as a small carton of the same brand? One of my colleagues told me that the food that people eat on New Year's day isn't particularly tasty but each foodstuff has a particular meaning.. but he doesn't know what the meanings are. So what can they be?

My boyfriend gave me a lot of encouragement about my teaching and my Japanese ability whilst he was here, which is one of the main reasons I feel so inspired. The other reason is that last week I signed the recontracting JET papers - with the decision not to renew. In August I will be coming home to the UK, so I feel like I really need to have something to show for it. Not necessarily anything concrete, just a sense of achievement and accomplishment. Almost half a year has already flown by so it won't be long before I'm home again; now I've had this little holiday I'm going to knuckle down and work hard. がんばります!

As for the stuff that I did over the past couple of weeks, you can all expect spurts and bursts of posts. This post is already long enough as it is ^_^ I hope you're all well!