I was so excited when I successfully applied for a job working in the Tokyo area. Little did I realise that the Tokyo Area encompasses about a 200 kilometre radius. I was in the sticks....again. This time I was working at The Tokyo University of Science. A place chockers with thousands of the nerdiest guys you ever laid eyes on. Teaching at a uni sounds fancy though doesn't it? However, it wasn't. I was involved in teaching extra-curricular English lessons for the top subdivision of "Nerds Grande", who would rather sit for even longer in a classroom, asking their neighbour 3 things he did last night......"Gee dude I'd rather not say"....... It was a strange program. My job consisted of teaching exactly the same lesson, six or seven times in a row everyday, to six or seven different groups of students. It made me go insane. Often I would have bad deja-vu while standing at the whiteboard - unsure if I was repeating myself or saying something enlightening to my current group for the first time. I'd freeze up like I was having a stroke....and perhaps I was. I have the genetically inherited resting pose - also known in my family as "stroke arm", to go with that theory.
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| The closest resemblance I can find |
I worked with six male teachers. Two were awesome, one I argued with everyday- but I think we still liked each other, another two were unfortunate - but not completely fucked. But there's always one.....in this case Dan "The Man", a morbidly obese, former disc jockey for some hick American radio station. We clashed. Often, And in the end almost violently. Luckily not quite. Dan The Man could have broken me like a twig. He would've had to catch me first though. He sure wasn't the ducking and weaving type. One of my co-workers was always on about him lurking around his lessons, trying to sleaze all over a couple of the only female students we had. I thought he was exaggerating. He wasn't. I think old Danny Boy got fired for sexual harassment after the students officially complained. The poor girls. The man was sweatier than a drug mule about to have a frisky pat down by Indonesian airport security. Which also meant, that during a hot Tokyo summer he used to really stink as well. Every time I walked into the teachers room, he was in there working his way through his second bag of bakery treats, sweating, dribbling and stinking with all the windows closed. He called me "little lady", and whenever I would say I was just going to the bathroom; he would always say "Bathroom huh? What you gunna do in there have a bath???" "No Dan, but maybe you should try that yourself sometimes".
Teaching English can sometimes make you bitter (Noooooo you don't say.......). Sometimes you accidentally direct this pent up moodiness at the fifth student in a row that repeats "Nothing Special" when you asked them what they did on the weekend. But often you turn it on your co-workers instead. It was for the best. Writing this blog is kind of like a therapy. For years I've been thinking "God dam it I worked with a lot of dickheads". Now I'm starting to have the uncomfortable realisation that just maybe, all that time, it was me. I was the grumpy, difficult to work with, bitchface. Actually, nah....it was definitely them.
The town I worked in didn't help matters. In my imagination (before touching back down in Japan); I saw myself briskly strolling through the bright lights of Shibuya with a clipboard (all my career fantasies feature clipboards). I dreamt of taking the lift to my modern apartment on the 55th floor and looking out over the pumping metropolis, right in the heart of bustling Tokyo. Instead I lived in Noda. A town famous for having the head-quarters of the Kikkoman Soy Sauce factory, and reportedly, a ninja school. I was always on the look out for ninjas - but never spotted one. Apparently being all stealth-like is a distinctive feature of your average ninja, so my non-detection was apparently unsurprising. Supposedly, a lot of gaijin (foreign) ninjas trained there. Well, I did see a few Westerners around, but they looked like big brutes in tucked-into-jeans polo shirts, rather than your lithe, somersaulting, black jumpsuit-wearing types. I wasn't convinced.
There was no mistaking the existence of the Kikkoman head quarters though. Sometimes when the wind caught the fumes emanating from that huge factory, my apartment would suddenly be filled with the stink of yeast at 3am. It was so strong that it would wake me from the deepest sleep. Then, all I could do was bury my head in my bean filled pillow, and try and block it from going up my nostrils. These days, every time I see Kikkoman's in the shop I get a pang of revulsion. I also can't stand Soy Sauce Warrier Kikkoman. I want the ninjas to kick his fishy head in.....So yes, my 12 weeks in Nodashi was not my finest time. Three of those weeks were also spent on crutches after the great foot slashing incident of '06,. And one of those three weeks was spent scrubbing blood off my carpet (See my earlier entry http://twintravelling.blogspot.jp/2012/03/sick-of-being-sick.html). Let me just also mention that the train station had three large flights of steps each end, and no elevators. That's rough travelling on a pair of over-sized wooden crutches from 1850.
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| Soy Sauce Warrier Kikkoman (what a loser) - didn't see him in the streets either |
It wasn't all soy sauce and sweaty perverts. I did have a bit of fun as well. Went to a baseball game, saw a piece of toast driving a car, and met a beaver.
Travelled into the city to see your odd summer festival.
Or your odd weirdos.......
Discovered that new flavour of Baileys - Creme Caramel and spent a lot of time snoozing as a direct result of the discovery.....
Anyway, you live and learn. Apparently I didn't because I signed up for another semester with the same company. To my joy, I had scored a job teaching in the city centre of Tokyo itself. To my horror I was living way out in the sticks and had a huge commute on my hands, and another, even more evil, "Dan The Man" to contend with.....Let the good times roll, and the Creme Caramel flow......
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