Perfumed night

Tonight we rode our bikes to Osaka Castle to check on the progress of the plum blossom. A perfect storm of scent welcomed us as we came across the ridge. The plums are indeed, blooming, and they're blooming beautiful (in homage to Mr Cundall).

Things I'm NOT going to miss about Japan

3. Workplace politics

It seems that it is a cultural thing. In Japan, positions do not come with written descriptions. And duties that might seem to not be your concern might become your concern if a certain person in a position of authority deems it so. Hence the phenomenon of English teachers handing out tissues at the station. This is a deliberate attempt to hamstring your ability to question the authority of your manager. "That's not part of my position description!" is not an acceptable retort even when asked to do something dangerous, demeaning, or downright stupid, because your position is whatever you are asked to do by your superiors.

Now, my Western sense of progress would suggest that perhaps this will change, but my jaded sense of Eikawa madness would tell me that this will definitely not change.

Change in my Australian workplaces was a constant and welcome force, blasting new efficiencies into every minute of every day. In Australia, pretty much no big companies use faxes anymore, and if they do, they're e-faxes, instantaneously filed in a TRIM record system, time stamped and electronically available instantaneously to multiple users. In Japan, the mindset is: "if we've never done it before then why would we do it now?" That seems to be a satisfactory argument for never trying it. It's not even a "if it's not broken, don't fix it" argument, because it can be broken for prolonged periods of time without being fixed because it's not the efficiency of the practice, but the unchangingness of it, that is seen to be the virtue. Thus, paper faxes sit on fax machines for weeks on end:

"We just received your resignation."

"I sent it 3 months ago!" (true story)

Hence extremely old fashioned practices remain in place in Japanese companies, far after they have been consigned to the dust bin elsewhere.

There is a hierarchy set in stone in almost every situation, and nowhere is this more apparent and unshakable than in the workplace. Seniority determines almost every move. The bottom of the pile is not a pleasant place to be, and junior employees wait with barely contained excitement for the next bus load of company juniors to be admitted, so that they can get off the bottom rung and start ascending the ladder. Career progression is highly predictable, regulated, and in most cases, automatic. Promotion is again based on years served, rather than merit. In front line Eikawa positions (teachers and staff members) staff turn over is so high that promotion is only ever achieved by very few people with the resilience to sit out the monstrous time in a junior position. New staff members with very little experience (and no job description to guide them) bungle their way through their extraordinarily long working days, making a mess of pretty much anything they touch (except sales). No one knows where anything is, or what they should be doing. A lot of energy is spent on looking busy. My inner cynic sometimes believes that "looking busy" takes up more hours of the average person's working day than actually doing anything productive.

Now, as far as the gravy train of English teaching in Japan is concerned, I believe that train has well and truly left the station. The "Bubble Economy" years of ridiculous high wages, short hours and long holidays are long gone. Your average English teacher works fairly hard for a moderate wage. Particularly on first arriving, English teachers are comfortably compensated in their first year, but as their living expenses (especially health and social insurance) increase with each year, what seemed like a relatively cushy salary, begins to look less viable as a long term prospect.

Particularly if you are a gifted teacher.

Because the final thing I have ascertained about corporate culture in Japan is that lazy workers get given less work, and good workers will be worked into an early grave. Now, my work ethic is like this: "I like being rewarded for hard work with leisure or perhaps cash-monies for a job well done." So rewarding hard work with more work doesn't sit particularly well with me. When my hard work gets me more work, but someone who "slobs around" all the time is not asked to do any work at all, for the same pay... well, I'm not up for it. So, if you are in Japan and you are identified as a competent person - Lord help you. You'll rest when you're dead.

Perhaps this culture of workmania is because the idea of leisure is a relatively new concept. The 5 day working week is only 40 or so years old in Japan, and still many people "choose" to put in birth rate crippling amounts of overtime, or work 6 days a week. Many public schools still operate 6 days a week. Leisure time is usually spent eating out or shopping (the two greatest joys of the average person's life) and thus time off is thought to be a thing to be avoided, because it is exhausting and expensive (unlike working, which apparently is not exhausting and saves money).

This is the sound of one hand napping whilst the other hand does all the work. I'm looking forward to going back to a real job.

Music, sweet music...

Well, it's been a busy little week. Very, very busy.

We had our first night on the grog on Wednesday for this year. Reminded me why I've not been on the grog. A powerful and bombastic hangover ensued. I strained a muscle in my shoulder whilst being silly and drunk, and have yet to feel it fully heal.

Ah! She'll be right.

I say that because I have been reminded by Tom's recent trip to the doctors (with what was presenting as either tonsillitis or a cold) being quite traumatic. He was bombarded with questions that he couldn't understand, given treatments that he didn't understand either, and was told to come back the next day. He decided that it would be better for his health if he just had a lie in instead. Doctors that don't speak your language = stressful!

All health problems are being put off until we get back to Australia. I've had it with Japanese doctors. Japanese dentists are awesome, Japanese doctors are stressful.

So, anyway, the Wednesday drink was brought on by a gig. Leila was doing her first show, her solo performance called The Patty Hearst Noise Opera. I watched and took photos for Leila's Artists CV. There were some points that I thought were quite moving, hypnotic, interesting, and there were other bits where I was just wondering "what am I meant to be thinking about here?" I'm a bit simple when it comes to performance art. I don't really get it. But I think it might have been good.

Either way, with the entry to the venue, you get a free drink ticket. And that was my undoing. I spent the drink ticket on beer, and had a few more, and was suddenly on Father Jack's Rollercoaster of "drink! drink! drink!" After the gig I had the excellent idea of going to Bar Konton for a few extra drinks, and well, got completely hammered. It was at Bar Konton that I received the shoulder injury. I didn't really feel untoward until the next day when I felt like I'd been hit by a truck.

But I was having a happy hangover, so I went off and tried to make the most of the day. Only much later did I start to realise that I wasn't bouncing back from this.

On Friday I had one weird event lesson type thing, on Saturday they gave me three kids model lessons (!) and one event lesson (!!) - a move that I was kind of annoyed with because I was on that shift with someone who is a more than competent Kids teacher, that the branch have decided to go cold on, so instead of talking to him about it, they just loaded me with all the model lessons. Pretty pissed about that. Will be having firm words with said school this week.

The shoulder strain was a bit of bad timing, that's for sure. We had to play a gig on Sunday evening, and this gig was with bigger and better bands than we've played with since we left Australia, so we were really hoping to put on a good show. I rushed all the way from Kuzuha to Amemura carrying my stupid, heavy, piece of shit kick pedal with me to get there on time, and then realised that this venue doesn't do on-time, and I could have actually saved myself the hassle. Unfortunately, the stars were crossed unfavourably. The amp that was supplied at the venue was a Marshall JCM900 that shat itself every time Tom tried to apply the "big muff" to the sound. So when the music should have sounded louder, it ended up sounding quieter! What a pain! I couldn't get the drum kit to sit together in an ergonomically sensible lay out, and the snare skin looked older than Byōdō-in. No one seemed to be mixing us. Tom's vocals were too quiet, my snare wasn't cutting through. It took us two songs to really lock in, and by the end of the 5th song, I was quite tired from struggling against my injury and my less than ideal set up.

Lesson to be learned from this: soundcheck. YOU MUST SOUNDCHECK. It doesn't matter if everyone has to wait for a few minutes. It's better for all concerned if you soundcheck.

I'm not too disappointed because I think we still did a fairly intense and fierce looking performance, and those three songs in the middle had enough smack down in them to make up for the three that sandwiched them, but I would have liked to have done better.

That said, after the gig, the venue owner asked us to do another show in March. So, we went from "Last show" to "not last show" again! And then we got a call from a dude we met at the gig on Wednesday night asking us to do another show in Kyoto in April. People seem to like us even when we're not firing on all cylinders. How strange.

But I suppose that's it. Music is a powerful force. Surprising. Thought changing. Strong. Emotional. Physical. That's kind of what Thrall is about. Creating something Thrall inducing. To put yourself into a sort of trance and let the music overwhelm you, and your audience. When it works, it is truly gob-smacking. When it doesn't work, it's just another band.

I'm off to another Zeni Geva show tonight. I'm really excited about seeing them again. The last show was so good, and this show is at a much vibier venue, so hopefully they'll be laying the smack down in quantities that won't be able to be resisted by the audience. It's my turn to lay down my will to someone else's sound and feel the power of their 'thrall.'

Things I'm NOT going to miss about Japan

2. Noise pollution

Dudes with megaphones, cars or planes circling the neighbourhood with loud speakers, three stereos playing different loud and clashing jingles all in the one store. Musical garbage collection. Sirens. Yapping dogs and screaming children. Roaring freeways and slow revving motorcycles. Drunkards shouting in thick Kansai-ben, business men roaring on their cellphones, gaggles of schoolgirls bothering dogs with their high pitched yammering. Honking subway trains, automated announcements, alarms that appear to tell you that there's nothing to be alarmed about. Even nature is noisy with cicadas and frogs!

But don't talk at all on the commuter trains or you'll annoy someone.

Sheish.

If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it, it wouldn't make any difference because no one could hear the sound of a tree falling for the rest of the din.

Things I'm NOT going to miss about Japan

1. Being stared at.

I eat my breakfast at the local ticket restaurant, and I feel these eyes boring into the side of my head. I look up and there's a little old man, staring at me. When I look at him, he doesn't politely divert his eyes, as I would tend to do if someone caught me having a good old stare at them. Nup. He just keeps on staring and slurping curry (I'm not the freak dude! You're the one eating curry for breakfast! I'm eating eggs and sausage! That's normal breakfast food!) and staring and staring and staring. I can barely eat because I'm feeling so self conscious.

After my meal I check my make up in the bathroom just to make sure I haven't grown a second head or accidentally written "stare at me, please" on my forehead in eyeliner, but no, I'm not looking particularly weird. Just average. Showered. Dressed in work clothes. Dirty blonde hair and ruddy celto-gaulic complexion. Definitely don't require staring at.

I get on the train, and there's two people staring straight at me for the entirety of my hour long train journey. I try to keep myself busy in my book, but I can feel their eyes. I glance up occasionally, just to see if they're still putting in the massive amounts of psychic energy required to stare continuously at another human being, but they seem to be feeling no strain at all. Just staring away like crazy.

I get off the train, and a kid stares at me and follows me around the convenience store when I'm buying my lunch. Eyes like saucers. "Gaijin da...!"

And then I go to teach my classes and I can't get one of these ADD afflicted kids to pay attention to me when I'm talking. Not one.

Back to the gaijin's koen: If a gaijin is not there to witness gaijinised behaviour, do Nihonjin behave any differently at all?

Reverse Nostalgia

I was just thinking, gee, my blog has been a bit business like recently. No great musings on the nature of place and happiness, no great stories, surprising anecdotes... just a brief run down of where we are and how we got there. Well, I should probably change tack.

Now that we're winding down our Japan adventures a bit, I've been finding myself feeling this strange sense of reverse nostalgia. For those of you who may not have experienced it, it's the feeling that you are leaving a place, probably for good, and that you will miss many elements of the place.

Here are some of the things that I will miss about my neighbourhood:

1. Riding my "mama-chari" (grandma bike) without a helmet on the footpath. I am the terror of Nipponbashi. No where is safe from my cycling! And blessedly, I don't have to contend with "helmet hair" afterwards.

2. The flashing lights of Den-Den town. The mad bustle. The silly "Maid Cafés." The scary "Obaasan Porn" arcade.

3. Mr Howly, the giant dog that lives across the road. He gives the neighbourhood a certain "je ne sais quoi."

4. Doguyasugi - the kitchen supplies alley about 4 blocks away from my house. It's wild! Knives, platters, takoyaki grills, maneki neko, plastic food, and all manner of stuff you need and patently do not need for your kitchen.

5. Cheap food, Osaka style. 7 takoyaki ¥300. Huge okonomiyaki with egg and negi (spring onions) ¥450. You can't get a meal that good for that price at home.

6. Subrock studios. Our home away from home. I spend between 3 and 6 hours here a week, beating the stuffing through the cheap, relatively well-maintained rehearsal drum kits for the princely sum of ¥300 an hour.

7. Ame-mura. Gigs are early, they're nearby, there's heaps of good d-beat around, and I love getting out and seeing what Osaka has to offer.

8. Spaworld. Mad stucco and nudity. What a marvellous combination!

9. Combini. Pay your bills at 4 in the morning whilst picking up some beer, collagen syrup, oden (weird stew), nikuman (steamed meat buns), and garbage bags. One every two blocks around here. Brilliant!

10. La La Indian Restaurant. One of the dudes fully looks like Groucho Marx. Best naan bread - EVER. The curry... whatever... the naan... to DIE FOR.

I'm already missing things and I haven't even left yet. It's a weird feeling.

Relativity

Ooops! I forgot to post in the blog last month. Well, probably not that much of a concern for you all, as last month was pretty cold, and I had an infection (doctors still have not managed to explain how I got it, but it's gone now, thanks to the marvel of anti-biotics), so we didn't get out much. But there is enough to report to make this more interesting than many people's lives, I'm sure. It's all relative. It's all relatively relative, anyway.

So, last post we were just about to go away to Kanazawa for our holiday.

Kanazawa is in Ishikawa Prefecture in the Hokrikyu region of Japan. It is famous for it's pleasant Japan Sea influenced summers, and harsh Siberian blizard influenced winters. We were hoping to see some snow, preferably in Kenroku-en, a famous Japanese garden, rated as one of the top three gardens in Japan.

We left on the 28th in a hire car. It was very nice. I enjoyed the drive. Made one wrong turn and almost ended up in Nagoya for a moment there. But I managed to find an exit and turn around, and all was well. We stopped in Hikone on the way to check out Hikone castle. The sun was being all shiny, and the photos look rather pretty, I think. Hikone castle is the last of the 4 National treasure castles I was hoping to see, so that's that. I have collected the set.

Hikone-jo

After hitting the highway again, the weather turned cold and rainy, and occasionally snowy as we wound our way through Fukui Prefecture. Fukui was cold and snowy, there were lots of tunnels that went for about 2km through mountains as we got closer to the Japan Sea coast. Just amazing scenery. I found it really exciting just to be there.

We arrived in Kanazawa, checked into our hotel, and I almost instantaneously started getting cold symptoms! Eee, gads, bad timing! I shuffled off to the chemist and got some cold and flu tablets and struggled on, almost uneffected. On the 29th we went to Kenroku-en. Unfortunately for us, there was no snow. Our students had been admonishing us for the entire month of December: "Kanazawa is very cold, be sure to wear lots of warm clothes." We get to Kanazawa and the top temperature in Kanazawa that day was higher than the temperature in Osaka! Talk about don't believe the hype!

Anyway, the garden itself is very pretty, and I'm sure it would be even prettier had it been snowy. But alas, it was not to be.

Kenroku-en and Kanazawa-jo

Whilst we were in Kanazawa I bought myself an umbrella for a souvenir. There is a local saying in Kanazawa that states: "Bento o wasurete mo, kasa o wasureru na!" (forget your lunch, but don't forget your umbrella). This is due to the mad weather that Kanazawa often experiences. On our last day in Ishikawa prefecture, the weather turned bad, windy, rainy, snowy, simultaneously, fantastically bad... just what I had been hoping for! But alas, it did so only in time to make my drive home a bit more perilous. We passed about 4 or 5 car accidents on our way, but being the Grandma slow-coach that I am, I didn't manage to be in any of those accidents.

So, in early January, that's when I started getting these mysterious abdominal pains. After 3 weeks, I decided that they were of sufficient quality to warrant a trip to the doctor, who took some blood from me and found some kind of bacteria having a party in my abdomen. Currently got the bacteria whacking stick out to give those unwelcome visitors a good seeing to, and will be back to normal by the end of the week. Don't know what those nasty bacterias were up to, but I'm going to have a full medical when I get back to Australia to see how it is that I managed to get sick like that. Anyway, nothing to concern you all, it's just why we haven't done anything much.

However, after three or so weekends of being indoors, I went a bit stir crazy and this weekend I demanded that we go somewhere to get some sightseeing in. So we went off to Uji city in Southern Kyoto Prefecture to get some sights in. The main attraction there is Byōdō-in. This temple is co-owned by the Jodo-shinshu (Pure Land) Buddhist sect and the Tendai sect. The image of The Pheonix Hall at Byōdō-in is featured on the back of the ¥10 coin. The hall houses an Amida-Buddha statue made from cedar and lacquered in gold of quite exceptional beauty. The roof is carved in a most spectacular style, and there are paintings on the walls of Amida-Buddha and his gang of Bodhisattvas cruising around on clouds, being awesome and stuff. Because Byōdō-in is so old (it was built in the 11th century), the original paintings now just look like some brown stains on the walls, but there are some replicas in the fantastic, modern, architect designed museum next door that give you an idea of what it must have looked like when it was new. The Jodo-shiki (perfection) garden is also extremely beautiful, but my photos look quite poor in comparison to how it looked in real life.

Byōdō-in

Last but not least, I trialed Picasa as a photo uploader for this post, and I think the official verdict is: it sucks. It's compressed my photos so hard, they look like faded prints. I swear, the exposure rate on my camera is set to auto, it shouldn't look that underexposed! So, the next post will be back on the cursed facebook. Facebook sucks, but at least it doesn't render my photos like muck!

Alright, off to work now. We're continuing to try and scrape all our belongings and whatnot together to send home, and get our travel plans in order. We've decided to abandon the original plan to do Kyuushu and Okinawa - it was just too expensive and the cost was stressing me out. So now we're going to just hang out in Osaka, do some hanami time in Kyoto, and make a quick trip back to Tokyo, the city I always wanted to call home in Japan, for one last Sayonara party.

In February we're seeing some bands, playing some shows, and in early March we're going to Hiroshima with Dave and Kerry (who're making it back for a second visit!) so there will be photos to show and stories to tell. Don't hesitate to let us know you exist. We get lonely over here sometimes...