Of Rice and Zen I'm going to Japan tomorrow... shit the bed Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 49 6648

Articles from Of Rice and Zen

Day 680: Homestay with the out-laws 2007-11-27 22:52:00 Today your girlfriend's email gossip circle relates a piece of news so exciting that even her mum joins in the cooing. The girls are always keen to broadcast it when they've claimed another piece of cheese on the board game of life, be it husband, mortgage or rugrat. This time it seems that one of their number has struck paydirt. She lives in Shiga and receives a vast sum of money from her husband who has just had to move away to Tokyo for a promotion. She now lives alone, the kids have flown the coop and she's slicing up credit card swipers like a potato hating ninja chef prepares gratin. Total autonomy. All the perks, none of the sags. Sugoi, desu ne... ii na, they sing longfully.You realise what Mod meant when Nova closed and he said he'd gladly marry a Japanese salaryman.Your host family's giant TV sits in your living room. They drive from Shiga to Kyoto to help you pack. They stock the fridge with your favourite beer. S's mum cooks your dinner every night, then ins ...

Day 678: Repeated packing reveals massive personality shift and reason 2007-11-26 06:55:00 You decide that the prospect of packing again is twitch-inducingly grim. Perhaps next time you live somewhere you should avoid renting, which as uses of money go makes about as much sense as trying to repel a mugger by choking him with ten pound notes and flicking pound coins at his testicles like dull edged ninja stars. It's time to buy.On the other hand the idea of buying a house in Japan is terrifying because it implies stability, routine, a secure job. These things are not forthcoming to most foreigners in Japan. On the other other hand you reason that you weren't fond of commitments in England either, and if you're gonna choose a country to live in you'll have to back to Eastern pony and sweat the details later. Buy the ticket, take the ride.For now you strip the walls of their A-flair. Bye-bye to the sumptuous onsen-themed soft porn calendar you received from the owner of the Miyage's izakaya. He was a bald-headed ex-izakaya martial artist turned chef who could bruise ...

Day 676: The four horsewomen 2007-11-24 06:04:00 Ellie (a.k.a. Easy E), Lisa (a.k.a Sophie Ellis Bexter), Becki (a.k.a. the undercover agent) and Audrey (a.k.a. open season) quit Nova before the bankruptcy and received news of Sahashi's nip-slip-tastic fall from glory by email. After traveling for weeks through Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand they are back in Japan looking fitter, happier, more productive. They spent a lot less on their jaunt than yourself, Harry and Mod did by staying at home and paying for rent and food. They are back for a week to collect their bags, then they'll join the growing group of people who constitute the broken links in your keitai phonebook.You're gonna miss these girls when they're gone.Their nicknames all involve interesting stories. Ellie, for example, is a slim, red-headed, diminutive British Cilla Black and Lionel Blair fan with a great line in biting sarcasm. She could instantly put the rowdy horsemen in their place and they in turn admired her pluck. Joel admired said pluck more th ...

Day 664: Apartment number four consigned to precarious memory 2007-11-12 11:52:00 You are packing your apartment into boxes once more in the full knowledge that your next abode will be temporary. Your Japanese girlfriend, the peerless A, still seems to be mystifyingly fond of you and as such her parents have kindly agreed to feed and house your jobless pauper backside until next year when you plan to visit the motherland for tea and crumpets. You're not sure if returning England should be called a trip home or a trip abroad.Again you're sitting on the floor in the place you used to call home surrounded by boxes. You stare at the blank walls and they look straight past you towards the door, waiting for somebody else to move in and warm them up. They've already forgotten your name. You notice that your Japanese experience has been defined by distinct and interesting chapters, each punctuated by a period of packing.There was the arrival phase in Heights Yamashina with the wonderful Mouse who accompanied you to Japan.There the Misasagi craphole in which neither ...

Day 663: Goodbye sanity, Hello Work 2007-11-11 22:40:00 At the end of October you are walking past Kyoto station when you notice, flashing in the bright sunlight, large wreaths attached to the walls wishing you a merry Christmas. This is before Halloween. You take a walk inside to see a huge Christmas tree at the top of the staircase twinkling with blue lights. Involuntary memory is a victim to these symbols and you recall a thousand Christmas dinners. Cosy yeti slippers. Gravy and crackers. Roast chestnuts in Lincoln cathedral. Then you remember it's not even halloween yet. If the festivities last two months, you're gonna start to notice you're a long way from home. You wonder how you'll afford presents this year.You're in central Kyoto to visit the Hello Work offices again. They give you the guidelines for applying for unemployment insurance.Step one - find the Public Employment Security Office. That's far too many kanji to try and find. You decide to ignore this cryptic line and assume it's talking about the Hello Work off ...

Day 659: Nova's buyer won't pay teachers or students 2007-11-06 22:05:00 Tales of Nova's decadence have made it into magazines and newspapers around the world. The Financial Times Deutschland attributes Nova's success to the fact that only nine of 147 countries ranked lower than Japan last year in average scores on the widely used English language proficiency test run by the Educational Testing Service of the US. Although it doesn't touch on Sahashi's many attempts at daylight robbery it at least reports on teachers being evicted.Time magazine repeats the statistics about Japan's notorious English inability and places them below North Korea, a country in which even talking about books or chocolate éclairs is illegal. Time has a more Rumsfeld approach to Sahashi's business style, reproducing a report by court-appointed lawyers that alleges Sahashi had turned his company into something of a personal piggy bank, lining his pockets through such ruses as buying teaching equipment from affiliated companies and selling them to Nova students at grossly i ...

Day 655: Buyer plans to reopen 200 Nova schools 2007-11-02 22:13:00 You always knew your prefecture was bizarrely fond of Nova. The teachers here largely know that their wage is a third below the national average, but you've only got to work near Kusatsu to see how much the teachers and students there are occasionally like a family. Shiga had inexplicably high visitor figures and made profits that challenged the leagues nationwide. You would say that your relationships with your students may have contributed to this, although you aren't one to blow your own whistle. You are surprised when you open the Asahi Shinbun today to find yourself faced with a story that says five Nova schools in Shiga will remain open.In that distinctively Japanese way of putting the cart before the horse, the newspaper doesn't report that a sponsor has been found or who that sponsor may be. Instead it simply reports the plans of an unknown intergalactic force to reopen 200 Nova schools across Japan.In Kyoto:- Sanjo- Kyoto Eki-ko- Fushimi Momoyama- Katsura- KitaojiIn Shi ...

Day 654: Nova teachers fed by students 2007-11-02 02:35:00 To escape the tragedy of sitting at home and reading about how teachers are being fed by former students and the Union's embarrassing "food for lessons" plan, you take Matt to Tokyo to show him the sights and sounds of the closest thing to Blade Runner either of you will ever see in the real world. Every single iconic location seems to house huge signs hollering the dominance of Nova's brokeback empire. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!, the signs seem to cry. I wish I could quit you but I can't, the students seem to cry. You wonder how long these signs will continue to add to the neon din if Nova can't pay the electricity bills.You return from Tokyo nonplussed and decide to take Matt to BBs to show him the magic of Japanese-style regression. On the way you pass your old Nova branch and decide to get some photos of the abandoned husk of a once huge and venal empire. As you approach the front of the building you can see several notices on the window. You speculate as t ...

Day 654: Nishida confirms he arranged Nova share deal 2007-11-02 00:51:00 You remember being amused to find out that "goosebumps" in Japanese is ???(tori hada - bird skin). Today you are amused to read a Japanese news story in which Nishida confirms he arranged the Nova stock speculation deal. This comes mere days after Sahashi and his lawyer both denied all knowledge of the existence of the man. Nishida confirms that he was on his way to London to meet with Sahashi when his passport was confiscated. If any more proof was needed that Sahashi was a lying schemer... then clearly the world was really not paying attention in the first place.You respond to an email from a journalist based in England about Nova and Sahashi's latest actions and it gives you goosebumps to see how quickly the scandals have stacked up.D,I'm still based in Kyoto, you can reach me by quickest by phone 090**** **** (international code 0081 - time zone is usually UK+ 8hours) and email if you need to. I'm currently going through theprocess of claiming Unemployment Insurance w ...

Day 654: Nova finds sponsor, no word on teachers' salaries 2007-11-02 00:26:00 You wonder how a sponsor would benefit from saving Nova. There are intangibles like infrastructure or simply a vast database of potential students to continue to milk. But why would a company want to honour all those free lessons? Pay all that rent? Pay the bank loan? Pay the advertisers? Pay the suppliers? Pay all those teachers their unpaid salaries?Then you find out the sponsor would not be obliged to do any of those things. These ten days are not about saving people. They are about saving a company. Brands. Logos. Letterheads. Textbooks. A sponsor would not have to honour bought points or unpaid teachers. They would be well within their rights to shut up shop for a few months, wait for the established teachers to stop clinging on for life and disappear back home.Then hire a whole new, cheaper set of fresh new graduates with no Japanese ability. All the better to fleece you with. It has already been proved that these guys are cheaper, less likely to stand up for them ...

Day 653: Nova teacher successfully claims Unemployment Insurance 2007-11-01 22:34:00 Your two weeks paid holiday come to an end. Your friend Matt visits you from England and you take two weeks off to get some distance from the Nova clusterfuck. You visit Tokyo, temples, shrines, department stores and BBs. You fall deeper in love with Japan. You spend more money than you want to but it's exactly what you need to remember that the Nova debacle is not why you came to Japan and it's not why you love Japan.You discover that while Nova is protected from bankruptcy for 10 days, you are still an employee. If the government was to pay your back wages you would receive about 80% of these ten days. Unfortunately, as these 10 days were officially paid holiday for you, you would only receive 48%. You spend a moment trying to work out what 48% of nothing is and realise that it needn't worry you too much.You meet Bourne, the man of a million identities, outside Hello Work and he briefly tells you he has received his rishokuhyo (letter of release) from Nova and he has started ...

Day 652: Unemployment insurance for Nova teachers 2007-10-30 23:47:00 You wonder what your next step should be as regards unemployment insurance. You go to the Kyoto branch of your bank to update your bankbook for the first time since you arrived in Japan. It seems this book acts like statements do in England. Perhaps this will act as proof that you were paid late twice. In fact the second payment is still outstanding. You wonder whether the nice chap at Hello Work will see fit to give you back the unemployment insurance you paid into despite the fact that you will turn up with a distinct lack of forms.By chance you meet Bourne in the bank. He's been to Hello Work three times and he's about to go again. He assures you that whether or not Nova paid you is irrelevant. The fact of Nova's oft-reported bankruptcy is not the issue here. The issue is paperwork. Bureaucrats live and die by forms, not facts. The former are more precious than life, the latter do not exist. He explains that he quit Nova before the Monkey fled the canopy. He later sen ...

Day 652: Nova's President Sahashi stole from Nova 2007-10-30 23:11:00 You check out the Nova news online, hoping that a declaration of bankruptcy will help your case for unemployment insurance. The discussion of Sahashi's character has stepped up a gear. He is a fascinating figure in so far as few men in Japan have been so grossly out of place in their positions and have single-handedly had such a hand in the demise of a huge corporation. The Daily Yomiuri paints a picture of an egotistic loner who was invited to the meeting at which the Nova directors Anders Lundqvist and co sacked him. He was an hour late and then called to say "I'm somewhere else now, I want to hold the board meeting here." If you've ever tried that line, say on a date with your ex girlfriend Ulrika Agda, you'll know that the Swedes especially don't take kindly to it at all.That quote makes you picture el Presidente in a hot tub on the veranda of a holiday home on St. John island in the Caribbean being fed grapes by a cherub in a swing while being light-heartedly fellated by ... President

Day 649: The scale of Sahashi and Nova's ineptitude becomes clearer 2007-10-28 07:08:00 After a Nova story aired recently an NHK TV presenter commented that the students were the real victims here. Mexican wave for the Japanese media. Akiko the pampered housewife will lose a fraction of the disposable income she usually spends on Luis Vuitton bags in two shades of diarrhoea, cultural capital building sessions with Binky the sanitised gaijin and cake mornings with the other kept women in Shiga. Meanwhile my friends have had their sole livelihood stolen, lost their apartments, have no health insurance, are in violation of several laws, are literally unable to eat properly and will be forced to fly home on mummy and daddy's dime before having the opportunity to take legal recourse. But the students are the real victims here.Some say Japan is not yet racially mixed enough to prevent it from being an institutionally racist country. As long as people are defined as Japanese or not according to their appearance, some say it's unavoidable. Some say it is no more or less ra ...

Day 649: Nova searches for a sponsor 2007-10-27 00:01:00 You wake up to the same old speculation game. Sahashi is still missing but some news reports say he has been sending orders via email to subordinates. Nova has filed for bankruptcy protection and has shut down shop for 10 days to find a 'sponsor'. Now I know what you're thinking... isn't that what Sahashi has been trying to do for 6 months?Well, in fact yes it is. The only difference now is that a vague disembodied blob called "Nova" is doing the searching, not a very distinct, recognisable megalomaniac called Sahashi. There was little faith in Sahashi, his Nova bicycle scheme or his shady methods of raising cash through issuing equity warrants to funds that seem to be yakuza affiliates in the British Virgin Islands, as Ken Worsley put it in his article:With the legality of that transaction in question, the JASDAQ has said that it will spend the next year examining how to create rules on such examples of corporate fund procurement via third parties.Our source at Nova said he ...