Of Rice and Zen I'm going to Japan tomorrow... shit the bed Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 0 6315

Articles from Of Rice and Zen

Day 575: A pod full soundwaves is being cast in your general direction 2007-08-15 12:14:00 It's time to get Boot Camp Billy on your saggy, unsightly, cellulite encrusted excuse for a brain. Feel the burn. Stretch it out. Walk it off. And by the way, why the Milton Keynes is the latest in a long line of prancing ponces in a unitard (incidentally unitard is also the title of George Bush's patented brand of unilateral politics/forthcoming autobiography - zing! Bit of politics there) so big in Japan right now? Maybe they missed Mr. Motivator. You wonder if he's big in the outside world too. Outside the bubble. You can't tell students what's big in England anymore... you just don't know. Out of the loop. In country. Out of range.Okay, are we all warmed up, pumped and ready to go? Good, now I want you to imagine today was your girlfriend's last day working at an English conversation school after 7 years and 4 months of blood sweat and tears. That's good. Work it. Now please carefully imagine that she's been doing that job since she left University, her wh ...

Day 573: Uji Fireworks Festival - making love to your senses 2007-08-12 22:56:00 Traditional summer activities in Japan usually involve dressing up in Yukata/Jinbei (summer kimono), going to see fireworks somewhere and eating food on sticks from yakuza subsidiary street vendors. You decide to take part in this tradition by approaching a chinpira (low level wannabe gangster chav) and his unfortunate girlfriend. The moll in question is black and blue with an arm in a sling, a nasty shiner on the right and the other eye patched up. If one of her eyes in black you wonder what could possibly have happened to the other to make her want to hide it. You speculate briefly that perhaps that eye has, by some strange fluke of the universe, become the epicentre of a new wormhole that leads to a strange dimension where Michael Bay makes good movies, or perhaps a tiny alien mutant lives under the patch and if you were to lift it he would request that you "open your miiiiind... open your miiiiiiiiind...."Then you realise her knuckleheaded boyf probably worked her over for bang ...

Day 572: Mario Party 8 - Wank the Can 2007-08-12 22:38:00 Here, for the first time captured on video is a Japanese girl playing the "Wank the Can" mini-game from the new Mario Party 8 for the Nintendo Wii. Proof positive that the real entertainment of the Wii is not in the playing, but in the spectating. Technorati Tags: aeon, ALT, arcade, baka gaijin, booby, chain, chain school, eigo no sensei, English teacher, engrish, gaijin, gaijin memoirs, ganbatte, geos, Japan, Japanese, japanese girls, JET, Kansai, Kyoto, memoirs of a gaijin, meta, nihon, photoblog, photographs, photos, pikki, podcast, shiga, teach english, teach in japan, teacher, teaching, teaching English, wanker ...

Day 571: My lawyer and me 2007-08-11 08:57:00 "What did you do this morning?"A student known simply as 'The Lawyer' likes to limber up before he answers a question. He shrugs and shakes his arms. He puffs and blows. It takes a lot out of him. He looks taken aback by the audacity your inquisition."Ah? Uh, oh whew... wow. Um..." (shrugs shoulders up and down 5 times and flicks head to the shoulder left and right as if about to pitch for the Yankees) He tells you he's gotta go to America to meet world famous baseball and Japanese national icon 'Ichiro' because said star is about to sign a business deal that could change the world as we know it. It's top secret right now but soon everybody will know, he assures you. "Need to know", old chap.You don't know much about Ichiro, other than the fact that every male student loves him more than his wife and would gladly fellate him until he collapsed in on himself given half the chance. You'd think he'd found a cure for brewer's droop or killed Michael Bay or something (dear ...

Day 570: The monkey is in daycare 2007-08-10 00:42:00 Today is a momentous day. Imagine you're moving out of your apartment for the summer. Imagine you will live... in a house. A house with aircon, a huge space-age talking bathroom, a two-door fridge, a Wii, even a nephew. Wait, let's back up a bit.Have you ever been so hot a drip of sweat has run down the back of your thigh? Have you ever been lying awake until 5am and then felt the adult inside you crumble and sob like an infant because you know it's gonna get hotter? Have you ever lived in a place that was so humid you could feel a constant wetness on your clothes? Has your cellphone ever steamed up when you walked into your apartment? Moisture on your skin, your walls, your sheets. Have you ever had red eyes because you've been sitting in front of a fan wearing contact lenses for 7 hours? You stay out late to try and avoid your apartment. You buy armfuls of drinks at the ubiquitous vending machines to replace to liquid you are about to lose.Have it ever been so humid yo ...

Day 569: Technology for your face 2007-08-08 09:32:00 One of the traits you share with your favourite Japanese people is your unwillingness to let a minute go past without doing something "productive". Even if you're a master at convincing yourself that playing video games in Japanese is in fact "study" and therefore the most essential thing you could be doing with your time. Adults' insistence that "games" are a waste of time but "brain training applications" (great euphemism) are a thoroughly inspired way to open handheld console gaming to adults and will help you achieve a higher Toeic score, raise your IQ, become a millionaire trading stocks, learn to cook, get chicks and achieve spiritual enlightenment.As if that wasn't enough, with the help of this new "Face Training" software you can now learn how to scrunch up your face, which we all know will make you look like Ueto Aya if you do it everyday while eating natto and attach a magnet to your left arm. Roll on payday.Technorati Tags: aeon, ALT, baka gaijin, chain school, drunk, ...

Day 568: Chain school recruits unpaid marketing team 2007-08-07 09:35:00 Welcome to the twenty-first century. Your chain school (aka, The Titanic) has launched a blog and wants 'teachers' (read 'foreigners') to write pieces and make short films to fill it. Is this this really your kindly benefactors attempting to give away prizes in return for your creativity? Seems strange... they've never encouraged your creativity before... Or is this, on the other hand, an attempt to have the already stretched engine stokers become the company marketing men too. Hmm, I know Mister Company President Sir, if we insert a broom in their bathing suit area maybe they'll mop the floor at the same time.Here's the poster that was faxed to every branch today:"All [chain school] instructors (who are left) are invited to enter the My Japan short film competition (ostensibly) for a chance to win a great prize (in exchange for their integrity and self respect). We are looking for original short films (aka, recruitment videos) of your daily life, artistic interpretations, or so ... Marketing

Day 567: Mysteries of Old Kyoto 2007-08-06 11:26:00 Mysteries of Old Kyoto Number One: The Liquid Dwelling Alien Scum.The summer's so hot you're sweating like Eddie Murphy before a DNA test. You take your green tea from the fridge and raise it to your lips salivating for the cooling gush of purest green, only to glance down in the nick of time and see a brown creature gestating inside the bottle.Why is it green tea and vitamin water can be left in the fridge at work and when you go to drink from them an alien has started growing inside them? The green tea beast was a tendril covered anemone-looking creature which, when forced through the neck of the bottle landed with a splat in the sink and turned into a huge liquid gob of pure, pulsating hate. The 'vitamin water' beastie was a white translucent jelly-fish looking thing that you would rather dispose of than analyse. Were they living in microscopic form in the water supply before the tea was made? Did they mutate from the lip fungus of the last person to take a sip? If you hav ...

Day 564: Prepubescent sexual harassment victim support group 2007-08-03 06:39:00 You stay at S's jikka for Wednesday night, through Thursday and return home on Friday morning. You borrow the family car to pick up your seven year old nephew Kota from extra-school. When you arrive at the school building and enquire about him you find that this is Zion and the kids think the robot squids are coming. They are tearing this old building a new one. A single elderly lady with her back to the action is washing cups in the corridor. She has no idea who we are looking for or in which classroom we'll find him. You realise that this school is a baby sitting service that specialises in busy-work to occupy the kids until you finish work. It looks like a lot of fun and you really wanna pull up a hobbit sized chair and start eating glue, dancing on tables and sticking glitter on your eyebrows like everyone else.You wander, unsupervised, from class to class at your leisure to pick out a child. Eventually you identify his familiar familiar cacophonous pitch over the primary ...

Day 564: Do my balls look fat in this? 2007-08-03 06:37:00 You've been searching for a new suit since you realised the one you bought in England was fraying. You realise if you are to accompany the missus to one of her almost-weekly wedding parties, or try to find a new job, going in looking like a bum who found a suit on another sleeping bum and stole it, slept and pissed in it for a night and was then rolled by another bum but then luckily found another suit in slightly worse quality than the first one... well it just wouldn't be badminton.You're in Hikkone's Viva City, which is a shopping mall, games arcade and a few other bits in the middle of Shiga. It's not quite a "city" per se, but if Japan ever has an enema they'll insert it in Shiga, so it's by far the most exciting thing outside of Hikkone Castle. Comme ca is a clothes store as ubiquitous here as Gap is in England, but has some surprisingly stylish stuff for guys, whose clothes have a lot more flair in Japan than in Engand. Whether that means flair as in style or flair as ...

Day 564: Motorway pile-up claims lives of Stitch and Mickey 2007-08-03 00:28:00 Japanese car interior design is a fascinating and incredibly dangerous phenomenon that deserves it's own website. Here's one containing a chain mail partitioning curtain, with a jungle-slash-stoner theme. It's like room personalising idea from Doubutsu no Mori applied to a vehicle moving at 60mph.When these things crash it's like a toy town holocaust.Technorati Tags: aeon, ALT, baka gaijin, chain school, eigo no sensei, English teacher, engrish, freedom, gaijin, gaijin memoirs, ganbatte, geos, gion, Hokkaido, Ice bar, izakaya, Japan, Japanese, Japanese cold, JET, job, kanji, Kansai, Kyoto, memoirs of a gaijin, meta, Misasagi, Moiwa yama, Mount moiwa, nihon, Nova, photos, pikki, podcast, shiga, teach english, teach in japan, teacher, teaching English, typhoon, Yamashina, zen ...

Day 564: Prepubescent sexual harassment victim support group 2007-08-02 23:41:00 You stay at S's jikka for Wednesday night, through Thursday and return home on Friday morning. You borrow the family car to pick up your seven year old nephew Kota from extra-school. When you arrive at the school building and enquire about him you find that this is Zion and the kids think the robot squids are coming. They are tearing this old building a new one. A single elderly lady with her back to the action is washing cups in the corridor. She has no idea who we are looking for or in which classroom we'll find him. You realise that this school is a baby sitting service that specialises in busy-work to occupy the kids until you finish work. It looks like a lot of fun and you really wanna pull up a hobbit sized chair and start eating glue, dancing on tables and sticking glitter on your eyebrows like everyone else.You wander, unsupervised, from class to class at your leisure to pick out a child. Eventually you identify his familiar familiar cacophonous pitch over the primary ...

Day 564: 40 awkward minutes 2007-08-01 12:18:00 You've come to know the feel of a typhoon in the air like the glimmer in an interested eye. The envelope of hot summer air suddenly breaks open and a cool breeze sweeps through Kyoto delivering you from summer nausea. There's one on the way. At work a new teacher is being described by the staff as 'a sales teacher'. This means Japanese girls think he's good looking and has nothing to do with his teaching ability, which is truly nigh on irrelevant. You are used to this and almost welcoming of it, but feel you should point it out for those who don't live here.He helps at your branch and you notice one of your ex girls - we'll call her K - on the schedule under your name. The heart jumps and a montage of flesh and sweat flickers before your eyes. You request she is switched to another teacher as you are trying to remain a one-girl-guy and you don't want anything to monkey with your wrench. You're not that resigned to middle age yet. You also want to avoid a potentially ...

Day 563: The kids log 2007-08-01 11:50:00 You flick through 2003 the kids log full of comments from long gone teachers to see if chain school history repeats itself. It's a fascinating piece of abstract art. Please note I have not corrected the teachers' spelling:"Shunsuke jumped up in the air during workbook and landed on his face. He went quiet and cried, a parent saw. Amy."[He managed that acrobatic feat while lying on the floor and writing in his workbook? That's not bad...] "Kazuya is a bit of a class clown. Today he pushed the limits by poking at and grabbing my groins"[ah yes, the legendary John "Two Chairs" McFreaky, a teacher with four legs and two groins]"Neha pushed all students. When Neha pushed Sakura, Sakura was cring. I told Neha "No!"every time, but I don't know she understood. I can't speak English, so Yukiko told her parents every time. Father told Neha @ home. Recently, Neha different understood.-> when Neha pushed someone, she says "No" same time...-> But... she will finish next time. We are ...

Day 562: No more cameos 2007-07-30 21:03:00 You sit awake at home until five. If your life was a movie this part would besped up. You don't know why you can't sleep when most of the people you meetcan't stop. Perhaps night's just the only time to work. You consider turningthis into a sci-fi movie called The Wind of Insomnia. In a post-apocalypticJapan a wind of insomnia blows across the cities, turning them into wastelandsof grey, sleepwalking undead. The small band who remain awake are racing acrossJapan to keep ahead of the winds and escape before they too and swallowed intothe hoard of somnambulists.It needs some work.At 10 you go over to see Mouse. She's packed up, the gas is cut off, theelectricity goes next. You take the last garbage downstairs. You give aparting gift to the friendly landlord. You take a last photo of her by herfront door, her hand resting on her rucksack as it bursts at the seams withomiyage. She makes you one last cup of the Yorkshire Tea you brought over for her and you sit on the floor ...