Of Rice and Zen I'm going to Japan tomorrow... shit the bed Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 147 6211

Articles from Of Rice and Zen

Day 552: Shiga is very convenience 2007-07-22 20:47:00 Using your newly re-aquired Japanese habit of counting on your fingers like a 4 year old you realise that it's possible all of your Japanese female friends are on some kind of overpriced slimming product. Some buy them at drug stores, some buy them online. Mira-sharkle, made with real shark. Some swallow sachets of powder, some drink miracle water. It's good old fashioned carpet-bagging and it's a huge industry with skyscrapers and EVERYTHING, because there's no limit to what people will spend if it'll make them thin overnight without any effort. If you wanna get rich, sell convenience.If such a miracle drug existed it would no doubt appear on every news site across the world and cause a major stock market splash. New diet pill only works if you eat 4 pizzas a day! The absence of this commotion is not enough to dissuade a Japanese girl from spending hundreds of dollars on a miracle cure or from standing on a machine with a large rubber belt wrapped around her stomach being ...

Day 551: Engrish "GET" shita! 2007-07-22 19:42:00 When you're fresh in and a Japanese person next to you shouts "bai bai!" like the spak kid at your school, for your first few weeks you've probably still got your British guard up and you may assume it's someone taking the piss. You will later realise that's genuinely is how girls part company here - with a massive wave from one foot away and a huuuuge retarded "BA-YEE BA-YEE!"You later become fascinated with the aspects of Western culture Japanese people pick up and wield, like a baby using dad's antique morning star as a chew toy. Recently there's been a trend for your girlfriend and her nephew to play video games and unnecessarily shout the word "getto" (get) in place of the Japanese verbs for receiving or acquiring. Rather than being conjugated in English it is usually followed by the Japanese verb "suru" (to do) - if you hear "getto shita!" it means a Japanese person has won or recieved something cool.This is both cute, ignorant bastardisation, very funny and incredibly ad ...

Day 550: Gion Matsuri Bloginated 2007-07-20 11:01:00 HOW TALL ARE YOU?Gion Matsuri: Smaller Than You May Have Heard. (cymbal)Haha HOOOOoooo. Just kidding, it really looks more like this...Not Very Portable ReallyThe world famous Gion Matsuri (Festival) takes place in the rainy season every summer. Thousands of locals and not so locals descend on the massive Kawaramachi shopping street for their opportunity to walk right in the middle of the road - AWESOME! Large portable shrines known as 'hoko' are wheeled awkwardly through the streets of Eastern Kyoto to purify the streets and rid them of evil, pestilence and gypsies. The idea is to bring good fortune to local businesses... and by criminy it works. Thousands of people in yukata flock to kyoto in the humid rainy season every year to enjoy the spectacle.By which i mean they get bollock drunk and try to get laid.Any sane Japanese person will tell you it's not to see the floats that they go to Gion on this night - it's our old friend unbridled consumerism! Yaay! Yummy food on stic ...

Day 549: iCommodity Fetishism 2007-07-19 02:59:00 An ex-student working in a Mac store in Otsu knows you well enough to alert you that the iPhone is now on sale in Japan.You kinda wish you hadn't received that news before a kid's class. It's really hard to look parents in the eye when you're teaching their 5 year olds with a semi.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 549: Just like King Kong 2007-07-18 23:05:00 Just like King Kong, originally uploaded by burleydude3. It once occurred to you that maybe Hitler's favourite movie was King Kong because he to felt like a tragic, misunderstood goliath.Browsing teh int@rwebZ'z ultra highways of surfing futuristic-ness, you run across a nameless oik implying that your coverage of Japan is negative, and following that another unwashed pleb claiming you ignore the negative aspects of Japan.Your first reaction is, 'wow, i guess my bitchy, limey sarcasm is not coming across to Dyawne Dimshanks of Ohio. How numbingly inevitable...' Then you realise knuckle dragger number 2 wins a consolation prize for identifying that you overwhelmingly celebrate the shallow, the crass and the ridiculous. This is not your political page, it's a personal one. You're in love with your own shadow because that's the essence of a personal blog. You could try to hide that or you could dial it up to 11.One of the great joys of life, in Japan or in England, is the rid ...

Day 544: Harry vs Crow 2007-07-14 14:50:00 Now you're become Mr Middle Aged Responsible Save Money Cook at Home Rent DVDs Stop Looking At Other Girls (oh, yep... I can hear my cells dying) and spend all your time with the missus, the memories of your "meet everyone in Kyoto" nights out with the boys are retreating into the past faster than a rainbow coalition from freshly stirred-up hornet's nest of Islamic fundamentalists (nature-metaphor-within-a-political-simile-five! SMACK - CLICK) It used to be a little excess drinking, a pinch of girl chasing and some light stabbage were all it took to blow off chain school steam. But the longer people stay in the chain school purgatory the longer they slide into nocturnal alcoholism and endlessly amusing self-destruction.Tonight a typhoon is coming to Kansai, so you batten down the hatches, flick on the PS3 and bed down for the night with a packet of smokes, a conbini cuppa kwoffee and finally get your teeth stuck into Oblivion that you bought many moons ago in an "I wanna be an otak ...

Day 543: Regression for breakfast 2007-07-13 02:54:00 When you arrive in Japan some things confuse you. Such as why your Shiga-based students all seem depressed and lifeless. Why is it the only thing they do in their spare time is sleep? How can they profess to enjoy sleep? Why do they spend what little free time they have doing nothing? Why do they have no aspirations? Where are the creative, genki, driven Japanese people studying, if not here? Why is it that when you have horny, hormonal guys in a repressed society awash with sexless marriages, it leads to a massive industry of anime rape porn and a seasonal increase in the number of flashers. In Japan, like the mosquitos and mukade that follow the summer rainy season, the passing of time can be marked on erect penises emerging from trench coats.These things are no longer a mystery to you.Now you're one of the family as far as your Japanese girlfriend is concerned you have the advantage of staying in a Japanese family home and being surrounded by the Japanese language. You fe ...

Day 538: Kurama Onsen Day Trip 2007-07-09 01:49:00 When you break up with a girl in the chain school bubble, staff or teacher, every employee in the prefecture will take the scraps of half-truths they came across and judge you with them. This is especially problematic when you later get back together. She's talking to you, but none of her friends or other members of Japanese staff will. Bad news travels like wildfire, good news travels real slow. Post break-up you dated a few Japanese girls and realised that while they were younger, cuter and skinnier they lacked personality that separates S from the pack. They didn't have her humour, her zest, her feisty but vulnerable combination that makes her so popular. For one night, Koda Kumi might be fun but if you had to listen to her mindless drivel about heels and "do-ru-ga-ba" (Dolce and Gabbana) for more than a couple of hours you'd quite rightly end up decapitating her with a shuriken fashioned from one of her "albums".S's not a ball-breaker, she's surprisingly easy-going, but s ...

Day 535: Where have all the cowboys gone? 2007-07-06 02:17:00 Your American friends know a flatlining company when they see one. They're snapping up every last ticket home as if they came with a free bucket of wings and you're really starting to miss them. On the other hand... the sound of American people speaking Japanese is like having your balls peeled.KA-REE-OH-KEEYou and your friends were known as the four horsemen, A from England (FAMINE - he spent so long living solely off sickly-sweet Snow Brand coffee and beer that the sugar consumption almost made him blind) , Harry from Trinidad (WAR - we turned him into an alcoholic and now he's always drunk, playing with guns and falls off chairs), Mod from Australia (PESTILENCE - the only thing holding his liver together is a fortunate cocktail of STDs) and Jobe from America (DEATH - eats fried chicken at every meal while complaining his heart hurts, but he claims to be from Canada). Some of your best friends and favourite thinkers and artists have been American. You don't know whether you l ...

Day 517: So you think you're good at video games? 2007-06-18 01:35:00 Josh doesn't look like a ninja, right? Josh looks like an American. Josh looks likes he's slowly becoming one of the hamburgers his people so adore (racist), but you throw Josh in front of the arcade game Beat Mania and he becomes something sublime.Beat Mania is a rhythm arcade game with 7 keys and a turntable. I know what you're thinking: "sounds like the gayest thing since the interminable musical section of Spiderman 3." Well I thought so too, but Josh assured me it was good so I went along to see what the fuss was about.He would visit this arcade out of the sight of other foreigners for a year after work, talking only to the local otaku who took 3 months to pluck up the courage to say hello.All of this training turned something so obscure and geeky as a rhythm game into virtuoso display of speed, reflexes and skill that bypasses nerd-dom and is launched into the stratosphere of awesomeness that most mere mortals will never match.You may never be this good at anything, ever. Wat ... Games

Day 513: Where everybody knows your name 2007-06-14 03:30:00 Your chain school's in the news again. The press in Japan works slow, but they're baying for green corporate blood and the bell tolling is not to start a lesson this time.In Japan rumours of your make ups and break ups will decide them long before you have. And here you go again on your own. After a year to the day with the most beautiful Japanese girl you've ever seen, you're now watching it come raining down dizzily around you like the embers of a zeppelin filled with fireworks. It's quite beautiful and drifts like fireflies into a grave you dug yourself.You've held onto bad ideas longer than you stuck at this one. You could've drifted on this way for some time to come but in casting yourself out to sea again your big consolation is that although it feels like a mistake, at least you're making whole new ones this time.The amount of fun times, alcohol ingested and money spent has increased ridiculously. The happiness is less easy to quantify. You miss her smile and the ...

Day 507: Korea Photos Do Little to Make Up for Memory Black Hole Memories Should Be 2007-06-07 12:22:00 Harry's BurningYou know what the DMZ really, really doesn't need? Me and my friends. We went to Shiga beach for an all night party before we went to Korea. Every night is a near death experience for the boys. The less hardcore watched on bemused as we started a fire for warmth, got drunk and allowed Mod to go get lighter fluid to "keep the fire going". He set fire to Trinidadian Harry's shoes and jeans...Tap Tap... then he threw unfinished bottles of something flammable onto the fire which exploded, giving me and Jobe cartoon black faces and hitting Harry. Harry was bleeding from the leg and head. We decided I should teabag Mod in revenge. I got my balls out, Harry went apeshit and threw a bottle of whisky at me and stormed off. Same old same old.Oh Good, I'm SavedOur first night in Korea we failed to meet Jobe's friend and found a roach motel. This life saving addition to our rooms that didn't have windows was about as useful as a condom at a jazz festival.Two's UpThe ...

Day 499: Korean Special Podcast 2007-05-30 23:58:00 Seoul stinks like a natto flavoured turd - FACT! This week we take a well earned break from Japan to visit Korea. Hear tell of being in slappers, near death experiences, whores, drinking till sunrise everyday, penis worms, injuries and being in the sights of a North Korean rifle."Mod" brings new parasites back to Japan and "A" nearly starts world war 3 in the DMZ.And I didn't even have time to tell you about the cat we found in our Korean apartment that had been there for five days having kittens. It shit in my bed.A drunk Korean guy smiled at me and told in his most friendly voice that he hates England and all of the west. I appreciated his honesty.Technorati Tags: aeon, ALT, baka gaijin, chain school, eigo no sensei, English teacher, engrish, gaijin, gaijin memoirs, ganbatte, geos, handicaps, Japan, Japanese, JET, Kansai, Kyoto, memoirs of a gaijin, meta, nihon, Nova, photos, pikki, podcast, teach english, teach in japan, teacher, teaching English, zen ... Korean

Day 474: Food that fights back 2007-05-12 05:45:00 Sachi attempts to eat a live octopus, but he doesn't go easy. This "dish" is called "dancing octopus" (not so much dancing "writhing in agony octopus"). If you can peel it off your plate and tongue you are treated to an experience not unlike chewing on a fishy, snotty, wriggling condom.Although I first ate this a year ago it's everybody's book of Things to Do in Japan. And it's generally tagged "Bollock drunk" and "Gotta be done". Food That Fights Back from memoirsofagaijin on VimeoTechnorati Tags: aeon, ALT, baka gaijin, chain school, eigo no sensei, English teacher, engrish, gaijin, gaijin memoirs, ganbatte, geos, gion, izakaya, Japan, Japanese, JET, Kansai, Kyoto, memoirs of a gaijin, nihon, Nova, photos, pikki, podcast, teach english, teach in japan, teacher, teaching English, zen ...

Day 473: Top gun salesman 2007-05-07 22:38:00 Maybe blogging from your keitai will add some timeliness, some urgency to your stories. In the last six months an uncountable number of outrageous nights and unforgettable encounters have gone undocumented due to that old faithful 'long term relationship funk'. Thanks to your brains incredible ability to cast the unforgettable into the oblivion those moments will be lost it time like replicant tears in rain. Damn you Amsterdam.Yesterday your manager charged you 500 yen for slapping her arse. You have her 1000 and slapped it again. She calls you hentai and strokes your arm. She tells you the regional manager has heard about your sales record and is very pleased with you. She tells you tomorrow she won't be here but a very important customer is coming for a level check with you. It is vitally important that you don't sell to this woman.There's a first.Why did you give this to me, you ask. There's no shortage of bile-filled instructors who don't even flash a smile. They destroy s ...