Elbows Out? Ready, Folks?!?!!111

“Nikki-san, what are you doing on January 16th 2007 at 17 hundred hours, 6 minutes and 17 milliseconds?”

“Uh…” I flip through my date book which is, after this coming week, essentially quite empty except for the 21st which is marked “PAYDAY!!! HUZZAH, NOW YOU CAN EAT!!!” And it is then that I am reminded that I don’t, in fact, keep an anal retentive calendar that is fastidiously marked up four months in advance in military time.

“I… may be free…why?” My one skeptical, left eyebrow is in the docking bay ready to be launched at any given moment.

This very skinny, comparatively tall (for a Japanese guy), timid looking man begins to explain to me in Japanese that there is an English class at the all boys technical school in January that he wants my help with. Essentially, many of these boys need just a few more hours of their foreign language class in order for them to graduate in the spring, whereupon they will promptly forget any English that may still be clinging on for dear life in their little brains squished next to all those complex chemical formulas and memorized digits of pi. Why my presence is required there for these few hours I’m not precisely sure. Most of these boys will continue on to become airplane mechanics or engineers at the local train stations; they hate English and, logically speaking, will most likely hate me as well as I come bearing this impossible philistine tongue.

In order to “motivate” the students for class four months ahead of time Mr. H, as I shall call him, decided it would be a good idea for him to take a photo of me to distribute to all the students. Apparently, these boys need four months to prep for my arrival and a photograph would help them do so. He seemed set on these students knowing exactly who I was, my favorite desert, when I went to bed, the name of my childhood stuffed turtle, and how many pairs of underwear I own, before I even stepped into the room.

I like some mystery in my life. This hardly seemed necessary to me. I am also vain enough to not particularly want to give these kids a random photo of myself after I had been running around school for the past eight hours in heels attempting in vain to entertain a bunch of seventeen-year old boys. But he could not be prevailed upon. I grimly threw in the towel. The result was a photo in which a tense grimace of a smile does a lousy job covering up the sneer of pure hatred I feel for the skittish little worm behind the camera.

Mr. H then pulled over one of my Japanese Teachers of English to translate. He wanted to make sure that I understood I would not be paid for these extra hours after school.

“Is that okay, Nikki-san?”

I looked at him and smiled: “No.”

This pained look of despair crossed his face and you would have thought I had just killed a bulldog puppy or kicked him in the groin with iron-toed shoes. Mental note: Mr. H – Sense Of Humor: Negative. My JTE started laughing loudly and, as is proper, covered her mouth to stifle the tee-hee-hees that were rapidly escaping. She later pulled me over to the side and confided in me that she thought he was being awfully strange: “He likes to take pictures of EVERYTHING. Last year he would take a photo everyday of the lunch that his wife made him to bring to school. Many, many photos he took. I don’t know why he needed a picture of you.”

Great.

Mr. H finally got back to me this week with responses that the students had written to a few simple questions. On the top of every worksheet is plastered my sour-faced mug shot that, if anything, is going to turn these kids off even more from learning English.

Upon perusal of their responses, perhaps it is not they who need the four months to prepare, but me:

One boy writes:

What do you like to do?
I like to sleep.

What is your favorite food?
NO.

What did you do last night?
I don’t NO.

Please introduce yourself.
NO

Some other gems when instructed to: “Please introduce yourself”:
“I DON’T LIKE ENGLISH.”
“I studying English now, but I don’t speak it. I have a question for you. What do you like to do?”

Another boy ignores the command entirely and writes dreamily, “Do you like music? What kinds of music do you like best?”

I showed my JTE the armload of paper filled with terse “NO” responses to inquiries that required a few more superfluous things such as nouns and verbs, and we had a good laugh over it. “I do hope they are polite to you,” she said. If not, I have four months to reconcile myself to the fact that I am volunteering my time to a bunch of boys who have no interest in being there at all and are not being paid. At least we have that much in common.

A friend recently commented to me that it seemed as though I had a lot of people trying to “elbow their way” into my life over here – whether it be strange men who take my picture to distribute like flyers or young Japanese women who want to practice their English. I sat back and pondered this for a while. That is a surprisingly accurate way of describing a foreigner’s life in Japan. Elbows. Lots and lots of elbows.

On Saturday a girl who ‘happened upon’ me (Read: was lurking in the elevator until the time was right to pounce upon the native English speaker) after my Japanese lesson invited me to her family’s okonomiyaki place. I grumbled all morning about having to spend my weekend speaking more slow, trivial, banal English; I could be doing far more interesting things with my days off like watching the tiny mites that live in my tatami scurrying around or plucking out my eyelashes one by one.

A time was set. A car pulled up and my new friend waved to me from the back seat. I piled into a car with three twenty-something Japanese girls who all looked as though they stepped out of a catalog. I was suddenly feeling frumpy and altogether far too masculine compared to these kewpie-dollesque, perfectly made-up girls with French manicures and immaculately curled hair. One spent the entire drive applying her make-up – mascara, eyeliner, foundation – that useless rearview mirror finally came in handy.

However, looking back I can only feel like a churlish, lousy human being as during the meal they showered us with wonderful food, cookies from a recent trip to Okinawa, and all around general generosity.

One thing led to another this weekend. I met a young Japanese guy at a birthday party who, upon finding out I was half Japanese-American, seemed thrilled beyond belief as he is currently doing an anthropological study on Japanese-Americans. After he had finished prodding me with tongue depressors and testing my reflexes he explained that he was more interested in how Japanese-Americans view Japan, how their lives were affected by World War II, why I came to Japan and the like. We exchanged information and he wrote me a message in perfectly scripted English that was sincere and rather touching. In another incident I was attacked by a twenty-nine year old intoxicated-beyond-belief Japanese woman who gripped me so hard when I attempted to leave to catch a cab that I swear she bruised some ribs. I barely escaped her iron vice grip. All I did was talk to this woman for, like, five minutes. This apparently merited a ten minute long steely hug in which she thanked me over and over again for my existence.

The trick is learning which elbows to accept and which to tell you’re busy. If you’re a drunk Japanese woman - I’m busy. I’m busy all the time. But I have some friends who might be free.

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Published:
10.23.06 / 6pm
Category:
classroom antics, what i call life