My special secret is: I’m happy 僕の特別な秘密は、僕が嬉しいということです

Howdy ho buckaroos.

This title was inspired by one of my student’s responses on a worksheet I gave them. It’s the end of the year and we’re doing About Me Bingo. The students had to fill out some things about themselves, the basics you know, favorite color, artist, food you like. One of the questions was, “What’s your special secret?” This got some good answers, and I enjoyed reading all of the students special secrets, like “I have an older sister,” and “I don’t like English,” but the one that really tickled me was, “I’m happy.”

And these days, I am happy! The Happy Light is here, the White Knights have made their charge, and the Cruel Mistress is vanquished. Today it was a bright and sunny day. My friends and I were sweating in the sun as we played soccer. The first trees are starting to bloom, the plum trees, and I am blooming with them. They resemble sakura but they bloom earlier. Last year I actually did mistake them for sakura, not knowing any better. As the days grow longer, so my mood is uplifted. It’s amazing how much of a difference a little bit of light can have on your disposition. We are not so different from the plum trees.

There’s a lot going on in my mind these days, and a lot of it is scattered, and is not so much good story material – but I think that enough time has passed and I owe you guys something. Every day that passes I feel a stronger urge to write, and I think that at this point there’s no better way than to just start and see what happens.

I’ll try to tell you some interesting things..

One thing that has been a fixation of mine for some time now is fasting. Like a fly buzzing around my head, it has floated around in my thoughts, always popping up during those periods of time where I’m free to think about whatever I’d like to think about, and my mind is wandering. In the beginning I wasn’t thinking about fasting. I was just doing it. I had gotten a little chubby, had a nice chub-chuberoo going on, and I had pretty much gotten sick of looking at it and talking about how I should do something about it, and so I did. Losing chub is not complicated – I started burning more calories and eating less. This was around November I believe, and I’m sure I also ate less because of the effect that winter has on me. I went from eating a hearty amount of food, as I acquired a habit of eating larger portions as I went through a muscle-building period, because I wanted to look like Captain America, to eating probably half of that, and spending a good deal of time hungry. And after awhile, I noticed that I had started to feel sharper, mentally and physically. I hadn’t given that much more thought beyond, “Hey this is interesting!” until one day, when I was at Shoyo, and I ordered the bento lunch. I used to eat the bento lunch every day at Shoyo. I would give the office 400円 in the morning, and at around 10:30-11am, I would find a big, beautiful bento sitting on my desk. (The hungrier you are, the more beautiful it is. In actuality the palette is a rather lackluster spread of grey-brown-white, not the most visually appealing thing to eat). I stopped eating the bento, partially because it was pretty lackluster, and partially because I was trying to cut down on food. But one day, I came in and had forgotten to bring anything for lunch. I knew I would need to eat something, and so I ordered the bento, and when it came, I did what I always did, like what everyone does, and I ate the whole bento. And why that was significant was because after I ate that I went from having a mind like a razor sharp katana to a should-have-been-thrown-away-three-months-ago disposable razor. I was a souped-up sports car who had just driven over a spike strip. Basically, my mental acuity, along with my productivity, was completely obliterated. And I thought, holy crap, what is actually happening? I used to eat that bento every day! I wondered if I had always felt that way after eating the bento, or if it was just because of the sharp contrast between my two states, going from fasted to stuffed, and it left a lasting impression on me. That was really the moment when I realized that there was something to this.

So, that was my anecdotal evidence. After that, what kept rolling around in my brain was a single sentence, coming from Obama’s “Dreams Of My Father.” After moving to New York, to study at Columbia University, he briefly mentions some of the habits he had adopted during that time. One of those habits was fasting on Sunday. There was no explanation as to why, and that kept coming back to me. Obama’s a smart guy – why’d he do it? That stuck in my brain, and so after this had simmered in my mind long enough, I took a dive and did some research. What I found was pretty interesting.

When I first had that epiphany, the bento-inspired one, I had done a bit of research, but very surface level. I got as far as the words “intermittent fasting” and popular fasts. I got a list of the reputed or empirically supported benefits, I thought, seems good, I’ll keep eating less, and so I did, and that was the extent of it. I knew that it was good, but I didn’t know why. Apparently that wasn’t enough, because fasting continued to stay on my mind, and so last weekend I sat down and I took a deeper dig. Quickly, I found my way to a TedX talk that I believe is about eight years old, by a researcher for the National Institute of Health in the US, named Mark Mattson. This fifteen minute talk was totally fascinating to me. People knew that eating less was good for them as far back as 3800 BC, based on an Ancient Egyptian quote, “Humans live on one-quarter what they eat, and on the other three-quarters lives their doctor.” But what people couldn’t do back then, that they can do now, is understand the biomechanics of why. I won’t say much here – I think it’s worth it to watch the talk – but I’ll say a bit. People have known for some time that restricting calorie intake results in greater longevity. Mark Mattson became interested in fasting, because his primary area of research is age-related neurological diseases, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and was looking to fasting as a way to help treat or prevent such diseases. What he found was why fasting does have a significant positive effect on the body and brain. To my understanding, this is why. Your body stores glycogen in the liver, and uses this as a primary energy source. It takes about twelve hours for your body to exhaust this glycogen store; less if you perform rigorous exercise. People who are relatively sedentary and eat three meals a day almost never exhaust this glycogen store. When you do, your body needs a new source of energy, and it turns to ketosis. Maybe you’ve heard of that before, that might be what the keto diet is all about, I haven’t done any research on that. Ketosis is a process where your body turns fat into ketones, and it turns out that ketones are really good for your brain. Ketones are used to produce what are called neurotrophic factors, which are, to my understanding, proteins that stimulate mitochondrial activity in the neurons in the brain. They also stimulate neuron growth, and do good things for your synapses and dendrites (increase the number of connections or increase connection speeds perhaps, I’m not sure exactly). Basically – you get smarter. This is not the only benefit of fasting – another benefit is that it encourages apoptosis, which is programmed cell death, which is where your body kills off and clears out old cells, making room for new ones. Mark Twain wrote, “A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.” That may be why! There are other measurable benefits as well, reducing inflammation in the body is another I can think of. Inflammation is a primary cause of cardiovascular disease. Who doesn’t want to reduce a little inflammation in the body?

When I learn about things like this, it just makes me realize that I still have yet so much to learn, that we have so much yet to learn. I just wonder, how much is out there that if I knew about it, it would change the way that I live, now, today? I think about all of the things that are already known, that are already discovered, but are yet undiscovered to me, things that I’d love to know, and have yet to find out.

I have now adopted an intermittent fasting strategy that seemed appealing to me – I’m eating from eleven in the morning to seven at night. I was already not eating breakfast, so this has been easy to do, I just delayed when I started eating by a bit. What’s really interesting is how at first I would find myself so hungry in the mornings, and now, while I do still find myself hungry in the morning, it passes quite quickly, and I can go on without a problem. It seems that our bodies tell us we’re hungry more out of habit than out of true need to eat.

The other things I’ve been thinking about.. I’ve been dabbling in public transportation and I hadn’t shampooed for twelve days, until today, as I got a haircut. I thought about telling Funai san, “Leave off the shampoo,” but in the end I let him suds me up. That’s another thing – the shampoo. Apparently there has been a “no-poo” movement around for a few years. I guess I’m doing that too.

I could keep writing… it’s been an eventful time. I can tell you a little story – there has been a little bit of drama in the prefecture in the past week. On Friday morning, I was at my desk at Shoyo, and I was greeted by a genki older teacher, in his usual genki fashion, saying “O-hayo!” He is the only teacher who greets me with an Ohayo only, as it’s more casual, and the way I understand it is he’s older and he’s earned the right to say Ohayo to whoever he pleases. And this reminds me of a joke that I also learned recently, from Sakamoto sensei, who is also a sensei of great interest. Sakamoto sensei is a kind and caring teacher, but he has that special talent that might be bestowed upon all kind old teachers, where he can put a third of the class to sleep within the first three minutes of class (these are the students who have decided from the beginning that it was nap time) and the next third to sleep by the end (the students who tried valiantly to stick it out, but succumbed along the way). I think only the final third survives with my help, or by having a true love of learning and/or the English language. Sakamoto sensei has a peculiar trait where he will start the class with a greeting that is totally unpredictable in its cadence, intonation, and volume. I have thought long and hard about why this happens and I don’t have an answer. It may just be an uncontrollable outburst of the raw joy he feels at being able to start another English Conversation class. When I first had class with him, this initial proclamation would burst out in such an unexpected and irregular way, but with such enthusiasm, that it was nearly impossible for me not to laugh, and many of the students would. It’s generally a variation of a phrase like, “Good morning everyone, how are you today?” And it would come out in a way such as, “Good morning everyone, how ARE you today?” with the ARE being the climax of a curve of increasing enthusiasm, or the crest of a wave of vocal energy within the sentence. Or perhaps, a “Good morning everyone, how are yoU TODAY?” Starting off seemingly normal, but ending with an explosive finish. What is even harder to catch in writing is the way he will stagger the phrase, on top of the already random surge of energy within the sentence. Comedy is funny because it’s unexpected – Sakamoto’s class greeting is comedy for this reason, coupled with the fact that he is so completely unselfconscious. To all appearances, he does not recognize that he is doing a humorous thing, and the fact that he struggles to read his crowd may be a big part of why so many students fall asleep in his class. But he does mean well, and his heart is certainly in the educating of his students, and he frequently will bring props into class (recently he brought in his new shoes, they were about six different shades of brown, he scored them for about $20) as topics of conversation, or focus on local or global news. Anyways, as we were walking to class, I told Sakamoto sensei a joke I had learned recently, and he chuckled. Then he surprised me by responding with a joke of his own, and here it is: A man says, “Minnasan, Illinois gozaimasu!” He meant to say, “Ohio gozaimasu.” Get it? Let me break it down. Ohio is one of the only states that most Japanese people know, along with New York, California, Texas, and Los Angeles (one of the most given responses when I ask a class to name US states), because ohayo gozaimasu is “good morning” in Japanese, and it sounds like Ohio, so it’s like there’s a state named “Morning.” Minnasan means “everyone”. Minnasan, ohayo gozaimasu is a common way to start a morning class or meeting. Illinois gozaimasu is what you say when you get the state mixed up. You can insert any state, Illinois, Kentucky, Florida – but you’ll have more success if it’s a state the Japanese person you’re telling the joke to knows; otherwise there will only be confusion.

Alright, that was a tangent. Where were we..

I’m at my desk, teacher comes up, says his “Illinois!” Shoot, I mean Ohio. (funny?) He says, “Ohayo!” And I reply with the usual diligent, “Ohayo gozaimasu!” And as that’s usually the end of it, I turn back to my desk – but then I notice, he’s hovering. This is a very rare occurrence. Perhaps only once before he’s stopped to talk to me after the ohayo, after many an ohayo. I turn to him, seeing that he wants to talk. He’s looking down, and I give him a “Genki desuka?” (how are you) and he quickly responds, “Genki.” And I can now see clearly that there is something on his mind. He looks up at me, with a somewhat somber face, and says, “Ima, toraburu.” (Now, there’s trouble.) And of course, whenever someone comes to me talking about trouble, they’re talking about America, and so I immediately reply, “America?” And I’m already steeling myself to have a conversation about the latest American atrocity. He says, “Yes. ALT.” And now I’m really on alert. So there’s been trouble with an American ALT. I’m already thinking of what and who it could be. My mind conjures up a list of names. As far as American ALTs in Kumamoto, I know most of them. I’m thinking, oh boy, do I know them, are they a JET, and what did they do. He tells me it’s big news, on the front page of the Kumamoto newspaper, and he’s got my full interest, and I tell him I don’t know about it. He looks around and asks if anyone has a newspaper, and then tells me he’ll bring me a copy of his, and then leaves me momentarily to my imagination. I realize that I could probably find this online, and so I turn to the computer and search up the Kumamoto newspaper, which I had never thought to look up online before, but will now be checking it frequently, and I found the article, #1 on the ranking of popular articles. I scan the headline, but the kanji are difficult, and I can’t read them. I give the article a click, read it through, and come up with this: he was a guy, he was working at Luther High School (a private Christian school in Kumamoto City), he hadn’t been in Kumamoto for long, and he wasn’t a full time teacher, so he wasn’t a JET, and he had imported 3 grams of something. What that something was, it was now time to find out. I copy and paste the first four kanji of the headline into my dictionary, and I come up with two words: liquid, and marijuana. Yikes.

Right after that, Ohayo/Ohio sensei returns, and shows me the newspaper, and sees that I’ve just looked it up. And then, I didn’t really know what to say. I said, thanks for telling me, I didn’t know him, and it’s a good thing it wasn’t me right! I thought that would get a laugh, because I think it there would be few things I could do that would blow the mind of my coworkers more than be arrested for importing liquid marijuana; but he was taking this all somewhat seriously. Marijuana in Japan is totally a no-go, so this guy really messed up. He will probably go to prison. The only thing I know about Japanese prison is from a conversation between the friend of the dad of the 6-year-old main character in the manga I’m now reading and the main character, when she told him that her dad had banned her from riding her bike because she rode without a license. He said, “It’s good that you didn’t get caught riding without a license, the police would arrest you. Do you know about prison?” and she says, “The place where you eat cold rice every day..” and he says, “Oh, you know about it!”

So that was my drama for the week! I wanted to write a bit about kanji, but I think this is where I’ll wrap it up this time around. We can save that for next time. We have all the time in the world to talk about kanji! Here is the link to Mark Mattson’s TEDx talk. If you’re interested in what I was saying about fasting, you should check this out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UkZAwKoCP8&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

And that’s it! I hope you’re surviving winter and if you haven’t seen the White Knights yet they’ll be there soon! I’ve just finished reading Thoreau’s Walden and.. man. Some books just find you at the right place, at the right time, and this was one. I could write a whole post, a whole series of posts on my takeaways from it. It seems like I found myself quoting almost every page. I can’t give you all of them, but I can give you one.

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.”

(Two updates I’d like to make)

Good article I found yesterday: https://jamesclear.com/good-bad-intermittent-fasting

I was asked how long a fast can be before it’s detrimental to your health, and so I looked that up, mainly out of curiosity (I’m not trying to test that out; 18 hour fasts are long enough) I’m not sure what the exact answer is as far as when fasting is doing more harm than good – it must depend on the person, and when your body starts to break down muscle; but it struck me that in the opening lines of the article, the author is, just like I was, referencing Obama. He brought the big BO in for another reason; he was touching on the power of the fast as a way to reduce decision fatigue; yet another reason to give the fast-life a try! But I wanted to add a little disclaimer: I spoke with my friend Madeleine about intermittent fasting and she brought up a good point that the author also briefly touched on, that women, and specifically menstruating women, may have a different experience when fasting, and possibly not a good one, as it can affect their hormone levels. She mentioned to me that most of the studies that have been done on fasting have not focused on women, and so that would be worth looking into.

Another update: There is one more thing I want to say about Sakamoto sensei. Along with his glorious class greetings, he has another particular habit that’s interested me. Whenever he’s done working for day, before leaving the teachers’ office (the teachers work in a shared, open space) he makes a point of coming over to my desk and saying to me, “Goodbye Steven sensei, I’m leaving for the day!” Of course, the other teachers say goodbye to me, and I say goodbye to them, but unless I catch them on the way out, or in the hall, it’s not a personal goodbye, but rather a communal goodbye, an announcement to the entire office. Sakamoto sensei goes out of his way to give me a personal goodbye, at the end of each day. And I quite like that. Only Sakamoto sensei does this, and I think this act is a Sakamoto specialty.. but now that I think about, it could also be because literally no one else leaves earlier than I do. This is something I often feel very guilty about, my early leaving time. It’s hard not to feel guilty as I look out across the sea of hardworking teachers and give my “otsukaresamadesu!” (this is often translated to ‘thank you for your hard work’, and that’s more or less accurate enough) and they respond in kind, and I know that they will all be there for possibly several more hours, grading their papers, holding their meetings, while I am a free man, walking my five minute walk home, making myself a hot bowl of delicious soba, putting my feet up, going for a leisurely run, cracking into a good book. If any of them then, at that moment, think to themselves, as they give their otsukaresamadesu in reply, “Oh Steven sensei, leaving so soon! You must be tired after your long day of bingo and preventing students from getting any work done during cleaning time!” I have no defense. The life of the ALT is a blessed one indeed. My close friend Matsunaga sensei assures me that no one despises me for it – I hope that’s true. It’s probably true. Whether they do despise me or not, Sakamoto sensei certainly doesn’t.

One day, on a day where I left not soon after him, I thought, “I don’t do this for anybody. It makes me happy. It will probably make other senseis happy. I should give it a try.” And I hesitated for a moment, as I was struck with a counter-thought, “Ah, it’s not worth bothering anyone over. You’ve said your otsukaresamadesu; you’re a free man.” But after I had taken a few steps past that sliding office door, I wavered again, and Sakamoto sensei’s influence won out. Someone was getting a goodbye. I walked into the adjoining office, up to Matsuzaki sensei’s office, like I have many times before, to ask about a lesson plan, or to tell her thank you for a dekopon (delicious sour orange), or try out a new joke, or ask a Japanese question – but this time, I just said, “Hey. I’m going home! Have a nice night!” And she was happy!