Slippers

Some writing from my Japan days.

This is a Frankenstein post.

It has been stitched together out of several sessions of writing and over the course of several days.

Last night I slept in a tent. In my own apartment. It’s right behind me. I will sleep there again tonight. I am doing this because I am at war. I have been at war now for some time, and the war I have won. I am at war with mosquitoes. They have my apartment. They will never have my blood.

I’ve sold my car. Last week or two weeks ago. Just in time for the rainy season. This morning I woke up at my usual time of around 5:30, to my usual serenading by Tamanaga san’s rooster. That rooster does his job well. Too well. He cock-a-doodle-doos for about two hours longer than he needs to. He just has nothing better to do. He’s crowing for his harem, perhaps. His diminishing harem. I was picking berries with the Tamanaga children and the eldest, Riku, told me about his recent experience beheading one of the chickens. His younger brother didn’t want to hear any of this story. He’s a tough kid; he described to me the chopping and the boiling and the spurting of blood and he might as well have been describing to me how ice cream was made. This rooster though, I noticed some months ago, whenever I would wake up in the middle of the night to take a squizz, I would open my bathroom door, and he would let out a wild cock-a-doodle-doo! (Which is kokkigokko in Japanese, by the way). Every single time, he would do this, and he still does. And I think, does this man not sleep? Is he really ready to flex all 24 hours of the day? He must have incredible hearing, to be able to hear that door. My window doesn’t fully close, it just kind of closes, as it’s covered with a series of slanted glass plates, that I can open or shut, but it’s not airtight. Still it’s quite far from him. I told Tamanaga san about this recently, and Tamanaga san said, “Oh, he thinks it’s another rooster.” The squeak of my bathroom door does not have, to me, even one-tenth of the vigor of that rooster’s kokkigokko; but he will tolerate not even a peep of challenge.

While I’m talking about my bathroom….

Let me ask you this – have you ever wanted to watch yourself pee? Have you ever had the desire to stare yourself down while you took a nice tinkle? At some point before me, a vain tenant, a well-meaning landlord, I don’t know who, but someone had this desire, and they affixed a small, square mirror, at eye level, above the toilet. Every time I go into the bathroom to pee, I have to make the choice to either look myself in the eyes when I let my stream loose, or look somewhere else. They put it right in front of my eyes, so it is more effort to look away, and it is also instinctive to want to make eye contact, and so if I go into that bathroom not wanting to stare myself down when I pee, and I don’t, I have to find somewhere else to look. It irritated me to the point that I finally tried to take it down, and I found that whoever put it up was so confident in their decision that this was a good idea, that they had it welded to the wall. The mirror stays. Do you think that’s ridiculous? Is it just me? I think that’s ridiculous. I don’t need to watch myself when I use the bathroom. I don’t need to watch myself at all. I think mirrors might be making us narcissists. Phone selfie cams most definitely are. I already think about myself enough. Don’t put a mirror in my bathroom. That’s like putting a mirror above your bed. I don’t need my first thought in the morning to be a reminder of how crusty I am.

I will tell you about selling my car. There is a reason why I brought up the car. I woke up this morning, to the crowing of Tamanaga’s rooster, at my usual time, 5:30, to grey skies. The skies are only ever grey now, and will be that way for a month or two. I like rain, so I don’t mind this time. Today was a day at my special needs school. That meant two hours of biking today – one in the morning, one in the afternoon. I leave at 7:20. Somewhere in between that window, the torrents begin. I sat on my couch, eyeing the downpour, and played with the idea of just calling in and saying, hey, uhh.. not today. This was the first time I’ve biked in such a rain, and it went as expected. Halfway through I was soaked. Not from the rain, but from my own sweat, as the amagappa (rainsuit) is so good at what it does, that no water enters, and no water leaves. I sat on the bench, in front of the changing station, the one that does not exist in American establishments, perhaps in no other country’s establishments than in Japan’s, the outdoor-shoes-for-indoor-shoes, or vice versa, changing station. Do you know about this? At the entrance of every Japanese household there is a space, called a genkan, where you change out of your outdoor shoes, and into your indoor shoes, which are typically a pair of slippers. You can walk around in socks, if it’s a house. That’s fine. When you get the bathroom, then, you change out of your indoor slippers, and into the bathroom slippers. In some bathrooms, such as bathrooms that are inside of a building where you can walk around in your outdoor shoes, there are slippers for your shoes. These are the best kind. You just slide your shoe right in. I think for this reason, ease of transition, the act of getting into and out of a shoe, is of great consideration to the Japanese. They choose their shoes with the fact that they will be performing this act daily in mind. I think they also just have some innate talent for getting into and out of shoes quickly – for anywhere we go, if I am with Japanese people, and we have to do the shoe to slipper swap (or just take the shoes off, which is common at restaurants that have elevated seating, where you all sit around a table lotus-style, criss-cross applesauce, I like this), if it comes to any shoe business, I am always the last one finished, as there will usually be some staggering around involved, perhaps a sitting or squatting down, to struggle through laces, to jerk a resistant shoe off, and by the time I stand back up again, I am alone. Only Austin, the Ozu yakuba Kansas boy, has got me beat. One time he took so long to put on his boots, that even I ran out of witty comments to make, and the restaurant hostess and I were both resigned to watching him struggle through his shoes in silence. I got a good kick out of seeing a thousand parents, at Ozu High’s graduation ceremony, dressed in their best suits and dresses, from head to ankle – because after the ankle were the slippers, and it seems that either no one has yet capitalized on the formal slipper market, or no one cares enough to want formal slippers, for the footwear for this occasion was an anything goes slipper bonanza, and it was all there. Linen beach slippers, fuzzy pink slippers, slippers of a more athletic bent. It was like Ozu’s graduation ceremony had a theme every year, like how we have 80’s themed or Halloween themed parties, and the theme for this year was slippers. And of course, they didn’t come there in the slippers, or else they couldn’t be wearing them in the auditorium, and so every person was supplied with a large plastic bag, that they carry their outdoor shoes in, while they were slippered up. I’m writing about the slippers because up until today, I have had to wear a pair at Kuroishibaru, my special needs school, and it was terrible. I only go this school twice a month, and so I had always made due with the guest slippers they gave me. The guest slippers are the lowest tier of slipper. You wouldn’t think this would be so, given the Japanese’s exacting standards of hospitality. It may just be that guest slippers in the Kumamoto school system are the lowest tier of slipper; but at the three schools that I’ve been to where I had to change into guest slippers, my experience has been the same with all three pairs – too dang small.

We’re pivoting again here.

Last night was a strange night for me.

I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. I’ve never been in the Twilight Zone, I haven’t even seen the show, but I imagine that what happens in the Twilight Zone is what was happening to me last night. There were just too many odd occurrences happening in such a short period of time that I couldn’t help but feel that I entered an alternate reality. The feeling was exacerbated by the fact that it was in the middle of night, where all sense of time vanishes, and I was only vaguely conscious. I was woken up by something. It could have been stomach pain, the buzz of a mosquito, a need to urinate. These things all did plague me in that Twilight Zone of last night.

I can’t say what it was, but I woke up last night, having not even a guess as to how long I’d been asleep. I was hot. It’s been hot here, and humid. The rainy season is here. I know this because it’s raining every day. And when you check the Apple weather app, and see rain forecasted seven days in a row, you get it. Rainy season is here. It will be raining almost every day for the next two months. It will also be incredibly humid. This is torture for some people – for me, it’s alright. I don’t mind a little sweat. Probably because I’m Swedish. I’m quite hairless. It is an annoyance, to be streaming sweat, to be moistening in your crevices, from the act of simply sitting – but some people have it much worse than I do. I’d take sweating over frostbite and dry skin any day. The real torture of this season is the mosquitoes. Evil, evil creatures. It probably started two weeks ago, that was the start of the real hell season, mosquito season. One night, as I slept peacefully, I was awakened by a high-pitched whining in my ear, like the whirring of an incredibly tiny, powerful drill. That was the beginning of mosquito season. I am now assailed by mosquitoes on most nights. Last night was one of those nights. I say mosquitoes, but I think it is always just one. That’s my feeling anyway, that just one of these hellions manages to sneak into my apartment every few nights, and engages in a dangerous game with me, trying to sneak that precious lifeblood out of me. The mosquitoes are winning. You can see that by the number of large red welts that mark my left forearm and right bicep. We are not prey for any other animal on this earth, not consistently, except for mosquitoes. They still devour us. I wonder how many hundreds, how many thousands of gallons of human blood are sucked up by mosquitoes daily. That would be a powerful statistic to use in any good destroy-all-mosquitoes campaign. They just released genetically modified mosquitoes in the US for the first time, this week, I read, in Florida. There are something like seventy-three species of mosquitoes and not all of them feed on humans, so we don’t need all of them to go extinct. Just the ones that stab and drink us like we’re big monkey juice boxes.

Anyways, last night I was plagued with diarrhea. I’m sorry if you’re eating anything right now, like chili. This is the second night I’ve woken up with such extreme gastrointestinal discomfort. I know the source. I have a bean problem. The problem is that I eat too many beans. I think we’re going to have to go our separate ways. This is very sad for me, because that means I have to find another source of protein, and I don’t know if I can find something as cheap or convenient as black beans. I was cooking up half a kilogram in dry weight of those babies every Sunday, in what I called the “death pot”, would freeze them all, and secure a week’s worth of daily bean rations, to utilize in my quest to become a mukimuki man. That has been one of my recent genius, is picking up the adventure again, in the quest to become a mukimuki man. I’m working out at the Ozu school gym with the soccer players. They think that I am the strongest man alive. It’s incredible, going from my local gym in Indiana, being at the near bottom of the totem pole of muscular men, to being number one, the king, without having to have really done anything at all except fly across the world. It’s all relative. Surrounded by hulking American men, I am weak – surrounded by puny Japanese high school soccer players, I am Hulk. They’re not puny, I’m just kidding – especially in the leg department, many of those guys are stronger than me. But weightlifting culture is not big in Japan. It’s fledgling, I would say, although that implies that it will be growing, and I’m not sure if it will be any time soon. When they first started coming to the gym, they would see me lift my weights, and it would just blow their minds. They would huddle around me, and make exclamations, “Wow! Wow!” “Oh my god!” “Very, very strong!” and cheer me on. It’s been a great ego booster. Recently in class, they asked me if I’d be in the gym that day, and they were excited to tell me they would be too, and they asked me what my max bench press was. The time before, they had asked me if I could bench 50 kilograms, and I actually laughed, and they said, “5 times,” and I was like, they’re gonna like this. (For the Standard Measurement users, you know who you are, (Americans) one kilogram is 2.2 pounds). That’s about 125 pounds or so. Even for me that is laughable. I laid out on that bench and just started pounding them out. I may as well have been lifting a barbell with stuffed animals on the sides. And with each rep, they’re realizing my true power, realizing why I laughed at 50, and they told me at fifteen, “Ok, ok.” So in class, when they asked me what my max bench was, I said, “I don’t know, maybe 200.” You should have seen their faces. It blew their minds. And these kids really think I am so strong, that they believed it. That’s 200 kilograms, almost 450 pounds. Obviously that is impossible for me. But I’m truly flattered you guys think I can do it. Really, imagine that you go to the gym and struggle to pound out your six or seven pull ups. You’re probably following in the wake of some lean mean pullup machine who just cranked out fifty for a warmup. You step up, and you’re doing okay, until you get to the fourth, or the fifth, and now it hurts, and your form is falling apart. The sixth destroys you, and you fall to the floor with flaming arms. The imagine of the lean mean pullup machine is fresh in your mind. You do not feel strong. Now, go to my gym at Ozu high. Ask if you can do some pullups. You may have seen a group of young bucks standing around it, eyeing it cautiously, perhaps one of two of them with courage having just given it a go, struggling through a few, probably with terrible form, doing the fish-flopping thing, where you buck your legs to give you extra momentum to lift yourself up. You now step up to struggle through your measly six or seven reps. On only the first rep, you’ve caught the attention of anyone watching. On the second or third, they are now openly commenting on your pullup strength, turning more heads. Sugoi, sugoi. By the fifth, they’re all in, cheering you on, many oh my gods have been exclaimed, someone has probably started counting for you. On your final pullup, they are enthralled, they will beg for one more, and you will fight for it, and you will fall to the ground; and this time, you fall down as a hero, a champion, to the cheers and celebrations of onlookers, who are thrilled to have just born witness to such a remarkable feat of physical strength. This is what it is like to workout at this Ozu school gym. When I sit down at the lat pulldown machine, I move the peg from somewhere around 20 kilograms, to double that. The soccer players see this, and their eyes immediately widen. It’s really incredible.

It has been a great way to get closer to them. Some of these guys have excellent English, and some of them don’t even speak enough English to use the escape card, “I don’t speak English.” when I start talking to them. It’s bad enough that I have to try and gauge the level of the student before I approach them, because it might be that to whatever I say, they will have absolutely no response at all. But it’s easier to bond in the weight room. Sports have that power. Last fall I played in a little Japanese-Vietnamese-American (me representing America) international soccer scrum. Those Vietnamese guys spoke almost no English and close to zero Japanese, and we left good friends.

Typing “believe” makes me want to share something I spoke with a friend about yesterday. We were acknowledging the nightmare that is spelling in the English language. That is one aspect in which Japanese has English thoroughly beat. Japanese is consistent, and the only problem I have with Japanese spelling is whether there is a small つ　or an extra う。For the Japanese it’s obvious, but for non-native speakers, it’s not. English speakers learning Japanese have it much easier than Japanese learning English. They have to struggle to discern even between letters of the alphabet. It is nearly impossible for a large percentage of my students to tell whether I am telling them to write b or v. When you make a v sound, if you do it right now, you’ll notice that you do a little buzz with your bottom lip. It’s fun. Try it. The Japanese don’t have this, and so they can’t pronounce v, and if they can’t pronounce it, it’s very hard for them to hear it. The same is true for the th and l sounds, among others. So, that is already a hurdle, and then put the fact that English has all kinds of nonsensical and inconsistent spellings, that it is pretty torturous for the Japanese to learn to spell anything. I showed you before how many different ways they could incorrectly spell frog. (Like, a million different ways.) Blue and vegetable are two other ones that frequently devastate my students (and the greater Japanese community, for at many restaurants, where they have their menu written on a chalkboard, which is a popular thing to do, if they’ve written “vegetables”, 98% of the time it’s spelled wrong). I am sympathetic to all of this. I think English speakers all recognize that English is a bastard sometimes. Look at tomb and bomb – it took me less than five seconds to think of such an example. Another one – close. How did you pronounce that? Close can be pronounced two ways, two words with entirely separate meaning. Japanese is at least consistent. But anyways, my friend, while we were bonding over the horror that is English spelling, asked me if I had any problems with spelling, and I am proud to say that at this point in my life, I’ve worked out almost all of the kinks (one that was kinking me for a long time was restaurant, and when I spell this word I now actually pronounce it incorrectly in my head to confirm that I have it right, as in, I pronounce the staur as you would the saur in dinosaur) but there is one that still kinks me, and that is the dreaded ie vs. ei debauchery. What reminded me of all this just now was that I typed believe, and I actually typed it wrong the first time, perhaps because my core has now been shaken and I am now subconsciously evaluating every ie ei word that I use. I think you all probably know what I’m talking about – is it theif or thief? It’s thief, but I often want to spell it theif. That one is a fifty-fifty for me, but the worst, is receive. I have made the mistake of writing recieve and correcting it so many times that I fear it is now engrained in my muscle memory – for me, writing the word receive is an act of writing receive and then thinking, “Is that right? That doesn’t look right.” And then rewriting it correctly. And it’s a bastard because you have relieve and believe, achieve, sieve, basically everything receive, conceive.. I know, it’s “I before e, except after c.” I know. I just hate it. I’m just pissed about it. But I guess that does solve our thief problem. I before e except after c.

Here are all of the ways that I have seen blue misspelled by my students: bleu (common), bool (only once), belu (common), brue (surprisingly uncommon), blu (uncommon), bloo (uncommon), and blow (only once). And I think this illustrates exactly why English spelling is so evil. To an English speaker, three of these would be pronounced nearly identically with blue: bleu, blu, and bloo. They’ve never written it, but there’s another, blew. You could also write blueue, couldn’t you, if you queue is a word? Bastard language. To the average Japanese who does not attempt to model true English pronunciation when they speak, beru and brue are also correct spellings of blue, in that it models how they hear the word.

On the beans.. I am not sure if I’ve adapted. I am sure that I’ve had to eat less of them, and to tell you the truth, I don’t want to eat them at all. I’ve come to even be afraid of them. It is a certain fact that if I consume any amount of black beans, I will have stinky farts the next day. But I have a dream, a dream that I will be a muscular, mukimuki man, and if I have to make such sacrifices, I will. The protein is too high, for too good of a price, and the convenience is hard to beat. I can whip up half a kilogram in dry bean weight, what I have called the “death pot”, and freeze it all, and now have a week’s worth of daily bean rations. My main protein sources are, along with the beans, soba, tofu, soy milk, peanuts, and a small fish called いりこ (iriko). I think they’re sardines. I eat soba every day, and I often tell this to Japanese people, when they ask me what my favorite food is, or what I usually eat. Soba is a perfect food. It is a perfect noodle. It has outmuscled every other food because it is simple, it is healthy, it is easy to make, and it has an incredible base flavor and texture. Direx has all but lost my business because they don’t carry it. I stopped at Direx this last week on the way home from Ozu High, to pick up some soy milk, which is ten yen more expensive at Direx than Trial (Direx losing on all fronts), and I checked, with very low expectations, as to whether there was yet any soba on the shelf, and there was none, and I left disgusted. Goto sensei, my old tantosha, who I really miss, gave me an amazing 図鑑 (zukan) (kind of a picture encyclopedia), meant for elementary school students and detailing all of the most fundamental aspects of Japanese culture, and it was actually thrilling to me to find that there were two pages devoted to soba, and the making of soba. How soba was made was something that had been sitting in the back of my mind for a long time, like many things, that I’m curious about, and would really like to know about, but just not so much that I’ll sit down and look into it on my own. This came to me, finally, and in the form of a beautiful, detailed, meant-for-children picture book, perfectly matching the level of my interest with the level of the explanation. Because you know, there are so many degrees of knowing something, as I could say, “Yeah, I know how soba’s made!” But if you asked me to make it, obviously, I can’t, so do I really know how soba’s made? Don’t push me on it. What I can tell you, which is what the zukan told me, is that the secret of soba’s power, being full of magnesium, and fiber, and protein, mainly comes from the ground up fruit of the soba plant. They take the fruit, which looks like (based on the zukan illustration) some tough ass raisins, grind ’em up, take off the shell, mix them in with a paste made of flour and yamaimo, a kind of root vegetable, roll it out, and chop it up into noodles. And viola, you have Japan’s greatest noodle.