Rock is the Beautiful

Greetings all and everyone,
Japan still continues to amuse and amaze. It's the land of the crazy and the nonsensical and it shouldn't work. It just shouldn't, but in whatever crazy mishmash of insanity they've got going here, well it just does.

There's this teacher at my main school who sits at the desk next to mine called Tanabe Sensei who's really frakking nice. He doesn't speak a whole lot of English and I speak even less Japanese but he just makes an effort to talk to me with what little English he can. He's always really friendly and has coffee with me all the time. We can hardly talk to eachother but he tries.
Last week he insisted that I come to his house for a welcome party. I was thinking "what the hell are we going to talk about - and HOW!" but he's just such a decent guy that I couldn't refuse, and I'd have been a complete shite if I did.

Anyway, he picked me up near my apartment today and drove out to his place, about 15 minutes drive away. I was both looking forward to and dreading the evening. Looking forward to it cause I'd been invited by a Japanese person to have dinner and drinks in his house with his family, and dreading it cause there was a very good chance we'd just be sitting looking at eachother saying, "so..." all night.
As it turned out his wife had much better English than he let on and she was also ridiculously gorgeous.
They had this really cute but expressionless one-year old who just stared at me the whole time like most of the elementary school kids do. They said she was usually really active and hyper but she was totally shy around me. They wanted a photo of me holding her but she switched on major waterworks every time they put her anywhere near me, oh well!
It was a kick ass evening though, they were just so freaking cool and decent. My beer glass was never more than 20% empty. Really nice people and I've been invited back even though I forgot I was wearing the bathroom slippers and walked back out into the kitchen with them on! Shock horror!

All the foreigners over here have taken to cursing like bastards. There's no-one to keep them in check so they can swear as loud as they want and no-one will understand anyway, so hey, why not be as profane as you can possibly be? There's this English guy called Stuart who does a 30 minute slot on a radio show in Fukuyama every Saturday informing the Japanese of what's hot in the English charts and he says "That's all for now. Goodbye, cunts!" at the end of his weekly broadcast and there's no-one to tell him not to!
Fantastic!

Still don't have my own internet. I've been on to people AGAIN about this but you try calling a Japanese telecommunications company and see how far you get. Fingers crossed though!

In other news, last week I was out on island schools. The first one had only 14 students. My first class was 2nd year and one of the students was sick so the total number of students was ... 1!

The second island was even crazier. There's no cars and the streets are barely wide enough for bikes. Cats everywhere. The school is made almost entirely out of wood and there and total of ... wait for it ... 8 STUDENTS!
3rd year has 1 student and the poor guy used to live in the States and Tokyo. Then his lunatic parents decided to move to a remote island in the middle of nowhere where he's the only kid on his class. He's a really nice kid too so I feel bad for him. He doesn't seem too put out by it but it's got to suck.

Speaking of 'not being put out by things' the Japanese seem to have drawn a pretty shitty lot in life. Don't get me wrong, Japan is great - if you're not Japanese.

It's great to be a foreigner in Japan because they just love us. The kids stare at you like you're Brad Pitt or the reincarnation of Buddha and the adults will go out of their way to help you with anything, but being a legitimate Japanese-born citizen dooms you to life of slave labour as long as you live.
For example, there was a 2 week break in between the end of 1 school year and the start of another at the end of March. Every teacher was in school every day. They had nothing to do but they all had to be there bright and early every morning. And it's not voluntary, they have to be there. And the longer they stay each night the more chance they have of getting promoted. It'd ridiculous.
And the same goes for summer holidays. They have the last 2 weeks of July and all of August off but they'll all be in school every day - doing nothing - but there nonetheless.
As Stuart put it, "It's great to be a foreigner in Japan but I wouldn't wish being Japanese on my worst enemy."

Still though, they all seem to be happy as Larry so maybe I'm missing something.

Either way, I'm going to bed so talk to you all later.
BAM!