The Big Stink

So just what was the Odawara GEOS school like? My first impression was when I got off the elevator and saw a mess of GEOS-related pamphlets and hand written posters in thick marker ink. If GEOS was such a huge and established company, why were the managers drawing posters? I mean, the stuff looked like it was prepared for a garage sale. Surely, GEOS could be more professional than that. Didn't image mean anything to the big wigs?

The Odawara school was simply one large room slap-dashed together with gyp rock that partitioned the space into classrooms. I don't think any of the walls had studs in them. The foreign teachers' rooms were fairly spacious and had huge conference tables in them (in the days before I finally quit, I used to sleep on my table between classes) . You could seat 10 students in the class but once you asked them to get up and move about to do an activity, it was like rush hour in Tokyo Station. Our rooms were also windowless and it wasn't unusual for a teacher to start classes at 2pm and not come out until 8. No wonder the Japanese were so envious of our pasty white skin&emdash;we were the Mole People.

The crappy partitioning of the rooms ultimately left the school with inadequate ventilation. The main air vent was in my room and thus blocked off from the rest of the classrooms. In the summer, my room was a meat locker; in the winter, it was an oven. Chris and Molly's room had piddly little slotted vents punched into the tops of the walls that only let sound flow through. I constantly fought with one Japanese teacher over the heating/air conditioning controls. It got so bad one time that I threatened to break her hands off if she touched the thermostat. Some of my students stated leaving blankets in my room so they could wrap up in them during class.

If you live in Japan long enough, you get used to the crowds and crowded trains&emdash;it just becomes part of your routine. One thing that no book on Japan will tell you about are the smells. There are still a lot of open sewers in Japan and come summer, they brew up one heck of a stink. You also can't buy Speedstick in the drug stores. So, by mid-afternoon, each room would develop their own smell&emdash;that one's musty with middle-aged housewives, another room would reek of some guy's lunch of 5 cups of coffee and a pack of Mild Sevens, and another would carry the BO of a high school student who just finished some club activity.

In the first few months of my job with GEOS, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and wanted to immerse myself in things Japanese. You know the old saying, "When in Rome..." One of the things I started doing was bringing my own lunch to the office. Eating out wasn't a problem, but doing it everyday...well, it takes a toll on your stomach. I wanted a "home-cooked" meal.

I went out, bought a bento box and started packing a lunch to work. Back then, I didn't know that there was a fine art...no, make that a culture, to making a bento&emdash;arrangement, color, and variety of ingredients are very important. If you're a kid in school, the quality of your lunch pretty much determines your status. Get a crappy one and people will think your parents abuse you. Get a good one and you'll be the envy of the class.

I wasn't sure what to put in the bento at first. Your average bento has two trays, upper and lower, that hold about 3 cups of cooked rice. So what to put in it? Plain rice? Bleah...no taste. In my quest for ingredients, I made a typical gaijin gaff at the supermarket by buying mirin instead of cooking oil.I didn't know what I was doing.

I took a look in the fridge: udon noodles, cheese, octopus. Alright...a meal! And with that, I stewed up a goopy mess of udon and diced octopus, all smothered in melted cheese. In hind site I can't believe I ate that mess.

Come lunch time one day, Chris and I had the same block of free time and would sit around, read the paper, and gab while shoving food into our faces. Dinner would not be until 10pm. I took my bento into the back room, nuked it, and brought it back to the classroom.

The moment I popped the top off my bento, I knew something horrible happened. It must have been what the scientists working on the Manhattan Project thought when they watched the first atomic bomb test: H-o-l-y S-h-i-t. The metled cheese and octopus smell that came out of the box was overpowering. It was too late for Chris to even protest. The odor had already made its way into our clothing, our hair, and into every crevice and corner of the room. I tried to eat the meal as quickly as possible in a futile attempt to "save" the room.

The sneer on Chris's face told me to duck out of there and prep for a class. He had to endure the smell for the rest of the day and that odor wasn't going anywhere; we all closed our doors when a class was in progress. Within an hour or two, the whole school began to smell like cheese and octopus. I was cursed between classes and even had a few notes slipped under my door while I was teaching: "You're dead, octopus boy! In the hall after class!"

Let that be a lesson to teachers thinking of saving a few bucks by making your own lunch: the quality of your bento pretty much determines your status. Get a crappy one and people will think your parents abuse you. Get a good one and you'll be the envy of the class. Bring a stinky one to class and be the topic of discussion for the rest of the day.