Crash-test Teacher

Guest post by Bob Perkins

Long cheap travel, humiliation and bloody mattresses; I've reached the zenith of education! Got Napster? Then "I'm Your Late Night Evening Prostitute" by Tom Waits goes well here.

"Ehhhhh? Bob-sensei! You are returning to Japan? Tanoshimi ni matteru kara neee!" "Can't wait til you get here Bob!" would be a rough translation of that last bit, but you can't really appreciate the warming of heart and tingle of nether bits that such a simple sentence can generate in a person until you've heard it uttered by an overly gleeful Japanese snack bar girl to a soul eager to get back in the mix. That soul was I, a six-year veteran of trench warfare English conversation school teaching, but now living and studying in Australia and needing cash in addition to amusements to fill the three months of break time. Why not Japan, again? Japan, my own little personal ATM machine. Need quick cash and lots of it? Go East young sportsman! Need late night drink-athons while someone else pours the scotch and picks up the check? Lock in your answer cause its gotta be Japan. Want to be fawned over, purred at and given the same wide-eyed, gob-smacked looks of bewilderment that the magical gold glowing case in Pulp Fiction got? Japan, man, Japan.

"Stupidity's the deliberate cultivation of ignorance," said William Gaddis and I was walking into a large rice field of moronic proportions. I was coming back to be an emergency teacher. Easy gig, right? Some whiners that couldn't hack their cushy positions wanted out and I would come in for a week or two, coast through the old routine and be on my way back to Okayama where I could lounge at headquarters until the next free train ride. Conceit is God's gift to little men.

I won't say who I worked for over those winter months, but it was one of the big three and to protect their reputation we'll just call it PEE-ON. A company that had once respected me and showered me with praise was now just going to shower me period. As soon as I arrived for my first day back in Playland I was quickly informed that I would be placed in my first position for, not a day, not a week, a full month in a prefecture by the Japan Sea (or China or Korean depending on which propaganda you listen to) and I would leave in a few days. Fine, so I won't see all my friends in Kurashiki for as long as I had hoped, but at least I'll be in an all-new place with the opportunity to see some of the other branches of PEE-ON and try out some of the new teaching ideas I had developed back in Oz, thought the silly and should have known better man.

A few days later I was on the four-hour local train ride to the coast. At the last stop, I collected my sports coat, picked up my bags and scooped my kidneys and what-nots off the seats-since this had been the rough rider police-car-stuck-in-a-riot swaying suspension express train over pot-hole pass route, and stepped off into the station.

"The head teacher at this branch is a bit overpowering and has put some of the foreign teachers off. This is why we need you to go there and teach, but with your experience I'm sure you can offer assistance and smooth the transition until the new teacher comes," I was told at headquarters. Have you ever been mountain biking and fallen off onto rough gravel thereby cheese grating a whole side of your body before crashing into a "fresh-squeezed" lemonade stand that also had a margarita glass salt dip that happens to fall on you just before a tailgating semi runs over it all? Would you call this a slightly overpowering experience and feel a bit put-off? Then you can relate to what the head teacher was really like and understand the kind of month it was going to be. However, she would be of little concern when the workday was done and I would be allowed to make my way back to my little chateau near (give or take 50 kilometres) the sea. At the end of the day, I was allowed to return to my new little abode and was kindly escorted there by the manager and the assistant manager, both truly charming and wonderful young women.

Japanese Culture Note: Akira Kurosawa is probably one of the best know Japanese directors in the world. Movies such as "Ran", Kurosawa's take on King Lear, featured some stunning and grand battle scenes as thousands of extras were used to charge across open fields in a vision of the days of the samurai. Sadly, Kurosawa died in 1998, but has left a long and impressive legacy of over thirty movies.

Back to the apartment on the coast-
"Kurosawa is not dead because, apparently, he has been filming a sequel to Ran in my new apartment. He has obviously attempted to incorporate a touch of L.A. Confidential into it as well," was the gist of my thinking when I walked into that place. In absolutely unexaggerated terms, the apartment contained:

1. Paper sliding doors at the balcony window that had had every single (EVERY ONE!) of the squares in the frame punched out allowing the lovely winter evening moon and all other lights to shine through.

2. The gas for both the stove, the shower and any other water dispensing items was not turned on (in frigid mid-December) and at 9:30 in the evening was not likely to be anytime soon.

3. The dishes that didn't have a fine layer of dust on them had a fine layer of dried food and rice bits because they hadn't been viewed in some time.

4. Trash that was stored in the closet (four bags FULL) because the previous owner "kept forgetting" to get them out in the morning.

5. A fine assortment of old work shoes at the front entrance that the previous owner thought the new teacher would still get some use out of.

6. A bare old mattress with a large, LARGE bloodstain on one side that was also explained away by the old teacher as "Well, it is kind of funny. It isn't all my blood. She was just...(yes, yes, fast forward)...and another time I was reeeaalll drunk when I got home and smashed my head open on the low doorway and (got the picture stop there please)...so now you know why..." Wonderful.

7. A shower that had to be cranked twice to pop the pilot on in a small tank next to it before the gas switch could be turned full-on to light the water heater...every DAMN DAY! Not to mention the fact that once the water made its way through the tank it produced a flow of liquid that I can only liken to the sensation of an irate old salary man spitting on you as he speaks in a hopped-up drunken fit close enough to your own face to be deemed illegal in certain southern states in the U.S., but with less moisture. One final coup de grace of shower life was the large curtain-less window that was positioned directly in front of the area where you would stand to shower. It wasn't a complete pervs' paradise because it was made with mosaic glass, so that the outer view was a bit like a Japanese porn film except all of you was shrouded in the little glass cloud not just Big Jim and the Twins. Still, one could see folks passing by both day and night and I often shuddered in mild embarrassment as to think what they were seeing. "Hey! If you press your face against the glass you can just make out..."

8. A toilet (and let me say I've been in many small apartment toilets in Japan, but this one was an exception) that was so close to the wall that I, in my 5'8" glory, had to kiss the tops of my knees for there was no place else to put them. In addition, it produced a flush, much like the shower pressure, sufficient enough to be considered more akin to a feces merry-go-round than a disposer of waste.

So this would be my home for the next month? This...this...CRIME SCENE was going to be my happy dwelling until the new teacher came? The assistant manager could see the mild look of discomfort forming on my face, which by now surely it must have looked as if I had just taken a 3-wood in the hackey sack, and was quick to offer the following words of encouragement: "Please, don't worry Bob-sensei! We promise this will all be fixed and cleaned-up before the new teacher arrives!" to which the manager replied, "Yes, of course."

Needless to say, the conversational reply which I offered to these two sweet young women, who were so oblivious to the needs of the here and now, was of a nature that could only be typed out here in a series of humorous language graphics and emoticons of the kind that Dagwood would use after striking his thumb with a hammer.

The following morning, I stepped into the office around eleven and approximately ten minutes later the office telephone rang, it was for me. It was headquarters calling for a chat. I was so relieved and picked-up the phone with the words: "What a lucky coincidence that you called! I was just going to call you! You won't believe what..." was all I could get out before, "BOB-SENSEI! I THINK YOU NEED TO JUST LISTEN FIRST! I was very shocked to receive a phone call last night from your manager and head teacher! They said that you are complaining about many things. Bob-sensei, I asked you to please help smooth the transition and you are causing more problems on your very first day!"

The breath literally left my body as a cold chill shot up my spine. I could not believe what I had just heard! The very woman at headquarters, the one that had wished me all the best a little more than a year before when I left my branch in Kurashiki; The woman who had called me more than a few times back in those days just to say thank you for staying with PEE-ON for the past five years and what a fine job I had been doing; The woman who had sent gushing emails to me just a few months previous to this moment explaining how PEE-ON would love to have me back even for just a few months of emergency teaching; The woman who just days before had spoke of me in glowing terms at a meeting of staff and head teachers at the headquarters. That woman...was now pissing all over me without so much as an "if, and or but" from me.

Ok, so it doesn't come as a shock to many and most of you that have read about this kind of thing before, but it was truly a mind-blowing experience for me. If you have ever been over to Dale Bay's ESL Japan website and read through a few articles about life at the big three, then you might have come across a few lengthy pieces that I wrote giving advice on the whole process. The first article was written six-months previous to the events written about here, and a follow up group of "Answers to many question about..." was written not more than a few weeks before I returned to Japan.

I love the Let's Japan site and visit it religiously. A great majority of articles written about the schools, culture and life in Japan are dead-on unexaggerated warts-and-all depictions about the reality of living and working in the land of the rising sun. However, another truth is that countless others have gone through the conversation school experience and had an amazingly good time. I count myself among those people. Those years I'll never forget and I still think fondly of them all the time, but the three months I spent back in the belly of the beast last winter will stay with me just as long. So, if you have it good somewhere in the Big Three system now, appreciate it, but also appreciate that whiner stories are not the exclusive domain of naive newbies. Fearful as reality is, it is less fearful than evasions of reality... Look steadfastly into the slit, pinpointed malignant eyes of reality as an old-hand trainer dominates his wild beasts.