Coffee-Flavored Coffee

I’ve been trading some messages with my friend Maren on Facebook (of all places) and I wrote this today. I realized that this is the kind of stuff my friends like to hear about so I figured I’d paste it on my blog. This is in response to Maren asking me why the Japanese school year starts in April.

Everything here starts in April. It’s probably because Spring is associated with rebirth. The Japanese are huge on seasons. Or maybe I’m just pulling that out of my ass. I’m really not sure. But it is true that all employment contracts, the school year, etc. run from April to March. If you join a company in the middle of that then your contract runs until the following March, then you renew. But usually all new jobs start in April unless you’re in the service sector or something.

My Japanese teacher tells me that for this reason, May is a big month for depression. People are excited about the new beginnings in April and then novelty wears off and work stress sets in. Also people get sick because of the shifting weather (Electra and I both have colds right now.) It’s pretty weird for May to be a depression month, but I guess it’s true.

From the Desk of Roy Huggins

Date: May 7, 2008
To: Japan

This love of seasons thing is getting way out of hand. FYI.

Thank You,
Roy (ロイ)

————

So there’s a long-standing cultural thing here wherein the changing of seasons is constantly recognized, remarked upon, and acted upon. Right now it’s nearing the end of flower-watching (花見) season in Hokkaido. It’s kinda cool, actually. Everyone goes out to watch the flowers and get drunk and eat BBQ’d ram.

But they took away my Yebisu Red. And what’s worse is they replaced it with “The Hop”, a beer which is as terrible as its name. I thought at first that my local store was just out of the red and I was waiting for more. So I didn’t worry. But when I complained of the situation at a party last week I discovered that the masterfully crafted, wonderfully bitter-yet-smooth Yebisu Red is only a winter seasonal. I of course wondered aloud about the strange policy of only producing one’s finest product during a certain part of the year. But it was explained very clearly that the Japanese love of seasons trumps pretty much everything. Ah, well.

Pretend that 100 yen is equivalent to one dollar. That’s what everyone around here does and it works pretty well.

Now pretend that you have am embarrassing amount of debt in the United States. All of it is, of course, in US dollars. At the moment, if you’re also earning your salary in dollars, you’re pretty screwed. The dollar is so inflated that any debts you’ve collected over the last 10 years are actually way bigger than they look or than they were when you got them. This is a standard risk of taking debt, but our nation’s “activity” over the last 6-or-so years has made it far worse than normal.

Luckily for Electra and I, we’re earning yen. When we got here, you needed about 120 yen to buy a dollar. This was useful for us, since we brought a couple thousand of those with us. On Friday, when I sent money home to make payments on the aforementioned embarrassing debt, I only needed 99 yen to get me one dollar. That’s right, the yen and the dollar are now floating around equality.

But how long will that last? Probably not long. The US is reeling from years of frantically printing money to fund, well, lots of things we never really needed enough to spend well over $1billion/month. We’re also reeling from the fact that nearly all of us have far more debt than we can reasonably handle. The whole country, government included, have been spending like teenagers with a brand new high-limit college student credit card.

Japan, on the other hand, is pretty stable. A little of that change in exchange rate comes from the fact that the Bank of Japan has stopped artificially suppressing the currency’s strength (they used to do that to support the carry trade) but the majority of that effect showed up a couple months ago. This latest drop is pretty much entirely due to the fact that the rest of the financial world is tired of propping the US up and they’re trying to move away from the unstable and unreliable US dollar. They’ve finally decided that even with all the investment they have in our economy, it’s not worth throwing more and more money at us trying to keep us afloat. The US dollar used to be the international currency but it’s quickly changing to euros.

So Electra and I are lucky that for the next 1.5 years or so we’ll be paying down our debts with an advantage, instead of the huge disadvantage that everyone at home is stuck with. I’m posting this because I remember that even with the Internet right there in front of me all day, I never had this kind of perspective from my home in the US. I could see that we were headed for trouble, but I never had the concrete example of seeing the same amount of yen I sent home turn into larger and larger amounts of dollars as each month went by. I’m happy to have more money for the same amount of work, but I know that the costs are going to outweigh the benefits in the long run. I only hope that we can turn this around before we all lose our collective shirts.

So, I’ve been pretty depressed and anxious. About halfway through my elementary school visits, the outsiderness got to me and I kinda cracked. The next two months I went to one school that was a little over an hour away and then another that is more like 2 hours away. For most of December, I had to get up at 4:30am to go to work every day, including my birthday.

So I wasn’t too happy. I still drift in and out of irritation/anxiety but I’m feeling a lot better now that I’m back at my base school. The teachers there are pretty chill and it’s clear that I belong and I’m not the perpetual guest^*. I think it helps a lot that they know I won’t just be there for one month. They can depend on me to be a part of their ongoing educational plan. Also, it’s a 20-minute walk instead of a 2-hour subway/train/bus Rube-Goldberg machine of transport.

I considered very hard the idea of not recontracting as an ALT and instead starting a therapy practice here. But I realized that worries about visas and taxes, etc. would probably just make matters worse. So I’ve recontracted. I’ll be working as an ALT for another year. I just really hope that my supervisor listens to at least one of my requests. He didn’t seem super-sympathetic during our meeting, which is actually kind of odd in my experience.

I will likely start seeing a couple of clients per week, though. I just need to sort out all the weirdness about taking money to pay for my supervision, etc. My contract doesn’t allow me to work on the side, so I need to make sure they’re okay with my bookkeeping plan.

My Japanese is clearly improving and I can talk about very shallow topics with my coworkers. They often express their amazement at my growth in ability. Partly this is because Sagara-sensei did a lesson-per-day intensive with each of us over Winter Break. It was super helpful. Soon we will cover the te-form (a kind of conjugation kinda thing) and I will finally be able to string together full sentences with more than one verb! Yay!

^*A few words about the perpetual guest: there is definitely a culture of hospitality in Japan. That’s great when you’re touring and it’s great when you’re visiting friends. But it’s really frustrating to go to workplaces that constantly treat you like a guest for months on end. You start to realize that the Japanese guest mentality isn’t just hospitality, it’s also rejection from inclusion. It’s “you’re not one of us, you’re just a guest.” When you actually live and work in Japan, that gets depressing fast.

Now I should make a note, before anyone jumps on the hate-wagon, that this kind of attitude emerges from a confluence of many factors, one of which is cultural values. So be aware that there are many Japanese people in my life who don’t treat me like this nor think that I don’t belong. The teachers at my base school feel I belong as do my Japanese friends. So being back at my base school has done wonders for my mood. Also, the situation was compounded by the fact that I was at the last two schools for one month each. So the “you’re a guest” approach will definitely dominate in that situation.

It’s good to be back at a place where I’m really accepted. Also, they keep me too busy to really be worried about anything!

Hello, peeps!

I know many of you have been waiting for me to break Internet silence and commence with the stories about Japan. Well, I got started two weeks ago and then my server crashed. I have yet to be able to restore the ability to post to the blog that Electra and I have together, but this blog is up! So even if I don’t have the time to write a lot of stories, I can start posting pictures and showing my Sapporo pride.

It’s pretty late at night for me. But tomorrow is Friday and that means I won’t be in front of this computer again, healthy enough to manipulate words, for a couple days. So here’s a few pics that I really like to whet your appetite. More to come this weekend!

My friend Mike at karaoke and at the pride parade. I’m collecting pics from my new friends here to create a Cast of Characters for y’all.

The awesome kids of ichinense (“first year” [7th grade]) sankumi (“class #3″)

Advanced Japanese coffee technology!

Cats!

(This one’s name is Kuma, which means “bear”)

Night life!

We’re having a good time. I’m finally hitting the culture-shock/homesick wall as is at least one other JET here in Sapporo. But that’s good. It’s mean I can get it over with now.

I have to leave my base school after next week and won’t be back until next January. It makes me sad because I’ve developed relationships with the teachers and students there and really love it. I do get to start visiting elementary schools next month, though. Japanese kids are cuuuute!

Have you ever wondered what happens if you stick your hand in the path a running ceiling fan? I know I often have. It’s one of the morbid fascinations I’ve secretly harbored and have never had any interest in testing.

The answer: nothing much. Maybe a few bruises. *phew*

When small birds, like brownbirds, hop around on the ground, they are so very cute.

Larger birds, like ravens, are not.

Some interesting facts about Sapporo, Japan:

1. It’s cold. Cold is not hot, unlike the rest of Japan.
2. It has an extensive and useful system of mass transit.
3. They make beer there!
4. The City of Sapporo is 60% forest.
5. My wife will be stationed there next year with the JET program.
6. I will be, too!
7. Yay!!!!

Yay!!!!