Last night I trekked into the city (Osaka) to check out the last of Kansai Time Out’s film festivals at the soon-to-be-closed Tocca a Te bar/club.  We saw a range of short films and outtakes, from North Korean propaganda war films to fictional shorts by an American.  The highlight of them all, however, was an incredible documentary made in 1995 by two sibling Australian filmmakers called “Hell Bento” (bento means “lunch box”).  This film explores the mid-90s Japanese underground in several themed sections- gender, family, art, drugs, and nationality.

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Today is by far the worst day I’ve had in the 10 or so months I’ve been working at this high school.  My first class of the day was being co-opted by my team teacher because she had to finish some work from her solo-teaching class.  I tagged along to watch and was soon dismayed not by her enthusiasm but by the archaic and useless method of learning that appears to run rampant in the Japanese system.  The students repeated from the text and then copied it, translating into Japanese as they went along.  There was very little question and answer, just straight copy and translate, copy and translate.  This is no way to learn a foreign language.  Translation should not be used other than from the native language to the foreign one and repetition is only effective for individual words, not whole sentences (which were terribly written anyway).  I had recently chatted with this teacher who had expressed dismay about my decision to leave this school (and perhaps education in general).  She is a strong believer in education and has wanted to teach for her entire life.  But she is fooling herself to believe that the problem is a lack of motivated teachers when the entire system of teaching itself is corrupt.

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it’s the little things that kill
little nicks and tiny cuts
it’s just a little bitter pill
little ifs and little buts

bruised pride and belittlement
turns a little hurt into spite
if your straight and narrow’s just a little bent
are you a little wrong or are you right?

a little more than 9000 kilometers
this little space ‘tween you and me
oh, to be a little closer to her
wait a little longer, then we’ll see

if only we had a little more time
a little love to help against life’s grit
to free my very little mind
just a little bit

then i’d sing a little happy song
about all the little creatures
but this struggle is just a little too long
to escape little wrinkles in our features

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It occurred to me as I tried to contain from jealous detection my frothing chuckles in the silence of the office that I would be entirely selfish not to share the source of such free-time fun.  My poison of the week is definitively web comics.  Spanning the range from sadistic bunny killing glee to action-figure dioramas to introspective robots, and endorsed by the Directory of Wonderful Things itself, Boing Boing dot net, I heartily recommend the following wastes of your life to any and all with a penchant for alternative joy.  Now you know what I do at work.

• questionable content
• nothing nice to say
• achewood
• robot the robot
• pbf
• bucket and dog
• random urine
• exhilarator
• alien loves predator
• dinosaur comics
• bunny
• bunny suicides

The original location of these strips can be found at Web Zen.  Enjoy.

Statistics of Golden Week:

• National Holidays:  4 in a 6 day period
• Parties attended :  4 in a 7 day period
• Current bike kilometer-age:  over 1400km since October
• Fastest Speed attained:  100km/hr
• Movies Watched:  5
• Interesting people met:  4 - A Brit DJ, the Japan DMC Champ, a tattoo artist/Jungle DJ, a Japanese female 19 year-old hip-hop encyclopedia.
• Un-interesting people met:  15-20 - Obese foreigners, ignorant Japanese people, etc.
• Museums attended:  1
• E-mails sent:  34
• Yen Spent:  35,019 (I keep a spread sheet with such columns as “Beer/Club”, “Cell Phone”, and “Public Transportation”)

Well, I almost feel bad that I spent the last vacation period of my current employment status in a state of relative non-productivity.  Almost.  I think that I’ve forgotten that a big point of working hard is so one can kick back and enjoy those times we do have free.  Soon enough things will be stressful and hectic again.

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Golden week so far has been pretty slow.  None of my foreign friends (or even the Japanese ones) are really around so I’ve spent some time watching movies (Police Story III - Jackie Chan goodness, this time made so much cooler because they filmed in Kuala Lumpur and I recognized places I had walked right by, Saw -  very screwed up psychological thriller, and Dancer in the Dark - heart-twisting but ultimately kind of cliché) and working in the garden.  One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that I have developed a tendency to get anxious or feel lethargic when I have large amounts of unstructured time.  The busy-ness of everyday life becomes the norm and I forget how to really relax.  I guess this is a symptom of adaptation to Japanese culture, where constant hustle is the way of life.  Philosophically I disagree- I do believe in stopping to smell the roses (or cherry blossoms, as of late), but it’s almost a physical reaction now.

I won’t say that I’ve completely wasted my time this week though, as I did add a first layer of white stones to my rock garden (I will post before and after pictures when it’s done), shot a roll of late night camera-trick pictures (same frame multiple exposures, long exposures, etc), and today went rock climbing with M-sensei, the leader of the climbing club at school.  He’s a physics and woodshop teacher, and from his mild-mannered demeanor seems like your totally normal Japanese guy.  However, on the car ride to Furuhokke, the quarry nearby that has a few routes, he told me about his younger days as a reckless kid, riding a motorcycle really fast and getting in accidents, climbing 40 meter walls with no ropes and ingesting massive quantities of LSD.  No, not really that last, but he DOES like the Bee Gees.  He did say he got thrown 30 feet after getting hit by a truck and even helmet less was relatively unhurt.  When I asked if he broke any bones he said: “No, because my body is strong and I used my judo training to break my fall.”  Uh-huh.  My life-threatening action of the day was to lead my first outdoor route!  I have no idea what the rating was but I’d guess it was 5.6-7ish.  It was a bolted route (most in Japan are) and about 10 meters - not too shabby.

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