Tossed to the Lions V. 2.1

It’s late in the evening and I have not heard the train-crossing signal in over two hours. I wonder if there has been a derailing, maybe a dead elephant on the tracks, a rabid sheep attack on the railway or the dreaded armed masked mongoose robbers that I have read so much about. Those mongooses are the scourges of Japan! Wait a minute, I just typed mongooses but got one of those squiggly red lines underneath mongeese. So wait! One goose and two geese but one mongoose and two mongooses? How am I supposed to teach a language that can be so damn ridiculous at times! While I am at it, could we have not thought up a different word somewhere in the history of English to differentiate read and read (“He read his book yesterday” and “I’ll read my book tonight”)? It’s a good thing I have been told to stick close to the basics because if I were ever asked to explain the lunacy of certain aspects of our language I’d be hard pressed to do so without erupting into a lava flow of disparaging commentary about the differences between read, red and read. I have decided to teach the color red, from this point forward, as a new word: Golinglezoink! Try it on for size. It’s a warm fit.

Okay, back on topic. The train doesn’t seem to pass as much after 9pm and now, as it edges into 1am, it doesn’t appear to go by at all. There is a break from the madness after all and, with some minor alterations, it will coincide with my schedule. So far my classes are all later in the evening aside from the day of the living dead, Saturday, which is a five round gauntlet of kids with only an hour break to re-adhere my body parts. All I need do is go to bed later, wake up later and explore for the day ensuring I make it to my class on time and by the time I return home I just need to play my music loudly for an hour or so and then the train is as dead as disco! Ha! I told you I’d fight you demon of the tracks and now you have much more to worry about then the mongeese. Yeah, I said it!

The sun peaked through the crack in the curtain and I slowly came back to life. The room wasn’t icebox cold as it was the night before. My little heater does its job well and assuming it doesn’t turn on me one night in my life and roast me to a fine crisp I will love it until the day I die. I’m watching you, though, heater. Not being able to find a reasonably priced alarm clock to replace the shelved lazy self soozer I converted my laptop here into one with a simple download. It is probably not needed. The train wakes me up long before the laptop has a chance to. I found my French bread I’d purchased yesterday frozen in the kitchen which was of arctic climate. A quick squeeze told me that the bread was salvageable so I cut down on it converting the bread into a thin pancake that had to be pulled apart to resemble bread again. If I can get just one Japanese person interested in WonderBread me and a single loaf are going to take the country by storm! The strawberry jam I found was very taste and I have discovered my Japanese cereal of choice in strawberry corn flakes. They turn my milk golinglezoink. This reminds me of Frankenberry cereal before Canada nixed selling such sweet pink goodness. My morning breakfast was complete with a cup of hot apple tea.

As it has been since arriving to Japan, it is always warmer outside then it is inside, as though the country was under some kind of constant air conditioning law, and I cursed myself for once again forgetting that I did not need my winter coat. The train ride would be a hot one but now that I am out of the large city area the rides are not as crammed and sardine can like. Before the ride I stopped into the 7-11 near the station where I found a line up of school kids in their uniforms perusing the magazine racks and thumbing through the comics. I think the younger boys had slipped some of the adult magazines into their comics and were learning all about the female form…except for the blurred bits. Yup, they are even blurred out in magazines and you want to know something really goofy? Sure you do! They even censor the lower portions of the anatomy in drawings! There are many adult comics here (which is another entirely weird area) and the naughtiest of naughty bits are not drawn in. Strange, with the censorship laws you’d think porn would be hard to get but this is not the case at all. Back home the pornography is on high racks to be reached only by basketball players and people on stilts. Here it is on the lower racks right next to the kids books. Bizarre.

I was looking for the bankbook I had left there the night before. Oh, yes, I didn’t write about getting my accounts set up. Let me touch on this briefly. On the day I moved in the other teacher walked me around town, orientating me and pointing out places of interest like grocery stores, the internet café and the bank. He was there to help me set up an account but his Japanese was only slightly better then mind. Once more, the easy tasks back home, like filling out a form, become difficult chores here when you can’t read the canned pasta lingo. Between me and the other guy we managed to only spend an hour trying to set up my account. I am now part of one of the largest banks in Japan with my deposit now securely banked. I did not like having an abundance of cash back home so the speediness of acquiring an account was a nice surprise. They handed over a shiny red bankbook which I would later forget in the photocopier of the 7-11 but before returning there let’s go to the ward office where I applied for my alien status card. This card is the law here for any foreigner residing in Japan longer then 90 days. If you are caught without one after that period you could be arrested and deported. Getting one is not a walk in/walk out process in this area of the country. I imagine in the larger cities they have somebody who speaks English doing this job because, after all, the card is for foreigners and most of us speak English. Here we get a smiling girl fumbling with the dialect as she forks over paper after the paper for me to sign. I never like signing things I can’t understand but at this point I just want things over with so I can return to my train assaulted apartment. I am told my card will come in the mail within a few weeks and I thank the woman and head out to two days later forget my bankbook in a photocopier. Ah, come on! It was the only transition I could think of at this late hour!

Somebody might have stolen such a thing in Canada but in Japan, I am told, you can leave a sack of money sitting in an empty park and you’d very well return a week later to find it still sitting there without a bill missing. My bankbook, which I identified by showing the previous days photocopies (these were requested by the Company, in case you were wondering). The woman handed it to me in a small baggie as if it were police evidence in a murder case. Death by bankbook! Solve that one Matlock!


My school was easy to find on this day despite the claims of difficulty made by my supervisor. The train rolled by some very nice scenery in the form of the Nara prefecture countryside. This shot was taken from the station platform in one of my train transfer spots. I don’t know what those trees are but here we find another place so close to the tracks. Hard to see here but the entire area is surrounded by green hills some in these parts might call mountains. We know better, don’t we, but we can let them play pretend if they want to. Beautiful site either way you slice it.



These blooming flowers outside of the train station shows just how warm it is out here so you can imagine how silly I must have looked wandering around in my winter jacket where most of the kids are wearing shorts. The jacket will be hung in the closet now and out comes the spring coat. Actually, come to think of it, if my heater breaks down I will need that winter coat to avoid becoming a Nighthawk-cicle.


Outside the station I stopped to listen to some Japanese boys playing guitar near the turnstiles. It sounded like they were playing some Johnny Cash but I could not be sure as they did not sing. They had this elderly groupie swaying along to their picking and you could tell they just wanted to swat her away like a housefly. There was a large cement square which could have served better as a park but oh well. In one far corner there was a statue of children with all bland expressions. I think they were modeled after the village of the damned kids and every year, on Children’s Day, the awaken from their stony slumber to demand toys and trinkets from the townspeople or else they unleash the curse of Zolaterat unto the poor folks of Tenri!

Ummm, where was it?

Oh yes, the Company hands out these maps to the classroom locations and sometimes they are easy to read and sometimes it is as if they have been penned by an intoxicated person with only two fingers. Today I got the drunken map with print I could not read and arrows that lead me astray. These Company cartographers should really think about putting a North/South/East/West compass on the bottom of, better yet, print so that I microscope borrowed from NASA is not needed to read your text. You may have predicted already that I took a wrong turn. Oh no, it was the doomed search for online services all over again! Breath, breath. You cannot be late on your first and, besides, you gave yourself an entire buffer zone to cover this. Just keep walking. Over there, that long empty road. The map has to be pointing there.

I kept walking down the path and was soon passed by many people wearing the same outfit, a black gi with a white logo on it. Soon a large building rose over the road ahead. I had accidentally found a church (though it resembles more a temple) and it was a beautiful one with a backing of green hills. This one was much larger then the similar looking one discovered in Kyoto. Chants rang out from inside so I did not go in afraid I would disturb whatever prayer session going on. Instead I put aside my lateness fears, still plenty of time, and spent the next half hour exploring around the church. These people in the uniforms were all over the place and I think they are the curators of the shrine because they were mainly sweeping up the steps and trimming the trees (I would be half right. They are followers and were doing daily choars around the temple). Because my school is not far from this area I can return for more photographs but, for now, here are a few snapped off today.




This church is the headquarters of Tenrikyo religion in Japan. The focus of Tenrikyo is to attain the joyous life on Earth by charitable work and abstaining from greed, selfishness, hatred, anger and arrogance. Sounds very Jedi to me. Followers are seeking yoki yusan (yo meaning positive, ki is spirit and yusan is loosely translated as an outing to the mountain or fields. They worship a single god. Tenri-O-no-Mikoto is called the parent of all of man, the Divine King of Heavenly Reason. This complex in Tenri is the spiritual center of the religion and was formally a Shoyashiki Village before becoming a modern city over the years of transition.






The religion was founded by a woman, Miki Nakayama, and her teachings begun here at the Jiba where devotees believe to be the original place of creation. Religious instruction began here in 1838. Tenrikyo teachings focus on group effort (which accounts for all the uniforms and team step sweepers). Tenri Judo may also be taught here as I have found photos online of Judo drills. Tenrikyo has slight ties to Shinto although these are mainly denied by true followers of the religion although some claim that Tenrikyo is not even a religion at all but simply teachings to better understand the universe. Tenrikyo currently is estimated to have 2 million followers world wide with 1.5 million in Japan and other sects in France, the United Kingdom, Brazil and even Los Angeles.




It was a welcome wrong turn but it was time to get to class and set up. Today I was to be tossed to the lions! Every year the company has parent observations and I just happened to start my first week under the gun. Lucky me! This is blessing and a curse because though some nervousness is expected it is nice to meet the parents are the outset and I would be accompanied by the Japanese teacher all week. She came in twenty minutes before class. She is a young girl, very loud and upbeat with a large smile. She had been to Canada on an exchange with a host family and she lived in Kamloops. I told her of the forest fires I had to go through there on the Canadian Pilgrimage and of my adventures so far in Japan.

The parents came in silently and with them they brought other kids that were not part of my class. It was hard to tell who I was supposed to be teaching! The room was filled. Because I do not know Japanese I was not able to talk to them and I hope they were not insulted but, really, they were just as equal in their ignoring of me. They sat silent, observant and watchful surrounding me as I fumbled my way through my first lesson. I thought of lions and here I was the Christian tossed into the stadium. In training we are given the option of involving the parents in the classroom experience but I choose not to as I wanted to just put them out of mind to ease up the tension inside. One kid, though, was a terror. I had read the notes the Japanese teacher had left regarding this guy. Oh, what a monster. He would not pay attention at all. The rest of the class was wonderful with some very smart young girls. Bear in mind I was teaching five year olds here so any form of attention is amazing. These 9 kids were great. The one, though, disrupted the entire flow of things and many times I had to forcefully tell him “No”. When I did he held up his hands in karate stance. Ack, I told you all. Ninja training! The Japanese teacher had told me to ignore the beast in sneakers but I did my best to involve him in the lesson and one time I got him to say “post office”. Two English words in one hour with this child was a small victory. He got off easy today as his parents were watching me but next time, buddy, watch out. I will not be so lenient with your tantrums and rebelliousness.

The second class was much better with all kids behaving and with this my second go round I was able to tune the parents out more. When all the lions walked out of this second session I was alone in the stadium. This gladiator had survived his first fight. The Japanese teacher gave me a lift to the station and I made my way back home. Tacos would be waiting, saved as my reward for getting through the first day. Tomorrow more lions, maybe more screaming karate chopping kids but tonight, ah, spicy Mexican food and a night of trainless sleep.