as promised, here's a return to blogging. i had thought that my gravy train of free hosting had been lost, but for some reason a friend clicked on my blog link from my myspace page and commented on its existence.

so it's back and i never knew. my life is once more interesting, so i'll post a few things about it.

firstly, i love my town. kashima is pretty much how i'd expected - like an abbotsford only with a beach, no crystal meth or christians or cows. it also has kashima shrine, which has a certain significance to samurai history that i don't really remember.

the job rules. firstly, it's easy. we have a pre-set curriculum that is put together by some company in tokyo. i have set criteria to meet, and after that i have a lot of leeway to play around do what i think is necessary. i have a maximum of 4 contact hours per day, usually it's only 3. the rest is spent in prep, or walking around the school talking to kids. there is no such thing as intensive. there is no chance of me ever doing the following:

1. working a 12 hour day
2. picking up a red pen and trying to figure out "why is this incorrect?"
3. going home at 8:30pm

and i'll say that i definitely yell a lot less now. first off, japanese kids are polite. they seem like they're being trained for the workforce from day one, in that they are expected to perform aisatsu (あいさつ), or "polite greetings" to whomever they see. so it's very unlike the korean "hello!!!" which may be just kids saying hello to you, but could very well be "let's fuck with the foreigner". my current students are much nicer. perhaps that would have been different had i been teaching public school in korea, but i'm not treated like "the help"　by children anymore.

therefore, i haven't had to raise my voice once in 3 months. that itself is calming.

the surfing has been awesome, but waves are pretty small in the summer. i am at the point where i can get up and actually ride into a wave on an angle - therefore gaining speed to do wacky maneuvers. come fall when the waves get big, i'll actually be able to hold my own, i think.

coworkers are super-cool for the most part.
brighid - head teacher. jolly teacher type who likes to host parties and sings her ass off.
mark - irish dude who looks/acts like alex p. keaton when he's sober and lemmy kilmeister when he's drunk.
devin - surfer from california with no hair. i mean he has NO HAIR. he lost it from malaria meds he took in tanzania.
nigel - 41 year old dude who has been surfing since he was 8. that means what... 33 years of experience?
emanuele - and he will punch you if you say it "ee man yoo ell" - it's "ee man welleh" - the first italian born english teacher i have met. fluent in pretty much every fucking thing in the world, japanese, spanish, chinese, kendo, tea ceremony, japanese dance, judo... great dude who will wreck you with his fiery wop temper.
danny - american dude who looks like santa claus with no hair and has a sitcom laugh track following him everywhere.
kim - american girl via scotland who believes in ghosts and other hokey hippie shit.
little justin - british guy who has one of the driest senses of humor i've ever witnessed. married to a local lady who is also funny as shit.
douglas - american guy who draws hello kitty-esque characters, loves jesus and says "fuck" a lot.

good bunch of people, and there are no julia ahns, brent steineckers or charles... what was that fat fuck's last name? so basically i don't go to work dreading listening to someone make sounds with their mouth and i don't dream of breaking their jaw. i don't know if it's japan that makes people more tolerable, or if korea just attracts more idiot troglodytes... but my crew is pretty cool.

my school is great. about 600 kids. 3 of each grade's classes, except for the grade 1s who have four 20-student classes. the rest hover around 30. all the teachers are cool, older ladies for the most part. therefore, if i've learned how to act around my mom, i can conduct myself well at work.

the town itself is mellow. kinda spread out, rural, everyone is basically friendly, but we did have a bit of a runin with some drunk douche who really needed a beating a while back. my buddy justin was having his birthday party at our local chain karaoke place SHIDAX. shidax offers 飲み穂代 (のみほだい・nomi-hodai) which means all you can drink. you pay about 30 bucks and it's all you can drink for about 90 minutes. it's a good economical way to get ridiculous, especially since a pint of beer is about 5 dollars. anyone worth their salt can put away enough to get willy-nilly in 90 minutes.

however, "all you can drink" can also mean "become a shitwizard asshole who causes as many problems as he possibly can" and that's what happened with this guy. i went to the loo to cope with the 飲み穂代 and this guy came up to me and started blabbing to me in japanese. i can understand much of what people say at this point,but he was drunk and speaking fast, so all i could really say was すみません。。。日本語をちょっと話せます。　分かりません。すみませんでした。basically "sorry for me, i can only speak a little japanese. i don't understand, sorry." at which point he grabs my crotch, as if to heft it for weight and check if culture shock is really necessary.

gayness is alright with me. be gay. but find out if your intended partner is gay first before making an advance like that, ok? i am really not into dudes grabbing my junk, even if it's for a cross-cultural study of girth or weight. i'm really not a good candidate for that.

so i politely excuse myself and walk back to our karaoke booth. he follows. he barges in and sits down. this kind of activity can be funny for about a millisecond in most cases. had he been cool, we may have welcomed him. funny drunks are, well, amusing.

he started getting aggressive with the female quotient of the room. at that point it was justin's wife miyuki, who is about 5'1" and 12 pounds, and my coworker kim who seems to not have a clear idea of when it's time to stop being nice to people, so she was speaking broken japanese with this idiot who was trying to grab her butt and miyuki's.

so we get the point across that he needs to leave. half of that was emanuele telling him in japanese, and when that didn't work, the rest was me grabbing him by the scruff and pushing him out of the room and barricading the door. idiot starts bashing on the door trying to get in. i noticed that he had dropped his buddhist glass bead bracelet in the room. i picked it up and returned it to him with a quick ごめんなさい。 (i'm sorry)but that just proved to make him angrier. he makes it in yet again, and we push him out again. he's spazzing.

each karaoke room has a phone to call the staff, and cameras, but the staff of the place were as ineffectual as an elephant seal fighting a forest fire. so miyuki phoned the police, whose response was a priceless "well, make sure to call us back if it gets really bad."

so i stand off with the guy. i'm at least 50 pounds bigger than him. he's drunk. he's falling over. he's spazzing, yelling at me for an apology. i'm seconds away from tagging him right in the moosh just for the cardinal sin of leaving your guard down when you're trying to start a fight. he pushes my head.

then he utters the famous line "I AM JAPANESE MAFIA!!! JAPANESE MAFIA!"

at which point i just laugh. nobody else laughs, everyone kinda gets all defensive and apologetic. the yakuza conjures up so much fear in people because they're generally secretive. you don't really see them flying colors or anything.

but i had the guy sussed from the start. any self respecting yakuza - had he wanted to be singing karaoke - would be doing it in a hostess bar that his buddy owned, getting buttered up by a couple of thai or filipino bar girls. he wouldn't be in a chain karaoke place. he also wouldn't be fucking with foreigners - no money in that. he also wouldn't be claiming "I'M YAKUZA". it's ridiculous. "HI, I'M A MEMBER OF A SECRETIVE SOCIETY OF CRIMINALS."

so the whole faux-melee spills out into the lobby with this fruit pushing me and me laughing at him. he hasn't taken a swing yet, so he's never going to take a swing.

emanuele translates and says "he is demanding that you prostrate yourself and issue a formal japanese style apology." this involves getting on your hands and knees and putting your face to the ground and apologizing, like some uppity dark-skinned houseboy.

fuck that. i wouldn't do that for anyone, even someone who isn't a drunk idiot who shoves my buddy's wife.

japanese culture dictates that a person in a lower position (what this guy clearly thought i was) should not make eye contact, should lower their head and take a submissive posture when speaking. i'm not going to do that. in the melee, he's screaming at miyuki "why doesn't he understand this? you should teach him our culture! this is japan!!!" to which miyuki replied "i'm japanese and I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOU!!!"

my apology was a quick "gomen nasai" with a smile on my face and full eye contact, just like mr. miyagi taught me. "ALWAYS LOOK EYE, DANIEL-SAN... ALWAYS LOOK EYE!"

he freaks out and starts yelling at manu and miyuki to teach me how to do it properly. so i do it my way, again. "gomen nasai." with eye contact.

the whole thing petered out eventually, and i didn't punch him. i wish i had. i don't regret not punching him, but i wish i had.