As a whole, the people of Japan have a reputation for being amazingly poor English speakers for the amount of time and money they invest in the process.  The reputation is well deserved (when you take into account that it is a mandatory school subject) but, in truth, I don’t have a problem with the country’s lack of English ability.  It helps me pay the bills for sure.  And,to their credit, most Japanese people are really good at Japanese and it is probably a much more difficult language, especially the writing part.  What I do have a problem with their seeming refusal to proofread the things that they write in English before they print them on signs or t-shirts.  But, the lack of checking has it’s benefits too.  I get to chuckle on a regular basis at things most people here will never fully appreciate.  I often return the gift of laughter when I dispense my wacky Japanese onto the unsuspecting folks in the land of the rising sun.  For now, let’s forget about my Japanese inability and have a chuckle at other people’s expense.  These aren’t laugh out loud funny but they brighten my day. I hope they brighten yours as well.

Near my house “TAX” is not just a thing you pay too much of it is also a place to buy used cars.  I’m not sure if you have to pay extra tax if buy a car there but judging from the name, I don’t have confidence that their prices are the lowest around.  I first noticed “TAX” more than ten years ago and thought that the owner might just have a sense of humor.  He might, but he may also just be to clever for his own good (and bad at fact checking). Recently, I learned that “TAX” is an (near)acronym for “Total Auto Excellence”. They should have stayed with the long version if they want to sell cars to native English speakers.

My current favorite sign is a bit more cerebral.  It is for a pachinko and slot machine parlor.  I don’t think casino is quite the right word but I guess it could fit since you can lose your money their pretty quickly, or so I’m told.  I’ve never actually been in one.  I tried pachinko in an arcade and it was mildly entertaining for a few minutes but quickly became mind numbingly boring.  I must not have done something right because pachinko is crazily popular here but I don’t know if the Wonderland Pachinko and slot Parlor is the place to be hanging out.  It may a haven for dangerous criminals.  The slogan for is “Here is Perfect Sanctuary”.  It’s a nice slogan, right.  The humor comes when they start flashing pictures of fugitives who are at large.  Right now, they are showing the pictures of some people who are still on the lamb after the Tokyo sarin gas attacks in 1995.  Kind of like “TAX” it is a nice idea that just doesn’t quite work.

-The Green Tea Dreamer

First off, a big thank you to those of you who have been following The Green Tea Dreamer Project.  I am grateful to all of you.  You probably can’t imagine how happy I am to be able to share my experiences with you.  Many of you have given me the gift of connecting with you by commenting on my experiences, either directly on www.greenteadreamer.com or via my personal email.  The kind words and thoughts I have received make being far from home feel…well, less far away.  That’s a comforting thing.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Until now I have posted long but sporadic posts.  I really enjoy the long format post and intend to do more of those but I would also like to do a better job of keeping in touch with my small but growing cast of  friends, relatives, and people I have never met face to face but who have found me in cyberspace.  Towards that end I have resolved to post a minimum of twenty times in the next 30 days.  By blog standards, I will still be far from prolific but that’s fine with me. The posts may not be long but I will try to keep things interesting and maybe even surprising.  Furthermore, I promise to respond to comments within 24 hours.  So please, keep the comments coming and let’s make this blog a place to share our thoughts and broaden our experience of the world.

Let me know if you have any ideas for making the blog more fun and interesting.  I already have some ideas and hope to be introducing a few new things over the next month.

And, if you haven’t signed up to get my posts sent directly to your inbox, you can do that right here ( www.greenteadreamer.com).  The signup is on the right side of the page.  If the urge strikes you, feel free to share The Green Tea Dreamer Project with your friends.  The more the merrier!

Talk to you soon and often.

–The Green Tea Dreamer

After ten year’s of relative sloth, I reentered the world of (somewhat) competitive running.  I was the 37th fastest over 40 year-old in a local 10k.  Despite the fact that I ran more than 10 minutes slower than my best 10k, I was thrilled. I can still run 90 seconds faster than my first 10k race, back when I was in the 7th grade.  Oh, how I can revel in the smallest of victories more as I age!

When the new year started I had high hopes of running much faster.  After all, there were still nearly three months to make up for 10 years of less activity than is required to call oneself a runner.  My plan was to run twice a week in January, three times a week in February, and every other day starting March first. January went as planned.  February started out better than expected but it was a dark and stormy night when I went off course, so to speak.  Determined not to let a little 33 degrees fahrenheit and freezing rain on a dark night keep me from a run, I ventured out to pound the pavement.  Usually, I am very against pounding the pavement because it makes my body ache.  My regular course had been loops around the outside of the local sports fields.  Many people would find it boring but I love doing the same loop over and over.  I find some joy in knowing a course in great detail.  It frees me up to refine other elements of my running: form, breathing, mental focus, smiling for photographers, etc..

With the rain falling hard the sports fields were a muddy soup so I ran loops on the paved road that encircles the fields. I was feeling fast and spry so when  on one of my final loops I felt a little ache and tightness in my leg from the cold and damp and pace but I didn’t pay it much attention.  My right calf was a little sore the next day but nothing to raise any red flags, just a yellow one.  The next day I headed out to run and should have quit five minutes in but I didn’t and ended up limping home.  That lead to two weeks of no running followed by a slow build up back to actual training.  Day one I ran 2 minutes, day three 5 minutes and built slowly over 10 days until I was up to 30 minutes.  March was a loss as far as training went.  I don’t know what happened but when I looked at my running log I had only run twice in March!

Thus came the race.  Turns out that it was a dark and stormy morning and I wondered if that was a bad omen.  I decided not to worry about it and just enjoy my race.  I was prepared to accept a fate of 50 minutes without complaint. Things went much better.  I jogged the first 5k, afraid to re-injure my calf. Over race’s final 5k I gradually picked up the pace until I felt my my old runner self the last mile or so.  No significant problems to report until the last 50 meters of the race. The final 400 meters was one a soupy wet dirt field (just like the one I avoided that dark and stormy night).  I made a mental not to not push too hard on the unstable ground.  Sometime during the next 45 seconds I forgot that I had made that mental note. When I geared up for the final stretch, I could see two other 40+ year old runners dueling up a head of me.  Some competitive fire sparked to life when I saw them giving their all and I kicked it into my highest gear and gave chase.  I was closing in on them fast when three very strange sensations rumbled from deep inside my right calf.  It was pain but it wasn’t unbearable.  It was like something just let go.  The odd and problematic thing was that I couldn’t get my right calf muscles to work any more. That sent my brain reeling for a solution as to how I was going to remain upright. Fortunately, my brain took care of that and there was no foreigner face planting in the mud for the crowd to remember and tell their friends.  Gingerly, I  jogged into the finish.  I felt pretty satisfied. When I looked at my watch and saw that I had run 43:13 the pain went away.  The pain is back now but I can engage my lower leg muscles again so there seems to be no permanent damage. I am being careful, though.  In fact, my leg is wrapped tight in an ACE bandage as I write this just to make sure that I don’t make things worse if I jump up too fast celebrating the completion of an especially great sentence.

Be well!

-The Green Tea Dreamer

I had just pulled onto the main road in what would turn out to be a vain attempt to keep pace with the ambulance carrying Satomi, her mother and father to the hospital about forty-five minutes away when I flipped on the radio and heard (from the band Chic, 1979):

Good times, these are the good times
Leave your cares behind, these are the good times
Good times, these are the good times
Our new state of mind, these are the good times

“How true,” I thought to myself.  I’m in a new country, having new experiences (like trying to follow an ambulance in traffic) and I surely have a new state of mind and plenty of good times. Well, maybe I’m not always having good times but at least the times I expected when we decided to move to Japan.  We did come here partly because we feared that one of her parents was going to get sick or injured from working too hard.  Someone was injured but it definitely wasn’t work related. It was still a bummer and I am glad we were here to lend a hand. Truthfully, the situation was by no means overly bad and if what I had just watched had been on a prime time sit-com, I would have laughed…a lot.  The good part was that despite the fact that three family members were in an ambulance, only one person was injured and not too badly on the scale of how bad things can get.

We had arrived at Satomi’s parents’ house about 9:30am to deliver some unbelievably delicious mandarin orange bread pudding that Satomi had made. I am not really a dessert person but if you watch me work my way through a plate of that bread pudding you would think differently.  In addition to delivering freshly baked happiness, we also wanted to talk her dad into going to see the doctor.  He had fallen heading to the bathroom, in the dark of night, a day earlier and had some pain in his side that he claimed wasn’t too bad.  We had seen him briefly the night before.  He didn’t look perky but he had convinced us that he was fine to wait a few days and see how things felt then.  We were happy to heed his wishes since we were headed to a rare night out with another couple.  Still, after we left him I had the feeling that he has in worse shape than he was letting on and resolved to talk him into a trip to the doctor the next day.

So, bearing gifts we entered the house to find her father curled into an very uncomfortable looking position on the floor where he had slept the night before.  He looked bad.  His lips were a little purple too but things didn’t seem life threatening. We said, “let’s go to the doctor today,” and without much hesitation he grunted his agreement and I could sense his relief.  One hurdle was that it was Sunday and his normal doctor doesn’t work on Sunday.  Satomi called around and found another doctor who could see him and we started to prepare for the journey.  Her father wiggled his way out of his pajamas and, with excruciating difficulty, into a regular shirt.  He managed the shirt and getting his pants on (but not zipped and belted) without getting off the floor.  It was an impressive feat.  Things were going very well, I thought. Then he stood up to put the finishing touches on hitching up his pants.  Bracing with his left hand on the low Japanese table, he pushed up to a position that resembled standing (about two-thirds of the way along the “evolution of man” diagram that supposedly shows our ancestors transition to upright and presumably upstanding human beings).  He worked his way to a supported standing position with one hand on each knee and that’s when things became a little bit like an episode of All in the Family.  He weebled, woobled and made some less than reassuring sounds but he kept upright and for a few minutes it was a little like Archie, Edith, and Meathead has been masterfully directed into performing a scene of well scripted chaos.  I can’t do the scene justice so I won’t really even try but I’ll give a quick run down. In his three-quarters standing position, the pain in Satomi’s father’s (hereafter referred to as Otosan, or father in Japanese) side became too much to bear.  Later, we learned that he had three broken ribs so, in retrospect, it doesn’t so strange that he began to panic and started having what resembled, and probably was an asthma attack.  How is is an asthma attack like a sit com you might be asking?  It really isn’t but from my perspective, mostly outside of the action and unable to understand the details of their dialect-ridden conversation and left to fill in the blanks with my imagination, it was much better than reality. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a hidden camera.  With Otosan barely standing and struggling heartily to breathe  it became clear that he would not be walking himself to the car in order to get to the hospital.  With the pain in his ribs, there was also no chance that we were going to carry him.  Without hesitation, Satomi said, “let’s call an ambulance,” and I chimed in in agreement. Otosan plopped down on the couch and, seemingly out of thin air, conjured up a bottle of compressed air with a red funnel-shaped front and began puffing away.  Then things got sit-comy.  In Japan you call 119 for an ambulance.  Easy right?  We didn’t make it easy.  Satomi asked me if we should just call 119.  I should have said “yes”. Instead, I said, “things don’t seem life threatening and I don’t know the protocol for calling 119 in Japan…”. Satomi has been away from Japan for quit a few years so we looked to Okasan (mother, in Japanese).  Okasan didn’t know either but she said she would call a neighbor who knew and ask.  So she called.  Otosan puffed away on the oxygen can that reminded me in shape and color of a can of Raid insect killer.  Somehow, I wasn’t reassured that he was doing the right thing but I didn’t know what else to do so I kept my mouth shut.  It’s a technique that has served me well in Japan and that I need to use more outside of the country as well.  Okasan got through to the neighbor and quickly ascertained the proper course of action.  But, she didn’t let us know what that course of action was because she was fully engrossed in a very leisurely conversation with the neighbor.  Even if she had told us we couldn’t have called until she got off the phone so in that respect it didn’t matter.  Otosan and his purple lips were getting the breathing problem under control.  That was good.  Satomi was becoming exasperated by the length of the phone call and began to seethe with impatience. That wasn’t good.  Satomi is not a woman who likes to wait.  Okasan was still casually talking.  I was watching with an increasing detachment from reality as the absurdity of what the scene might look like from a distance began to dawn on me; In short, a grown man sucking down raid bug killer with one hand and at the same time he tries to fasten his pants with the other while his wife chats casually on the phone, oblivious to the action around her and the daughter boisterously futilely tries to wrangle the situation to a satisfying conclusion.

Eventually, Okasan did get off of the phone and 119 was called.  With the ambulance en  route, Otosan really wanted to get his pants belted properly so that he was presentable.  He tried to stand up again.  Not a good idea.  He was unsteady from the get go and Satomi barked at him to sit back down.  He plopped back down on to the couch with a shot of pain flashing across his face.  While it was the smart thing to do, I really wanted Otosan to get the pants situation squared away but it just didn’t happen. I am a big fan of having your dignity squared away before face the first big trial of the day.

I couldn’t help much.  I view myself somewhat like the family dog but slightly better.  I can drive and I have opposable thumbs.  I did my part to make a clear path for the paramedics.  I moved the kerosene stove to another room, opened the shoji doors between the entranceway and the house, moved our car out of the way, and basically tried not to be a bad dog.

Within a few minutes we could hear the sirens approaching ever so slowly.  I imagine that there are times when Japanese ambulances move with great haste but I have yet to see what might precipitate that haste.  A minute or so later the ambulance reached the end of the driveway.  I couldn’t help but notice that “HIMEDIC” was emblazoned in all capital letters across the top of the ambulance.  A sense of absurdity hit me and I imagined a long haired Japanese snowboarder-type, who pays the bills by working as a medic, taking one last toke off of a joint before saving the day.  Oh, how I wanted to see that! Alas, no suck luck. In short order, a paramedic with a slight build and impeccable grooming emerged with his back pack of medical gear. He moved as casually and unhurriedly as the ambulance itself had.  His grace and composure was very calming.  The fact that he looked about 16 years old was less so.  He went in the house and debriefed Otosan about the events that led to his predicament.  Eventually, two other paramedics showed up with various modes of transport that could get Otosan from the house to the ambulance.  In addition to what they ended us using there was a stretcher and a rigid orange plastic board used for neck and back injuries.  They were clearly over prepared and I appreciate that.  In the end it took all three paramedics, using a vinyl sling chair to wrangle Otosan around the furniture and down the big step into the genkan (entranceway).  From there, they loaded him onto one of those stretcher/gurney contraptions with wheels that always looks too tall to be practical. They casually wheeled him past a gaggle of neighbors and relatives watching and lifted him into to the ambulance.  Originally, they were going to take him to the doctor that Satomi had found but after conferring, by cell phone, to someone higher up the command chain, they decided to take him to the national hospital about 45 minutes away.

Otosan, Okasan,and Satomi hopped in the ambulance and I was given the job of following in our car so that we could get back home.  After using my best Japanese to thank the neighbors and relatives for their concern, I jumped in the car in a vain attempt to follow the ambulance to the hospital.  Hence, I found myself grooving to:

Good times, these are the good times
Leave your cares behind, these are the good times
Good times, these are the good times
Our new state of mind, these are the good times

The song was reassuring.  Nothing unfixable had happened. The story I had imagined around the actual events was the most fun I had had all week.  Yes, Life is good times and we should all leave our cares behind and have a new state of mind.

When it was all said and done, I couldn’t keep up with the ambulance.  Not because it went fast but because the next town over had a 10k race that day and traffic was stopped mere seconds before I reached the intersection where the race would soon pass.  The ambulance got to continue on and I was left with with my new state of mind to have some good times watching a sport I really love.  I settled in for the show. Like most road races it was a sport for some people, for others a test to endure, and for others something uniquely personal that only they can fully comprehend.  With this in mind, I watched the runners stream past, their running styles, their pace, their expressions and everything else about them hinted at a different story that each was playing a part in even as they trod down the same path. When the final stragglers had trundled by, the intersection reopened and I continued on down my own path to play my small role.

When I got to hospital about 40 minutes after the ambulance I found that Otosan had three broken ribs and had pneumonia.  That explained the pain and purple lips perfectly.  It’s now a week later and he is still lounging away at the hospital.  In the U.S. he probably would have been home the next day but here in Japan people stay in the hospital for a long time.  The role I play is chauffeur.  I doing the driving between our town and the hospital. We visit everyday and there are always a few memorable things in addition to hanging out with Otosan. I love looking a the patients in line at the ATM, bedecked in their PJs, some wheeling IV carts or sporting casts or neck braces and all wearing slippers as if it were just another lazy day at home.  There is a cute wild rabbit in the courtyard outside Otosan’s room.  There is also a poster on every floor that encourages breast feeding.  It has pictures of women from all over the world breast feeding their newborns.  In one of the pictures a baby boy has the happiest expression I have ever seen as he stares at his mother’s breast.  I assume that he is excited about food but it’s also possible that he is a prodigy when it comes being a female breast aficionado.  Maybe the thing that I like the most is how when the hospital staff members catch themselves staring at me, the only foreigner in the building, they break eye contact by bowing.  Genius!  Possibly, I have stumbled onto the real reason the Japanese bow…to avoid eye contact.  But, I’m starting to really digress so farewell for now.

-The Green Tea Dreamer

The cool weather brings “kakiyaki” (oysters grilled in the shell) season to the Ariake Sea, just across the road and railroad tracks from where we live.  Oysters are one of the well known delicacies of our town…along with crab and mandarin oranges.  Until a few days ago we hadn’t indulged in the pleasure of “kakiyaki” yet this year.  Unexpectedly, we had the opportunity to eat oysters three meals in a row!  First, we were treated to kakiyaki at Satomi’s parents’ house.  Truthfully, it was my first experience. Satomi’s mother started the grill and we grilled and grilled and grilled.  The technique is simple.  Take an oyster and put it over the coals flat side down.  When it pops open and the water from inside the shell starts to drip out you just flip the oyster over on to the rounded side to finish cooking.  Why bother paying attention to the orientation of the oyster on the grill, you ask?  The answer is painfully simple.  If the flat side is down when the shell pops open the boiling water goes down into the hot coals.  If the rounded side of the shell is down the shell pops open, hot water volcanically erupts and flies in all directions.  If you happen to be hovering over the grill, tending to your oysters you risk permanent scarring.  Even when you have the shell properly oriented there is still the danger of a scalding but the danger is much less and much less danger is part of the fun.

As we were leaving our oyster feast, one of the neighborhood ladies gave us a bag of oysters that she had collected from the sea herself and shelled for us.  We put them in our miso soup the next morning.  They were amazingly delicious, by the way, but the most impressive part of her feat is that she is in her 80s.  Add to that, that the temperature was close to freezing when she trudged across the mudflats to gather the oysters.  The woman is amazing.  See the picture to see her mode of vehicular transportation.  She still grows and harvests oranges by herself too.  When it is time to sell them, she drives her tractor, loaded to the gills with crates of mandarines, to the co-op to sell.  It’s quite a sight to see her, bent into an L-shape by osteoporosis or hard work (or probably both) driving down the road stoically at ten miles per hour or so while gigantic trucks barrel past her going much at more than  fives times her speed.  It’s even more impressive to see her slinging forty pound crates of oranges around.  I hope that I have some semblance of her energy when I approach that age.

Our third oyster feast was at one of the local Kakiyaki Restaurants that line the roads around here in the cold months.  It’s a fun time.  When you get to the restaurant you are greeted by a small shellfish market.  In addition to oysters, there were crabs, clams, sea snails, and a few other things.  You buy what you want to grill and take it to one of the tables.  In the middle of the table is a grill.  It costs about three bucks for the charcoal.  Next, grill to your hearts content.  Come visit us in the winter and enjoy the fun.

-The Green Tea Dreamer

Keep me in your thoughts.  I’ve developed a drinking problem in Japan.

Before I get into the details I should give you a few tidbits of information about drinking in Japan.  1) It seems to be expected that all men (and many women) will drink to insane excess on a regular basis. It’s expected.  2) The legal blood alcohol limit for legal driving in Japan isn’t zero but it is so close that it is just best to never drink and drive.  In theory, I’m a big fan of no legal drinking and driving.  There will always be plenty of illegal drinking and driving in any country, unfortunately.  If you happen to live in a Japanese city or even the town that you happen to be drinking in, Japan is a great place for zero alcohol tolerance when driving.  Cities have amazing public transportation and it often runs until the wee hours of the night.  When that stops, there are always plenty of taxis prowling the mostly deserted streets.  If you live in smaller towns or rural locales your best bets are taxis or my favorite, “daiko”.  You make a call to the “daiko” service and they send someone to drive your car home.  When I lived in Japan 10 or so years ago, they drove you home in your own car.  It was great.  For what I assume are insurance reasons, now someone drives your car home and you ride in the “daiko” company’s car.  It’s still a good deal.  You get a ride and your car ends up safely home for a little more than the price of a taxi.

Where Satomi and I live there are places that you can go for a drink and walk home.  We haven’t actually been to any of them but they do exist.  The problem for us is that all of our friends live at least a 45 minute drive from where we live.  If we go to meet people for dinner and drinks one of us has to drive home.  Satomi doesn’t like to drive and she really really doesn’t like to drive at night.  I’m a fairly nice guy so I give in and agree to drive home (and too dinner for that matter).  We are too far away and too stingy (not to mention underfunded) to pay for “daiko” for that long of a drive.  We could stay at a hotel but that is pretty pricey too.  So, Satomi drinks (sometimes with her friends and sometimes with mine) and has a jolly old time.  The first few times that we went out I just sipped my green tea happily and hovered on the edge of the drunken conversation. It was nice to be out but I was on a different frequency from the rest of the group.  Sipping green tea just doesn’t make me a boisterous member of a drinking party.  The good part of that was that I was up and ready to conquer the world early the next morning with no lingering effects from the night before.  I was basically happy but I longed to have a drink with friends.

Then came that fateful night.  I was out with a group of eight or so friends in a town about an hour from where I live.  I had to drive home later so I was planning to go alcohol free.  Just for kicks I decided to look at the cocktail menu.  There are always some overpriced juice concoctions that serve as alternatives to the alcoholic ones.  Then, below the cocktails, I saw it!

キリンフリ ノンアルコール！

Or, as we would write it in English, Kirin Free non alcohol.  It had been many years since I tried a no alcohol brew but I was ready to take the plunge.  I ordered one.  It was pretty good…not amazing but satisfying.  Malty enough that if I didn’t think about it too much I really forgot that it wasn’t beer and it had a pretty decent flavor.  The can looks like a beer can.  It is made with malt and by a beer company.  I guess it allowed me to feel “contact tipsy” from being a part of the group. I wasn’t the life of the party, I never am, but I was a functioning memeber of the Japanese rite of inebriation and that made everyone, including me, happy. And, because it is truly 0% alcohol, I could drive home.  As a bonus, I felt great the next day.

After that I had it a few more times when I was out for dinner.  Then, strangely, I started craving it while I was sitting at home in the evening so I bought a few cans and they went down so easily.  If I had had a case I probably would have just kept drinking. I’m drinking one as I write this. In fact, I may have chosen to write this as a way for feel good about indulging.  After all, I needed to take a picture of the can so that you could see it.  As Yoda might say, “The subconscious is strong with this one it is”. I feel enough like I am having a beer to be satisfied but I still keep my initiative.  If I have a beer or a glass of wine or sake, I can’t seem to muster the energy to do any meaningful work. That isn’t always bad, I just always seems to have something I want to get done in the evening.  But, that isn’t really my drinking problem.  Here is my drinking problem.  It costs almost two dollars for a one can of Kirin Free if you buy it at the convenience store.  It is a few cents cheaper at the super market.  I want to drink it every night…but I’ve have become what they call “ketchy” here in my corner of Japan.  I am “cheap” or call it frugal if you want to put a nice spin on it.  I can’t bring myself to pay two dollars a day to support my drinking habit.  Since we have come to Japan we have slowly weaned ourselves from some of our egregious American spending habits because we have to stretch our paychecks and savings.  It’s been great…except for the Kirin free.  For the price of thirty cans (a months supply), I can buy enough kerosene to keep us warm for that same month.  Winter is cold.  I am choosing warmth.  I imagine that when summer comes I will most likely choose air conditioning over my beloved Kirin Free and, that too, will probably be a good choice.  It’s a hard life but I’ll face my challenges one day at a time.  Hope you do the same.

-The Green Tea Dreamer

Those of you who know me probably do not think of me as a great self-promoter.  I don’t feel particularly comfortable tooting my own horn in the hopes of drumming up business but a dwindling bank account is changing that.  Satomi and I have been in Japan almost five months and we haven’t made as much money as I was accustomed to making in just a few days in my previous incarnation as a salaried employee.  That isn’t to say that  we haven’t labored hard on most days.  It’s just that when you volunteer your help you don’t get paid.  We knew that coming in but we expected that there would be lulls in our volunteer labors when we could make some dough.  Finally those lulls have come.  We are down to three days a week of work on the orange farm and with our readily available cash at a level that I figure will last us fewer weeks than I have digits on my two hands, I would call the times desperate-ish.  And, desperate-ish times call for me to get off of my modesty-horse and drum up some business.

I came to Japan with a (very) basic business idea:  Teach yoga and teach English and pay the bills. Granted, my MBA friends might not consider that a business plan but we have taken at least one step down the road to a business.  As faithful blog readers may remember, we rented a house well suited for me to teach both yoga and English.  Add to that the fact that I am fairly proficient in both of those arenas and success seems imminent…if I can get some students.  Like most first time very-small-business-people who want to make a career out of offering a service that they enjoying giving, I hoped deep deep down in my self-promotion-fearing soul that I could just dream up some good classes, let a few people know what I was up to and BINGO…the money would roll in.  My practical self knew and still knows that that isn’t true so I did what others of my ilk would probably do as well.  I decided on a class that I wanted to teach: Let’s Talk About Animals (for 5th and 6th grade students).  I planned the class (an it’s going to be really good!) and picked the price.  Using my best Japanese I made a flyer that I hoped would win the hearts and pocketbooks of my fellow townspeople. Next, I showed the flyer to Satomi.  She gave me a few grammar and vocabulary fixes but nothing major and I thought I was ready to go.  After printing up a few copies I was ready to start conquering the world of elementary school ESL but before I could run into the street to foist my flyer into the hands of the unsuspecting, Satomi pulled me aside and said, “don’t give those to anyone!”  It turns out she was just being a supportive wife when she showed approval of my original flyer. I sincerely thank her for that.  I also thank her for stopping me in my haste.  Apparently, my third grade Japanese was fine for around the house but is bound to call my intellectual capacity into question.  Not a good thing to do when you want work that is aimed at imparting brilliant wisdom to young minds.  So, Satomi rewrote my flyer and I was ready to go.

I gave a few flyers to people I know around town.  Dropping one off at the agricultural co-op caused quite a stir.  Excellent, I thought.  People are interested.  Farmer’s have kids.  Ka-ching with a side order of good karma for helping the people of the world communicate a little bit more easily.  Now, all I would have to do is sit by the phone an wait for it to ring.  The phone didn’t ring.  The next time I was at the co-op people were still talking about my flyer.  They all loved the career bio that Satomi added to pique people’s interest.  No one mentioned my class. One man asked, after reading that I teach yoga as well as English, “is yoga like Akido?”.  I said, “not really.”  He said, “oh, yoga is more like this,” and proceeded to twist his arms together in a way that made me worried that he might break something.  I think he was trying to look like one of those statues from India of the dancing Shiva.  It’s also possible that he had yoga mixed up with having a brain aneurism or traumatic head injury.  This exchange made me think that maybe I should go directly to the people I hope to serve (or wite a book about my life and sell it at the co-op).  Vowing to skip the middleman and make a personal connection with the people who I want to teach (or at least the people who value their children’s education) I did what anybody else in my situation would do.  I printed out twenty more copies of my flyer to go with the ones I already had and put them in a very nice clear folder and set folder on the table by my front door.  Still the phone didn’t ring.

“Time to bring my ‘A’ game!”.  I did what I should have done in the first place.  I decided to get out and meet some people and ask them, “are there any message boards in town where I can post a flyer?”.  With my shiny clear folder chock full of flyers, I headed out.  First stop was the community center where I know the woman who runs the weight room.  She happily posted my flyer.  I should have been doing this all along.  It’s soooo easy!  Next I decided to stop at the town’s education division. My Japanese boss from ten years ago when I lived in Japan (in a town about 45 minutes from where I live now) had asked me to stop and introduce myself to his friend who is my current town’s Education Chief.  Maybe he could give me some hints on where to hang flyers.  To the town office I went and stated my purpose and was quickly ushered in to see the Education Chief.  He was really nice and suggested that I go to the schools to “play” with the children sometimes, presumably free.  All in all that exchange was a wash.  On my way out I asked one of the Education department’s employees, who happened to be wearing an eye patch that was skin tone in order to be less visible but that had the effect of causing me to feel a little queasy, if there was a message board in the building where I could hang a flyer.  A very polite answer of “no” was given and, undaunted, I headed off to the library.  Turns out that I couldn’t hang my flyer at the library because I wanted to charge money.  Only flyers for free events can be posted.  But the cute ladies who work there asked for flyers so they could let people know but I think that they were really interested in my bio.  This was getting to be like work.  I wonder if they would by bio if it were published as a book?  The stop wasn’t entirely a waste of time though, Satomi had ordered a book from another library and I picked it up while I was there.

Back to the drawing board.  After some thinking about what approach to try next, I was was down to two alternatives.  The one that I really wanted to do would let me stay home, listen to some music, and have people knocking at my door in no time.  The other would mean that I would need to talk to people and sell my vision.  In the end I chose to promote my vision even though my other idea of meditating until I was able to manifest  a gaggle of paying customers was amazingly appealing.

Out the door I went to bring honor and earnings to my poor humble home.  It occurred to me that if I want to teach elementary school students then maybe I should just go to the elementary school and hand out flyers as the students leave school.  It was getting close to 3pm as I walked to the school.  My guess was that just after 3pm the school doors would open and a throng of potential enrollees would rush toward me.  I would say, “hi”, in English, dazzle them with my charisma and witty charm, give them my flyer, and they would run home begging their mothers to call and reserve them a spot while there is still space available.  At 3pm the school doors did open and twelve very small students ran out the door and began twirling their back packs around in circles.  It was very cute and they seemed very happy but they weren’t my demographic. I waited and waited and the twelve students twirled and twirled.  Eventually, another twenty or so young students came out into the school yard.  Some twirled, some ran around and did this disturbing thing called “kancho” that Japanese students love to do.  “Kancho” means enema (I think) and the students poke their fingers at other students butts.  The reality is much worse than my description.  It is beyond super duper not cool. One kid picked his nose or at least it looked like it from where I was standing.  Time passed and the rest of the students finally came out but no one was leaving school.  Was some danger lurking?  The thought passed through my mind that maybe someone had reported a suspicious foreigner in the neighborhood and the authorities had been alerted.  Maybe it was just a matter of time before I was handcuffed and hauled off for questioning.  Maybe they would throw a jacket over my head so that the TV cameras couldn’t get a look at my face.  Judging by the video on Japanese news shows, they always do that.  I don’t know if they do it to protect the identity of the person in case they are innocent or what.  But, I like it.  It adds mystery.  I wondered if the saying, “there is no such thing as bad publicity,” applied to foreigners living in Japan who hoped to work with children.  Eventually, the teachers came out to the school yard as well and none of them even threw a glance my way so I was probably not the cause of the day’s delay.  The students all lined up by what I could only guess was class.  Both the teachers and students stood at attention while a man, who I guessed was the principle, began talking.  It was a little windy so I couldn’t hear what he was saying and even if I could have heard there is a sizable chance that I wouldn’t have understood anyway.  I was starting to get a bit worried about looking like a dangerous pervert.  A woman in a Japanese pick-up truck had driven by a couple of times and I felt like her gaze was getting colder with each pass.  I decided no to find out if bad publicity is bad in Japan. My intuition said to call it a day, at least at school.  That would be an adventure for another day.

I looked at my shiny folder of brochures and knew that if I went home without giving out any flyers I would feel like a loser and that my wife would emotively and verbally confirm my loserness.  “Start with something easy,” I told myself.  In that spirit I left a flyer on the counter of an empty laundromat.  One down, literally.  With the ice broken I had a little more confidence.  I stopped in the dentist office.  I have seen the teeth of Japanese people and know that they spend plenty of time at the dentist starting from an early age.  Despite the fact that I forgot to take of my shoes and put on slippers before entering the office, they let me put my flyer in with the magazines.  Next, I tried the local drug store.  Satomi and I sometimes go there and use their shipping service to send oranges to various parts of Japan.  Initially, I just asked if there were any message boards in the area where I could hang my flyer but I got more than I asked for.  The clerk was really nice and said that she would hang it on the front door.  Things were looking up.  From there things continued smoothly.  I knocked on some doors where I knew kids lived and talked to their mothers.  Somebody said that they would see about getting my flyer to the PTA. It was actually fun.  The mothers had questions about the class and if it was possible for other ages to come, would I do private lessons and so on.  I even offered a neighborhood discount to one family. Maybe I do have a drop or two of business acumen.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that things will work out but just in case I might spend a few minutes meditating in hopes of manifesting success on the astral plane and hope that success trickles down to my bank account.

I’m back!  After a whirlwind trip to Colorado for Christmas and back to Japan for the New Year I am back to blogging.  We actually had a snowy day here in our neck of Kyushu and I loved it.  Nothing lasted long on the ground but the laundry that we hung out to dry (not expecting it to snow) turned a wintery white.

The orange season is winding down for us and the search for work that pays in intensifying.  Now that we are living full time in our rental house we need some cash to pay the bills.  I taught my first private yoga class in Japan last night…entirely in Japanese.  It went pretty well and I think that I will have a returning student.  I have big plans for teaching some English classes for elementary school students in the near future (when I track down some students).  Right now my only income is from teaching a few classes on Saturdays at a local pre-school.  It is amazingly fun to teach 4 and 5 year olds.  I have a line on teaching at another pre-school in town as well.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it works out.  In addition to the fun factor pre-schools pay really well!

Here are a few pictures of what I’ve been up to:

This is a picture of a typical days picking for Satomi’s parent’s and I.  I don’t think it is particularly large by orange farmers’ standards but it seems pretty impressive to me.

I pounded the shells?  hulls? off of a garden full of soy beans.  Talk about exhausting work.  You can see the wooden mallet I used.  Apparently, Satomi’s grandmother used that mallet for the same work until she was in her nineties! Unbelievable!  I am less than half that and I found it exhausting.   I don’t have a picture of the next step but we used a hand crank winnowing (I hope I have my terminology correct) machine to sort the soybeans from the chaff.  That part was easy.  I don’t know what we will use the beans for.  Tofu maybe????

Satomi and I picked oranges for our friends and to use to make our own orange juice.  We don’t have a truck so our tiny Subaru had to be our beast of burden.  These oranges were from a field that Satomi’s parent’s abandoned because it has become too difficult for them to take care of.  It’s on a steep hillside and the wild boars have broken many of the terraces and made the paths somewhat treacherous but I like the field so I pulled all of the weeds and carried the oranges out by hand forty pounds at a time.  It was well worth the effort.  Our friends thought so too.

-The Green Tea Dreamer

Do you ever wonder where those delicious green sheets of dried seaweed that hold your sushi rolls together comes from?  It’s possible that it was grown just across the street from where we live.  All of those poles jutting up and out of the water in the picture above are supporting nets that are used to grow seaweed laver.  I’ve been told this area is famous for its nori (the green sheets of seaweed).  I can personally vouch for it’s yumminess.  In fact, I had some with my rice and miso soup for breakfast.

-The Green Tea Dreamer