I ate raw chicken and lived

I'm watching two teachers converse, one on either side of the staffroom doorway. They do this at leisure, even as other staff enter and exit with regularity. Indeed, rather than move to a more stand-and-talk-friendly location so that passers-by do not create momentary obstructions to their chatter, the two who are talking remain right where they are, and the prerogative is on the passer-by to bow low, say 'sumimasen' (excuse me), and crawl their way between them with all the humility they can possibly exude.

Personally I find this odd. The doorway and its passage cannot be moved, but the teachers can. It only makes sense for them to talk somewhere less compromising.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining; the system works. In New Zealand you move to a place where it makes sense to talk. In Japan, you don't. It's fine. But it's interesting.

Here's a platter of raw chicken served at a restaurant. I'll get to this in a bit!

Oh, and look; one of the JTEs (Japanese teachers of English) has just demonstrated, with unrivalled humility, the above prerogative on her return entry into the room. After passing, reverting, straightening, and exhaling, she has noticed my less-than-subtle observation of the whole affair and has laughed, perhaps to acknowledge that this custom is indeed odd, but that, well, it is how it is: "shoganai", which is slang for "it can't be helped". Or perhaps she was picturing me in her shoes, trying to arch and crawl just so, then realising that I'm so tall I should really just jump.

Bowing is so ingrained that people even do so when they're on the phone. Not all of them, but I've identified who are the phone call bowers; as it turns out, more than a few!

I may not bow on the phone, but I certainly find myself doing so at all hours without my willing it. Bowing and the affirmative word 'hai' are twins that accompany me to every conversation. They're an obnoxious pair.

And finally, for otherwise the title of this post will have to be changed, I ate raw chicken. Raw chicken! And lived. It's quite edible here, apparently, including the waddle (plume thing on roosters' heads) and gizzard (digestive tra-- let's just call it the stomach, even though that isn't much better). Anyway, I ate them all - raw! I've thus learned that it is in fact possible to eat 'chicken sashimi' (single quote marks because I'm still a little bit sceptical) safely if the chicken is super fresh and super unhandled. It's also super chewy (and the waddle could scarcely be chewed at all), and I felt super primitive eating it. But in conclusion, it tasted fine - not rich or soapy (for some reason I imagined raw chicken tasting like soap) - and did not result in my stomach doing turns throughout the night.

But this doesn't mean that it was good. Like the sliver of fugu (puffer fish) I'd had the week before, it's a novelty. I probably won't have it again.

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A Giant in Japan

I've said it before that in Japan I have to duck to successfully clear thresholds. What I haven’t said is how significant this ducking needs to be.

Last week I was sitting on the couch, doing nothing much. At some point I rose, took my phone to hand, began thumbing away a text, and began the necessary looking down at my phone so as to thumb it correctly. (What this means is my neck and head were tilted forward just so.) Still texting, I proceeded from the lounge to the kitchen with all the speed and impatience of every millennial in existence.

Only, I did not reach the kitchen.

I was stopped.

Furthermore, someone had taken a hammer and whacked my head with it.

The pain was like a rising kettle, silent at first, then excruciatingly loud. I recoiled, my lips mouthed the syllables for something French (well, syllable; there's only ever one), and my fingers crunched into fists.

But then, though I glared at that doorframe with all the contempt in the world, I breathed. Somehow my knuckles thought twice about enduring the same fate as my head that, quite literally, sits in the clouds. Once again I'd learn that above these clouds is a ceiling.

This selfie took too long; I was borderline late to work. But see that door frame? And see my head? Yeah.

Yes. I’m tall. Tall enough that simply tilting forward doesn’t suffice. Instead, my head and neck must assume a sort of battering ram angle if I’m to navigate the apartment with any success. This becomes hazardous in the early hours when the lights are off but the bladder needs swift escort. Very hazardous. The potential for spilt blood - and spilt urine - grows.

Since then, I’ve mastered the bowing angle: my hair now grazes the frame like a cat’s whiskers while the integrity of my head goes untouched. Surprisingly, my spatial perception has not been compromised in the hammer thwacks hitherto; rather, it has only heightened: ‘ducking at thresholds’ is the newest and most reliable technique in my repertoire of defensive reflexes. I duck even at those doors built for the 6’2” citizen. For you see, in Japan one must adapt if one is to survive. And so I have.

This doesn’t mean that I enjoy bowing at every entranceway. I do not envision with pleasure the slowly shifting verticality of my spine, nor return with joy the myriad stares of those who watch me bow like a pitcher pouring forth its dignity. Exactly like a pitcher.

People look up at me like a mountain they’d prefer to go around than over; like a giant whose mere existence bids them question if it’s reality or just a dream; as if this town is, and will henceforth be, a foreign and foreboding place so long as I’m in it.

The first question my students ask when they meet me is how tall I am. When I tell them, their faces beam and their eyes grow wide with wonder. I of course pat them on the head and say, “Don’t worry, with time you, too, will grow tall.” Which is a lie.

Because this height thing is, oftentimes, coveted. Many a person has told me they’d kill to be half as tall. At least, that’s what I think they tell me; it’s hard to hear them from this altitude.

And how can I blame them? Here in Japan, height alone makes me an expert at many things. I’m a basketball pro; I’m a natural at high jump; tall or not, because I’m from New Zealand, I’m obviously great at rugby. Coach volleyball? Pfft. Course I can! I mean, I don’t exactly play volleyball, but if I did I’d be amazing at it. 

And that's not all: my hobbies include coconut picking, rescuing cats from trees, and laughing at ladders. (Hah… ladders…)

Well, that is until I tell them that I in fact do none of these things. To which the faces beam anew, and the eyes, again, cannot sit still. It's the kind of punchline that no one knows how to react to. The kind of news your audience wasn't quite ready to hear. 

“Oh,” I add, “but I do like volleyball.” This tends to work. The general composure returns once more. Hmm? What’s that? Stereotypes? Nonsense. I’m one of a kind!

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The sensei, the school, and the bitter cucumber.

It’s 4pm, school has finished, but the staff room is ever abuzz with teachers. To my left, Aizumi sensei graces a trio of sweat-smeared colleagues with two rigorously sweeping hand fans. On my right, Akubara sensei works the tape measure to see how, in millimetres, his height compares to mine. And in front of me, the vice principal stamps my work log before writing in the comment box, “Hot Matt!” Yes, hot Matt. Gochu’s vice principal makes the most of his rudimentary English.

I thank him as he returns the journal, and begin to head out. “Matt!” he calls after, and the sternness in his voice makes me wonder what dastardly thing I’ve done wrong. I turn to him, showing no fear; then, finally, without any give in his single expression, he says, “Easy come, easy go.”

Wise words. I tell him so.

“Wise?” he responds.

“Smart.”

“Wise, wiser, wisest?”

“Yes, that’s right!”

“Matt, Matter, Mattest?”

“Uhh...” I scratch my head. “We’ll get there.” Surely. I mean, that is what I’m here for, right?

Sensei's feedback is never taken for granted.

The average day at school is both seamless and straight forward: there is a class, then there is another class, then there is another class. If I’m with the same teacher for more than one of those classes, each of them is the same, just with a different set of kids. On a good day you might say the final set gets graced with a very polished duet from me and the JTE. On a bad day you’d say we sound like drones.

But even when our team-teaching is amazing, it is also, simultaneously, not. Due to a combination of excessive heat, excessive height and ever-increasing (bordering on excessive) hunger, by the third or fourth period I begin to feel light-headed. Class becomes a mission of searching for excuses to walk around the room or lean against flat sections of wall. Seriously, I’m no longer thinking about what the students are doing or what the teacher is saying; I’m devising schemes that will ensure I don’t faint for 50 minutes whilst all the time looking normal. 

It's funny in hindsight; it’s not so funny in class as I'm wondering when hindsight will be the only sight I have left.

But then the class finishes, it’s lunch time, and, as I sit down to eat, I learn anew that without the four-hour suffering, my stomach would not know heaven.

One perk is that I don’t have to prepare my own lunch: it’s all provided. Students and teachers each get a handsome helping of rice, soup, salad, and... well... to be honest, I often don’t know what the fourth thing is. Today I’d thought it might be onions, or shrimps, or some strange deep-fried insect that tasted like onions and shrimps. I shrugged and ate it anyway, but it was none of these things. It was bitter cucumber.

Other times it’s fish, or pork, or some unrecognisable thing to which I shrug and devour all the same. A yearning stomach does not discriminate.

There’s also a carton of milk, which I'm still getting accustomed to consuming with lunch, but which is fine because, for all those times when the food doesn't sate my appetite, the milk does its job convincing my stomach that it did.

On that note, a friend from back home asked me what the low-light is. I said the hunger. Another asked me the highlight. I said the food. Such is the world we live in.

I mean, yeah, there are other low-lights, like the time the teacher left and I proceeded to read half of a story before realising I was meant to get the students to ‘repeat after me’ with each line; but that was only a lowlight until I remembered all the times I could’ve made a fool of myself and didn’t. In the end I felt quite victorious.

But that’s school. I’m actually home as I type this. Procrastinating. Really I should be doing the dishes, cleaning up the plum wine that spilled in my fridge, and, I dunno, making dinner or something. I’ll get to one of those things now. Easy come, easy go.

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I Encountered a Sparrow Bee

"The stranger that greeted me today had three eyes, two antennae, six legs, and a buzz whose pitch caused the whole air to stop."

Is that a sinister enough opening for this retelling?

How about this:

"I was exiting my car, finding the keychain button to lock it, and gazing with pride at my perfectly calibrated reversed parking manoeuvre when, suddenly, I saw movement…"

Okay, whatever, on with it.

For future reference.

A bee had landed on my side mirror. Well, it could've been a wasp; who am I to judge? It was large for a honey, small for a hornet; but the word ‘small’ doesn't enter in the Japanese bestiary, so I'm going with the former. Anyway, this bee remained on the mirror for a good half minute, staring at itself, not exactly pleased with its yellow tan, and during this bout of self-deprecation undulated its abdomen in that way that bees and/or wasps can’t seem to stop doing - and for which reason they’d still be just as disturbing even without those hypodermics we call stingers.

But I would not be stung by this one. Soon, bored of its own face, it detached from the glass and disappeared into the air. Meaning I was alive. It was also alive, but unlike me was clearly mad at its own untanned existence. Perhaps its flight into the sky was to be an endless flight. Perhaps that’s why bees unhinge their stingers: they have a good look in the mirror and decide they can’t take it anymore. The undulating is probably a constant indecisiveness about whether to end it then and there, or wait to find an unsuspecting victim to take down with them.

We’re giving this one the benefit of the doubt. We’re saying it was a bee, and bees, as we know, deserve some sympathy. In fact, I’d be quite happy to befriend our humble honey suppliers if they would only stop that constant undulating. I once saved a bee from a spider’s web, which I felt quite good about until, fallen and too weak to fly, it began to, you know, undulate. In the end I felt worse for having deprived the poor, innocent spider of its dinner.

Which brings me back to the present story.

Free from the threat of bee undulation, I locked my car. Yet I'd no sooner pocketed my keys when I saw another sting-laden spawn whiz by from right peripheral to left. There was no mistaking this for the earlier bee: this creature took up three times the airspace, sported a far deeper tan (orange, so it could’ve been fake tan; I can imagine a bee of this size quite comfortably holding up a convenience store and stealing as many cans of the stuff as it felt the need for. Of course, no store owner would admit to this – to think, the shame!), and the beating of its invisible wings created gusts that messed with my hair and composure both. At first I was grateful - in this humidity, the breeze was a welcome one - but this breeze carried with it the smells of a thousand mutilated bees (death and blood and honey). Bittersweet it was, like the ending of a Christopher Nolan film.

You see, Suzumebachi (sparrow bees/Japanese giant hornets) hunt honey bees. And (from this point forward I’m no longer exaggerating) 30 hornets can murder 10,000 bees. This one, I was soon to find out, was on the hunt.

At this point, I still wasn’t certain of the insect’s identity, so I followed it to the garden. It was not a nice garden; granted, the bushes and trees were, like other bushes and trees, fine; but the space between was an indecipherable network of shimmering silk. Droplets of rainwater trailed from leaf ends to tightrope threads, down one and then the next, to bump, but not to disturb, the statues that were the Joro Spiders. Like bees, these spiders are striped: yellow, black, but also with a bit of red. But more than bees, their heads resemble human skulls. If you’re familiar with Skulltulas from Zelda, you’ll know what I mean. True to Japan, these spiders are large. They’re also cousins of the golden orb web; thus their silk is nylon strong. Of this garden, there wasn’t a space left unchecked; their traps covered every square inch.

Still, somehow, as if it had every web memorised, the hornet bobbed and weaved between them, searching the trees and the bushes, yet never tripping the wires that would’ve certified its death. By now I was more intrigued than afraid, waiting, hoping for a battle between two large and poisonous creatures – perhaps more than two, given the sheer infinity of rain-washed spiders that graced the air like Christmas ornaments.

This hornet gained its respect with every dodge of web, every start-and-stop, each decision to fly under rather than through. But the suzumebachi is an assassin; what else did I expect? By now I was sure of its calibre; though, in case there were remaining doubts, it landed on a branch to flaunt its size, its orange black jacket, its quarter-inch-long stinger. It was clear now: the thing was hunting for bees not unlike the one that eluded death (although, as we learned, wished it were dead) moments before.

Soon, like the honey bee before it, the hornet took to the air again and flew on. And the search for 10,000 bees continued.

Some more facts: When one of these hornets finds a hive, it drops a beacon in the form of pheromones. Doing so summons all other hornets within several kilometres. There's a raid, and after having their fill, they dismember the bees’ bodies and take their parts to feed to their hornet larvae. Pleasant.

But here’s where it gets cool. The Japanese honey bees (specifically them, not other countries’ honey bees) have adapted. When a hornet pays them a visit, they enshroud it in a blanket woven of 100% bee. In fact, it’s more like an electric blanket, because - hear this - they beat their wings so fast that it heats the centre of the blanket to exactly 47 degrees Celsius (one degree above that which hornets can withstand), cooking the hornet! The bees, meanwhile, are content up to 50 degrees. Crazy, right?

Right, so that’s where the story ends, because then I walked up the stairs to my apartment and did boring things like have a shower and iron shirts. Things totally unrelated to the title of this blog post. But, um, the cliff hanger ending is… let’s see here.

"This was but my first encounter. It would not be my last."

Good enough?

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At School I am Matt-sensei, but you can call me Tatami-san

As I sit at my staff room desk, writing this blog and sipping iced coffee, throngs of school children bottleneck at thresholds in their eagerness to die in the summer heat and have their corpses carried away by suzumebachi (Japanese hornets, or, literally translated, sparrow bee, because, you know, their size). Really, though, they’re preparing for sports day.

View of Gotsu from the aquarium

As a sidenote, these hornets, which I have had multiple pleasures of seeing, murder 40 people in Japan each year, and they hospitalise far more. So, I’ve no idea why these children are so eager. But this is a sidenote.

Today is my first day; I taught my first class; and I write for the first time on this blog in two years. I don’t mean to remain on this blog (a new site is in the works), but I can no longer not write. I’ve been itching to write – and yet not writing – for five weeks! Why would anyone do this to themselves? It’d be like, I dunno, having a hot coffee instead of an iced coffee right now. The word is masochistic.

Well, not all the time. This room, for instance, is air conditioned. As is every room. They can’t not be; we’d all be dead. Here in mid-year Japan, air-conditioned spaces are like bubbles of life, and venturing outdoors is a mission of negotiation – that is, negotiating one’s way to the next nearest bubble. Cars are moving bubbles: we thank God for moving bubbles.

Fortunately, the teachers here are lovely. They showed me the fridge, the iced coffee inside the fridge, the glasses in which to pour the iced coffee inside the fridge – for, as well as life bubbles, a man needs his coffee.

“Kohi-ga daisuki-desu.” This means I love coffee. I say it when introducing myself. There have been a lot of introductions; and afterwards a lot of people asking me what my hobbies are. I lie: I say writing, movies, and making strange decisions like going to Japan to teach kids how to English. My actual hobbies are bowing and yoroshiku onegaishimasing (nice to meet you, ing). Here’s a fact: everyone in Japan has the same two hobbies.

And there seems to be an art to bowing – a technique, like nailing a harmony, or knowing how far to turn the steering wheel so as to remain on the road yet not converge with that obnoxious cyclist. There’s a sense of pride when you do so successfully. A bloody mess when you don’t.

In my apartment, which is large in width but small in depth, much bowing has been had. A refusal to bow means a head-butt to the doorframe. But what my apartment lacks in height it more than compensates in square metres and cheap rent. Just one of the perks of rural Japan.

But rural Japan isn’t like rural New Zealand. New Zealand’s towns and small cities are devoid of life, their deathly silence broken only by the occasional baaing of a sheep. Japan has – how do I word this – people. Moving figures. These moving figures have jobs, drive cars, occupy aisles at grocery stores. They unload coinage at vending machines and make pedestrian crossings relevant again.

The highways in between cities are also different. Unlike New Zealand’s vast spaces of nothingness where featureless hills fold over each other like golden oceans caught in a frame (okay, when I put it like that, it doesn’t sound so bad), Japan has variety. Countryside and civilisation are unified; townships are spread out; nature is lush and diverse. And the ever-changing terrain necessitates extravagant infrastructure. Countless mountains mean countless tunnels, and countless rivers mean countless bridges. Simultaneously, Japan is both city and wild.

Also countless are the aforementioned vending machines. Ah, but I’ll save food for next time; the kids are going to the gym for a lecture on school cleaning. And I’ve a mind to follow them.

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