Johnny

It’s been a while since I last posted. I caught something last week, so I wasn’t feeling too well most of the week. Thanks to a system that encourages sick workers to continue working, everyone in the office has caught the same thing and no one will take a day off to get over it. This could have all been prevented had the one person who was sick two weeks ago not come to work and taken a sick day. But no. These are thoughts of rationality, none of which are included in a Japanese education. I am, however, feeling a little better.

Last week we had a meeting with the BOE about all the things they want to tell us for the month of November. This included them asking us about re-contracting and inviting us to a company retreat. They had already given me a stack of papers about the re-contracting process, but had not asked me directly what I was thinking about. As it’s October and I have been here about three months, I am not really too comfortable with making a real decision about re-contracting this early on. (Last week I went to one of my schools for the first time.) The real deadline is in February, but they want to know asap. We will see.

Saturday I went to a local festival in town. Each shrine in Sasayama has its own fall festival. This weekend was the fall festival for the shrine right in the middle of town, Kasuga shrine. It’s a classy shrine right behind the grocery store. First they had a parade of stagecoach looking things. On top were kids playing some instruments and a bunch of people were pulling them. I think there were eight of them all together. After that they had a procession of portable shrines (called “mikoshi”) into the grounds of the shrine. About twenty men each carried these on two really long sticks. Each mikoshi represented an area around the shrine. The men had carried them from their respective areas and had stopped at stations one the way to eat and drink. By the time the men entered the shrine, they were absolutely plastered. I’m not sure whose idea this was, but I really don’t know how no one was injured. The men shook the mikoshi (which had kids in them beating on drums) in a sort of competition. This lasted at least an hour. And then another group of four mikoshi came to the shrine and did the same thing. Then after about an hour all eight of them (in a very small area) started this mock fighting. They would act like they were about to charge into another mikoshi and then back away. The simple math of men + alcohol added up to lots of fighting. There were people in the middle of all of it whose job it was to make sure the fighting did not escalate too much. It got to be about 10 pm and the emcee kept on saying “it’s time to go, it’s time to go…”, but they wouldn’t stop. All in all a successful festival I guess. Did I mention it was freezing cold the entire time? This all was a lot of effort for people who don’t even believe their gods exist.

There is another amusing anecdote about the festival. Since the shrine is right in the middle of where all my students live, a lot of them came to the festival. Outside of school, all the boys dress like girls and the girls dress like prostitutes. No kidding. It’s not even about that the girls wearing next to nothing as much as it is their makeup. I really think that if my students did some sort of study abroad thing in America, the majority of them would be picked up by the police on suspicion of prostitution. I guess it’s a hidden blessing that none of them have neither the English skills nor the motivation required to go abroad. I’m far from any sort of puritanical judge that sits around talking about how today’s youth wear skimpy clothing and listen to the devil’s music. But I really doubt the sincere individuality or taste of anyone who dresses like a whore because everyone else is doing it. I didn’t even mean to talk about that, but it bothers me I guess. Anyway, so I saw a lot of my students at the festival and they all said hi to me. One group of first year (7th grade) boys were pretty surprised to see me. I think it’s akin to seeing a polar bear outside of the zoo. I get about the same reactions. They came up to me and asked me for 100 yen since they had just learned how to say numbers over 100 and the word “please”. The one of the boys grabbed my crotch and said “Johnny”. This only mildly surprised me since elementary kids grab me all the time. 13-year-old boys though were usually a bit more…behaved. These kids always call me Johnny-sensei in class, so I thought it was some sort of dare or whatever they do. After that I told a Japanese friend what just happened and asked what “Johnny” means. She said that it is slang for penis. So these kids have been calling me the equivalent of “Mr. Penis” for two months. The only things that shocks me about this is just how little it bothers me.