Section 14 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 February 12 Wednesday.
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Yokohama's Chinatown is a major tourist attraction, and I went there on Coming of Age Day, which, unless I'm misreading my Japanese-language diary (and it's possible that I am) was February 13, a Monday.

Coming of Age Day is when kids celebrate the fact that they have theoretically attained adulthood, which is, I think, age 20 or 21 - I forget which.

Consequently, on Coming of Age Day, you can see, and I did see, the unusual sight of young women parading around town in formal kimonos. Most young women have absolutely no idea how to wear a kimono, and it was painfully obvious, even to me, that some of them were making a real hash of it.

On top of that, a number of these young things were heavily made up in a style which I think could reasonably be described as Extreme Harlot, complete with liberal specklings of glitter. I have no idea how the glitter is made to stick to human skin, but I'm sure it can't be healthy, and the sight of these metallic sparklings made me wince inwardly.

Still, they provided a splash of color in an otherwise drab scene. Most Japanese people tend to favor dark colors in winter, and almost everyone has black hair. So we're talking black hair, black coats, and gray streets of concrete buildings cluttered with wires and utility poles and transformers.

So the young women in kimonos were the day's first sight on the journey to Chinatown ... you will also see kids in kimonos on the evenings of the major fireworks festivals in summer, but, apart from that, the dress code for the young is thoroughly westernized. If you keep your eyes open as you wander around Tokyo, you will notice the occasional older woman in a kimono, even on ordinary working days. But by "older" I'm talking about older than sixty. Nobody would wear a kimono to the office unless their job compelled them to work in fancy dress.

Anyway, so much for the kimonos. To access Chinatown, we got off the train at Ishikawacho and wandered through the Motomachi shopping area, where just about every clothing store seemed to have an array of English-language "SALE" or "CHANCE BARGAIN" signs.

It was a warm day - "Poka-poka, desu ne?" - but the interiors of the stores were warmer. Some of them had not just heaters but humidifiers, the steam from the humidifiers designed to moisten the air, which can get fantastically dry in the Japanese winter, in which the humidity can and does drop below thirty per cent.

Motomachi is a great place if you want to buy bric-a-brac - model ships, teddy bears, art deco lamps, clocks shaped like watering cans and so forth. And, when we finally ventured in through one of the gates of Chinatown, one of the first places we stopped at was another bric-a-brac shop, this one selling goods from Thailand, Turkey, India, Mexico and so forth - from just about any place which happened to be on the same planet as China, in fact.

The one thing that really stands out about Chinatown is the food. If you want to buy something mildly exotic for the kitchen, the stores here are a good place to start, offering delicacies such as sugarcane, durians, candied ginger, oolong tea, citron honey tea and dried stingray (in Japanese, "ei").

Apart from the stores, there are also restaurants. Everyone agrees that the Chinese have the best food in the world, and Chinatown has a vast variety of these.

However, as it was a public holiday, everywhere was impossibly crowded, and it was necessary to stand in line to get into any eatery, humble or grand ... one of the things about Japan is that the Japanese are indefatigable tourists in their own country, and any recognized tourist site is going to be commuter-train crowded.

(I once made the mistake of going to see the temples at Nikko on a rainy way ... what I saw, mostly, to the extent that I could see anything at all, was a sea of black umbrellas.)

What there is to do at Chinatown is, basically, shop and eat and eat and shop, and after windowshopping and eating we ended up doing more windowshopping, this time in an extensive junk shop internally divided into a confusing array of booths and boutiques and locked showrooms and unattended display areas, these being interconnected by stairways and corridors which kinked and turned and rotated and twisted ....

.... to the point where you could easily imagine that your next step would bring you out through the exit portal debouching into Kathmandu or Devonport ....

I'd never been to this particular junk shop before, but it was remarkable how it duplicated or at least partially replicated dozens of other junk shops, big and small, scattered all the way from New Zealand to London ....

.... same old turquoise jewelry, silver jewelry, Buddha heads, Venetian glass, a manual typewriter, junky samurai swords, model sailing ship with large digital clock on deck, leather flying jacket, Michelin Man effigy, thermometer inside a lightbulb, large poster for Cecil B. DeMille's movie The Ten Commandments ("INTACT! UNCUT!"), framed monochrome version of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus ....

And then, outside, in the streets, the aroma of roasting chestnuts, bringing back memories of Hong Kong and of Taiwan, and, for just a moment, yes, this is not anywhere and nowhere, this is definitely an outcropping of China ....

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"Poka-poka, desu ne?" ... unless I'm mistaken (and it's possible that I am) this means "It's warm, isn't it?"

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Section 14 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 February 13 Thursday.
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If you live in a foreign country it's nice to know at least a little of the language. After studying Japanese for three years at university and after living in Japan for five years, I'm now at the unscripted telephone call level. I can generally handle simple conversations on concrete topics, as long as I'm reasonably familiar with the topic and as long as the topic doesn't switch too often.

My reading skills are still pretty weak, but I'm forced into contact with the written language because I'm often using computers with Japanese-language operating systems, and trying to solve computer problems by clicking buttons at random is not a very efficient method of working. You've got to read the error messages. And drag out the dictionary, if necessary. At this stage I'm at least signboard-literate ("No Smoking", "Open for Business" and so on) and this basic competency came in handy yesterday when I was starting my journey from Tokyo to Takasaki, and immediately hit a problem.

The problem was that my ticket for the shinkansen (the bullet train) was rejected by the automatic ticket machine, not just once but repeatedly. (Okay, two times - at that point my intellect clicked in.)

I looked at the ticket, which was all in Japanese, and saw immediately that it was for a journey from Takasaki to Tokyo, not vice versa. I'd been given two tickets, and I'd naively assumed that they were interchangeable. (I'd never hit this problem on any previous journey to Takasaki, but maybe random choice had been in my favor.)

Later, my Japanese came in handy when I had to figure out which platform I should be on. The transportation system in Japan is a system of bewildering complexity, particularly if you're an English teacher who travels to different clients who are scattered over an area of thousands and thousands of square kilometers of urban terrain.

Once I had succeeded in getting to what I figured was the right platform, I decided I should check that I was in the right place. There was no guard in site, so I spoke to the only available staff member, a cleaner who was sweeping up stray bits of trash on the platform.

"Excuse me," I said, in Japanese, "does the next train go to Takasaki?"

But to my surprise my Japanese failed me. He said something which at first I found totally incomprehensible. Then I realized that he was saying "I'm sorry but I'm Chinese and I can't speak Japanese." (At least, I think that was his intended meaning, though his Japanese was so bad that I think a native speaker of Japanese would have been as baffled as I was when it comes to nailing down the details.)

I have to say that I was singularly unimpressed, even though my face remained inscrutable. What I was thinking was "If he's living in the country then why doesn't he learn the language?"

I was thinking this even though, at the very time I was thinking it, I knew full well that the thought was unfair. It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to learn a language. In my own case, I've put in a fair amount of effort learning Japanese, but even after eight years I'm only semi-literate.

If you're a new immigrant and you're working a lot of hours trying to keep body and soul together, then you probably don't have the time to do the necessary study. And if you're doing a job like cleaning, which doesn't involve the routine exercise of verbal skills, then you're not going to have much of a chance to pick up the language as you go along.

When I first started teaching, back in New Zealand, I was still struggling badly with Japanese, so I had a lot more sympathy with the students I was teaching (some of whom were Chinese immigrants to New Zealand.) However, the gradual improvement of my Japanese has been bad for my patience, and on a number of occasions I've caught myself thinking, "Well, I can do it in Japanese, so why can't he do it in English?"

The idea that a language teacher should learn a second language is a commonplace idea. But, in a textbook I read a few years ago (the name of which escapes my memory) I found an even better idea:-

It's not enough for an English teacher to go learn a second language. You can learn a lot that way, but you tend to forget the most valuable lessons. Instead, every few years, a language teacher should make a point of starting to learn an entirely new language from scratch.

The reason being that you forget how hard it is. You forget what it's like to be stumbling with basic grammar, to be struggling to make a simple sentence, to hear a spoken sentence as a blur of senseless sound, to be repeatedly frustrated, to be operating at a functional level right down at the extreme brain damage end of the spectrum.

In my situation, it would be a good idea for me to resume the study of Chinese. This would teach me humility and make me more sensitive and understanding as a teacher.

Back when I was a teenager, I spent two years studying this language, as a result of which I now know how to say, in Chinese, "I don't speak Chinese".

I really don't speak Chinese - my trip to Taiwan a couple of years ago certainly hammered in that point. However, the ability to say "I don't speak Chinese" did come in useful at one point.

Some six years ago, when I was teaching in New Zealand, I had a class of Chinese students - people who had immigrated to New Zealand, some from Taiwan and some from the People's Republic of China. These students were all native speakers of Mandarin, the main Chinese dialect, and the one that I had studied.

One girl (I won't dignify her with the term "woman") was exceedingly lively, over-lively in my opinion, and kept chattering away in Chinese, despite all my efforts to enforce an "English only" rule.

While chattering in Chinese, this girl would from time to time glance in my direction. I honestly didn't have a clue what she was saying, but I did pick up on the fact that she was probably talking about me, and I also picked up on the fact that some of what she was saying was probably considerably cheeky.

(A big warning: even if someone doesn't know your language, they may quite possibly be able to figure out that you're talking about them. And, if you're saying something rude about them, they may be able to figure out that, too. Always remember that dogs don't speak any kind of human language whatsoever, but even dogs are pretty good at picking up on stuff.)

Finally, there came the day when the cheeky girl said something which, I think, really ruptured the boundaries of the socially acceptable, and one of the other students got a bit worried. At which point the cheeky girl looked at me and said, in English, "You don't speak Chinese, do you?"

So I declared, in all honesty, "I don't speak Chinese."

But I said this not in English but in Chinese. I can't now accurately remember how to transcribe Chinese into the old fashioned Wade-Giles romanization system that I was taught, but "I don't speak Chinese" ends up looking something like this:-

"Woo bu shuo Jonggwohuah."

That's what I said, and at which point the Chinese girl evidently thought that I had perfectly understood every single thing she had been saying over all the weeks we had spent in that classroom together. Because she blushed. Boy, did she ever blush! I've never seen anyone blush like that! She went red! Totally, totally! I loved it!

It was, believe me, a highly satisfying moment. From her point of view it was also, educationally, probably the one most useful moments of the course ....

Anyway, getting back to the Chinese cleaner who couldn't speak Japanese ... I was a bit annoyed, but I figured that I didn't really need his help at all, because I was actually convinced that I was in the right place waiting for the right train, thanks to my ability to read and correctly interpret written Japanese.

(I was going to write either "the written Japanese language" or "the Japanese written language", but my grip on English adjective order is slipping, and I couldn't figure out which is correct.)

Given that I was already sure that I was in the right place, why had I tried to check? Just out of habit, really. There was actually no need to do any such thing.

So I stood in line and waited for the train, and then I waited some more while the train was cleaned, and then, finally, I was allowed to board. I sank into a seat, and the first thing I did was to watch the messages scrolling on the LCD screen at end of the car, first in Japanese and then in English.

Well ... it turned out that I was not on the right train after all. This train was most definitely not stopping at Takasaki.

However, I did eventually arrive in Takasaki. Which, by the way, has a really great waiting room in the area reserved for shinkansen passengers. It's a room with glass walls in the middle of the shinkansen area, and it's warm, it has a widescreen TV tuned to NHK, and it has comfortable seats ... admittedly, the seats are like big square cushions, and don't have backs that you can recline on.

Although I've gradually become increasingly involved in computer-based projects, which have seen me spending more and more of my time sitting at a keyboard contemplating Microsoft error messages written in Japanese, I am still doing a certain amount of actual teaching, and so I do continue to have a string of short-term Homeless Person Experiences, as there's often a gap between leaving Client A and arriving at Client B.

If you're teaching a company president, for example - which is something I'm not actually doing at the moment - then you can't really show up in his office three hours before the lesson is scheduled to start. On the other hand, three hours might not be time enough for you to go home between leaving the premises of the Intelligent Banana Optimization Company and showing up at the door of the Sharper Samurai Spaghetti Factory.

Consequently, my mental map of the area in which I travel is dotted with park benches, waiting rooms, libraries, railway station platforms, coffee bars and outposts of the Empire of the Golden Arches.

I've heard that there's a myth, which apparently some people believe, that the homeless person lifestye is romantic. That's one of the craziest notions running loose in modern civilization. Having sampled the homeless lifestyle now and then, if only for a few hours at a time, I'm more than convinced of that. If you doubt me, go read about the real thing at thehomelessguy.blogspot.com or www.thehomelessguy.net (both links, if they're working, will take you to the same spot.)

Having slept for a couple of hours in the waiting room (I needed it) I ventured out into the streets of Takasaki for my latest adventure.

And then, eventually, after a very long bus ride, I arrived way out in the countryside at a busstop which was near the site of the factory where I was supposed to be teaching English, a factory which was perhaps an outpost of the Great Eastern Enterprises Light Emitting Diode Swizzlestick Fashion Kimono Company ... or then again, perhaps not ... yesterday was a long time ago, and I don't guarantee that I recall all of it with perfect accuracy.

And then I really needed my Japanese, because the map which I had been given, the map which theoretically showed the location of the factory (which I'd never been to before) seemed to be operating in high surrealism mode. The map most definitely did not seem to have a one-to-one relationship with the ground which it purported to describe.

(This was not necessarily the fault of the map. There is something about the way I use maps which is capable of making even the best-designed map start operating in a mode of extreme surrealism. This - and here I speak from personal experience - can be quite embarrassing if you are out in the mountains and are using the map for navigational purposes up near the three thousand meter contour line.)

Anyway, at this point I definitely needed to use my Japanese ... a little difficult, however, in a place where there seemed to be no people, except the ones whizzing by in cars, none of whom seemed likely to spontaneously stop for a chat. Eventually, however, a helpful rustic happened by and directed me to the missing factory, where I taught ... but what did I teach?

As I noted above, my memory of yesterday is not perfect, but perhaps (or then again, perhaps not) I taught a lesson from the textbook Basic Geopolitics: The Essentials, perhaps a lesson based on the final chapter, which deals with how to run things from the White House, and which includes the sample role play which ends with the memorable line:-

"Okay, we got the nukes, so let's nuke 'em."

Which brings me to my next topic which is (I'm sorry if this blog is starting to become a bit repetitive) nuclear war in Iraq - a CIA man shares his fears).

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Section 14 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 February 13 Thursday.
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