Green-san* and Dance Man

Oh, low-budget Japanese television. How can I even start to explain this...

Well, I guess it all started during training for my teaching job. My company, ECC, has a contract with a satellite channel called BS Fuji. When BS Fuji is in need of some whiteys for its English-language educational segments, it calls ECC. When we watched some of these in training, as terribly goofy and embarrassing as they were, I was thrilled. Japanese TV! I told the people at headquarters that I would love to do it. This confused the hell out of them (why would anyone willingly humiliate themselves like that?), but they told me they'd let me know if they heard about anything.

About six weeks later, there I was, waking up at 5:30 in the morning for a twelve-hour shoot of a show called Mojya². There were six scenes in all, teaching the words Airplane, Eat, Cap, Monkey, Peel, and Cut. I would be Green-san, one of Dance Man's four perpetually dancing henchmen.

All day, we wore earpieces that looped the same sixteen bars of "Boogie-something-or-other," so that our dancing would be in sync. We danced in terrible heat, first in a playground, then in various rooms of a hot, stuffy house. We were tired. We had woken up early. We sweated. The Japanese director and his crew didn't manage time well, so we found ourselves half-assing our way through the last few scenes, often using only one take. I'm hoping the shot of me trying (and failing) to pull a ski cap over my green wig gets lost on the cutting room floor.

Despite being an awful day overall, I'm glad I did it. Hell, I'd probably do it again. I'm sure I'll look terrible on this show, all tired and sweaty and saying things like "Let's PEEL the POTATO!" with a deranged smile, but you know what?

I'm on TV, bitches.

Highlight of the day: We're inside the house, and Dance Man is wearing plastic shower caps over his giant platform shoes because of Japanese cleanliness standards. So he's dancing on the staircase, right up close to the camera, with us in the background near the bottom of the stairs. We're doing "Cap! Cap! Cap!" turning left and right while miming the brim of a baseball cap. Without warning, CRASH! Dance Man has taken a major spill and is now sprawled out at the bottom of the stairs under a large potted plant. Of course we all stop dancing and start laughing, but within seconds Dance Man is back up and at the top of the stairs, dancing like nothing has happened. The cameramen haven't stopped filming. The four of us look at each other in confusion, shrug, and resume our "Cap! Cap! Cap!" routine, stifling laughter for ten more seconds until the director gives us a "cut." He approves of the take, and we move onto the next scene. I guess he decided he had enough to work with in editing and didn't have to do it again. I really hope I can see that footage sometime.

Here's the website for the show. I'm not on there yet, but you get the idea. I guess the old Green-san didn't want to do it anymore. Can't imagine why...

*I look like hell in this picture because a) I am wearing a green afro wig (obviously), and b) well, why don't YOU try looking good after dancing, making stupid faces, and sweating for twelve hours.

Hey kids! Guess what time it is!
IT'S PICTURE CATCH-UP TIME!

Yeah...I haven't uploaded pictures in weeks. So here are the highlights from what I unearthed tonight:

My roommate Jen and I in Shinjuku.

This guy is on advertisements all over the city. I'd party with him.

Outside Shinjuku Station at 6am. You know when you've stayed up all night and you're on your way home, and it's sunny and you're tired and hung over and you want to die? Yeah, that.

A sign at a train platform in Shinjuku.

Fumi's birthday. Guess which one is Fumi.

What a nice, scenic place to drink cheap beer next to some homeless guys.

Nate, Adam, and I at the izakaya with Random Japanese Guy #1. Note the dangerous organ meats in the foreground.

In Japan, monkeys host talk shows and drive cars. Sometimes at the same time.

For those of you who were curious, here's the living room of my apartment. Meet Stumpy The Couch, and his friends Stumpy-Ass Table And Chairs.

Another view. It's not really on a slant, I don't know what happened there.

That's all for tonight. I'm a little braindead because I woke up at 5:30 this morning to spend twelve hours dancing in a green afro wig. But I'm saving that story for later.

Goodnight.

I don't feel all that bad for not posting this past week. It was the second week of my big two-week summer vacation, and having spent the first week going to festivals and the like, I made the educated decision to spend the second week partying like a rockstar.
Needless to say, I soon found myself in a black hole of terrible sleeping habits from which it has been impossible to return.

Of the memory soup left over from last week, these are the tidbits of life that float to the surface:
Chilling on Tom's Tokyo balcony and looking out over all the roofs.
Dancing and chanting with a crowd of Japanese strangers in the techno room of Club Vanilla.
Drinking at an izakaya (look it up) with Adam, his friend Nate, and two random 40-year-old Japanese guys we picked up on the street.
Watching a middle-aged, Scottish coworker of mine stage a drunken revolution against Japanese waitstaff.
Lots and lots of early morning trains home.

That's really about it.

When I was out drinking with aforementioned 40-year-old sketchy dudes, I asked them to order us food, and the waitress came back with some meat on sticks. But this is Japan, and if there's one thing the Japanese love to do, it's to pull the Gross Card on some unsuspecting foreigners. That said, the four meats presented to us were:
Chicken Skin
Heart
Liver
Chicken Hamburg (whatever that is)
But I was hungry, goddamnit, and if you ignored the textures it wasn't all THAT bad. So I ate like 3/4 of all the food on the table, organ meats included. And then I got really sick for about a day. And then I swore never to eat organ meats again.
The End.

Anyway, my first day back at work started out pretty awful. My very first class was a "Mini Kids" lesson, meaning "dance and sing at some babies and their moms." I wouldn't have had a problem doing that, except today only ONE baby/mom duo showed up. I had to spend half an hour desperately dancing and singing at one kid, who made it quite obvious that she wanted nothing to do with me. To top it all off, I didn't know the words to any of the songs, and was sweating profusely the whole time.

Awful.

But it got better. Fast-forward two hours, and I now have two 5-year-old boys fanning me with their books, one giving me a shoulder massage, and the fourth blowing on my face for lack of things to fan me with. That class was pretty cool. We mostly just ran around yelling about cookies, ice cream, sandwiches, etc (for some reason, the vocabulary word "pancakes" was the only one they could never remember). At one point, they discovered the stuffed velcro monkeys in the corner of the room and decided to attach them all to my arms, screaming with delight as I lumbered around like some big monkey-monster.

Question: How can you get a small Japanese child to stop systematically lining up his crayons and organizing his belongings, and have him move onto the next activity?
Answer: You cannot.

As for today's adult classes, they were the most boring people imaginable, across the board, and I was very glad when the forced-conversation portion of my day was over.

Now for the lying-on-the-couch portion of the day.

It's hot in here, where are Hitoki, Tatsuya, Satoshi, and Kousuke when I need them?
GOD, JAPANESE CHILDREN ARE CUTE.

I'm watching Matthew's Best Hit TV (now called Matthew's Best Hit UV for some reason) and feeling VERY indignant. For the last five years, this guy has had his own TV show, which, like most other Japanese programming, is just him hanging out with guests, making exaggerated Japanese faces, and playing with stuff. So why can't I screw around in front of a camera for half an hour and call it a TV show?

I DESERVE MY OWN TELEVISION SHOW. I AM WAY MORE FUNNY AND INTERESTING TO WATCH THAN THESE JERKS.

If someone reading this could hook that up, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.


ANNNNNNYway.

The highlight of my week wasn't any of the festivals, any time I befriended a random Japanese girl/old man/masked festival monster/crazy dog lady, any time I witnessed a Japanese person passed out in or near vomit (twice), or even that time I ate my weight in shrimp-flavored snack foods and spent the next three hours with an apocalyptic stomachache.

It was this guy:

Just a guy, with a watermelon for a head, hanging out by the side of the road. Seeing as he wasn't selling anything or handing anything out, I figure he was either on break, or he was a pervert. The crotch sombrero would seem to point to the latter. Either way, I ran over to him and had Adam take a picture.


Honorable Mentions for Japan Double-Take Of The Week

Japan's newest and most heavily-advertised brand of canned coffee.

Check out the name of the restaurant on the third floor.

Neckface Strikes Again

This costume kit is called "Hello Gaijin-san!" ('gaijin' being the derogatory term for a foreigner). It comes with a big white nose and blue eyes. I've nothing more to say about this.


I also need to add that I've been to Tokyu Hands' toy department four or five times since I got here, and each time I've been transfixed by this:


But forget Melon Man, the hypnotic Disney army, and racist party accessories.

Because on Wednesday, Adam and I did what we needed to do.

We went back to Jiyugaoka, where we had lived as study-abroad students last year (see: Japan Part I). We checked out our familiar train station, our favorite izakaya, the 100-yen store, and finally walked the old route back to the place we've been pining for since last April:



One personal demon down. 27 to go.

Festival Number...Something: Asagaya Tanabata Matsuri

Pretty much just a long crowded street decorated like a kid's birthday party, if a kid's birthday party was populated with grown men screaming at you to buy tentacled snacks. C-, Asagaya. C-



Ten points to anyone who can figure out who Transgender Nosehair Soccer Player is supposed to be.

You haven't known fear until you've had an Enormous Paper-Maché Baby staring down at you from above.

I figured eating a whole squid on a stick would give me some Japan Cred. It gave me a squid juice stain on my pants.

Festival #2 - Hachioji Matsuri









Crazy Dog Lady

Her dog's custom-made festival accessories





I love things that end in "...of the future."

Quick post before I go out.

It's vacation time. My next day of work is the 19th.
All my students have asked me what I'm going to do over vacation (partly because they're crap at coming up with novel conversation topics), and all seem to be surprised that I'm not going on some fabulous trip. Um, hi, I just got here. Not to mention it's miserably hot and humid out every day.

So what's a girl to do with her extra time and money?
FESTIVALS.
Throughout the month of August, Japanese people are busting out their yukata and partying like its 1899, and I'm gonna be there to witness it.

First festival: Yesterday's bon-odori outside the huge Buddhist temple in Tsukiji. The bon-odori is a traditional dance to celebrate the return of the dead ancestors to their homeland. This particular bon-odori featured traditional taiko drummers, traditional paper lantern decorations, traditional Japanese food, traditional clothing, and of course, the traditional massive amounts of draft beer and people in giant animal costumes.

I wonder what kind of people volunteer to be the giant animals at a festival, as the job description includes not only sweating under layers of synthetic fur, but being punched in the crotch and ass by small Japanese children about every twenty seconds for one's entire work shift.

I thought about participating in the dance. From what I could see, it was really nothing more than just going with the crowd in circles around the central stage, waving the arms, clapping once in a while, turning around, and looking around wildly trying to figure out what was going on. But I didn't want to be "that foreigner." So instead, I headed for the beer tent, downed three beers in a row, and spent the latter two-thirds of the festival pretty spectacularly drunk.

From there on, I made it my personal mission to get pictures with the giant animals. It was a difficult feat, because not only was I drunk and pretty slow to react, but the animals were always either participating in the dance or being openly molested by small herds of Japanese children. After hanging around near the panda quite creepily for a while, I found a small opening and took it. In one quick motion, I shoved my camera at a Japanese bystander, gestured toward the panda, grabbed the panda by the shoulder turning it around, and grinned like it was my job. I soon accomplished the same with the pink bunny. I was on a ROLL.

Unfortunately, I wasn't fast enough to get to the chipmunk or the monkey, as the dancers cleared out at 8 and the bon-odori suddenly turned into a Japanese pop concert, featuring some terrible male singer in a shiny silver suit. It was really awful. The kind of stuff that passes for music in this country...

So I cut out of there and spent the next hour or so wandering the streets of Ginza. Really wandering. I mean like crossing streets at random, turning around in circles trying to figure out where I was, feeling very overwhelmed by it all, furiously fanning myself with the fan that had mysteriously appeared in my back pocket, and eventually plopping down in a way-too-classy-for-me coffee shop and eating a banana muffin because I couldn't find anywhere else to go to the bathroom.

That's my story of the bon-odori. Like I said, there will be many more festivals to come, so look forward to more stories of Christine Drinking Too Much Festival Beer And Disrespecting Other People's Cultures.






The tiny microphone on my camera is no match for loud drums, so the sound sucks, but you get the idea:

The Story of Bee

The discovery of "Bee" Darts Bar was a very exciting development. Why? Because unlike all the other bars within walking distance of our apartment, this one stays open until 5:00am EVERY NIGHT. You see, Jen and I, like all the other ECC teachers in town, have most of our work shifts from 3:30 to 9:30 pm. But factor in the commute, the post-work meal, and the need to change clothes and freshen up after work, and we usually find ourselves at 11:30 or so looking for somewhere to go. What's the use of a bar that closes at midnight for people like us? We stay up late every night, and sleep in every morning, and we need to be accomodated, goddamnit. "Bee" Darts Bar would be just the place to fulfill our needs.

Where should I start...
Bee's bizarre overblown decor, resembling something like S&M-meets-classy?
Multiple colors of mood lighting?
Wealth of board games? (Uno! Jenga! ...Crocodile Dentist?)
Large plasma screen TVs playing nonstop Japanese music videos?
Of course, its big selling point, like many other "American Darts Bars," is its long row of state-of-the-art electronic darts boards.
And the number-one aspect of all Japanese bars: NO TIPPING. That's right. I've tried tipping in Japan a few times for various things, and it always confuses the hell out of the recipient.

Needless to say, the drinks are expensive and you pretty much have to come pre-loaded, lest you spend your entire paycheck on 800-yen watered-down rum and cokes. But overall, it's a good place to be, especially when you are lucky enough to witness an extremely drunk man fall down three steps, land directly on a small suggestively-dressed Japanese girl ("squeal!"), and remain unconscious at the bottom.

But that's neither here nor there.

The first time we went to Bee, we had in tow an American named Christian who we had just met on the street. We drank, we played Uno, we played darts, and we had an okay time, despite being a bit weirded out by our guest. So last week, Jen and I went back by ourselves, having been unable to find anyone to invite out at 1am. Once again, we sat at a small table in the middle, where we could see and be seen. Well, one thing led to another, and we found ourselves playing darts with two young Japanese bartenders named Takuya and Gottsu.

I worked the charm, and Takuya fell in love.

I know this because he told me. Repeatedly.
"I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!"
or rather...
"I LUB YOU! I LUB YOU!"
As an English teacher, I can say that it would seem he has been practicing his "L" sounds.

"Uhhhhhh...I love you too, Takuya."

So there I was, midway through the game, about to throw my dart. Right foot forward, right arm extended, eyes on the prize. I had been playing my best game ever, and Jen and I had a commanding lead over our Asian opponents. Takuya was to my right, a little too close for comfort, but I wasn't going to be psyched out. I drew my arm back, and...

"You're beautiful! You're beautiful! You're beautiful, it's true!"

Takuya was singing to me. Loudly. Right next to my ear.

Taken aback, I laughed it off with a "James Blunt desho?" and finished my turn.
Gottsu was up next, so I booed playfully. I then heard a second "boo!" echo my own, a male one. Sure enough, I looked over at Takuya, who was grinning and waving two thumbs down at his own teammate.

Oh, Takuya.

Well, Jen and I ended up winning the game, with a total of 267 points, five or six instances of "I LUB YOU!" and one more refrain of "You're Beautiful."

While Takuya and Gottsu were off getting us our check (after they had stalled us for as long as possible), a third bartender scurried over for a piece of the action. He brought with him a plastic replica of a Japanese snack called Calpis, which he instructed us to shake in turn after rolling a die. Jen and I looked at each other, shrugged, and did as the man said. He watched with wide-eyed excitement, tension building, until finally the thing halfheartedly popped a few plastic french fries onto the floor. Well, this was hilarious to him. He clapped and laughed at our expense, picked up the pieces, and ran away just as briskly as he had come.

We paid our insanely expensive bill (free drinks for flirting? not in Japan!) and headed for the door. Our bartender friends were all lined up there to make sure we knew the exact location of the door, gesturing and bowing wildly, and they made us promise we'd come back soon.

Who am I kidding, of course I'll go back. I love the attention.

Lucky: Walking out the door of your apartment to find that a summer festival has exploded all over town into little bits and pieces of happiness, paper lanterns, golden shrines, and people in cute outfits.

Unlucky: Going to take your first picture, only to find that your camera has run out of batteries in the past week of non-use.

Lucky: Having a cell phone camera as backup.

Unlucky: Looking at your cell phone and realizing you only have about ten free minutes before you have to get your ass to work.

Lucky: Said workday is "stay time," meaning there's nothing to do and you can perch yourself by the window and watch the festival from an awesome vantage point.

Unlucky: The window is made of the most reflective glass ever, and all your pictures will inevitably contain the ghost of the back of a microwave.

Lucky: Wow! Look at all those drunk dudes in cute little shorts bouncing that shrine on their shoulders! And there's a parade when the sun sets! More people dancing in colorful outfits! Young men waving giant flags around! Smiling women pounding on drums! Asian babies!

Unlucky: Someone just signed up for two lessons back-to-back with me? At the height of parade time? Who DOES that?

Lucky: You have been getting paid about seventeen dollars an hour to sit on the windowsill and watch a festival while eating an ice cream cone. Shut up.

If you squint really hard, you can see a bunch of guys hauling a gold "omikoshi" shrine down the street.

Taken from the teachers' room window, with my cell phone. I need more megapixels.

The beginning of the nighttime parade. I was soon ripped out of my childlike wonder by my two private lessons with Hitoshi, a businessman who complained to me about his loneliness, in very broken English, through a mouthful of noisy saliva.

The festival is supposed to be two or three days long, depending on who you ask. Tomorrow I'm going to leave the house with plenty of time before work, armed with my fully-charged legit digital camera, to see if I can find any sights early in the day.