Mike's Can't Miss Travel Tips

I’ve been in Japan for close to two months now. In that time, I’ve managed to compile this list of some of my favorite things about the country. While you may not find any of these in your standard Japanese Tour Book, I’m confident that experiencing any of these things will enhance your Japan experience. In short: you’re welcome.

--Construction sites. At every site, there is at least one guy in a suit and a sweet hat holding one of those orange traffic-control sticks. His only job appears to be to direct pedestrian traffic around the roped off construction-zone.

--My beach towel. It’s oversized, it’s bright yellow, it has a picture of a bear watering four-leaf clovers on it, and it says in huge block letters: “This life which have been my long cherished desire now begins from here.” Clearly, it’s better than your beach towel.

--My feud with a 7-Year-Old. Although I’ve only been here a few weeks, it’s quickly reaching Biggie-2Pac levels. I see the kid for forty minutes every Thursday. It’s the worst forty minutes of my week. I spend most of my Thursday mornings gearing myself up for whatever tricks he may have up his sleeve. I open every meeting with “so is today going to be a good day or a bad day? I’d prefer to know up front.” Yes, he’s one of my students. Yes, he’s seven years old. But that won’t stop me from writing a scathing rap song about the time I had sex with his wife.

--Hitachi drinking culture. I can’t speak for anywhere else in Japan, but people in Hitachi sure seem to take care of their own. I was walking home from work one night (at roughly 9 PM on a Wednesday) and saw a woman in her mid-forties puking outside of a karaoke bar. Who was holding her hair back? The staff of the karaoke bar! Incredible. It’s also impressive how well developed their drunken walks home appear to be. I’m disappointed if I don’t pass at least three massive groups of businessmen in full suits, holding each other up in an elaborate drunken matrix as I walk home from work on Fridays.

--The Look. When kids in Hitachi see white people, they get these wide-eyed, confused, terrified, curious looks on their faces that I’m not a good enough writer to do justice to. You have to see it for yourself to truly appreciate it.

--Hiromu’s American Flag Jeans. It appears as though someone took a bunch of old American flags and sewed them into a pair of pants for a three-year-old boy. It’s the most remarkable achievement in fashion design since the T-Shirt. If you see these pants, and you aren’t at least a little tempted to start singing The Star Spangled Banner, then you probably hate freedom.

--The button at Gusto. Alright, I’m probably going to suffer some sort of karmic demise for this, but I can’t help it. I eat at this chain restaurant after work sometimes that has a button on every table to press when you’re ready to order (servers don’t approach the table here unless you ask them to.) Anyway, if the server is far enough away from you when you press the button, they will break out into a run to get to your table quickly. It’s awesome. Sometimes (every time) I wait until the server is across the restaurant before I hit the button. I’ve done it several times, and I don’t see it ever getting old. If a bolt of lightning strikes me down, now you know why.

--The karaoke-night killer. It usually begins when someone picks either a fast-paced or an obscure rap song. It starts out fine, but within a few bars the singer can’t keep up and he starts to crack. A special wrinkle is when the song is unexpectedly dirty or racist, and the singer has to make some difficult and awkward choices with what he decides to repeat. It finally ends with everyone feeling slightly uncomfortable and a little less into karaoke. Best example: an awkward guy from Chico performed “The Seed 2.0.” Honorable Mention: The time I performed "Morris Brown" (new Outkast song) and realized that I only knew the first two lines. Bad times.

--The time I saw a guy say yes to a prostitute. On the street next to my apartment, there are a lot of women offering massages to passing men late at night. They could be massage therapists, but I doubt it. Anyway, I was walking by last Saturday and saw a guy stumble out of a bar. From across the street, a lady yelled out “massage-E?” They started talking, I heard some numbers get thrown around (unfortunately, that’s roughly all the Japanese I know) and then he crossed the street and they walked off together. I’ve never been more upset with myself for not knowing Japanese.

--Grocery shopping. It is absolutely disorienting. I spent five minutes today looking at milk, trying to decide which one was low-fat. As I was staring at the various cartons, a small LCD screen played a commercial in which a carton of milk looked like it was killing a cat. Meanwhile, I was trying to evaluate the cartons based on the appearance of the people that were purchasing them, but there is a much narrower range of body types here than in California, so I couldn’t get a feel for the situation. I ended up going with the carton that had the slimmest cow on the box, but it was whole milk anyway.
On a lighter note, the food kiosks here are top-notch. Not only is the food usually very good, but the cook has a very personal interest in whether or not you purchase his or her product. It’s a great feeling to try some green tea, pick up the package on the table, and then smile and give a thumbs up to the green tea maker as he bows and says “thank you” over and over. It’s why I have three types of green tea in my apartment right now. Everybody wins.

Brad Penny, Rick James, and a Violent Baby

I woke up early this morning to watch (and by watch, I mean read on mlb.com Gameday) Game One of the Dodgers-Mets series (first pitch-5 AM.) I knew that it was a gamble: If the Dodgers won, I would be ecstatic for the rest of the day; If they lost, I would be pissed about not only the loss but the sleep lost in order to watch the loss. Imagine my horror as I read “Pitching Change: Now in the game for the Dodgers--Brad Penny.” Let’s put it this way: I went to work pissed off.

(There’s also an outside chance that I’m not welcome back at the Toyoko-Inn. I go there for its reliable internet connection and friendly staff, but I may have burned some bridges with my lengthy, F-Bomb ridden tirade on Brad Fucking Penny at 7 AM.)

So my day didn’t get off to an auspicious start. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much of a reprieve at work. I had my first Baby Class today. Now, I should have thought about this beforehand, but I didn’t realize until my student showed up that, well, she’s a baby. Twenty months old, few actual words, always doing a crazy run-walk-crawl, baby. As I should have expected, my lesson consisted of me singing, dancing, running, flying, and basically making a fool of myself. Meanwhile, Baby was launching an all-out assault on her mom. Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen children get away with crazier stuff than I ever thought possible. One kid walked up to his mom, got six inches from her face, and screamed as loud as he could. Another did a Rick James impression in the lobby, doing everything but yelling “FUCK YO’ COUCH!” as his mom serenely looked on. But nothing prepared me for this outburst. It started with punches to the shoulders, escalated to running clotheslines, and culminated in a devastating head-butt to the chin that put Mom on her back. Seriously. I wish I were making this up. Once Mom was down, Baby started running circles around her like she was about to perform a religious sacrifice. At this point, I realized three things: I was a little bit afraid of this child; teaching babies a foreign language is a complete waste of time; and if Brad Penny hadn’t ruined my day, this would have been one of the funniest things I had ever seen.
I had pretty much convinced myself that I hated teaching at this point. But as we were leaving, Baby spoke her first English words: “Goodbye! See You!” The lobby broke out into applause. I am the best teacher in the world.

And Fuck You, Brad Penny.

My Magic Blue Book

My manager walked up to me on Friday and handed me a small blue book with a bunch of blank pages. As she handed it to me, she said:
“Michael*, this book is very important. You need to keep it in a safe place while you’re in Japan, and then you’ll have to give it back when you leave.”
“OK. What’s it for?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“So, what do I write in it?”
“You don’t write anything.”
“Oh, OK, OK…right, right. So, when do I need to bring it in for you to write in it?”
“No no, you don’t do anything with it.”
“Oh, right. So, why do I need to keep it?”
“I can’t explain in English.”
Oh, that’s cool.

*(I’ve done everything short of wearing a shirt that says MIKE on it to get them to call me Mike at work, and they’re not budging. It’s infuriating and impressive at the same time)


Greg, one of the foreign teachers at another English school here, had a party for himself on Saturday to celebrate his two-year anniversary in Japan. We met at a bar near my apartment, which is owned by a guy named Hiro that drives a loud motorcycle and marks the end of summer as the day that it’s too cold to pass out in the street. An hour or so after I got there, Hiro came over with his co-owner to give Greg a bottle of champagne. But before they gave him the bottle, they made him stand up in front of everyone and bend over a chair while Hiro shot the cork at his ass and the co-owner held his face forward so he couldn’t see what was going on (Call the American Embassy!). After the cork struck, the bar broke out into polite applause, Hiro handed Greg the bottle, and everyone went on like nothing had happened. When I finally could muster up some words, they came out as “He bent him over a chair and shot a cork at his ass! And then you people acted like that was the same thing as a handshake! How is that not a noteworthy event? How did a fight not break out?” I wasn’t even talking to anyone in particular; I just needed to talk my feelings out. My friend told me that it probably wasn’t the weirdest thing that would happen that night. As we were leaving, a group of fifteen gay Japanese men insisted that we sing the Backstreet Boys’ “As Long As You Love Me” while they snapped pictures. So I guess she was right.


On Sunday, I saw Pirates of the Caribbean at a theater in Mito. A few notes:
-When we bought our tickets, we got to pick our seats. That’s right: It’s reserved seating. It’s also eerily silent in the theater from the moment the previews come on.
-Seeing the “Snakes on a Plane” trailer in Japanese? Hilarious. Seeing the preview for the upcoming movie about Iwo Jima in Japanese? Awkward.
-I'm pretty sure Pirates of the Caribbean 2 would have been more enjoyable if I didn't speak any English. In fact, it's so bad that I wish it was dubbed in Japanese. With that said, listening to people speak English for two and a half hours was suprisingly relaxing.