I had a job teaching English conversation out at Ichinomiya, near Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture, Japan every Wednesday night and Saturdays until about two or three in the afternoon. I did that for a solid year every week. I took the Meitetsu line forty five minutes out of Nagoya to Ichinomiya. I used to ride it and stare out the window at the blue ceramic tile roofs and the factories and the billboards in Japanese characters. I was in this whole melancholy soup, like I was floating in a big bowl of ramen. It was warm and comfortable at times, but also very disorienting and confusing. I’d think about home, but home was so damned abstract, and I couldn’t get a handle on home any more than I could the weird culture I found myself in. The things that life tossed my way were so damned confusing, but I just went on because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, just like now when I just kept staring out the window of the Meitetsu train, with its futuristic glass curving around you in the lead car where I usually sat. Up in the front of the lead car, they had a speedometer readout in kilometers per hour for passengers to look at. I remember Oba-san at the shamisen lessons would refer to Ichinomiya as "Ichimiya,” for short, dropping the “no” in the middle, and I thought that was interesting.
Mr. Shibata ran the Elite English School...Erito Eigo Gakko, and he was a real entrepreneur. He'd been slinging English lessons like hash in a diner since the occupation, it seemed, and his English was salted with GI expressions. He was a kind of huckster, an entrepreneur, and he was interested in me just for the way I looked, and the fact that I was a white American. That was all very clear, and comforting in a way. For him, I wasn’t defined by my youth, my scraggily long hair or my scruffy untrimmed beard, but instead by being a white American male. That’s what I was to him, or as he would put it, a native English speaker, a gaijin sensei…a foreign teacher.
Ichinomiya was near the Nagoya International Airport, known as Komaki, which had been a US military base during the Occupation. I was succeeding this other American guy as Shibata’s foreigner. You had to have at least one foreigner to be taken seriously as an English conversation school in Japan. It was part of the deal. I was the new foreigner. The old foreigner looked like a marine, I thought, when he met me at the Ichinomiya station. His name was Jim somethingorother. He met me at the station the first time to show me the way to Shibata's. The guy had this burr haircut, and looked like he pumped iron or something. He found me easily, of course (we gaijin all stood out), introduced himself, and said he was going to take me over to the school. I fell in with him as he lead the way through the station and out onto the street, and then into a kind of mall with a steel archway entrance with pink and green plastic decorations hanging from it. There were all kinds of shops in the open mall: shoe stores, pharmacies, ramen stands, watch shops, bedding stores, you name it. It was crowded this time of the day. Jim walked fast. I could barely keep up.
Finally we came out of the mall and into a residential neighborhood, with twisty streets and lots of the houses with dark blue ceramic tile roofs like the ones I had seen from the train. After what seemed like a long while, we reached Mr. Shibata’s house, the headquarters of the Elite English School. I met Mr. Shibata, and he showed me the little classroom in a sort of porch attached to the side of his house. Then he showed me a larger more traditional looking classroom next to a kind of carport outside his house. That was where the cram-school English was taught to junior high school kids trying to pass entrance exams that would get them into a higher status high school. Shibata introduced me to the cram school teacher, a Mr. Nishino, who could barely speak English at all. Mr. Nishino was a small mousy man in a white shirt and conservative tie. He wore the kind of horn rim glasses that seemed to be standard issue in Japan, especially for middle aged men. They had thick dark brown or black plastic along the top of the lenses, and silver metal below the lens. They looked sort of institutional, an effect that was heightened by the fact that so many men wore them. Though Mr. Nishino couldn’t speak much English I knew that he would be an expert in the intricacies of English grammar, at least so far as it pertained to the questions that always appeared on the high school entrance exam
I would be making a few guest shots in Mr. Nishino’s class of thirteen-year olds. Students who paid a bit extra got to spend an hour in a smaller class of ten or twelve with me, the foreigner. My class would be held in small porch-like area attached to the side of Mr. Shibata’s house, a few steps away from the larger classroom where Nishino taught, which was in a kind of converted car port next to the house. After a few words of introduction to Mr. Nishino, Mr. Shibata funneled me into the little converted porch where my classes would be taught. He ran through what would be expected of me on the job. I accepted it, and showed up the next Wednesday to begin.
Mainly, what Shibata wanted was for me to make regular appearances, and to keep the kids entertained. It was mostly just so they could see, and (if they were lucky) even talk to, a real foreigner. I found out later that I would be a major drawing card in attracting the citizens of Ichinomiya to the Elite English School. Glossy color photographs would be taken of me. There were portraits and action shots of me leading the class. Some of these shots wound up on posters plastered all over Ichinomiya, advertising the class. There was even an annual event planned at the local auditorium where students of Mr. Shibata’s school would give a kind of recital of their English skills. It was clear that I would be a major draw to this event as well. When the time came (as it turned out) I brought my guitar and regaled the masses with a folk song. We also did a skit (devised by Mr. Shibata), in which I pretended to be shocked at the students pronunciation of the word rice. According to the script, I assumed (because of the students pronunciation) that they were saying lice, not rice. A poster with rice on one side, and a creepy lice on the other emphasized the point. It was sort of a step-n-fetchit routing with the gaijin doing broad takes and reactions to the dopey idea that someone was asking him to eat some lice. It went over very well.
The class taught in the little porch attached to the side of Mr. Shibata's house was labeled conversation. That's where I was supposed to spend an hour with them trying to get them to actually say some stuff in English, and to listen to me talk. There were five fifty minute long classes in a row on Wednesday nights. Some where with the teenagers, others with adults.
Mr. Shibata also had a string of classrooms all around Ichinomiya, located in rooms above little restaurants or other businesses in commercial buildings. In these classrooms, little kids (second or third grade to sixth grade or so) would meet for English lessons from young college or junior college graduate women teachers who were living at home waiting to get married. On Saturdays, the gaijin sensei (foreign teacher) was expected to take a cab (using vouchers that Mr. Shibata provided) to make the rounds of these five or six classrooms and to make appearances. It was really like doing guest shots at comedy clubs (although they didn’t have those then). I'd appear, pick up some pictures of animals that were provided there, and the teacher would have the students repeat after me as I said, "zebra, cat, snake, elephant.” The kids would look earnestly up at me and repeat "zeh-boo-rah, kah-toe, e-re-foo-an-toe"
"Very good!" I’d say. "Good afternoon, kids!"
Then, in unison, they’d say "Gu-doe ah-foo-toe-noon, mee-soo-toe boo-ree-toe!".
One of the classes was taught at a Buddhist temple. They had classrooms there, and they were made available for the English lessons. It was usually kind of cold there in the winter, sitting on the tatami floor. I remember the kids thought my name was a riot. They called me “Mee-stah Boo-Ree-Toe,” and it was funny because “Boo” in Japanese is onamatapoeia for “fart.” So I was Mr. Fart to them. “O-nara, bu.” They’d say over and over, giggling and, laughing. “Farting Britt.” Ha, ha, ha, hee hee hee. I also had a beard, which was a novelty, too, and the fact that I was balding too just added to my charm as a strange strange gaijin. But that wasn’t really a bad thing. After all, what good is a gaijin if he isn’t strange?
And then it was back to the cab, and on to the next school. I would do this every Wednesday evening from about six in the evening to nine-thirty or ten, and then again every Saturday afternoon from one to six or so. At the end of the day on Wednesday, Mr. Shibata would always order out a nice meal, complete with miso soup and rice. Sometimes he'd order sushi. I’d sit by myself in the little make-shift classroom (really a kind of screened in porch attached to Mr. Shibata’s house). Come to think of it, I never did go inside Mr. Shibata’s house in the year I was teaching there.
After I finished eating, I would walk back through the deserted shopping area in the gloom of the late evening and catch one of the last Meitetsu trains back to Nagoya. Once a month, Mr. Shibata would hand me an envelope full of ten thousand yen notes along with my meal. The envelope was about half an inch thick. This was the equivalent of about one month's pay at my regular job. I used to take this money and leave it in the closet at home. Whenever I needed some, I would reach into the envelope and pull out a couple of crisp ten thousand yen notes. Ten thousand yen was worth about fifty dollars at the time. The Meitetsu train would be nearly empty except for a few drunks heading back home. The flashy red train cars would slide up to the platform in the station. I’d get on and take a seat. It would be just me and a drunk or two sharing the fluorescent bright institutional tunnel of space inside the car. My reflection flashed on and off in the window as I stared out at the lights of Ichinomiya while the train went up to speed, the sound of its sad rising whine over the clickety clack of the steel wheels on the rails lulling me as I sat and stared, thinking about home or would-be lovers or English pronunciation.
Mr. Shibata ran the Elite English School...Erito Eigo Gakko, and he was a real entrepreneur. He'd been slinging English lessons like hash in a diner since the occupation, it seemed, and his English was salted with GI expressions. He was a kind of huckster, an entrepreneur, and he was interested in me just for the way I looked, and the fact that I was a white American. That was all very clear, and comforting in a way. For him, I wasn’t defined by my youth, my scraggily long hair or my scruffy untrimmed beard, but instead by being a white American male. That’s what I was to him, or as he would put it, a native English speaker, a gaijin sensei…a foreign teacher.
Ichinomiya was near the Nagoya International Airport, known as Komaki, which had been a US military base during the Occupation. I was succeeding this other American guy as Shibata’s foreigner. You had to have at least one foreigner to be taken seriously as an English conversation school in Japan. It was part of the deal. I was the new foreigner. The old foreigner looked like a marine, I thought, when he met me at the Ichinomiya station. His name was Jim somethingorother. He met me at the station the first time to show me the way to Shibata's. The guy had this burr haircut, and looked like he pumped iron or something. He found me easily, of course (we gaijin all stood out), introduced himself, and said he was going to take me over to the school. I fell in with him as he lead the way through the station and out onto the street, and then into a kind of mall with a steel archway entrance with pink and green plastic decorations hanging from it. There were all kinds of shops in the open mall: shoe stores, pharmacies, ramen stands, watch shops, bedding stores, you name it. It was crowded this time of the day. Jim walked fast. I could barely keep up.
Finally we came out of the mall and into a residential neighborhood, with twisty streets and lots of the houses with dark blue ceramic tile roofs like the ones I had seen from the train. After what seemed like a long while, we reached Mr. Shibata’s house, the headquarters of the Elite English School. I met Mr. Shibata, and he showed me the little classroom in a sort of porch attached to the side of his house. Then he showed me a larger more traditional looking classroom next to a kind of carport outside his house. That was where the cram-school English was taught to junior high school kids trying to pass entrance exams that would get them into a higher status high school. Shibata introduced me to the cram school teacher, a Mr. Nishino, who could barely speak English at all. Mr. Nishino was a small mousy man in a white shirt and conservative tie. He wore the kind of horn rim glasses that seemed to be standard issue in Japan, especially for middle aged men. They had thick dark brown or black plastic along the top of the lenses, and silver metal below the lens. They looked sort of institutional, an effect that was heightened by the fact that so many men wore them. Though Mr. Nishino couldn’t speak much English I knew that he would be an expert in the intricacies of English grammar, at least so far as it pertained to the questions that always appeared on the high school entrance exam
I would be making a few guest shots in Mr. Nishino’s class of thirteen-year olds. Students who paid a bit extra got to spend an hour in a smaller class of ten or twelve with me, the foreigner. My class would be held in small porch-like area attached to the side of Mr. Shibata’s house, a few steps away from the larger classroom where Nishino taught, which was in a kind of converted car port next to the house. After a few words of introduction to Mr. Nishino, Mr. Shibata funneled me into the little converted porch where my classes would be taught. He ran through what would be expected of me on the job. I accepted it, and showed up the next Wednesday to begin.
Mainly, what Shibata wanted was for me to make regular appearances, and to keep the kids entertained. It was mostly just so they could see, and (if they were lucky) even talk to, a real foreigner. I found out later that I would be a major drawing card in attracting the citizens of Ichinomiya to the Elite English School. Glossy color photographs would be taken of me. There were portraits and action shots of me leading the class. Some of these shots wound up on posters plastered all over Ichinomiya, advertising the class. There was even an annual event planned at the local auditorium where students of Mr. Shibata’s school would give a kind of recital of their English skills. It was clear that I would be a major draw to this event as well. When the time came (as it turned out) I brought my guitar and regaled the masses with a folk song. We also did a skit (devised by Mr. Shibata), in which I pretended to be shocked at the students pronunciation of the word rice. According to the script, I assumed (because of the students pronunciation) that they were saying lice, not rice. A poster with rice on one side, and a creepy lice on the other emphasized the point. It was sort of a step-n-fetchit routing with the gaijin doing broad takes and reactions to the dopey idea that someone was asking him to eat some lice. It went over very well.
The class taught in the little porch attached to the side of Mr. Shibata's house was labeled conversation. That's where I was supposed to spend an hour with them trying to get them to actually say some stuff in English, and to listen to me talk. There were five fifty minute long classes in a row on Wednesday nights. Some where with the teenagers, others with adults.
Mr. Shibata also had a string of classrooms all around Ichinomiya, located in rooms above little restaurants or other businesses in commercial buildings. In these classrooms, little kids (second or third grade to sixth grade or so) would meet for English lessons from young college or junior college graduate women teachers who were living at home waiting to get married. On Saturdays, the gaijin sensei (foreign teacher) was expected to take a cab (using vouchers that Mr. Shibata provided) to make the rounds of these five or six classrooms and to make appearances. It was really like doing guest shots at comedy clubs (although they didn’t have those then). I'd appear, pick up some pictures of animals that were provided there, and the teacher would have the students repeat after me as I said, "zebra, cat, snake, elephant.” The kids would look earnestly up at me and repeat "zeh-boo-rah, kah-toe, e-re-foo-an-toe"
"Very good!" I’d say. "Good afternoon, kids!"
Then, in unison, they’d say "Gu-doe ah-foo-toe-noon, mee-soo-toe boo-ree-toe!".
One of the classes was taught at a Buddhist temple. They had classrooms there, and they were made available for the English lessons. It was usually kind of cold there in the winter, sitting on the tatami floor. I remember the kids thought my name was a riot. They called me “Mee-stah Boo-Ree-Toe,” and it was funny because “Boo” in Japanese is onamatapoeia for “fart.” So I was Mr. Fart to them. “O-nara, bu.” They’d say over and over, giggling and, laughing. “Farting Britt.” Ha, ha, ha, hee hee hee. I also had a beard, which was a novelty, too, and the fact that I was balding too just added to my charm as a strange strange gaijin. But that wasn’t really a bad thing. After all, what good is a gaijin if he isn’t strange?
And then it was back to the cab, and on to the next school. I would do this every Wednesday evening from about six in the evening to nine-thirty or ten, and then again every Saturday afternoon from one to six or so. At the end of the day on Wednesday, Mr. Shibata would always order out a nice meal, complete with miso soup and rice. Sometimes he'd order sushi. I’d sit by myself in the little make-shift classroom (really a kind of screened in porch attached to Mr. Shibata’s house). Come to think of it, I never did go inside Mr. Shibata’s house in the year I was teaching there.
After I finished eating, I would walk back through the deserted shopping area in the gloom of the late evening and catch one of the last Meitetsu trains back to Nagoya. Once a month, Mr. Shibata would hand me an envelope full of ten thousand yen notes along with my meal. The envelope was about half an inch thick. This was the equivalent of about one month's pay at my regular job. I used to take this money and leave it in the closet at home. Whenever I needed some, I would reach into the envelope and pull out a couple of crisp ten thousand yen notes. Ten thousand yen was worth about fifty dollars at the time. The Meitetsu train would be nearly empty except for a few drunks heading back home. The flashy red train cars would slide up to the platform in the station. I’d get on and take a seat. It would be just me and a drunk or two sharing the fluorescent bright institutional tunnel of space inside the car. My reflection flashed on and off in the window as I stared out at the lights of Ichinomiya while the train went up to speed, the sound of its sad rising whine over the clickety clack of the steel wheels on the rails lulling me as I sat and stared, thinking about home or would-be lovers or English pronunciation.