St. Valentine was clubbed, stoned and beheaded in 1493 for marrying Christian couples

Thanks, Wikipedia! And unexpected as it was I've had a better V-Day than any in recent memory. So many holidays have metamorphosed into their own separate entities here in Japan, and Valentines Day is no exception. How, you may ask can it get any more commercialized? The answer is White Day, a holiday invented only 30 years ago as a chance for "men to pay the women back." For whatever odd reason, here on V-Day only women are supposed to give chocolate to men. Ergo, one month later on White Day the men are supposed to return the favor. It all seems rather superfluous and unnecessary to me, and not just because I'm single! I thought to myself: "this year, I won't get any chocolates, so none to give back!" Then the Staff Director at a certain school gives me and the other teachers these bad boys:


Apparently they are really expensive too! Rightfully so, it was really, really good. The first chocolate I've eaten that wasn't a kit-kat dipped in peanut butter in veritable months... more like a piece of fancy soft cake.

Also, most likely just because the schools like to have school parties so that the teachers and students can mingle and drink outside of class, there was a Valentines party at one of my schools. I probably would not have went. except that my friend and staff member Kana was quitting the job to become a Primary school teacher! So I pretty much had to go. But I wasn't really complaining, my weekend was fairly quiet otherwise so it was something to do.

On the way there, I got reminded that the Yamenote (main circular loop-line in Tokyo) is NOT my least favorite train to ride... it's the Chuo. This might sound overly negative and it is intended as such. I love the train system here, but the crowds, closeness and just plain cuckoos you encounter are a rife pain. Case in point:

I'm riding the line when I hear some woman speaking indecently loudly (Japanese people are usually really quiet on the trains, except for the occasional semi-loud bunch of kids), so much so that by her words and tone of voice I thought she was being molested or something. "Thank God I'm on this side of the traincar," I thought, having recently watched "Soredemo boku wa yattenai," ("Even so, I didn't do it!") a Japanese film about a man who gets accused of molesting a girl on a subway, all the while protesting he didn't do it. The serious problems with the Japanese legal system - no mistrials, lack of a jury, bias toward law enforcement agencies - are all outlined by a dude who basically gets his entire life wrecked because some girl thought she groped him on a packed train. Guilty until proven innocent, if that's even possible, kind of stuff. Scary.

Tangent! The point is ever since watching it I've been keeping my hands up in plain sight or somewhere where no poor young girl could accuse me of a crime that would have me deported. So this lady is apparently crying about something for all to hear, everyone just ignoring it of course. Time passes - it's a 25 minute train ride. About 10 minutes afterward, a girl walks in on the opposite side of the car, texting on her cell-phone, a normal enough scene. I need explain that in every train-car here they have a special handicapped section, where there are signs not to use your cell phone (apparently due to the fact that maybe 10 years ago cells could have possibly interfered with pacemakers). Suffice it to say the girl wasn't adhering to this rule, and that's also totally normal. There's no danger unless you're talking on the phone in a loud, rude fashion, and that's just the danger of getting mean stares from old people.

Out of nowhere, there's a loud "EEEEEEEEEEEKKKK!" like a bat caught in a cocktail blender. I jumped out of my skin, crawled back in and looked around. Then, the same voice as before, but much closer to me saying something along these lines, really loudly: "Stop using your goddamn phone! Can't you read? EEEEEEEEEEEK!! STOP IT, STOP IT!" The girl looks like she's completely bewildered but hiding it really well. She says "I'm sorry," and the woman says "SHUT THE HELL UP!" And goes in ranting really loudly in the poor accused girl's face, using a lot of words I didn't catch but that anyone from anywhere would get the gist of. Finally she quiets back down and at the next stop I see this protesting woman waddling off: short and middle-aged, with a spiteful face like she had been terribly wronged.

Now there's a decent chance (maybe better than decent) that this woman was mentally handicapped somehow. That's all well and good - it reminds me of how certain mentally disabled people in my life back home would take things as black and white as they were written, so in other words "no cell phones" means NO CELL PHONES, end of story. But still, I wonder what her story was, and in any case am thankful that I rarely have to ride that particularly busy, packed train, the kind which always carries along with it an extra batch of nutters.

So the school party was actually pretty fun. I got a good buzz on at school which was a little weird. At first it was quite funny: there were the 3 female staff members, 3 male teacher and about 10-15 middle-aged men in attendance. And more and more of what seemed to be nothing but men 35+ kept coming in. Quite the romantic occasion! -___- Eventually - and I recall saying "there is a god if the next person who walks in is a woman," and being pleasantly surprised - the gender ratio evened out a bit. It was fun to get to hang out with Kana before she left for good, and here's a picture after she gave a speech to everyone about her leaving:


As the night progressed I looked up the fact I started this entry out with on Wikipedia. For obvious reasons I didn't really try to explain it to anyone who couldn't speak English fluently (somehow "beheaded" just doesn't come up in the textbook vocab lists more often than not). Later one of the other staff members was pop-quizzing me on character readings, pointing at the various stuff on the computer and saying: "what's this?" and me wowing the students that I could read 4 characters. They are way too easily impressed!

We went out to a short-lived after-party at a local "Irish pub" - short-lived since we are all slaves to the last train - and it was nice to drink a dark beer like Bass again. A shame it costs 900 yen...

That was that night in a nutshell. Nothing major happened this weekend except a whole lot of Japanese studying, the usual. I want to be able to pass the level 2 JLPT test at the end of the year, which is a very lofty goal I will admit. However, if I continue at this rate, I might just pull it off. I'm currently reading Silence of the Lambs as well, just finished Henry Rollins' "Get in the Van" (short and very sweet), and am listening to Chuck P.'s "The Haunted" and Richard Dawkins "God Delusion" on my Ipod (sorry Mom and Dad).

And in closing, yoinked directly from Japan Probe:"Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa gives drunken press conference at G7 meeting"



Even if you don't understand any Japanese, watch this. It's hilarious and incredibly disgraceful on the part of the Japanese government. This dude is drunk, but later claims were that he was on "cold medicine." He asks the questioners to repeat themselves, and at the very end he's asking which way to face the camera.

"If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses." - Lenny Bruce

"Money is funny - how a piece of paper can make or break your very existence
Quick as it come, quick as it go - you better know about the ebb and the flow
You get money in droves, trick it on cars and blow
Throw dollars at black queens 'cause, for the dough they'll strip their clothes
And for the right amount of money
A king will pimp his queen into being a ho on a stroll
Life will always be hard when you choose to make money your god" - KRSone featuring MC Lyte