Pooping in Japan is a continuing essay series. To start from the first post, click here: https://steemit.com/travel/@jeunebug/pooping-in-japan

March

What’s the mandatory minimum on a farewell tour?

If you use the KISS precedent, it’s a two-year hiatus between dropping a “final” album and reuniting for a worldwide goodbye. And after said goodbye? Their status remains up for debate, with each new tour simply provoking new questions: “Are they starting up again?” “Are they retiring again?” “Do those motherfuckers even know themselves?”

Or, in the words of The Beatles, a rock n’ roll band that knew how to definitively bow out of the game, “You say goodbye, and I say hello.”

Point is, the current status of KISS is a murky gray area, and by living there, they can inconsistently produce work of questionable value without widespread retribution, because they are “post-career”. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Have I produced enough Pooping in Japan to similarly “retire”? Has enough time elapsed between the last edition and now to qualify this as an exciting reunion, as opposed to a needlessly-delayed release of a continuing work?

These are legitimate questions in this current world, where progress is always speeding up exponentially. What was the 24-hour news cycle is now the 24-minute Twitter cyclone. The planned obsolescence of electronics has worsened, from VCRs that ran for a solid decade before they started shredding tapes into confetti, to iPhones that are programmed to deliberately fuck themselves up after about two years. And music? There seems to be no required quantity of work to justify a greatest hits release. Justin Bieber alone has released five compilations. He’s only released four studio albums.

Now before I settle back on my self-assured throne of internet snark, let me add that really, the last bit isn’t all that new of a phenomenon. Vanilla Ice also released a greatest hits album, as did Lou Bega (is it just “Mambo No. 5” fourteen times in a row?) Even the Rolling Fucking Stones put out “Big Hits” in 1966. They’d only been around four years at that point, and weren’t much more than some snot-nosed, bowl-cut kids ripping off Chuck Berry tunes. Keith Richards didn’t even require a necromancer to attend band practice yet. Greatest hits? Half of their material wasn’t even theirs!

Let’s cut to the chase: I think there’s a healthy precedent for me bowing out of this series a little early, and when someone with as inconsistent a work ethic as mine sees that precedent, they’re likely to seize it. So on this farewell tour, let’s stomp that pedal to the metal and go out with engines roaring and tires screeching.

And by that, I mean let’s get those hands planted at 10 and 2 and keep it at a steady crawl just below the posted speed limit.

Because this time, we start with a driving test.

Men in their thirties can find themselves surprised with a sudden onset of decline. That’s certainly been the case with me; the problems I always assumed would start much later in life have shown up to the party unfashionably early. Rising out of bed each morning sets off a cacophony of cracking bones and rip-roaring farts so loud, my neighbors would be forgiven for thinking I’d renovated my apartment floors with wall-to-wall bubble-wrapped whoopie cushions. Segue into a sad scene in front of the bathroom mirror, where I review my thinning hairline like King Leonidas overlooking his last surviving Spartans holding the line at Thermopylae (referencing “300” is a conservative estimate of how many I have left). And if I was so bold as to drink the night before? Well, hope my schedule’s clear, because what used to be a few hours of hungover recovery is now a multi-day event.

By the time my coffee is brewing, I can be solidly in the throes of a full-blown pre-mid-life crisis.

I wasn’t blessed with a mathematical mind, but I think there’s a formula for inverse correlation in here somewhere. Life expectancy is on the rise (well, given a macro view of trends, at least; the U.S., meanwhile, has seen it drop for the past two years (thanks, opioids!), meaning what qualifies as middle age should also be edging up. At the same time, our culture is growing increasingly youth-centric, thus bringing that marker back down. The line between social relevancy and that quaint farm upstate where those past their prime are sent to live is thus in flux, and worrisome types like myself may find themselves feeling lost and wondering whether, when watching certain classic films, they’re supposed to identify more with Harold or Maude.

Faced with this new reality, some of us desperately start seeking out ways to recapture our yesterdays. There are the tried-and-true clichés: buying a sports car, starting a rock band, hitting the gym, and having an affair (or for those with less skill and a tighter budget, driving the Volvo over to Guitar Center to flirt with/creep on the employees, and then masturbating in the shower at Planet Fitness). There’s the ever-versatile spectrum of substance abuse, from alcohol on down to rock bottom (thanks, opioids!). And, of course, a free market ready to step in and and mine our nostalgia into purchasable and binge-watchable commodities, giving us all the Stranger Things and other things our lovely, empty little souls could want (thanks, capitalism!)

And after reviewing all these options, what I’m here to tell you is this: ain’t nothing gonna make you feel like a young sixteen-year-old full of ignorance and vigor once again like nervously sitting in a department of motor vehicles lobby for six hours while awaiting your turn to take a driving test.

Many ex-pats get to forego this experience, because they live in an urban center with enough awesome public transportation and awful traffic to render a driver’s license utterly useless. But, by continuing my lifelong trend of living in nowheres close to somewheres (bumfuck Fredericksburg just north of Richmond, VA; bumfuck Antioch just southeast of Nashville, TN; bumfuck Loudi southwest of Changsha (hometown of communist heartthrob Mao Zedong and capital of Hunan, the province that at least six of your local Chinese take-out restaurants named themselves after); and now, bumfuck Naka in bumfuck Ibaraki (a.k.a. Kanto region’s “Most Unappealing” area, voted 47th out of 47 prefectures three years in an row!) just north of Tokyo), I find myself in a different situation than they. The nine schools I’m currently traveling between run the gamut of urban to rural, with the majority tucked away in mountains accessible only by way of long, narrow gravel roads criss-crossing paddy fields (in other words, waaaay off the bus route).

So I kinda need a car.

For those who are planning on living and driving in Japan for less than one year, a Japanese driver’s license is unnecessary. A trip to your local AAA and a $25 fee are all it takes to get set up with an international driver’s permit, which is the only requirement for getting behind the wheel here. Yes, it really is that easy. Just think! You could snag a permit and be on a plane tomorrow, and find yourself fast and furiously drifting all over Tokyo the day after! (and probably in jail the day after that)

For those like me who are staying longer, that permit is valid for only one year, and can’t be renewed. Leaving only one option: apply for a Japanese driver’s license.

I moved here in July, meaning it’s not something I technically need to worry about for another few months. But the Japanese Auto Federation is notorious for failing applicants numerous times, due to a strict examination that both ensures widespread safe driving practices from those who’ve passed, and a full enrollment for JAF-affiliated driving schools ready to collect tuition from those who’ve failed. My bosses, who’ve been running their business for over thirty years, say teachers average about three attempts before passing. Best to start attempting it early.

But like a driver attempting to chart a course forward, the first step is to find my location on the map. And I can’t know where I am without accounting for where I’ve been.

(That map metaphor brought to you by pre-smartphone GPS millennials; pre-smartphone GPS millennials, because “Back in MY day… we used to waste more time!”)

So let’s briefly retrace the course of the previous six months and what it’s like to drive here, from fumbling with my dashboard for the first time, to sitting on a bench awaiting the instructor to accompany me out around the examination course. Might as well; like I said, I have over six hours to kill, and have already assembled a number of quick observations about the driving experience thus far, which I’ll now relate:

1. The first few trips are primarily a series of erratic over-corrections of potentially lethal blunders, due to everything being flipped from its normal location. These actions are often punctuated with “oh, fuck, right”s. “Oh, fuck, right- that’s the lever for my wipers, not the turn signal!” “Oh, fuck, right- everyone is honking at me because slow traffic uses the LEFT lane here!” “Oh, fuck, right- I’m driving down the wrong side of the road again, LOL, and that truck is heading OH, FUCK, RIGHT AT ME-” And while desperately trying to reorient myself in this strange mirror world, I’m all the while half-expecting the Enterprise to touch down at the intersection ahead, and for the goateed Spock to leap out, phaser in hand, and proclaim: “One more mistake like that, and it’s the Tantalus Field for you!”
   (That Star Trek reference brought to you by… my sad, sad, existence)

2. The gas prices seem really reasonable... until you remember they use the metric system, and that's the price per liter. OH FUCK, THAT TRIP TO THE GROCERY STORE JUST COST ME NINE DOLLARS

3. The erratic shaking I've associated with driving around a busted automobile for the past ten years is no longer related to mechanical troubles. My car is fine. That's an earthquake.

4. Google Maps doesn't perform at the same high level of quality in Japan as it does in the U.S. I've stopped using the app and now appeal directly to the soul of David Bowie/Jareth the Goblin King, as he's much better suited to deal with this labyrinth of knotted routes and redundantly-numbered roads. "Okay, so you're saying I follow 31 down to the light, then take a left at 31, and continue on 31 until it intersects 31? Uhh... yeah, got it?"

5. 75% of the roads here are about the width of your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart's typical parking space. They're still meant to convey traffic in both directions. I refer to these quaint little lanes as Thunderdomes. "Two cars enter... one car leaves. The other is probably in the ditch."

6. Previous issue is mitigated slightly by the design of most Japanese cars. They're about the size of the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. In general, products here are smaller. The American small is the Japanese large. The American large is a Princess Bride quote: "Inconceivable!" This applies to most things: beverages, clothing, egos.

7. Sometimes, while stopped at a light, you might peek into the cars in neighboring lanes, and would be forgiven for thinking you’d suddenly been transported to Humboldt County. It seems like every third car has a pot leaf air freshener dangling from the rear view. But is that young salaryman in the suit behind you really getting blazed after work? Is that elderly couple in the right lane regularly ripping crucial gravity bong rips before heading off to the pond to feed the ducks?
   Answer: probably not. Marijuana is super stigmatized here, and getting caught with possession can land you a five-year stint in the slammer. I asked my boss what’s up, and he said simply that people think it’s a cool shape, and many of them probably don’t even know what it actually is. For a society that generally places great emphasis on the beauty of the natural world, in particular flora, and is generally unaccustomed to drug use, this actually makes sense.
   But to reappropriate one of Shakespeare’s famous lines: “Would a weed by any other name smell as highly of THC?”

8. The tolls are comparable to your typical mortgage payment. OH FUCK, THAT TRIP TO THE GROCERY STORE ACTUALLY COST TWENTY DOLLARS

And alongside all of these experiences was my constant driving companion: the wholly bewildering assortment of programming riding the airwaves on 83.2 FM. We became acquainted way back in July, as I sat sweating in the parking lot one afternoon after school, scanning the radio for something new and interesting to play on my drive home. Instead, what I came upon were the flutterings of Vivaldi’s “Summer” (it was a sweltering July day, so… a little on the nose, 83.2). Now I know that, for whatever reason, talking classical music usually gets someone immediately pegged as fucking pretentious, but if anyone deserves to be name-dropped, it’s Vivaldi. A brilliant composer who, like so many others, sadly descended into poverty in his final years. It’s reported that, at the end, he even had to sell off his own manuscripts; he was just too baroque.

BA-DUM-CHISSSS

That selection earned 83.2 a fast-track to preset selection 1, but immediately got me thinking: this is certainly no time to be listening to something familiar. In fact, this is the single most important opportunity for expanding my own listening experiences, if ever there was one. Because, along with the flipping of turn signal levers and street lane orientations, one other important thing has also ended up on the opposite side of what I’m familiar with: the radio.

Quick recap, for those not well-versed in pseudo-science: early neurologists like Broca and Wernicke pioneered research into the localization of different functions within the brain. Pinpointing these functions to one hemisphere vs. another turned out to be a pretty neat method for later theorists to prove the old aphorism true, and reduce all our infinite ways of thinking into “two types of people in this world”: left brain (logical and analytical) or right brain (creative and intuitive).

My high school art teacher was particularly dogmatic about this, and refused to allow any forms of verbal communication in her classroom once we started on a project; those were LEFT BRAIN activities, and had NO place in her right brain sanctuary of pure, unfettered artistry.

Maintaining the purity of her right-brain classroom also involved her constantly playing her stereo, blasting right-brainfood like jazz, classical, and the occasional twenty-minute prog-rock mindfuck from Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (whose occasional use of lyrics, you might think, violated her moratorium on verbal communication- until you realize that lines like “See the gypsy queen in a glaze of Vaseline!” aren’t communicating anything particularly logical).

While continued research has shown this oversimplification for what it is, the left brain/right brain categorization fits in nicely with Myers-Briggs, Hogwarts Houses, and all the other quizzes and categories we turn to in the hopes of making some sense out of the clusterfuck of insanity going on in all our minds.

So let’s roll with it.

If our dominant traits are linked to a particular hemisphere, and our dominant hand is cross-wired to the opposing side of our brain, then my right-handed actions have been forever dictated by my logical, analytical left brain. Well, shit! That’s the hand that scrolls along the iPod click wheel (I’m dating myself here (to a recent past that already feels incredibly distant)), slides the the vinyl album out of the sleeve, and, yes, operates the knobs on the car stereo! And all this time- run by left brain? Dude, this isn’t your area of expertise! If anyone should be stepping in to regulate operations related to music, it should be ol’ righty.

Have I been limited all this time? Is this why I just “didn’t get” that seven-piece experimental band from Brooklyn who mic’ed a blender through nine Electro-Harmonix pedals and played a drum set composed of nothing but crash cymbals? Fucking left brain in the way!

But oh, sweet relief! Because now that I’m driving on the right side of the car, my left hand is running operations over at the radio. Well okay, right brain, let’s see what you got!

…talk radio, eh? Huh. Didn’t see that one coming.

Okay, 83.2 it is.

The next few times I tuned in were like the first: leaving school in late afternoon to be treated to an orchestrally-arranged ride home. But then, on Friday night about a week later, I was surprised to start my car and be bombarded with the rapid power chords of Green Day. Those chords continued for the entirety of the drive, because 83.2 was playing the album Dookie in full.

It was the first inkling that 83.2 was much more than the classical station it had originally seemed to be. Over the next few weeks, I found myself setting aside my various podcasts in favor of experiencing what 83.2 transformed into at different times of day. Afternoons consistently yielded classical, while evenings generally offered a wide assortment of rock- maybe Green Day, maybe Van Halen. Around the lunch hour, you might find some of the very worst hip-hop the genre has to offer (tinny snare beats ripped from a 1993 Casio overlaid with the typical cliches of clubbin’, ho’s, and gettin’ paid; thanks, capitalism!), while an hour or so after that might showcase some “new” sound, often especially tricky to categorize; one showcase featured a German industrial mess so brash, it was as if Phil Spector decided that the best way to achieve his “wall of sound” was to fill a fleet of industrial washing machines with brass bolts and set ‘em to spin. Overtop droned a vocalist who sounded kind of like how Robert Smith might sound if a wish gone awry Freaky Friday-ed him into the body of the lead singer of Smashmouth.

At this point, someone leans over your shoulder and asks, “Hey! What are you reading?”

“Oh, just Brandon’s latest blog entry.”

“Ahh. What’s the subject this month?”

“He’s writing music reviews.”

“For what band?”

“I don’t know. And… actually, he doesn’t, either.”

“…how is this a good use of your time?”

The morning shows are pretty great, especially one deejay who plays hit pop songs in both their English and Japanese versions, back-to-back. This can be interesting, and also a huge mistake, as in the case of The Carpenters.

The reason so many of us humans would agree that dogs are our best friends is because we share such close emotional connections. Those connections are forged through sharing some core traits: namely, poor impulse control. Unlike the cat, we cannot just leave dogs at home with a few days’ worth of food and go out of town; they’ll overeat until they vomit and then starve for the remainder.

But before you counter that you’re not subject to the same whims as this inferior species, please take a moment to consider what you did to your own body the last time you visited an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Like the dog, we have this habit of consistently overestimating our own appetites. Fast food restaurants concoct hamburger combos with enough meat patties to reenact the first murder from Se7en; as sort of an additional fuck you, the blu-ray release of Suicide Squad actually contains bonus footage; and on my last visit to a sex shop, I realized just how many penises one woman can be expected to contend with.

Yes, I was at a sex shop. I had to buy some Christmas presents.

The Carpenters fit in well with this idea because, while I always remember myself liking some of their material and thinking I can get down with them, in practice I rarely make it through an entire song with that outlook maintained. Karen sure had a beautiful voice, but some of those lyrics are so saccharine they give me cavities; in fact, I believe the song Sing is currently tied up in wrongful death litigation, because every time that children-sung chorus hits, a certain proportion of diabetics start flatlining.

In other words, a potential appetite for The Carpenters will be more than sated by a single listen. A change to Japanese lyrics or not, that second play-through is gonna be rough.

Cue the segue (on 83.2, that segue is the first four measures of Cake’s Short Skirt/Long Jacket, which is an awesome choice in that it works so well as a segue, and a terrible choice in that pretty much no matter what follows, you’re disappointed and just want to continue listening to Cake) and we’ll transition from the back-to-back jams on into my personal favorite late morning show, weekdays from 10-11. The deejay is a real character who gets super pumped about the tracks he plays, generally talking about each one for two to three minutes afterwards, and even throwing in a few beatbox recreations of his favorite parts (his oral rendition of a Dream Theater drum track was… an experience). He also has some quirky little traditions, like playing AC/DC’s Back in Black every Thursday morning at 10:48 for the month of December.

It was on my second Back in Black Thursday that it all became clear. All these random bits of programming… of COURSE 83.2 makes no sense.

83.2 is the western station. And a western station by definition makes no sense… at least, not to the westerner. Now anyone, of course, could listen to The Carpenters, and then a little AC/DC, and describe some difference in their sound. But as westerners, are we more susceptible to noticing the differences among the familiar? Do those of different cultural backgrounds listen and hear, instead, more of what those two pieces of music share?

We are definitely predisposed to categorizing by similarity ourselves, in particular with one of Japan’s more famous exports: anime.

Do a quick survey on the street, and I guarantee that the majority of people, if they’re even able to describe it at all, will define anime as a genre. “Anime? Oh, right, those Japanese cartoons, where they all have big eyes and spiky hair and are always shooting energy beams and kissing cat girls and shit.” And sure, those shows are out there, but what about all animes about cooking competitions? The crime procedurals? The ghost stories, the space operas, the slow unfolding dramas of a woman giving up her career in the city to find peace in rural farming? How absurd does it look to the initiated that the rest of us lump them all together under one umbrella, based solely on some perceived aesthetic similarities?

About as absurd as following up Karen Carpenter’s sha-la-la-las with the screech of Brian Johnson.

But hey, it can’t be helped- this is just how we’re programmed. I’ll defer to the theorist John Dewey here: “Foreign languages that we do not understand always seem jibberings, babblings, in which it is impossible to fix a definite, clear-cut, individualized group of sounds. The countryman in the crowded street, the landlubber at sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between experts in a complicated game, are further instances. Put an inexperienced man in a factory, and at first the work seems to him a meaningless medley. All strangers of another race proverbially look alike to the visiting stranger. Only gross differences of size or color are perceived by an outsider in a flock of sheep, each of which is perfectly individualized to the shepherd.” We do not recognize subtleties in the unfamiliar. It’s why, when writing in English, my Japanese students have such a hard time differentiating between lowercase i’s and j’s… and why there’s a good chance that the Chinese character tattooed on your lower back is wrong.

It’s also why grocery shopping can often be a pain in the ass. Already I’m trying to sort through thousands of products in a language I can barely utilize, and now I have to decide on which of 28 varieties of tofu I want, based on some incomprehensible aspect of their form?

You know, sometimes a guy really just wants a good ol’ fashioned western duality: a world in black and white, with morality in good and evil, and tofu in soft or firm. While this thinking may be fairly reductionist when applied to much of human experience, it seems to pair well with our consumer habits. Look up Columbia University’s jam study to see some evidence that supports the idea that more choices = more anxiety = lessened confidence in choosing any one option. A duality, or even a handful of easily distinguishable options, is often preferable to a laundry list of possibilities. It’s why “which Beatle are you?” is a solid first date question, while “which member of Slipknot are you?” is not.

For multiple reasons.

The additional challenge we face when engaging in another culture is that our brains did not evolve to leave things unknown. There are certainly those among us who actively meditate and pursue a perception freed from the restraints of mind; they have cleansed the doors of perception William Blake wrote about, and perceive with less discrimination. For the rest of us, the “jibberings” and “babblings” will stay as such for a time; but stick around that unfamiliar culture long enough, and the brain will start trying to sort. And without the benefit of the tabula rasa child’s mind that engages with new stimuli and builds internal structures to match, we adults are stuck with old, fault machinery suited for a different task. When we start sorting new experiences with that shitty old machinery, we get shit wrong. In terms of language, we hear sounds that do not exist in English, like the Japanese versions of “r” and “f”, do our best approximation based on where’d they’d fit in our own alphabet, and hear them as such. We carry this knowledge home, we tell stories and write records, all built on a mistake in perception. This gets done enough, and eventually you help misinform an entire society into incorrectly referring to the country “Nihon” as “Japan.”

That, or you go through the process of committing to learning a new system.

That process is multifaceted. The tasks can range from the great undertakings of language study, to the subtle imitations of mannerisms. It’s learning how low to bow to your bosses, where to leave your shoes when entering the bathroom, and, as is the case today, getting a driver’s license.

Speaking of which…

Yes, all this time I’ve been rambling, and we’re still sitting on that hard bench in the department lobby, waiting to take the driving test. You can look back and think of everything that’s transpired as one overwhelming series of tangents, or remark at the ingenuity of my containing all that within one overarching framing device.

Your call.

Eventually, my name gets called, and I look up to see examiner. Imagine an anthropomorphism of the very concept of bureaucracy: a sort of middle-aged android with the gait of a retired military officer, dressed in a suit that’s the textile equivalent of white noise. He scans me from within an impenetrable fortress of tightly-held documents and thick, obscuring eyeglasses, and accepts my greeting with all the warmth of a man having a catheter removed.

The long walk down the green fluorescent hallway is one haunted by the phantoms of the driving test training guide, and its admissions of “a high rate of failure,” “notoriously difficult,” and the mandate that I “check under the car, get in, lock the door, adjust the seat, put on the seatbelt, and adjust the mirrors IN THAT ORDER” if I have any hope of passing.

So when I sit down to the actual written test, I’m thrown for a loop.

…10 questions? And… yes, three of them are just about U-turns.

No tricky Japanese-specific situations? No curveball questions about unfamiliar signs? Just a handful of brain busters like, “True or false: If an unattended child is walking along the shoulder of the road, you should slow your speed as you approach.”

I pored over the questions three times, with each scan seeking to uncover the hidden “gotcha!” element that would fail me. But nope. No tricks here. Just a super fucking easy test.

I passed handily, and after marking my grade, my android rose and escorted me out the back of the building and onto the driving course.

You ever see that M. Night Shyamalan film The Village? About the small society of people continuing on in an anachronistic existence in the forest, completely isolated from the outside world?

The course is kind of like that: a loop of roads with all the workings of the real thing, but completely contained within itself and separated from the real world (in this case, by a chain link fence). There are merge lanes and yield signs. There are intersections, with stops signs and traffic lights. There’s a goddamn bridge. The course is built and arranged to present test takers with all the challenges of the outside world, so there are also obstacles: work zone cones to avoid. Crosswalks to yield to. Like Shyamalan films, plenty of twists to navigate. Also like Shyamalan films, plenty of signs warning you that a twist is coming.

To add to the feel of authenticity, they also send four or five people, all testing for a variety of license types, around the course at the same time. So while stopping at the red light at a fake intersection could feel like a joke, it actually turns out to be just as important as the real deal- because that woman coming around the bend on a motorcycle, and the dude attempting to navigate that flatbed truck through a 32-point turn up ahead, could just as easily hit you as not.

Now on the other side of the exam experience, I can both dispel and exacerbate the fears associated with this test. Yes, they are very strict. Yes, there are some tricky maneuvers. That said, it is a closed course, and every single one of those maneuvers is pre-planned. So if you just memorize the order and method in which you have to execute each task, it turns out to be nearly as easy as the written test. Take a cue from the examiner and morph into android mode. “I. am. a. perfect. driving. robot. and. stop. at. all. marked. signs. for. a. full.

three.

seconds.

Aaaand. now. check. all. blind. spots.

twice.

And. proceed.”

Long story short, I left the department with a freshly-printed license shining in my hot little hand, and rode off into the sunset.

Which brings this outro back around to the intro: this might be it as far as blogs go. Aside from driving observations, I haven’t had much to write about these past few months. And I can’t write if nothing happens to me. I’m a blogger, not a French existentialist playwright.

—

Brandon: (sits at kitchen table) The oranges grow soft. Yet here, one has fallen from the bowl, and rests alone. Its peel is taut.

Brandon: (peels and eats orange) Ah, such bitterness! The flesh is tough, the taste acrid and biting. This is what it means to be alive. I’m reminded of my father. I recall him smiling only once.

—

It may just be that winter affords fewer experiences for dudes like me, who tend to hole up with a stack of books all season. Asian winters find me particularly immobile, as the thin uninsulated apartment walls and lack of any central heating tend to have the inside feeling a lot like the outside.

Thankfully we’re on the other side of it now, a milestone celebrated here as “Setsubun,” the last day of winter. This holiday is usually around February 3rd, and is centered around the idea of expelling the negative energies of the previous year, and welcoming in the good fortune of the year ahead.

Of course, this is Japan, and nothing is left to simply exist as intangible; the metaphor must be made manifest. In this case, it means the male teachers dress as oni: hulking, masked demons with giant horns and teeth who brandish giant clubs as they stalk the school hallways. When they arrive at a particular classroom, it’s the students’ job to fight the oni off by pelting them with roasted soybeans, until these monstrous representations of misfortune relent and run off, thus leaving open the pathways of impending fortune.

In reality:

Two grown men burst into a room of thirty screaming four-year-olds, most of whom were already hysterically crying at the very idea that a demon was about to arrive. The barrage of beans comes fast and heavy from the braver kids, but even they quickly retreat as the creatures step farther into the classroom. Soon, they’re all cowering in terror and fighting over the corners of the room, hoping to escape this nightmare.

One of the grown men, yours truly, figures this is too much for the kids, and hangs back, looking to the Japanese teachers for guidance on how to proceed.

Meanwhile, said teachers are having a grand old time.

The gym teacher, the other male in this tale, sprints towards Nonoha, a meek little cherub of a girl. She darts behind her teacher, but this oni isn’t relenting. He grabs her by the fucking legs, and unleashes a monstrous roar: “NOW I’M GOING TO EAT YOU!” As he pulls, this girl starts shrieking bloody murder, clinging to her teacher’s skirt and looking at her in desperation.

The response? “Tee hee hee!” * snaps picture *

This is certainly a conservative culture in many ways, but I’ll tell you what- when it comes to Setsubun, they go fucking hard.

And perhaps that metaphor is itself a metaphor for my own series. These eleven pages of content have been my little box of beans that I’ve been casting at all the lingering observations of last year. And now that they’re gone, perhaps there’s nothing left for me to say.

Then again, maybe my brief foray as an oni is a sign that, after a wintery respite, life is about to get interesting again, and I’ll be back with another batch of nonsense before you know it.

I return once again to that idea of the KISS precedent. You never know when those motherfuckers are gonna come back onstage.