*insert tumbleweed here*

Unfortunately I haven't had time to put anything up. It's the time of the year when all the junior highschools have a big festival. It's the last one for the 3rd year students so some schools spend weeks preparing for it. So the last couple of weekends I've had to get up at 5:30 on Saturday and Sunday and drag my tired ass to school. Hopefully I'll find time to put something up in the next few days about the school festivals. I'll leave you with the awesomeness of eiken which is what Japanese people take to test their english abilities similar to the JLPT.



The entire poster is hilarious. I spend ages staring at it and laughing my head off. The kids just kind of stare at me but I don't really care. I'm currently in the process of negotiating for the poster. If that doesn't work out I'm just gonna jack it.

Iizaka goodness

So I was kindly offered the opportunity to take part in one major festivals that occur around the prefecture. Since a lot of my students from ootori (big bird) junior high wanted me to go and I really had nothing better to do I went along. Turns out there were to be 50ish foreigners gathered to carry a shrine around the town for the rotary club. Of course being JETs the actual number that turned up didn't quite turn out to be what was expected. As you can imagine the opportunity to get paid and work in Japan with little qualifications is temptation for the most useless of people to apply. Retards that sign up to do something, fill up the last so others have to be turned down and then decide the morning of the event they can't make it. The excuses ranged from the plain "stupid"

A: "It's on Sat. Ok Sat. When was it? Sat?"
(and on Sat)
"Oh I thought it was Sun. I can't make Sat I'm already going elsewhere"

to "you really weren't even fucking trying were you..."

B: "Oh I can't go. I hurt my foot"

I really don't like dealing with a lot of JETs. This kind of stuff really doesn't go down with the Japanese people. I really don't know how people couldn't possible know that and they fuck it up for every other foreigner in Japan. For years to come they will always remember this moment when they're about to deal with foreigners.

I know a JET that had to go to his school on a Sat for a special event and looked up the weekend train times and caught the train as he should've. Unfortunately, this turned out to be one of the very rare times when the train wasn't running on time. He was 45mins late and tried to explain this to the teachers. When your late because of a train you have the opportunity to receive something from the driver to prove that you were late. Of course you need to go get one for yourself and since the JET didn't know that he didn't get one. They reminded him that the train schedule was different on the weekends and that pissed him off. So he was late from no fault of his own and he was pissed at their condescending tone and probably a little angry cause they didn't believe him. I personally don't think I wouldn't have been as angry as he was. I probably would've used my brain and phoned the school as well but I will say he was probably right to be a little peeved.

A fellow JET commented in that situation that even if he's on time everyday for the rest of his stay here there will be always one Japanese person that will say: "Omg!!!! your actually on time!" That would probably piss anyone off. But life goes on. He couldn't be fired for something like that and he still had the chance to make right on every next occasion. So what does he do the very next school day? He turns up 2 and a half hours late. GG noob, end game and all that shit. His credibility was completely shot and now he has no right to whinge at least in this country. That plus one other little comment he made about a Japanese teacher giving Japanese lessons during a weekend seminar was enough to give him a bad reputation. More ammunition that Japanese people will use when complaining about western people.

So like I was saying 50 tangents ago, in Iizaka we carried this shrine around town for 3hrs.


This bad boy was fucking heavy. And being one of the tallest didn't help. There were times when we had to launch it up in the air and when it came down it would stop halfway through my shoulder. So we walked around and followed a bunch of other heavy things being carted around the city.



This guy here was kind of interesting in the whole tengu get up. If you look closely at his shoes there's only one stick of wood at the bottom so you can imagine how much of a bitch to walk in those it would be. While his shoes were interesting more interesting was the giant penis he had for a nose which is sadly not visible in this picture. Which lead on to a conversation about a penis shrine located near Iizaka. I contemplated the journey to see it but quickly gave up as it would take a couple of hours to do so.


Eventually like all good festivals it took a break outside the local Sunkus and people chilled out, ate food and drank alcohol.

So after carrying the heavy shrine around all day we went back to a little hotel place and had lunch and drank with all the old boys from the rotary club. We also had a couple of people play the shamisen for us.


Turns out the boy was one of my students and the man next to him was his father. So I had a chat with him and all the rotary people were really excited that somehow I had already engaged somewhat with the town. So up to then everything was ordinary and it was only afterwards that the "robo" like experience kicked in.

Turns out that all the old boys on the rotary club are all presidents of various companies around Japan and are basically multi-millionaires. One of the guys invited us back to his hotel to enjoy his onsen. Turns out his hotel is the biggest and nicest one in all of Iizaka. Which is saying something when the town is know as a tourist spot. In Iizaka there are around 70ish small hotels around so to have the biggest and best is quite an achievement.



After having a hot bath and getting naked with a bunch of Japanese men, we went to one of the rotary club members houses to watch the parade on the main street. It was a cool feeling for me when a whole heap of the kids that were marching turned around and started calling out my name. Everyone was turned and said: "Man your fucking famous in this town. WTH!!!"

After that we went to the shrine for the main event. I wish i had some good pictures of that but it was night and i don't have a million dollar camera or anything. Basically people carry the float like things as pictured above and ram into each other with them. It sounds stupid but its kind of exciting. There's a float for each town they duel each other. The floats weigh a shit load and they get launched up in the air a great deal. When they come down the momentum sometimes carries it out towards the audience. I'm surprised people didn't die that night actually. After that we had to take the train home and relax cause were were all tired and in pain. We had to rest up for the festival in fukushima the next day .

The Olympics Fukushima Style

Two months in Japan and all I've said is that I don't do any work. The truth is I've done
a lot of things and to catch up now would entail to much work on my part. So I'll slowly
catch you all up when I have the time. So I'll just mention one REALLY exciting thing I've done
recently.

On the 30th of September Fukushima hosted the annual ( I'm guessing it is atleast) yakitori olympics!!!!!!!.



People from all over Japan come to cook various "meats on sticks" and charge somewhat ridiculous prices for them. Yes it was exciting as it sounds. Atleast the food was pretty good although I believe that it's impossible to screw up "meat on a stick." The best I had was some chicken from Aizu (the same place where the festival I went to that I haven't told you about was). From what I understand the meat they used was from the chickens ass. I had always considered myself a breast man but I can definetely say I'm now an ass man through and through.

And of course no yakitori festival would be complete without various stands dedicated to shitty Japanese beer and sake. One stand in particular caught our attention cause they were the only ones willing to give out free samples. So we stood there and drank their sake and chatted and displayed are foreignness and of all things they gave us all a copy of a DVD they had produced. I haven't watched it yet but I'm sure it has all kinds of interesting tidbits about the brewing of their sake through many generations. I was kinda baffled as to why they would hand out DVD's to a bunch of foreigners they just "stole" their booze but heh whatever.



Quickly we left the sake stand and ran as fast as we could to the center stage to watch the yakitori girls sing. No thats not my clever name for them. I'm not that impressive. That was the name of their actual band. I didn't quite catch the name of all their songs but the one song they were kind enough to bestow upon us twice was called "the yakitori song." My Japanese abilities
weren't quite up to deciphering the complex lyrics but from what my friend said, the song was all about yakitori. Some lines including; "I walk around with my boyfriend eating yakitori" and "When I feel like yakitori, I ring my friends and we go eat yakitori." Score 1 Japan.



Anyway after the event we did the usual. Got drunk, played wii till early in the morning and then called it a day.