An Alternate Universe

Amid thunderclouds and ripening corn, I drove to work this morning, sleeplessly and deliriously marveling at this strange new parallel universe I have entered: Wisconsin. Ross and I have been residents of Madison, WI for nearly two weeks now, and every day seems to pack a whopper of a 'sconi punch.

It all began, of course, with a rain-soaked move into our still-not-unpacked condo about two weeks ago. After spending a week packing non-stop in Chicago, we arrived in Madison with our entire families in tow. Never having met before, they quickly met and moved onto unloading our 24-foot truck into our 900-square-foot condo. I think the parents bonded over their worried marveling about how we would ever fit all of our (mostly extraneous) belongings into our petite-yet-perfect new home. They had plenty of time to marvel, thanks to the super-movers we scored on Craig's List--not only did they unload the entire truck in less than two hours, but Trinity, the head mover, carries around a photo of Bon Jovi and himself on tour together. Dude! Our $20-an-hour mover is Bon Jovi's opening band, and he's got the hairdo to prove it!

We spent the better part of the next week moving boxes back and forth around our apartment. With nowhere to actually unpack them, we figure periodically shuffling them to a new room is the next best thing. My personal goal was to be totally moved in by the time of start of work, but that was foiled by, well, us. My other personal goal was to be well rested for the start of work, but that was foiled by, well, tornadoes. Yep, you heard, me: tornadoes. Or rather, the threat of tornadoes.

The night before I was due to go to work for the first time, just as I'm brushing my teeth before bed, a weird siren sounds. "What is that?" I asked Ross. My first thought was police sirens or a bomb threat, but Ross was more in touch with his own Midwestern roots than I was: "Uh, Gibbs, that's a tornado siren." The last time I heard one of those, I was four feet tall livin' in the burbs and there was still a farm behind our apartment. What do I do, stop, drop and roll? Thank god for Ross: "Grab a radio, and let's get down to the basement, quick!" In our haste to save our own lives from the approaching tornado, we left the cats to fend for themselves upstairs and rushed to the...EMPTY basement. No one else in the apartment building budged. The radios barely mentioned the tornado warning. We sat foolishly in the basement for about ten minutes, then came to our senses and realized it was probably more important to be cool about these things than to actually save our lives. We went to bed, only to be awakened at 4 in the morning (the night before I start my new job, mind you!) by ninety minutes of tornado sirens! I thought the world was surely ending, but I kept my cool this time. I sauntered into the hall a few times: no stirrings. I stood at the window to check out our imminent doom: Nothing but still catalpa leaves and a slightly green sky. Not a single weather announcement on the radio? What is Madison's deal? Doesn't anyone care that they could be smashed to bits by some apocalyptic approaching twister? Ross finally cleared his foggy thoughts enough to call the police: Should we be worried? "Oh, no, the siren's broken. Can't quite get it to turn off. When it finally does turn off, though, could you let us know? Just dial 9-1-1 and ask for Nate." A few hours later, I learned that only naive foreigners react to the sirens; the rest of Madison woke up to the sideways rain and gale-force windstorm that Ross and I soundly slept through.

The tornado sirens are just the tip of the Wisconsin iceberg! I work with a brigade of blonde German-Americans, all married, all with children, and all planning their next several pregnancies thanks to Waunakee's generous benefits and short-term disability insurance. Everyone is perfectly nice, and there's even a faculty kickball league, but I sense a bit of the alterior Minnesota nice behind the endless smiles and "you betchas." Maybe I'm a jaded urbanite, but can anyone really smile this much?! I take that back: in Wisconsin, people really do smile that much. I mean, why the hell not? At the grocery store, there are literally FOUR AISLES of cheese, all from Wisconsin and all dirt cheap. At the Saturday morning farmer's market, you can buy a month's supply of bratwurst for $3! You can get buffalo meat, ostrich, venison, and pork chops all for less than a beer in Chicago! And did I mention the ten types of eggplant and endless varieties of sweet corn? And that four ears of sweet corn only cost $1? Or that Wisconsin has fabulous microbrews that are cheaper than the already-cheap gourmet cheeses? We're beginning to understand the extra girth on most Wisconsin waists.

Alas, our beloved local farmer's market was closed this past weekend by the annual Nazi march on the capital. When we arrived at 11:30, the farmers (who are mostly Hmong, by the way...go figure!) were scrambling to pack up their tents. Why was the market closing early? "The Nazis are coming. The police are worried for our safety." So worried, in fact, that the riot-gear-free police force stood on corners on their cell phones and talking with market patrons.

Fortunately, our neighborhood is a haven from the likes of the anachronistic Nazis. We live in the hippiest neighborhood of hippy Madison. Every other building is a co-op, a social justice center, an actupuncturist, or a plain old head shop. At our neighborhood festival this weekend, aging white deadheads rocked out to the soulful accordian tones of Buckwheat Zydeco and the Chicago Afrobeat Project...not the music I'd expect from hippies, but then again, the urban hipster seems to be creeping in. Are we the front wave of the "urbanization" of Madison?! The newspaper does run a story every week about the condo blemish upon Madison's soul, and we do live in a condo...uh-oh. While we refuse to stop washing our hair and wearing socks with our Tevas, we will try to assimilate a little. We shop at the Willy St Co-Op, and we may even call the local pet psychic to find out why our cats are crazy. Yep, we've got a local pet psychic.

I love Madison.

Tuna Town and Other Unexpected Adventures

On my last day in Tokyo, I finally found the Japan of my imaginings. In the back streets of Old Tokyo near the Sendagi Metro shop, there is a Japan that is devoid of neon signs and brash, beehive-haired girls and punk-rock boys. This Japan comprises winding cobblestone streets, temples and bathhouses on every block, and shop purveyors who offer you tea and green tea cookies if you so much as glance their way. It is to this Tokyo that I lost myself on my last day, during a much-needed break after a morning of lectures and presentations. It's difficult to get alone time amid a group of 200 teachers, but I managed it on Wednesday when I snuck away for the 30-minute metro ride to Sendagi. My first stop was a small Shinto shrine, perched on a rock island in the middle of a koi pond also home to turtles. A little Japanese boy was running back and forth on the red bridge screaming, "Hi! Hi!" (not a greeting, but Japanese for "Yes!") while trying to nail the turtle in the head with his slingshot. His obaasan was sound asleep on a nearby bench, oblivious to the havoc her grandson was wreaking on the otherwise peaceful garden. From here I got lost in the back streets of old Tokyo. The sounds of cars disappeared and were replaced by twittering birds; skyscrapers were replaced by rice-paper sliding doors and bonsai trees lining pathways.

I'd encountered this side of Japan before: at the green tea noodle shop in Kamakura, where we sat under a bamboo roof near a little brook and slurped green tea soba noodles; at the ryokan in Shimokita, a typical Japanese inn and hot springs resort, where we slept on futons on the tatami-matted floor; and in Mutsu, my group's host city, where we spent ten days. It was an appropriate way to spend my last day in Tokyo...and Japan. All of these (and especially Mutsu) are like anti-Tokyos: quiet, decidedly un-hip, and--in the case of Mutsu--a bit of a rural backwater in Japan. Tokyo is bold, bright, and cosmpolitan...fun to explore, but not a place I could love. These other parts of Japan--the quiet and quirky secret corners of Japan--are enthralling.

Mutsu, in particular, was a surprising place to fall in love with. It is, after all, a tiny city (pop. 67,000) in the remote Shimokita Peninsula, a three-hour drive from the nearest airport and university. In Shimokita, there are abundant cedar trees and wildlife (including snow monkeys!) and little else. As 20 gaijin descending on this unsuspecting town, we were quite a spectacle. Our first day in town, we made the local newspaper; from that point on, every time we went out we ran into someone who had either seen us in the newspaper, met us at a school, or knew someone who knew someone who met us at a school. We were celebrities! Mike-san, a fortysomething English teacher from New Mexico and member of the Muskogee Indian tribe, was the best at working our celebrity status. Mike made fast friends everywhere, but especially in important places...Mutsu's bars. Mike befriended Steve, a purveyor who built a bar in his living room, replete with beach umbrellas and Coleman camping chairs. If you went into Steve's with Mike, you were elevated to demagogue status, which includes free food and rounds of drinks bought by other patrons. On our last day in Mutsu, Steve even got up early to bid Mike farewell with a bag of Asahi beer "for the road."

Mike was also beloved by Kumi, an ancient pipsqueak of a woman with a gravelly, bar-tuned voice. Kumi ran a snack bar, Mutsu code for hostess establishment. Aside from Steve's place, just about every watering hole in Mutsu is a snack bar. What else are you going to do when the winters are long and your only visitors are little pink-butted monkeys?! The thing about snack bars is that, if you can find one that doesn't employ endentured Southeast Asian child abductees (these I firmly boycotted, even when scoffed at by some men in our group for being "uptight"), they can be quite fun. Every snack is also a karaoke bar, and instead of charging you per drink, they charge you a $20/hour drinking, singing and sitting fee. A good deal! At Kumi's, the "hostesses" are sixty-something Japanese women who spend most of the evening crooning their favorite Japanese ballads. After they are completely drunk, they may come to your table and try licking the necks of your male companions. Fortunately, they are easily shooed away, just in time for our group rendition of "Sweet Child of Mine." Every time we tried to sing at Kumi's, however, she swiftly confiscated the microphone and handed it back to one of her Japanese ladies. With some coaxing, I did convince Kumi to sing a duet with me: "There's Only One Flower in the World," by SMAP, the Japanese Backstreet Boys. She sang the words, I hummed "Na Na Na watashi waaaa...."

Our days in Mutsu were a little more upstanding. During our school visits, we got to teach English classes, eat lunch with students, and converse with teachers. The elementary school was mind-blowing: the school's brass band was better than any high school brass band I have ever seen! Also, after lunch, the students clean the school. No janitors employed by Mutsu Public Schools. Rather, students scrub the toilets, polish the floors, and sweep every last particle out of the building. The high school (which also requires its students to clean) was a powerhouse, what you imagine when you think of what a Japanese school is like. The middle school, however, was a regular old middle school: paper balls flying, notes passing, kids flipping under their desks and talking back to their teachers. In the back of one class, I even witnessed a wrestling match that was completely ignored by the teacher! I actually really liked the middle school...felt like home!

The highlight of our trip to Mutsu was certainly the home stay. I stayed with Ichiro and Natsuya Inoshita, a young couple with a two-year-old daughter, Manaka. Ichiro is a civil engineer working on the nuclear power plant; Natsuya is a former elementary-school teacher who is now a stay-at-home mom. Most host families took their American guests on a whirlwind sightseeing tour of Shimokita. Not mine. The Inoshitas instead hosted a block party barbeque in my honor. So on Saturday, from 2pm until the wee hours, I sat in the yard with about thirty other Japanese families who spoke varying degrees of English. They prepared a feast for me of fresh grilled scallops, octopus salad, onigiri rice balls, and copious amounts of biru (the most important word in Japanese: beer). At the beginning of the barbecue, it was a little awkward: the adults struggled to find English words while the fifty-some children whisked me around to show me their favorite games and tricks. Eventually, after enough biru, the parents came out of their shells, particularly the moms. Every mom in Japan is a house wife, and this is as much of a state-of-mind as it is a description of how they spend their days. The wives had trouble at first finiding conversational common ground: I'm not married, I don't have children, I work full-time. And then, they discovered I had a boyfriend. Before you knew it, they were my new best friends, squealing about when we were getting married, what kind of dress I would wear, where would we honeymoon, how many children would we have, what was I going to name those children, and if I could name my children Japanese names, which names would I pick. It was like being at a middle school slumber party! Hiroko, the block lush, was my willing translator. Draped over her lawn chair, drink in hand, she sighed deeply after about twenty minutes of this: "Housewife talk. They are so silly. All they want is babies and more babies. I don't even like children." Hiroko, by the way, is the mother to Risa, the most adorable, chubbalicious two-year-old I have ever met. Fortunately, Hiroko's rueful state was interrupted by shouts of, "Hi! Hanabi!" Or, "Yes! Fireworks!" We ended our evening with sparklers and bottle rockets, which the parents passed out and then sat back and enjoyed while their children blew up everything in sight.

Perhaps the best thing about Japan, whether it be in the winding streets of Old Tokyo, in Mutsu's backwaters, or in the swankest of hotel bars, is the food. I cannot get enough fish and seafood. At one point, I was served a giant bowl of maguro (or tuna) sashimi. Half a pound of raw tun atop a bowl of rice. Heaven. There were people in our group who never ate anywhere but McDonald's. Man, they missed out on the very reason I came to Japan...tuna and scallops and shrimp and yellowtail and salmon and mackarel and fish roe and snapper and trout and...there's no going back now. I need to find a fresh fish market to indulge my addiction. Fortunate for me, my love of all things fish was made public, and on the second day of my home stay, Ichiro and Natsuya took me to "Tuna Town," or Oma, the northernmost point on Honshu. We posed in front of the statues of giant tunas, we stared across the Tsugaru Strait at the mountains of Hokkaido, and we ate more tuna than I ever thought was humanly possible. The Inoshitas kept asking, "You like? Maguro is good?" Amid my tuna-stuffed mouth, all I could answer was, "Oishi," or yummy. Manaka, their two-year-old laughed, and threw pieces of tuna right at me.

Muted Tokyo

Ohio gozaimasu!

Today I found a team to root for that beats both the White Sox and the Cubs...the Yoimuri Giants (aka the Tokyo Giants). In the sweltering humidity of the Tokyo Dome, fifteen other American teachers and I nibbled on bento snacks, sucked down icy cold Kirin beers, and cheered on the Giants to a landslide victory over the Orix Buffalos. After losing the previous two games in the series against the Buffalos, the Giants rallied last night, scoring not one but six out-of-the-park homeruns! Amid a rowdy crowd of drunk salary men and screaming girls decked out in designer threads, I learned all the latest cheers, including "da da da da Toyoda" and "Nioka, Nioka!" For the first three innings, I was confused...by the brass band, the beer girls in flourescent mini-skirts carrying kegs on their backs, and the rousing renditions of Nirvana and Joan Jett in the background. I could've sworn I was at a regular baseball game! I also could've sworn that the Japanese fans were cheering "Let's go team!" I was so sure that I even started cheering along with them (much to my Japanese neighbor's amusement). But then I remembered that d

espite all appearances otherwise, I was in the Tokyo Dome and not at an American stadium; the cheer was not, "Let's go team," but an elaborate rhythm and rhyme chant using different players' names. For effect, every shout of the name was accented by the thumping of little plastic Giants souvenir bats. Once I caught on, I became the biggest Giants groupie in the stadium (albeit underdressed in my jeans and t-shirt...didn't think to wear a suit to the stadium). Go Nioka!

Baseball, like everything else here, has been a whirlwind. I am here in Japan with 198 other American teachers on a three-week crash course in all things Japanese. At our orientation in San Francisco, Kyoko-san (the head of the Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund program) reminded us, "This is not a paid vacation. You are professionals, and this is a professional learning opportunity." Lest we forget her solemn reminder, she has crammed our days full of lectures and official shmoozing opportunities and daily speeches about our newfound ambassadorial roles. Most of this is fascinating! For instance, today two members of the Diet (Japanese Parliament) came to explain how government works in Japan. A benign informational lecture quickly devolved (or perhaps evolved) into a a heated debate on state entitlement, the need to reform the Japanese pension system, the travesty of Japanese students dropping to sixth in the world in math and science, and whose party is letting the people down more. The two speakers, Yuji Tsushima and Wakako Hironaka, are in opposite parties (conveniently both with liberal in the name), and both are brilliant, former Fulbright scholars in the United States. Hironaka-san is also one of only a handful of women in elected office in Japan! Although I didn't understand all the nuances of the political debate (accents can be hard to decipher), I did get this: despite obviously fierce disagreement, they were having fun, laughing and ribbing one another the whole time that they were arguing over policy. A refreshing break from the fierce partisanship of our own elected officials.

Since arriving in San Francisco on Sunday for our orientation en route to Japan, the red carpet has indeed been extended to us. From four-star hotels to elaborate sushi feasts to visits by important policy makers and intellectuals, we are being treated as very few teachers usually are. Over and over, we are told how revered teachers are in Japan; after the extravaganza Kyoko-san has planned for us, I believe it! For our first full day in Tokyo, we were treated to our own private kabuki theatre performance, complete with watching the dancer apply her geisha-like make-up. In another lecture from the Ministry of Education, we were surprised to learn that education in Japan has "serious problems"! Those problems, however, are not that students can't read or drop out rates are high. Rather, the "serious problem" is that only 50% of middle school students say they like math or like studying! According to the Ministry of Education, this is obvious evidence of the rapid decline of Japanese schools. Perhaps it`s also why over 70% of Japanese parents say they are dissastified with their children by the time they reach middle school (in the States, it's only 15% of parents who say this). The Minister of Education told us that, to him, the most worrying social problem facing Japanese children is not their math scores or dislike of homework but the fact that they are not really loved by their parents. And just like in the States, where we know of the strong connection between home life and academic performance, Japan is stuck. How do you make policy to improve someone's family life?

So for most of each day, we participate in a crash course on all things Japanese and here the variety of solutions being attempted in Japan to heady problems like parents not loving their children enough. But we are in Japan, and most of us are itching to get out of a lecture hall and into the city. So when we can, we've been sneaking in our own frenzied tour of Tokyo. Our time in Tokyo got off to a rocking start on Tuesday when Naoki, a young Japanese college student in a Rolling Stones t-shirt, tried to show us the town. JFMF organizes students and Fulbright alumni to take all jet-lagged 200 of us out to dinner our first night. My group was welcomed by the smiling pseudo-punk rocker Naoki. Very friendly, but he couldn't find his way out of the hotel. So instead of heading out for okinomiyake (apparently a kind of Japanese pancake), we instead stumbled across a harvest festival at the local hybrid Buddhist/Shinto shrine. There was acrobatic drumming high above the crowd and about 100 men and women in kimonos and yukatas dancing in Tai Chi-like movements. All around the drumming and dancing were school
kids and food vendors, giggling and chowing and heading into the shrine to wake up the gods by ringing the temple bell and then making a wish. We prayed, we gawked, we ate some takoyaki (octopus balls), and then we lead Naoki to dinner. We wound up at an udon restaurant where, after flying for twelve hours and not necessarily thinking to put on clean socks, we had to take off our shoes to sit on tatami mats. Yikes! Over the course of dinner, we taught a chopstick novice how to eat, we celebrated a 65th birthday, and we grilled Naoki on his studies next year at Hope College in Michigan. He was adorable and terrified of the five teachers he had been assigned, but by the end of dinner, we were fast friends.

Jet lag took over Tuesday night, and after exhaustedly ironing my "professional attire" for the next day's lectures, I crashed hard, only to wake up at the crack of dawn. I went for a stroll around the Akasaka neighborhood where we are staying. At 5:30 in the morning, what had occurred to me the night before finally found words: Tokyo is like a city on mute. Cars have quiet engines, silent horns; people shuffle silently around the city in stylish clothes; even the crowded subway is silent (save for loud, tall, obnoxious Americans). Even people's speaking voices are different. I'm falling in love with the gentle cadences and smiles of our uber-intelligent hosts. I'd always scoffed at the seemingly demure nature of Japanese women, but something about the quiet and melodious tone of voice calms and entices me.

In the silence of early morning Tokyo, I strolled for an hour through gardens and convenience stores. I found the best vanilla yogurt I've ever had; I found a bamboo forest in the middle of Tokyo; I even found a young man worshipping at temple by whispering into his cell phone. But then I got hungry. Not yet ready to eat sushi for breakfast, I instead headed back for breakfast, the first of our daily feasts. Kyoko-san is meticulous not only about mingling Japanese delicacies with American culinary disasters but also about forcing us to mingle. One morning we were randomly assigned to numbered tables, another day we were grouped by state, another by grade, tomorrow by subject area. She is making sure that we at least get to mingle briefly with the motley crew of 198 other teachers. The morning socializing also reinforces just how big a group 199 teachers is. Every morning I am meeting someone I have not seen before!

Within this group of new faces, a group of younger women has gravitated to one other, and we've become a good exploration crew. The 100 Yen store one day, baseball game the next...we've even hunted out night life. That was perhaps the funniest moment of all. Ten of us, twenty- and thirty-something female teachers, plus one middle-aged male kindergarten teacher from Vermont, went out last night. The ladies wanted to find a hip sake bar and sing some karaoke, Jeff wanted to...look cool walking around with ten young women. Unfortunately, all the cool places, according to guidebooks and the hotel concierge, are in one of three neighborhoods—Ikebakura, Kabuki-cho, or Rappongi. We were expressly told to stay away from these neighborhoods. We were told they are not safe for tourists or Japanese, but David Satterwhaite, a US embassy man, also laughed that we'd probably go there anyways. But we're good guests of the Japanese government, and so the eleven of us spent 90 minutes wandering the Shinjuku neighborhood looking for a bar, any bar. And 90 mintues of aimless wandering wound us up at, where else, Kabuki-cho. At a restaurant—a closing restaurant—not a bar. Where, in the empty fourth floor of the restaurant, we tried to order glasses of Wandering Poet and instead wound up with a $70 magnum-sized bottle of sake. It was last call when we ordered; it took us so long to finish that two-foot tall bottle of sake that the waitress fell asleep on the dish washer. The giggles overtook us (helped on by excessive amounts of sake, no doubt) and we wandered back through the dangerous streets of Kabuki-cho to the metro. Our verdict: Kabuki-cho is nothing more than a PG-rated red light district. The government doesn't want us to go there because then we'll see that—gasp!—Japan isn't perfect.

That's the adventure so far. Tomorrow morning it's the fish market, some group sightseeing, and getting lost in Old Tokyo. I am dying for temples and gardens, but that will have to wait for our one free day. We got to experience one temple today, but our guide Keiko-san warned us that it is the most commercial of Tokyo's temples. Even so, the giant Boddhisatvas and incense burning and rhythmic gong left me thirsting for the reverence and silence of temples and gardens. That is my pilgrimage for Saturday, our last day in Tokyo before heading to the Northern hinterlands of the Shimokita peninsula.