Too Cool for School

Today's Japan fact: there are no janitors in the Japanese public school system.

I just helped three other teachers carry a dusty mold-filled refrigerator down four floors of outdoor stairs and across a parking lot to the school's own personal garbage dump in 90-degree heat. Totally worth it though, because now we finally have a functional fridge in the English office again after months of drinking warm Coke Zero with lunch.

My Personal Cheer Squad

Every morning on my commute to work, I play Nintendo DS on the train. Even if I don't particularly feel like playing, I have to. People are counting on me.

It started a few months ago when I was really into Pokémon White Version. I played it every chance I had, which of course included standing on the train platform in a huge crowd while I waited for my morning train. A small group of elementary school boys--decked out in their goofy little sun hats with elastic chinstraps, dress slacks shorts, and their $300+ backpacks--eventually noticed that the foreign gentleman was playing Pokémon.

The kids were pretty shy at first. They'd pretend not to be watching me, and just sneak peeks at the screens when they thought I was too into the game to notice. They weren't subtle though. They'd elbow each other and bicker, trying to get the best view. And although I don't understand that much Japanese, I can easily pick out Pokémon names, even Japanese ones.

One morning, when I was really into the book I was reading, I decided to read on the platform and train instead of playing DS. The kids gathered around as usual, but they were disappointed. One boy worked up the guts to approach me and ask, in Japanese, where my DS was. Another boy knocked him pretty hard on the head for being so forward. I hadn't realized, until that point, that they actually looked forward to watching me play. So, I put my book away and got out my DS; this small action was met with much fanfare.

Now my little schoolboy cheer squad pushes through the crowds every morning to watch me play. They shout out their advice, cringe and curse when I mess up, and gawk at all the English text in my North American localized games. Part of my job as a JET Programme ALT is to promote cultural exchange and break down the barriers that exist here between the Japanese and the outside world. So, part of my job, as I see it, is to play my Nintendo DS every morning to the great delight and amusement of a growing group of little boys.

Lice Check

Japanese kids often confuse the letters "r" and "l" in both speech and writing. Now, I'm not making fun of my students--I would never do that--but I had to giggle just a little when a kid wrote, "My favorite food is fried lice."

The Midnight Creeper

The ¥1 coin is about the size of a penny.

A mukade is a disgustingly large poisonous centipede, and sometime after midnight on Thursday night (early Friday morning) I noticed one crawling on my leg as I lay in bed. The lights were off, and I wasn't quite sure what I was feeling move up my leg, but I put my hand on it and flung it off of me. I heard its heavy body thump against the cardboard-esque sliding door of our closet, and at that point I was pretty sure we'd just had our first mukade encounter. I sprang up and tugged at the string of our overhead lamp, and the light came on just in time for me to see the nasty little creature scurry under a bag of old clothes.

I kept my eye on that bag, and Morgan went for a can of bug spray. Once armed, I sprayed all around the base of the bag, and then picked it up to find nothing underneath. We searched for a while, but didn't find it. Desperate, we laid out an entire roll of tape face up around the edges of our bedroom hoping to trap it if it came back out. We moved onto the couch in the living room to be elevated off the floor. Morgan was up the rest of the night, terrified and unable to sleep.

It wasn't until the next day at work that I noticed I'd been bitten. It must have got me right when I put my hand on it to fling it off. It left two tiny little red dots on my hip. Fortunately, I must have some natural immunity--or maybe I just flung it off before it could really envenom me--because the bite didn't swell or anything. I did feel a little sick, and the area did ache a bit, it's entirely worn off now.

Morgan spent that entire Friday mortified and unable to sleep or really do anything in the house. She went out and amassed an arsenal for our fight against the creature, and when I came home we set out to destroy it. I sprayed a special liquid chalk mukade killer around the perimeter of every room, every window, and every door. I sprayed bug spray down every drain.

I guess we smoked it out, because Morgan spotted the thing crawling out from under the couch I had been lying on. It went right under my pillow. There are a whole lot of creepy stories about mukade out there, and some of them say that squashing them releases a sent that attracts more. I've also read that surviving segments can crawl away and survive. The recommended methods are burning and drowning.

We had a hammer and the bug spray handy, so I pinned the thing to the couch with the hammer and unloaded just about the whole can of spray onto it. It bucked and flailed for a long long time, and I just kept spraying. It lost a few legs, and finally grew still. I picked it up with a mismatched pair of chopsticks and dropped it into a tupperware. It was still moving even when I sealed it inside, so I filled the container with water and sealed it again.

It's dead now, and we can sleep again. I don't think I'll ever forget that thing crawling up my leg in the night though, so I don't think I'll sleep as soundly as before in this apartment ever again.

Yucko, right?