I've been living in rural Japan for around a month now, and here are 3 things they don't prepare you for at your induction as a teaching in Japan.
3. BUGS THE SIZE OF YOUR FACE!
Oooh watch out for the mosquitoes they said, you might get bitten a couple of times in the night. No one mentioned the wasps that are both the size of, and about as friendly as, a hand-grenade!
JUST LOOK AT THE BASTARD! I know I'm supposed to be a profession at all times, but if that thing ever flies into my classroom I am grabbing the nearest child and sacrificing it to the wasp daemon that has just flown in!
BUT...Even worse are the centipedes!
They crawl along some some over-limbed ninjas and just exist to fuck you up! They're huge, poisonous, and that whole "they're more scared of you than you are of it" does not apply to these creepy millipede envying twatbags!!!
2. Old people and Children.
Living in the countryside I have realised that all human beings in the demographic 18-60 have left the countryside. They have all realised that there is literally nothing here, and have thus moved away for a better chance at sex, coffee, and or conversation.
Thus the town is full of children and old people, who, as it happens, are the two groups of people most likely to engage you in conversations about weird shite when you're walking home. I don't know how they know, but they all just seem to have this acute awareness that I want to talk about Winston Churchill with a complete stranger! I have since learnt the Japanese phrase for, I'm really sorry, this conversations is really riveting but I need to remove my fingernails with some tweezers.
The young have no choice and are sent here by their parents because they like the schools here (mostly down to the new English teacher being devilishly handsome and shit hot at learning them kids some english). The elderly seem to return here like some kind of wrinkly crustacean. They've lived there lives, spawned, and now they are just clock watching until a centipede comes and shuffles them off their mortal coils.
1. Not a pub in sight!
Not even an Irish bar!!! And even in fucking Myanmar, which had been a closed country until fairly recently, me and the girlfriend managed to stumble across some heinously stereotypically named bar and have a decent Guinness. This town has had eternity to open a bar and not one bugger has thought it profitable to open a bar for children and the elderly! The thoughtless gobshite! Thus my evening entertainment options are fairly slim.
To illustrate this If you go on trip advisor and search Yanai, the area I'm in, the number 1 tourist attraction is...a bridge. Not a nice pretty Bridge of Sighs type bridge, or even a tradition wooden red bridge, no, a normal, steel, vehicle bridge. The number one thing to do or see, is a bridge. And I've been to see it, it's a nice bridge, but, I've peaked too soon and according to trip advisor everything I do from now on will be less fun than a bridge. I guess I'll go back to sitting in my box apartment, rethinking life choices and eating Marmite from the jar because the bread here tastes like sugar paper!
