The Wondrous World of Hikimi

I have a confession to make: sometimes, things happen and I neglect to tell you anything about it. For example, I saw a badger at school today. Wait, that’s a terrible example. After all, I’m telling you about it, aren’t I? It was pretty cool, though. I don’t remember ever seeing a badger up close before, which means I never have, or I have a really bad memory. I’m honestly not sure which is the case.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you about the badger is that seeing it reminded me of something else I saw, was amazed by, and then promptly forgot to write about.

About a month ago, I was driving along in the mountains on my way to Hikimi. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you about these mountain roads: crazy. Every Friday I wake up extra early because I have an hour-long commute to work. Of that hour, about 45 minutes is spent navigating treacherous mountain passes; narrow, winding roads filled with blind turns and surrounded by deep gutters, inviting your car’s wheel s to just slip in for a moment.

The tradeoff for enduring great peril is some incredible scenery. In fact, even though these roads will undoubtedly be the cause of my own fiery death, driving through them is made rather enjoyable by the fact that it’s essentially like driving through a huge Bob Ross painting. Happy little trees and all.

On occasion, I’m treated to a view of wildlife even more intriguing than the rare and exotic badger, which brings me back around to what I was trying to tell you in the first place. Man, no wonder I didn’t write about this. Anyway, about a month ago I was driving along in the mountains on my way to Hikimi. As I came around one of several blind turns, I saw a form standing in the middle of the road. At first, I thought some irresponsible parents had abandoned their hairy, ugly child in the mountains to either die or grow up wild and become the subject of campfire stories.

However, as it turned to look at me—its piercing gaze chilling me to the bone—and walked into the forest, I realized that magnificent, hairy, ugly child was actually a monkey. Sweet.

Oh, also on the list of things I forgot to mention, I went to Hamada last weekend to celebrate Thanksgiving with a bunch of other ALTs. I made sweet potato casserole. Check it out!

The Surgeons of Lunchtime

Lunchtime is something of a strange occurrence here in my experience. Every day, I start getting hungry around ten-thirty, but when lunch rolls around (12:40 at most schools) it brings with it no comfort, no solace. Whether or not I'll be full by the end of lunchtime on any given day is anyone's guess, and the question always fills me with apprehension as fourth period draws to a close.

I never considered myself an especially picky eater when I lived in America. There were certainly things I wouldn't eat (mustard-flavored ice cream, for instance), but I didn't feel my range of tastes to be out of the ordinary.

The problem is in Japan, 75% of food is out of the ordinary, at least according to American standards. Don't misunderstand me here; there are plenty of Japanese foods that I love. I'm fascinated by Japan's many varied and delicious interpretations of the humble noodle. School lunch, however, is a completely different animal.

I won't bother with giving you the details; they would serve only to bore or horrify you. Simply let it be known that I am not terribly fond of school lunch. Furthermore, let it also be known that the previous sentence was an immense understatement.

More interesting than lunch itself is the way it's served. In American schools, lunch is prepared and served by school personnel whose primary function is to prepare and serve lunch. In Japan, these people do not exist, having been replaced long ago by robots which were - according to Japan's Ministry of Education - cheaper and more efficient.

Sadly, these robots began to break down all over Japan and were never fixed because the engineers who designed them starved to death while working on a solution. Now lunch distribution is handled by the students themselves.

Every day, trucks pull up to the schools, their holds full to bursting with strange and exotic foodstuffs. These are passed off to the students in gleaming metal buckets and then dished out onto plates for individual consumption.

Methods vary slightly from school to school, but the main points stay the same. Every day at the same time, bad pop music kicks in over the school's speaker system, compelling the students to action. Quickly, they don their aprons and organize themselves according to some mad, indecipherable scheme. Then, their dark work begins.

The only notable difference is at the elementary school, where lunchtime is serious business. Here they wear not aprons, but rather full smocks, along with special caps and masks. As they scurry about, their eyes solemn with the weight of their responsibility, the resemble nothing so much as tiny surgeons.

Ladies and Gentlemen

Well, Halloween has come and gone with little fanfare, and has left me regretting the shortcomings of everyone's favorite Youtube. Finding "Garfield's Halloween Adventure" and "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was no problem, but such Halloween classics as the original "Disney's Halloween Treat" and Bugs Bunny Halloween Special were curiously absent. It's a terrible loss, but the memories of these fine programs will live on.

While we're on the topic of these old animated specials, anyone notice just what a raw deal Charlie Brown got? I mean, honestly; sure, his so-called friends never treated him very well, but it extended beyond just that. Even adults - people who had presumably never met Charlie Brown before in their lives - felt compelled to throw rocks in his trick-or-treat bag. That's just mean.

By the way, following this tangent even further, why does the cast of invisible adults that populates the world of Peanuts seem to completely exclude the children's' parents? And it's not as though we just don't ever hear from them; they don't seem to be present at all. For instance, late Halloween night - long after everyone has gone to sleep - Lucy wakes up and checks to see whether Linus has returned from the pumpkin patch, and finds his bed empty. She then gets dressed and treks out to the pumpkin patch herself to bring him home. Where on earth are their parents when this is happening? No one in their right mind would let their kid go sit in a pumpkin patch alone all Halloween night.

It makes me wonder whether the children of peanuts actually live alone in some kind of frightening society of their own design, free of the constraints placed on them by the adults of this world a la Children of the Corn. Lacking true authority figures, they follow imagined orders issued by disembodied voices, made by the children's' twisted psyches to fill various roles, such as 'teacher' and 'doctor'.

Man, Peanuts was weird.