1. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, 1977 (More details here & here)
2. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, 1999 (More details here, here & here)
3. Roman Holiday, 1953 (More details here)
4. You Only Live Twice, 1967 (More details here)
5. Lost In Translation, 2003 (More details here)
6. Kill Bill: Volume I, 2004 (More details here)
7. Babel, 2006 (More details here)
8. Godzilla, 1954 (More details here)
9. Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, 1979 (More details here)
The potential of BA going on strike over the festive period wasn’t the end of my troubles as a day after it was ruled to be illegal there was the heavy snow in Europe which really buggered up the Eurostar schedules. Last Christmas I stopped off in Paris for a day before taking the Eurostar home so this year I thought I’d do similar and go to Brussels and Bruges in Belgium for a day trip en-route to England.
Having set my heart on this I then found out that I had to fly into Heathrow first and then go on to Brussels that evening (22nd December) with a day return trip to Bruges planned the following day before taking the Eurostar to London and another train, already booked cheaply on-line, from there to Market Harborough where my parents live.
Eurostar was out of action completely between December 19th to the 21st and with official announcements not being made until a few hours before I left my flat in Tokyo I had to make a quick decision. I had been umming and ahhing over the decision all day and night but finally I decided to not take the risk as I couldn’t afford (the time) to get the Eurostar back from Brussels any later than I had planned as my booking was in the evening of the 23rd and I didn’t want to spend a night in the station. Consequently I got back home in the evening on the 22nd after a very very long day. However, this still wasn’t to be the end of my troubles for this Christmas break from Japan!
It was late at night in Japan on Monday 14th when I heard the news that British Airways (BA) cabin crew were planning to go on strike at, for what me and many of my colleagues, was the worst possible time. Our last day at work was Monday the 21st meaning that the majority of those going back to the UK were planning to fly on the Tuesday.
I went to my travel agents on the 15th but they didn’t even know about it until I got there and indeed the whole story never ever made it into the Japanese media despite the fact that it would affect many Japanese planning to go to the UK over the New Year period when the strike would still have been going on.
From the breaking of the news it was three days of sitting, waiting, wondering, contemplating and hoping before a judge over-ruled this ridiculous decision that would have crippled millions of people in terms of their festive travel plans.
At times I was clinging on to the hope that if the strike did begin then it would start at 9am UK time meaning i would have been in the air by then. Even if it had have began at midnight UK time I might have been OK as my flight a couple of hours later would have been the first to head back to London and one would have thought that the crew themselves would want to be back in England rather than Japan.
On top of that long haul flights are usually the priority in these situations but nevertheless with all this in mind it doesn’t make the actions of the Union and the crew to strike for so long at such a critical time any easier to take.
Indeed, we are still just about in a recession and like many companies BA also has to make changes which help it operate better in more-financially restrictive times. Furthermore the flight attendants are already on double what Virgin crew get but to be honest I can’t blame them too much as its really the Unions who push them into such decisions.
Anyway, thankfully the high court judge intervened and I had an enjoyable flight home in the company of some chatty girls next to me as well as having a few workmates dotted around the plane which was a far cry from the usual sit-in-silence affairs. However, this wasn’t to be the end of my troubles in getting home!
Given that they don’t celebrate it or really care about it I decided to almost bypass any Christmas chat with adult students this year. Instead, I did a Christmas song with many students (gap-fill or lyrical jigsaw listening exercises) and these were all recycled from last years Christmas lessons (John Lennon & Yoko Ono and Band Aid) with the addition of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ for one student who had mentioned the week before that she liked to sing it in karaoke.
A lot more effort was put into my kids lessons though I did limit my appearances as Father Christmas this year to just a couple of lessons. A few new flashcards were added to the ones that have been serving me well the last couple of years. Magnetic fishing for the flashcard words, throwing a plastic Santa in to a box to teach prepositions of place, stick the eyes and nose on the snowman (whilst blindfolded), slap, guess the missing card and preposition drawing were a few of the games that I used with all kids and a few others were used for others depending on their level. The chocolate pooping reindeer, Christmas music, Santa hats and Christmas party snack-bags all added to the lessons being a success even if I do say so myself!
Shinjuku played host to my company’s Christmas party last Saturday night which was attended by around 100 students from about five schools. A couple of jumbo sized gin and tonic’s beforehand maybe wasn’t the best preparation as I was buzzing on arrival and to be honest most of the party passed me by without much notice from there on.
I didn’t get to eat too much food, didn’t really do much for the two games (one was for students to guess the mystery Santa’s on a piece of paper and I didn’t even notice the game of pin the beard on Santa or near equivalent) and had to go on stage at short notice to perform the role of emergency Father Christmas giving out a sack of presents to the winning team.
After the party many of us went to find a new bar but the party of teachers, receptionists and teachers was a bit too big for one place so inevitably we split up into two smaller groups. I wasn’t planning to stay out all night but ended up passing the point of no return in terms of missing my last train home.
Shortly after that a fair few people started to leave which got me worried that I was gonna be left alone to twiddle my thumbs for a few hours before the first train. As it was, four others stayed (or had to stay!) and we went to karaoke purely to kill time for a couple of hours. Having not consumed so much in the hours before I then was somehow rejuvenated and managed to drink a fair few more beers. Even more incredibly was the fact that I was feeling almost fine on the Sunday.
It took me a fair while to get round to making it but at the end of November I finally finished my Star Wars Tunisia filming locations video and got it up on YouTube for the world to see! It’s unlikely to set the world alight but I am quite proud of it.
If you can’t watch it above then click here
Click here to see the Tokyo Fox YouTube channel
At the end of September I not only left Tokiwadai school but I also departed from Narimasu school having been there since January 2006. I didn’t really want to leave but changes in the school districts meant I had no choice even though I lived quite close. However, two months on and I am now back there albeit only for a couple of hours on Wednesday evenings as part of a split-shift with another nearby school. To be honest, its a pain in the ar*e really as I am now working the maximum hours while also having to travel between two schools.
Having said that, my first day back in Narimasu was fortunate as I, along with my girlfriend, had arranged to meet up with my former evening class for the usual mix of drinks and food which can be seen in the first photo below. The next photo is from my last lesson with Yoshihiko and Kenta (where we played Star Wars Top Trumps as part of a lesson on comparatives and superlatives) and the one under that is from the end of May when Mami left our group.
As part of the BBC4 Japan season earlier this year there were a series of documentary’s on the land of the rising sun. I finally got round to watching the last of these the other day, Great Railway Journeys: Tokyo to Kagoshima, and it was probably the least informative of the lot for me but still interesting and better than most of what Discovery Channel come up with on Japan.
The first one I saw many months ago was Fish! A Japanese Obsession nation which was much better than the title may suggest and was a load of fish related scenes which included the fishing restaurant where my girlfriend and I went a few years ago when I caught the most expensive fish by mistake!
The programme involved the presenter investigating the Japanese’ love of fish but also questioning their need to eat so much with particular reference to whale which is forever causing controversy around the world. They don’t have the emotional attachment to it which other countries have but instead seem intent to keep on hunting these huge specimens which may become extinct. In the western world people want to be as far removed from the idea that what they are eating was once alive but not so in Japan where they don’t see any conflict between the suffering of fish and eating it.
Next up, was perhaps my favourite and that was Japan: A Story Of Love And Hate which was about a part time postal worker called Naoki (aged 56) who had it all during the bubble era but then lost it all in the early 1990’s.
Now thrice-divorced and dating a girl nearly half his age he has long been an outsider in a country where the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. It was a pretty grim tale at times and showed them living in their shoebox room with no windows where he was the house-husband with only a part time job while his girlfriend had three jobs to support them both. It also focused on meeting the other half’s family which he didn’t want to do initially before finally coming round to the idea of it in order to save the relationship.
The other programme was on a topic I had never even heard of. In Search Of Wabi-Sabi With Marcel Theroux was rated far more highly by my mate Richard who went wabi sabi mad using the video in many of his lessons over a couple of weeks including a class which I had to observe as part of my TESOL course.
Wabi-sabi is very difficult, if not impossible, to define but is basically the unique Japanese way of thinking or “aesthetic centred on the acceptance of transience” with regard to asymmetry, asperity, simplicity, modesty, intimacy, and the suggestion of natural processes. Still none the wiser?! No, neither am I really but the documentary was very enjoyable and offered something different which I certainly haven’t heard talked about at all.
I think I was first really aware of Michael Jackson around the time of the release of ‘Bad‘ in 1987 and it was actually the family hairdresser who gave us copies of that album as well as Thriller and Off The Wall with the former being most impressive to me.
However, by the time Dangerous was realeased in the early 90’s I had lost interest in his music and then all the trouble started following him around. Of course there were a few songs of his which I really enjoyed after that time and then when he died I, like many many others, jumped back on the Jackson bandwagon and began to appreciate him for the dancing and music without any of the other stuff getting in the way.
For Halloween I used ‘Thriller‘ in my lessons with the adults which went down well and sensing the opportunity I decided to capitalise on the Japanese love for MJ by doing the new song ‘This is it‘ in a few lessons, particularly with those students who mentioned that they had seen the film. The song is much slower and easier to understand than ‘Thriller‘ and the words which I erased for the students to fill in all rhymed and/or had the same phonemic sounds which is something I learned on my TESOL course in the first half of this year.
I hadn’t planned to see the movie as I was fairly happy to just see the minute clip which aired in the days following his death. However, when a student strongly recommended it to me I decided to watch it later that night online as much as for research as anything as I wanted to be able to discuss the film with the students.
I had low expectations to be honest but was pleasantly surprised at how interesting it was. I would even go as far as saying it was more interesting than normal live shows (which I’m not really a fan of anyway unless I was actually there) as you get to see all the detail that goes into the rehearsals and the directions which MJ gave his team.
The amount of work that goes into such a show, including all the extra bits filmed for the concert big screen behind him, is quite incredible and it would have been interesting to see how MJ would have fared if he had been alive to go through the planned 50 date show. However, I can’t help feeling that the real true story of the filming of the tour lies in the hours and hours of footage not used.
Tokyo Fox Rating 7/10
Before I came to Japan all those years ago I was well aware that certain washed-up actors, singers and so on from back home were big in Japan. However, I wasn’t aware that the same applied to your typical average guy teaching English here. Within a few weeks of being in the staff room in my first job here I had heard the words ‘Loser back home’ (LBH) a few times which I found very funny and it struck a chord with me.
Of course I never really truly believed that any of the guys I saw with beautiful Japanese girls were like the Charisma Man character (a Canadian burger flipping loser back home who was transformed into a muscle-bound hunk, attractive to Japanese women and admired by Japanese men) but there’s certainly an element of truth to it all and I admit that myself.
Well over a year ago my mate Ethan and I came up with the idea of making our own LBH t-shirts and subsequently bought the iron-on printing paper with which to make said item. The idea never got put into practice though until Ethan left Japan recently and gave me the necessary stuff to complete the design. I finally got round to finishing the job the other Sunday and here are the results. You might have to look closely to see the back of the t-shirt. No offence is intended!
Tokyo Fox (東京狐) 