Welcome to my first post on Jim Jam’s journal! I was going to start off telling you all about my strange but wonderful trip to Hawaii. But I’ve decided to go with something more in the present for the time being. Keep an eye out for a write up of my Hawaii trip, though coming soon…!
I think I may have been suffering from the post-holiday blues of late. Recently, after the crap cherry blossoms and crap weather, everything seems to look comparatively pale and uninteresting. The school year in Japan has just started (it starts in April here). So everyone has to contend with new teachers…and old ones you’d grown to like disappearing off the face of the earth. We had opening ceremonies…the most rigid funeral-esque, mind-numbing thing I’ve ever experienced. Sometimes the incredibly regimented, almost military approach to everything in Japan can get you down. The endless bowing, stiff-necked speeches and ‘yoroshiku’s’ can sometimes make me long for office piss-taking and ‘in jokes’ like you get back home. How I miss those days when five gin and coke’s down the Romilly pub was what you’d get for lunch, and strange locations and zany Welshies and arty-farty’s and more eccentrics than you could shake a stick at.
Pretending to learn new teachers’ names (which you’ll instantly forget) is the name of the game these days. I sit next to a really stony-faced guy whose name I don’t know. I miss Mr. Kimura! At least he had a personality. And he giggled. I like men who giggle. It’s cute. Also, I’ve decided that one of my JTE’s (Japanese English teachers) has a Sociopathic personality disorder. He is quite positively the vilest, most anti-social, uninspiring man I’ve ever met. Today after speaking with him I was physically shaking with rage. But being in Japan, you have to do as the Japanese do…so I wasn’t able to tell him ‘Oi...wanker…why don’t you just stick the lesson plan where the sun don’t shine...al’rite?!’.
Whilst I am on a rant, I will tell you something else…I hate flag patrol. Basically Flag patrol teachers take turns to stand in the pissing down rain waiting for the green man (or walk sign) and ‘cross’ HIGH SCHOOL students across the road using a yellow flag, and in the process attempt to make me feel guilty because I am on my way to school at 8.15am and they are already working. I understand the need for flag patrol for elementary kids, but high school kids? C’mon… Anyway Hirata is hardly a buzzing metropolis; you’d have more chance of getting run over by a milk float.
A week or two ago, I was subjected to one of the most loathsome things ever…The Election Van. A few times a year (it seems) a group of 40-60 year olds (with nothing better to do) compete against each other to sit on some obscure local authority committee in the arse end of nowhere. For weeks on end, the unsuspecting public is bombarded posters of their ugly mugs and shrill soundtracks of their voices being played at 1.5 million decibels by some decrepit coffin-dodger wearing white gloves. Sometimes they start at 7am. 7am!!! If that happened in the S.Wales valleys, first of all that would be noise pollution – an offense. Secondly, anyone stupid enough to try it would be beaten within an inch of their lives….and they’d nick the car as a finale. 
Ah yes…the valleys…how I miss you! I did get to relive some nostalgia however, last Saturday. Teaching 80’s dance at the International Dance Day in Matsue City. Ah yes…remember the 80’s and the fabulously gaudy outfits? I love it! I am a child of the 80’s through and through. Catherine, the Amazing Adelaide chick and I taught the poor folks how to do the Nutbush, the birdy song and ‘Superman’ by Black Lace. A good time was had by all. (Even Ben…reluctantly)
I shall finish this post by suggesting you go out and purchase/download/steal or borrow some classic Black Lace tunes…including Superman, Agadoo and Do tha Conga. “Agadoo doo doo, push pineapple shake the tree…!”
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I have evidence to support my suspicion. I grew up in an area where there were plenty of Junkies and pushers to observe (Tonyrefail in Rhondda-Cynon-Taf, S.Wales). The Yakult woman displays ‘manic’ symptoms. Extreme cheerfulness, darting eyes and a demonic fixed grin. I have never seen one of her ‘lows’. I can only surmise that she snorts/injects/consumes her stash before she gets to school. She’s always leaving school just as I’m arriving, so she must do her ‘rounds’ before I arrive.
Let’s all be drug aware. We can overcome junkie scum together if we try. 
