Sunday: Part 2

Let me preface this with that I had no camera and this is a long story....enjoy.

So as Sports Festival ended, the kids and teachers stowing away wet and muddy equipment, the families scurrying to their cars and heading for home...it was brought to my at attention that this was the night of my first enkia.

The enkia, to the untrained eye, is just an outing where coworkers go out and celebrate. It could be for a new school term, the end of one, new staff or the end of a big event....like Sports Festival. Everyone goes out to a restaurant and eats, a real big spread that resembles a pot luck dinner back in the states, while drinking, talking and relaxing. To the untrained eye.

So I get told that our enkia is that night and that someone will come to pick me up at my apartment in an hour. So I rush home, grab a quick shower, crack open a bottle wine and have a little pre-party of my own. The person coming to pick me up is a fellow who not only speaks zero English, he's also not really friendly....I'd be willing to bet in any language. So riding thirty minutes with this guy to the restaurant is not something I'm super excited about.

While waiting for my ride, I establish a place to crash for the night in the chance the party goes longer than the train schedule, and remember, there is a typhoon blowing in. Well, my ride gets there and much to my delight its someone else. I don't know why, nor do i care, and I'm already feeling pretty talkative thanks to the wine. My chauffeur wound up being the art teacher, a really nice 30 year guy with two small children. I know this because the passenger and one seat in the back had child seats in them. So I sat in the back with a bunch of baby toys...that smell like "spit up". So we talked about art, or at least tried and the ride is over before I know it.

We get to the restaurant. I've been to different enkia's with different groups and a really cool thing they do, or so I think, is a random seating. Basically draw a number and sit at that place. Everyone, that is, except the Principle (kocho-sensei), Vice-principle (kyoto-sensei) and yours truly....who gets to sit in between the two of them. Grrrrr. Both of these men are super nice. The vp speaks very little English but pats me on the back a lot and laughs.

My pseudo-problem is with the principal. He also is a very nice man and knows a great deal of English and is always very excited to talk to me, and I him. But, all the other teachers don't really like him, and after spending a couple of weeks with these people I've started to get the impression that if he's around, I some how get shuffled in his direction. I think they see me as a kind of diversion so no one else has to interact with him. When we chat, its for a long time. I'm also frustrated because I'm anxious to aquiant myself with some of the other teachers better. And once they are sauced, so I'm told, everyong is more willing to use their English.

Culture Lesson: So the Japanese society is a very passive one. In no office anywhere in Japan would you see any confrontation between anybody. They save them up, so when an enkia comes along, they can go out, get plastered and get everything off their chest. With their boss, their peers, their boss again...its really game on, all under the pretense that they are just "drunk". Which they may be, but there is still much truth behind the insults or harsh statements. So whenever everyone goes to work the next day, its like nothing ever happened and everything is forgiven just because everybody was just "drunk".

So between the to bosses I sit eating a whole bunch of I don't know what. (I've gotten to the point where if it tastes good or bad, I'd rather not know what it is...my stomach is safer that way, and I don't get grossed out.) And because we had unlimited drinks for two hours I'm also ordering beers and pouring for anyone around me whose glass is even slightly empty.

"Get um drunk, stir the pot, raise hell" is what I'm thinking to myself, excited to see the fireworks of interoffice politics. ( I also am intoxicated at this point, having my pre-party wine finally catch up with me). I think the complaining happened. The part I forgot to realise was that it all was going to happen in Japanese. So after listening to the first heated diatribe of a disgruntled teacher I moved to a different part of the long table (there were 30 of us) looking for more of the food I knew I liked.

Well, before I know it half the teachers are gone, so is the principal, and we are off to what can be loosely translated as the 2nd party. Its only 9:30 pm, maybe, and no one can walk in a straight line. At least no one that I'm with. So off to a karaoke bar we go! Whoooooo!

I think I was born to karaoke. I love it and will blog more about it later, but it's a lot more fun when friends can sing with you and vice versa. The next two hours were a mixture of many things. Me singing and everyone else getting bored, some singing in Japanese and me trying to decipher the squiggle marks on the monitor, teachers falling asleep sitting up and then falling over, me ordering more drinks and so on. At some point, somebody told me the trains had been cancelled do to the typhoon.

Ohhhhhhh, I forgot about that. So after a discussion with one of the PE teachers who claims to be the Prefectural (think State) boxing champ and "playfully" jabs me in the side to prove it (it hurt) I decide to call it a night. Somehow I called my friend, an Irish saint named Maire, who met me, I don't remember where, and walked with me to a taxi, and then back to her place. I do remember her laughing at me a lot, its only fair. All in all it was a good day.

I slept well that night, the typhoon came and went and I never knew. I think only the apartment collapsing could have woken me up. I spent Monday, a national holiday thank god, sleeping in, cooking a mean bacon and eggs breakfast and listening over and over again to Marie mimicking and doing impressions of me when I'm inebriated.

Appartenly I like to pick people up.