A Japanese tea ceremony

I've had a couple of nice e-mails recently from family in the States and friends in the UK, thanks to all for writing, and as is becoming a familiar refrain, sorry I haven't written back to most, but I am thinking of you. A former colleague at a Midlands newspaper (that shall remain nameless)  wrote how she would love to see the sub-editors department performing  "I'm a Little Teapot" every morning. The Japanese are often lampooned for the exercise rituals observed at more conservative companies, but I can see benefits. Nothing would cut a pompous boss or middle manager down to size like a public exhibition of his or her handle-and-spout/tip-me-up-and-pour-me-out moves. I can think of several former bosses whose daily dose of humiliation would benefit office morale, I'm sure you can too.

Bye-byes and a big Buddha

It's been a hard week. We had to say goodbye on Wednesday to two of our first students, sisters Esther and Sophia (pictured below, left and right of Katherine at Kamakura beach at New Year). They were the second and third students to enroll at our school. Yoshie, K-chan and Emma-chan and I had been walking to the bus station (we still haven't got round to buying a car) to go to Unidy -  a badly spelt DIY store - to buy some magnolia paint for the hallway (how British is that?) when a Japanese lady intercepted us on her shopping bike, desperate to know if I was in fact the English teacher who had just moved into the area. It turned out that her husband was American, from West Virginia, and their two primary-school daughters needed a teacher to boost their English reading abilities. I fitted the bill, and their lessons have become a weekly fixture here since we opened in October. They have been great students, and their parents have become good friends, so it's with a heavy heart that we had to say goodbye. The silver lining? They are moving to Kamakura - the Kyoto of the North (it's got a big Buddha statue and loads of temples - see below, and the, er, calming effect it all had on Emma-chan) and have bought a house within walking distance of the beach. Now, there's a reason to stay in touch.

Moving the goalposts

If Tower English were a Premier League football club, which would it be? It's a question that has vexed me of late, and I'm sure it has you too. I think we can safely rule out the extremes of soon- to-be-done-for-Derby and the perennial big four. I'd like to think we have a great youth policy - we have just signed five new students from our playgroup youth academy - while attracting our fair share of out-of-favour stars from other schools (such as the relegated Nova). I think Portsmouth are where we are this season, though we have no chance of silverware in our cabinets yet. Our goal this year is mid-table mediocrity, but it's a funny old game. 

Pillow talk

File this under "only in Japan." We had a lovely sunny day yesterday and my long-suffering wife was in a hurry to take advantage of the moment by hanging out the futons over the upstairs balcony railing (if you don't air them occasionally they get flatter and flatter until one morning you wake up with the grooves of the tatami straw floor embossed on your posterior) when she realised that in her haste to beat the 3pm deadline (conventional wisdom has it that futons won't fluff in late afternoon) she had inadvertently tossed her pillow overboard. We looked down from the balcony, and sure enough, there it was marooned on the corrugated plastic porch roof below. I leaned over the balcony, arms flailing, but couldn't reach it. In a flash of inspiration, Yoshie told me to stand in the garden with my hands raised to the heavens and, in a move any kendo master would be proud of, she unhooked the 6-foot pole we use to hang our washing from and deftly knocked the pillow into my waiting arms. She's not called shacho for nothing, you know.

Flushed with success?

Today was a good one for confirming that the wife and I were right to up sticks and start afresh in Japan running our own business:

1. I got an e-mail from England from a former colleague who quit newspapers for the bright lights of PR. He said he was loving his work now. In his old job at a UK local newspaper his writing would have been read by a handful of folk in the immediate circulation area, whereas now, in the age of cut-and-paste journalism, he gets a kick out of seeing his phrases reproduced around the globe - thanks to the wonders of technology and diminishing budgets for journalists to actually do their own writing and research.
2. One of my students has just started a new job in Tokyo at a fashion company, and while she is hopeful that it will turn out fine, she was a little put out to discover that far from the thrusting big-city operation she was expecting where she could use her (rather good) English-speaking ability, she has found herself, after an hour wedged in a packed morning commuter train, typing up bills of lading all day long. There are no restaurants or cafes in the area so she has no choice but to eat a packed lunch around a table with her immediate colleagues. All well and good, but the only toilet is on the same open-plan floor as her office, and has paper-thin walls. The result is everyone in the department can't help but monitor the eating, working and toilet habits of their colleagues.
   

The moral of the story? My commute is 30 seconds (from futon to classroom), I can write what I want, eat with whom I choose and have an upstairs and downstairs loo. What luxury!

A clean sweep

Mornings in Japan are a far cry from those of my previous life in the UK. After getting up, folding the futons and stashing them behind sliding doors, then it's a case of performing the most important ritual of the day - sweeping and then washing the entrance hall and front steps with salt water. Jane wrote a dissertation on such purification rituals, all about how they are quasi-religious rites with links to Shinto and Buddhism and all that, but from my point of view they are a pain. If I do a proper bucket-and-scrub job, shacho complains about how wet the step is and how all the students traipse mud into the house. If I barely sprinkle a bit of water for form's sake, giri-no-shacho is liable to do the whole job again herself, for fear that I have upset the cosmic powers that be through my lacklustre effort. The only winner in all this is Chame-chan, who finds a bucket of salt water in the entrance hall even more irresistible than the downstairs toilet bowl. 

All play and no work

If you wanna play, you gotta pay, as Bruce Springsteen famously said to folk not dancing at the back of one of his concerts. Well, our mothers get a full workout as well when they bring their toddlers for a dose of English at our twice-weekly playgroup surgeries at a local dance studio. Pictures courtesy of our unofficial photographer, May Arai. Just what the doctor ordered.

 

Contact

To contact me:

• the best way is to leave a comment on the newest post, and I'll get back to you,
  
• or e-mail me at patricksherriff@gmail.com if it is of a more sensitive nature.

Glossary

• Chame-Chan - The mother-in-law's cat. An American short-hair Tabby, he had flown from Japan to Britain and back again. He died in 2008.
  
• Dad and Margaret - Live in Leicester and between them translate novels from Spanish and Portuguese, learn French, do the Guardian crossword and cook vegetarian meals all day long.
  
• Emma-chan - My precocious younger daughter.
  
• Geoff - My older brother who jacked in a career in newspaper circulation to become a long-distance truck driver in the USA.
  
• giri-no-shacho - A term I coined combining giri-no-haha (mother in law) with shacho (boss) to mean literally "boss-in-law". Also known as Baa-chan - grandma- by my kids. But her name is Michiko.
  
• Jane - My little sister who lives in Leicester. After a couple of years as a social worker in Portsmouth, she is finding work as a primary school teacher more her cup of tea.
  
• K-chan - My sensitive elder daughter.
  
• kappa - Mythical green water sprites who seem to be all over the place in Abiko
• kawaii - Cute. This is something seen as a goal in itself in Japan.
• LDP - The Liberal Democratic Party. This party is neither liberal (it is pretty darned conservative) nor very democratic - it has been perennially in power since 1945, bar a couple of years at the end of the 1990s.
• shacho - Company president or boss. In my house that means my wife, Yoshie.
  

Links worth a click

• Agent's Diary
• BBC News
• Between the Covers
• Creativity Sells
• Debito.Org
• Drudge Report
• Expat Blog
  
• Guardian
• Guido Fawkes
• Huffington Post
• Japan Blogger
• JapanSugoi
  
• Japan Times
  
• Lancamento Cafe
• Mainichi Daily News
• May's Cafe
  
• New Yorker
• New York Times
• Nihon Hacks
• Nihon Sun
  
• Pink Tentacle
• Politico
• Political Betting
• Publishing 2.0
• The Onion
• Thoughts on Information Overload 
• Tokyo Times
• Tower English
  
• Tower English charity appeal
• Tower Talk
• RDV Live From Tokyo
• Rohan Sisodia
  
• Rolling Stone
• Rongo Backpackers
  
• Washington Post
• What Japan Thinks
• Zest Inc
  

About Tower Tales

• What is Tower Tales all about then? Nice of you to ask. It started life as the musings of a British ex-journalist who found himself running an English school, Tower English, in 2007 from his front room (behind the yellow sign above) in Abiko - 20 miles East of Tokyo. This blog's sole purpose was to keep him from losing his marbles by flexing his writing muscle.
  
• What's changed? Not a lot actually. But the blog has adopted the mission of informing and entertaining readers about life in Japan from the point of view of an outsider with a young family, with occasional jaunts into commentary on UK and US politics.
• Oh, so that means making fun of your host country? No, well... only occasionally, to be honest. It's too easy to point at the differences between Japan and the West and conclude Japan has a screw loose. Where there is hypocrisy or irony, Tower Tales is there, but equally when Japan has it right, Tower Tales is happy to say so. 
• Am I free to comment, write or suggest posts? Yes, wherever possible guest views are featured and comment is welcome, provided it is vaguely relevant, interesting, amusing or at least not overly insulting. Add your own comments to any post, or e-mail at patricksherriff@gmail.com with your own ideas.
• Can I cut and paste material or link to posts here for my own site? Yes, within reason. Feel free to link away. As for using pictures or quotes, you can, but only if you attribute them to Tower Tales. You may not pass off anything here as your own work or try to make money from TT's occasional flashes of originality, unless there's something in it for us.
• Why don't you talk more about your school, Tower English? There's a time and blog for everything. The school's blog is here.
• I really enjoy Tower Tales. Can I send you large sums of money? Well, OK in unmarked, non-sequential notes if you insist. Or even better, you could make the odd digital donation, no matter how small, to charity appeals which grace these pages occasionally.

First things first

Hello all, bear with me here, I'm new to the world of blogging. What's this blog all about? A good question, one that I'm struggling to figure out. I hope it will provide a small window on my world, for whatever that's worth, and I suppose it's a stab at keeping my sanity through exercising my writing muscle. While I figure out what on earth I am going to do with it, why don't you have a look at the news feed at the bottom of the page which has a variety of subjects of interest to me.