Let's Enjoy List-Making

[bonelesspuppy]

I've only got another couple weeks in Japan, and it's really hitting me how much I'm going to miss this place. My solution is to break out the

, so here we go with a list of things I'm going to pine for:


• My Shimokita crew. There is so much geek here.
  
• Sashimi-quality fish in the grocery store. What am I going to do without melt-in-your-mouth raw tuna? Let's go ahead and add squid and ikura to this item, too, so that my list doesn't end up being half food. And let's not forget melon bread. Or mochi. Or red bean paste. Or maccha flavoring...
  
• The trains. I don't get to use them often, mind, but the system is just so good.
  
• The customer service. I keep waiting to find a genuinely surly person with a front desk sort of job, but it just hasn't happened. They're more likely to be crazy than rude.
  
• My subsidized rent. I spend more a month on school lunches than on keeping a roof over my head.
  
• The good kids. This covers pretty much all of Okoppe and some of Oma, though Oma students as a whole (excepting the third-years) have been quite good this week.
  
• Impromptu staff room parties when school ends up canceled because of inclement weather.
  
• Scheduled staff parties at which the core group ends up at Hohoemi (usually until well after midnight), feasting on edamame and shouchuu while providing wildly off-beat tambourine back-up for the karaoke numbers. Feel the Bon Jovi!
  
• Discussing the differences between the Famicom and the NES with my co-workers. And on that note, reasonable access to the Tokyo Game Show.
  
• Just Tokyo in general. I'm really quite fond of the city.
  
• And Hakodate, which I've been so glad to have nearby. I wanted to visit again before I leave, but my weekend schedule is already packed. Hmph.
  
• Those neat 200-yen toys sold at convenience stores. I have cheap plastic model of old-school Dragon Quest monsters, and I love them.
  
• The mingled aroma of cedar and kerosene that permeates my house. Hey, I think it smells good.
  
• The sea, especially the stretch of coastline west of Okoppe JHS and the area just east of Oma. There's a tiny, ball-shaped peninsula there with a single house on top and a fishing boat below, and I think that it would an awesome place to live, provided the Internet found its high-speed way to me.
  
• That very happy cartoon squid in Ohata.
  
• The mountains of western Shimokita. So pretty.
  
• Using chopsticks as my primary method of getting food into my mouth. I use my hands for finger food and a spoon for my curry-over-rice, but for everything else, I reach for the hashi. I really like eating soup by chopsticking (watch me verb) out the solid bits and then drinking the liquid, and it saddens me that I'm not supposed to do that in North America. I think I will anyway.


Now, to cheer myself up, a list of things I won't miss:


• Dealing with my supervisor. Obviously.
  
• Teaching. The classroom portion of my job has been something I've mostly endured rather than enjoyed. At least now I should be able to shut up anyone who insists I'd love teaching if I just gave it a chance.
  
• The bad kids. Intellectually I know better than to write off a group of junior high school students, but I'd still sell my teeth to have them in shock collars.
  
• Living nearly a two-hour bus ride away from the nearest train station.
  
• "Gaijin da!" The actual exclamation hasn't come out many times, but things like a mother protectively scooting her child away from me on a train are really annoying.
  
• "But I always heard that Americans eat three times as much as we Japanese." It wouldn't be so bad if the same JTE and I didn't have this conversation quarterly. The fact that I'm too full to finish the dinner that you just packed away in its entirety might be a hint that you haven't exactly got hold of a universal truth there, bub.
  
• Being almost entirely unable to buy clothes, especially of the underwear variety. My vast tracts of foreign land cannot be fenced in by padded A cups.
  
• The odd drunk with a thing for gaijin and the kind of persistence that only a long night of sake and desperation can foster. It's a safe bet that if I didn't want your phone number the first four times, I'm not going to change my mind when you follow me outside.
  
• Learning that "You can eat that; it's fish" techincally holds true for milt. See, I like fish eggs. I do not like what my co-workers translated as "fish-man egg."
  
• The national mayonnaise fetish. I shouldn't have to wipe down my tuna-salad-and-potato pizza before I can eat it, yo. What, wasn't the mayo in the tuna salad enough on its own?
  
• The pit-toilet. It's not that bad, but plumbing is something I will never again take for granted.
  
• Lack of ready access to books in my language. See, I could live in the attic of a library and be perfectly happy, even if I had to wash myself in the water fountain after hours. I needs the bookses. Needs to smells them. Needs to touches them. Yesss.
  


Another thing I'll miss about Japan is the cold barley tea (mugicha), especially when it's made by my co-workers during the hot season and brought to school in decorative ptichers. To my eternal delight, it is never, ever adulterated by sugar. Anyone who grew up with the conviction that "iced tea" does not imply "sweetened" and later ended up living in an area where it most distressingly does will understand me here.