Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries (24 page)

After a few more rounds of drinks (none of which I have to pay for) and innumerable toasts made in my honor, I declare to my students that our next lesson will be at a karaoke box and that everyone should be sure to bring their tambourines. And I promise to sing “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

Meanwhile, my classified ad has borne fruit. A woman contacts me about teaching her children. Being deathly afraid of children, I was at first reluctant to take on the job. They—children—are always plotting against me and/or making inappropriate comments about my hair, my glasses, my clothes, my speech patterns, and/or my sexual preference. But then I reconsidered, thinking I could charge a nice price for private at-home instruction. So money talked, and my ears were pricked. Besides, though I fear them, I’m pretty good with kids. They like it when I cuss in front of them.

I experience a rude awakening on the first day of the job. You see, though I am a revered and admired superstar at my business classes, basking in my students’ unshakable interest in me and all that I have to say, the children I will be teaching couldn’t give a good goddamn that I am a native English speaker from the exotic country of America.

Their names are Kai, age thirteen, and Daisuke, age eight, and they have just returned from the U.S., where they lived for about three years while their father was on an assignment for IBM. They know a good bit of English already, but their parents are worried about them losing their speaking skills now that they’re back in a completely Japanese environment. Kai and Daisuke do not share their parents’ concern.

Since they have just returned from spending three years in the U.S., having an American tutor isn’t so exciting for them. In fact, I can say with complete certainty that I am of absolutely no interest to them whatsoever. For three years, they went to school with Americans, lived next to us, ate our food, watched our television, played with our toys, read our books and magazines, and wore our clothes. They went to our ugly strip malls and Walmarts and realized how fat we actually are. To them I am not an entrancing enigma, a handsome stranger from the West. I am just another white guy. So when I try to get them to ask me questions about myself during their respective lessons, a warm-up technique that never fails to work with students who haven’t spent much time away from Japan, it falls flat.

“Who are you?” Kai asks.

“Why do you come to here?” asks her brother.

And since they spent a lot of time with American kids, they have also picked up some expressions that I am not used to hearing from my other Japanese students. For example, “give me a break,” “that sucks,” “aw,
man
,” “you suck gorilla butts,” “what’s your problem?” “no fair,” and Daisuke’s personal favorite, “that’s gay.” One time Daisuke even called me a “nasty old Yankee,” which I would have reprimanded him for severely had I not been crying tears of laughter.

I teach them three afternoons a week. We spend a lot of time reading and working in the grammar workbooks their parents bought from the Kinokunia bookstore. Actually, the first few lessons I spend trying to get them to talk to me without rolling their eyes.

Daisuke at first seems only able to communicate with Legos. Every time I walk into his room he’s on the floor making cars, houses, aircraft carriers, and alien colonies with his beloved Lego set.

“What’s that you’re making?” I say in my kindly teacher voice.

“I no tell you. You no need to know,” he grumbles.

“Come on, tell me, what is it?”

“You have to figure out.”

Towards the end of my hour with him, I’m eventually able to coax him up to his desk to do a bit of reading or grammar, but he always huffs and puffs the whole time, and he usually brings at least two of his Lego creations with him to play with.

Soon his uncooperativeness starts to bug me and I decide to put my foot down.

“Put the Lego robot down, Daisuke,” I command him.

He slams it down and breaks it, then picks it up and puts it back together.

Ugh, I’m not getting anywhere with this kid, I think. I’ve got to show him who’s boss. Looking down at the floor on my side of his desk, I see a Styrofoam gun that shoots out little Styrofoam missiles when you squeeze it. I pick it up and point it at him.

“Drop the robot, Daisuke.”

He puts the robot down, reaches over to his side of the desk and picks up a big-ass toy rifle, points it at me, and pulls the trigger. It goes “
rickety ricket rick
” and shoots out a rubber ball, which bounces against my forehead. Then he puts it back, picks up his pencil, and does some grammar, every so often looking over at me with a little Japanese smirk on his face.

He finishes two whole pages of grammar exercises, and, elated that I now have some actual proof of work that I can show his mother, I tell him that if he does better next time, I’ll bring him some candy. He promptly writes down for me what candy he likes and hates. I bring treats the next time, and he spends the entire hour on the floor with his Legos. I tell him I’m not going to beg him to do his work.

“Look, Daisuke, I’m totally fine with sitting here and reading my
Vanity Fair
. I’m not going to beg you to do your work. It’s up to you. I’m not going to beg.”

Forty-five minutes later I’m begging Daisuke to do some work.

“Please, Daisuke, we’ve got to show your mom that we’ve done something, OK? Come on! Just five minutes! Five minutes!”

Thankfully, Daisuke seems to respond to near-nervous breakdowns. He sits in his chair and finishes his vocabulary worksheet.

“Can I have some candy now?” he asks.

“Um, no, Daisuke, you can’t have any candy. You worked for five minutes.”

He picks up his worksheet and makes like he’s going to tear it in half.

I take some candies out of my bag and put them on his desk. Then I swipe the worksheet from his hands and pick the candies back up.

On my way out of the room a Styrofoam missile hits me in the back of the head.

Kai is a little more mature about things, but no more excited about having to spend an hour and a half after school with an English tutor, no matter how tall and handsome he is. Every day she sits at her desk listless and bored. If I don’t constantly prompt her to answer or move to the next question, she will happily sit silently staring at the page until I slowly disappear from her life.

“OK, what do you think about number two?” I ask, to which she shrugs her shoulders, to which I say, “Give it a try,” to which she then answers with something like, “Had been watching,” to which I say, “Exactly, very good,” to which she says nothing, after which there is a pause, and then, “OK, what do you think about number three?” and the cycle continues.

A few weeks in, I have a breakthrough. Extremely hungover from my previous night’s lesson with my business students, I can’t bear the thought of teasing English out of Kai for an hour and a half. I take the easy way out and ask her about her print-club pictures, the instant photos you can have taken at shopping plazas and game centers all over Japan and that are decorated with titles of your choosing, generally messages like “Happy Camping!” or “Laughing Party!” and always feature at least one cute animated creature waving at the camera from the corner of the photo for good measure. When I ask her if she likes taking print-club pictures, it is a watershed moment. Immediately she is seized with a new energy. Her face lights up, and she seems to float across the room to get her pocket organizer, where she keeps all the stickers. She returns to her desk and opens the organizer.

“This is me and Kumiko at game center in the Shibuya,” she beams. “And this is at mall near to my house. Oh, and this is mall in Shinjuku.” That’s just the beginning. We spend the rest of our time that day looking at and discussing photo stickers of her alone, her and her friends, her and her boyfriend-whoisn’t-really-her-boyfriend-really-but-they-kissed-once, and her friends alone and with their boyfriends-who-aren’t-really-their-boyfriends, all taken in malls and game centers throughout West Tokyo. She never asks to see my print-club pictures, even when I offer to show them to her (I only have two), but I don’t push it. I have just successfully moved our awkward teacher/student relationship to the next level, so I can hardly complain. Plus, I get to learn that Kumiko smokes cigarettes sometimes, plays the guitar, and has talked about going to a tanning salon.

One day, she asks me a peculiar question. “What’s a cinderblock?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because my friend Denise telled me this joke at the summer camp in U.S., and I never understand it.”

“What’s the joke?”

“OK, a girl named Rose ask her father how she got her name, and he say, ‘When you were born, rose petals fell onto your face while mommy was holding you.’ Then his other daughter Violet ask same question, and he say, ‘When you are born, violet petals fell onto your face while mommy was holding you.’ Then his third daughter asks same question, and he say, ‘Shut up, Cinderblock!’”

I explain to her what a cinderblock is, and she covers her mouth and laughs. Then she gets on the Internet and starts translating the joke into Japanese for all her friends.

Seizing on this moment of lighthearted fun, I say, “OK, and after you finish doing that, we can finish this worksheet!”

She pretends not to hear me, and I sit in silence as she click-click-clicks her fingers on the keyboard, telling the sad story of poor, lonely, unloved Cinderblock.

This job leads to another job with a little first grader named Ryuji. His mother works for IBM and knows Kai and Daisuke’s parents, which is how I get the job. Since I’m now on a mission to make children like me, I gladly accept another tutoring gig. Ryuji, his mother, and his grandmother have also just returned from a stint in the States, so Ryuji is continuing his study of English in the same fashion as Kai and Daisuke.

The first day of class, I show up at his house, ring the doorbell, and Ryuji answers the door with a puppy in one hand and a paper airplane in the other.

“Teacher?” he says.

“Yes,” I smile.

“
Bark
,” the puppy says.

Then he pivots around and launches the paper airplane down the hall, hitting his grandmother in the forehead.

I am very happy to find out that he is not nearly as averse to continuing his English as Kai and Daisuke. Though I am still not the international man of mystery to him like I am to the business folk, he doesn’t resent my very presence like Kai and Daisuke, and he usually even looks happy to see me when I arrive. In fact, I often have trouble shutting him up; he has an amazing ability to stray from any topic and involve me in complicated discussions that his English is not sophisticated enough to handle.

“Spiderman’s Batman,” he says once when we are talking about the difference between subjects and verbs.

“Huh?”

“Spiderman’s Batman.”

“Spiderman’s Batman?”

“Yeah.”

“Um, I know Spiderman and Batman.”

“Yeah.”

“What about them?”

“He have gun.”

“Spiderman?”

“No.”

“Batman?”

“Batman.”

“He has a gun?”

“But Spiderman have wings.”

“Wings?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean he can make a spider web.”

“And he go
kssshhh! Powwww! Ffffghhhsh!
”

“Yeah.”

“Do you like more Buzz Lightyear or a Spiderman?”

And so on. When it comes to studying, he has the attention span of a gnat. Often he’ll become bored or frustrated with the task at hand and stop what he’s reading or writing to draw a crude picture of what is happening in the story or the sentence. One day we’re reading a story about two guys, Jack and Dave, who are fishing on a boat in a lake. Ryuji, clearly not riveted by the story, picks up his pencil and draws an interpretive study of Jack and Dave in the fishing boat. Actually, it looks like Jack going down on Dave on a surfboard, but I know what he’s getting at.

His favorite device for spicing things up during the writing exercises is the exclamation point. He uses it to innervate sentences that in his opinion are lacking in action and drama, which, of course, is every sentence without an exclamation point. Thus, we constantly end up with sentences like, “Jim ate pizza for dinner last night!!!!” and “The bird was flying high in the sky!!!!”

And at the end of every lesson, he makes me read to him from his favorite book,
Captain Underpants and the Curse of the Wedgie Woman
, which gives him his fix of innocuous toilet humor for the day. But before I read to him I always make him recite to me the Pledge of Allegiance, which he learned when he was at school in the States.

Just like I used to say it.

So now, as part of my extracurricular schedule, I work with children, something I never thought I’d be doing and something that is allowing me to build useful future social skills, like patience, empathy, and the concocting of unique punishments for not doing what I ask. When I first imagined having to teach children, I thought of Medusa, the tattered redhead from Disney’s
The Rescuers
who in one scene has a helpful exchange with her sidekick Snoops regarding a young girl, Wendy, whom they’ve just kidnapped. It goes something like this: