Before I leave Japan I'll be making a few interesting videos. The first is based on a previous post about a karaoke nightmare. It took me about 20 minutes to make the video yet I'm too lazy to spend another 2 minutes looking for the link to the old post so please find it in the archives. Enjoy...
I'm going on a 10 day tour of Europe to watch the tail end of the European Soccer Championships. Countries to be visited: Germany, Slovakia, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Hungary (maybe). My flight has a 24 hour layover in Seoul, South Korea, so Asiana Airlines has given me free room and board for the night in order to make up for the "unfortunate" situation of having to wait a full day for a connecting flight. Little do they understand I was more than happy.
I depart Thursday from Fukuoka airport. While in Europe if I am doing something other than watching soccer, drinking real beer, and/or eating wienerschnitzel, I may be able to blog about it. I hear the Dutch fans are the craziest people you'll ever meet. Because I don't want to be caught on the wrong side should a bar fight erupt, GO HOLLAND!!!
It's Tuesday and I have to go to one of my least favorite schools. Riding shotgun in the gym teacher's car, we head to Tokusa High School as he speaks to me in unintelligible Japanese with the TV on the dashboard turned to some crazy channel, all the while swerving in and out of the narrow lanes to pass a slowly-moving vehicle only to have to get behind another one several meters ahead.
Nestled high in the mountains, Tokusa is an agricultural high school, meaning that most students already have their future career paths figured out for them. At 11:30 AM every day an air horn blasts through the entire town to let the people in the fields know its time for lunch, and is certainly an ominous reminder to some of the students who will also become fellow tillers of the earth.
The students at Tokusa are entertaining enough, but the only thing I've taught that they've managed to remember is actually the Japanese word 'bankkai', which is apparently a manga reference to having an erection. (see video)
A lovely old woman from one of my other schools recently asked me to come visit her town, or as I soon came to discover, her secret village. It's a few minutes drive from where I currently was, and so I strategically scheduled a time that would allow me to leave Tokusa at around 12:30 PM. The teachers at Tokusa weren't too happy but since I have less than two months left I more or less implied that I'm doing whatever I want from now on.
The old woman, Araika, picked me up outside of school right on time, and I felt like a rebellious teenage girl escaping the clutches of her strict parents in order to ride off on her boyfriend's motorcycle, only instead I was picked up in a mid-sized, baby blue semi-luxurious sedan, and we were off to Tsuwano.
Hidden deep within a lush green valley in the Japanese countryside, it didn't surprise me that this secluded little town has exactly two entrances.
Equipped with an elementary, junior, and senior high school, a train station, a city office, and a shrine, this town has everything it needs to remain shut off from the rest of Japan and function autonomously and in relative anonymousness.
The reader is probably wondering what the title of this post has to do with anything, and so I will shed some light. Literally as soon as we parked the car, we were walking in front of the city office when we hear the pitiful sound of flesh hitting steel followed by gasps of terror. We run out to the street and witness the victim of a hit and run. A freaking wild piglet had run out of the forest and had just been struck by a car and was bleeding profusely while laying on its side. Kicking its legs widly in a vain attempt to flee, it made a bloody circle on the ground until a bystander removed it from the site after it had eventually expired. I didn't want to seem like a weirdo and take a photo of an animal while it was dying, so instead I waited until the animal was removed to take a picture of the self-portrait of death that it left behind.
Still with memory of that terrible scene fresh in my mind, my GF and I went to the shrine to throw money into the prayer bucket and make a wish, and I snapped a photo of her while she was snapping one of me with her cellphone. She left me there to take the train back to Hagi since it was too far of a drive for her, but I was more than grateful to her for showing me more of Japan's quiet little towns.
