Archive for February, 2009

The Annual Tussle

Published by Bob Sanchez on February 21, 2009 in Observations. 3 Comments

The heavy, rusty streetcar lumbered toward the deserted platform, paying little heed to the large pieces of rotten, broken wood sitting in the middle of the tracks and spilling out into the busy street.

Rain poured from the sky in massive sheets, yet I would have felt comfortable in a T-shirt underneath the low platform awning on this April day. Unfortunately, I was in a shirt and tie and was jobless, chasing leads all over Kochi City and attempting to stay dry in so doing.

The blocks of wood presented a hazard to the westbound trains and traffic, and I had to do something to clear the way, so I tossed down my umbrella and stepped out onto the tracks to collect the wood.

Piece by piece I heaved the soggy wood onto the platform and out of harm’s way. I got the wood off the street and returned to the platform, smiling wanly at my good deed on a bad day.

An angry honk and a splash of water from the street awakened me. A motorist had torn through a puddle right next to the platform and soaked me from the knees down. Right out of the movies, I grumbled disgustedly.

The rain had been coming down like that ever since I returned to Kochi from Phoenix, Arizona and baseball spring training. The sun and limitless baseball lessons had done wonders for me, and I was floating amongst the clouds when an unexpected phone call brought me crashing down to earth.

Excuse me, Mac? Ah yes, this is the Evil English Teaching Company calling . . . I’m afraid we’ve got some difficult news for you . . . we’re going to need you to pack your things and move to Matsuyama City at once . . . yes, we’ve lost the contract with your current high school, but we’ve got a great position for you in Matsuyama . . .

I got this call on April 4. School was supposed to start on April 7. I had put a couple thousand dollars down on a new apartment in Kochi and planned on spending another year in paradise. I had mapped out the lesson plans for the school year and was looking forward to implementing new ideas and methods.

Instead of coasting home, I spent my last day in Phoenix and 24 hours in a plane and a bus worrying about my immediate future. My meal ticket was gone in an instant. I stood to lose a heinous amount of money on the new apartment and would have to pay another egregious sum to move into a different city. And it wouldn’t stop raining.

I worked at a vocational high school in Kochi, but the contract with the Board of Education was handled by a third party, which was the Evil English Teaching Company. They had sketchy policies and shoddy operations, but of course I was coming to Japan to scout, so I didn’t think it would matter much.

Evil English offered to give me five hundred bucks to go along with their plans, effectively holding up a band-aid to the brain tumor they had caused. I declined and don’t recall what kind of language I used. To their credit, they explained that they had been outbid by another agency, but they did not tell me the name of the company.

I shuffled to school to clean out my desk and devise a plan to stay in Kochi. I was close to tears when I told the head English teacher what had happened so suddenly, and she didn’t hold her tears back. It felt good to be loved and missed, but it was a Pyrrhic victory at that point.

The Kochi City Employment Office refused to help me and wouldn’t touch my visa, and I thought I was going to take a ride on that merry-go-round all over again. Friends I had emailed from Phoenix had drawn blanks on available jobs. While many a Japanese was starting his new job according to custom on that first Monday of April, I was wandering the streets with a cheap umbrella, stopping every few minutes to beg, plead, and scream into my cell phone.

On a whim, I decided to call the Board of Education and give them a piece of my mind about the whole thing. They had blatantly disregarded actual people while trying to save a buck. It took 15 minutes of cajoling and convincing, but I finally got through to the right person, said my piece, and received the phone number of the new agency for my efforts.

I had a boot mark on my behind from the Employment Office, denials by phone, torrential rain, and even the proverbial drive-by splash before noon that day.

While eating a fittingly unfulfilling bowl of instant ramen at my drafty old apartment, I got a call from the Good English Company. As desperate as I was to find a job and stay in Kochi, they were even more desperate to find teachers to get started on the contracts they had just won.

It all worked out in the end, as you know. I got to stay at the same school with a slight raise and more paid vacation despite the fact that the Good English Company had submitted a lower bid for the contract. Evil English is truly evil.

I left the Good English Company office after the interview, and, I kid you not, the clouds parted and the late afternoon sun burst through brightly and beautifully. I leaped and rejoiced, and I hopped on my bike and gave Kochi City a huge hug, riding around and doing everything short of yelling, “Meeeeeeeeerry Christmas, Bedford Falls!”

It turns out that the Board of Education waits until March 31 to accept bids for the following school year, which for teachers begins on April 1. I can’t begin to describe how ridiculous and inconsiderate I think this is, and I’ve got a few words to say about other public education policies that I’ll save for another time.

Save a miracle or eight-figure job offer, I am staying in Kochi for another year, but this time, I will be ready to fight for my job on April 1.

Camping vs Living

Published by Bob Sanchez on February 19, 2009 in Comforts of Home. 1 Comment

Life in Kochi improved dramatically after I moved to a new apartment last April.

Everything about the new place trumps everything about the old place, and the basic difference is that, while both apartments offer a roof over my head, the old one didn’t shelter me from much besides rain. In many ways, it resembled camping every morning and every night.

I spent my first five weeks in Japan without a home. I stayed at my girlfriend’s place in Tokyo and at a hotel in Osaka while learning the Japanese professional baseball league. The teaching job was to begin in late August 2007, and all I knew was that my assignment was somewhere in Kochi Prefecture.

The time came to begin teaching, so the Evil English Company trucked me out to Kochi and put me up in a hotel downtown. I arrived under cover of darkness and was eating whale and jellyfish at a local restaurant before I even knew what the city looked like.

The next morning, a correspondent for Evil English took me to a real estate agency to help me find an apartment. I did most of the talking and told the agent what I was looking for, but I think that Evil English had already prepared a list of options, none of which were fantastic. I was informed that I had until 5 p.m. that day to decide on one.

The agent took me to about eight different places, and each one of them had a dead roach or two somewhere inside the cramped quarters. The wallpaper in the last place was torn to shreds, but I didn’t see any roaches and it was only 200 yards from school, so I took it on the condition that the wallpaper be replaced before I moved in the following week.

I had chosen a second-floor apartment, priced at $350 (2007 dollars) per month for 258 square feet. It had a toilet room, a shower room, a tiny kitchen, a bedroom, and a balcony. Believe it or not, places in Japan get much smaller than that, and I’d easily pay double for that same apartment in Tokyo.

Everything about the apartment was wrong. It faced northeast, which I was actually happy about at first because it meant that the obnoxious morning sun wouldn’t wake me up at 5:00. Then I discovered cycling and actually wanted to wake up early. Then Fall fell and my laundry wouldn’t dry in one day. Then I got awfully sick and learned that the cause was a moldy futon mattress; the sun wasn’t in the room long enough every day to dry it.

I made a note: “Next apartment – south-facing.”

There was a cleaning shop on the first floor when I moved in, but it quickly left and the space stood empty. That made it a great place for drunk passers-by and taxi drivers to stop and relieve themselves on the side of the building knowing that they were unlikely to get caught.

Next door to the south (about ten inches away) was a battered building with corrugated iron siding, and its first floor was a small karaoke bar. To the west side of my building was another small karaoke bar, and there was no end to the cacophony. I struggled to fall asleep every night; the dueling karaoke bar patrons were just getting warmed up at bedtime.

I made a note: “Next apartment – pay attention to what surrounds the building.”

Ten inches out the kitchen window, in the rusty old karaoke building, lived an old couple who loved cats and nothing else. They left bowls of food out for the many stray cats in the area, which is a problem because Japan doesn’t do animal control and the strays have to go somewhere.

The alley cats chose the single, untidy room next door, not only for the food but for the kitty litter that the old couple lovingly provided. Unfortunately, the kitty litter was just strips of newspaper in a cardboard box, a poor substitute and no match for the odor of fresh cat poo.

I made a note: “Next apartment – get a peep at the neighbors.”

My balcony looked right out onto the street leading to and from the high school where I work. It took four minutes to get from my front door to my desk, but I found that I couldn’t leave work behind when I was at home. Students passed by right beneath my nose, and if I happened to be outside hanging laundry, they’d yell at me from their bikes. I lived way too close to work.

Across the narrow street to the east was the back end of a small market, and that doorway was home to more old lady gossip and cackling than I cared to hear. Without fail, on Thursday nights a grizzled old woman brought a mangy dog and tied it up outside, and the mutt whined and yelped at maximum volume until the woman would come back out half an hour later with one or two food items.

I made two notes: “Next apartment – farther away from work, farther away from the street.”

The worst thing about the old apartment was its paper-thin walls. The set-up of the building was such that my bedroom had three outside walls. They offered me absolutely no protection from the elements; it was as though I was always outside but couldn’t enjoy the two best things about being outside – sunlight and fresh air.

Winter hit and the room temperature was about the same as the air outside. I had to sleep with clothes on and I was able to see my breath in the room when I woke up. I’d make a little cave with my blankets and refuse to leave. I’m known for not being the clearest thinker when I’m in bed, and it regularly took an hour for me to bust out of the cave for irrational fear of the cold.

I made a note: “Next apartment – insulated.”

(It doesn’t seem possible in a first-world nation, but insulation is actually very difficult to find in a Japanese apartment building. I often like to say that these people can build robots who can talk to humans and cameras that can fit through train ticket machines, but don’t believe in insulation or clothes dryers. Just different, I guess)

I took my long list of notes to a different real estate agent last January and asked them to find a better apartment for me. I had a map of downtown Kochi and suggested some places that looked convenient, and they went to work on it.

The agent took me to four places, each of which was much better than my digs at the time. I finally settled on my current apartment, a 300 square-footer for $580 a month (2009 dollars).

With the move, I was able to address every problem on my list. I’m a mile away from school. I’m closer to Kochi Station for those baseball trips. My room faces south and overlooks a boat canal, not a street. Only one building neighbors mine, and it’s a noiseless two-story industrial frozen storage unit. There is a little bit of insulation, and a little more space.

It doesn’t stop there, though. The landlords live right across the street, and while they are a bit strange, they keep the place immaculate. The husband designed our building, which is only five years old. He needed a place to keep a few of his eleven vintage European motor vehicles and figured he might as well rent out some rooms above them.

They gave me a break on the deposit, which in Japan includes a month’s rent that the landlord takes as a gift. They didn’t require a guarantor on the lease, which is great because the only guarantor I could have gotten (Evil English) would have disappeared right before move-in. They give me little gifts like laundry soap and towels. They turn a blind eye to tenants bending Japan’s inane trash separating rules. And, bless their hearts, they’ve tried to hook me up with every single, young woman in their other buildings.

I’ve got a fantastic view of a mountain with a temple on its peak out the east window, and the wind passage in the apartment is superb. I didn’t use the A/C once throughout the summer. The balcony is big enough for my laundry machine, my road bike, a month’s worth of unburnable trash, and a mound of sunflower seed shells, and I can still sit out there comfortably and enjoy a beer on warm nights.

I wrote a whole entry on the smallest room in the apartment.

The shower room is made of shiny plastic and has a window in it, so it’s so easy to keep clean. The sink is separate, so I don’t have to hunch over a tiny washbasin in my bare feet to shave like I did in the last place. There’s more storage than I need, but not too much more.

There’s enough space to actually cook in the kitchen, and I can leave my fold-up table in there when I’m sleeping in the bedroom.

The area is very nice, too. My previous neighborhood wasn’t exactly a slum, but it was a rundown area of town. Now, I’m in a very clean quasi-industrial zone. A tiny warehouse across the street produces tubed fishcakes which I always accept with a huge smile before pawning them off at school. Rice Man has a warehouse on the street, and there is a fishing net manufacturer, a discontinued truck part carrier, and a pushcart vendors’ headquarters within a stone’s throw. Interspersed are relatively small apartment buildings and single houses.

The street runs alongside the canal and has no traffic lights on it, so it’s a popular bypass for the nearby national highway during rush hour but is dead quiet at night. I enjoy the long, straight ride to and from home simply for its aesthetic value. It’s much better than streets going every which-way, meaningless signals, and random piles of cat poo.

I love living on the water, and I guess that makes me especially White. The canal has floating docks along both sides, and I take a stroll down on the planks any time I go somewhere on foot. The naked trees in the picture turn into beautiful pink cherry blossoms around the end of March.

It’s truly amazing what a difference it makes to love where you live. I am happy to wake up in my room every day and look forward to returning home after a long haul. I don’t live in a fancy tent any more. I’ve got everything I need and see no reason to live anywhere else as long as I’m single and renting in Kochi.

Postscript: I went by the old apartment the other day and saw that the cleaning shop has been turned into an izakaya, which is a restaurant that serves small dishes and alcohol. But mostly alcohol. Three-way karaoke tournaments, anyone?

Customer Responsibility

Published by Bob Sanchez on February 1, 2009 in Observations. 3 Comments

I am upset. Disappointed. Deflated. Betrayed.

My favorite Italian restaurant in Kochi, Trattoria Felice, folded up at the end of December but ten days after the makeshift forget-the-year party I arranged for my school.

It was run by one Japanese man, and my friends and I made him busy every time we climbed the stairs into his small, second-floor dining room. Mr. Felice was an absolute genius with pasta and pizza dough, creating dishes like eggplant and tuna pasta and sesame chicken pizza. His lone waitress was stunningly beautiful and pretended to be very interested in me – and I didn’t even have to tip her!

The first time I ate there, my family was in town to visit and after one day was tired of picking at skimpy Japanese dishes made of fish-n-bones and mountain roots and herbs. I had passed Trattoria Felice several times before and was drawn in by the Ace of Base blasting from the boom box at the bottom of the stairs, so I decided that the time was right and went with my family.

Everyone was able to pick out something filling and delicious for less than ten bucks. Mr. Felice only had enough dough for two small pizzas and whipped both of them up for us. It took a few visits to learn that he was always short on dough, so I took to calling the day before I wanted to eat there to make sure he had some on hand.

After two or three more visits, Mr. Felice informed me of an all-you-can eat deal that he featured: an open-menu, 90-minute free-for-all for $25. A mountain of pizzas, pastas hot and cold, garlic toast, and Japanese side dishes for $25. Let me say that again – I could go eat all of the fantastic food I wanted for $25. This wasn’t Sizzler or HomeTown Buffet. This was going to a fine Italian restaurant and pigging out for $25.

I did it once by myself, picked Mr. Felice up and shook him by the collar to make sure that he was absolutely serious about the deal, and invited friends each and every single time afterward. We ordered dish after dish, pizza after pizza, and Mr. Felice made them all in earnest, each one savory and succulent.

We always remarked that we would pay more for that meal. I was willing to pay $35 but could have been pushed to part with $40. This was the good stuff in an extremely personal setting made by an honestly good guy. Don’t even get me started on the gorgeous waitstaff. Nights at Trattoria Felice were part of the magic of Kochi.

Indeed, it was a rude shock to stride up to the familiar stairwell and come face-to-face with an ugly, gray roll-down door and a handwritten message scribbled on a piece of paper taped to the wall:

To my beloved customers,

This is unexpected and troublesome to you, but as of the end of December, Trattoria Felice will close its doors. I appreciated your business and hope that you can forgive my inconsiderate action.

Love, Mr. Felice

Beneath the heartfelt message, someone had scrawled the following in pencil:

That IS really inconsiderate.

Great, so at least I wasn’t solely responsible for running his business into the ground. I felt like a helpless lab rat whose food supply just got cut off because he pushed the food button too many times. Granted, I had pushed it once a month, but that’s more often than I eat out anywhere because I simply don’t eat out much.

What really stings is that he knew he was closing up as he smiled and served ten teachers and me at our forget-the-year party. It was the best meal I had ever had at Trattoria Felice, just like every other time I ate there, and Mr. Felice and his bodacious busser shone.

I don’t know why Trattoria Felice went down. Maybe Mr. Felice won the lottery and took off to Brazil. Maybe he got tired of cooking such perfect food and needed to be challenged doing something else. Maybe he succumbed to slumping sales unrelated to his fabulous, loss-leading smorgasbord. Business in Kochi stinks regardless of what Americans are doing with their dollars.

Whatever the case, I deeply regret not making it clear to Mr. Felice that I think he should have charged more for his work. The branch of Domino’s Pizza in Kochi offered an all-you-can eat pizza deal for $15, and that was just stupid considering that a medium pizza costs nearly as much here. But Domino’s Pizza is a soulless corporation; it’s fun to take advantage of them. It may take years, but I think I will pay for taking advantage of Mr. Felice.

What is the customer’s responsibility in this situation? What could I have done to keep Trattoria Felice open? I could have offered to pay more, but that’s crossing a very definite line of respect in Japan (this is why there is no tipping). I could have eaten less, but I don’t think I was tipping the scales too far in my favor when I dined there. I could have eaten there more often, but I have to keep myself in business, too.

I ask this question not only because I feel terrible for Mr. Felice (unless he really did win the lottery) but because every restaurant I have found, enjoyed, or otherwise touched has taken a turn for the worse. The only VietNamese restaurant in town didn’t survive the summer, and I would have paid more to eat there, too. Strangely enough, Domino’s skipped town over the New Year holiday as well. Tacos Pamos, barely decent but the only Mexican food restaurant within 35 million yards of Kochi, has begun closing at six in the evening.

Tell me, good people, do I have the touch of death or am I eating out incorrectly? What does a good customer do to keep his favorite entrepreneurs in business?

I need to find out what happened to Mr. Felice. The phone number I dialed to reach him at the restaurant doesn’t go through any more. It’s so sad – I wish that just once more I could get the fax machine before he could answer it, just like old times.

I am prepared to go to City Hall, the Better Business Bureau, or wherever he must have gone to turn in the key to the building in order to find him.

I need to know that he is OK.

I need the recipe for his delectable chicken and corn pizza.

And I need his waitress’ phone number in case she breaks up with her boyfriend.